by Amelia Gray
He noticed how each girl casually feared Elizabeth and how she seemed to appreciate their fear and cultivate it. He found her most attractive when she was feeling confident, and their happiest romantic episodes often tended to come after she had just finished disciplining the girls. Elizabeth was a strong woman, and when he lay in bed with her, he was reminded of his reading on the earliest days of man, the tribal squabbles solved by combat. She was in many ways his physical ideal, and he found it interesting only in passing that she was also his opposite, for he was a small man and often sickly.
The Constantinople jag reaches its peak with a visit from a mystic
Another telegram arrived from Duse, stacked with the first and slipped under the door, sounding plainly annoyed: QUIT CASTING ABOUT EUROPA. Tucking the card under my pillow, I dream of touring villages on a white bull, flowers draped across his flank. I’ll send a response when absence turns my memory of Duse a little gentler, though such a resolution could keep me off for a while. Despite a sweet and plaintive face that charms all she sees, even the resting heartbeat of Eleonora Duse has an urgency, insisting that everyone keep strident pace. A simple meal with her is exhausting, and my energy lately is in short supply. Still, I should go and see her soon or else she’ll never speak to me again, a condition which could last upward of six months.
Raoul prepares the room. He decided earlier that the jeweled tone cast by a goblet of wine by the window imbued the room with certain mystical properties, and began to fill every vessel with wine to its trembling brim—an ashtray, a crystal vase—and align each to catch the light. He filled a glass jigger and moved it from the dressing table to the bureau, then emptied the salt and pepper shakers from breakfast, topping them off and arranging them to diffuse the pinks across the far wall.
“That’s enough, dear. She’s coming soon.”
He takes up the bottle. “If she is going to the trouble of a house call, we should make the environment ideal.”
“You’ve got the idea of it, don’t you think?”
“The idea,” he sneers, plucking a cigarette out of the ashtray and examining it pinched between his fingers before filling the ashtray with the last of the bottle. I remember that look from Loie Fuller, who could stare at any stage for hours, chewing on the insides of her cheeks before digging through her suitcase of gels and slides for the colors to display on her costume. She looked like a traveling salesman selling rainbows, which I suppose she was, in a sense.
Penelope enters without knocking, appearing very much unlike an oracle with her hair slicked back with sweat. She holds her belly, looking about, as if she suspects someone is going to take it from her. She hasn’t slept well on the couch in our two-room suite but refuses to share a bed with Raoul.
“Good afternoon,” Penelope says.
“Hullo,” he returns, turning his back on her to open another bottle.
“Raoul,” I say genially, “come have a conversation.” It’s important that he show her some deference. He was advertised as a scholar of broken hearts, but when he ignores her, the currency of his heartbreak loses some crucial exchange rate in the open market. We’ve been enjoying wine and sandwiches at her expense, and if she really likes him, she might go in on the fortune-teller as well.
He returns with the petulance of a spoiled child and lifts one hand to take hers, the other occupied with a soap dish full of wine. “Hello, love.” he says. “You had a productive session with the Madame?”
“Very productive,” she sniffs. “She said I would lose my child and my husband soon after, and that my own life would end after a meditation. You haven’t yet met with her?”
“Wonderful, just wonderful,” he says, setting down the soap dish and picking up a wine-filled pint glass. “How very romantic, how affecting.” He arranges the pint glass to catch a shaft of light on the floor.
Taking her by the fatty part of her arms above the elbows, I draw her close. “He has been preparing all morning to hear news of his love; you’ll have to pardon his excitement. You know how the romantics are always gazing into a mirror.”
She looks as if she has just dislodged a nib of last night’s steak from a rear molar. “I should go,” she says. “I thought I stayed away long enough to avoid her.”
“You most certainly should not go. We need your support.”
“You’ll do fine, I’d rather go. It was difficult, you see.”
She pulls free from me and makes her escape, but just as she opens the door, she cries out to find the oracle herself, wrapped in shawls despite the heat. Serves Penelope right for trying to escape.
It’s the oracle’s youth that surprises me first. With a teenage self-assurance she unpins the veil over her mouth. She wears a linen dress in brilliant red, and her waves of hair are tucked around a comb at her neck. Apparently, on top of everything, I’ll have to get used to young oracles. “The world rolls on,” I say, embracing her.
She accepts me stiffly, looking over my shoulder to find no fewer than ten perfectly placed glass vessels around a pile of cushions on the floor, over which Raoul holds a deep bow.
“Do you have another room?” she asks.
He opens one eye, looking to find any offensive object that was placed without his knowledge.
“I will not read before an audience like a trick dog,” she explains.
“Would the bedroom suit you better? It’s a little darker.”
“Let me see it.”
“Penelope, will you take her in?”
Penelope obeys, looking truly miserable. How tragic for her, to be forced to entertain! She steps over Raoul, who has sat down in the center of his pillows.
“I didn’t think of her privacy,” he says, balling his fists and pressing them against his gut as if he could physically work the shame out of himself bodily.
“Don’t mind a picky girl. She probably sent back her tea this morning because the cup was not aligned with the ecliptic plane. Take heart, love. The artist never knows what she requires until the moment she requires it.”
