PROLOGUE
As a child, there were many people who implanted all the tenets of marriage, bundled all neat and tidy. One, sometimes men would stray, but he would make up for it when he was nice and showered you with presents and gave you a home to furnish. Two, be a lovely wife so that your husband may have no reason to stray. Three (and most importantly): a woman came to love after marriage. When she found herself at the altar, she most definitely mixed up all three and perhaps that was her first mistake. She assumed that since she had violated that vital rule, then perhaps their romance could withstand the New Age.
By 1924, her husband had left her. In the immediate fallout, stunted by the immediacy, she was left unable to find the reason.
April 1916
When she first saw him at sixteen, he had just returned from London. His tweed three-piece smartly pressed, blonde hair rebelliously vibrant in the wind, his gray eyes teeming with curiosity for life. She fell for him before he even uttered a word, and such intelligent, sweet words he subsequently uttered that it completely sealed her fate to his whim.
It became her foremost assignment to learn all about him. He was an Oxford man, back in the States after his first-year, on sabbatical to care for his ailing father. His favorite author was Charles Dickens. He preferred tea and not coffee. He wanted to pursue journalism, to write about Woodrow Wilson's re-election, the situation in Mexico, the ongoing war in Europe. The only thing she knew about Wilson was his most unusual and swift remarriage after his wife's death and the fact that he did not care for women's suffrage. In response to the latter, she was unsure of her opinion–she was far too young and pretty to think about a thing like voting.
She told him so and he laughed, calling her charming, and so she continued to be charming as he explained the economy, American neutrality, and the timelessness of classical architecture. There was a wonderful way he spoke about the world that demanded her to listen. Humans, roaming like the Olympians, and nature so lush and life-renewing, he magnified the beauty in everything to the point she took his word as Scripture.
She could seldom find anything wrong with Ashley Wilkes and for this perfection she loved him.
"When I see the rolling hills, the underbrush of willows, the scent of fresh grass, I'll be reminded by your softness, the passion for living in your green eyes."
In retrospect, it was idealistic and naive, but at sixteen, the words shook her soul and she wished to lay down on a meadow of flowers beside him, to live in the world as he envisioned.
After his brief stay he promised to write to her. After his next visit, beneath the solitary moon, he kissed her. She kept one of his letters under her pillow, spritzed with a spray of his cologne and felt as if he were perpetually beside her.
Dearest Scarlett,
The other day I had the peculiar thought of us in old age, talking as if we never aged from sixteen and nineteen, seventeen and twenty, eighty and eighty-three. I don't mean to slight you by referencing your age–I only hope that you realize my commitment to you, that I see you by my side as a man would want a woman. Your vivacity, your loveliness, your charming quips, I feel as if I could live beside you forever.
It is not long until I can return to Atlanta.
She replied:
Ashley darling,
Your words excite me. If I could, I would pack my luggage and book a ship to England–I cannot bear being so far from you. There are so many men around me who try to dissuade me, claiming you are too busy, too self-involved to care for me. I received many proposals, but do not fret for I've rejected them all while awaiting your return. Are there any beautiful women in London? I would hope not, I shall be cross with you, but perhaps I have no right for I am not your wife.
Come home safely, I'll be waiting.
Ashley returned on the New Year's Eve of 1917 with a wrinkle in his brow. She did not notice as they danced close together, her head buried in his shoulder and cocooned so lovingly that she felt nothing could disturb such happiness. His turmoil went without detection until she realized he exchanged his speeches on Shakespeare and the Vienna Secession for the Zimmerman Telegram, bombings, submarine warfare.
By the spring, Wilson decided that the war in Europe was, in fact, their business.
"Scarlett, dear. I think I may enlist."
She hardly remembered her response. She must have thrown a fit, cried, screamed. Perhaps she fainted for the first time in her life. He went on, however, about justice and duty, with the same romanticism that swayed her into loving him. The only thing that brought her to her senses, taming her outrageous scene, was his promise to marry her on his return. So, instead of tweed and wool, she saw Ashley off in his army coat. Rather than literature and journalism, he returned to London to fight for a world where his ideals could flourish.
In such little time, she lost many friends. The Tarleton twins–the rascals who said they would kill themselves and her if she dared accept Ashley's proposal–died in some little forest in France called Argonne. The Doctor's son, Darcy Meade, died in Saint-Mihiel. Frank Kennedy, her sister Suellen's beau, came back crippled with a permanent limp, his foot gone gangrene from the filth in the trenches. But no news of Ashley until the very end, announcing his return.
