Fallen Beauty (2 page)

“How can I forget?” says Margot.

“Why would you want to?” I reply. I look sideways at Elinor and she turns away. Margot and I giggle as we run up the stairs to the trunks of Chinese trousers, Turkish silks, sarongs and slippers, and carry them back down as an offering to the party. My lovers remove their clothing and dance around the fire like devils, telling stories, acting parts, making love and mayhem, and rising to the most delightful level of intoxication, and when the night and our tightness begin to press on us with their weight, Floyd talks of the good old days in Greenwich Village when the war had ended, and we performed plays, and were poor and young and free.

“I’ll never forget the day we walked into Vincent’s apartment,” says Floyd, “and she and her sister Norma sat like two old ladies sewing while the most magnificent swearwords tumbled from their mouths from around the sides of the cigarettes they smoked.”

“I had to teach her to curse out loud, and smoke, and walk around without a corset,” I say. “It took two days of nonstop debauchery to break her. I was positively ill.”

“Such a family,” says Margot. “In Paris, Vinny’s mother would sit in the corner—a true old lady, smoking and swearing—and watch us drink and fall all over one another without judgment.”

“I love my dear mother,” I say, “and it’s been too long since I’ve seen her. Uge, we must visit her soon.”

“Yes, love,” says Eugen. “We shall as soon as the roads clear.”

“Now we’re so damned conventional,” I say, killing the last of my gin and my good spirits. “I’m thirty-six years old. One day bleeds into the next. We are alone up here at Steepletop. Utterly.”

“But our friends are here tonight,” says Eugen, slurring his words in his thick Dutch accent. “And I’m going to bed because I’m appallingly drunk, so any of you may have your way with my wife.”

The group protests his leaving, and Elinor pulls Eugen to her. “No, don’t make this night end.”

He kisses her on the lips, and she caresses his face.

“It has ended for me,” he says, “but you all keep it alive. Don’t let the old Maharajah spoil your fun.”

He uncoils himself from Elinor’s arms and stumbles up the stairs, leaving a subdued group in his wake. I am suddenly overcome with guilt for how long it has been since I’ve seen or written to my mother or my sisters. Our Greenwich Village and Paris remembrances have depressed me and make me long for that time again. The stark winter weather that refuses to leave us in our isolated mountain estate has seeped into me for so long that I don’t know if I will ever again bloom.

And I am drunk—dreadfully inebriated and spewing nonsense and musings on the decline of man and my loss of hope in civilization since the execution of those Italian immigrants, Sacco and Vanzetti, framed for murders they did not commit.

The cry of a bobcat in the distance silences me, and I feel the terrible thrill of dangers lurking outside our doors, and inside too. The cat’s cry sounds savage and predatory, and I wonder what she’ll kill for herself tonight.

Elinor reaches for me with her elegant fingers and I slap them away and stand, caring not that I’ve offended her at every turn this evening, from my rejection of her physical advances, to my poetic arguments, to now. Why do I do this to her, when I would like nothing more than to take her upstairs with me? I don’t know what evil chills my heart, but I know I have to go before I further poison the room.

As I am about to leave, I catch the eye of the ebony bust of Sappho in the corner, that ancient love poet whose black gaze reflects the light of the fire, and I feel a rekindling. My enchanting power has been stoked, reminded of itself in the company of these old lovers from Vassar, where fifteen years ago my power first pulsed within me. I inhale the energy to feed the dry well of words and love and beauty inside me, and remember that it is fresh, savage love that gives me power. I meet the gaze of the marble bust across the room, and implore her to return my strength after this bitter winter so I may complete this poetry collection whose construction continues to elude me. I’m nearly frantic to know if she’ll grant my wish—if she’ll lay a new love at my feet and allow me to burst forth again and reclaim the power that I am born to possess.

LAURA

Our home was in a row of redbrick stores and houses that stood, tidy and straight, subject to the frequent blasts of diesel train engines roaring through the center of our small but busy town of Chatham, New York. The front of our house faced Main Street and held the dress shop my mother had started when we were small. My sister and I now worked there. The back looked over the gentle slope of field that ran down toward the forest and its hidden waterways. The curve of the hills lay like an invitation to my feet to race down to the woods, and I continued to heed its call, even though, at nineteen, I was well past the age for such adventures.

