by Black Silk
“They?”
“Audience. Pease. The people who honor the draft at the bank.”
It hit him so suddenly, so sharply, that he said something equally sharp. “What a shame Henry left me the pornography. It’s a small market, but so lucrative.”
“That is an obnoxious and unfair—”
“Don’t speak to me of fairness—”
“If you will only think for a moment—”
“Or of thinking, goddamn it—”
She tried to defend herself. “If it were simply venality—” She paused. “Have you no understanding?”
He knew she was waiting for a more definite reaction than sarcasm. Fury. Anguish. Forgiveness. Something. But he had nothing to offer. This information—that she and Henry were in collusion, had been betraying him in unison—seemed impossible to absorb.
“I wish I could explain,” she continued, “the part I have loved about it. To have something of Henry’s that William couldn’t touch, a true legacy. It is mine. And it has been a practical necessity. I have supported myself by it.” Her voice broke. She looked down. “God, what you have done to me,” she said. “By your gentleness. By taking such genuinely innocent pleasure in my company. And then by making those other moments, those less-than-innocent moments also true. By being both: a cad and a gentleman.”
“What you have done to yourself,” he corrected.
She sounded weary. “Yes. Yes, of course you are right. But part of you is very much Ronmoor—a remarkably handsome man who relies flatly on that, almost as if he were afraid that nothing else about himself would ever measure up to the superlatives of his good looks.”
Having summed him up neatly with that, she rose to her feet again.
“So,” she said. She left a businesslike pause. He could imagine her differing over figures with Pease. “If I continue, I am a hypocrite. And if I stop, I am destitute. Or—I take it you would offer me an alternative—obliged.” She lent the word an extra meaning.
The funny thing was, he would have taken that implied arrangement. Put her in his flat and fucked her silly. With or without the serial’s stopping, there would have been satisfaction in that. He looked over his shoulder, at this dickering, word-struck female. “And would”—he looked for a better word, then chose irony instead—“obligation—is that what you’d call it?—be so terrible?”
“Yes. When I have just tasted, for the first time in my life, not being obligated to anyone. I want to be selfish. I have to be selfish right now.” There was a frustrated pause. “Can’t you see? I can’t describe to you the sense of power—pure, halfpenny, economic power—I have over myself. The sense of freedom.”
“Autonomy is more expensive than you think. And more lonely: I know.”
She waited before she gave her pat, sophomoric answer. He hated her for what he saw as willful stupidity: “Well, I don’t know,” she said.
He didn’t dare speak. He didn’t dare move for fear he’d shove her down the stairs.
Seconds elapsed before he was finally able to say, “Then you must continue to sell me. To make commerce of my faults.”
“You trade on them.”
“They’re mine.”
She was not completely confident. “Perhaps I will find a way—a compromise.”
He made a dry laugh. “Already compromise.”
“You know what I mean. Temper it.”
“No one will like that. Not what they’re buying, as I recall.”
She took a rebellious breath. “You are so sure I can’t shift the attention, that I haven’t the skill to create a fiction larger than yours?”
He lowered his head, his voice. “What I am not sure of,” he said, “is that I have the skill to create a reality larger than it.”
He glanced at her, but she was standing to the side, one step lower than he. All he could see was the top of her head, the dark shoulders of the dressing gown peeking through the hair coming out of her braid. Loose, her hair had no form. Not like Rosalyn’s harmonious mass, but a thick multitude of wild, curling, independent hairs, each with a mind of its own. Light shone through and about this mass of hair, like a nimbus. Or a blur.
She had lost her clarity, her sharp resolution as an ideal.
He took the fact in with a kind of vacant acceptance, a refusal to put anything of himself anywhere. They might have stood there any length of time, each of them contemplating her fall from grace.
But on the periphery of his consciousness, he heard his name called from far off.
“Graham?”
He exchanged a look with Submit, but her expression was only a mirror of his own modest embarrassment. The fog of murmured feelings and private disagreements was lifting.
