Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,45

had a childlike sweetness. Her complexion was reddened by the sun, hardly that alabaster tone that she, like all the women of their tribe, protected with broad hats and delicate parasols. “Who is they?” she demanded.

“So you think you are the only one who talks to gossip columnists?”

How pitiful that Vida should be surprised by this, that she should still care. Vida had not thought that Dame Edna was her friend, precisely, but she had believed that their alliance was an exclusive one. She went on tossing aside the wet leaves, but with the extra zeal of this fresh embarrassment.

“Everyone knew you were after Fitz.”

“What do you think you’re accusing me of? I didn’t make it a secret.”

“No, I guess you didn’t.”

“I must have looked foolish to you. But I didn’t know he was yours,” Vida said, fast as she could. She was glad to have it outside of herself and in the air.

Camilla snorted. “He was hardly mine.”

“No?” Vida sucked in breath and narrowed her eyes. She was overcome by two strong and simultaneous desires: that Camilla explain that statement immediately and in elaborate detail; and that she herself seem supremely above caring at all. “I thought you were what the columnists call ‘an item.’ Before you were married.”

“Yes, once upon a time the famous Fitzhugh Farrar and I were known to be romantically entangled. We went around New York together and had all kinds of fun. But he gets bored easily, haven’t you noticed that? And he only likes the ones who know well how to play a game of hard to have.”

“Hard to have?”

“Oh yes, we played all sorts of games. He would make a promise and I would demur, and he’d go to lengths for my attention, and I’d think he was mine at last. And I would say all manner of desperately sincere and adoring things. And then he would disappear on some sort of trek down the Amazon!”

“Sounds romantic.” Vida had meant to sound sarcastic, but there was another part of her—not a part she was especially proud of—that did think what Camilla described sounded exciting.

“Oh, it was.”

“Why did you marry his brother, then?”

“Me and Carlton—that started as one game of many. I thought if Fitz read in the papers that his brother and his girl were known to be dancing with each other he might come home. But he didn’t. And then he still didn’t. And then the game with Carlton had gone too far—I found myself engaged, and walking down an aisle, and promising to be his in this life and the next.”

Vida took in a big breath of the fragrant jungle air. “Oh.”

“But marriage is different than you think it is.” Camilla straightened up and glanced away and hung her head and put her face in her hands. She made a funny sound that began as a sigh and ended as a laugh.

“Oh?”

“Yes,” Camilla said, and the word was so heavy she seemed pushed down by it, her body sinking to the ground. “As a young girl you run around trying to get a husband, thinking that getting a good husband is the only goal of life. Then you have him. Well, it’s not romantic, your heart doesn’t beat like mad, and you don’t fill pages and pages of keepsake books with the precise way in which his eyes lingered on your bare neck. It’s something else than that. Suddenly, it’s really all you have.”

She looked very small there against the massive, knotty roots and big green leaves of the hanging vines. “I’m sorry you lost him,” Vida said.

Camilla cocked her head, unsure of Vida’s sincerity. “Thank you,” she said at last. With a sigh she wiped the wetness from her eyes. She seemed fatigued by having talked so much. “Now let’s be good Yankees and never speak of it again, please.”

“Lady’s honor, we shall never speak of it again.”

And like that, the idea that Camilla was any kind of rival disappeared.

And, for the better part of the afternoon, Vida was as good as her word.

The sun traveled across the sky and clouds came and threatened rain, but passed with only a few little drips, and sweat beaded on their foreheads, fell salty against their tongues. They did not speak very much and yet they communicated more than they had before as they moved into the jungle, helping each other to reach old, dry leaves stuffed into the crevasse of a big tree, holding hands as they struggled over a slippery