And yet, beside these concerns, Jane's heart warmed with pride and love at Elena's brave vows on her behalf.
She found stationery in a small desk in her room and answered Elena:
Darling,
I am so glad to know that we will be together again soon. I am longing to see you, though you only left me yesterday! After three nights in your sweet arms, I ached last night without you. I hope you don't mind too much how I want and need you. But I do, Ellie.
Please thank your mother for inviting me for Christmas. I'm sorry she wasn't pleased about the ring. I hope you told her that I adore you and support your every ambition. I do not want her to worry that my love for you should compromise your plans in any way. Please never say you would give them up for me, Elena. That is something I could not think of asking. I am so proud of my brilliant girl.
What can I do on Saturday to please your parents? Please tell me just what to do and I will do it. I am anxious that they should not find me too backwards and western. Tell me anything you can think of that will help things to go well with them.
Sweet, sweet girl, please dream of me tonight as I will be dreaming of you. It is an eternity until Saturday.
I am kissing you everywhere, my love,
Your own Jane
Jane sealed the letter with Eleanor's red wax and sent it back with Christine and the breakfast tray to be posted. She dressed and went out to find Christmas gifts for Elena's parents.
***
Elena met Jane at the door in a brown velvet dress, her hair swept up fashionably. Jane's anxiety fled at the touch of Elena's hand. "You're so beautiful," she whispered and kissed her on the cheek.
She handed Elena the gifts. "For your parents," she told her.
"Oh," Elena bit her lip. "You're a darling." And she kissed her once more quickly and ushered her into a little parlor where Mr. and Mrs. Whitman stood waiting to shake her hand.
"It's such a shame you are so far from your family during the break in terms, Miss Sparrow. Tell us, what do they do in New Mexico to celebrate Christmas?" Mrs. Whitman smiled and Jane felt herself relax a little as Elena's family settled down for dinner.
"It's not so extravagant for us as it is to be in Boston," Jane answered. "My aunt Susan makes cookies and my uncles play music. There's dancing. The children have candy from town."
"That sounds perfectly lovely," Mrs. Whitman told Jane. "My own parents would probably not even approve of this duck—and certainly not the Claret," Elena's mother waved her fork just a little and smiled.
Elena noted Jane's blank expression, "Quakers in those days didn't celebrate Christmas," she said with a quiet smile.
"Oh," said Jane, suddenly worried about the brightly wrapped gifts she had brought.
Elena's father turned to Jane now and asked, "Elena says you are a student of art history, Miss Sparrow?"
"Literature," Jane confirmed.
"What will you do with this knowledge?" Mr. Whitman asked.
"I'm...not certain yet," Jane admitted.
Jane gave a worried glance towards Elena, who interjected quickly.
"Jane's aunt has a beautiful piano. I played the harp etude for her the first time I was there for dinner. She said I belonged in a concert hall."
Mrs. Whitman did not look at Elena, but at Jane as she said, "You play beautifully, Elena. I have always said so."
Jane tried to smile. "She does."
"Elena plans to go to study the law, as I'm sure she's told you" Mrs. Whitman said, continuing to look at Jane.
"Yes, of course." Jane felt that in spite of her soft eyes and slight smile, Mrs. Whitman was offering her a challenge. She took it up. "Everyone says that she is the best student at college in any year."
"If her social calendar doesn't become too distracting, perhaps she'll be able to live up to that reputation," Mrs. Whitman said, and returned her attention to her dinner.
"Mother." Elena dropped her fork quickly but quietly on her plate and looked at her parents each in turn. "I have very little on my social calendar. There's no danger of it overwhelming my studies, I'm sure. Jane will tell you from her own experience how difficult it is to eject me from the library."
"It's true, she won't even stop working to eat sometimes, unless I plead with her," Jane added, hoping it was not a terrible mistake to speak at all.
"Well, she must eat. Thank you, Jane, for encouraging her not to starve," Mr. Whitman said and smiled.
And Mrs. Whitman declared it was time for dessert.
"Your parents don't like me," Jane bit her lip and frowned over her lunch in the dining room of the Hotel Vendome. It was three days after Christmas.
Elena sipped her wine. "It isn't you in particular, it's me, having--someone like you in my life. They'd rather I was a spinster devoted to nothing and no one but my work."
"If I were a man..." Jane began. In fact, she was dressed as a man today—as she often was when she left the confines of college and went about the city. Today, she had worn a suit not unlike one a young man at Harvard might wear to take his girl for a Christmas lunch.
"If you were a man, they'd feel the same way," Elena insisted. "They might not mind me marrying—when I'm forty and have a successful career."
"They married each other," Jane objected.
"Yes, but they were mutually devoted to the cause of education. They are colleagues as well as husband and wife. They grew up together. They understand each other."
