Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [75]
“No. It could be a derivative of Olivia,” he says.
“But it might be from Olaf,” she says, again giving a boy’s name.
“Olive,” he answers, taking up the challenge.
“Olney,” she says, not to be outdone.
“Olinda,” he answers quickly.
She thinks a minute. “Olin.”
“No,” he says. “I cannot accept that.”
“Then . . .” She concentrates. “Ole.”
“Fair enough,” he says. But he will not be bested at this game. “Olwen,” he trumpets.
“But that is a man’s name,” Olympia protests.
“No, actually it is not.”
She narrows her eyes. “Oleksandr!” she cries.
He thinks awhile and tilts his head. Then he kisses her. “I believe you have won,” he says graciously.
“Thank you, Dr. Haskell,” she says, fitting herself against him. And then, rather abruptly, she asks: “Do you think our love for each other is the same?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, your images and your memories surely are not so much of yourself as they are of me, while I see only you and feel only you and speak only to you. And do you not, because you are a man, with a man’s sensibilities and a man’s body, have different sensations than I and therefore different recollections?”
“All lovers seek the illusion of oneness,” he answers. “But you are right. Most of a love affair is in the mind.”
“Is it?” she asks.
“Of course, there are the times when we are together,” he says. “When we express our love for each other. But do not these episodes but feed the true and ravenous lovers, which are the minds, creatures unto themselves? So that love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.”
“But if that were true,” she says, “then it would not be necessary to be physically together at all. We could just simply imagine it, and be done with it. And not worry about being caught out or about hurting anyone else.”
“Yes. Well . . . ,” he says. “The imagination must have fuel. It must have something to base its memories on. In the beginning, when we would meet, I used to marvel how it was that we never began exactly where we had left off, but seemed to have progressed to yet another level, and then another. The mind is intolerably impatient. It can imagine the whole of a love affair in an instant.”
There is a sudden and strained silence between them.
“Have you done that?” she asks quietly. “Have you imagined the whole of us?”
“Yes,” he answers, “and you have done so as well.”
She stands and walks to a window, having long since lost her modesty in his presence. “The house will be ready by the weekend?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Then Catherine and the children will be returning for good,” she adds, stating an obvious truth that has been gnawing at her for some time.
“Yes,” he answers simply. He climbs out of the bed and stands beside her at the window.
“What is it?” he asks, although he already knows.
The future lies like a thickening gas all around them. They both dread Catherine’s return, for not only will it mean that the house, their house, the one Olympia and Haskell have christened and have loved in, will be occupied; but also it will mean that Haskell will have to move out of the Highland Hotel. Thus, they will have nowhere to meet. For Olympia, the tenth of August looms in the future not as a date of celebration, but rather as a day on which a particularly painful sentence is to begin.
“We have run out of time,” she says.
“If we wallow in the pain,” he says, “we shall have spent all our pleasure already. It was you who taught me this.”
“My father’s gala will be a grotesque charade. I shall feign illness.”
Though they both know that she cannot.
Beyond the salt-encrusted windows, they can see the noontime bathers on the beach. They watch as a man in a bowler hat constructs an elaborate canopy of wooden stilts and canvas around and above the stiff figure of a woman. She sits rigidly on a collapsible wooden chair and stares at the water. The day is hot, with a sort of lemon haze all along the shore,