Wilde West

by Walter Satterthwait

  Oscar smiled again. So: not a puppy after all: a fox. Ah well, Reynard, no nasty quotations from me tonight. “Not at all,” he said. “I found Denver, for example, altogether fascinating.”

  Heads nodded, indicating that this was not an unpopular opinion. Everybody seemed (rather annoyingly) content to let Cathcart continue playing the part of inquisitor.

  “Is it true, Mr. Wilde,” Cathcart asked him, “that you’re traveling with a servant and two steamer trunks packed with clothes?”

  Probably none of the Manitou Springs gentry gathered round would be in any way ruffled by the idea of Oscar’s traveling with a servant. Those who didn’t employ servants themselves doubtless envied those who did. Some of them, possibly most of them, doubtless looked back with fondness to the good old days of slavery. Cathcart was plainly pursuing some plum he could present the rest of his readership, the simple untutored yeoman, the honest untutored laborer.

  “No. I have only one steamer trunk,” Oscar said. And then, on an impulse which he knew he might later regret, but could not now resist, he added, “The other four were unfortunately lost at sea. As for my valet, he’s a charming fellow. His name is Henry—he’s floating about here somewhere—and we often sit together by the fireside and discuss the merits of republican democracy.”

  “Excuse me,” said a familiar voice.

  Cathcart, who had opened his mouth again, suddenly clamped it shut as Elizabeth McCourt Doe appeared at Oscar’s elbow.

  She was, of course, stunning. Tonight she was swathed in clouds of bright beaming scarlet, like a rising sun. The color should have clashed with her titian hair; but nothing in the world could have clashed with her titian hair. And when she looked smiling up at Oscar with those luminous violet eyes, and laid her slender hand upon his arm, he felt a curious weakness at the knees, as though his joints were liquefying.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the group. “But may I steal Mr. Wilde away from you for just a moment?”

  Immediately, and without physically moving, the group had divided itself into two separate camps. Among the men, Cathcart smiled a courtly smile and graciously lowered his silver head in a small bow. Mayor Muggs beamed in delight around his pomegranate and announced, “Ah, Mrs. Doe!” Among the women, Mrs. Muggs lifted her meager chin and, disdain making her bones shrink away from her skin, miraculously acquired additional creases. The frigate, sails snapping, ponderously wheeled her heavy guns about.

  “I’ll bring him right back,” said Elizabeth McCourt Doe, and, with a gentle pressure on Oscar’s arm, she led him off.

  Her silks rustling beside him, her scent fluttering beneath his nostrils, they passed several chattering coveys of lumpen aristocracy. (Silver barons, cattle barons, timber barons and their respective baronesses, some of the men in costumes so stiffly starched that their occupants appeared to have petrified.) By the time the two of them had located an open space, a pocket of privacy, Oscar had remembered that he was an aggrieved party. His knees were still weak, but he had determined to himself that the weakness was galling rather than curious.

  He must maintain his aloofness; he must firm his resolve.

  She stopped and he turned to face her.

  She smiled and tapped him with the hand she held upon his arm. “Oscar, you’ve been ignoring me all evening.”

  Coolly he said, “I ignore you? Madam, I assure you I have not.” How dreadful. He sounded like a butler. But his pride could see no way to escape the role which circumstance, and Elizabeth McCourt Doe, had thrust upon him. “Permit me to point out that it is you who have been ignoring me. For two days, I might add.” Dreadful. Worse than a butler. An insufferable Prig.

  She leaned toward him, leaning on his arm, and she smiled.

  “This is fun, isn’t it? Can we do this in bed sometime?”

  In a flash, firmness drained away from his resolve and began to trickle into another (potentially more visible and embarrassing) part of his person. “Ah, Elizabeth,” he said, and in his voice he heard passion and yearning, which he was pleased to convey; but also a kind of tremulous whimper, which he was not.

  “Oscar,” she said, and canted her head to the side, her brilliant curls trembling along her scarlet shoulders. “I couldn’t get away. Horace had all sorts of horrible business meetings and he needed a hostess.”

  “A hostess?” So perhaps they had not been, she and Tabor, skidding naked one atop the other for the past thirty-eight hours. As Oscar, for the past nine, had been busily imagining them; or busily attempting to avoid imagining them.

  “You can’t believe how boring it’s been,” she said. She smiled and put her hands behind her hips, which caused her pert perfect breasts to lift up and strain against her bodice, as though reaching out for him like the hands of a child. “Have you missed me?”

  “Of course I’ve missed you. Elizabeth—”

  “I talked to your friend, the Countess.” Smiling her Gioconda smile, she narrowed her eyes slightly. “Should I be jealous of her?”

  “Jealous?” He produced a laugh which he intended to sound light and airy; it came out giddy and shrill, nearly hysterical with relief. She jealous?

  “She’s a very beautiful woman, Oscar.” Still smiling. “And French. And ever so much more cultured than I am.”

  He laughed again. More successfully this time: blithe, debonaire, almost avuncular. “My dear Elizabeth. No. I promise you. There is no woman, anywhere in the world, of whom you need be jealous. I only wish that I could prove that to you, just now, just at this very moment.”

  Her smiled widened. “How?” she said. “How would you prove it?”

  Oscar glanced to his right. The nearest bevy of barons and baronesses stood twenty feet off, all their pink faces staring frankly at Oscar and Elizabeth McCourt Doe. Instantly, in unison, like a troupe of minstrels, they turned away. Oscar glanced to his left. Saw Ruddick leaning earnestly forward as he talked to a young waiter with a silver tray tucked beneath his arm.

  Oh dear. Discretion, Wilbur.

  He turned back to Elizabeth McCourt Doe and lowered his voice. “I prefer showing you to telling you. May I see you tonight?”

  She sighed sadly. “I’m sorry, Oscar. I can’t tonight. Horace has another boring meeting.”

  Oscar felt his facial muscles wilt.

  “Poor Oscar,” she said. “And poor me.” She smiled. “But tomorrow morning let me show you the sights of Manitou Springs. I’ll rent a carriage.”

  “You’re the only sight I care to see.”

  “I know a place, up in the mountains. It’s beautiful. It’s shaded and quiet and there’s a little brook nearby. We can lie down on the pine needles.”

  Oscar was willing to lie down in the brook. “But the train to Leadville leaves at one o’clock.”

  “I’ll come pick you up at nine, at the hotel.”

  “Nine o’clock, then.”

  He smiled, delighted.

  She smiled, reached out, put her hand lightly on his arm. “I’ve missed you, Oscar. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I look forward to it. There’s something I wish to ask you. Something rather important.”

  She smiled again, gently pressed his arm with her fingers, then turned and rustled off.

  Tomorrow!

  The ballroom, despite its size, was suddenly too small to contain both Oscar and his elation. He glanced around once more. Ruddick had gone missing, but after an anxious moment (SCANDAL IN MANITOU SPRINGS!) Oscar spied the young waiter serving champagne to Colonel von Hesse. Four or five yards to their left, O’Conner stood talking to Mathilde de la Môle, the Countess wearing a lovely blue gown of taffeta and lace and an expression of heroic politeness. O’Conner had dressed for this occasion, as he did for all others, in his brown scarecrow suit.

  At the moment, no one seemed to be paying Oscar any attention. He crossed the room, nodding politely to the gaggles and bevies and coveys. He opened the French door and stepped out onto the veranda.

  But someone had b
een paying attention. As Oscar spoke with Elizabeth McCourt Doe, an intense pair of eyes had watched the two of them.

  I know you, slut. I know you, harlot. For all your expensive clothes and your expensive perfumes and your red red hair, you’re no better than any streetcorner whore riddled with pox. No better than any alleyway trollop sour with stale liquor and the stink of a thousand squalid couplings.

  I know you, Elizabeth McCourt Doe. I know you. I’ve learned about you. Left your husband. Ruined one marriage already, and now you’re ruining another. And still you you prance and whinny with Oscar Wilde.

  Shameless bitch.

  You sicken me.

  Whore.

  Oh yes, walk away. Walk away while you can, you vile stinking hole. Walk away now. One day you won’t be able to walk away.

  One day, perhaps, I’ll show you the flame that roars at the center of the universe.

  The moon, nearly full, splashed white light across the flagstones. Overhead, the bare branches of oak trees clucked and sighed. Oscar looked up through them to the sky. The Milky Way swept across the blackness, an extravagant scattering of diamonds hurled against velvet. And over there was Orion. And there was Ursa Major. Or was it Ursa Minor? One of them, he remembered, had some sort of chummy relationship with the North Star.

  No matter. What did stars signify?

  Tomorrow! Tomorrow amid the whispering pines he would ask her to come away with him! They would sit on the banks of the babbling brook and dip their feet into its laughing water. Tomorrow atop the pine needles they would pledge their troth.

  But didn’t pine needles cling to one’s clothing? Didn’t they irritate one’s skin? Well, presumably a woman like her, as practical as she was beautiful, would ferry along a blanket.

  Yes, tomorrow he would tell her his plans, show her how the two of them, together, would become the toast of London.

  Tomorrow—

  He heard a faint rasp to his left, a foot scraping against stone, and he turned.

  The figure by the balustrade, looming out of the shadows of the nearby oak, was monstrous. Something inhuman, something gross and foul that came lumbering toward him like a beast, like a bear …

  Oscar’s heart juddered.

  And then a voice came from the shadows, an uncanny whisper: “Poet.”

  And as the man stepped out onto the moonlit veranda, hands in his frock coat pockets, Oscar heard himself exhale a hiss. “Dr.”—his voice was strangled; he cleared his throat—“Dr. Holliday. I didn’t see you there.”

  So. Only a trick of light and shade. Ursa Accidentalis.

  Acci-dentalistic.

  But the wordplay was desperate, defensive: Oscar’s heart still clapped against his chest.

  Why all these bloody bears?

  “I came for the lecture,” Holliday whispered.

  “Ah.” Oscar cleared his throat again, something he seemed to do quite a lot whenever Holliday was in the vicinity. By now the man must be convinced that Oscar was consumptive. “This wasn’t the one you heard, then, while you were in San Francisco.”

  Holliday nodded. “One of them.”

  Oscar raised his eyebrows. “You’ve heard it before?”

  Holliday nodded. He wore tonight, below his beautifully cut black frock coat, a three-piece suit, this just as black and just as beautifully cut. Oscar wondered who his tailor was. Patently, not the same man who dressed the majority of Coloradans. This one obviously had taste. And eyes and fingers.

  He smiled. “Well, it’s very flattering that you’d come to listen to it again.” Dentist or gunman, Holliday was clearly a man of discernment.

  Holliday smiled his ghost of a smile. “When I find something I like,” he whispered, “I stick with it.”

  “Do you?” Oscar smiled. “Personally, when I find something I like, I immediately attempt to find something else. One should avoid habits of any sort, I think, and especially the good ones. But if one must have habits, then attending my lectures is, I suspect, a habit of the forgivable kind. I thank you. And, by the way, I thank you again for your intervention back in Denver. It’s difficult to believe, I know, but I have a feeling that the large furry gentleman was beginning to take a dislike to me.”

  Holliday nodded his ghost of a nod. “Seen him again?”

  Oscar remembered the shambling figure he had seen, or fancied he had seen, at the Denver train station. “No.” And realized: bear. And realized that since he had left Denver, down some dark corridor at the back of his mind, the figure had continued all along to shamble.

  This was why he had lately been suffering an invasion of bruins.

  “Keep your eyes opened,” Holliday whispered.

  “I shall, yes. But I do thank you.”

  Holliday nodded faintly once again. In the moonlight his black clothing, his black hair and black mustache, those jet-black empty eyes—they all conspired to make him seem somehow a creature of the night. An almost elemental being who in some unaccountable way shared the night’s substance, its darkness, its mystery, its promises and its threats.

  How, exactly, did one converse with such an individual? What, exactly, did one say?

  But it was Holliday who renewed the conversation. “Saw you talking to Mrs. Doe,” he whispered. “A handsome woman.”

  “Isn’t she? Do you know her?”

  Faintly, Holliday shook his head.

  “An extraordinary woman, I think. Not only handsome, as you say, but remarkably perceptive as well.”

  Faintly, Holliday nodded.

  “Totally unlike any of the women one meets in London. I wonder what they’d make of her there. I mean, if she were ever to travel to England. Which is thoroughly unlikely, of course—why would she? But I should think that if it ever did transpire, she’d go over rather well in London.”

  Holliday nodded.

  “She’s engaged, I gather, to that fellow Tabor. Do you know him?”

  Holliday shook his head.

  “Splendid chap, I suppose. But somehow, you know, he doesn’t seem quite right for her. I can’t imagine why I say that. I barely know him—or her, either, of course. It’s merely a feeling I have. Call it an intuition.”

  Holliday nodded.

  All at once Oscar realized that he was seeking Holliday’s approval, trying to pry from him an opinion that would validate his own. It was Holliday’s stolid indifference, his ultimate lack of opinions of any sort, which had suddenly made Oscar uncomfortably aware of what he had been attempting.

  Yesterday Holliday had rescued him, and today Oscar was turning him into a father confessor.

  Well, rescue was perhaps too strong a word; certainly, Oscar would have done a creditable job of Biff-bashing, had that proven necessary. And father confessor, too, was a bit off the mark. Oscar was hardly confessing, or even admitting, to anything. He was merely attempting to elicit Holliday’s judgment of Tabor and Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

  But why on earth would he want to elicit the judgment of this … gunman? A gunman of discernment, perhaps, when it came to clothes, and to lectures, but still a gunman.

  “Ah,” he said. He cleared his throat once more. (Soon the good doctor would be prescribing lozenges and syrups.) “Well,” he said. “It’s been, as always, a great pleasure chatting with you. I hope—”

  The French doors opened behind Oscar. He turned.

  Young Ruddick stepped onto the Veranda. He glanced at Holliday, turned to Oscar, and said, “Oscar, that awful Marshal Grigsby person is here. He has to talk to you, he says.” He glanced back at Holliday and frowned slightly.

  Oscar said to Holliday, “Well, I must run. I hope that one day we’ll have another opportunity to chat.”

  Holliday nodded. “Be seeing you.”

  Inside, Ruddick closed the door. As they walked across the floor, he said, “Oscar, who was that man?”

  “Dr. Holliday,” Oscar told him. “He’s—”

  Ruddick abruptly stopped walking, causing Oscar to do the same. Irritating. “Doc Hollid
ay?” Ruddick said. “The gun-fighter?”

  “Yes. Fascinating chap. Quite a raconteur. Where’s Grigsby?”

  “But he was in El Paso,” Ruddick said.

  “Hmm?” Oscar looked around, couldn’t spot the marshal anywhere among the Manitouians.

  “And in Leavenworth, too,” Ruddick said. “I saw him there. I thought he was a reporter or something, like O’Conner.”

  Oscar turned to him. “What are you saying?”

  “Doc Holliday. I saw him in El Paso, and then a few days later in Leavenworth. He was in the audience both times.”

  And Holliday had been, by his own admission, in San Francisco.

  “Are you certain?” Oscar asked him.

  “Of course I am.”

  Oscar looked back at the French door. He could see nothing through the glass. He could only make out, framed like a photograph along its surface, brightly lit beneath a spectral chandelier, looking sleek and dashing and more than a little alarmed, his own reflection.

  “HOWDY, MATHILDE,” GRIBSBY SAID to the ringlets of gleamring blond hair, the opposed white arcs of naked shoulder blade fanned above the band of bright blue satin.

  She turned, a glass of ehampagne held between both hands, and she smiled broadly up at him. “Bohb!” She reached out and touched his arm. “How are you?”

  He grinned, deeply pleased by how deeply pleased she seemed to be. “Just fine. Yourself?”

  “Very well, thank you. When did you arrive?”

  “While ago. I was over at the hotel, thought I’d step out and take a gander at this blowout here.”

  After checking into the Woods and learning at the front desk that he had received no telegrams, Grigsby had drunk a quick bourbon in the bar and then limped painfully upstairs to his room. He had lain down—for only a moment or two, he had told himself, only time enough to rest up his hip a bit. Almost immediately he fell asleep. He had slept away the entire afternoon, the first time in years he had been able to sleep in the daytime.

  She was good for him, this French countess.

  In more ways than one—when he awoke, the pain in his hip had contracted to a memory of itself, a dim trivial blur, meek and powerless. And, even more surprising, he hadn’t felt the need for a drink to get his head cleared and his stomach settled. (He had put one away anyhow, of course, down in the bar; but that had been just a bracer, what he called a heart-starter.)