Believe Me

by JP Delaney

  “I’m so sorry…Claire, I’m so sorry.”

  I guess he isn’t referring to his remark about my appearance. I want to tell him none of this is exactly his fault, but the words won’t come.

  “If it’s any consolation,” he adds, “they lied to me too. Dr. Latham and Detective Durban. I realize that now.”

  I shake my head. “It’s not much consolation, no.”

  “This might be, though: I’m suing the NYPD. What they did was grossly irresponsible. That’s why I’m here—at least, partly. I want to add your name to the lawsuit.”

  I can’t cope with all this. “Why?”

  “You have an even stronger case than I do—if it hadn’t been for their sting, you’d never have tried to kill yourself. You’d never have ended up in here. I just spoke to your doctor. He’s an idiot. You need proper help. I’m going to make sure you get it. And the NYPD will pay. We’ll start by appealing against your commitment.”

  “Patrick…Are you…” The idea seems so impossible, so wonderfully wrong, and at the same time so perfect, that I laugh out loud. “Are you rescuing me?”

  “What if I am?” He studies me for a moment. Self-conscious about how I look, I duck my head. Then he says abruptly, “You said in your email we had a connection. But back then, you went a lot further. Do you remember?”

  Something flickers through the fog.

  ME

  I fell in love with you! They told me not to but I was too damn stupid. Patrick, don’t you understand? I love you.

  Even through the meds, I can remember how good it felt to finally say those words out loud.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “Yes. I remember.”

  “Was that real? Or just something they told you to say?”

  “I don’t know,” I confess. “I thought it was real, at the time. So real, it hurt. But that’s me, Patrick. Actors do it all the time. Falling in love with your costar. Showmances, they call them. Fool’s gold. I seem to do it more than most.”

  “I see.” He glances around at the drab, beige surroundings. “Anyway, the first priority is to get you out of this hellhole. You can stay with me until you decide what to do. After that, you’ll be a free agent.”

  I try to protest, but he interrupts me. “You need looking after. Besides, I have an ulterior motive. I finally wrote my play. I’d like you to read it.”

  “Patrick…” I say helplessly. “I can’t even read a comic book.”

  “Then we need to get your meds changed. I’ll speak to the doctors. And to my lawyer, about getting you discharged.”

  60

  Two weeks later I leave Greenridge. Patrick takes it for granted I’ll stay with him, and I don’t have the energy to resist. He installs me in a spare bedroom, runs baths filled with sweet-smelling Parisian oils, swaddles me in vast soft towels, and cooks me meals made with organic produce from Westside Market and Citarella. His building has a gym room, and I start to exercise, slowly losing the weight I put on in the hospital, all the while avoiding my own reflection in the mirrored walls that reflect a thousand tubby Claire Wrights back at me.

  I can’t help remembering Kathryn Latham’s words. If he’s the killer, he’ll be drawn to her vulnerability the way a shark’s drawn to the scent of blood.

  But Kathryn was wrong, I think firmly. Not to mention a liar.

  Every day a private psychiatrist visits, while Patrick tactfully goes out to leave us alone. The first few sessions Dr. Felix takes blood samples to check for traces of Banner’s meds, but mostly we just talk about what happened. When I describe Kathryn’s role in the operation he goes pale with anger. From what he knows of forensic psychology, he says, the sting she constructed was almost certainly illegal. Something similar was attempted in Britain once, with an undercover policewoman as decoy. The policewoman ended up having a breakdown, the judge threw out the evidence as tainted, and the psychologist was charged with professional misconduct.

  “Really, you got off lightly, Claire. Anyone would experience identity disturbance under that kind of pressure, let alone an untrained civilian.”

  Increasingly we also talk about my past, the demons I came to America to escape but which somehow smuggled themselves in with my hand luggage. Dr. Felix suggests coping strategies, areas where I might be able to rescript my thought patterns using a technique called Dialectical Behavior Therapy. We all have life scripts, he tells me, narratives we construct for ourselves as children, which, left unexamined, shape the outcome of our lives. His kind of therapy is all about revealing those narratives and rewriting them.

  “There’s a theory,” he explains, “that Cluster B disorders may result from a mismatch between the emotions a child feels and those her caregiver validates by being receptive to. If your emotional needs were ignored or even thwarted by your foster parents, it could result in the kinds of behaviors Dr. Banner highlighted.”

  I think of Paul’s warning. For some, those are pretty dark places, Claire. But you still have to go there.

  * * *

  —

  The night before I left the hospital, Dr. Banner came to see me. I thought he’d be angry I’d found a way to get out from under him, but if so, he hid it well.

  “I’m not entirely surprised you’re leaving us, Claire,” he said. “Most psychiatrists would argue that if a person’s functioning okay, they are okay. And you’re clearly functioning pretty well.”

  I braced myself for the but.

  “The reason I think differently is because I’ve made a specialty of these particular disorders. And I can see what most practitioners can’t, which is that you’re putting on an act. Pretending to be someone you’re not.”

  I leaned forward and spoke very quietly, so he had to crane forward to hear.

