by Anne Rice
But the great exception to this quiet disdain for the respectable had always been the Famille Lermontant who struck Christophe not so much as desperately conforming bourgeoisie but rather the genuine article of middle-class gentility possessed of whatever nobility that hard-won position might allow. And Rudolphe’s conviction that the family could absorb the tragedy and scandal which had all but destroyed Marie Ste. Marie, as well as Richard’s courage in marrying her, had gone to Christophe’s heart. Of course his love and relief for Marie and for Marcel knew no bounds.
So why then had an excess of emotion at the wedding caught him so off guard?
Had he not expected the current of shared feeling in that crowded sacristy, the bride’s uncommon radiance, the raw and innocent love in the eyes of the tall groom? When Marie had spoken her vows in a halting and vibrant voice, Christophe’s eyes had misted over, and it seemed to him, though he had scorned all things romantic since his exile from Paris, that the immense structure of the Cathedral itself veritably trembled when the bride and the groom embraced.
Reasonably enough, he could tell himself now that it had been a rare moment when the very concept of marriage had been exalted, and that the collective act of faith in that room had transcended the sum of all the individual hopes. Marry they had, in spite of everything. And even Richard’s wan little cousins come so valiantly from far and wide to peer fearfully at the resplendent bride had been affected by it as well as the more worldly Anna Bella, Marcel, and Juliet.
So why this unhappiness, why as darkness fell completely over the struggling gas lamps, and the burnished light of the open taverns spilled into the fog, was Christophe on the verge of panic, trudging through these streets? Was it a sense of exclusion, no, that could not be, he told himself. And muscling to a crowded bar, he drank down another shot of cheap rum.
And yet summoned back and back to the sacristy door in his imagination, he was confronted by a bewildering sight, that of Marcel turning from the young couple, and smiling almost sadly at Christophe as he went off down the alley beside the Cathedral alone. Christophe’s eyes followed that retreating figure unwilling now as they had been then to let the figure go. And he realized with a stultifying amazement that all this long dreary afternoon he’d been thinking of that moment, weaving it in and out of his more lofty considerations of the wedding, his more conscientious considerations of Dolly Rose. Marcel. And what was so remarkable about his leaving that sacristy, about his evanescent and melancholy smile? What was so remarkable about that figure moving on through Pirate’s Alley, tall, blond-haired, indifferent, moving steadily away from the Cathedral and steadily away from him!
Images came back to him, images alien to these waterfront streets, images so old that their freshness startled him, shook him in their clarity, images of a mountainside at Sounion, the tip of Greece, below the Temple of Neptune where Lord Byron had carved his name. And Christophe was thinking of the low peasant’s hut where he had first made love to Michael, after a year’s wandering from Paris during which Michael had never once touched him, leaving it to Christophe to make the first move. No, Christophe wasn’t thinking of it now, he was there!
And stumbling suddenly on the gunwale sidewalk, the crowd jostling him, he looked up with an exquisite relief to realize that he had found the familiar door to Madame Lelaud’s.
In a moment he had pushed through the knot of white men blocking the entrance, and that relief still coursing through him, relaxing him, quieting him, he rested his back for a moment against a heavy rough-hewn wooden beam. Not ten yards from him was his regular table, the table where he and Marcel had talked when he had first come home. And the feeling of Sounion descended on him again, wouldn’t leave him, and he was seeing in disconnected blasts those rocky cliffs, the sea itself stretching out forever and those few columns piercing the sky. Not this crowded bar, not the sweetly shabby figure of Madame Lelaud with skin the color of a walnut shell, who very obligingly left the bar to put the usual mug of beer in his hand. He was feeling, smelling that Greek countryside, and he could hear the tinkle of the bell about the neck of the Judas goat, see the shepherd climbing the steep cliff. He had to rest his back against the rough post to drink the beer. Where was Marcel now, at this moment? The smoke of this crowded place burned his eyes.
