• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Louise Victor

She wants to laugh at this, but at the same time, she wants to curl up, wrapped in sadness. The fire of this overwrought feeling—this constant feeling of the animal self caged and unable to run free—she thought that this feeling would wane after the end of the war, after the first flame of her youth faded. It is not so. She is still not an adult, and this bothers her. She used to think that the birth of children would bring her peace and composure, but now she is not so sure. She suspects that adulthood is a chimera. Even her old father, so affable and seemingly resigned to the vagaries of life, can be a roiling mass of puzzlement and hurt beneath his placid exterior. (The day her brother died—what her father did that day—she will not think of this. It is not in the record.)

All these measured manifestations, all these repressed emotions—what considerate liars we all are, being so civilized.

Louise looks at the faintly yellow paper before her and does not want to be civilized. Damn all this consideration, she thinks. She writes:

Dear Sir,

Today I think of you. I think of your beautiful mouth and what it might feel like on me. I think of your beautiful hands and what they might look like freeing me of my clothes. Your slide into me—what might that be like? What do you taste like? I’m sure you are delicious.

You eat my dreams and I don’t know why. Please show me why that body of yours burns in me like a distress flare. Give me a reason to be so warm and ready for you. There has to be a reason. You must fulfill it.

There must be some room we can meet in, some room you can rent with a little bit of stray cash, some place for committing this magnificent crime.

Thanking you in advance and in the expectation and hope

of reading you, please agree to my warmest salutations,

Madam

The business closing makes her titter aloud to herself—she didn’t know she had such panache. She is a funny woman.

There is nothing for her to do but post this letter while she is still in this heated trance, and see if anything happens.

WHEN HUSBAND AND WIFE get ready for bed together that night, Louise says to Henri, “I wrote a love letter today.”

Henri slips in between the sheets and looks her over, propped up on pillows in her white nightgown. “Oh yes?” he says. “And to whom?”

“I don’t actually know. To some complete stranger. A young foreigner who couldn’t write French asked me to help him write a love letter to a girl he wants.”

“And you did?”

“Why not? I had time.”

“It’s true. One must pass the time. What did you put in the letter?”

“Oh, some nonsense about muses and flowers and music and fire in the blood.”

“Sounds romantic,” Henri says, with a distracted look on his face that Louise cannot read.

“If we had known each other during the war, would you have written me things like that?”

“Probably. The war did strange things to people.”

Louise looks into her husband’s face, softened by the light of the bedside lamp, and it occurs to her that maybe he has written things like that, to some other woman, during the war. She wants to ask him. She wants to tell him about Camille. She has a feeling that he would not be angry, but still, something stops her from saying such things. What would happen if she were to introduce stories of sweeping romance into a marriage that has none? They had come together truly as man and wife, and thoroughly. Still, their union was one made in a spirit of weariness; a wish for peace and quiet was what drove them toward each other. He worked for her father. He was a good man. She wanted a good man, something steady and safe, something unlike the blazes of the just-ended war.

For all that, such blazes sometimes flare in her heart and find no outlet.

Henri looks back into Louise’s eyes and smiles gently. He lays his hand on top of hers, which is resting on the coverlet, and says, “You know, foolishness like that can feel lovely for a while, but it doesn’t last. It is false.”

She leans in and kisses him, kisses his lax and comforting