The Age of Desire

by Jennie Fields

  “It was as though he were trying to spin a drama. . . .”

  “I wish we could steal away from everyone,” Morton says. “And just go where no one cares who we are. . . .”

  “I’ve never felt so in need of escape. But Teddy . . . I hardly feel I can leave him. Anna helps. Anna always helps.”

  “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Oh, nonsense. Anna doesn’t have an opinion about people.”

  “I’m quite sure you’re wrong about that.” The solemnity of his voice carries a warning.

  Edith shrugs. “It’s always seemed to me if I like someone, she does as well.”

  “She’s protective of you. She doesn’t trust me yet. But if she’s willing, maybe we can employ Anna to babysit Mr. Wharton, and we’ll go off for a nice drive somewhere. Next Saturday perhaps, when I’m free for a full day. I need to be alone with you. I need to be with you.”

  “A full day. Just those words! Could a day ever feel so full as to spend it with you? An entire day without the whole world needing our attention. Oh, Morton. Can we really make it happen?” She hears herself, and knows she sounds young, overexcited. Foolish, even. And yet the idea of having so much time with the one person who pleases her most is irresistible.

  “But do you understand what I’m saying, Edith?”

  She looks up at his face. “I think I do.” Does she? Is he saying he wants the sort of intimacy she is uncertain to be able to give him?

  But Morton hasn’t dropped the thread of Teddy’s distressing behavior. “You don’t think Teddy would ever become . . . truly violent. . . .”

  Edith is quiet for a moment. “He’s always been a kind man. He’s blustery more than dangerous.”

  “The way he held that knife to Gregory . . .”

  “It was a butter knife.”

  “But if he ever found out you and I . . . had feelings for each other . . . what would he do?”

  Edith can’t help but smile at hearing that Morton has feelings for her, however obliquely. “He won’t find out,” she says.

  Morton shakes his head. He doesn’t appear soothed by her words.

  “Teddy wouldn’t do anything that might hurt me. He loves me.”

  “It’s because he loves you that I worry.”

  “You know he and I have been nothing to each other for years but two yoked oxen. I’m sure there have been other women. . . . I’ve accepted that.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Is it? Why?”

  “Women are more forgiving about such things.”

  “Are they indeed?”

  “He thinks you couldn’t have feelings for another man. You never have, have you?” Morton looks up at her with worried eyes.

  “No,” she says softly. “I never have. Never before you.”

  “Edith . . .”

  “Look, we’re in Paris already,” she says, pointing through the clear space in the front window where Cook has continually reached around from the side window to clear the snow. Through the peephole, the Champs Élysées is coated with sugar. The shop windows are steamy. There are almost no cars on the normally crowded thoroughfare. And even the horse-drawn vehicles seem to be moving at an exceptionally slow pace.

  “I’m sorry to be here so quickly,” Morton says.

  Edith weighs asking Cook to drive around for a while. To give them time. But she knows in this weather it’s too much to demand. And their progress will be slow enough in the snow.

  “Next Saturday?” he says.

  “Yes. Next Saturday.”

  They look at each and settle back in sweet, smiling silence.

  That night she writes in her new diary, “I should like to be to you, friend of my heart, like a touch of wings brushing by you in the darkness, or like the scent of an invisible garden, that no one passes on an unknown road at night.”

  EIGHT

  SPRING 1908

  Morton writes her often now. Mostly scribbled petits bleus that whisper to her thoughts that occur to him: about books or conversations that remind him of her. About how he is haunted by his memory of their being together “like a ghostly breeze that blows on my thoughts, shuffling them all like cards, sweeping them right off the table.”

  On Saturday, with Teddy growing worse and worse (throwing a crystal paperweight, weeping, shoving aside his food), Edith and Morton still manage to steal away, but rather than for a full day at Senlis, only long enough to walk the streets of Montmartre together. Oh, what an exquisite Saturday it is! Not quite spring, but so much warmer than the Saturday before. Shoulder to shoulder, they talk about what they once hoped to accomplish in their lives.

  “The first time I was able to read a book, I thought, This is what I want to do every day for the rest of my life,” Morton says. “I lose myself in reading.”

  “I find myself in reading!” Edith says.

  “I find myself in reading your books. I’ve gotten hold of The Fruit of the Tree. When I am reading it, it is as though you are reading aloud to me. And I’ve ordered your short stories as well.”

  When they share good-byes, he whispers, “We didn’t have our day together. We need to. I need to be alone with you.” He caresses her cheek tenderly.

  She peers into his eyes and says nothing.

  “I fear you don’t understand what I’m saying.” His frustration is visible.

  She opens her mouth, but words don’t come.

  “What are you thinking?” he asks.

  “When can I see you again?” she says.

  The next day, she writes him a letter:

  Do you know what I was thinking last night, when you asked me and I couldn’t tell you? Only that the way you’ve spent your emotional life, while I’ve—bien malgré moi—hoarded mine, is what puts the great gulf between us, sets us not only on opposite shores, but at hopeless distant points of our respective shores. . . . Do you know what I mean?

