V. in love

 I

 The clock inside the Gare du Nord read 11:17: Paris time minus five minutes,  Belgian railway time plus four minutes, mid-Europe time minus 56 minutes. To  Melanie, who had forgotten her traveling clock - who had forgotten  everything - the hands might have stood anywhere. She hurried through the  station behind an Algerian-looking facteur who carried her one embroidered  bag lightly on his shoulder, who smiled and joked with customs officials  being driven slowly to frenzy by a beseeching mob of English tourists.

By the cover of Le Soleil, the Orleanist morning paper, it was 24 July 1913.  Louis Philippe Robert, due d'Orleans, was the current Pretender. Certain  quarters of Paris raved under the heat of Sirius, were touched by its halo  of plague, which is nine light-years from rim to center. Among the upper  rooms of a new middle-class home in the 17th arrondissement Black Mass was  held every Sunday.

Melanie l'Heuremaudit was driven away down the rue La Fayette in a noisy  auto-taxi. She sat in the exact center of the seat, while behind her the  three massive arcades and seven allegorical statues of the Gare slowly  receded into a lowering, pre-autumn sky. Her eyes were dead, her nose  French: the strength there and about the chin and lips made her resemble the  classical rendering of Liberty. In all, the face was quite beautiful except  for the eyes, which were the color of freezing rain. Melanie was fifteen.

Had fled from school in Belgium as soon as she received the letter from her  mother, with 1500 francs and the announcement that her support would  continue, though all Papa's possessions had been attached by the court. The  mother had gone off to tour Austria-Hungary. She did not expect to see  Melanie in the foreseeable future.

Melanie's head ached, but she didn't care. Or did but not where she was,  here present as a face and a ballerina's figure on the bouncing back seat of  a taxi. The driver's neck was soft, white: wisps of white hair straggled  from under the blue stocking cap. On reaching the intersection with the  Boulevard Haussmann, the car turned right up rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. To  her left rose the dome of the Opera, and tiny Apollo, with his golden lyre .  . .

"Papa!" she screamed.

The driver winced, tapped the brake reflexively. "I am not your father," he  muttered.

Up into the heights of Montmartre, aimed for the most diseased part of the  sky. Would it rain? The clouds hung like leprous tissue. Under that light  the color of her hair reduced to neutral browns, buffs. Let down the hair  reached halfway over her buttocks. But she wore it high with two large curls  covering her ears, tickling the sides of her neck.

Papa had a strong bald skull and a brave mustache. Evenings she would come  softly into the room, the mysterious place walled in silk where he and her  mother slept. And while Madeleine combed the hair of Maman in the other  room, Melanie lay on the wide bed beside him, while he touched her in many  places, and she squirmed and fought not to make a sound. It was their game.  One night there had been heat lightning outside, and a small night bird had  lit on the windowsill and watched them. How long ago it seemed! Late summer,  like today.

This had been at Serre Chaude, their estate in Normandy, once the ancestral  home of a family whose blood had long since turned to a pale ichor and  vaporized away into the frosty skies over Amiens. The house, which dated  from the reign of Henri IV, was large but unimpressive, like most  architecture of the period. She had always wanted to slide down the great  mansard roof: begin at the top and skid down the first gentle slope. Her  skirt would fly above her hips, her black-stockinged legs would writhe matte  against a wilderness of chimneys, under the Norman sunlight. High over the  elms and the hidden carp pods, up where Maman could only be a tiny blotch  under a parasol, gazing at her. She imagined the sensation often: the  feeling of roof-tiles rapidly sliding beneath the hard curve of her rump,  the wind trapped under her blouse teasing the new breasts. And then the  break: where the lower, steeper slope of the roof began, the point of no  return, where the friction against her body would lessen and she would  accelerate, flip over to twist the skirt - perhaps rip it off, be done with  it, see it flutter away, like a dark kite! - to let the dovetailed tiles  tense her nipple-points to an angry red, see a pigeon clinging to the eaves  just before flight, taste the long hair caught against her teeth and tongue,  cry out . . .

The taxi stopped in front of a cabaret in the rue Germaine Pilon, near  Boulevard Clichy. Melanie paid the fare and was handed her bag from the top  of the cab. She felt something which might be the beginning of the rain  against her cheek. The cab drove away, she stood before Le Nerf in an empty  street, the flowered bag without gaiety under the clouds.

