The Green Muse (7 page)

“She is an angel,” Verlaine said to me. “An angel indeed,” I said. She could be no ordinary mortal. But she was looking tenderly at the poet, and my jealousy evaporated, forever, because I saw in that moment a way that she could be mine. I saw that indeed we need never part.

“Drink, Paul,” she said, “and say for me my favorite poem.”

“Which one is that?” I asked her. “I know them all.” I did. In moments of weakness I recite poetry to myself, slaking a thirst for energy or wisdom with other men's words. Poetry is a better drink, almost, than absinthe. Almost.

“Shh,” said V, because Verlaine had begun his ritual. Each absinthe drinker has his own way with the liquor, the sugar, and the spoon. The ritual is almost as important as the effects of the drink itself.

The waiter had presented the poet with a fresh glass, a new carafe of water, and a full small plate of sugar cubes. Apparently Verlaine liked to start afresh after a certain amount of time, or liquor; that is one way. The waiter also replaced the volcano-­shaped plate that held upright wooden matches. Perhaps the poet must start out with a completely clear table each time, a tabula rasa of marble and glass. I was leaning over the table in anticipation; V touched my arm and I found myself looking with sadness at Verlaine's disheveled hair and dirty cravat. He had been publicly repenting his actions with the poet Rimbaud for twenty years. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to regret anything I'd done. But I was young; I had not yet reached the age of regret.

He picked up one of several slotted spoons the waiter had brought and turned it about in his hands. “Too narrow,” he said dismissively. He held up the next with a mischievous look: “What do you think, my dear?” It was an odalisque, a sinuous nude form in silver.

“I think it's lovely,” said V. “May I see it?” It glinted as he passed it across the table. I was acutely aware of her next to me, the faint smell of green rice powder and rosewater, the musk of her hair. She took the spoon in her fingers and it became for a moment a living thing.

“Isn't it lovely?” she asked me, and her eye flashed deep into mine, and I felt she knew every trivial and base thing I was thinking.

“Yes,” I said without thinking. “It looks like you.”

Verlaine burst out laughing.

She was biting her lip to keep from laughing as well. Verlaine turned to the next spoon and chose it, a simple one shaped like a slotted poplar leaf.

He placed two cubes of sugar on the spoon, after first examining them in his fingers. He lifted the carafe of water and slowly poured, a shiver of water, over the sugar and into the glass. I watched the tiny green whirlpool, and felt again the pull of my own desires. When I looked up, the poet was watching me. The liquor, the woman: He knew. He knew everything, and for a moment I was afraid. Then he looked back to his potion, and his eyes went soft, as for a lover, and I knew that I was safe, that he did not really know. The liquor, the woman: He only thought he knew.

“Too little water spoils the freshness of the taste, does it not?” he asked, and I nodded. I did often drink absinthe undiluted, out of the flask I kept in my pocket. This practice was rare because the taste was bitter indeed. Normally I used only one sugar cube at a time. But this was not the place to argue the fine points of the ritual, although I could see that Verlaine wanted to, wanted to discuss at length his love. That he had seen instantly in me another lover and known him.

The poet removed the spoon and tipped the cubes over into the glass. He then used the pointed tip of the spoon to crush the sugar; I could hear it. The liquor went paler, to a pleasing creamy green, then to an opalescent cloud. Verlaine took a long time about this, delicately seeking out and tapping down stray crystals while V and I watched.

“Surely you would like a glass,” he said at length, darting a keen eye toward me. “I have enough here for two.”

There was no point in denying my desire. For V, for the green drink, for Verlaine's poetry. Although she had told me she did not drink absinthe, I asked her. “That is not one of my vices,” she told me lightly, and I resolved to make it one, before the night was out.

I filled the cup. As I watched the river of green I heard the poet speak: “In the old park's lonely grass two dark shadows lately passed.” It was his “Sentimental Conversation.” It was my favorite poem.

I put three rough cubes of sugar on the shining odalisque. I heard V's silvery laugh and Verlaine's slow, calm voice: “Do you remember our former ecstasies? Why would you have me rake up memories?”

