by Bill Adams
Later the Pretender said something that might have revealed the same thought as I propped him up on the way to the lavatory.
“I need a friend like you, Chris. Nonpolitical. No party, no faction. They’ll all want to enlist you when they see you next to me. Don’t let ’em. No politics between us, just our ancient Republic of Books. ’Za deal?”
“You’re the Boss,” I told him. “I’m good at ignoring everything offstage…Just tell me when to duck.”
He grabbed my shoulder hard, locked his bloodshot eyes with mine, and gave a significant nod—then lurched off to use a stall.
I turned to find myself staring Lou Malatesta in the eyes. A broad head on a broad body—it was like facing a wall. I didn’t know how long he’d been listening.
“You did okay today,” he said.
“I guess.”
“Kept the Boss alive. ’Course, you had to keep yourself alive. And you’re always trying to get closer and closer to the Boss, aren’t you, Sly boy? Do you like it when I call you that?”
“Please,” I said. “No compliments in the men’s room. Maybe the next time the Boss is in danger, his bodyguard won’t be watching on the sidelines. Then I could take it easy.”
The Pretender returned, and Malatesta let it go, saying only, “You do that, Sly boy. You take it easy.”
Dawn colored the stained-glass windows and redoubled in the mirrors. But the party did not break up without one last development, the strangest of all. A steward in ducal livery looked in first, probably to make sure we hadn’t reached the stage of sodomy or cannibalism, and a few minutes later returned to announce Julia’s mother.
Lady West had just arrived from the spaceport. No doubt she’d heard about the party when she inquired after another ducal guest, her daughter. At the sound of Lady West’s name, Julia stiffened in her chair; she and Foyle were two of only five or six women present, and all the rest were obvious whores. It was easy to guess what sort of family scene we were about to witness. Or so I thought.
I was completely unprepared for the woman who swept in a moment later to make a social and almost sexual conquest of the entire room. Lady West was taller than Julia, a raven-haired beauty in her forties, wearing a strapless pearl-gray gown that showed off the flawless pale skin of her back and shoulders and traced, without too much vulgar clinging, the curves by which a superbly designed rib cage could reconcile sumptuous breasts with the waist of a greyhound. That’s the prose equivalent of drooling, of course, but inadequate to express her immediate physical impact. Her leopard’s gliding walk took her past Julia—“Poppet, the dress is charming, but you look absolutely dead”—to the Pretender—“Evan, I hear you were dead, so I’ll withhold comment”—and the head of the table. “Oh, are there no chairs?”
Two hulking bravos fell to their knees in their haste to offer up their own seats. With thanks like a Pope’s blessing upon them, she descended in some manner more graceful than sitting and made a general announcement—without seeming to raise her voice—that she had ordered breakfast and strong coffee for the company, though it would be an insult to the Doge not to polish off every open bottle first; she had been promising herself a double brandy for the past six hours. “And now I know you’re sick to death of the story by now, but please, could someone tell me what happened yesterday at the Maelstrom?”
The Pretender, half-sobered the moment she walked in, orchestrated the tale, acting as narrator but calling upon Foyle, myself, and other participants to recount our parts, while those Hard Men still conscious repeated random phrases two beats after hearing them—a geek chorus. The Pretender’s eyes were lustful slits, and his hand occasionally rested on Lady West’s forearm; Julia, by his other arm, looked as pale and shell-shocked as I felt. Lady West was the single most desirable woman I had ever seen.
And worse, she was Domina Wintergrin.
Chapter Eleven
There would be a rational explanation, of course, and I would accept it merrily, merrily…Life is not a dream. I was not in a suspend-sleep tank on the Barbarossa, there were perfectly good causal explanations why Domina should stride into the wrong century looking like sin, why everything in time and space should spiral around me and back to me like the black waters of the Maelstrom headed for the pit. Still, it was too bad I hadn’t poured away more of those drinks.
