Geoffrey sat staring out the window. The mourners had all gone, few as they were. Conny knelt beside him and touched his hand. Dry and papery.
“What now?” he asked.
“We go on.”
“With what? I haven’t felt much this last year. A few times.” He looked at her with a puzzled frown. “Will it be like this from now on?”
“I don’t know.” She patted his hand and stood.
The chest was by the fireplace. Conny broke twigs and piled them onto the ashes of the last fire, then set four good-sized logs on top of them. The dried sticks caught fire easily and soon the logs burned, too. She sat on a footstool and watched the flames lick the air.
“Did you ever wonder what it would’ve been like if it’d been me you met first and married?”
“No.”
Geoffrey stood nearby, hands in his pockets, staring into the fire. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”
“All right.”
He hesitated. “Conny … do you think when I get back … maybe …”
“We’ll see.”
He nodded and backed away. A few moments later Conny heard the door close.
She sighed and opened the chest. It seemed to have grown larger over the years. The pages were an inch away from filling it completely.
She understood Geoffrey’s frustration, but it was a frustration they shared. Neither of them had felt any desire for nearly a year. Not since that last night, when William had surprised them both. They talked about that night sometimes, as if it marked history for them. Conny supposed that it did.
In the morning William had been feverish and blood flowed from his mouth. They finally got him to see a doctor. Tuberculosis. As if hearing it made it real — more real than it had been — William grew weaker and sicker. Geoffrey and Conny had done their best to take care of him, but there was little they could do. William still refused to go to a sanitarium. He wrote little. Friends sent cards, a few sent money.
Geoffrey was afraid. He did not want to leave her, but without
William — without William’s scratching and scribbling — he thought she might leave, or that he might.
She lifted a sheet from the trunk. The words blurred. “This is all we had,” she said. “All that’s left.”
She fed it into the fire.
Too many sensations. The smooth texture of skin, the pressure of hands, the rush of breathing in her ear, taste of sweat … the tension now building in her stomach, as if someone were holding her inside, a safe, warm, protective embrace — too many sensations. She counted them all now, after so many times, and counted them again. She slid a hand between her thighs, pressed her fingers into the moistness, and the pressure began to build again, like the fear of finding something long lost and wanting never to lose it again. The stillness around her, as if she were enveloped in silence, drifting in a nonplace, without time. It came like panic and an exquisite urge to escape …
She stared into the fire, at the few dark shreds of blackened paper. She was still staring at it when Geoffrey opened the door and came into the room.
“Conny?”
She looked up at him. His scar, she noticed, was not so prominent anymore. Over the years it had grown fainter and fainter, so that now it was only obvious when he became flushed and excited.
“Geoffrey.” She took out another page. “I have something for us. Something William left us.”
The House of Nine Doors: The Man Who Came But Did Not Go
Ellen Kushner
IN THE HEART OF the city there is a certain House …
The young man had been coming to the House of Nine Doors for several weeks now, asking always for the services of the same man. Tonight, as Carlin prepared himself for his nameless client (and are not all clients of that House nameless by choice and by courtesy?) the Master of the House stopped him. “You say he never touches you, Carlin.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“And yet he seems to enjoy himself fully.”
“I think so. I certainly do.”
“Do you?” The Master of the House, who was called Eyas for his hawklike qualities, ruffled the dark hair of his employee. “I’m glad. What is he afraid of, I wonder?”
Carlin shrugged his muscular shoulders. “Me? Himself?”
“People pay good money not to be afraid here. What’s his secret, then?”
Carlin wished the Master would not play with his hair that way. Attention from Eyas was always piquant, frequently stimulating, and he needed to save his energies for the client ahead. “I think he is ashamed of his desire.”
“As are so many. But, tcha!” The Master ran his finger down to his chin, and the man licked his lips. “You know how to help him get over that, surely.”
“He does not want me to. He made that very plain.”
Eyas sat up straight. “Does not want you to? Or,” he shifted the emphasis to quite another meaning, “does not want you to?”
“Really doesn’t,” Carlin explained.
Eyas fingered his nipple. “I love secrets.”
“Shall I find this one out for you, sir?”
The Master of the House said, “I will soon make you fit to find out nothing at all. No, don’t be offended. And don’t go. I’ll be sure you make good money tonight, but leave this one to me. Oh — how does he tip?
“Too high.”
“Not a nobleman, then; their fathers always teach them exactly how much.”
At the First Door of the House, anyone may knock and be admitted. The porter did not speak, but made a question with his face, and the client nodded briefly. And so the porter led him, as usual, through the Fourth Door, which is the Door of Joy Unasked For. It opens onto a hall hung with green and gold like a woodland in spring, and always there is the faint scent of jonquils. In that hall waited a girl as fresh and young as dawn, with long hair down her back, but her form girded with silver armor, and a long hunting knife at her side. She knew this client did not want his hat and cloak removed, and so she simply escorted him up to a door bound in brass. She knocked and disappeared, and the client entered the room.
It was the usual room, dark with wood and red velvet, candlelit, cushioned. He began to take his gloves off, but stopped when he noticed the room’s other occupant.
“Is there a mistake?” he asked in a low voice. “You’re not … precisely what I require.”
The slender man lying decoratively on the floor cushions wore the simplest of white robes. His close-cropped hair stood up like a brush. Although his eyebrows were dark, his hair was bleached almost to white. “I am not Carlin, of course, sir. He cannot come tonight. If you wish to wait, another man, darker than I, and more to your taste, should be free in a matter of an hour or so. But the Master of the House thought I might serve.”
“Oh, he did, did he? What does he know of me and what I want?”
“He would not be Master if he did not know us all.” The blond stretched his body back against the cushions luxuriously. His robe opened on a supple set of muscles, but his chest had been stripped hairless: no way of knowing whether he were a blond by courtesy only. “I know it does not please you for me to join you on the bed, sir. With your permission, I’ll stay here where you may see me clearly.”