The Age of Desire (38 page)

Disappointment crumples Thomas’s mouth. But he nods.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Yes.”

There is a long moment of silence. Anna sips her wine, feeling a tumultuousness inside that the wine can’t settle. She is afraid he will argue. And she will say yes just to please him. She doesn’t want it to come to that.

But Thomas is not the sort of man to argue or cajole.

“Do you think you might send me postcards of your journey?” he asks at last. “It will give me something to look forward to. And I can imagine my dear Miss Bahlmann in beautiful places doing wonderful things.”

She smiles at him, thinking him a very special man.

They walk back to her lodgings together and the silence is companiable, though sad. When they reach the doorway of the hotel, she holds out her hand in farewell. Instead, he steps forward to take her face in his hands. He gazes at her for a long while, as though he is a camera imprinting her image. And then he kisses her lips. Just a moth’s wing of a kiss. Later, as she travels through Weimar and Frankfurt, Baden and Rothenberg, she will often fall asleep thinking of that modest kiss—the haunting brush of a man’s lips against hers—the first she has ever known.

FIFTEEN

EARLY AUTUMN 1908

S
leep will not come to Edith—no matter how she tries to change her habits, her thoughts or even her level of anger at her impossible situation with Fullerton. (Not a letter. Not a card. For weeks and weeks
again
!) She begins to fear her own bed. Because she knows in it she will wrestle with sleep and lose. When morning seeps through the curtains, it always finds her emotionally spent. She writes, but how difficult it is to remember where she left her characters, what they are thinking or how different they are from one another! Guests come and go, filling her guest rooms and parlor. She laughs with them. Eats with them. But feels nothing.
The walking dead.
She has heard these words before, but now she knows precisely what they mean.

She hears that Dr. Kinnicut, the doctor she trusts most for both Teddy and herself, has come to Lenox for the month of September. He writes that he’s all too happy to see her at his rented house, a stately white colonial right in town. He views Edith over his reading glasses as she tells him about the torment of her sleeplessness. He nods, the only doctor she’s ever known with such sympathetic eyes.

“I’m sorry you’re suffering so,” he says.

He takes a deep breath and pens a prescription for a sleeping powder.

“Just a few grains before bed and you’ll be fast asleep,” he says. He smiles, this cheerful reliable man with a bald pate as pink as a rose. “Works every time,” he says. Well, why not believe him? If Dr. Kinnicut thinks it will work, it surely will, she tells herself. By the time she is back at The Mount with the packet from the pharmacy, she is immersed in a glow of expectation she hasn’t felt in weeks. At this point, sleep seems almost as desirable as a night with Fullerton. After dinner, she excuses herself from her guests and follows Dr. Kinnicut’s instruction, stirring the powder into her evening cocoa. Even the few grains infuse the cocoa with a poisonous tinge, but she drinks it down, determined.

She settles into her bedroom armchair to read
Jenseits von Gut und Böse
while waiting for the drug to take effect. How she’s enjoyed Nietzsche lately, even in her wounded state! But suddenly, she might as well be sitting on a high, bright cliff, for her bed appears far away, her dresser, the mirror on her dressing table flickering, dancing, shimmering in lamplight. A wave of nausea overtakes her, but she can’t quite understand what she’s feeling. She stumbles to the bed, which she thankfully had turned down earlier, but even before she turns off her light, the drug sends her plummeting toward a dreamless ocean. Oh! The feeling of falling is so real. So dangerous.
Falling
.
Asleep
. As she says the words aloud, they take on new meaning.

She wakes in the morning and is certain the cliff of her last waking thought has collapsed on top of her. The heaviness of her limbs, her brain, startles her. The morning light feels evil, pressing through the window, reaching out to pry apart her sticky eyes. Her head could not be more swollen and useless if she had drunk an entire bottle of brandy by herself. The light by her bedside is still burning. She never turned it off!

Most mornings, she wakes and grabs a handful of paper from the nightstand, dips her ink in the well she keeps there and begins to write immediately—before her trip to the bathroom. Morning is her best time. The time of her greatest clarity. Even after a sleepless night. But today, she can barely lift her head. And her thinking has been reduced to primal thoughts. Sip of water. Bathroom. Sick. Must be sick.

She wakes again and it is late. The sun has flooded the room. Her head is not as groggy as it was. Someone is at the door. Teddy.

“Do you plan to sleep all day?” he asks. His voice hurts her ears. “Are you unwell?”

“What time is it?” she asks.

He pulls his watch from his pocket.

“Seven minutes after eleven.”

She sits up, startled, miserable.

“This won’t do,” she says aloud.

“I’ll say it won’t,” Teddy agrees. He closes the door and if it is not with a definite slam, it certainly sounds like one to her bruised brain.

