The General's Mistress

by Jo Graham

  —Just so. Fire is fire.—

  And I felt it at my fingertips, my palms growing hot with it, limitless and vague, and knew it was only the smallest part. Desire, I thought. Pothos.

  —He smiled. And Eros. And Thanatos. And lots of other things besides.—

  “O Dove?” Lebrun’s voice cut through, and I realized I’d been silent, wavering. The room blurred in front of me.

  “I . . .”

  “It is too much for the Vessel. You should dismiss,” Noirtier hissed at Lebrun. “You should dismiss now.”

  End, I thought. Yes. I was very tired, and hardly knew why.

  —Dismissing is very rude, he said. It’s like pitching your friend out the front door when you’re ready for him to leave, rather than asking nicely or saying, “My goodness, it’s late.”—

  I won’t be rude, I thought.

  —Nor shall I.—

  The room swam, and I fainted.

  When my eyes opened, I was lying on the couch. Bonnard was patting my hands rather enthusiastically, and Lebrun was fanning me with a paper.

  “Madame?” Bonnard said.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Are you well?” Lebrun asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It was just too much.”

  Leaning nearer so that the others didn’t see, he winked at me. He thought that I had feigned a faint to get out of specific questions, and that it was a good job. I wished the faint had been pretended. I felt terribly light-headed.

  In the carriage on the way home, and later lying in my bed, I wasn’t sure if it had been real or not. How could one know? How could one prove it? Everything before might have been acting. This wasn’t. I wanted it too much, this casual communion with the numinous. It should have been harder. It should have hurt more. It should have been unpleasant and strange, not so oddly comforting, so easy.

  Mad. Mad as my mother, preferring her mirror and her ghosts to real life. Of course I would imagine an angel with my father’s voice, with Victor’s sense of irony, with something in his manner that reminded me of Ney. I would make up a pastiche of men I had loved and admired, a dream of men I had trusted. I imagined that he was near, a concerned expression on his face. I imagined that he spoke. I imagined that someone cared.

  I wrapped myself around my pillow and clutched it to me, crying soundlessly. I imagined that someone loved me. That was all. It was pathetic, really.

  The next day I sent a note to Lebrun.

  Dear Monsieur Lebrun,

  While I am sensible of your trust and kindness in offering me a position in your enterprises, I regret that I will be unable to assist you in the future.

  Sincerely,

  Ida St. Elme

  A week later, I signed a contract for three months’ repertory work in Marseilles. I would play the nurse in Violette, the Sinful Woman in Heloise, and Sisygambis in Alexander in Asia. Sisygambis in particular was a good part—and, for a change, did not involve a lot of skimpy costumes or comic lines. I left for Marseilles the next day.

  Nine of Swords

  Of my time in Marseilles, little is to be said. It was summer repertory, with a very small company and all that this entails: the sudden intense friendships and rivalries of people who live and work together day in and day out for a very short time, but would have little to say to one another otherwise. There were many things that seemed important at the time but weren’t later.

  I remember that I had words with one young man of the company over his appropriation of my cosmetic brushes that seemed likely to burst into deadly enmity, and that I made love with another whose last name I did not know for no other reason than as we sat about drinking on a day we had only a matinee, he offered massages to any who wanted them, proclaiming that he was famous for them. When his hands were on me, I wanted them there. Or at least, I could see no reason not to.

  There were some assignations that paid, of course. Gentlemen of the town who wanted to be taken for something, and to whom I had the cachet of novelty. If I did not amass a vast fortune in Marseilles, in three months I was no poorer.

  As the summer turned and the days shortened, the days were hotter than ever, and anyone who could desert Marseilles for cooler places did so. The crowds in the theater thinned to nothing. So we ended the run, and some of us began to make our way back to Paris. It was time to cast the shows that would open at the beginning of the winter.

