Beautiful Wild
Page 23
“Excuse me?” Vida was still thinking about the prospect of retribution, wondering what was meant by that, and hadn’t quite understood the subtlety of Fitzhugh’s question.
“You say it’s not true, and I believe you,” he said evenly. “But Sal is my friend. He was before he quit abruptly and went off, anyway. I can see he was fond of you. I want to know—is there any truth to the story?”
Vida’s throat ached and she had to lower her eyes to the floor. She couldn’t quite bring herself to answer, so she just swung her head in a way that wasn’t quite an affirmation or a denial.
“In what way is it true?” Fitz persisted.
Vida’s eyes were wet. She steeled herself, met Fitz’s narrowed gaze. “It wasn’t a ‘liaison.’ He never touched me on the island. It wasn’t like that. We became close, that’s all, and after a while without meaning to I found that I wanted to be around him more than anything else.”
“And what do you want now?”
The truth tumbled out of her. She wasn’t sure she could have dissembled now if she wanted to. “The same thing,” she said.
Fitz folded his hands before him on the table. He seemed very tired, and Vida wondered if he didn’t want her to retreat from the room, and from the city, as quickly and soundlessly as possible. But that wasn’t it. He inhaled deeply, and she remembered his old trick of inflating himself, of making his body and his presence larger than it was in any literal, physical sense. “A marriage is long, and much of it is a kind of business arrangement. Together you build a public front behind which a home is maintained and wealth is accumulated. One of the reasons I so liked you was that you seemed to understand that. We can fix this, Miss Hazzard. The public relations man is very good, and he thinks Dame Edna has overplayed her hand one too many times. The people adore you, he says, and a sympathetic portrait in other newspapers will right things, and the overall good for the Farrar firm of having a wedding in the papers at a time like this cannot be ignored, regardless of whether it carries a slight whiff of scandal or not. But I do really care for you, Vida. If I am sounding overly practical, that is because I am now in charge of my family business. I am not the younger son anymore. But I care for you, and it matters to me what is in your heart. So I will ask you again, what do you want?”
“I’m sorry, Fitz,” she said. “I want the same thing as I wanted before.”
Fitz looked away from her and very slowly took one of the papers in front of him, flipped it, and put it facedown on another pile.
She waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, she asked in as strong a voice as she could manage: “Do you know where he has gone?”
The face that lifted toward hers was entirely unfamiliar to her. There was an anger in his blue eyes that she had never seen before, and the “No” that he pronounced, before looking away from her again, cut her more than a string of shouted obscenities would have. As Vida turned away from him, she felt weighed down with all she had so suddenly lost.
But as she walked to the doorway she became lighter with every step. Perhaps it was only that she had set down an enormous burden in that room. As she left it and arrived in the hall she felt so weightless she thought she might actually lift off the carpet and take flight. She could hear her heart again; it had been beating steadily all this time. The elevator doors opened and she went in.
Thirty-Two
In the days that followed, Vida shed other poundage. She gave away all but one trunk’s worth of her new clothes to Nora. She said her goodbyes to Camilla, and suggested that Nora be hired immediately as her lady’s maid. But Nora said she had been keeping company with Jack, who she’d gotten to know on their cross-country journey, and that Jack was sailing away soon, and that they couldn’t stand to be apart—she was going to take a position on his new ship and be his wife. So Vida packed her own trunk with some clothes and personal effects and the little knife that Sal had given her, the blade that reminded her who she was and what she really wanted.
The legend of Vida Hazzard—that plucky and brilliant girl from San Francisco who had survived the open ocean and a desert island, who had very nearly made the match of the century and then been quite publicly ruined—began to change, too. At first the crowds outside the hotel were even more rabid. The calls from other reporters were unceasing. A publisher offered her a heap of money for her memoirs; a theater producer insisted her story must be brought to the stage. But when neither she, nor her parents, nor Nora, nor Camilla responded to these entreaties, or to the gathered crowds, the interest began to fizzle. Public attention returned instead to Fitzhugh, who was said to have been seen around town in the company of Adele Jones.
That did smart a little.
The Vida who liked to get what she set out for, who had gone to great lengths to win that which she was told she could not have, became alert again, did think over what she would have to do to take back her prize. But she went on a long walk and waited for her desire for a grand life to come again. It didn’t. Instead, some new desire led her to a bookstore on Broadway, where she purchased several travel guides to the Mediterranean region, as well as a history of the ancient world, and another one that told the stories of several prominent volcanoes.
On the day she set off Mother’s lip trembled, but she was brave and didn’t cry.
Father smiled—it was a sad smile, but mixed with a kind of grudging, adoring pride.
“I’ll write all the time,” Vida promised.
“Good,” her mother said, and held her close awhile. “I hope you will be very happy.”
“I think I will,” she said.
“I only ever wanted you to be happy,” Mother went on, not letting go. Vida had always thought her parents were a little silly, but they surprised her now—they seemed to understand that Vida was seeking something true, and to want that for their only daughter. “You always wanted so much. I thought getting you as much as possible would make you happy forever.”
“I thought so, too. But maybe what I wanted all that time was less.”
How much less was only really apparent in the simple cabin that she occupied by herself with the contents of her one trunk and the books that she had purchased on the long solitary walk that she had taken down the wilds of Broadway. But with less, she found, you can see and feel so much more.
