by Sarah Smith
But I can.
If he was Richard, he was sane.
He sat in the car with the breath knocked out of him, looking out over the bowl of the valley. It was as if someone had left him the whole valley—which, if he was Richard, was something close to true. He couldn’t see the situation all at once, not in the detail he needed.
My G-d, to be rich and sane and to have all one’s chances to take again. It was a little too much to understand.
No. Most certainly no. He didn’t want to be Richard.
On the other hand, he would much prefer to be sane.
He drove back slowly. Being back at the house felt awkward and tentative, like acting on a decision not really taken. He shut himself up in the telephone closet under the stairs and put through a call to New York.
“Alexandre?” Louis said through the wires.
"J’avais tort,” Reisden said. “I was wrong. I didn’t want to kill Tasy.” He took a deep breath. Speaking French felt stiff after two months thinking and speaking in English. He massaged his temples. Thinking of Richard too much was like pushing against pain.
Long silence. “Good,” Louis said.
Neither one of them knew what to say after that. The telephone line sang tensely like a cicada.
“Was that what you went off to find out?” Louis asked finally.
“Not at the time. I didn’t know.”
“You hurt me, up in Boston.”
“Yes. Not only there.”
He had never apologized to Louis; apologies for what Louis knew about him would have cost his last shred of pride. “I have been so wrong I don’t know how to be right yet. This is all new. Nothing’s clear.”
“At least something is happening.”
“Oh, my G-d, yes.”
“What about Paris?”
He hadn’t thought about Paris. Valleys upon valleys opening.
“Alexandre? Tu es lá?”
“Yes, I’m here.” Fool not to say yes, I’ll go to Paris, though he knew already that someday he would. “It’s all a little too early. Don’t ask me yet.”
“But tell Berthet not to hire anyone else? Because he hasn’t.”
“Don’t for G-d’s sake let him hire anyone else.”
No sound on the other end of the line. Then finally Louis cleared his throat. “Ouais, OK. Ça va bien. ”
“Yes, everything’s all right.” More or less all right. Again, neither of them said anything, trying to deal with that confusion when relationships change. “Have you found anything in the lab?”
“It was good you called. O’Brien wants to send you some results. And he wants your results from last winter.”
“I’ll telegraph Lotmann to send them, and of course I want to see O’Brien’s work. What’s it about?”
Reisden could sense Louis grinning. “The package will arrive on Monday.”
Perdita tries on a dress
“I don’t care, it’s too hot,” Efnie complained. “Mamma, you can’t possibly expect us to wear all this!”
“I expect you to look like other girls at the dance, yes. I do not expect you to shed your undergarments like a Hottentot.”
“Mamma, it’ll be as hot as soup at that dance. You know half the ballroom windows at the Lakeside don’t open.”
“These are the dresses you have, and these are the dresses you’ll wear,” decreed Aunt Violet. “Look at Perdita, she doesn’t whine about a little heat.”
The door closed definitively. “I don’t have breath to complain,” Perdita murmured.
Efnie and Perdita were laced into the corsets they would wear that evening, canvas stiffened with thin steel boning. Under their corsets they wore chemises; over them, cotton and lace corset covers, then their petticoats. Perdita was fanning herself with the fan that belonged to her dress. The dress was pale pink, edged with a deeper pink ruching, and the fan was ostrich feathers, pink and plumy. The fan-feathers moved a languid suggestion of air. She didn’t feel at all like going to a party tonight. She felt a little sick; she hadn’t slept at all last night, thinking about the thing in the barn. Harry had stayed very late, so that she couldn’t call to Island Hill and ask Gilbert or Richard. They might have called, but they hadn’t, and she didn’t know. Only the memory of that horrible smell.
“You look like a flamingo in your dress, pink doesn’t suit you,” Efnie said critically. “You look all pale. And my dress is ten years out of style. Nobody wears big flared skirts like this anymore. Everyone will laugh at us.”
