Finally, the pauses between our words, our sentences, become longer. I am relaxed and begin to feel myself flag. I want something to happen. The thing that made Margaret giggle as we sat in the Hotel Baltimore in Raleigh, having tea at the table near the fountain.
The single lamp beside the bed suddenly dims, startling us both, and we laugh. Michael Searle gets up and turns it off. I can see him in shadow. I am no longer so nervous.
“Olivia.” His voice is a whisper, but I hear sadness in it. “I’ll try to make you happy. Forgive me if I can’t. Will you forgive me?”
I don’t know how to answer. I have never thought too much of being happy. After my accident, I became used to being pointed at and whispered about. I became brave and aloof instead of frightened in the face of unpleasantness. Thank God for dear Margaret! She sees beyond my face. My bravado. But the house—Bliss House—that is now ours together frightens me. On my visits, Michael Searle showed me all of it, from the servants’ rooms to the places he’d hidden to play as a lonely little boy (How could he be otherwise? He had few friends, he told me.) to the roof with its magnificent view and strange collection of tiny shacks. At night, lying alone in one of the bedrooms near the back stairs, I heard sobbing and laughter and footsteps coming from the third floor when everyone else was asleep and there were no other guests besides my mother. She heard nothing, and so the sounds must not exist. They must not matter.
“We have to choose to be happy, Olivia. You know it as well as I.”
I choose to trust him.
I have never been naked in front of a man before, and my mother has hinted that it isn’t necessary if I don’t want it to be that way. But the wine makes me bold, and although he looks politely away, I notice a small tremble on his lips that I can see even in shadow. I take off my robe and untie the front of my gown so that it hangs open, partially exposing my breasts.
Michael lays his blue velvet smoking jacket over the back of the chair. I am surprised to see that beneath it, he wears a long old-fashioned nightshirt tucked into his pants. But who am I to judge? I know so little about men.
Margaret has told me enough that I believe my mother wrong—that I should not simply bear what will happen to me, and that I should touch him in ways similar to the ways in which he touches me. He is tender enough, lightly pushing my gown away so that it falls from me. Kissing my shoulder, the crook of my elbow, my wrist. Approaching me gently. Kissing me deeply, bringing more than a flutter of a response to my body.
How does he know what to do? I had taken his trembling for fear. But had it been desire? Anticipation?
He helps me onto the bed. We can feel the vibration of the ship, hear the constant hum of the engines. He lies atop me but not so that he puts his full weight on me, and takes my face in his hands. He wears no scent but smells faintly of perspiration and the ship’s lavender soap. We’ve never spoken of my scar. Sometimes, in fact, I even forget that it is there. Now he puts his lips to it and I feel his breath on my face. No man, not even the young Irish boy who cared for me, had ever kissed that most tender place. Something inside me breaks: the embarrassment, the fear, the years of my mother looking hopefully at my male friends, praying that one might take pity on me and marry me. It wasn’t that I believed I was ugly or unlovable. It was the sense that I had disappointed. Always disappointed. It almost made me bitter.
Almost.
Each night of the crossing, and in England, before we arrive in Paris, he comes to me. Touches me. His lips on my face, my breasts. His hands running over my body, searching. Searing me. Causing me to put my hand to my mouth so the others on our corridor won’t hear.
But he never removes his nightshirt, and he gently pushes my hands away or stops me with a kiss when I try to do it for him.
“Wait,” he says. “Soon.”
I wait. I want to write to Margaret to ask her what to do, but the post would take too long. By the time a letter reaches her we will be leaving Paris. Waiting is all I can do.
Before another ship returns us to New York a month later, I am in love with this gentle man who makes me laugh and makes me wait. I find myself looking for his face if we are separated in a crowd, or if I leave my room to go down to breakfast before he has left his room. He knows so much. His dark eyes are intelligent and he knows the histories of so many of the pieces of art we see, he knows the cities from studying maps in books, he talks of the places where we will travel later. He knows all about the war, and tells me Germany will never, ever truly give up.
I love him. I trust him.
God forgive him.