The American Lady (The Glassblower Trilogy Book 2) Page 15

  “Marie, what is it? What’s wrong, my darling? You’re pale!”

  Marie couldn’t even answer. It took all her concentration just to keep breathing. She was so dizzy, her throat felt tight . . .

  She mustn’t faint . . .

  The first thing that Marie noticed when she woke up was the smell of linen drying in the sunshine. It reminded her of home. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. These walls, the beige curtains, the green striped wallpaper—all of it was strange. Her muscles tensed up as though in response to some hidden threat.

  “Mia cara . . .” She was with Franco! The tension drained away at once.

  “What happened? The festival . . .” She wanted to sit up, but Franco pushed her gently back down.

  “You fainted. It was probably from the heat. Stefano and I carried you here to my apartment so that you can recover.”

  His apartment.

  No more strangers around them.

  No noisy crowds.

  No more feast of Saint Rocco.

  Marie sat up with some effort. Her dress clung to her back. She wanted to lift the cloth away from her skin, but the bodice was too tight.

  “You still don’t feel well? Should I call a doctor?”

  Marie shook her head. “I need a little more air, that’s all. I’m so hot.” She pointed to the buttons that were hidden in the seam down her back. “Perhaps you could . . .”

  Their eyes met. Marie saw a mixture of concern and desire in Franco’s gaze, and it electrified her. A hot shudder ran through her body when she felt Franco’s hands at the back of her neck. As the first button eased through its elaborately embroidered buttonhole, then the next, she had to make an effort not to cling to him. She felt the urge to tell him to go faster.

  Then at last he was at the last button.

  It was now or never. Marie wriggled out of the bodice and threw it down next to her without looking to see where it landed. The thought that soon she would feel Franco’s hands on her naked skin almost drove her out of her mind.

  She turned her face toward him and came closer to his mouth, opened her own mouth for his questing tongue. They kissed, tiny kisses as light as a feather. Franco’s hands wandered up and down her back, his fingers fumbling with the satin strap that held her corset together. Soon this too fell to the floor.

  “Come here,” Marie whispered. Her hands trembled as she reached for the collar of his shirt to undo the first button. She could have screamed in frustration when it wouldn’t come loose right away.

  “Slowly, my love . . .”

  At last they lay there, skin on naked skin. Her gentle curves nestled into his hard, muscular body. Marie caught fire beneath Franco’s hands, and she yearned for the moment when he would take her. She thrust herself toward him like a young foal, wanting to wrap her long legs around him, but Franco stopped her. As he pushed her back down into the pillows with his left hand, he ran his right hand down her side.

  His hand glided in wide, strong strokes from her calves up to her breasts and then back down to her belly. Although she thrust her mound toward him, he lifted his hand over it and resumed stroking her thighs. At first Marie could have screamed from the disappointment; she wanted more, more, more, and it had been so long since a man had touched her! But soon his long, powerful strokes calmed her, and she felt beautiful and slim and young. All of a sudden she felt his mouth on her right breast. She was overcome by dizziness. How many other women had he driven wild this way? She didn’t know, but she knew she never wanted to share him again. She was shocked by the vehemence of her reaction.

  He kissed her again on the mouth and then took her nipple between his teeth, sucking on it until a thousand bolts of lightning shot through her. She wanted to wriggle out from beneath him, but his left hand held her fast. He moved his mouth across to her other breast and had his way with her there too. Only after that did he release her. She shimmied toward him and pulled him to her. Her legs spread open like a flower in bloom, as though she were a blossom carried from a cool, dewy garden into the warmth of a house. When she felt how hard he had become, she groaned aloud. She wanted this man. Now. Right now. And forever after.

  But again Franco stopped her at the threshold. He pressed his body down upon hers, but he put his hand on her soft opening instead. He moaned when he felt how wet she was, and the sound made her so happy she was even a bit frightened. She whimpered.