  I stopped at a small hotel in Aix. The common room was stiflingly hot. Even so, the custom was brisk, and there were a number of fashionably dressed young people taking a cold supper before the empty fireplace. One of them, a young woman with dark curls fixed in drooping ringlets, looked very familiar. I was trying to place her from one of the many auditions I had done when she looked up.

  Her eyes widened and she smiled, getting up and coming over to me. “Ida St. Elme? Is it you?”

  “It is,” I said. “Isabella Felix?”

  “The very same! I remember you from the auditions for Iphigenia in Aulis. You didn’t get a part. But then I didn’t either.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you were in Paris.”

  Isabella shrugged. “I was. But now I’m stuck here.”

  “In Aix? Why?”

  She rolled her eyes toward the party at the table. “We’re in pawn, my company and I. Moiret handles all our business. He’s the leading man, and the chariot is his. And we’ve spent too much, so it’s impounded until the theater manager at Digne sends us an advance on our contract. We’re supposed to play there next, but who can tell if we’ll ever get there? We need seven hundred francs to get out of this mess.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said. It was about what I had with me from the summer contract, and from a number of liaisons along the way.

  “I know,” Isabella said. “And we’re shorthanded, too. Two of the troupe decided not to wait and see if the manager would advance the money, so now when we do get to Digne we’ll need a new Third Girl and a new page.”

  “I’m on my way back from doing Sisygambis in Marseilles,” I said. “I’d be your third girl in Digne. What are you doing?”

  “Not Alexander in Asia!” Isabella said. “Don’t tell me you just did it.”

  “I did,” I said. “Everyone’s doing it this year, I hear. Is it one of yours?”

  She nodded. “We’ve got Alexander in Asia as our history, Blue Beard with singing, because you know how they go in the provinces, and we’re doing The Comical Romance as our comedy. That’s the one that will be hard to recast.”

  “I don’t know it,” I said.

  Isabella nodded. “If you’ve got Sisygambis, you could learn Sébastienne fast enough. She’s the girl who for some complicated reason is dressing up as a boy named Sébastien, and Orlando (he’s the hero, of course) falls for her without knowing that she’s really a girl, and all sorts of complications ensue, assisted by his old nurse who is in love with Sébastien’s valet, a silly sort named Roland who knows that his mistress is really a girl and the heiress of a vast fortune that’s coveted by a rogue named Thierry who—”

  “I think I get the idea,” I said. “So the part open is the girl who dresses as a boy?”

  “Yes. And carries off the masquerade in breeches onstage. The men come to watch a girl with nice legs. And, of course, you’ve got Pompey onstage, which is always an adventure.”

  “Who’s Pompey?” I asked.

  “Moiret’s pug,” Isabella said. “He loves to be onstage, and Moiret swears he’s a trouper. He’s always good for a laugh.” She sighed. “But we’re still stuck here until the manager advances the money. Hoping he will.”

  “I’d lend you the money,” I said. “But I’d have to have it back soon. It’s all my earnings from the summer. If you’d take me on as third girl. I’m not especially in a hurry to get back to Paris.”

  The next day I was off for Digne with Isabella’s company. The “chariot” turned out to be an open farm wagon that someone had enterprisingly paint
ed bright green. It carried the costumes and baggage of the company, plus the eleven human members, Pompey the pug dog, the soubrette’s parrot, and Isabella’s Angora cat. We looked something like a circus as we traveled along the road at a snail’s pace, practicing the songs from Blue Beard while Pompey and the Angora snarled quietly at each other from under the sideboards.

  At last I got out and walked, wearing the old pants and coat belonging to Charles. Moiret and the others agreed that I cut a nice figure in pants, and would be just what was needed for Sébastienne.

  Isabella laughed. “You carry that off so well that they’ll think you’re really a young man until unveiled as Sébastienne! They’ll be wondering if we have a woman dressed as a man or a man dressed as a woman dressed as a man!”

  I shrugged. “That suits me,” I said. “I enjoy it.”

  “I believe you do,” Isabella said, looking at me more keenly.

