Exile: A Titanic Fanfiction in Four Parts
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and a story beautifully originated/crafted by James Cameron and I obviously don't own them in any way; it exists purely for entertainment purposes!
PART ONE:
Unmoored
April 14, 1913
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
It seemed one of nature's cruel jokes, really, how warm it was today. Sun, high now right at noontime, as orange-red as the inside of a Cara Cara. The warblers and the tanagers, they'd come back early this Spring and sounded metallic. The clean line of the woods that started just past the property, it held so many secrets and she contemplated them mostly through sound, in fact, from a safe distance; at the old house she would walk and walk, and run, too, as a child, the muddy footpaths like her church. But here anything beyond the house seemed a painting beyond her grasp, behind a glass. Better left. Better to watch. Better that she laid upon the outdoor chaise with an attempt at calmness now, deep breaths.
"Rose."
Sometimes she spoke her own name. It was the anxiety. An existential crisis in miniature. Since the sinking she'd have these episodes, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for an hour or more. Disconnected from her own body. She reassured herself of herself. If that even makes sense. She cataloged items around her. Or just looked down upon her creamy palms, counting the lines in every direction. That's what Jack had done that first hour after they woke up on Carpathia, he soothed her by tracing them, by describing in rasping detail what a palm reader in Paris had told him about every line. Which ones were children yet to come. Which ones were love affairs and what would happen if they cut off in a certain pattern. She'd laughed, once, it came out as a weak cough, but it had worked, hadn't it; he had this innate ability to turn the macro into the micro, to focus in chaos. His eyes so tired there had been red lines running straight through the white of them but he'd never faltered.
Three children, her right palm bespoke, and a love affair never ending. A cruel joke, now, written on her own body.
When she thought about him now she preferred to feel physical pain as to properly punish herself. Raising a hand to her face, she looked into the sun for a split second, as if daring the damn thing to burn her corneas. Her brain. Anything. Or please, she thought, bake it all out of me, but then she frantically chased the thought to try and erase it. She couldn't lose it, the memory of him like a shadow on her body that was maddening but absolutely necessary. Her whole being had become a moving contradiction. She lived two completely different lives inside herself.
Eight months since she had seen him, touched him. Two hundred and thirty nine days since she'd walked out of a peeling, mahogany-colored door and, even though she was convinced she'd turn around at some point and go back in, she never did. Two hundred and thirty nine days since she watched hunched-over bodies sleeping on a train while tears rained in steady streams down each cheek. All of them, days of disquiet, but after the first dozen or so the numbness set in and for most of each day, now, she could go through the motions. In fact, some of them angled forward. Not many, but some.
Two hundred and thirty nine days that he hadn't come for her. Even though he knew exactly where she was.
"You packed a bag, Rose?" His features wide, wild and vibrating like she'd never seen them before. Not even on a sinking ship had he looked this desperate, but all she could think about? Causing him pain. It was an inconsolable itch on her whole face, and inside her body, this urge to act out. She knew better. Reason danced, still, in the back, way back, curves of her brain, but the mess of her heart, the chaos of it, took over like a virus. The thin line between love and hate, they'd found it this afternoon.
She wanted to kiss him. Hard. The way their lips seemed sometimes to meet in a bruise, swelling. She wanted to pull on his face, devour him like so many times before. This time, like never before, she stopped.
"I'm going, Jack. You were right, yesterday, the letter was from my mother." A gulp of stale air. The tiny room was so hot. It was August and there was no escaping the terror of this type of heat, of the sweat. "Cal's gone, he's gone, but she asked me to come home. This is best! This is best."
How was she this collected in tone? None of this should be said. None of it should be happening. The theater of it took on a life of its own.
"Rose."
Jack's voice cracked. It cracked.
"Rose."
"Rose."
"Will you eat anything?" She shuddered. Ruth's voice came from behind, from large glass doors that opened to this small stonework patio behind the house, where Rose could stay in her silk robe and let all the posture fall away. Unbrushed hair. Her naked feet, pale against all this fresh sunlight. Her mother's voice had softened these past few months, both considerably and surprisingly. The moments at the lifeboat loading had fused a hairline fracture into Ruth's relationship with her privilege; it was small, it wasn't absolute, but it was something and it wasn't going anywhere that Rose could see. She'd been quiet upon her daughter's return, absorbing. There had been less judgment thrust than Rose ever expected. A smug knowing, an "I told you so" but just with eyes and not with the vocals.
"I...yes, I can get dressed and join you." She rose shakily to her feet. It was a Sunday. The anniversary of the sinking. She'd taken an entire bottle of Cabernet to her bedroom the night before to block out as much of the imagery as she could, forgoing a glass and drinking in fast sips right from the source; Ruth had knocked on her door at midnight, offering a touch to Rose's right arm and in that one gesture acknowledged that it would take years, maybe many years, to properly process what they'd been through.
"I'm hungry, I saw Lena making the quiches." Rose tried, in these moments. Ruth was trying, so she could try.