Morning seemed to have been postponed in the overcast, foggy hour after the party. The gondolier who took my fare didn’t notice. Despite my burnt-out protestations, he recited his usual tour speech, pointing out every bridge where a lover had been stabbed or a would-be dictator lynched in the last eight hundred years. I stretched out as much as I could, my ear close to the lapping water in the darkness, and let reality cut in and out, since that was what it wanted to do.
“Along the Grand Canal, everything changes but the palace. Towers are repaneled, docks are totally rebuilt. But when we go down the Red Canal toward your hotel, my friend, we glide into the past. See that lit window, the turret room of the Cinzano? They call that the Window of the Dark Lady, and I will tell you why…”
And I see Domina standing against the window in nothing but her skin, a vision for the whole world except she’s blown out the candle, but the image of her dark-tipped breasts and pale belly still burns in my mind as I open the door and dash up the stairs, and I can hardly live through the few seconds before I can touch her. Another door opens, and she is in my arms in the darkness, her hot breath against my throat, her clever fingers at the buttons of my shirt and the buckle of my belt. And then it is two more hours before she is again at the window.
From this side she is a silhouette edged in silver, Nexus’s moon tracing moon curves on her hands-and-knees crouch as she peers through the big sandalwood box she keeps on the floor across from our pallet bed. It is a treasure box full of sex toys and sheer silk trappings and one large antique wood-pulp book of watercolors depicting the sixty-five positions we have tried—most of them only once but all of them with a passionate sincerity. For sex is never a joke to Domina, though she smiles and will even laugh at some triumph of endurance or timing. It is life and death to her, and while her obsessiveness is unbalanced and lacks humor, it is also highly erotic—what is more compulsive and single-minded than the act itself? And I can laugh anytime, but may never again have someone like her to guide me along the high night paths, may never again travel to so many peaks or fall from such a height at the finish.
Domina is to sex what the Valkyries were to war. She takes only a hero, and only if he spends his life in the cause—but him she makes immortal. We are at each other constantly, and day shows dark rings under our eyes; but I take a nap in the afternoon, eat like a wolf, and find time to perform miracles of scholarship and art, a whole act of Cyrano translated in a weekend. Always she tests me, but always I prevail. I feel like a demigod and laugh at anyone who tries to put me in my place. The people I wanted to like me hate me, but they must accept me, because I am with her, and she worships me in front of them even though I am her slave.
And now she has found what she was looking for, and gives me a heavy-lidded look. And the long legs shift enticingly as she displays her find with a pose, the most pornographic of lovers, and this is how she trusts me, Evan the satirist, trusts me not to laugh; and I never will. I’m happy to be young and strong enough to face the next hurdle. She lights another candle, and the flame is too bright, too hot, to last for long, but I never believed in the future anyway, where the gondolier is saying,
“Now that is a tough place, my friend—amico mio, they would say here in the Quarter—and I would tell you, amico mio, it is not a place for a tourist to set foot. These are the people who use old tongues and follow old trades and do not like the tourists and their ways. They wouldn’t let you enjoy your drink there—”
And she knows it, but she drags me in anyway, because I’ve said I used to drink here and she doesn’t believe me. But I haven’t risked the dive since the night Lucan Kostain and I had to
take it apart. The bartender hesitates before serving us beers. We’re dressed like students, nothing fancy, but it’s no good, this place is for townies. I tell her to drink up fast, but one of the cargo humpers from the Kostain fight is here tonight, and he sidles up to Domina and tells her just what he’d like to do to her and how often. She lowers her long black lashes demurely and gives him the graphic anatomical reasons why someone like him could not do it, and I curse and drop him with the beer mug, fast, because I’m not sure how close his buddy has come up behind me. Luck is with me; I manage to overturn a table just within the doorway and yank Domina out over it—I don’t care if it hurts her arm—and that slows down pursuit just enough for us to lose them in the rain and fog, running headlong down the streets of the old town and ducking into an alley when we can’t run any more.