I’d waited until the morning of the show to tell Marie that I was going out with my secret love, and wouldn’t get back until very late, refusing to tell her where we were going because her jealousy would stop her from helping me. I’d made up a story about hiking the falls along the Housatonic River by moonlight. She’d rolled her eyes and called me crazy because of the cold, but agreed to go along with my feigned illness.

By five o’clock, I had put on quite a show about my aching stomach for my father. Marie insinuated that
the curse
was the cause of my troubles, effectively silencing his questions. I had balled up bedding under my covers to fake my presence there, and waited until my father left with Marie to visit the drugstore soda fountain. Once they were safely away, I’d pulled out my secret bag and the old shoes I’d dyed to match my dress, crept out the back door, and hurried through the field to the forest to meet my love. He had come to me with a flurry of kisses, and drove while I dressed. When I’d emerged from the back of his car at the restaurant near the theater, utterly transformed into a gilded flapper, his face had given me all the approval I’d hoped for.

When I returned home, I used the key to unlock the low doors that led to the cellar around the back of the house, and hid the bag with my dress, shoes, headband, and necklace on the top stair. I would conceal the bundle better in the daylight after my father left the house. For now, I just wanted to crawl into bed to think of all that had happened to me that night. I felt dizzy with love and promise, and I couldn’t wait to tell Marie about my dreams of costuming.

I would tell her that he’d surprised me with the tickets, which wasn’t entirely untrue. Then I would describe the lighting, the music, and the gorgeous forms of the supple dancers. Finally, I would conjure the image of the exquisite costumes, which enabled the dancers’ transformations from nobility in a Baroque ballroom to goddesses in an ancient Oriental palace, to beguiling birds in a dazzling garden. I knew Marie would be as swept up as I was—we had spent endless nights reading aloud to each other from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories, discussing his wife Zelda’s wardrobe, reading about Follies productions in
The
Saturday Evening Post
.

I did not yet plan on telling Marie about what had happened after the show. I still couldn’t quite believe it, and felt such conflicting emotions that I didn’t want known to anyone but myself and my lover. It thrilled me that we had finally given every piece of ourselves to each other, and I fully understood the depth of his love for me. But now that we had taken our passion so far, could we ever turn back, and would we want to? The height of our love seemed to make the circumstances of our separation even more painful.

Marie had left open the back door that led to the kitchen, just as I’d asked. One of the chairs was not pushed under the dining table, and as I thought of my love, I ran into it, cursing as I knocked my knee against its thick wooden legs. I stopped short and listened, swearing that I heard a noise. My heart raced and I began to sweat in spite of the chilled air. I stood there for what felt like hours, though it must have been only a minute or two, and then continued to the staircase.

In the black night, I had trouble finding my way. The only light in the house came from the last chunks of charred embers still smoldering in the fireplace. I was so cold from my walk down the road that I ventured to the fireplace to warm my hands. I shivered, but I thought that might have as much to do with the cold as with my shock over what had transpired earlier that night. It wasn’t until I drew near the fire that I saw my father. He sat in the shadows, staring into the embers, with only the dying firelight illuminating his face. I sucked in my breath.

“I never thought I’d be waiting up for you like this,” he said, without looking at me. I felt sick, and thought that he must know what I’d done, the way one senses a change in the weather.

“I don’t know who you’re sneaking out to in the middle of the night,” he continued, “and I don’t understand why you cut off your hair, but you live in a small town. You are judged and I am judged by how you behave.”

I noticed my parents’ oval wedding picture on the mantel, and I shrunk further into myself when I met my mother’s gaze. She looked out at me from her proud, unsmiling face, formal as a statue next to my handsome father. She had died in the flu epidemic of 1918, and my father had kept her memory alive by canonizing her with every story and utterance. He’d taken us to church every weekend since her death, despite having no faith himself. It was what she would have wanted.

“Your mother and I never quite fit in around here to begin with, being from out of town. If these people think I’m raising loose girls, no one will patronize the shop, and I won’t get handyman work. I would hate to see you ruin your future.”

