Anna Godbersen - Envy

“Yes,” he replied, hearing her request clearly and rising to offer his hand.

She rested her palm just lightly on his, and allowed him to lead as they exited. The party had now reached such a pitch that no one noticed the absence of these two, and they strode through the halls of a house that could have fit ten of the Hollands’ home inside of it. If Diana had thought that leaving the room where Henry and his wife were celebrating their happiness would soothe her, she was finding herself very wrong now. Her small frame was still trembling with the knowledge of what the Schoonmakers’ life together was — what it must have always been, even while she’d imagined all the different ways that Henry might truly, secretly belong to her. He had taken advantage of her, or at least he had intended to. She tried to feel lucky that she had discovered the truth so soon, but her ability to see silver linings had been thoroughly damaged by this last shock.

“The paintings in this gallery are particularly nice.”

They had entered a dimly lit room, and Grayson raised a candle, which he had acquired somewhere on their walk, although Diana found herself less than interested in examining the canvases.

“Miss Diana, I am glad we are alone. I’ve been wanting to tell you how often over the last week I have found myself thinking about you.”

She turned to Grayson, and found that his face looked not only handsome, which of course it always did, but open and earnest. That was a surprise. “Is your interest in me sincere, or is it some scheme of your sister’s?” she asked in a plain, quiet voice.

“My interest — and that word doesn’t do it justice — is beyond sincere. Now. Please don’t make me tell you how it began, but believe me when I say that doesn’t matter anymore.” Grayson reached forward to tuck a curl behind her ear, and his eyes stared into hers with an adoration that she could not possibly match. She saw that his aim was true, or that he was at least intent on making her believe that. But could she ever trust herself to know the difference?

“Tell me why.” After Henry’s treatment of her, she wasn’t sure that men could honestly love women, but she wanted to believe it. She wanted to be told pretty things, and for the frightening clip of her heart to slow to something more reasonable.

“Well”—Grayson laughed softly—“because you are beautiful and curious and because you like to go places and feel life. Because I feel free with you, and unbound from all the stupid constraints of my dull self.”

“Oh.” Diana moved backward against the wall. She wondered if Henry had ever felt that way — maybe at the beginning, before he’d realized how easily she could be manipulated? But there was Henry again, invading her thoughts, twisting the knife, and she groaned a little without meaning to.

Grayson put a hand on her waist gently.

“Do you think you’ll go on feeling those things?” she asked after a pause.

He took a breath. “I can’t imagine stopping.”

She opened her eyes, but did not meet his before blowing out the candle. Then she reached for him, placing her hands on his shirt and shoulders and pulling him nearer. The brass holder clattered to the ground. She could feel his breathing against her neck, and decided that she liked it. She had never imagined being touched by someone other than Henry, but she found in the event that close proximity to another’s body made the knife wounds somewhat less excruciating. She opened her mouth and brought it up to Grayson’s.

“I’ve never felt so much for a woman before,” Grayson said, when, after a minute, he pulled back from her. “I find that I want to be with you always and—”

Diana was nodding along with him, but she didn’t want to hear more. She wanted to be kissed again until the kissing subsumed all her other feelings. She put the crown of her head against the wallpaper, inviting him to kiss the skin of her throat. There was a hesitance at first, but then he did bend to put his lips there, before moving again to her mouth, where he kissed her lightly over and over. She wrapped her arms around his neck, spreading her fingers just below his hairline. She had nearly forgotten the hour, or the people they had left behind in the other room, when Grayson protested again.

“Do you think they will miss us?” He was panting a little.

Diana tried to catch her breath. “Not yet,” she answered. Grayson blinked at her — perhaps he was trying to determine how well she knew her own desires. In the dark, he looked just like Henry, or close enough.

“Miss Di,” he went on sweetly, “I don’t want to seduce you into…”

He trailed off as Diana stared at him. She had been thinking of the way Henry used to be able to gaze at her from across the room and make her feel that he was at her side drawing his fingertips across her skin. Still the memory made her weak. At that moment, with the shouts of the Schoonmaker party still faintly audible off in the next wing, with the rain falling against the elaborate eaves and sleep still too far away, it seemed that only one thing might possibly make her stop thinking of what Henry had done to her. She raised her finger and pressed it across his lips, urging quiet.

“Please,” she whispered.

Then he hoisted her up, so that she was rested against the top of the oak wainscoting. Her pale green skirt and white crinoline were all around them, like a wave breaking against a jetty, and she felt her whole self butter flying open. He bent to press his mouth to her shoulders, and she discovered that that felt nice. His arms were under her, holding her aloft, and she found she liked that, too. Then she pressed back against him, knowing full well that she would give him all, willing him to take her down into some abyss of forgetting.

