Twilight

by Katherine Mosby

  Lavinia knew that Mavis would scoff at her weakness, decrying the need for companionship even while providing it. They had frequently discussed the handful of philosophers Mavis read at night in a rented room that sleep disdained to visit. Philosophy, Mavis contended, was the best cure for insomnia. “It brings you wisdom or it brings sleep. After two in the morning, either one will do. Besides, all the great minds have already done the hard work of the thinking for us. It’s just sheer laziness not to bother to have a look-see.”

  It sometimes seemed to Lavinia as if Mavis had compressed all that she had learned into a single truth as hard and sharp as a diamond. “We are all alone and that’s a fact. Everything else is just window-dressing.” The first time Mavis had pronounced this, with irritating authority, was when Lavinia first inquired if Mavis had ever hoped to marry. The last time was at their parting.

  “Those are the facts. Denying them or being a crybaby about it doesn’t change them. It just wastes time,” Mavis advised, clearly deriving a kind of solace from her severity. Lavinia, unfortunately, had never been able to take much comfort from the beliefs her friend had espoused in lieu of less reliable relationships. While Lavinia admired Mavis for the rigor with which she pared sentimentality from her life, Lavinia couldn’t imagine comfortably inhabiting such a world for more than a few hours at a time. Mavis was fundamentally different from her: Mavis was unburdened by the concerns that lineage imposed. She had grown up in an orphanage; her actions reflected on no one and therefore excited no censure. She could smoke on the street, chew gum, and treat sex as if it were a sport that was more engaging with a partner but didn’t require one. Her life, it seemed, needed no passion in life that politics couldn’t provide. It gave Mavis a purpose and dignity not ordinarily ascribed to an unmarried bookkeeper living in a rooming house in Hell’s Kitchen.

  As she crushed the telegram into a small wad, Lavinia reflected on this irony: she would miss Shelby even more acutely than she would her tough-talking, suspenders-wearing pal who fancied herself a revolutionary. Despite the many things she’d found to admire about Mavis, Lavinia had never developed a closeness with Mavis equal to the one she’d had with Shelby. Now that Lavinia was freed from the obligation to be Shelby’s wife, she found herself unexpectedly aggrieved to be without the particular charms and comforts Shelby had brought to her life. She had underestimated the depth of the bond she felt for him, regardless of her decision to forfeit almost all of the privilege she had known just to escape him. With Shelby she had forged an odd but powerful friendship, animated by shared intellectual interests and an uncanny, almost perfect accord aesthetically.

  They had shared an eye, if not an embrace, and Lavinia was shrewd enough to know that the pleasure of seeing the world through the same prism of taste and expectation was more than just a pleasing convenience: it was a rare luxury she would not easily replace, given her exacting nature and the diverse and peculiar subjects that compelled her. She thought now with great tenderness of the way Shelby leaned on his vowels, giving his speech an idiosyncratic flair, as if he retained the traces of an accent from an unspecified elsewhere, more colorful and interesting than most origins, if only because it was imaginary.

  Lavinia was haunted too by the memory of his wounded brown eyes when she had broken with him, blinking as if the impact of her words had temporarily blinded him. She was unaccustomed to thinking of him as vulnerable or defenseless and seeing his pain so perfectly exposed had been more terrible than she had expected. She found that when she least expected it, in the bath or crossing a street or stooping to straighten her stocking, she would recall some insignificant detail, like the brass dog tag he had saved from the collar of his first dog, named Kirby. Or that he kept it wrapped up in a handkerchief that had been his father’s, stashed in a cigar box that still housed his skate key and three marbles all of which had some variation of cat’s-eye design.

  Lavinia would remember the way Shelby’s quips had made her laugh and his erudite wit continued to amuse her even in recollection. A woman’s red velvet cloche could suddenly conjure up the way Shelby would gallantly pluck the cherry from the top of her ice cream sundae, making a show of removing the one ingredient in the confection she disliked before it could stain the whipped cream on which it sat.

