Orfeo

by M. J. Lawless

  “So is that your plan, then? To seduce me first and then make your way through all the other pretty girls in Xanadu?” As soon as she said it the words tumbled like dead petals from her lips, massacred by her stupidity. The effect on Orfeo, however, was instant.

  Standing slowly, he buttoned his shirt completely up, covering the firm pectorals of his chest beneath the rich fabric. His face had become impassive although, for the most fleeting of seconds, Ardyce thought she caught a glimmer of pain in his eyes.

  “I’ll thank you for your hospitality, Miss Dubois,” he said in a tone of restrained politeness. “I guess I should be leaving you in peace.”

  Barely an hour before she had been crying in ecstasy as he lay on top of her, moaning all sorts of oaths as he brought her to yet another orgasm, his voice broken with lust in her ear. Now it was veneered with respectability, the effect of which was to freeze Ardyce in place.

  As he began to move, his dark brown eyes watching her warily, at last her body moved by itself and her hand came up to rest on his arm. He paused, the bulk of his frame above her, so strong, so tall.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t go. Not yet.” She swallowed down a final word: please. She had never begged a man before in her life and she was determined not to begin now.

  He looked at her, nodding slowly. “I should go,” he repeated quietly. “And not because of this. It’s not safe.”

  This astonished her and her laugh was high-pitched, a nervous reaction to such an unexpected observation. “Nonsense!” she said. “Xanadu is perfectly safe.”

  He smiled a little sadly at this and shook his head, dipping his eyes away from hers for a moment. When he lifted them again, he did not look at her but instead stared out of the window. “Xanadu,” he repeated, his smile ironic and strangely undecipherable. “So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and pillars were girdled round.”

  For a few seconds she was at a loss, wondering what on earth he was talking about, and then the lines came to her: she had heard them before, from Baptiste.

  “Yes,” she said. “From the Coleridge poem, though my grandfather was thinking more of Citizen Kane from what daddy told me.”

  “And are you one who has always gagged on the silver spoon?” he asked, returning those deep, dark eyes to hers once more. Ardyce stared at him in incomprehension and he laughed, his face lighting up in glee. “I take it you are not a follower of the oeuvre of Orson Welles,” he remarked, his voice rumbling in mirth.

  At last catching onto him, she smiled and gripped his arm a little more tightly. “I’ve always been more of a Casablanca fan myself. Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, you walk into mine.”

  His laughter was louder now at this and she responded to its infection, her own body relaxing as his shoulders shook beside her. Without thinking, she raised herself up onto her toes and kissed him on the cheek. He, equally thoughtlessly, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her small body closer into his, his mouth hunting out hers.

  “It’s hardly a lousy gin joint,” he said at last when they parted, looking around admiringly at the room. “This is a beautiful house, and you most beautiful of all.” He smiled at her, his dark eyes sparkling.

  She had heard such things many, many times before, but this time her heart beat more quickly than ever before. “Just you remember it,” she whispered. “Because you’re the most beautiful man I know.”

  He nodded at this. “If I’m happy with your maid, it’s because you make me happy. I’d heard about you, you know, long before I saw you. One of the members of the band at Apollo’s, he told me about the divine Ardyce Dubois. He’d seen you, in clubs: he said you were the most perfect woman he’d ever seen, but that you always looked so sad.”

  “Sad?” Ardyce pulled away slightly, staring up at him. She could feel her body trembling slightly in Orfeo’s hands as he held her gently but firmly. He nodded.

  “Yes. Sad. And when I saw you, you looked even more melancholy—and even more perfect—than he’d led me to believe. When I saw you, I had never wanted another woman more in my life.”

  His words were having a strange effect on her and she pulled away slightly from him, pulled away because part of her wanted so strongly to push him to the ground, to make him force himself upon her—but something wasn’t right, something didn’t quite make sense and she struggled to remember what it was.

  Then her memory cleared. “You said it wasn’t safe, you being here.”

