Swiss Cottage Library did not become more romantic in miniature, but Gwen could think of no other way to represent the day’s events. Certainly she had no desire to record the morning’s argument, in which her mother had made it clear, once and for all, where her traitorous priorities lay. Maybe you could go with Nathan, she had suggested, not simply missing the point but readily giving up custody or care of her daughter and forgetting, erasing, a precious long-ago memory. Gwen did not usually like old people’s music but when she was eleven they had gone to hear Simon and Garfunkel, and it had been a magical evening in a dark, hard year. The concert, held outdoors in Hyde Park, had been hot and dry and perfect, and the first glimpse of a possible future in which they might once again, one day, be happy. Gwen had shut her eyes tightly and tried to feel the passion her mother felt for this strange, folksy music, had tried to let the simple melodies, the unexpected rhythms of the language, move in her blood. At eleven she was already the same height as Julia but she had hunched over and drawn closer under Julia’s arm and had felt safe, and hopeful. Couples stood around them interlocked, swaying, and her father wasn’t there to sway and sing alongside her mother but she was there, she told herself, and after a while she had straightened her spine and stood up to her full height and put her arm, instead, around her mother. In the days that followed, Gwen taught herself the words to every song they’d heard, and learned to love them. They would be okay. They would be a family again, just the two of them. But Julia had made it clear that James was her only priority.
Her mother had needed a vessel for her love and energies, and now no longer needed to be needed. But it wasn’t fair—she had lulled Gwen into believing that she would always be there. Gwen had offered up her life, her sorrows and pleasures, her preoccupations and requirements, had worked busily to keep her mother fulfilled and contented, and her being had formed around this belief, molded like ivy around a solid trunk. Now, Julia had withdrawn. Without her mother at her center she wavered. If she had seemed sturdy, it had been Julia firm beneath her.
She already had several sets of small bookshelves usually used for scenes in her mother’s music room, and these just needed populating with cardboard concertinas, decorated with some fine cross-hatching to imply the microscopic titles on the folded projections of tiny spines. She set up a shoebox to be the reading room and assembled all the paraphernalia to scatter on her tiny desk and on Nathan’s—mobile phones, some pens and pencils and even a lined and ring-bound notepad she had painstakingly constructed long ago for use in an imagined, flashback scene showing her grandmother at work as a journalist. All that remained to make were some textbooks to indicate homework, and the subtle nod to the real incident—the tiny paper airplane on which she had written her explosive missive and, heart pounding, sent it sailing over the wall between their carrels like a kamikaze. It was time, she’d decided, to grow up.
She wanted the blog to capture the formative events in her life, good or bad, while as much as possible sparing the humdrum, or repetitious. This was not the way her friends depicted themselves on the Internet but she had no interest in varnishing her life as they did, glamorous moments threaded one after another like an endless string of glossy and identical fake pearls. That, after all, was not brave, and was also definitely not Art. She wanted wit, or poignancy, or meaning. This was her coming-of-age story, after all, and one day when the story was over and life had acquired stability—perhaps when she was twenty-five, or twenty-six—its coherence and powerful narrative thrust would be united into a book, or possibly an animated television program, her own history reenacted by tiny clay figures in shoebox worlds. It would be an album of memories. It would be proof that she had been, and felt, and lived.
But tonight something had happened and though it was momentous, she was at a loss as to how to honor it. Her grandfather read her blog. Her traitorous mother read her blog, and in any case thought this landmark long behind her. Meanwhile, she had a more pressing and practical problem for it was very late, and she did not know what to do about the bedsheets.
• • •
ALREADY THE NIGHT’S EVENTS seemed distant. She examined her own feelings and found only deflation, and a sense of anticlimax. If she thought too long, she could summon a quiet, mawkish grief for her own innocence.
The true secret turned out to be that there was no secret. She had thought that sex would be something else, yet already could no longer articulate what that something else could have been. Instead it was what it was—the putting of parts into other, tighter parts. She had wanted to advance their intimacy, to elect Nathan as the central person in her new, adult life; she had wanted them to cleave together conclusively and could think of no more conclusive way than this. He had been loving, and gentle, and tender. He had whispered endearments, had held her face and looked into her eyes, and had shown he thought of no one and nothing but her. But when it was over she had felt weepy, and though Nathan had stroked her hair and told her he loved her and that she was beautiful, she had needed more reassurance than he could give. She had expected the intensity of his focus upon her in those few, vital moments to be the way he’d always look at her now, forever, and when his breathing had slowed and eventually his talk had gone back to normal she felt crushed. It was all meant to be different now, and wasn’t.
The bleeding had been a surprise. She was not a demure and sedentary Victorian maiden. She had done school gymnastics and ridden horses; her own fingers had never encountered resistance. But there had been a great deal of blood, in disproportion to the pain, which had—a relief—been less than she’d expected. They had drawn apart and it had actually gushed from her, warm and shocking. This was not the pale spot of new womanhood. Hung outside the window in another place and time, these sheets would suggest the groom had dismembered, not deflowered, his new bride. Nathan had looked stricken, and his concern that she had not been truthful about it hurting had made it all the more embarrassing. “My poor baby,” he had whispered, his hand on her heart, and his pity had made her feel pitiable.
The sheets were now stuffed into the kitchen sink and soaking in an improvised solution of washing-up liquid, peppermint hand soap, and hot water, and the contents of a sachet of something she had found in the back of a cupboard that claimed to restore net curtains to a wafting summer purity. Scrubbing had seemed to make it worse. While they soaked, she sat at the dining table in semidarkness, re-creating the watershed that had come hours before, when she had told Nathan she finally felt ready. Maybe you could go with Nathan. Well, maybe she would.