Beautiful Wild

by Anna Godbersen

  “It was his unsinkable ship that sunk and got us here,” Vida said as she picked up her handmade rope again. “So you’ll forgive me if I withhold my judgment.”

  “My men and I spent all day climbing these trees,” Fitzhugh boomed so that all the survivors could hear him. “And we have brought you lunch!”

  As if on cue, the men who had been crewmembers of the Princess emerged from the trees carrying a ripped piece of tarp heaped with the coconuts that Vida had, until then, only seen high on the palms, or broken and emptied on the ground. Upon waking that morning, she had sucked the water from an empty husk that she had placed on the roof of the ladies’ hut to collect dew. It had a faint taste of something savory and sweet, but she had not yet tasted the meat of a coconut. The other ladies lay down their handiwork and began to buzz. They stood and moved toward the men, who used their knives to cut holes in the furry brown hides of the fruit, and showed the women how to drink. When the milk was gone, they split the coconuts on rocks and shaved off pieces of the white innards.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” asked Dame Edna.

  Oh yes—seeing the others eat made Vida’s stomach tighten and howl. But she did not want to be one of those desperate women clamoring for any little scrap. She had fasted at least this long on several occasions in preparation to wear an especially fitted gown. She had her pride, still. “Not hungry enough to participate in that spectacle,” she said.

  A little smile flickered on the older woman’s face. “So—you are the girl I thought you were.”

  “I don’t know if the girl I was could survive a place like this.”

  “Well, if she does, it might be the beginning of the greatest love story I have ever written,” the dame said with a little nod toward the man who had separated from the crowd.

  Fitzhugh was coming her way. Vida was flushed with renewed mortification. Dame Edna was right. There was a ripe, human smell coming off her person, and she had no idea how far away this smell could be detected.

  “Miss Hazzard,” he called, revealing his strong white teeth. “How are you this morning?”

  “All right,” she replied in as disinviting a tone as she could manage.

  “That’s good.” He nodded, as though this were an ordinary answer on an ordinary day. “That’s good. Aren’t you hungry?”

  “I’ll let the others have their fill first,” she answered coolly.

  “Nonsense.” Fitzhugh’s brow flexed, and his smile softened without losing its ironic curl. “If you wait, there will be none left.”

  He was coming toward her all this time and she was willing him to stop but he didn’t. She stood as quickly as she could and stepped backward and away.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” he said.

  Oh, how it curdled her heart to be called ridiculous. Ridiculous was, to Vida, even worse than being ugly, worse than being unwanted. She would rather be a girl with a great mess of a face who no one ever asked to dance (that she could work with, or else enjoy the solitude) than a girl who showed up in a laughable dress expecting everyone to admire her. But before she could think of a biting reply, Fitzhugh flung himself at the nearest tree and began to haul himself up. He had a time of it—she could hear his labored breathing as he ascended the tall trunk—and she willed him to fail. He didn’t, though. He knocked a coconut from its high, sprouting nest, and it fell at her feet. Then he slid down, jumped, and was, to her horror, within range of her underarms.

  “My lady,” he said, stooping to fetch the coconut and kneeling as he punctured its side with a blade.

  Vida retreated with a hasty “No, thank you.”

  “Vida,” he implored as he followed her.

  “I beg your pardon,” she replied with haughty formality. “Are we friends?”

  “Miss Hazzard,” he corrected himself, and slowed his pace.

  Without thinking she had marched farther into the jungle than she had yet traveled. The smell of the earth, of trees just sprouting new growth, not to mention the dense perfume of some sort of flower she had yet to see, overwhelmed her nostrils, and she was relieved that she had at least this dignity—that the forest’s bursting life would mask her own sweaty scent.

  “You don’t know me at all,” she said.

  “I know you a little,” he replied, catching up. “The night we met I kept thinking to myself it was easier to talk to you than any girl I’d ever known. It was like we’d met a hundred times before. And then, on the Princess, I felt I wanted to know you more and more.”

