Night Train to Lisbon (7 page)

When the play started, Carson noted that “Julieta” had the same coloring that she did, and that “Roméo” was built more along Alec's lines, his hair brown and hanging in his face a bit. Alec couldn't have failed to notice this either, Carson thought, and as they sat side by side on the hard wood, intently watching the production on the distant stage being spoken in a language that was completely incomprehensible to either of them, he took her hand in his, his fingers playing with the tiny blue beads of the bracelet he'd bought her. Something stirred inside her.

It was during the balcony scene, when Julieta
was asking “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”—or, at least, the Portuguese version of the question—that Alec lifted Carson's hand up to his mouth and gently kissed each finger. Then he stroked her fingers there in the dark, and slowly took each one and placed the tip lightly in his mouth for a mere second. The feelings that this created inside Carson were powerful, unlike anything she had felt before. His mouth was on her littlest finger now; he sucked the fingertip gently, and Carson involuntarily closed her eyes.
Wherefore art thou Romeo?
When she was a younger girl and had first read the play in school, she and almost everyone else in her class at Miss Purslane's had understood the line to mean, “Where are you, Romeo?” It had seemed to be the question of a young lover calling beseechingly into the darkness. But no, their kindly old teacher, Mr. Benjamin, had explained that the line actually meant, “
Why
are you called Romeo?” It meant what, in essence, was the meaning of the label, the name, when Romeo's true essence lay not in such a label, but in
himself?

Wherefore art thou Alec?
she wondered to herself now as he kissed and caressed her hand. He was someone she did not really know; they had met on a night train to Lisbon, two travelers from different countries, drawn together by something she did not understand. Certainly, it was called attraction; that much she knew. But possibly, just possibly, Carson thought as Alec leaned toward her now, tipping her face up to meet his own, the
two of them looking for a long moment into each other's eyes, the amphitheater blurring and disappearing, along with the actors and the audience, and the ticket sellers, and the trees, and the city in the distance, it was also called love.
Amoro.
Yes, that was what it was, Carson knew, and she trusted her instincts, and wasn't afraid.

Wherefore art thou Alec?
It didn't matter really, not one bit. He was someone strange and new, but, improbably, he was hers.

S
o then they were in love. Full-flowering, astonishing love, the kind that Carson had always read about—the kind, she supposed, that her mother had hoped she would one day have with Harris Black back in Connecticut. Could people even really fall in
love
in Connecticut? she wondered, for here in Portugal the atmosphere seemed somehow to enhance her love for Alec Breve. She and Alec held hands as they strolled through the old streets of the city or the Praça Dom Pedro IV, the city's main square, listening to the tolling of distant bells. They stole kisses as they wandered the windswept rocky coastline of Sintra, the spray of the ocean crashing far below. They explored the beaches of gorgeous Cascais, where tanned and well-rested couples lay splayed on
the fine sand, couples just like themselves.

This
was
a fairy tale, in a way, Carson realized. That first moment on the train, when Carson glanced into a smoky compartment and Alec Breve glanced up from his playing cards and their eyes met: wasn't that love at first sight—or at least as close as it comes in real life? That whole headlong rush all evening on board the train, as if their bodies were willing them toward that platform and a kiss born of urgency as much as passion: wasn't that a now-or-never moment—a perfect example of two lives taking a sudden turn that neither lover could have possibly foreseen but afterward acquires the inevitability of dream logic?

So Alec was to be her prince. He just wasn't the kind of prince her mother would approve of, Carson suspected. Sometimes when Carson and Alec strolled, and a silence filled the space between them that neither felt the need to fill, that both in fact allowed to linger, the better to slow the passage of time, she would try to imagine the moment she would introduce Alec to her parents. Carson wouldn't even have to explain; her parents would just
sense
that Alec wasn't one of their own. Her mother would be gracious toward Alec, of course, but Carson would detect in her eyes a surprise mingled with disappointment, and then later her father would pull her aside to quietly inquire just how much she trusted this poor English chap—how she could be absolutely sure Alec wasn't simply some gold digger with designs on
the Weatherell family fortune. In those moments of silent reflection, Carson would find herself sighing inwardly and wishing that her parents could somehow be as understanding, as accepting—as open to life's life-altering possibilities—as Jane and Lawrence. And then Carson would turn to Alec and give his hand a squeeze, as if he were the one in need of reassurance.

