The Green Muse (19 page)

 

“
Y
OU HAVE YOUR
admirer,” Adelaide tells me on the lunch line, her eyes gleaming like a hungry cat's. “Surely you can convince the gentleman to help you.”

“No,” I tell her, and I cannot. Even if I wanted to I could not convince Edouard to do anything that runs counter to his principles, I know that as surely as I know him; I almost wrote,
my name
. But that is by no means certain these strange days, because Augustine Dechelette is either a young woman living in the country with her parents and her big dreams about the future; or she is a waif adrift in the halls of the Hôpital Salpêtrière, under the eye of the great Dr. Charcot, who terrifies her; or perhaps Augustine is the young woman who receives visits from that nice young photographer Adelaide thinks is courting her but who is in fact only interested in her in the most professional and impersonal way; and Augustine is crying now, sitting in her familiar little chair at her familiar little table and feeling the familiar ache of loneliness she once felt only for a dark-­haired bookseller in her familiar little hometown.

Oh, I am a fool, and a brazen one at that! My only consolation is that Edouard is a good man, a man who surely does not dream that the insignificant young insane woman he visits could ever feel such things toward him. But I do! Because he has been kind, and because of the intensity with which he speaks of his work, and because his gingery mustache simply will not grow all the way in, and leaves him looking boyish and somehow chagrined. Why can I never remain pure? Each day here I wake up and vow that this day, this day I will move through like a ship on quiet water, going calmly about what I must, with no quarreling in my head, no angry retorts on the tip of my tongue, no wayward daydreams disturbing my concentration. Because I do so want to be let out of this place. I would like to say, to be made well. If were certain I needed to be made well the goal would not seem so distant and odd, and I would have something to strive for. But all I have to strive for now is the attention of Dr. Charcot, and the increasing pleasure I derive from acting the hysteric onstage at Dr. Charcot's Friday lectures. I should not like that; it is more corrupting than anything I have ever done to myself, I am certain of that. More corrupting than my silly dreams of love, whether with Louis or with my fine and noble Edouard who will never think of me that way.

But I do like the feeling of being onstage. At first it terrified me. I was nothing but the object of every eye in the Amphitheatre. That this was exactly what I had always longed for escaped me entirely, humiliated as I was with my madwoman's status and dingy smock. But it was quite easy to see what the Great Charcot wanted of me. And it is quite easy to give it to him. “The hysteric moves her arms thus,” he says, and who am I to prove him wrong? I am, after all, the hysteric he is talking about; he diagnosed me before he even saw me; I did not even have a name until he found that I could mimic hysteria as though it were a part in a play. Onstage I am not insane; I am not even a silly country girl with green disease: I am Augustine, already, in so short a time, the pride of the asylum! Oh, if I were to laugh now I would not stop until my laugh sounded like Adelaide's. Until it echoed down the corridors of this place as I now recognize that hers did the first day I was here, when I was still without a future.

I am not happy here, but I am not unhappy. I have achieved my dream! Adelaide assures me (and the Great Doctor implies) that I will soon be the toast of Paris. Of course, they will not copy my dress or hair. They will not print drawings of me in the fashion pages of the newspapers, although my photographs have already appeared in several prestigious medical magazines. They do not send journalists to take down my every utterance. They do not know that I am real, any of them, excepting Edouard. But every Friday I take to the stage and put on my performance.

Finally I am able to lose myself in my posing. It is like a dance. Each movement lies before me like a choreographed step. The hysteric experiences paralysis of the left arm: I slowly extend my arm, as if searching for something; my splayed fingers tighten and fold inward as my hand stretches forward. My elbow locks, and suddenly I make a fist, thumb held out stiff, and my wrist snaps down into an unnatural angle. I pull my forearm toward my face so swiftly it seems I will strike myself, turning my cheek downward toward my clenched knuckles before halting my fist.

Then I tilt my head upward and allow a small smile to creep across my mouth: I flirt with heaven. My smile broadens, my eyes close, and I melt with a sigh onto the tousled bed. Lying on my side I hug my shoulders gently and think of what a lover's caress would feel like against my skin.

I raise myself from the waist, bringing my hands out as if to clap; I am still smiling, as if in response to a lover's blandishments. But there is no shame now, and no coy demeanor either. This is Augustine in ecstasy: Is it a lover or communion with a saint?