“And where’s my blue-eyed bébé?” Madame Lelaud smiled at him, flecking the smallest bit of dust from his lapel. He laughed. She wore a dark rouge on her lips that was dried and powdery, “Hmmm, I haven’t seen my blue-eyed bébé in ever so long, he stayed here for three days, right at that table, and then he was gone.” Gone, gone, gone, gone. “Hmm, you give him a kiss for me, hmmmmmm?”
“Certainly!” Christophe winked as he blew the foam off the beer. And then on tiptoe Madame Lelaud kissed him, a worn working mouth but gentle, and resisting the urge to wipe the bit of moisture left on his lip, he smiled at her, beamed at her in fact. He and Marcel together at that table which he could no longer see for the crowd, “Monsieur, you don’t know how I admire you, if you would only give me a chance…”
“I’ll kiss you again if you don’t watch out,” she winked, but the man behind the bar was shouting at her, taunting her, they teased her about Christophe as they always did when he came in.
“Billiards, Madam, billiards,” he said to her in English, quite unaware of the crisp British sound of it, a white man in a broad-brimmed hat looking up suddenly from the billiard table, his mouth a moist smile beneath the shadow of the brim. “It’s time to play some serious billiards,” and pushing toward the brightly illuminated felt as the white man was chalking his cue Christophe surveyed the scattered ivory balls. There was the black man who was always there, the one with the two camellias in his lapel, the silk vest and the frock coat with its velvet collar, his skin so black it reflected the light all over it, the lips almost purple.
“Aaaah, Monsieur le Schoolteacher,” he said, he spoke English also, elegant British English with just the hint of Jamaica, and saluted Christophe with his cue. He was running the balls, had shot the last three in while Christophe was downing the beer. And now he moved around the table for his fourth. Christophe slapped a five-dollar gold piece on the rail of the table, and the black man smiled, nodding, “Yes sir, Monsieur le Schoolteacher.” He bent over the table, made a high bridge with his very long fingers, and banked the red ball before it went in.
Sounion in this place, it was enough to drive a man mad! Some sudden irrelevant flash of sitting in his room drunk after Michael’s death, on the very same bed in which Michael died, explaining something to Marcel about Sounion and telling him only some vaguely metaphorical image for the real truth, the raw and passionate truth in the hut. “Not very high stakes,” said the black man driving in the eight ball.
The white man with the broad-brimmed hat threw up his hands. The cue was standing against the table for Christophe to take it. The man wore fancy river gambler clothes, and rested his back with a feline movement on the rough-hewn support, crossing his ankles in pale immaculate buckskin pants that were tight over the bulge between his legs, the shimmer of his gray vest making Christophe grit his teeth suddenly at the thought of a fingernail running across the silk. The chest beneath it was solid, broad.
“Ten dollars, Monsieur,” said the black man chalking the cue, “and you break.”
“Generous, generous, let’s lag for break,” Christophe fished in his pocket, put the ten-dollar piece on the rail. “That’s fifteen, sir.” He liked the feel of this cue because it was heavy and short. “Eight ball,” he said. The Jamaican nodded. Marcel had listened so patiently, the blue eyes so intense, the face exactly the color of honey poured from a glass pitcher in the sunlight. The same Marcel who did not seek my company today after the wedding, who turned and gave me that affectionate, almost intimate smile, easy, touched my arm and then walked out of the church precisely when I had expected, expected what, that we would go on together???
“You break, Monsieur,” a smile on the sculpted black
face, the high sloping forehead, prominent nose, white teeth.
“So I do.” There were several ways to approach it, take a risk, he felt the thrust perfect and then the balls went everywhere. Or so it seemed. He had sunk three.
A cluster of men pushed suddenly against the head of the table, and the usual din was underscored by the hard heavy sounds of a scuffle, shouts. And passing then was the spectacle of a man hoisted in the air, brogans dangling above a score of rising, shoving hands. Into the street, the fog curling just for an instant as those who blocked the door gave way, and then closed again against the cold.
