Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [49]
Olympia feels her body, for the first time, transform itself, become liquid, open itself up, wanting nothing more than more. An absolute stillness follows. It is a long kiss, if such a touch may be called a kiss, although Olympia experiences it as something different: The memory of the Franco woman with her legs open, the unruly living mass pushing against her, overtakes Olympia and seems now not an event to be feared, but rather a sensation to be savored; and it is as though she understands a thing about what will come to her in good time. She touches the back of Haskell’s neck and feels the fine hairs that twirl in a comma there. He removes his mouth from her throat and presses his forehead to hers, sighing once as if only this particular embrace could give him ease.
They remain in that posture as the half-moon rises higher in its arc and the crickets scratch their repetitive tune. In the distance, they hear another carriage approaching.
“It is late, and I must go,” she says. “Take me to the seawall near my house, and I will walk from there.”
The other carriage comes into view, and they part reluctantly. The driver passes them with a greeting. Haskell takes up the reins, and he and Olympia journey on. When they arrive at the seawall, which is crowded with evening revelers, he helps her down from the carriage, takes her hand, and bids her good night in a manner so necessarily formal as to belie any intimacy they shared just minutes earlier.
• • •
Her father is sitting on the porch when she returns. He is smoking — a dark figure in a chair, with only the ember of his cigar clearly visible.
“Is that you, Olympia?” he calls.
“Yes, Father,” she says, climbing the steps. She moves into his line of sight. He lights a candle and holds it out to her. He studies her face, her clothing.
“We have been worried about you,” he says. “It is after ten o’clock.”
“I went for a long walk on the beach and met Julia Fields, with whom I had a meal,” she says, discerning at once that to tell the obvious lie, that she has been at the Farragut party, will lead to discovery.
“I am not certain I ever met Julia Fields,” he says, somewhat puzzled. “When you did not appear at dusk, I went to fetch you at Victoria Farragut’s,” he adds, thus justifying at once her pragmatic deceit.
“I stopped there briefly on the porch,” she says, “but I saw that to gain entrance I would have to engage in a lengthy discussion with Zachariah Cote, and so I fled, preferring my own company for a time.”
It is a clever lie, for her father will easily be able to empathize with the unpleasantness of being trapped in conversation with a man who proved sycophantic and boring at table. Her father partially smiles; but then, as Olympia takes the candle from him, she sees him looking at her collar, which she has not thought to refasten. His incipient smile vanishes, and his expression turns to one of faint alarm.
“I am exhausted, Father,” she says quickly, stepping past him. “Let me say good night.”
But she does not bend to kiss him, as is her custom, for all about her is the distinct smell of John Haskell, as though the pores of her skin had absorbed the essence of the man, a foreign essence she luxuriates in even as she fears its consequences.
DAYS PASS into days, and it seems the entire coast lies under a gray pall that, for nearly a week, neither breaks nor gathers enough momentum to become an actual storm. But there is rain, a steady drizzle that renders nearly all outdoor pursuits unmanageable. Her sense of isolation, of being set apart from those around her, only intensifies with the poor weather; and it is as though she inhabits a warm and impenetrable cocoon in a damp and irrelevant