“Graham?”
Again, the sound cut through the air, soft and crystallizing. It condensed identity, like cold water poured into his warm doldrums. His own name came to him like a familiar stranger.
Names, he thought. It was accurate, in a way, to call Yves DuJauc her lover. The pseudonym sang of Henry. Graham felt he was still competing with Henry, the seduction of his ideology. Independence, intelligence, reason over emotion. All this in the woman he loved. It was astounding. It was depressing.
“Graham.”
They were no longer alone. Rosalyn stood at the head of the stairs.
Blearily unkempt, her hair a wild, artfully arranged tangle about her shoulders, she called out from the shelter of her semidarkness. “What’s wrong? Are you coming back to bed?”
These mild words. Their strong meaning. They were spoken to Graham, but directed at Submit.
“Rosalyn, don’t make a fool—” he began.
“Pardon?” As if she didn’t understand. “I’ve been waiting for you.” She was in her nightgown, the front ties undone to the waist. It revealed white flesh, pretty swells of breast, one perfect, round shoulder holding her modesty intact but askew. She looked ravished.
So did Submit. By the look on her face, his stance of moral indignity had been hollowed out, crumbling in the face of this seeming duplicity: Worthy of the convolutions of a DuJauc plot, he looked as guilty as Submit—trying to seduce one woman, while having another waiting in bed, Graham wondered wearily if he didn’t help write these things too much himself.
Submit started up the stairs.
Graham was paralyzed.
Rosalyn was talkative. “Graham, I have been waiting for so long. I had thought you were bringing the brandy. I have such a headache. And my back hurts. Would you please….”
Graham felt an infantile urge to cry coupled with the monstrous urge to murder.
At the top of the stairs, Submit touched Rosalyn’s shoulder. Rosalyn turned to her. For a moment, there was sympathy between them. They liked one another. How had he missed that? They seemed to tolerate each other on almost a friendly basis, when he had considered them—what? Rivals? Submit passed, leaving him with just Rosalyn’s importunate voice.
“Are you coming?”
“Bugger off, Rosalyn.”
“What?”
“You know damned well what’s happening, so stop your spiteful acting.”
Graham began up the stairs, two at a time.
At the sight of him, angry, on the move, Rosalyn shrieked and ran. It was the perfect, deranged scenario. Exit Ophelia. And an audience indeed began to gather.
As Graham rounded the banister, a door down the corridor opened. “What the blazes….” John Carmichael in his night cap peered out. Then another door opened, and another.
Graham had to dodge three, four, eight people, as he chased after the fleeing, screaming Rosalyn. He yelled at her. “I’m going to wring your bloody neck—”
At Rosalyn’s doorway, however, another actress was in charge. Submit had taken Rosalyn into her care. Rosalyn was crying. Submit was sublime, encompassing, encompassed by her task of comfort. Rosalyn sobbed onto Submit’s shoulder, as Submit patted and cooed. Then—it appeared so, at least—once they were sure he had seen them, they b
oth disappeared into Rosalyn’s room.
Complicity between the women invaded Graham’s imagination. He felt unreasonably set up. Women had a right to competition, resignation, even friendship and compassion. But none of these should run concurrently, he thought.
Behind the closed door, anyone and everyone could hear Rosalyn. She lamented in wretched sobs that were loud and vocal, nothing like Submit’s before. It was unabashed hysteria. He stood by the door as ten, eleven, a dozen more people came from their rooms. Graham removed himself to the railing, his back to the mess. He was staring into the entrance room below when he heard a soft click. The door behind him opened. It was Submit.
“Will someone get a doctor? Perhaps some laudanum.” She looked past the others, straight at Graham. As if he were to blame for this, too.