There was thirty dollars in gold gleaming on the rail, Christophe took his time, knowing now that he was at that perfect stage of drunkenness when this would be easy, this would go well. An hour from now, maybe less, get out of the game. “You have another one of those, cold and foaming?” he whispered to Madame Lelaud. Her apron was filthy, her thin rippling hair reminded him of his mother who said of Marcel so indifferently last night, “But he’s no longer a boy, he’s a man now,” as if that made all the difference in the world to her passion.
“But Dumanoir is no boy, what is that to you!”
“Ah, yes!” she’d answered with remarkable candor. “But he is a very old man!” Nothing like you, Maman, since ancient Rome, he had thought.
“Watch out for these boys, darling!” Madame Lelaud said to him in English. “You know what I mean?”
“Seven ball, far right pocket,” he said and with a quick and somewhat reckless thrust sent it in.
“Hmmmm,” he took the beer from her, drank a mouthful and giving it back, wiped his hand on his pants.
“They let you win a little at first, hmmmm? Watch out.”
“Five ball, side pocket,” he tapped the leather edge with the tip of the cue, then banked the ball at the perfect angle so that the black man smiled. He wore pomade on his tightly waving hair. It gleamed like his face under the low-hanging lamp, the little camellias in his lapel browning at the edges, but otherwise he was perfect, the coat tapering at his narrow waist, his nails shining as if they’d been buffed. A rough-bearded Dutchman appraised him slowly as he passed, thudding up the wooden stairs to the rooms above. Men in the corner suddenly roared with laughter, heads bowing, rising, at some perfect exchange.
“Three ball, far left pocket,” Christophe said, but he had been thinking this was the time to try to get both of them in, the three and the two, the two chasing the three perfectly, very tricky. And as they sank, he heard the murmur around him like applause, the riverboat gambler in his green coat shifting his weight from one foot to the other with that moist smile and only shadows for eyes. “Very good, Monsieur le Schoolteacher,” said the black man.
“Now this is your Waterloo!” Madame Lelaud’s hair brushed his ear. “This is where you always go crazy, with the eight ball.”
“Madam, for the love of heaven,” he rubbed the chalk on the cue, “have a little faith.”
He was sizing it up, why not make it a beauty? And calling the farthest pocket, he heard them gasp.
“But on second thought,” he said suddenly with a slight mocking lilt to his voice, and a touch of the fop to his gestures, “I think that ball looks just fine right where it is.”
The black man was laughing, the riverboat gambler let out a low rumble as he smiled. Adjusting the brim of his hat he showed for one instant the gleam of a clear hazel eye.
“You are a witty man, Monsieur le Schoolteacher,” said the black man. Christophe tapped the pocket again. Marcel had just left the church as though that smile were enough.
“Did you think he was going to be a boy forever?” his mother had turned the questioning around the night before, pulling the hair from her brush. “And you, Christophe, are you going to be a boy forever?”
“Stop, Maman, enjoy your old man.”
“And suppose I go to the country with him…”
“But you won’t!”
“I don’t know,” she had shrugged, flicking the long hair over her shoulder again, “I was born in the country, maybe I want to go back to the country, and you, Christophe, you?”
He drew in his breath and shot, hard, fast, the ball crashing against the right bank, left bank, right bank again and straight into the wrong pocket!
The black man had thrown back his head to laugh, his long concave fingers sliding the thirty dollars off the rail. “You should teach the art of billiards, Monsieur le Schoolteacher.”
“The art of billiards, the art?” Christophe surrendered the cue to an anonymous hand. It seemed the black man’s pocket jingled with coins. “Billiards is not an art, Monsieur,” Christophe smiled as he turned to push his way toward the bar. “You wouldn’t think of marrying,” he had said to Juliet, and she with that wan smile, “Ah, but what you mean to say is I wouldn’t think of leaving you!”
He was staring at himself in the filthy mirror beyond the row of bottles. All the shades on the oil lamps that hung from the ceiling were completely black. “And I would think of it,” she had touched him lightly with the handle of the brush. There loomed suddenly behind his own reflected image the broad-brimmed hat of the river gambler, the light skittering again on his gray silk vest.
“Kentucky sipping whiskey!” the barkeep stared into the river gambler’s face, the glinting shadows that were the man’s eyes. “Sipping whiskey, sipping whiskey!”
