Wild Girl Running, page 12
And, anyway—Estelle just didn’t like anyone as much as she like Ulysses. Not to listen to, not to be near, not to look at. Mark, Jason, the man who was always downstairs when they were on their way outside, all the people who were outside while they explored it: none of them filled her heart with such aching joy by nothing more than a glance. Sometimes, while Ulysses sat with the object he had called a ‘book’ and made his noises for awhile, Estelle would stare at him to absorb his features like a fish swallowing up the water through which it swam. Sometimes she thought she saw him looking at her, too, and that excited her very much—then he would look away, sometimes even leave the room, and she would worry she had done something wrong.
It never seemed to be her fault, though, whatever it was that occasionally sent him away from her. The next thing she knew he would be back and kinder than ever, taking her for walks or teaching her to ride the horse. What a development that was! Estelle was astonished the first time she sat astride the beast, and even more astonished when she got to see how fast it could run.
Her favorite part of it, however, was that Ulysses showed her how to ride. First he helped her up, then he climbed upon the animal’s back along with her. At once, her body screamed with the same delight that washed over it when he held her in his arms. It made her think of that time when she had first arrived, when they sat together on the edge of the bed and he permitted her to sit on his knee the way they now sat together on the horse. When she leaned back against his chest she swore she felt his heartbeat as clearly as she felt her own; and each time his hand landed upon her waist to steady her against a fast turn or a sudden gallop, those hearts both sped in equal measure.
How she loved it when he touched her! There was nothing on earth that made her feel this way, not in her world or in his. Every time he touched her, she wanted him to keep touching her. Every time he embraced her, she wished it could be forever.
That was something she noticed about this world, and the way humans interacted: they touched one another very frequently. When two humans met—two ‘male’ humans, anyway—they held each other’s hands, then shook them up and down. Small humans, children, clung to their mothers or other female caregivers, often slung in their arms or at the very least holding hands.
But the interactions of male and female, adult humans were what interested Estelle most of all. Near the dwelling where Estelle lived with her friends was a place Ulysses called ‘the park.’ The park was a place where it seemed like humans had cut out a little part of nature and put it into the center of their constructions. If buildings had an outside and an inside, so did the place Ulysses called the ‘town.’ Therefore, Estelle came to think of this park as a strange sliver of outside brought inside; a kind of three-dimensional window where she could catch her breath, because the city was a busy, noisy, often smelly place where people hurried along the street, and shouted to sell items Estelle didn’t understand, and went in and out of buildings like ants hurrying about their hills.
Being in the park was soothing, then, and not just to Estelle. People in the park acted differently—as though they were the only humans there for miles. It was a nice, quiet place full of trees and grass, where the stream (she assumed—correctly—this was the same stream by which she had lived before, and was relieved to see it had joined her here) flowed more cleanly then it did elsewhere in the town. She enjoyed it, and so did everyone else; and, lulled by the soothing sounds of the water and the comfort of nature, people could slow down. They could behave differently. Estelle noticed men and women went there frequently together, which was one of the few places—one of the only places, she thought—where these two types of humans mingled. There they walked hand-in-hand in the same way Ulysses and Estelle walked. They whispered quietly together upon benches or beneath the boughs of trees.
And sometimes—when they thought no one was looking because they had not seen Estelle—they leaned their heads together and kissed.
Seeing a kiss was not a regular occurrence, but it made Estelle feel so very nice whenever she got to see it. Watching two strangers kiss reminded her of being small; of being supported by mother wolf. When she tripped and cried for the pain in her knee or woke up from a nightmare or did something good during a hunt, mother wolf would hurry up and kiss her face with joy. Estelle saw that kind of affection among human mothers and their cubs—not the same kind of kiss, of course, since wolves and humans had very different ways of kissing, but it was kissing all the same. But what drew Estelle’s eye was seeing kisses exchanged between adults. Hand-holding adults, like her and Ulysses.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be kissed by Ulysses! Oh, he was very reliable about praising her when she did something good. Yes, whenever she pleased him he would tell her she was good, then pat her hand or stroke her hair in a fond way. He would smile and compliment her. Sometimes he would even give her a chocolate, which was very nice.
But the longer they were together, the more all she wanted was for him to kiss her. When she watched him read to her, it was all she thought about. These thoughts swirled into her mind to fill up her heart and leave her body sizzling with that intense flame once felt while upon his knee. Sometimes her mouth ached the same way, as though it were an open wound that could only be healed by the application of his. She leaned against his shoulder when she felt that way; he would slide an arm around her, and both of them would sigh as he went on.
One day, in that same park as usual, she saw another instance of affection between two people and quickly tugged her chaperon’s hand. “Ulysses,” she said, pointing toward them. “What?”
She had learned this word ‘what’ from Bonnie, who used it all the time when she didn’t know what Estelle as trying to get across. The wild girl had taken it to mean a request for clarity, and it seemed to work when she used it in this way. Ulysses followed her gesture just in time to catch the end of the kiss and the lingering stare of the lovers who had shared it.
“Ah”—he chuckled a little while she stared at him curiously—“kiss? Is that what you mean? They’re kissing.”