  And I’m so afraid that the treasures I long to unpack for you, that have come to me in magic ships from enchanted islands, are only, to you, the old familiar red calico and beads of the clever trader, who has had dealings in every latitude, and knows just what to carry in the hold to please the simple native—I’m so afraid of this, that often and often I stuff my shining treasures back into their box, lest I should see you smiling at them!

  Well! And if you do? It’s your loss, after all! And if you can’t come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame, and if wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, and if when you hold me, and I don’t speak, it’s because all the words in me seem to have become throbbing pulses, and all my thoughts are a great golden blur—why should I be afraid of you smiling at me, when I can turn the beads and calico back into such beauty—?

  On that Tuesday and Thursday and the following Tuesday as well, they lunch together at faded restaurants far from the Faubourg where none of their acquaintances would deign to dine. Places with worn doors and broken shutters, and soft smiles shared across butcher-paper- covered tables. Sometimes there are kisses in the vestibules of the restaurants before they charge into the street to say good-bye with a handshake. Edith has never known kisses like this. Deep and slaking. Heart-shattering. She and Teddy never once kissed like this! She relives these kisses late at night, drinking from them again and again as if they were endlessly refilling carafes of intoxicating wine. A single sip can make her drunk. Oh, the silken siren’s call of the inside of Morton’s lips!

  The restaurant on the second Tuesday is a sweet surprise: a tiny bistro that smells of baking bread, with a view of the river and bunches of riotously colorful silken flowers in flimsy vases on each table. They hold hands beneath the table. Forget to eat. Quote poetry.

  And then Morton says, “Today is the day.”

 
“For what?” she asks, game and excited.

  “To be alone together.”

  “Here in Paris?”

  “That seems to be where we are.”

  “You’re . . . you’re serious?”

  “Of course.”

  “But I . . . how would we do that?” Her voice is light but careful.

  “I’ve hired a room.”

  “A room?”

  “There is a small inn not far from here. It’s why I chose this restaurant. We can eat quickly, go out the back door, walk from here, then return, and Cook will merely think we’ve had an extended lunch.”

  “Morton, that’s madness. We couldn’t possibly.”

  “I need to be with you, Edith. I long to be with you. To touch you. Don’t you want to be alone for a few minutes . . . ?”

  “I don’t want this to be about sneaking through back alleys,” Edith says. “And a few minutes? Is that what we want? A few stolen minutes? There’s too much that’s fine between us to sully it with that sort of behavior.”

  “That sort of behavior is what people do when they love each other,” he says, his voice churlish.

  “And speaking to me like that. Is that what people do when they love each other?”

  “If you loved me, being alone together would be exactly what you’d want.”

  “But I’m a woman. I express my love in a different way.”

  “I told you: there are women who express their love exactly as I do. And if you are not that sort of woman . . . perhaps you are not the right woman for me.”

  Edith feels her lips begin to quiver. “Maybe I am not that sort of woman at all. I’m a woman who loves poetry and tender touches.”

  “And what makes you think there wouldn’t be that as well?”

  The waiter brings their food but neither of them takes more than a bite or two. The silence between them is painful and weighty. The windows of the restaurant are open and the newly warm air blows in with the scent of flowers; sunshine shot with gold spills onto their table. If only Morton were suggesting instead that they walk down the avenues with the horse chestnuts just beginning to flower! If only he wanted to celebrate the spring together, like lovers do, instead of suggesting something so crass, something so beneath her. When the waiter has cleared the dishes, and Edith has paid—for Morton does not even reach for his purse in the face of the bill—he refuses to go back with her in the car.

  “I’ll go out this way,” he says. “I have somewhere I need to be.”

  “But Cook will drop you wherever you wish to go.”

  “Not today. I have to go pay for that room. Just because we’re not using it doesn’t mean I don’t have to pay for it.” How petty he sounds! He heads for the restaurant’s back door. She follows him to the doorstep.

  “Wait,” she says.

  “I don’t like to be played,” he says. “It’s brutal.”

  “It’s not my intention to play you. I’m nothing if not honest. We just need to find a way to make it work for both of us. I didn’t ask you to hire a room.”

  “It’s never going to work if you’ll continue to be impossible,” he says.

  The word stings her like a slap. How much of her life has she spent trying to be reasonable? To think and act as rationally as a man? But for him to call her impossible . . . the way he would a cotton-brained woman . . .

  He is a few steps down the street when he turns back to see her standing in the doorway, letting the alley’s unsavory air into the restaurant. She hears a stir behind her.

  “Fermez la porte, Madame!”

  Closing the door behind her, she steps outside into the fetid alley, shivering without her wraps. He comes back to her and takes her shoulders in his hands.

  “It’s not too late to say yes.”

  She shakes her head, slowly and with certainty all the while, breathing in the damp scent of the restaurant’s garbage.

  He squints his eyes as though he’s trying to understand her, but they’re speaking different languages. He walks away.

  “Morton,” she whispers. Her voice drifts out into the street, full of questioning and mourning.

