by Jo Graham
“You?” He seemed the picture of a big, honest Saarländer.
“I’m not as wholesome as I look,” he said, smiling.
I couldn’t help but smile back. “You can’t be as bad as you think.”
“Try me,” he said. “Maybe I just need some lessons.”
I laughed and looked away. The desire on his face was so plain. Every emotion was written all over him. I could read him like a book. “Like a soldier from the country looking for sophisticated vices?”
He shrugged again. “In Saar-Louis, vice is having a baby six months after the wedding. We’re wholesome people. Salt of the earth. Hardworking and early-rising and all that. We love our vineyards and our farms and orchards and wells, and our big families and our excellent ham.”
“And you?”
His smile faded. He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “I never belonged there. I’ve always been in love with blood.”
A chill ran down me.
“As a child, I always wanted the darkest stories. When the old men would sit around in the tavern talking about the Seven Years’ War, I wanted to see the stumps of their arms, to touch them. And wondered how I would feel, knowing my arm wasn’t there, how it would feel to lose it, half frightened and half fascinated.” He picked up his glass, the light playing on the stem, on his clear, passionate eyes. “I ran away to the army when I was sixteen. I’d never wanted anything else. This was in ’85, when if I served all my life, I might end a sergeant. A half-lettered thug with a really big sword.” Michel raised an eyebrow at me. “I was a sergeant at twenty. Then the Revolution came. And suddenly it was a good time to be a thug with a really big sword.”
“I think you’re more than that,” I said. “You couldn’t look at yourself with irony if you weren’t. Man of blood you may be, but you’re a good deal more than a thug.”
“If so, it’s because I chose to be,” he said, lifting the glass again. “If there’s one thing that the Revolution taught me, it’s that we’re all inches from savages. It’s just that I know it more than most. I can’t dress it up in pretty explanations when the bloodlust is on me, pretend that I’m fighting for anything else than the joy in it. That’s why I have to be so careful. And trust in God to help me moderate these passions.”
“You believe in God?” I got up to fetch the chicken and its accompaniments and bring them to the table. “That’s very dated.”
Michel didn’t seem offended. “I do. I believe in God and the teachings of Christ, in the brotherhood of mankind and the inexpressible love of the Holy Spirit.”
I looked at him, as shocked as if he had muttered obscenities. I couldn’t remember hearing anything of the kind before, except as a pious platitude or a clever mockery. It simply wasn’t said in society by intelligent people. But he sat there perfectly composed, getting ready to carve the chicken.
I sat down across from him. “I am only wondering how you can be anything but a rationalist after what you have seen,” I said.
“Like Moreau?” he asked, looking at me, one eyebrow cocked.
I didn’t rise to that bait. Instead I sat back in my chair, my fragile muslin dress looking the color of old blood in the light.
“How can you be anything but a cynic after the things you have seen? How can you really believe that, other than some vague humanistic aim of good government and freedom from foreign oppression, that there is any greater good in all of this?”
He looked at me, startled. “How can I not?”
Two years ago, I had fancied him my eternal love. Instead he was a stranger, a man I didn’t know. Not really. I wanted to reach out and touch him, for him to tell me something, to know it all and understand. But he was a stranger.
“Don’t you believe in anything?” he asked quietly. “Not gods or destiny? Not justice or beauty or Heaven?”
I took a quick gulp of the wine. It stung my throat and my eyes. “Heaven is no comfort for me,” I said lightly. “I hope it does not exist, as I plan never to reside there. Which is just as well, I suppose. It would be awfully boring, sitting around with Augustine and the Church Fathers, playing the harp and wearing a little white chiton. I’m all fumbles with stringed instruments anyway. Can’t you just see me taking up foot washing in the St. Mary Magdalene room, having seen the error of my ways? Forgiven, but only so much?” I spread my finger and thumb apart.
He raised his chin. “How many men have you killed?”
