The Green Muse (10 page)

 

I
AM HOME
now, after my first day of work at La Salpêtrière. Richet spent hours just showing me around: The place is a city, an endless labyrinthine series of hallways all identical; I half expected a Minotaur. If this place that houses five thousand souls were a city, its patients could walk its streets freely, stopping to talk to neighbors and shopkeepers along the way. There would be blue above, or the famous pearl gray of the Paris sky. Here the halls are dim, and although the ceilings are not low they feel low: I had the impression that we were in fact underground here, and every window was a surprise.

And it seems as if one can walk for what seems like miles without seeing a window. The halls are all lit with electric light, with which I am unfamiliar; it disorients me. I was shown the rooms where hydrotherapy is performed, with their constantly working bellows assuring a steady supply of hot water; I glimpsed a young woman immersed to her neck in a steaming tub over which a tarp had been placed; she was kicking her legs, causing water to spill from beneath the tarp, and screaming in the most awful language at what she called her captors.

“You're going to have to learn to be tough,” Richet said to me, “if you are to work in this place.” And then, as I look hastily away from both the wailing woman and him, “But your sensitivity shows in your photographs, and that is just what is wanted for our studies here. I just do not want you to be damaged by the things you see and hear at La Salpêtrière.”

“I am no delicate flower, Richet,” I reminded my friend, but he ignored that and started talking about how all the methods and equipment here are state-­of-­the-­art, the finest anywhere.

I saw the electroshock machines, black boxes with shiny knobs, and Richet explained how a jolt of electricity to the brain has been proven to activate certain dormant centers, thereby bringing a cataleptic back to life or calming the wild spirit of the madwoman out of control.

It was a city with dark places indeed, and I was relieved that there were no patients in that room when we were present.

I did not know which would be more difficult: looking death in the face day after day or observing the details of lives destroyed by insanity.

Although I was hot to see the Amphitheatre, it was closed up (tomorrow I was to photograph, for the first time, a patient from this place). Richet showed me the room behind the Amphitheatre, a large space replete with plaster casts of former hysterical patients, death masks, two skeletons, a man's and a woman's, and various tools and equipment Dr. Charcot uses in his studies and experiments. It was a most satisfying place.

There was a darkroom, off to the left, with all of the latest photographic equipment; and Richet showed it to me proudly. I envied the electric lamp, the shiny new zinc trays, the rows of bottles containing every kind of developer imaginable. Stacks of gleaming glass plates, stacks of paper ready to be treated. Long marble countertops so unlike the space I have to make do with at home. The sinks were zinc, and deep, and as Richet showed me each item it was obvious he loved this place, and I knew that I would come to love it as well; the idea that its strangeness would in time be replaced by a comfortable familiarity was a solace to me: La Salpêtrière is a cold, forbidding place, and I look forward to a not-­too-­distant future when I feel at home in its great hallways, no matter that today this seems an impossible goal.

I was anxious to meet with the great Dr. Charcot of whom I had heard so much. But Richet informed me that the doctor was busy, and would be busy, for several hours. His dedication to his work was common knowledge, his stamina legendary. I was not to see him today.

Everywhere I went I saw the sad inhabitants of this placed, walked or drawn along or half-­dragged by burly young male attendants. There was not a single smile from either, and no words exchanged that I heard. I had to remind myself several times that I was here to help these poor souls only by documenting the phases of the illnesses, that the Father of Neurology might study these illnesses in a new and different light.

But still the obvious suffering made me uneasy.

At home that evening I looked at my darkroom with a jaundiced eye, but I was determined not to let envy eat at my spirit.

I tried to remember I was a lucky man, and I intended to live up to my possibly unrealistic expectations. “You cannot save the world,” Richet said when he saw my expression as one of the unfortunates of the institution was led past us this afternoon. I knew that I could not save the world, and I did not intend to try. But what I could do was help Richet and the great Dr. Charcot improve the lives of the women housed at La Salpêtrière.

And that would be enough.

 

I
MISS
MY
hairbrush. I miss the hair oil Maman and I made together, rosemary and lavender oils mixed with vanilla for my brown hair. I would have preferred oil of lemon, which is suggested for blonde hair, but Maman would take a length of my ordinary brown and explain, once again, that lemon for blondes, or saffron, which is used on red hair, would only bring about damage to my own mouse-­fur locks.

