This, then, was how we were to go back to the way things had been before. We were to pretend, as if it had only been a dream, just like my waking thoughts had suggested. I could pretend having sex with Truman Calvert had been merely a dream, but I knew I’d never be able to pretend I didn’t remember it. That was impossible. No one could do that.
By the time Celine arrived home a bit before noon, I was scrubbing toilets and Truman was in the tasting room with a restaurateur from Sebastopol.
Over the next few days, I saw little of Truman. He either skipped breakfast or took it down in the tasting room. He made himself lunch when I was busy doing other chores, and he came to the dinner table after I had laid out Alphonse’s dishes. I was glad one minute and irritated the next that he kept his distance. I found myself reluctantly reliving the feeling of having been in his arms, of being kissed, of being touched. Nothing had taken the sharp, deep edge off my losses like being with Truman—in that way—had. Nothing had come close. Not walking among the vines, not the colors. I was not in love with him, and I knew he was not in love with me, but what I’d felt when I’d been with him was the closest thing to love I had felt in months.
But even so, Truman should have stopped when I asked him to. I should’ve stopped him. I should’ve been stronger, should’ve drunk less wine.
If only he had stopped. If only I had made him stop.
•••
The next weekend arrived, and I was expected in the tasting room to assist Truman with a group of East Coast tourists. I reported for duty half an hour before the group was to arrive to polish the stemware and prepare little plates of aged cheddar and dark chocolate. It was only the second time Truman and I had been alone since the night in his study. As we readied the room, Truman uncorked a zinfandel to let it breathe.
“Everything all right?” he said, but he did not look at me.
“Everything is fine,” I said, not looking at him, either.
We said nothing else to each other. The awkward silence between us lifted as soon as the guests arrived. The group wasrelaxed, cheerful, and easy to please. They enjoyed the wines and one another’s company, even when their conversation drifted to the news of the day—the chaos in Europe. I had seen the latest headlines in the Calverts’ morning newspaper. Over a period of two days, raiding parties of National Socialists, angered by the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jew, had vandalized thousands of Jewish homes, schools, and businesses—in Munich, Berlin, Leipzig, everywhere. The Nazis—as they were being called—had littered thousands of streets with broken glass from smashed windows and had burned hundreds of synagogues. Dozens of people were dead and thousands of Jewish men had been arrested.
When one of the guests mentioned trouble in Vienna as well, Truman looked up from the bottle he was uncorking. “What’s this about Vienna?”
The man, who’d been speaking to his friends, turned, surprised that Truman had put himself into their conversation. The group of guests had moved from the oak bar where Truman had introduced the wines to a little table of their own.
“Sorry. I don’t mean to intrude, but my sister lives in Vienna,” Truman said.
“Ah, well. Not the safest place at the moment. The violence and vandalism happened there, too. And it seems the archbishop of Vienna is now under house arrest. His residence was also smashed up during all that hullabaloo.”
“But,” Truman said, “the archbishop is Catholic.”
“He apparently spoke out against how the Jews are being treated,” the man said. “He continues to speak out. He’s in hot water now, you could say.”
“It’s just terrible what is happening over there to the Jewish people,” said the woman next to him.
“If I were Jewish, I wouldn’t stay another minute in Germany. Or Austria,” said another man in the party.
“Nor would I,” said the woman. “But where would you go? Who would take you? You couldn’t come to America, you know. Not unless you had family here already, and even then you could only come under the quota.”
“All those poor mothers and their children,” said another woman, shaking her head. “How will they keep their little ones safe from such brutality? And look what happens to you if you speak out against it.”
The people around the table nodded and sipped. No one had any answers. I glanced at Truman; his brow was furrowed in thought. He turned and handed me the next vintage for the tasters to try. I could not read his face.
I walked over to the little table and began to pour.
•••
Wilson didn’t come home at Thanksgiving—he’d met a new girl and was visiting with her family over the four-day break—so the Calverts accepted an invitation from friends to have the Thanksgiving meal with them. Celine told me I could join them if I wanted to, but I had no desire to tag along and Celine seemed relieved that I didn’t.
As the month eased into December and the many boxes of Christmas decorations came out, Celine asked me to help make every room look festive, but I hung the garlands and trim with a growing sense of emptiness. Pretending around Celine was exhausting, and the approach of Christmas made me miss my family with an intensity that surprised me. It was as if they had all died just yesterday. Worse, I felt as though I deserved to have lost them all. My mother and father would be horrified by what I’d done.
And yet I also battled thoughts that my parents had abandoned me to this fate, and now I was stuck in a house that felt like a prison, reminded every day when I made Truman’s breakfast orwashed his clothes or cleaned his bathroom sink or made his bed that he’d not stopped when I asked him to.
The hope I had begun to nurture on my birthday in October was starting to fade, and I wasn’t the only one in a restless state. The merry decorations couldn’t relieve the uneasiness that seemed to seep from the very walls of the Calverts’ house. I saw it in the way Celine would watch Truman when he didn’t seem to know he was being watched. She surely suspected he was troubled about something, but I could also tell, to my relief, that she had no idea what it was. Truman’s unexplained moodiness irritated Celine; that was also obvious.
A week before Christmas, a deliveryman came to the door with a flowering plant, beautiful and exotic, with trumpetlike blooms of crimson flounced by a loose wrapping of translucent gold paper. I could see that the sender’s address on the accompanying note was in Vienna. This was surely a Christmas gift to the family from Helen Calvert, a world away in Austria.
I brought it in to the Calverts as they finished a late breakfast.
“What in the world is that?” Celine said.