  Now it was his turn to look somewhat mournful. He nodded again.

  “What did you mean?”

  He sighed and let her go, moving toward the window and staring out of it with his back to her. She watched him for a few moments, taking in his short, thick hair, the expanse of his shoulders and back as he stood there with his arms folded.

  “When Jeb—he was the saxophonist—when he first saw you, it was at Hades.”

  “Ah,” she said, understanding at last. “That.”

  He half turned and looked at her, his face serious now. “Yes, that.” He returned his gaze to the gardens outside the window.

  “Are you afraid? Of Earl?”

  He said nothing for a while, then bowed his head. “Yes,” she heard him say, very quietly.

  Coming up behind him, she slid her arms around his waist, pressed her head against his back. He was solid and firm in her grasp, immoveable, and she felt that she could just stand here, close to him, for an eternity.

  “You don’t have to be scared of Earl,” she told him. “He won’t hurt you.”

  There was a pause. “That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  She frowned. “Then what is it? What’s to fear?”

  At last he turned and, holding her arms very softly he stood in front of her, waiting for her to lift her head so that she could look up at him. His face suddenly looked much older than its years, as though cares he had never expressed before were now allowed to reveal themselves.

  “I’m frightened of what he might do to you.”

  She didn’t allow him to leave, nor did he want to go. His fears had not diminished but she refused to believe they were real. Instead, as though it would prove more solid than any threats from Earl, she took him around the house, showing him Xanadu. Orfeo couldn’t help but smile at this: the house was grand, of course, but if she thought that was why he stayed then she hadn’t yet realized just what it was that she meant to him.

  The early August sun was bright in the sky above them, though the wind blowing from the south was stronger than they would have expected on such a clear, summer’s day. He had indeed admired the house, standing in the grounds and looking up at the great, Tuscan portico built in emulation of the old Beauregard mansion, but in the end it mattered little to him. In any case, he could guess what Xanadu had been built upon, the lives it had consumed to fulfill one man’s ambitions.

  “You don’t seem as impressed as I would have expected,” Ardyce told him a little archly.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Mighty fine—but it would just be another house if you weren’t here.”

  She suppressed a smile at this. “And where do you live, then?”

  “In New Orleans,” he replied enigmatically. “For the time being.”

  “For the time being? And haven’t you ever wanted to settle somewhere?”

  He laughed and looked sideways at her: “What, and no longer be the lord of all I survey? Wherever I go, there I’m king.”

  His humor was infectious and she joined in his laughter, squeezing him tightly. “Then be my king,” she told him.

  “I shall, Queen Ardyce,” he said, only half-mockingly.

  “Come,” she said, releasing his waist somewhat reluctantly and instead taking him by the hand. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  As they walked at a leisurely pace, he sang songs to her—some of them his own, some of them in other languages. French she could understand passingly well, but the Creole ones were barely comprehensib
le to her and so she simply listened to the baroque roll of his deep voice as he filled the air with music.

  “Where did you learn to sing like that?” she asked. He enjoyed the feeling of her head resting against his arm as they walked.

  “Back home.”

  “And where’s home? New Orleans?”

  He laughed again, but almost immediately his laugh was replaced by a sigh. “No,” he replied at last. “Port-au-Prince.”

  “Aha!” she exclaimed. “That explains your voice—there was something exotic about it the first moment I heard it. The effect of it...” for a second her face flushed and she looked up sideways at him almost shyly.

  This made him grin. “Then thank heavens for my Creole voice,” he remarked ironically. “Ti vwa ou bèl tankou wosiyòl.”

  She smiled at this and gazed off dreamily into the distance. “What does it mean?” she asked at last.

  “Your beautiful little voice is like a nightingale.”

  After this, she said nothing for a while, simply listening as he sang more love songs in a language she could not comprehend but which somehow she understood. “And yet you don’t speak like that—I mean, Creole—all the time.”

  He gave a shrug at this. “It’s true, I guess.”

