Sweet Agony

by Charlotte Stein

  Not that I can blame him.

  I can feel the music from here. God knows what it must be like for him. I bet he can sense Brahms pulsing through his bones. I bet he aches with it the same way I do – so strongly that I find myself crossing the bare floorboards to be nearer to him. And when I get there, the feeling only becomes stronger.

  He’s so lost he doesn’t even sense my approach. His eyes stay closed and his fingers keep rolling over the keys, Brahms giving way to something I think might be Liszt and Liszt giving way to what I know is Chopin. He picks out the final heartbreaking notes of Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, and after that I just have to do it.

  I have to put a hand on his shoulder. I think I want to partly just to alert him to my presence, but as soon as I touch him I can tell that was a lie. Oh, the things we tell ourselves, just to get by. I should have known that I am doing it purely out of greed. We spent the last week only talking through notes, and now he is so close.

  What else could it be but my own desire?

  Though, God knows, I wish it wasn’t. As soon as I make contact I want to take it back, because his reaction is like nothing I’ve ever seen. I might as well have shot ten thousand volts into him. He stands up so quickly that the piano stool flies backwards, though I could have sworn the thing was seven foot across and made of lead. When it hits the floor it makes a sound like thunder trapped in a tin, and the whole house seems to shake.

  I know I shake – though that might be because of his anger more than anything else. He looks like he would kill me with his eyes if he could. His face is suddenly all lines and angles, and when he finally manages to spit out words his voice is not the rich roll I know. It seems to splinter and break over each syllable, half in fury, half in despair.

  ‘How dare you intrude in this manner?’ he says, and at that moment it comes to me in one long, embarrassing rush: the intimacy I thought we had created with those notes was all in my imagination, all an illusion, brought on by my hunger for the barest sign of human interaction or affection.

  He was just being mean, I think, and I want to slide through the floorboards.

  ‘I just thought that you –’ I start to say.

  But he cuts me dead.

  ‘You thought what? That I would welcome you flouncing in here to run your filthy fingers all over me? I told you clearly that you are to knock before entering a room. I explained the rules and you have broken them. You have flaunted your insubordination in my face and yet the first words out of your mouth are not an apology,’ he says.

  Though maybe ‘says’ is the wrong word. ‘Snarls’ would be more appropriate. He is so fierce that I have to obey.

  ‘I’m sorry, all right, I’m sorry, I had no idea you –’

  ‘You had no idea that I wish to have privacy to play?’

  ‘You can hear it all through the house! You were playing what I was singing so I just assumed that you –’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest clue what you are talking about. Do you honestly think I would perform a duet with my housekeeper? That seems at best a ridiculous leap and at worst the delusions of a diseased mind.’

  ‘You really don’t have to be so horrible about it.’

  ‘I am horrible. I told you clearly when I hired you – I am cruel and hateful and ill- tempered, and if you find any of that objectionable then you should leave now. In fact I believe it would be better if you did, considering your consistent inability to maintain boundaries,’ he says, in a way that to me seems pretty unfair. He can have the delusions-of-a-diseased-mind thing – that’s fine. But how can I fail consistently to maintain boundaries when we’ve hardly ever been in the same room together?

  ‘I’ve barely spoken to you for days and days,’ I say, half-sure already that my protests are only going to make things worse. Yet somehow, I still don’t fully understand by how much. I imagine him just telling me to go, and instead receive something so awful that I am wincing before he even finishes.

  ‘And that is precisely the way I like it. If I never saw your moonish face again I would be deliriously happy. If you were to refrain from placing your greedy hands on me again I could live something resembling a contented life. But instead you force your presence upon me – worse, you touch me on the shoulder as though that is something I could ever wish for,’ he says. And at that point I have to get out of there. If I stay he will probably say something even more diabolical than ‘moonish’, and that was bad enough. The second he said it I just wanted to crush myself into a tiny cube and mail myself far away from here. I am still feeling that as I stand out in the hall, legs slightly wobbly and with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Why did I do that?

  Why did I touch him?

  I should have been able to tell how that would go down. Just because we shared those letters does not mean we are bosom buddies, and the idea that I thought so makes me want to kill myself. At the very least I want to peel off my own skin, before it can finish roasting me alive.

  And things stay that way for a long time. I will be dusting a shelf or making some dinner or drifting off to sleep, and suddenly there it will be: a searing flash of mortification to remind me. You saw a friendship or connection that was not really there, my mind will kindly explain, and of course I cannot argue. It seems sound to me, this theory. It has no holes.

  Or at least I think so until I see him some time later. He stops at the end of the hall when he notices me coming from the other direction. And the second he does he goes to turn around, but not before I see his hand go to his shoulder, just as it did in that room. As though protecting the place I touched, I think.

  From a wound I never intended to give.

  Chapter Five

  I consider writing him a note of apology but have almost no idea where to begin. I’m still not sure what happened. I want to believe that he is just an awful nightmare of a man, driven mad by a deep desire to insult me. But the more I think about it, the less it looks that way. I keep seeing my hand on his shoulder, as though I was giving him an injury. He was just defending himself, in a way I would probably understand better, if the imaginary intimacy argument was not so good.