Face to face, they were near-mirror images of one another, just that Rose got the height and the robust presence from her father and Ruth stooped lower. But the fiery hair, the eyes, the delicate way they carried themselves, hid incalculable strength. The way their bodies curved into the kind of femininity that many coveted and few achieved. It was the money, in part, but it was also just genetically the DeWitt. The poise, the finesse, written in a seemingly ancient code upon their bones. Rose tested the edges of it, had become modern in her rebellion, her trauma and her actions, in the way she'd loved and left Jack, but when she and Ruth stood next to one another it was hard to deny that the room was full of a stubborn sort of magic. Both women, now, for there was no girl left in Rose.
"Joseph left a message with her, with Lena, this morning." Ruth was dressed in a suit the color of a robin's egg. The corset was gone, her figure a more organic set of lines but still elegantly smooth. Her motions, more fluid. She had a beau now, as well, a regal railroad retiree named Victor who seemed to genuinely enjoy her company. "He said he's planning to come by for tea this afternoon like you spoke of, unless you object, in which case you can just telephone him back, he's at his parents' all day and he said we have the number." The smiles, the body language, all of it different now too; it was as if Ruth knew she would have to pay a permanent debt for her behavior with Hockley, with how she'd forced him upon Rose. How she'd cheapened her daughter's affections, her view of love or partnership or whatever someone might call it all.
Rose pulled her robe close together, felt her breasts react to the mix of emotions this moment evoked in her. Nodding, she moved inside with her mother and spoke of herbs and flowers and a dress on order but really her stomach was churning and she daydreamed of vomiting up bile so that all her demons would be excised if she purged enough.
She moved quickly through the house to her room. Ruth had sold the Main Line mansion Rose grew up in, the massive white thing with the gables and the hunting leases, her father's cellar. The oak of whiskey and the aroma of smoked venison, those were the smells, that's how Rose remembered it all. Ruth paid off some of her late husband's debt, begged some more off due to the sinking, and with the rest of the proceeds from the house she'd bought something smaller but almost superior in its elegance. Returning here, something unfathomable to Rose a year ago today, it was a surreal experience cushioned by the newness of this house, of its relative modesty compared to Ruth's previous existence. They had one maid, who helped to cook for them as well. One too many, but marginally forgivable? Rose hated to think of it. She loved Lena but she hated to think of it.
The windows were huge, all of them. Light danced around Rose down the hallway and she closed her eyes just briefly against the headache.
"Vino, vino, no more vino for awhile," she laughed to herself breathily as she closed herself in her little room, threw her robe upon the floor and felt for a split second so exposed even in the privacy. She didn't look at her own body enough anymore; when she did she tended to see it through Jack's eyes, through his eyes as a lover and it was too broken a concept to embrace. Joseph had held her several times. They'd kissed, twice; the first time, she'd swept her tongue across his lips, hungry, seeking out what she knew of it all now, seeking some passion but she'd ended up embarrassed at his shock. When she looked in his eyes she wondered if he'd ever understand what her body had been through or what she knew of the world now. If his well went that deep. She suspected it might, for he was sharp and compassionate, his brown eyes warm and full of patience.
She ran her forefinger over the tapered curves of her abdomen as she dressed, as she smoothed over the silk of her chemise but all she could feel was Jack's hand. His hands were rough, roughened by those years of working odd jobs. There was a scar on the side of his left one from when he'd mishandled a wire cutter. In the mornings he'd come up behind her as she dressed. Breath on the back of her neck, those hands over the thin fabric at her waist.
"Maybe it was this that saved us, the warmth of our hands together."
Rose looked down at the jumble of their fingers, mixed and all clinging, at her waist. He'd just showered and come back in from the shared washroom down the hall, he smelled like oatmeal soap.
"You're what saved us." She was so adamant. He had to know. Grasping even tighter, both of them. "You knew what to do, you kept us alive."
Everything around her, such a blank slate. The clean lines of rooms Ruth had barely adorned; she'd sold off most of the art, the contents of John Bukater's once-cavernous library. This room, hers but it didn't feel as such even after months, just a bed with white linens and the sunlight. A small maple desk with a dozen books she wanted to read but couldn't bear to crack the virgin spines of. A thousand-page tome on Renaissance art begging for her. The notebooks, Ruth had bought them. A pen Joseph brought over last week and said, simply, "use it to write all the dreams down." But she couldn't quite budge past the vacant phase yet. Nothing felt solid. Nothing felt like a commitment. Even the work she did, teaching English at a settlement house in the city, was rewarding but she refused to let it dig deeper inside. She was a machine there, words and sentences on lined notecards, and smiles, to be sure, but she owed those people more; the children would break her, sometimes, break her open and she'd sing little tunes or laugh at their jokes. But she couldn't latch on. The people, they reminded her too much of those who'd inhabited the boarding house she'd lived in with Jack; the constant chatter, the smells of food from a thousand lands, it was gorgeous and bustling but it also reminded her of failure. Of her own inability to sacrifice. Of her privilege she couldn't overcome.
She watched her mother a lot now. As they ate their lunch, mostly in silence, she watched and she wondered how much she hadn't seen before. The way Ruth sighed when she read the newspaper. The attempts at conversation. The way her eyes watered when she was worried. When her father was alive they were a unit of two, something Ruth sat outside of and Rose honestly didn't know how that had originally transpired. John and Rose, they had their love of art and the duets at the piano and all the joy of the adoration, the bear hugs, the emotion that fits in the palm of your hand. Had John made Ruth the enemy early on somehow? Had Rose? Had they unfairly locked her out, and if so, had all of it culminated in Ruth's collapse into the Hockleys? Her complete adulation of a family rich in gold but deeply impoverished in its morality?
