sheets, the sheets the machines in his mills wove all day long every day. He wanted with all his heart to stand in front of her as he pulled back his braces, undid in seconds the buttons and belts of his own clothes. He would lay his father’s heavy silver watch on the nightstand. He would lie down beside her in his one-piece underwear, washed by Mrs. Larsen, changed every day, always clean, the buttons buttoned from crotch to neck.
Every piece of his clothing was always clean. He bathed every day before it was light, the water scalding, and the air in the room like a Turkish bath, thick with fragrant steam. He would stand in front of her and not think about how strong and solid his body had once been. He would not think about how he had thrown himself away on whores.
They would gasp, the whores, when they saw him naked. At the strength and grace of his body, a strength and grace even he could see, looking at himself naked in a long mirror. They would giggle with joy, and say things in Italian he could barely understand. That was a long time ago.
He looked at Catherine. He imagined her in bed. In his bed.
He wanted to hold her face until she finally raised her eyes to look at him. He wanted to look in her eyes and know who she was, who she was in her hidden soul. He wanted to kiss her with his hands on her cheeks. He wanted her to answer his kiss with an eager tongue. He wanted to feel the moment her hand moved beneath the cotton of his shirt and touched, for the very first time, the hair of his chest, the skin of his body. He wanted her to want all this and he wanted her to fear it, but he wanted her to submit.
Sometimes his loneliness was like a fire beneath his skin. Sometimes he had thought of taking his razor and slicing his own flesh, peeling back the skin that would not stop burning.
But he knew it would not happen, not happen to him, not ever.
“There’s something I would like.” She stared into the fire. It was the first, the only wish she had expressed.
“Of course.”
“I want a wedding dress. I want to send to Chicago for some material and make a wedding dress. It’s something girls dream of. I want a ring. Nothing large or fancy. My father told me I would never have one, and for that reason I want it. Not to spite him, but to say to myself that sometimes your little dreams come true, no matter what people tell you.”
“I’ll get whatever you want. I told you.”
“You needn’t worry. I don’t expect much. Ours is an arrangement, yes? Not a childish passion. We both have reasons.” And she smiled at him, the first time he had seen her smile. Her smile aroused in him a longing for something, the past perhaps, that brought him almost to tears.
“Gray, I thought. Silk, if… I could wear it again. After the wedding. Or I could give it to my daughter one day, if we were to have children.”
“Order whatever you want. Write it down, and I’ll telegraph for it tomorrow.”
He thought of her standing in this house in a wedding dress she had made with her own hands. He thought of the mortal sins that raced through his bloodstream. He thought his desire had putrefied. He thought his desires would kill her. He thought, yes, they would have a child, and it would emerge, another monster.
He did not think of wanting the woman whose photograph lay in his drawer, along with the letter which Catherine may or may not have written. He wanted the woman he passed every day in the hallway, who sat across from him at dinner, who ate her food with such delicacy and charm, her small teeth sparkling, who never failed to ask Mrs. Larsen about some sauce or some ingredient he hadn’t even tasted.
He wanted her teeth to bite him. To leave marks on his back, his legs. He wanted her hair to strangle him. He wanted her to tell him that his touch would not kill her.
He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body.
He didn’t touch alcohol. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t go to Chicago, as many would have, to have sex with women he didn’t know. Not for a long time. None of it mattered. None of it did any good.
He wanted the moment at which he finally lay naked against her, chest to chest, her hands fluttering above his shoulders like white birds in the chill night, her frantic fingers threading invisible needles. He wanted to know that his desire was life, pure and clean and unformed and unbroken. Life as good as anybody else’s. As clean as any ever known. Perfectly healthy.
In the end, such a simple thing.
In his fantasy, morning never came; they never woke to look at one another with shy eyes or bitter eyes in the blinding light. There was no tomorrow. There was only this moment, her hand sliding for the first time between his undershirt and his skin, his body sliding into the most private and untouchable parts, not just of her body but of her life, so that they were bonded together not just by the desire itself but by the burning, the ineradicable memory of the actual taste and smell of the flesh.
He remembered every woman he had ever touched. He had thought that he would forget, the way he forgot people’s names or the grades he made at university or the faces of men he had gotten drunk with and told his secrets to. But the scenes of his sexual life came back to him more and more as his years in exile endured, so that he could recall their names, he could see their silken dresses and the diamonds hanging from their ears. He could remember the names of the jewelers from whom he bought these baubles for his little sweethearts.
He could lie in bed at night and see himself, as though he were a third person, making love to an English girl named Lady Lucy while his friend and roommate watched from across the room, too drunk to move or even be aroused. He could see Lucy’s fingernails. He could feel her tongue on his feet. See the bow of her mouth as she slid him into her throat.
He could remember standing behind redheaded Sarah at a sink as she took a cloth and washed beneath her arms and between her legs, in a hotel room in Chicago, his kisses covering her thin and exhausted shoulder blades.
He thought of a widow in a neighboring state, a state where he often did business, a plain woman who had taken him into her bed, and submitted to him without a word, who arched her back with passion and spread her legs and opened every part of her body to him and put her tongue in his mouth and her mouth on his sex and then lay, afterward, wrapped around him, their mourning for everything they had given and lost like a blanket wrapped around their cooling sweat. They shivered in the dark.
When he left her, he had not even said good night. She had not even raised her head from where it lay in the crook of her elbow, her tears wetting the mangled pillow and her matted hair. He had left a red scarf hanging over the back of a green chair.
He had never gone back for it. His way had not taken him again to her house, nor had either of them imagined that it would. Love not worth even a scarf.
He remembered the insane trips he had taken to Chicago, after Emilia had left, to look for her and her lover. He knew then that it was not Emilia he looked for, that he wouldn’t have had her back if she had crawled naked in the street and begged. He was just looking, looking for it, the crack between her legs, her black nipples in the dark. Her skin like oiled earth.
He passed Catherine in the hall. He watched her from an upstairs window as she wandered the road that led from the house, poking at the dirty snow with a stick, sometimes angrily, sometimes with the forlorn hopelessness of a child.
“What do you do? When you go out walking?”
“I just look.”
“Have you lost something?” “It doesn’t matter. I just look.”
Who was she? What did she think about all day, while he was at the office, his dark office in the iron foundry, pushing his goods around the country, digging deep into the earth to haul out its riches? Where did she go when she wandered away from the house after lunch, as he knew she did because Mrs. Larsen told him she did?
He wanted to touch her, to tear her clothes, and he did not. Instead, he gave her things. He sent for hothouse roses from Chicago that arrived blood red and sat in vases, roses that were named with the old names, French poets, English dukes. The roses, forced to lavish bloom under glass, gave no scent.
He sent for chocolates. He sent for marzipan in the shape of animals and flowers, candies for which she had no taste and which Mrs. Larsen slipped to her sweet-toothed husband in secret, until they were gone. He sent for bonnets she had no place to wear. He sent for music boxes, and sparkling ear bobs, which she would not put on. He sent for novels, and she read of the adventures of rakes half his age, of the despair of English girls wandering the moors looking for their dead lovers. He sent for a tiny bird, which sang her to sleep, which she allowed to fly at will
