Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

their own. She grew up in Dover, Massachusetts, went to Yale, and hopes that one day she’ll believe in more than she does now. At the same time she has a curiously Latin temperament—not the tempestuous but the fatalistic kind—for someone with solid layers of Dana and Hallowell ancestors behind her. This trait helps her at work; she is a vice president at an American bank in Rome. Tonight under a long pleated skirt she is wearing, instead of the racy Italian underwear she puts on at home, a pair of conventual white underpants and white cotton stockings held up with the kind of elastic garters her grandmother’s Irish housemaid might have worn. Edo has been direct, and as impersonal as someone ticking off a laundry list, about what excites him. She is excited by the attitude in itself: an austere erotic vocabulary far removed from the reckless sentiment splashed around by the men she knows in Rome, Boston, and Manhattan.

Elizabeth discovered early on that the world of finance, far from moving like clockwork, is full of impulse and self-indulgence, which extend into private life. When she met Edo she had just come out of a bad two years with a married former client from Milan, full of scenes and abrupt cascades of roses, and a cellular phone trilling at all hours. In contrast, this romance is orderly. She supposes it is an idyll when she thinks about it, which, strangely, is almost never; it flourishes within precise limits of ambition, like a minor work of art. The past he sets before her in anecdotes—for he is a habitual raconteur, though rarely a tedious one—keeps the boundaries clear.

Africa; dust-colored Tanzania. Edo is telling her how his mother once got angry on safari, blasted a rifle at one of the bearers, missed, and hit a small rhinoceros. Under a thatch of eyebrows Edo’s hooded blue eyes glow with a gentle indifference, as if to him the story means nothing; the fact is that he couldn’t live without invoking these memories, which instead of fading or requiring interpretation have grown more vivid and have come to provide a kind of textual commentary on the present. His hair is white, and he has a totemic Edwardian mustache. His cheeks are eroded from years of shooting in all weathers on all continents. It’s the face of a crusty old earl in a children’s book, of Lear, and he is appropriately autocratic, crafty, capricious, sentimental.

He watches Elizabeth and thinks that her enthusiasm for the gluey pig’s foot and the rhino story both grow out of a snobbish American need to scrabble about for tradition. Americans are romantics, he thinks—“romantic” for him is the equivalent of “middle-class”—and she is no exception, even if she does come from a good family. Accustomed to judging livestock and listening to harebrained genetic theories at gatherings of his relatives, he looks at her bone structure with the eye of an expert. She is beautiful. Her posture has the uncomplicated air of repose which in Europe indicates a wellborn young girl. But there is an unexpected quality in her—something active, resentful, uncertain, desirous. He likes that. He likes her in white stockings.

She says something in a low voice. “Speak up!” he says, cupping his ear like a deaf old man. He is in fact a bit deaf, from years of gunpowder exploding beside his ear. He often claims it turned his hair prematurely white and permanently wilted his penis, but only the first is true. “You’re a gerontophile,” he tells her.

She’d said something about storms on Penobscot Bay. The rattling windows here remind her of the late August gales that passed over Vinalhaven, making her grandmother’s summer house as isolated from the world outside as a package wrapped in gray fabric. She recalls the crystalline days that came after a storm, when from the end of the dock she and her cousins, tanned Berber color and feverish with crushes, did therapeutic cannonballs into the frigid water. She sees her grandmother in long sleeves and straw hat, for her lupus, dashing down a green path to the boathouse with a hammer in her hand: storm damage. In the island house, as in Edo’s, is a tall clock whose authoritative tick seems to suspend time.

Elizabeth and Edo finish the pig’s foot and stack the dishes in the sink. Then they go upstairs and on his anchorite’s bed make love with a mutual rapacity that surprises both of them, as it always does. Each one has the feeling that he is stealing something from the other, snatching pleasure with the innocent sense of triumph a child has in grabbing a plaything. Each feels that this is a secret that must be kept from the other, and this double reserve gives them a rare harmony.

Later Edo lies alone, under the heavy linen sheets, his lean body bent in a frugal half crouch evolved from years of sleeping on cots and on bare, cold ground. He sent out the dogs for a last piss beside the kitchen door, and now they sleep, twitching, in front of the embers in his fireplace. He has washed down the sleeping pill with a glass of Calvados that Elizabeth left for him and lies listening to a pop station from Aberdeen and feeling the storm shuddering through the house, through his bones. He imagines Elizabeth already asleep in the bedroom with the Russian engravings, or—hideous American custom—having a bedtime shower. He has never been able to share a bed with a woman, not during his brief marriage, not during love affairs with important and exigent beauties. It gives him a peculiar sense of squalor to think of all the women who protested or grew silent when he asked them to leave or got up and left them. Alone among them, Elizabeth seems to break away with genuine pleasure; her going is a blur of white legs flashing under his dressing gown. Attractive.

After immersion in that smooth body, he