The Green Muse (18 page)

 

“
Y
OU KNOW WHAT
this room is for,” V said as I lay spent beside her. I had gotten to know this room well. We have done nothing to make it beautiful. The flowers I put on the mantel died long ago, the vase was empty of water. V's petticoats are soiled from lying on the dirty floor, which was covered with ashes from the fireplace.

The cracks in the ceiling have become my roadmap. That one there, a split in the concrete, a split in the road: when she first introduced me to the extraordinary delights of pleasing her orally. That fractured star, cracked into seven directions: when she turned to offer her beauty from behind. She knew all the secrets of lovemaking, and I was not jealous. She came to me whole and free of any past. I have accepted everything; I will accept anything. She who is so completely mine cannot have had any past outside of my imagination.

But this thought made me uneasy. I did know what this room was for. But V's childhood with the nuns, their fond recollections of the lovely blonde child, had never been real to me; nothing that ever happened before I met her can ever be made real to me.

Except for the Empress's Children.

“What do you want to tell me, V?” I asked, covering my suddenly nervous hands by getting up to gather her petticoats and stockings from the floor.

“I don't want to tell you something,” she said imperturbably. “I want to give you something.”

I stood bent, clutching the soft silk in my hand. There was a pale shadow on the wall that showed where a painting once hung. I wanted to know what it was a painting of.

“Will you let me give you a present?” She reached over to run one sharp nail down my back, light like the scratch of a spoiled, sleepy kitten.

“You know I will do anything you want,” I told her. A boating scene, a scene of indecent love? A portrait of a little blonde girl in a parochial-­school uniform?

She was preparing me a glass of absinthe, sitting up naked in bed, expertly mixing the water, the sugar, the green. The familiar clink of ice and metal soothed my ravaged nerves, but still I did not know if I could take seeing what she wanted me to see.

We went shopping for fruits and vegetables the next morning, I in my cape and she demure in gray muslin. She was dressed for the summer, which had suddenly come upon us, in gray faille shaped like a proper suit coat, but lighter; it gave the impression almost of indecency although it was very proper indeed. She wore a gray hat with dyed violet ostrich feathers laced around the brim. Her boots were dove, her stockings, petticoats, and gloves brightest white. We browsed the stalls of the rue Cloisot: cheeses and live chickens and loaves of fresh bread, ducks and eggs and heaps of red tomatoes, yellow squash, and exotic delights from far away: pomegranates and grapefruit, star fruit and mangos. V had not said anything more, last night, about what she wanted to show me. And I had not asked.

We walked slowly. V took time at almost every stall. She held the fat rock doves and asked the vendor what sauce was best with squab. She tasted a walnut, the tip of her pink tongue visible for an instant, and in that instant four men were staring at her mouth, her pearly teeth. She bit. I smiled at the man nearest us, and he turned away almost angrily.

“I used to find them here,” she said, bemused “I didn't have to take them home.”

I should have felt only revulsion; I should have left her in the street.

I was excited. So delicate she looked, like a china figurine. I knew what she was capable of. The men staring at her voluptuous mouth did not know, no matter what they dreamed while they looked at her.

She pulled off one glove and slipped her hand into my pocket, and I grasped her fingers, surprisingly coarse fingers for a woman of her delicate beauty. She stepped closer to me. She turned slightly and brushed her hip against me; and the men stared.

“I will whet your appetite first,” she said.

F
OR A WEEK
we spoke no more of it. We did not go to V's room. She seemed to take extra pleasure in the luxuries of our life together: dried rose petals and lavender in the bath, hot toddies and poached fruit; frequent presents of lace for collars, and new kid gloves and silk stockings. I loved spoiling her. I bought her a pair of harem slippers covered with pearls; I bought her candied quinces. She never said thank you. She knew I did not want words. I wanted to watch her pull her new stockings on slowly, with painted toe and extended leg. She knew I wanted to watch her sink into the steam of her scented bath. To see her delicate teeth bite into crystal sugar with a barely audible crushing sound.