Every evening I daubed a bit of this mixture onto the brush, let my hair fall, and bent my head until my hair swung freely almost to the floor. Some nights Maman would brush it for me, one hundred strokes. Some nights, when I preferred to dream, I did it myself, although Maman would stand in the doorway with a worried pout on her pretty face. But I would turn away, then I would lower my head and close my eyes and it was Louis brushing my hair, Louis' hand on the brush; why can I not remember him here? The smell of his person, which was not one particular smell, no soap or cologne but only his scent, the scent of his hair and skin: It is lost to me. Sometimes after I had seen him I would let down a lock of hair on my way home and hold it across my face that I might smell his scent before it faded. And now it is entirely gone. Everything about Louis is gone, has been gone since that awful moment in my room. Oh, am I really so wicked? I must be, and losing my memories of Louis, which were both so immediate to the senses and so precious to me, must be my punishment. And my penance is to be served here, where the smell of steam pervades the halls, and a strange undeniable odor that smells like nothing I have ever known, nothing I could ever have imagined before they brought me here: the pervasive, intangible scent of fear.

They have given me a scratchy white cotton dress that barely covers my shoulders, and a blue smock. Flat leather shoes and thick white stockings; there are no petticoats at all. The stockings itch. I have no mirror to gauge my ugliness.

There is a small panel on the window to my little room; it is covered with closed curtains of indeterminate hue, and I dare not open them, lest by the noise I excite the interest of one of the male orderlies who prowl these halls. Every time I hear footsteps the globe in my throat threatens to strangle me. That had come over me, of late, even when at home, most often before or after seeing Louis. As I neared his shop my breathing would all at once begin to quicken, and my throat would seem to have an obstruction, and I would find myself stopped and standing with my hand at my throat and my heart in my mouth. I knew what it was a symptom of, but I refused to believe it. I took it as a symptom of love.

Now all of a sudden I felt my heart begin to pound. I was afraid, suddenly, of what I did not know. The blank white walls of my room shimmered and seemed almost about to move. My heart constricted, and I could hardly breathe. What was wrong with my heart? It was beating almost out of control; my throat began to tighten, as though a great, angry hand were reaching down my throat to pull my heart out of my body. Suddenly I thought that I might actually die here, a thought I had never seriously considered before. I am young; I have always been healthy: What was happening to me now?

I walked with agitation about the room. The bed, the small table, the dirty mullioned window, all seemed designed to create a sense of oppression,

Ah. My heart had calmed. It was merely the shock of being here.

The attendants frightened me, with their white smocks and tight mouths. They were all men, and so big! As big as farm boys. And they never said a word, not one of them. There was one who smiled at me, but I was not sure I liked it. He had insinuating eyes. Other than that, he was like Gérard back home, with a face like a cow's and a clod-­footed gait. But oh, I would be happy even to see Gérard in this dreary place! Anybody from home, anybody who smelt of dandelions and meadow air. It is always stuffy here; I suppose they think we should escape out the windows if they were opened up. Certainly I would run away!

The other women here are so different from any I have ever met as to seem almost another species. There is an old woman who shouts that she is Mary Magdalene; she is old enough to be Mary Magdalene . . . but I am being uncharitable. There are several women who for much of the time are kept in what are called straitjackets; the straitjacket immobilizes the arms by securing them inside long sleeves that are then wrapped around the body and fastened tightly at the back. These poor souls are piteous indeed.

There is one who woman who does not speak, but emits high-­pitched screams at intermittent intervals, her face impassive all the while. She rouses my pity. I tried once to approach her, a vacant-­eyed woman older than I but with the eyes and unlined face of a child, but the moment I came near she screamed and screamed, all the while seeming completely unaware of me. And a burly attendant hurried over and took her brusquely by the arm and hurried her away; he was very rough with the poor thing, and I felt responsible both for her distress and her punishment.

There are those who mumble, those who hold converse with the air and the walls. There is Marie-­Renée, who talks to herself, quietly, all the time. And the woman who screams is called Lucille. She has been at La Salpêtrière almost all her life; she has been as she is almost all her life. This really is her home, although she seems to be unaware of almost everything around her. Something draws me to her; perhaps it is simply that she is clearly more helpless even than I am.

