Page 46 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“Oh,Tâm.” I was satisfied to see her composure momentarily dissolve.

“I wish we were alone.”

“My dear,” she said. Her eyes darted around, to see if anyone had heard. But we were leagues above them all. “We mustn’t.”

I whispered hotly. “If I could, I would lower you onto your husband’s plush carpet. I’d kiss you from the tips of your ears to the divot on your ankle while everyone looked on. I would slide my hands up your legs. Part you like a sea, my tongue a pirate ship in your waves of pleasure.”

She flushed, clutching her reddening neck, and seemed on the verge of saying something. Then she turned her back to me. “No,Tâm. I cannot do this anymore.”

She did not call me her Cheval Sauvage, and that’s how I knew. Something life-giving was being gouged from my chest—it took my breath away, the loss. I held on to the railing, watching the heaving of her back.

She continued, still turned against me. “Marcel has moved his business overseas, to Germany. Things are happening there. He wants to be on the ground. We are relocating before the snow arrives.”

“Leaving?” I croaked. “For how long?”

“He does not intend to return to France.”

“And you?”

“I will go with him.”

There it was, the cannonball that I always saw coming. Knowing its inevitability did not lessen the impact. I reached for her, but she was already descending the stairs. What did I expect? A tête-à-tête at this party with their friends underfoot? A long and loving goodbye? The Chaton vanished into the crowd, this woman who could only ever offer me marginalia in the book of her existence.

I returned to the cottage alone. The dark overwhelmed me. And my rage, it took over. After all her complaints about Marcel; all her professions of love for me—

It came to nothing. She might have wanted me, but she did not want me enough to leave the life she’d maneuvered for herself.

I made a fist and punched through the floor mirror in the cottage.What a beautiful mess it made. Glass sparkled in the candlelight, arrayed itself on the floor like a mosaic of silver.

A line of blood rivered down my palm, jogging to meet a vein in my wrist.

As if on instinct, I turned and pressed the open wound to the surface of my secret painting.

Let it divide the women in two, as Justine had divided us.

Then I painted over my blood with cadmium red. I would not allow this pain to fade. It sought witness.

Exhausted, I fell into bed, dreaming of nothing at all. The age of dreams had passed for me.

Again, I will rest my pen. The end of the story comes too quickly.

May 25, 1943

The morning after the fête, I woke with a gnaw of dread. Sitting up on my elbows, I gazed at the blue lovers—ruined now with that thread of blood. It was fitting, then, that this piece should be our final memento. Strange, volatile art that stirs when it should pacify; agitates when it should soothe. Staring back at me was Justine’s fine-boned face, which could convey any manner of feeling. She loved and then she discarded. She was deep, she was shallow. What contradiction inside such a small and adored body!

I resolved that I should confront her one last time. I deserved more than a disappearance from the woman I loved. And so I went to the gardens, where I knew she liked to stroll after her breakfast. And she was there, dressed in white voile, her mouth twisted in concentration as she leaned over a spent rosebush.

I fell into step and she remained silent, not in challenge, but in despair, perhaps, or confusion. The poised socialite from the previousnight was still slumbering. For a moment, she was my very own Chaton again.

Finally, she began, “Oh,Tâm. How many things I would change if I could.”

“Why can’t you? Women have divorced before.”

“And then what? I have no skills, no talent on which to feed myself. I am old and accustomed to a certain rhythm of freedom. You know this. Would I resign myself to a life as my parents’ burden? Scavenging on the crusts of society?”

It hurt terribly that her life without Marcel did not, also, include me. That alone should have said everything. Perhaps I should have argued with her, allowed her to see what our future might entail—afternoons of love, evenings of fervid conversation, art and music and the balm of true companionship. But I could never offer her an estate or diamonds or friends who moved through the world like rainfall across glass. Our life would be penury and hardship in the end, and she was not built for hardship. She liked the company of bohemians, but only as a diversion. She was, to her core, a pragmatist. An edifice of convention. I had not seen this, because I didn’t want to acknowledge how distant we truly were. If not for Emil and her own charitable impulses, Justine would have never glanced my way.

Bitterly, I said, “‘After all this time’ becomes ‘only for a time.’”