The Green Muse

by Jessie Prichard Hunter

  I put three rough cubes of sugar on the shining odalisque. I heard V’s silvery laugh and Verlaine’s slow, calm voice: “Do you remember our former ecstasies? Why would you have me rake up memories?”

  Already, the world around me was taking on the quality of a dream, as in anticipation I separated myself from everything around me and entered into the realm of the Green Muse. I became acutely aware of the cold outside the water bottle, the way the glass fit the palm of my hand. The way the glass could have been skin.

  “Does your heart still beat at my name alone? Is it always my soul you see in dreams? Ah, no.”

  The light fell down on the table in a sharp-­edged circle that cut the darkness in an arc against the dark green tablecloth. The absinthe waited, dark in the glass. I poured the water much more slowly than Verlaine had, savoring the tiny sounds: metal, water, sugar, glass. Slowly the liquid turned milky and spun. V was watching me. “Oh the lovely days of unspeakable mystery, when our mouths met! Ah yes, maybe.”

  I put down the carafe and shook the spoon lightly, and the remaining sugar toppled into the green.

  “How blue it was, the sky, how high our hopes! Hope fled, conquered, along the dark slopes.” I stirred my drink languidly, as I always did, enjoying the moment before I drank; my mouth filled with saliva and I caught V smiling. I smiled back.

  “So they walked there, among the wild herbs, and the night alone listened to their words.”

  I drank.

  “Paul, that was beautiful!” V said, her voice fresh with admiration. It was as though she had never heard the poem, and yet I knew she must have heard it many times. The old poet looked at her with affection while the room shifted under my feet. The absinthe pulled at my ear, as Theo always said of that first rush of feeling. Verlaine was looking at me but I could not tell him what I thought of his poem; I could not speak at all. The room receded, and I receded from myself and hung suspended just above and to the right of my own head. There is nothing like that first moment: All of God’s creation is clear to you. It is all yours. There is nothing you need, because there is nothing you do not have. I was Verlaine’s ghosts in the moonlight garden; I possessed the light that hung in V’s hair. I was no mortal thing; I would not die. Then V was looking at me catlike, and Verlaine was staring into his glass, and I was only myself, and thirsty.

  “Is everything to your liking?” V asked me. It was. The night outside, cold and wet, the warm light of the table lamp, the glint of liquor in the glass, the woman next to me.

  “There is nothing I lack,” I said. I love the illusion of completeness that liquor gives. That the liquor and whatever immediately surrounds me is enough. The cocoon of absinthe is warm and thick, then a thousand butterflies appear and brush their wings against me. This is not prattle. I have felt it: the paper-­softness of a butterfly’s wing as it caressed my hair, one summer night, after a few glasses of absinthe on the grass of the Bois de Boulougne. I remembered that, and felt for a moment that softness—­and it was V’s hand. Like a butterfly’s wing.

  “You have a red hair on your neck,” she said.

  “I am wearing Theo’s scarf.” I took the hair from her fingers, long and bright. It revolted me. I burned it in the candle on the wall and it made a hideous smell.

  “Your impish friend?”

  Absinthe makes me feel. The softness of the velvet backing to my seat—­I placed my hand upon it and could nearly have swooned, like a girl or a degenerate. Texture, flavor, sight, and sound—­these things come alive, they leap out from where they hide in the objects around me and assault me with their beauty. The spoon became an object of desire, the necklace around V’s neck almost as delectable as the neck itself. I was seduced by the uniqueness of that neck and the laugh that lodged in her throat.

  “His name is Theo, and he is a disgrace.”

  “I think he is very funny,” she said. “Perhaps you could introduce him to Paul.”

  “Good Lord no, he would become a poet!”

  V laughed and laughed. Verlaine stirred himself and said, “I will have no degenerates in my society. I have paid for my sins, I have been suffering for twenty years for my sins. The Holy Mother knows how I regret my sins.” He went on in a quiet voice, with the words my sins as the touchstone of his private rosary. V and I spoke quietly also, half-­turned toward each other on the softness of the velvet seat, her hair forming a golden net that caught and transfigured everything I saw. It transformed the poet’s face and made golden the liquid in the absinthe glass. I leaned my head closer.

