by Anita Shreve
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 and appears to reevaluate his daughter at every turn. He no longer regards her as the girl he loved and cherished in June, but rather looks at her as at a foreign creature, one who is perpetually distracted. Suddenly she has become a poor scholar who has difficulty attending to his informal lectures. She tries his patience and confuses him and makes him sad, she knows, more often than she makes him happy. As for her mother, Olympia is quite sure she thinks her daughter has a beau. Several times she has asked Olympia questions designed to cajole her into sharing a confidence, to elicit a boy’s name. Occasionally, when her mother is looking at her, Olympia can see her running through the names of sons of families who are summering in the area.
Despite these awkward moments, Olympia knows she is fortunate in that both of her parents are, by nature, often preoccupied with other matters: her father with his intellectual life, her mother with a world that requires nearly all of her wits to absent herself from. For certain, there are challenging interruptions in this routine, such as when Haskell’s schedule changes and suddenly permits them to be together, and he is able to get word to her; but these hiatuses Olympia disguises as best she can. Altogether, their affair is a reckless endeavor, although they have agreed never to be together when Catherine and the children come for the weekends. Nor has Haskell visited Olympia’s house again.
They have been several times now to the site of the new cottage, the construction sheltering them more each day. They go in the early mornings or in the evenings when the workmen have not arrived at the site or have left already. As the frame is filled in, it becomes easier to be together behind and under the thick wooden beams and cedar shingles. They make love in the room that will be a sun parlor, under an eave that might one day grace a servant’s bedroom, on the hard floor of the room at the back that will be a kitchen. On this occasion, Haskell brings rashers of bacon that he filched from the hotel kitchen and that they cook over the hearth along with slices of bread, and later Olympia will not be able to remember eating anything as delicious as those bacon sandwiches. Curiously, being together makes her ravenous, and so there is often food, and sometimes a good deal of it, and even occasionally champagne. As a result, she is filling out some and developing, in her bosom and thighs and stomach, the body of a woman — as though her outer form sought to catch up to the experiences of her inner life.
With interest, Olympia has watched as the windows of the cottage have taken shape and been glazed, as the entrance to the cottage has been fashioned and then enclosed with massive wooden double doors, as the floors have been sanded and polished and covered with painted floorcloths, as the bedrooms have been adorned with moldings and the roof overhead enclosed against the stars. It is, as the days progress, as though Haskell and she are being further separated from the universe — set off, set apart — and are allowed ever more daringly to explore each other.
It is a beautiful cottage, she thinks, with many gables and wide porches and a delicately carved tracery under and along the eaves. The upper panes of the windows have diamond panels of lavender glass, and a rich cherry wainscoting has been installed in all the public rooms. Situated as it is directly on the beach, it has an unencumbered and unparalleled view of sand and sea. It is a house in which memories will be made, a house that will be handed down from father to daughter to son, a house in which Haskell will live with his wife.
• • •
They lie on the floor, entangled in rugs and cloths stained with peach juice that has dribbled off their chins and onto the bunched material they hold to their chests as napkins. Olympia is wearing the locket and nothing else. A plate with cheese and mango chutney and the crusts of brown bread is listing precariously on her thigh, leaving a smear of amber-colored chutney on the makeshift sheet.
“Ollie is a boy’s name,” she protests. “From Oliver.”
“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, and she is overdressed in a heavy black taffeta suit. And though she wears a hat, and her husband is frantically trying to construct the canopy, she holds a black ruffled parasol at a precisely vertical angle. The haughty and cold demeanor of the woman is a painful contrast to the too-eager-to-please mien of the husband and seems to suggest an imbalance in the marriage, if indeed it is a marriage, or a desire on the part of the man to make amends for an unknown transgression. Olympia wishes suddenly, looking at the water, that she could bathe in the sea right now and that Haskell could join her.
She rests her head on his shoulder. She knows much about him now: the tufts of hair between his knuckles, the cords at the back of his thighs, the hushed pause, as though all the world held its breath, and then the low, quick exhalation of pleasure. But sometimes doubts creep into her thoughts, and she cannot help herself from wondering: Might Catherine know things about Haskell that Olympia has not had time to learn?
“What a silly woman,” Haskell says, watching the sad comedy of the chastened husband and his overdressed wife.
He moves behind her and wraps his arms just under her breasts. He looks out the window over her shoulder. “Now, they look to be having a better time,” he says, pointing through the window at a couple with a young child sitting on a rug near the water.