V took pleasure in spoiling me, too. A new spoon for my absinthe ritual, shaped like a young girl with a basket and a hat with ribbons, and the clogs of a peasant. She liked to point these girls out to me on the street, so different than she. Thicker around the waist, with heavy wrists and coarse hair. Perhaps it was because of Tabby; how had I thought she noticed so little?

“What do those farmer-­girl hands feel like on a man's body?” she asked more than once. She was not jealous; her eyes were shining. I told her that I did not care for farm girls, which on the whole was true. I had wanted Tabby so desperately because I knew that she was going to die.

Once, upon awakening, I found V almost ready to go out. We slept when we wanted to, and often I did not know whether I was waking into day or nighttime. It was twilight, and the streets were full. The men's top hats created a shining sea of undulating sheen amid waves of black luster. The women's skirts flowed mauve and blue and yellow along the busy street; their feathered hats bobbed. All Paris was on the Boulevard tonight.

Every man looked at V; she was so obviously not the demure young lady she looked.

“I want to give you my gift,” she said to me, clutching my arm with a girlish grip. She knew that her light touch excited me, I who knew how thoroughly woman she was.

“You wanted to take me for a walk,” I said. “You know that I am yours to command.”

So we walked to the Seine and along the quays, past Nôtre Dame, where a carnival atmosphere pervaded the large square, as it always did: Tumbling troupes performed their antics while pickpockets fleeced the crowd; Gypsies read cards for the credulous; young men took liberties under the guise of protecting their young ladies from the frightening faces of the gargoyles smiling placidly and obscenely out of the Middle Ages on the cathedral walls, protecting nothing.

We walked on. V had one hand in her muff and the other on my arm, but she removed it to put it into the pocket of my topcoat. Such a schoolgirl gesture. I squeezed her hand. We walked over one of the oldest bridges over the water toward the neighborhood of the apartment. I was not surprised.

There was no one at all on the bridge. V took her hand out of my pocket and slipped it down to touch my crotch.

“I will take you to a club I know,” she said.

We walked for a long time holding hands, seemingly aimlessly. I wasn't thinking, particularly; walking had become kind of a dream. The streets got darker and dirtier and more deserted. The air was clouded silk against my face, my body. We did not speak until we came to a small door, scoured by age, set down a flight of worn stone steps on a no-­name street.

The steps were slippery, almost mildewed, and bowed in the center from wear. I felt I was descending into an underwater cave. V seemed to float down the steps in front of me, a miasma of color and scent, and at her gentle knock the door opened immediately.

Smooth dim light, a lot of red brocade. Women in clothing so diaphanous it seemed no more than colored smoke around their breasts, their bellies. A stage. A sudden, raucous can-­can performed by women wearing red corsets with black trim, black garters and red hose, and short red-­silk skirts with a white froth of petticoats. They wore nothing to cover the sweet darkness between their legs: When they twirled and bent, flinging up their skirts, their white asses gleamed and made the darkness leap.

I looked at V and her eyes were glistening. Her lips were parted and her teeth pearls.

“You remember La Salpêtrière,” she said finally, after she saw my face relax and knew that the green music was playing in my veins. “That girl. You remember that girl.”

“The young thing with the frightened blue eyes? Yes, I remember her.” I closed my own eyes. I could see the girl now, standing terrified before the crowd, and I felt myself grow hard.

V laughed. “Yes, you do remember her.” I opened my eyes, but V was looking only at my face; she could not see beneath the table!

“I have an idea about that girl,” she went on. “It is likely that she is all alone. That her family is far away and does not visit her. I have known girls like that one, girls who were sent to institutions simply for being girls, for speaking their minds at their fathers' tables.”

I waited.

“It is called green disease,” she said, and I started to laugh.

“I thought this was called green disease,” indicating my glass.

V laughed too. “That is the Green Muse.”

“You are the Green Muse.”

“Certainly not. Green is my worst color.”

“But you are inspiration and addiction both. You are as powerful as a drug, and beautiful as any angel that inspires a poet.”

“And you are talking green nonsense. Listen, Charles, we can do something extraordinary here. This girl she is our opportunity.”

“Opportunity?” I was high in the night sky—­I was the sky itself, filled with flocks of birds fleeing southward.

