Fourteen

Joel took Camille’s hand in his and took her into his studio. It was an incredibly difficult thing to do. He had never before invited anyone into his work space, even when it was just his crowded bedchamber.

His almost-completed portrait of Mrs. Wasserman was on the easel, the eighteen charcoal sketches he had done of her strewn on the table beside it. It was an odd moment for him to realize what had been nagging at him for days, the missing detail that would allow him to complete the portrait and sign his name to it, satisfied that it was the best he could possibly do. Although she was always carefully, elaborately coiffed, there was invariably one slender lock of hair that escaped the rest and curled across her forehead just beyond the outer edge of her left eyebrow. It was surely in every one of the sketches, but it was absent from the portrait. She did not look quite herself without it. And such a very small omission made all the difference.

But this was not why he had come in here and brought Camille with him. He took Mrs. Wasserman’s portrait off the easel and set it on the table beside the sketches. Then he strode over to the corner of the room behind the door and picked up the clothbound package he had propped against the wall there yesterday and stood it on the easel instead.

“Come and see,” he said as he removed the cloth carefully and dropped it to the floor. She came to stand silently beside him.

His first reaction—perhaps it was a defensive one—was purely critical. She had been formally posed on a gilt-backed, gilt-armed chair, one elbow resting on a small cloth-covered table beside her, her hand dangling gracefully over her lap, holding a closed ivory fan. Her other hand rested on the back of a tiny dog in her lap, its eyes all but invisible beneath its long hair. She was half smiling at the beholder with a carefully contrived expression. There was a certain stiffness about it and about her pose generally, and Joel knew that she had been painted from life, and that she had sat still, probably for hours at a time, while the artist painted her. She was pretty, dainty, graceful—and totally unreal. Looking at her, one saw only the prettiness, the daintiness, the grace, the perfection of hair and complexion and dress and expression, and nothing of the person herself. The eyes looked outward but did nothing to draw the beholder inward. There was no hint of character, of mood, of vitality, of individuality. One could see this young woman, even admire her beauty and the care with which she and her props and surroundings had been arranged and painted. But one could not know her.

His second reaction was that outside the painting, where he was standing now, was the invisible figure of the painter. There was no hint, either in the facial expression and posture of the woman or in the way she had been painted, of any connection of tenderness, of intimacy, of passion, of love between painter and subject. Had he expected there would be? Had he feared there would not?

His third reaction—the one he had been holding back—was that this was his mother. She was blond, blue eyed, apparently small and dainty, pretty in a fresh, youthful way without any individuality to set her apart from hundreds of other young ladies her age. She was his mother. She had died giving birth to him. He wondered how old she had been. She looked no older than eighteen in the portrait, probably younger. And the hand that had painted her—the invisible hand though it had touched this canvas numerous times—was his father’s.

His fourth reaction was that the painting had not been signed. He had not even realized that he had been hoping for some clue, however small, to his father’s identity.

He became aware again of Camille standing beside him, looking at the painting with him, but not speaking, for which fact he was grateful.

“Cox-Phillips was right about one thing,” he said, surprised to hear his voice sounding quite normal. “The painter was not particularly talented.” Why had he chosen that of all things to say? The painter was his father—at least, in all probability he was. “He left the beholder with no clue as to who she was. I do not mean her identity. That must be undisputed. I mean her, her character and personality. I see a pretty girl. That is all. I do not feel—”

“The connection of son to mother?” she said softly after he had circled one hand ineffectually in the air without finding the words he needed.

“Did I expect to?” he said. “Did I expect to know her as soon as I saw her? To recognize her as part of myself? It is not the painter’s fault, is it, that she is just a pretty stranger, a decade younger than I. I wonder if the dog was hers or the painter’s. Or was it a figment of his imagination? But there is no other evidence that he had an imagination or could paint something that was not before his eyes. He painted her as she sat there before him. She had to sit still for a long time and probably over several sessions.”

