Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  I thought we might head a little farther out to be free of the chop, but the man keeps the boat huddled close to the port wall, shoving off it at times with the javelin. He scratches a jagged scab on his forearm, bracing himself as my balance goes off, which sends my left foot across the right into a funny curtsy. He stabs the wall, bucking us in the other direction, and my right foot crosses the left, bending at the knee. The ferryman smiles broadly at the sun.

  Penelope by now will have drawn the curtains and called for a seltzer. Perhaps she is afraid I will curse her, and her child will be born with raisin eye. I could lay a powerful curse indeed, but in many ways the work has been done for me.

  The ferryman points his javelin at the house, set close to the water. The house looks as if it were transported on a barge from Alamo Square, flanked by palm and pine and creeping jasmine, a sweet lattice lifting its gables like a sugar shell. Shutters cover each window, and everything but the stone roof is painted a blinding shade of white, reflecting the sea painfully on itself. The strongest fortress is a mirror, no doubt, but this takes it to an extreme. Shielding my eyes, I cross the yard to explore it.

  Ropes of jasmine hang from the front eaves, cooling the porch. Back on the water, the ferryman watches in bored amusement. He’ll obviously stay there until I come back to the boat. To avoid him, I’ll have to live here in Ayastefanos forever; after a few years I might recruit some local women and set up a musical series at the Russian monument. We could take donations. Of course the local women will have to do their part to establish an audience from their own social circles, begging friends and family to arrive and support them, an endless cycle of debts without a significant return to warrant the work. Not too many go in on artistic greatness when they realize the effort involved.

  I’ll look into the various halls in Ayastefanos soon enough. For now, there’s a man who needs my help, a man prepared to perform violent acts upon his own body if I do not intervene. His mother knows it to be true, which means he’s passed the subtle stage and time is precious indeed. The front door pushes open when I knock. Hearing nothing and with no cause to delay, I enter the house.

  I find myself standing in a great and airless hall. Someone has gone to pains to absolve each room of the sentiment that might attend color, and I find myself surrounded by stark white walls over floorboards painted black. After the slight latch of the door behind me, the sound of gulls vanishes and the house is silent. I feel a pulsing pressure circling my skull, as if my ears have been steadily boxed by invisible hands.

  The silence drives me to speak.

  “All men are my brothers and all women are my sisters.” My voice makes a pathetic small quiver at the end.

  There is no response, save the floorboards squeaking with my footsteps as I walk through the entry hall. This hall would make a fine small performance space, empty as it is. The local ladies and I could start our series here.

  “All men are my brothers and all women are my sisters,” I say again, stronger a second time. The hall leads me into a kitchen, which seems to have never been used for cooking; the smell of fresh paint is the only sensory element of the whole place.

  Through the kitchen is a dining room, empty save for a marble-topped table with a single white lily ludicrously displayed in a delicate crystal vase. The flower browns from its petal fringe, orange pollen drifting into an ordered pile.

  “All men are my brothers—”

  Through a wide marble archway on the other side of the dining room I find Raoul. He is laid out on a white chaise, dressed all in white, a white suit and shoes with a white pocket square camouflaged in his pocket, all clothes he must have purchased specifically for this inaugural and determinate use. His arms are crossed, and a revolver rests under his folded hands.

  The room throbs around him, drawing me close. I find myself leaning over him. “The lily is a little precious,” I say.

  He opens one eye. “A field of lilies fling open to the sun,” he says. “White flags aloft. Death is one act with no second.” His eyes flutter closed. There is no sound, save for the metallic sound his revolver makes as he gently rolls the cylinder between two fingers.

  “That’s all very good, but since you obviously practiced, I wouldn’t mind giving you a few notes.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You should be nude, for one.”

  He opens one eye, frowning, but doesn’t interrupt.

  “If you are supposed to be exiled from a place, you can’t wear its uniform. The lily is supposed to represent you, isn’t it? You don’t have it dressed in a dinner jacket. And I have to say, the gun is a nice touch but could go somewhere a little less conspicuous.”

  He sits up to remove his sack jacket. “On the mantel?”

  “Christ’s sake, under the sofa, something your audience would find at eye level but wouldn’t be so present in the narrative. That’s the problem with the scene as it stands, everything is placed just so. It’s too much.”

  Once he removes his jacket, I smell the liquor on him. “Pardon me,” he yawns. “I must insist on my personal creative process.” But he lets me ease the gun from his hands.

  It’s as heavy as I remember. Mother kept one at her bedside when we were young, and I well recall the feeling of it, like lifting the corner of a bookshelf. I crouch down and place the weapon under the sofa, pushing it just out of reach. He lies back again but makes room on the couch for me to sit beside him.

  “Out of sight, out of mind,” I say, tapping his temple.

  Like all boys careening about inside the bodies of men, he is soothed by a simple phrase. His thumb twitches, and I can tell he wants dearly to suck it.

  “Your mother is worried. After what happened to your brothers. We should go to her.”

