The Age of Desire (51 page)

“Ah.”

“I have never known, since the very first day, what I am to you.”

He blows a cloud of blue smoke and settles his wrist over his eyes. He looks as though he is about to answer her, but the bells of Sacré-Coeur ring out joyously, a full-hearted song of devotion, interrupting any attempt he might have made to speak. By the time they have completed their concert, if he was going to answer, he’s forgotten.

He suggests she leave the hotel first, exiting via the café, and he lies still with his eyes closed as she dresses. She notes the purple hollows beneath the arc of his lashes. The pinch of exhaustion at the corners of his mouth. How she cares for him. Even when she’s angry, or feels betrayed, it’s unthinkable that she can ever stop loving this man. Before she steps into the hallway, she says, “We should be friends now. Nothing more. I’m convinced it’s best that way.”

He shrugs. Looks at her blandly.

Walking through the café, passing tables of relaxed friends, openly romantic lovers, she is flooded with a bitterness, realizing that she will never have the single thing she wants most in the world.

When Teddy returns with Nannie in tow, he is a frightening specimen. He stares glassily and doesn’t ask questions. While in the States, he saw Dr. Kinnicut again, who wrote Edith a note of extreme caution. “Of course you will be careful about being alone with Ted with nobody within call. You cannot tell what mental tensions have been accumulating since you’ve seen him, nor how explosive they may be.” She has thought many negative things about Teddy over the years, but never did she imagine he might actually be a danger to her. Still, shouldn’t she have seen it when he raised that butter knife to Eliot at St. Cloud? Shouldn’t she have expected this? My punishment, she thinks ten times a day. I have brought this on.

So, introducing him to the new apartment, she uses a kind and even tone as one might use to soothe an easily spooked and dangerous animal. It is the voice Tonni used with him when he was ill. She points out the things she thinks he’ll like: how his room is near the library; how the light pours into the drawing room from the garden. Teddy’s always loved houses, but she wonders what he can see or take in. At their first dinner together, he exhibits an empty stare like a man who has been given a sedative. He speaks only when spoken to. And then just a syllable or two, as though he is too weary to generate more. The primary sound at dinner is the clatter of silverware. He doesn’t even answer the maid as she serves meat to his plate, asking him how much, and piles up the potatoes assuming he’ll stop her when she’s given him enough. And so his plate is groaning with food, which he barely touches. Afterward, Edith walks him out in the garden, which sparkles with pansies and late tulips all honeyed by the early evening light. Despite his love of gardens, he doesn’t say a word.

And then, as she says good night to him at the door of his room, he starts to shake and his eyes light with malice.

“You make me a prisoner in this horrid place when I can only be happy fishing. Or with my animals. Why must I be here in Paris with
you
? I hate the very sight of you!” She shudders, sick that the neighbors might hear him. He’s never spoken against her this way, even when he was at his worst. And to think he begged Dr. Kinnicut to let him make the journey to Paris because he missed her. Before, when he was soaked in melancholy, there was always Anna to soothe him. Now, Anna mostly keeps her distance. Nannie is no good at all, running from the room the moment Teddy raises his voice.

It’s fallen to Edith now, and she doesn’t like it at all. She doesn’t know how to speak to Teddy. Maybe she never did. While she ponders what to say next, Teddy suddenly snatches his bedside lamp, a Limoges vase that Edith had converted to give him light to read by, and, yanking its cord from the wall, flings it at her. The beautiful vase with its hunting gentlemen and slender ladies slams against the door frame, exploding into a thousand pieces, celestial stars of china spewing from a single center. She feels the spray against her skirt, the shock against her ankle, and, lifting her hem, sees three small roses of blood blooming there. Panicked, she gathers herself and escapes down the hall.

“
No
, Puss. Don’t go. I love you desperately.
Desperately
,” he calls after her. “If only you loved me. Instead of that
bounder
.”

She calls for White to go soothe him, warning him that Teddy has turned violent. One of the braver maids accompanies White to sweep up the mess. And Edith telephones the Paris doctor who diagnosed his ailment as gout in the head the previous year.

“He’s gone mad, I think,” Edith says. She gingerly touches her bandaged ankle. “He wants to hurt me.”

The doctor arrives in less than an hour, his black leather bag banging against his leg. His hangdog face observing her with irritation, accusation.

“I did nothing to upset him,” Edith feels the need to declare. She holds up her hands like the victim of a bank heist.

