All He Ever Wanted: A Novel

by Anita Shreve

  Etna and I sat in silence in the room while the boy made the fire. As it was growing dark already, a walk outdoors was out of the question (nearly out of the question during the day as well, owing to the precipitous drop from the cliff edge). Since the hotel remained unheated but for the dining room and one or two other of the public rooms, wandering the hallways of that cold building was also unappealing. As we sat there, a sense of claustrophobia threatened to sink my spirits altogether, and, oddly, it was Etna who broke the stillness when the boy had finished the fire and left the room (I could not help but notice the knowing smirk on his face as he shut the door).

  “Nicholas, I should like to lie down,” she said.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, standing.

  “Just for a few moments. A rest.”

  “I shall go for a walk.”

  She was silent.

  “I’ll just go down and have a cup of tea.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Shall I send some up to you?”

  She shook her head. “No, no. A short rest is all I need.”

  With some relief, I left the room then and went down to the lobby. Stepping out onto the porch, I noted the remarkable view in the twilight and could see how the inn might come to life in the warmer months. Aware of a sudden thirst (and needing some courage), I searched for the insolent boy and found instead a woman cooking in the kitchen who agreed to send some tea and sherry to a sitting room. I made my way toward said sitting room, where I smoked a stale cigarette that was on offer in a silver box on the table. The boy brought the tea and a decanter of sherry and set them down on the table beside the wing chair in which I was sitting. I gave him some pennies for his trouble. The sherry warmed me almost at once. The room grew dark but for the fire in the grate, which snapped and hissed pleasantly.

  As I smoked, I began to think about Etna, upstairs asleep on the bed. I wondered if she had undressed. Of course she had, I mused; a woman would not sleep in her wedding dress, would she? I must confess that at that point in my life, I had had little experience with women who were not skilled in sexual matters. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that I had seldom ever been with a woman who was not, in some sense, a professional. My sexual life with Etna would be very different, I knew; it would be I who was the more skilled, the greater teacher. Not for me the slim volume entitled What the Young Husband Ought to Know that was supposed to be of use to the bridegroom on his wedding night. (The servants who cleaned the dormitories at the end of term would routinely find a dozen or so copies of the college-banned book when the undergraduates moved out for the summer.) I understood that Etna would be a virgin, and I was, I admit, a bit concerned about my ability to cross that most sacred of all barriers. I hoped that I would not hurt her, and I hoped something else as well: that the raw physicality of the act would not frighten her and forever stunt the pleasure that might someday come her way.

  (I have always been amazed by the secret world of sex in the same way I have always regarded the common occurrence of birth as a miracle. Nearly everyone who grows to adulthood experiences the sexual act, and yet, removed from the event itself, it seems astonishing that human beings should behave in the way that they do. Sometimes, during a worship service or when I am having a cup of coffee in a crowded tearoom, it will occur to me that most of the well-composed persons there have had sexual relations, perhaps even that very day. I will look at a middle-aged woman, for example, who sits primly with her purse on her lap, barely concealing her impatience with the waitress, and I will think: What secret pleasures has this woman known? Is she prim in public places but wanton in the night? Does she squander herself in various transports of connubial delight? Does she favor, in private, practices that she might feel compelled to condemn in public? The woman, laced and buttoned as she sits at a corner table, her packages beneath her seat, seems incapable of such animal-like activities. And yet one guesses — one knows, unless the woman in question is that rare species, a spinster with no experience of love whatsoever — that she has once or twice or often, or even daily, comported herself in a manner that we, in polite society, might label shocking. In my youth, when I was a man of great passion, which I tried to contain with varying degrees of success, such idle thoughts and fantasies plagued me hourly; it was a favorite game of mine, I must confess, to spot in a room the person who appeared to be the most priggish and invent for him or her a sporting sexual life. I am, I am happy to say, less troubled by such thoughts in my old age.)

  I entered the bedroom lit only by firelight. Etna lay beneath a dimpled quilt. She stirred when I moved closer to her, and she opened her eyes. I removed my boots and then my frock coat, and when I opened the wardrobe, I saw that the beige silk wedding dress was hanging inside. The sight of that dress and the knowledge that Etna lay beneath the covers in her underclothes or a nightgown was enough to ignite my senses, and I no longer had any fear of being able to perform the act. I quickly undressed, crossed to the other side of the room, and slipped between sheets that Etna had already warmed. Because I sensed that to hesitate even a moment might make any further action impossible, I embraced her at once. Her body was warm and loose inside her shift; she had, I was thrilled to discover, already removed her corset, that tantalizing yet annoying garment.

  “Wife,” I said to her, and pressed her hard against me.

  I draw the curtain now as I must, and it is not a coy gesture that I make. I do so to spare the reader of this narrative the full harrowing nature of that encounter. I will reveal only these details. Etna trembled beneath the weight of my body and yielded to me only as far as her wifely duties dictated. That I could have borne. That I might cheerfully have borne, content in the knowledge that with careful tutoring, her fears would vanish and that it would not be long before my pupil would be greatly pleasured and pleasuring in return. No, it was the other thing that so chilled my heart, that disturbed me so greatly I was nearly unable to complete the act.