  “I love you so much that it hurts,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice torn to shreds by the passion she felt for Franco, the passion that grew with his every touch. Anything that Magnus had ever done to her was faded and forgotten now, meaningless, unimportant, not worth her memory.

  “I love you! Mia cara . . .” Franco took her head between his hands, his thumbs pressed into her cheeks, and his eyes held her gaze as he thrust himself into her.

  At last!

  She was scared to give away all that she was feeling and wanted to shut her eyes, as though there were some way to disguise her innermost self. But she returned his gaze, more scared that she would hurt him if she did not. When he let go of her head and clasped his arms around her body, she buried her face in his shoulder and breathed in deeply. The aroma of tobacco, sweat, and cologne was unmistakably and uniquely his. If I die tomorrow, I will die happy, she thought and laughed out loud.

  From then on they moved to the same rhythm. They were one flesh, one passion. It didn’t take long for their desire to reach its climax—they had waited long enough for one another. They screamed aloud together, one voice, one triumph, as they conquered the last peak, clinging to each other, slick with sweat, trembling.

  Marie did not want to let go of Franco. He tried to shift his weight off her, but she clung tight to him. Never leave! Don’t say a word. Don’t even stroke me. He understood. He stayed there with her, propping himself up very slightly on his elbows. Marie never wanted this feeling to end, never. She was complete now.

  16

  That summer New York was in love with itself and so was Marie. For the first time in her life she felt the need to make herself look pretty, to wear perfume and jewelry, and she did it all for Franco. Until now she had barely bothered with such frivolities, but the blazing sun of his adoration beamed down upon her and made her shine.

  “You slept with him!” Pandora blurted out the first time she saw Marie after the festival.

  Marie blushed more than just a little, then nodded. “How . . . do you know that?”

  “There’s a certain gleam in your eye that women only have after a night of love. A night of pleasure! What I wouldn’t give to feel that way again.” She sighed deeply. “But at the moment all the men I meet are either unappealing or more interested in their own sex. Would it help if you kissed me? Maybe happiness is infectious?”

  They flung their arms around one another and giggled for a moment.

  “Love is a strange beast,” Pandora said, becoming serious again. “It attacks us poor women and—”

  “Leaves us crazed with happiness!” Marie interrupted, laughing.

  Pandora took Marie’s hand and squeezed it as though trying to bring her back down to earth.

  “I was going to say, and before we know what’s happened we’re flat on our backs. Be careful, Marie! They can talk all they like about free love and the emancipation of women—but in the end we women are the ones who are left with a bun in the oven and no husband to show for it.”

  Marie laughed. “Is this really you speaking? I would have expected something like that from my sisters. But never mind.” She leaned in closer to Pandora. “I haven’t exactly lived like a nun up till now, and I’ve never been pregnant yet. I might not even be able to have children!”

  Magnus had been downcast about that, at least in the early years. “Why don’t we have a little bundle of joy?” he would often ask when her period came again, as it always did. Marie alway
s felt he wanted an explanation from her. But she didn’t miss having a child. He eventually stopped saying anything but went around with a long-suffering look on his face.

  Magnus . . . Marie found that she had almost forgotten him. She shook herself like a dog shaking burrs from her coat.

  She would have to write to him, at some point, and explain everything.

  “You might be surprised at what changes when you have a new lover,” Pandora said dryly. “Anyway, tell me, what was it like?”

  Marie swallowed. Should she really tell? She felt a sort of superstitious dread, as though simply talking about how much she loved Franco might make her love vanish into air. But she was so happy she couldn’t keep quiet about it.

  “It was wonderful! I’ve never felt anything like it. Franco and I . . . I felt the whole time that we belonged together all along and our moment had finally come. Does that make sense?”

  “Whether it does or not, you’ve got it bad!” Pandora replied with a knowing look in her eyes.