  She remembered too, the way he would kiss her brow tenderly and say, “My darling Cricket,” and “Good old girl,” or even just “Sweet dreams, Mistress Mouse.” Then, she would wince as if a barb had been wedged somewhere deep within her vital organs. Certain memories pierced like random arrows launched by nothing more than the sight of a commonplace object or simple phrase, or even the set of a man’s shoulders when viewed from the back.

  Lavinia wondered if what she felt for Shelby was what other people called love, and if she hadn’t, like a fool from Aesop’s fables, thrown good enough away in the name of the always elusive something better. Perhaps the passion for which she had so yearned was no more available to her than the whisper of genius or the gift of an angel’s face or the ability to dissemble.

  There were certain points in the day, like stations of the cross, when she was especially vulnerable to the lacerating pain these reflections invariably engendered. Often, it was at those moments when she was fatigued or lonely or taken off guard that she felt especially susceptible. She recalled Grace pointing to the spot on baby Hadley’s skull that was not yet firm and the skin covering it was so thin a pulse throbbed visibly beneath the pale fuzz on Hadley’s head. It had sickened Lavinia to realize how delicate the infant was, not just because Grace had said, “You could poke your finger through if you’re not careful,” but because it was such a potent metaphor, so much more apt than the Achilles’ heel, which had always struck her as too masculine and athletic an image to signify human vulnerability.

  Finding her own carapace full of thin spots where sharp memories intruded, Lavinia had childishly hoped that she would no longer feel so porous among strangers, as if she could leave behind her on the diminishing shore all that had driven her from it. It hadn’t occurred to Lavinia that, in fact, the radical privation of the familiar would make her cleave to it all the more. Even when she had been sent to camp in the Adirondacks, and Grace had pretended not to know her for most of the summer, Lavinia had not felt such a profound sense of aloneness.

  From her handbag she withdrew a new lipstick, purchased specifically for the crossing. As Lavinia swiveled up the carmine column from its golden case she marveled at her audacity. She had decided that before she landed at Le Havre she would no longer be a virgin. Europe was no place to languish as a spinster; she could have done that in New England. Regardless of what happened to her heart, Lavinia wanted to know what it was like to let a man inside her. Her maidenhood was no longer something she needed to save; indeed, it was something she needed to spend.

  Near the shuffleboard court, cocktails were being served to the first-class passengers with upper-deck staterooms. A small band played earnestly, despite a saline wind that fingered their sheet music, and carried away the notes meant to encourage conviviality. Lavinia left after one flute of champagne and a labored conversation with a missionary couple en route to the French Congo. In the library, she secured two volumes of Trollope, a collection of Tennyson’s verse, and a passenger list.

  It seemed likely she would know a few of her fellow travelers at least peripherally, and she wanted to be prepared for whatever acknowledgments were necessary. The thought made her queasy and the alcohol disoriented her. As Lavinia made her way down a corridor she hoped would lead back to her stateroom, the ship rolled slightly. At cocktails there had been talk about the weather “picking up” but Lavinia had not paid much attention: weather was a refuge to which only the most bereft conversationalist would resort.

  A heavy-set man in a blue cashmere blazer caught Lavinia by the waist as she stumbled and lost her balance, dropping her books and losing a shoe as she lurched forward into his welcoming arms. There was something about him, especially arou
nd his eyes, that reminded her of her brother Ambrose, making him seem familiar. She could see he was a little drunk, but so was she, so it only disposed her to like Eugene Turnbull more than she might have had they both been sober.

  He kept his arm around her waist as he escorted her back to her room and unlocked the door for her. He helped her into a side chair and put her books on the writing desk in a tidy pile. Eugene Turnbull’s unctuous solicitude seemed like just the palliative Lavinia had been looking for, mitigating his other less attractive aspects. She wondered if he might be the material of her adventure. He kneeled before her, examining her ankle, holding her stocking foot in his hand and rotating it gently.

