Madeleine Is Sleeping

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Aha! she cries, grabbing with her free hand her sister's brown wrist, the butter knife flashing wildly like a fish twisting in a beak.

  Let go, Emma says. I'm still eating.

  No, her sister says. You let go. Let go of the knife.

  But Emma is not yet finished with her breakfast. She would like to spread some jam on her last piece of bread. If she cannot spread her jam, like a lady, she will simply have to dunk her crust into the jar itself. So, forgetting the knife, she reaches out to grasp the lovely, golden, glowing jar that sings its siren song from across the table.

  The eldest daughter perceives with alarm the younger's intent. The cutlery clatters, the dishes sway.

  Take these!

  The mayor finds himself responsible for the china.

  And still pinching the brown wrist in one hand, his eldest daughter confiscates the treacherous jampot. She holds it up above her head, away from the clamorous hands of her sister, and looks down, as if from a great height, at her father's puzzled face.

  Don't you see? she asks.

  Tell Me

  YOU MUST SEE, the photographer pleads. You must see how you are—compromising—

  His hands fly up from his pockets, fluttering with urgency, making all the arguments that language has failed to provide him with. Madeleine notes this carefully, the articulateness of his hands. He has become, quite suddenly, interesting to her. She grows shy in his presence. She is curious about everything he does.

  Wrecking? Madeleine asks, as his hands wring the air. Destroying?

  Together they stand at the edge of the lawn. She is spreading her newly washed drawers across the privet hedge to dry. How white they appear against the green, looking as if they might rise up at any moment, like sails, and pull with them the privet hedge, the velvety lawns, the grand house with its carpets and curtains. Only a great gust of wind is needed, and all will be unmoored.

  Madeleine must concentrate on this, the white against the green, so as not to gaze too long at the photographer's face, or his talkative hands.

  Yes, Adrien admits, exhausted. You are destroying everything.

  He means that the widow is unhappy. She is unhappy because the girl continues to refuse her. Every night, they gather in her drawing room; every night, the candles are lit, the tripod's spindly legs are spread, the performers are placed in their humiliating poses; every night, the girl lifts her paddle (his cheek, her hand, smack! was the sound) and freezes.

  Madeleine nods, pretends to listen. She would like to be having a different conversation. She would like to ask, Do you chew anise seeds? And is that you I hear sometimes, singing beneath your breath? Maybe they could take a turn around the garden. Maybe he could invite her inside, for a drink of water. What gives your shirts their nice smell? She wants to say, Tell me. She wants to know: Was it like—? Did you feel—?

  She will send us away, the photographer says.

  Taste

  SPECIAL DELIVERY! Mother sings out, clutching a jar in each of her hands.

  But the mayor opens his door no more than a crack.

  Mother smiles at him shyly. It's pear, she says. Your favorite.

  The crack widens by a hair.

  Madame, the mayor begins, I am a supporter of local business—

  Indeed you are! she cries. Last month you bought a dozen jars!

  And presenting her gifts, she says, Do not think I have forgotten.

  The door creeps farther open, then closes with a slam.

  Mother stumbles backwards. She stares at the mayor's front door; she frowns at this most uncivic display.

  The red door swings open once again. The mayor has been replaced by his sour-faced daughter, her jaw set, her feet planted. Old enough, Mother thinks, to be married by now, and bullying someone other than her father.

  Good morning, Mother ventures.

  What do you want? the daughter replies.

  To leave a token, Mother says, of my appreciation for the mayor.

  And she holds up each golden specimen for her to see.

  Preserves! the daughter snorts. Just as I thought!

  She folds her arms across her narrow chest: We are not interested. The things you make—they have a queer taste.

  Mother, looking in dismay at her jars, cannot muster a reply.

  The mayor's daughter takes advantage. She observes, as she closes for the last time the door, But why should you care whether we like your preserves? You have so many customers in Paris.

  Naps

  THE FLATULENT MAN is very tired. His pale face has turned grey. Two dark circles seep from beneath his eyes, like drops of ink dissolving in a bowl of milk.

