Our Ecstatic Days (20 page)

That night she slept in the room where I used to do my readings, the I-Ching of melody-snake slithering across menstrual

among its irrational horrors, that sometime in the last century modern

blood. I laid her out on a mat, dressed in a tattered black silk robe with jade vines crawling up her body. She slept soundly … but it took me a while, to fall asleep I mean, tossing and turning … and then I woke with a start.

I sat up from my bed in the dark.

Sat listening to the dark for a contradiction, and heard none. Got up from my bed and pulled on a robe and stumbled through
the outer room, over to the other room where she slept. Suddenly I just knew, I don’t know why. Suddenly it was just obvious.

“Brontë?” I said to the dark, in the doorway. When she didn’t answer, I said it again. “Brontë?”

“Yes,” a small voice answers.

Lulu Blu, otherwise known as Mistress Lulu, the Dominatrix-Oracle of the Lake, Queen of the Zed Night, once called Kristin, staggers where she stands, clutching her robe to her, still staring into the dark where the girl lies. “It’s you,” Lulu finally chokes; there’s silence and Lulu says it again—“It’s
you”—
and then hears from out of the dark, “Yes, I … I’m tired….” Lulu nods, still standing in the doorway. “Sorry,” the girl’s voice says in the dark, “I just need to sleep,” and Lulu keeps nodding, “thank you for taking me in …” the girl’s voice in the dark barely finishes; and Lulu turns to the outer room and goes to sit on the divan before the dead fireplace. She sits for a long time before she goes back out onto the terrace, staring out in the distance at that place in the water where Kristin vanished years ago and where Brontë emerged a few hours ago. She gets cold and returns to the fireplace where she wishes there was a fire, but she’s too tired and rattled to build one. She’s curled up there in the divan the next morning when she wakes and sees the girl out on the terrace.

Everything in Lulu aches as she stands, pulls her robe closer to her. Brontë on the terrace, long straight gold hair almost down to her waist, is still wearing the old black silk robe with jade

apocalypse had outgrown God, and after he tried in his own craziness to make

vines. Lulu watches her awhile before the girl notices. “Are you hungry?” asks the woman.

“Yes, please,” the girl answers. She looks about nineteen, which is how long it’s been since Lulu waved goodbye to Kristin in the boat and Kristin disappeared into the lake. Brontë walks in from the terrace out of the sunlight while Lulu suppresses an impulse to reach out and run a finger along her face and touch her
shimmery golden hair; as though she senses this, Brontë pulls back from the other woman, feeling examined: Is she my daughter, Lulu wonders, or Kristin’s, or is there a difference? Did I conceive her and Kristin deliver her, as we both carried her for all those years? Conceived with Kirk, is she his twin? Delivered years after him, is she his younger sister? Is she his half-sister, both of them of the same father but of two mothers, who used to be one?

She’s petite, spritelike. She can’t be five feet tall, a wraith except for breasts that, on her frame, verge on the absurd. How did such a little girl get such breasts? the mother thinks, not from me. Not classically beautiful, thinks Lulu, but much prettier than I ever was … did she get that from her father? She doesn’t look anything like him—he had jetblack hair—but then Kirk didn’t either. Am I doomed to strangers for children? Are all of them to be more of the lake than of me?

Lulu cooks some eggs while Brontë sits at the kitchen table. The younger woman doesn’t say anything or seem particularly curious about the older woman, more wary than anything although suspicion doesn’t agree with her: “Nice place,” she finally allows at some point, to say something.

“I’ve lived here almost twenty years,” Lulu explains. “It was a hotel once.”

“Oh.”

“Before the lake. Movie stars and musicians stayed here. It was famous.”

me part of the calendar, a moving date unto myself, a date he had determined

The younger woman realizes she’s stumbled irrevocably into a conversation. “Were you here before the lake?” she finally asks.

She doesn’t know who I am, Lulu thinks, trying to consider this in all its aspects. Or rather: I don’t know what she knows: does she know what she knows? Just as well she doesn’t know me
as Mistress Lulu … but then does she know I’m her mother? Did she really return to me by sheer accident? “What’s your name?”

The younger woman flushes, narrows her eyes. After a moment she says, “You know.”

“Tell me.”

“You know. You said it last night.”

“Tell me.”

After a moment the girl says, “Brontë.”

Lulu turns back to the eggs on the oven. “Yes, I was here before the lake. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Have you been here long?”

Brontë seems to meditate on the question. “No,” she finally answers.

“Visiting?”