  “I do,” I said. “Who wouldn’t prefer to be a man if they could choose? If I could live my entire life as a man, I should.”

  I spent three months with the company in Digne. We barely broke even financially, the old problem with provincial troupes. I got back most of my seven hundred francs in the end, but I did not return to Paris until fall was ending and winter coming. In my absence, Lisette seemed to have become nearly entirely nocturnal. She had acquired an opium hookah and supplemented her income by giving parties that went on and on until dawn. Most of the young men who came were students or young soldiers. The money was terrible, and the job worse than Lebrun’s had been, but by the middle of the winter I was desperate.

  The smell of the opium penetrated every part of the apartment whether I wanted it or not, whether I stayed in my room or not. I might as well go out and join in. A few breaths, and half the time the boys hardly knew if they had me or just sprawled boneless in the cushions that Lisette had gotten to create oriental ambience, and if they suckled a little at my breast in their dreams, it was enough. If it wasn’t, I hardly knew it myself.

  It was one of those times. I knew it must have been. I had been very careful, otherwise. Victor had insisted upon it, and I had learned all the ways. I had always insisted on the English letters with Chaptal and Gantheaume and the rest.

  My courses had always been regular. Two weeks late, and I knew. I had felt that tenderness in my breasts before, the swell of their flesh and the darkening of my nipples. I knew. After all, I had been pregnant twice before.

  I sat among the pillows in the late afternoon, wishing that the rooms were warmer, wishing that I could conquer this panic welling up in me. I will just sit still, I thought. I will just sit still. Nothing bad will happen if I don’t move. And so I sat while the light crept in the window and across a purple and red brocade pillow beside me.

  Lisette knew someone, of course. She swore the woman had done for her last year, and for half a dozen women she knew. “These things happen,” she said practically, flipping back her long red hair. “Madame will put you right in no time.”

  She nearly killed me instead. I remembered the blood and the cramping and cramping, lying in a pool of my own blood listening to her talking to Lisette, just out of sight of the bed. I knew it wasn’t going right. It was so much easier, I thought, to have a child than not to.

  I was dying. I hoped Delacroix and Lisette would spring for the pauper’s field. Otherwise, I was sure that my fetus and I would make an interesting lecture at the university. “See, gentlemen, the distention of the uterus? Seven or eight weeks of pregnancy, by my estimation.” Very educational for the medical students, cutting me open.

  I tried to scream, but nothing came out. My voice was already not my own.

  “She’s delirious,” I heard the old woman say.

  “There’s too much blood,” Lisette whispered.

  “I am not responsible. Sometimes it goes wrong. . . .” Her voice shook.

  I wanted the dreams. I wanted to walk there and never come back. I would not come back to see what happened to my body. Surely I would be somewhere else.

  My father had been right: When you die, you simply stop. No heaven. No hell. I would even welcome hell, about this time. I would settle for demons.

  Dark. Night. Sticky blood around me. Every limb filled with ice.

  I wandered in deep caves, and they were home. I will stay here, I said.

  —You can’t, someone whispered behind me, magnified by the caves, whispering around the walls. I am not done with you.—

  Let me stay, I whispered. Let me stay. I am done. There is nothing. Let me stay here with this daughter who will never be. Let me forget.

  —You asked for the gift of memory. Now you will never forget.—

  Light grew, and I stood in the half-lit cave. He wore the dark blue coat of the Army of the Republic, a tricolor sash about his waist, its ends weighted with bullion fringe. His face was plain and beautiful, and behind him wings unfolded in a riot of white feathers, every pinion glittering with imprisoned light.

  “Elza,” he said, “and Georg and Jauffre and Lydias and Charmiane and more besides.” His voice was like rain on the trees, like fire whispering in the grate. “You taught me about faith when I had lost hope. Have you lost it now?”

  “My lord,” I said, “let me begin again.” I fought back tears. “I am in too deep. There is no way out. Let me go, and begin again. In the name of mercy.”