“I know you have it,” came the velvet whisper, a shoulder nudging Christophe.
What had he expected, that Marcel would come to him then after the wedding, alone, and vulnerable, what are you going to do now with your life, which direction, and they would sit again in his room as always talking, sharing all of it, the wine, the relief, the despair? Marcel didn’t need him anymore, Marcel had not needed him for some time, the young man who returned from the Cane River was without that certain yearning, it was simply absent, replaced by that confident and remote smile. A hand was squeezing his arm.
He felt a pain in his temples as if the skin were tightening and the veins were protruding, veins that were always there, a small expressionless and completely unremarkable brown face confronting him in the splotched mirror, and the panic rising again which he had left, somehow or other, by magic at the door. This isn’t the component of a great emotion, Christophe, this is petty, the thinking of a child. How to live without it, that’s the question, without the cool Englishman sitting in the door of the hut at Sounion waiting, waiting, knowing precisely what was going to happen through all the confusion, the exposure, the pain. And the boy with the blue eyes, “But I don’t know how to be your lover, you have to show me, be my teacher!” “No, the answer is now and forever no.” Yes, love and pain, that’s exquisite, but how to make life worthwhile even when they aren’t there, how to be sustained by what you do, what you want, what you are yourself! “But you can’t marry Dumanoir!” he had said to her, and she, “Ten long years I kept my vigil for you, Chris, I tell you I will marry him, I will leave this house.” He shuddered. And in the dim mirror saw again the ruddy square face of the riverboat gambler, light glinting on the fine bones of his cheeks, his jaw. The lips spread in that moist, easy smile. The editor from Paris had written just months ago, “This novel has your old brilliance, but not your narrative strength. Send more, we want to see more, can’t you recapture your old narrative strength?” One had somehow to feel one’s own powers, one’s own skill coursing through one’s veins!
“I know you have good sipping whiskey, I’ve seen it!” said the river gambler.
“Ah, darling, you lost your money, I told you to be careful.” Madame Lelaud leaned on Christophe’s shoulder like a child going to sleep. I feel empty, empty! And over all is laid a layer of ash so that nothing has its former brilliance, all is indistinct. “Give them the good Kentucky bourbon,” she winked her eye. “You don’t play any more billiards tonight.” She brushed Christophe’s hair back from his temples which was perfectly absurd because his hair was so wiry and closecut it neve
r actually moved. “You watch out for these boys!” she smiled at the gambler.
“I always watch out for the boys, Madam,” Christophe beamed down at her. And he heard the river gambler’s soft American laugh. The man had placed his elbow on the bar beside Christophe, one foot on the brass rail so the buckskin pants pulled over the bulge between his legs.
“And this house is going to be empty, empty,” she had warned him with another long swipe at her dark hair. “You grow up, hmmmmm?”
“You want to find a little amusement?” the gambler whispered in French.
Of course it will all come back to you! Christophe drank the mellow expensive bourbon, soothing the rawness of his tongue. In the classroom tomorrow it will come back to you when you see their faces, when you see young Gaston with those poems he won’t dare to show to anyone but you, and Frederick, that brilliant Jean Louis, Paul. This deadening cloud will lift when you hear their voices, there will be a flavor to things, color, you were living with some foolish notion while Marcel was gone, or were you merely living with the notion that he would come back? “He’s not a boy anymore,” flick of the hairbrush, “and that’s why I didn’t wait for him. And you, mon cher, when I’m gone, what will you do?” Go to hell, Maman, go to hell for all I care, go to the country, go to hell.
“Amusement?” he whispered to the mirror. The buckskin leg nudged his gently. “Women?”
“Is that what amuses you?” asked the unobtrusive American voice.
“Mon Dieu,” Christophe smiled.
“I have a room just down the street, nothing fancy, just clean,” the gambler pushed the gold coin at the barkeep, the sleeve of his green coat resting against Christophe’s arm. “I want the bottle,” he said. His lean smooth face wrinkled softly again in a smile.