“Yeah.”

Don’t pry so much, Lulu tells herself now, you’re prying. What were you doing in the water last night? “Family or friends here?” She puts the eggs on the table in front of the girl who begins devouring them. “Boyfriend?”

“No boyfriends,” Brontë says emphatically between bites. She’s sucking on slices of lemon, one after another, until it makes Lulu’s mouth sour to watch her.

“You don’t like boys?”

Well, not in that way, the girl thinks to herself. I like them

through his arcane and unhinged calculations but the meaning of which

all right, but not in that way. Actually I’m into girls—and I almost say it, as much for the shock value, you know? Because actually at this point I’m a bit afraid of this woman cooking me breakfast, whoever she is. I’m trying to act cool and it’s true about the girls but if I were to say it, it would only be to try and perhaps intimidate her back a bit, though as I’ll find out soon enough that’s hardly the sort of thing that would. Intimidate her, that is. So I
don’t say it, and the way she keeps checking out my chest just makes me think all the more perhaps I shouldn’t say it, because at this point I still can’t tell about her, here I am out in this old hotel out in the middle of this lake stuck here for the moment and also, to be honest, not all that ready to leave, it seems a pretty mega place really, a terrace you can walk out and see a big part of the bay, water stretching far out to sea in the west, hills curving ’round to the north and that big battleship or whatever it is out in the distance, the one tall building that’s not gone under. It’s all something to see isn’t it and I’ll never get tired of it, so already I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind so much not having to leave right away.

Even from the first the Mistress, she seems a bit off, I must say, as much as I come to love her. Naturally later I understand some of it a bit better, later clients they’ll tell me there was a time not so many years ago she was the most powerful woman in the territory with an army of submissives, and then there’s all the religious business going on ’round her, but I don’t know what her story is this first morning except she’s called me a name I’m not really sure is mine and she’s checking out my chest, which I’m selfconscious about anyway. So they’re a bit big. If I was taller they wouldn’t seem so big. It’s not really they’re so big it’s that the rest of me is small. My chest and height I’m selfconscious about. If it was up to me I’d like to take a bit off the front and put it on top.

Later when I get to know her better and realize it’s a

remained an infuriating and impossible mystery to him and everyone else, and

mother thing with her not a lover thing, I tell her about being into women and she laughs and calls me God’s little joke on the male gender. Perhaps so. The boys they do check me out and want to be with me and we all know what that’s about, and I don’t think it’s taken me much of my life to figure that out. It’s funny what I sort of remember from before and what I don’t. As time goes by, some things come back to me but they’re just isolated pictures in
my head of a city street though not this city, a thousand shops, a thousand cars and lights and towering buildings—but it’s all another lifetime. I still remember things about myself like being selfconscious, I have this sort of sense of who I am even if I don’t remember the name, and for a while I confess it scares me, it seems important doesn’t it, but honestly? I don’t know that it’s so important, if you think about it. Perhaps my name really is Brontë, it’s not as though it’s impossible. That night the Mistress pulled me out of the water, brought me in, gave me a place to sleep, I felt so strange about everything and awhile there in the water at the end I seriously thought I was about to drown. And when you seriously think you’re about to drown, all the little chambers of your mind become one big room, all the walls between things that happened long ago and not so long ago, things you’ve felt badly about perhaps or things you’re sorry you didn’t get to do I suppose, all the walls come down and memory, it becomes this big open mezzanine, to the extent you’re actually thinking any of that at all as you’re trying to keep from drowning. Except at that moment, when all the little chambers of my mind opened up and all the walls came down, I couldn’t see a thing, though at the time I wasn’t conscious of much other than trying to stay alive. I was looking at what was revealed in that moment, and nothing was revealed. The big open mezzanine of what I remembered from my life was just dark and empty.

So I was sort of—I’m sure when I first get here I’m a bit

which I couldn’t be expected to remember but which I know at this very

hysterical, I’m sure I’m in some sort of shock. At first I don’t know where I am or how I got here and I’m exhausted and scared, and lying in that strange dark room that used to be the Mistress’ ceremony chamber, how do I know it’s not my name when she calls me that? I still don’t know. Later I actually read the books and I’m not sure which she named me after but I like Emily the
best, the one about the girl who drives the boy crazy and then even when she dies she goes on driving him crazy, yes I like her best.