  He shook his head like a soldier who sees danger and must yet go forward. “I can’t.”

  I walked toward him across the cave, and I did not know if the face he saw was mine or some other, if the hands I reached toward him had ever belonged to Elzelina. “Why not?”

  “I need you too badly, scarred as you are. And there is no time. If you begin again, it will be too late.” His eyes were filled with terrible compassion. “I must use you, and use you I will.” He took my hand, and his touch was like liquid fire in my veins. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are,” I said, and looked up at him. I thought his eyes were blue, and that they were like some I knew, in some place far distant from this.

  He said something that might have been a reason, or a word, or a promise. But it wasn’t. It was simply love.

  “Is it so odd that I should love you,” he said, “when I send you to suffer? And can promise nothing, only that it is the best that I can do?”

  “No,” I said, and clutched his hand as if I could grasp a brand, or grasp the wind. In this place, it was solid. “I love you too.”

  His mouth twisted. I closed my eyes, and felt the world move. I was a bird in his hand, white-winged and strong, my heart beating fast. A dove?

  He laughed. “No doves for you, dear one. A gull. To face the winds far out to sea, and come at last storm-tossed to shore, if you are lucky.” He raised his hand and I took off, spiraling upward toward a circle of light at the apex of the cave, leaving behind the bright angel in the dark.

  Grand-Saint-Bernard

  To my surprise, I didn’t die. It was hard to say that I lived either. Winter wore on, grim and gray. I hardly ever left the apartment, even when I was strong enough to get down three flights of stairs to the street. Sometimes there was food and sometimes there wasn’t, depending on whether or not Lisette’s friends brought enough money with them for food and opium both, and whether or not anyone bothered to go get some.

  One day I was hungry and there was nothing, but there was money lying around. I had no idea who it belonged to, but I took some and went down the stairs. It took a long time. The stairs made me dizzy.

  It was cold outside, and the skies were leaden. I went across the street to a café and ordered bread and a hard-boiled egg. I ate the egg very carefully. It was good. There was butter, and the bread was nicely crusty, with just a little ash from the oven clinging to the bottom.

  Nobody looked at me. It was the middle of the afternoon, I guessed, too early for dinner and too late for lunch. February? March? Could it be March already? I saw my reflection on the inside of the window
overlooking the street, and I looked like an opium eater, wan and listless, with lank, tangled blond hair. I ordered a glass of bad burgundy and drank it watching people walking around on the street.

  Two men were moving a cartload of furniture. From the printer’s shop a boy emerged with a wrapped bundle, going on an errand. A young girl in a thin cloak carried a magnificent hatbox, probably delivering a purchase. The night-soil cart went along, the old horse patiently waiting while two men swept the streets in a desultory fashion.

  And, I thought with a curious sense of detachment, a young prostitute sits in the window of the café, eating bread and an egg and wondering what happens next. If it’s so damned important for me to be here, I’d really appreciate a hint about why. What I’m supposed to be doing that’s worth living for.

  Except that, having lived, I could hardly die. Of course, plenty of people killed themselves. My mother had tried often enough. But I had always known that somehow I would never go through with it, never really mean it. It simply wasn’t in my nature to go quietly.

  And maybe that’s it, I thought, sipping the sour wine quietly. I’m alive because I’m not dead. And I’ve got to find something to do. Because otherwise it’s back to the same old thing, back to Lisette’s friends and her boys, until it all happens again. And I’m not doing this again.

  It took me most of the afternoon, stopping whenever I got dizzy, but I found a tobacco shop with paper and sent a message to Isabella Felix.

  Dear Isabella,

  As you may know from our mutual friends, I have recently been ill, but I am glad to say that I am now fully recovered, and I feel my strength returning every day. I wonder if you have yet engaged a third girl for touring this summer. If not, I would be eager to renew my contract with M. Moiret’s company and to join you on the road wherever you happen to be engaged.

  With warmest regards,