And then there are those women who do not seem the least bit insane; we eye one another warily, unsure. I have been afraid to speak to any of the other women, and even more afraid, I think, lest they speak to me. But I am intrigued by some of them. There is Lise, for example, whose husband wanted to marry another and so had her put away. And there is one in particular, a girl roughly my own age, with big brown eyes under a fringe of dark hair. She spends a great deal of time staring out of the big windows. There is nothing to see. Her doe eyes are often sad; but so are my blue ones, I suppose. Laughter is against the rules, I do think.

All I have is this journal, this bad ink, and Maman's advice to me about flesh worms. My skin is not prone to these pernicious and disgusting creatures that leave a black mark on the face and come out all yellow-­white and putrid if you press at the skin around them. What would I do about them anyway? Well, I suppose the soap here, which is so abrasive, is a good preventative in itself; it practically takes the skin right off, it is so harsh.

Ah. I hear footsteps in the hall. I believe it is time for my hydrotherapy session.

 

A
FTER OUR MARR
IAGE
we never saw Theo or Laurence. I told her they were vulgar and morbid, but she lamented Theo. She spoke more candidly than any woman I had ever met.

We never went back to the Morgue. We had our own bodies, and each other's, and the repeated exchange of caresses consumed all desires. I learned things from her that I cannot even name. She had no family. She had no past. There were intimations––she reassured my jealousies and poured me absinthe.

We went to Italy. We made love in an old graveyard in a forgotten suburb. She liked to read aloud the names of the dead.
The dead show me how alive we are. The dead excite me.

One Sunday after our return she persuaded me to drive into the country. I expected an inn, or a forest with a creek where we could undress and hope for prying eyes. She would have been equally at home in either.
I love the feel of dirt between my naked thighs
, she told me.
I like the way the twigs and stones bite my skin.
And yet she also loved silk sheets and firelight.

After a two-­and-­a-­half-­hour drive, our carriage pulled up at a Carmelite nunnery, a great old stone monument in the middle of empty hills. Where I was born, she told me as we waited at the door. And the sister who answered the door cried out in joy; she called my lover by a childhood name; she led us to a bare table. My lover embraced the nuns, and looked at me and smiled. The nuns turned the bare table into a table of plenty for her sake. Clearly they loved her. They told me what a lovely child she had been, how quick to learn her catechism, how diligent in her studies.

I could not see her here, although I tried. A small blonde head silhouetted against a rainy windowpane; a light fast step just around the corner in the vaulted hall. I could not see her. Yet to the sisters she was real.

“You see?” she told me afterward, her hand soft inside my pocket against my leg. “I received excellent training. Don't you think?” Pushing against the satin to reach her fingers up along my thigh.

I never asked her anything. She chose to give me the convent. She could have given me something less pleasant. On our wedding night she bled, but I have heard there are ways to assure a timely bleeding.

I could hardly bear the obligatory darkness of the wedding night. Before a week was out, I was watching her undress. I would hold her mirror as she washed.
Pissoir
was a word she liked;
baiser
. She astonished me.

I might not have minded images other than those the nuns showed me. Somehow she knew; and she arranged a scene for me. One day I came in from the rain to absinthe on the sideboard, and a lighted candlestick at the bottom of the stairs. She made no answer to my calls.

I went up the dark steps. The door to her bedroom was locked. I went into my own room, where I found another small glass of absinthe. There was no light beneath the door that connected our rooms. That door was never closed.

I stood for a moment, frightened, with my fingers on the cold doorknob. The door opened without a sound.

The bed was hung with silk and tapestry. There were tasseled pillows all around it and satin bedsheets, with silk pillow shams; there was an antique lace throw and lace bedspreads of every description.

She lay white across the bed. I could hardly see her: a shadow, an intimation of flesh. Her languidity was desire itself. She lay silent. Absinthe made me unsure of what I saw: my love, covered with roses, roses trailing red petals down her arms, overflowing her hands, her hands dripping petals drifting to a silken pile on the floor.

She had slit her wrists. There were no flowers. She was not silent; she said my name, the one candle turned the blood all gold, and I was by her side.