  “She cannot know my pain,” he says, this and similar, on and on. He eventually works himself up to weeping, very dramatic. It reminds me of Deirdre at the grocer, reaching for an apple at the bottom of a barrel but not well grasping it and slipping to her knees to scream.

  “Hush now, I can help you.” Like a country doctor who can name the beast by its bite, I have learned well enough the scope of grief to know its subtleties. There’s something here beyond even the pain of death. “What is it truly?” I try, simple ideas often yielding the best results.

  Suddenly despondent, he turns his head to the side, the look of a man forced to face two different kinds of suffering and remember that his is the lesser. I once saw the same sour look on the faces of a group of white women who had accidentally arranged their rally for the vote across the street from a freedman’s hospital.

  “It’s all right,” I say. “You can tell me.”

  “Sylvio,” he whimpers.

  Young love. “Did she leave you standing in the rain?”

  “He is in Saranda with his mother.” He pouts, watching the wall.

  “A gentleman,” I say, employing the wonder he wants to hear in my voice.

  “That’s right. There now, you despise me.”

  “My dear, Phaedrus is the most exquisite love song ever written. Come now, it’s not as bad as all that.”

  “Not as bad? It’s impossible!”

  “Anything’s as possible as you want it to be. Bring him to Paris and begin a new life.”

  He laughs, a sharp laugh. “Yes, we’ll get a little house.”

  “Maybe not in Ayastefanos. But in France, you’d be surprised.” I stroke his sweet thin hair. “You underestimate the pleasures of the progressive artistic class.”

  “And you underestimate the pleasure of being executed in the street.”

  What a little saucepot! I like him more already, almost enough to forgive him for not allowing me to solve his problems.

  “Diaghilev kept a lover, a lovely man. I can’t say much for his talent as a dancer, but people seemed to like him personally.”

  “Yes, I know the story. Diaghilev was destroyed when Nijinsky took a wife, and if you can name only two moral perverts, you’re not workin
g too hard to find them.”

  “I’m naming the famous ones to hearten you. There are a great many—”

  He leapt up. “Thank you, I’m very heartened. Perhaps this lifelong trouble of mine is all a misunderstanding. If only I had you to come and simplify it for me years ago, I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “There’s Oscar Wilde also, if you don’t know.”

  “Good!” he says, placing his palms over his eyes. “Good. Let’s dig him up.”

  “Raoul, be reasonable. You only have to come back with me to the hotel, this will all be sorted out.”

  “But why do we have to go, when you’ve come and sorted it all out already?” He takes my hands. “If you could only change Sylvio’s mind things would really be sorted. He says I cannot possibly love him as much as he loves me, and so the whole thing is off.”

  I make a play of considering this. “That presents a real challenge,” I say carefully. “Your lover may have found the truest form of love and heartbreak both, and meeting that call requires true bravery. But you two are very lucky. Let me ask you this: Can you even imagine how many millions of people are fated to find love in lesser measure and then marry young, live well, and die? Can you think of anything more earnest and ordinary?”

  “I would have liked that,” he insists, but he already sounds unsure. The romantic poets nearby got the best of him, but I learned this trick years ago when a landlord who found me weeping on his stairs declared that my heartache was a rare gift, and that I had a duty to bear it to the whole of Eastern Europe. I did not die in his stairwell as I declared I would. His wise words inspired me through the rest of my tour, and I earnestly worked to lay my heart bare to the world. Much later I realized that old landlord only wanted me out of his stairwell, as my groaning was disturbing his other tenants.

  Since then I have employed this tactic to great effect, first to a stagehand who couldn’t bear to lift the curtain and then to Teddy Craig, despondent over a snip he met staging Hamlet in Stockholm. Of course, then Teddy and I fell in love and the tactic was lost to me, until a police officer, finding me despondent over Teddy, used it to coax me off a railroad track. Raoul here clearly feels as if he is at the bottom of a terrible well of pain, that nobody has ever fallen this deep, despite all the handprints in the mud.

  He dries his eyes with quiet dignity. “Will it ever release me?” he asks.

  “In truth it may not.” Though of course it will—one day he will happen on a picture of a ram and think of how stupid Sylvio was for confusing rams and goats, despite growing up on a farm, and he will realize he has not thought of Sylvio in many months and will shortly forget him for years, saying farewell to the sole passenger on a ship with a route as wide as the world.

  But of course it is important now for him to believe that this emotion has no end, that this brief and common madness bears some essential significance to his life.

  “We should go have a drink,” I say, squeezing his arm. “Your mother is sick over this.”

  He allows me to help him up. “I should stay,” he says.

  “Nonsense. Come now, fetch your things.”

  It isn’t until after we’ve settled in at the bar that I remember the revolver under the sofa and wonder how long before the caretaker finds it. If Raoul has thought of this as well, he doesn’t mention it, but rather gazes at the dregs of his whiskey cocktail, his grand love melting away.

  At Oldway, Paris avoids the loudest of the renovations, which sound like a team attempting to tunnel through the entry hall

  They had been treated lately to some terrific storms. The girl doing the shopping returned with hailstones snug alongside the bottles in her basket, and a lightning strike split the big whitebeam and set the tar of the new road ablaze.

