T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“You don’t mind?”

Josephine shook her head. “No, of course not. I remember how it was with your father”—and she looked down at her hands and then gave Katherine a guarded look—“on our honeymoon, I mean. You know, we had a big wedding — half of Chicago was there — and when we finally got off on our own, that first night in the hotel…”

Katherine had been leafing through a book of poems, but now she quietly closed it and gripped its leather covers as if it were alive and wriggling in her lap. Her heart was pounding. “Yes?” she said.

“Well, it was a real adventure for us both, because we’d never been alone together in that way, and your father was”—she looked down again—“he was very amorous.”

There was an awkward silence. After a moment, Katherine cleared her throat. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Mother, just that subject — about marital relations, that is — because Stanley, well, he—”

“Oh, dear,” her mother cried, “will you look at the time? It does fly, doesn’t it?” She looked as if she were about to leap from the chair, dash across the strand and plunge headfirst into the sea. “I did want to get up to my room for a nap before dinner — it’s all this sun, it’s positively draining.”

“Just give me a minute, Mother,” Katherine persisted, “that’s all I ask. Will you, please?”

Her mother’s head moved just perceptibly, the faintest nod of that feathered hat. Her eyes were pinpricks, her mouth a slash of distate and disapproval.

“Stanley doesn’t seem—” Katherine began, and then faltered. “He doesn’t act as if he—” She reddened. Her voice wadded up in her throat. “Intimacy, I mean.”

Josephine looked startled, and her face had colored now too. She made as if to get up, then thought better of it. “Katherine,” she said finally, in the tone of voice she might have used to scold the servants, “there are things one just doesn’t discuss — or one isn’t comfortable discussing.”

“But I need to discuss them, Mother,” Katherine said, and all the pain and confusion of the past weeks stabbed at her, goading her on, “because Stanley isn’t my husband, not, not the way I thought he would be, the way everyone…” She trailed off.

“Not your husband?” Josephine had put a hand to her mouth, and she shot a quick glance round the room. “What are you talking about?”

Katherine was miserable, she was abject, she was a little girl all over again, and all her scientific training, all her understanding of what men thought and knew about the systems of life and reproduction availed her nothing: her mother knew what she didn’t. “He won’t… perform.”

It took Josephine a moment. She sat there rigid in the chair while the Mediterranean moved luxuriously beyond the windows, and she had the look of a torture victim, a woman whose nails were being prised from the flesh, one after the other. “Get him out of doors,” she said finally. “Fresh air. Meat. That sort of thing.” Another pause. “Why not take him skiing?”

The place Katherine chose was St. Moritz, in the Rhaetian Alps, not far from the Italian border. They booked rooms at the Grand Engadiner Hotel Klum, an immense and charming old place with snow-sculpted roofs, great roaring fireplaces and a Viennese quartet playing at dinner and tea. In the mornings they went for long walks through the snow-bound village, all the houses and shops decorated for Christmas, the air fragrant with woodsmoke and the smell of roasting chestnuts, and after a leisurely lunch they took to the slopes. Katherine was an accomplished skier, but Stanley was nothing short of magnificent. Graceful and adept, he moved across the unblemished hills like a line drawn across a blank page, tackling even the most daunting trails with a confidence and elan that bordered on recklessness. She’d never seen him so exuberant. Or physical.

By the end of the first week he was a new person altogether, utterly reborn, and Katherine kicked herself for not having gotten him away sooner. He laughed at the slightest pretext — an open, cheerful sort of laughter and not the startled hyena’s cry that seemed to burst out of his mouth when his mother was around. He grew reminiscent over dinner. He was soft-spoken and confidential. He anticipated his wife’s every need. This was what Katherine had been waiting for, the slow sweet unfolding of the days, each one opening on the next like a vase of budding roses… and yet still the nights remained problematical. And chaste. Maddeningly, insufferably, heartrendingly chaste.

But what to do? She had plenty of time to turn it over in her mind — a surfeit of time, nothing but time — lying awake at all hours, sitting over breakfast, lunch and dinner with her grinning husband, schussing down the slopes while he cavorted round her, launching himself dizzily over every hummock and mogul as if his legs were coiled springs, the silence of the mountains absolute, the sky a vast empty ache. Her muscles firmed. Her appetite grew. She felt vigorous and young and so wrought up with frustrated desire she couldn’t have slept if she’d wanted to.

The solution came to her one afternoon just before Christmas — the day before, in fact — and it was so clear and self-evident she almost gasped aloud. They were skiing the runs at Pontresina at the time, high above the village, out of sight of their guide, the peaks rising up around them like the white walls of the earth, and she’d broken the heel binding of her left ski and Stanley had knelt before her in the snow to repair it. Even through the integument of his gloves and the insensible thickness of her boots, she could feel his touch. That was what set her off, that touch, that lingering humble subservient gesture of love, her husband there at her foot, and in that instant she knew what she had to do: she had to take charge.

It was so obvious it was ridiculous. Though it violated every notion of the woman’s role — the pure vessel, the passive partner, sex an onus — she had to take charge, seize the initiative, go where no wife had gone before her. Stanley was a special case, and no one would know what happened between them in the privacy of their bedroom — and there was no shame in that, none at all. She was determined. She would come to him in the night — that very night — and use her hands, her mouth, any means necessary to excite him to his duty. Of course. Of course she would. It was either that or die a virgin.

They dined that night in a restaurant not far from the hotel. Katherine had made herself up, a red-and-green bow in her hair, a new dress, the tourmaline bracelet Stanley had given her sparkling on her wrist. She encouraged him to drink — a Grignolino that smelled potently of the earth — and she drank two glasses herself, for courage. When they got back to their rooms, she submitted to his stiff nightly kiss and then told him she was worn out from skiing and thought she’d retire early — If he had no objections. “Oh, well, yes — sure,” he said, jerking each word out as if it was fastened to his teeth, his eyes running up and down the wall behind her. “Well,” he said again. “So. Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.”

She waited till the light had gone out in his room — the very moment; she didn’t want him drifting off — and then she padded across the floor, perfumed and naked, and she could have been anybody, any wanton, any whore, and tried his door. It was unlatched. And she pushed it in with the breath caught in her throat and every nerve strung taut. “Who is it?” he said, and she could see the dark form of him sitting up in bed in the cool blue light the snow threw at the windows.

“Hush,” she whispered, “it’s just me. Katherine. Your wife.”