For as improbable a prince as Alec might seem in her parents' estimation, Carson seemed just as unlikely a princess in her own. Sure, her good looks and easy grace and offhand flirtatiousness might be the ideal complement to the likes of Harris Black, but what did she have to offer the likes of Alec Breve? He didn't care about money. He didn't need a wife who could oversee a dinner party for twenty without breaking a sweat. He didn't want everything that Carson Weatherell had been taught, for as long as she could remember, men wanted.

So what
did
he want? He wanted the thrill of the chase as he tracked down the subtleties of a physics equation. He wanted the satisfaction that comes from cobbling a life, however improvised, out of mathematics and cigarettes and camaraderie. But most of all what Alec Breve wanted, as improbable as it sometimes seemed to Carson, was her.

And so in the days following that evening of
bacalhau
and Shakespeare, they strolled, and they wandered, and they explored, and then one day Alec took Carson on a bus to the very western-
most point of the entire European continent, Cabo da Roca, and there, at a small
pensão,
they made love.

They had arranged to go there in advance; he'd brought the subject up tentatively, trying to gauge how she would respond. What he'd said was, “Carson, I want to be with you.”

“You are with me,” she'd said. They were sitting on the porch of her aunt and uncle's villa at the time, side by side on the porch swing, her head in his lap, and he was stroking her blond spill of hair. Both Lawrence and Jane were well out of earshot.

“No, I want to be
with
you,” he tried again, his voice quieter, even shy. “I don't know how you'll react to this, and God knows I don't want to scare you off, but I'll say it anyway.” He paused, then said, “I want to make love to you. I want it so much.”

“Oh,” she said, and she quickly looked away. Of course she wanted this, too, but it was not what she was supposed to want, not even remotely, and as a result, the mutuality of their feelings alarmed her. Whom could she talk to about all of this? Her aunt? Although their “friendship” had developed over the past weeks, Jane was still and forever her “aunt,” no matter by what name Carson called her. No, Carson had no one. No one but him.

Alec was whom she'd come to confide in. Alec was the confidant, the constant companion, the endless receptacle into which she could pour her wishes and desires and dreams. Even though their
lives were so different—or maybe
because
their lives were so different—the fact was, she could talk to him, and he to her, about almost anything. When she spoke of her upbringing, and her fairy-tale existence, he seemed to understand, nodding at key moments and asking all kinds of incisive questions, trying his hardest to imagine what this “Connecticut” must be like. And he seemed to understand, too, her embarrassment or discomfort or even boredom at having to describe dinners at the country club, the intricacies of the social season, the charity work that seemed to speak more to the needs of the wealthy women stuffing envelopes and ordering arrangments of flowers than those of the disadvantaged they were helping. And so he would gently switch subjects and talk instead about
her
—who Carson was—in a way that nobody else ever had.
Who was your very best friend?
he wanted to know.
When were you happiest? What's been your deepest fear?

And when it was her turn, she would try to learn what his “Cambridge” must be like, and she, too, soon learned that he didn't want to be defined only by equations on a blackboard. It was when he spoke of his own childhood, describing in detail his memories of his father, his relationship with his mother, now deceased, and the elderly, wealthy woman named Mrs. Violet Bertram whose house she'd cleaned, who had sent Alec to Cambridge, and who still maintained a room for him in her house—when he spoke of all this, he spoke from the heart, and Carson listened, rapt.

Maybe they weren't so different after all. Maybe this is what they had in common: Carson and Alec had come from isolated lives, they had always thought that in some way, without even thinking about it, how they lived was how the rest of the world lived, and now they knew otherwise.
What else?
one of them would ask, and the amazing thing was that there always
was
something else, something more, another detail or story that he could summon, or that she could remember about her own childhood, one more round of memories that they could share, and in so doing, remain together a little while longer.

They were getting to know each other; this was what people in love did. It happened effortlessly, and the more that Carson learned about Alec, the more she seemed to love him, and when he asked her to make love with him, it was him she naturally wanted to ask about whether she should. But she couldn't, and so she had to do once more what she'd found herself doing so often during this endlessly surprising and suddenly consequential summer, and decide for herself.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Her aunt and uncle, upon realizing that their niece was falling in love while under their care, were of course concerned. “You're a young girl,” Lawrence said that very same night at dinner, “and he's an older man.”

“Not so old. He's twenty-five,” said Carson.

“But compared with you, it's a lifetime,” Lawrence grumbled.

“Ignore your uncle,” said Jane. “He's forgotten what it was like to woo me when I was but a girl myself. The age difference shouldn't really matter if you truly and honestly get to know and respect each other.”

“Thank you,” said Carson.

