Louisa Doyle smiled her small, tentative smile. It all pleased her very much. New York had already rewarded her with a small thrill and something to write home about. How nice.
“Come along, Ethel,” she said to her maid.
The rooms were precisely what she’d hoped for, more for Arthur’s sake than her own; he was particular to a fault (“too fussy to live,” her mother had said). Both rooms had windows looking down on Twenty-Third Street; the sitting room had a small fireplace, the bedroom a bed large enough for anything they might get up to. Arthur could be surprisingly athletic for so large a man; of course, he still played football occasionally. And cricket. Cook’s had suggested that the new American fashion was two matching beds, but she had refused, blushing, using the Italian term lette matrimoniale to buffer her embarrassment as she insisted on one bed for the two of them.
A woman friend in their young married days had told her quite a daring joke about marriage and what Arthur called S-E-X: If a newly married couple for their first year put a bean into a jar for every time they made love, and if at the beginning of the second year they took a bean out of the jar each time they made love for all the rest of their married life, they’d never empty the jar. That had sounded cynical and depressing to Louisa and still did: she believed that she and Arthur were still, after years, putting beans into the jar.
Perfect the rooms were, then, with a perfect bed, and she wished they might stay there longer than a few days before the railways would whisk them off to exciting places named Erie and Buffalo and Milwaukee. But Arthur’s career came first.
“I hope you have a nice room, Ethel?”
“Oh, very nice, ma’am.” Ethel was unfastening the hooks and eyes at the back of Louisa’s bodice. “In the back and upstairs, but quite nice.” The boned bodice was gray velvet with a high collar and gray piping, dull silver beads next to the piping — all quite tasteful, and in fact one of her favorites.
“You must be tired, Ethel. Heaven knows I am. All that hurly-burly of the dock! And no man to help you oversee the luggage.”
“Mr. Doyle helped, ma’am.”
“Well, of course, but…” She meant no manservant to help; Arthur was, after all, the man in charge, the general, as it were, of the campaign that had had to fight its way from the dock to this very pleasant hotel. “I do hope that Masters will be released from quarantine quite soon.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The bustle, please, Ethel.”
The dress had a separate bustle, very dark red wool, almost a brown, the actual bustle quite small but with folds of the wool falling to the floor. When it was off, Louisa reached into the opening in the skirt, just where her right buttock began, and undid the ties there, first reaching into the pocket that hung below the opening and taking out her notebook, her pencil, and her beaded change purse. “I’m always forgetting these things.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ethel gathered up the skirt as Louisa stepped out of it, leaving her in her gray silk petticoat and corset, also silk, boned, decorated around the top and over the breasts with ecru lace. “Undo me, please, Ethel.” Ethel was folding the skirt; she laid it on the bed, then undid the corset.
Louisa sighed with pleasure as it came off. “Don’t you despise corsets, Ethel? I simply loathe them. It must be lovely to live in the South Seas where they wear practically nothing at all.”
“Oh, madame.” Said rather perfunctorily.
“Oh!” Louisa stretched. She untied the side fastening of the petticoat and let it fall, leaving her, rather daringly, in form-fitting combinations. She wanted to say, It’s a good thing Arthur can’t see me now, by which she meant it was a too-bad thing, as Arthur would have been excited and they’d have made love. Arthur, however, was out walking, “getting the lay of the land,” as he put it. At any rate, she couldn’t say such a thing to her maid, so she said, “Who helps you with your fastenings and corset and all, Ethel?” She meant, corsets were the devil to get in and out of, so did the maids help each other?
“I do myself, ma’am.”
Louisa saw her in a mirror. Ethel was blushing. She supposed it was the idea of having help in undressing, perhaps the idea of a man’s helping. Ethel was plain, in fact quite homely—“homely as a mud fence,” Louisa had heard a man say of a woman once, though she’d never seen a fence made of mud. And at forty, surely Ethel was far past any dreams of men. Surely. Not that Louisa was any raving beauty herself — not enough chin, rather too little nose, too — but she had never thought of herself as plain.
“I can fend for myself now, Ethel. You go and have a nap.”
“You should have a nap, ma’am; remember you’ve been ill.”
Louisa was supposed to have had tuberculosis, but she didn’t acknowledge it and didn’t accept the diagnosis and hated the idea. She’d had a stay in Switzerland because Arthur had insisted. She thought it was all nonsense. “I’m quite fit now, Ethel.”
“I’ll just hang these things up, then, ma’am.” One of the steamer trunks was open and sitting on its end; a cave full of clothes was visible. As Ethel hung her dress in it, Louisa moved about the handsome room in her combinations. She tried the bed, found it gratifyingly firm but bouncy; she stood by a window and looked down on the tops of carriages and people’s hats. New York City! She had been told that New York was terrifically energetic and quick, full of people perpetually on the run. London seemed to her about as much city as the world could want or need. Could New York be bigger? Quicker, noisier, grittier? London had had its underground for decades; what did New York have? Something called “the El,” trains that ran along next to people’s windows, which she would hate, she knew. The idea of people looking in her windows, looking into her life, appalled her.
“I’m going then, madame.”
“Thank you, Ethel.”
She moved about the room again. She touched things, smiled at nothing, realized that she was excited—New York! A hotel detective! An illicit liaison! She came to the full-length mirror and studied herself. Without her glasses, she looked, she thought, rather pretty — but then without her glasses, she couldn’t see very well, so perhaps it was only her poor vision. Her figure had come back after the babies, although she’d been secretly pleased (and scolded herself for vanity) that her breasts had kept their size. So had Arthur been, she thought. Of course, there was the problem of her hips…
She began to unbutton the front of the combinations. She slipped a lacy strap from her left shoulder; her breast appeared, happily plump, rose-brown at the nipple. She exposed the other breast. Yes. She undid more buttons, pulled the garment over her hips. There. There was the soft hair, paler brown, she thought, than her head, so intricately coiled. Her own smell rose to her, clear through the scent of patchouli. She slid the combinations down, pulled one side over her left heel, then the other over the right.
And, naked except for her stockings, wondered if anyone could see her.
She threw her left arm across her breasts and cupped her right hand over her pubis. Crouched, she turned, as if she would surprise an intruder. (And say what? she asked herself.) There was nobody, of course. She looked at the windows, over which Ethel had pulled lace curtains. Could somebody see in? Some horrible creature several streets away with a telescope?