Free The Eleventh Year by Monique Raphel High Page A

be lying awake in the darkness, feeling like a trapped animal.” She looked away, her eyes filling with tears. She’d worried, once, about becoming pregnant. She’d sat up praying for her period to come, for fear of being caged by force into a marriage she had no wish for. Then she added, somewhat coldly: “But you wouldn’t understand that sort of life, Lesley. The life of a day worker in a city like Cincinnati, Ohio.”
    â€œIt isn’t that different from the life my sister leads in New York City. She has luxuries that a day worker would never even dream of—but basically, there are no vistas and she has no horizons. George comes home every night and insists on seeing the same parade of couples every weekend. No one looks her in the eye because she’s a matron, a married woman with a child. There are no possibilities, no risks, no miracles for Emily. She must lie awake in the dark too, unless she’s anesthetized her mind to such an extent that she can’t see her situation clearly anymore. I don’t want to end up like her. It’s the nightmare I’ve been staring at.”
    â€œWhom did she marry?” The description sounded horrible, and Jamie pictured a fifty-year-old man with a pipe and a paunch.
    â€œA very nice young Harvard graduate. Handsome, funny. I can’t stand to be around them!”
    They were suddenly laughing, laughing over George who was so nice and bright and who could be compared to Willy who had never been to college; George who was a bore and Willy who might not have been, if he’d been born into a luckier family. They laughed, understanding each other, and all at once they were friends, and the room had become smaller, more cozy, filled with warmth. Lesley in one movement was unpinning her hair, letting it flow unimpeded down her back, shaking loose the waves.
    â€œGod,” she said, “I wish we could be in Paris drinking wine.” Then she looked at Jamie, and her eyes were serious, wide, and striking. “Are they drinking wine in Paris, do you think? I read that the government had fled to Bordeaux.”
    â€œThat was last year,” Jamie replied. They stared at each other, wondering about this war that neither one of them could imagine, could understand. “Now the elegant folk have come back to the capital from their resort hideaways.”
    â€œThen the French don’t care either about their own men?”
    Jamie didn’t know what to answer. “I can’t really believe that,” she finally stated. But what was death from the vantage point of the living? “This is my first trip away from Ohio,” she admitted. “All I know of Paris is through the books I’ve read, and from the newspapers.”
    â€œWhy is it,” Lesley asked bitterly, “that we can’t even be entitled to a dream? I’ve so often pictured myself in a garret somewhere on the banks of the Seine, watching the barges moving slowly down the gray waters. But in my pictures there have always been young men, and wine, and roses.”
    â€œAnd love?”
    â€œAnd of course love. But not the love of pessaries and condoms, and of coy petting in the back seats of cars. Real love, like Natasha and Prince Andrei in War and Peace. ”
    â€œHe died,” Jamie cut in. “From his battle wounds.”
    â€œI want my money back,” Lesley said, watching a brown leaf fall twisting onto the hill below the window. “I bought the book thinking he would survive, because she was by his side, loving him, nursing him. And Anna Karenina threw herself in front of a train. Is that love? Would you have done that for Willy?”
    â€œI’m here, no?” Jamie retorted. “I guess maybe I didn’t love him. Or maybe just not enough.”
    â€œBut at least you’ve had something close to the real thing. To me it’s still Anna and Natasha, never me.”
    Jamie started to laugh.