When he came back, he had all his limbs. But, the sheen to his hair had dulled, the gray eyes murky. The world he held with high regard, now he could no longer stand–the rolling hills, the underbrush of willows, the smell of fresh grass–it reminded him of Europe, he said, without elaboration.
"If you hate it so, let's get away from here, I'll be happy wherever you are."
By spring of 1919, they eloped to New York, a place without memory, to start anew. In the first year, they mulled over many cans of beans while they got their feet up. Ashley got a job copywriting at a newspaper office, editing stories that other people had written. Semicolon instead of a comma. One misspelling of legislation. Put a space between government and subsidies.
It turns out people in New York hardly cared about Oxford men.
Ashley working was not enough, so she found a secretarial position at an advertising office for twenty cents an hour. Her predecessor had quit because she found luck and married an engineer. When Scarlett told her husband this offhandedly, he was cross with her for the entire day.
He had rich dreams of excess for her, with only twenty-five cents an hour in his pocket. Still, she found her small share of extravagance beyond the sterility of concrete, finding meadows in the display case at Tiffany's, or peering through windows on Fifth Avenue, aligning her figure just right in the glass to fit the darling frocks from Chanel, Callot Soeurs, Vionnet. She decided through these frolics that red and green were most certainly her colors.
If she stayed home waiting for him, she would have gone crazy. There was much time to fill without Ashley between three in the afternoon and eight in the evening for they saw each other only in the mornings and at supper. She would think they were roommates and not man and wife if not for the night, clinging to him so tight and filled with a love poverty could not dampen. When he was not tired (which was rare) they were intimate and she was reminded every now and again that he still loved her. Until the morning, and he would be gone again, and she would not see him until supper.
There were no meadows of flowers to lay in, no Olympians roaming. Only the swarm of people getting lost in the big crowd, trying to survive. Ashley was her world alone, until he was not.
In this time, she learned many things about herself.
Her favorite actress was Mary Pickford. She preferred coffee over tea, sometimes with a small dose of brandy. She wanted to be more than a secretary–she wanted to be the one on top, managing the sales of soaps, of millinery, of vacuum cleaners. When asked about women gaining the vote, she would smile coyly and say women can be just as sensible as men, and men can be just as insensible.
She met one of her very first friends this way, out on the town. Cathleen Calvert was manager of the department store near her work and like her, she descended from the long line of good Victorian Southern women who feared the delinquency of the new generation.
"Perhaps, I am evidence that they were right," Cathleen laughed, sipping her tea with refinement. When Scarlett asked what she meant, the reality of the New Age yawned before her.
She was a divorcée, which was surprising, for Cathleen was only two years older than herself. The first few years were swell, until they quarreled nonstop, and by the end of this down period, he fell in love with another woman and wanted separation on account of his infidelity.
"At least he left me this joint, or else I'd starve, so I suppose it isn't the worst."
There must have been a look on her face for the woman smiled, as if she were a woman of middle age, and she were just a child.
"Oh, Scarlett, don't look at me like that, my situation is far from pitiful. I support myself and am free to do what I please. The only person who would be upset is my mother."
After a few of these afternoon teas, they went out to the cinema. One week they saw Fanchon the Cricket. The other week they saw The Divorcee, and Cathleen had a good laugh. Scarlett did not see what was so funny; she'd rather die than be with anyone but Ashley. But, despite her pent-up excitement for moving pictures, she saved it for her good friend's ears only–Ashley was not very fond of her newfound hobby. When she first mentioned their outings, it only sparked a row about her spending habits, but she did not see how it was of any detriment to him. He had his cigarettes and she had her pictures.
When she explained this to him, and he stopped speaking to her, she wondered if he was being daft on purpose.
Author's Note: I had this idea the other day and could not stop writing, so apologies for not working on my other works (I am getting through the next chapter of Age of Appetence as we speak, but I feel these sorts of stories gets me out of a writing slump.) This is inspired by Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrot and When Harry Met Sally..., though the latter becomes more relevant in the second act of this work, with the introduction of a certain ex-blockade runner.
Also to preface: the M rating is due to sexual themes, multiple references to drinking (it is the 1920s after all), and one instance of sexual assault (for this specifically let me know if it is necessary to put a warning in the chapter ahead of time, I'll be glad to do it). Nothing written will be sexually explicit.