by Megan Chance
My brother’s eyes softened. “You don’t have to do it alone, you know, Soph. I’ll do my part.”
I nodded. “I know.”
Joseph looked back out the window. Quietly, he said, “They won’t have heard of us at Bronson’s. Don’t mention Roberts, whatever you do.”
A pall settled over me. “Why would I mention him?”
“I didn’t say you would. I’m just warning you not to. You get nervous sometimes, and things just come out.”
That stung, no matter how true. “I wouldn’t talk about him. I’ve forgotten him already.”
“You’re certain he wouldn’t have spoken to them of you?”
That pall grew heavier. “I meant nothing to him. It was only you he cared about.”
Joseph let out his breath. “Then we’re fine,” he said with satisfaction. “There was no reason to speak of me.”
I went over to him. “It was such a very little scandal, Joseph,” I whispered. “Hardly anyone knew of it. No one was hurt.”
“Only you,” he said gently.
I nodded. I laid my cheek against his back, the soft, worn cloth of his suit coat, and put my arms around him. He gripped them tight. “Only me.”
ODILÉ
I stood at the window and watched the late afternoon sun play upon the currents of the Grand Canal, sparkling and settling and spreading to the strains of the pianoforte he played. It was a concerto I knew well. I had heard it as it came to life, each note set fast upon the one before it, a flurry of notes like a blizzard, racing and tumbling from a hand shaking with the urgency to get them down, to not lose them.
I closed my eyes, remembering, savoring. I remembered how he’d finished it, nearly collapsing from exhaustion, sweating with the heat of composing, staggering to me, falling into my arms and bringing me down to the floor, where those notes of his tangled in my hair, twining around our contortions and contractions, convulsions of pleasure, cries that echoed his song.
Now, the playing came to an end, the last chord lingering in the warm afternoon, fading slowly, dissipating into separateness, settling like dust upon the floor. Neither of us said a word—this new musician of mine was as appreciative as any of a predecessor’s talent. It was my favorite characteristic of musicians. They were competitive and jealous, but unlike poets or writers or painters, musicians borrowed and built upon old foundations and acknowledged the genius of before. They used it. One discovered, and others embraced, embroidered, and embellished, twisting and shaping it into something that was quite their own, even as it held echoes of the past. In this way, every melody and harmony felt part of some vast universe that belonged not just to man, but to every other creature—worldly and otherworldly.
It was music that had saved me once upon a time. Music that assured me I still had a soul—otherwise how was it possible to be so affected? During those times when my appetite was appeased, and I was left numb and waiting, it was music that reminded me that I had felt something once. Smells anchored me, but music . . . music told me that whatever else had been taken from me, my soul remained. Even when the dark craving possessed me, and I was nothing but appetite and rapture tangled together, I was still—somehow—Odilé. And that was what I was most afraid of losing now.
I heard the shuffle of papers, the soft closing of the lid, the creak of the stool as he rose. I opened my eyes, glancing toward him. He was wild with playing, his pale face flushed, his red hair falling over his forehead, his eyes bright. My appetite leaped the space between us, drawing upon him, making him stumble. He frowned a little in confusion and looked at the floor as if accusing it of meaning to trip him. Then he came up behind me, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me against his chest.
“Odilé.” He whispered each syllable—Oh-de-lay—into my neck, just below my ear, stirring the fine hairs there, sending a shiver down my spine. “You look so beautiful and sad I can’t bear it.”
“It was the music,” I said. “Do you know who wrote the piece?”
“Schumann,” he said without pause.
“They say he was inspired by angels. But he wasn’t, you know.”
“His wife, I heard.”
I resisted the pull of hunger for the moment, letting the pain—almost exquisite now—build. “No, not his wife, though he loved her. There was another woman. One no one knew of. He called her his angel. He thought she had come from another world, and in a way, she had.”
He nuzzled my neck, breathing deeply of me—I felt his bewitchment in my pulse, my hunger opening wide to swallow him. For now, I denied it, savoring.
“He met her on an icy street in Düsseldorf.” I remembered the way Robert Schumann turned a corner, sliding on the ice with the suddenness of his stop. He caught his fall with a gloved hand pressed to the wall. He had intense, burning eyes, and longish dark hair beneath his hat. “He told her later that she had been silhouetted against the winter sun when he first saw her, so it seemed she was haloed, as if she’d been an angel sent to him by God, and he’d thought for a moment that she wasn’t real.”
The musician murmured something. I felt his lips move upon my skin, warm and moist, the press of his kiss.
“He was desperate. He loved his wife, but he was jealous of her. Her fame eclipsed his, and it tormented him. He felt he could write nothing. He said he heard voices that told him to stop composing, and others screaming to be let free. But when he was with his angel, the music flooded from him. He could not write quickly enough. It was she who made him see his own genius. It was she who brought him the fame he longed for.”
My musician had gone still. “Who was she?”
“No one knows. Only that he wrote The Ghost Variations for her. Some think he dedicated it to his wife. But he didn’t. It was for his angel, though he never revealed her name. He rewarded her with obscurity and insignificance.”
“I remember that he was obsessed with angels. He went mad, didn’t he?”
