Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

She releases her breath in a quivery gasp. “Yes,” she says, though she sounds as if she’s in pain.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m fine.” She lets out a long sigh, perhaps more to make herself relax than because she actually is relaxed. “So is that it?”

“What?” He kisses her top lip lightly, then her bottom lip.

“Is this all we do?”

“No.”

“Well, what then?”

“This.” He pulls most of the way out, then pushes gently back into her.

She makes something between a grunt and a moan.

“How does that feel?” he asks.

“It’s nothing like I expected. It’s…”

He is sliding in and out, in and out, in a slow rhythm.

Her mouth falls open. “Ahh,” she sighs. And then a little later, “It’s just so different.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A little.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No. Keep doing that. I like the way it feels.”

“You’re wonderful!” he says.

“Why?” She looks him straight in the eye, her expression bemused, but maybe also slightly challenging.

“You just are.” He laughs and moves more forcefully inside her.

“Oh!”

“Did I hurt you?”

“No. Not really. Just keep doing that. I don’t want you to stop.”

And so he doesn’t stop, not even after his own orgasm has rushed up inside him and then receded. He keeps going as long as he can manage it, hoping that she, too, will come. Mostly she is silent underneath him. She grips his upper arm with one hand and runs her other up and down his back and has intertwined her legs with his. Every now and then, she lets out an “ah,” an “oh” or a grunt, but most of the time she seems to be studying what is happening with the intensity of a scientist.

When at last his penis has slipped out of her and it is too limp for him to get it back in, he rolls onto his side with a happy groan.

“Are we done?” she says, still lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling.

They are in her chamber, which is on a small alcove on the opposite side of the stairway from all the other servants’ rooms and thus so much more private than his.

“For now,” he says. “We can do it again in a little bit if you would like.”

She rolls onto her side and faces him. She smiles. “No. Now that you’ve stopped, I’m feeling kind of sore.”

“It’s always like that the first time.”

“I know.” She puts her hand between her legs, then looks at her fingers and shows them to him. “Blood.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not too much?”

He takes her hand and examines it in the flickering candlelight. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so.” He doesn’t really know, of course, but he considers it unlikely that anything could have gone seriously wrong. He puts her hand down on the mattress between them and pats it.

She lifts it up and looks at it again. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” He smiles. “It’s not just blood. There are secretions. From you, and from me. They make it seem that there is more blood than there really is.” He rolls backward, gropes around on the floor and reaches into the pocket of his waistcoat for a handkerchief. “Here. You can mop it up with this.”

“Thank you.” She takes the handkerchief and tucks it between her legs. “I’ll get up in a minute and use the basin.”

“You’re beautiful,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“How are you feeling?”

She rolls onto her back and sighs heavily. “I’m fine but… I don’t know. I feel strange. Restless.”

“Do you feel as if you’ve changed?”

She lets her head fall to the side and looks at him. Another smile. “Maybe.”

He lifts his head and props it up with his crooked arm. He looks into her eyes and smiles.

“How are you?” she says.

He laughs. “I’m happy. Just happy. I am so happy.”

“Good,” she says.

“I know I shouldn’t be. But I am.”

“Good.”

They lapse into silence for a while, and in a few minutes they are both asleep.

Thomas Jefferson’s last words before leaving in that blackest hour of the night: “I must go now…. I can hardly bear it!… I must go, before birds rouse the rest of the house. But… Oh!… One more… And now— Oh! Oh!… And now I really must— No, I must… I must.”

In the morning Sally Hemings feels hollow. It is not just that the place where she and Thomas Jefferson were one now seems, for the first time in her life, an emptiness rather than just a part of the amorphous interior of her body; it is that all her strength seems to have drained out of her. Also, there is the pain — a dull gnawing that, because of what it signifies, is almost pleasant.

As she descends the back steps from her bedchamber, she has to steady herself against the wall with a tremulous hand. The very world seems to have weakened and waned overnight. The light through the windows is pale. Deep shadows seem places where physical reality reverts to the nothingness from which it sprang. Even the stone walls of the Hôtel seem like veils hanging in empty air.

Thomas Jefferson has clearly been waiting for her. No sooner does she emerge from the back stairway into the narrow passage beside the kitchen than she sees his shadow loom outside the door to his study. He is entirely in silhouette against the light from the dining room, and he doesn’t make a sound, but she can tell from the twitching of his shoulder that he is beckoning her.

He withdraws into his study as she approaches and closes the door once she is in the room. He strokes his fingertips lightly across her shoulder and kisses her, not on the lips but on the temple. “You are even more beautiful in the light,” he says, then takes a big step away from her, to sit on the edge of his desk. “Please.” He points toward the solitary chair in the room not covered by books, papers and mechanical devices.

She does as she is told, then places her hands on her knees and waits. He, too, seems weakened. Restless. Pale. Capable of being stirred by the wind. In the scant instants before he speaks, his eyes do a dance with hers. Their gazes meet, glance away, then meet again.

“I hope you know,” he says, “how terribly grateful I am that you allowed me to… to take liberties. I will never cease to be… I will never forget, I mean.” He looks at her firmly now, his mouth a straight line, his upper lip perspiring. “I am not sure what is going to happen. I feel such a terrific… I hardly know how to put it… unity with you, one that I don’t dare imagine is reciprocated.”

He looks away. Sighs heavily. In the morning light his hazel eyes seem almost golden. Sally Hemings is afraid.

“But I think we both know,” he says, “how very wrong… how what happened between us ought never to have happened. And, more to the point that… it ought never happen again.”

She interrupts him with a sharp intake of breath.

He holds up his flat hand, palm toward her. “Dear girl!” he says. “I don’t want to speak on that now. That is something”—his mouth turns down grimly at the corners—“for later. I don’t think either of us is sufficiently clearheaded to draw any reliable conclusions. I only want to say two things. First, as I am sure you understand, no one must ever know about last night. No one at all, but most especially Patsy and Polly. You do understand that, don’t you?”

After a moment Sally Hemings makes a small nod.

“And second, you must understand that however relations may be conducted between us in the future, I will never be able to give my love to you… publicly, I mean.”

Thomas Jefferson stands and looks at her firmly, as a teacher might look at his reprobate student. He lifts his hands to grasp his coat lapels firmly. “I trust that you also understand why this must be so,” he says.