Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [73]
This time they are quick, as though at any minute her father might come looking for them or a stray craftsman might wander in. They are forced to stand, to lean against a wall. She did not think the body could so quickly want again. She feels a double guilt, the guilt of their betrayal and the additional guilt of embracing in the house that will one day belong to Haskell and his wife. But mingled with the guilt is a strange and quiet rapture, a resting in the moment, not thinking of the next thing or the next. And with it as well a distinct sense of possession. The house is not hers, but the moment is, and it cannot be taken from her.
Just before they leave, she slips a finger under the gold chain and brings the locket out from under her dress. “Thank you for this,” she says, kissing him.
“It is only a locket,” he says.
“No,” she says. “It is not.”
FOR A WHILE, she will be able to remember each of the days she and Haskell had together: what he wore on the first day, what she wore on the second, the day they lunched together in the hotel and what they had to eat, the formal way they greeted each other and spoke in public, and all the words they said in between. She will recall vividly the late afternoon they went boating in the marshes, losing themselves amidst the watery maze. And the night she left her bedroom in a frenzy, not caring if she was discovered, running barefoot along the beach, luxuriating in the darkness, and then seeing the lighted windows of the hotel as a refuge, a sanctuary, and weeping for the joy of it. She will remember every endearment and sentence of love, as well as all the words of a tearful argument she and Haskell had when he chastised himself severely for having seduced her, and she could not, with all her skill, convince him that she was at least, at least, as responsible as he for what had happened between them.
But in years to come, she will have only images, blurred images, a sense of how it was, but not its precise content: a face, not clean-shaven, turned slightly to the side; the smell of damp skin that sometimes followed her when she left him; an ivory crepe blouse she wore often that he liked; her kneeling on the sand, laughing at the sight of him in a bathing costume; his hand slipping from the sole of her foot, up along her calf and thigh; a plate of oysters that he had sent to his room and that they devoured beneath the sheets; the wistful tilt of his head as he stood at the threshold of his room when he waved good-bye to her . . .
Sometimes it feels to Olympia as though she and Haskell are always saying good-bye. While he works at the clinic, she conjures up reasons to be away from her house during the odd hours of his leisure, and occasionally it requires all of her wits to create suitable excuses for her absences. To this end, she has invented an entire cast of friends and acquaintances and occupations, and as far as her father is concerned, she has taken up golf in a rather passionate way. Olympia has selected the sport because her father himself does not play, and thus there seems little danger he will one day challenge her to a game — which is fortunate, since she herself has not the faintest idea of how to hit the ball or make it go into the little cups below the flags. Olympia has also created “friendships” with a number of young women, Julia Fields amongst them, to appease her parents’ curiosity about her suddenly hectic social life. Once or twice, she is nearly caught at these fictions, and several times she feels acutely ashamed at how unconscionably skilled she has become at lying.
Her father, she knows, is puzzled by her new behavior