  Now that she was drawing again, Marie saw the people and the street scenes around her with new eyes. A paving slab laid in some unusual pattern, the fire-eaters at a street party, the silhouettes of the ships in the morning mist over the harbor—all at once she found herself surrounded by dozens of ideas, and all she had to do was pick out the finest images and put them down on paper.

  “Haven’t I always said that your talent will come back to life of its own accord?” Franco said triumphantly. He was quite convinced that it was his love that had awoken Marie’s creativity. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had started drawing again the night before they made love for the first time. She too liked the idea that Franco’s love could work such a change.

  When she sent her designs back to Lauscha, Johanna and the others were so delighted that they sent a telegram bubbling over with words of praise. Reading between the lines, she could see that they were all very pleased with themselves for having had the idea of sending Marie off to Ruth for new inspiration. None of them knew that it wasn’t New York itself that made Marie so happy, but rather being in love. Nor did they know anything about the drama that had taken place in the Miles household. Ruth had decided it best not to mention it in the letter that accompanied the drawings.

  Although Marie had apologized a dozen times over for her faux pas, Ruth hadn’t forgiven her. The sisters were still cool and distant toward one another despite Steven’s best efforts at reconciliation. Wanda, too, had gone back into her shell and rarely wanted to see anybody.

  Not wanting to stay in the apartment amid such tension, Marie had no choice but to go out on her own.

  “I’ll walk along the streets of New York, and I’ll be just a woman out having fun! A woman like any other.” As she recalled Georgie’s words from the ship more loudly than ever, she felt guilty that she still hadn’t paid her a visit. But there was simply no time for that; there was so much to do each day.

  When she wasn’t with Franco, Marie usually headed to Greenwich Village. She was still convinced that she had to drink in every impression, that she mustn’t miss anything. And she was finally beginning to understand all the connections that had passed her by before: the Naturalists and the Symbolists, the apostles of fin de siècle decadence who had traveled in Europe, Pandora’s expressive dance and Sherlain’s expressionist poetry, and even the Art Nouveau artists who made Ruth’s costly jewelry—they were all pieces of a puzzle, part of something greater that still had no name. This was a new creation, made not by God’s hand but by man, and there was no single style to it. Everything was allowed here, and styles flourished and multiplied. Though Marie had been in America for months, she still found this astonishing variety confusing, almost humbling. She wondered yet again where she fit into the daring leaps of thought, the protests, the new discoveries about the subconscious, the emancipation of women. She had to admit that her idea of art was rather more commercial than what people liked here, yet she was nonetheless part of the greater whole. The sketchbook she carried around with her, its pages bursting with images, was all the proof she needed. And there was further proof as well; the other artists all treated her with respect, especially after a conversation in which she could give as good as she got in discussing matters of art.

  “You’re from Germany? Then surely you know my friend Lyonel Feininger? He’s been living in Germany for a while now,” one painter had asked her almost the first time she had joined a group at one of the café tables. The whole group seemed to stop their chatter and await her answer. As chance would have it, Marie knew the name from Alois Sawatzky’s weekly gatherings. She knew that he was a painter, that he had been born in America to a German family, and she even knew his themes.

  “Where Cézanne found his lifelong inspiration in Mont Sainte-Victoire, your friend has found his in the village of Gelmeroda,” she declared. “He paints the village church over and over again, as though he’s looking obsessively for some deeper meaning hidden there. And although the Cubist elements in his paintings certainly prevail, I do believe that he’s a Romantic at heart.” Or so some of Sawatzky’s guests had said, at least.

  That had raised a few eyebrows and won her recognition. She had passed the test! She, a glassblower from Germany, could now join the circle of the select few. The next moment they switched the topic of conversation and began to discuss subjective perception. All of them agreed that “a man truly has to want to see!”

