This Is How I'd Love You
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Authors: Hazel Woods
A PLUME BOOK
THIS IS HOW I’D LOVE YOU
HAZEL WOODS
lives in New Mexico with her husband and two children. This is her first novel.
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Hazel Woods
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REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Woods, Hazel.
This is how I’d love you : a novel / Hazel Woods.
pages cm
eBook ISBN 978-0-698-15771-2
1. Loneliness—Fiction. 2. Correspondence—Fiction. 3. Impersonation—Fiction. 4. Chess players—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: This is how I would love you.
PS3623.O67623T45 2014
813.' 6—dc23
2014014928
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
Contents
For Edward and Margaret
Part One
T
he docks are flooded with deep, black puddles. Men move quickly, their nerves numbed by their hurry. The French steamer awaiting them appears massive and gray and gloomy. Its twin black stacks convey the seriousness of the day. Charles stands shoulder to shoulder with other Field Service volunteers, all of their overcoats darkened by the rain. These stoic faces of theirs are a sham. His eyes scanning the crowd, Charles notes that none of them look the part of warriors, least of all him. Instead, they only need mortarboards and graduation gowns to betray that their most recent barracks were the dorm rooms overlooking idyllic quadrangles of Ivy League alma maters. They have the sloping shoulders and occasionally bespectacled eyes of intellectuals and idealists, motivated by the injustices they’ve read about in newspapers and seen on film reels in their dormitory’s lounge. Their own country, after all, had yet to stand up to the tyranny overseas when they signed their contracts two months ago. But their faces are somber in the attempt to convey the look of the men that they hope to be.
We are the serious ones
.
The first. The bravest. The ones who will represent America as it should be.
But then, without warning, a nervous giggle will begin at the front of the line and travel all along, the joke always something juvenile, about the rain camouflaging those among them who would soon mess their trousers, or the crimson scent of a Harvard man’s flatulence.
Charles smiles and crams his hands into his pockets, trying to imagine the familiar pattern of the chessboard. It is a welcome respite from the useless conjecture his mind makes about what will greet them in a week’s time when they land in Bordeaux. He’d been taught to play chess on his father’s onyx set and he remembers those long afternoons pleasantly, the fire dying down, his father’s whiskey replenished regularly, the family dog sighing loudly in a dream. While at Harvard, Charles played in a bridge club as well as a Sunday afternoon chess bracket, but only once since coming home from college had he and his father played on the onyx set in the parlor. It had ended badly, with his father excusing himself a move before checkmate, claiming he was late for an appointment across town. Which was why, when he’d gone for his physical at the Rockefeller Institute, the notice posted by the Women’s Auxiliary caught his eye. They were offering to match volunteers with civilians in a pen-pal arrangement. Charles took down the number and placed a call to a woman who agreed to search for a chess partner for him.
After the very first letter, however, Charles understood his opponent was hardly the kind of dutiful patriot he’d expected to volunteer for such an assignment. A journalist by trade, Mr. Sacha Dench of West Thirteenth Street made it clear in that first letter, which was mailed just weeks before Congress’s war vote, that he was a pacifist and would work every day to prevent the United States from entering the war, that he found anyone who would volunteer to participate either daft or tragically misinformed, but also that he did not think personal sacrifice should go unnoticed, however foolish.
As Charles considers their current board and his opponent’s ruthlessness, he further understands that the endeavor may not be as charitable as he’d first expected. Mr. Dench has taken one of Charles’s pawns in the third move of the game, their bishops facing one another and the next move of utter importance. Charles must be wary of the temptation to play too aggressively, putting his own pieces at risk in the next turn, which, he senses, is probably his opponent’s strategy. A classic lure. But playing like this, without body language or eye contact, is a new challenge. And knowing that Mr. Dench thinks him either “daft” or “tragically misinformed” has shaken his confidence. He posted his latest move yesterday with the timidity of a boy, turning over all of his options in his mind once more before he had the nerve to seal the envelope.
Now, as the order comes that they will embark momentarily, he tries to reassure himself that he’s made the right move. He wants to win. He wants to prove the guy wrong. About everything.
When they are thoroughly drenched and their duffels are carrying more water than supplies, the whistle sounds and they board the ship.
They stand on the deck, smoking, waiting. There are several women still on the docks, holding big black umbrellas and white linen handkerchiefs. For the love of their brothers or husbands, their betrothed or sons, they shake their linens. A stupid tradition, Charles thinks. Melodramatic; fruitless. But he also looks around, searching the deck for the men who are waving back, the men to whom those limp, white hankies are declarations of love, the pale quivering of passionate hearts.
His thoughts linger only briefly on his mother and father, the croquet party they’d planned for their weekend guests in the country, now ruined by the weather. The mood there will be black for many reasons, not just their bitter disappointment about his “foolish, crassly transparent rebellion.” It’s better that they’re not here, he thinks, as he wonders what move Mr. Dench will make and how long it will take for it to find him in France.
The ship pulls away from the dock and it appears as though the island of Manhattan is the one being set afloat, being cast out to sea. Hard to tell that the ship is even moving. Soon enough, the horizon is blurred out by the storm and they seem to exist in a vast tunnel, ever darkening, ever deepening, only the black sea in sight.
