Arc d'X

35

AFTER ETCHER RETURNED TO Aeonopolis, a calm settled over his daily life. But his nights were filled with dreams of his father and dreams of Kara and mostly dreams of Sally, and worse were the waking moments when he lay staring in the dark unable to believe he wasn’t with her anymore. “I can’t believe what happened to us,” he said out loud in the dark. When his nights became nothing but the same dreams again and again, he went looking for another kind of night.

He found himself at the feet of a naked blonde.

In the rosy stupefaction of the wine he wasn’t always aware she was there. Sometimes he looked right through her. Her yellow hair was tied back and she had long legs and wore only long black stockings and high heels, and she danced for him though he knew she danced for everyone. Somewhere in the onslaught of his dreams and the stupefaction of the wine he understood the true nature of his exchange with the naked blonde, and realized that in such an exchange it was not the woman who gave herself to the dance but the man, that it was only the man’s folly and conceit that allowed him to believe it was a naked blonde giving herself to him, and everything about the exchange was contingent on that conceit. The dance wasn’t about her obliteration but his. It was he who lost his persona in the dark of the club, it was she whose persona became all-pervasive in her body’s celebration. And so there were moments he took comfort in this, losing himself in the same way a man loses himself in the climax of sex, and there were also moments he wasn’t aware she was there at all, when he looked right through her, those moments when there was too much of him to lose no matter how much he might have wished to.

Those were the moments she noticed him. The moments when her spell over him was broken, and her power over him was gone; and she danced to those moments in the expectation of seizing them back from him, and in the hope she never would.

He dropped his glasses one night. The two of them crawled together on the floor of the Fleurs d’X, and when she found them and he put them on he couldn’t help but see her then, her breasts close enough to touch and her mouth close enough to kiss. She laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“You’re very beautiful,” he explained in the dark. “I’m just like all the others.”

“Yes,” she answered, relieved. He could tell she was from the Ice. Not long after, it might have been the next night or the next — in the onslaught of dreams and the stupefaction of wine and the time of the Arboretum it was difficult to know or wonder why it was important — when she came to talk to him at the edge of the Fleurs d’X he said, I’m from the Ice too. “You don’t have an accent,” she said.

“I lost it after I came to the city.”

“I never leave the neighborhood,” she said, by which she meant the Arboretum, “so I never lose anything.” She added, “You don’t look like you’re from the Ice.”

He could tell, even in the dark, that with each passing moment she doubted more and more he was really from the Ice. She believed it was just another fiction of the Fleurs d’X, where everyone had their fictions, the girls most of all. That was one of the attractions of Fleurs d’X, the invention and acceptance of fictions. So he just answered, “I know.” After a moment he said, “My father is dead,” and was appalled that he’d reduced his father’s death to a seduction, only because he couldn’t bring himself to so reduce what had happened with Sally.

“My father’s dead too,” said the woman in the dark, and more than just the cold of the Ice was in her voice.

“Who are you?”

“Call me the Woman in the Dark.” Mona was the fiction she offered all the other men, the one that had been claimed by the black giant who lived in her flat on the other side of the neighborhood; and she looked around her as she said it because though the giant wasn’t here she knew he was watching from her flat, peering at the living map he’d painted across the walls where she lived. If she’d thought there was any corner of the Arboretum that was hidden from sight in the walls of her flat, she might have taken Etcher by the hand and led him there. Or she might not. It might have been that any violation of her relationship with the men she danced for was too monumental, though of course it had already been violated by the man who lived in her flat. It never crossed her mind to fuck Etcher. She wasn’t sure it crossed his either. But she supposed that finally she’d found a man to whom, in some dark cold corner of her life, she might say, “Keep me warm,” and it would mean something entirely different from what it had always meant before. “Keep me warm,” she might say to him, and not feel colder for it. The dead part of her heart in which her father lived might, should she say it to Etcher, surge with the blood of her life, and in the flush she would dance for only one man and obliterate herself at his hands.

Every night he went to see the Woman in the Dark. She did not tell him her name. He drank again now.

Three months after he’d returned to the city the messages came from the north.