  Whenever Marie was out and about with Pandora and Sherlain, they were surrounded by a cast of colorful characters who listened devotedly as the poet recited her works in her smoky voice, or who thundered out their own lines of verse. There was a crazy German everyone called Kristi, who claimed to be a count but who dressed as though he had raided a theatrical costume department. A fiery-eyed Communist, he was never to be seen without a glass of red wine in his hand and was always ready to share a bottle with anyone who sat down at his table. Marie always liked listening to his stories, even though he smelled more than somewhat. Once he mentioned scornfully that his blue-blooded family had tried its best to cure him of alcoholism. They had even sent him to a mountain called Monte Verità in Switzerland, he said, so that he could kick the bottle in a salatorium there.

  “A salad what?” Marie asked. But Kristi had already moved on to the story of how he had won his crossing to America in a bet. So now here he was!

  Pandora had been sitting at the table as well, and later she explained what the remark meant. “There’s a sort of sanatorium in Switzerland, above Ascona, in the hills above Lake Maggiore. It’s run by a collective of artists and freethinkers. I think they chose the name Mount Truth for the hill where they built their settlement because they hoped that Mother Nature would grant them some great revelation there. Apparently it’s entirely vegetarian as well, no meat allowed.”

  Marie giggled. “So that’s why he called it a salatorium! I can imagine Kristi having a hard time of it there!”

  Pandora nodded. “You hear a lot of stories about Monte Verità. Apparently the artists’ chosen lifestyle takes a certain amount of getting used to. Some seem to thrive on it—but not Kristi!”

  “I wouldn’t grumble about having to do without meat. When I was a child we were so poor we couldn’t afford meat,” Marie said.

  “I don’t think that’s the most important aspect. It’s more about the . . . How shall I put it? The atmosphere of the place. A friend of mine, Lukas Grauberg, went there last year. He was suffering from some sort of psychosis, hearing voices, that sort of thing . . .”

  Pandora waved a hand as though hearing voices were quite normal.

  “Lukas wrote to me at New Year’s and was in raptures about Monte Verità and the people who live there. He told me that he’d begun writing a book about his visions and that he’d finally met people who understood him—as if we didn’t!” she said indignantly. “Well, anyway, Lukas is feeling better, and if
we are to believe him, it’s all because of that magical place. He wrote me that the sun and the mountain air heal most of the complaints people have when they arrive at the mountain. And then at the end of the letter he was good enough to tell me that he wasn’t coming back and that I should give away all his possessions to our friends here. Apparently he and some woman named Susanna were building their own wooden cabin in the colony, and he didn’t want to clutter up his new life with memories of the old. A wooden cabin, can you imagine!” Pandora reached for the wine bottle that was doing the rounds and poured another glass for herself, then offered to do the same for Marie, who waved the bottle away, lost in thought.

  A place where the sun shone and where everybody could do—or not do—whatever they chose? With a view of Lake Maggiore? She found the notion very tempting. She asked why the artists had chosen to build a sanatorium, and Pandora replied that it was just the means to an end.

  “After all, they have to live off something, don’t they? And this way at least they are helping the sick, rather than having to bow and scrape to commercial tastes—the way some of us have to,” she added, still smarting over her recital at Ruth’s party. “They recently built a very modern dance studio at Monte Verità—I’d love to see it one day!”

  “It does sound magical,” Marie said, realizing once again that the world was getting smaller all the time. The distances were shrinking. Apparently it was nothing strange to end up in New York because you’d won a bet. Or to go all the way to Switzerland to visit a dance studio.

  When she asked Franco later about Monte Verità, he laughed.

  “Have I heard of it? Who hasn’t? They’re all nudists and long-haired dreamers! But the people of Monte Verità aren’t quite as pure as they profess to be. Everybody in my line of business has heard the stories about how the tavern keepers in Ascona never sold so much wine before those eccentrics arrived! The competitors in nearby towns are quite envious.” When Marie looked baffled, he explained. “My dear, when nobody’s watching, they come down from Monte Verità to the village to have a square meal and a drink or two! Is it any surprise? A few glasses of red wine always help if you’re seeking wisdom!”