The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (13 page)

Silence pooled between us; with a glimmer of a young Françoise who stood mutinous against her relations. (Gossip upstairs alluded to the very worst of histories for the submistress, spawned from a family of bankrupted lacemakers and petty criminals. She'd trumped the system and climbed on top of the pile—she was detested for that). A steely, slippery young woman who shipwrecked here, of all places; and had nailed herself to a plank in the roiling sea.

“All right,” I said, surprised to be getting off so lightly, without a fine or a penalty, of which I had heard plenty, upstairs. Cautiously, I continued. “Françoise—something else.”

“What is it?”

“The paper you said my mother signed. The document from the police investigation. I need to see it.”

The submistress toyed with a strand of hair, swiveled to and fro in her chair. She raised a dark eyebrow and slid her hands into the pockets of her skirt.

“Of course. All this paperwork! What a headache. You have no idea. Well, I'm surprised you raise it, with other matters so much more pressing?” Françoise rose and went to the armoire, fishing and rummaging in its drawers and recesses, tossing about lacy underthings and whalebone, then back to the desk, where she scrabbled in pigeonholes and shifted piles of paper, all about to topple. “The doctor's report . . . Bringing on your menses, I mean. Better now than later, you know.”

I looked down. The baleful fish eye on the embroidered ottoman stared up.

“Ah. Here we are.” She was holding out a small bottle of brackish-looking liquid, spidery writing on its label:
ERGOT, ABORTIFACIENT
.
“If this doesn't do the trick, we'll go for a visit to the midwife. Count yourself lucky. The madames could turn you out for this if they wanted to.” I hesitated; she dropped the bottle in my lap.

“May I . . . see the paper?”

“Of course.” She sighed again and rummaged through the pigeonholes for an eternity. Finally handed over a dense page of print stamped with a seal from the police and the city of Paris. My name had been written in—not whatever they happened to call me in the salons on any given night—and the date and place of my birth. At the end stood several important-looking scrawls of dark ink. A peculiar sensation crept over me and I stared at the woman across from me, her belladonna eyes glistening, for a fleeting moment wondering who she was, who was I—what was I doing here?

“This is not my mother's signature,” I said. “I know it. I'm not one of your illiterates upstairs.”

“I'm sorry that you are upset. It is—you know, it is what happens.” I stared at her, then down at the paper, in a creeping blight of fear.

“Now, come. Whatever the situation is, you are going to need to think calmly. If your family can help you, well, you can post a letter today if you'd like. But I think you know, and I do, that they've washed their hands of this.” She leaned forward. “Really.”

My hands clenched in my lap. I shuddered in my skin as though to slough it off, vomit myself out of this body.

“A girl in your position needs a friend; don't think I don't understand. Just between the two of us, I'll send you up to the Josephine Room to rest a bit. Take it easy this afternoon, you know? Believe me, your situation's not so bad. Here, wait, I have something else”—she fished a second phial from a drawer. “A few drops of this. I take it myself for a headache. All right? Then the other. And it's chilly, wear a dressing gown through the halls.”

The submistress pulled the bell rope, and a maid I didn't know, a violet cap from Salon Deux, appeared on cat's feet. At the door the submistress called after us, “You'll be better for tonight. It will be a gay evening; Madame Jouffroy has asked some of her special guests.”

T
HE JOSEPHINE ROOM
was white, gold, and coral; its furnishings a Bourbon mirage, the bed a rosy blister of satin. What new price would be extracted for this sojourn from the attic's dingy confines, I could only imagine—the Tivoli, with its drafty reproach and spidery cracks, was likely a bargain by comparison. The violet-capped maid left quickly, turning the key in the lock: business as usual. I started at the stoppered glass bottle of ergot; its message clear.

I palmed my belly; settled queasily into the armchair's faithless expanse. Pulling my dressing gown closer I felt a stab of longing for real clothing, the honest rough stuff of my old goose-dress; and a fleeting, murky anger. It was all too much, this jumble of need, coercion, and unwanted company. Françoise's headache potion was sweetish and flowery (digitalis, I think; Berthe had had it). The warmth and the potion leading me blessedly, fuzzily adrift under the pad of a giant's thumb, consciousness flattening and slipping away. I did not swallow the ergot.

.
 .
.
Golden fields in September, and again in spring when the earth is soft; and green dots the black soil.

Birds squalling, feathers flying. How they turned toward me, gabbling, mouths open. Slaughtered by Saint Martin's Day.

The smell of apples, slowly rotting on the ground, and fallen leaves.

Reaching, a color, a texture, a scent—what to hold on to?
.
 .
.
Sliver of moon, hanging over the Paris skyline as a train hurtles down the tracks, through a long tunnel—

. . . Faint rustle, soft knock. Creak of hinges. Not the main door, but from some passageway behind. Murmur of a voice that did not wait for an answer. And then I was no longer alone.

