T H E A G E O F D I S S O N A N C E (9/9)
dan, blair, serena, others.
4478 words. a re-working of edith wharton's the age of innocence.
summary: Dan has, in many ways, accomplished everything he set out to do. He had a successful marriage, wonderful children, and a rewarding career. But he knows that even so, there has always been something missing.
note: It seems very fitting for me to finish this fic at Christmas considering that is when I started it, for one of my December prompts three entire years ago. I'm happy to conclude it. It might be the longest fic I've ever written (though we know how much of that is due to Ms. Edith herself and not me) and potentially the most ambitious. I hope you guys enjoy the end, and that it was worth me taking three years and a day to finish! Happy Christmas & other holidays & happy Thursday/Friday if you don't celebrate!
e p i l o g u e
Dan Humphrey sits at his desk in his library in his home on East Thirty-ninth Street holding a copy of his newest novel in his hands.
It is his most modern attempt yet and has so far been well received, a lengthy and lingering treatise on memory and history. The writing of it had brought up associations Dan had spent over twenty years of his life trying to forget, but he couldn't deny that the resulting novel far exceeded his expectations.
He sets it aside for now, leaning back in his chair and taking in the room around him, which has remained largely unchanged through the years, no matter the many milestones it has witnessed. This library is where Serena first told him she was to have a child; where Dan began work on what would become his first novel; where their eldest daughter Celia took her first eager and stumbling steps; where their youngest child Laurence uttered his first word (a charmingly unimaginative "da"); where, most recently, their daughter Mattie had announced her engagement to one of Nate Archibald's many sons. It was the room where the family gathered to pass hours playing or reading until they made too much noise and Dan had to laughingly usher them out so he could work. It was where he and Serena would retire fireside to discuss their children, the fears and worries they shared for those three bright futures.
Dan has had a good life. Abandoning the law following Celia's birth had led to staggering success with his writing, and for many years he hadn't been able to stop the flow of words spilling out as fast as his hand could move across the page. Everyone thought it very charming for him to go from lawyer to novelist and for a time Dan was happy to vent his embarrassments and frustrations under the guise of fiction. He had Serena to thank for it; more than anyone else, she had always supported his writing and urged him never to give it up. Dan has, in many ways, accomplished everything he set out to do. He had a successful marriage, wonderful children, and a rewarding career.
But he knows that even so, there has always been something missing.
His desk bears the mementos of his well-lived life: the first photograph he ever had of Serena, tall and strong and beautiful, but also the last, taken a mere six months before her death from the pneumonia that had nearly taken Laurence with it too. She had nursed him tirelessly back to health before succumbing suddenly herself, and in the three years that have passed since, Dan still finds himself adrift without her constant steadying presence. Only yesterday he had found one of her hatpins in his pocket. He has no idea how that happened.
Between the photographs of Serena is one of both their daughters together, two beaming faces that could not have been formed more differently. Mattie is his own clear as day, slight and angular with piles of dark curly hair and a somewhat studious nature that nevertheless holds a hint of her mother's mischief. Celia, on the other hand, is all her mother: blue eyes, windblown blonde hair, and distinctively infectious grin, but she also has Serena's courage of her convictions. Celia makes waves just the same, though she pushes back even harder and more ferociously, and her devotion to suffrage has caused her maternal grandmother more than a few dizzy spells.
Sometimes Dan thinks Serena was a little wistful, if not outright envious, that she had not had the freedom Celia has, or perhaps that she had not pushed harder to have it. She was at the very least a more forgiving mother than her own.
Just then the telephone goes and when Dan answers, it's the very girl he has been thinking of.
"Hello, Dad – I've got a question for you. How do you feel about sailing for Europe? Paris, to be exact. This very Wednesday. It seems a publisher over there has some interest in my manuscript. Yes, I'm still using a nom de plume – I'm not a ninny, I don't want anyone to think I got it because my father's Daniel Humphrey. Just a quick trip, mind – got to be back in time for Mattie's wedding. Please say yes, Dad, I want you there in case it goes well."