I knelt, I took her hand, and blood ran silently all over my hand too. She looked at me without expression, like a cat. I bent my mouth to her hand and bloodied my lips. She had done this for me, that I might choose. The candle guttered in a sudden wind, a shutter flung itself loose and clapped against the wall. She tried to smile. Her life was mine, to recapture or destroy. If I wanted, she could be behind the glass of the Paris Morgue tomorrow. I could leave her naked along an alley, and she would be displayed that way, with only a white sheet to cover her body. For a moment I imagined her as all Paris would see her, and I was quickened by desire. Then I tore off my jacket and ripped the lining of the sleeves, that I might make a tourniquet. I lifted her arms, both cut with a knife that she had managed to lay back on its plate next to the apple she must have been eating. The blade was bloody; and the blood and the apple made me laugh. I laughed as I bound up her wounds

“A new Eden,” I told her as I lifted her head. “We have made a new Eden, where there is no temptation in the apples of this Earth.” I felt the soft sigh of her breath when I laid her head against my neck.

When I was certain her wounds had stopped their bleeding, I lifted a sugar cube to her mouth. I dipped my finger into the glass of absinthe I had found on the mantelpiece; I brought it to her lips and said, “Suck.” And she closed her eyes and breathed in the sweetness of sugar and blood and wormwood, and that night, when I made our choice for her, our souls became one soul.

Time passed. Time made me love her more. We traveled again; we experienced every kind of passion; every act, every aspect. We lived entirely in the moment, and the moment was sweet. There was never anything we longed for: no other place, no other food or drink or company. We had no need of anyone but each other. I would do anything to please her, and she knew that. One day she decided we must return to Paris. We were in Constantinople. We had only arrived two days before; but she said we must go, and I willingly gave up Nicea and the Bosporus crossing. She wanted to go; we would go.

We arrived at the Gare Montparnasse on a rainy night, a night much like the one when I was first alone with her, albeit much warmer. As we waited in the rain for a free cab, she said, “I do not want to go to the house.”

“We will go wherever you wish,” I said, but when she told me I was astonished. I asked her to repeat herself.

“You heard me,” she said.

The most dangerous quarter in the city. There was nothing there for a lady of quality; there was much there in the way of pleasure, if you took your pleasure coarse. I knew in an instant what she wanted there—­she had bought me a large knife as a present in Rome, and I had never doubted what it was for.

When we got into the cab she threw the lap rug over us both, despite the warmth.

“Do you have your knife?” was all she said. I had carried it with me, in the large inner pocket of my coat, from the day she gave it to me. When I bought a light, long coat for late-­spring wear I made sure it had a large pocket on the inside.

Beneath the throw she stroked me to hardness, and I knew I would do whatever she wanted.

When we reached the quarter the rain had stopped. The streets seemed at first to be deserted, but then I saw the women in the doorways. I became almost afraid; of her, of my love! The fear was sweet to me, a feeling almost of intoxication, with the same voluptuous disarrangement of the senses. The wet cobblestones fractured the light and sent it up in sharp little knives. The women remained. I wanted to touch the breasts of one of these women, to touch her neck.

V walked easily toward the nearest building, a dim brick tenement utterly like all the others. Watching her I became aware of how little I knew her, and I felt my love for her quicken. I followed, content to let her set the rules of this game.

The door closed behind us, and we were left in utter darkness. Then V stood smiling in a flare of candlelight. She was holding a dirty porcelain candleholder with a stub in it. I didn't recognize her, my love, my wife. We stood at the bottom of a dank, empty landing, but she was looking upward. I followed her glance: ancient wallpaper of Paris green with dirty flocking; cobwebs and small scuttling bugs. She smiled again at me and started up the steps.

I followed. I was nearly ill. My V could not be so at home in this place. She could not have known where to find that candle stub, that filthy striker. She could not now have a destination up that dark stair.

Two flights, three, four, in silence, then the turning of a key in a rusty lock. I had not seen a key—­had she picked it up from the shelf in the lobby? Had she had it with her all this time, secret from me, undreamed of as this building had been undreamed of? Oh, I knew she had a past. All ­people do. But I had chosen to accept the convent as the image of that past. As though there had been nothing else.

We entered, and the candle illuminated a small, low-­ceilinged attic room. The roof slanted to the floor, with deep-­set windows showing only blackness now. There was nothing but a bed and a table. The bed was iron, and narrow, and the table was deeply scarred and thick with dust. There was no air in that room, and yet the candle was guttering, and the air was unseasonably chilly. V walked across the floor to a small hearth set in the facing wall. She reached for a tinderbox on the mantel, and I then I knew: I had to accept that she had been here many times before.