I turned to face my musician, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Yes. It was the price he paid.”
“The price? For what?”
“For inspiration.” I smiled at him. “For fame. Do you think it was worth it?”
The musician stared at me as if I’d bewitched him—the same look I’d seen in Robert Schumann’s eyes on that frosty street, the black glove poised upon the wall, a moment in time frozen, arrested, a breath of fog on the air.
“Yes,” Jonathan Murphy murmured. “He’s the one we remember now, isn’t he? Not his wife.”
“Indeed.” I went up on my tiptoes to kiss him. His mouth was like honey. He staggered against me like a drunk.
“But what of the woman?” he insisted, slurring, weakened. “Was she really an angel, as he said?”
“An angel? Oh yes.” I pressed my mouth against the pulse in his throat, feeling it jump beneath my tongue. He gasped and shuddered with pleasure, already cresting, a willing prisoner, begging to be taken, and I felt a frisson of exhaustion, and relief too, as I ran my hand through the fine thick red of his hair, murmuring, “Yes, she was his angel. But can’t you guess, my love? She was his demon too.”
ODILÉ
I was obsessed with Madeleine—I can see that now, though at the time I knew only that I was fascinated. For months, I followed her like a hapless puppy, and was grateful that she seemed to want me about. I know now it was because my insistence bewildered her. You are something new, she said to me, and I didn’t understand until much later exactly how much of a novelty I was. She was used to leaving, and I would not be left.
She had abandoned her artist, as she’d told me she would do, and he went into a decline soon after, a depression that ended with his suicide. She seemed unmoved by it, unsurprised. When I brought her the news, she said only, “Ah, very sad,” as if the sadness were simply something to be acknowledged, a fact like that dog is black, but not something she felt. She was quiet and reflective in those first days—she liked to listen to me talk, and I found in her a listener who was always i
nterested, if not empathetic.
“What is it you want with me?” she asked me one day, those black eyes sharp, and I felt the question held weight and import; I felt oddly that my future depended on what I might say.
“I want to be like you,” I told her.
“You want this, you mean,” she said, gesturing to the room, which was almost cloying in its opulence—scarves and pillows, golden statuettes, lamps inlaid with jewels, plush carpets.
I shook my head dismissively. “I have enough things.”
“You want lovers then.”
“No. I want to be what you are.”
“What I am?” she asked, and there was a wariness in her voice, a stillness I had not heard before.
“These men you’ve inspired will never forget you. You’ve made your mark upon them. They say you are unforgettable.” People knew her name; they wanted to be with her. Since she’d left the artist, there had been letters, pleas, visits from other artists: poets and painters and musicians, all begging for a moment with her, all hoping for more. Madeleine did something I had never before seen in a woman alone: she chose whom she liked without regard for money or prestige, and her choice transformed. She whipped her lovers into an artistic frenzy. She moved them and inspired them, and I wanted to know how she did it. No one ever looked past her. No one ever looked away. They remembered her. I wanted what she had with an intensity that sometimes frightened me.
I never wondered about the strange things I saw in her, though I should have. I never wondered at how quickly she went through her lovers—sometimes only in days. Now and again I came to her rooms in the morning to see them staggering away as if they’d been weakened by a fever. I found one or two of them collapsed on her carpet. She would say only that it was nothing—he was ill, he’d forgotten to eat, the night had been exhausting—and the servants carried them away. In those first months, two killed themselves over her, one jumping from a balcony and another hanging himself. I didn’t wonder at it—why would I? I understood it. I would have been devastated had she cast me aside.
I put off the few lovers I had, not caring when they grew so impatient with my lack of attention that they left me for others. I cared only for her. Her influence was astonishing; she told me stories of the men she’d inspired, and I was stunned at how much she’d done in her life, how many works of art owed their existence to her. The realization only increased my own sense that she held the answer to my every dissatisfaction. I believed she alone knew how to make me stop wanting.
Tell me how to be you. I must have said such words, or variations of them, several times, and she always put me off. You don’t know what you’re asking, cherie, or, Be happy with your own life.
But I was not, and over the next six months, it became more and more evident. She took up with a composer, and I watched in envy as she cajoled him into writing his best opera—a stunning enough piece, but nothing to thrill the ages. I began to realize that what she’d said before was true, that she had an eye for talent, but not for brilliance. I began to think that she was not utilizing her abilities to their utmost.
“Do you never wonder what the world could be if you chose to inspire the best?” I asked her one day.
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “This composer has talent, but he is like your artist. He will be famous for a time, but he will be forgotten. Do you not wish for more? You could be known as the muse to genius, Madeleine. You could change the world. Choose the best, instead of the middling talents you take up.”
She turned a critical eye to me. “Do you think you could do better?”
“Yes. Let me find someone worthy of you.”
She went thoughtful. I felt the magic of her dark eyes as I always did; there was something truly astounding within them. She said slowly, as if she were trying to decide something, “Very well, find him. Bring him to me and we will see if you are right.”
It was the only thing she had ever asked of me, and I was determined not to fail her. I still had some cachet, and I used what was left of it to attend the suppers and balls that had once been, for me, de rigueur. I went to the theater, to the gambling halls where artists gathered looking to change their luck.