She chewed. It was too loud. A radish cracked between teeth.
"We should try to talk with Molly today. Is she in Denver, is she reachable?"
Ruth visibly warmed at the mention. Molly Brown, once so anathema to some degree of sophistication that Ruth blindly coveted. But she'd been the reason Ruth maintained sanity through the sinking, through the long days and nights on board Carpathia. Molly and Helen Churchill Candee had shared a room with Ruth, held her down in the sobs when she thought Rose had disappeared into the water, held her even more when Rose had been discovered below decks with Jack and refused to see her. They'd kept Cal away. It had been Molly who stuck by the situation to a fault, who had facilitated the contact between Ruth and Rose in the weeks following but had also secured the spot in the boarding house for Rose to share with Jack. She'd filled out the forms for them. Jack and Rose Dawson, so no questions would surface from the relief agency. No judgments, only good, from Molly, only the desire to help each of them individually in the hopes that reunion and reconciliation might be possible down the road. Molly had been audibly shaken when she heard Rose's voice across the telephone line from the Bryn Mawr house. She'd asked if Jack was with her. When Rose croaked out a "no" so pained it sounded like the midnight calls of a dying animal, Molly had known, hadn't she.
Everybody knew. Love does not conquer all. It doesn't bridge the divide.
"You know what I think about the most?" The sincerity in Ruth's voice startled Rose often, now. Yet another thing she couldn't recall from the before. Perhaps it was all a product of the trauma. Rose raised her eyebrows in reply, nodded in a waiting. "That I never felt the water. Not a drop. The ship sank, the flailing, the rowing, all of that cold water and I never felt it. All night I was dry, I don't know how." Ruth's voice cracked and Rose sat up straighter, pursed her full lips, attempting to defy the emotion of the moment. The type of anger she'd nurtured, it dies hard. Cal's sinister face, the sting of his hand on her cheek, it was still so fresh, even a year later. "But you were in it. All the way in it."
"We were." The "we." Eight months and it hadn't gone away. She saw her mother pause at it. At him, at the thought of him. Ruth had never spoken his name. When Rose arrived early that stifling summer morning, full of headache and heartburn and dehydrated, Ruth had paused only for about ten seconds in the reality of it before opening the door all the way. A thousand things unmentioned but understood. That Rose had lived with a man outside a marriage for four months. That she had lived on the other side of anything the DeWitts or the Bukaters had ever, ever been. That she was, in the vocabulary of the Main Line life, tainted, ruined, any word for broken you could think of.
"I suppose I'm sorry I don't understand that part. I…" Ruth swallowed, sat a fork down. "I'm sorry that I don't, Rose." Her voice retained that stilted tone, ingrained from fifty years in the milieu, but a year ago she never would have offered up an observation such as this.
"Maybe one day I can help you, to understand it better." Rose met her mother's gaze. "I can try. I think there's a huge moat still between us, Mother, but I can try."
Moments like this were new. Eight months of building. Every metaphorical stone placed with sore arms, with fear; for every conversation they had now, twenty over the course of the fall and winter that had ended in tears. Many had ended in Ruth's insinuation that Rose should be ashamed of her prior choices, of her time with Jack. Soaked in the mores, soaked to the bone in tradition, Ruth had been convinced that Jack would never have made an honest woman of her daughter, would never have taken a knee or taken a vow. And perhaps she was right, Rose often thought, perhaps that was the soul of her taking leave. Perhaps Ruth had been right all along and the sting of that took a tremendous amount of getting used to.
Ruth hadn't said it outloud to her daughter yet but Joseph Calvert was precisely, she knew, the type of man who took a knee and took the vow. And unlike Caledon Hockley (who, in hindsight, even Ruth understood now to be a bullet dodged), a man like Joseph Calvert, with the type of gentle manners and compassion groomed into and unto him by the mid-level Main Line family he emerged from, would actually mean it. The vow.
He was confident, the middle of three brothers. Ruth knew his parents. Rose had played with him as a child, only three years younger than him and they'd run together at the manicured park in Rosemont. One summer she'd followed him about like a sick puppy, her auburn curls wild in the breeze. Joseph had brown hair so dark it was almost black, his whole family did, and his eyes were the same as they'd been as a child, a deep amber and warm. He and Rose had begun to speak to one another at church on Sundays, as Joseph taught mathematics at a private boys school just across from the college in Bryn Mawr now. He'd never be as wealthy as his father and he seemed fine with that. Ruth could see through to the light of a calmness like that now, now that she was thankful to have what she did. Still so much more than most.
Of course there was the question of what Joseph knew of Rose's past. It was a constant shuddering in Ruth's body, the worry of what Jack Dawson's mark on Rose would do the rest of her life; not to mention that it was invisible, wasn't it, the sheer pain in Rose, to the naked eye, but Ruth knew the scars were fresh. She suspected that Joseph's even temper and warm sensibilities might be the balm. For Rose, for all of it. But she was done pushing her daughter into anything. Never again. The relationship blossoming between Joseph and Rose had been of their own creation thus far and would stay that way.
But a hitch. There was always this hitch.
