The Summer Guest Read Online Free Page B

feet.
    He saw me back to the house, kissed my hand in a gentlemanly fashion, his eyes full of irony, and walked away.
    In the days to come, every time I thought about that moment, his blue eyes staring into mine, his fingers twirling my hair, I felt a dizziness that left me on my feet but filled me with both shame and surrender. I waited for him. I wanted him to do it again, to blur me into the summer landscape.
    He came a few more times but ignored me and went fishing instead with Pasha and Georges, even though they were so much younger. When he saw me, he always called me Doctor and my cheeks went red. Mama looked at me, but I remained stubbornly silent.
    I had pushed him away. That is my regret. I don’t know if it was instinctive, or my good upbringing, or mistrust. Because even though there were other young men later, in Petersburg or Moscow or even Sumy, and even though there were those I loved who did not kiss me, and those who kissed me whom I did not love, it was never the same. I did not love Andryusha; I don’t know what strange luminosity warmed the evening air that summer and stayed with me until I left for Petersburg. Perhaps it was youth, the last days of a certain blissful inexperience, nothing more. The moment above the river reflected it all.
    For Andryusha, it had been meaningless—a moment’s flirtation, engaged through boredom; the lack of anything better to do, futile but vivid.
    Mama told me that he made a wealthy marriage and lives on a huge estate not far from Kharkov.
    I suppose I still regret it, yes. Because it won’t come again, that I know.
    There were other suitors, or should I say real suitors, with nobler intentions; they hardly bear thinking about, but whatelse do I have to do at this moment? There was the fat one, Konstantin Ignatyevich, with his paunch and his fob watch, like a character out of an English novel; there was Aleksey Sergeyevich, with his spots and his stammer, so servile he made me want to giggle and hit him with my parasol (the rare times when I went about with a parasol—that is Natasha’s manie ). Mama wrung her hands, urged me; Elena dissuaded me. And thankfully so. Could I have continued my work as a doctor? Can marriage provide that satisfaction of good work and generosity? Perhaps with children, but . . . When I see the unhappiness of some of my cousins or friends who have married—they do not know they are unhappy, they delude themselves quite successfully and proudly, but their illnesses and complaints tell a different story—I think I made the wise choice. As did Elena. For Natasha, it is too soon to say. She is immensely happy with her work as a teacher, but she is also a flirt who loves company and laughter and children, and noise and chaos . . .
    But am I being truly honest with this page? In the end, is it not a mirror, too, a distorting mirror? There are words that are like faults in the silver behind the glass . . . Of course I could avoid putting down the words that will follow, of course I could be evasive with myself, with the page, but the matter has tormented me—and perhaps Elena and Natasha, too—all my life, and as a doctor who studies the human body and the human soul, I cannot disregard this simple physical fact: We three sisters, without exception, are plain. We do not have beauty to recommend us. Elena is earnest to the point of being stern; Natasha is much more whimsical, but her laughter is perhaps too boyish, even rowdy. Perhaps that is why, early on, all three of us decided to study, and Mama encouraged us. Our Russian boys, like Andryusha, like Pasha and Georges, whenthey talk of women—if they talk of women—talk of little else: appearance. We are prizes in some competition they play among themselves. For Andryusha, I was an easy prize and a worthless one. A plain girl, eager and innocent, her affection easily won, just as easily tossed aside.
    If I had placed my hopes in marriage, I might