Beautiful Wild

by Anna Godbersen

  “Good. That’s how I should seem. But you must know how precarious our situation was, especially in those first days. Is. Everything is still precarious. We should enjoy these moments. These precious moments.”

  Her lips parted. She wanted to look at him, but was afraid her eyes would betray some yearning. She wanted to ask him exactly what he meant. But she only nodded and whispered that she understood. “We’ll be all right,” she added, not knowing quite where this conviction came from.

  The women were sitting together and talking by the fire that was sparking off into the night. The children were laughing and racing back and forth, everyone happy and relaxed. She didn’t see Camilla anywhere, but there was Dame Edna a little apart from the rest, outside the bright reach of the fire’s light. It was difficult to see in the dimness, but Vida thought the dame was scribbling on a piece of bark with that little pen that dangled from her wrist.

  Suddenly aware that they were even more observable here than in a grand room, Vida said, “We should go back.”

  “Vida?”

  She was so startled by the seriousness with which he held her gaze that she almost laughed. It took some effort, but she managed not to by pressing her lips together. “Yes?”

  “I want to tell you something about myself. The person I am in newspapers and things—I made all that up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . I wasn’t born the dashing adventurer type.” He met her gaze again, and gave a little roll of his eyes, and she couldn’t help it, she liked him for this show of self-deprecation. “I was actually quite a sickly child. Had to wear leg braces until I was ten, and the doctors said they didn’t think I’d live to adulthood. I wasn’t supposed to know about that, but I did. You can learn almost anything when you spend most of your day in bed. It was awful, mostly, but I was educated by private tutors. At fourteen, I’d read more than most can read in a lifetime. Only my best friends know that about me. It is very important to my family that my . . . my weakness not become public. But I am grateful for that time, in a way. It was during the years of my infirmity that I became absolutely fixated on getting to see the world, on making myself strong and able, so that I could go anywhere, everywhere—to all the places I was told I’d never see.”

  The fire was throwing off sparks, and so too was her heart. In the hothouse of the social swirl, Fitzhugh had seemed a shining object, desired by all the marriageable girls. Yet unbeknownst to her he had been just like her—a rather imperfect person who by the force of their own imagination and ambition had created a new and more magnificent self.

  Just like her, he was determined to go where he pleased, and see all of life.

  Fitzhugh gazed out in the direction of the ocean. “Anyway,” he said, “you’re right, we should go back,” and with a gesture of weariness and regret he was on his feet. He offered her a hand so that she, too, could come to standing. “I’m glad we’re friends again.”

  “We can’t be enemies,” she said. “Not here.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” he said.

  As they walked back in the direction of the others he let his fingers linger for a moment at the small of her back, brush down her skirt, and fall away.

  Fourteen

  The morning after the bonfire, Vida once again fetched Camilla to be her partner in kindling collection. She wasn’t sure why exactly. She didn’t particularly want to talk to the widow, and Fitzhugh’s silly subterfuge didn’t matter now. But the other woman was sitting in the sand staring off at nothing in particular, and Vida felt stabbed with pity. Her sense of charity insisted it would be a good deed to nudge Camilla into some sort of action. Well, that, and—Vida had to admit, to herself, if to no one else—it was satisfying to feel sorry for her rival rather than the other way around.

  After the second day of searching the jungle floor for little flammable scraps, it seemed established that they would do this every day, together but in silence, acknowledging each other only when necessary.

  Vida had learned to be absorbed in tasks. She had learned to braid her hair with the same intensity that she once used to parse a seating plan. To sift leaves, bark, twigs, for what was truly desiccated and would catch fire easily, with the same attention she’d once scrutinized fabrics for the colors that would most flatter her complexion.

  This fixation, however, was not a perfect defense against certain thoughts.

  Thoughts were often upon her before she could dodge them.