  “Yes, for some reason you wanted me to believe that,” she snapped. “I can’t think why you’d still want to convince me of such falsehoods now.”

  “How can you say—”

  “Oh do let’s be honest with one another. I know about you and Camilla.”

  The sun here was filtered by the high green canopy. His face was all dappled. His expression shifted, became serious. “Yes? What about me and Camilla?”

  “I saw you together! On the ship—and yesterday, holding hands. Or the day before. Whenever it was. And I know what was between you in the past.”

  “No, that’s not . . .”

  The air was denser here, so full of tiny floating specks of life. Vida felt pink all over. The dress constricted her arms, her waist. Her underclothes chafed at her thighs. She was feeling so many things, certainly too many at once. Mostly she wanted him not to come any closer. She wished that she had never wanted him; that he had never been. That she was Mrs. Whiting de Young just now, or even Mrs. William Halliday, and that she was reading the Chronicle in the garden court of the Palace Hotel while she drank her tea and petted a little lapdog. And that she and Rosa de Hastings could go on pretending that they were lovely young ladies forever, who had only lovely things to say about all their friends and all their enemies and of each other.

  Instead she was here—hideous, tired, harassed by tiny insects.

  “That’s not true?” she prompted. “Do you mean to tell me there was never anything between you and Camilla Farrar?”

  For a long time he said nothing, and Vida knew what hope was again. She had hoped—still! After everything!—that it had not been true, that she had misinterpreted things in the map room, that Fitz and Camilla’s intimate history was just rumor. But his silence confirmed things, and Vida learned there was still sufficient sensation in her trampled mess of a heart for it to sting with fresh humiliation.

  Twelve

  “Don’t you dare come after me,” she said. With a brisk little turn she marched on.

  A few moments later she glanced back and saw that he had heaped yet more insult upon her by doing as she asked and not pursuing her.

  On she marched—yet her abjectness marched on with her. Soon snotty tears were running down her face, and she gasped and sobbed and lost any sense of where she was, or who. She had believed herself somehow better than other girls—a girl especially adept in the fine art of being wanted. Now look at yourself, she thought. A sunburned wreck who sobbed in the ugliest fashion, and who, apparently, smelled like a back alley on top of everything else.

  All she knew was the misery inside herself, and for a while she had no sense of her surroundings. Then a shock of pain spread in her toe—a rock had stopped her forward motion. She lost her balance entirely, and before she could grab hold of something she was facedown on the ground. The soft earth filled her palms.

  “Oh,” she wailed pitifully.

  Too late, she considered the tattered remnants of her once-civilized appearance. The tiers of pale pink lace, the belled sleeves she had lifted in her ship cabin to dab her wrists with tuberose perfume, were already stained by water and yellowed by sun, like some old doily left too long in the window of an unloved house. Now her garb was stained also by the wet soil of the jungle floor. In how many ways could she become more ugly? The idiocy of it all hit her at once—that her own vanity had further marred her appearance. She began to laugh and cry at once.

  As she sat up she went on laughing and crying. It
was distinctly possible that she was going mad. But laughing and crying at once felt good, so she went on laughing and crying until she heard the shriek.

  The shrieking split her ears, zoomed past her and upward.

  She gasped in terror and scrambled to her feet. Her blood coursed, and fear seized her throat—she couldn’t make a peep, much less call for help.

  A burst of exquisite orangey red was disappearing up into the ropes of greenery overhead. A bird, she reassured herself, just a bird, and her breath came back to her, and she saw where she was.

  A little clearing, lit by a small skylight that opened in the high foliage, at the base of a rocky hill that was grown over with vines, with small trees, with flowering bushes. Her heart still pounded, but it was slowing back down to normal again.

  The bird still squawked, and another bird squawked back, and then she heard the symphony of the place, the chatter of birds and rustle of leaves and the rush of water down the side of the hill where it filled a rocky basin. This must be the bathing spot Dame Edna had told her about. Vida was still frightened, but she fixed the fear in her sights and told it to come along with her, if it absolutely must.