Jane frowned. "We understand each other. We may not know everything about each other..." Jane bit her lip to remember all the things she had yet to explain. "But you know me." Jane reached over the table and picked up Elena's hand. "You know me and I know you."
"Yes." Elena assented almost inaudibly. Jane knew her—knew at least a part of her that no one else did. And whatever the details that remained to be discovered between them, it was that part that mattered most.
"I want your parents to see it. How can I convince them to trust me?" Jane asked.
"Don't let it concern you. It doesn't matter to me."
"It matters to me then," Jane said.
Elena changed the subject. "Let's go back to your uncle's house before you take me home. I want to play for you." And she smiled.
***
Elena didn't play.
Instead she found herself in Jane's room, tearing away her clothes like a fallen woman in one of the French novels she'd secretly read as a girl. When Jane took her in her arms, Elena might have dropped to the floor, so weak was she for wanting, but Jane led her to the bed, and made her cry out three times before she finally whispered "enough, Jane," with a weary smile.
"You're sure? Jane grinned, propping herself on her elbow as the girl caught her breath.
They were quiet for several minutes.
"Jane?" Elena said at last.
"hmm?" Jane trailed the back of her hand down Elena's throat, across her breasts and over the soft rise of her stomach.
"I want to touch you," Elena whispered. And she reached up and slipped her hand under Jane's right suspender strap and slid it over her shoulder. The gesture unbalanced Jane and she tumbled back onto the pillow.
"Ellie, no—" Jane began, but Elena stopped her with a kiss.
"Shhh..." she hushed her, then whispered, "please, Jane," pushing the other suspender strap down as Jane pulled her arms out and reached them up to the girl.
"Ellie..." Jane tried again, weakly as Elena unbuttoned her shirt, reached through and found the fastening of the bandage that Jane had wrapped tightly around her breasts.
"It's alright," Elena whispered, kissing Jane by her ear as her fingers worked gently to loosen the bindings. She sat up, pulling Jane with her and slowly drew the bandage away, dropping it beside the bed.
Jane squeezed her eyes shut and took a shuddering breath. "I can't—" she whispered, but made no move to stop the girl who was now pushing the shirt down over her shoulders. Instead, she pulled it off by the cuffs and let it fall, as Elena pushed her bac
k again and leaned over her, making little circles with her tongue around the very parts of Jane she most wished would disappear.
She took Elena's head in her hands and raised her face to kiss her. "I love you, beautiful boy," Elena whispered, and her hand slipped to the buttons on the front of Jane's trousers.
Jane reached down and stopped Elena's hand. "I can't," she whispered again urgently.
But Elena put her lips very close to Jane's ear and said in a low voice, "John, my darling boy, your girl only wants to please you."
Jane gasped and all her will turned to liquid as Elena unfastened her trousers and slipped her hand inside to the warm, wet place between her legs. "Oh my god, Ellie—oh..." Jane breathed as Elena found the tight, slippery button beneath her tangle of hair and stroked it gently at first, then harder as she felt Jane panting under her.
"John," Elena kept up a whispered monologue in her lover's ear as she touched her, "handsome young man, your Ellie wants you so..."
Jane bit down on her lower lip as she almost involuntarily pushed her hips up to meet Elena's hand. "Elena..." she whispered again.
"Brilliant John—how I want you—lovely John, beautiful boy," Elena whispered as if chanting a spell, weaving her words like clothes around Jane's nakedness until at last it seemed to Jane that every muscle in her body convulsed hard, then melted to water beneath Elena's touch.
Jane pulled Elena's hand from her trousers and wrapped her tightly in her arms, flesh against flesh, shaking hard, as tears streamed silently down her face.
"How did you know?" she breathed roughly, "How did you know?"
Elena smoothed Jane's hair from her brow over and over. "Shh...," she comforted Jane gently, "I see you, my love. Your Ellie sees you, beautiful boy."
The name had been Jane's secret since she was four years old. She had never told anyone about it.
As a child, Jane had found certain things easier to do if she called herself "John" instead of Jane. It was her magic word. When Jane was afraid in the dark, creaking house late at night while her parents slept, John was brave. Her little sister would crawl into bed with Jane after nightmares of her own and John would comfort her. Later, on the ranch, Jane would use the name when the boys dared her to keep up with them in the kinds of work they were sure no girl could do. Jane invoked John and learned to hold the branding iron to a poor colt's flank as it burned. She called herself John when she took her turn to sit awake at night by the fire, shotgun across her lap, watching for coyotes and bobcats.
She had tried to forget it since coming to Boston, imagining it as something to be put away with childhood, like a beloved toy.
But Elena had found it. She had whispered it like a sorceress and had transformed Jane into herself. Elena had washed it of shame and set it glowing like a jewel.