“Of course not, Madame,” the doctor says, his lips pressing together with doubt. He enters Teddy’s room with a nervous smile, and speaks to him in childlike English, asking questions that just seem to confuse him. How is he feeling? Is he very,
very
angry?

“I’m not angry. I’m
not
angry,” he says.

“I hear you threw a lamp at your wife,” the doctor offers.

“I didn’t do that,” Teddy says. “It’s just not true.”

“Ah, but you did! I see a piece right here.” The doctor bends down and lifts a small shard from the floor that the maid must have missed and holds it out to him.

“I see there’s no lamp by your bedside. Perhaps this is part of it?”

“It ain’t true. I didn’t do any such thing. They just want to make it look like I did. She makes me the villain, but it’s not so. It’s a setup.” Edith shrinks back into the hallway, shaken.

Later, the doctor tells Edith he has theories, but no certainty. A brain malady, he declares. Perhaps a rest cure in Switzerland would help? Other than that, he is at a loss. The patient feels persecuted, misunderstood. The doctor wants to verify: did he really throw a lamp? Edith shows him her wounds, annoyed.

When Teddy is finally asleep—Oh, thank God, he is asleep!—she writes Morton, telling him of the impossibility of her life. She hates herself for turning to Morton. But even as unpredictable as he is, she feels he understands her. If he would just pen one line about feeling sorry for her. Or wish her relieved of such a painful burden! Or worry for her safety.

It should not surprise Edith that no response comes. Teddy grows rapidly worse, weeping, screaming, calling her names, sweeping things off tables. Thank heavens they are no longer at George Vanderbilt’s. At least here, when Teddy breaks things, the items are hers and she can replace them.

Days pass. Weeks pass. Edith is tired and literally sick. Food won’t go down. Sleep won’t come. Just a word from Morton would be a salve. She writes again. And still receives no answer. When it comes to friendship, she tells herself, Morton is an eel, slipping away into the shallows at the first sign of a stir.

One night, with still no word from him, she paces her room. She locks her door at night now, leaving the key in the lock so Teddy can’t jimmy his way in. As she walks from one side of the room to the other—such a beautiful room—she sees her life as the most ironic of stories. At last she has her foothold in Paris. After all these years, a dream realized. She has finally known what other women know. She has tasted passion. She has loved, truly loved! She should be ecstatic. Her days should be bursting with promise. Instead, her hopes lie near death, the weight of each breath almost too heavy to lift.

Morton. Once her solace, again her anguish. And everything she’s feeling focuses on him. Her hopelessness, her frustration. Who is more dangerous to her: Morton or Teddy? Teddy is no longer in his right mind. She expects nothing of him. But Morton should be there to soothe her, to hold her, to care and worry. Even as a mere friend! Barefoot, shivering, for rain is singing coldly against every pane, she nervously unlocks the door and, listening for movement from Teddy’s room, pads down the dark hall to the library, lights the lamp and finds a pen, a handful of paper, and begins to write. She inscribes the first line slowly.

I am sad and bewildered beyond words.

She runs her index finger across the sentiment, knowing this is where Morton has brought her. To a desert of wordlessness. A woman who has spent the best part of her life, against all odds, shaping a respectable living from words! She could stop now, crumple the paper and throw it away. Wait for him. Wait on and on for this mercurial man to come to her again. But she can’t. She writes for two hours. Considering every line. It must be said. It must be shared. She is worth more than this pain. More than this disappointment.

I am sad and bewildered beyond words. And with all my other cares and bewilderments, I can’t go on like this!

I seem not to exist for you. I don’t understand if I could lean on some feeling in you—a good and loyal friendship, if there’s nothing else!—then I could go on, bear things, write, and arrange my life.

I understand something of life, I judged you long ago, and accepted you as you are, admiring all your gifts and your great charm, and seeking only to give you the kind of affection that should help you most, and lay the least claim on you in return.

I have had a difficult year—but the pain within my pain, the last turn of the screw, has been the impossibility of knowing what you wanted of me, and what you felt for me—at a time when it seemed natural that, if you had any sincere feeling for me, you should see my need of an equable friendship—I don’t say love because that is not made to order! But the kind of tried tenderness that old friends seek in each other in difficult moments of life.

My life was better before I knew you. That is, for me, the sad conclusion of this sad year. And it is a bitter thing to say to the one being one has ever loved d’amour!

She finds an envelope, seals and addresses the letter and sets it out on the table in the hall where White collects the mail each morning to hand to the postman. And then she goes to bed. Her sleep is instantaneous and dreamless.