Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [64]
I thought that I was not of the sort to experience a great passion, that such states were fictions written by persons who wished to make more of a natural physical event than was necessary or even advisable. Indeed, my equanimity in such matters was a quality I often congratulated myself in possessing, and having in Catherine as well, who has not ever shown herself to be demonstrably passionate. I am sorry if I offend you by writing to you in such a forthright manner. God knows that if I could, I would apologize to Catherine, too, for exposing her in this way, although I know that she would not permit any apology, just as surely as I know that she would be heartsick by my betrayal of her.
Dearest Olympia, my life has been upended ever since the moment I first saw you at the beach. You do not remember me, but I remember you: a young woman in a dusty pink silk dress that seemed barely to contain the life within its folds. You walked barefooted along the sand, and every man on that beach watched you and desired you. Later, on the porch, when we met for the first time, I felt a profound shock upon seeing you, as if we two had already met.
Heretofore, my life has been one of self-satisfaction, of pride in my work, service to the community, and gratification in my family; but all that must now be something less than it was. Not enough. No, never again enough. How can I explain this to myself, let alone to you? You who are so young and have hardly begun on your journey?
I have prided myself as well in having an instinctive understanding of physical matters, when in fact I did not have the faintest comprehension, not the faintest. I thought I knew myself well — my habits have always been regular — but I find today that I am a stranger to myself, foreign. How placid I used to be, how smug. . . .
How uncommon everything about you is to me. You know much already about how to give pleasure to another, and I think to yourself, which is a quality that is not true of Catherine. Despite her love for me and her desire to please others, she does not know how to please herself. This is not a situation which distresses Catherine much, I think. When such a thing is a given, one knows not what one misses. . . . But I do not think I realized until today how very important a woman’s pleasure is to a man’s (and how the obverse, of course, must also be true).
You must not regret what you have done, Olympia. You must not feel shame. And I sense — indeed, this is one of the things that so astound me about you — that you do not, that you will not. Not in this. Perhaps in other things, but not in this. Is this self-deception on my part, wishful thinking? I sincerely believe not. I think you understand that which you do. Or am I so deluded as to see only what I wish to see? To wish, and therefore to believe, you to be more mature than your years, to possess a physical understanding that eludes so many women their entire lives?
(I do not mean to suggest here that you were thinking of your own pleasure today or even that our coming together gave you pleasure, though you will one day feel such physical joy; of this I am certain.)
Forgive me, Olympia. Forgive me for taking from you what is not mine to have.
How rash this all is. How dangerous.
I met Catherine in the second year of my practice. I was much taken with her inner repose and her tenderness. Her father is a minister of the Methodist faith, a man of modest means, though learned and likable, a man whose approval meant something to me. (And, God, how this man would despise me now, if he knew! There is between men, between father and suitor, an understanding of certain aspects of a man’s life that cannot be acknowledged outright, and certainly not in the presence of the woman; and so there must be, between the men, a sense of trust, of belief that the daughter who will one day become the