He falls silent, implying that Elfriede should make some response, but she can’t. Maybe she won’t. There’s just no reply possible, is there? Maybe an honest one, but not a decent one.
“Anyway,” he says at last, “since the time seems ripe to confess our sins, let’s return for a moment to that appalling moment in October of 1900, when Baron von Kleist vanquished the typhoid and a black future opened up before me. I began by drinking, but I couldn’t seem to kill myself with it, no matter how thoroughly I bent myself to the task. So I joined the army. I thought surely the Boers would kill me, which at least might serve some sort of purpose.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? We’ve all got to do our bit in life. One serves one’s country with a certain amount of distinction, if by distinction you mean murdering anything that dared to raise its head on that godforsaken plain, and managing to avoid getting killed oneself, despite carrying out one’s duties in a spirit of desperate recklessness. Or maybe there’s no contradiction. Maybe it was the recklessness that saved me. Only the careful ones get killed, after all. But I’m upsetting you.”
“Yes. But don’t stop. I want to know the truth. I want to know everything.”
“The truth? My dear, there isn’t enough time in the world.” He lifts his hand to rub the corner of one eye with his thumb. “As you see, however, I didn’t die. Instead I spent most of my time learning how many things there are worse than death. Or rather, how many ways there are to be dead. Then, just in time, I would receive a dear little letter from you, like a cup of water in a desert, and for a moment or two I was glad to be alive.”
“Did they mean so much? They were so short. I never knew what to say. They were all just nonsense, I thought.”
“They kept me alive, whether I wanted it or not.”
“Then I wish I’d written a thousand.”
“A waste of time. I didn’t deserve them.”
She starts to protest. He paces forward and turns. She can’t see him in this darkness, can’t see the brilliance of his hair or the saturation of his eyes. Only the shape of that round, large head against the indigo sky.
“A thousand letters wouldn’t have mattered. You were lost to me, you see. You were married to another man. And I must tell you, in my despair, I often sought the particular kind of oblivion that carnal intercourse can give.”
“Of course you did. I never expected you to be chaste.”
“No? Well, I haven’t disappointed you, then.” The cigarette’s finished. He tosses it in the grass and scuffs it with his shoe. “Of course, I satisfied my conscience with the knowledge that you were doing the same. Now I realize I was the faithless one.”
“It doesn’t matter. You owed me nothing. I had no right to ask for a fidelity I couldn’t give you myself.”
“And yet you gave it.”
“Only by chance. Anyway, you had no way of knowing that.”
“Still, I can’t help feeling as if I should have known, somehow.”
Elfriede sinks into the coarse, short lawn. The Florida nights are anything but silent. The bullfrogs croak, the alligators groan. The birds chatter and chatter. “Was there any particular woman?” she asks softly.
“Particular? They were all particular, Elfriede. Each of them human beings, God’s creatures, like you and me.” He lowers himself into the grass beside her. “They were all the exact opposite of you. As if I were looking for an antidote. Maybe I was. But if she existed, I didn’t find her.”
He smells of cigarettes and orange blossom. Or is that the air itself? But also—yes, there it is! That other, queer scent, impossible to articulate. The particular flavor of Wilfred. She hasn’t smelled it since Switzerland. She lifts her hand and touches the stiff hair at the end of his moustache. “When did you grow this?”
“As soon as my commission came through. Army regulations. An officer’s got to grow some kind of hair on his face, you know. Presumably lends one the necessary air of authority. Do you hate it?”
“Not at all. I love whatever’s yours.”
He closes his eyes. She moves her hand to his cheek, newly shaved. “You’re here,” she says in wonder.
“Yes.”