His hand reached out to touch the paint, but he rested his fingertips on the top of the frame instead.

“There is no evidence,” he said, “that he loved her or felt anything for her. Did I expect that there would be? A grand passion transmitted onto the canvas by a painter deeply enamored of his subject, to be transmitted to the beholder more than a quarter of a century later?” He closed his eyes and lowered his head. “It is a pretty picture.”

All his life there had been an emptiness, a blank, where his parents ought to have been. He had never dwelled upon it. He had got on with his life, and he had little of which to complain. On the whole, life had been good to him. But the emptiness had always been there, a sort of hollow at the center of his being. Now there was something to fit into that hollow, and it brought pain with it. So close, he thought. Ah, so close. They were so close to him, those two, painter and painted, father and mother, yet so eternally unattainable.

“Joel.” Her voice was a whisper of sound from beside him.

Why the devil was he going all to pieces over a mere painting, and not a very skilled one at that? He could have lived the whole of the rest of his life knowing no more than he had ever known about himself without feeling any pain greater than that certain emptiness. Why should knowing a little feel worse than knowing nothing? Because knowing a little made him greedy for more when there was no more?

He would find a place to hang the painting, he decided, somewhere prominent, where he would see it every day, where it would no longer be something almost to fear but on the contrary, an everyday part of his surroundings. It must hang somewhere where other people would see it too, and he would point it out to any of his friends who came here—Ah yes, that is my mother when she was very young. Pretty, was she not? The painter was my father. He was Italian. He returned to Italy before he knew I was on the way and she never did let him know. A bit tragic, yes. I suppose there was a reason. A lovers’ quarrel, perhaps. She died giving birth to me, you know. Perhaps she intended to write to him afterward. Perhaps he waited to hear from her and assumed she had forgotten him and was too proud to come back. A comfortable myth would grow around the few facts he knew.

He turned to look at Camille. “I will not paint you with a contrived smile on your face,” he told her, “or with a fan in one hand that has no function but to be decorative. I will not set a little toy of a dog on your lap to arouse sentiment in the beholder. I will not paint you with flat eyes and an unnatural perfection of feature and coloring.”

“They would have to be very unnatural,” she said. “And I do not like little dogs. They yap.”

He smiled at her and then laughed—and then reached for her and drew her against him with such force that he felt the air whoosh out of her lungs. He did not loosen his hold but clasped her as though she were his only anchor in a turbulent sea. She let herself be held and set her arms about him. Her face was turned in against his neck. For long moments he buried his own face against her hair and breathed in the blessed safety of her.

“I am sorry,” he said then. “I am behaving as though I were the only person ever to suffer. And how can I call this suffering? I ought to be rejoicing.”

“There are some things worse than not knowing your parents,” she said. “Sometimes knowing them is worse.” She sighed, her breath warm against his throat, and lifted her head. “But that is not really true, of course. How can I know what it would have been like not to know my father? How can you know what it would have been like to know yours? We cannot choose our lives, can we? We have some freedom in how we live them, but none whatsoever over the circumstances in which we find ourselves when we are born. And I do not suppose that is a very original observation.”

“Camille,” he said, smiling at her.

“But here we both are,” she said, half smiling back, “on our feet and somehow living our lives. Why are we so gloomy? Must we wallow in the tragedies of the past? When I stepped out of my grandmother’s house just over two weeks ago and set out for the orphanage and Miss Ford’s office, I had decided that for me at least the answer was no. Definitely not. Never again.”

“I have identity at last,” he said. “All is well.”

He cupped her face in both hands, and they gazed into each other’s eyes, both half smiling, for long moments. She closed her own briefly when he traced the line of her brows with his thumbs and ran one of them along the length of her nose, and opened them again when he feathered both thumbs along her lips, pausing at the outer corners. Her fingertips came to rest lightly against his wrists. He smiled more fully at her, drew breath to speak, changed his mind, and then spoke anyway.

“Come to bed with me,” he said.