It was so hot that just standing still made the sweat come out on her. Girls weren’t supposed to sweat. Perdita pushed her hair up distractedly in a coil at the top of her head. If she fainted again, the way she had in the wedding dress ... “I don’t want to go to the party.”
“Of course you do. Mama is just saving money, giving you an ostrich fan to take to a party like this. Oh, Perdita, I want to go off and buy a dress, something that’ll really make the men take notice, so I can get a boyfriend like Harry. I want to dance with some man and have him know I’ve got a body, not a suit of armor. It’s too hot not to— Oh, Perdita, don’t look like that. Come with me, Mama has an account at that New York shop on Main Street, and I saw just the dress I want. ”
At the shop, Perdita stood smelling the air while Efnie tried on dresses. Scents of sachet, powder, sandalwood, perfumes. One of the shop assistants let her try one of the perfumes. “Ylang-Ylang,” the shop assistant said. “From Paris.”
It was astringent, alcoholic, with an undertone of musk and flowers. Perdita shivered. From Paris, from all the places she had never been. She sniffed her own wrist, smelling the perfume and beneath it the odor of her skin.
“Perdita, stop smelling yourself, that’s disgusting.”
She hadn’t thought of trying any dresses. One would be very like another to her. But if the dresses were like the perfume . . . “Please,” she said, “may I try one on?”
“Why do you want to?” Efnie muttered. “I mean— You’re engaged.”
Efnie did mean it, besides the inevitable You don’t have to be fashionable, you’re blind, but it made Perdita’s blood rise. “I do want to,” she said, low-voiced.
“Try that one then,” Efnie said carelessly, “the color suits you.”
Efnie’s tone made her suspicious, but the shop assistant agreed. In the changing room she unbuttoned her clothes and stepped out of them, down to her slips.
“No, the petticoat too,” the shop assistant said. “You don’t wear petticoats with this dress.”
“None at all?” she said in a small voice.
She stood up in her chemise alone, and the shop assistant slipped the dress over her shoulders. It was lighter than anything she had ever worn. There was a little weight from the beading around her neck and shoulders; otherwise it seemed as though the dress would float away. The shop assistant pressed the snaps together around her neck.
“That is right.” The shop assistant smiled with her voice.
“It’s pretty,” Efnie said almost with disappointment.
“But the one you’re wearing is your color, it’s simply you,” Efnie’s shop assistant gushed.
“What color is mine?” Perdita asked. “Is it pretty? If I get into the light, I can see it.”
In the light from the front window the color was like nothing she had ever dreamed of wearing: a color like the smell of sandalwood, like that perfume from France. It was a filmy brass or gold, a color from a foreign country, not a girl’s color at all. “Oh,” she sighed and ran her hand down the smooth, soft fabric as gently as if it were a lion.
“The silk is Chinese. The beads are amber and iron,” the shop assistant said. “And everyone at the dance will want to look like you.”
“That will be good for you!” said Perdita, pleased.
“Yes, my dear; although what they want to look like, they can’t buy. So we will pick you out the right shoes and fan to go with this, and— Are you dressing at the hotel? Good. Tonight Ma
ry and I will come and dress your hair.”
The two girls walked back to the hotel, their purchases under their arms, while Efnie schemed how they would dress tonight without alerting Aunt Violet. “I don’t know I would wear that dress if I were you, Perdita. That color’s just unearthly.”
“Will Harry like it, Efnie? You know he doesn’t like anything too odd.” Who had she bought it for? Harry would think she was half undressed.
Richard would like it.
She thought of the two of them in the barn and for a moment shivered uncontrollably. She didn’t know whether it was because of the thing in the barn, or just because he would be there.
Really, she shouldn’t go.
A dance
The Midsummer Soiree was in full swing when Gilbert, Harry, and Reisden arrived at the ballroom of the Lakeside Hotel. Roar of voices, heat that made sweat stand out on the skin, and the orchestra violently sawing at the latest songs.
