“Poor soul.”
“He must have been playing with the pistol, for his hand was still around it, you see.”
“Oh. Around it, then. I thought it was upon the pillow.”
“As was the hand in which it lay. Of course.”
“Of course. Please …”
“I took her from the room and then returned. I had to tell him good-bye.”
According to a newspaper, the coroner’s jury said this verdict: “That the said Child came to his death by Suicide by shooting himself in the head with a pistol at said place while laboring under temporary insanity of Mind.” According to another: “The deceased was one of two sons in the family, their father well-known in literary circles.” According to a third: “The youth, 18 years of age, son of a well-known literary gentleman, committed suicide yesterday by shooting himself with a pistol.” And, weeks later, according to Mr. S. Mordecai, in the Boston Weekly Advertiser: “The boy was armed with a deadly pistol, suitable for military purposes. He was enlisted in the Guard of the Army of the United States. Soldiers die, with and without pistols, and perhaps there is solace in the boy’s embrace of danger. By all accounts, his father knew dangerous days in his own youthful past, and perhaps he and his grieving wife can find comfort in what we might think of as the courage of their son.” You sob sister, Sam, I thought as I read.
“In his coffin, he lay so sweetly, with the ease of a gentle nature. Ah, Mackie: You never gave me a disrespectful word, nor in any way ever failed in your filialness,” he said, more to the gin in his glass than to me. If a ship came in, I thought, I would have to pretend to be the inspector. And I should like, I thought, to see the captain and the pilot who would hand the lading bill to a man in a little white mask.
Filialness, I thought.
“But just a boy,” he said. “And his brother cannot hear. He wanders the house in his own interior silence, as if he has heard, already, far too much. The gunshot, I wonder.” He looked up. “Do you think?”
“I have been deafened by shots.”
“Just so.”
“But they were shots that I fired. The detonation in the cartridge, you see, occurs at the level of the ear. It is natural, at times, for a loss of hearing to take place.”
“But not, then, you think, if the shot occurs elsewhere? In a different room?”
“Perhaps your son — Stanwix?”
“Stanny, yes.”
“It may be that he wishes not to have heard.”
He shook his head. “I must drink my drink,” he said. “As to wishing and hearing: He has heard, and we all, one way and another, have heard. There is no retreat from knowledge. If there were— But you don’t think him mad? My son?”
“Perhaps sad, then. Sad?”
“Sad,” he said. “The universe is diminished and it closes in upon us when a child dies. Certainly, sad.” He said, “We buried him in his military apparel, did I say? He has gone from us a soldier. But he fights no more.”
It was half past five, and Mrs. Hess’s place was still, it being too early for the nightbirds and too late for those who wandered through the city after midnight and into the dawn. Through the thick carpeting and past the flock of the wallpaper and under the heavy door with its brass handle and silent latch came sounds of women laughing or talking low while conducting the tasks one associates with kitchens in the latter afternoon. Jessie had not lit the lamps, and we lay in shadows and a kind of grainy light that strives for darkness. She smelled like the docks — of heat, and spices of the bitter sort, and heavy oils. She tasted like foods I had not eaten but had read about — mangoes, and the milk of coconuts. And, for all our long acquaintance and fondness, I despaired of knowing her.
She finally said, “Oh, my. Oh, well.”
I reached for the floor beside the bed, then forced my hand from the mask. I returned the hand to my side and felt the chill of the heavy sheets. “It’s the second time I’ve failed,” I said.
“No, you mustn’t regard it as failing.” She rolled toward me and kissed my arm, while her long, naked leg lay hard against my own leg, hip to hip and knee to knee. “Could this, in fact, be the third?” she asked.
“Are you counting, you mercantile woman? And the word is failed. If I’m here to enter you and haven’t and can’t, then the transaction is a failure.”
“No, dear. You aren’t here to enter me. You have a tongue and fingers. You have toes. There are candles on the stand, as long as you’re careful. You could enter and set up housekeeping, for all that. Which, I would wager, is precisely why. You are not here to fuck like a stoat. You are here for me. There are emotions in the room.”
It would have been an apt moment to inquire as to hers. Our relationship was predicated, no matter our intimacies, on asking little — asking less, asking least.
“Shall I tell you an exciting story, Billy?”
“Something splendid in its filth? To whip me along?”
“I have a whip, if that’s what you’d like.”
I turned and rubbed her buttocks and the dip in her spine. It reminded me of a topography I had known but could not recall. And it was smooth, golden and smooth, as exciting to touch as her breasts. I lay my forehead against her shoulder and said, “I could not wound such perfect skin. I could not do you harm.”
“Do me good, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you again about the Irishman who loves to bugger.”
“Please, no,” I said. “Please do not. Tomorrow—”
“Ah,” she said. “I am paid for a dinner party tomorrow. Three others and I. A gentleman wishes his gentleman friends entertained. We dine in private rooms at Broadway at half past eight and for all of the night we are together. He is said, the host and my dinner companion, to have been known by President Lincoln. He is a manufacturer of boilers for the steam trains.”
She nipped my shoulder, then licked where she had bitten. Then she gently chewed at the place, as if I were to be her meal.
“What has he in mind?” I asked with what I hoped was a tone of idle curiosity.
“He wants, I would suppose, what most of these gentlemen want.” She scraped her teeth against the flesh above the shoulder bone. “To tear our clothing away after they have made a decorous dinner of roasted beef and excellent Champagne. To rape us on the table among the gold and silver flatware and the platters from Limoges. To have us on the floor, or bent over chairs. To piss in our mouths. To spurt their mettle on our faces and our throats. The usual.” She bit me harder, for she knew — did she not? — that I was growing hard and that what I hated to hear from her was also an incitement. I turned sideways now, and so did she. She lay her leg around me and pulled us with it closer together, she moving up and then down and upon me while seizing me with her left leg and arm. She was like the concubine of the Arabian prince, telling her stories, charming my flesh with her words, but hardly to save her life. She spoke for the sake of mine, I could not help but think. She charmed me into blinded action, away from my mind, and therefore safe for a while, and — so far as the sensations were concerned — entire again.
The woman I dreamed I must kill was not the woman I killed. She was a Rebel whore or, anyway, a whore who served the Rebel soldiers. Let me avoid all judgments and only say that she was a woman of business. It was a farm, and of course in a dip of the farmland that was flanked by low hills and then a long, gradual incline: Jessie’s naked back. There were two large sheds or little houses instead of a single large building, and the men’s horses were left in a rude corral made of rope affixed to saplings and some stakes impaled in the hard, dusty ground. No trees grew near the house, and I would have to crawl down from the hills. I would therefore have to wait for darkness, and thus rely upon lights at windows, unless I could take them as they departed the women. Since there were few windows, I chose the latter course.