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When he is in bed with his wife, an increasingly infrequent occurrence, Laurie closes his eyes and pictures another face. Jo’s hips gyrate against his, she runs her calloused hands along his chest, and he imagines another pair of hips, another pair of hands, both softer than the ones that press against him now. She leans down and her long hair grazes his neck. He grabs it in his fist and yanks it. She gasps. She yanks his in turn.
Amy March, Amy March, small and pink as a ballerina, Amy blue-eyed and smiling sweetly, she takes up residence behind his eyes on these long, obligatory nights with Jo above him like a man. He grabs Jo’s waist and pictures it narrower, pictures Amy squealing and giggling, slapping his hand away coquettishly. Amy his. Amy Laurence, not Vaughn or March but Laurence. He comes with a gasp and Jo rolls off instantly and returns with a wet washcloth, and they clean up in silence, neither daring ask the other who was on their mind tonight. He’s certain she must have been thinking of that German professor she’d known in New York, that awkward, kindly man who’d failed to come to their wedding. It’s horrible, horrible.
They don’t talk anymore. Not even as friends. Marriage ruined all that. They move as separate entities throughout their big house, she in her corner, writing and reading, he in his, playing the piano and passing the time in pottering and daydreaming. They take their meals together still, for some semblance of something. She talks haltingly of the story she’s working on or the latest adventure she’s read, and he listens earnestly and politely, humming when he ought, nodding and gasping when he ought. Then they bend their heads back over their soup, and the sounds of slurping replace again their voices.
One night she sets her spoon down in a sudden gesture, and looks up at him, wild-eyed, eyebrows taut, her entire mouth quivering.
“Teddy, dear, what have we done ?” She whispers. “We’ve made each other so very miserable.”
He stares back at her and doesn’t know what to say. He swallows another bite. Then he whispers back, “I don’t know.”
She nods and that is all. Good old Jo, he thinks, with a sincere fondness that is still there, that has never left but is not enough to make a marriage.
In the long empty hours he goes on dreaming of Amy. He plays her when he sits at the piano. Tinkling and chimes and glass and laughter. Amy somewhere in Europe with Fred Vaughn, in his arms at balls, in ecstasy with him at night, in love with him in the morning. Smiling at him over cups of tea and behind paintbrushes. Amy’s face never quite reveals itself to him in full, but is always there, slightly fractured and smiling and coy. Amy, Amy, Amy. He places her throughout the house, in a loveseat or under a tree with a lump of clay, where she should be, where he’d might really have had her if he’d thought things through a while longer, or if Jo had been wise and said no.
In February there’s a ball at the Moffats, to which Jo and he arrive two hours late and immediately separate at the door. She takes off almost certainly in search of a corner or plant behind which to read, he in search of the alcohol. He declines offers to dance and suffers through seemingly endless monologues from old men about the state of the economy and of their marriages as they blow cigar smoke into his face. He gets drunk. He stares at the white ankles underneath their shifting gowns. He’s halfway through his third glass when a little silhouette at the back of the room, holding a drink against the curtains, shifts into focus and reveals itself to be Amy March (no, Vaughn) back from Europe, watching the dancers cooly. He starts. Amy, here. Amy, in the flesh. Amy, not a dream or a fantasy but a woman standing by herself in the dark at a ball. Most unusual. Amy is never alone at a ball, is never not dancing. He walks over to her.
“Amy,” he says with a smile, with a slight drunken slur. “Amy, hello.”
She startles. “Laurie! It’s been so long.”
He takes her hand and clasps it tightly, then raises it to his lips to kiss it. As he does so, she tips her face up to him with a radiant smile and he sees, all at once, that she is pale and feverish, with purple shadows under her eyes. The veins in her neck are very visible.
“You’re turned out very elegantly,” he says, then coughs, almost against the very dryness of this dull talk, gives her hand one last squeeze and returns it to her. “Anybody could tell you’re a lady of status from all your silk and pearls. But have you been ill? You look so pale.”
She flaps her hand, the same dainty little hand he has just kissed. “A slight cold. That’s what the wine is for,” she adds, with a kittenish wink. “But you must stay with me a while and tell me everything. How is married life with our Jo? Has she broken you yet? Are you still so madly in love, and are there any signs of babies?”
He laughs and shakes his head. “No babies yet, thank heavens. And Jo is surprisingly peaceable a wife, though she does rather get ink all over my nice white sheets whenever she comes to bed.”
“If that’s the worst of it, then you’ve gotten off easy. Perhaps even more so than I have with that dear cretin --” she nods at Fred Vaugn somewhere in the crowd, “over there. Let me tell you, the things he…”
They stay in that dark corner telling half-truths and frivolous anecdotes and laughing falsely for over an hour. He invents a marriage with Jo, while she speaks of Fred with an almost motherly disgust. It’s frightening, trying to look at her and talk at the same time, trying to make this fragile little Amy correspond with the image of her that has been building in his mind these past months. Her bony shoulders, her scrawny neck, the dullness of her hair; she looks terribly ill, more so than a mere cold. He stops talking and clutches her forearm. “Amy, darling, you don’t look well at all. Are you quite sure you’re alright?”
She gives a shrill little laugh and tugs her arm away. “Yes, of course I am. Don’t be so rude.”