“What?” There was, unbidden, falling past me, the bandit on the road with no face, the other whose face I had never seen.
“How many men have you killed?” he demanded again, leaning forward, nothing nonchalant in his pose now, just intensity of line and feature.
“One or two, perhaps,” I stammered. “Does it matter?”
“451 dead at Heinsberg, 72 at Maastricht, 967 at Altenkirchen, 244 at Winterthur, close to 1,200 in other actions. These are my casualties, my troops killed by my orders. Close to seven thousand of the enemy. Hundreds who have lost legs or arms or their sight.” His voice was perfectly steady and terribly precise. “So you have shared men’s beds. You have not dismembered them, or seen your own wounded hacked to pieces by surgeons in a futile attempt to save their lives. You have not written the letters. ‘Dear Madame: I send you your son Jean-Paul in three pieces. I am dreadfully sorry. I made a stupid mistake in the disposition of my left flank!’”
Michel reached for the wine again. “So when I am here, safe and sound, where there is only the guillotine and a crowd of mad ex-Jacobins to fear, please forgive me if I do not die of guilt at the thought of spending the night with a woman I am not married to, or in some other sophisticated vice. It pales next to more than nine thousand counts of murder.”
I sat there in stunned silence while he poured carefully and drained his glass. “And you believe in God?” I asked.
He looked up at me over the gilded rim of the glass. “Of course I believe in God. I have come within inches of death more times than I can count. Men have fallen at my back stricken with the bullets aimed for me. A saber once turned in the air above my head as though it had been stopped by a blade I couldn’t see. I believe in God. I must. In all these slaughters, I am spared. God has something else in mind for me. And given the slaughters to which I aspire, I can only say”—he paused and took a sip of the golden wine. “He delights in it.”
“Delights? You don’t believe, then?”
“In a good and just God?” Michel met my eyes. “Oh, yes, I do. Because, hackneyed as it is, I believe in the Republic. I do believe that this is necessary. It’s better. Not perfect, because nothing made by the hand of man ever is, but better. Better than starvation under a corrupt king. Better than hundreds of thousands of lives stifled and dying for lack of air, living and dying in ignorance, spirits broken by the sameness. By doing as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them, with no hope and no choice. It is better that the responsibility of sin be taken on by those who agree to do it.”
His eyes were shaded in the flickering light. “Make no mistake. Our enemies mean to destroy us. If they should win, it will be French citizens who bleed under a Terror like we have never known before, and French children who grow up in ignorance and poverty, condemned to accept it with the fatality of the inevitable. If we go back, we will go all the way back. It will be 1648 again. Who knows how many hundred years it will be again, before we once again have the idea of revolution?” He gave me a sideways smile, rueful and sharp. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know that my hands are covered with blood.”
I looked down at the chicken on my plate, half touched, then looked up. “How can you do it? Wide-awake, knowing what you do?”
“It’s what I was born to do,” he said, almost gently. “We are both who we were born to be.”
“You can’t know who I am,” I said. I stood up a little unsteadily, knocking against the edge of the table. The plate and china rang. “And you wouldn’t like it if you did.”
&
nbsp; “Ida—”
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped.
“Why not? You can call me Michel.”
“Because it’s not my name,” I said, turning away. The cheese. The Madeira. The plums. That would be a distraction.
“Not your name?” He tried to make a joke of it. “Then who are you? I thought that I was having dinner with the famous Madame St. Elme.”
“It is a stage name,” I said with some annoyance. “Do you think I would use my own name as I have used this one?”
“What is your name, then?” he asked gently. I heard the chair move as he stood up.
I took a deep breath. “Elzelina van Aylde Versfelt Ringeling.” I didn’t look at him.
“Elzelina,” he said quietly. He stood behind me. “Elza.”
“Yes.”
Reaching around me, he took my hand in his and pressed it slowly to his lips, leaving a trail of fire that made me shiver, his eyes warming me to the bone. “Hello, Elza,” he said.
