Fortune's Rocks (21 page)

Authors: Anita Shreve

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Boston (Mass.)

BOOK: Fortune's Rocks

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He takes her earlobe into his mouth and presses the heel of his hand against her through the cloth of her dress. There is a quickening through her body. With an instinct she has not known she possesses, her hips rise to meet his hand.
How is it that the body knows?
She stretches her legs and pushes herself urgently against him. The new sensations within her are keen and knife-edged. Her shoulders slide down against the grass, and she arches her back. Haskell holds her tightly, his face buried in her neck.

They lie together in the marshes. The wet seeps through the grass.

“I could not have imagined this,” she says.

She wants to speak further of this thing that has shaken her body as if it were a rag doll, this thing that has left her with a curious thread of lingering desire. She wants Haskell to be inside of her, as he was in his room. She cannot think of how to tell him this except to raise her skirts.

How astonishingly bold she is becoming, she thinks.

“Is this how it is?” she asks him. “Is this the secret all men and women share?”

“Some have this,” he says. “Not all. Most men do. There are women who do not ever have this, who cannot allow themselves to have it.”

And Catherine,
Olympia instantly wonders.
How is it with Catherine?

“We cannot lie here,” he says.

They help each other up, and he kisses her. “I will take you to the cottage now,” he says. “We will sit in the sun, and our clothes will dry there.”

Her legs are wobbly, and she has to pull herself up into the carriage with her hands. Her dress is damp all along one side.

Haskell takes up the reins, turns the horses around, and heads in the direction of the new cottage. He reaches for her hand, which he holds in the folds of her skirt.

“You flirt with risk,” she says.

“It is not normally my nature.” He presses his hand against her leg. “Sometimes I say to myself that we must never see each other again, and I am resolved in this — ”

Her heart seizes up at this pronouncement.

“—and then, within seconds, I understand that such discipline will not ever be possible.”

They travel the length of the coast road, Olympia praying that they will not encounter anyone known to her. After a time, he draws the buggy up to the skeleton of the new cottage. Olympia can see that it will have a stunning view, with only the Atlantic for a front yard. He helps her down from the carriage and takes her arm. She wonders if her father is even now trying to see them through the telescope, if she now exists in its circular universe. Most of the cottage has been framed, and there are many places through which one can see the ocean. Olympia begins to imagine fancifully what it would be like to enclose such a house entirely in windows — to have light always, to feel surrounded by sand and ocean.

“I am not sure I have ever seen a house being built,” she says.

Together they enter the cottage and move through rooms that for now exist only in the imagination, rectangular and oblong chambers framed in pine and oak, forming a house that will one day shelter a family. She wonders how such a structure might be built, how one knows precisely where to put a post or a beam, how exactly to make a window. From time to time, Haskell murmurs beside her, “This will be the kitchen,” or “This will be the sun parlor,” but she does not attend him closely. She prefers, for the moment, to think of the house as ephemeral and insubstantial.

“This is the dining room,” he says when they have come to a stopping place that has been partially enclosed.

And she cannot help but think of the dozens of dinners he and Catherine will one day have in this room. Perhaps even Olympia might be invited to such a dinner and will sit where she is standing now. She shakes her head quickly and turns away.

“What is it?” he asks.

“This . . . ,” she says. “It is not important.”

“I should not have brought you here.”

“How old is Catherine?” Olympia asks.

“Thirty-four,” Haskell says tentatively.

“And how old are you?”

“Forty-one.”

“Do you have family? I mean, do you have brothers and sisters? Are your parents still living?”

“My mother is still living. My father is not. My mother lives with my sister in Cambridge. I have a brother who is a minister in Milton.”

A sensation, as though her chest were being squeezed, overtakes her. Why, she asks herself, the first of many times she will ask this question, must love be so punishing? Why, so quickly upon the heels of the moments of her greatest joy, must she be haunted with images that produce only pain: images of Haskell with another, speaking words that might have been saved for her, sharing intimacies that she can hardly bear to think about? Why, she asks herself, as she stands in this room that is not yet a room, does she have to imagine, in the greatest of detail, a meal Haskell will share not with her but with his wife? In his letter to her, he wrote that he has known Catherine in “all the ways possible to a man.” The phrase is haunting in its implications. Even as Haskell takes Olympia’s hand, she is visited by an image of Haskell holding Catherine’s hand; and though the persistent touch of him slowly brings Olympia to her senses and momentarily overwhelms all thoughts of the past, she feels an ache that will, if she lets it, blunt her joy and abrade the edges of her pleasure.

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.”

F
OR 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.”