“If, of course,” Jane added lightly, “you're well aware of what you're getting into: that a man in his twenties might expect the relationship to include certain elements that are, shall we say, inappropriate for a girl your age.”

Jane looked at her niece sternly, and Carson found herself simply looking back, not wavering or blinking. What was happening between herself and Alec was something so exciting that she wanted to talk about it with everyone, to climb to the top of a Moorish castle and shout it over the hills, and yet she also knew that she could not do that. Her aunt and uncle would not approve. No one she knew would. If her own parents found out that she was falling in love with a penniless English physicist in his twenties who had just this afternoon whispered to her, “I want to make love to you,” they would personally fly over to Portugal and drag her home, making sure that she never saw him again.

So she wouldn't tell anyone. She would keep it between herself and Alec, where it rightfully belonged. She would travel with him the following day, as they'd planned, to Cabo da Roca, and enter the
pensão
posing as man and wife.

 

And so it was in that
pensão
that Carson found herself sitting on a simple white bed facing a window that overlooked the sea and the west. Across that great expanse, far, far away, were Carson's parents, just waking up and having their coffee and toast and eggs-over-easy, for in America it was still morning. But here in Portugal, time had already passed and it was the middle of the afternoon, and Alec Breve was sitting down beside her on the bed.

“You are so lovely,” he said, and she lowered her eyes, then began to unbutton her blouse. Her hands were shaking so hard, she could barely undo the tiny seed-pearl buttons. “Are you cold?” he asked, concerned, but she shook her head no. “Just scared?” She nodded. “Don't be, darling,” he said. “Please.” He kissed her cheek and stroked her hair.

“I'm trying not to be,” said Carson.

“If this isn't what you want, we can wait,” Alec said. “We can wait as long as you want.”

“No,” she said. “I don't want to wait.” She wanted to touch him, wanted to see his body, tanned from the Portuguese sun, free of its clothes. She wanted to see the muscles in his legs and arms, and look into his eyes in the dim afternoon light. She wanted him as much as he wanted her.

And then, to her own surprise as well as his, she opened her blouse fully and pulled him against her, lying back onto the bed and bringing him atop her, so she could feel the weight of his
body on hers. He actually felt
weightless,
she realized, and even the bed itself seemed unmoored from the floor in this small, simple room. They began kissing each other quickly and urgently, and touching each other everywhere, exploring, trying it all out, creating delicate patterns with hands and mouths, and as if from some great distance she heard a voice say “Oh, don't stop,” and she had no idea whether it was his voice speaking, or her own.

 

Later, back on the bus to Lisbon, the couple sat side by side for a long while, barely speaking but simply letting themselves think back over what had just happened, and where this would all lead. For Carson, making love with Alec was the most extraordinary experience she'd ever had. The woven straw seat of the bus was hard and uncomfortable, and the vehicle itself seemed to have been manufactured in an entirely different era. A woman in the seat behind them carried a live chicken on her lap; it continually squawked and complained and shrugged its feathers into the air throughout the short trip into the city.

At one point Alec turned to Carson and looked at her. “Are you all right now?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “I wanted to make sure you weren't feeling…regret, or something like that.”

“No,” she said. “Not at all.”

She knew that he'd been with other women; he'd told her so when she'd asked. He'd been em
barrassed by the question but had answered it as honestly as he could. Yes, he'd said, he had been with women before, three to be exact, but none of them had really amounted to anything in the end. Two of them were fellow students at Cambridge, one studying history, the other mathematics; the third was an older woman, a barmaid he'd met at a party right after he graduated. He hadn't loved any of them. With Carson it was different, he said. With Carson he'd felt everything it seemed humanly possible to feel. Though the experience of lovemaking was new to her and not to him, he'd explained that it did feel new to him when he was with her, because it was the first time that it had
counted.
It was the first time he'd ever been in love with the woman he was making love to. And she knew he was telling her the truth.

Today he would go to his scientific conference and she would return to Sintra. Tonight he would have dinner with Freddy and Tom and Michael, and she would sit across from her aunt and uncle in the Villa do Giraldo.

How was your trip to Cabo da Roca?
they would want to know.

Oh, fine, fine. Would you pass the salad, please?

Of course. And what did you see there, Carson? Any particularly interesting sights?

Oh yes. A beautiful man, stretched out naked on a white bed.

Short of saying such things to them, she really had nothing to tell. There would be a strained silence between herself and Jane and Lawrence,
Carson knew. She needed time to figure out how to manage all of this.

“You know,” said Alec as the bus passed a massive collection of stones that formed the vague outline of a castle, long abandoned, “we only have two weeks more.”