Reisden had not gone to a formal summer dance since Vienna. Outside, the fairy lights were strung through the tree branches as if this were a dance at Hofbrünnerstein’s. The smells were the same: crushed geranium leaves, crushed flowers, perfume and punch, sex and sweat and anticipation.
A dance is sex in good clothes, in which eligible young women and men may meet, and walk, and talk, may look at each other’s palms and trace each other’s future with one finger, finding each other fascinating. A young man may take a young woman to see the fairy-lights strung out in the dark trees, and when the moon is full and there is a lake to reflect the moon, they may find more trees and lakes and moons than chaperones; and who knows what comes next? For a young man of good presence, the spring of a dance floor underfoot is as good as the promise of a woman. Reisden was astonished at how many women there were in the world tonight. It was a new way of forgetting when he should be thinking, but without any conscious effort he undressed them with his eyes, stripping off bugle skirts and spiky bodices to look at the astonishing curves of breasts and bellies and thighs. He was apparently going to go directly from madness to satyriasis.
“Mr. Knight,” Anna Fen purred, “you called me this afternoon, my maid said.”
She was a confection of tulle and lace and moon-colored charmeuse, covered with silken lilies and geraniums and glittering bugle beads. Her dress plunged on top just to the bound of discretion, so that he could see she had a beauty mark on the side of one ample breast, and rose discreetly at the hem so that her slim silk ankles showed themselves. Reisden took a long comprehensive look. Jay was dead, which he would have to tell her to learn her reaction, and he didn’t like her overmuch, and the dress looked like a drunken dream. Still he looked her up and down and mentally filled in hidden details under the silk. Her eyes demurely dropped to below his waist. He mentally cursed the woman. Mrs. Fen was a public convenience, which is sometimes all that’s required; but he didn’t want to feel like one too. “I am so sorry she put you off. Do call again,” Mrs. Fen said. “Come for tea. I shall always be at home to you.” She turned and swayed away, presenting them with a magnificent rear end. Even Gilbert stared.
“Richard, you seem distracted,” Gilbert said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Oh, much more than I expected.” He smiled.
“Have you seen Perdita?”
“No.” She was expected to be in pink. He was still standing on his vantage point on the stairs and he looked over the pink dresses in the crowd, but didn’t see her. “You must dance with her when you find her,” he told Gilbert.
“Harry says he’s taken all her dances, but I hope he will give me one. He must give you one.”
“You shall have mine, Gilbert. ” He thought about their dance lesson—yesterday, in the music room, when she had told him that she had given up music for Harry’s sake. Then in the barn; only yesterday, in the barn? She would not want the reminder. And tonight he felt dangerous. No, not Harry’s Perdita.
Charlie Adair came by, in a dark suit, not formal dress, looking tired and discouraged. Gilbert took his arm and the two men went off, moving out toward the chairs on the terrace. Reisden was besieged with requests to sign dance cards. Here, as in Vienna, the dance card was the legal tender of dances; it was a small booklet with a pencil attached on a silk cord, showing the types of dances, the music, and the order in which they would be played. “Waltz, Fair Rose. Two-step, Can't You Eat a Bull- Dog?” What?—a song about Yale. “Waltz medley, from The Merry Widow.” Men asked for dances by asking women for permission to sign their dance cards, then writing their names for the dances they wanted. The system was cumbersome and required no little diplomacy, since once a man had permission to sign a girl’s dance card, he could sign for more than one dance. Men were given no aide-memoire, but were expected to commit to memory the combinations of women and dances with which they had been favored.
The women’s system ran smoothly on a roadbed of forgeries, prevarication, and erasures—dance card pencils deliberately had no erasers, but most women learned to make do with the inside of a roll from the buffet. The stag line, on the other hand, was as full of confusion here as it was in Vienna: “Which one’s Whitwell’s sister? I think I've got the next dance with her, and I don’t know her from a puppy.” Reisden pleaded honestly that he didn’t know any of them, thus could dance only with women who were not already taken for that dance. This offended all the right people. Every mama’s girl wanted to dance with the eligible bachelor Richard Knight, but none wanted to confess herself deserted for that very dance.