  “You are a habitué of this place, and yet you do not drink.”

  She cocked her head and her lovely hair fell across her eyes and they flashed.

  “I do not need to drink,” she said. “I take my pleasure from the ­people around me.”

  I had known many women. She was not like any of them. Woman is not capable of self-­individuation; she is made to be mother; she is like the waves of the sea. Each woman thinks herself unique. I listened to their stories and they were all the same. They all had dreams that do not involve motherhood. As though the wave could escape its destiny to break against the shore! But the dreams are all the same, dull dreams of fame or altruism or art. They are as dull as men, these women who think that they can make their mark in the world. It is only that the men are right, and have the character and will to carry out their dreams. The women I pretended to listen to while appraising the whiteness of their hands and the firmness of their bosoms were destined for the nursery: the shopgirls, the gentle children of the aristocracy, the showgirls of the Moulin Rouge. Waves in a great undifferentiated ocean of femininity, beautiful and inane. This woman regarded me with a man’s intelligence in her smoky eyes.

  As if from a great distance, Verlaine spoke.

  “Have you ever longed for that which will destroy you?” His eyes were almost biblical in their intensity. A drunken prophet, lost in the desert. “One night,” he said, staring past me out of the booth and back into some other time, “a man came to me and Arthur as we sat in a bar. It was nothing like this bar. Nothing. I was nothing like the man I am now.” He stopped. He seemed to talk this way habitually, in fits and starts, without any reason for stopping or starting. “It was a fine bar . . . A fine place I cannot remember, except for the light. A man came and sat down next to us and began to speak without being asked. ‘I have been making an inspection,’ he said, ‘and nine out of ten ­people that I have inspected are going to hell.’ ”

  Verlaine looked for so long into his drink that I thought he had forgotten us. I wondered what the light in that fine bar had been like.

  Finally he resumed.

  “Arthur laughed. I was appalled. Arthur said he would greatly prefer hell to heaven. In that voice of his, which I have never been able to forget.” I looked at V, who was staring at Verlaine with something I could not understand, something that repulsed and drew me at the same time. Gentle pity lay in her light eyes, and the sharp light of predation. I felt a shiver of longing so intense I was afraid she would feel it from where she sat, and indeed she turned her head and smiled at me with the hawk light still in her eye.

  “What did you say, Paul?” she asked, all gentleness, still looking at me.

  “I did not dare answer, and Arthur lost respect for me that night—­if indeed he ever had any,” Verlaine said bitterly. “That boy who respected nothing, feared nothing. I was afraid of a man who could ask that question, even though I knew he was nothing but a drunken fool. I knew that if every soul were to be inspected, the man was right, nine out of ten would be found wanting, and would be condemned. And I knew that I would be condemned. Arthur didn’t care. He never cared at all what ­people thought, what they said or did. You, young man,” he said, turning suddenly to me when I thought he had forgotten my existence. “Do you believe in heaven? Are you afraid of hell?”

  I did not laugh, although I wanted to. Hi
s intensity was nothing but green vapor. The master who had written those exquisite poems was gone now, dead perhaps in the arid reaches of a hot foreign land these many years ago.

  “I do not subscribe to the idea of hell as put forth by the priests. If there is a God, he has built the world on the Darwinian model.” Suddenly I looked over at V and she was trying desperately to stifle a giggle. She indicated Verlaine with her head, her hand over her mouth and her eyes merry: He was asleep over his drink. I started to laugh. I was in danger of laughing so hard I would wake the old man, so I also tried to stifle my laughter. I grabbed the lapel of V s dress and pressed it to my mouth; it smelled of musk and roses. We could not stop laughing;

  I fell in love with her. We hastily left the booth where the old poet sat, oblivious now, with his memories and his absinthe, in heaven or hell under the circle of light from the candle in the wall sconce. His life was over. I left some money on the table and let V lead me from the bar.

  The street was slick with water, but it was no longer raining. The moon shone intermittent and full from behind thin fragments of cloud. V’s hair was gilded silver, and her face seemed lit not by the moon but from some fiery source within. Absinthe made the night air feel like a field of flowers around my legs. As we stepped into the street I had the sensation of wading through irises and poppies and long-­stalked allium. I took V’s arm, and she offered no objection. We walked in silence a little while, the sky spinning above us.