  But unfortunately it is. It sounds like something I would do. I could probably build a castle in the sky out of nothing more than stones, given half the chance. And God knows I want to, considering the state of my life to date. I grew up in a two-bedroom house with four brothers, all my feelings crammed down to nothing to avoid pain. In truth, before I came here I thought my feelings had died. I thought giddiness and singing were for rich girls.

  I had no idea I could be happy.

  And happiness, once felt, is hard to get rid of. It stays with me even as I try to dismiss it as unreal. I get down on my hands and knees and scrub his floors, and when they are all gleaming I do them over again. I fight with his frightening garden, clearing away the weeds and debris inch by inch until my hands are sore and sometimes bleeding.

  But even as I do, even as I do my best not to tell myself over and over that he just thinks I am gross, or that some transgression of mine has driven him mad, it creeps up on me just the same. How else could it be when the very house I’m living in is him? Everything in it represents some aspect of his personality, and all of it is so fascinating that I can’t help looking and touching and exploring. I can’t help being interested in him all over again.

  And especially when I find his study.

  Oh, God, his study. Why did he have to leave the door unlocked? He never has before, but for some reason on Wednesday morning I find it standing ajar. Like a beckoning finger, I think, then quash that image. He probably just wants me to clean there, I tell myself, though I can see the problem with that rationale the second I let it out.

  It still means I end up in the room, looking at his things. Though really, can I blame myself? The room is a million times more intense than his parlour. It belongs to my dreams of dark towers owned by witches. Every shelf is heaving with extraordinary items, from antique
pocket watches to stoppered bottles to actual honest-to-God glass eyeball collections. The latter I find behind a bust of some bearded old dude while I’m dusting.

  Not that I am really dusting at all.

  After a while I can admit that I’m just rifling through his things, like a thief in the temple of him. I mean, I barely know how to dust. Mostly I just move layers of it around, sneezing. More of it ends up on me than on the duster, and the room doesn’t look any better for my being in there. If anything it looks worse, because now all the stuff has been moved around. There’d been a certain order to it all – and now that I can see that, I wonder what his reaction will be.

  Death by firing squad for touching his things, I think.

  Yet even that doesn’t put me off. It has almost no chance of doing so, once I’ve noticed the book on his desk. A book that he is most likely reading? There’s no way I can resist that. I was beginning to think his love of literature was exaggerated. Twice I’ve found myself searching cupboards for all those words that must be waiting for me somewhere, and now here they are.

  The mere idea of restraining myself is ludicrous.

  But God knows, I try. With the end of my duster I try to push the book further under the newspaper he has folded over it. And when that doesn’t work, I do my best to imagine his reaction. I conjure up that apoplectic face and that voice filled with vitriol, then wait for it to subdue. I wait, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be holding me back. I always thought my thirst for literature would one day kill me, and this is pretty much proof.

  Though I swear, I only intend to take a peek. Just a little peek, but of course a little one leads to a bigger one, and a bigger one leads to me sitting down, and me sitting down leads to me greedily devouring the whole thing. Partly because Charles Dickens is ten times better than anyone says, and he drags me along despite my best intentions.

  But mostly because his is not the only writing in the book. There are other words, written in the margins. Harcroft’s words, written in the margins. I know they are his – I recognize the cramped, narrow writing from his notes. It always makes me think the strain of talking to me makes him press too hard on the paper, but now I can see it’s just how he is.

  I can see everything about how he is.

  His character is in every line, so that I can almost hear his voice in my head when I read. ‘I would possibly give your heartfelt opinions on the poor a little more credence if you had not divorced your wife for a teenager via a letter in the newspaper,’ one of the notes says, because apparently even Dickens does not escape his contempt.

  Or his withering analysis.

  His seven-paragraph screed on the final scene between Little Dorrit and Arthur is so excruciating that I think I have secondhand embarrassment for a fictional couple. My face gets hot, not just because he is more or less right but because this is what he thinks of two people having intimate contact. He thinks it seems like two birds squabbling over a wet crust. He thinks it an inexplicable turn in an otherwise just about passable story.

  God, he probably thinks my hand on his shoulder was an inexplicable turn in an otherwise just about passable story. I bet he thought I was ruled by sloppy, inconvenient emotions that he has no use for. Hell, I think I might have to agree. Here I am practically licking the words he wrote in a book, when I should be dusting or cleaning or bringing him a cup of tea. At the very least I need to be doing something other than snooping in this desperate manner.

  If only to spare me the expression on his face when he catches me.

  He looks even worse than last time. His lip curl is so exquisite it hardly seems like one. You could probably call it a pout and paint a fancy picture of it, though it would need a rather ominous title. And Now the Hour Cometh, I think. But then I want to explain my heinous actions – really quickly. Before he decides to murder me.

  Is he going to murder me?