  She cannot eat. She cannot sleep. And worse, she finds no pleasure in writing. It is as though her pain and shame washes away her thoughts, her once phenomenal ability to lose herself in a story, in words. Every time she conjures up the word “impossible,” she shivers, she freezes. In the middle of the night, she gets out of bed and goes to her letter-writing desk. Her hands shake as she writes:

  Cher ami,

  Of the extent to which I have been tiresome and “impossible” and not worth giving another thought to, I am perfectly and oh so penitently aware—ne doutez pas! I “walk dreadfully illumined,” believe me.

  On the practical side, as to your particular suggestion, it would be “the least risk,” but possibly the greatest, to follow your plan, even if I could—as assuredly I should—finally overcome my reluctance.

  At least believe that I am unhappy, more than I can say, about it all.

  And now when you “make a sign” I’ll answer—whenever you make it. Only arrange somehow beforehand.

  I’m not worthy to write to or think about. My only merit is that I’m unsparingly honest. But that’s not a charm, alas!

  I’ll let you know the moment I am free. It might be Monday or Wed. Next Friday, Sat., Sunday are absolutely mine, en tout cas. I beg instant cremation for this.

  E

  Anna notices that Edith is not herself.

  “Are you ill?” she asks as she drops new pages off for Edith to work from.

  “Not at all,” Edith says, hoping that a breezy tone will make it so.

  “Well, you seem unhappy.”

  “I can’t imagine why you think so.”

  Her dismissive tone still doesn’t make Anna leave.

  “You’ve been quite busy this spring,” Anna goes on.

  “No more than usual.”

  “I think quite certainly more than usual. . . .”

  Edith looks up sharply.

  “Do you have something to say to me?” she asks. Lucretia is long gone, but Anna’s frown is as condemning as her former mistress’s. “Do you?”

  Anna goes white but shakes her head. Yet she’s not ready to back down.

  “It’s Mr. Wharton I’m concerned about.”

  “We’re all concerned about Mr. Wharton. You’re always concerned about Mr. Wharton.”

  “He’s worse this time, Edith. Last night I came to see him for a few minutes and he was saying terrible things. About how he no longer wished to live with his pain.”

  “I haven’t heard him say that sort of thing.”

  “No, he might not say them to you. . . .”

  “But he does to you?”

  “He said if he were at The Mount and had his rifles near at hand . . .” Anna can barely set the words one before the other. Her voice, normally sweet and lilting, is heavy and slow.

  Edith sets down her pen. “Tonni, he does it to get your attention. Like a child.”

  “Are you so certain? I’ve never heard him speak this way before.”

  “What should I do? What could I possibly do to help?” Edith snaps.

  “He might see the doctor again. And you might spend less time with”—she clears her throat—“Mr. Fullerton.”

  Edith hears her breath catch. She takes in Anna’s small, pinched face. Her once-soft lips are narrow now. Her reproachful gaze makes her look years older than Edith. Has Anna ever loved any man? Could she ever understand what Edith feels for Morton? How longing can alter a soul, change a woman forever? How a single kiss as passionate as his could change all expectations?

  “What makes you think I spend time with Mr. Fullerton?” she asks in a m
easured tone.

  “Cook told me,” Anna says.

  “Am I being spied on then?”

  “Spies are emissaries of an enemy. Could you ever think of me as your enemy?”

  Edith is surprised how boldly Anna stands before her.

  “If you are asking me not to see Mr. Fullerton, who has become my dear friend, then yes, you are my enemy,” she says.

  “Edith . . . I have no right to ask anything of you. But Mr. Wharton is suffering. I believe he knows something. . . .”

  “There is nothing to know.”

  Anna closes her eyes, clearly not believing what Edith is telling her.

  “That will be all,” Edith says. Has she ever spoken to Anna so curtly?

  “All?” Anna asks with a gasp. She leaves the room, but her reprimand echoes for a long while after she’s gone.

  Anna is shaking when she leaves Edith. It is nearly four P.M. She can’t imagine what to do with herself. She cannot go back to her room or even up to the servants’ common room feeling the way she does. She thinks about visiting Teddy, but in his sensitized state, he might well notice her upset and she wouldn’t know how to explain it. She stands against the wall in the main hall of the apartment and tries to breathe. She’s not the sort of person who confronts others, having learned long ago it could be a dangerous way of life for a person as peripheral as she.

  Instead, when she is upset she finds comfort in putting things in order, cleaning everything that isn’t perfectly pristine. When she lived with Aunt Charlotte, she’d alphabetize all the old volumes by author, line up the spices from the most to least used, slap the lamp shades with a damp rag, forcing them to release their soft fur of dust. And most satisfying: she could kneel right down onto the hearth to scrub the tiles with soap and water and make them shine again.

  “Anna’s got cleaning fever,” her cousins used to say. “Come to my room, Anna.” She soon got smart enough to demand a penny or two for her services. Aunt Charlotte was mightily pleased that all the children had suddenly become so neat.

  Now Anna goes down to the kitchen where the cook and a scullery maid are peeling vegetables, chattering in rapid-fire French.