The wife is dressed in a loose white shift and has her skirts pulled up to her knees. She seems relaxed, though Olympia notes that she does not take her eyes off the child playing in front of her in the water. The woman’s husband has been bathing, for his costume droops with the wet. He sits beside his wife and runs his fingers up and down the thin cloth of the back of her dress. Olympia feels a keen, not to say ferocious, pang of jealousy and regret. For Haskell and she will never have what that couple have and, perhaps because it is so easy for them, cannot value as much as they might: a child, a marriage, the ability to sit outside in public and touch each other.
She turns quickly toward Haskell. There is again the lightning within her body, that endlessly repeatable lightning. The need for the relief and release only he can offer. She puts her face against the pad of his shoulder.
“We have only one more day,” she says.
As if echoing the man and wife outside, Haskell strokes her back with his fingers.
“In our imaginations,” he says, “we have a lifetime.”
• • •
She is later than she has said she would be, and as she walks, she composes excuses: Victoria’s mother asked me to stay for tea. They were getting up a croquet match at the hotel. Julia and I were playing duets on her piano, and I lost track of the time. The sand is hard, and her dress is wrinkled. She looks up toward her house, dreading having to enter it, and when she does, she is startled to see that her mother and Catherine Haskell and Zachariah Cote are sitting on the porch.
But surely Catherine is in York, Olympia thinks.
Olympia instinctively turns and bends to the sand as if she had dropped a handkerchief or purse.
My God, she thinks. We might have been caught.
Slowly, she stands and tries to smooth her skirts. Her fingers feel for the buttons at her collar to see that they are fastened. She checks to see that the locket is inside her dress. When she turns, her mother is already waving to her, beckoning her to join them. Olympia walks toward the house and makes her way up the porch steps.
“Olympia,” Catherine says when she has reached them. “I am so glad to see you. How are you surviving this ghastly weather?”
“Olympia seems to have a secret life these days,” her mother answers for her.
“Indeed,” says Cote, flashing her a smile.
“Tell me about it,” Catherine pleads. “You have a young man.”
“No,” Olympia says in a confused manner.
“Olympia, do sit down,” her mother says.
“It is just that I have made a number of friends here this summer, and I have been much occupied with them,” Olympia says in a voice tight with strain, a strain she thinks neither Catherine nor Cote can fail to notice.
“Olympia has learned to play tennis,” her mother says. Beside her, Olympia can feel Cote’s scrutiny.
“How delightful,” Catherine says.
“Catherine has returned a day early,” Olympia’s mother explains to Olympia. “She means to surprise John.”
“But I was seized with a sudden desire to visit your mother,” Catherine says, leaning toward Olympia and placing a h
and on her knee. “To discuss this exciting gala in your honor on Saturday night. Your mother has been telling me all about your dress.”
“And I have come early as well,” Cote says. “I did not want to have to travel north on that dreadful Friday train, and so I have slipped out of the city early. Indeed, I think I shall stay on in Fortune’s Rocks for a while now.” He pauses for effect. “I am sure the muse will find me here,” he adds, smiling again in Olympia’s direction. He accepts another cup of lemonade from Olympia’s mother and settles back into his chair.
“I used to play tennis as well,” Olympia’s mother says in a surprising non sequitur.
Olympia hardly dares look at either her mother or Catherine.
“I was rather good,” her mother adds shyly. “Actually, I had a beau once who was a tennis player. Before Phillip, that is.”
Olympia struggles to attend to what her mother is saying. She wonders if she should alert Haskell somehow, tell him of Catherine’s arrival. She tries to remember if they left anything at the cottage.
“He was the son of a carriage-maker in Rowley,” her mother says, warming to her subject.
“Oh, Rosamund, do tell us . . . ,” says Cote.
“There is so little to tell.”
“Rosamund, you must,” Catherine insists.
Her mother looks away and then back at her hands, which are folded in her lap.
“I met him on a day that I was asked to accompany Papa on an errand to his carriage-maker,” she says. “I was young, maybe seventeen, and we had been coming north for only a half a dozen summers. Papa went into the shop, but I was left to wait in the buggy. I remember that I was very cross at this, because it was hot and I was thirsty and he seemed to be taking an inordinately long time. But while I was sitting there, a young man came over to the carriage.” She raises a hand to smooth her hair and only then seems to realize that she has committed herself to her tale.