Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,95
to lower her eyes to the floor. She couldn’t quite bring herself to answer, so she just swung her head in a way that wasn’t quite an affirmation or a denial.
“In what way is it true?” Fitz persisted.
Vida’s eyes were wet. She steeled herself, met Fitz’s narrowed gaze. “It wasn’t a ‘liaison.’ He never touched me on the island. It wasn’t like that. We became close, that’s all, and after a while without meaning to I found that I wanted to be around him more than anything else.”
“And what do you want now?”
The truth tumbled out of her. She wasn’t sure she could have dissembled now if she wanted to. “The same thing,” she said.
Fitz folded his hands before him on the table. He seemed very tired, and Vida wondered if he didn’t want her to retreat from the room, and from the city, as quickly and soundlessly as possible. But that wasn’t it. He inhaled deeply, and she remembered his old trick of inflating himself, of making his body and his presence larger than it was in any literal, physical sense. “A marriage is long, and much of it is a kind of business arrangement. Together you build a public front behind which a home is maintained and wealth is accumulated. One of the reasons I so liked you was that you seemed to understand that. We can fix this, Miss Hazzard. The public relations man is very good, and he thinks Dame Edna has overplayed her hand one too many times. The people adore you, he says, and a sympathetic portrait in other newspapers will right things, and the overall good for the Farrar firm of having a wedding in the papers at a time like this cannot be ignored, regardless of whether it carries a slight whiff of scandal or not. But I do really care for you, Vida. If I am sounding overly practical, that is because I am now in charge of my family business. I am not the younger son anymore. But I care for you, and it matters to me what is in your heart. So I will ask you again, what do you want?”
“I’m sorry, Fitz,” she said. “I want the same thing as I wanted before.”
Fitz looked away from her and very slowly took one of the papers in front of him, flipped it, and put it facedown on another pile.
She waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, she asked in as strong a voice as she could manage: “Do you know where he has gone?”
The face that lifted toward hers was entirely unfamiliar to her. There was an anger in his blue eyes that she had never seen before, and the “No” that he pronounced, before looking away from her again, cut her more than a string of shouted obscenities would have. As Vida turned away from him, she felt weighed down with all she had so suddenly lost.
But as she walked to the doorway she became lighter with every step. Perhaps it was only that she had set down an enormous burden in that room. As she left it and arrived in the hall she felt so weightless she thought she might actually lift off the carpet and take flight. She could hear her heart again; it had been beating steadily all this time. The elevator doors opened and she went in.
Thirty-Two
In the days that followed, Vida shed other poundage. She gave away all but one trunk’s worth of her new clothes to Nora. She said her goodbyes to Camilla, and suggested that Nora be hired immediately as her lady’s maid. But Nora said she had been keeping company with Jack, who she’d gotten to know on their cross-country journey, and that Jack was sailing away soon, and that they couldn’t stand to be apart—she was going to take a position on his new ship and be his wife. So Vida packed her own trunk with some clothes and personal effects and the little knife that Sal had given her, the blade that reminded her who she was and what she really wanted.
The legend of Vida Hazzard—that plucky and brilliant girl from San Francisco who had survived the open ocean and a desert island, who had very nearly made the match of the century and then been quite publicly ruined—began to change, too. At first the crowds outside the hotel were even more rabid. The calls from other reporters were unceasing. A publisher offered her a