"You believed us after all." M. Itague stood, half-stooping, holding the  handle of the traveling bag. "Come, fetiche, inside. There's news."

On the small stage, which faced a dining room filled only with stacked  tables and chairs, and lit by uncertain August daylight, came the  confrontation with Satin.

"Mlle. Jarretiere"; using her stage name. He was short and heavily built:  the hair stuck out in tufts from each side of his head. He wore tights and a  dress shirt, and directed his eyes parallel to a line connecting her  hip-points. The skirt was two years old, she was growing. She felt  embarrassed.

"I have nowhere to stay," she murmured.

"Here," announced Itague, "there's a back room. Here, until we move."

"Move?" She gazed at the raving flesh of tropical blossoms decorating her  bag.

"We have the Theatre de Vincent Castor," cried Satin. He spun, leaped,  landed atop a small stepladder.

Itague grew excited, describing L'Enlevement des Vierges Chinoises - Rape of  the Chinese Virgins. It was to be Satin's finest ballet, the greatest music  of Vladimir Porcepic, everything formidable. Rehearsals began tomorrow,  she'd saved the day, they would have waited until the last minute because it  could only be Melanie, La Jarretiere, to play Su Feng, the virgin who is  tortured to death defending her purity against the invading Mongolians.

She had wandered away, to the edge of stage right. Itague stood in the  center, gesturing, declaiming: while enigmatic on the stepladder, stage  left, perched Satin, humming a music-hall song.

A remarkable innovation would be the use of automata, to play Su Feng's  handmaidens. "A German engineer is building them," said Itague. "They're  lovely creatures: one will even unfasten your robes. Another will play a  zither - although the music itself comes from the pit. But they move so  gracefully! Not like machines at all."

Was she listening? Of course: part of her. She stood awkwardly on one leg,  reached down and scratched her calf, hot under its black stocking. Satin  watched hungrily. She felt the twin curls moving restless against her neck.  What was he saying? Automata . . .

She gazed up at the sky, through one of the room's side windows. God, would  it ever rain?

 

Her room was hot and airless. Asprawl in one corner was an artist's lay  figure, without a head. Old theater posters were scattered on the floor and  bed, tacked to the wall. She thought once she heard thunder rumbling from  outside.

"Rehearsals will be here," Itague told her. "Two weeks before the  performance we move into the Theatre de Vincent Castor, to get the feel of  the boards." He used much theater talk. Not long ago he'd been a bartender  near Place Pigalle.

Alone, she lay on the bed, wishing she could pray for rain. She was glad she  couldn't see the sky. Perhaps certain of its tentacles already touched the  roof of the cabaret. Someone rattled the door. She had thought to lock it.  It was Satin she knew. Soon she heard the Russian and Itague leave together  by the back door.

She may not have slept: her eyes opened to the same dim ceiling. A mirror  hung on the ceiling directly over the bed. She hadn't noticed it before.  Deliberately she moved her legs, leaving her arms limp at her sides, till  the hem of the blue skirt had worked high above the tops of the stockings.  And lay gazing at the black and tender white. Papa had said "How pretty your  legs are: the legs of a dancer." She could not wait for the rain.

She rose, in a near-frenzy, removed blouse, skirt and undergarments and  moved swiftly to the door, wearing only the black stockings and white buck  tennis shoes. Somewhere on the way she managed to let down her hair. In the  next room she found the costumes for L'Enlevement des Vierges Chinoises. She  felt her hair, heavy and almost viscous along the length of her back and  tickling the tops of her buttocks as she knelt beside the large box and  searched for the costume of Su Feng.

Back in the hot room she quickly removed shoes and stockings, keeping her  eyes closed tight until she had fastened her hair in back with the spangled  amber comb. She was not pretty unless she wore something. The sight of her  nude body repelled her. Until she had drawn on the blond silk tights,  embroidered up each leg with a long, slender dragon; stepped into the  slippers with the cut steel buckles, and intricate straps which writhed up  halfway to her knees. Nothing to restrain her breasts: she wrapped the  underskirt tightly around her hips. It fastened with thirty hooks and eyes  from waist to thigh-top, leaving a fur-trimmed slit so that she could dance.  And finally, the kimono, translucent and dyed rainbowlike with sunbursts and  concentric rings of cerise, amethyst, gold and jungly green.