“It’s here. It’s still here, it’s the same as before. How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. I never understood it to begin with. Why a woman like you should give the slightest notice to a plain, ungainly, ginger-haired chap like me. I’ve got nothing to offer you. A captain’s pay, a trifling inheritance. A shoulder to cry on, I suppose, but—”
Then she’s kissing him. The touch of his lips amazes her. The strange tickle of his moustache. She tastes tobacco and the wine they drank at dinner, this cool white Riesling because of the heat. His tongue is gentle on hers. His mouth is slow. Under her hands, he’s no longer the skeleton he was. His flesh has thickened over his bones. There’s simply more of him. By the time he lifts his head, she’s forgotten Helga and her viper letters, she’s forgotten her marriage, she’s forgotten the children asleep in the house behind them, God help her. All she knows is Wilfred.
“Oh, Christ,” he whispers in English.
Elfriede takes hold of his shoulders and pulls him down with her, into the grass. He goes willingly. Sheds his jacket and spreads it beneath her head. Her fingers wobble as she unbuttons his shirt.
“I do have something for you,” he says. “For what it’s worth. From the moment I learned of von Kleist’s death, God rest him, I haven’t touched another woman. Waited and hoped, that’s all I did. Does that help at all?”
She finishes the buttons and pulls his shirt from his trousers, then the undershirt of white linen. Now his pale skin attracts a little light, from the new-risen moon or the house or the last echo of sunset, who knows. She places her hands on the tender hollows between breastbone and shoulders and kisses his sternum.
“Wait a moment,” he says. “One more thing.”
But she doesn’t want to wait. She’s lost all patience. Hasn’t she waited enough? Years and years for him. She unbuttons his trousers. He’s stiff and heavy, there’s no going back. Only death can part them now.
In the garden, they’re swift and efficient. Consummation, that’s all. They lie stunned with relief afterward, listening to all those croaks and chirps, while their hearts thump like drums and the perspiration rolls from their skin. Not a word. What possible words? The whole world is wet and hot and stuck together. At last he eases himself out and helps her with her drawers, her skirts. She finds his shirt. They wander in a daze back to the house. In the kitchen, Elfriede chips ice from the block in the icebox and pours a pitcher of water to take upstairs. Wilfred follows her without a sound.
Elfriede’s bedroom is pale and prim and hot. The windows are screened; she opens them to slight refreshment. Now there’s time to undress each other. They have all night. She unpins her hair and Wilfred takes up handfuls to rub against his cheeks and his lips. He uncovers her breasts and her belly for the first time and falls to his knees on the braided rug. The moon’s risen above the nearby sea, and Wilfred tells Elfriede how she glows in its light. He kisses every curve and hollow. He licks the salt from her skin. Like a penitent he worships her. Twice she bursts into climax—she’s a bowstring, tightly wound, and each release is the flight of an arrow—and while she lies there basking a second time, he parts her damp hair from her shoulder and apologizes.
“For what?”
(They speak in whispers, because of the children.)
“I meant to ask you something, out there in the garden, and instead I forgot myself entirely.”
Elfriede rolls atop his chest and presses her fingertips to his mouth.
“The answer’s yes,” she says, and she straddles him the way Charlotte straddled Gerhard in his chair in that far-off study, she rides him the way Charlotte rode Gerhard, vigorous, sweating, ecstatic, shockingly deep, but when he spends a few moments later, he doesn’t close his eyes and roar like a lion. He l
ifts his hands to cradle her face between his palms, and there, then, staring reverently inside her, he groans from his chest as if he’s dying. La petite mort, as the French call it.
Perchance to dream? Drowsy, satiated. They lie entangled, perspiring into the night and into each other. Elfriede’s stuck one hand in Wilfred’s hair. With her other finger, she touches his army moustache. At last she knows the texture of his skin and the weight of his bones, which are heavier than she imagined. That lanky skeleton contains a deceptive mass. Shanks. She thinks of her English books, the English words she’s learned over the course of the past five years. Longshanks. Wilfred’s long, heavy leg wound around hers, his arm draped over her hip. Wilfred! A delirium of contentment settles over her. She’s going to fall asleep like this, she’s going to sleep all night in Wilfred’s arms. And this morning she woke alone, with no notion of what was to come!
“How do you feel, my love?” he whispers in English.