I stared at the fire, wishing with all my heart that I could get as far from my father as possible. It destroyed me that he suspected what I’d been up to, that I might be jeopardizing my family’s livelihood by carrying on as I had. How disappointed he would feel if he knew with whom I’d been earlier that night. The tears I’d been holding escaped, but I made no move to brush them away. I wished I could melt into the fire, but all I could do was stand paralyzed by fear and remorse.

“Go to bed,” he said.

His firm words gave me the push I needed to start up the staircase. I paused on the bottom step and looked at him with guilt and sorrow in my eyes, but he would only stare into the fire. I climbed the stairs and went into my room.

When I opened the door, Marie stirred in her sleep and turned from her side to her back. Moonlight fell on her sleeping face, casing her like a bas relief on a tomb. I longed to crawl into bed with her like we had when we were children. Instead I climbed into my own bed, under the covers, and willed myself not to think of the possible consequences of this night. I thought of the Follies, and the dresses, and my love filling me with his passion, and making promises with his body, assuring me that we would find a way to be together in spite of the odds against us.

•   •   •

VINCENT

I
offend my dear Elinor. My antics leave me cold in bed. I want to reclaim my position as goddess of all people and all words, but my plan has backfired, and I am ill from the alcohol and the wounds I inflict on those around me.

She calls my behavior pathological, and I fear that she is right.

Oh, sweet Elinor, how I wish I could redo the night. I wouldn’t be cruel to you or insult your dear love of me or your poetry. I wouldn’t argue with you so, or bother your husband while he mourned his dead mother, or bring up the barbaric slaying of those poor men Sacco and Vanzetti to cast a dark shadow over our revelries. I wouldn’t torture my old lovers by playing them off one another like fools in a Shakespearean play. I would open my mother arms and bring you all into me to join our light instead of extinguishing each of you with my wet fingertips.

Don’t you understand? My cruelty is always a bag of arrows meant for myself but misdirected. I do not deserve any of your love. I deserve to rot and age, like the crone I am becoming.

I hear a door close in the hallway and wonder if Eugen is up early. I wrap myself in my robe and creep downstairs. He has already arisen and sits at the fire, wearing his leather gloves and wrapped in a scarf. How I feel my love swell for him at this moment. How dear to me he is.

He hears me in the hall and turns to me as I stand in the doorway, his face alight with kindness and no surprise to see me at the fireside so early. He knows my deviances yet he never, never judges me for them. He loves me in spite of them and never asks for a thing in return. He is the true immortal. I have no capacity for omnipotence, only a flesh-eating selfishness. I cross the room and crawl into his lap.

“The morning is cruel,” he says.

“The cruelest,” I reply. “Rejuvenation is saintly hogwash. We are all mortals, and the morning sits white and pure to remind us of our foulness. With the exception of you. You are my patron saint.”

His eyes crinkle in the corners.

“Don’t beat yourself, Vincie,” he says, his voice still deep and thick with sleep and booze. “This little minute by the fire is who we really are, not all that big devilishness we pretend at in the night.”

I burrow into his chest, and he rubs my hair.

“I hurt everyone I love, and I love everyone,” I say.

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve offended Elinor. She left on the train and took her hurt with her.”

“She is just bruised,” he says. “She will heal, and then she will be back, and the two of you can make beautiful love and words together.”

I warm at the thought of his prophecy. “How did I ever get so lucky to find the man who understands and accepts me so completely?”

“How did I get so lucky to find the poet star with a universe of love big enough to enfold me and all the others in her pockets?”

“This poet star is flickering,” I say. “I feel a darkness that I hope the coming spring will lighten. I must finish my poetry collection and begin anew. I feel as if I’m on the pulse of a new beginning, but I can’t find the path to take the first step. April has always been kind to me. Or not kind, but provocative. Stirring. I’ll put my faith in April.”

“What you need is a new flash of experience. I hoped last night would inspire it, but I think you need something really new. Brand-new.”

Eugen, my manufacturer of experience. I know what he suggests. I need a new lover to consume me. Perhaps I will revisit my virgin days when I would burn a candle on the third night of every month, hoping to conjure my perfect love. With April marching in, it will be the perfect time for such a ritual. Then I will have to watch and wait to see who will be laid as an offering at my temple.

I can imagine the candle’s light growing in the fire, and I feel a thrill beginning inside me. I know someone new will come, and I can barely contain my excitement at all that lover will bring.