  “You’re right,” I told him. “I’m just as crazy as ever. But so was that guy with the apple tree in his stomach.”

  * * *

  —

  A week after I move in, Patrick takes me to Liberty Island on the ferry. I never did the tourist things when I first came to New York, so this is all new to me.

  We stand beneath the hollow lady, watching the lights of Manhattan dance on the silver-black water.

  “Claire,” he says at last, “how much of the person I fell in love with was real?”

  “Kathryn was very clever. There was just enough of me in there to make it seem plausible.” I glance at him. “I warn you, you may not like the real Claire as much. I’m a lot more actressy than she was, for one thing. Kathryn used the words desperate for approval about me. I change my mind in a heartbeat about things I feel passionate about, I like being the center of attention, and I can be strident on occasion. Oh, and I’m rarely meek, not a victim, and never, ever submissive. The Claire you got to see had been watered down by Kathryn for male approval.”

  “You sound fascinating,” he murmurs. His eyes are on some fireworks, sparkling in the sky above Battery Park. “I’ll take my chances.”

  I sigh. “And I’m gullible, too. Even when I was certain you hadn’t done it, she convinced me I was just believing my own part.”

  “I didn’t kill Stella, Claire.”

  “I know. I think I always knew.” I turn to study his profile. “I didn’t kill her either.”

  He nods.

  “I’ll take a lie detector test if you want,” I add.

  Patrick smiles. “That won’t be necessary.”

  We’re both silent.

  “I knew you didn’t do it when we went to the theater,” he adds. “After that actor came up to us.”

  “Raoul,” I say. “Raoul the singing rat. The one you headbutted.”

  “I panicked,” he confesses with a thin smile. “I thought he was going to blow the whole thing. But he’d been so vile to you…It felt good, what I did. And then, in the cab, when you were upset…I told them the next da
y I was sure you were innocent.”

  “I was ahead of you there. I’d been saying that about you for ages. Poor Kathryn. It’s a wonder she didn’t call the whole thing off.”

  Even as I say it, something flickers at the edge of my mind. Yes, why didn’t she? Why still pursue the sting, when she must have known it was doomed?

  Something to do with that website, perhaps?

  “Oh, and I’m an orphan, too,” I add. “That was one of the hardest things, not being able to tell you that.”

  Patrick nods slowly as he takes in the implications. “I think I always knew, though. I certainly sensed we were alike, in some way other people aren’t.”

  He reaches for my hand. “I asked you this in the hospital, Claire, and you didn’t really give me an answer. But I think you’re better now, so I’m asking again. Is there any chance we could start over? Or has there been too much water under the bridge?”

  I gaze at the elegant iron tracery of Brooklyn Bridge. And suddenly, wonderfully, everything seems possible.

  “Some bridges can span an awful lot of water,” I say.

  61

  That night we make love for the first time since I got out. Or, as we’ve agreed to think of it, for the first time, period. Him and me, naked for each other in every sense. Without the costume of our deceptions.

  He kisses my scars, the three thin red weals across my left forearm. They’ll fade in time, the nurse at Greenridge had said. I hope they don’t. I’m not ashamed of them.

  Then he enters me with infinite gentleness, one hand cupped behind my head so he can see into my eyes.

  The thought of being observed so minutely frightens me, and I try to hide myself from him, to force the crisis away. I think about all those times I slept with strangers, pretending to be someone else. Sometimes faking pleasure, sometimes just pretending to myself that I was faking it. But always, always putting on a performance.

  This is what I was so scared of, I realize. Being seen for who I really am.

  The sense of being so exposed only has the effect of making it stronger. When the climax comes, it breaks over me like a wave, churning and tumbling me in its rip, and I’m lost, a mewling, wailing castaway, incoherent words torn from my throat, my legs spasming, my back arching, all my muscles twitching uncontrollably.

  “So that’s what you look like when you do it for real,” he whispers.

  62

  It’s several days before I feel well enough to pick up Patrick’s play. Even then, the words won’t stay still to begin with. But because he wrote it, I persevere. Gradually I can read two pages at a time, then three, then whole scenes.

  My Heart Laid Bare opens in the summer of 1857, in the run-down apartment Baudelaire shares with his mistress, Jeanne Duval. She’s complaining about their poverty. He’d always said the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal would make his fortune. Instead, the book has been seized and he’s being tried for obscenity. If found guilty, he’ll be fined or sent to jail.

  Jeanne gives him a choice. Should she sell the jewels he bought her with his advance, or prostitute herself on the street, as she has had to do so many times before?

  Baudelaire’s torn. He knows it has to be the jewels, but he can’t bear for her to sell them until she’s worn them for him one last time. Jeanne disappears into their bedroom, and returns naked but for the jewelry. At this point, the dialogue switches to verse:

  My darling was naked, and, knowing my desires,

  Had kept on only her tinkling jewels…

  Flicking forward, I see the whole play follows this structure: scenes from life, interspersed with Baudelaire’s poems. A challenge for a director, but an intriguing one.