  “What do you think of Paul?” she asked at last, very quietly.

  “He is like a ruined monument,” I said after a moment. “He has no dignity. But he has something—­something almost like grandeur. I pity him, and I have to say that he disgusts me. Anything that I pity disgusts me. But there is a spark there, an intimation of the man he once was, the man who threw over his whole life for a beggar boy who came to his door with a sheaf of poems in his hand. I do not despise that weakness in a man, although I find it grotesque. It is religion that destroyed Verlaine, not vice. If he had been able to rise above guilt, what a life he would have lived! And now he whores himself and calls it repentance. Guilt is the real evil. The man who can conquer guilt can conquer the world!”

  “I think he is exalted,” V said. “I think he has finally found his heaven.”

  “How could you think that?”

  “He has wanted nothing more for twenty years than to pay for what he perceives to be his sins. Well, he pays for them every night. He is steeped in the very degradation he abhors. He is in the very hell he has always dreaded. He is happy, Charles.”

  All I noticed was that she had said my name.

  We had walked to the river. There was a wind, and occasionally I would smell that musk-­and-­roses scent from V’s hair. Most women’s hair smells of quinine, which they rub on it more or less frequently; many women seldom actually wash their hair. V’s hair looked like a cloud around her head, as if escaping. I was unused to hair that did not stick, slicked down, to the scalp, and I found it enchanting. There was also something about her smell: Women often carry flowers to hide their ordinary bodily scent, but it seemed that what I smelled was V’s body. It was intoxicating. It smelled primal and pure at the same time. Its raw intimacy made me think of the skin at the nape of her neck as I had seen it outside the Morgue, and I thought I would go mad. But I merely stood next to her and stared into the current.

  The water of the Seine had an evil reputation. It is polluted by nearby graveyards, and offal of every description is emptied into it. But its beauty is not dimmed on a moonlit night, and the wind was blowing strong. I used it as an excuse to move closer to her.

  “I must go now,” she said.

  “You must stay.”

  We were looking out at the moving current and the light on the current, not at each other. We spoke as if our lines were rehearsed and we did not mean them at all. I felt bewitched; I did not know what she felt.

  “It is time,” she said.

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “at the Morgue.”

  “I would like to see you there,” I said, and suddenly my hands were around her neck. I caressed her skin as I removed her scarlet silk scarf, and she let me. She looked at me with a doll’s dead eyes, and yet I knew that she was not afraid. I was afraid of her.

  She was looking at me steadily. My hands found their grip upon her neck. I pressed. The voluptuousness of the sensation was like the voluptuousness of walking through the field of flowers that was not there. I was not sure if I was really doing this, squeezing the life out of this woman that I knew I loved.

  V leaned her head back, leaned her neck into my hands. She closed her eyes, and her mouth twitched for an instant into a smile. She wanted to know what I was capable of. Perhaps she thought me amusing. I looked beyond her to the water, which did not care whether she lived or died. The moon came out from behind a cloud and gave her a silver halo. I wanted to throw her down and possess her upon the dirty stone pavement. I wanted to release her and ask her to be my wife. I wanted to press the life out of her and leave her here, a testament to my power.

  She sighed, that was all.

  I GOT HOME late. My boots were muddy, and so was the hem of my coat. I had lost a glove. They say cobwebs are good for cuts; I ran my right hand through the wheel of dust at the corner of the landing on my way up to our apartments. Theo snored; something I have never mentioned to him. He would be crushed by so ignominious a betrayal on the part of his body. I was thinking very clearly, although I was exhausted; Leonard slept silently, like a plant. I fell across my bed with my clothes still on and did not wake or dream till morning.

  Chapter 10

  Edouard

  Dearest Natalie:

  It is such a pleasure, after a long and trying day, to come back to my bachelor apartment and write my weekly letter to my most precious little sister. I have intended since you were a child that when you were grown you would be my most intimate confidant, and now that I am in Paris and you are yet home in our small town I have found in you the friend and inspiration I have long sought fruitlessly in the outer world. Oh, Natalie, this world is cold! And it is not the dead who are most cold, the dead I photograph for their loved ones or for the police. Just yesterday I was called upon to photograph the scene of a murder. I will not enumerate for you the horrors of the tenement yard where I found the body of a young woman lying amid shadows and offal.