When I found him, I knew. He was not pretty. His hair was dark and wild, and he had been crippled in childhood, a bad hip that required the constant use of a cane. He was also nearly sixty, but in those days neither Madeleine nor I shirked from age. He had a gnarled face, but it was not unpleasant, and his eyes were sharp. I found him reading his poetry at a small supper, and I knew the moment I heard him that he was touched with genius, though I think no one else at the gathering noticed. They chatted through his reading, laughing among themselves, paying no attention, and I could tell by his sighs that he was discouraged at the end of it.
Afterward, I brought him a glass of sherry to ease the rasp in his voice. I think he was surprised I deigned to notice him. I was still beautiful, after all, and he was not a man used to such attention. I said, “Come with me. There is someone I would like you to meet.”
I took him to Madeleine’s. When I brought him through the door, she raised her eyebrow and I said, “Trust me.”
He was struck immediately, as they all were. When she invited him to have wine with her, he stayed. I left them with a smug sense of satisfaction. Because I was right about him. His poetry still is lauded, though he went mad soon after Madeleine left him. It was a small price to pay, I thought then. I think it now.
Although Madeleine was grateful for what I’d done, something changed after that. I often caught her watching me when she thought I wasn’t looking, and the expression on her face made me uneasy.
One day, as we strolled the halls of a private art exhibition, Madeleine stopped short, as if arrested, before a portrait of a young man. He was dressed in velvet finery; his hair hanging in dark curls to his shoulders, his eyes so black they were only pools of opacity.
Madeleine shuddered. “Those eyes.”
I frowned. “What of them?”
“How they follow me. They seem . . .” She let the words fall away as if she could not wrangle them.
I glanced at the portrait. The eyes were badly done, with no depth, and I saw no real reason for them to have so affected her. I started to move on. She touched my arm to stop me. Her gaze had not left the portrait.
“What do you know of demons, Odilé?”
It was the painting, I knew. It was obvious that it troubled her. “It’s only that the artist did a poor job of capturing dark eyes. I hardly think him a demon.”
“How little you know of the world.”
That stung—it was unlike Madeleine to be so dismissive. “I’m hardly an innocent.”
“No, but there is so much you don’t know. You’re like everyone else, believing things because you’ve never questioned them.”
“Why would you say such a thing to me?”
“Because it’s true.” She seemed hardly aware that she’d offended me. “You talk as if you would know a demon if you saw it.”
“I believe I would,” I said coldly, thinking of the man who’d taken my virginity and left me bleeding on the floor. “One rarely mistakes malice and cruelty.”
“And you think those things the province of demons alone.”
“No, of course not. But I think it is how you know when you are dealing with one. The man who ruined me had a demon’s eyes. I see them in my nightmares.”
“And yet, had it not been for him, you would be a common whore like your mother, instead of one of the preeminent courtesans in Paris.”
“No longer preeminent,” I said softly, feeling the pinch of it.
“But you are better off than you would have been otherwise, are you not? He forced you to do what you had only dreamed of before. He was not your ruin, but your savior.”
“I hardly think of it so rosily.”
“No, you are like everyone else. You would like to think that things are easily categorized. Man
kind likes little boxes. Everything in its place. And yet . . .” She moved close to the painting, reaching out, pointing to the boy’s painted eyes. “You say the artist hasn’t the skill to paint dark eyes. I say you are not looking closely enough.”
She laid a finger upon the eyes. I looked, and suddenly those blank painted orbs sprung to life. They seemed to glimmer, as if her pale skin and the rings on her fingers caught the light and reflected them into the paint. Though I was looking only at heavy impasto, I thought suddenly of the compelling nature of her gaze, those times when its darkness seemed to pull me in, to capture me in an endless orbit, and I saw the same thing now, in the eyes of a painted boy.
“Do you see, Odilé?” she whispered. “Do you not see the light, even in such darkness? Now that you are looking for it, do you see what is beyond a first glance?”
She drew her finger from the painting. The boy’s eyes went black again, black as eternity, endless, and yet . . . I saw that glimmer in them, as if the reflection she’d put there had somehow stayed. Ah, but that was impossible, wasn’t it? It was only an illusion.
When she turned to look at me, I saw that glimmer in her eyes too, something that spoke of hidden things, of a knowledge beyond what anyone could or should possess—a knowledge I yearned for.
She said, “You told me I should use my talent to change the world.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “And I was right, wasn’t I? His poetry was stunning, and everyone knows who inspired it. It will last. And so will you.”
“You know this?”
“How can anyone know for certain? But yes, I think it will.”
She looked back at the painting. I heard sounds in the hall beyond, footsteps, the swish of skirts, the low murmur of talk and laughter.
“And if you had such a talent for inspiration, what would you do?”
“What I advised you to do. Inspire the world. Leave a mark.”
“No matter the cost?”
“Is there a cost?” I asked. “I confess I fail to see it. And even if there were, surely such an outcome is worth it? To change the world and have your name be known and remembered? Yes, I think it must be worth anything. Now come, shall we move on? I’m beginning to feel the boy’s eyes as you do.”