"Of course, Cee, I wouldn't dream of refusing." In truth, something in him is unsettled. They used to travel all the time as a family – Serena insisted on it – though, oddly, never to Paris. Dan has not seen Paris since his honeymoon, all those many years ago.
Still, it is a faint and unformed refusal. He wouldn't miss for the world Celia's first chance at publication, though a part of him still laughs uproariously, inwardly, that his name means anything or could confer any kind of unwarranted opportunity. He has been reading his daughter's stories since she was old enough to scrawl, and he will be proud to watch her triumph.
But strange – after all this time, Paris.
* * *
Paris is still the city of Dan's youth, even if his youth is now long behind him. As a mere visitor, the sights and sounds are unchanged to him; without the intimate experience of living on these pretty, tree-lined streets, he has no sense of the little changes that twenty-odd years have wrought. He only sees buildings that seem familiar, architecture that hasn't changed in decades. The scent of coffee and bread outside the cafés, or the perfume of lilacs, brings him back so abruptly to his honeymoon that he could almost feel Serena's hand brushing his. He misses his wife. Even after it all, he misses her.
Throughout the intervening years, Dan had often imagined his return to Paris. Once it had been an impatient and hotheaded vision, Dan disembarking a ship and racing through the streets. As he grew older, the picture changed and finally faded, flickered to nothing. He endeavored to see the city as simply the setting of Blair's life. In idle moments he might think of her taking a stroll down half-remembered streets or adjusting her hat in the breeze off the Seine. When he thinks of Blair Waldorf – for despite himself, he always thinks of her as Blair Waldorf– it is always as one of the heroines of his novels. Paris became the stage on which her life was constructed, a collection of shapes or impressions formed around her, holding her there in amber. It was all fuel for the narrative.
It is another thing entirely to be in the city now.
The richness of experience dwarfs Dan's inane imaginings. He feels positively provincial; what is he except the silly New Yorker who had come to believe Manhattan held everything there was to see in the world? Had he so utterly forgotten the breath and scope outside of it? To relegate Paris to little more than set dressing, and to turn the woman who lives there into a ghost made out of paragraphs – the entire thing feels immature and ridiculous.
Celia comes up beside him and links her arm with his. Her free hand, ungloved, is busy trying to shove loose tendrils of blonde hair back into the safety of her hat; she never seems able to keep all that hair tucked away. "Hullo, Dad. This sure is something, isn't it?"
"Indeed it is, Cee."
They stand together looking down the street for a moment before Celia rouses herself and says, "By the way, I've got a message for you: the Countess Grimaldi expects us both at half-past five."
She says it carelessly, eagerly even, and when Dan looks at her he is strongly reminded of her namesake, that wicked old woman who used to tease him so.
"Didn't I tell you? I'm terribly excited, I haven't seen her since that summer I came to Paris as a girl. So I rang her up this morning and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to see her."
The summer Celia speaks of, when she turned fourteen and became briefly impossible and so was sent away as appeasement (to Mattie's endless wailing), had resulted in one of the more pained winters of Dan's life. He had had to leave the room every time Blair's name came up (which was often, because Celia adored her) and got something of a reputation amongst his children for disliking her. But this feels different. "You told her I was here?"
"Of course! Why not?" Celia leans her cheek against his shoulder as they begin to walk. "What was she like?"
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, come on, Dad, own up! All those years making us believe you didn't care for her! I know you and she were great pals, weren't you? Was she awfully lovely? Mother had a picture of the two of them from ages and ages ago, and every time I look at it, I just see me and Mattie."
Dan swallows with difficulty. "I don't know. She was different."
Celia sighs dreamily. "Ah, there you have it. That's what it always comes to, doesn't it? When that person comes, they're different – and one doesn't know why. That's exactly how I feel about Henry."
"Henry?" Dan repeats. Several different strains of distress are braiding together around him. "Henry Bass?"
"Mm. I think I might marry him, you know. If I choose to marry at all."
Henry Bass had come up to New York following his eighteenth birthday, after the death of his parents and a childhood spent in languid prosperity in Buenos Aires. All of the older set had rather expected the worst from him, but Henry proved himself a relatively somber young man more in the mold of his grandfather than his late father. Only people Dan's age or older even remembered Bass' business failure that had so rippled through New York and sent the man running, or that after his first wife's death he had quietly remarried to the notorious Eva Coupeau. Only twenty years prior, he would have had no prospects at all, and now Dan's own daughter considers him one of the only possibilities for her in the world.
