Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper Read Free Book Online Page A

France.”
    â€œThank you for the timely warning, Sara.”
    â€œ Obviously it had less to do with the absinthe than with the man’s preexisting lunacy. We haven’t murdered anyone, have we? Yet?” That lovely, wide, slightly insolent smile. Those grey eyes, with their shifting mysterious depths like the sea.
    â€œThat is hardly reassuring.”
    She shrugged and became preoccupied with her eggs. When I bade her good-bye, she barely looked up.
    Over the next few days I noticed new things unfolding inside me, as if Sara’s embraces had implanted a slow-acting drug. Frequently I found myself pierced by a desire so fierce it left me breathless. Natural beauty overwhelmed my senses. Even a passage in a book set off a series of paroxysmal shivers and I had to stop reading or “go off.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, you ‘go off’?” Sara said when I mentioned it a few days later. We were out in her garden planting impatiens in the shade of the beech tree. The day was beastly hot. Flies droned over the flowerbeds. Sweat gathered on my upper lip; I tasted the saltiness with my tongue.
    â€œI don’t know, just that I—I pass out for a minute or two.”
    â€œWell, why do you do that?” Her tone was impatient. I wondered what I had done to displease her.
    â€œI don’t know.” Sometimes I suspected the “going off” was a doorway to another world, but seeing Sara’s closed face, I said no more about it.
    At home, meanwhile, I felt like a stranger, or else my family had become strangers to me. At odd moments I felt Mother’s and Aunt Kate’s eyes on me and wanted to swat their glances away like mosquitoes. When I met their gaze, they looked away and pretended to be absorbed in some domestic task. I avoided undressing in their presence; my body held secrets now.
    Sara had revealed to me the essential nullity of my sentimental education so far. I’d been living in my body as if it were an inert, unfeeling thing. Now I felt like Vasco da Gama or Cortez landing on a new continent, with still unnamed rivers, virgin forests, secret veins of gold. Being so sheltered, I was not entirely sure at this point that the transports of the Emerald Nights were not Sara’s private invention.
    Our rituals were repeated many times over the next few months, always, by unspoken agreement, at Sara’s house, because of the privacy offered by the deafness and sleeping habits of her aunts. Our nights were electric, but none of the enchantment was permitted to touch ordinary daytime life, and thus remained a sort of dream, which was evidently how Sara preferred it.
    No doubt Sara had always been capricious, but it hadn’t caused me pain before. Now everything she did or said cut straight to my heart. One moment she’d say that I was her best, her truest, her dearest friend and we must make a pact not to marry anyone who would take us away from Boston and each other. (This was easy for me. I was not sure what women got out of marriage, anyway.) The next moment she’d be talking about Fanny Morse and her family and would say, “Aren’t they the most wonderful family? Don’t you wish you could be adopted by them?” When her family bought a sewing machine, Sara became preoccupied with the clothes she intended to sew with it—suits for Arthur, dresses for her aunts, Theodora and herself—and shut herself up for two weeks without seeing anyone, including me.
    She would never speak or allow me to speak of what passed between us in the dark, although la fée verte always led us back to the same rapture, with Sara as passionate and tender as I could wish. One night, as we lay in each other’s arms, our hearts slowing to a resting rhythm, I was stroking her hair and blurted, “Let’s run away together!”
    â€œWhere would we run to?” Her tone was resigned.
    I considered this. I had no money of my own, nor did