How can she stop herself? The sweet, new tickle of Wilfred’s moustache. She draws the tip of her tongue along his lower lip, from left to right, and tastes . . . herself.
Wery vell, she whispers back.
Against her belly, his cock stirs and stiffens. So maybe dreams will have to wait, after all.
Just before dawn, Wilfred rises from the bed and dresses himself, so quietly that Elfriede almost doesn’t hear him. Only a sense of parting invades her dreams, and she opens her eyes.
“Shh,” he says, kissing her. “I’ll be back soon.”
Lulu
June 1942
(The Bahamas)
There’s a reason so many revolutions occur in the summer months, and this transformation starts earlier in the Bahamas than most places. By the first of May, the furnace had begun to crank up, the heating of the air, heavy, sticky, murderous. By the middle of the afternoon on the thirty-first, as I sought refuge at the bar of the good old Prince George—window shades down, electric fans rotating furiously—you couldn’t walk ten feet without your lungs turning inside out, your skin melting off your bones and into your footprints.
“Now, why ain’t you lying on a beach someplace, taking in the ocean breeze, Mrs. Randolph?” asked Jack, wiping away on a glass that didn’t need it. “Better yet. Why ain’t you back in America with your bosom friend?”
“My bosom friend? You can’t possibly mean the duchess.”
“Peas in a pod, ain’t you? Thick as thieves.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m her friend, believe me.”
Jack shook his head and set the glass in its pristine row. “Coulda fooled me.”
“What do you know, anyway? You never met the duchess in your life.”
“I hear things.”
I idled the ice cubes, around and around, clinkety clink. There was a slice of lime that kept getting crushed almost to death, before it popped right back to the surface, bright and green. I kind of appreciated its fortitude. “Jack, my darling,” I said, “you first of all have to understand how friendship works between women. It’s perfectly possible for me to see the duchess daily, to chin chin by day and chacha by evening, if you know what I mean, and not to know the least intimate thing about her.”
“Aw, now, you can’t fool me, Mrs. Randolph. I hear you two sit down nose to nose on the sofa all the time, trading all your secrets—”
“Nope.”
“I stand by my sources.”
“Oh, we cozy up and chatter, believe me. But you can talk for hours and hours to certain women, and never know them at all.” I tilted my glass toward him to illustrate my point. “And we’re both of us that kind of woman.”
Jack reached behind his own back and—without even looking—picked up the next glass in the row and began to wipe, just Jack standing there wiping behind his counter, while I drank my gin and tonic and collected perspiration in the crease of my legs.
I tried another tack. “It’s just business. Just business, between the duchess and me.”
“Just business between her and anybody, I hear.”
“You hear. You hear from whom?”
“From a lot of people.”
“You do a lot of listening, don’t you, Jack?”
He shrugged and replaced the glass. “That’s my job, Mrs. Randolph. I listen to people. Pour ’em a drink or two, maybe, but mostly listen.”
By now, I had sucked away most of what was useful in my glass. Only the ice remained, melting fast, and that poor, limp, defeated slice of lime. I nudged it with my finger, just an inch or two, and Jack—professional that he was—took the hint. Fresh ice, fresh lime, fresh gin, fresh tonic. The sides of the glass ran with condensation from the wet air.
“So tell me something I don’t know,” I said.
“See, that’s exactly nothing, Mrs. Randolph. You know almost as much as I do, these days.”
“I’m a gossip columnist. It’s my job.” I lift my finger to my lips. “Shhh.”
“Well, now.” He screwed up one eye and peered at the ceiling. “Say. Did you hear the one about the heiress who got herself hitched to a French count a couple weeks ago? Two days after her eighteenth birthday, yet.”
“If you mean Nancy Oakes, I’ve heard that one. But he’s not French, Jack. He’s Mauritian. And he isn’t really a count, not by English standards. What he is”—and here I removed the slim wooden stick with which I’d been stirring my ice, and pointed it toward Jack’s round, pink, overheated face—“is thirty-two years old, and already divorced.” I sipped my drink. “Other than that, he’s a nice enough fellow.”