  “It’s not sprained,” Eugene assured her, kneading the underside of her foot with his thumb. “My brother is a doctor so I know these things,” he added, with a wink. Something in the wink repelled her, snatching her from the champagne stupor like a sharp whiff of smelling salts. Lavinia pulled her foot out of his hand and thanked him. She rose imperiously, despite the rolling of the ship beneath her, and ushered Eugene out of her stateroom and her life with one firm good-bye and handshake. If she wanted to, she realized, she could spend the entire trip in bed, reading, having trays brought to her. She could sleep and wake without regard to anyone’s schedule. It gave her an odd feeling of weighlessness rather than the surge of elation she might have expected.

  When night had fallen and she realized she couldn’t see the shore and that even if she could, it was farther than anyone could swim, Lavinia was seized with panic. For an interminable moment she thought she was choking. It was probably in some measure to compensate for the helplessness she felt that she decided to steal one of the imposing green and gold tassels that punctuated like exclamation marks the lavish swags of silk brocade that draped her stateroom.

  After she had laboriously cut the tassel from its gold cord with a pair of manicure scissors, she thought briefly of sending it to Shelby, for no better reason than that she imagined he would like it, but instead she tucked it into the toe well of a pair of walking shoes and didn’t think about it again until she unpacked her trunk in Paris.

  When she held it in her hand, in the unforgiving light of a southern exposure, it looked like a small animal she had killed. It was limp and severed and she was ashamed of herself. It was not an auspicious beginning.

  Although Lavinia had been abroad only once before, her father had impressed upon his children the importance of having a quest when arriving in a new city. It gave the visit a shape and purpose which general sightseeing did not; it provided a goal for which the beautiful backdrop of a foreign city suddenly had a meaningful context as opposed to being a frivolous diversion.

  Mr. Gibbs did not believe in pleasure for its own sake and he was suspicious of things that seemed too beautiful the way other men mistrusted what was easy. Lavinia had never understood it before; it had always seemed ungrateful not to embrace the pleasure of whatever beauty life threw your way, whether it was the Roman nose of a ticket collector or the crown of a cherry tree or a Chopin étude someone behind an open window was practicing.

  In Paris, Lavinia found everywhere the kind of useless beauty that made her father nervous: in the variegated gleam of the cobblestones after a rain, or in the rust-colored moss that speckled the stone edifice of her hotel. It was giddying, and she could see why her father would have found the kind of surrender it prompted frightening, like being drugged, or crazy. It was true what Nora Fuller had said when she returned from her honeymoon—the light was different—more cadmium in the afternoon, and the morning light was so white it was almost blue. Or maybe it was the air that acted like a scrim through which everything seemed to shimmer and glow with an opiated sheen.

  It therefore only increased Lavinia’s delight to apply her father’s principle and his money to a cause of which she knew he would not approve. Mr. Gibbs had often repeated an aphorism with such evident pride it was clear he was the author: “Women who smoke are like servants who drink: it is behavior that calls into question all previous behavior.”

  Lavinia may have failed to lose her virginity between continents, but she had taken up tobacco, and one of the first things she did after settling in to her hotel on the Left Bank was to acquire all the accessories of her new vice: ivory holder, gold lighter, and silver cigarette case. Lavinia watched, with an almost reverent attention, the way French shopgirls used cigarettes to gesticulate when they gathered like finches at the tiny round tables of cafés, and she made a point of imitating them. On the Rue Jacob, she bought herself an expensive notebook in which she began to keep a list of Beautiful Things, yet another project that would have galled her father, but ironically the one that led Lavinia to later discover her calling as a collector.

  By the end of her first month, she had visited six museums and befriended a young nurse staying at the same hotel on her way back to England from Spain. Elsie Donner was freckled and plump and she laughed easily. She had lost Lavinia’s Baedeker guide the first day she borrowed it and had returned to Lavinia instead a dog-eared Guide to Cutaneous Infection and Dermal Trauma. Tucked inside the flyleaf was a note explaining how the Baedeker had undergone a miraculous conversion at Our Lady of Notre Dame. The note concluded with the line, “But you can see for yourself how dramatic the change is. Even a skeptic would have to agree.”

