Read Online Every Day by Elizabeth Richards - Free Book Online Page B

won’t wait for me to respond, just leaves quietly. I shift closer to Daisy at her work. “Da,” she says definitely.
    “Daddy,” I remind her.
    “Da.”
    •   •   •
    They called her la palatine because she came from a region that was called the Palatinate, which is part of modern-day Germany. She married, sight unseen, the brother of Louis XIV, and her letters reveal not only the depth of this mistake but the strength she possessed to endure it. She is frank on the subjects of his infidelity, his homosexuality, his excesses. In an era of excess, she kept her head while the rest of the court indulged. She is worlds from me, but I envy her endurance, her ease with going on record, with being the record. As for his side of the story, it seems he didn’t deserve to have one, and it strikes me as lucky that he died young.
    I am ravenous for gossip, poring over these letters. I wait for her to confide any infraction against matrimonial law, but she doesn’t. My daughters are sleeping. My son and husband are out whacking golf balls over a cartoon landscape. I don’t want absolution, just company. I want to talk to Fowler.
    I want so much more than that.
    Liselotte, my seventeenth-century focus, doesn’t yearn for much except the company of her aunt and one or two close friends. She is not distressed, is instead relieved, that she has no sexual inclination toward her philandering husband. I have always found Simon attractive, although I’ll admit that while I sat at dinner with him tonight, no part of me filled with a yearning for sex. In fact, it wouldn’t be dishonest of me to say that I rarely think about having sex with Simon, and when I do the impulse is easily thwarted by circumstance. Perhaps it is high time that I worried about this.
    With Fowler, I like the whispering, the cajoling, the occasional cruel remark that requires emending. I like feeling flush in a new setting. Simon and I went to Club Med once, and I momentarily retrieved that business. But it’s been years since I felt at the mercy of whatever current is loose and looking for a conduit. Fowler’s postcard was all I needed to get plugged in. But I’m being ruthless now. I mustn’t compare them. Simon is devoted. Fowler left me in New York City when I was eighteen years old with an infant and no income. I couldn’t be sicker if I chose to run to Fowler over my husband.
    Liselotte would say that the choice is not an issue, that one must be plain-speaking, true to oneself, not to others. Kirsten would shrug. “Tell me something I don’t know.” Gillette would say, “Fuck them all,” which she does.
    I have become tame to the deadening point. It can’t be good for any of us.
    Liselotte is under growing scrutiny for her outspokenness, for her noisy reservations about the Edict of Nantes. She has figured something out about her era and she’s up a creek because of it. I look up from the thick book. Headlights stream into the driveway. Doomed, I think, because she can’t handle what’s been handed her—socially, I mean. What do we know about marriage before we enter into it? That it’s difficult, admirable, treacherous, and not for the weak of heart. We hear these things and believe none of them and only learn as we go along, bucking the confines and wanting them at the same time. The weak of heart. This is where I put myself tonight, in a country with the weak of heart, although mine fills at the thought of nearly everyone I know.
    Isaac’s triumphs abound. He was under par for every hole, the only one in the crowd. “We’re going for the real thing,” he says, breathless. “This weekend. Simon’s going to rent clubs.”
    “That sounds good,” I say. I hear Simon in the kitchen, getting something to drink.
    “I’m goin’ up,” my son says. “I’m really beat.”
    “Sleep well.”
    I had hoped for a few more minutes of him, of safety.
    Simon gets a coaster for his soda can, chooses a chair, and sits, elbows on knees.