Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [88]
She reaches the empty corridor that connects the main house to the chapel and slows for breath. She leans against a wall and puts her head back and closes her eyes. She stands in that posture, trying to calm herself, for some minutes. She can hear a viola, a waltz beginning. Will Haskell dance with Catherine? Olympia puts her hands to her eyes. She pulls the pearl combs roughly from her hair and studies them in her hands. She holds them tightly, digging the teeth into her palms.
She hears footsteps on the polished floor and turns her head. She realizes she has known that he would follow her. She watches him walk toward her, and she does not move. On his face is an expression she knows well: an expression of both anguish and expectation. He comes close to her, and she can feel his breath on her eyes. She hears a shudder, an exhalation. He bends and presses his mouth hard into her shoulder, and for a moment, Olympia is frightened. She can feel his teeth. He has not done this before. There is a wetness on her skin, and she knows suddenly that he is crying. He cries the way a man does, both silently and noisily, gulping for air. It is a loss of control so complete that the weeping triggers the lust, or perhaps it is the other way around. She wants to hold his face, to bring it up to hers, to calm him, but his mouth is on her breast, and he presses his hands so hard against her back, she can hardly breathe. They move, or lurch, along the passageway, looking for darkness, for shelter, anything to hide them. She bangs against the wall, and a picture falls. It is a wonder they do not rouse a servant or a guest. She holds his head, and they turn so that his back is against the wall. She steps on the hem of her dress and hears it tear slightly at the waist. They enter the chapel and stand looking at its deconsecrated altar, its wooden pews. Behind her, she hears the door shut. Haskell fastens the latch. Olympia glides toward the marble slab and sits on it. Haskell hovers over her. She cannot see his face.
“What happened?” she asks.
“I did not tell her,” he says.
She wraps her arms around his legs and bends her head to them.
“I cannot live in that house,” he says. “I cannot. I cannot.”
“No,” she says, rolling her forehead back and forth. And like Haskell, she is crying.
“I will go away from here,” he says. “I will find a reason. I cannot be in this town.”
“Let me,” she says, looking up at him. “Let me be the one to go. You are needed; I am not. I have already resolved to speak to my father tomorrow.”
He crouches down to put his face opposite hers. He digs his hands deep into her hair. “No, I cannot stay,” he says. “There is no vista that does not remind me of you, that does not make me want you.”
He puts his mouth on hers. It is a kiss, but more than a kiss. Something akin to drowning perhaps.
But the body cannot content itself with kisses, no matter how encompassing or generous. The body will go forward on its urgent course. Thus she lies down, her head against the cool marble, her legs straddling the stone. The marble is hard and uncomfortable, and she feels ungainly, her legs spread, her slippers touching the floor on either side. Haskell kneels. His cheek is wet on her thigh. He unfastens one stocking and puts his hands on her leg. She tries to raise herself up to look at his face. She calls his name. But he is lost to the most powerful sort of lust there is: that which stems from hopelessness. She is frightened — at least as much for him as for herself. And yet she knows that she cannot stop this, that it will have its own momentum, its own beginning and its own end.
And it is then that she turns her head to the side and looks through the open window of the chapel and sees Zachariah Cote move graciously away from his place upon the porch, allowing Catherine Haskell to step up to the telescope, lower her face to the eyepiece, and briefly adjust the knobs until finally the scene onto which Cote has precisely trained the instrument comes incomprehensibly into clear focus.
SHE IMAGINES it to