Dan rather thinks cheerful, strong-willed Celia would be a good match for serious Henry, but he's still having trouble with Celia's implications about the Countess.
"You know you are certainly too young to marry," Dan tells her finally, and then follows it with, "Only I don't see how the comparison stands."
Celia lifts her head so she can level him with an unimpressed and knowing look that Dan suspects she got from him. "Don't be prehistoric. Wasn't she once your Henry?"
It wasn't all Rhodes blood that made Celia so unabashedly frank; her candor was a sign of her entire generation, one that seemed not to possess an ounce of reserve. "I don’t know what you mean."
Celia doesn't spare a moment's consideration to her next words. "Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for, only you didn't."
Stunned, Dan can only echo, "I didn't."
"Mother said –"
"Your mother?"
"Of course, who else's mother would it be? The day before she died, when she sent for me, she said she knew we were safe with you and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you wanted most."
Dan can only answer that with silence, suddenly distanced from the arm in his and the pavement beneath his feet. At length he replies, very quiet, "She never asked me."
With both sympathy and exasperation, Celia says, "No, I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other and guessed at what was going on underneath."
Still withdrawn, Dan says, "Don't be cruel, Celia."
A wince mars her brow. "Oh, Dad, don't be angry with me! I didn't mean anything by it. It's just your whole generation."
Despite himself, Dan snorts softly. "No, I'm not angry. Forgive your father, he's a very old man and prone to shock easily."
They share a less eventful lunch, then part so Celia can run some errands, but Dan suspects she devised it as such to leave him time to compose himself again. He has to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of a lifetime.
He's not sure he minds Celia knowing – or, more likely, all of them knowing, considering Celia could never be counted on to keep a secret. It takes him a little while to realize the sensation he is experiencing is relief– to receive some kind of consolation after all this time is humbling, and to learn that the one person to see his pain and pity him had been his wife moves him indescribably.
Blair waits at the close of a few hours' time. Little details of her life have filtered down to Dan through the years, overheard at family functions or glimpsed in letters left abandoned on tabletops. He knows her husband passed without her ever returning to him. It had comforted him to know that, and he was pleased to let the version of her in his mind's eye continue living unattached and free.
He walks through the city until he finds himself at the Louvre. Blair had once remarked to him offhand that she liked to visit there, and the information was upheld by fourteen year old Celia, who spoke at length of their afternoon trips to the museum. It appeals to Dan to pass the hours in a place where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. The idea of her passing her life amongst such beauty is appealing too; he knows such a thing is important to her. He thinks perhaps he has been starved for similar sights.
Studying an evocative Titian, Dan mutters to himself, "But I'm only fifty-two –" and then turns away, impatient.
Dan leaves the museum and wanders, content only to move until he realizes his feet have carried him all the way to the Invalides. Blair lives in one of the nearby squares. He even knows the number, scribbled on a scrap of paper in his daughter's hand so he would know where to meet her.
Dan is overwhelmed, stifled, thinking of the entirety of the world Blair has inhabited without him. Surely his own life, even with its prizes and achievements, is small in comparison; he is just another person to marry young, have children young, and spend his life corralled inside the house he, once upon a time, longed so deeply for. It is strange how desires shift, and how the very things one imagines are designed to fulfill them don't do nearly enough. Dan has been mostly happy; he knows this. But now a life unlived is unraveling alongside his own and the comparison is staggering.
For twenty-five years, Blair's life has been spent in this rich atmosphere, this city of such incomparable beauty. He thinks of the theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations. Dan is so apart from it, so sequestered in the life he built for himself. It seems absurd to think their lives might intersect again, two parallel roads somehow running into one another. Dan has aged. He's gray at his temples and needs spectacles to read. The telephone still startles him sometimes.
Celia finds him sitting on a bench beneath a drooping tree, his gaze lifted to the building ahead as he tries to pick out which window is Blair's.
