Arc d'X

6

THE REVOLUTION, SHE SAID to herself, has come. But when she looked up at the crescent-moon window above her bed, there was no light from torches, there were no voices from the streets. She heard her door open; she didn’t move. She lay still with her face in the pillow, but she didn’t turn to look. An uncomprehending terror gripped her: a secret had come stalking her to Paris. Something she’d never known, something she’d never wanted to know, was in her doorway. Like the child she still was, she thought if she lay still he would leave. He’d think she was asleep and therefore inviolate. But he didn’t care whether she was asleep.

He closed the door and with no hesitation came to the bed. He didn’t touch her to see that she was awake; he didn’t grab her roughly, but without thought at all to either roughness or kindness. She looked up into his face in the dark; his eyes were wild. He took the sheets and blankets that covered her and threw them on the floor.

“Sir?” she said. He took hold of her sleeping gown by the neck and pulled it, and she heard it tear. “Sir,” she could barely choke it out again; he tore the rest of the gown off her. Naked, she now pulled away toward the other side of the bed, but he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. He took from the bedpost the long blue strip that she’d surreptitiously shredded from the curtains that had hung in his bedchamber in Virginia. It’s my fault, she thought, for taking a piece of the curtain to tie back my hair: “I didn’t know,” she said; “I thought it was all right.” He tied her wrists with the cloth. “Please,” she said, but he held her tight, and then, when he loosened his robe, she saw him. In a panic she tried to bolt, but her wrists were bound and he held her by her legs. She fell back onto her bed. Behind her he pulled her hips toward him so she was on her knees, and took her long black hair in a knot in his fist. Before he buried her face in the pillow she had one last chance to gaze up at the crescent-moon window, to look for the light of torches, to listen for the sounds of voices. The window was black and silent.

He separated and entered her. Both of them could hear the rip of her, the wet broken plunder, a spray of blood across the tiny room. She screamed. She screamed so her brother James would hear, so the whole hotel would hear. She didn’t care if he killed her for it, if he pulled the hair out of her head for it, she screamed so they’d all know that their secret had found her. It was their secret, she’d seen it in all their faces, in London and Paris. But he didn’t strike or kill her, and then she knew it had been a secret to him too, and he couldn’t bear to live with it anymore. She screamed as the tip of him emptied his secret far inside her.

It thrilled him, the possession of her. He only wished she were so black as not to have a face at all. He only wished she was so black that his ejaculation might be the only white squiggle across the void of his heart. When he opened her, the smoke rushed out of her in a cloud and filled the room. It thrilled him, not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear, for once, the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn’t he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other. This possession made him happy, until he came. Then he sank out of his own sight, refusing to look at himself or what he’d done. He fell asleep, half on the bed and half on the floor.

For a long time she lay naked beside him, shuddering. Her face was turned away from him, but she could feel him there; if she could have moved she would have, but she could not. Nothing was more terrible to her than the silence, because she’d screamed so loud there was no way they couldn’t have heard her; she knew they were all awake in their beds in the hotel, James and Patsy and Polly, all lying staring in the dark still hearing the screams to which they didn’t respond. In these first moments she hated them and then she hated herself, for the way they would despise her now. So she lay shuddering, silently awake, and they all lay awake, except him.

Finally Sally slept. When she woke, before dawn, it was he who awakened her.