She saw it today. She was headed out for a dinner with Victor's cousins, visiting from France, when Joseph arrived and she watched Rose's body language, felt a fluttering against her ribcage; was it adrenaline, was it some sort of revelation she'd now always have, that part of her daughter was missing? Rose was half-awake in this world, which is far better than dead, but half-awake would never be enough for a heart like hers. Her daughter would shrink more, Ruth feared, shrink and shrink into this paralysis, into this living halfway.
She wore the same simple peach day dress from earlier (for she never changed throughout a day anymore, those habits were gone in Rose), pleated at the chest and conservative but feminine, modern. Her hair was down save for a silver clip above her left ear. If you didn't know Rose before it all you'd already think she was the most gorgeous woman in any room, Ruth thought, but if you knew her before you knew her eyes weren't always a tad sunken in like this. That once she smiled all the time. That once her giggle could save a whole day from its doldrums. Before John's death, before Hockley, before this Dawson stomped her heart out. Rose had yet to tell her exactly what happened between them. Ruth had supposed it involved an unwillingness to settle down, to marry; when her daughter showed up at her doorstep that August day she was surprised to feel relief but also sadness. She'd seen Rose's body around that boy, her mannerisms, the lucid sparkle in her eyes; that the love had died somehow for her daughter, that would never bring happiness, no matter how glad she was to see someone like Dawson out of their lives.
Ruth left with the quiet click of a door, as quiet as she could be. A church mouse. A baby's breath. It wasn't just now. She tried to be as quiet as she could around Rose all the time. Years of being too loud with her. Years of stepping on her neck, one way or another.
The sitting room in this house was its jewel. An addition to the original floorplan, it stretched on its own to the northeast. Its windows doubled as doors and Rose had opened several of them, so a fresh breeze blew up the eggshell-colored curtains. Silk in whooshes. She'd made a pot of jasmine tea (her favorite scent in all the world) and Joseph sat before her, his bearings and his disposition the same as they always were-even, orderly, but also somehow generously open. When they were children he'd been the same way, already in three-piece suits at age ten, she recalled, walking around with a discarded timepiece from his father and acting the part of a baron or a bank manager, it depended on the day; he'd had a lisp, then, but it was long gone. His smile was warm. His teeth were gorgeous, straight.
"I just read that the college acquired a Degas, of all things," he sat his teacup down and leaned forward, balancing his elbows on the knees of his navy slacks, "and I thought of you, of course." His voice lowered an octave. "I hope it's okay to speak of it." She'd told him about the paintings. Swollen and drowned, how she envisioned them on the ocean floor now covered in crabs. Not that they mattered, the art, so much in the grand scheme of all that had happened but she was haunted by the dancers, by their positions suspended in mid-air and how she'd wanted to just gaze upon them once more; the realization that she was fine with losing things but that the emotions and that version of herself that had bought them, loved them, it was all worth mourning. Degas. Monet. Jack's excitement as he ran to them, his coat billowing behind. But she couldn't tell Joseph that part. Sure, perhaps she could, but she hadn't. He knew she'd been in New York following the sinking. He knew about Cal; the entire fucking city knew about Cal, didn't they. But Joseph didn't know about Jack, nothing beyond the shadowy gossip that had followed her. Nothing to touch, nothing concrete.
"Of course it's okay." She sighed, crossed her legs rather casually and leaned back into her chair, a Rococo revival with needlework that Ruth had saved from the fire sale; the seat was embroidered with roses. "I think about them all the time. But you know the thing about Degas." She felt enlivened because he looked as such, by her. A little tug in her chest said, with vigor, no. A little tug in her stomach knew she was breeching something; was it his heart? Were they there yet? She was only eighteen but she knew now, she knew the look of a man enamored. Perhaps it was dishonest to present this way, this prepared for joy, knowing that when she went to sleep tonight she would walk back willfully into the dark. "I tried to tell my mother about this and she shushed me. But he doesn't even identify with the Impressionists, not really."
"Really?" He laughed. God, did he laugh when she seemed happy. Rose couldn't deny how addictive it felt. "That's all I know of him, so here now I feel ignorant. Enlighten me, Rose." The way he pronounced her name. One syllable but he worked at every part of it.
"You know about Degas, then, about the dancers? They're not happy, it's not as pure a thing as the paintings would…"
"I know, Jack," she laughed and put both of her hands on his face, rushed into him with a frantic kiss to the top of his nose. "I may have been sheltered but I'm not an innocent. Those dancers are prostitutes. I've been to Paris, I know about the seedy underbelly of the ballet."
He looked down at her in wonder and she was amazed, for the four-thousandth time, it seemed, that two people who had become captivated by so many of the same things of this world had found one another in the circumstances in which they did. She thought about the first time she saw his face, windblown on a deck below her.
The bed creaked beneath them. It was old. Everything in the boarding house was old and decrepit except, she thought with abandon, this love and how they nurtured it. Despite the tragedy now melded to them. They'd just made love. She felt sweat beads creeping up on her shoulders, at the top of her breasts. She didn't care. Skin on skin on skin, with him, that's all she wanted.
"If you want to know the truth, I am amazed, still." His mouth found hers. Just for one beat.
"At my lack of innocence?" She laughed against his mouth, a laugh fluid and sweet like honey.
