Envy - Anna Godbersen

“She’s smiling and explaining away your absence now, but she’ll have your head later,” Grayson said. “Oh, boy, drink up. I wouldn’t want to be you tomorrow.”

Henry’s drink had arrived, and — knowing this last bit to be true — he took a healthy sip. “Who cares?” he muttered.

To his surprise, Grayson chuckled. “And she used to be such a sweet girl.”

“Oh, I only meant—”

“Don’t worry, Schoonmaker. And don’t think I don’t know she sometimes likes to pull the strings like some puppet master from hell.” The hand ended, but Grayson’s eyes had lost none of their animal quality. “Could you lend me another twenty?”

Henry waved his cigarette at the dealer in confirmation and finished his drink. He tried to discern the waiter, out there amongst all the other men in black and white, in order to request another drink. But the waiter had already seen him and was on his way, and after Henry had taken a sip of the fresh Scotch he felt loose enough to prod a bit.

“You seem awfully fond of Diana Holland.”

Grayson was distracted by his hand, and Henry experienced a terrible moment when his words hung in the air without hope of a response. Eventually his brother-in-law looked over, revealing a sparkle in his eye. “She embodies all varieties of feminine beauty,” he said, taking a cigarette from the box that Henry had left on the edge of the table and placing it for a moment between his broad front teeth. “She is perfection in a woman.”

Henry’s mind’s eye filled, briefly, with the chaos that would ensue if he struck his brother-in-law across the jaw.

But then Grayson continued: “Her mother must have been strenuous in raising her, though. There’s a door no man can crack. She’s quite young, quite naïve, more protected even than her sister. I can’t get so much as a kiss on the cheek out of her.”

Henry’s shoulders relaxed, and in celebration of this news he drained the contents of his sturdy glass. He circled his finger in the general direction of the waiter, indicating that he wanted drinks for his friend and himself as well. He knew that he should abandon the conversation there and then, but Diana was everywhere in his thoughts and on his tongue. “She is lovely…” he continued, almost to himself.

“Ah!” Grayson looked up at the ceiling fans and smiled to himself. “That pink skin. Those dreamy lashes.”

Henry closed his eyes, and imagined the sweet, petulant woundedness with which she had stared at him on the beach. He felt a little proud that she could love him. “And she moves so gorgeously.”

“I tell you, Schoonmaker, she doesn’t know what she has. That’s the heart of it. She’s like some wild creature who hasn’t a clue the worth of its coat.” Grayson paused to up his bet and then assumed a philosophical tone. “Whoever wins her in the end will be a lucky man indeed.”

More drinks arrived, and the colors in the room grew both brighter and less distinct for Henry. Grayson became engrossed in cards again, and asked to borrow more money, but the last thing he’d said about Diana had lodged itself in Henry’s head and begun to put down roots. He lit another cigarette and thought on it, and also on his promise to her, and how he would keep it.

The arrangement of the furniture in the best suite in the Royal Poinciana had never seemed so treacherous. It was all blurry, low-lying forms, although the moonlight did glaze the tiled floor. Henry’s eye followed the glittering reflection to the French doors, which were thrown open onto the terrace. The silvery trail ended in a fluted skirt of white chiffon dotted with black that was cinched at the waist and then spread over the bust and up to the shoulders dramatically, where the fabric was gathered with black ribbons. His wife was still wearing her long black gloves, although they had slipped somewhat at the elbows, and she had put all the weight of her long body against the voluptuous carved wood balustrade.

The sky was turning from purple to navy, and beyond Penelope the tops of the palms were just visible, like the unkempt heads of giants. The moon above her had grown hazy under the clouds, but still it glinted in her hair and on her bracelets. He hated her then, not just for having cost him so much, not just for all the hypocrisy and vanity and stupid greed she embodied, but because he had returned to her, even now, when all his being wanted to be elsewhere. He looked at her back — for she showed no signs of turning toward him — and imagined all the ways he might tell her he would leave. But his tongue was as useless as some mud-bound carriage.

Out on the terrace, Penelope remained still, except that she bent her ear toward her shoulder — it seemed to him that no gesture had ever contained such malicious self-possession. His mouth did open once or twice, but his anger had grown and sat in the way of words.

Now his feet were carrying him across the floor, his conscious mind trailing a few beats behind his heavy, drunken footsteps. He had seen how easy it would be. Without any words he could sidestep all the messy legal entanglements, all the cutting judgments of society. His wife was leaning carelessly there, four stories above the gravel walk, and if she leaned too far — trying to catch a glimpse of Lady Dagmall-Lister’s bejeweled coiffure, say, or the flight of a parrot from one low branch to another — then she might stumble, lose balance, and fall to her death. Her neck would snap in painless seconds, and then she would have no way of preventing her husband from finally being with the girl he truly loved. The girl who was somewhere in those hundreds of rooms, believing his promise…

Henry had traveled across the room with forceful speed, removing his jacket as he did and dropping it on the tiles, but something stopped him at the threshold of the terrace. The warm outside air met him like a thick, damp curtain, and Penelope twisted to look at him. Her bottom lip quivered and the corners of her eyes turned down in sorrow. She watched him, and he watched her, and then he knew that the danger had passed. She had seen the idea in him, and now he recognized the full horror of it reflected in her eyes.

