Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [99]
Before Ben and Nancy were married she had expected Happy Ever After to follow the ceremony, which would be a fairy-tale affair: a white satin gown, the bouquet thrown to eager, giggling bridesmaids; speeches, her mother in tears, a honeymoon in San Francisco or Hawaii. Joey, and all that went with him, changed things: the wedding was less grand and more subdued than she had anticipated. As was the consummation.
Nancy was not a prude, but saving herself for marriage had always been the plan. That Ben had not similarly saved himself came first as a shock and then as a lingering disappointment. He was careful, even deferential when he approached her; she sensed no pulsing flare of arousal, an absence of passion. Their couplings were restrained, without wildness, never soaring free of bedroom respectability. And she was unable to fend off thoughts that Ben had obviously done this before. Perhaps the Nagasaki woman had even taught him a trick or two.
Charles was gentle where it mattered, but he could be masterful, and she was grateful to be shown ways to please and be pleased.
Evenings usually began with a drink at the bar of the Benson Hotel – Nancy drinking cocktails! – another new experience that took her by surprise. She had hesitated the first time Charles enquired ‘What will it be?’ Her occasional, ‘medicinal’ thimble of bourbon was all she knew. Now she found she liked a Manhattan, just the one, enjoyed in comfort and the flattering glow of softly shaded lamps. She sipped, they talked, laughed. Later they moved to his neat rented apartment and made love for a leisurely hour, not always in the bedroom. Then perhaps a restaurant, though Charles liked to cook, transforming red snapper into British fish and chips, learning the American way with steak.
They both knew that he was only visiting, that one day he would get on a ship and go back to England, where life, he had murmured one day, was complicated. But words like ‘leaving’ or ‘going home’ never figured in their conversations, though there were times when he pulled her close to him and groaned with a sort of regret or when, close to sleep, he kissed and stroked her throat – a throat no longer as smooth and taut as it had once been. At those moments Nancy allowed herself to think that perhaps there might come a day when he would ask her how she felt about seeing England. But he never did. He told her about Italy, the curious Florentine mix of wool and art and history, showed her the correct way to season a ragù. His own country remained unexplored, though he introduced her to English poetry. In return she gave him Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. Not Whitman.
*
From the bed Nancy could see the street beyond the window, partially obscured by Charles’s naked shoulder. The evening had gone well: the drink at the bar, the stroll to his apartment. The easy move to the bedroom, it was usually the bedroom now. They had made love, and soon it would be time to eat. She realised they had fallen into a pattern, and the thought gave her pleasure, lent a spurious permanence to their arrangement.
He lifted her hair away from her neck and breathed in the warmth of her flesh.
‘Thank you for the book. I liked the one about the blackbird.’
She said, sleepily, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking . . .’
The poem, he said, reminded him of Japanese woodcuts. Punctuating his words with kisses, he mumbled into her bare shoulder that he wanted to visit Japan one day.
‘But if this war goes on much longer, there won’t be much left to see.’
Nancy felt warmth and well-being draining out of her, and turned away, drawing the blanket close, thrusting her face deep into the pillow. She wanted to say, I went there once, I went to Japan and saw nothing. Just the inside of an office, a church, a rickshaw. A small paper house on a hillside and a woman in a white kimono. A child, screaming. A woman who is still there, the unprotected target of our bombs.
She wrote every week to Joey, telling him what she was reading, what music she had heard. She found these letters