Anna Godbersen - Envy

She floated on her back and paddled aimlessly, and the shouting from shore grew indistinct. The beach cabanas and umbrellas were far away, and the hotel, with its place settings and carpets and lawn games and bicycles, farther still. Grayson was sitting in the sand, waiting beside her wicker chair, but he wasn’t in much of a mood for high excitement, either. He followed her dutifully, but some of the recklessness had left him, and he seemed to have run out of things to say. Whenever she turned to him she was met only by great, sad, yearning eyes. Meanwhile, Henry seemed to believe everything was as it had been between them, and she was playing along with his game. Diana had directed whole scenes in her head, imagining what it would be like to confront Henry, and all the witty, devastating insults she would hurl at him. But another part of her wondered if she would have the chance. Perhaps he would go on sending her little notes forever, never noticing how hard her heart was to him, and the only difference would be that they would have returned to New York and she would have to put them in the fire.

Meanwhile, she’d grown trusting of the ocean, and in the midst of her contemplations a wave picked her up and then buried her under its arm. She had to swim hard to get back to the surface, and when she did she shook the water and the bright sun from her eyes. She kicked to keep her head up and pushed the hair back from her face. Then she blinked, trying to see in the light again, and realized that Henry was bobbing a few feet away from her. His eyes were attentive, and his sharp shoulders just emerged from the water.

“Are you all right?” he said, paddling toward her. But there was a smile secreted in his concern, and she knew he was proud of having found her like this. “Say, nice spot you found here.”

“I’m fine.” She gave him a steady, unkind look, and began to swim away.

“Diana, I think I’ve realized something about — what’s wrong?”

“Are you asking what’s wrong with me?”

“Yes….” He paddled toward her. “You seem…”

For a moment, it was too vast and terrible to put into words, but she felt another wave come on, and this saved her from any silence or outburst. She ducked under it and held her breath, and when she came back up she looked for Henry. She was ready to get out of the water, and as soon as she told him where things stood, she could.

She spun around, and when her sun-spotted vision settled on the place where Henry surfaced, she said, “I saw you.”

“You saw me swimming out to find you?” he asked. Then he looked over his shoulder, as though he feared some other witness.

Diana’s legs and arms worked to keep her afloat, and she breathed in gulps. “I saw you and Penelope on the terrace of your suite, and so I know that all those stories you told me about there being no love between you, and all the lies about leaving her, were just as false as every sweet song you ever sang me.”

A few seconds passed before Henry appeared to comprehend what she’d said, and then he cried out, “No!” He swam closer to her and tried to reach for her arms, but she floundered away. His fingertips grazed her skin, and she sensed a kind of desperation in them. “You don’t understand what you saw. I mean that it’s not what it seemed. I am going to leave her, I told her—”

“There’s nothing between us anymore, Henry.” This line had occurred to Diana in the hour after she realized his deception, and she had thought it to herself and even whispered it in the mirror hundreds of times since. She had no idea how she would wince when she finally had to say it to him, and she was relieved to feel the water swell under her with the current. “We’re quite done,” she added, as though that finalized things.

In the next moment another wave crashed over them, and it sent her wheeling head over heels back toward shore. She didn’t fight this one. She let it drag her in. When she could feel the sand below her, she stuck her feet in, and then she began staggering out of the water. She was unsteady at first, but she kept on bravely and didn’t look back.

My spy at the Royal Poinciana, where many of our brightest New Yorkers have been enjoying the sun, has gone silent. The last note informed that Diana Holland has been paid much attention by her sister’s former fiancé’s new wife’s brother, and that the young lady would seem to be blushingly returning his affections….

— FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1900

IT WAS THE HOUR WHEN THE WOMEN WENT UP TO their rooms to dress for dinner and the sky went from tedious blue to a kind of fireworks. All along the wide veranda of the hotel, fathers and husbands and brothers drank afternoon cocktails and reclined in the large rattan chairs in the fading orange and purple light. They folded newspapers across their knees and accepted telegrams on silver trays. They smoked cigars and talked about the golfing and the hunting and the driving they had done that day and, in lower tones, how the markets back in town were doing. Down on the far end, leaning against the white wood railing so that he would be least seen, Henry was trying to get drunk in a hurry all by himself.

There was little else for him to enjoy. Days had gone by in Florida, each one like the last. He was formal with his wife in public, and avoided being with her in private. He watched Diana laugh with Grayson Hayes and go off to the beach with him after breakfast. Now he knew she no longer hoped for him, and he felt the full idiotic weight of his many missteps. He had known that morning, after having been with Penelope, that he was a fool, but until a few hours ago he’d believed that Diana would never find out about it. Moreover, he’d seen that look on Penelope’s face when he’d called her bluff — she could no longer ruin Diana as she’d once threatened. Her own reputation was too much at stake. But that was a precious insight that he couldn’t use now. It was useless to him, just like every other pointless thing in the whole pointless world.