Portrait of Passion
Paris 1902
Claudine shrugged off her robe and stood naked before Anne in the little rented attic room.
"Comme ca?" she asked, tilting a foot and raising an arm slightly.
"Oh—" Anne hoped she wasn't blushing. She had worked with nude models in her classes at the Academie de Beaux Arts, but never alone in her own studio. She took a careful breath and stepped to the girl, gently moving her arm and touching her chin to tilt her head slightly. "Like you're dancing...voila," she said in what she hoped was a business-like voice.
She returned to the canvas to begin her sketch, and found that her hand was shaking faintly. But after several minutes of work, she forgot her embarrassment, lost in her picture.
An hour later, she took Claudine for a drink at the café on the corner. Anne wasn't sure what to say to the girl. They had barely exchanged a word while she had worked. At length, she began, "You are a good model. Do you like it?"
"Like?" the girl asked.
"Tu l'aime? Modeling?"
"Modeling is honest work. Many girls do not such honest work." The girl stretched her arms over her head as if to relieve an hour's stiffness. "Modeling is better."
"Oh." Anne colored. Sometimes her friends at the Beaux Arts would get drunk enough to forget that—attired as she always was, like them, in trousers and ties—she wasn't really a man, and tell stories about models they had known. Anne was sure at least half of this talk was boasting, but now that she had seen Claudine's vulnerability in her own studio, a sense of protectiveness rose in her. How hard it must be for models to keep on the "honest" side of the thin social line that divided them from the girls men could purchase in the alleys of Paris at night.
But Anne didn't have long to ponder Claudine's flirtations with social propriety. The girl had turned to her wineglass and was smiling at Anne over its rim.
"Vous avez une cigarette?" she asked.
Anne reached into her breast pocket and drew out her cigarette case. "Only one left." She lit it. "You have it," she said, handing it to the girl.
Oh, non," Claudine said with the hint of a pout. She took a long drag on the cigarette and handed it back to Anne. "We share it," she said.
Anne leaned in to take the cigarette back.
Their faces were inches apart. "Vous est une femme," Claudine said. Her voice was low, but Anne looked around quickly anyway before nodding faintly. How long had Claudine known Anne wasn't a man? Had she agreed to the modeling job without knowing, or...
"Pourquoi ceci?" the girl asked, brushing the lapel of Anne's jacket.
Anne shrugged.
"Vous est un homme...a l'interieur." She smiled again.
A man inside? Anne had never thought of herself that way. She frowned a moment and considered.
"Je ne sais pas," she said. She removed her hat, ran a hand through her short hair and leaned back in her chair.
Claudine's eyes narrowed. "C'est bon," she said. "I like it."
***
Anne lost herself in the painting. Or was it in the model? The two had become confused in her mind.
She never touched Claudine, except to adjust the angle of a knee here, the turn of an arm there. She was always careful to avoid contact with any part of the woman's body that might make her forget the professional nature of their relationship.
It was frustrating. Claudine's waist and hips and shoulders were often not right—not where they had been the day before when Anne had left off and so she would ask her to move, Anne's limited French and Claudine's limited English failing them both.
And so in spite of all her efforts, Anne only became less and less satisfied with the picture. She had planned to represent Salome in motion—dancing for King Herod. She wanted to convey the girl in a way no artist had before—in spite of how often they had tried. She felt certain that she knew just what it would take to make a king offer a girl half of his realm for a dance.
She painted out the basic lines of the picture again and again, adjusting on the canvas what she dared not touch in life, painting again and again the rosy nipples, always taut in the chill of the attic, the generously curving hips, the tiny round belly, the strong thighs she longed to thrust open with her knee, to plunge her tongue between...
The longer she worked at the picture, the more she wanted the model. But it would be wrong. She was not like the men at the art school. Not even Stephen, her housemate, who went with boys, had the proper respect for the women who stood for hours, exposed in the cold, for the sake of art. To Anne they were heroes.
Claudine was a hero. Claudine was a goddess. It was Salome who was the whore.
Nevertheless, as thoughts of Claudine's body filled Anne's mind even outside the studio, even creeping into her dreams, a craving rose in her, a desire to touch the woman everywhere, the trace the outlines of her curves with her fingertips, her lips.
She did not take Claudine out for drinks again.
And Claudine never mentioned Anne's secret again, calling her always "monsieur" until Anne almost forgot that Claudine knew the truth.
***
"Are you putting anything in the exhibition?" Stephen asked
Anne at breakfast one morning.
"That's what I had planned for Salome."
"Will it be finished?" Stephen raised an eyebrow.
"By July? Of course."
Victorian Passions: The Complete Collection of Four Stories under One Cover Page 3