She lay back once more, hair spread above her on the pillowless mattress,  breath taken by her own beauty. If Papa could see her.

The lay figure in the corner was light and carried easily to the bed. She  raised her knees high and - interested - saw her calves in the mirror  crisscross over the small of its plaster back. Felt the coolness of the  figure's flanks against the nudecolored silk, high on her thighs, hugged it  tight. The neck top, jagged and flaking off, came to her breasts. She  pointed her toes, began to dance horizontal, thinking of how her handmaidens  would be.

 

Tonight there would be a magic-lantern show. Itague sat outside L'Ouganda,  drinking absinthe and water. The stuff was supposed to be aphrodisiac but it  affected Itague the opposite. He watched a Negro girl, one of the dancers,  adjusting her stocking. He thought of francs and centimes.

There weren't many. The scheme might succeed. Porcepic had a name among the  avant-garde in French music. Opinion in the city was violently divided: once  the composer had been loudly insulted in the street by one of the most  venerable of the Post-Romantics. Certainly the man's personal life wasn't  one to endear many prospective patrons, either. Itague suspected him of  smoking hashish. And there was the Black Mass.

"The poor child," Satin was saying. The table in front of him was nearly  covered with empty wine glasses. The Russian moved them from time to time,  blocking out the choreography to l'Enlevement. Satin drank wine like a  Frenchman, Itague thought: never outright falling-down drunk. But growing  more unstable, more nervous, as his chorus of hollow glass dancers grew.  "Does she know where her father's gone?" Satin wondered aloud, looking off  into the street. The night was windless, hot. Darker than itague could ever  remember it. Behind them the small orchestra began to play a tango. The  Negro girl arose and went inside. To the south, the lights along the Champs  Elysees picked out the underbelly of a nauseous-yellow cloud.

"With the father deserted," said Itague, "she's free. The mother doesn't care."

The Russian looked up, sudden. A glass fell over on his table.

 

"- or nearly free."

"Fled to the jungles, I understand," Satin said. A waiter brought more wine.

"A gift. What had he ever given before? Have you seen the child's furs, her  silks, the way she watches her own body? Heard the noblesse in the way she  speaks? He gave her all that. Or was he giving it all to himself, by way of  her?"

"Itague, she certainly could be the most giving -"

"No. No, it is merely being reflected. The girl functions as a mirror. You,  that waiter, the chiffonnier in the next empty street she turns into:  whoever happens to be standing in front of the mirror in the place of that  wretched man. You will see the reflection of a ghost."

"M. Itague, your late readings may have convinced you -"

"I said ghost," Itague answered softly. "Its name is not l'Heuremaudit, or  l'Heuremaudit is only one of its names. That ghost fills the walls of this  cafe and the streets of this district, perhaps every one of the world's  arrondissements breathes its substance. Cast in the image of what? Not God.  Whatever potent spirit can mesmerize the gift of ir reversible flight into a  grown man and the gift of self-arousal into the eyes of a young girl, his  name is unknown. Or if known then he is Yahweh and we are all Jews, for no  one will ever speak it." Which was strong talk for M. Itague. He read La  Libre Parole, had stood among the crowds to spit at Captain Dreyfus.

The woman stood at their table, not waiting for them to rise, merely  standing and looking as if she'd never waited for anything.

"Will you join us," said Satin eagerly. Itague looked far to the south, at  the hanging yellow cloud which hadn't changed its shape.

She owned a dress shop in the rue du Quatre-Septembre. Wore tonight a  Poiret-inspired evening dress of crepe Georgette the color of a Negro's  head, beaded all over, covered with a cerise tunic which was drawn in under  her breasts, Empire style. A harem veil covered the lower part of her face  and fastened behind to a tiny hat riotous with the plumage of equatorial  birds. Fan with amber stick, ostrich feathers, silk tassel. Sand-colored  stockings, clocked exquisitely on the calf. Two brilliant-studded  tortoise-shell pins through her hair; silver mesh bag, high-buttoned kid  shoes with patent leather at the toe and French heel.

Who knew her "soul," Itague wondered, glancing sideways at the Russian. It  was her clothes, her accessories, which determined her, fixed her among the  mobs of tourist ladies and putains that filled the street.