  Sometimes Paris is the saddest city in the world.

  The woman was young, though not so young as you, and she was blond, and wore a black bolero jacket in the latest style. I had to move her fair hair to photograph her face. I felt that I became intimate with her then, as though I touched her spirit in the curtain of her hair. And I was moved. Today I felt a need I had never felt before, to go to the public Morgue and view the body. The young woman had been found with no identification of any kind, and, as is customary with such cases, her body was set up for display at the Morgue so that the citizenry could come and see if she could be recognized.

  The Morgue is a horrible place, Natalie. I may have mentioned it before. It is vast and airy, and when I went in there were children running about as though it were a park, and a woman with a dog on a leash! But I am getting ahead of myself: First I had to wait in line for thirty-­five minutes. They say ten thousand came to see her that day; somehow I am ashamed; when I saw her I wanted to protect her, to take her away from all those alien eyes. But again I have gotten ahead of my story.

  I stood in line outside the Morgue at ten on a Thursday morning and felt as though I were waiting for a carnival to begin. Already there were several hundred ­people ahead of me, some of whom had obviously come up from the country for the day, complete with lunches in huge covered baskets that could be smelled fifteen feet away. There is something about the smell of sausage, Natalie, that will always bring back the memory of the cow in the churchyard th
at morning so long ago!

  There was the most astonishing cross section of Parisian society on display that morning. The country bumpkins were directly behind a group of sophisticated men speaking quite heatedly on the implications of the Social Darwinism, now so popular in England, for the medical and social establishment here on the Continent. There were shopgirls, and young men from the lyceums, and families, Natalie, with little children. I cannot imagine what reason a mother would have for bringing her child to see the dead. Of course death is the fitting end to all our aspirations; it is our rest and our reward. We all know this. And to familiarize a child early with the outward manifestations of death is no harmful thing; quite the contrary. But to subject the innocent soul to the sight of a woman brutalized by murder! The modern sensibility seems capable of accepting almost anything, Natalie; anything at all, no matter how grotesque. Judging from the crowd, I could almost say, the more grotesque the better.

  There was no loveliness left to her, sitting there at the bare wooden table behind the glass. There had been some loveliness left in the dawn light on the courtyard floor. Here she looked like a clown, a harlequin who might at any moment dance.

  As I stood there sad, I heard a familiar voice. “Edouard, my dear man, this is not the lady’s funeral!”

  It was Robert Richet, a photographer working at the Hôpital Salpêtrière. I had met him, as I’m sure I have told you, two years ago at one of the lectures I attend Thursday nights at the Lyceum: “Photography and the Modern Manifestations of Light.”

  Richet is an educated man, sardonic, a wonderful raconteur; he keeps himself at a distance with his humor. I greeted him warmly. I do not have many friends in this huge, impersonal metropolis: It is as though we each go our own way, cogs in some great machine the use of which we do not know.

  “You look as though you knew this lady intimately, my dear Edouard,” said Richet. Friends keep me from thoughts such as these.

  I did, I told him, in a way. He was terribly interested; I do not believe he had ever thought about police photography. We spoke for several minutes, about technique mostly, lighting and suchlike. I had to ask Richet to move away from the window, as we were beginning to anger the crowd behind us by lingering too long, and I was ever more saddened as I stood in front of my poor unknown lady. We moved into a corner and watched the crowd as we talked. Oh, Natalie, there is nothing like talk! It freshens the soul, and mine was parched that day. Richet spoke to me about Dr. Charcot, the head of La Salpêtrière. Now, Dr. Charcot is a great man, Natalie. He is studying something you ought to learn something about, so I shall essay to teach you. You know that the members of your sex are prone to hysteria and all of its attendant horrors. You remember Adelaide Blanchot, of course, whose parents own the butcher shop in town? You were too young to be told the full details of her confinement, but I will tell you now, as it has bearing not only on what Richet and I spoke of but on all that happened after.