by Anita Shreve
I thought that I was not of the sort to experience a great passion, that such states were fictions written by persons who wished to make more of a natural physical event than was necessary or even advisable. Indeed, my equanimity in such matters was a quality I often congratulated myself in possessing, and having in Catherine as well, who has not ever shown herself to be demonstrably passionate. I am sorry if I offend you by writing to you in such a forthright manner. God knows that if I could, I would apologize to Catherine, too, for exposing her in this way, although I know that she would not permit any apology, just as surely as I know that she would be heartsick by my betrayal of her.
Dearest Olympia, my life has been upended ever since the moment I first saw you at the beach. You do not remember me, but I remember you: a young woman in a dusty pink silk dress that seemed barely to contain the life within its folds. You walked barefooted along the sand, and every man on that beach watched you and desired you. Later, on the porch, when we met for the first time, I felt a profound shock upon seeing you, as if we two had already met.
Heretofore, my life has been one of self-satisfaction, of pride in my work, service to the community, and gratification in my family; but all that must now be something less than it was. Not enough. No, never again enough. How can I explain this to myself, let alone to you? You who are so young and have hardly begun on your journey?
I have prided myself as well in having an instinctive understanding of physical matters, when in fact I did not have the faintest comprehension, not the faintest. I thought I knew myself well — my habits have always been regular — but I find today that I am a stranger to myself, foreign. How placid I used to be, how smug. . . .
How uncommon everything about you is to me. You know much already about how to give pleasure to another, and I think to yourself, which is a quality that is not true of Catherine. Despite her love for me and her desire to please others, she does not know how to please herself. This is not a situation which distresses Catherine much, I think. When such a thing is a given, one knows not what one misses. . . . But I do not think I realized until today how very important a woman’s pleasure is to a man’s (and how the obverse, of course, must also be true).
You must not regret what you have done, Olympia. You must not feel shame. And I sense — indeed, this is one of the things that so astound me about you — that you do not, that you will not. Not in this. Perhaps in other things, but not in this. Is this self-deception on my part, wishful thinking? I sincerely believe not. I think you understand that which you do. Or am I so deluded as to see only what I wish to see? To wish, and therefore to believe, you to be more mature than your years, to possess a physical understanding that eludes so many women their entire lives?
(I do not mean to suggest here that you were thinking of your own pleasure today or even that our coming together gave you pleasure, though you will one day feel such physical joy; of this I am certain.)
Forgive me, Olympia. Forgive me for taking from you what is not mine to have.
How rash this all is. How dangerous.
I met Catherine in the second year of my practice. I was much taken with her inner repose and her tenderness. Her father is a minister of the Methodist faith, a man of modest means, though learned and likable, a man whose approval meant something to me. (And, God, how this man would despise me now, if he knew! There is between men, between father and suitor, an understanding of certain aspects of a man’s life that cannot be acknowledged outright, and certainly not in the presence of the woman; and so there must be, between the men, a sense of trust, of belief that the daughter who will one day become the wife will not be harmed in any way. And though unspoken, it is a kind of sacred trust. I had this with Catherine’s father and felt it necessary to honor. And now I experience the greatest anguish at having betrayed that trust.)
I cannot write about this.
I meant to describe to you, you to whom I wish to tell everything, how it was I came to love Catherine, to want her to be my wife. I had occasion to observe her often in the role of caretaker to her nieces, whose mother, Gertrude, had died at an early age from tuberculosis. I admired the way Catherine was with the children, and I saw she would be an excellent mother to her own. You will think this opportunistic, and I fancy it was; but she, too, must have thought me a good prospect as well, for I do not think she loved me in any grand way when we married — rather in a cheerful and pleasant way, which makes for a good wife and a good marriage. And I hope I have not been a disappointment to her.
(Although I shall be now. I shall wish her you. Every minute. And for this reason, as well as for the secret in my heart, I dread her return on Friday evening. I am not of a nature to enjoy deceit.)
Why, I ask myself, is passion, when it occurs in circumstances outside of marriage, so absolutely wrong? This is a question that vexes me. How can something that feels so true and honest and pure, which is how I must describe my feelings for you, and I do declare them love, which I had not thought possible after so short a time (and how deluded I was again), be so ugly as to cause such pain? And more vexing still, have no happy conclusion? None . . . None . . .
I cannot deny that I have known Catherine in all the ways possible to a man and that she has been generous. So why — why? — has this not been enough? Why? I seek a rational answer when reason is not wanted. I seek a scientific answer where science is not invited.
Or is it possible that such a union as I have begun now with you has for its origins a science of its own? Its own physical laws and formulae? Might we one day be able to detect this blinding thing called passion and quantify it and thus save ourselves from this helpless agony?
And yet, could I wish for that? Could I, in truth, wish this elation, this mystery, quantified and thus tamed?
I must stop now, for these are all delusions, dangerous delusions which exhaust me.
I am not a writer, but a man of medicine, infected with an illness so subversive, the patient wishes not for his own cure.