  Though one can never be absolutely certain about such a thing, human anatomy being as variable as it is, I was sure that entry into my new wife’s body had been made easier by another before me. Even as I was experiencing those moments of the greatest physical pleasure a man can know, I was composing questions that would haunt me for years. Who? I cried silently. And when? I shuddered in the way that all men will do and then rolled onto my back. Beside me, Etna was silent. I thought of the good Meritable’s pronouncement, that a child conceived on the wedding night would be clever and charitable. There would be no life conceived on this night. The act would, instead, give birth to jealousy — intense and fruitless and all-consuming. Love, which just moments before I had thought too domestic and tame a word for my nearly transcendent feelings for Etna, was replaced by something for which I have never been able to find a suitable name: the helplessness that descends when a cherished object has been stolen, the anger that one feels when one has been deceived.

  I have often wondered if I had spoken at that moment, if I had expressed to Etna all the emotions I have just described, we might not have had an unpleasant hour or two (a hideous hour or two, I imagine) that we would always be saddened to remember, but that might have cleared the air and allowed us to go forward with some intimacy.

  But I could not do that. No, no, Nicholas Van Tassel could not ask his new bride why there had been no barrier to her body. He could not demean himself in that way. Instead, he lay on the bed, in the dark of his imaginings, his new wife breathing quietly beside him.

  We have had a brief stop, during which I debarked from the train to stretch my legs. I stood on the platform and watched the sun and steam create a kind of luminous fog under the vaulted ceiling. A large clock, whimsically fashioned in the shape of a pocket watch, glistened in this mist I write of. Men and women alike (I remember in particular a dark-haired woman in a short cloth coat who stared straight ahead and smoked a cigarette) were blurred in the eerie light. This unlikely cloud produced both an ethereal and a prosaic sight: the plat
form dirty with litter and oil stains, the shimmer so beautiful I wished I owned a camera. Unwilling to leave my momentary oasis (which was strangely quiet apart from the hissing of the steam engine), I had to run to catch my train when it began to move, doubtless a comical sight to those who had already attained their seats.

  I take up my narrative on a morning fourteen years after my wedding day. Etna and I sit in a breakfast room papered with crimson roses and trimmed with dark mahogany. The year is 1914, and somewhere in the house are two children — happy children, one would have to say — not abed, both already up and noisy, and in the case of Clara, our elder at thirteen, already dressing for her classes at the Thrupp Girls’ Academy. There are sounds throughout the house that indicate activity: a drawer closing, a shoe dropped, the scrape against the stove of a cast-iron pan. In the sunlight of the transom windows, dust motes sparkle against the dark woodwork. The pungent smell of coffee stirs the senses.

  All this I remember as clearly as if I had just walked through the door. Yet when I look at the years preceding this memory, it is as though time passed the way the leaves of a book caught in a breeze will do: the pages fluttering by so quickly that it is sometimes not possible to glimpse but an expression or a phrase. “What words were said?” I ask myself as I hover now over my journal. “What looks exchanged?”

  I can recall a sense of how my marriage was — truths more felt than spoken — but not its precise content. Occasionally, scenes or facts present themselves out of context, floating in the ether of time lost. I have an image of the baby Nicodemus at Etna’s breast, his eyes as wrinkled as an old man’s, his hair stiff with birth matter. I recall a wonderful dress of Clara’s, a sort of red velvet and crinoline confection that sounded like paper as she moved. I remember the first day Nicky walked by himself: he strode wildly, pitched forward, and fell into my arms. And, of course, the larger facts about our life together are clear enough (I do not mean to suggest a doddering fool); it is just that from the perspective of a sixty-four-year-old man, many details bleach into a life composed equally of daily contentment and nightly anguish.

  The daily contentment is easy enough to explain.

  After my wife and I returned from our wedding trip, Etna settled in to prepare for motherhood, an event that was not long in coming, though I was not to prove as prolific as my father. We had only the two children, seven years apart; Etna had miscarried twice, to her great sorrow. As anticipated, she proved to be an excellent mother, and we were able to share a considerable joy in our boy and girl. Etna was a superb teacher and had an aptitude for play that not all mothers are able to summon (certainly neither of mine ever did). Thus I might find her in the nursery sitting on the floor, her skirts beneath her, manipulating with considerable skill a pair of puppets to Nicky’s delight. Or I would sometimes see her with Clara in the garden, a slender pair in their spring dresses, chasing each other all around in the manner of schoolboys. Etna had a strong constitution as well as an unusual affection for the out-of-doors, both of which made her a splendid playmate. I was glad of this (and not one bit disturbed by her lack of femininity in this regard), since I, as the reader will not be surprised to hear, felt disinclined to sport. Etna was insistent that both Nicky and Clara learn to play tennis and croquet, and to that end, we had had various lawns and nets installed on the premises. My wife always looked charming in her tennis dresses and was a disciplined yet encouraging teacher. Over time, I came to understand that in these games with Clara and Nicodemus, my wife found appropriate release for an inherent restlessness — one that I had seen fleetingly on her face when she was living in the home of her uncle; indeed, one that I could be said to have taken advantage of.

