The Reinvention of Love

the wind is remarkably low, and I feel a borrowed restlessness from Victor. I leave the well-worn path at the top of the cliff and set out across the middle of the island along a sheep track.
    On Jersey there was French society, but here on Guernsey the inhabitants are mostly English. We keep to ourselves, and the English in turn do not bother much with us either. Occasionally we have visitors from France, or some of Victor’s Jersey friends will make the short voyage to our island. Victor enjoys guests and he has what he calls an “emergency” bedroom up in his glass tower, in case visitors arrive unexpectedly, or late at night. He has nicknamed this bedroom the “Raft of the Medusa” and it is quite frequently put to use.
    I have no friends myself. The visitors who come to see Victor are never that concerned with me. I am lucky to have my family around me. Once my sister made the trip from Paris, but seeing her just made me lonely for home and, in the end, I wished she hadn’t come.
    The sheep track is deserted. I meet no one on my trek across the girth of Guernsey. I thought that I had come up to the high ground to pick wildflowers, but I seem to walk right by their weave and flash in the tall grass without hesitation. I seem to want to keep moving, to be able to get to the other side andback again before dinner. I will need to be in attendance when Victor climbs down from his tower. He likes to have his family gathered around him after a day spent alone.
    The wind is higher when I get to the far side of the island. I stand on the edge of the cliff and the wind tears the breath out of my body. I sit down beside a rock and the force of the blast abates. The ground beneath me is soft with grass and thrift. I put a hand out and touch the rock, warm from the sun.
    I don’t know why I do it, but I lie down, there on the grass, with my body next to the boulder. The sky is endless above me, all blue like the sea, a few birds swimming through it, far out of reach. Perhaps it is because there is nothing above me that thoughts are released in me that have never struggled to the surface before. I do not think such thoughts in Hauteville House. I cannot. If I did they would be caught by Victor in his glass tower at the top of the house. He would net them as soon as they left my mind. They could not simply rise, undisturbed, into the open air.
    I live in service to others, and because of this I do not often know what I think or feel. I say this, not as a regret, but as a comfort.
    It is Charles I think of. Not that day, that first day, when he came to visit us in rue de Vaugirard. No, what I remember is a much more dangerous time than that.
    I run from the rented château at Bièvres with the children’s cries fading softly behind me. I run down the long cinder driveway, over the small bridge, to the edge of the wood where I know Charles waits for me. He hides there all day, preparing for the moment I can get away. And I don’t care that Victor is probably watching me go from his room at the top of the house. I don’t care that my children need me. I care only about reaching my lover.
    And when I do find him, when he steps out from behind a tree or bush to meet me, we stagger together like drunks. Sometimes I don’t stop running at all, just keep on going, smash right into him and knock him to the ground. Charles is so slight that it doesn’t take much to wind him, and I like to hear the breath rushing out of him as I follow him to earth.
    I cannot get enough of his embraces, of his kisses, of the way he pushes his face into mine as though he wants to become me.
    Victor loves me. I know this to be true. But Victor loves me for himself, and Charles loves me for myself, and the difference between those two is so astonishing that I don’t know how to reconcile them.
    Charles holds my hand up to the sunlight. We are lying on our backs at the base of a huge tree. He holds my hand overhead, so that my fingers echo the pattern of the branches above us.
    “You are as strong as that tree,” he says. “I would like to be a little bird nesting in your branches.”
    “I wouldn’t mind being a tree at all,” I say. “It would be nice not to have to move.”
    “But you would move all the time,” says Charles. He puts down my hand and rolls onto his side to look at me. “You would move with the wind.”
    “No, I would respond to the wind. I would answer it.” I look up through the web of tree to the sky. “And only