  “And...” she hesitated. “The things you know—films, books, poems... I wouldn’t expect... I mean.”

  He let out a loud, bellowing laugh that made her jump. “You don’t expect a black man to know that shit?” he asked.

  This made her blush deeply, and for a moment Orfeo thought how even more beautiful she looked, confounded as she was in this way.

  “My father was a doctor,” he told her. “I had the best Haitian education money can buy.” Again he gave another shrug. “That may not be much, I guess, but it was something.”

  She frowned and glared at him slightly, wondering if he was teasing her. “You have more finery in your little finger than any fool I’ve ever met from Loyola or Xavier,” she said. “I’m sorry, I was stupid. But really... there’s something about you. What happened, to your father I mean?”

  “Who said something happened?”

  She paused. “You said ‘was a doctor’.”

  Orfeo did not reply for a while and the pained look on his face pierced Ardyce to her heart. At last he gave his answer: “He was killed.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, turning her head away for a moment because the expression on his face was almost impossible to bear. At last she forced herself to turn to him once more. “How did it happen? I’m sorry—if you don’t want—”

  He raised one finger gently to her lips, his eyes glistening slightly with the memory of some far off agony. “It’s fine. He was killed, by a gang. I wasn’t... I wasn’t so old. Eleven, twelve maybe. He had built himself a practice in the city, not so much—nothing like your clinics here, but it was a fine place. He had to keep drugs there and a gang broke in one day, demanded everything he had. He tried to reason with them, but they weren’t interested in reason that day.” Orfeo did not look at her as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the distant horizon. Then he shrugged.

  “I stayed with my mama for a little while, but then I began to run with the gangs—not the same people that killed my papa, but with others who knew them. I thought I might be able to find them, find the ones responsible, but instead I became more like them. Then one day, disgusted at myself, I took passage on a boat—a stowaway. It brought me to Miami, and I traveled around a bit, up the east coast at first. But that was too cold and I headed back down south.

  “I’d always been able to sing as a little boy. I’d sing songs to my mama while she cooked, and to my sisters, but my voice—well, I guess it got better as I grew older. I didn’t need much: I’d cook and clean and carry stuff when I needed to. As long as I had a bed and a place to stay that was enough.”

  “It sounds a hard life,” Ardyce murmured. Orfeo looked at her when she said this, smiling.

  “It’s a free life, and that’s what I’ve always wanted.”

  For a while they said nothing. They had left the well-tended grounds of Xanadu and were now walking across rougher terrain, the land flat and grassy salt marsh extending as far as the eye could see, with birds rising up in the distance and soaring against the clear, blue sky. The landscape was both bleaker and yet strangely more comforting than the manicured lawns that lay beside the mansion.

  “See that, over there?” Ardyce pointed toward a sliver of darker blue against the green. Orfeo nodded.

  “That’s Blind Lagoon. I used to come out here a lot when I was young, with my daddy, or on my own. Then for a while I didn’t bother. It was like... it was like I’d forgotten it, or something. No, not forgotten. I just didn’t want to think about it. I just wanted fun and excitement. I wanted to forget myself. But it was always here, just... waiting for me.”

  Her auburn hair was streaming behind her in the wind, and her face was intent and serious as she stared toward the water. Her skin, usually so pale, was now a little flushed from the exertions of walking and, rosy-cheeked, she looked vibrant in the afternoon sun.

  “It can get pretty marshy around here. I remember Pa telling me to be careful—it’s pretty treacherous if you don’t know where you’re going. Beyond that’s Lake Pontchartrain, of course, and the bridge, and back behind us is the city but here... here you can forget everything else for a while.”

  He watched her travel far over the horizon with her gaze and, as he stared at her, taking in her soft blouse flickering around her arms, the collar beating like a bird against her neck, he became lost in her. At last she looked up at him, her eyes shy once more. But when he bent down to kiss her she became as yielding as water to his touch, sinking slowly toward the soft, moist earth as he lowered her in his arms.