"Our prima ballerina has arrived today," said Itague. He was always nervous  around patrons. As bartender he'd seen no need to be diplomatic.

"Melanie l'Heuremaudit," his patroness smiled. "When shall I meet her?"

"Any time," Satin muttered, shifting glasses, keeping his eyes on the table.

"Was there objection from the mother?" she asked.

The mother did not care, the girl herself, he suspected, did not care. The  father's flight had affected her in some curious way. Last year she'd been  eager to learn, inventive, creative. Satin would have his hands full this  year. They would end up screaming at each other. No: the girl wouldn't  scream.

The woman sat, lost in watching the night, which enveloped them like a  velvet teaser-curtain. Itague, for all his time in Montmartre, had never  seen behind it to the bare wall of the night. But had this one? He  scrutinized her, looking for some such betrayal. He'd observed the face  some dozen times. It had always gone through conventional grimaces, smiles,  expressions of what passed for emotion. The German could build another,  Itague thought, and no one could tell them apart.

The tango still played: or perhaps a different one, he hadn't been  listening. A new dance, and popular. The head and body had to be kept erect,  the steps had to be precise, sweeping, graceful. It wasn't like the waltz.  In that dance was room for an indiscreet billow of crinolines, a naughty  word whispered through mustaches into an ear all ready to blush. But here no  words, no deviating: simply the wide spiral, turning about the dancing  floor, gradually narrowing, tighter, until there was no motion except for  the steps, which led nowhere. A dance for automata.

The curtain hung in total stillness. If Itague could have found its pulleys  or linkage, he might make it stir. Might penetrate to the wall of the  night's theater. Feeling suddenly alone in the wheeling, mechanical darkness  of la Ville-Lumiere, he wanted to cry, Strike! Strike the set of night and  let us all see . . .

The woman had been watching him, expressionless, poised like one of her own  mannequins. Blank eyes something to hang a Poiret dress on. Porcepic, drunk  and singing, approached their table.

The song was in Latin. He'd just composed it for a Black Mass to be held  tonight at his home in Les Batignolles. The woman wanted to come. Itague saw  this immediately: a film seemed to drop from her eyes. He sat forlorn,  feeling as if that most feared enemy of sleep had entered silently on a busy  night, the one person whom you must come face to face with someday, who asks  you, in the earshot of your oldest customers, to mix a cocktail whose name  you have never heard.

They left Satin shuffling empty wine-glasses, looking as if tonight, in some  tenantless street, he would murder.

 

Melanie dreamed. The lay figure hung half off the bed, its arms stretched  out, crucified, one stump touching her breast. It was the sort of dream in  which, possibly, the eyes are open: or the last vision of the room is so  reproduced in memory that all details are perfect, and the dreamer is  unclear whether he is asleep or awake. The German stood over the bed  watching her. He was Papa, but also a German.

"You must turn over," he repeated insistently. She was too embarrassed to  ask why. Her eyes - which somehow she was able to see, as if she were  disembodied and floating above the bed, perhaps somewhere behind the  quicksilver of the mirror-her eyes were slanted Oriental: long lashes,  spangled on the upper lids with tiny fragments of gold leaf. She glanced  sideways at the lay figure. It had grown a head, she thought. The face was  turned away. "To reach between your shoulderblades," said the German. What  does he look for there, she wondered.

"Between my thighs," she whispered, moving on the bed. The silk there was  dotted with the same gold, like sequins. He placed his hand under her  shoulder, turned her. The skirt twisted on her thighs: she saw their two  inner edges blond and set off by the muskrat skin on the slit of the skirt.  The Melanie in the mirror watched sure fingers move to the center of her  back, search, find a small key, which he began to wind.

"I got you in time," he breathed. "You would have stopped, had I not. . ."

The face of the lay figure had, been turned toward her, all the time. There  was no face.

She woke up, not screaming, but moaning as if sexually aroused.

 

Itague was bored. This Black Mass had attracted the usual complement of  nervous and blase. Porcepic's music was striking, as usual; highly  dissonant. Lately he had been experimenting with African polyrhythyms.  Afterward Gerfaut the writer sat by a window, discoursing on how for some  reason the young girl - adolescent or younger - had again become the mode in  erotic fiction. Gerfaut had two or three chins, sat erect and spoke  pedantically, though he had only Itague for an audience.