So I know at once the Mistress she’s a bit off but I also decide she’s probably all right too, and it becomes obvious it’s a mother thing. She says something a couple of times that, when I think about it, seems a bit odd, we’ll be talking about the business, the clients and what not, and she says in self-reproach, “What kind of life is it, for a mother to leave to her daughter?” Later after I’ve been here awhile and when I think she knows I won’t get too put off by it, that’s when she tells me how those first nights after I arrived at the Chateau she would come into the chamber while I slept on the mat, sitting and watching and even talking to me. I had no idea. I never heard anything but then I’m a
very
sound sleeper. I was talking to you, she’ll say, but you were sleeping the sleep of the dead, and perhaps that’s the first real memory I have of before, I can remember someone else saying that. Because that’s exactly what I sleep all right, the sleep of the dead. And if the Mistress isn’t in any hurry for me to leave then I’m not in any hurry to go, not back out there into the lake I came from. I love the Chateau, feel safe here, protected from the lake and after awhile I feel protected by the lake, from the world. I surely don’t feel any great urge to go back and find out things about my life or my past or wherever I came from, to the contrary there’s something a bit lovely about the feeling of starting fresh. What happened before that would make me feel I want to start fresh? Well all right that

moment here in the birth canal of the lake, as I know so many things, happened

does nag at me a bit, I do wonder, but not so much. To wonder too much about it, after all, wouldn’t be starting fresh, would it?

The Chateau, there’s the main room and what I come to call the ceremony room when I begin working it, where I usually sleep except the nights I sleep on the divan out before the fire listening to the sound of the lake and the feeling of the night air coming through the terrace doors—or in the dungeon downstairs.
Since it’s below water the dungeon is cool all the time, in the hot months it’s lovely and I sleep down there listening to the radio like the Mistress says she used to when she was ’round my age living in Tokyo—a pirate station broadcasts from a boat out in the lake. It probably makes sense to keep my private space and my working space separate but cool as it is in the dungeon I’m all the more inspired to put something into the discipline, without getting carried away naturally, then if I work up a bit of sweat I can stop and cool off, watch the beads of the lake form on the dungeon walls while the submissive writhes a bit in his shackles. Another good reason for the blindfold, you see—besides the sensory deprivation he can’t see when you’re taking a breather, and he gets all excited the way men do wondering what’s going on, when all you’re really doing is just sitting there enjoying the cool and listening to the currents of the lake against the outer walls. Any one of these days—I’ll tell the client now and then—any minute these walls aren’t going to hold and that lake it’s going to come crashing in. I tell him this and then leave him there by himself awhile chained and naked in the dark thinking about what I said and, you know, listening for the walls to start cracking. During these little recesses the Mistress and I, we have a cup of tea out on the terrace for ten or fifteen minutes and laugh at the sound of the clanking of chains coming up from below through the vents. What a bad girl you are, the Mistress says. Sometimes when I go back, without even being able to touch himself he’s gotten off just from

to be the very date when, three years old, I stood on the shore of that island

the terror, so don’t tell me the boys don’t like it in their own way. When I mention this to the Mistress in some amazement, she already knows all about it: the male-wangie is a thing of mystery, she just smiles.

But jeez life is lovely in these early days before the business with the Mistress’ lapsinthe. I don’t go ashore for three months after that first night, very contented in the Chateau,
standing on the terrace sucking those slices of lemon like I love and dropping the yellow peels in the water below. At first, because I know nothing about the Mistress, to me she’s just an eccentric lonely lady; I haven’t heard the stories about the dominatrix-oracle business or the Saint Kristin stories, which I don’t understand anyway or what they actually have to do with the Mistress, but I see the people camped out on the hillside hour after hour and day after day and week after week watching the Chateau as though expecting a sign. Sure it’s not something the Mistress ever says much about. That is, early on it’s a bit obvious she was in the trade given the shackles on the walls downstairs and then I come on the tool box with the ankle cuffs and fur-lined handcuffs and riding crops and ball-gags and violet wands. I find this tiny collar I think is for a cat or something. Well it’s a collar all right but not for any cat. So I ask her right out and she tells me right out, though I see this look in her eye a moment like she’s trying to decide. She tells me right out and I just say no way. Not really. Really? And here I thought she would be shocked by my liking girls! I’m fascinated from the first. I go right past offense and never even skirt revulsion. Something in my true nature takes to it. Not to pain, I never want to inflict real pain and never have, beyond a good healthy whack in the balls, naturally. The Mistress says she never inflicted real pain either or meant to anyway; if she struck harder than she intended and left so much as a bruise or welt she felt bad, and there was never a drop of blood once—other