I gathered my wits about me, looking anywhere but at his face. “Do not tell me that you will not hurt me,” I said harshly. “That is a promise you can’t keep, and I would as soon that you never made it. And do not ask if I will be faithful. I am not the kind of woman who can be faithful, even to someone she feels sincere friendship for.”
“That is as well,” he said evenly. “I am not the kind of man who can be faithful either. Certainly not when I am away in the field.”
“That would be unreasonable to expect,” I agreed. “I could not be faithful if I were left behind.”
“No fidelity, then.” He shook his head. “And the money? I am not a rich man, and I live on my pay.”
“No fidelity. But I must live.”
Michel sighed. “So must I. And I actually live on half my pay. My father’s arthritis is so bad that he can’t work anymore, so I send half my pay to him and Margarethe, who takes care of him. I’m still paying off the farm I bought them. It has a little orchard that I thought could be Margarethe’s dowry if something happened to me.”
I blinked at him. “You do know that you’re too good to be true,” I said flatly.
He shrugged, looking for a moment like an embarrassed schoolboy. “Anyone would do as much.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” I said.
“I’m not in a position to make any offer you could accept. I can’t afford two establishments. I have rooms like this.” He looked around. “I’m renting from an old woman on Île Saint-Louis.”
“We’ll manage,” I said. “You should try selling some favors in the corps.”
“I would never—” he began hotly. Then he saw my face. “Elza.”
I looked at him then, and he was smiling, his face half-turned from me. “Michel,” I whispered, “it is better if we never begin this.”
“You were not frightened two years ago,” he said, reaching for my hands and drawing me toward him.
“I was a different person two years ago.”
“Two years ago, you were my commanding officer’s mistress,” he said. My eyes came just to the level of his shoulders. Moreau had called him an Alsatian bull. He might have been right. I wanted to press against those tight pants, see if all that bulge was real.
“It would be better if we were only friends,” I said. “I do have a sincere regard for you.”
“And I have a sincere regard for you,” he said. My face must have been disbelieving, for he smiled at me and said, “Elza, surely you don’t want me to say that I love you.” His long fingers brushed at my cheekbone, at the curve of my face. “You wouldn’t believe me if I did. You are so young and so much a woman of the world.”
“I am twenty-four,” I said, trying not to sound breathless. I wanted him as I had never wanted anyone in my life.
“And I’m thirty-one,” he replied.
“I know.” He was an innocent anyway, much more than I had ever been. I had never been wholesome.
His mouth was drawn, fine and strained, his eyes searching my face. “Is it ordinary, do you think, to remember a woman you met once, two years ago, who sent you an inexplicable letter, so vividly that you must go and find her two years later?”
“Of course it’s not ordinary,” I said, trying to ignore the touch of his hand on my face. “You aren’t an ordinary man.”
“Elza, why are you fighting me?” he asked, one thumb tracing my jaw lightly. “What do you have to lose?”
I shook my head, smiling at him. He was so beautiful, this stranger, but familiar all the same, as though I had known him in distant infancy and only forgotten. “You are arrogant, and you are shamelessly manipulating me.”
He cupped my face, brushed back a stray tendril of hair. “I thought I was being pretty transparent.” I could feel the sword calluses on his palm, the rough places where reins would lie.
“Let me think,” I said, and he released me. I sat down in my chair and leaned back, telling myself that my head was only spinning from the wine. I closed my eyes.
How could he be different from any of the others who lay with me for a night or a week or a month, and whom I was forgetting? If I have him, he will be no different, I thought, one more lonely soldier, one more Gantheaume, whose face I barely recall. If I do not, I can continue to love the idea of him, my modern cavalier, flawed and dangerous, the imperfect ideal of everything a man should be. If I do not have him, do not know him, he cannot disappoint me, or tear away the last thing I have to believe in.