Already, the world around me was taking on the quality of a dream, as in anticipation I separated myself from everything around me and entered into the realm of the Green Muse. I became acutely aware of the cold outside the water bottle, the way the glass fit the palm of my hand. The way the glass could have been skin.

“Does your heart still beat at my name alone? Is it always my soul you see in dreams? Ah, no.”

The light fell down on the table in a sharp-­edged circle that cut the darkness in an arc against the dark green tablecloth. The absinthe waited, dark in the glass. I poured the water much more slowly than Verlaine had, savoring the tiny sounds: metal, water, sugar, glass. Slowly the liquid turned milky and spun. V was watching me. “Oh the lovely days of unspeakable mystery, when our mouths met! Ah yes, maybe.”

I put down the carafe and shook the spoon lightly, and the remaining sugar toppled into the green.

“How blue it was, the sky, how high our hopes! Hope fled, conquered, along the dark slopes.” I stirred my drink languidly, as I always did, enjoying the moment before I drank; my mouth filled with saliva and I caught V smiling. I smiled back.

“So they walked there, among the wild herbs, and the night alone listened to their words.”

I drank.

“Paul, that was beautiful!” V said, her voice fresh with admiration. It was as though she had never heard the poem, and yet I knew she must have heard it many times. The old poet looked at her with affection while the room shifted under my feet. The absinthe pulled at my ear, as Theo always said of that first rush of feeling. Verlaine was looking at me but I could not tell him what I thought of his poem; I could not speak at all. The room receded, and I receded from myself and hung suspended just above and to the right of my own head. There is nothing like that first moment: All of God's creation is clear to you. It is all yours. There is nothing you need, because there is nothing you do not have. I was Verlaine's ghosts in the moonlight garden; I possessed the light that hung in V's hair. I was no mortal thing; I would not die. Then V was looking at me catlike, and Verlaine was staring into his glass, and I was only myself, and thirsty.

“Is everything to your liking?” V asked me. It was. The night outside, cold and wet, the warm light of the table lamp, the glint of liquor in the glass, the woman next to me.

“There is nothing I lack,” I said. I love the illusion of completeness that liquor gives. That the liquor and whatever immediately surrounds me is enough. The cocoon of absinthe is warm and thick, then a thousand butterflies appear and brush their wings against me. This is not prattle. I have felt it: the paper-­softness of a butterfly's wing as it caressed my hair, one summer night, after a few glasses of absinthe on the grass of the Bois de Boulougne. I remembered that, and felt for a moment that softness—­and it was V's hand. Like a butterfly's wing.

“You have a red hair on your neck,” she said.

“I am wearing Theo's scarf.” I took the hair from her fingers, long and bright. It revolted me. I burned it in the candle on the wall and it made a hideous smell.

“Your impish friend?”

Absinthe makes me feel. The softness of the velvet backing to my seat—­I placed my hand upon it and could nearly have swooned, like a girl or a degenerate. Texture, flavor, sight, and sound—­these things come alive, they leap out from where they hide in the objects around me and assault me with their beauty. The spoon became an object of desire, the necklace around V's neck almost as delectable as the neck itself. I was seduced by the uniqueness of that neck and the laugh that lodged in her throat.

“His name is Theo, and he is a disgrace.”

“I think he is very funny,” she said. “Perhaps you could introduce him to Paul.”

“Good Lord no, he would become a poet!”

V laughed and laughed. Verlaine stirred himself and said, “I will have no degenerates in my society. I have paid for my sins, I have been suffering for twenty years for my sins. The Holy Mother knows how I regret my sins.” He went on in a quiet voice, with the words
my sins
as the touchstone of his private rosary. V and I spoke quietly also, half-­turned toward each other on the softness of the velvet seat, her hair forming a golden net that caught and transfigured everything I saw. It transformed the poet's face and made golden the liquid in the absinthe glass. I leaned my head closer.

“You are a habitué of this place, and yet you do not drink.”

She cocked her head and her lovely hair fell across her eyes and they flashed.