Henry gripped the doorframe, unsteady and panting a little, shocked by what he had discovered himself to be nearly capable of. The rich fabric of her dress was contorted around her long body, and even in the darkness she had the appearance of a woman who had seen too much.

Time passed, and then she said, “I don’t blame you for wanting to kill me.”

Her head swayed away, as heavy on her long neck as overripe fruit. A few of the short dark hairs on the back of her neck floated down, away from her coiffure and toward the clasp of the diamond and onyx necklace that she had had to buy for herself as a wedding present. Below them women in evening wear and festooned hairpieces were teetering through the Coconut Grove, a little worse for drinking, laughing just slightly too loud in response to the sweet lies of suitors who were growing generous with the waxing of the moon. Her shoulders slumped, and she gave him an imploring look, as though she would rather he’d just go ahead and do it.

“Penelope”—his voice broke over the name—“I could never—”

“Oh, Henry,” she sighed. “No one would blame you.”

A few moments ago he would have agreed, but he’d climbed some great summit and descended into an unfamiliar valley since then. “It would be…I’m sorry.”

But she did not seem to hear him. She put her hand farther back on the balustrade, and leaned on it as though she were trying to better hear the faint music of the orchestra. Her position looked precarious, and he worried briefly that she might push herself over. He decided that he was close enough to stop her, but then he took a woozy step toward her and felt the floor wobble under his feet, and in the end nothing dramatic happened. She stood and gazed at Henry with those same aged eyes, and then she took a shaky breath and tried to smile bravely, once or twice, without ever quite succeeding.

“Well then,” she said quietly. She moved back into the suite with woeful grace, leaving Henry alone on the terrace. He closed his eyes and allowed the relief of having not acted on that awful impulse to soften in him. His blood was still agitated about it, but he knew suddenly that he was very drunk, and that his already unreliable memory would soon subsume the incident into the realm of the forgotten.

He followed Penelope, although his pace was slower and less sure this time, all sorts of pathetic explanations sputtering in his head. Her hip rested on the edge of the bed, and her back was to him and bent forward in a poignant arch. He shuffled closer and sat down beside her, and when she still gave no acknowledgment of his presence, he put an awkward hand on her back. That was when he realized she was crying, for her body was just slightly racked by silent tears. He found he wanted nothing so much at that moment as to look into her face.

“Don’t cry,” he said. He had always felt unnerved when anyone cried, and since he was a child had been known to promise anything just to make somebody stop. But then she twisted around to face him and he saw the wetness already catching against her lower lashes.

There was something unbearable to him about seeing Penelope brought low, and to stop her from any more self-abnegations he put his mouth — so fragrant with drink — against hers. Neither moved for a long moment, and then she took his lower lip, very gently, between her teeth. He felt dizzy and charged with emotion. Then he pulled her against him, just as he had the summer they had spent together. His hands fluttered along her face and shoulders and down her back, where they began to undo her corset.

He had watched several corsets being removed over the years, but had never done the work himself. All the hooks and ribbons presented a complicated puzzle, but despite his drunkenness — or perhaps because of it — he proceeded with great, plodding care. When, finally, the layers fell down around her waist she gave him a mysterious smile. Was it shyness, or gratitude, or some quality he had never seen before? The room was full of stars and Henry wondered for a moment if it hadn’t come unmoored from the hotel and gone spinning off into the night. Then he told himself to smile back at her — he did so, a little sloppily, as he batted a leaf of hair back from his face — and moved to push her down into the sheets.

Twenty Six

MANY OF OUR GUESTS LIKE TO DANCE

QUITE LATE, AND FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE

WE NOW HAVE OUR COBBLER SET UP

ALL NIGHT LONG. HE IS STATIONED IN THE

LOBBY, JUST BEYOND THE NEWSSTAND,

AND ALL LADIES ARE ENCOURAGED TO DROP

THEIR SLIPPERS THERE BEFORE THEY GO TO BED.

— THE MANAGEMENT,

ROYAL POINCIANA, PALM BEACH

THE WAVES WERE STILL BREAKING AGAINST THE shore, and over on the other side of Lake Worth, in West Palm Beach — the town that Henry Flagler had built for the help — everything had gone dark. But light still poured from the dance floor of the Royal Poinciana onto its manicured lawns. The hotel’s guests were eating second suppers or howling in laughter or dancing far closer than they would have dreamed of doing in New York or Philadelphia or Washington, with partners they might not have considered in their regular lives. The music grew faster and some of the husbands snuck off to play cards at the adjacent casino. Then their wives started strutting with the waiters, and more bottles of wine were ordered. The first lavender fingerprints of dawn were visible on the horizon when Diana Holland looked around to make sure that the man who owned her heart was nowhere in sight.