Beneath the light of the halfmoon, she says to herself, The revolution has come.
She turns to him on her bed. She isn’t going to bury her face in her pillow this time and pretend to be asleep. She isn’t a fourteen-year-old girl anymore who thinks that if she lies still enough he’ll go away. This time he isn’t going to rape her, spraying her blood across the room, and then absolve himself with cool rags between her legs and tears on her thighs. This time she isn’t going to scream out in the hope that the night will somehow rescue her; she isn’t surprised that the night answers with an unnatural silence. She isn’t surprised by betrayal at all, she expects it; she won’t fall this time into the light of the crescent moon above her. She’s already well on the way somewhere else. When he comes to take her, without hesitation she greets him with a fierce merciless urgency. With no delusions that she might resist him, she turns instead to devour him back.
In the light of the fire he sees behind her eyes something moving, something that isn’t Sally at all, the sudden swish of its tail, the slithering flick of evidence inside her of the thing to which she’s abandoned everything of herself but desire. Desire bleeds at her mouth. It ripples to her fingers. She parts her lips to inhale him and take him in her hand. Though he tries to pull away it’s a lie when he tells himself he wants to resist her: he doesn’t want to resist her. Though he tries to pull away it’s a lie when he tells himself she can survive his fucking her: she cannot survive it. She sweeps away resistance as he swept away the web of the iceflies around her bed. She takes him in her hand and drives him up inside her and he hears the response inside, the scamper of something into the swampland; his cock feels the ripple of the marshes. He fucks the thing in her so as to find what’s left of Sally at the end of the thing: it’s a lie when he tells himself he wants to free her. It’s such a huge lie that in his mind it never finishes his own sentence. He’s oblivious of the night and he’s oblivious of the fjord and he’s oblivious of the fire in the distance and, somewhere on the other side of the fire, of the child. And it’s only when he thinks of the child that, in horror, he tells himself he has to stop. He can’t lie to himself about the child. And when he tells himself he has to stop, it’s only then he realizes he’s been oblivious of how cold Sally has suddenly become in his arms, beneath his body, holding him in the grip of memory. Desire isn’t the only thing left of her after all. The memory is left, a small trace of it in the embers of her slavery that his seed hunts down, the memory of how he loves her and how she loves him and how it’s bigger than anything they have ever known or perhaps anyone has ever known, and how it isn’t big enough. She whispers in his ear.
“Take care of Polly,” she said. And I knew she was gone.
In the light of the fire a shadow scampered across her face, like a serpent taking flight. But it wasn’t a serpent. Etcher turned to see Polly by the edge of the fire. As she’d done on the edge of the city’s white circle, announcing with a tiny finger something no one could see in a crowd of birds, she raised her arm and pointed now at the fatal flame of her departed mother.
38
THE WIND BLEW THE chains that hung from the northern wall of the Paris courtyard. The wall was over three hundred years old, as were the chains, because they had been laid into the stone when the wall was built, eight sets of shackles that once held the prisoners of dukes and kings and then, after the Revolution, the enemies of the Republic condemned from the highest summit of Robespierre’s Mountain. The shackles dangled listlessly, the rain of centuries having long since washed them of their blood. Now sometimes teenage lovers broke into the courtyard in the middle of the night to play with the shackles and Seuroq would hurry out of the house to chase them away. More exasperating than the mirth of the kids running off was that of Seuroq’s wife, who found amusing the doctor’s indignation at the harmless bondage games — since the shackles could not be locked — being played in his courtyard. Teasing, she would slip into the chains herself, give them a good rattle. “My God, Helen,” Seuroq said with shock, and Helen laughed.
“You always were so proper,” she said.
“Not that proper, was I?” He softened, momentarily worried that, knowing he was not a demonstrably passionate man, he had in the course of the many years they’d been married denied his wife something. “I wasn’t so proper,” he asked quietly, “when it mattered not to be proper, was I?” and she took her wrists from the shackles of the courtyard wall and slipped them around his neck, with that smile that was always young.
No one had broken into the courtyard since Helen’s death.
Now, with the courtyard’s silence interrupted only by the city’s distant festivities and its shadows broken only by the twilight through the sieve of the trees, the assistant stood watching the old man through the library window. He’s mourning again, Luc thought to himself, though that didn’t seem precisely right, since it implied there had been a time in the past eight months when the old man had not mourned. It wasn’t that the expression on Seuroq’s face was mournful but rather the opposite: his had always been a mournful face, even when he was lighthearted; no one was funnier than Seuroq when he laughed, because his face was perpetually cast in mourning and the contradiction of laughter was comic. Then Helen died and the mourning went right out of his face, the face went blank of its natural pathos; in the light of the lamp on the desk in the library, that was the look on Seuroq’s face now, lost somewhere in the thirty-one years of marriage and searching for a ghost. “Dr. Seuroq?” Luc finally called through the window, but as he both expected and feared, the old man didn’t answer, staring right through the window and right through his assistant, which left Luc with the choice of either an even more unseemly intrusion, rapping on the window, or leaving without a goodbye. He had more heart for the goodbyeless departure than the intrusion.
In the eight months since her death the world had learned not to intrude, leaving him in his chair in the library and waiting for him to wake from grief, reconciled to the possibility he would never wake. The university had tried gently to nudge the disconsolate widower back into the realm of the living and the learned, coddling him with propositions of study or teaching that he’d find intriguing but not demanding, understanding that the heart’s grief makes a person into a child who must grow old again, or takes him to the edge of life’s end from which he must again grow young. No one had a formula for grief. For a marriage of thirty-one years, was eight months too much, too little, or about right? That was one month for every four years, more or less. It wasn’t the first night Luc had found Seuroq sitting in the library chair staring into the courtyard, with neither a rap on his window nor the call of his name to arrest him from what Luc was young enough to suppose was a particular recollection rather than simply the gruel of light that wore her face.