Then I widen my eyes as much as I can. I must at some point actually look insane!

I fall suddenly prone on the bed. Then, from my position on my back, I raise my body from my head to my feet, holding myself up with my arms behind my shoulders; it is called the
arc-­en-­ciel
, and Adelaide taught it to me. Dr. Charcot has told me of the shameless antics of hysterics, and though this is the most difficult part of my performance, I must do it. It's more humiliating than anything else I do in my performance, my entire shift sliding as it does all the way up my thighs, but I have even grasped it and pulled it toward my head to show my drawers! Once the initial, inevitable humiliation is gotten over, it hardly matters to me what follows. And by this time I have fully assimilated my character, broken as she was by love. Oddly enough, it makes me feel better about my own situation as the girl with the crush on the bookseller. It is nothing in comparison with what my poor invented hysteric has been through! And her agony, as interpreted by Dr. Charcot, and reenacted almost every Friday for the rather overeager students at his private lectures, somehow quiets my own pain as it gives life to hers, which, oddly enough, I think she deserves, for all that I made her up! Perhaps every actress interprets a role thus, making it her own.

Once I have lifted my body I try to create of it a perfect rainbow of pain. And after I have held the rainbow a full thirty seconds (which is a very long time, I must say), I simply collapse on the bed—­and I am done.

Once I was given a chair to sit on instead of the usual grubby, unmade bed. After I had clenched my fingers and bent my wrist inward I was momentarily at a loss. Then I lifted my knee and crossed my legs, exposing myself up to the hip, and oh, sweet Jesus, I twisted in my chair and stretched my leg out straight to give the spectators a good side view! I did not smile, but it was only because I somehow knew that melancholy would be more seductive than flirtatiousness. Afterward, I told myself that ballerinas expose their entire legs; but really it was just that that instant of indecision had plunged me even deeper into my role, so deep that I merely did what my nameless, piteous hysteric would have done.

At the lectures I must show fear, terror, and declaiming. Declaiming is the hardest: I had to think for the longest what it is that the hysteric has to declaim. But there are truly ill women here; I do more than take lessons from Adelaide and hints from the Master. I have watched, and listened, and finally come to the conclusion that the greatest pain for the hysteric, and the greatest obstacle to her recovery, is the trauma of not being listened to. After all, if she were listened to, would she have to resort to pantomiming her fear and terror? What would she even have to declaim?

And it became easy after that. Even exposing my flesh became easier. And I no longer feel shame about feigning insanity. What if even one of my actions prompts Dr. Charcot to listen to his hysterical patients? That would be worth every seductive glance, every
arc-­en-­ciel
, that I could ever do here!

 

W
ITH THE EXCITEMENT
of our baser instincts comes an almost insatiable curiosity. This is, I suppose, what is meant by temptation. I did not want to make love to Odette, but I wanted to find out what would transpire between us when next we met, a sensation both delicious and repugnant, of wanting to experience again the same base feelings she had elicited from me before. But along with this came the desire to conquer those feelings.

For all of this I despised myself. I did not blame Odette. She was the image of Woman as Temptress made flesh. But I am not a weak man: I make my own choices.

There was a tree, when I was a boy, that I wanted to conquer. I would stand at its foot and envision myself among the topmost branches. Each summer I would climb a little higher, and a little higher, knowing the danger and knowing the thrill. When, at twelve years old, I fell out of the tree far short of my goal and broke my ankle, I did not blame the tree. It was a beautiful challenge, a challenge irresistible to me, yet even at that young age I would never have thought to blame the tree for its beauty, for the way the sounds in its upper branches made the summer breeze become a siren song to my naïve and adventurous mind.

No, Odette could not help being Odette. She could no more control the insinuating huskiness of her voice, the fullness of her bodice, the habitually parted lips and smoky eyes, than a tree can control the sound of the wind through its foliage. We are to our natures born, I think, and society molds those natures as best (or worst) it can. Clearly Odette had received no education proper to a young lady; clearly she had never been in the care of, say, nuns! The cobra is beautiful, but only a fool would expect to put out his hand to it and not be bitten, and I am no Indian snake charmer. I had seen Odette's degraded beauty, I had heard the siren song of her shadowed eyes. And I knew that not only was I too moral a man to fall, I was also too soft. It takes a certain fearless disregard, for convention, for safety, for self, to reach toward the cobra's shining head. I had not the fortitude of the willfully dissolute. I have too mundane a heart to truly be swayed from the path of righ­teous­ness. The rules are clear, and the path strewn with enough sweet-­smelling flowers, enough benign beauty, for me to prefer it to a more glamorous yet dangerous road. I thought of Odette and felt a stab of purely animal longing; I think of Augustine and I feel a melting in my heart.