He had reversed his stance, leaning, his arms braced on the balustrade. Someone shot off for the doctor, still somehow asleep down the hall. Doctor, doctor! Oh, the group fun of these minor excitements. People spoke in eager voices, already weaving their own versions of the event. Through this, Graham held Submit’s eyes, preventing her in this odd way from closing the door. For a moment, it was as if the drop to the floor below were still in front of him. He couldn’t surmount his fear.
“Submit, I love you.” He said the only words that might continue to keep the door open. He said them loud enough for her, for anyone, to hear. “Stop with the damned serial. Marry me. I want out of all this. For God’s sake, marry me, Submit.”
It was not exactly the traditional offer of rescue, but it at least shut up a few people. The gathering crowd grew quiet, waiting for her answer. Only murmurs and Rosalyn, howling in the background, could be heard.
From around the edge of the door, Submit stared at him. Then without a word more, the door closed.
Chapter 34
Rosalyn asked Submit to stay with her, and so she did for most of the day. Partly, she remained with the poor woman because she had sympathy for her. Rosalyn, in trying to feign a nervous collapse, seemed to have gone too deeply into her role. She drifted in and out of medicated sleep, weeping and grieving and telling Submit more than she wanted to know. If she were honest with herself, however, there was another reason Submit stayed: Her own disrupted state of mind stood minimized by the grand and total breakdown of Rosalyn Schild.
Also, Submit realized, Rosalyn’s room was the one place that Graham wouldn’t go. Even after Rosalyn finally slept soundly, in early afternoon, Submit didn’t leave. She picked at a tray of food brought to her from downstairs. After a time, she gave that up, standing to stretch. She stooped to pick up a crinoline that lay on the floor; she hung it in the wardrobe. For a few minutes more, she made a vague attempt to straighten the room. It was a mess. Bright, gay dresses lay in heaps, like deflated aerial balloons gone to ground. Jewelry lay scattered over the top of a chiffonier—Submit picked up one particularly glittering piece that lay on the floor. Spilled hairpins covered the surface of the vanity like abandoned armor, chain-link mail. The room looked as though Rosalyn Schild had been in a rage of indecision after her dip in the lake, creating a mess no lady’s maid could, or perhaps would dare, clean up.
Submit gave up making order of the room. When the kitchen girl came to take the tray away, eyeing Submit with looks of suspicion and interest, Submit knew she could no longer gracefully stay. Not in this room. Not in this house. She had become part of what she was writing about. Those who would enjoy the story of a widow losing her head on a set of stairs would have all the details they wanted. Rosalyn was already murmuring incoherently in her sleep a fairly salacious reconstruction of what circumstances had led her to surmise.
In her own bedroom, Submit opened the trunk she had yet to unpack and got out a fresh dress. On the vanity in her room were a few toiletries, a brush. All she needed to do was pack these away, change her clothes, and ring to order up a ride to the train. Walking over to the vanity, she began undoing the last that remained of the previous night’s braid. It was mostly pulled out already. What an untidy mess she’d become. Mechanically, she tore at the braid.
The sun shone through gauzy curtains at the windows. The room was bathed in the light of day. A fresh beginning, Submit thought and sighed. She sat on her bed, staring out.
Marry him, indeed. She did not want Graham Wessit. She wanted her life back. Her neat, organized, highly civilized life. A life of her own that she could control. Surely this was best for her. The most consistent thing about Graham Wessit was his attitude of open experiment. Can you even imagine, she asked herself, plain, quiet, intellectual little you spending a lifetime on the arm of such a havoc-producing man?
No.
But as she began to pack, tears began to roll down her face. They made Submit’s nose run, her chest constrict until she had to lie down. And, once they had her down, the tears really let loose. She cried till there was nothing left in her, until her body was empty of anything but the desire for exhausted, dreamless sleep.
The next morning, Graham came in on Submit as she was having breakfast in the conservatory—a place, in view of the continuing regatta outside, she had thought would be free of people, especially him. He sat, ordering his own toast and tea.