  Holding back her skirt so as to protect it from the mud, but mostly to prevent herself from tripping again, she advanced to the pool. The surface rippled outward from the spray of the falls and it sparkled in the sun. At the edge, she removed the satin slippers she’d worn to dance in on a long-ago night, and carefully lowered herself into the still water. She knew, then, how warm the air was. The coolness of the pool stole her breath and her chest rose in shock. She knew the water became deep quickly by how cold it was on her bare feet. The water soaked her skirt, made it heavy, so she hurriedly undid the buttons at the small of her back. She slipped out of the thing and heaved it onto the sunniest piece of rock.

  She reviewed sweet memories—perfumed baths Nora had prepared for her, the taste of strawberries dipped in chocolate as served in the de Young’s dining room, the sensation of Bill Halliday’s fingertips on her cheek when he was trying to lure her to a private corner. But her memory could summon nothing that felt quite as wonderful as this fresh water against her skin. Dame Edna had said naked—she didn’t go that far. She left on her bloomers and her corset (which would have been difficult for her to undo herself). The water seeped against her skin nonetheless. The trials of wind, sand, sun—all of it seemed undone by this sweet coolness that she submerged herself in again and again until her hair was unbound and she felt washed clean.

  As she lay on the rock beside her dress, letting the heat absorb the beads of wetness from her skin and underclothes, the dampness from her dress, she listened more closely to the whispering of the wood. It seemed to be telling her a secret. The secret was a sound like the ocean as heard from the coil of a shell, telling her that which she had seemed to know but hadn’t really:

  I am alive.

  Well, of course I am, was the practiced and civilized rebuttal from the voice that went on unceasingly in the space between her ears.

  But the secret persisted in its resonant tone—I am alive, I am alive, I am still alive—so that the knowledge of her aliveness seemed to echo throughout creation and also into the deepest, darkest corners of her person. And she knew it to be true in a way she hadn’t in the fog of her misery and the awful slog of survival.

  Coldness seeped into her skin, making gooseflesh of her clean limbs.

  The jungle was abundant with sound. So it was strange that she could hear one in particular. It was a sound that did not belong. She sat up suddenly and jerked her still damp dress over her partial nakedness.

  “Who’s there?” she demanded.

  Light burst against her field of vision. There was so much darkness and so much blazing color.

  Her imagination conjured a great sleek cat and a three-headed beast. A thick snake hung from a low branch.

  Then she saw that the snake was just a vine, and afterward she understood that the great cat was just a man. A young man. The young man was Sal, and he was bending in such a peculiar way. Bending as though he wanted to assure her with his eyes that he was not a danger—and at the same time to not look at her directly.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “I am not dressed.”

  “I’m sorry.” He shielded his eyes and turned away. “You’re such a lady,” he went on. Not in the judgmental way he might have onboard the ship, but in a curious tone she could not place. It sounded almost like a lamentation. He was wearing those same clothes that had looked all wrong in the dining room of the Princess, but had fared well through their ordeal. They were that same color as before, neither white nor brown, and no more or less rumpled. “So I would not have thought you would—” He paused, struggled for the word. “Disrobe.”

  Laughter burbled up and escaped her mouth. To hear that euphemism, spoken by a boy who had proclaimed himself free of such hypocrisies! “Disrobe? Is this a newspaper serial for church ladies?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  “Yes. I suppose I do. Stay that way, I’ll just be a minute.” She was amazed by how quickly the dress, even with so many layers of lace and tulle, had dried. This was not the city she grew up in, where a thing, once damp, stayed damp a long time. “Don’t look,” she warned, but when she glanced up from the task of bringing her enormous skirt over her cotton knickers, and the bodice over her boned corset, she saw that he was already fastidious in looking away. “I’ll need your help with this last bit.”

