He sat there on the end of her bed, his head in his hands, talking to himself, moaning, cursing, and then he left, staggering as he pulled up his breeches in midstep. And as Sally Hemings watched his shame, all of her own went away. I am blameless, she told herself. And now, in the hallway, she says aloud, “I am better than him.” Never before did she imagine that she could be better than Thomas Jefferson. The world as she knew it simply didn’t allow for that possibility. And now it does.
~ ~ ~
There is so much room inside Thomas Jefferson. I shout, and there is no echo. I have been walking for days and am not sure I will ever traverse the distance between his head and his feet. Nights I unroll my sleeping bag and make a fire from the dried sticks and punky logs that are scattered everywhere in here. Last night a man walked out of the darkness and asked if he could sit down and warm his hands at my fire. A fresh-killed rabbit dangled from his belt, and he said he’d be happy to share it with me. He, too, has been walking for days and days, and he has come to the conclusion that Thomas Jefferson does not exist, that this is only a sort of purgatory or perhaps one of the upper rings of hell — the one reserved for those who can’t distinguish fact from hope.
Tonight a different man is warming himself by my fire. He has no food to offer, but he is happy to help me cut potatoes and beets for a soup. I tell him what the man said last night, and he tells me he knows for certain that Thomas Jefferson is real and that we are inside him. It’s just that these fires of ours make him lighter than air, and so he is constantly drifting among the clouds. “That’s why you can never get to the end of him,” the man says. “He is everywhere.”
I tell him I don’t understand why that should be true, and he tells me he has conclusive evidence. “A couple of weeks ago,” he says, “I happened to be near one of his eyes, and I could look down at the moonlight shining off the tops of the clouds. And below them I could see the orange lights of a huge city — London or Los Angeles. Or maybe Tokyo.”
I don’t see what this proves but decide not to argue.
After we have finished our soup, we put a couple of big logs on the fire and get into our sleeping bags. Sometime later I am awakened by the clicking of clawed feet and by soft but emphatic woofs, exhalations and semivoiced yelps, which all together sound remarkably like speech. I sit up and place a couple more logs on the fire. At first they only smoke, but after I have blown on them awhile, flags of yellow flame ripple up into the darkness.
As I pull the top of my sleeping bag back over my shoulders, I notice two perfectly round coals glowing in the gloom about a dozen yards from the fire. I hear a low noise, something between a grunt and a howl, and find another pair of coals hovering about the same distance away in the opposite direction. I grab a stout branch and drag it into my sleeping bag with me, just in case. There is no horizon here and no real dawn or daylight — just a cataract-colored luminescence that lasts about as long as a regular day.
~ ~ ~
Thomas Jefferson walks hurriedly along the sandy path through the Champs-Élysées, head down, hands in the pockets of his breeches, coattails kicked again and again by his striding calves, a grid of plane trees spreading out for acres on either side of him. He hardly slept last night and was too bleary and restless this morning to work. It is April 21, a month past the vernal equinox, but the air is dank, cold. Heaps of cloud, white and gray, drift over the rooftops, intermittently releasing showers of musket-ball-size drops, but so far never intensely enough to merit his turning around and heading home.
He is trying to convince himself that what he had wanted last night would not have been a theft but a gift, that the girl, with all the modesty that is natural to her sex, had been looking on him exactly as he had been looking on her and that, unable to acknowledge the depth of her own feeling—
But this line of reasoning is quashed by his memory of her rigid body, her averted face and the noises she had made — noises of childish fear and grief.
He veers off the path and into the geometric forest, where identical tree trunks angle through his peripheral vision in perfect diagonal and perpendicular rows. He stops, his forehead against smooth, mottled bark, and gasps in panicked despair at the impossibility of escaping his own being. But then, hearing that the sounds he is making now are the sounds he made last night, he falls silent.
This is self-pity, he tells himself. You have no right to self-pity.
Pushing away from the tree, he continues walking, his head down, hands in his pockets. He feels tears rising to his eyes, but they never come. He hasn’t cried in years, not since Martha died.
How could he have allowed himself to get so drunk? How could he have allowed such low urges and repulsive ideas to take possession of his judgment? It is true. He cannot deny it: le droit du seigneur. That foul aristocratic presumption had come to mind last night every time his resolve wavered, every time he was overcome with anticipatory shame. Who would blame you? he had thought. They all do it. Lafayette has told him that he has had un goûter of every single one of his serving girls. Even James Monroe has confessed to a dalliance with his chambermaid. No one will blame you, he had told himself time and again.
And yet once he was actually in the girl’s room, he never gave a thought to his “right,” nor did he think of himself as “taking” anything from her. All that was in his mind were his nights with Martha — especially those first nights of their marriage, by the fireplace, when the snow was falling outside the windows. Stupidly, blindly, selfishly, he had imagined that all that was needed was a little patience, some loving words, a gentle touch here and there with hand, lips and tongue, and all at once Sally Hemings’s desire would overwhelm her modesty and, as with Martha, her thighs would loosen, her arms would fly up and she would cover his neck and lips with her kisses. But instead he’d inspired nothing but her loathing, and now he feels nothing but loathing for himself.
He hears a pattery drumming in the leaves overhead. A cold drop strikes his cheek. In a matter of seconds, the rain is falling so thick and fast that it hits the sandy earth all around him with a sound like millions of tiny feet stamping.
~ ~ ~
Thomas Jefferson has never called her “Miss Hemings” before. She came upon him under the portico, squeezing water out of his sodden coat by twisting it into a thick rope. The sleeves of his white shirt were sodden, too, and perfectly transparent where the wet linen clung to the skin of his arms. As soon as he realized he was being observed, he shook out the coat and attempted to put it on. After prodding several times at the interior of a still-drenched and twisted sleeve, he gave up, flung the coat over his shoulders and pulled the lapels across his chest.
His lips were blue, his hair a mass of tarnished copper coils, his face dripping. As he looked at her, a shiver passed through his whole body. This was when he said it: “Miss Hemings, I know that I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I want you to know that I profoundly regret my actions. They were utterly inexcusable, and they will fill me with shame until the end of my days.”
Now he is silent. His clearly rehearsed speech over, there is nothing he can do save wait for her reply.
But Sally Hemings is too filled with rage to talk. Her ears roar with it, and everything turns white. By the time she comes back to herself, she is already at the bottom of the steps and making her way rapidly but unsteadily toward the gate to the street.