by Megan Chance
Johnny stood and said something, but whatever it was got lost in the kaleidoscope. Suddenly Kerwin wasn't there. Suddenly I was on my feet, and Johnny had hold of me, and I was stumbling after him through the Palace and up the stairs to his room, trying to catch my balance against the flimsy curtains of the boxes lining the hallway. When he opened the door and we went inside, I was glad. This was what I wanted--jealousy, punishment. I wanted him to take away the mocking blue eyes, the thoughts of my other life. I turned to him, pressing my hands against his chest. He was so solid. All muscle and brawn. Not thin from four years of prison--
I felt for the buttons at his trousers. Johnny grabbed my hands, stilling them, his fingers strong about my wrists. He threw me to the bed, and I sprawled upon it like a whore, my hair falling down around my shoulders. I waggled my fingers at him.
"Come here," I said.
He turned away, heading for the door. "Sleep off whatever's got into you."
It took me a moment to realize he was leaving. I struggled to get off the bed. "Johnny, no, stay--"
"I thought we were past all this," he said impatiently. "Who is it you want, Margie? Me? Or Kerwin? Or someone else?"
His words cut through the fog of my drunkenness. I could only stare at him.
He said, "You want to fuck Kerwin, just say the word. I'll have him brought up. I'm sure he'll be happy to oblige."
I could not answer; it was so far from what I'd intended--what had I intended? To make Johnny jealous, to use him to forget. To make today disappear. Suddenly I wanted to cry.
At that moment, the whiskey turned, my stomach grabbed, and I jerked myself over the edge of the bed, vomiting.
Johnny said, "I ain't here to clean up your messes," and left me there.
IN THE MORNING, I woke alone, sprawled on the mattress with the stench of vomit heavy in the air, and I groaned and crawled from bed, my head pounding, feeling sick again as I nearly slipped on the pool beside the bed. I tiptoed around it, going to the basin, pouring water, gulping it down with trembling hands before I plunged my face in and let the cool water do its work. I washed myself as carefully and thoroughly as I could, trying not to think of why I was taking such care, wincing at every too-loud splash.
When I was finished, I cleaned up the vomit and opened the door to the little balcony so that the cold wet wind rushed inside, and only then did I feel better. I did not think about last night, not about Mr. Prosch's words, not about what I'd done. The morning was far advanced; there was someplace I had to be. I was possessed with the urge both to hurry and to delay.
I grabbed my cloak and crept from Johnny's room. The Palace was dark and quiet, smelling of whiskey and smoke and the lingering stench of sweat. I heard my own footsteps echo as I went down the stairs. Johnny was nowhere to be seen, but Duncan was behind the bar, and he looked up in surprise and said, "You're up early."
"Where's Johnny?"
"Sleeping in his office."
I went to the back door. "I'll be back later."
"He'll ask where you are."
"Breakfast." I braved a smile; it seemed to split my skull. "With Charlotte."
Duncan nodded, and I slipped out the back door, breathing a sigh of relief.
I had not realized how nervous I was until I was outside. I took a deep breath of the cold air, but it did nothing to ease how tightly I was wound. The rain was light but steady, the clouds so low it seemed one could reach up to touch them. There was a delivery wagon across the street, a drover unloading barrels, and I drew up the hood of my cloak, pulling it forward in an attempt to disguise myself. Though I doubted anyone would take the time to notice me, I did not want it getting back to Johnny that I'd made a morning visit to the New Brunswick Hotel.
I told myself to slow, but my nerves sent me racing onward. I was jangled and unsettled when I reached Commercial Street and the old door of Squire's Opera House. I glanced up at the sign reading NEW BRUNSWICK HOTEL before I went in and climbed the stairs.
The lobby was still wide and open, though not so much as before, because there was a desk there now, behind which a man stood, and behind him a row of cubbyholes holding keys. He looked up as I came in, and I approached him and said, "I'm looking for Mr. Price's room."
"Around the corner to your right, number ten," he said, and I nodded my thanks and went past him, following his direction, into the hallway that had once been the theater, sliced up now, the ghost voices from Faust imprisoned behind pine boards and wallpaper. The hallway was dim, the gaslight turned low. The closer I got to his room, the more my footsteps faltered. I was at number ten before I was ready. I stood there for a moment and then I knocked lightly, tentatively--perhaps he would not hear.
But then I heard his steps, and the door opened, and I was blinking in the light from the room that seemed too bright after the dim hall.
"You've come," he said.
"Did I have a choice?"
He stepped back, motioning me inside, shutting the door, and I was thrown so far back into the past it was as if there were no present to be had or as if I did not exist in it.
