Louise has been reading for the better part of an hour.
At first, she had only taken out the book for something to do with her hands, to steady herself, after their return from the dining car. But then he had turned away from her, looked out the window, and she hadn’t known what to say. If she could, she would tell him that it was a waste, when they had such little time left, but he has been distracted since their return, agitated even, no doubt because of the man Louise had pointed out.
She wonders whether Henri had recognized the man, wants to ask, wonders whether there is any point to this pretense.
In the quiet, Louise finds herself thinking of the woman he mentioned before, Marianne. She feels jealous of this woman she does not know. She whispers the name to herself, imagines someone with long, dark tresses and an old-fashioned dress, down past the knee. She imagines Sunday lunches and trips to the ocean. She does this sometimes—imagines other people’s lives, the way they might live, the happiness they might have experienced.
Louise herself can’t recall ever being happy, or at least, if she was, she can’t remember what it felt like. Which isn’t to say there have never been moments, interspersed among the rest, just no one like Marianne, no one she looks back on and wonders what might have been. They were all just clumsy fumbles, mostly in the seconds, the minutes, she was able to get away from home.
“What is it that you’re reading with such intent?”
Louise nearly drops her book, startled by his voice. She looks up, finds that he has been watching her, and she wonders what he might have seen, what she might have revealed, lost in her reverie.
“Just a novel.”
He glances at the cover. “What is it about?”
She wonders whether he is actually interested or only inquiring to be polite. His mood seems to have passed, she thinks, or he has decided to push it aside for the moment. She glances down at the book. She had purchased it back in Paris, though she has not opened it until now. “A governess, pretending to be someone she is not.”
“Ah. And how do you think it will end?”
She frowns, wishing he hadn’t asked. Perhaps silence would have been better. “I don’t know, I haven’t decided, but I suppose it must end the way all of these stories end. It makes reading them a bit tiresome after a while.” She shakes her head, not wanting to explain. “But the heroine in this one isn’t your typical heroine, so the beginning and middle bits are quite good.”
“How is she not typical?”
She tries to think of how to explain, remembers another conversation, in another city, not so very long ago, and wonders what this man in front of her might say. “She’s bad, I suppose.”
“Bad?” He frowns. “How so?”
She considers. “She isn’t innocent. That’s the main thing she’s guilty of, and so she thinks and schemes her way into a better life. Which means she’ll most likely be punished, in the end. Women almost always are.” She pauses. “Sometimes I wonder how I would be written. In a novel, I mean. I’m certainly not innocent—or particularly kind, if it came to that.”
“You seem perfectly kind to me.”
“That’s only because you don’t know me. Not really.” She turns toward the window. “Tell me, Henry, why is it that men are allowed to be absolutely wicked, while women are considered monstrous for acting as they do? Condemned to death, or worse.”
“Worse?”
“Yes. There are fates worse than death, I think.” She wonders, then, what he might say, what he might think, if he knew. “Tell me,” she says, setting aside her book, “what is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
“A strange question.” He frowns. “Are these the type of novels you read back home?”
She turns away. “I don’t want to talk about home.”
She takes out her cigarettes, lights one. She doesn’t usually smoke this much, but she tells herself that the day calls for it. “I’ll tell you the worst thing I’ve ever done.” She won’t. She’ll tell him something else, a lie. She can’t possibly tell him the truth.
She remembers, as a child, her father forcing her to go into the confessional box at church, how she fought the entire way there, unnerved by the idea of being stuffed into that closet, a disembodied voice demanding the revelation of her secrets and sins. She wondered, at the time, what others had said. If they actually told the truth. She herself had lied every second she had spent in that damn box, refusing to part with her secrets for anything.
“My father died,” she begins, “before I left England.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” she responds, her mood turning sour. It’s all this talk of endings, she thinks.
She can almost hear her father now, muttering to himself, the words, the accusation, unmistakable: You’re just like her. And Louise knew what he meant—that there was something wrong, just as there had been with her mother, that there was something rotten inside her as well. Something that meant she would never be happy with what she was given, that she would always want more. Don’t think too hard, her mother had said—not an admonishment, she had realized over the years, but a warning.
Now, the man across from her raises his eyebrows, and she knows that whatever shape he had molded her into within the confines of his mind, it is wrong—knows that it is the impression of a girl, of a young woman, who does not actually exist. She supposes it is cruel to say these words to him, but she finds she wants to be, feels a familiar lick of rage flare up within her, so that in this moment she wants nothing more than to shatter whatever image he has created. To burn it all to the ground.
“It’s the truth. He died and I was happy, relieved, even. He had been ill for years, and I was his caretaker. All those years, I resented him, blamed him, and then—” She stops, snaps her fingers. “Suddenly, it was over. My imprisonment had come to an end.” She exhales, tries to calm her shaking voice. “But that isn’t the worst of it.”
“No?”
She meets his eye. “No.”