Olympia drops the pages of the letter onto the floor. She covers her face with the skirt of her dress. She sits in that posture for some time.
Never has she read such a letter. Never. Nor understood so well its meaning, nor felt that she might, apart from its specific history, have written it herself.
She releases her skirt. With an impatient tug, she unties the sashes of her bonnet.
My God, she thinks. What have we done?
There can be no doubt now that she has set in motion a series of events that cannot be recalled, that she has trespassed unforgivably upon a man and his family, upon a father’s trust and a woman’s kindness. The only remedy is to cause Haskell to forget her, so as to blunt the edges of this madness. A derangement she herself feels and for which she must now hold herself accountable.
She will never see the man again, she vows, nor permit him to see her. And if he comes to her house, she will absent herself.
How reckless she has been, how selfish, caring only for her own happiness when the greatest possible consequences were at stake. She knows that she would lose her father forever were he to discover her clandestine actions, that never again would he trust her.
She lies back upon the bed and digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. She lies looking at the ceiling for some time, and perhaps because she is exhausted, she sleeps.
She wakes with a start and sits up. She walks over to a table where there are a basin and a pitcher of water kept at the ready. She pours water over her head and face, soaking her hair. She dries her face and scrutinizes herself in the mirror.
And as quickly as tinder igniting, she forgets her earlier resolve. Her desire to see Haskell is so keen that she consciously has to fend off the urge to bend over, as though she had received a blow to the center of her being.
At the very least, she thinks, she and Haskell should discuss the questions and sentiments contained within his letter. Do they not owe it to themselves at least to do that? And if it is too dangerou
s to speak in person, then should she not write the man a letter? Yes, yes, she should. She will do that now.
And later she will think, How cleverly the mind deceives itself. For the need to respond is never-ending, is it not? He to her, and she to him, and so on?
She does not know what time it is. She has no clock in her room, and she does not want to show herself at this moment downstairs. She peers out at the sea, to discern in the color of the water and the sky the hour of the day, but she is greeted with the same flat light as earlier. Is it afternoon? Has she missed lunch? And if so, why has she not been summoned? She tries to dry her hair as best she can, brushing it and repinning it. She finds paper and pen in the drawer and sits down to write.
My dear sir,
And already I am tongue-tied, speechless (what is the equivalent of speechlessness when it be pen and paper and not the tongue?) for I cannot call you sir, nor John, which is the name that others (and I am thinking here of Catherine) give you, and in my thoughts, as I have said to you, you are always Haskell, so let me amend my greeting, and though the name may sound too formal, it is, I assure you, not at all, not in my thoughts of you, which are constant.
My dearest Haskell,
How far we have traveled in just a few short hours, hours spent not even in each other’s company, but alone with our own thoughts and words, however inadequate they may prove. I meant, upon reading your letter, which I appreciated all the more for its spontaneity and its unfinished circumstances, to insist that we not see each other again, nor communicate, nor allow ourselves to be in each other’s company, regardless of the formality of the event. And I meant to do this by not responding to your letter and by severing all that is between us with one fierce blow. But I find that I cannot. There is no part of me that can possibly hold to that resolve. Indeed, I find that I want nothing more than to be with you.
I was at first, I must confess, horrified by your letter, deeply stricken that we had gone so far, and I mean not only in the physical manner that overtook us yesterday but also in the even more consuming realm of the spiritual, which appears to have seized us and will not let us go. I wish to say to you that I am at least as responsible for what happened yesterday as you, and that no matter what happens between us, or what dreadful pass we many come to — for what good outcome can there be? None, I fear, as you do, none — I will never feel myself seduced. I do not have age, but I have will and some understanding, and though the event was new to me, I comprehended it and embraced it and could have stopped it at any point. Even now I can write truthfully that I luxuriate in the memory of yesterday, and though these memories are but faint echoes of the actual, they are treasures I would not willingly part with. The image of you is imprinted upon me as is the light upon photographic paper. I know already that no other human form shall ever be so dear.
(And yes, it was I who disturbed the photographs upon your bureau. But you knew that at once, did you not?)
Yours is the greater anguish, for you are married to a good woman. And though I share that anguish whenever my mind’s eye lights upon her face, I know that you must bear the heavier burden, for I cannot know what you know, what you have had with her all these years. (And the sin is knowing that we harm her, is it not? Not simply that we lay together for those moments, but that in writing even these words, we do her conscious, incalculable harm?)
I so very much admire your work. I could not be a physician, for though I have interest in the body, I do not have the courage to face daily the threat of ugliness and death. Nor, curiously, do I have much respect for physicians of the mind, as I feel the soul to be so private a place as to resist invasion. I do sometimes think I should like to be a writer of stories or of verse, though my skills are wanting, and I am not sure what good such an endeavor would serve. I am not yet persuaded of the glorification of art over other endeavors requiring skill and craft. Is there not more good, and therefore more value, in a simply constructed chair? Or a well-made coat? Surely, your poor Rivard woman might think so. I admire you as a writer, but I admire you more as a physician, the skill and kindness of which I have had ample demonstration.