  The worst thoughts concerned Nora and Mother and Father. What might have befallen them on the stormy sea. She also imagined her own grisly death, shuddering to think what might have become of her. Her mind wandered to what her friends were doing in San Francisco. Bill and Whiting, his sister Ellen and cousin Louisa.

  She speculated on her appearance. This category of thought was as bothersome as a hungry street dog that would not be dismissed, yelping for attention with:

  The wreck of your hair.

  The ruin of your face!

  The complete ignominy of your dress—is it even worth it to be saved, when the saviors will never forget how hideous you really are?

  Whenever Camilla appeared in the running chatter of her mind it was always as “my rival.” But why, thought Vida, should Camilla be her rival, when they had nothing whatsoever to compete for? Yet the word stuck.

  Meanwhile, she and Camilla wandered into a part of the forest where the trees were overgrown by a vine that sprouted magnificent pink flowers. Their petals were big, with a texture like crepe paper.

  As Vida marveled at these lovely petals, Camilla picked up a conversation that they had had the day before yesterday. Her voice was sharp against the dense and fragrant air. “I know perfectly well why you don’t like me.”

  “Who has the energy to like and dislike anything?” Vida crouched to examine a pile of leaves. “The girl I used to be had the privilege of preferences,” she went on snappishly. “Now I am grateful to eat whatever will not poison me, and sleep anywhere I won’t be rained on.”

  Camilla made a high, sharp noise through her nose. It was like a laugh, but wasn’t quite. “They were right,” she said. “You are clever.”

  Vida glanced up. They? Although Camilla’s face was not as marred by weeping and sunburn as before, she was nonetheless unrecognizable as the beauty Vida had encountered on the top deck of the Princess. Without makeup her features had a childlike sweetness. Her complexion was reddened by the sun, hardly that alabaster tone that she, like all the women of their tribe, protected with broad hats and delicate parasols. “Who is they?” she demanded.

  “So you think you are the only one who talks to gossip columnists?”

  How pitiful that Vida should be surprised by this, that she should still care. Vida had not thought that Dame Edna was her friend, precisely, but she had believed that their alliance was an exclusive one. She went on tossing aside the wet leaves, but with the extra zeal of this fresh embarrassment.

  “Everyone knew you were after Fitz.”

  “What do you think you’re accusing me of? I didn’t make it a secret.”

  “No, I guess you didn’t.”

  “I must have looked foolish to you. But I didn’t know he was yours,” Vida said, fast as she could. She was glad to have it outside of herself and in the air.

  Camilla snorted. “He was hardly mine.”

  “No?” Vida sucked in breath and narrowed her eyes. She was overcome by two strong and simultaneous desires: that Camilla explain that statement immediately and in elaborate detail; and that she herself seem supremely above caring at all. “I thought you were what the columnists call ‘an item.’ Before you were married.”

  “Yes, once upon a time the famous Fitzhugh Farrar and I were known to be romantically entangled. We went around New York together and had all kinds of fun. But he gets bored easily, haven’t you noticed that? And he only likes the ones who know well how to play a game of hard to have.”

  “Hard to have?”
<
br />   “Oh yes, we played all sorts of games. He would make a promise and I would demur, and he’d go to lengths for my attention, and I’d think he was mine at last. And I would say all manner of desperately sincere and adoring things. And then he would disappear on some sort of trek down the Amazon!”

  “Sounds romantic.” Vida had meant to sound sarcastic, but there was another part of her—not a part she was especially proud of—that did think what Camilla described sounded exciting.

  “Oh, it was.”

  “Why did you marry his brother, then?”

  “Me and Carlton—that started as one game of many. I thought if Fitz read in the papers that his brother and his girl were known to be dancing with each other he might come home. But he didn’t. And then he still didn’t. And then the game with Carlton had gone too far—I found myself engaged, and walking down an aisle, and promising to be his in this life and the next.”

  Vida took in a big breath of the fragrant jungle air. “Oh.”