Day by day she began to recognize more words, and though the meaning of each was not always precisely known to her, nor were the things Ulysses said always meaningless babble anymore. She could at least parse his statements into separate sounds and get a vague sense of his intention. In this case, satisfied he understood her, she nodded. “Kiss,” she repeated, looking up at him. “Ulysses kiss Estelle?”
“What?” His eyebrows lifted and his lips parted in momentary surprise. “Oh,” he began again, laughing a little, glancing away, “oh, well—well, yes, I suppose when we took you out of the forest I did kiss your cheek—”
She knew ‘forest’ and ‘cheek’ and now she knew ‘kiss,’ but so much had happened in the many day and night cycles since she was brought into the city that she hardly thought about the last day spent in the forest anymore.
“Now,” she said, trying to explain to him that she wasn’t referring to the last time it happened but instead hoping to make him kiss her again. “Now, Ulysses kiss Estelle.”
“Oh—oh, my, well—” Clearing his throat, Ulysses glanced around. He shared a laugh with Bonnie, who almost always walked with them through the park. “Well!”
“Kisses are for marriage,” Bonnie explained, talking extensively with her hands. This, she had found, helped her clarify herself with Estelle, making the process of communication far less frustrating between the women. She brought her index fingers together, saying, “Man and woman marry. They love. They kiss. Man and woman create baby, become mother and father.”
“Oh,” answered Estelle, understanding the family appellations she had been previously taught but not understanding something else. “Love?”
Again, the human man and woman shared a laugh in front of the wild girl. Ulysses tried first, starting “Love is…goodness.” He laughed again and said something to Bonnie: Estelle caught none of it except for the words, “tall order.”
“Love is a fire in your heart,” Bonnie explained, eliciting a pleased sound from both Ulysses and Estelle at the description. “Mother and baby love, father and baby love. Mother and father love different.”
“Different?”
“Different,” agreed Bonnie.
“Estelle love Ulysses,” the wild girl informed them both firmly. Now it was Bonnie’s turn to laugh, but Ulysses simply looked somehow shocked—almost afraid. This made Estelle feel badly: it made her wonder if she had really understood what Bonnie was trying to tell her. “Love bad?”
“No,” said Ulysses very quickly, taking up her hand again and holding it between both of his. “No, no, of course not. Love is good. Love is very good, Estelle, it’s very nice. You are very nice.”
Smiling, the girl admired Ulysses’s pleasant face until he lifted her hand to his mouth. Her body stilled with joy as, upon the back of her knuckles, he placed a gentle kiss that made her heart flutter like a bird in a trap. When he lowered her hand again and looked up at her, she was warm from head to toe.
“There,” he said, “a kiss for you.”
Though she smiled—though she was grateful—that was not at all the kind of kiss she had meant. Did Ulysses really not want to kiss her the way she saw men and women kiss in the park? Did he really not want her to lay with him, curled with him, happy in his arms while he was happy in hers? Did Ulysses not look at her and feel the love-fire raging in his chest, like what she felt when looking upon him in her turn?
Somehow the thought made her very, very sad. Worse—well, it frustrated her. Why didn’t he love Estelle? He had no one else to love. Maybe he loved Bonnie? That didn’t seem right, though. Estelle had never seen them kiss or even hold hands—and Estelle, meanwhile, held Ulysses’s hand every day. Estelle spent her days with him. Estelle ate with him and walked with him and rode with him and learned from him.
If Ulysses and Estelle were not made to love each other, then Estelle was clearly just not understanding what love was. It frustrated her; it saddened her deeper all the time. For as many things as Ulysses understood and could teach Estelle about the world, it seemed to Estelle that he knew very little about things that were truly important.
Maybe she just had to go out of her way to make him understand.
ESTELLE’S PROGRESS ASTONISHED Ulysses more and more each day. She was smart as a whip, as Bonnie said. By the end of her first month she had developed enough of a vocabulary to respond to very simple sentences and come up with a few of her own. She had also begun to ask about specific things, terms like ‘window’ and ‘bed’ and ‘building’ joining her pre-existing mental dictionary as more and more items began to enter the field of her awareness.
Truly, it was fascinating. The girl was so accustomed to her wild life that she seemed to lack the frame of reference to fully perceive objects like buildings, trains, coaches until she had been around them for a few weeks and could consciously inquire. What she noticed before anything else in any environment was whatever was organic: women’s furs, the feathers of hats.
Most of all, living animals. Each new such thing she saw was subject to a giddy point of her finger and the instant question, “What?” Lifelong mysteries, missing definitions were explained to her. Birds, divided into pigeons and ravens and chickadees and many other types, were named and defined for her eager eyes. Cats made her squeal with delight just to look upon and the antics of squirrels dashing through the park made her laugh every day.
Dogs, however, were by far her favorite. She would tear away from him at a second’s notice to hurry over and pet a stray, often muddying her dress by hugging the animal and crying in grief when she had to be pulled off. The first time she saw such a creature, she had cried out with excitement.
“Wolf?”
“Close! No, not wolf. Dog, Estelle. That is a dog.”
