CHAPTER EIGHT
He wanted to touch her. He wanted to see the exhaustion of sex in her every gesture. He wanted to unpin her hair in a warm room, and lift a pristine nightdress above her head. He wanted to feel the first touch of his hand on her smooth dry skin.
He said nothing. He did nothing.
“Does it snow forever here? It seems like it just snows and snows.”
“It snows. We’re almost to Canada. And, of course, the water… coming across the water it gathers strength.”
“And then it will stay perfectly dry, sometimes, for days at a time.” She turned her head from the breakfast table, the blinding white washing her skin from rose to pale, then turned back to him. “Sometimes you think it won’t happen again, and then it does. It’s just… it’s just there. Like that.”
“Does it surprise you? It’s the North. Across the lake it’s Canada.”
“No. No, of course not. It’s just there, that’s all.”
Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured. He wanted to be in love, but he knew that love, now, for him, was something that happened to other people.
“And it goes away?”
“In April. April or May.”
Fool. Idiot. And the worst part of it was that he knew he gave the impression of coldness. He knew that she found him sexless, as frozen as the landscape, and he wanted to say, It isn’t true, I would give everything I have to see you writhing on this floor, right now, and still he said nothing. He made no gesture that might be interpreted as leaning in to her in the slightest way.
He might have said anything. He might have said that grief had burned through him so thoroughly that it had turned his sins to ashes. That his mother had said, needle to the bone, that the way to goodness, the only way, was through pain and suffering. He could have said that grief had left him wholly good. But he said nothing. What did she care about his grief, or his sin? She had traveled the world. A missionary, she said, and there was no reason, looking at her prim quietness, her prudish stillness that never gave way for a moment, there was no reason to doubt her. She had traveled. She had heard enough about sin.
“There’s so little to do. I wish there was something I could do. When you were sick, there was some reason to be here. I felt that I was doing something you needed. It’s something I know, and I was glad to do it.”
He touched the purple scar on his forehead.
“Now I’m better. You’ll find your way.”
“I could help Mrs. Larsen, but she doesn’t like it. I could clean. I could visit the sick people in the families who work for you. I could come into town and help you. In your office.”
“I have people for that. Just enjoy yourself. The quiet. Read.”
“I love to read.”
“Then read. I’ll order you anything you want. It can be here in two days. Novels. Newspapers. Whatever you want.”
“I’ll make a list. Might I do that?”
“Of course.”
He felt strangulation, a beating in his heart. “I didn’t bring you all this way to be miserable. I hoped, hope, you will be happy. At least comfortable, in your choice.”
“You brought me here for reasons entirely your own.”
“But you came.”
“I don’t regret it. I won’t regret it.”
He wanted to hear the sounds that came from her throat when she had no breath left, when she was breathless with desire. He wanted to possess her, in all the ways his formal and distant wife had denied him, truly and deeply, in the ways of his youth. He wanted to have her in his bloodstream like a drug, to sit in his office all day making money and contemplating the rush of ecstasy in his blood.
He wanted to speak to her of his desire, of his desire for her, of the desire gripping his throat. He wanted to stand in front of her naked.
He rarely spoke to her. He never touched her, even in passing. He was no fool. He knew that she was not what she appeared to be, and he knew that what she was lay just beneath the surface of her clothes.
His loneliness was so deep. It made him feel, sometimes, as though someone malevolent were pulling on his hair. Relentlessly pulling on his hair. He wanted to touch her, and he did not. It gave him a pain like a fever.
He saw her, and he wanted to undress her. He wanted to unbutton the many buttons of her severe black dress and pull it back from her neck until he saw her white shoulders. He wanted to drop the dress on the floor, to see it lying around her feet like a pool of black oil. He wanted to see her step out of it and stand before him in her slip, a slim woman in a thin cotton chemise and dark stockings, cotton stockings he would unroll inch by inch until her delicate feet were naked on the floor. The chemise would button up the back, and so he would turn her away from him, to slip each pearl button from its buttonhole, and then the whole flimsy thing would drop, barely skimming her hips as it fell into the darkness of the mess around her feet, and so the first sight of her, his first sight of her naked body would be from the back, the wisps of hair at the neck, glowing like filaments of fire in the candlelight of a dark, cold room. He wanted to trace with his tongue the long line of her white spine, glowing in the brightness from the moon on the snow spilling through the curtains, and she would not want to move, would not turn of her own free will, and so he would grasp her shoulders and turn her toward him and then he would kiss her. The sweetness of skin. The soft touch of his lips on hers. The moment before it all began. Just pure and kind desire.
He would kiss her very lightly, and her nipples would graze his shirtfront, and her lips would graze his lips, which hadn’t been kissed in so many years he couldn’t count them. His tongue would touch her tongue. He would hold her face steady with both his hands as he softly kissed her.
How could he have spent his life without this? How could his youth have passed, his body have aged untouched, unadmired, unloved? His body was starting to leave him and it would not come back. In ten years he would be old.
He wanted everything. He did nothing.
One evening, a week after he had told her the story of his life, he said to her at dinner, “I thought we would marry on Thanksgiving Day. If that’s all right. If it would suit.”
“That would be fine. Who would come?”
“Should people come?”
“I don’t know. People do. Usually. You must have friends. People you know. I haven’t seen anybody.”
“It seemed inappropriate, for you to go to town. People talk enough. And the weather…”
“There must be people.”
“A few.”
“So we’ll have people here? There will be food, a supper maybe. A wedding.”
The woman he wanted to undress, to see naked, was a stranger. Her conversation, her requests, were strange to him. Nobody had asked anything of him for so long.
“I’m not… I’m not pure. You should know.”
He watched her in silence.
“I was a child. A friend of my father’s, a fellow missionary in Africa. He came to me one night and… I’m not pure. Not without the sin of fornication. My father killed him. You should know.”
Mercy touched at his heart. He held her hand, just for a moment, for the first time.
“That life is past. It was a long time ago. It was not your fault. Don’t think about it anymore.”
She looked so far away.
“It doesn’t matter to me. Nobody’s pure. My daughter, my Francesca was pure, but nobody else.”
He passed her in the hall, they sat at dinner, and she was beautiful and unknowable. He wanted to lead her to his bed, his father’s huge cherry bed with the massive carved headboard and the finely laid, perfectly crisp sheets. He wanted to pull back the coverlet and lay her gently against the cool and antiseptic white of the linen