  Chapter Six

  It was much later in the afternoon when they returned to Xanadu. Ardyce had nestled her head into Orfeo’s shoulder as they walked back across the grounds of the house and the two of them were talking and laughing without a care.

  He saw Beatrice first, running across the gardens from the wing of the house and pointed out the maid to Ardyce who frowned at the sight. While Xanadu had been a scene of chaos during her early twenties in recent years there had never been anything that demanded such a fluster from any of her staff.

  The young black woman came to a halt a few feet away from them, her face clearly showing signs of panic. Releasing Ardyce Orfeo took a pace backwards, allowing his lover the chance to resolve this unexpected scene.

  “What is it, girl?” Ardyce asked, a little harshly, aggravated by anything that disturbed her idyll.

  “Oh ma’am, he’s here and he’s stomping round the place, demanding to see you.” The words came tumbling out of Beatrice’s mouth. “I tried to tell him you weren’t here, and me and Ron tried to keep him out but he wouldn’t take any of it. He had others with him and knocked Ron straight down—I think he might have hurt him ma’am and -”

  “Who are you talking about?” Orfeo could not resist asking.

  “Earl,” sighed Ardyce. For a moment she was perplexed, her lips pursed as she thought. She looked at Orfeo, her eyes flashing bright green for a moment. “He’s been trying to see me all week.”

  He nodded at this. “I should go,” he said quietly.

  “No!” Ardyce’s exclamation was imperious. “I won’t have anyone forcing me into anything in my own house!”

  Beatrice looked from her mistress to the tall, black man standing behind her. Ardyce’s face was furious, but Orfeo stood impassively, looking over her shoulder toward Xanadu.

  “I tell you,” Ardyce continued, her voice rising along with her passions, “I won’t stand for it! Not now—not ever!”

  At this, Orfeo came toward her and lifted her hands in his own. “I will go, just for now,” he told her very quietly.

  She pulled her hands out of his. “Don’t you dare! You’ve got nothing to fear from him.”

  He smiled at this. “Oh, but I
have everything to fear. Not for myself. I’ve met Earl’s kind before, remember. I don’t want him to take everything from me.” He looked across toward Beatrice. “Did he say anything about me?”

  Beatrice blushed at this and looked down. “He said lots of bad things, begging your pardon, sir. He said if he caught you two together...” Her voice faltered at the memory of this and Orfeo nodded slowly.

  “I was afraid of it, it’s why I didn’t want to be seen here.” Looking down at Ardyce he lifted her hand again, so small and pale in his strong fingers. This time she did not resist him. “Was he violent?” he asked Beatrice.

  “Not so much after that big fella of his hit Ron. He looked sort of upset.”

  Orfeo appeared to reconsider: “I should stay with you, in case things get out of hand.”

  Now, however, it was Ardyce whose passions were giving way to reason. “No,” she said at last. “I can handle this. He won’t harm me—not if I’m on my own. He doesn’t know anything—oh, he has lots of suspicions, but then Earl always has his suspicions.” She sighed and stared up at the clear, blue sky overhead. “Why can’t things ever be simple?” she muttered under her breath.

  Gathering together her self-presence once more, she stood up on tiptoe and kissed Orfeo on his cheek. “Go, love,” she told him softly. “We’ll meet again. Tonight.”

  He was silent as he watched her face and then, sure of her calmness, he nodded. Releasing her hands he turned to leave but then hesitated and looked back at the two women. “Go easy on her,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Ardyce was frowning.

  “On Beatrice. Remember, for a queen to be loved she must love her subjects.” He was smiling as he said this and, before she could respond, he had slipped away toward the wall that surrounded the gardens of Xanadu.

  For a few moments Ardyce was infuriated at this and opened her mouth to give vent to her anger. Then she closed it again with a wry smile: he must have seen in her manner that this would have happened sooner or later. It wasn’t the silly girl’s fault. If anything, Ardyce was the only one to blame for inviting Earl into Xanadu in the first place.