“In her desperation she overstepped her limit and would compel me to overstep mine. The situation became dreadful.”
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Two months later, Regina was exhausted. She and Søren sat side by side on the sitting room sofa, the late afternoon sun slanting dusky rays of light on his shoulders. And she could feel, in the way she leaned toward him and the way he leaned away, that it was over.
She told herself to calm down. Søren wasn’t going anywhere. She just needed more sleep, that was all.
Her eyelids drooped. She’d stayed up all night pouring over his love letters, soaking them in. The candlelight had shrouded his words in a burnt sienna shadow, making even the way he wrote her name—our own dear little Regina—seem bathed in darkness.
If only she could relax around him, she wouldn’t keep saying the wrong thing. She stared at the fireplace. It didn’t seem real. Nothing in the room seemed real. Was she going mad?
She sucked in her stomach, but he didn’t look her way. She was being ridiculous. Two inches off her waist, a straighter back— a corset couldn’t make him love her more. There was something else wrong with her—something fundamentally wrong.
Søren shifted beside her. He had wrapped his black cravat so tightly around the neck of his shirt that the two points of his white collar cut into his cheeks. It pained her to look at how tightly he had tied his cravat. Two opal studs glimmered from the shirtfront bulging out from beneath his white damask vest. One stud was a round amber yellow, and the other a hexagon of turquoise.
“Did you know you were wearing two different studs?” she asked. She reached over and touched the amber yellow one.
“Yes,” he said, leaning further away from her, onto one elbow. The fingers of his right hand splayed over his chin and cheek like the overextended arms of a starfish. She let her hand fall away from his button.
“I must go,” he said. He drew his watch out of his pocket. “I am meeting Emil at the Royal Theater tonight. The White Lady is playing. I don’t want to be late.” A muscle in his cheek quivered. He sprang off of the sofa, walked away from her, and leaned against the window sill.
Don’t follow him.
She felt herself rise from the sofa and close the distance between them. She knew that the self doing this walking was the ephemeral, silken self, the one over which she had no control. She felt this shadowy self turn him round, slip its soft arms around his neck, drape itself around him, and hang off of him, while the muscle and bone self shuddered.
“Why don’t you love me anymore, Søren?”
He looked away. He shrugged. She watched the rise and fall of his narrow shoulders, and felt it match the rise and fall of her breast.
She gripped his collar. “Who?” she asked. “Who is it? Who have you fallen in love with?”
“No one,” he said. His face seemed to settle into stone. “Not yet. But there will be someone. My irony has something extraordinarily seductive and fascinating about it. It lifts women up out of their immediate existence. They like that. Enticing, yet always at a distance, never unmasking itself.”
“Will you ever marry?” she whispered, wanting to know the answer but feeling that if he said yes, the shadowy ephemeral self that hung onto his neck would lose its grasp and fall to the floor.
His jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed to the shape of crescent moons. “First, I shall sow my wild oats. Then, perhaps in ten years or so, I shall marry some young girl to rejuvenate my blood.”
The muscle and bone Regina recoiled, lurching away from him, dragging the ephemeral, shadowy self by the waist. The arms of the silken self dangled along the floor as it went.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said, stepping close to her. “Seducing women runs in the family. My father—that bastion of severe Christianity—seduced his maid while his first wife lay dying in her bedroom. That maid was my mother. But then, you met him. You saw what he was, didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t know,” she said. “But you’re not your father. You’re not doomed to repeat his mistakes—that’s only Satan whispering melancholy lies in your ear.”
“Are you calling my mother a mistake? That’s not very kind?”
“Stop it,” she said. She walked away from him. “Just stop it.”
“Don’t be upset. I’m not worth it.”
She spun around. “Is it because of the prostitute?”
“How do you know about that?” His eyes bore into hers, as sharp as a letter opener.
“I read about it in your journal entry that day I came alone to your apartment.” Her face grew red. Her body tensed for the attack she knew she deserved.
He shrugged. “Yes, I ran with a bad crowd before my father died. We went. Once. But nothing happened. I was too drunk.”
She recoiled. The image she had of him grew brighter and yet more tarnished at the same time. If only she’d confessed sooner. Maybe she would have acted differently, been more herself, more relaxed. She jabbed her fingernails into the palms of her hands.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You will marry someone else, someone kind and good who loves you. You’ll recover. You are just suffering from the illusory eternity of first love. It had to end eventually.”
“I will never marry. I’ll become a governess to eight children,” she said, hating herself for the self-pity she was revealing. “I’ll watch children who will hit me and tell me they don’t have to listen to me because I’m not their mama.”
“If you have anything else to say, please hurry. I’d hate to keep Emil waiting.” His face closed in on itself, giving him the hooded look of a lizard.
“Søren! Why are you doing this?”
“Well,” he said, pursing his lips, “the problem is, you love me too much. Don’t you?”
“Kiss me,” she said.
He moved to her, a mechanical stiff walk. She realized immediately that she’d made a mistake, that she shouldn’t have asked. But it was too late. He closed his lips on hers with a cold, perfunctory compression.
She wrenched herself away from him. Don’t let him see your face. Don’t let him see how much you love him, despite everything. She pushed open the front door, ran down the steps, along the edge of the harbor, and over the bridge—as far away from him as she could get. She knew that if she kept running, she would not give in to the despair, the sobbing, wrenching despair that was trying to flatten her as completely as if she’d leapt from a window.