The room was small and not elegant, like every hotel we'd stayed in during those early tours. His clothes were strewn over the back of a chair, and there was a folio on a desk, thick with sheaves of paper--music, I knew, because such a folio had always been present, everywhere we'd gone. A pair of mud-spattered boots by the door, and on the small table by the bed a lamp and a book and two framed photographs. The one of me in the blue silk dress and pearls, taken in San Francisco, and beside it the one of the two of us together.
I heard myself make a noise, a little moan, and I turned again to the door. "This is a mistake." I reached for the doorknob, suddenly desperate to get out.
He set his hand against the door. "You're not going anywhere."
"I'm not staying."
"Where's the brave girl I used to know? My Sabine was never afraid of anything."
"I'm not your Sabine. And stop calling me that. It's no longer my name."
"It's who you are. That won't ever change."
"It already has."
"Not for me."
"You're the past," I said. "And that's where I want you to stay."
He said, "You don't get what you want this time. I've just spent four years in hell for you--"
"Four years is hardly enough time to make up for everything."
"For everything?"
"For Alain," I spat. "And the rest too. Leonard, San Francisco. All of it." I let my anger grow, a safer emotion than fear. I threw the words at him. "I did whatever you asked of me. Whatever you wanted."
He laughed disbelievingly. "Whatever I wanted? My God, what a story you've told yourself."
"I never would have been in that hotel room if not for you. You told me we needed Alain. You told me we couldn't get to Paris without him. You told me to convince him."
"Convince him, yes. Not kill him."
"You wanted me to take him to bed." I felt a surge of satisfaction when he flinched. "I did it all for you."
"Don't fool yourself, Sabine. You had your own aspirations in mind every moment."
"I don't want to be that person anymore. I don't want to be who you made me."
He looked at me with an expression that was both familiar and not, and for one moment, he was not Gideon at all, but a stranger, and I faltered, uncertain, suddenly more afraid of what had changed about him than of what I knew. "Then don't be," he said.
"How easily you say that now. What would happen, I wonder, the first time a theater manager refused to pay our percentage? Or when some son of the Four Hundred decided to take an interest in my career?"
"What do you want me to say? That I'd keep you out of it, when you've such a talent for persuading men to your way of thinking?"
"You trained me well," I said bitterly.
He shook his head. "That was nothing I taught you, Sabine. That's simply who you are. It's who you've always been. That hasn't changed, has it? I've watched yo
u in that boxhouse, you know. Promising everything with your eyes. Confusing those poor miners so they can hardly see straight--"
"It's not the same," I protested, once again disconcerted that I'd never noticed him there.
"It is, and you know it. You use it easily enough when you want something. It's only when it doesn't work out as you wish that it's someone else's fault."
"Ah, I see. I was to blame. It wasn't you who told me to have a private dinner with Leonard Jerome. It wasn't your plan to have me persuade him to give us money."
"A dinner. I didn't tell you to go to bed with him."
"What else does a private dinner mean?"
"He was enamored of you. He would have given you the money without your becoming his mistress if you'd pressed him."
"How disingenuous you are! You knew exactly what would happen when I went to that hotel."
"I knew what you would probably do," he admitted. "You were like a bludgeon when a tap on the shoulder would do. After all, it takes effort to lead a man along and keep his attention without meaning to fuck him, and you were never one for effort."
"You said we needed the money."
"We did. But I didn't ask you to whore for it. You had to see how jealous I was. You had to know how I hated sharing you. God knows I didn't try to hide it. But none of that mattered to you, did it? You knew exactly how much power you had--all I did was give you permission to do the things you would have done anyway."
His words were like little stones. I refused to feel them. "Oh yes. And you were so faithful yourself."
"More so than you."
"What about Leila? Or Pauline Lucca? Do you mean to tell me I had no reason to be jealous of them?"
"You had no reason."
"You're a liar. Don't tell me you weren't fucking them."
"It wasn't what you think. It was never what you thought."
"What was it then? Chaste little affairs? Flirting and nothing more? Do you really expect me to believe that?"
"Whatever I did, I did for us."
"For us?" I laughed shortly. "How good of you to make such a sacrifice. Forgive me if I don't thank you for it. I should have listened to Barret. He was right about you."
"Barret was a fool."
"He tried to protect me, and you wanted him gone. If not for you, he wouldn't have died."
