I located an unoccupied bar stool and ordered a glass of wine. Most of the patrons were of an age with me, fashionably dressed, and as I glanced about, I realized I knew everyone that I had thus far seen, either as business associates or chance acquaintances. Just down the counter was Joan Gwynne, a lovely dark-haired woman who had catered several of my dinner parties before I was forced to let her go due to our unfortunate romantic entanglement, one toward which she had since expressed great bitterness. She had on a parrot-green dress identical to that Amorise had worn, and her drink shone with the same hue and intensity as the neon letters on the facade. Though all about me other women were being clutched and pawed, no one was bothering Joan. A space had been cleared around her, and she sat without speaking, her viridian eyes flicking side to side. Behind the bar was a long mirror so unclouded it appeared to form an adjunct to the club. In its reflection I saw Carl McQuiddy and Angelica Korn conversing together, separated from me by at least a dozen people. They were dressed in matching gray suits and black shirts. A large golden pin nested in Angelica’s hair. I had no urge to join them.
I drank several glasses of wine and continued to stare at Joan. Something about her made my thoughts bend like a field of wheat impressed by a force of wind. I might have approached her, but her eerie solitude restrained me, and when the saxophonist completed his song to scattered applause, she downed her drink and moved off into the crowd. I was oddly distressed by her departure. Someone jostled my elbow. I spun about and confronted John Wooten, my lawyer for the last few years—he had recently successfully defended me in a civil suit brought by the families of two clients who had been killed when they misused one of my devices. Thick-waisted and jovial, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, clothed in a blue suit. He looked down at my hand and said with wry amusement, “Quick to anger as ever, Francois.”
I discovered that without my notice, as if obeying some old barfighter reflex, I had put knife to his belly; but this did not concern me as much as the fact that he had called me Francois.
“Guillaume de Villon,” said the man I knew as John, inclining his head. “I was your friend, Francois. Of course I have no memory of that time. We have only your words and fragments of history to tell us who we were. Nonetheless, I’d know you anywhere.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Put your knife away, man. Things have always been unclear. Our task is to make as much light as we can in the darkness of life. Let us enjoy this night.”
He raised his glass in a toast, and responding to what must have been a vestigial trace of camaraderie, I followed suit.
“What’s happening here?” I asked.
“I confess that my understanding is incomplete,” he said. “But from what I can gather, Amorise has brought us all forward from the fourteenth century to enact a certain rite that will allow us—and her—to continue.”
I stared at him, rejecting this preposterous notion…and yet something would not allow me to completely reject it.
“Of course,” he went on, “I’m merely repeating the consensus view. I haven’t spoken to anyone who claims to know anything for certain.”
“Are you saying she carried our essences inside her? Our…”
“Our souls,” he said. “Her sinecure at Emerald Street afforded her the means to effect the transfers.”
I wanted to inquire further, but at that moment a woman’s voice sounded from the stage, asking for our full attention. It was Amorise. She posed as if embracing the spotlight, her arms outspread, wearing a simple white dress whose hem grazed the floor. Beside her, Joan Gwynne stood swaying, her eyes closed. The crowd grew still. It was so quiet I could hear the rain beating down on the roof. Amorise took Joan in her arms and kissed her deeply. Just as she had kissed me back at the shop. The kiss lasted nearly a minute, I reckoned, and for its duration no one spoke. Amorise’s cheeks filled then hollowed, as if she were breathing into Joan’s mouth. The expulsion of breath appeared to be causing her difficulty, for she soon began to tremble. At last she broke from the kiss. Two men jumped onto the bandstand to support Joan by the elbows, or else she might have fallen. Amorise steadied herself and then, flinging up her arms, she proclaimed, “The sublime act has begun!” She gestured at Joan. “I wish to present she who was last Martha Laurens! Our beautiful friend, Joan Gwynne!”
Martha Laurens.
The woman who, according to “The Testament,” had metaphorically buried Francois Villon’s heart in a little casket.
Shaken, I stared at Joan as the crowd applauded, seeing another woman, or rather seeing in her the force of another, one toward whom I felt both an intense longing and an intense aversion. Moved by no act of will or conscious desire, merely drawn to her, I pushed toward the stage. By the time I reached it, she had regained her senses and—to a degree—marshaled her composure. She looked as I imagined I must have when I woke from my kiss. Ruffled and disoriented. But there was no alarm in her face, and it occurred to me, thinking about her green dress, her solitude at the bar, that she had been prepared for whatever had happened. When she noticed me, the corners of her mouth lifted in a smile. She extended a hand so I could help her down from the stage, and then led me toward the bar, glancing at me with shy anxiety as we proceeded. We sat on stools near the end of the bar and considered one another.
“I don’t know what to call you,” she said. It was as if another face were melting up from beneath the pallor of her familiar face, thus making her doubly familiar. Though disguised by bright green lenses, the shape of her eyes fit a shape in my brain that seemed to have been waiting for this sight. As did the fullness of her mouth, the concavities of her cheeks, her graceful neck and smooth forehead, every part of her.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
She laughed, letting her head drop and glancing away, and the delicacy of that movement enraptured me. This was wrong, I told myself. I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling. I wanted the comfort and security of David LeGary’s blighted yet well-tended mental garden. Je te deteste, Amorise. I said it beneath my breath, but to no effect.
Joan, Martha, this creature whom I sat before, nervous and eager as a dog hoping for a treat, she looked at me, and that look became a heated environment, an absolute immersion—I had no idea why. Martha Laurens was to me no more than a name that caused a bloom of heat beneath the ice of my soul, and Joan Gwynne was an attractive, personable, yet rather soi disant woman who, according to other of my business associates, had—following our brief fling—seen the light of the White Goddess and was now an avowed lesbian with a live-in lover. Yet blended together, cooked in the same flesh (this, if I were to believe the improbable scenario related by John/Guillaume), they became a third person whose luminous specificity enlivened and bewildered me. If what I had been told was truly happening, why was it happening?
A rite, Guillaume had said. To allow our continuance. But for what reason did we continue…and what was “the sublime act?”
The saxophone man was back on stage, executing a mournful ballad. The people who milled about us were all, like Joan, doubly familiar, as if two identities had been combined within their bodies. I did not believe in souls. So I had told Amorise. Yet feeling what I felt, having witnessed what I had, how could I not believe that the kiss had effected a transference, that Amorise had breathed some essence into me, into all assembled, and now into Joan?