Barely able to talk, I curse her and all her fucking games. She tries to hit me and I slap her hand down, I hold her against the wall and she bites me on the neck, but she is undoing the toggles on the front of her long wool coat, and there’s nothing under it, and so we do it fiercely against the wall, as if it were my idea, a punishment, instead of another scenario she has written and I must play, her heat the only warmth in the misty cold, her rasping breath in my ear—breaking as dramatically as an opera singer’s at the climax—the only sound except for the timeless gurgle of water flowing along the drains and into the Red Canal, where the gondolier says,
“—but all these stories end the same. Happy people don’t make history, yes? The ones we remember are the criminals and the lovers who were oh so happy until the night he sees her with another man and says—”
“She’s just a whore, Larkspur.”
“What are you doing, Luc, what’s the point of hanging around in the bushes like this?—I saw you last night, too. Come on, buddy—”
“I’m not your buddy,” Kostain says, his eyes glaring with anger and shame, the heavy shoulders hunched. I’m glad Domina took this apartment off-campus, glad no schoolgirls are hanging out of windows to listen and humiliate the poor bastard further. “But I almost like you,” he goes on, and raps it out faster and faster: “At least you’ve got balls enough to walk your own way in the world, not like the rest of them. That’s why I’m telling you, she’s a whore, she’ll just drag you down, I see you strutting around campus and everybody’s laughing at you, she’s done it all before—every dirty thing she does with you—a dozen times, with me and half the guys you know.”
“And what did you say?” Domina asks a few minutes later. “I could hear him from the window; I couldn’t hear you.”
“I told him to go home.”
“No big deal to you, was it?”
“You told me not to hurt him.”
“I’m sorry for him,” she says. “It’s weak and wrong for him to hang around my place like this, but I’m sorry for him anyway. I’m the one who started calling him the Orphan, you know. I didn’t know how true it was. He’s got nobody, and his trust money will run out when he graduates. He looks tough, but he needs someone to belong to…Do you still think he’s your friend? The things he said—”
“I think he wanted a fight, but…you told me not to hurt him.”
“He’d have killed you,” she says. “He’s enormously strong.”
“Like a bull,” I said, “but I’ve seen him fight. They don’t teach it in prep school.”
“Of course, darling, I forgot. You don’t hate him for fucking me freshman year, or calling me a whore—what’s that to you? But the crime of being rich, nothing can blot that out. You’ll throw away everything I’ve given you to avoid joining the filthy rich.”
“Luv, I don’t care that they have money, I don’t care if they hoard it, I don’t care if they spend it on a thousand foolish luxuries. I would, myself! But your Reform playmates aren’t satisfied with their money. They want people to dance when they say dance, they want to jerk the whole world around on a chain, and what the hell’s the point of it? How they can enter the frat temple, and read the words, and still—”
“Words, words, words!” she yells. “That’s your Kanalism, yours and Summerisle’s. The temple’s just a building, a place to meet, to connect, to decide who’s important and who’s going to lead. And you could have led them! You’re smarter than they are, almost as smart as you think you are, and tougher, more brutal than you let yourself know. And you had me behind you! Do you think there’s anyone else like me? Don’t you know I reached back two thousand years for you, you mythologist, I made myself an archetype for you! Do you think you could have written all those golden words sleeping with a college girl, one of those regular-guy girls, talks like a guy, dresses like a guy, not a lover but a best friend, roommate, partner, ‘working out’ your ‘relationship’—”
Domina’s out of breath, and has to gasp.
“—fucking sexless vegetables! I was willing to make you a king, with a queen to sleep with. I was willing to stand a step behind, pouring all my power into you, because we would be one flesh, one destiny! But you’ve thrown it all away.”
She can’t keep it up, just throws her hands in the air, and her bathrobe falls open—and for the first time it does absolutely nothing for me. She’s just an unclothed human in the harsh light from the bathroom, cords showing in her throat, fishbelly-white skin, a tiny ball of lint in her pubic hair, nothing.