“Her parents ain’t too happy.”
“Well, of course they’re not happy. Nancy’s just fresh out of school, you know, this nice French boarding school in New York City that’s supposed to keep the foxes from poaching its darling baby bunnies. And now he’s apparently whisked her off all the way to Florida on their honeymoon, while Lady Oakes sits and stews in Bar Harbor.”
Jack whistled softly. “Florida? I didn’t hear that.”
“Oh, I have my own sources. All up in arms too. If there’s one thing rich folks everywhere can unite against, it’s a fortune hunter.”
As I spoke, Jack’s eyes flickered to the left, the passageway to the hotel lobby. It was just past four o’clock in the afternoon, and now that the British Colonial Hotel’s former cadre of American tourists had been replaced—thanks to Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt—by the employees of the Pleasantville Construction Company of New Jersey, building out two airfields for the use of the newly combined Allied forces, Nassau’s favorite watering hole was largely empty. Just the usual old fellow at his usual old table, reading his usual old newspaper, and a couple of gents chattering confidentially in the corner, and yours truly, recuperating from her Red Cross morning. The doorway lay behind me, so I couldn’t see the newcomer. Jack’s gaze returned to me.
“Fortune hunter?” he said. “If you say so.”
“I didn’t say so. I’m just telling you what others are saying.”
“For one thing, he ain’t exactly broke, Fred de Marigny.”
“He’s not exactly Sir Harry Oakes, either.”
“And for another thing, he ain’t the type.”
“You don’t figure?”
“Likes the ladies too much to marry one for nothing but cold hard cash, if you ask me.”
I peered at my thumbnail, pressed against the glass. “I guess I can believe that.”
Jack ambled off in the direction of the newcomer, who had come to rest his elbows and his hat at the opposite end of the bar. I opened my pocketbook and drew out the Chesterfields and the lighter—To Lulu on her birthday. SBL—and contrived, under guise of lighting a cigarette, to catch a glimpse of the fellow. Yes, it was a fellow. Of course it was. Medium size, balding head shiny with perspiration, limp jacket slung over his arm, general air of sunstroke. Nobody I knew. I returned my attention to my drink, to the half-hearted operation of the cigarette, to the arresting spectacle of Jack’s glasses and bottles in their imma
culate rows, the woodsy palette, the gleam of mirrors, the blue, fragrant curls of tobacco smoke, the draft stirring my hair from the fans overhead, all of it soaked in heat, sagging with heat, heat sticking to every last molecule of everything. I slugged down the end of the drink, put out the cigarette, made to rise. The world sort of throbbed. Jack reappeared before me.
“Leaving already?”
“Column to finish. You won’t miss me.” I opened my pocketbook and rummaged for shillings.
“You be careful out there, Mrs. Randolph,” Jack said. “You know what’s been happening out at them new airfields they’re building.”
I laid three shillings on the bar in a neat stack and closed my pocketbook. “I know the native laborers have been demanding the same pay as the Americans, and I don’t blame them. Working all day under the hot sun. Construction too. I don’t blame them a bit.”
Jack set his palms on the edge of the counter and leaned forward. “I hear there might be some trouble tomorrow. So you just stay in your nice bungalow, you hear me?”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The usual kind. Fellows making their point.”
As he said this, Jack gave me the same stare with which a cobra might fix you. I knew he came from the South somewhere—you could hear it plain in his voice—but I hadn’t once heard him say a word against the Negroes. You never could tell where Jack’s true loyalties lay. He harbored no love for the Bay Street Boys, that I understood, even though he served their drinks and took their tips. But as for where he stood on that complex and monumental question so delicately phrased the color line? Only Jack and his Maker knew.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll stay home.”
His face relaxed. “Good. Lock your door.”
“Always do.”
“And that colored woman who keeps your house?”
The Golden Hour Page 22
