“You’re not boring.”
“I wish I were more like you, Vivs. I wish I had your . . . I don’t know what it is. That spirit of yours. You’re so modern and brave.”
“I’m not brave at all. Brash, maybe.”
“Yes, you are brave.” She took my hand and pulled me onto the bed next to her and put her polka-dot arms around me. She smelled like Johnson’s baby powder, pink and perfect. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“You can tell me anything.”
“The moment I knew I was in love with him.”
I breathed carefully around the knot of building pressure in my chest. I found it helped to dig my fingernails into my palms, as hard as I could bear.
She went on in her soft voice: “It was at the end of vacation. He was going home in a few days. We went out to dinner and drinks and I had . . . well, I had a little too much champagne. I guess he did, too.”
“That’s my girl.”
“And we went back to my room—Mummy was still out with Gilbert—and we . . . we were kissing and . . . things . . . and I decided I would do it. I would . . . you know . . . with him.”
There was no breathing now. I was suffocating on the hard knot lodged in my lungs, I was sinking irretrievably into the squish of Gogo’s mattress.
Gogo was stroking my arm. Her fingers found the skin beneath the elbow-length sleeves of my black-and-white checked jacket, my snug little wonder of a female business suit. “So we took off our clothes and we were on the bed and . . . well, it felt so good, Vivs, the way he touched me. Really, really good. Is that bad of me?”
“No. It’s not bad of you.”
“Because Mummy always said . . .” She hesitated. “But it felt so good, Vivs. He was so gentle. And we were about to . . . you know . . . and I told him . . . I told him I’d never done this before. And he . . . he . . . Oh, Vivs.”
“What did he do, honey?” I whispered. My eyes were watering from the cut of my fingernails into my palms. My body was too hot in its wool suit and silk stockings. I toed off my shoes and let them tumble to the fluffy pink carpet. “Did he hurt you?”
She moved us both with her sigh. “He stopped.”
“He stopped.”
“He stopped. He said we should wait. He said it should be special, my first time. Well, I told him that it was special, that it was, you know, perfect. I told him I really wanted to do it. And I did! I really did! But he said no, we should wait.” She made a sad little giggle, a brokenhearted noise. “I thought that meant he wanted to wait until we were married. That it was a sign, you know, that the reason I’d always been disappointed, the reason I’d been saving myself all this time, was for him.”
“You’d think.”
“Anyway, that was when I knew it was real. That he was a true gentleman and I loved him.”
“Of course it was.”
“Do you think it was wrong of me? Going to bed with him like that?”
I withdrew my claws from my palms and curled my fingers around hers. “No, Gogo. You were in love with him. You wanted to show him. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I thought he loved me. I really did. Why else would he stop like that?”
Why, indeed.
I stared across the room at the gigantic antique dollhouse against the wall, a relic of Victorian girlhood, flawless in every gingerbread detail. It had been Gogo’s mother’s dollhouse, and she had given it to Gogo for her eighth birthday. Gogo once told me that she, Gogo, wanted to put it away in storage somewhere—she was twenty-two years old, for heaven’s sake—but she didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings. She had been reclining on this very bed at the time, staring at the ceiling, dressed in a white nightie and fluffy white slippers, which she propped up against the wall, one slender ankle twined around the other. She’d just wait until she got married, she said, and give it to her own daughter. She’d name her daughter Vivian, she said, and then the little girl would be just like me.
Well, in that case, her little girl might not have much to do with dollhouses, I’d pointed out. Gogo had laughed and said yes, but she’d play with it anyway, just to humor her mummy.
I wondered, sometimes, if Gogo didn’t understand me better than anyone.
“Can you stay with me tonight?” Gogo asked.
“I’m sorry, hon. I have a lot of work to do. I’m working on a gig for the magazine.”
“The one you told me about on the telephone?”
“That’s the one.” I swallowed and went on. “You know what? I found out today that Aunt Violet knew all the most eminent physicists of her time. They were all there together at this scientific institute in Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, before the war. Einstein was there. Max Planck. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. They used to get together at Planck’s house for musical evenings, after they left the laboratory for the day. Einstein played the violin.”
“Einstein. Really.”