  With an awkward little jump, she came off the rock and toward him, holding the back of her dress closed.

  “It’s just a few buttons. I know you’re a rough sort of person, but I think you can manage,” she assured him.

  He made no sound of acquiescence, but he did as she asked.

  Or tried, anyway. He had done half the buttons when he began to undo them again. His breath became short, and she realized he must have missed some.

  Now he was slower, more careful, and it seemed a long time his fingertips moved up along her spine.

  When he was done she turned to him, her expression pert. “Thank you. You can enjoy your bath now.”

  As he considered his reply, she realized that she had misinterpreted his presence here.

  “Oh,” she said. Her anger flared. “He sent you after me.”

  Sal’s dark eyes were still reluctant to meet hers. “He said you seemed upset.”

  “Did he.” She strode past him, back toward the beach.

  “Vida.”

  “Just like your master,” she called over her shoulder, trying very hard not to trip on any hidden rocks or roots. “You seem to think you know me well enough to call me by my given name.”

  “Miss Hazzard.”

  “Oh, what,” she replied tiredly as she continued through the dense hanging vines.

  “That’s the wrong way.”

  She stopped. Her mind rebelled. But he was right—this was not the way at all.

  “And he’s not my master.”

  “What would you prefer?” She half turned, but he was too obscured by the shade of the jungle to see his expression. “Don’t tell me you want me to call him your friend.”

  “Your maid, who you boarded the Princess with . . .”

  She squeezed her eyes closed, thinking of Nora, of what might have befallen her.

  “Was she not your friend?”

  “Of course she was my friend!” Vida replied with sudden fury. “She is my friend,” she corrected. “She is,” she repeated, and her anger was doused by the soggy mess of tears she could not help. “She is, oh God, please, let her still be.”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m sure she’s all right. So many passengers were transferred to the other ship.”

  She wavered like a kite in a high wind and her hands covered her face. “But what if she wasn’t? What if she was asleep, and didn’t know the ship was going down? What if they didn’t let her on a lifeboat? What if some first-class typ
e insisted she go back after their luggage? What if . . .”

  “Stop.”

  Vida sucked in a breath. Her fears had tumbled out, and all along the sunlight found its way through the high leaves, the buzz of insects and birds continued, the jungle busy and indifferent to her existence. When he began to walk, in what she presumed was the correct direction, she followed along. “How can I stop? How can I not wonder?”

  “It doesn’t do anything, worrying.”

  “You don’t understand. She was my responsibility. She took that journey on my account. My parents, too. And now what? Now what? I must forget her, just because I am stuck here, at the ends of the Earth and can do nothing about it? No, I will not pretend it was not all my fault.”

  “You?”

  Ah. There was that smirk. She had rather missed his smirk. Being smirked at made things seem normal, and she knew again who she was supposed to be. She was the formidable Vida Hazzard, wild, vain, and selfish. If one squinted, they might be two civilized people strolling in a particularly ill-kept corner of the Golden Gate Park.

  “Yes, me.”

  “Miss Hazzard, you are very grand, but you could not sink a ship like the Princess of the Pacific all by yourself. Only nature could do that.”

  “I think I like it better when you laugh at me.”

  “Well, there’s plenty of reason to do that.”

  “Oh really?”

  “No. Not really. Actually there are very few reasons to laugh at you.”

  “Because I’m so awful, you mean? Having risked the lives of my dearest ones for a big lie like the love of Fitzhugh Farrar.” Sal was silent a moment. She hated the silence, and blathered on: “Oh, don’t be like that. We both knew that’s what I was up to.”

  They had come through the thickest bit of jungle by then and could see the beach through the thinning trees. Beyond that: the endless marriage of sea and sky.

  “Don’t worry. It doesn’t help. I can’t promise you that everything is all right. But Fitzhugh and I have been all over the world, down rivers and canyons where no man had ever been, with fewer resources than we have now, thirsty, hungry, doomed. We always find a way.”