Joseph seemed a bit shocked at her tangent off into the private mens' rooms of the French opera houses, but he covered tracks well. He was bewitched by the way she flirted with impropriety. He'd never ventured far off any path laid out for him. His spirit was jubilant, though, it was accessible. He was accessible. She wondered sometimes if some of his innocence is what she needed infused back into her life. They reached for the last macaron on a tiny tray at the same moment and she pulled her hand back quickly. Expecting sparks but, for her, they were evasive. She couldn't be so hard on the process, though; she reminded herself, or at least attempted to, a reminder that the adrenaline of what she'd known before, infused with an unprecedented immediacy, made comparison a horrific folly.
For, importantly, Joseph didn't lack passion. He had, in fact, a great amount of purpose and it pulsed through him, gave him the tick of his palm constantly moving against his left thigh. Rose sipped her tea, listened to him talk about his students; most of them were thirteen or fourteen, thus confused and messy and loud but many of them were also sharp, headed to Ivy League schools. Passion, in how he spoke of his work. He'd studied mathematics at Amherst. There were moments Rose felt lost in what he spoke of, probability theories, statistics, but the universality of ardor makes it its own language, in a way.
"Would you have dinner with me tomorrow night?" The way he sighed into the question. She was warm from it. She said yes. She melted into a yes. Those two halves of her, pointing in opposite directions. One year ago today, she'd been at attention. Pointed only one way. With Jack, to Jack. To a horizon they fetishized. Some nights she still awoke in a sweat because she'd seen them in a dream, on the surf, out in California, their horses dancing with one another as water sprayed and the complete manifestation of their love became this physical memory. But she'd wake up and it was a ghost and she remembered it hadn't happened at all.
The horizon, faded.
And sometimes she was so angry to think that he'd started it. It was the struggle of her life, now, and he'd started it, hadn't he, pulled her into his world and held her eyes open, until she barely wanted to lose a fraction of a second blinking. Put his hands on her waist and her face. His lips all over her. What choice did she have then, but to give into that type of fervor? To that fairytale? Was she a ghost that haunted him, too, she wondered? Did he wake up sunken into a bed and aching for the dreams that didn't and wouldn't come true?
Deep down she knew it wasn't fair. To hold him accountable for it all. She jumped, he jumped. For four months they'd been in tandem, for better or for worse. High highs, lowest lows; the fights she'd started, now shuddering at the memory of them, at the way she'd beaten his kindness like a punching bag, demanding the impossible. She'd taken a man full of freedom and joy, hadn't she, and saddled him to promises they'd made when they looked at that first sunset, before the whole world crumbled right beneath them.
"You jump, I jump, right?"
"Right."
Certainly a promise that she hadn't kept, not by a long shot now. And so now she walked through each day, trying, often trying, but also actively grieving. Grieving, though, for the living.
April 15, 1913
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York
Jack's head fucking hurt.
A headache that enters through the nose (this particular dryness likely ignited by the smoke at the pub the night before) then creeps up into the sinus cavities and radiates through the forehead. Pressure. Less pain, more a pressure that he couldn't shake no matter how hard he pushed on his temples and willed it away. He sat up in his bed and lit a cigarette, probably the last thing that would ease the misery, physically anyway, but sometimes the drag of one was the only motion that could dull his senses to a tolerable level. The way his breath sounded when he sucked it in. That sound had been with him, had reverberated in his own head in comfort, for a long time now. His parents lowered into the ground, one at a time, that sound. Nights out under the naked sky in a thousand places, that sound. Hungry, sometimes, sore, lost and exhilarated on those travels in equal measure, that sound. The very first time he saw her, that sound.
The silence after she left, that sound.
He hadn't scratched out the days on his wall with ink but he'd considered doing so; instead he did it in his head, every morning awakening to the visual just under his eyelids, one more black line added. Long heavy lines of them now, taunting. Two hundred and forty days since she left. Two hundred and forty days since she didn't turn back. And, thus, two hundred and forty days of trying to become some new version of a man. Of walking by the train station, sometimes multiple times per day, but the choosing of the staying still, rooted in the place where she screamed it at him. To let it go. To let her go.
There had been wolves over her shoulder, over his, that whole time. He realized that now.
One year ago today they'd woken in a lifeboat slowly taking on its own water, their feet so numb that they feared frostbite, amputation, feared their bodies would never function properly again. Their hands had frozen together. A metaphorical feast, wasn't it? A few hours after that, awoken by a steward on the Carpathia after being literally lifted upon it (while mostly unconscious) in woven sacks. He'd assumed that was the worst of it, the way every muscle felt bruised. And so he'd coasted through the after. Lost in every kiss, grateful for every moment. Working himself to the bone to try and get them somewhere. But to presume that everything will be good after one thing that was so implausibly bad, Lord, what a dangerous game. The wolves, they'd watched Jack and Rose. Watched them as they screamed down a coaster at Coney Island and Rose grabbed his left thigh so tightly he felt a shiver down his spine and he adored it. Wanted that feeling forever. Watched them as they danced in the tiny room in the mornings, to no music. Watched at night when she allowed him to undress her, every centimeter of her ivory skin like a gift and he worshipped at the altar of how pleasure played across her face. This woman he'd never expected, in circumstances he'd never have been able to conjure. She'd left her entire life behind, for them to have a chance.
