She taught him, among other things, the joy of fasting. She would stop all sexual play on a certain date and remain aloofly celibate for ten days or two weeks. She would let her desire build slowly, deny it, welcome it, deny it again, until there was some enormous need that always started in her imagination, in some dark cave of denial. He matched her fasting and then erupted with her in a shared paroxysm of flesh and water.
She never once used the word love and said nothing about the two of them forging a private pact. He didn’t even sleep with her through the nights. “Nothing,” she said, “is more horrible than seeing each other after a night of sleep.” She didn’t have any form of conventional jealousy, certainly not about the flesh. And definitely not his flesh. As long as they began each evening with the bath, just she and Cormac, she didn’t even mind if he made love to the other women. It was simply understood, without being said, that he would not develop any emotions for them beyond the simple needs of the flesh. And shared talk. And the details of food and books and music.
“You’re always humming tunes,” she said. “You should learn to play an instrument.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the piano. We have one downstairs, you know.”
He laughed. “If I play it, the customers will revolt, and so will you.”
“The rooms are sealed,” she said. “There’s no one here until the lunch hour. And nobody can hear if you close the door.”
“And who would teach me?” “I would,” she said.
And so she began teaching him the fundamentals, explaining the keys and the correct position of his hands, and then scales and the mysterious notations of music sheets. You need three fingers to make a chord, she said. Your fingers have specific targets, she said, those keys, and you must hit the keys cleanly. He kept hitting between keys, clanging them too hard, and she cried out in mock horror, laughed, and made him try again. She explained about flats and sharps, and how chords were major, minor, or dominant. She showed him the language of music too, and he realized that he had first heard Irish and Yoruba and French as sounds without meaning and then slowly broken them down into individual words, which were here called notes. He told himself that music was a language like any other, and he would learn it.
“Time is everything in music,” she said, demonstrating with a booted foot the way to maintain tempo.
“In life too.”
“Please, cheri, it’s too early for philosophy.”
The tempo of his days was also shifting. He could not always appear beside her at the piano at eleven in the morning. His duties to the Evening Post often had him running from one event to another, and the work had greater urgency now because a Scotsman named James Gordon Bennett was bringing something new to the newspaper trade. He had founded the Herald and, after some false starts, was beginning to find readers. He published the sort of details that Cormac put in his notes and failed to get into the Evening Post. Instead of burying tales of mayhem and horror in the back of the paper, Bennett put them on the front page, which all other journals devoted to advertising. He used crude woodcuts as illustrations. He broke the neutral tone of the writing. As his sales increased, particularly after his accounts of the murder of a prostitute named Helen Jewett, the other editors dismissed him as a cheap vulgarian. But the Evening Post was now selling eight thousand copies each day, delivered to the desks of businessmen, while Bennett was selling thirty-five thousand, peddled on the streets by boys. The Evening Post began to run more tales of murders than before, discreetly, of course, and still buried in the rear of the newspaper. That meant more work for Cormac O’Connor. He moved around the town with a mask pulled across his lower face to reduce the miasma, checking with policemen and lowlifes for stories, humming the tunes that he was taught by the Countess de Chardon.
On slow days, or Sunday mornings, he sat beside her on the piano bench and ran his fingers over the keys, savoring each chord, astonished at the way music brought something from deep inside him. A choppy Celtic anger. A longing for a world already lost.
“You have very good hands,” she said one morning. “But then I already knew that.”
“They’re not good enough for music,” he said.
“They will be.”
She showed him what to do with her own long-fingered hands, telling him to watch the way those fingers moved. Sometimes she lost herself in the music, doing a concert for an audience of one, her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly backward, listening as if the rest of the world were a vast silence. Her music was lyrical and romantic, and he saw her as a girl in some stately white mansion in Port-au-Prince, alone in a vast room, or with some French exile serving as her musical overseer. In his imagination, her instructor looked like the dancing master from John Hughson’s tavern, small, a dandy, and then he wondered: Where did the dancing master go? Where did all of those people go who were in my life for a month or a year and then moved off the stage?
And so music merged with water as he meshed more closely with the Countess de Chardon. A set of rules was being formed between them, unwritten, unposted, but part of their shared time. He understood, as he painted the women of the house in his studio down the hall, that he might finish the night with a token of mutual gratitude. With shrugs, or phrases, the countess encouraged it, for she insisted that jealousy of the flesh was an absurd form of human weakness.
“Jealousy kills,” she said. “It kills love. It kills people. You know that. You see the results at least once a week in your job. The cemeteries are filled with people who thought jealousy was love.”
“But it’s there; it’s part of human nature.”
“No, it’s part of the idea of property. Read Mary Shelley, Cormac. I mean, truly read her. Men think women are their personal property. When women decide that they own their own bodies and will use them as they please, men kill them.”
“Women kill men too,” he said. “Jealous women.”
“To protect themselves. To kill before they are killed. They don’t really care if men go off with other women, as long as they come home, as long as they don’t pick up a disease and carry it into their beds and their bodies. I know. I see certain men here all the time, and then see them with their wives going down to Trinity or St. Paul’s on Sunday mornings. Then I see a notice in a newspaper that poor Missus So-and-so has died after a long illness, and I know she’s died from what he brought home. Not from this place, because I have the doctor to check each woman every week. But from a hundred dives on South Street. My point is simple: More women are murdered by men’s pricks than by gunshots, Cormac.”
“Can I quote you in the Post?” he said, and laughed.
“You can translate me into Latin and chisel it over the courthouse door.”
She implied that when he was alone while she traveled to Philadelphia or Boston on business, she would not care if he sampled the other women of the house. They were there for many men, even Cormac. He was entitled to small pleasures, and so was she.
“I just don’t want your personal report,” she said. “I don’t want you to tell me that Fiammetta is wonderful. If she is, I want to be there myself, with the two of you.” She smiled. “The only way to prevent jealousy is to share one’s flesh. To be generous. To break down the notion of permanent ownership.”