With less, she might for instance find herself alone on the top deck of a steamer crossing the Atlantic at dawn and understand that one does not dwell in the busy cities of men, but on the great curve of the watery Earth. She might feel, in some deep and ancient corner of her mind, the true romance of the ocean. She might find in some dusty old books she had acquired almost by accident, on a day when she was looking for something else, clues to where she is going, and how she will search out what she truly wants.
She might discover, too, that journeys are always longer and more arduous than what one has carefully planned. That a girl will sometimes find herself in shabby port cities, with only second-rate hotels. That she will despair of ever finding the right port. She will be brought to tears over how difficult it is to order the right dinner in a language she doesn’t speak, and this will be made all the worse by the knowledge that she is being conspicuously ridiculous. But then she might also learn that second-rate hotels have their own charms, that there are far worse fates than being ridiculous, and that every port can teach a girl a little more how to be oneself in the world.
And as she travels she will acquire a kind of easy certainty.
She will begin to be sure, without knowing exactly how it will happen.
Maybe she will find Sal on his Mediterranean island, maybe she won’t.
Some deep confidence of the heart begins to tell her own story.
Epilogue
Maybe it happens like this . . .
Vida’s ferry arrives at dusk at a rather dusty port. Representatives from the little hotels in the village built into the high cliffs appear, enthusiastic in their pleas that she choose their establishment o
ver the others. Donkeys decorated in colorful tassels and pom-poms carry her luggage up the steep path. She asks if there has been another American in the village, but the people at the port, unaccustomed to an accent like hers, shrug in confusion, evade the question. She looks around. No, there is no American in the crowd, no tall boy in plain clothing.
She thinks, as everyone on any voyage of true consequence thinks from time to time, that she has made a terrible mistake. She wishes herself transported home, and consoles herself that she will have a night in a hotel room and a good breakfast in the morning and she will write a cheery postcard that she almost believes and then she will book passage back the way she came.
For some girls that might be the end of the adventure.
For some it might even be the right choice.
But Vida remains, as always, determined. She has come a great distance already.
On the island she had learned to be especially observant of the way waves break against rocks. She listens now to the sounds of the sea. She glances toward the end of the docks, wonders if there might be another little dock just around the outcropping. And so she goes on, takes the simple plank walkway that bends around the outcropping, and there she finds another cove with a smaller port, where the fishermen bring their boats in to avoid the big ships at the big port. The fishermen are hauling their nets, spreading their catch on the pier, shouting to each other in a language she can’t understand at all.
And then she sees him.
He’s sitting on a lone chair outside a simple restaurant, with a week-old American newspaper that he isn’t really reading folded up in his lap.
And he looks back, not surprised at all, and says, “How did you find me?”
“I remembered,” she says. “The story you told me about the island with the volcano.”
And he beams as though this were the sweetest thing a girl has ever done for him. “Will you sit?” he asks. “If you sit here, you’ll hear the locals shouting the most unbelievable profanities.”
So she sits, and undoes the buttons of her dress at the wrist. In a little while her hand and his find each other as they watch the fishermen go about their business and listen to their cursing so that the first words she comes to know in that foreign tongue are the ones a proper girl isn’t allowed to say. She puts the ferry schedule on the table between her and Sal, so that Sal knows it is there. The sun going down makes all the world look made of gold. Neither of them can stop smiling. Neither Vida nor Sal knows when they will leave, or where they will go, or what sort of people they will become, only that they will be traveling on to the next island together.
Acknowledgments
This book was mostly a smooth sail, and that’s all due to my wonderful editors. Thank you to the great Sara Shandler. Thank you to the brilliant Alice Jerman. Thanks to my friends at Alloy who have been marvelous collaborators for a long time now: Josh Bank, Joelle Hobeika, Hayley Wagreich, Romy Golan, Les Morgenstein, and the rest of the team. Thanks to Erica Sussman, Alexandra Rakaczki, Clare Vaughn, Christina MacDonald, and everyone at Harper. Thank you Joe Veltre and Tori Eskue and everyone at Gersh. Thanks to Adrienne Miller, Ryan Hawke, Hannah Tinti, Darin Strauss, Anne Heltzel, Jessie Gaynor for readerly and writerly support. Thanks to everyone I’ve learned from in teacher land: Julia Fierro, Michele Filgate, Alisson Wood, and Leah Johnson, among many other inspiring colleagues. And thank you to Marty McLoughlin—without you, none of it is possible.
About the Author
Photo by Maya Galbis
ANNA GODBERSEN is the New York Times bestselling author of the Luxe series and When We Caught Fire. She was born in Berkeley, California, and educated at Barnard College. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
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Books by Anna Godbersen
The Luxe
Rumors
Envy
Splendor
The Luxe Complete Collection
Bright Young Things
Beautiful Days
The Lucky Ones
When We Caught Fire
Beautiful Wild
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Copyright
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
BEAUTIFUL WILD. Copyright © 2020 by Alloy Entertainment and Anna Godbersen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover photographs © 2020 by Seth Mourra / Stocksy
Cover design by Jenna Stempel-Lobell
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020911615
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-267987-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267985-7
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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