  It is necessary now to take naps. Every afternoon he goes off hunting for them. Sometimes he is lucky: once, behind the gatehouse, in a cool damp spot that smelled of clay; another time, in a corner of the kitchen garden, abandoned to the eggplants. He creeps up on these places. He makes himself thin as a shadow.

  When he wakes, he expects to find himself squinting into the sun. He expects that a long afternoon has passed, that the sun has moved across the sky and found him, its light slanting across his face, staining the inside of his eyelids. So he is surprised, when he wakes, to discover himself still in shadow, to see only the green sweating flagstone of the gatehouse, its surface alive with insects; or the dark, hairy depths of the tomato vines. And when he draws himself up onto his elbows, he will often hear a rustling, will catch a glimpse of white stocking disappearing into the foliage, or the flash of a silver watch chain.

  He wants to cry out, Wait!

  But the two are doe-like creatures; they seek him out and stare, then flee, their white tails showing. They spring off into the underbrush, off to their quarrels, their little anxious tasks, their acts of love, before he can stop them and say: At night, with the gravel rattling overhead—I have difficulty sleeping.

  Poem

  LOOKING AT HIM, the man asleep in the garden, Adrien says, One time I touched his face.

  Madeleine, at his elbow, finds her eyes watering at the thought of this.

  He offers her the nice-smelling sleeve of his shirt.

  Can you see? he asks, pushing aside a branch, pushing the hair from her face.

  The sight makes her suffer. There he is, her enemy, on the ground as if dead: he who has, without knowing, without even trying, replaced her in her own affections. This makes the concession all the more galling to her, this unconsciousness. Yet the beauty of him asleep, arm thrown out, mouth open—if only she knew a poem! If only her hands and fingers could speak for her, making eloquent shapes in the air as Adrien's do. It is with one of these fingers that he tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. She turns to him, full of speech. But her hands are struck dumb, and the only words that occur to her are: Orchard. Swallow. Bell.

  Mise En Scène

  M. PUJOL KNOWS what he will find when he opens the drawing-room door. He pictures it with the same sense of misgiving with which he recalls the schoolroom he sat in when he was a child, the map he had drawn of its dangers and unfriendly territories: the desk with an obscene picture on its lid; the alcove where the strongest boys hatched their plots; the row of meek children who would look at him knowingly, as if he belonged to them; the chair with the mysterious words scratched under its seat, over the ridges of which he would trace his fingers helplessly, and then pull his hands away in self-disgust, feeling contaminated. He had been glad, as a child, to be taken from that schoolroom. It was all thanks to his unusual gift.

  But what now could deliver him?

  Deliver him from the constellation of widow, girl, photographer: one perched on the edge of her delicate chair, one waiting at attention on the carpet, one crouched behind his camera, making the whole contraption tremble with his hunger. In a corner of the drawing room stands an Oriental screen, behind which he will be asked to take off his clothes. In another corner is a small bust of Racine. In the window seat is Marguerite, pouring lotion from a bottle into the thick palm of her hand.
And crowded against each other, limbs and haunches bumping, like statuary forgotten in a warehouse, are the acrobats, the emaciated man, the dog girl, and the stringed woman, each body arranged to tell its own story.

  Knight

  IF HE DECLINED TO open the door, if he refused to enter—would that be cowardly or brave? Trusting habit, he should think himself a coward. But when he stands outside the drawing-room door, his damp forehead resting against the frame, he discovers that what he fears most is not his own humiliation, which he has grown used to, but rather the fury that will be unleashed upon the girl. And to rescue her—that would be a brave thing. What a brave thing! For the girl, in her stubbornness, is met every night with glowering looks, and pinches, and the thump of the acrobats as they collapse accusingly onto the carpet. Sometimes Marguerite rises up from the window seat and strikes her. As for the widow, she never shows her displeasure, but the very restraint with which she leaves the room makes him afraid.