"You wanted him gone as much as I did," he countered angrily. "He was useless as a manager. We couldn't afford for him to run things. But he could have worked for us in other ways instead. I never wanted him to die. Who tried to stop him from killing himself more than I? You? You ignored what you didn't want to see. Who was it who fished him from the brothels? Who went out in the middle of the night to bring him back from whatever hellhole he wandered into? I kept him alive for years longer than he should have been. You were willing to give him up to get what you wanted. At least admit that."
"You smoked opium with him."
"Of course I did. How was I to know he would take to it the way he did? It was a lark at first. After that ... I went with him to keep him safe."
"And I suppose you had nothing to do with Willa either? You betrayed her and seduced me. What choice did I have? I was only sixteen--"
"How self-righteous you sound. 'I was only sixteen,' "he mocked. "Ah yes, what a little innocent you were. Following me around with those big blue eyes, pushing those breasts against me as if you didn't know exactly what you were doing. Poor Rinzetti never had a chance, did he?"
"It--it wasn't like that."
"It was exactly like that. Lie to yourself all you want about what happened between us, Sabine, but you can't lie to me. I was there. Yes, I wanted you. But you wanted me too."
"I was too young to know what I wanted."
He laughed. "Everything, as I recall. You wanted me to get it for you, and I did. You were more than willing to do what was required."
He was too close. His words were too loud. "I was a child," I protested weakly.
"You were too young for me," he conceded, and the admission seemed to calm him. "I tried to stay away from you. But you were no innocent." He sighed. "You and me, Bina, ... we know what we want from the world. I won't apologize for it. If you feel guilty ... well, you'll have to find a way to live with that. You can run away from me all you want, but you can't run away from what you are."
"I left you because I was afraid of you. I was afraid of what I would do for you, of what I had done. I'm afraid of you still."
"You don't understand, do you?" He stepped back to put space between us, shoving his hand through his hair. "I love you, Bina, but--"
"You love what I can do for you."
His head jerked up. I saw the flare of anger in his eyes, and then with almost rigid calm, he said, "I won't pretend that I don't want something from you, or that I don't think you owe it to me. I do. I want my life back. I want our life back. I've spent the last four years thinking of how it could be. I thought ... it could be different this time." There was something in his eyes--sadness, I thought, and it surprised me and snagged uncomfortably at my heart. "I love you, Sabine, whether you believe it or not. But my days of absolving you are over. I won't be the one to take all the blame. Accept your part. We'll be equals in this, or we won't ... go on."
My discomfort bloomed and spread. I could not call back my anger. I felt the inexplicable urge to cry. "Why am I here? Why did you ask me to come?"
"Those are two different questions," he said.
I said nothing.
"I don't believe you don't want it." His words were a whisper, as seductive as he must have known they would be. "You loved it. I know you miss it. This time it could be even better."
I looked away as if it could somehow diminish the fierceness of my yearning. I did not want him to see it. "Better? They would never leave me alone. There are reporters still looking for me. Dear God, it was bad enough before the scandal."
"I wasn't aware you disliked the attention. I would have said it was the lack that offended you."
"They would never let it be. You know what it would be like. All those questions--"
"You needn't answer them. Let it remain a mystery. They'd only be dissatisfied with whatever you told them, in any case. It would never measure up to what their imaginations provide."
I swallowed hard.
He said softly, "Believe me, Bina, I know. My own imagination has tormented me."
"I've put it all behind me. I'm not going back."
He was quiet for a moment. I knew he was waiting for me to tell him, but I could not. I could not bear to think of it, even now.
Finally he sighed and crossed the room to his dresser. He pulled open the top drawer and took something out, a book, along with something small, wrapped in a handkerchief.
He turned to face me. "These belong to you."
I was afraid again, swept by a panic I didn't understand. "I don't want them."
He came over to me, holding the book out. "They gave everything that was in the room to your family when they took me away. Your jewels--what was left of them, anyway--and your clothes. This. Willa brought it to me."
"I don't want it," I said.
He pressed it into my hands. "Perhaps it would do you good to read it again."
It was my journal. I thought of myself bent over these pages, night after night scrawling on them by the flickering light of a candle first, and then later by a rather ornate oil lamp, the constant scratch of the pen nib on the rough paper. I pushed it back at him. "The stupid ramblings of a very stupid girl."
He made no comment to that, but his full lips curved in a slight smile. He didn't take it. Instead he held out the other thing, the size of his palm, wrapped in a handkerchief. "This is yours too."
This I wanted even less. I had no idea what it was, but it felt dangerous. I shook my head.
He took my other hand and forced the thing into my fingers. It was heavy, round, and flat, and I felt a dread so large and overwhelming it seemed impossible that it might be
caused by something so small. I let it lie there in my flattened palm, making no claim.
"Look at it," he whispered.