She had lost all sense of herself, and turned away from Grayson so that he might more easily bury his lips against her neck, when she saw a figure in the umber halo of the doorframe. Was it Henry, or did she only imagine him everywhere? Then the figure was gone, and she knew she would never have anything quite so sweet and new and pure as what she’d had with Henry again.

Men’s reaction to the news that they are to be first-time fathers is often inadequate, if only out of nervousness; if they are wise, they will look to their own fathers, who have had plenty of time to get used to the idea, for cues.

— MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK

“WHAT A JOY AN EXPANDING FAMILY IS,” THE elder Mr. Schoonmaker declared as his heavy body sank back into his chair. He had, for the moment, grown tired of raising his glass in celebration of his son and daughter-in-law and their family manqué. It was a lucky thing for Penelope, who must be weary — Henry could only assume — of trying so arduously to blush whenever his father referenced her condition. It was a lucky thing for him, too, as there was no expression he even knew to attempt. At the head of the table, Penelope’s father stared, stultified, into his dessert wine. On the other end, her mother was beside herself with giggles, and winked at anyone who so much as glanced in her direction. The other guests went along, gamely enough, with the calls for more champagne and every time a greater need for congratulation and excitement.

“That was lovely,” Richmond Hayes offered halfheartedly as the waiters descended on the oak-paneled dining room to remove the final course. The guests paused in their chatter and looked over at the man of the house, for even they knew there would be more. Henry wondered if they were as exhausted by it all as he was. But everyone likes a party, especially when it is already well under way, and their eyes were very bright.

“Mr. Hayes,” said Mrs. Hayes, “shouldn’t we invite our guests into the smoking room for digestifs?”

The men and women arranged along the long table murmured their approval, and then Richmond Hayes agreed, not altogether convincingly, that it was a good idea. Henry could not bring himself to glance at Diana, who sat across from him only partially obscured by the arrangements of pink begonias. Everyone was pushing back their chairs and standing. The gentlemen were reaching for the arms of the ladies they had escorted in, somewhat less tipsily, several hours ago.

“Henry, sit by your wife,” old Schoonmaker commanded once they had all, somewhat stumblingly, relocated.

Penelope turned to him, from her place on a settee, her eyes as large and trusting as a doe’s. It was dizzying, he thought, all the different emotions she could feign. In her pale pink, expertly tailored dress she looked just the part of the young mother who cares for nothing so much as her children, although he could never believe again that she was even partially such a person. Not after the way she had used them long before they were so much as born. He walked around to her and sat at her side, but could not bring himself to meet her gaze.

Hours passed like this. At first, Henry rejected the champagne that was poured for him. He’d been sober all week, and he still felt that he should keep himself strong and ready and brave. But then he began to wonder about the slight possibility that Penelope might be telling the truth, and the very notion caused him to demand a drink and down it in a hurry. Then he ordered another and another. When the sounds of the others’ voices had grown giddy and loud enough to drown out what Henry had to say, he addressed his wife.

“You can’t really be.” His voice was hushed and a little slurred, but he managed to focus his black eyes carefully on her and remain hopeful.

“What do you mean, Mr. Schoonmaker?” she returned innocently.

Henry glanced across the room, where women were rearranging their skirts in order to appear to the best advantage of the chandelier light and the waiters were circling with full decanters that he would have liked to have gotten both of his hands on and absconded with to some dark corner. There was a huge, gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace, tipped slightly forward to give a view of the room as though from above. In the far corner of the scene Henry saw his own reflection, in his black slacks and tails, and beside him his wife, in her subtle and artistic dress. For a moment, he saw what they all saw: two perfectly matched, tall, dark, lithe people, too in love to join in the shrieking of all the others. He hated himself for having glimpsed that picture.

“It was only once, a week ago, two — I can’t remember.” Henry sighed and shifted his jaw. “I don’t believe it.”

“All right, then.” Penelope let her white shoulders rise and fall in careless acknowledgment.

“You’re not.” For the first time that evening, Henry’s dread ebbed.

She rolled back her eyes and let her mouth open slightly. “Well, I’m not completely positively sure that I am.” Then she brought her gaze to his. “It’s possible, of course.”

Henry let out a sigh from the bottom of his chest and shook his head in relief. There was no baby, there was no family. He could leave her after all. It would only take a little longer, and the conversation with his father would be somewhat more awkward. But he could still do as he had planned.

“Oh, Henry, don’t be cruel.”

Her face had gotten all crumpled, and though he didn’t know what she was about, he felt the fears creeping back from the base of his skull.

“I told you how it is,” he said carefully.

“But now it’s all different!”

“Penny, don’t be stupid, you said yourself—”

Penelope looked down at her gloved hands, with their circles of rubies at the wrists, and began to squeeze them together. “I’d be careful whom you call stupid,” she said quietly. “For instance, you haven’t even considered how it will look when you leave your pregnant wife. It is awfully different now, don’t you see?”