"Sorry I'm late," Celia says, though she always is, ever the whirlwind. "It's nearly six. Shall we go?"
"Oh, I don't know," Dan says.
She looks at him. "You don't know?"
With a slight smile, Dan tells her, "Go on. Perhaps I'll follow you."
"Do you mean you won't come up at all?" Celia shifts her weight, perplexed, and finally wonders, "But what on earth shall I say?"
His smile stretches. "My dear girl, don't you always know what to say?"
Frowning, Celia determines, "Fine. I shall say you're terribly old-fashioned, and prefer walking up five flights because you don't like lifts."
That amuses him too. "Say I'm old-fashioned; that's enough."
With another very tragic look, Celia turns from him to enter the building. Dan follows her progress in his thoughts, narrating a little like he sometimes does, the effect of too much writing on the mind. She will make her way upstairs restlessly and likely enter the drawing-room with a beaming smile and a skipping step. He sees Blair as he remembers her: small and pale with rich brown curls, only ever smiling a little, her delicate hands decorated with rings. She will be as happy to see Celia as Celia is to see her. But perhaps, just perhaps, after greetings are exchanged she will look past the daughter of her departed cousin and ask, "But where is your father?"
Dan sits for a long time on the bench, so long that dusk rises around him, but his eyes never turn from the fifth floor balcony. At length a servant comes out to draw up the awnings and close the shutters, which Dan takes as a signal to finally get to his feet. He will return to the hotel to wait for his daughter, have a cup of coffee in the interim, and sketch out plans for the next book.
If there is one thing that has lingered round Dan's neck as an albatross all these many years, it is a life of inaction. He has discovered safe ways to be brave, with pen and ink, but ultimately he is nothing like the man he once dreamed of being – a man who sought and made his own destiny.
Momentarily rooted to the spot, Dan thinks finally of a girl who was nasty to him once at a party; who looked at him, lost, with tears in her eyes; who kissed him in a snow-covered carriage and almost immediately regretted it. He thinks of the confidences they once shared, the promises made and kept. He thinks of Blair and he knows then what to do – or perhaps he has always known, and is only now uncovering it.
He goes up.
f i n
dan, blair, serena, others.
4478 words. a re-working of edith wharton's the age of innocence.
summary: Dan has, in many ways, accomplished everything he set out to do. He had a successful marriage, wonderful children, and a rewarding career. But he knows that even so, there has always been something missing.
note: It seems very fitting for me to finish this fic at Christmas considering that is when I started it, for one of my December prompts three entire years ago. I'm happy to conclude it. It might be the longest fic I've ever written (though we know how much of that is due to Ms. Edith herself and not me) and potentially the most ambitious. I hope you guys enjoy the end, and that it was worth me taking three years and a day to finish! Happy Christmas & other holidays & happy Thursday/Friday if you don't celebrate!
e p i l o g u e
Dan Humphrey sits at his desk in his library in his home on East Thirty-ninth Street holding a copy of his newest novel in his hands.
It is his most modern attempt yet and has so far been well received, a lengthy and lingering treatise on memory and history. The writing of it had brought up associations Dan had spent over twenty years of his life trying to forget, but he couldn't deny that the resulting novel far exceeded his expectations.
He sets it aside for now, leaning back in his chair and taking in the room around him, which has remained largely unchanged through the years, no matter the many milestones it has witnessed. This library is where Serena first told him she was to have a child; where Dan began work on what would become his first novel; where their eldest daughter Celia took her first eager and stumbling steps; where their youngest child Laurence uttered his first word (a charmingly unimaginative "da"); where, most recently, their daughter Mattie had announced her engagement to one of Nate Archibald's many sons. It was the room where the family gathered to pass hours playing or reading until they made too much noise and Dan had to laughingly usher them out so he could work. It was where he and Serena would retire fireside to discuss their children, the fears and worries they shared for those three bright futures.
Dan has had a good life. Abandoning the law following Celia's birth had led to staggering success with his writing, and for many years he hadn't been able to stop the flow of words spilling out as fast as his hand could move across the page. Everyone thought it very charming for him to go from lawyer to novelist and for a time Dan was happy to vent his embarrassments and frustrations under the guise of fiction. He had Serena to thank for it; more than anyone else, she had always supported his writing and urged him never to give it up. Dan has, in many ways, accomplished everything he set out to do. He had a successful marriage, wonderful children, and a rewarding career.