“We should have taken Tabby home,” I said, and knew the green had taken complete hold of me.

V laughed. “Yes,” she said. “We should have. But this girl from the hospital, she will be better than Tabby. Augustine is a simple country girl. She is already cowed. She is accustomed to doing as she is told, at home as well as at La Salpêtriêre. A girl like that will be easy to tame. And she will not have the slightest idea of how to save her life.”

This club, this table, were far away. I was flying higher than any bird ever had, alone in the night sky with V.

 

“
L
OOK,
E
DOUARD.
D
O
you see her?” Rosalie was casting aspersions at the vacant corner of the courtyard. Adelaide, sunning herself imperiously on the crumbling stoop of the ancient door? And then I did see her. It was Augustine's pitiable imbecile. She was smiling the unrestrained smile of a child while she flapped her hands in front of her at the waist. She seemed intent on something, although I couldn't say what it was. There was a bed of roses, fresh petals littering the courtyard. The only other flowers were the dents de lions, which had struggled up through uneven bricks. I looked carefully at her: Her skin was so pale, her features so immobile, she might have been entirely constructed of moonlight and wax.

Then the smile disappeared as if it had never been, and her face held no expression whatsoever. I glanced at Augustine; she was watching the poor madwoman with something like a mother's pride.

“She has the mind of a child,” Augustine said. “I want to befriend her.” I must have looked startled; it had not occurred to me that one would want to be friends with anyone who had spent her entire life in a mental institution.

“But what possible good can you do this poor creature? If in the past twenty-­five years in the mental institution the doctors have not been able to reach her, well, my dear Augustine, it is unlikely she can be reached.”

Augustine shot me the first disapproving look I had received from her. She felt that I was demeaning something that was important to her—­or perhaps she felt that I was being patronizing. I realized that she lived now in a place where much of the treatment she received might indeed seem patronizing to her. I went beet-­red.

But it was not because I might have hurt her that I was so suddenly shamed. It was because when I had said, “My dear Augustine,” far from distancing myself from her with a paternal phrase, I had simply spoken the truth.

Augustine was dear to me. This truth was a slap in my own face, like mortality, like Fate. Something inexorable that cannot be denied. Augustine was dear to me. She was not simply a beautiful girl whose misfortune had touched my heart. She was not one of Charcot's experiments, or an example of hysteria, or even a girl who had stirred more than my pity as she stood half-­naked on a stage in front of hundreds of gawking men. She was Augustine, and I cared about Augustine.

She did not understand my blush: She thought I was sorry for having patronized her. I was relieved she thought it only that.

She smiled; she forgave me.

“I am sorry if I sounded like one of your doctors,” I said softly.

“
Mon dieu!
” she cried, laughing. “You could never sound like Dr. Charcot! Do you know that I heard him telling some of his students that there is no such thing”—­suddenly standing and throwing her arms behind her back with a motion as though she were flipping a frock coat aside—­“as hysteria!” And she turned a cold demeaning eye upon me, and was for a moment almost as formidable as the doctor himself.

Then she laughed her pretty blue-­eyed laugh and sank down on the wooden swing.

“I am afraid of the old man,” I found myself saying.

“Oh, everybody is,” she said cheerfully. “The whole hospital. The attendants straighten their sleeves as they go by him”—­tugging nervously at the hem of her own sleeve. This girl was not insane. The only oddity was her ability to laugh in a place like this.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, instantly on guard like a cat, with slitted eyes.

“I'm sorry,” I said gently.

“I suppose you cannot help but pity me. I will have to resign myself to ­people's pity.”

“Pity you? You are as sane as I am!”

“Well,” she said lightly, “so are many of the women here.” Then, seeing my disbelief, “It's true that there are some here who, by some fault of Nature or their own decadence, do belong here, and some of them may never leave. I was so afraid of them at first! I cannot tell you how afraid. The first time I went into the courtyard I was afraid that one of them might attack me. You have studied the painting that hangs in the Amphitheatre?”

I had indeed.

“I expected them all to be like that. Like animals. But they're not. They're just women. Girls, some of them, like me. Many of them do not know why they are here. Several of them were beaten by their husbands, their fathers, and they fought back. Some of them—­” She stopped. “You must wonder what brought me here, if you do not think me insane.”

