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they probably fooled no one. In the heat of the moment, they made their decisions based on impulse<br />
and emotion.<br />
“If the two of you suffer the same,” Konstantin said, holding out his arms, “then this Trevor must<br />
be a great friend.”<br />
“He is.”<br />
“So he is the one who is your lover.”<br />
“He most certainly is not,” she said impatiently, moving into his frame. “I have no lover.<br />
Trevor and I are friends, and that is all.”<br />
“Good,” he said. He was moving slowly in the shape of a box, as if this were their first<br />
lesson. “For people who are similar in character should not be lovers. Your lover should be<br />
someone who stands across from you, who sees the world from a different place.”<br />
She wondered if he were speaking of his own affair with Tatiana. “We have a phrase for that in<br />
English,” she said. “We say that opposites attract.”<br />
“Opposites attract,” he repeated, expanding the scope of their waltz very slightly, beginning<br />
only the gentlest of a turn. “As in science, you mean? The, how do you say this, magnum?”<br />
“We say ‘magnet,’” she said. “And yes, that is the basic idea. But I have always wondered.<br />
Opposites attract…and then what? Does the attraction remain or, after a while, do these dissimilar<br />
lovers fall apart?”<br />
He did not answer, at least not with words. He turned his face from hers, stretched his frame<br />
and began to dance with more energy, pushing off from flexed knees, covering a greater distance<br />
across the floor with each stride, carrying her along like a sail carries a mast. Or perhaps she was<br />
the sail and he was the mast – it was hard to say, really. She closed her eyes, more out of habit than<br />
anything else, and let herself relax into the repetitive motions of the dance.<br />
At moments like this, when her guard was dropped and her mind was free to wander, Emma<br />
would sometimes drift back in time and speculate about how her life might have been different. If her<br />
mother had not nursed the town during the cholera epidemic…if her parents had not sickened and died<br />
and her brother Adam not gone to America and if she and Mary had never been cast into the dark<br />
streets of London…if none of that had ever happened, then who might she be? She probably would<br />
have stayed forever in the town of her birth. Been the schoolmaster’s daughter who married the<br />
cobbler’s son. Most likely would have had children of her own by now, as would Mary and Adam.
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