"Jack, let me do the undressing once, for Christ's sake," laughing, and she placed her soft hands on top of his where they'd been poised on the buttons of her blouse; he could remember feeling nervous maybe seven times in his entire adult life and this was, suddenly, one more of them. Which made no sense. They'd made love almost a dozen times by now, their two bodies a unit, snug when they were bare, unashamed at every angle.
But she was so beautiful, and nothing lessened the impact of that. Every time was different. And so this one would be because her fingers danced in a brand new way, came hungrily to his shirt and removed it quickly, cloth over shoulders and he was shaking.
"I love the red of your cheeks right now," she paused and, God, when she did, her lips popped open, closed, "I like making you blush."
The juxtaposition of how she'd wanted him, how they'd just inhaled one another, against the brutal facts of her departure. For eight months it hadn't made sense. How does one make sense of a living nightmare?
He'd moved from the boarding house he'd shared with Rose. Two days after she'd shut that ugly, peeling door behind her. He couldn't sleep in it. It had taken him all of forty hours to become a shell of a person. She'd left herself behind. The feeling of her but also little pieces, real pieces. A nightgown that smelled like her. Eucalyptus, a dull citrus. By the bed a tin of the beeswax balm she put on her lips and hands. Notes to him, written when he'd gone to work before she awoke or when he worked until long after she had fallen asleep on top of a novel. A short grocery list scribbled on the back of a receipt from a department store: sourdough bread, butter, coffee, matches. They hadn't purchased much. There wasn't much money. She'd managed to pack most everything quickly. Except for those morsels. He saved only one note, just one sliver of paper so he could trace her name, or his the way she wrote it, from time to time. It was thin, already, cracking in the back flap of his wallet. He lived three blocks south now, but those three blocks had proven enough to numb out the initial shock. New people. He kept his distance most of the time, but it was nice. That they were there.
He couldn't leave. Which was odd, for him, of course. Before her he'd never stayed in one place for longer than a few weeks. It would be so easy to adapt to the knapsack of a life again, to pack a pathetic amount of things into a bag and hit the road to focus on all the not things; but if he did there would never be any hope of her again. She could find him here, still, he felt. In the vicinity. Circling. If he left, if he was everywhere and nowhere, it was a coffin. He'd be putting them in a coffin.
Inexplicably he'd thought that the catharsis of the sinking's anniversary combined with a near-handle of whiskey might clarify things. But, unshockingly, nothing in the processing of it had budged. All that really transpired was that he had to remove himself from a devastatingly awkward situation; eight months and he'd avoided one like it. But things began to feel hazy as he'd downed the whiskey, several honey-colored glasses cut only by a little local ginger beer on tap. The pub, vast and shadowy in its high ceilings and wood-paneled walls, provided a fair amount of anonymity. Students from the art schools came here. The warehouse workers came here. Off-duty policemen. A patchwork of people to disappear into. He sat at a two-top near the bar, by himself, alternating tapping his chewed-down fingertips on the wood with sketching lines of nonsense on a paper in his portfolio.
All of his sadness about Rose, usually diffused over hours and days and spotty sometimes when he had a good day working, or the sun shined bright and he made it to the Great Hall at the Metropolitan, was lassoed, now, into a brick in the center of his chest. His hair had gotten long again. He brushed it back, angrily, angry at so many little parts of himself he could barely keep track anymore.
She was sitting at the corner of the bar, writing in an old leather notebook. Her fine posture, the blouse with the lace and the pearl buttons at its collar, it all seemed wildly out of place in the darkness, next to the boisterous shouts of three men throwing darts. One almost hit her shoulder yet she only shuddered for a quick second, glanced up at them, communicated their gross error with a single look. Jack laughed to himself, a shocking instant, sucked down a piece of ice. He'd met her before. Briefly. She was quite possibly the only woman who came in here, regularly anyway, and Jack had witnessed a near-altercation several weeks prior in which a man splashing a beer around had attempted to remove her. The owner stood strong, so had she. The gut-punch of the truth was that he hadn't thought much about being with a woman since Rose left. He admired some, the forms of them in the park, on a street, anywhere; his body wasn't a dead thing, not by a long shot. But the only reason he'd given this woman more than a passing glance was her hair. Her hair. It was the color of red autumn leaves, the ones that almost look a marred purple in the right light. Braided into a knot at the back and dappled with bits of amber.
Her name was Eva. And he'd known, even in the muck of all the drink, what he was doing. Of course he did, deep down. So he was almost shocked when her voice sounded a little deep, a little hoarse, so much had his rattled mind convinced itself that she was some version of Rose he could experience. A ghost floated above his head, a little whispering voice that kept saying, so low, "no, no, it won't work." But that hadn't stopped him from saddling up next to her, from watching with a convincing smile as she corrected him in the assumption that she was a writer of some sort. No, she was an artist. Had studied in Paris for four months, returned to a little job at a gallery and she painted her friends (both men and women, quick to clarify) in her spare time. She was, without a doubt, the type of mischievous, beautiful woman he would have begged at least a drink's worth of time from in the past, in Paris, in Bruges; he knew what his smile did to women, he'd figured that out, and he'd used it to his advantage a few times.