It is an easy choice for me.

But I must admit I had thought sometimes of Odette. Her smoky eyes would appear to me at odd times, most often in the moments before falling asleep. Blue, blue—­and I would start awake, picturing Augustine's very different blue eyes. In truth, I felt ashamed to think of Augustine when I had just been picturing Odette's exotic visage. Augustine's eyes were cornflowers in a sunny field; Odette's were midnight. Augustine's whole face was light and purity and gentleness, whereas Odette's was lit by the fires of corruption. I was astounded, frankly, that such a woman as Odette could so easily have kindled a fire in my heart, but I had never before been approached by a woman like Odette. I had never dreamed that such a creature could exist outside the pages of a romance novel—­I had never even read such a novel, just glimpsed the ones Natalie kept hidden at the bottom of her wardrobe. I had heard about women whose sexuality was unbridled and corrupt—­there are those who think
all
women's sexuality is unbridled and corrupt, but I don't believe such nonsense. But I have been exposed to so little in my sheltered life! The fairy princess, the damsel in distress—­what do I know about women? I had begun reading what little literature exists on hysteria and had been astonished at the acceptance of the idea of Woman as a succubus unable to control her own passions. Am I so provincial that I cannot understand the threat of Woman? Of certain women, of course; every man has read or heard stories of the femme fatale, and more than half hope to meet one, even to be ill-­used. But Augustine was no succubus, no threat—­except perhaps to my heart. Maybe that was what was meant by these dramatic claims, that Woman has the natural capacity both to entangle the heart of man and make a fool of him while doing it. But is that not our fault as much as it is Woman's? She follows her nature, we follow our basest desires or our untried hearts. I did not blame Odette for what she was, just as I thanked God for what Augustine was.

But I felt a certain guilt in thinking about both these women so close in succession, although I knew I would be foolish indeed if I thought I could control the meanderings of my mind.

And then I faced that it was not my heart that had been kindled by Odette, but the very baseness I so deplored in other men. So I was human after all. I would be doubly careful, then, when I met her at the party. Because I knew that my very humanness would make me seek her out, make me see if I could quench this unholy thirst by conquering it before it conquered me.

 

I
WAIT FOR
Edouard. All along the endless hallways the air is completely still. In the Great Goctor's office the black walls soak up all the air and light, and my voice falls straight to the floor. Even outside in the courtyard the air is as still as the sunlight, which is always pale, as though it loses something in reaching past the walls and down to where we pace or cry or stand and stare. Even the sound of crying seems flat—­it is only at night that sounds take on any resonance.

And in the hydro-­treatment rooms even the great gasps of steam do not disturb but only add to the heaviness of the air, which weighs, like layer upon layer of cotton blankets.

But when Edouard visits he brings the wind. His hair always looks as if he has just been running. His cheeks are always flushed with vigor and good health. He has a wonderful amount of animal spirits, and during his visits he shares them with me, as if they were an elixir, a far better elixir than even the green and yellow of my own meadows at home. Edouard's Healing Elixir, like the tonics Maman used to take for her nerves. Used to. As if my entire past were dead and gone, and I only away from home these few months!

I have alluded to Edouard in my letters; but gently, lest I frighten Maman. I see now how I have hurt her: What must it have done to her to find out that her own daughter lusted after a married man! What must it have done, in the weeks and months leading up to my commitment to La Salpêtrière, for her to see my sadness, my surliness, my constant sulks and temper? Oh, I know now that I did not have green disease; I do not even believe in green disease anymore. But I cannot blame her for thinking that something was terribly wrong with me. And something was. Immaturity, bad judgment, the need to pull away from what I loved most: my parents. Even Papa felt my moods. And, scientific-­minded man that he is, it was only natural that he would find a new cause for the old malady of growing up and blame it on Progress, at that.

I hear a knock on the door, how odd; I have no treatments until three. Perhaps it is Edouard already!

I am the happiest girl in the world!