But he knows that even so, there has always been something missing.
His desk bears the mementos of his well-lived life: the first photograph he ever had of Serena, tall and strong and beautiful, but also the last, taken a mere six months before her death from the pneumonia that had nearly taken Laurence with it too. She had nursed him tirelessly back to health before succumbing suddenly herself, and in the three years that have passed since, Dan still finds himself adrift without her constant steadying presence. Only yesterday he had found one of her hatpins in his pocket. He has no idea how that happened.
Between the photographs of Serena is one of both their daughters together, two beaming faces that could not have been formed more differently. Mattie is his own clear as day, slight and angular with piles of dark curly hair and a somewhat studious nature that nevertheless holds a hint of her mother's mischief. Celia, on the other hand, is all her mother: blue eyes, windblown blonde hair, and distinctively infectious grin, but she also has Serena's courage of her convictions. Celia makes waves just the same, though she pushes back even harder and more ferociously, and her devotion to suffrage has caused her maternal grandmother more than a few dizzy spells.
Sometimes Dan thinks Serena was a little wistful, if not outright envious, that she had not had the freedom Celia has, or perhaps that she had not pushed harder to have it. She was at the very least a more forgiving mother than her own.
Just then the telephone goes and when Dan answers, it's the very girl he has been thinking of.
"Hello, Dad – I've got a question for you. How do you feel about sailing for Europe? Paris, to be exact. This very Wednesday. It seems a publisher over there has some interest in my manuscript. Yes, I'm still using a nom de plume – I'm not a ninny, I don't want anyone to think I got it because my father's Daniel Humphrey. Just a quick trip, mind – got to be back in time for Mattie's wedding. Please say yes, Dad, I want you there in case it goes well."
"Of course, Cee, I wouldn't dream of refusing." In truth, something in him is unsettled. They used to travel all the time as a family – Serena insisted on it – though, oddly, never to Paris. Dan has not seen Paris since his honeymoon, all those many years ago.
Still, it is a faint and unformed refusal. He wouldn't miss for the world Celia's first chance at publication, though a part of him still laughs uproariously, inwardly, that his name means anything or could confer any kind of unwarranted opportunity. He has been reading his daughter's stories since she was old enough to scrawl, and he will be proud to watch her triumph.
But strange – after all this time, Paris.
* * *
Paris is still the city of Dan's youth, even if his youth is now long behind him. As a mere visitor, the sights and sounds are unchanged to him; without the intimate experience of living on these pretty, tree-lined streets, he has no sense of the little changes that twenty-odd years have wrought. He only sees buildings that seem familiar, architecture that hasn't changed in decades. The scent of coffee and bread outside the cafés, or the perfume of lilacs, brings him back so abruptly to his honeymoon that he could almost feel Serena's hand brushing his. He misses his wife. Even after it all, he misses her.
Throughout the intervening years, Dan had often imagined his return to Paris. Once it had been an impatient and hotheaded vision, Dan disembarking a ship and racing through the streets. As he grew older, the picture changed and finally faded, flickered to nothing. He endeavored to see the city as simply the setting of Blair's life. In idle moments he might think of her taking a stroll down half-remembered streets or adjusting her hat in the breeze off the Seine. When he thinks of Blair Waldorf – for despite himself, he always thinks of her as Blair Waldorf– it is always as one of the heroines of his novels. Paris became the stage on which her life was constructed, a collection of shapes or impressions formed around her, holding her there in amber. It was all fuel for the narrative.
It is another thing entirely to be in the city now.
The richness of experience dwarfs Dan's inane imaginings. He feels positively provincial; what is he except the silly New Yorker who had come to believe Manhattan held everything there was to see in the world? Had he so utterly forgotten the breath and scope outside of it? To relegate Paris to little more than set dressing, and to turn the woman who lives there into a ghost made out of paragraphs – the entire thing feels immature and ridiculous.