He asked, in the most moderate of tones, for more details of how she could be writing the serial. When had she started? When had she realized it was him? How much of their private talks had she used? How much had come from the notes? He asked, it seemed, not for the information but for confirmation, the way someone wants the details of a fatal accident in order to better convince himself a loved one would never return. Submit answered stoically, surprisingly able to command her emotions. She told him plainly, and he accepted—the same way he accepted that she was packed and ready to leave.
After breakfast, he walked her outside. Submit thought she would get away safely now. He stood with her by her bags at the edge of the drive, waiting for the carriage that would take her to the train.
As Submit watched the carriage pull out distantly from its house, her eyes turned glassy. Her lips, of their own accord, pulled tight. She bit them, feeling her self-willed insentience breaking. She prayed for a moment he wouldn’t notice, but then her friend from picnics and boat rides and talks in sunny fields turned her into his arms.
Graham took it upon himself to soothe her, though he felt it was a little unfair that he should be the one to have to comfort her because of him. He stroked her hair, saying nothing. She took this friendship, as after a long binge one gulps a last shot before one must sober up.
“Why is it”—she sounded to Graham unhealthily calm, taking every measure to assure a dry good-bye—“you destroy me?”
“No,” he resisted quietly.
“You do.” She paused. “I would have done very well without your being part of this summer, the serial, the pictures, everything.”
“No.”
“But yes.” He felt her nod her head, rubbing her forehead on his coat where she leaned against him.
“I didn’t set you up with all that,” he whispered. “You’re blaming the wrong man.”
She hit him in the chest with her fist, a small, futile gesture of protest.
“You have taken him from me,” she whispered. “I thought no one could do that. I feel as callow and stupid as I was at sixteen.”
Again, “No.” He stroked her thick, springy hair. “There is no one stronger.”
The carriage stopped behind them. He walked her around while the driver loaded her bags into the luggage box in the rear. Graham opened the door and handed her in.
“Will I hear from you?” he asked.
First, she shook her head no. Then abruptly she nodded yes. Then her hand opened out and landed in her skirts. “Oh, I don’t know.” She looked away, a woman at loose ends.
“I still think you should stay. Less risk of a bad end.” He made a wry smile. “They don’t buy unhappy endings, you know.”
She looked at him, defensive, possessive. “You can’t take
that, too—”
“I’m in it. The villain. Cum-hero, I hope.”
“If you would only understand,” she began. “I have loved it, treasured the quick pages I can scratch off in the night.” This little speech fortified her somehow. She went on earnestly. “It is something the world has a use for that I can do. I might even be able to do it better in time. And I didn’t do it—at least at first—to be mean.” She took a breath. “But I want to keep on. To see where it leads. I have to. And I can’t let you gentle me out of all the good that it does me by dredging up all the bad it may be doing you. You will simply have to accept that.”
Graham leaned in and sat, one hip on the carriage floor, one leg dangling out. “All right.” He took the hand that had settled into the dress and kissed it, first on the knuckles, then, opening it, on the palm. Her hand constricted, wanting to evade what was seen as a kind of treason. “All that aside, in spite of it…no, because of it”—she gave up her hand to him, letting him play with her fingers—“I still think I should take you to bed. Properly. Not for comfort or healing. And certainly not because the serial and the fact that you’re writing it don’t matter a great deal to me. But because the physical act has come into the middle of all this. Like an obstacle. We can’t see around it. We, neither of us, know what is beyond it. You deny we’ve been on a mad run, heading straight toward it ever since we first met, until it is right before you. One should never hesitate, you know, Submit. That is the mess we now find ourselves in. One should always take a jump head-on. We stand a much better chance on the other side, rather than trying to regain our balance here.”
“Graham.” She took her hand back with a sigh. “Now you know why I can’t stay.”
“I don’t.”
“I couldn’t withstand this for long.”
“So don’t withstand it.” When she didn’t say anything, he told her, “Take a deep breath and step out of the carriage.”