He regretted the words immediately, for her hands tightened about his wrists, and he guessed he had ruined the fragile connection he had felt between them. She did not step away from him, however, or pull his hands away from her face. And when she spoke, it was not with either indignation or outrage.

“Yes,” she said.

*   *   *

They left the portrait of his mother on the easel, uncovered, and crossed the hall to enter his bedchamber, not touching each other.

“I am not the tidiest of mortals,” he said as Camille heard the door close behind her.

The bed had been made up, but the blankets hung lower on one side than on the other, and one pillow still bore the imprint of his head, presumably from last night. A book lay open and facedown on a table beside the bed. Camille itched to mark the page, close the book, and check to see that the spine had not been damaged. A few other books were strewn on the floor with a scrunched-up garment, probably his nightshirt. But at least there was no noticeable sign of dust.

“I never had to be tidy until recently,” she said. “I always had servants to do everything for me except breathe.” Her hair had given her particular trouble in the last couple of weeks. She was unaccustomed to brushing and styling it herself. And why did dresses almost invariably have to open and close down the back, when one’s elbows did not bend that way and one had no eyes in the back of one’s head?

But why were they talking and thinking of such things, allowing awkwardness and self-consciousness to enter the room with them? She had made a decision, a very spur-of-the-moment one, it was true, for his suggestion had been totally unexpected, but she had no wish to go back on it. She had come to believe that for twenty-two years she had been only half alive, perhaps not even that much, that she had deliberately suppressed everything in herself that made her human. Now suddenly she wanted to live. And she wanted to love, even if that word was a mere euphemism for desire. She would live, then, and she would enjoy. She would not stop to think, to doubt, to feel awkward.

She turned toward him. He was looking steadily back as though giving her the chance to change her mind if she so wished. How could she ever have thought him anything less than gorgeous? His hair, very dark, like his eyes, had surely grown in just the two weeks since she had known him. His facial features were all suggestive of firmness and strength. His Italian lineage was very obvious in his looks, but so was his English lineage, though he looked nothing like the young woman in the portrait. It was not just his looks, though. Mild-mannered and soft-spoken though he was, and seemingly uninterested in male pursuits and vices, there was nevertheless something very solid about him and very male. She could not quite explain to herself what it was exactly and did not even try. She just felt it.

He was gorgeous and she wanted him. It was really as simple—and as shocking—as that. She did not care about the shocking part. She wanted to be free. She wanted to experience life.

“Camille,” he said, “if you are having second thoughts . . .”

“I am not,” she assured him, and took one step closer to him even as he took one toward her. “I want to go to bed with you.”

He set his hands lightly on her shoulders and moved them down her arms. For a moment she regretted not being as slender and delicately feminine as Abby was—and as Anastasia was. But she brushed aside such foolish, self-doubting thoughts. She was a woman no matter what she looked like, and it was she he had asked to go to bed with him, not either of the other two. She slid her hands beneath his coat to rest on either side of his waist. His body was firm and warm.

He began to remove her hairpins, slowly and methodically, setting them down on the table beside the open book. She could have done it faster herself. So, probably, could he. But this was not about speed, she realized, or efficiency. This was about enjoying desire and building it—her first lesson in sensuality. Oh, she knew nothing about sensuality, and she wanted to know everything. All of it. She leaned into him, setting her bosom to the firm muscles of his chest, and holding his eyes with her own while his hands worked. She half smiled at him. Tension built in the room almost like a tangible thing.

“I am guessing,” she said, “that you have some experience in all this. I hope so, because one of us needs to know what to do.”

His hands stilled in her hair, and his eyes smiled back into hers while the rest of his face did not. It was a quite devastating expression, one that surely would only ever be appropriate in the bedchamber. It made her knees feel weak and the room seem a bit deficient in breathable air.

“I am not a virgin, Camille,” he told her, and as he removed one more pin her hair came cascading down her back and over her shoulders. “My God. Your hair is beautiful.”

