Wilde West by Walter Satterthwait

deny. Even if he confronts you, the brute of a husband. Even if he discovers you en flagrante , you understand me? If you never waver, even for a moment, he will begin to doubt the evidence of his own eyes. I promise you that this is true.”
    Oscar laughed.

    Later, as he lay fully clothed atop the bed in his room, he teased and tortured himself with memories of Elizabeth McCourt Doe. Visions, pink-tipped and titian-tufted, twirled across his brain. He heard her laughter, her sighs and moans. He felt the shiver of her flesh.
    And when he opened his eyes, found himself alone in the small, drab room, he experienced within an aching emptiness, a pain at once appalling and delicious. Before he met her, he had thought himself whole, entire; now he discovered that he was merely half a being, a tattered fragment of a soul, yearning wildly, desperately, for that which would complete it.
    The refrain of an old Irish love song kept repeating itself back in some musty, misty corner of his mind. Do not forget, love, do not grieve, for the heart is true and it can’t deceive. My heart and soul I will give to thee, so farewell my love and remember me .
    Irish love songs. Nothing in the history of literature was more perfectly contrived to bring a tear to the eye, or a sneer to the lip. He was becoming pathetic. Soon he would be plucking the petals off daisies, loves me, loves me not, and walking blindly into walls.
    He was mooning and swooning about like a provincial schoolboy.
    He was twenty-seven years old, a grown man in full possession of all his limbs and organs (indeed yes!) and all his faculties.
    But, God in heaven, the woman was like no other he had ever met.
    He slipped her note from his pocket. He opened it, inhaled the dark, exhilarating, remembered scent that clung faintly to the paper.
    Tonight at one-thirty. The north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets.
    (He had possessed the foresight to ask the desk clerk—with a towering nonchalance—where these particular avenues might happen to converge.)
    Her unparalleled grace and intelligence were obvious even in this simple missive. Not a word wasted, each doing its job in a simple, straightforward manner. The north corner: how sublimely specific. Really, how altogether admirable.
    And the handwriting itself—it was as uncluttered and spare, as pure of line, as Japanese calligraphy.
    He tugged free his pocket watch. Eleven-thirty. Two hours yet.
    Where was she now? What was she doing at exactly this moment? Why was it necessary for them to wait until one-thirty? Why was his mind suddenly achurn with idiotic questions?
    How wearisome this love business actually was. The endless waiting, the endless wanting, the endless futile fantasizing. No wonder that lovers were forever quaffing poison and leaping from bridges. Anything to relieve the tedium.
    Would she like London?
    Of course she would. A woman of instinctive cultivation, of natural, inborn refinement, how could she help but like the most cultivated and refined city (excepting Paris) in the world? And together the two of them would become its leading lights—arbiters, because paragons, of fashion. They would amaze and dazzle with their taste and flair. Their house, perhaps a small Georgian on Grosvenor Square, would become a legendary gathering place for the cognoscenti.
    A few small obstacles did loom on the horizon, admittedly.
    Money, for a start. Where exactly would they find the lucre to support this enlightened existence?
    Two can live as cheaply as one.
    Yes, so long as one of them doesn’t eat.
    His play. Vera. It would be produced. All he needed was the agreement of that wretched woman in New York who labored under the misapprehension that she was an actress.
    First New York, great success, his name emblazoned across the marquee, Jimmie Whistler gnawing his liver in a paroxysm of envy back in London; and then the West End. Money gushing into Grosvenor Square. He could burn the stuff to