I follow her glance, and for an instant our eyes meet—his keen, mine resolute. In that second of contact, I have the familiar impression of a thick, unscalable jaw and hair so short as to bristle from his head.
“Quite certain.”
“Because I expect he’s a tremendous lover, once you work past his inhibitions. Think of all that feral energy he’s got.”
“My God. How do you imagine all these things?”
“Darling, I just know. Let’s just say I haven’t spent the last few years like you have, busy with hearth and home. For one thing, I haven’t got either one. Hearth or home.”
“No, you haven’t.”
Clara takes the bottle by the neck and refills my glass. “Well, then. A girl’s got to keep busy somehow, if you take my meaning.”
I don’t quite take her meaning. I don’t really want more champagne, either—my brain is already swimming—but I drink anyway, and then I venture, “The last time I saw you, you looked miserable.”
“Well, I was miserable. I was frightfully miserable. It was awful at first, to be perfectly honest. I couldn’t stay in dreary old Cornwall after all that, catching drizzle while the house fell to ruin, so after a bit, when the dust had properly settled, I moved to London and started living again.”
“But what did you do? You must have taken work of some kind.”
“Work? Oh, darling. Don’t use such words.” She waves her hand. “I had a bit of money from my parents. And the chaps paid for everything. If a girl learns how to play her cards properly, she shouldn’t have to buy a thing.”
I fall silent at that, because what can I say? I prod the remains of my supper. The giddy recklessness that carried me into this place tonight has died away, like the fizz in my champagne, leaving me flat and merely drunk. If this is what drunk is: muddy and blurred and pieced together, the Expressionist vision of yourself.
“I’ve shocked you,” Clara says.
“No. Not really.”
“Yes, I have. You think I’m some kind of prostitute.”
“No! Of course not.”
“I suppose it’s a species of prostitution. But so is marriage, when you think about it. It’s all just trade. His money and your—whatever it is you’re inclined to give him. A meal, a well-ordered house, a bit of affection, a child or two. Sex, naturally, or else he’s going to get that elsewhere, with women like me.”
I touch the back of her hand with my fingers. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true, and I’m not ashamed. Why should I be? We’re all ever so much more modern now. And I don’t see why I should have become a dried-up little maiden aunt, just because some silly archduke got himself assassinated by a petty half-mad nationalist one June day and ended up taking most of Europe’s eligible young men with him. The fellow I should have virtuously married lies under a cross in France somewhere, and I never even knew him.”
“Not all the eligible men.”
“No, that’s true. But the ones who survived are practically useless, or else terribly maimed, and I’ve had enough of nursing. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? It’s true, though. That’s one of the reasons I love America. You have so many strapping, healthy young men running about. Playing at their golf and tennis. Racing speedboats in Biscayne Bay. They’re so tall and tanned and vigorous, I want to weep for the excess of it. If only I came here sooner, when I was young enough to get married.”
“You’re not that old.”
“Oh, I am. I am old. I shall never marry now. I should never burden some poor chap with all my eccentric tendencies. It’s too late for me. You see? You’re the lucky one, really. You had a moment of marriage at least, even if you hadn’t married the man you thought. A moment of contentment, and a daughter to show for it. I’ve only got this.” She waves her hand again, and when it returns she lets it fall on the neck of the bottle, at rest in its bucket. She pours the last dregs in democratic shares: a drizzle for her, a drizzle for me. “And if you’re not going to encourage that fellow to drag his primeval jaw over here to seduce you with, I jolly well will.”
“Oh, Clara, don’t!”
But she’s already tossed down that last drizzle of champagne, already risen from the table in a swish of fringed black gossamer. The look of flushed determination on her face terrifies me. I reach for her hand.
“Now, darling. You let me manage this,” she says, and she bends her finger in the direction of Mr. Marshall.
I don’t imagine he can resist her, even a man like him, a man doing his job, whatever it is. Clara is absolutely irresistible in her current moment, all lustrous and mettlesome, stylishly daring, a glossy trick pony you can’t help watching. Waiting to see what she does next. But Marshall doesn’t wait. He fixes on the doorway instead, as if something’s going on in the main room, something of terrible interest, and only when Clara arrives at his table does he look at her, a second late, and then around her shoulder at me, and then back at her.
She places her two hands on the edge of the table and leans toward him. She’s asking him something, and her endless necklace of imitation pearls, knotted in the middle—they must be imitation, right?—dangles exactly between them.
He replies. She replies back, pulls out a chair from a nearby table, and slides it into intimate proximity with his. Sits, graceful as a dancer, one leg extended to the side and the other folded atop, and rests her chin upon her laced fingers. Like a dreaming child, only dangerously grown up.
For some time I watch them converse. I can’t see Clara’s face, but I don’t need to. Her pose says it all—angular, languid. I think of Clara in London, cadging a living at this, and compare her to the Clara I knew briefly in Cornwall, even the Clara who bounced into my bedroom in the Cocoa apartment, and I think, This is Simon’s fault; Simon created this creature.
And then I think, But is that so very bad? The Cornwall Clara was a martyr in a gray dress. This Clara is happy, healthy, confident. Maybe this is Clara as she’s meant to be, liberated from the shadow of her parents and of the war itself, and maybe Simon’s done her a service, even if serving his sister was never Simon’s object.
And then I think, out of the dark blue, as Clara lays her fingertips on the back of Mr. Marshall’s considerable left hand: What am I doing here?
A small pool of flat champagne remains in my glass, the drizzle that Clara left for me. I drink it down, because I hate to waste anything, and I walk out of the inner chamber to the boisterous, middle-class main room, and straight on out the door into the black Florida midnight, and the reason I have come out to play this evening, under the new and invisible moon.