He takes up a bottle of wine, pulling the cork out with his teeth. “You would know!” he says, tipping it back.
Fearing another scene like the one he made earlier while gazing at a photograph of Sylvio he had come upon in his breast pocket—a fit that included him hitting himself with one of Penelope’s heavier books on ornithology—I hasten to his side. “That’s all right,” I say, easing the bottle from his hand. “Everything will be just fine.”
“Didn’t you see her expression? I’ve ruined the day. Every spirit she had been channeling took off when they saw what I did.”
He obviously needs to be comforted and kissed on the mouth, and I take the responsibility gladly. “The oracle will be flattered to see it worried you so. People only want to know they’ve had an effect.”
He pushes me off, tripping over his pillows but catching himself before he falls on the sideboard. “Woman!” he shouts. The women emerge on cue with champagne, having somehow found the bottle I had hidden in the bathtub. The oracle points at Raoul, who follows her directly back into the room. Penelope sits down with a magazine, holding her glass aloft.
“I haven’t seen this level of dramatics since Teddy Craig,” I say. “And even he has been distant lately. I suspect everyone matures if you wait long enough, like wine, though perhaps some people just go sour. You know, Paris acts as if he is the arbiter of this entire tragedy, but Teddy was Deirdre’s father, after all. As a romantic, he was too devastated to attend the service. You understand.”
She ignores me, running her fingers along her belly as she reads a magazine. Penelope would be happier in a different kind of society, where rooms held vast libraries, candlelight flickering to reveal dark paneled walls and brass-cradled models of the planet, their equators sewn with leather thread. But she will never know that society, not beyond what she reads of it. It was her fault for throwing in with Raymond; my brother means well, but at the end of the day, he is only a benign polygamist and a
pretender at best. Penelope must have seen his potential as a man of philosophy and art, but Raymond never did develop the skill required of social movement, success at which might have placed them in those libraries and smoking rooms. Penelope should have run the moment he declared that it was a serious goal of his to design a sandal. But then she must have demurred, picturing as women often do the most successful version of her lover’s dream—a factory line spanning a city block. We want only the best for the ones we love, particularly when we stand a chance to benefit. But now she must watch the turn on the poor wager she made years ago.
“You wouldn’t like to be rid of me, would you, Penelope?”
“I wouldn’t at all like that,” she says, turning the page. “I hold you as my dearest kin.”
No doubt, if we’re including Raymond. “Why, I feel the same! I love you as well as I do my own sister, for you are as loyal to me as she always has been.”
“It is my only hope that you dance again,” she says, squinting at an advertisement for stockings. “When I first saw you in Athens, I knew you would usher in a new age.”
She doesn’t look up when I settle near her. “Your love heartens me, you are so dear to me.”
She holds her magazine so she can keep reading while she leans in to kiss my cheek. I hold still for her until the moment her lips graze my face, at which point I twist my head and snap at her, catching her lower lip like a piece of gristle between my teeth. Clamping down, I hold on, keeping her there despite her shocked sounds.
She claws at me and slaps my face. Face to face, I have a clear look at her eyes, sparkling with anger.
At last I release her, and she falls back against the sofa.
“What is it?” I ask, wiping the line of spit from my mouth as if we have played this game many times before.
“Nothing.” Closing her magazine, she lays it between us.
“What’s wrong, dear sister?”
“Nothing at all.” And she says nothing more, only moves her hand away when I reach for it. We stay like this until Raoul returns. Family time is so dear to me, I wish it would last forever.
Romano Romanelli
cura di Raffaello Romanelli
cura di Pasquale Romanelli
Viale Alfredo Belluomini, Toscana
Maybe you were right about Darmstadt. I can’t shake this feeling of anonymous dread. I mean to say dread of my own anonymity, but the dread itself is anonymous as well, a man on the street looking at himself in the shopwindow. I wonder sometimes about the damage of simply living in the world.
Of course, this isn’t a problem unique to Germany, as you’d claim. The perfect image of America came as our little boat was leaving the Port Authority. We had almost cleared the break when we saw a man sprint down the pier, leaping like a stag over the wooden gate bounding the dock. It wasn’t clear if he was evading an attacker or the police or if he had been caught in some other confusion, but he didn’t slow where the pier ended at open water. He jumped and was airborne, arms pedaling in mad circles as if he could wind himself back, hitting the water with a sickening slap and sinking, never to rise. We watched from the deck, and one of the cattlemen said that it seemed about right. Eventually we were too far away to see the police boats, and by the time we landed in Hull, any paper that might have mentioned it had long since turned to other mundane dramas, the problem of the vote and similar. News of the man’s leap probably didn’t make it any farther over the water than he did.
I had thought that escaping America’s endless chaos would bring me a sense of peace, but I found none of that peace once I left. In London my head could have doubled as a shovel, so consistently was it aimed toward the pavement. Though it was a pretty pavement, drifts of fresh coal carved by bicycle tires. If it wasn’t so expensive to live there, I would be there still, eating my weight in Dairy Milk bars and treating myself to opening nights at the Palace.