Itague didn't really want to talk with Gerfaut. He wanted to watch the woman  who had come with them. She sat now in a side pew with one of the acolytes,  a little sculptress from Vaugirard. The woman's hand, gloveless, and  decorated only with a ring, stroked the girl's temple as they spoke. From  the ring there sprouted a slender female arm, fashioned in silver. The land  was cupped, and held the lady's cigarette. As Itague watched she lit  another: black paper, gold crest. A small pile of stubs lay scattered  beneath her shoes.

Gerfaut had been describing the plot of his latest novel. The heroine was  one Doucette, thirteen and struggled within by passions she could not name.

"A child, and yet a woman," Gerfaut said. "And a quality of something  eternal about her. I even confess to a certain leaning of my own that way.  La Jarretiere . . ."

The old satyr.

Gerfaut at length moved away. It was nearly morning. Itague's head ached. He  needed sleep, needed a woman. The lady still smoked her black cigarettes.  The little sculptress lay, legs curled up on the seat, head pillowed against  her companion's breasts. The black hair seemed to float like a drowned  corpse's hair against the cerise tunic. The entire room and the bodies  inside it - some twisted, some coupled, some awake - the scattered Hosts,  the black furniture, were all bathed in an exhausted yellow light, filtered  through rain clouds which refused to burst.

The lady was absorbed in burning tiny holes with the tip of her cigarette,  through the skirt of the young girl. Itague watched as the pattern grew. She  was writing ma fetiche, in black-rimmed holes. The sculptress wore no  lingerie. So that when the lady finished the words would be spelled out by  the young sheen of the girl's thighs. Defenseless? Itague wondered briefly.

 

II

 The next day the same clouds were over the city, but it did not rain.  Melanie had awakened in the Su Feng costume, excited as soon as her eyes  recognized the image in the mirror, knowing it hadn't rained. Porcepic  showed up early with a guitar. He sat on the stage and sang sentimental  Russian ballads about willow trees, students getting drunk and going off on  sleigh-rides, the body of his love floating belly up in the Don. (A dozen  young gathered round the samovar to read novels aloud: where had youth  gone?) Porcepic, nostalgic, snuffled over his guitar.

Melanie, looking newly scrubbed and wearing the dress she'd arrived in,  stood behind him, hands over his eyes, and caroled harmony. Itague found  them that way. In the yellow light, framed by the stage, they seemed like a  picture he'd seen somewhere once. Or perhaps it was only the melancholy  notes of the guitar, the subdued looks of precarious joy on their faces. Two  young people conditionally at peace in the dog days. He went into the bar  and began chipping away at a large block of ice; put the chips into an empty  champagne bottle and filled the bottle with water.

By noon the dancers had arrived, most of the girls seemingly deep in a love  affair with Isadora Duncan. They moved over the stage like languid moths,  gauzy tunics fluttering limp. Itague guessed half the men were homosexual.  The other half dressed that way: foppish. He sat at the bar and watched as  Satin began the blocking.

"Which one is she?" The woman again. In Montmartre, 1913, people  materialized.

"Over there with Porcepic."

She hurried over to be introduced. Vulgar, thought Itague, and then amended  it at once to "uncontrollable." Perhaps? A little. La Jarretiere stood there  only gazing. Porcepic looked upset, as if they'd had an argument. Poor,  young, pursued, fatherless. What would Gerfaut make of her? A wanton. In  body if he could; in the pages of a manuscript most certainly. Writers had  no moral sense.

Porcepic sat at the piano, playing Adoration of the Sun. It was a tango with  cross-rhythms. Satin had devised some near-impossible movements to go with  it. "It cannot be danced," screamed a young man, leaping from the stage to  land, belligerent, in front of Satin.

Melanie had hurried off to change to her Su Feng costume. Lacing on her  slippers she looked up and saw the woman, leaning in the doorway.

"You are not real."

"I . . ." Hands resting dead on her thighs.

"Do you know what a fetish is? Something of a woman which gives pleasure but  is not a woman. A shoe, a locket . . . une jarretiere. You are the same, not  real but an object of pleasure."

Melanie could not speak.

"What are you like unclothed? A chaos of flesh. But as Su Feng, lit by  hy............