She had not worn it down outside of her dressing room since she was twelve, but sometimes, in rare moments of vanity, she had thought that a pity. She had always thought her hair was her finest feature. It was thick and heavy and slightly wavy.

“You are beautiful,” he said, his fingers playing through her hair, his eyes on hers.

She did not contradict him. She said something foolish instead, though she meant it and would not unsay it even if she could. “So are you,” she said.

He cupped her face with his hands while she grasped his elbows, and he kissed her, his lips parted, his mouth lingering on hers, his tongue probing her lips and the flesh behind, entering her mouth, circling her own tongue, feathering over the roof of her mouth so that she felt a raw, purely physical ache of desire between her thighs and up inside her. He moved his hands behind her waist, pressed them lower to cup her buttocks, and drew her hard against him so that she could feel the shocking maleness of him, the physical evidence of his desire for her. Her own hands flailed to the sides for a moment and then settled on his upper arms.

“Mmm.” He drew back a little and leaned beyond her to draw back the bedcovers. “Let me unclothe you.”

She let him do it, did not try to help him, and did not allow herself to feel embarrassed as garments were peeled away one by one with tantalizing slowness. He was looking at her, drinking her in with eyes that grew heavier with desire. He had called her beautiful when all her clothes were on. She felt beautiful as they came off—beautiful in his eyes, anyway, and for now that was all that mattered. Her heart hammered in her chest and her body hummed with anticipation and her blood pulsed with desire.

Who would have thought it? Oh, who would? Not her, certainly. Not until . . . when? A few hours ago when she waltzed with him? A few days ago when she dashed laughing through the rain with him? A short while ago when she watched him look on his mother’s face for the first time?

“Lie down,” he said when she was wearing nothing at all and he was turning his attention to removing his own clothes.

She did not offer to unclothe him. She would not have known how to go about it. She lay on the bed instead, one knee bent, her foot flat on the mattress, one arm beneath her head. It did not even occur to her to pull the bedcovers over herself to hide her nakedness. He watched her as he undressed, his eyes roving over her, and she watched him.

His shoulders and arms were firmly muscled. So was his chest. It was lightly dusted with dark hair. He was narrow waisted, slim hipped, long legged. If he was imperfect, as she was, she was unaware of it and it would not have mattered anyway. He was Joel, and it was Joel she looked at, not any romantic ideal of the perfect male physique. She drew a slow breath when she saw the evidence of his desire for her, and for the first time she was afraid, though not with the sort of fear that might have had her leaping off the bed to grab up her clothes and bolt from the room. Rather, it was the sort of fear of the unknown that might just as accurately be described as an aching yearning for what she had never experienced before and was about to experience now.

She had never seen a picture of a Greek or Roman statue, because of course they had been sculpted nude, a shocking thing indeed and to be kept far from a lady’s eyes. But he looked as she imagined those statues must look, except that he was a bronzed, living, breathing man while they would be cold white marble with sightless eyes, like those busts in the hall of Mr. Cox-Phillips’s house. Perhaps he was perfect after all. His eyes, those eyes that could not possibly belong to any statue, were dark and hot upon her.

And then he lay down beside her, gathered her into his arms, and turned her against him. She felt all the shock of his warm, masculine nakedness against her own, but she was not about to shrink away from it now when the long, slow building of desire was at an end, and the urgent heat of passion and carnality was about to begin, and their hands began to explore and arouse, and their mouths met, open and hot and demanding. She was not going be a passive recipient either. All the longings and passions of her suppressed femininity welled up in her and spilled over as she made love with a fierce eagerness to match his own.

But ultimately she was shocked into stillness when his body covered hers, his weight bearing her down, his knees pressing between her thighs and spreading her legs, his hands coming beneath her buttocks. She twined her legs about his as he pressed against her entrance and came into her, slowly but firmly and not stopping until she felt stretched, until she feared there could be no deeper for him to come without terrible pain, until the pain happened, sudden and sharp, and there was indeed somewhere deeper for him to come and he came there, hard and thick, and her virginity was gone.