“Luv, you’re raving. Reform Kanalism doesn’t have a ‘destiny.’ You can’t fool all the people all the time; the Column Constitution will never pass. Thirty or forty years from now, no one will even remember it—just another self-indulgent student movement, spoiled kids playing revolution.”
She picks up on it, suddenly more wary than angry. “What do you mean ‘thirty or forty years’? You’re not still considering that navy survey nonsense—”
“Why not? I’ve lost all my prospects here, you’ve got that part right. And they don’t love me any better at home on Wayback. I don’t seem to fit anywhere. Maybe I should try again a few generations down the line.”
“You fool, you imbecile,” she says. “You can’t even let it be known you’ll break with them. Do you know how much they hate you, some of them? That night at De Bourbon’s party, when you gave that poor girl carfare to get her away from Von Bülow—yes, he’s a sick pervert, but you made it public—do you think he’s forgotten that? Power comes first; as long as there’s a chance you’ll join the cause, you’re safe. But they’re afraid of Summerisle’s secrets, and they’re afraid he’ll give them to you. You could ruin it for all of us, and they know it. They could even blame me for—oh, fuck it, run away, that’s good enough. Run like a coward. And when you get back—”
“You’ll be sixty,” I say. “But cheer up, maybe you’ll be ruling the universe. It’s not too late to get Luc back. You could groom him, train him—”
“At least he really loved me!” she screams, a contralto roar. “He’d kill or die for me—he’s a real man, a man of action, not of words. Not a poet!” And that’s the word the door slams on, as loud as thunder in the morning overcast, and the gondolier looks up and shakes his head. Sick with more than hangover, I stumble to my feet on the Angleterre’s dock, find a fair-sized bill in my pocket, and hand it to him as it begins to shower. He starts to sing merrily, merrily, as his boat passes into a curtain of rain and disappears like a dream.
And now for a moment, as I climb the dock stairs, I am truly stuck between visions, tenses, centuries. I have to hold the railing and stop, in the rain, my eyes shut, rejecting a memory, refusing to be on the footbridge over the river gorge that night when I returned to her. The night she tried to kill me.
I went inside, took off my false face, and slept like a dead man.
◆◆◆
“She’s much older than she looks,” Julia said during our lunch in the makeup room at the next rehearsal, a few days later. “I mean, how old would you say Mother looked?”
“I don’t know,�
�� I said. “If you get all your treatments spaced just right when you’re a kid, there’s a plateau between forty-five and, oh, eighty-five, where—to my eyes—you age very little at all. Women always seem to be able to guess it within five years. But I’d certainly say Lady West was near the beginning of that stretch.”
“My mother,” Julia said, “is over a hundred and twenty years old.” She ate up my phony surprise with the remainder of her cucumber sandwich, then admitted, “Physiologically, you’re right. She was born the same year as Evan; in fact, they went to college together, though I gather they weren’t friends. But when the Alignment fell, she did a strange thing. She went into deep-suspend.”
“Never heard of it.” And I hadn’t. I had managed to consult a few Larkspur biographies in the last two days, though, and had discovered that Domina barely appeared in any of them; I didn’t know what to make of that yet.
“Deep-suspend?” Julia looked surprised. “It’s quite common now, though expensive. At the time, though, it was experimental—and ruinously expensive. It’s like suspend-sleep, only more so; you can do it for longer without psychological damage because there’s no mental activity.”
“No danger of sensory deprivation, then,” I said. “So no need to feed the sleepers enhanced dreams.”
“That’s right, though not everyone can last long periods like Mother. She was able to stay under for all but a week or two a year. She stayed young while her generation went into middle age. She would get a digest of current events when she woke up at the end of each year, and would decide what to invest in, which politicians to bribe—I don’t know what else. I guess she wanted to find out whether the Column would succeed or fail before committing the best years of her life to it. I guess there were no people she was committed to.”