The first came from Kara. It was filled with expectation and insinuating pathos. His responses conveyed as much compassion as their obligatory nature could allow. If he no longer loved Kara as he once had, he nonetheless felt bound to love her for what had happened between them; for the source of his defining anguish to dry completely now would be another betrayal by love too profound for him to live with. But even as his answers to Kara became more perfunctory and less urgent, he wasn’t prepared for the simple one-line letter that arrived one afternoon: I don’t ever want to hear from you again. For the first split second he thought it was a joke; but he knew it wasn’t a joke. He thought, for another split second, of answering; but he didn’t answer. And so silence followed until, some time later, another message arrived: Your love was a lie. Then another: You led me on. These memos continued until their terse brutality changed to palpable rage. Now he tried to soothe himself with indignation, that this woman who had rejected him so bluntly and then, after the passage of so many years, beckoned him so summarily could accuse him of leading her on. But it was a cheap indignation, won by logic but without force of argument on the terrain of aging and abandonment and self-remorse: it was easier for her now to believe their love was a lie than to accept the consequences of having once made the wrong choice.

In the midst of these messages came Sally’s.

Now at the age of forty, his father and youth and love all passing at the same moment, he might have seemed comic in his new incarnation. This new role was to embody the recent bitter revelations of beautiful women who had come to assume by the nature of their beauty — even when, as in the case of Sally, they never quite believed in that beauty — that their lives were always to be filled with a hundred romantic choices, any of which could at some point be discarded or undone. Then the moment arrived for one woman after another, Kara and then Sally, when a choice could not be discarded or undone: and Etcher had been that choice for each of them. Because his love had seemed so enormous and his faith so pure they found his betrayal all the more incomprehensible. Now Sally was in trouble. Her life had become destitute and terrifying. She didn’t call Etcher to help her but to love her again. She called on him to promise her hope. And now Etcher could neither promise nor hope. She wrote scornfully in her letters of how he didn’t trust her anymore; he didn’t deny it. She wrote scornfully of how she didn’t trust love anymore; he couldn’t refute it. It infuriated him that she somehow felt love had let her down, when he believed she had let love down. He turned his back on her. His father and youth and love all having simultaneously passed from him, he no longer believed happiness was something pursued timelessly but rather that it was stumbled upon in a moment, seized ruthlessly and sensually with the understanding that it too would pass as quickly as a father or youth or love. But as much as he tried, the one thing Etcher couldn’t pretend was that he didn’t love her anymore. He couldn’t stop the dreams of her. He couldn’t stop the voice in his head that spoke to her, or her voice in his head that spoke back.

Then the correspondence stopped and the dreams changed. In the new dreams Sally was sick again, something in her again fluttering for release. As two years before she was in bed dying, the black bloom of her turned livid by fever. At first he thought these dreams were just old memories until in one of them he stopped to look around and saw he wasn’t in her old unit in her old circle but in the house far to the north in the Ice where he’d been chained to her bed while police rampaged across the rooftop. He told himself the dreams didn’t mean anything. He told himself they were a conspiracy of heart and conscience to provoke him into some kind of flight to her, into rushing back to save her again when he couldn’t save anyone anymore. Gann, after all, was there. It wasn’t as though she were really alone.

But one night not long after this dream, Etcher saw Gann in a corridor of the Arboretum.

He glanced up from Mona’s feet to catch sight of him just beyond the Fleurs d’X door, making his way to the stairwell that held the sound of the tide and led up to the surface; and at that moment he knew something was wrong. Sally was up there alone in the Ice after all, with no one but Polly. A cold dread passed through him. Suddenly oblivious of the Woman in the Dark, he rose to hurry after Gann, dropping his money on the stage and leaving the club behind. He had gotten down the corridor and was beginning to climb the stairs when he felt someone behind him.

The large hands on his back tore him from the stairs and hurled him against the wall. Etcher fumbled to try to catch his glasses as they flew off his face. In the force of his collision with the wall of the corridor, as he slipped bloodily to the floor, he was aware of nothing but that his glasses were somewhere in the hall where he couldn’t see them; in the vertigo of his blind haze and the smell of blood around him he was reminded not of when he’d smashed his glasses before the priests but of how far from the grace of love’s power he’d fallen. He called out to Gann in his mind, thinking, Something is wrong and I have to find Gann. But what he said out loud, what everything came down to, as it had all come down to since the first moment he saw her, was her name.