He danced several times with a clever girl who knew exactly what she was doing—plain face, splendid body—and once each with a series of delightful American virgins, whom he chose for their variety of body shapes like a pasha going through a harem. A little blonde so shy she almost melted in his arms; a brunette who talked about tennis while her small, round breasts jiggled; a big, warm, comfortable girl whom one could have licked like ice cream.
In Vienna—or even, say, in New York, if he had spent the summer as Louis had wanted—one part of a dance would have led very naturally to another. In Vienna, virgins were off limits but wives were not; one would move through the dances making a little verbal love here, there pressing a hand for a few extra moments; men and women cooperated very naturally, female sensuality rubbing and pressing against male, as the waltzes became slower and the hour later, eyes looked into eyes, hands pressed against hips; and when Reisden, at two or three or four o’clock in the morning, took some laughing woman up the discreet backstairs in the Schwarzenbergplatz or stripped her in her own bedroom, it was the whole dance they climaxed, all the men she had danced with, all the women he had.
Here he did not know the rules, except those Anna Fen had offered him. He didn’t know what was permitted, and there were far too many virgins, who did not dance as well as in Vienna; but the same slow electricity was building up, and he played the mental game of deciding who, of all these beautiful women, he would want to end the evening with.
He took a glass of wine and stood at the top of the stairs on a little balcony with a wrought iron railing in the shape of vines. He could see across the dance floor; and out of all the wealth of women, his eye was caught by one because her dress was simpler than the rest and an odd color, almost a bronze. She was a woman of medium height, slim, with beautiful shoulders and small high breasts; the rest he had to leave to imagination under the dress, which was in the Greek style, one perfect line falling from her breasts to the floor.
She stood as gracefully as if she had been barefoot. He took one almost painful breath, swept by an emotion like the moment in music when the theme declares itself. He felt a line stretching between him and the woman, something like the tug of a fish-line, a simple, painful precision of desire. She was talking with Efnie Pelham, and she gestured with one of her hands, large hands for her size, with long fingers; and he was looking at her now because he had looked at her all summer.
Perdita.
Harry shouldered his way throu
gh the crowd and took Perdita by one arm, leading her toward the dance floor. He put his arms around her in a bear hug and shuffled back and forth, out of step with the music. Perdita kept in step with him. This was her only season for dancing. At Christmas she would be married to this oaf who couldn’t dance and, knowing Harry’s possessiveness of her, she would never dance with anyone else again. Reisden wanted for her a night of waltzes with someone better than Harry; but not himself, not when he so simply and impossibly wanted her. Harry danced badly, grabbing Perdita by the spine and running her up and down the dance floor like a football. Reisden wanted her; he wanted to put his hands on her and feel the curve of her hips underneath her dress; he wanted to plunge into this beautiful woman, away from everything that had happened in the last two days; and, because she was Harry’s Perdita, for her sake Reisden wanted anything but that complication.
The orchestra took a pause. Harry brought Perdita back to the edge of the floor and, when the music started again, took out her cousin Efnie instead, as if there were no difference between the two. Efnie leaned her head against Harry’s arm and simpered. On the edge of the dance floor, not quite out of its traffic and not near any of the few paths on which even the sighted could get from one area to another in this crowded place, Perdita was standing against a pillar. She was so beautiful Reisden’s heart hurt. On the other side of the room Harry and Efnie had found a group of girls, apparently school friends of Efnie’s, and she was introducing him to them, leaning against his arm. Harry stood there talking to them; someone brought him a glass of punch. He was in no hurry to come back to Perdita.
Gilbert should have been there to rescue her, but he was deep in conversation with Charlie on the other side of the room. Reisden came down the stairs toward her, too unsure of himself to be glad.
“Perdita, may I have this dance?”