The Drowning Girl (35 page)

I stuck the postcard on the fridge with a magnet, and for a few days I thought too much about Gévaudan, and was surprised by how much I worried about Eva, and how frequently I found myself wishing that she would call again. I sent a couple of emails, but they went unanswered. I even tried to find a contact for Perrault, to no avail. I spoke with a woman at Subliminal Thinkspace Collective, a brusque voice slathered with a heavy Russian accent, and I gave her a message for Eva, to please have her get in touch with me as soon as possible. And then, as April became May, the humdrum, day-to-day gravity of my life reasserted itself. I fretted less about Eva with every passing day, and began to believe that this time she was gone for good. Accepting that a relationship has exceeded its expiration date is much easier when you always knew the expiration date was there, waiting somewhere down the road, always just barely out of sight. I missed her. I won’t pretend that I didn’t. But it wasn’t the blow I’d spent so much of our four years together dreading. It was a sure thing that had finally come to fruition. Mostly, I wondered what I should do with all the junk she’d left behind. Clothing and books, CDs, and a vase from Italy. All the material ephemera she’d left me to watch over in her absence, the curator of the Museum of Her. I decided that I would wait until summer, and if I’d not heard from Eva by then, I would box it all up. I never thought far enough ahead to figure out what I’d do with the boxes afterwards, once they were packed and taped shut. Maybe that was a species of denial. I don’t know. I don’t care.

The first of June came and went without incident, and I heard nothing more from her. I don’t think of myself as a summer person, but, for once, I was glad to have the winter behind me. I welcomed the greening of Boston Common, the flowers and the ducks and the picnicking couples. I even welcomed the heat, though my apartment has no AC. I welcomed the long days and the short nights. I’d begun to settle into a new routine, and it seemed I might be discovering
an equilibrium, even peace, when I got the letter from Eva’s sister in Connecticut. I sat on the bed, and I read the single page several times over, waiting for the words to seem like more than ink on paper. She apologized for not having written sooner, but my address had only turned up the week after Eva’s funeral. She’d OD’d on a nortriptyline prescription, though it was unclear whether or not the overdose had been intentional. The coroner, who I suspect was either kindly or mistaken, had ruled the death accidental. I would have argued otherwise, only there was no one for me to have the argument with. “I know you were close,” her sister wrote. “I know that the two of you were very good friends.” I put the letter in a drawer somewhere, and I took the postcard off the refrigerator and threw it away. Before I sat down to write this out, I promised myself I’d not dwell on this part of the story. On her death, or on my reaction to it. That’s a promise I mean to keep. I will only say that my mourning in no way diminished the anger and bitterness that Eva’s inconstancies had planted and then nourished. I didn’t write back to her sister. It seemed neither necessary nor appropriate.

And now it is a cold day in late January, and soon it will have been a year since the last time I made love to Eva. The snow’s returned, and the radiator is in no better shape than it was this time last year. All things considered, I think I was doing a pretty good job of moving on, until a shipment of Perrault’s book arrived at the shop where I (still) work. It came in on one of my days off, and was already shelved and fronted, right up front, the first time I set eyes on it. The dust jacket was a garish shade of red. Later, I would realize it was almost the same shade of crimson as the girl’s cap in
Fecunda ratis
. I didn’t open it in the store, but bought a copy with my employee discount (which made the purchase only slightly less extravagant). I didn’t open it until I was home and had checked twice to be sure the door was locked. And then I poured myself a glass of
scotch, and sat down on the floor between the coffee table and the sofa, and scrounged up the courage to look inside. The book is titled simply
Werewolf Smile,
and opens with an epigraph and several pages of introduction by a Berkeley professor of modern art (there is also an afterword by a professor of Jungian and Imaginal Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute). I saw almost immediately that Perrault had dedicated the book to “Eva, my lost little red cap.” Reading that, I felt a cold, hard knot forming deep in my belly, the knot that would soon become nausea as I turned the pages, one after one, staring at those slick full-color photographs, this permanent record of the depravity that Albert Perrault was peddling as inspiration and genius. I will not shy away from calling it pornography, but a pornography not necessarily, or exclusively, of sex, but one effusively devoted to the violation of anatomy, both human and animal. And the freeze-frame violence depicted there was not content with the canvas offered by only three dimensions, no, but also warped time, bending the ambiguities of history to Perrault’s purposes. History and legend, myth and the Grand Guignol of
les contes de fées
.

I should—though I can’t say why—include that epigraph, which sets the book in motion. It was written by a Boston poet I’d never heard of, but since there are many Boston poets I’ve never heard of, that means next to nothing, doesn’t it? I live here, and work in a bookstore, but that hardly seems to matter. It’s no protection against ignorance. The text of the epigraph appears first in Latin, and is then translated into English. It is titled “The Magdalene of Gévaudan”:

It doesn’t actually feel like a poem. It feels like an invocation. Like something from Aleister Crowley.

I am becoming lost in these sentences, in my attempt to convey in mere words what Perrault wrought in paint and plaster, with wire and fur and bone. The weight and impotence of my own narrative becomes painfully acute. Somehow, I’ve already said too much, and yet know that I will never be able to accurately, or even adequately, convey my reaction to the images enshrined and celebrated in Perrault’s filthy book.

I am a fool to even try.

I am a fool.