The fun Anna has with her cousins Liesel and Lotte! Lounging in a green-hued café in Gottingen, sharing feathery potato dumplings, Westphalia ham, and beer—such beer! They chuckle over a mention in Anna’s guidebook of Otto-the-One-Eyed’s reign over Gottingen—“Imagine. A Cyclops ruled Gottingen,” Lotte declares. Anyone watching them could see they have the same happy, drifting laugh, the same soft gray eyes. They could be sisters. Three round-faced, older, single women. In their company, it is easy to put aside thoughts of Thomas. To block thoughts of Edith, except, of course, remembering to send each of them postcards. How Anna labors over the condensed little messages she pens on the back, making sure they are charming and informative. But at night in her room at the Friedrichsbad Spa, she aches, without knowing why.

After two and a half weeks of laughter and getting to know one another far better than they ever have, Liesel and Lotte return to Frankfurt and Anna travels on to Verona and Venice alone. Unafraid. The silence soothes her. The sights are beautiful with or without a companion. “I am a lone animal,” she thinks proudly.

Yet sitting in her sparkling room overlooking the Grand Canal, she has a weak moment. How much more fulfilling it would be to share this scene with someone about whom she cares. She pens a real letter to Thomas, describing the sound of the water, the singing, the light off the canal washing her ceiling and glass chandelier in watery ripples. And she says he would enjoy it all. She wishes he were there. Later in the week, as her elevator cage settles in the lobby, Anna, a pink mohair stole wrapped about her arms, ready to make her way to a café for dinner, spots Thomas through the gilded bars. He is leaning on the hotel’s front desk, speaking her name.

“Thomas?”

He raises his face, beams at the sight of her.

“My dear,” he says. “Don’t you look well!”

She feels her heart thudding. He is not a handsome man. His features are weathered, and maybe he was never beautiful. But his eyes are remarkably gentle, and so happy to see her.

“I didn’t expect. Why are you . . . ?”

Through the hotel’s arched windows, the early evening light on the canal is buttery and glowing, as it was when she wrote him the note.

“Perhaps you will join me for supper,” he asks, extending his arm.

“Of course,” she says. “I’d be delighted.” Isn’t it best to let gravity take her than to flail, than to struggle? She tucks her fingers into the crook of his arm and they saunter down the dock to a waiting gondola.

“This is my gondolier, Giuseppe.” The man nods at Anna and helps her into the craft.

As the vessel swings its way into the heart of the Grand Canal, Anna hears Thomas sigh with pleasure.

“I am a fortunate man,” he declares.

Edith receives a postcard from Anna hand-painted in the most glorious shades of sea and sky.

I had a sudden opportunity to run off to Greece and enjoy a friend’s hired yacht, and after all you told me about this exquisite country, I didn’t see my way to turning down such a generous offer. Athens was marvelous but sweltering, and after visiting the Parthenon—which simply snatched the breath from my lungs—we have driven to Cape Sounion by motorcar. The breezes here are delightful, the pines are as green as parrot feathers and the air is perfumed with “rigani”—Greek oregano. Do you remember the scent? It makes me weak in the knees. Have you ever tasted retsina, the pine-resin wine? It’s awful and yet curiously makes me want to drink more! I do so wish you were here to enjoy this. I know it would raise your spirits, dear.

Anna in Greece? Joyous! Having made a friend who can hire a yacht? “We have driven down
.
” Who are
we
? A party of people? Another maiden friend? And she knows that Edith’s spirits need raising. The woman is clairvoyant! Edith, indeed, feels like she’s sinking daily. It’s been weeks since she felt like herself. Her head hurts. Her heart aches. But Anna has never sounded better! Edith is relieved to find the card lifts her own heart, that she doesn’t begrudge dear Anna her glistening fragment of happiness, though her own happiness is so miserably fleeting.

“The woman who loves a fool, is a fool,” she tells herself sternly.

I will forget him,
Edith vows
.
I will reclaim myself. After weeks of intense writing despite her exhaustion, she slips the first six chapters of
The Custom of the Country
into an envelope and hands it to Miss Thayer to ship out to
Scribner’s Magazine
. And thus unburdened, she begins by spending hours in her garden weeding—something she almost always expects the gardeners to do. She had forgotten how much pleasure there is in yanking up weeds, rendering a bed pristine again. At night she focuses on her guests—this weekend an opera singer, a French poet. She reads Nietzsche. In the mornings, she writes a new short story about a woman who misreads a man’s intentions. She thinks she is winning the battle.

And then, a few nights later, suddenly heart-thuddingly awake, she finds herself so bloated with anger at Fullerton she paces the room rather than struggle for sleep on her bed of nails. And eventually she descends to the library, seats herself at her desk and picks up her pen.