He had taken for granted his own smoothness and taste, his ability to discriminate and have his pick. It was an unhappy realization that when something mattered, when he actually cared, he was a hopeless boor tripping over himself and destroying everything in his path. That morning, before Diana had told him how much was changed in her, it hadn’t been so bad to see her in Grayson’s company. But he’d made the mistake of reading the society columns over one of the other gentlemen’s shoulders, and it had confirmed his worst fears.

“Henry!”

Even the sound of his own name irritated him, although he did glance up dutifully in time to see Teddy approaching over the rim of his julep. Teddy was already wearing his dinner jacket, and, unlike Henry’s, his tie was neatly in place. Henry was wearing a dress shirt of fine Italian linen, although he had forgotten his cuff links and left the top two buttons undone. He sipped from his glass and grimaced a little, even though there was no one else whose intrusion he could have tolerated at that moment.

“Henry,” Teddy said again, when he had crossed the thick boards of the porch and reached his friend’s chosen column. “Where have you been hiding?”

Henry shifted his black eyes away from the Coconut Grove, where a few women who had completed their post-tea transformation were strolling with men they thought were in love with them. There were a lot of flounces and parasols being twirled idly, and he couldn’t stand any of it. “I wasn’t hiding — I just haven’t had the stomach for the party anymore.”

“I know just what you mean,” Teddy replied.

“I doubt that,” Henry said darkly. He was being ridiculous, he knew, but Teddy had long suffered Henry’s silly behavior, and that was too old a habit to change now. He didn’t, anyway, seem to mind too much.

A waiter appeared, and Teddy gestured at Henry’s drink. “Two more, please.”

“You might as well order four — that man takes forever,” Henry muttered, although the waiter was by then already gone. He waved his hands lethargically, as though the futility of every little thing was too great a problem to get very worked up about.

“I am tired of it, and I think my reasons are not so different from yours.”

Henry looked at his friend slantwise, and noticed for the first time the furrows above his brow. “Oh?” was all he managed. He was sure that Teddy’s reasons could not be half as devastating as his own.

“Yes.” Teddy’s tone was firm as he looked out toward the sea, and for a moment the orange light of sunset was reflected in his gray eyes. It made them look washed out and much older than he was. “I think I’m going to give it up for a while.”

Henry, who had been experiencing his life as though it were a well that he was at the bottom of, was irritated by this turn of phrase. “Give it up?” he returned ironically. That would be easy enough for Teddy, he supposed, who had finished college and managed not to get himself married.

“You’ll be all right without me,” Teddy replied with a rueful smile.

“You’re serious?”

“Oh, completely so.” The waiter appeared with their drinks, and both men turned toward the porch railing and looked out contemplatively for a moment. The light was still blazing on the grounds, and it reflected on both heads of slicked hair. Henry’s jaw worked as he anticipated his friend’s response. “I’m going to war.”

“To war?” Henry found that he was too stunned to sip.

“Yes, I’m joining the army.” Perhaps because Henry went on staring at him with incredulous, bulging eyes, Teddy added: “I was in the cadets in prep school.”

Henry had to look away. They had gone to the same prep school, but he couldn’t remember his friend doing anything like that. “But where—?”

“I hope to become an officer and to see action in the Philippines. I’ve already written to my father’s contacts at Fort Hamilton, and hope to enlist as soon as I return to New York. I can’t wait for tomorrow — I’m going to be leaving tonight, after dinner.”

This all sounded hopelessly far away to Henry, and he could not help but look appalled. Just thinking about it made his skin crawl under his shirt. He considered several more profound responses, something like “My God” or “Bravo.” What he did finally say was: “But you could die.”

Teddy put his elbows against the rail and leaned forward. “Of course I could die.” He clutched his drink and smiled a little. “But I can’t stay here forever, staring appreciatively at the new girls in the latest dresses and drinking from four in the afternoon till four in the morning. No, that would be a poor use of a life. I don’t want to hide from danger — that’s not what it means to be a man. I don’t think so, anyway. To look in the face of hard things and keep moving forward — that’s what one has to do.”

It was not lost on Henry that what Teddy described as a poor use of a life was more or less his life. But he found that he was not insulted. He was rather affected by the phrasing, in fact, and so only half-listened to what Teddy said next.

“I’ve been speaking to that lovely creature you were engaged to once, Elizabeth Holland, and I find she makes me want to search out the profundity in things. She is so tiny and frail, and yet she came back from harrowing experiences, and seems no longer to tolerate frivolities. How could she, now, when she knows what it is to be alive as we do not?”