Celia comes up beside him and links her arm with his. Her free hand, ungloved, is busy trying to shove loose tendrils of blonde hair back into the safety of her hat; she never seems able to keep all that hair tucked away. "Hullo, Dad. This sure is something, isn't it?"
"Indeed it is, Cee."
They stand together looking down the street for a moment before Celia rouses herself and says, "By the way, I've got a message for you: the Countess Grimaldi expects us both at half-past five."
She says it carelessly, eagerly even, and when Dan looks at her he is strongly reminded of her namesake, that wicked old woman who used to tease him so.
"Didn't I tell you? I'm terribly excited, I haven't seen her since that summer I came to Paris as a girl. So I rang her up this morning and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to see her."
The summer Celia speaks of, when she turned fourteen and became briefly impossible and so was sent away as appeasement (to Mattie's endless wailing), had resulted in one of the more pained winters of Dan's life. He had had to leave the room every time Blair's name came up (which was often, because Celia adored her) and got something of a reputation amongst his children for disliking her. But this feels different. "You told her I was here?"
"Of course! Why not?" Celia leans her cheek against his shoulder as they begin to walk. "What was she like?"
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, come on, Dad, own up! All those years making us believe you didn't care for her! I know you and she were great pals, weren't you? Was she awfully lovely? Mother had a picture of the two of them from ages and ages ago, and every time I look at it, I just see me and Mattie."
Dan swallows with difficulty. "I don't know. She was different."
Celia sighs dreamily. "Ah, there you have it. That's what it always comes to, doesn't it? When that person comes, they're different – and one doesn't know why. That's exactly how I feel about Henry."
"Henry?" Dan repeats. Several different strains of distress are braiding together around him. "Henry Bass?"
"Mm. I think I might marry him, you know. If I choose to marry at all."
Henry Bass had come up to New York following his eighteenth birthday, after the death of his parents and a childhood spent in languid prosperity in Buenos Aires. All of the older set had rather expected the worst from him, but Henry proved himself a relatively somber young man more in the mold of his grandfather than his late father. Only people Dan's age or older even remembered Bass' business failure that had so rippled through New York and sent the man running, or that after his first wife's death he had quietly remarried to the notorious Eva Coupeau. Only twenty years prior, he would have had no prospects at all, and now Dan's own daughter considers him one of the only possibilities for her in the world.
Dan rather thinks cheerful, strong-willed Celia would be a good match for serious Henry, but he's still having trouble with Celia's implications about the Countess.
"You know you are certainly too young to marry," Dan tells her finally, and then follows it with, "Only I don't see how the comparison stands."
Celia lifts her head so she can level him with an unimpressed and knowing look that Dan suspects she got from him. "Don't be prehistoric. Wasn't she once your Henry?"
It wasn't all Rhodes blood that made Celia so unabashedly frank; her candor was a sign of her entire generation, one that seemed not to possess an ounce of reserve. "I don’t know what you mean."
Celia doesn't spare a moment's consideration to her next words. "Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for, only you didn't."
Stunned, Dan can only echo, "I didn't."
"Mother said –"
"Your mother?"
"Of course, who else's mother would it be? The day before she died, when she sent for me, she said she knew we were safe with you and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you wanted most."
Dan can only answer that with silence, suddenly distanced from the arm in his and the pavement beneath his feet. At length he replies, very quiet, "She never asked me."
With both sympathy and exasperation, Celia says, "No, I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other and guessed at what was going on underneath."
Still withdrawn, Dan says, "Don't be cruel, Celia."
A wince mars her brow. "Oh, Dad, don't be angry with me! I didn't mean anything by it. It's just your whole generation."
Despite himself, Dan snorts softly. "No, I'm not angry. Forgive your father, he's a very old man and prone to shock easily."
They share a less eventful lunch, then part so Celia can run some errands, but Dan suspects she devised it as such to leave him time to compose himself again. He has to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of a lifetime.
He's not sure he minds Celia knowing – or, more likely, all of them knowing, considering Celia could never be counted on to keep a secret. It takes him a little while to realize the sensation he is experiencing is relief– to receive some kind of consolation after all this time is humbling, and to learn that the one person to see his pain and pity him had been his wife moves him indescribably.
