Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [176]
“No, I cannot.”
“Your face is exquisite. More formed. As though your character has been completed.”
“But we are all unfinished portraits,” she says.
“Will you not at least give me your hand?” he asks. “We never said a proper good-bye.”
“No, we did not. We could not.”
She walks to him in the doorway and extends her hand, which he takes. His skin is coarsened with calluses.
“We made a child together,” he says. “It hardly seems possible.”
“I have often wondered when,” she says. She glances at the room that will be her son’s. “He may be here tomorrow. To think of it.”
“Love him,” Haskell says suddenly. “For me as well.”
She squeezes Haskell’s hand with all her strength, digging her nails into his skin. The want is sharp, the sorrow too keen.
“You could have come back at any time!” she cries.
“I made myself stay away. Can you not see how far I had to go?”
“You could have kept the child!”
“No, Olympia. I could not.”
He draws her toward him, burying her face. He weeps like a child himself, hiccuping with the weeping, with no shame, with no thought of hiding this from her. She is speechless with the relief his body offers her.
He holds her head in his hands. He kisses her, and she remembers the softness of his mouth, his taste.
“I shall never believe that this is wrong,” he says.
She looks at him, having already decided. She shuts the door and leads him along the hallway and into the room with the blue forget-me-nots on the walls and the amber-beaded lamp on the scarred mahogany table, unwilling yet to take him into her own room.
“I remember this room from the night of the shipwreck,” he says, glancing around.
She walks to the narrow bed, having forgotten how to begin. “We shall have this whole night,” she says. “We shall sleep beside each other this whole night, and no one will disturb us.”
“No one,” he says. He listens, as if astonished. “What perfect quiet.” And she thinks: Where he has been has perhaps been crude and noisy.
“Have you loved another?” he asks quickly.
She shakes her head. “Have you?”
“I tried to be with other women. To lessen what we had. If I could cheapen it, I thought, then it might be bearable.”
She feels a quick stab of jealousy. Other women’s bodies.
“But I could not,” he says. “I kept seeing your face.”
He traces the outline of her mouth with his finger. “It was this that tormented me most,” he says.
He kisses her, a chaste kiss, unlike the one before.
“Do you still have the locket?” he asks.
She nods.
“Then let me see it.”
She unfastens the buttons of her dress. He leans over to turn on the lamp. She bares her chest, the locket lying just above her corset. He takes it in his fingers.
“It is evidence you truly loved me,” he says.
He lets the locket fall and traces the curve of her breasts as he did her mouth.
“I was tormented by the memory of this as well,” he says.
• • •
She does not sleep for fear of waking and finding him gone. In the middle of the night, Haskell dresses himself and walks down to the kitchen to forage for food. He comes back with bread and butter and jam and more quilts to burrow under. He undresses and climbs back into the narrow, single bed with her. Above the quilts they can see their breath. Beside them on the mahogany table, a thick wine-colored candle burns down, creating a waxen waterfall to admire.
She thinks, as he sleeps beside her: A love affair is the sum of many parts — the physical, the sense of being set apart, the jealousy, the loss. It is not a trajectory, not a straight line, but rather a deck of playing cards that has been shuffled, this thing fitting into that thing fitting into this thing.
“You cannot go away now,” she says, waking him. “I could not bear to lose you again so soon.”
• • •
“You are distracted,” Tucker says to her from across the table. “Well, of course you are.”
The walls of the restaurant are covered with red silk. On the tables are small bouquets of early daffodils. The white linens are heavy and embossed, quite the most beautiful table linens she has ever seen. The room is crowded