Villa America Read Online Free PDF

of Rutland. This particular act stood on the fine line between decorum and titillation, but her mother had said: “This is London, after all. Tastes are generally more piquant.”
    The lights had been dimmed, the room thrown into near darkness. Then gasps from the audience when the lamps were slowly turned up and their eyes adjusted to the sight of Sara and her sisters standing bare-shouldered and motionless behind a gauze curtain. Ever so slowly, the three Wiborg girls began to undulate their arms, the backlight catching their exposed skin like pale water and throwing rippling imitations of their figures across the translucent fabric. They started to sing the song of the nymphs, a lament of loss and reproach, their torsos swaying gently from the waist, forward and back. It wasn’t exactly shocking, but it had a languid sensuality that was unexpected and obviously slightly thrilling. Which is exactly what their mother had counted on.
    But something had happened last night: Sara had let her mind wander, just a little, then a little more, until there was only the gently flowing curtain, her sisters’ familiar voices, a remembered scene from the nursery, the gaslight warm on her back. For some reason she couldn’t fathom even now, Sara had tipped her head onto Hoytie’s shoulder, breathing in her sister’s perfume. And then Sara was gone, back to her childhood home in Clifton, Ohio, and it was spring and she was comforted by all the small things she knew: the place in the hedge where the rabbit with the missing ear lived; the dark patch under the yew tree where the ferns were shyly uncurling themselves, green and fuzzy and new; the spot next to the cellar door that smelled like violets.
    Then, all at once, Hoytie was elbowing her, pointy and cruel, and she was brought back to the drawing room and the smell of moldy carpets and half-eaten beef on the sideboard, and Sara realized she had fallen into a deep sleep. Only for a few moments, just a few, insignificant moments.
    Yet, if they were so insignificant, why was she still thinking about them now, as she watched the maid reach for a bit of cloth to wipe the blood from her side?
    She was twenty-nine years old and most of her friends were already married, setting up their own households, running their own lives. For a while, on the cusp of womanhood—and for some time afterward—Sara had felt like she was living in a state of suspended animation, waiting for life to really begin. Waiting for the pivotal moment when, like the fairy tale, a kiss would awaken her and she would stir her frozen limbs and everything would be set in motion. Eventually, however, it had dawned on her that this was life, what was happening right now. And with that revelation, she had just gone back to sleep. No, not sleep, exactly. It was more precise than that; it was the kind of dozing where you think you’ve been awake the whole time only to realize that hours have passed and that, after all, you must have been asleep.
    But things—well, she—had gotten worse over the past year. It had started last summer. She found it harder and harder to get out of bed, and sometimes she didn’t bother at all, instead spending the mornings staring out the bay window of her bedroom in the beach house in East Hampton. She would squint her eyes to blur the line between the lawn and the ocean beyond. Squint, release, squint, release. Until blue became green and green, blue.
    In the fall, she’d gone to see the Whistlers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sara could remember those paintings, Mother of Pearl and Silver: The Andalusian, that dark swath of hair, her swirl of silver skirt brushing the floor, the sliver of face turned towards the viewer. But it was the Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water that had made Sara’s breath catch in her chest. The smudgy, luminous harbor seen only by the light of an orange moon (or was it a setting sun?). The painting was obscured, melting, light drowning at the