  He could save her from this, he thinks, by his absence. It would be as simple as leaving.As simple as airing out his travelling case, folding his evening clothes in tissue paper, sliding his shoes into their little felt bags, putting his brushes in order. How easy and how courageous it would be, to leave. He imagines how the gravel will crunch underfoot, the feel of his case bumping against his side. A flying leap! An adventure! But where to? That he will consider later. For now, as he nods to Racine, as he disappears behind the Oriental screen, his fingers already loosening his white evening tie, he will think only of the felted bags, soft and grey and consoling as the moles he sometimes finds outside his door, in the mornings.

  Arcane

  WHAT A BRAVE THING he is about to do! M. Pujol swells; feels briefly, blissfully, free from disgrace. But as he looks up at her, it occurs to him that the girl does not lend herself very well to being saved: she is too odd, too refractory; she looks unsettling as she stands there, paddle suspended, and even when Marguerite's ivory fan cracks against the side of her head, the girl's face remains furrowed in thought. Though dressed as she is, ridiculously, in a froth of petticoats and bows, there is nothing she resembles more than a fading scholar, lost within the thickets of his own peculiar field. The ivory fan makes a sharp and terrible noise, yet she looks as though she is deciphering a moldy text, or perhaps creeping her way through a mathematical proof.

  Archaeology

  WHEN SHE GAZES AT HIS BODY, crouching on the carpet, the only words that occur to her are: Orchard. Swallow. Bell.

  One morning her father found in their field a ruined coin. In the very place where he stood was once a town, but then an empire collapsed and the buildings languished and the river overflowed its banks, flooding everything. This is what she imagines. How else does a town sink into the earth? It lies buried far below, where all is dark and still, but on occasion some small thing will loose itself from the town and feel its way to the surface. Her father found a coin. Another man found a bottle. If it were not for the coin, and the bottle, they would not have believed that a town existed.

  She hears the word bell, or orchard, or swallow, and she experiences a strange surprise, like the feel of a coin in the soil. These words make her wistful; they overwhelm her with longing. Not for her orchard, nor the bell in her church, nor the swallows that nest in the eaves of her house. For something else altogether, something she would have forgotten completely.

  She wonders: Why should these words pierce me, if they are not the remains of a currency I once knew how to spend?

  In the Candlelight

  CRACK! IS THE SOUND of an ivory fan meeting the furred curve of a child's ear.

  Unclean

  BRUISES BEGIN TO RISE upon the skin of the sleeping girl. All over her body bloom patches of lavender and gold and lichen green. Beatrice conducts a concerned examination: What could be the cause of this?

  Mother hunkers over her cauldron, saying nothing. She thinks, Sometimes I grow clumsy with the handle of the broom. But is it my fault, that she takes up so much space?

  The preserves seethe about the neck of her spoon. Drops of sweat tremble on her brow. She frowns down, protectively, at the mess she has concocted: she must devise a defense. Her business, which she has nurtured so very tenderly, now finds itself under attack.

  The other women of the village, who until this point have been her stalwart companions, her confederates, her sisters-in-arms, have risen up against her. The reason? Covetousness, simply, which is certainly a sin. They begrudge her the success that has struck her house, swift and unbidden as the lightning bolt that set the mayor's roof on fire. The new fur muff in her lap, the lustrous flanks of her new horse, the rattle of the jam jars atop the postman's cart: it all feeds their fury. Sabotage is their only recourse, and soon rumors of unwholesomeness and sorcery are set roaming about the streets.

  Shattered crocks appear on her doorstep; the stone wall is speckled with jam. One day, on her way to market, she sees that a shrill placard has been erected along the road:

  IF THE FLESH IS UNCLEAN THEN SO IS THE FOOD

  BEWARE THE PRODUCTS OF AN UNHOLY HOME!

  She turns abruptly and stomps her way home. There, she surveys the girl spread before her, dewy and white and unruffled: You are the source of all this trouble, Mother says.

