Morning by Nancy Thayer Page B

I became his master—but, strangely enough, never his mistress, although his hope for that was the whip in my hands.
For I continued to be lucky with my looks. I knew this; I exploited myself—what else did I have to work with? I had waist-length black curling hair, which I tied up with blue ribbons to bring out the blue of my eyes. I had very pale skin that blushed rosily when I was happy or excited, and long legs, a slender waist, and what I learned over and over again was a spectacular bosom. Before I went to college, I spent hours in front of the mirror admiring myself, criticizing myself, deciding just how to improve myself, and every admiring look I received I took as proof and omen: use this to live your life.
Still, I do not know how I had the courage, the sheer brashness to pursue Henry as I did then: it was desperation, all desperation. I was wild with need. Henry came from an old eastern moneyed family, never mind that he was dark and handsome and thin; he could have been a fat dwarf from an old eastern moneyed family and I would have been crazed for him. My needs and his insecurities fit together perfectly.
Henry wanted to be an artist. His family insisted that art was frivolous and would not support him in his attempts to paint. They said he was, at twenty-seven, too young to know what he wanted in life, and that he would not get his inheritance until he got a “real job.” Over the bronze-bright autumn semester, I spent time with Henry, first over coffee in the student union, then over wine in his apartment. Never in bed: that was how I tempted him. I discovered that although his family was cutting him off from the real money, he was still receiving income from a trust his grandmother had set up for him, which his parents could not touch. After I recovered from the shock of it—that he was given more money than my family with all their labors had ever earned and he considered that money “nothing,” I grew even harder within myself and more ambitious. Why dida fool like Henry have so much when my hardworking parents had so little? There was no justice in the world—none given—so I must take and wreak and wrestle what justice I could.
You must paint, I told Henry, you are an artist, you must not waste yourself here. You should go to Paris and paint, it’s 1950, that’s where the artists are. I believe in you, Henry, I will go with you, I will encourage you, I will help you be brave.
So we went. What a flurry it caused! What telegrams and phone calls from his parents, his sister, his brother, his uncles, the head of the university art department! I loved it. My own parents and Will did not seem surprised when I told them, and they all wished me well. I loved Paris. Stone and river, cathedrals and cafés, lovers kissing openly in the streets, and everyone openly admiring me, blowing kisses at me as I walked past. We took a small apartment in a crooked building in the Latin Quarter. We drank Pernod at Les Deux Magots, we ate at La Coupole, I read Hemingway and Stein and Camus and Genet, Henry argued art with other painters, other painters taught me to speak a decent French and promised me that if I would only let them, they could teach me the language of love. I remained a virgin. It was one of my powers. It made Henry crazy for me. But I did not love Henry—I was so young, I loved only myself, I loved others loving me, I wanted everyone to love me. I was so young, so vain, so naive: I thought the lust of men was love.
    The phone rang, jolting Sara back into the present. Sears had an order of vacuum cleaner bags in for her. She put the receiver back and stood a moment, staring at the phone. How brave Jenny was, how determined—she went out and got what she wanted! At seventeen she had had the courage and the spunk to get herself all the way to Paris. She had not waited passively for fate; she had manipulated fate. Jenny thought of life as a malleable object, a ball of clay she could pummel and mold;