Thomas Jefferson squeezes her hand gently. “I just had to see you,” he says. “Do you understand? I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” He smiles crookedly. “I think you do understand. You are, of course, the most innocent and modest of girls, but”—he looks straight into her eyes—“I think you do.”
He stands, looming so large in the darkness that he seems twice her size. Now his mouth is on hers. She feels the prickliness of his lip and chin, his tongue attempting to push between her lips. “Oh, Sally!” he gasps. “Oh, Sally! You are so lovely! So utterly lovely!”
Now he is kissing her neck, her throat. His hands are running up and down her body, touching her in places, front and back, where no one has ever touched her before. The feeling of his fingers on her body fills her with loathing. She wants to slap his hands away. She wants to shout, “Leave me alone!” She wants to bite his tongue. But she does none of these things. Looking down from above, she sees herself as a limp rag doll. If he weren’t holding her up, she would fall to the floor.
“I will make it good,” he says between kisses. “I will be gentle. You will see. Gentle. I will make it good.”
And now he has lifted both her gown and her shift over her head. And now he lays her naked body on the bed. He is kissing her breasts, her belly, that part of her down below. He is making the husky groans and ripping sighs of animals.
All at once he pulls away. He is standing beside the bed, tearing at the buttons on his breeches. She knows what is going to happen. It cannot be possible. But that makes no difference. It is happening. It is inevitable. And there it is. Like a club sticking up out of him. Like a skinned fish. Like an enormous mushroom that is practically all stem. She never imagined that it could be so repulsive.
But now something else has happened. Her entire body has gone rigid. He tries to move her legs apart, and he can’t. He cannot move her hands from her sides.
He laughs softly. “Sweet girl! Don’t worry. I will be gentle. You will see. I promise. I understand. I will make it good.” He is talking between kisses. And he is kissing his way up her body. She feels his blunt, hot thing bump just above her knee, then press into her thigh — lightly at first, then harder.
When his mouth reaches hers, she keeps her lips clamped shut. She is shivering. Her whole body is icy in the icy air, and she can’t stop the shivering.
He pulls back his head. “Sally?” He starts to smile, but then his smile fades.
She makes a small shriek, like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog, and shakes her head once, hard. She cannot speak.
“Are you all right?” he says.
Again she shakes her head.
For a long moment, he only looks at her, his disconcertion resolving slowly into something like profound exhaustion.
“Oh, God!” he says. “Oh, God! How could I be such a fool?” He turns away from her. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he puts his elbows on his knees and his forehead into his hands, clawing at his hair. “I’m sorry! I am so sorry! Oh, God.” He stands and pulls his breeches up from around his ankles. “I can’t believe I… I can’t believe… What a fool… Unforgivable…”
Then he is gone. The door has closed behind him.
His candle is still on her night table. The flame drops and flutters as a gust seeps around the window casing.
Outside her door she hears an abrupt, hollow thundering. He has stumbled on the stairs. Quiet. An exhalation. He cannot see. Unsteady foot thumps quieten as they recede. He must make his way in total blackness. By touch alone.
~ ~ ~
Colors are illusions. Better yet: They don’t entirely exist. A particular blue will look radically different in a field of orange than in a field of green. Show ten people a blue wall. Then take them into another room, present them with a hundred cards in assorted varieties of blue and ask them to pick out the color of the wall they were just looking at. It is highly likely that each person will pick out a different blue and likelier still that none of the blues they choose will match the wall in the other room. What is blue in sunshine might be green by candlelight and purple under fluorescent light. A blue on a smooth surface will appear a different blue when the surface is rough. There is a color that, especially in its paler tints, most men see as blue and most women see as green. It is a fact that the colors we see are never actually present, and yet, at the same time, they are absolutely present, as present as our emotions, memories, hopes, desires, beliefs — our very selves. And, of course — individually, but more commonly together — colors can constitute that most vivid and immediate form of truth, that truth also known as beauty.
~ ~ ~
The huge clamor of steel shrieking on steel recedes into the rumble and roar of the train hurtling through the soot-blackened tunnel. As Thomas Jefferson watches, Sally Hemings lowers her fingers from her ears, pulls her book out from under her arm and reopens it. She sighs, and her face settles into peaceful concentration — so maybe she hasn’t noticed him after all. Gradually a faint tribulation darkens the center of her brow, but maybe only in response to some sorrow or worry experienced by the imaginary people about whom she is reading. He remembers, years ago, watching her through a window as she sat in a wicker chair out on the porch, gazing idly into space, her feet up on the railing. He felt, as he studied her then, that he was seeing her as she actually was — which is to say, as she was in his absence. It was a moment of terrific intimacy.
III
~ ~ ~
Sally Hemings stands in the dim hallway thinking about different kinds of knowledge. Some things that you know leave you alone, like the way bread tastes, or your name, or the stink of butcher shops on a summer afternoon. But there are other things that once you know them won’t let you be yourself anymore. You can remember who you used to be, but you are no longer that person. And you never will be again.
The fear came first and the disgust afterward. As she lay alone in her bed once Thomas Jefferson had gone, she was haunted by the images of his sweating, red face, distorted by drink and by the brutal, animalistic urges that had taken him over. He had, in fact, become an animal as he threw himself on top of her, grunting, groaning, clawing at her, rubbing himself against her. How is it possible that a man as dignified, gentle and wise as Thomas Jefferson could have yielded to such crude impulses?
If she could find a way to go back to when he’d asked if she would like to see a true miracle, she would say no. And when he told her to put on her yellow gown: No. And when he asked her to get into the carriage with him, she would say it was not proper for a gentleman to ride with his serving girl. And when he offered her wine, she would say, “No. I won’t drink it. No.”
But now, in the cold morning — gray sky in the window at the end of the hall — she thinks that as horrified as she may have been last night, it is probably for the better that she now knows that Thomas Jefferson is no different from any of the brutal men her mother warned her of, that his civility is merely a subterfuge, as it is perhaps for all men. She is wiser for this knowledge, and maybe also stronger.
Last night she had thought that she was weak, that she was nothing, not even a leaf blowing down the street. But now she knows that Thomas Jefferson is the one who is weak — because he showed her that he needed something from her; he needed something so badly that it turned him into a wordless animal. And he also showed her his shame — which perhaps is what matters most.