  Lavinia might have been annoyed but instead the gesture delighted her. Elsie had managed to combine the ironic calculation and wicked pleasure that made her dimpled smile so disarming. Lavinia bought a new Baedeker’s guide which she told Elsie had been the Kama Sutra before its visit to Saint-Germain des Prés.

  “Go ahead and lose it,” she dared Elsie. “I’m dying to see its next incarnation.” That night Lavinia found in front of her door a copy of a book so smutty it had been left wrapped in newspaper, on which, written in lipstick was the message: Shocking relapse!

  Elsie Donner’s room was at the end of the hall, and didn’t include a private bath. Elsie thought nothing of wandering down the corridor to the communal claw-foot tub wearing only a Chinese dressing gown, through which the contours of her body were strikingly evident.

  “What if someone were to see you?” Lavinia asked.

  “Well, surely it wouldn’t be the first time they were seeing the curves on a female body,” Elsie said, dismissing Lavinia’s concern.

  “Besides, they’ll never see it again, so why should I care? I’m only here for another ten days.”

  “But,” Lavinia began in protest, when Elsie interrupted her. “And what they really want to see is this,” Elsie added, exaggerating a wink as she flapped open the upper half of her dressing gown to reveal a flash of freckled breast, and then giggling, she ran back down the hall to her room.

  Elsie and her brother had been among the first International Brigade volunteers in Spain. Her brother was there still. It was hard to reconcile Elsie’s mischievous grin with a civil war but her fingernails were bitten to the quick and sometimes bled. She also drank in a way Lavinia had never seen a woman drink before: with determination. “I’ll be right as rain when I get home,” Elsie said. She laughed even about that, her being “all jangled up.”

  There was a sweetheart in Coventry she was going back to called Lanky Lou. She had known him since he was a choirboy. “But he’s no choirboy now,” Elsie always added, with the drumbeat timing of a burlesque. Even the first time, it had sounded rehearsed to Lavinia, and made her suspect, rightly, that Elsie was not the racy sophisticate she pretended to be. This was confirmed one evening when they were dining out at a café in Montmartre, with a Danish medic Elsie had worked with in Spain. While Sven was inside the restaurant paying the bill, a drunk had stumbled by their table and stopped to leer at Elsie. His attempt to flirt had been so slurred and foolish Lavinia had been amused but instead of dismissing his attentions as the tedious but inevitable price Elsie paid for her starlet allure, Miss Donner blushed to her eyebrows and burst into tears.

  “I’m just overwro
ught,” she said, drying her eyes with the napkin that had lined the bread basket. “I don’t really give a sou about some old letch drooling in my direction. Le salaud.” It didn’t surprise Lavinia, however, that Elsie knew the appropriate swear word and pronounced it correctly.

  “You two go on without me,” Elsie insisted. “I’m splurging on a taxi back to the hotel, my dearies, and Lavinia, don’t expect to find any hot water left by the time you get back.” As she waved from the window of the taxi, she called out raucously, “And whatever you do, don’t get caught.”

  It was with Sven Larskan, in a borrowed apartment overlooking the Rue Monge, that Lavinia finally lost her virginity. “He’s very brave,” Elsie had said of him on their way to join him at the café. “My brother said if anything happened to him while we were in Spain I should turn to Sven. He can be counted on my brother said, and Bert trusts just about no one. Intellectuals least of all.” Lavinia had never heard anyone described as brave before. The word alone was stirring. It suggested so much with just one syllable.

  There was water damage on the wall of the apartment and patches of plaster had blistered and stood out in swollen relief, like a damp rash mapping the unexpected beauty of decay. In the amber light of dawn, it had a primitive power, like cave paintings, raw and delicate. Lavinia watched Sven as he slept, his mouth open and his arm flung wide in the familiar posture of a fallen warrior, like the figures that littered the foreground in the paintings of Rubens and Titian. The very twist of his torso conveyed an archetypical arrogance, as if even in sleep his body found its most flattering position, like water naturally finding its level.