He'd tried to resurrect that version of himself. Her teeth, white and even as she spoke. Her hand closer and closer to his after a third glass of red wine. A fair amount of common ground to speak of; she'd just spent months immersed in the history of French art, she was a veritable mine of appealing information.
"And I suppose we should head out, then?" She'd looked at him so intensely even as she pretended to focus on gathering her notebook, her bag. The candles on the bar melted in his eyeline, made the whole thing seem like a dream. It must have been thirty seconds of a stare, at least. Decisions made, or in this case, half-made. "I live with three other women, it won't…" Her breath caught in her throat. She was lovely. Huge eyes. Long elegant nose. A light smattering of freckles at each cheekbone.
They'd snuck her up into his room easily; it was almost one in the morning by then, shadows became their eager friend, and the man who ran the desk downstairs was out in a back alley having a smoke. Jack's space. A tiny rectangle, a stamp, just a bed and a small table and one rickety chair. His books. His sketches lining one wall like a waterfall. She'd collapsed happily into his sheets and for about five minutes he kissed himself out of it, out of the grief, coasting into the warmth. The sound of their bodies settling into one another. She was confident, pulling on his shoulders, pulling his body directly on top of hers, tongue exploring and he realized that he'd actually have to do very little to be and have this experience, which was a simultaneously exhilarating and melancholy revelation.
He fumbled with the top latch on her blouse. Images in his head clanked like tin types, piled, women before, life before, he tried to create a narrative that this would fit neatly inside. This could be normal. This could be the way out of the sadness, couldn't it, moving on. Be careful, sure, but move on. Eva reached for his collar, moved her slender hands to graze his neck and then began to undo buttons; he nodded, no words, just nodded and tried to bury himself in the whole of it.
Pale skin. Her limbs, so lively. There for him.
"Come on, Jack, you don't have to smooth over any bits at all." Rose looked up at him, hazel flecks dancing in the blue of her eyes; the blue, sometimes the color of the sea in a storm, sometimes darker when she was upset. Sometimes, inexplicably, lined with jade. "Tell me one thing, tell me about one girl." She laughed and he felt her body shift and vibrate below his, her bare breasts against his chest and it was so hard to focus on anything. "I won't be jealous, I have you now, they don't."
She did have him, didn't she. He rushed to kiss her, once, twice, their lips together a glorious snapping sound.
She did this sometimes, asked about the women before her. He shook his head in jest, usually, dismissed it. It was all nonsense now, but she seemed to not quite believe him on the subject.
"How could it matter," another kiss, "nothing, no one," another, "can compare to you, to us." She smiled and she would have stopped there, he knew, but he wanted to show her he trusted her. Sighing, he sat up, crouching and full of wonder to see the entirety of her, wild hair like flames splayed back against the white of her pillow. "There weren't as many as you're thinking...Rose…" She giggled, reached just a forefinger to his abdomen. Her featherlight touches sometimes were the most ruinous. She was silent, though, waiting. "When I was in Paris, I stayed with a family who had a printing business, worked for them. Made deliveries. They had a daughter who was my age."
"And you wooed her?" Rose looked drunk on the information, and he couldn't tell if that was a good thing yet.
"She wooed me, more, I'd say," he brought his thumb to trace her bottom lip, serious again, "Rose, I loved my life, my freedom, but I didn't really know what living was until I met you, does that make any sense?"
It was such an inconsequential thing, for Jack to move his face a few inches then and bury it in Eva's hair, which she'd taken down. It was a split second and then everything was wrong. Whatever coma he'd been lulled into, it lifted, leaving behind a frenetic jerk of a motion as he pushed his head into his own mattress, searching for the words as knives dove into his chest, his stomach. Perhaps it had been the scent of her hair, decidedly un-Rose and his senses had finally alerted him to the mistake he was in the middle of. Lilies, a sickly floral, it wasn't right. A few seconds later Eva seemed to become aware of his shift to hesitancy and worked to pull him in closer, as if she could correct their course by being a bit more forceful.
Jack winced, now, thinking about the evening's final few moments. Her frantic dressing, cheeks flushed and the embarrassment. He'd tried to explain. That it wasn't about her. He'd gone as far as to plead a bit, not typical of him at all, begging that she not leave with the impression that anything was wrong with her. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her. She just wasn't Rose, which was a circumstance that Eva not only knew nothing of but could have done nothing to help even if she had.
Everything, everything that was wrong, was with him.
He stared down at his hands this morning. His left one, now plagued occasionally with tremors, lasting damage from the cold water. It seemed to worsen when he was upset; the evening Rose left he'd had to clamp it down with his other hand, anchor it to a surface as it vibrated so quickly as to almost seize. Today it moved, just a little, in tandem with the adrenaline churning in his stomach. He'd realized something, while literally on top of Eva and working furiously to prove that Rose had been correct. Somewhere deep down maybe he'd wanted what she'd shouted at him that night to be correct. That maybe what they had was lightning but it couldn't be contained, that they'd perhaps be better off without the pain and the conflict that had settled in as intimate bedmates to their passion. That there was an Eva out there and it would be calmer, easier, like melting butter sliding but what could be truly interesting about it? Would she be jealous now, Rose if she'd seen him with her?