  Fortunately, there was no damage to the girl, the road, or the hangar under construction on the far side of the property. Paris was glad the structures were spared, though it would have been some fun to see it all ripped apart. During the worst of it, the sea came in from Tor Bay and eddied harmless around the hangar frame, tossing up a bit of sand and burying a wheelbarrow one of the men had failed to secure, but otherwise leaving no trace.

  The storms were a blessing because they kept him inside just as he was starting to see Napoleon Charles out in the world. He glimpsed the boy from the painting first in print advertisements, then in the schoolhouse windows and the faces of the children he saw on the street. He was wary to greet the young mothers walking their children down the lane, sensing a terrible potential within each of them to spontaneously create another doomed boy, if Paris only willed it.

  Stuck inside with the rain, there was a much lower chance of meeting ghosts. He turned his study to Hortense de Beauharnais, Napoleon Charles’s mother, who was wearing a blue dress that would have brought out her eyes. At first he couldn’t bear to look at her for longer than a moment, something about her expression. He turned to look at the ladies in the papal chorus, but after gamely trying to imagine each of them receiving confession, he returned to Hortense. He felt her grief and feared her uneasy gaze.

  Paris saw the people of the world as falling into two categories: creators tasked with making the world, and consumers, who would take and ruin all that had been built. Sweet Hortense obviously fell into the latter category. She looked up at the crown as if it were already locked away. Soon enough she would outlive her use to the history of the world, yet she would continue to exist, in flesh and then in oil.

  He saw some of his own mother in her, a woman who made it her duty to use up the estate’s surplus of food every month in feeding everyone who entered her home. She constantly monitored kitchen activity to see that there was an abundance of food for her family and their guests, the kitchen and cleaning staff, the gardeners and the men in Isaac’s garage, the patent men who arrived daily, and even the fellow who delivered the truckloads of flour and meat, accepting his cart of raw materials and sending him away with roast beef in sandwiches and fruit for his children. She wasn’t happy unless people were eating the fruits of her husband’s labor. She had a supply of small pies made on the days she went out, which she would distribute to children she encountered on the road. She cast herself as a kindly benefactor to the unfortunate, the type of character usually depicted in her favorite serialized orphan stories as a moneyed older man, and she made sure to care so well for such a broad population around them that her own children were often left picking among the scraps.

  From the days of his early youth Paris was naturally suited to enjoy the offerings his father provided, and he had come to expect such gifts from the world. In that way he became a member of the consuming class, though he bitterly fought the distinction.

  When Isadora came along, he jumped at the chance to serve as a conduit for her work. He marveled at how she produced and consumed in vast quantity and as a closed system, rushing across her rehearsal room in the tenth hour of self-directed practice with the same look of keen pleasure she brought to endless lazy afternoons reading poetry in the bath. She stayed in bed for three full days and spent the fourth writing enough lecture notes to fill a laundry bin. She was neither the flighty dreamer he had imagined she would be nor the miracle of the generative earth she seemed to like people to believe she was; she was something enticingly other. Her only desire was for control of the bounds of her body—this put her in stark contrast with Paris, who wished to control the acreage plans of multiple estates—but she was insatiable and uncompromising in this small window, in a way that made Paris feel amateurish and forgetful in comparison. She seemed unimpressed by praise and unmoved by sentiment, though she always liked the flowers he brought her, and so he chose to keep his praise of her astonishing skill to a minimum; he could lay gifts at her feet, but then he would be no different from the others at her altar, those false friends who waited outside the funeral, trying to get a better look at her as she went inside. Paris prided himself on a better understanding of Isadora than most would ever know. She worked to resemble
a figure on a vase, but she was more essential than the figure or the vase itself, or even the museum in which the vase was displayed. She was a tower, a spire, a gleaming copper steeple forged in fire and rising from chaos to spear the cloudless sky. He would hardly admit any of this to her and thus suffer one of her weeklong preens, but it was true enough, and she knew it.

  A letter arrived from her one afternoon, greeting him as “Lohengrin” and going on about her time in Turkey. She claimed to dream of him! He laughed aloud, and surprised himself at the echo the hall produced. The gallery of the Coronation seemed startled as well. If Isadora had her way, she would be Napoleon and Josephine both, kneeling before herself and raising the crown for her own bowed head as Paris stood along with the other ladies in the gallery, trying to catch a glimpse of her robes.

  His resentment would burn off when she returned. She had a way of making even his most deeply held beliefs seem petty and malformed, and never ceased to be relieved by her visits, despite the fact that he had no reason to seek her blessing in the first place. He was ashamed by the pride he took in standing beside her; it seemed that in his study of the painting, he could bear daily witness to the coronation of an empire felled by pride and not take from it the slightest warning.

  He looked one last time at Hortense. Though her boy tried his best to pull her closer to the activity at the center, she held back. She was comfortable where she was, standing and smiling as if she had been paid to stand and gamely smile. He tried to remember what happened to her. Napoleon’s favorite was the other one. Surely Hortense was buried in France. He would have someone look into it.