I heard him get up and cross behind me, his booted footsteps hesitant. “Elza?” He was behind my chair, but he didn’t touch me. “Would you like to go to a concert tomorrow night? It’s a drinking kind of party, and I don’t know if you . . .” Oh yes, I knew what he was really asking. Will you or not? he wanted to know.
“I don’t know either,” I said. “Shall I let you know in the morning?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “It’s after midnight now.”
“Goodness, is it that late?” I said, getting up and trying to look businesslike. “I didn’t realize.” I tried not to look at his face.
His voice was not cool and sophisticated, even though he said the right things. I could hear the hurt. “Perhaps I should be going,” he said, looking behind the table for his gloves. “Thank you for an excellent dinner.”
“I enjoyed it very much, too,” I said, going to get his hat and handing it to him. “Let me show you down. I’ll have to lock the street door behind you this late.”
I unlocked the door to the hall, still not meeting his eyes. My body was aching for him, yearning toward him, aroused by the mildest of touches, by one almost-kiss.
The stairs were narrow, and there were four flights and four turnings to the bottom. I held one of the candles high so that we could see our way, lifting my skirts and holding the banister with the other hand. He was behind me on the stairs, his boot heels heavy on the polished wood, walking with the heavy scuff that always means cavalry, a man used to walking in spurs.
When we reached the bottom, I already felt the draft of cold air under the door. I put the candle on the stand while I unbolted the heavy door, my back to him. “Good night, Michel,” I said.
“Good night,” he said, sliding his arms around me. I turned, and somehow we were locked together, all the warmth of him flooding into me like a tide submerging all the rocks. My arms went around him, pressing him to me, feeling the scratchy wool of his coat on my bare arms. He pushed me back against the door, its solidity holding me up. My mouth opened under his, and I felt the warmth and hardness of his body against me, slipping my tongue into his mouth, pulling at him.
I came up gasping, but there was no respite. His lips were on my neck, the smoothness of his shaven cheek against my throat, one of my hands tangling in his hair. I moaned and pressed against him, his knee in the cleft between my legs, his hardness against my thigh.
He bent his head, his mouth opening and closing on my nipple through the thin muslin. With a ragged breath, I started t
earing at the cravat at his throat, dropping it and ripping the buttons open so I could get at his flesh. Our mouths met with some sort of primal sound. His hands were on my breast, and I could taste the wine on his breath. Upstairs, I heard a door open and close.
“Michel.” I tried to surface, pushing against his shoulder. I didn’t dream of this, to be taken like an army whore drunken in a stairwell and forgotten tomorrow. Better the ten-course banquet we had both imagined.
He raised his face to mine, flushed and intent. “Elza?”
“Let’s go back upstairs,” I said. “It’s more comfortable there.”
He put his arm around me, his hat suddenly in the way. “Elza, I promise you—”
I put my hand to his lips. “Don’t promise me anything, Michel. Then it will be easier when you don’t do it.”
I couldn’t see his face in the shadows. “If you trust me so little, why do you want to make love with me?”
“Do you think I have to trust you for that?” I asked with a smile that didn’t reach my eyes.
Two of Chalices
We went upstairs together. I locked the door, then took one of the candles from the table and carried it into the bedroom. He followed me.
Light made everything spring into place at once, the crimson curtains at the window and door, the bed with its gold covers and curtains, the gilt mirror over the dresser reflecting and refracting bottles of oil and perfume, the curved handle of a hairbrush, the china box that held my tarot cards. The light left shadows in the corners. One candle does not show too much.
Michel stood just inside the door, something oddly uncertain in the way he stood, like a man who has gone into a secret place and doesn’t know what to make of it. The flickering candle turned his red hair bronze again.
His shirt was open, and I could see the pulse at the hollow of his throat. Below the sunburn his skin was redhead fair and freckled. He took his coat off and looked for somewhere to put it, settling for hanging it on the end of the screen that separated the necessary pot from the rest of the room. I walked over to him and undid every button on his waistcoat.