I am.

He festooned the gallery’s walls with black-and-white photos of Elizabeth Short’s corpse, those taken where she was found in the weedy, vacant lot at Thirty-ninth and Norton in Leimert Park and a few more from the morgue. These photographs were so enlarged that a great deal of their resolution was lost. Many details of the corpse’s mutilation vanished in the grain. There was also a movie poster from George Marshall’s 1946 film noir,
The Blue Dahlia
, written by Raymond Chandler, which may (or may not) have served as the inspiration for Short’s sobriquet. Hung at irregular intervals throughout the gallery, from invisible wires affixed to the ceiling, were blowups that Perrault had made of newspaper accounts of the murder, and there were the various postcards and letters taunting the LAPD, like the one that had been used for my invitation to the installation’s opening.

Scattered among these gruesome artifacts of the Black Dahlia murder were an assortment of illustrations that have accompanied variants of the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale over the centuries. Some were in color, others rendered only in shades of gray. Gustave Doré, Fleury François Richard, Walter Crane, and others, many others, but I don’t recall the names and don’t feel like searching through the book for them. They would have only seemed incongruous to someone who was blessedly unaware of Perrault’s agenda. And displayed among the postcard facsimiles and the red-capped girl children were eighteenth-century images of the creature believed to have been responsible for all those attacks in the Margeride Mountains. From my description, it may seem that the installation was busy. Yet somehow, even with so many objects competing for attention, through some acumen on the part of the artist, just the opposite was true. The overall effect was one of emptiness, a bleak space sparsely dotted with the detritus of slaughter and lies and childhood fancy.

But this odd assemblage, all these sundry relics—
every bit of it
—was only a frame built to mark off Perrault’s own handiwork, the five sculptures he’d fabricated from Eva’s life casts and, presumably, with the aid of the taxidermist acquaintance she’d mentioned to me. The centerpiece of The Voyeur of Utter Destruction and, later on,
Werewolf Smile
. The desecration made of the body of Elizabeth Short, as it had been discovered in that desolate lot in Leimert Park at about ten thirty a.m. on the morning of January 15, 1947. Here it was, not once, but repeated five times over, arranged in a sort of pentagram or pinwheel formation. The “corpses” were each aligned
with their feet towards the wheel’s center. Their toes almost, but not quite, touching. There are twenty or so photographs of this piece in the book, taken from various angles, the sculpture that Perrault labeled simply
Phases 1–5
. I will not describe it in any exacting detail. I don’t think that I could bear to do that, if only because it would mean opening up Perrault’s book again to be certain I was getting each stage in the transformation exactly right. “It’s not the little things,” Eva once said to me. “It’s what they add up to.” That would have served well as an epigraph to
Werewolf Smile
. It could have been tucked directly beneath the author’s dedication (as it happens, the actual epigraph is by Man Ray: “I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive”). What I will say is that
Phase 1
is an attempt at a straightforward reproduction of the state in which Elizabeth Short’s naked body was discovered. There’s no arguing with the technical brilliance of the work, just as there’s no denying the profanity of the mind who made it. But this is not Elizabeth Short’s body. It is, of course, a mold of Eva’s, subjected to all the ravages visited upon the Black Dahlia’s. The torso has been bisected at the waist with surgical precision, and great care has been taken to depict exposed organs and bone. The severed arms are raised above the head, arranged in a manner that seems anything but haphazard. The legs are splayed to reveal the injuries done to the genitalia. Every wound visible in the crime-scene photos and described in written accounts has been faithfully reproduced in
Phase 1
. The corners of the mouth have been slashed, almost ear to ear, and there’s Perrault’s “werewolf smile.” Move along now, widdershins about the pinwheel, until we arrive at
Phase 5
. And here we find the taxidermied carcass of a large coyote that has been subjected to precisely the
same
mutilations as the body of Elizabeth Short, and the life casts of Eva. Its forelimbs have been arranged above the head, just as the Dahlia’s were, though they never could
have been posed that way in life. The beast lies supine, positioned in no way that seems especially natural for a coyote. It was not necessary to slash the corners of the mouth. And as for phases 2 through 4, one need only imagine any lycanthropic metamorphosis, the stepwise shifting from mangled woman to mangled canine, accomplished as any halfway decent horror-movie transmutation.

The face is only recognizable as Eva’s in phases 1 and 2. I suppose I should consider this a mercy.

And at the end (which this will not be, but as another act of mercy, I will
pretend
it is) one question lingers foremost in my mind. Is this what Eva was seeking all along? Not enlightenment in the tutelage of her
bête noire
, but this grisly immortality, to be so reduced (or so elevated, depending on one’s opinion of Perrault). To become a surrogate for that kneeling, red-capped girl in
Fecunda ratis
, and for a woman tortured and murdered decades before Eva was even conceived. To stumble, and descend, and finally lie there on her back, gazing upwards at the pale, jealous moon as the assembled beasts fall on her, and simply do what beasts have always done, and what they evermore will do.

The End

T
here is a very famous poem by Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), “Dover Beach,” that has always been a favorite of mine. I’ve read it aloud to myself many times, delighting in the interplay of words and metaphor. But, until this past week, it has never assumed a personal meaning for me. My own
private
meaning. It’s only ever been pretty words written in a time when all the world was a different and rapidly changing place: