Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  She remembered a shop on the Rio Terrà Canal, off Campo Santa Margherita, a shop that made masks; they’d bought the plague doctor for David, a papier-mâché face in black and white with small round glasses and a huge curved beak of a nose. (Anti-Semitic? No. In the Middle Ages a plague doctor wore a cone-shaped beak stuffed with herbs and straw to ward off “plague air.”) She shook the dust off the mask onto the tarp.

  Hadn’t warded off anything.

  Ever.

  She remembered going to empty out David’s office at the hospital, after he had died so suddenly. She had cried in the street and put the mask on momentarily to cover her tears. A little white boy holding an older black woman’s hand had pointed at Marianne, reached up, and tried to touch the mask; he’d called out “trick or treat,” though it was April.

  She wanted to touch David, not the decayed David who was in that box; probably the bacteria had eaten away everything but the bones. Maybe the bones, those slim bones, were gone, too, by now.

  She touched a receipt from a hotel in Spain, in Toledo. It was dated almost seven years earlier than the Venice receipts – she’d been pregnant with Billy. On a clear afternoon during the Easter season, they’d driven a rented car to Toledo. From a distance they could see most of the hilly, terraced town with its stone gray wall and the blue Tagus River winding round; Toledo looked so much like an El Greco painting that she half expected to see elongated figures in glowing robes walking the streets. She’d learned that the artist had lost commissions because of his hauteur and pomposity. Not to compare herself, but she’d been turned away by donors for understating what she could do as a filmmaker. She’d always had self-doubts.

  Church bells rang throughout the day in different pitches and timbres. On the ancient walls, paper pictures of saints were taped, and red-and-white streamers flew overhead. Half the town seemed to consist of tourist shops. At dusk, the couple joined a solemn parade that was moving ponderously up to the Catedral, the great church of Toledo. Incense suffused the air. At the front of the line, in a gray robe, a monk carried a big wooden cross with a life-sized carved Jesus hanging from it. Marianne and David left before the procession reached its destination – they had seen so many churches that they felt weighted down by them – and made their way at first gravely, then giggling, two escapees, to their hotel. They ate – she remembered a rabbit-and-vegetable paella – in their penthouse suite, from which they could see the city lights glimmering in the night. Two big bottles of sparkling water, which tasted like champagne to them, accompanied the meal. David had joined her in abstinence; he claimed that not drinking and doing Lamaze with her brought him as close as he could get to the experience of being pregnant himself. Not drinking was actually easier for him than for her: she liked her glass of wine with dinner, but alcohol put him to sleep. They kept nonalcoholic beer in the refrigerator at home.

  After dinner they undressed, Marianne keeping on only a heavy string of black pearls David had bought her on a trip to China. She’d had a head of thick blond hair back then; “my lioness,” he’d teased her. He took a photo of her standing against the bay of windows, her hair and the pearls and her belly luminous. She still had that photo around somewhere; it was a favorite of hers. She took a photo of him naked, too. He was five feet ten, a very slim man with a raised appendectomy scar (“made by a butcher,” he’d say) from when he was nine and a sharp, jutting elbow where he’d broken his arm and it had been set badly when he was ten. She thought he’d become a surgeon in order not to repeat with others the botched jobs done on him. David had curly black hair that he kept very bushy because she liked it that way – an Isro, they’d called it in those days. Afterwards, when he saw the photo of himself naked, he was delighted with how well hung he looked. They had made love slowly, gently, she on her side, her back to him because of her belly, still wearing her pearls, which they took off and hung from his erection for a moment, and she remembered feeling, in that city of churches, Jew that she was, beatified.

  She occasionally recognized that she had an eternally summery image of her marriage to David. À la Fragonard, if that wasn’t too fancy. It was not so much that the dead sprouted wings, as some said, for she genuinely believed David had been a good man – as was Stu. In fact, she was a fortunate woman. It had something to do, she’d had the thought very recently – why only very recently? – with glorifying the inaccessible, while denigrating what was available to her. She recognized in some inchoate way that doing this darkened her life, and the lives of others.

  *

  Afterwards, in that Toledo hotel room, she had asked him if he wanted to have anal intercourse, and he said if she wanted. Neither of them had ever done it before. She lay on her side and they lubricated him to the hilt and he came into her slowly, carefully, and it felt strange, like she had to go to the toilet. Throughout, she worried she’d crap all over the place. And she got angry at him later. And he said, rightly, “It was your idea!” And they both spent a long time in the shower.

  Sometimes he would come almost as soon as he entered her. They would have screaming fights about it – why had she screamed at him? She had impoverished their love life – even though he’d get a second erection and could last so long she’d limp afterwards.

  In a box from the basement she saw her shrink bills that he’d paid. She’d gone to Dr. Levinson with the complaint that she was in the wrong profession and that she’d married the wrong man. She’d had it with social work – sitting on the phone at the hospital trying to find dispositions for chronic psychiatric patients, getting them out of the hospital and into group homes, or into the homes of relatives. It often took days if the patient was poor. Finally, when she found a place, the patient would stay there at most a few months – after which he would stop taking his meds and end up hallucinating on the streets again. And then, back to the hospital. She wanted to do something less Sisyphean.

  David made enough money so that she could afford to quit. She’d gone to film school at NYU, which she really enjoyed. But she wanted to be a star, to excel at something, and she never really had. Except that she’d been loved immoderately. But that wasn’t exactly her excelling.

  She complained that her husband wasn’t creative. She should be married to a filmmaker. Not someone who put in long hours at a hospital, although he managed to drive Billy to school several mornings a week, and he ran a boys’ basketball league. He spoke at different medical schools and hospitals, and not only about that procedure he had invented but about different materials he was experimenting with for pinning bones. She went to hear him a few times and was vaguely proud of him, but found the talks stupefying.

  There was a receipt from a hotel in Lucca, in Tuscany. It had been pouring so hard that dark night that he had to pull the car to a stop on a cobblestone street before they could get near the hotel. Billy was asleep, seat-belted in, in the back of the rented car. She and David somehow got into a discussion of money. He was very proud of being a good breadwinner. She was maintaining that money didn’t matter. Art mattered. She yelled at him, “All you think about is money.”

  “I’m what keeps this family afloat,” he said. The rain beat against the windshield and the top of the car. “It’s because of me you can do whatever you damn please.”

  “Don’t throw that up to me.”

  “I’m not. I was happy to pay for school for you.”

  “You don’t respect me. I mean, as an artist.”

  “For God’s sake, where do you get that claptrap from? Talk about respect! If I had to depend on you for my self-esteem, my head would be in the toilet.”

  *

  She was in the bookstore with her son. Billy was his present age, thirty-seven, but with his formerly curly blond hair (a putto, they’d called him, until he was school age), indeed a big bush of curly blond hair, although his hair had never been bushy. Certainly he didn’t have his current bright-brown wavy hair, graying a little, thinning out and receding at the temples. Instead of being distraught, he
was happy. Happy to see her. In fact, he shone. He was well muscled, in a black T-shirt and red shorts. He showed her first editions of books she had read to him in childhood (he handled them with pleasure now, but also carefully): Charlotte’s Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, Norman the Doorman. She remembered he would lie under the covers and she would lie above the covers beside him and read to him. They would look at the pictures. They would fall asleep together.

  One night Billy, age four, had said to her, “Marry me.”

  “What about Dad?” She smiled.

  “He can sew.”

  Now Billy took her by the hand and led her to his book-lined office. There was no photo of Lyria here, not even one with the glass cracked. And no computer. What there was, was a riot of flowers, cream-colored roses on the desk, a tall black vase of burning orange gladioli standing in front of the fireplace, fat pink peonies and deep-red poppies in a bowl on a side table beside an easy chair. A soft light shone against the white walls. The mingled odors, the sweetness of the flowers and the woody acridness of the books, moved her. She and Billy slowly, languidly undressed, and he had a glistening erection. Her body was taut as a young girl’s or as a pregnant abdomen. He entered into her and she came at once, explosively, yet gently, and they went on and on.

  Darkest Desire

  From JUSTINE

  Marquis de Sade

  Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, writer and libertine. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts; in his lifetime some were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously with de Sade denying authorship. Works such as The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Justine (1791), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) and Juliette (1797-1801), combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy. He was incarcerated in various institutions for about thirty-two years of his life, including the Bastille and the Charenton insane asylum. However, during the French Revolution, he was an elected delegate to the National Convention. Many of his works were written in prison.

  “Were these alternatives not so clear, were they not so few, I would ask for your response; but in your present situation we can dispense with questions and answers. I have you, Thérèse, and hence you must obey me.... Let us go to my wife’s apartment.”

  Having nothing to object to a discourse as precise as this, I followed my master: we traversed a long gallery, as dark, as solitary as the rest of the château; a door opens, we enter an antechamber where I recognize the two elderly women who waited upon me during my coma and recovery. They got up and introduced us into a superb apartment where we found the unlucky Countess doing tambour brocade as she reclined upon a chaise longue; she rose when she saw her husband.

  “Be seated,” the Count said to her, “I permit you to listen to me thus. Here at last we have a maid for you, Madame,” he continued, “and I trust you will remember what has befallen the others – and that you will not try to plunge this one into an identical misfortune.”

  “It would be useless,” I said, full eager to be of help to this poor woman and wishing to disguise my designs, “yes, Madame, I dare certify in your presence that it would be to no purpose, you will not speak one word to me I shall not report immediately to his Lordship, and I shall certainly not jeopardize my life in order to serve you.”

  “I will undertake nothing, Mademoiselle, which might force you into that position,” said this poor woman who did not yet grasp my motives for speaking in this wise; “rest assured: I solicit nothing but your care.”

  “It will be entirely yours, Madame,” I answered, “but beyond that, nothing.”

  And the Count, enchanted with me, squeezed my hand as he whispered: “Nicely done, Thérèse, your prosperity is guaranteed if you conduct yourself as you say you will.” The Count then showed me to my room which adjoined the Countess’ and he showed me as well that the entirety of this apartment, closed by stout doors and double grilled at every window, left no hope of escape.

  “And here you have a terrace,” Monsieur de Gernande went on, leading me out into a little garden on a level with the apartment, “but its elevation above the ground ought not, I believe, give you the idea of measuring the walls; the Countess is permitted to take fresh air out here whenever she wishes, you will keep her company... adieu.”

  I returned to my mistress and, as at first we spent a few moments examining one another without speaking, I obtained a good picture of her – but let me paint it for you.

  Madame de Gernande, aged nineteen and a half, had the most lovely, the most noble, the most majestic figure one could hope to see, not one of her gestures, not a single movement was without gracefulness, not one of her glances lacked depth of sentiment: nothing could equal the expression of her eyes, which were a beautiful dark brown although her hair was blond; but a certain languor, a lassitude entailed by her misfortunes, dimmed their éclat, and thereby rendered them a thousand times more interesting; her skin was very fair, her hair very rich; her mouth was very small, perhaps too small, and I was little surprised to find this defect in her: ’twas a pretty rose not yet in full bloom; but teeth so white... lips of a vermillion... one might have said Love had colored them with tints borrowed from the goddess of flowers; her nose was aquiline, straight, delicately modeled; upon her brow curved two ebony eyebrows; a perfectly lovely chin; a visage, in one word, of the finest oval shape, over whose entirety reigned a kind of attractiveness, a naïveté, an openness which might well have made one take this adorable face for an angelic rather than mortal physiognomy. Her arms, her breasts, her flanks were of a splendor... of a round fullness fit to serve as models to an artist; a black silken fleece covered her mons veneris, which was sustained by two superbly cast thighs; and what astonished me was that, despite the slenderness of the Countess’ figure, despite her sufferings, nothing had impaired the firm quality of her flesh: her round, plump buttocks were as smooth, as ripe, as firm as if her figure were heavier and as if she had always dwelled in the depths of happiness. However, frightful traces of her husband’s libertinage were scattered thickly about; but, I repeat, nothing spoiled, nothing damaged... the very image of a beautiful lily upon which the honeybee has inflicted some scratches. To so many gifts Madame de Gernande added a gentle nature, a romantic and tender mind, a heart of such sensibility!... well-educated, with talents... a native art for seduction which no one but her infamous husband could resist, a charming timbre in her voice and much piety: such was the unhappy wife of the Comte de Gernande, such was the heavenly creature against whom he had plotted; it seemed that the more she inspired ideas, the more she inflamed his ferocity, and that the abundant gifts she had received from Nature only became further motives for that villain’s cruelties.

  “When were you last bled, Madame?” I asked in order to have her understand I was acquainted with everything.

  “Three days ago,” she said, “and it is to be tomorrow....” Then, with a sigh: “...yes, tomorrow... Mademoiselle, tomorrow you will witness the pretty scene.”

  “And Madame is not growing weak?”

  “Oh, Great Heaven! I am not twenty and am sure I shall be no weaker at seventy. But it will come to an end, I flatter myself in the belief, for it is perfectly impossible for me to live much longer this way: I will go to my Father, in the arms of the Supreme Being I will seek a place of rest men have so cruelly denied me on earth.”

  These words clove my heart; wishing to maintain my role, I disguised my trouble, but upon the instant I made an inward promise to lay down my life a thousand times, if necessary, rather than leave this ill-starred victim in the clutches of this monstrous debauchee.

  The Countess was on the point of taking her dinner. The two old women came to tell me to conduct her into her cabinet; I transmitted the message; she was accustomed to it all, she went out at once, and the two women, aided by the two valets who had carried me off
, served a sumptuous meal upon a table at which my place was set opposite my mistress. The valets retired and the women informed me that they would not stir from the antechamber so as to be near at hand to receive whatever might be Madame’s orders. I relayed this to the Countess, she took her place and, with an air of friendliness and affability which entirely won my heart, invited me to join her. There were at least twenty dishes upon the table.

  “With what regards this aspect of things, Mademoiselle, you see that they treat me well.”

  “Yes, Madame,” I replied, “and I know it is the wish of Monsieur le Comte that you lack nothing.”

  “Oh yes! But as these attentions are motivated only by cruelty, my feelings are scarcely of gratitude.”

  Her constant state of debilitation and perpetual need of what would revive her strength obliged Madame de Gernande to eat copiously. She desired partridge and Rouen duckling; they were brought to her in a trice. After the meal, she went for some air on the terrace, but upon rising she took my arm, for she was quite unable to take ten steps without someone to lean upon. It was at this moment she showed me all those parts of her body I have just described to you; she exhibited her arms: they were covered with small scars.