There was wood in the fireplace, so dry that when she placed tinder to it, it burst immediately into bright flame. The bright light rendered the mirror above the mantel absolutely black. V turned, and her face was changed. She was harder; she was cool as glass.

“I want you to do something for me.”

I didn't recognize her.

I suddenly wanted her, violently. On that dirty bed, in this squalid place. She was smiling because she knew, and I took her with something like hate. I would obliterate every memory she had. She was a different woman in that bed, silent, passive. I knew that she would do anything I wanted. I took her like a whore.

Afterward, in the light from the dying fire, she said again, “I want you to do something for me.” Her face was turned away, toward the dark wall. I had not removed her dress, and it lay crumpled around her. There were cracks in the ceiling. I knew she knew them all by heart.

“Anything,” I said. How many men, here in this bed, had moved as I had moved, had seen what I had seen, had taken what I had taken?

“I want you to kill a man.” She spoke softly toward the wall. I had to strain to hear her, but I knew what she wanted.

“A stranger,” I said.

“I will bring him to you,” she said as she turned her face toward me. I did not know what woman I would see. But it was my V, with her eyes light and shining, as innocent as a girl.

I sat on the bed while she smoothed her hair and painted her face. She took a mirror from the mantelpiece. She asked for my handkerchief to wipe the dust from its surface. She set the candle on the mantel and stood facing away from me, but I could see her eyes in the mirror.

When she was done she was the woman I had been afraid of seeing: younger, feverish, proud and powerful, and the perfect victim. I took her again, anonymously from behind, lifting her skirts out of the way. When I was finished she walked out the door without looking back, and my love for her hardened around me and I knew that I could never live without her.

On the street she motioned to me to stay back, and I dropped behind her as she moved sure-­footed along the broken cobblestone. The very first man she passed gestured to her, and as she stood with him in the cavity of a doorway I wanted desperately to hear her voice setting the terms of their transaction.
How much would he be willing to pay for her and what would he ask her to do? Would she bring him back to her room (I loved the sound of those words in my mind: her room), or would a secluded doorway suffice for his needs?
I realized that I wanted her to perform whatever he asked of her, wanted to see her act her part in its entirety. But she would never allow me that. She would never be another man's whore, no matter what she had been in the past. This was just a game for her—­had been a game, I suspected, before she ever met me. The rosy girl on line to enter the Morgue had been no whore. The painted woman in the doorway had never been a whore, no matter what she'd done. I was for one moment afraid:
Was our life together also a game, a part she had chosen to play?
I took my flask out of my pocket and drank. And as she walked out of the darkness with this stranger she flashed a smile toward me where I hid in the shadows, and I was soothed.

As V and the man moved away down the street I appraised him: tall but thin; older than I, perhaps even middle-­aged. Not tentative; that was bad, because a man familiar with these streets would be ready for danger. But I had surprise and certainty on my side, and an almost joyful anticipation. Because of the gift she was going to give me: more power than I had ever had. On that dirty, ill-­lit street, I was like God.

V and the man turned the corner. He held her arm. When I reached them I found that she had moved him into a deeply recessed doorway and that he was fumbling already with the fastenings on his pants. And oh, I wanted to wait, to make her do what he thought he was going to live to pay her for.

I did wait long enough for the man to finish unfastening his trousers and fully expose himself. And then I made as if to pass them, and the man started and grabbed at his clothes. And V moved as if to cover his body, and I knew. I walked very quickly toward them. V moved away just as I reached them. The knife was in my hand; I will never remember taking it out of my pocket, but it was ready, and it caught the fire from the streetlamp and glowed. Suddenly I was as near to him as a lover. I plunged the knife into the soft spot between the ribs, as if I had done this a hundred times, as if I had been born to do this. I twisted the knife; I pulled it up toward his heart.

He did not say a word. His eyes went wide. I could smell his skin and his fear. It was V he looked to. But she was staring at the knife. Blood was everywhere, on my hands and coat, on her neck, on her face. The man reached toward her, and his body started forward. I moved to catch it, but he was too heavy, he crumpled at my feet, then there was blood on the sidewalk too. V and I moved away at the same time, and the man's body banged headfirst onto the cobblestones and lay facedown, one arm stretched out toward nothing. I looked at her and was for the only time repulsed—­an instant only, a shiver in my heart. She was smiling at the body, and I was afraid of her, and then she was my V again.