I did wonder. I wondered intensely, because I had suddenly found that every thought, every feeling I had about this girl was thought and felt with an intensity I had never before felt without my eye to a lens, my hands working with the solutions that could turn a negative into a photograph.

“Why you are here is no business of mine, Augustine,” I said, tasting her name on my tongue. “It matters only that you do not belong here and that I want to be your friend.”

“I do not have a weak mind,” she said firmly. “I would hate to have you pity me for that.”

“Oh, no, Augustine, your mind is not weak. If anything, it possesses an immoderate—­that is not the word I mean—­a perfect firmness not usually found—­”

“—­in a woman?” She laughed. “That is perhaps my Papa's fault, for teaching me to reason as a man does. Certainly my poor Maman must think so. She was quiet a moment, and then, “Edouard, do you really believe that a woman should always be compliant? My Papa professes to believe so, and yet he trained me from infancy to think as rigorously as a man. And perhaps this has indeed weakened my mind. Sometimes I fear I do not know right from wrong.”

I sat, awaiting her confession. But instead, “I have done nothing wrong! Oh, I know they say.” And suddenly her young face suffused itself with blood, flushing her cheeks a brilliant crimson. She looked about to cry; she looked down at the floor. “I am not a bad person,” she said, so softly that I had to lean down to hear it.

Within the walls of this place we had fallen into an intimacy impossible to achieve in the outside world in so short a time. I felt I knew Augustine in a way that I had never known anyone else: She was showing me her heart, and her heart was pure.

But instantly I knew it was a charade, this intimacy. She had shown me the depths of her girl's heart, but what had I given her? Kindness, solicitation, attention, some fruit. The things any suitor might bring, the same things she had so detested from the farm boys in her little village. When suddenly I knew what I did want to give her. But I had no idea how to tell her nor even whether telling her was a good idea.

Instead I fumblingly went back to her imbecile, who was standing a short distance from us.

“Augustine,” I said, as though we had been discussing nothing of very much importance. “What does it behoove you to reach out to this woman? What does it behoove her? She is a hopeless idiot, it is plain to see. I do not want you to hurt yourself trying, out of the goodness of your heart and soul, to help an imbecile who is not even aware you and I exist.”

“Oh, she is aware. You just have to watch her. She is much more aware of the world around her than she seems, at first, to be. She has pleasures, Edouard, she has feelings and desires just as we do.”

I was overawed then, that she could see so much in such a pathetic creature. The woman was staring at the ground, the dent de lion in forgotten shreds at her feet. She seemed intent on something, but I could not for the life of me say what.

“Watch,” Augustine said softly, touching my arm, and as she moved quietly toward the woman I felt that touch electric through my whole body, and felt an accompanying jolt of sadness that she herself seemed to feel nothing but the need to show me that her idiot was sentient.

But it was a pleasure to watch her move carefully toward the woman, as though approaching a timid deer. Augustine stopped a few paces from her and simply stood until the woman glanced downward in her direction.

“Lucille,” she said quietly. “Lucille.” The woman did not indicate in any way that she had heard her name spoken. Augustine knelt next to her on the pavement and reached a hand to touch the moss. “Soft,” she said gently, as though showing one of Nature's treasures to a child. The woman did not move, for so long that I felt a pang of sadness for Augustine: This kindness was a waste of time. And yet Augustine stroked the moss, with one finger, gently, over and over, all the time watching Lucille's face.

Augustine tried a few more times to attract the woman's attention, but she could not. But when she turned her face back to mine,it was shining still.

“Lucille is very dear,” she said quietly. “She is more pure than a six-­year-­old child. I will reach her one day. And I think she will surprise me; I think that perhaps one day she will reach for me.” And she knelt in the grass, unaware of her own loveliness, plucked a dandelion, smiled at me, then held it forth until Lucille noticed it. She did not take it at once; I did not think she even saw it. But suddenly she snatched it out of Augustine's hand and thrust it up to her nose, and breathed.

And Augustine looked as happy as a child herself, and as I smiled at her I felt that I was smiling at my destiny.