  “But marriage is different than you think it is.” Camilla straightened up and glanced away and hung her head and put her face in her hands. She made a funny sound that began as a sigh and ended as a laugh.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” Camilla said, and the word was so heavy she seemed pushed down by it, her body sinking to the ground. “As a young girl you run around trying to get a husband, thinking that getting a good husband is the only goal of life. Then you have him. Well, it’s not romantic, your heart doesn’t beat like mad, and you don’t fill pages and pages of keepsake books with the precise way in which his eyes lingered on your bare neck. It’s something else than that. Suddenly, it’s really all you have.”

  She looked very small there against the massive, knotty roots and big green leaves of the hanging vines. “I’m sorry you lost him,” Vida said.

  Camilla cocked her head, unsure of Vida’s sincerity. “Thank you,” she said at last. With a sigh she wiped the wetness from her eyes. She seemed fatigued by having talked so much. “Now let’s be good Yankees and never speak of it again, please.”

  “Lady’s honor, we shall never speak of it again.”

  And like that, the idea that Camilla was any kind of rival disappeared.

  And, for the better part of the afternoon, Vida was as good as her word.

  The sun traveled across the sky and clouds came and threatened rain, but passed with only a few little drips, and sweat beaded on their foreheads, fell salty against their tongues. They did not speak very much and yet they communicated more than they had before as they moved into the jungle, helping each other to reach old, dry leaves stuffed into the crevasse of a big tree, holding hands as they struggled over a slippery knot of roots. How frightening the jungle had seemed to Vida at first, how lush and lovely now. When they had collected enough leaves, Camilla plucked two flowers and carefully placed one behind Vida’s ear, weaving it into her hair.

  “Here,” said Vida, and did the same for Camilla, tucking a bright pink burst of petals into her tumble of golden hair. Then Camilla smiled. Vida realized she’d never seen Camilla smile, not really. It was a wonderful, surprising smile, and before she could remember to be standoffish and difficult to please, Vida smiled back. It was only as they approached the encampment that Vida considered breaking her word to Camilla. She began a vociferous internal debate within herself over what could be assumed by the phrase “lady’s honor.”

  In the course of the afternoon she had come to think of Camilla as her friend. And her friend Camilla had said very clearly that she did not want to talk about what had been between her and Fitzhugh anymore. Yet Vida very badly needed to know what exactly she had seen in the map room.

  And just as Vida was trying to decide whether or not she could ask about that, she already had. “If Fitzhugh wasn’t yours, what were you doing with him?”

  “When?”

  “That night.”

  “Oh.” After a moment Camilla said, “You mean what were we doing when you interrupted us?”

  Vida’s pulse quickened as she remembered all that had happened since that moment. Those unreal hours when she and Fitzhugh and Sal remained close together as though that could undo the disaster. The sea, and everything after. “Yes.”

  Camilla shrugged and squinted through the trees, in the direction of the bright beach. “He said he wanted to see me, and I was quite thrilled. We never really stopped, you know, even after I was married. But it would be only now and then that he’d pay me special attention. I lived for those times. Carlton was good to me. But he wasn’t loving, he wasn’t an exciting conversationalist, he didn’t . . . well, a lady doesn’t talk of that. So, when Fitzhugh did remember that I existed, it always thrilled me, and I couldn’t wait till we were together.”

  “And so you were together that night? Again, like you used to be.”

  “No. . . .” Camilla shook her head. “No. I thought we would be. But when I reached for him in the old way, he said it was over. That it was really over this time, and I must not hope for it to be revived.” Her face was drained of color—the memory seemed to age her in an instant.

  Some small and demanding part of Vida whispered, “Did he tell you why?”

  Camilla’s lips trembled. Her eyes took on a faraway quality. “I can only guess. I didn’t want to hear that, and I left—or tried to leave—before he could explain.”

  Vida’s thoughts raced. She needed to hear the end of this story. Yet she sensed she must somehow learn patience. Camilla would tell the story in her own time. They kept walking and Vida had to hurry to keep their piece of fabric piled with kindling aloft. In the encampment, they wordlessly lowered their haul to the sand. Camilla stood, stretched her arms up to the sun hovering over the placid expanse of ocean.

  “There was something different about him that night,” Camilla said. “I could tell it was not the same old game. I don’t know what had changed him,” she went on with a shrug. “Maybe he finally felt too guilty about Carlton. Or maybe it was you.” She lifted her arms to undo the knot of her hair, so that her golden mane spilled down her back.

  They stood together in a silence thick with significance.

  Down at one end of the beach, the Misses Van Huysen had climbed the high rocks. They too were looking out. Miss Flynn and Eleanor and Dame Edna and the two women whose husbands were employed by the sugar companies in Hawaii—Ingeborg and Sonja—were sitting in a huddle watching the children. The children were using a piece of driftwood to whack a small drained coconut that served quite nicely as a ball. One of them shrieked—an actual shriek of pleasure—and then another one of them laughed, and it was a real laugh, the kind a person can’t help, or fake. That true and joyous sound filled Vida with such a feeling—it was either all the feelings, or one that was new to her.

  A smile overcame Camilla’s face and she began walking toward the water.

  “I feel like putting my toes in!” she called over her shoulder. Soon she was running down the sloping beach.

  Vida wondered over what the widow had said. That phrase—maybe it was you—coursed through her body, was her very pulse. Meanwhile Camilla had reached the water’s edge. She laughed with abandon and did a twirl; her dark skirt flew up and revealed her lovely legs.

  Fifteen

  For a while Vida remained motionless, her gaze fixed, her mind drifting, soaking in the happy mood of the camp. The children playing, their mothers at ease. Camilla a beautiful silhouette against the glaze on the surface of the water. And there, down the beach, was Fitz, striding in his confident manner from the dazzle of the sea. With him were the men who had once been sailors. They rested their makeshift fishing poles over their shoulders and hauled in the fish they had caught. Fitz’s pants were rolled, his voice buoyant with salty air.

  He was looking around for someone.

  For Vida.

  When he saw her, he smiled and raised his hand.

  She raised her hand in reply. What Camilla had suggested recurred to Vida with a littl
e drumroll of triumph, a blush of fear, a bright spike of hope, a warm wanting. Maybe she was the one who could tame the famous Fitzhugh Farrar after all. But in the brilliance of that lovely moment she felt no great need for anything to be different. To possess more than she had right now. She knew that in her old life she would have rushed to secure Fitz’s affections. Instead she turned, leaving the kindling she and Camilla had collected, and moved back into the shelter of the palms, wondering if she even was the same girl she’d been before, the kind who was always campaigning, strategizing for what she wanted. Or if she should be—if she already was—a different sort of girl.

  She had no idea, so she walked on, in a new direction, and eventually into a little grove surrounded by strange and mighty trees. Those trees were gnarled and vast; their branches reached out to form a great halo of leaves. Their roots were massive, spreading across and deep into the earth. Little birds with bright yellow plumes darted between the high limbs. Yet at the same time there was a profound and living stillness in that grove, as though the place was animated by a spirit of the divine.

  The spirit was laughing. For a moment it really seemed like that, like there was a wood nymph and it was laughing at her. Then it occurred to Vida that the laughter was rather masculine, and her eyes adjusted, and she saw Sal sitting on the edge of the lifeboat that they had spent so many hours in. The boat had been transformed, however. Additions had been made, including a contraption that attached what looked like floating planks to the sides, and a mast where she supposed a sail should go.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “I was just thinking about the first time I saw you. All dressed up. How impossible it would have been for me then to imagine you as you are now.”

  Vida blushed at this reminder of how far she had fallen, appearance-wise. “I didn’t know you imbued our first meeting with such extraordinary meaning.” She had meant this as a riposte. But his eyes went reflective and she knew too late that he did view it with some meaning. “Oh.”