At the bottom of the chest, under a lace and velvet ball gown of Amelia’s, Clara found two objects from her father’s studio she had forgotten that she’d packed.
“Two treasures,” she teased Edward, holding them behind her back. “I want you to have them.” She sat next to him on the smooth pine porch step in a pool of sultry light from the occluded sun. “First, these…” She handed him two L-shaped pieces of thin wood, thin as yardsticks, each arm of the Ls nine inches long and joined at the cornice with a bright hinge. The wood, light enough to float, was varnished to a russet sheen and inlaid with kaleidoscopic circles, opalescent as the scales of fish.
“What are they?” Edward asked.
“My father made them.”
“They’re beautiful. — but what are they?”
She held the two L-shaped pieces at right angles to each other.
“Viewing frame,” she said.
She slid the two pieces up and down along their axes. “Here, look through the center. At the barn. You can change the dimensions of the frame to form your focus…”
Edward took the pieces in his hands and held them up before his eyes and framed her face in them, then, holding them apart, said, “But I can’t accept these.”
“You must. They were designed for use. I’ll never use them, and you will.”
“What are these bright circles in the wood?”
“Butterfly wings.”
Their fingers brushed as they both reached to touch an inlay.
“Father made them on his trip to Florence. He studied all kinds of strange techniques there. That’s where he bought this…” She handed him a book.
“Il Libro dell’Arte,” he read. “Italian?”
“Open it…”
Inside, on each page, handwritten between the printed lines in a bold brownish-red ink, was her father’s own translation.
“It’s a craftsman’s handbook by Cennino Cennini—15th century. Here, look—” She turned the pages for him:
“HOW YOU SHOULD GIVE THE SYSTEM OF LIGHTING,
LIGHTS OR SHADE, TO YOUR FIGURES, ENDOWING
THEM WITH A SYSTEM OF RELIEF.”
They read her father’s translation together: “Always follow the dominant lighting; and make it your careful duty to analyze it, and follow it through, because, if it failed in this respect, your work would be lacking in relief, and would come out a shallow thing, of little mastery.”
“—is that what it says? — ‘of little mastery’?” He took the book in his hands and laid his palms across the pages. “I shall treasure this. Thank you, Scout.” He leaned toward her and for the briefest flicker passed his lips across her cheek.
He stayed on his feet most of the day, taking practice walks around the yard, and by suppertime it was clear to her that he was on his way to full recovery. They took their evening meal at the table in the kitchen and after he had finished his piece of custard pie and a mug of sweetened tea he said, “I think that I deserve some rest.” Leaning on his walking stick, he stood, while Clara remained seated, stock still, thinking he would leave her there and retreat to his own bed in the barn. But he started down the hall, saying, “—coming?” and she followed him, carrying the lantern. She watched him undress and then undressed, herself, down to her undergarments. He got into bed and sat upright against the pillow and started playing with the viewing frame again, looking through the square the two sides made, focusing views of things around him. “I think this is my favorite toy,” he said as she slipped into the bed beside him. He framed her face and she turned her head to profile so her features were backlighted by the lantern.
“That day you were in the tub,” he said.
She angled her head more elegantly so she could look him in the eye. The lantern highlighted her hair, a burnished corona.
“Why did you stand up?”
She stared at him.
“So you would look at me. So you would see me.”
“—see you…how?”
“The way I am.”
He put down the viewing frame and studied her.
“Show me,” he instructed.
Moving carefully, almost afraid to fall, fearful of disturbing what she intuited was a fatal balance, she stood, walked several paces toward the wall so he could see the full length of her body, turned to face him and slipped off her remaining underclothes.
“Turn around,” he told her.
She turned her back to him.
“Lift up your hair,” he said.
She raised her hair with one arm and stood waiting, facing away from him, facing the wall, facing into that non-participatory space that figures turned away in pictures face.
“Don’t move,” he said.
She stood for him, staring forward at the wall, until his silence started to feel strange and his unseen gaze on her created not a shared experience but a partition. She began to want to look back, to meet his eyes, to play an active, not a passive, part in what he saw, so she glanced over her shoulder and saw that he had framed her body in the viewing frame. She stood regarding him and in the shadow of the lantern on his face saw for the first time a different sort of animation rising in his eyes. “Come here,” he said, and as she moved to him she became aware of something in his body, in the way he held himself. When she climbed beneath the sheets she saw his excited sex, a third party in the bed.
“Show me how to do this,” he asked her.
“Edward, I don’t know—”
“You know everything,” he said.
Her instinct was to kiss him, press her breasts against his chest and press her body to him, but when she tilted her face to meet his lips he rolled her over, rolled her to her side, her back once more to him and then he pushed her top leg forward and she felt his sex pushing at her, felt him fumble himself forward through the narrow place between her thighs and then she felt the pain of his insertion. She made a small knob of the sheet inside her fist and bit down on it as he pressed forward, deeper, into her. He began to rock against her as she closed her eyes and then in a juttering spasm he fell still, his ragged breath against her back. She had thought that love would be an open confrontation, face to face, that love would be between the eyes, not like this, the way two animals would do it. She didn’t speak, although she wanted to, she didn’t move, she merely breathed and waited for some gentle sign from him. After a while she felt that part of him that was inside her diminish, then she felt a bath of liquid on her legs and Edward rolled from her onto his back. She raised herself onto her elbows and looked at him. His arm was crooked across his forehead, casting his eyes in shadow, hiding them from her. She said his name. “Sleep,” he told her, and she put the lantern out.
She thought she heard him rise while it was still dark and she thought she’d said his name again and that he’d told her to go back to sleep again, but she may have only dreamed it. When she woke gray light filtered through the only window, shadowing the outlines of the pictures on the walls and at the instant that she started to remember where she was and what had happened she knew at once that he was gone. She sat up and listened. There was no sign of him. His walking stick was nowhere in the room.
She stood up and was immediately leveled to her knees by pain, clutching at the bed for balance. Somewhere deep inside her pelvis was a thorn that made it hard to stand and as she knelt, trying to overcome it, she saw that she had bled across the sheet during the night. Her thighs were caked with blood and as she rose she reached for her black poplin skirt to dress in and to hide her stain. Over the skirt she pulled her shift and then she walked, one stiff step at a time, to the door.