  After they’ve made love, Jeanne leaves to sell the jewels and Baudelaire is visited by his friend Flaubert. Flaubert—who was recently prosecuted for obscenity himself, for Madame Bovary, but acquitted—tells Baudelaire that this time the authorities are determined to succeed. Baudelaire, he warns, urgently needs to find influential figures to pull strings on his behalf.

  Baudelaire has come to the same dispiriting conclusion. There’s just one person he can think of: Apollonie Sabatier, the White Venus: the woman to whom he sent, anonymously, some of the most violent and cruel poems in Les Fleurs du Mal.

  The next scene takes place in Apollonie’s house. It’s the first time the two of them have spoken since the book’s publication; since she discovered that the unknown admirer who sent her these strange, savage verses was the same penniless writer who frequented her salon. The scene is electrifying. She wants to know why. He refuses to explain himself. When she asks him if this is really what goes on in his head—whether he genuinely has those violent feelings for her—he replies that she must interrogate the poems, not him.

  She has, she says. And, knowing him as she does, she chooses to believe that the poems’ brutality is just a literary device, for sensational effect, not glimpses into a truly depraved mind.

  But her lines are written in such a way that she might be trying to convince herself.

  The scene ends with Apollonie saying she’ll try to help him, but in return, after the trial, she intends to ask a favor, which Baudelaire must grant, no matter what it is. Baudelaire guesses she’ll make him promise never to see or write to her again, but he has no choice. He agrees to pay her price.

  * * *

  —

  At this point I stop to think about what I’ve just read. The scene with Jeanne Duval was good, but somewhat simplistic. The scene with Apollonie was something else. Her character leaps off the page, complex and torn, both attracted to and repelled by the darkness she senses inside the poet’s heart.

  Just as I was fascinated by what I sensed inside Patrick’s, I think.

  * * *

  —

  The second act of the play is taken up with the trial. In his defense, Baudelaire speaks eloquently of art that has no moral agenda. But, when asked by the prosecutor how he would feel if someone was inspired by one of his verses to commit an act of evil, he falters. He claims the poems may show immorality, but they don’t celebrate it. The prosecutor reads out several passages that plainly do just that, and repeats his question. How would you feel if someone is inspired by one of your verses to commit an act of evil? Baudelaire insists that we all have vile thoughts: All he has done is given them a voice. But clearly, the idea he might inspire followers doesn’t displease him.

  The trial lasts less than a day. Six of the most extreme poems remain censored, and Baudelaire is fined the enormous sum of three hundred francs.

  He goes back to Apollonie. Too late, he’s guessed that, when she interceded on his behalf, she also arranged that the most brutal poems about her should remain banned.

  She doesn’t deny the accusation. But she reminds him of his promise.

  Very well, he says with a heavy heart. What is it that you want?

  She tells him she wants to sleep with him.

  It’s the only way, she’s decided, to discover what his feelings for her truly are—whether it’s the savagery, or the tenderness, that’s the real Charles Baudelaire.

  Which do you hope for? he asks quietly.

  And we can see she’s torn; that, at some level, she hopes he really is the devil his poems make him out to be. She’s been loved before by sentimental, timid men. She’s never been adored by a man who wants to simultaneously worship and desecrate her.

  Nevertheless, she insists that she knows him to be a good person at heart.

  They go to bed. At the climactic moment, there’s a blackout. The next day, he sends her the now-famous letter of rejection.

  63

  The play is good. Like a true dramatist, Patrick has balanced out the arguments. Far from glorifying decadence, the play reveals it as a kind of narcissism, the self-regard of the artist who pursues originality at any cost.

 
Most of all, though, it’s a story about a man and a woman trying to guess each other’s motives. To work out what’s really going on inside the other’s mind.

  It isn’t hard to see where Patrick got his inspiration. It’s our story: the story of the police operation, transposed back to nineteenth-century Paris.

  Yet it’s also a story that’s unresolved. Does Apollonie sleep with Baudelaire for the reasons she gives? Or has she fallen in love with him? Does she even hope that the reality of her naked body will somehow draw the venom of his violent obsession with her? If so, it may have worked. He wrote her no more sadistic poems after that night. He even broke with the Vénus Noire, and went to live with his widowed mother in the countryside. The play’s final scene shows him picking a fresh flower from her garden, then placing it in his buttonhole.

  As for Baudelaire himself, the play never fully answers the question Apollonie first put to him: Is this how you genuinely feel, or are you just trying to shock? What would I really see, if I could look into your heart?

  All the roles are good. But Apollonie’s would be the most interesting to play.

  64

  “Your play,” I tell Patrick when he returns. “I love it. It’s provocative, but multifaceted. Nuanced, even.”

  “So you’ll do it?” he says eagerly.

  “Do what?”

  “Play Apollonie, of course.”

  My mood crashes to the floor. “Patrick, I can’t,” I say wistfully. “Didn’t Frank and Kathryn tell you? I’m not allowed to work here. That was how they ensnared me in their stupid scheme in the first place.”

  “Haven’t you heard of the Equity exchange program? Swapping a job for a British actor here with one for an American in the UK?”

  “Yes, but that’s only for producers—”