Yes, come to my father’s ill-conceived gala. Come. Write my father that you will come. (And do I not now seal my fate with my greatest sin, encouraging the continuation of what we have begun, and worse, in the presence of Catherine and my father, whom we would so willingly betray?) But I cannot, in truth, write that I wish you not here. I will not speak to you beyond the expected, nor cause your wife any distress. I will be content merely to gaze upon you from a distance and know that once we were together in the most intimate of ways. I take pleasure already in imagining the silent words we shall exchange.
Know that in all things I am yours.
She reads and rereads her letter and disciplines her untrammeled thoughts with punctuation and legible cursive. She seals the note, wondering next how best to deliver it. And then she quickly conceives a plan to send it with Josiah. If Josiah should happen to mention his mission to her father, Olympia can explain by suggesting that she felt too unwell to deliver the earlier note herself and finally had to send Josiah to the Highland.
That decided, she leaves her room in search of the man. Checking her appearance for visible signs of the storm that earlier overtook her, she descends the front stairs and listens for clues as to the hour. Her father must be either asleep or in his study, she concludes, moving along the passageway to the kitchen, where she hopes to find Josiah engaged in not so great a task that he cannot be persuaded to deliver her letter. Thus it is that she moves silently through the swinging door and comes upon an extraordinary sight.
She is, for a critical second — the second during which she might have backed unseen through the door — unable to read precisely what she has inadvertently stumbled upon. She sees an indecipherable creature, half standing, half sitting, with limbs wrapped round the body in an improbable position, a flurry of clothing in disarray, a double-image of white globes of flesh, a head thrown back, the smile a rictus on the face. And then, in the next instant, propelled already inside the room, she parses the image and sees that the standing figure with his back to her — but now the face is turning toward her, the body unable to cease its thrusting — is Josiah, and that the limbs around him in a swath of stockings and petticoats are the legs of Lisette. The twinned (and then twinned again) globes of flesh are the buttocks of the man and the breasts of the woman, respectively; the rictus smile the strain of pleasure upon Lisette’s face.
The act of love, as Olympia experienced it with Haskell just the day before, was fluid, seemingly a sinuous movement of the flesh. But now, seen with the shocked eye of the unwary observer, the act appears at best comic and at worst brutal, so that nothing of love or tenderness is necessarily conveyed, only the animal-like coupling of two fleshly creatures. She thinks at once of the animality of birth, which also belies its sacred context and its beauty.
Olympia leaves the room, knowing that they have seen her. She leans against the pantry wall and feels the shame that attends the inadvertent voyeur, the shock of interrupting such a private act. Though, curiously, she does not feel horror. And she is grateful that her own knowledge of the event has come as a result of having been with Haskell and not from the sight of the ungainly creature in the kitchen. For she might have been — and who can say for how long? — put off by the notion of physical love altogether.
She holds her letter still, which she tucks into her sleeve. She walks out onto the porch for air. She guesses then that her father must be away, for Josiah would not risk such an incident were he in the house. And then, suddenly, it is all around her: the realities of the body. As she surveys the sea, she comprehends, with the shock of associative leaps, that her mother and her father, too, have shared such a physical life, and that they do still. That her mother’s rooms are so overtly feminine and sensual because her father likes them that way. She can see her mother’s silk nightgown laid out upon the bed each evening, the wisteria satin
sheets, the candles at the bedside table, the pots of incense and the many vases of flowers, the elaborate coiffures and toilets of her mother’s evenings, and the lengthy absences of her father when he takes her mother up to her room after the evening meal. If Haskell and Josiah are sexual beings, then so, of course, are her father and mother.
Unwilling to imagine further that which should not be contemplated by a daughter, Olympia steps away from these thoughts, simultaneously catching sight of a group of boys playing with a ball on the beach. Seized by an idea, she goes up to her room, fetches some coins from her purse, and walks down to the seawall. She calls to the tallest of the boys, who runs in his short pants, his hair dried stiff into comical sculptures by the salt water and sea breezes, to where she stands.
“I want you to take a letter for me,” she says. “To Dr. Haskell, who is at the Highland Hotel. Do you know it?”
“Yes, miss.”
“And here are some pennies for your trouble. I wish it to be delivered now.”
“Yes, miss. Thank you.”
She hands the boy the letter and the coins and watches as he sprints along the hard sand near the water, his form and posture very like those of Mercury himself.
DREADFUL FIRE last night in Rye. Have you heard?”
“A fire?” Olympia asks. She crouches on the floor of the porch, trying to unfasten the clasp of the mahogany case that holds the telescope her father ordered from New York for her sixteenth birthday. He intends for the instrument to be set up so that she might have excellent views of the sea and bird life, although privately Olympia suspects that her father and his visitors will use it more often than she, and that when they do, they will turn the instrument in the direction of the summer houses that curve in a shallow half-moon along Fortune’s Rocks.