  Deal

  M. PUJOL CAN SEE the girl and the photographer, quarrelling once more behind the shrubbery. A flurry of fingers rises up above the privet hedge. If he stood his travelling case on one end, and climbed on top, he could wave his arms; he could cry out, Adrien! and maybe the photographer would turn around and slowly smile. But instead he drives a bargain with himself: I will not call out his name, as long as—above him an arbiter rustles, presents itself—that leaf does not fall from that tree.

  He repeats the terms. They seem fair. And trusting in the impartial justice of the universe, he sits down on his travelling case.

  The voices continue, passing from reproach to lament to something he cannot quite recognize. Please. His face. Cannot. I saw you. The words sift over and stain him like pollen: Your hands. I cannot. But then a wind rises and the leaves stir and the voices are carried in the opposite direction, away from him. Remembering his leaf, he is sent into a panic: so many of them! All rustling, shifting, silvering; made unrecognizable in their commotion. But eventually the wind subsides and the leaves are stilled and once more it is revealed: his leaf, the one not as green as the others; looking, in fact, somewhat sickly. It trembles on its stem. It twists fretfully against the sky. When the wind lifts again, so do the flatulent mans hopes.

  But the leaf is more firmly attached to the tree than, by all appearances, it should be.

  M. Pujol searches for other signs: If that crow takes flight, he tells himself. That thistle bursts. That handsaw, in the distance, ceases.

  Then I will not have to go.

  Harbinger

  THERE WAS ANOTHER young man once, his father an ambassador to a country M. Pujol had never heard of. He had come backstage bearing an armful of orchids, of cattleyas, and M. Pujol had shrunk in embarrassment: as though I were an opera dancer! But the young man presented them with his eyes lowered, saying nothing; and M. Pujol felt that to be insulted long would be impossible.

  Together they spoke little, and not often of love. Which is perhaps why, when remembering that year, M. Pujol will say of it only, My happiness then cannot be described. He means it literally, but how theatrical it sounds! To hear himself say it, even silently (for no one has asked), makes him prickle with shame. He takes refuge in these facts: the carriage we rode in was green; he had a scar, from an appendix operation, of which he was proud; he attended sixteen of my performances and his enthusiasm did not wane; his name was Hugh.

  The year had ended suddenly, with the announcement of his engagement to a young lady with two houses in Neuilly, near the Bois de Boulogne. At the time M. Pujol had found it painful to accept the news, but looking back he sees that it was simply the portent of what was to come. So that when, many mo
nths later, he would once again lose what he loved most to an ordinary woman—La Femme-Petomane!—the shock would not be too great for him.

  Signs

  BUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER is unlikely to marry a woman with houses. He seems to have few prospects at all, of any kind. He lacks coordination; he tries to but cannot grow a moustache; his pictures are of an uneven quality. When he speaks, he has trouble looking one in the eye. But his hand had not trembled. What a surprise that had been: a most touching surprise.

  The whole world is bent on surprising M. Pujol. There is a conspiracy afoot, it seems, a conspiracy to gratify him. From the far field comes a cracking, a whistling, and after that, silence; the handsaw is now abandoned in the grass, the task completed, and as if startled by the cessation of that gnawing sound, the crow shakes its wings and takes to the air, and as if released, at last, by the little spring with which the crow leaves its perch, the branch shudders, the leaves quiver, and a sickly yellow specimen comes spinning down from the sky.

  The flatulent man looks about him in astonishment. Could the universe be capable of such kindness? Clambering atop his travelling case, he clears his throat; he prepares a greeting; he wonders if to wave his arms would throw off his balance.

  He will cry out, Adrien! and the young man will turn around and look at him.

  But oh, surprise: the stern Impossible! The photographer is no longer there. The crown of his head does not float above the privet hedge, nor do his pale frantic fingers. Nothing of him remains visible; he has sunk beneath the privet hedge like a ship, or a sun. M. Pujol, stranded on his travelling case, is left to search the horizon and wonder. He was just here, he protests. How could I have lost him?