Read Online My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page B

boy? . . . Why now? . . . after these many days of happiness . . . when you know how I adore you?
    . . . I am sorry, Eloise.
    . . . now that I am your fiancée, and we have only to wait until the decree, and then, oh sweet Christopher! . . . we will be married.
    Yes Eloise . . . ma’am.
    Why, is she not young ? . . . Eloise Peck née Ingram so very young ? . . . to have been married twenty-three years to an old man who will not die ?
    Christopher!
    Yes ma’am.
    . . . We will be wed when I am free, it is not a mere dream? . . . a champagne fancy?
    Not at all, ma’am. Which is to say . . . yes.
    And you love your Eloise?
    Oh yes.
    And you will be tender with her?
    Oh yes.
    And you don’t care a fig for the world’s censure?
    Not at all, ma’am.
    And you have no fear of my vindictive husband?
    Not at all, ma’am.
    And you don’t regret your lost vocation? . . . for you would have made, dear Christopher, so very handsome, so very . . . so very powerful a man of the cloth!
    . . . Why yes ma’am, Eloise I mean, I do regret . . . some things.
    But your heart is not broken?
    Oh no.
    Your heart is whole . . . wholly . . . mine?
    Oh yes.
    We will be wed till death do us part? . . . in sickness and in health, whether rich or poor?
    Oh yes certainly, ma’am.
    And you do love your Eloise? And no one else?
    And no one else . . . ? Oh yes.
    ON THE SUNDAY-THRONGED boardwalk, on the wide windy splendid beach, Eloise Peck and her strapping young blond lover (said to be a former farm boy?—a former seminarian?), Eloise Peck and her twin Pomeranians (Princess and San Souci—so sweet), Eloise Peck causing heads to turn in her aigrette-adorned silk turban, her sapphire-and-diamond choker, her printed silk Poiret frock (Empire waistline, loose flowing sleeves, tight “V‑necked” bodice) . . . She carries a white chiffon sunshade, wears white net gloves (showing stark little rhomboids of flesh), her face is hidden by a white tulle veil but everyone in Atlantic City knows who she is: who else but old Wallace Peck’s runaway wife?
    Christopher!
    Yes?
    Give me your arm, dear, and don’t take such long strides . . . .I am quite out of breath in this wind.
    Sorry ma’am. Yes ma’am.
    . . . Eloise , dear.
    Oh yes: Eloise dear.
    . . . And you are tugging too hard on Princess’s leash, the collar is cutting into her throat, do take care, dear.
    Yes certainly Eloise dear.
    Ah, that’s better!
    Yes?
    AFTER TWENTY-THREE YEARS of being good , whence comes, and so suddenly, this delicious badness ; after twenty-three years of being Mrs. Wallace Peck in her gilded cage, whence comes, with such exhilaration, this certainty in being . . . Eloise? Glasses of champagne, and French burgundy, and Swiss chocolate almond liqueur, and, in the candlelit Crystal Room of the Saint-Léon, squeezing, sub rosa, the blushing young Christopher’s knee: Do you love me, Christopher dear, or is it all a . . . fancy? In the airy vestibule of St. John’s Episcopal Church the renegade Mrs. Peck snubs, before they can collect their wits, and snub her , the dowager sisters Vandeventer; in the clubhouse at the Atlantic City racetrack Mrs. Peck manages a coolly blithe flirtation with old Elias Shrikesdale, a friend of her late father and her yet-current husband. She drinks a good deal these days (as she is the first to admit!) but she is always in control, perhaps too generous in her tipping, too lavish in her confidences, telling dressmaker, masseuse, hotel manager, telegraph operator, tearoom proprietress, most of all her Filipino maid . . . certain ecstatic plans for the future (honeymoon voyage to the Greek Isles, renovation of the old Ingram estate in Newport) once she is, legally, Mrs. Christopher Schoenlicht.
    Sometimes she weeps, it’s true. But only out of joy. For she is shortly to inherit a great deal of money (by way of a long-delayed court settlement following her