  Occasionally, this restlessness became something more: Etna needed to be away. As a consequence, she was a great one for wanting to go on holidays. In the summers, she and I took Clara and Nicodemus to a small seashore community on the coast of New Hampshire. We rented a cottage there for a month or so, or took rooms at a hotel called the Highland. In my memories of those holidays, we always have sand in our boots and the children are slightly sunburnt. Etna is in her linen duster, the black ribbon of her straw hat snapping behind her in the east wind. She stands looking out to sea, or she is simply walking along the shoreline. Or she is wading in the water in her mohair bathing suit, her hair captured in her turban, her long legs and arms deliciously white and bare.

  As often as I could, I joined her on the beach or went walking with her, for I, too, was equally happy to be “away.” Thrupp, I had long since learned, could be only too confining. I had continued on at the college and had risen to the post of Hitchcock Professor of English Literature when Noah Fitch had moved on to the position of Dean of Faculty four years earlier. (The word Rhetoric, much to my sorrow and before my time as the senior professor, had been dropped. Students didn’t like it, it was thought. I, of course, found such pandering thoroughly detestable, but Fitch had argued, and successfully, that one could certainly continue to teach the subject, albeit in a surreptitious manner, and that there wouldn’t be much teaching of anything if enrollment didn’t go up. Every discipline had been told to “improve” its curriculum so as to be more appealing. Slippery standards all around, I said.) It was a post that suited me well, as I was an able administrator and had implemented some few ideas in the department, such as stricter requirements for a degree in English Literature and the awarding of the Kellogg Prizes for superior essays.

  When we returned from the shore each September, Etna would again take up the overseeing of the education of our children, at first tutoring them herself in rudimentary mathematics and in the principles of reading in preparation for grammar school. More recently, however, Etna had also taken on charity work at a settlement house in an adjacent town. The Baker House on Norfolk Street in Worthington was an establishment that took in the poor and the sick. We had Mary, our cook, and Abigail, the maid, and because the house had long been seen to (Etna unleashing in me a decorating streak I had not known I possessed), Etna was able to volunteer her services at the charity house several hours a week. Indeed, she had, just the year previous, learned to drive a motorcar in order to accomplish this. I had purchased for her a Cadillac Landaulet coupe, one of the first cars to have an electric starter, thus enabling a woman to manage it. It was quite a lovely little thing, a green boxy affair with a gold stripe. Etna was one of only four women in Thrupp who could drive an automobile, and I must say she made a most spirited picture in her hat as she sat behind the wheel. I would sometimes catch sight of her speeding by the quadrangle as I crossed it for my classes. The tails of her scarf would be fluttering, a dust cloud would have risen up behind her, and I would think, with considerable satisfaction, That is my wife. That is Nicholas Van Tassel’s wife.

  So these are the facts of daily married life. But beneath this pleasant narrative there is another story — that of a nightly struggle I could not win.

  I try now to understand. Was there something I might have done differently? Was I being punished for having grasped for more than I was due? I cannot say. Never have I experienced such a fraught and complex entanglement as is a marriage. The most vexing student or the most abstruse essay are as nothing compared to the challenge of negotiating the delicate marital truces we forge and live by.

  To wit: though Etna proved to be an excellent mother and we were happy in our children, our relations, cordial enough by day, grew strained as evening approached, so that silence replaced conversation, glances became more guarded, distractions were sought and welcomed. As was our custom, we passed our evenings together in the parlor, a sentence neither one of us was willing, or able, to commute. Thus I would read in preparation for a lecture and Etna would bend over her needlework, and it would be so still, so quiet, that I could actually hear my wife swallowing across an expanse of Persian carpet. If she felt imprisoned, then so did I — doubly so — not only by my desire for her, which seemed never to abate, but also by the tension that thrummed between us as I r
ead Dreiser and Etna embroidered dresser scarves.

  It will come as no surprise to the reader that the cause of this considerable unease between Etna and me was the existence of the marriage bed, a mahogany monstrosity we had purchased in near silence on our wedding trip. Though Etna seldom refused me outright, she took no pleasure in the event. Night after night, I would slip between the sheets and embrace a woman whom I had seen only that morning lift our son from his carriage or plait our daughter’s hair, the woman who only hours before had handed me a shirt she had just mended or who had looked up from her book, pleasantly distracted, to answer a question from our cook, to discover that I was, in essence, as barred from her body as I was from her soul. Though she was dutiful in that bed of trefoils and flower medallions, Etna could not love me. Time, which I had imagined to be my ally (would not a woman come to discover the joys of physical love with patience? might not the alchemy of time transform respect into love, duty into passion?), proved only to pass too slowly during those agonizing hours before we met in our bedroom. As a consequence, I had learned to hold myself back, and an unnecessary coldness had set in, made chillier still by the fact that each night I was reminded of the first, of my hideous certainty that Etna was not a maid when she married me. Thus was jealousy refreshed, renewed, doomed to repeat itself. It was my constant companion in the night, more trustworthy than love, more faithful than my vows.