Envy - Anna Godbersen

“Mrs. Schoonmaker?”

She cracked one eye open and glared at the girl who had come through the door. It was her maid, in her starched black-and-white uniform, and though her mouth was forced upward into something like a smile, the effect was more akin to distress. Penelope unlaced the sleeping mask and tossed it onto the floor, so that the girl had to tiptoe forward and bend over to pick it up. That was when Penelope noticed the newspapers that were folded under the girl’s arm and remembered that she had instructed her to bring all of the Schoonmakers’ clippings to her room personally every morning. Penelope knew that distance was the true engine of desire, and had hoped that in her absence all New York would again grow jealous of her many, many possessions.

“You can leave them there,” Penelope said, pointing to the table that had been erected and laden with juice and coffee and pastries in the middle of the large room. The girl obliged hastily, though perhaps a little too hastily — there was something ominous about the way she scurried from the room.

Penelope propped herself up and shook off the last, lazy vestiges of sleep. She let her eyes linger on Henry’s golden back for one second longer, and then swung her feet to the floor. She tied her robe around herself and went over to the tray of breakfast things, where she had a sip of coffee, took a deep breath, and felt happy for the last time that morning. For in the next second she saw the headline, and all of the hateful parts of her personality surged up.

She read a few lines but stopped as soon as she realized the gist of the article. Then she stormed back to the raised platform, and up to the lavish, disheveled bed, and threw the newspaper at Henry’s head.

“What the hell?” he cried, coming to life and tossing off the sheets.

Penelope fell onto her knees and grabbed a pillow, which she aimed at Henry for good measure. He caught it in midair, and grabbed his wife by the wrist.

“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” he asked, holding her arms against the bed.

“What’s wrong with you?” she spat back at him, once she had freed herself and taken several deep breaths.

Henry picked up the paper and then he too fell back into the pillows. He read a few lines before putting the paper down on the heaps of bedding that separated his wife from himself. His hands pressed against his hair furtively, trying to get it all back in place. “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said eventually. His inability to meet her eyes did nothing to quell her ire.

“In what sense, Henry?” She brought her robe tight around her body, which still trembled a little in fury. She turned her face into a pillow, her jaw jutting petulantly, but kept him securely in her gaze. “You mean you didn’t personally write it? Or you mean you didn’t do anything to give anyone the sense that any of it might be true? Because I’m not stupid, and if you expect me to believe the latter, you are mistaken.”

“I only meant—”

“You don’t mean anything!” Penelope shrieked. “Even after you promised to be good, I saw you trying to speak with her yesterday at the beach. The way you look at her, with your pathetic, longing gaze, you idiot bastard!”

She rose to her knees again, and — only half-conscious of her actions, so heated was her blood — began to rip the paper to shreds. The strips of paper fell down around them, the cheap ink smudging the sheets she had moments ago taken such pleasure in. When she was done Henry just stared at her, his eyes as big as they ever got.

“Why should I look like the fool? I am the sympathetic one in all this. What I ought to do,” she went on, climbing off the bed and walking hotly toward the tray in the center of the room to retrieve her coffee, “is call the paper and tell them my version. I’ll tell them how I loved my husband, was faithful to him, packed his bags for his every trip. But he had eyes only for Diana Holland, whose virginity he took one snowy night—”

“Don’t do that.” Henry stumbled off the bed and came walking toward her, still wrapped in a sheet.

Penelope turned her back on him and sipped her coffee. “What alternative do I have?”

She knew she had his attention now, and felt no need to turn around and confirm the fact.

“We’ll go to the beach again today,” Henry finally said.

“What good will that do?”

“It will show everybody that that column was fiction,” he went on tentatively. He had taken a few steps toward her; she could sense him at her back. “Maybe it will inspire some piece that contradicts the one you just tore to pieces.”

“It deserved to be torn to pieces,” Penelope shot back hotly.

There was a pause, after which Henry said, “Yes, it did.”

“You’ll take me to the beach?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“And later, you’ll sit with me at dinner, and dance all the dances with me?”

Henry was just behind her now, and he put an awkward hand on her shoulder. “Yes.”

Penelope kept staring away from her husband, and so he couldn’t see that her winner’s smile had returned to her face. “Oh, and Henry?”

“Yes?”

She closed her eyes and enjoyed the placement of his hand for another few moments. She breathed deeply, and her whole torso moved with the breaths. “You’ll never make me look like a fool again, will you?”

“No,” he said at last. “Never again.”

Twenty One

A man is made in the rough-and-tumble of the world; a lady emerges from the flossy back rooms of her own imagination.

— MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK

“WHAT ARE WE DOING?” CAROLINA ASKED WHEN she stopped giggling.

Leland Bouchard’s automobile, which he had had shipped at great personal expense from New York, had come to a sudden stop after several rough leaps and dives. They had traversed more than one dirt road that day, and though Carolina had been to Coney Island when she was a child and gone on the roller coaster, she had never taken a ride quite like this one. It scared her a little, but in a way that made her feel happy and filled her with inexplicable hilarity. Leland, who had long ago done away with his jacket and rolled his white shirtsleeves up to the elbows, revealing forearms that were almost ungentlemanly in their strength, gave her a slightly wild smile. The road was overgrown with jungle, all ropey and shadowy, and from somewhere out in the greenery they could hear the cawing of birds.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

There was nothing funny in what he said, and yet she found herself giggling a little again as she replied, “Why, yes.” She had not in fact eaten all day, and had several times grown frightened that Leland could hear the faint rumblings of her belly, although mostly her attention had been occupied by other things.

He leaned forward and looked at her intently. “You sure? You’re not tired? I’m not boring you?”

Carolina threw back her head and laughed. “Bored? There aren’t any dull moments in your world.” She hadn’t had a lot of practice in flirtatious tones of voice, and did not have to use one here, for what she said was absolutely true. Besides driving up and down the rough roads, they had already seen alligators and giant sea turtles and all manner of strange flora and fauna. She did think, a little regretfully, of the sky blue day dress with the ruffled hem that she’d had her maid lay out for her that morning and planned to wear to lunch. But that was a short-lived concern. It was well past two and lunch had already been served at the hotel, and anyway, she found that the opportunity to show off another dress paled in comparison to another hour or two with Leland. Her only real complaint was that her yellow gingham jacket and matching skirt had grown a little damp from cavorting all day in the heat.

“Good,” he said. “I’m starved.”

He came around to her side of the car then, and opened the door for her. She let him help her out of her seat and hold her by the hand as they traveled up a pair of boards, which lay over slightly muddy ground, leading the way toward a small shack that was built against the trunk of a great banyan tree. She clutched her wide straw hat with one hand, and Leland’s palm with the other, as they moved upward as though along a balance beam. She had taken her gloves off at some point, and was pleasantly surprised to feel Leland’s skin against her own for the first time. She didn’t worry even a little about the swampy earth below or what would happen to her skirt if she lost her footing.

Once her eyes adjusted to the indoor light she saw that the roots of the tree had grown through some of the windows, and that the unfinished floorboards had been placed to accommodate them. There was a young boy fanning the room with palm fronds, but the place was not a fancy one. The few diners who were left at that late hour wore no jackets and barely looked up to note the arrival of the fine people from New York. A heavy woman who seemed to know Leland ushered them to one of the red-and-white-checked cloth-covered tables, and asked him how long he was staying this time.

“Not long enough,” Leland said happily. “This is my friend Carolina,” he added.

“Pleased to meet you.” When the woman smiled, she exposed a wide gap between her two brown middle teeth. The skin of her face had grown thick and creased from many years in the sun.

“And you,” Carolina replied. Mr. Longhorn had once or twice tried to take her to down-and-out places for a different kind of thrill or to hear the music they played there, and she had balked each time. In New York, she hated missing even the smallest opportunity to display her new things and know that they were envied. But with Leland, she didn’t mind that no one of special importance was there to see them. In fact, over the course of the day, she had increasingly come to savor being in his presence alone.

“We’ll have two shrimp gumbos, please,” Leland said.

“Spicy?”

“Yes.” He glanced back at Carolina and she realized she had again been staring at him witlessly. She wondered if it wasn’t the hunger and its attendant light-headedness that made her behave so gauchely. “What are you looking at? My nose, I know — it’s burned. And too large.”

She recognized the painful redness only after he’d called attention to it, and realized that he had not, like her, had the protection of a hat. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching out and touching the skin of his cheek. The new color looked painful but also brought out the beautiful blue of his eyes.

“It’s a perfect nose,” she said, meaning it. His nose was broad, but well structured, like the rest of him.

“You are too kind! My mother blames our French ancestry for the monstrosity.”

Just then the gap-toothed woman appeared to place bread on their table. Carolina thoughtlessly reached for the basket, breaking off a large piece and putting it in her mouth. She was chewing exuberantly when her large eyes rolled to where Leland sat beside her, and saw that this time he was staring at her. In the next moment she felt the dampness under her armpits and became aware that she’d sweated through her ivory silk shirt. She swallowed hard, and reached for the little jacket, which she had stupidly taken off and draped on the back of her chair.