Beatriz Williams - The Golden Hour

“I bet it would,” I answered.

Until that instant, I hadn’t noticed the tension in her face. That tautness, I thought it was her natural state. Now everything loosened, her eyes and cheekbones and mouth, that fragile skin, like the softening of frosting on a cake. She looked almost human. I thought this couldn’t be happening, I couldn’t be standing here. She couldn’t be offering me this prize. There must be some trick. But her eyes were so blue.

“Then we understand each other?” she said.

“I believe so.”

“Good.”

She held out her hand to me, and I clasped it. The coldness shocked me, but what did I expect? I always seemed to simmer a degree or two warmer than other women. I opened my mouth to ask her particulars, how all these lovely plans might be set into motion, but she spoke first.

“Let’s return to our guests, shall we? There are so many people I’d like you to meet.”

IF SOMETHING WERE to happen to my husband,” Elfriede says, “which God forbid, I wouldn’t marry again.”

“No. No. I don’t see why you should. I never did understand why women agree to marriage, unless perhaps as a kind of business arrangement.”

His answer so surprises her, she sits up and turns to stare at him. They’re lying side by side in a meadow not far from the clinic, but shielded from view by the shoulder of the mountain and, for good measure, by a stand of shrubby trees. Though the sun’s out and the temperature warm, the wildflowers have begun to die out by now. Color and scent have faded. Thank goodness for sunshine, then. Turning Wilfred’s hair—growing out nicely—a bright, autumnal copper. He lies with his arms raised, elbows bent, hands cradling the back of his head, and he stares back at her in enchantment.

“You’ve got grass in your hair,” he says.

Elfriede reaches for the back of her head. “Why do you say that? About marriage?”

“I just think it’s a rum deal all around, don’t you? Particularly for the women. Most wives—not all, by any means, but most —most wives strike me as chattel. They’ve got this dull, mute, complacent expression that says they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. They simply go about their appointed daily tasks, keeping busy, and—oh, I don’t know, maybe they’re happy. But it’s the dumb happiness of surrender. I’d rather be miserable than happy like that.”

A long stalk of meadow grass hangs from the corner of his mouth. The day after their encounter in the woods, Wilfred had a relapse—a minor one, as it turned out, but he was in bed for another week and confined to the infirmary garden for the week after that, and Elfriede begged him not to smoke any more. He protested that it was the damp weather and not the cigarette (half-smoked) that had caused the relapse, but he threw away the rest of the cigarettes anyway. Instead he chews on the meadow grass. Like a bull, she tells him. More like a steer, he corrects her, mournfully.

Now he plucks the grass from the corner of his mouth and says, “Also, I’ve always suspected their husbands don’t do much to please them in bed, these women.”

Elfriede makes an O with her mouth and turns away to face the peaks of the neighboring mountains. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” she says.

“You speak from experience?”

“You shouldn’t ask such questions.”

Wilfred makes a noise—not his Scotch noise, another one. He has a wardrobe of noises for every occasion. Each nuance of thought. Over the course of the past few weeks, Elfriede has learned and cataloged them all. This one’s meant to convey amusement, tempered with just a lash of longing.

“Anything but that,” Elfriede says. “You can ask me anything but that.”

IN FACT, GERHARD WAS ALMOST touchingly eager to please her, after the disastrous deflowering. He had dreamed of nothing but consummation with Elfriede during those months of their betrothal, and when at last he lifted his damp, triumphant head from the pillow next to hers, he’d evidently expected to see his own expression of spent rapture mirrored in that of his bride. The tears astonished him. Well, they horrified him! Filled him with profound remorse.

The thing about Gerhard, he was so stiff and formal in public and to strangers and even to his own family, his two sisters, one married and one maiden. Inside the privacy of marriage, however, he was a pussycat. Not, not a pussycat. More like a spaniel, deeply emotional, almost abject, wholly bound to the late Romantic ideal of a singular, mystical, all-powerful love between husband and wife. Also as a Romantic, he worshiped nature. He loved to go walking with Elfriede, away from the schloss and its gardens, maybe rowing on the lake. He didn’t say much during these expeditions, but tears often welled in his eyes as he gazed at her, especially once she became pregnant and her belly began to swell beneath her dress. He hated to leave her side, even to work in his study for a few hours, as duty demanded. Yet when he traveled to Berlin or to Vienna—to pay his respects to his Kaiser, to see to his business interests, to buy art for his collections—and Elfriede asked to go with him, he always refused.

No, he said. His angel Elfriede must not be polluted by the dirt of the city. He liked to think of her here, in the country, breathing the pure air that was so healthful for their growing child. Besides, he would say, kissing her tenderly, she wouldn’t like Berlin, it was chock-full of merchants and artists and Jews. The worst, decadent aspects of Vienna transported into a kind of German Chicago, whatever that was.

Back to bed. Yes, the wedding night was a tearful disaster, but Gerhard was remorseful. The next evening he took greater care, and—a man of discipline—didn’t allow himself the pleasure of penetration until he had coaxed Elfriede’s first orgasm from between her legs, sometime past midnight. Following this victory, he became determined that they should experience climax at a simultaneous instant, in order to achieve the sublime, transcendental union of which he dreamed. In fact, so determined that Elfriede, touched but not inexhaustible, learned it was sometimes easier to simply pretend that she was about to reach the desired peak, so that Gerhard could join her there, or rather imagine he’d joined her.

Then she could go to sleep, stunned by the weight of his body.

STILL, SHE CAN’T DISCUSS THESE things with Wilfred. Something sacred should remain of that time, she thinks. Anyway, once she’s recovered from her breakdown, once Herr Doktor Hermann determines she’s completed her course of treatment, she must return to her husband and family. And can she face Gerhard again if she’s disclosed these intimate secrets to another man? Another man than Herr Doktor Hermann, of course, who is a professional. (Although she hasn’t described her conjugal experiences to Herr Doktor Hermann, either, despite how often he insists that her successful treatment depends on such revelations. That’s the bind, in fact—she can’t return to her husband until she’s completed her treatment, and she can’t return to her husband if she’s completed her treatment.)

“FAIR PLAY, I SUPPOSE,” SAYS Wilfred. “We’ll leave that aside. But what would you do, if not marriage?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think about it. It would be like wishing he were dead.”

“All right. We can speak in the abstract, if you like. If not marriage, then what?”

Elfriede draws her knees up to her chin. “I might travel.”

“Travel where?”

“Everywhere. I want to see the ocean, first. I used to dream of traveling on a liner across the sea, and ending up in some exotic place, like America.”