"Jack, I can't sit in this damn room anymore, I can't just waltz about the park seventeen times a day waiting for something to happen!" She'd said it a dozen times before, but softer previously. He'd been working 55-hour weeks at a paint supplier's for almost four months now, a monotonous experience that made his nostrils smell constantly of chemicals and his head, heavy like it was filled with lead weights. He was glad to do it, though, to get him and Rose somewhere, anywhere.
And then the refrain, his voice a grunt. Their muted pleading reverberating in that small space. The sounds of the family in the next room over, a mother who shouted about soup and two kids who liked to throw marbles against the wall. A constant reminder, all the families, all the couples, here, that they presented to their new little world as husband and wife but were, in actuality, not that at all. He'd started to feel the strain of it.
A ring would cost weeks of his pay.
"Rose, we can't get anywhere without money, it's not…."
"We could. We could do it the way you used to, Jack, we could just pack up and go," and she'd come closer, her face animated, almost primitive, and she looked so hopeful, "the way you were living your life four months ago. We can do it together." He always shook his head as she spoke. This made her angrier. And he'd say that she couldn't handle it, the nights with nowhere to sleep, the long days with little to eat, the cramped trains and bodies covered in sweat. That it was no place for a baby, what if they ended up expecting a baby. They were careful, as much as they could be, but it could happen.
She'd offered to work, he'd insisted that she not; he'd battled so hard to prop up some facade of her former life, to keep her hands clean, which made no sense given his enthusiastic persistence that she shed it all when they were on the ship; when he looked back on it now, on the hollow way he'd spoken to her sometimes, full of platitudes he'd always hated, it was sickening. One afternoon on the way home from work he'd looked in a store window and saw reflected back an emptiness akin to a sad gray sack of a person in a Goya painting. If they were on fire why were they also so very low? Maybe that's why he'd been frozen for months now; she'd called him a coward, and he entertained the notion that she might be right. That when it came down to it he wasn't able to chase the horizon with her as he'd promised. He'd put her on a pedestal, made her too precious.
They'd dug into one another. Become Achilles' heels for one another. When you love someone that hard you also hate them in your lowest moments, and they'd lived out years and years of a relationship all in a matter of weeks.
When he thought about her in Philadelphia. When he thought about her body sleeping alone, how the sheets might drape her, how her face looked in moonlight trickling through an open window. When he thought about the places they didn't go. In darker moments, when he thought about the faint idea that she might not be alone anymore. A shudder at the thought. Surely if anyone had tried to touch her she would have experienced what he did the night before. A physical reaction. No one else would ever work. No one else would ever make his heart race so quickly it became a thump, thump, thump so alarming that it felt as if his chest might explode. And then this indisputable fact that he'd gladly self-destruct for her. He'd become a puddle of nothing for her.
If he went to her and she hadn't changed her mind. If he went to her and she stomped on his heart, danced like Isadora Duncan atop it. But at least he would finally get to tell her. He'd been afraid to disagree with her. Ever, really. But she was wrong about them and he was, suddenly, sure he would tell her so.
"Wine tasting is very different from wine drinking, though," Rose gulped down too much of the Pinot Noir, a cheap bottle, it burned her throat and she laughed so suddenly that a few drops of it flew unto his arm. Looking up at her the laughter became contagious, delicious. "Right now, I'm definitely drinking the wine."
He ducked in to place a kiss on her shoulder, which was bare because her nightgown was sleeveless, just a paper thin thing. Her lips were purple-red from the wine. He went there next, grabbed her bottom lip in between both of his, tried to suck every bit of her in, there.
Hours. Slow kisses, a languid world at night. At night everything was possible and everything was theirs.
"When I was in Burgundy, there was a courthouse that had this visitor's center," God he loved to talk to her about places, "and I wandered in right off the street thinking there would be a water station, maybe maps." She watched him with such reverence when he spoke, those big eyes. "Inside there were these huge cylinders with glass lids you could lift and laid out were all the flavor notes of the wines. Flowers, food, just objects like in a diorama. It was so odd, I was so tired and dirty but suddenly I was in the middle of a wine tasting."
"You have a knack for ending up places you shouldn't be, Jack." She leaned forward and set her cup on the little circular table on her side of the bed. They didn't have wine glasses so they used tea cups. She always slept on the side away from the door. She'd told him she felt protected by him. Her lips hovered, that terroir of the wine, even of this cheap wine, a lingering scent on both of their mouths. "But then you make them yours." A thinly-veiled reference.
Her, she meant her.
Author's Note: Hiiiiiii guys! So here's the scoop: I spent a few weeks debating what chaptered-story I should tackle next and nothing felt urgent. Then I heard the new Taylor Swift album, Evermore, and got so inspired; I can't even properly explain it, just the lyrics that explore yearning, loss, deep love that is gorgeous but also harrowing. Found myself daydreaming about Jack and Rose within that aesthetic. About them in a cinematic arc similar to the movie but more of the movie stretched out, explored in terms of if Jack had survived but they'd been forced to confront life in a realistic sense, in the day to day. Anyway, long story short? This is Jack and Rose in some pain. It's real. It's (I hope!) historically accurate and meant to be immersive. Hope you like it. Timewise it will likely be a slow and methodical update schedule. It's going to be four parts. It took me awhile to finish this first one. I want the whole thing to be polished.
If you're also a Swiftie, you'll probably pick up on the veiled references ;)
Cheers, you guys!