“Dog?” She had repeated the word with great curiosity, frowning. Later that night, when they were once more in the suite, she pointed at the skull on the nightstand. “Dog?”
“No, Estelle, that is a wolf. Wolf hunts lamb and cow,” he added, trying to give her some idea of the chain of predator and prey. “Hunts for food, hunts for eating. Dog protects lamb and cow; Ulysses protects Estelle.”
“Oh,” she answered, looking thoughtfully at her trophy.
Ulysses did really wonder about that thing. As she was more articulate now, he tried asking her, “Did you hunt this wolf, Estelle?” She looked at him, trying to fully understand his question, and he repeated it more simply. “Estelle hunt wolf?”
“Ah—no, human hunt wolf when dark.” He did not understand her position on death, this notion she had developed of humans as death-spirits made visible. He took it to mean another human had literally hunted the wolf and Estelle had collected its skull and pelt until Estelle added with a sad expression, “Mother. Nice mother. Estelle love wolf.”
His understanding struck him through like an arrow that was second only to the pain caused by the sorrow in such a delightful girl’s expression. “Why—this wolf raised you? Your mother was this wolf?”
“Mother wolf,” answered the girl longingly, extending a hand to pet the muzzle of the carefully tended-to skull to which she sometimes presented chocolates or little pieces of roast she had stashed in her napkin during dinner. “Mother wolf love Estelle. Nice wolf. Nice mother.”
“Poor girl…oh, my, no wonder you had her bones this way.”
How sad! How sad he was, especially, to think of some human hunter slaying Estelle’s first protector. Someday he would uncover the truth of her perception and find it infinitely more fascinating—and somehow flattering to his ego—to think Estelle believed Ulysses some kind of death herald. After all, he had felt the same about her.
But love was a great killer. A great ender of old lives and beginner of new ones. And, Ulysses had to admit, this new life he was living was a far cry from the old one.
He had brought Estelle into civilization to study her and see how best to teach her, of course. In language she was quick, being as it was a tool like any other; but in most other things she was simply not interested, whether that included mores, manners, or fashions of dress. Every morning was a nightmare for poor Bonnie until the girl realized that in order to go out she had no choice but to be dressed, at which point she would grudgingly submit herself to be (wo)manhandled into this outfit or that bonnet. How adorable she was! How beautiful. No man could have looked upon Estelle and resisted his urge to sigh with admiration.
It was almost hard to remember she was a wild girl—until she opened her mouth. Her unrefined speech gave her away and Ulysses suspected most in the town thought she was in some way mentally deficient. It annoyed him, really. She was maddeningly intelligent. The haste with which she learned language surprised him, and when they walked together through town he could see her mind working rapidly to absorb every detail of this new life around her. That the townsfolk held such a dim view of her intellect insulted him more than it ever would have her.
All this was just as well, however. Ulysses would have hated it had someone taken an interest in her. An unscientific interest, he meant—he himself was interested in her for research purposes, after all.
Though…one had to admit that sometimes he became very disconnected from the research aspects of teaching Estelle. It was hard to avoid. She lived so purely, as she moved moment to moment with no pretensions or plans for the future, that Ulysses—sometimes even Bonnie—was drawn into this way of effortless being right along with her. Yes, of course, it was very interesting to see her intelligence adapt to the modern ways of life; but if he had been recording every little detail every second of the day as perhaps an anthropologist should have been doing, he wouldn’t have been able to share in the simple joy of her successes, her comprehensions, her fun.
She had fun, Estelle. Ulysses had to wonder if he’d ever had fun in his adult life. Anthropological studies were fun to him, but when he was doing them for someone else—jumping through Cambridge’s hoops for this or that grant—it became a duty instead of a matter of personal interest. He had lost his passion before Estelle, and he didn’t even realize it until it came back to him.
Speaking of Cambridge: after a month, they returned his letter with great interest. Yes, they wanted very much to see his findings and meet the girl. They would send money to cover her travel expenses and be thrilled for an opportunity to interview both of them upon Ulysses’s return home to Europe. This response seemed like an accomplishment when he received it, but soon he had to wonder if it really was something to be looked forward to.
After all…to the boys back on the board, Estelle was little more than a subject of research. Less than a subject: more of an object, an entity reduced to a walking artifact implying the history of mankind. And perhaps, at first, she had been partly that to Ulysses—but she had never been only that to Ulysses, and the truth was, as time went on, he found himself less an less interested in Estelle as a topic of research and more interested in Estelle as a human being. He loved her joy, he loved her small spates of melancholy, he loved to come upon her dozing peacefully in the window bench of her bedroom overlooking the cluttered city.
He loved Estelle.
And this notion made him feel terribly guilty.
What business did he have loving her, after all? He was a scientist. However he felt about her and however well he got to know her as a person, he was only in America based on the good will and scientific expectations of Cambridge. He was in a professional role with her, and just as it was his duty to see that she was never taken advantage of by someone else, it was also his duty to control himself and avoid his own foolish yielding to natural urges. How he would have loved to hold her, to kiss her! To experience the raucous joy of her body as at last he gave her what he sensed she wanted, but what she did not even fully know she wanted.