Blair waits at the close of a few hours' time. Little details of her life have filtered down to Dan through the years, overheard at family functions or glimpsed in letters left abandoned on tabletops. He knows her husband passed without her ever returning to him. It had comforted him to know that, and he was pleased to let the version of her in his mind's eye continue living unattached and free.
He walks through the city until he finds himself at the Louvre. Blair had once remarked to him offhand that she liked to visit there, and the information was upheld by fourteen year old Celia, who spoke at length of their afternoon trips to the museum. It appeals to Dan to pass the hours in a place where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. The idea of her passing her life amongst such beauty is appealing too; he knows such a thing is important to her. He thinks perhaps he has been starved for similar sights.
Studying an evocative Titian, Dan mutters to himself, "But I'm only fifty-two –" and then turns away, impatient.
Dan leaves the museum and wanders, content only to move until he realizes his feet have carried him all the way to the Invalides. Blair lives in one of the nearby squares. He even knows the number, scribbled on a scrap of paper in his daughter's hand so he would know where to meet her.
Dan is overwhelmed, stifled, thinking of the entirety of the world Blair has inhabited without him. Surely his own life, even with its prizes and achievements, is small in comparison; he is just another person to marry young, have children young, and spend his life corralled inside the house he, once upon a time, longed so deeply for. It is strange how desires shift, and how the very things one imagines are designed to fulfill them don't do nearly enough. Dan has been mostly happy; he knows this. But now a life unlived is unraveling alongside his own and the comparison is staggering.
For twenty-five years, Blair's life has been spent in this rich atmosphere, this city of such incomparable beauty. He thinks of the theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations. Dan is so apart from it, so sequestered in the life he built for himself. It seems absurd to think their lives might intersect again, two parallel roads somehow running into one another. Dan has aged. He's gray at his temples and needs spectacles to read. The telephone still startles him sometimes.
Celia finds him sitting on a bench beneath a drooping tree, his gaze lifted to the building ahead as he tries to pick out which window is Blair's.
"Sorry I'm late," Celia says, though she always is, ever the whirlwind. "It's nearly six. Shall we go?"
"Oh, I don't know," Dan says.
She looks at him. "You don't know?"
With a slight smile, Dan tells her, "Go on. Perhaps I'll follow you."
"Do you mean you won't come up at all?" Celia shifts her weight, perplexed, and finally wonders, "But what on earth shall I say?"
His smile stretches. "My dear girl, don't you always know what to say?"
Frowning, Celia determines, "Fine. I shall say you're terribly old-fashioned, and prefer walking up five flights because you don't like lifts."
That amuses him too. "Say I'm old-fashioned; that's enough."
With another very tragic look, Celia turns from him to enter the building. Dan follows her progress in his thoughts, narrating a little like he sometimes does, the effect of too much writing on the mind. She will make her way upstairs restlessly and likely enter the drawing-room with a beaming smile and a skipping step. He sees Blair as he remembers her: small and pale with rich brown curls, only ever smiling a little, her delicate hands decorated with rings. She will be as happy to see Celia as Celia is to see her. But perhaps, just perhaps, after greetings are exchanged she will look past the daughter of her departed cousin and ask, "But where is your father?"
Dan sits for a long time on the bench, so long that dusk rises around him, but his eyes never turn from the fifth floor balcony. At length a servant comes out to draw up the awnings and close the shutters, which Dan takes as a signal to finally get to his feet. He will return to the hotel to wait for his daughter, have a cup of coffee in the interim, and sketch out plans for the next book.
If there is one thing that has lingered round Dan's neck as an albatross all these many years, it is a life of inaction. He has discovered safe ways to be brave, with pen and ink, but ultimately he is nothing like the man he once dreamed of being – a man who sought and made his own destiny.
Momentarily rooted to the spot, Dan thinks finally of a girl who was nasty to him once at a party; who looked at him, lost, with tears in her eyes; who kissed him in a snow-covered carriage and almost immediately regretted it. He thinks of the confidences they once shared, the promises made and kept. He thinks of Blair and he knows then what to do – or perhaps he has always known, and is only now uncovering it.
He goes up.
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