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Karl sniffed and his eyes were red, but the look on his face was pure joy. They walked through the lobby, his arm around her as he occasionally stopped to press a kiss into her hair.
“I don’t believe Jenufa would forgive the Kostelnicka so easily after the woman murdered her child. Or that she would forgive Laca for slashing her cheek. Sins out of love, indeed,” Vivian said after they’d settled into a cab.
Karl slipped his gloves off and reached for one of her hands, taking his time to peel her glove off, staring down and intent on his task. Once her hand was bare and wrapped up in his, he looked at her. “Like I said, the story is only nominally about Jenufa. It’s more about the Kostelnicka, who has a duty to care for Jenufa—her stepdaughter, not her own child—and who understands the social pressures and prejudices acting against a young girl, even a pretty one, who allows herself to get pregnant by a drunk and whom no one will marry. Jenufa is too overwhelmed with love of her baby to see her future. The Kostelnicka is responsible for Jenufa’s future and fixes it the only way she knows how.”
“By murdering a baby and marrying Jenufa to the man who knifed her?”
He shrugged and said matter-of-factly, “Better than the drunk who got her pregnant, then tried to marry the mayor’s pretty daughter.”
Karl’s eyes twinkled in the passing streetlights and Vivian was surprised enough to laugh. “I thought you didn’t have a sense of humor, but now I realize you have a macabre one.”
His head fell back against the headrest. He lifted her hand up to his lips, kissed her palm gently then closed his eyes. “The world is full of pain. If you can’t find humor in it, you’ll drown.” He raised his head and turned to look at her. “You can imagine people wouldn’t find my sense of humor appropriate in my current job.”
“So you think the Kostelnicka was right to do what she did?”
“Not right—crimes are never right. She will be tried for drowning the infant and deserves death. That is justice. But there is also social justice for Steva, who got a girl pregnant when she was pretty and abandoned her when she was disfigured.”
“Laca seems to come out all right. He gets the girl.”
“Neither social justice nor legal justice work perfectly. Maybe Laca will come to realize he is complicit in the death of an infant because he refused to marry Jenufa, the woman he says he loves, while she still had his brother’s child.” He was resting against the headrest and his eyes were closed again. “Or maybe he will never take the time to evaluate the consequences of his actions and die confident in his infallibility.”
“His sins are sins of love.”
His voice was sleepy as he replied, “That’s the stupidest line in the whole opera. I think it’s supposed to be romantic, but love doesn’t excuse sin.”
Which, Vivian supposed, was why she was living with her mother-in-law instead of with the man she loved.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
INVITING A PREGNANT woman up to his apartment for a nightcap had been an obvious pretext, but Karl had done it and Vivian had said yes. He hadn’t even bothered to smooth out his ploy with “before I drive you back to my mom’s.” They both knew a “nightcap” meant she was sleeping over.
His fingers brushed the skin of Vivian’s bare arms as he helped her out of her coat, and the smoothness burned through his body. He walked over to the closet to hang up their coats before she could turn around and notice his increased heart rate.
He’d spent years practicing how to cover up his emotions so that when people looked at him they saw who and what they needed to see—and who and what he wanted them to see. But Vivian read him. Not the perfect son, not the Golden Pole overcoming tragedy for a greater purpose, not the man in a suit on a woman’s arm. She saw him. He had felt her perceptive gaze the first time she’d sat next to him in Las Vegas, and in his drunkenness it had been invigorating. When she’d sat on the couch in his Chicago condo and begged for health insurance, it had been scary. Now he wasn’t sure he could live without it.
He also wasn’t sure how to reconcile his need for her with his opinions of her past. Tonight would surely jumble any hope he had of being rational about her, but he found he didn’t care.