  It certainly appears that way when he just stands there staring, without speaking, for what feels like half an hour. By the time he does say something my insides are practically in a knot. I have to wrench them apart before I can do what he asks me to, though most of me would rather not. ‘I think you had better follow me,’ he says, and all I can think is: oh, my God, now I’m going to meet my doom for repeatedly daring to transgress against him in a bird-squabbling-over-a-crust manner.

  It even seems that way, as I mimic his long, slow pace. Like I’m taking part in my own funeral march, I think, then want to stop and run in the other direction.

  Doubly so when we get to the door.

  For some reason the wood is painted red, which never bodes well in this situation. Not when every other door in the house is a normal, natural colour. Behind this one he probably has a room full of whips and chains – or maybe the bodies of his former wives. Why else would it be locked? He has to take out a big bunch of keys to open it, and they are not the kind to reassure someone like me. They are heavy and rusty-looking, on a big ring that he has to turn and turn to get to the right one.

  And the right one is a curling knot of wrought iron. It makes me think of spooky stories about haunted mansions, and even more so when he fits it into the lock. It screeches when he turns it, as though no one has been in this room for a thousand years. He only ever has sex with the ghost of his long-lost love once a millennium, because the rest of the time she is as mad as hell. I bet she’s going to bite my head off for daring to have lustful thoughts about her husband.

  A thought that seems silly, I know.

  But it still makes my heart thunder in my chest when he tells me to go in, and at first all I can do is put my head around the door, with my eyes closed. I want an extra second to gather myself before I have to face whatever this is. One more moment before I get eaten by God knows what. Most likely his terrible proclivities, I know.

  Then I open my eyes, and see the most beautiful thing in all the world.

  Not a torture room for disobedient employees who break the rules.

  He has a library, a goddam library, a real honest-to-God library, right here in his house.

  And not just any old library. This is a gigantic, amazing, brilliant repository of books, like nothing I’ve ever seen or even hoped to. It spans two fucking floors. Somehow, he has hollowed out two floors of his seemingly small house and made this cavernous room of wonder. And I know he did make it, too, because every part of it is so him that I could put this picture under his name in the dictionary. Every book in here is terrifying or beautiful or ancient-seeming or all three, and whatever order they might once have been in has long ago dissolved into chaos. There are tomes piled on pamphlets piled on paperbacks, and none of them at normal angles.

  One shelf has been divided into triangles. Another is crammed so full I doubt anyone could ever pull anything out of it, though, by God, I am going to try. My very bones are already itching to do it. No force on earth could prevent me, not even him telling me that as punishment for my snooping I must spend all my days in here tidying up. After all, most of me knows what he really means.

  It comes over me in a great relief-filled rush, telling me all the things the letters and the open doors and the left-behind Dickens tried to. This is not my imagination. I didn’t see something that wasn’t there. If I had, he would never do this in a million years, because he has to understand what it is to me.

  I know he understands what this is to me.

  He saw me reading.

  And so gave me books.

  He can pretend all he wants but anyone would understand that much. He even tells me he expects some improvement when he returns in a week’s time, then begins to leave me amidst all this glorious wonder. He is going to leave me for a week, as though that is going to seem like some awful punishment. But to someone like me it never could. He overplayed his hand, and now I can see.

  Yet, when I thank him, he reacts almost strangely as he did before.

  ‘Why are you like this?’ he asks, voice so cold and faint I could almost believe I have it wron
g. I say, ‘Like what?’ and brace myself for a blow. As it turns out, I was right to, just not in the way I thought. I expected a quick knife under the breastbone, bloody and brutal.

  And instead I get something that swells my heart.

  ‘So utterly forgiving and endlessly kind,’ he says.

  But here is the best part: he means it. He really and truly means it – I can see it all over his face. His expressions are usually so devoid of human feeling that any evidence of sincere emotion stands out like a stone in the middle of a field full of confetti. It takes everything I’ve got to pretend to be incredulous.

  But, damn it, I do my best.

  ‘You think I am forgiving and kind.’

  ‘Yes, of course. What else could I possibly think?’

  ‘Judging by your reaction in the piano room: that I am an intrusive, delusional arsehole,’ I venture, still expecting him to nod and utter some dry quip.

  ‘Well, yes, you are that too, I imagine.’

  But he refuses to give me even that much.

  ‘From the moment you walked up to my gate I have been nothing but a hideous nightmare to you, yet somehow you believe that you are the arsehole,’ he says, after which I have to do something. He honestly seems to think he is treating me so terribly that I should hate him – despite what I just realised and what he just did.

  Does he think I don’t know what he just did?

  I think he might not. I think I might have to explain.

  ‘I wouldn’t call you a hideous nightmare, exactly.’

  ‘Quite probably because you are utterly forgiving and endlessly kind.’

  ‘I was thinking more because you just gave me all of these books,’ I say, but I can tell he still doesn’t see it. Either that, or he believes he is extremely convincing in his cruelty. So convincing that I would carry on believing in it no matter how desperate he sounds – and he does sound desperate. He buries it deep beneath ten layers of sneering contempt, but I can still hear it. Somehow, I think I always could.