He slid his hands from beneath her and found her own hands and laced his fingers with hers on either side of her head. He raised his head to gaze into her eyes, his own heavy lidded and beautiful, his weight full on her. And he kissed her while her body adjusted to the unfamiliarity and she tightened inner muscles about him to own him and what was happening between them. She would never regret this, she thought quite deliberately. She would not no matter what conscience and common sense told her afterward. She felt as though she were awakening from a lifelong sleep during which she had dreamed but never been an active participant in her own life.

She thought he was leaving her body and almost cried out with protest and regret. But he withdrew only to return—of course. And it happened again and again and again until it settled into a firm, steady rhythm in which a slight soreness and a pounding sort of pleasure and the sucking sounds of wetness combined into an experience like no other, but one she did not want ever to end. And it did not for what might have been several minutes or only just two or three. But finally the rhythm became faster and deeper, and he released her hands in order to slide his own beneath her once more to hold her firm and still. Pleasure swirled from her core to fill her being, though she willed him not to stop yet, ah, not yet. She did not want the world to resume its plodding course with this behind her, all over, to be lived again only in memory.

He held firm and deep and strained against her so that almost, for a moment, oh, almost . . . But she did not find out what almost happened, for he sighed something wordless against the side of her head, and she felt a gush of heat deep within, and he relaxed down onto her. She wrapped her arms about him and closed her eyes and let herself relax too. Almost was good enough. Oh, very much good enough.

After a few all-too-short minutes he moved off her to lie beside her, one bare arm beneath her head, the other bent at the elbow and resting across his eyes. The late-afternoon air felt pleasantly cool against Camille’s damp body. There was a soreness inside, though it was not unpleasant. He smelled faintly of sweat and more markedly and enticingly of something unmistakably male. She could sleep, she thought, if the bedcovers were over them, but she did not want to move to pull them up and perhaps disturb the lovely aftermath of passion.

“And I will not even be able to answer with righteous indignation,” he said, “when Marvin waggles his eyebrows and makes suggestive remarks about this afternoon, as he surely will.”

Camille felt suddenly chilled at the suggestion of sordidness.

“I am so sorry, Camille,” he continued. “I ought to have known I was feeling too needy today to risk asking you to come here with me. You must not blame yourself. You have been kindness itself. Promise me you will not blame yourself?”

He removed his arm from his eyes and turned his head to look at her. He was frowning and looking unhappy—and guilty?—far different from the way she had been feeling mere moments ago.

“Of course I will not blame myself,” she said, sitting up and swinging her legs over the far side of the bed. “Or you either. It is something we did by mutual consent. I wanted the experience and now I have had it. There is no question of blame. I must be getting back home.”

“Yes, you must,” he said. “But thank you.”

She felt self-conscious this time, pulling on her clothes while he sat on the side of the bed and began to dress himself. Self-conscious and chilly and suddenly unhappy. If her education as a lady had taught her anything, it was surely that men and women were vastly different from one another, that men had needs that must be satisfied with some frequency but did not in any way involve their emotions.

What had she thought while they were making love—Oh, that was a foolish, inappropriate phrase after all. But what had she thought? That they were embarking upon the great passion of the century? That they were in love? She did not even believe in romantic love. And he certainly was not in love with her.

Neither of them spoke again until they were both out in the hall, she tying the ribbons of her bonnet while he watched, and arranging her shawl about her shoulders and turning to the door. He reached past her to open it, but he did not do so immediately.

“I can see that I have upset you,” he said. “I really am very sorry, Camille.”

And she did something that was totally unplanned and totally without reason. She raised a hand and cracked him across the face with her open ungloved palm. And then she hurried from the room and down the stairs without a backward glance and without any clear idea of why.

Except that by apologizing and saying it ought not to have happened he had cheapened what for her had been perhaps the most beautiful experience of her life.

Oh, what an idiot she was! What a naïve idiot.