“I do not need to drink,” she said. “I take my pleasure from the ­people around me.”

I had known many women. She was not like any of them. Woman is not capable of self-­individuation; she is made to be mother; she is like the waves of the sea. Each woman thinks herself unique. I listened to their stories and they were all the same. They all had dreams that do not involve motherhood. As though the wave could escape its destiny to break against the shore! But the dreams are all the same, dull dreams of fame or altruism or art. They are as dull as men, these women who think that they can make their mark in the world. It is only that the men are right, and have the character and will to carry out their dreams. The women I pretended to listen to while appraising the whiteness of their hands and the firmness of their bosoms were destined for the nursery: the shopgirls, the gentle children of the aristocracy, the showgirls of the Moulin Rouge. Waves in a great undifferentiated ocean of femininity, beautiful and inane. This woman regarded me with a man's intelligence in her smoky eyes.

As if from a great distance, Verlaine spoke.

“Have you ever longed for that which will destroy you?” His eyes were almost biblical in their intensity. A drunken prophet, lost in the desert. “One night,” he said, staring past me out of the booth and back into some other time, “a man came to me and Arthur as we sat in a bar. It was nothing like this bar. Nothing. I was nothing like the man I am now.” He stopped. He seemed to talk this way habitually, in fits and starts, without any reason for stopping or starting. “It was a fine bar . . . A fine place I cannot remember, except for the light. A man came and sat down next to us and began to speak without being asked. ‘I have been making an inspection,' he said, ‘and nine out of ten ­people that I have inspected are going to hell.' ”

Verlaine looked for so long into his drink that I thought he had forgotten us. I wondered what the light in that fine bar had been like.

Finally he resumed.

“Arthur laughed. I was appalled. Arthur said he would greatly prefer hell to heaven. In that voice of his, which I have never been able to forget.” I looked at V, who was staring at Verlaine with something I could not understand, something that repulsed and drew me at the same time. Gentle pity lay in her light eyes, and the sharp light of predation. I felt a shiver of longing so intense I was afraid she would feel it from where she sat, and indeed she turned her head and smiled at me with the hawk light still in her eye.

“What did you say, Paul?” she asked, all gentleness, still looking at me.

“I did not dare answer, and Arthur lost respect for me that night—­if indeed he ever had any,” Verlaine said bitterly. “That boy who respected nothing, feared nothing. I was afraid of a man who could ask that question, even though I knew he was nothing but a drunken fool. I knew that if every soul were to be inspected, the man was right, nine out of ten would be found wanting, and would be condemned. And I knew that I would be condemned. Arthur didn't care. He never cared at all what ­people thought, what they said or did. You, young man,” he said, turning suddenly to me when I thought he had forgotten my existence. “Do you believe in heaven? Are you afraid of hell?”

I did not laugh, although I wanted to. His intensity was nothing but green vapor. The master who had written those exquisite poems was gone now, dead perhaps in the arid reaches of a hot foreign land these many years ago.

“I do not subscribe to the idea of hell as put forth by the priests. If there is a God, he has built the world on the Darwinian model.” Suddenly I looked over at V and she was trying desperately to stifle a giggle. She indicated Verlaine with her head, her hand over her mouth and her eyes merry: He was asleep over his drink. I started to laugh. I was in danger of laughing so hard I would wake the old man, so I also tried to stifle my laughter. I grabbed the lapel of V s dress and pressed it to my mouth; it smelled of musk and roses. We could not stop laughing;

I fell in love with her. We hastily left the booth where the old poet sat, oblivious now, with his memories and his absinthe, in heaven or hell under the circle of light from the candle in the wall sconce. His life was over. I left some money on the table and let V lead me from the bar.

The street was slick with water, but it was no longer raining. The moon shone intermittent and full from behind thin fragments of cloud. V's hair was gilded silver, and her face seemed lit not by the moon but from some fiery source within. Absinthe made the night air feel like a field of flowers around my legs. As we stepped into the street I had the sensation of wading through irises and poppies and long-­stalked allium. I took V's arm, and she offered no objection. We walked in silence a little while, the sky spinning above us.