He was vaguely aware of someone at the end of the hall. He might have recognized her as the Woman in the Dark if in the light she hadn’t been transparent. If he could have seen anything he might still not have recognized the big black man from the church lobby years before, since the big man was more naked than the woman. Etcher reached to his mouth to touch his blood. It glistened from the blur of his hands. He was still saying her name when the large man placed his glasses in his hands and ran down to the other end of the hall.

All the way back to his unit he held out his hands before him and said her name, as though the blood were the medium of their communication and he spoke to her now through his wet fingers. All through the night he lay on his bed with his hands open at his sides. He could tell his hands were still wet with blood in the wind that came through the crack beneath his door. Something’s wrong, he told himself over and over; he did not sleep so as not to dream, because he couldn’t bear to dream of Sally dying alone in the Ice. It was as well that he didn’t catch up with Gann, he tried to tell himself: what would he have said to him anyway? “Gann, I’ve been having dreams.” Now as he lay on his bed he shook himself awake each time he thought he might fall to sleep. He didn’t change positions because he didn’t want to wipe the blood from his hands onto the sheets beneath him. He had almost slipped to sleep when there was a knock on the door.

Gann, he thought. “Sally,” he said.

“It’s me,” she answered behind the door.

He sat up. “Sally?” he said, astonished. The blood didn’t matter anymore, it had conjured her, he thought, and it didn’t matter if he got blood on the door when he went to open it.

“It’s me,” Mona repeated, in his doorway.

“It’s you,” he agreed, looking at her. She had a coat pulled around her, and appeared cold. He stepped aside and she stepped through the doorway into the dark of his unit. He closed the door and turned on a lamp. He motioned her toward the only chair as he sat on the bed. She sat on the chair for a moment, and when neither of them said anything she got up and came to the bed and sat on the edge of it next to him. In the light of the lamp she touched the battered side of his face, where he’d been thrown against the wall of the Arboretum.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She took one of his hands. “You’re still bleeding?”

“No,” he shook his head, “I’m all right.”

“I think I caused trouble for you.”

“No.”

“I think so,” she nodded.

“Do you know him?”

“Yes.”

“Does he hurt you?”

“Yes. No. I can’t go back now, except to leave.” They sat in silence, the light of the lamp growing a little dimmer. Glancing casually around the unit, she turned back to him to say, “Do you want to sleep?”

“I can’t sleep,” he answered, exhausted.

“If you try.”

“I mean I can’t let myself. I have dreams.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have dreams?”

“I dream of the room falling.” She stood and took off her coat and he wasn’t surprised that beneath the coat she wore only the black stockings of the Fleurs d’X. She sat casually naked on his bed. He worried that she was cold. “Should I go?” she said.

“Are you cold?”

“I’m cold,” she admitted.

Instinctively he moved to put his arm around her.

“It’s all right,” she said, raising her hands.

He pulled back. “OK.”

She hadn’t meant he couldn’t touch her. She hadn’t really thought through, as she followed him from the Arboretum out of Desire into the city, whether or not she would let him touch her. She had only recoiled from the promised shelter of his arms, not from his bloody hands touching her. Just as instinctively as he’d moved to put his arms around her, she touched herself, since it was her job to touch herself — a vocational habit — since she’d long since come to define all of her relations with men by the way she touched herself in place of their own hands. I’ll do the touching for you, was what she said to every man. And so when Etcher came to her not so much out of desire as to protect her from the cold, and when she rebuffed him, she tried to repair the reproach by touching herself for him. Her little gift to him.

There was no blood on her fingers. Her fingers were clean and dry of blood. They didn’t mar the butter of her thighs or the precarious labyrinth of her labia to which she attended every moment, pampering its petals and soothing its inflammations after Wade’s violations. Watching, Etcher sank into the swirl of her. On the bed next to her he reached out to touch the place where her body opened, that he might raise his fingers to his mouth and taste something other than blood, since taste was the one sense he never dreamed, since taste was the sense that told him it was not a dream. He was inches from her when she knew she had to decide now to let him touch her or not: she never said no, but her abrupt gasp at the moment of truth made him draw back again. He felt a bit humiliated, in his position. In her position, he knew instantly, a man would feel humiliated as well, except that it was the fundamental difference between a man and woman, the difference in their brands of humiliation. “I was made,” she explained, “to be seen and not touched.”

He nodded. It was the fundamental difference between a man and woman that she would not, in such a position, feel she’d let him down. But she did offer a consolation.

“I can take you from the city,” she said.