“I’m not being rude! Come now, do old friends really have to treat one another with such absurd courtesy?” He peers anxiously into her pallid face. “I’m worried, that’s all. It’s unlike you to stand alone and not want to dance at a ball. You seem… muted.”
She shrugs and pouts. “It’s a cold, it’s worn me out a tad. I’ll be dancing double at the next one to make up for this disappointment. As a matter of fact, I’ll give you the first dance.” She holds her hand out for him to shake. “I promise.”
He shakes her hand in playful acquiescence but still thinks the logical thing to do would be to take his coat off and put it around her, or command her to go home to bed. Maybe Fred ought to be pulled aside and told to call for a doctor. Stubborn little Amy would rather die than go home early from a party. But she has started talking again, in those silvery, insipid tones, about a dinner party last month that was a complete failure, now about a shopping expedition in Paris, about this and that and there’s something in all of this superficiality that reeks of boredom. Only the unhappy are this insincere. He watches the quick movements of her mouth and hands without hearing her words. To take her in his arms, to kiss her neck, to make her say something real…
Now she is touching delicately the sleeve of his coat and saying, “I must be going now, Fred gets so awfully bored at these things, but I’ll call on you before we go back to Europe and we’ll go for lunch or a stroll. I shan’t forget!”
And Amy Vaughn is gone like Cinderella puff into the night, leaving behind a whiff of perfume, the vague memory two bright, girlish eyes, and a conversation wherein absolutely nothing was said. Laurie goes to the bar to pour himself another glass of wine. Then another. Then another. By the third, Jo is next to him, pouring her own with a wry little smile, all the way up to the brim. They clink glasses. She downs hers in one glorious gulp, then sets it down and winks at him.
“Don’t look so glum,” she says, “you’ll see her by-and-by. Maybe they’ll even move back to Connecticut, who knows. Anything could happen. A beautiful and sordid affair would certainly give me inspiration for my next book…” and she throws her head back and laughs, and so does Laurie. Good old Jo, he thinks again, for the second time in his marriage. He claps her on the shoulder.
“I’ve been such a fool,” he announces, in vaingloriously self-pitying tones, “and I’ve made an ugly mess of everything. I hope you can forgive me one day.”
Jo shakes her head. “It was me who was stupid enough to say yes.”
“I suppose, yes.”
“Drink to that? To our stupidity?”
“Of course.”
They both laugh again, then he offers her his arm and she takes it, and they go out proudly together, drunk and generous and grinning, not bothering with any compulsory goodbyes but doing things in the way they have always done them, which is to say without thinking. Yes, they leave the ball not like a married couple but like two gentlemen, incredibly, unspeakably fond of one another but with not a hint of romance or desire between them. They sleep in separate beds that night and he lays awake thinking of Amy’s laughing face.
A week later the letter arrives. Very simple, very dryly written, as though a commission for a new public building instead of a death announcement. Amy Vaughn, née March, 23 years old, scarlet fever, will be buried February 25th Concord Cemetery, survived by husband Fred Vaughn, mother Margaret March, sisters Josephine Laurence and Margaret Brook. Jo flies into a rage. Books are tossed, ink splattered all over valuable paintings, fine china smashed.
“The dirty bastard, he never thought to write to Marmee or any of us and tell us she was ill? The poor thing must have wondered why we didn’t come!” She grinds her teeth furiously. “Bastard, idiot, layabout…”
Laurie sits quietly in an armchair, watching this incredible fit, and says nothing. Almost certainly because he has nothing to say. In him there is a yawning, pale emptiness growing and growing. Because Amy is gone, or because there is nothing now left to dream about? Because he loved her, or because they have grown up? Jo is sobbing on the couch now. She has lost two of her sisters. She does not love the man she has married, nor does he love her. And that is all. Amy is gone, she has taken her mysterious smile with her, she has taken painting and silk dresses and blue hair-ribbons, and daydreams of a tryst in the garden, and girlhood, yes, above all, girlhood. Amy is gone. She didn’t seem to know she was dying when she was. Or she did, and was coy and flirtatious about it. Amy March, flirtatious about death! And why not? He touched her thin arm and she snatched it away and she was dying that night. And that is all; that is all.
Jo, having worn herself out at last, lies limply on the sofa with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Laurie stands and goes to the drinks cabinet, asks if she wouldn’t like a whiskey. She shrugs. Her tear-stained face and her frazzled hair make him want to hug her as tenderly as child. But he does not dare. Instead, he pours out two glasses, brings one of them to her, and they drink them together in silence.
Jo’s hand slips, almost despite itself, into his and he takes it and squeezes it very hard, and they understand without needing even to look at one another that there is nothing to say, no need for words, that this is their life and they will have to make the best of it, and Amy is dead, and so is Beth, and they are married. Poor Amy. Goodbye to her white shoulders. To all the misery that was in her eyes that night. To her frustration with Fred Vaugn and with life in general. Goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye Amy. Laurie takes Jo in his arms and kisses her. So, this is what is to be. There is not another version, unless Jo writes it for them. He’ll have to ask her when she’s less distraught to write them both a love story and get it right, with different protagonists and different endings. They’ll have a good laugh over that. And he knows Jo, she’ll write it well, she’ll understand just what he means.