In The Mood For Love

by lucillevici

After the shantytown raids, Frank Kennedy survives, and an unhappily married Scarlett finds solace in the company of Rhett Butler, who reluctantly resigns himself to the burden of unrequited love. Driven by loneliness, they begin to entertain ideas that make their volatile relationship even more ambiguous than it was before as they wade through perverse fantasies of what could be.

3. Chapter 3

Vignette 3

"And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice." -Hart Crane, The Broken Tower

An envelope fell to his lap, scrawled with messy, barely legible cursive, telling of its urgency, and he could only imagine it to be littered with gossip and rumor and untruth. The powerful combination of smoke and drink made it difficult to read out the letters and he looked up to his mother cautiously, seeing the troubled expression that demanded explanation. Was it not that same face that turned away from him all those years ago?

"What is this?"

Her gloved hand swiped the brandy from his grasp, and she did not answer, instead, sitting across and waiting with a perceptiveness that was borne from years of living with his father. He chuckled, seeing the game she was playing, and unfolded the hasty letter with a casualness he did not feel, expending all emotion from his face.

Eleanor,

I apologize if my writing is abrupt; I write to you today not as a friend, but as an aunt who is concerned by your eldest son's connection to my niece, Mrs. Kennedy. Her and her husband have just recently been involved in an accident and it is with reluctance that I inform you of your son's bad influence on my niece's behavior when she should otherwise be engaged with tending to Mr. Kennedy's ill condition. It has come to my attention that he has been driving her unchaperoned to the mills which, I am astonished to report, he financed, while calling on her at irregular times even when she is married to another. I have no anger for you, only I ask that you implore your son to mind the reputation of others to avoid the scandal that will soon surround the family name.

Your dearest friend,

Pauline

A mirthless laugh escaped him, and he tossed the letter aside (ignoring the desire to set it aflame) and met his mother's narrowed eyes.

"Do be serious, Rhett. What is she talking about? Are you trifling with her? Have you not put this behavior behind you?"

He clenched his fist and glared, reminding her of the very delicate state of their familial affairs, with the past looming behind and preventing them from being as close as a mother and son should.

"Don't speak of things you know nothing about."

She was silent for a moment and studied him. Her mouth gaped beneath the mourning crepe.

"Do you love her?"

"I do."

The absence of expected hesitance startled her, allowing her a tiny crumb of his mind, full of profound passions as vibrant and ardent as his lover's name, though only a fraction of what she knew him capable of.

"And what about her? Does she love you too?"

"Who knows?"

The look in her eye likened him to a pitiful child and he dragged on his cigar, letting the wisps of opaque smoke to obscure him from his mother and all else that reasoned him to be mad.