In France the work that satisfied me before began to experience an uncomfortable elevation, a balloon inflated beyond its bounds. I found the city of Paris to be very much like the poet who stumbles into the party and silences the room with his gleaming witness before falling onto a table of champagne flutes.
The city gives you the illusion that you could offer something new to the world, a loathsome fantasy shared by every artist in residence. The shopgirls believe it, too, and the philosophers. Even the thieves work harder in Paris: I can’t imagine any of the pleasant young grifters on your standard Italian tourist beach summoning the organizational energy required to steal the Mona Lisa. In Paris you can steal whatever you like as long as you put in the effort to be original about it. It’s marvellous to live but exhausting to make a living.
By the time we arrived in Vienna, I had gotten into the habit of taking long walks to get away from my students, and I found the city amenable to quiet mornings and contemplative afternoons. I walked every afternoon into the evening, conveniently missing Isadora’s performances. Sometimes I would walk until sunrise, thinking of nothing but the strange way my feet appeared like little mice from under my dress and vanished quick as they came. I stopped in cafés at pure random and gazed at their pastry windows like I meant to buy one of everything on offer but first needed to find the best example of each.
But back to thoughts of you, my dear. I wonder if you would steal the Mona Lisa? Surely you have better taste.
At Oldway, Paris finds the problem with close study lies in what you inevitably find
It happened in the upper gallery first. He was squinting to look at a nobleman when he saw her emerging chin-first from the hazy crowd at the back. After a few days of tickling the ladies’ skirts, she appeared in the lower gallery, leaning on the gentlemen to make conversation. Just when Paris thought she surely couldn’t be bolder, he caught her winking among the assembled sisters in front, vanishing if he looked directly but reappearing the moment he tried to focus elsewhere; very true to life, he found. She was barefoot, possibly drunk. Teasing him in her ruthless way. He prepared himself for the day she would become Josephine in profile; in fact he was curious as to how she would carry the crown, if she would hate it on concept or allow an exception to her principle against adornment just this once if it meant she could rule the First French Empire.
But Isadora didn’t touch Josephine. She left the woman kneeling as she took the role of Napoleon himself, slipping the man around her shoulders and taking on his pose with perfect, sneering ease. She commanded control of every inch of his bodily empire, her eyes wild with power. Paris was humiliated by her impersonation. She remained as Paris drew near, impertinent to his attention.
When he tried to look away, she was everywhere. She was lodged in every face on the canvas, whether they were three tiers up in the crowd or holding the coronation robes or guarding the hall. She became the pope and the marble angels, she became Christ on the cross. His own ruthless mind had exposed him for what he was: a devoted admirer waiting at her stage door with a stack of her postcards clutched to his chest, her every articulation known to him, every one of her expressions lashed to his memory with unbreakable thread. He was a slave to her legion gaze.
It was time to go. He stood with some difficulty, bowing to the painting as if formality might ease his shame.
He avoided The Coronation from that day forward, turning his head when he passed. On the opposite side of the stairwell a terra-cotta bust of Neptune caught his eye, and he had to convince himself that under the floating heroic curls, the old man wasn’t laughing at him.
His work would be his comfort, now as always. Resolving to dedicate himself again to the study of architecture, he passed more nights in his office, suffering only a few hours of sleep at a time on the reclining chair, which the girls noticed and started making up like a bed. He took a few meals each day there and quit asking after the mail. The cook’s maid reported to the buyer that he was drinking absolutely no beer and less liquor as well.
There was work to be done, and nothing so intoxicating as ex
panding the empire. He wanted something more permanent in France, and he found a new lease south of the Paris city center, a grand old hotel in Bellevue. Signing the papers inspired the freeing sense of a lightened financial load, the excitement of a fresh enterprise, and the promise of the obliterative tide of industry. The property was in an ideal location, among parks and wooded areas, retrofitted for electric light, and included a lovely modern stage. They could open a school there and offer free tuition to urchins or at least employ them in the garden. If Isadora didn’t consent to teaching, he would hire Elizabeth and her man Max. They would support the day-to-day fees and advertising concepts and organize performances for the public. Once it got going, it would require very little in terms of his own operational involvement.
The thought began to bore him just as he signed the last of the documents. He preferred to occupy himself with ventures that held a real chance of failure, not this old academic route, its small gains on low risk. Because he enjoyed such a constant cash flow—a figure that could build two new schools a week if he wanted—solvency wasn’t important to him. He preferred the thrill of the venture, the success or failure coming in spectacular fashion. He liked to buy mineral rights in low-lying plains, or whole islands that ended up so overrun with pests that everything would have to be burned to the stakes and begun anew. He fantasized about finding himself in a situation where his good business sense would be rewarded, but until then he was trapped in a carnival game as broad as his life, and nobody would ever pity him for it.
The property at Bellevue would be the perfect place for Isadora to return to work. He would write to Elizabeth at once and ask her to set it up and bring her students from Darmstadt, so that when Isadora arrived, she would find accomplished girls and a comfortable bed. From there, she would remember what brought her to teach in the first place, the importance of training the next generation to carry on her legacy. She might not care for her own life any longer, but in the students she could at least see her ideas begin to manifest. That might be enough.