“Are you all right?” she whispered. Lips warm and brushing; her hair falling like a heavy-tasseled drape.
“Come, lie down. You must be so tired.”
I was, and did; and soon I didn't care why she was there; only that she stayed.

 

Next to me, she was a pale gleam of ivory, soft, known, yet strange. Spinning beneath the surface, very close; a hand, gentle but firm; perfumed breath against my cheek. What lapped against my own flesh was soft and loose as though nothing bound her; nothing familiar. Scarlet, crimson, ruby, blood red—like the center of an enormous rose; candlelight glimmered against soft draperies.

A gentle urging of fingertips brushed the bones of my hips, passed over my thighs and knees. She slipped her hands down my body, traced the curve of my neck; palmed the whisper of my belly's curve. As she touched I wakened to myself, curled; dared not move or breathe. A body's shift, then, down to the soles of my feet, pausing, just barely, at the rough places. My body was not mine; but it roused, nonetheless—as it had before, but not recently—and then she lay down with her arms around me, cupping me, no cloth between us. Slowly she retraced with her lips the places where her hands had been. Covered me with scent, every part of her smooth, polished; and at last urged me onto my back and pressed the length of her self against mine. Light; almost weightless even though everything about her seemed enormous; long-limbed. “Are you ready?” . . . Or I thought I heard that; words evanescing like drops into water. My thoughts, even, were wisps that vanished as quickly as they came, and all that remained was the cool of satin falling against my flesh, the soft cling of lips—nowhere, everywhere. I found the edge of the bed and grasped it as if it were the side of a boat; I was rocking on the waves while something warm, flaring, bursts of green, slashes of violet, flowerlike, bloomed within me. Sunlight on stones from a crumbling wall. Wild bells of morning glories in a garden, maroon and purple and white. The moan was mine, then the sob, and hot tears; I reached for her again, my mouth searched for and found her white breast, caught, gleaming against the crimson, in a pale flare from the lamp.

 

“Would you like an orange?” Her fingers—long and tapered, oddly (in this place) unmanicured—peeled away the skin, removed the pith. The flesh of the fruit was red-tinged, each crescent flushed like the harvest moon. She settled the sections on the plateau between her breasts—gold-spangled, brazen. A vine of her red-gold hair trailed damply over my chest as I lay close. Breath falling in and out. The juice was bright and sweet.

She rolled over, a heavy, graceful movement, extracted a cigarette from a silver case. Her back was long and her head dipped for a moment between the shadow of her shoulder blades as the match flared. She closed her eyes briefly as she inhaled; the smoke coiling up, blue. She smoked without speaking, letting the ash get very long. The perfumed air was still and smoky.

“I saw you the first night, you know. But then I was away. As luck would have it, I always seem to come back. So—are you making a stay of it?”

“Is there a choice?”

She tipped the ash into her cupped palm and leaned up on an elbow, traced a fingertip along my cheek, lips, neck. Across my barely rounded belly. “No ashtray.” She laughed. “You're not a
prisoner.
”

“I have nothing to wear and all the doors are locked. Every day she says I'm more in the red—” I stopped. Why did I think she was trustworthy, this girl?

“As long as you don't owe, you can get out. Let me put it this way: if you're smart about it and make it worth their while, you can cut a deal that suits you.”

“Is anyone else smart about it?”

She inhaled; tapped her ash again. “Bit of a dim crowd up there, wouldn't you say? Except for Banage.”

“Well, it doesn't seem very likely, the way they keep the books.”

“Oh, Françoise and her ledger.” She gestured with the cigarette, making smoky curls. As if she had some magical way around the ironbound figures and chits.

“And now they have given me something to”—
stifle the infant seed, flailing in a curve of my womb
—“bring on my bleeding.”

“Ah. Well, the madames cannot be accused of being sentimental about
that.
Or Françoise.” She drew her long legs out of the bedclothes and stretched; a lazy motion, soft and lithe, from the soles of her feet and up through her torso and neck, her whole physical length. Mocking self-possession came off her like the scent of musk and oranges and smoke; every curve of flesh, every inch and ounce of it, belonged to her. She gathered herself like a rich fabric, and the wildness of it—of her, her limitlessness—was frightening, arousing: I wanted it—
something
—
what
? The longing was sharp, so fierce and unknown. The rage against my captive status dissolved, and now . . . now I was groping my way back to that last moment, the one in which she had asked me if I would stay, as though it might matter to her.

When she turned quite slowly toward me again, with something like amusement, holding her handful of ash, the feeling shuddered and changed, bitter like the pith, longing-become-loathing and back again. Was she just cheap and coy, a spy of Françoise—? And I saw, in a blinding flash, a lightning crack of vision in a dark landscape, how impossible it would all be,
worse than ever I could have imagined
—but this was nonsense because I could never have imagined—
this—
could not grasp hold of it, any of it, and how it changed, quick-silvery . . .

“How did you find me here?” I asked.

“A Bette-bird told me.”

Bette was a Salon Deux chambermaid of high echelon; I only knew her from glimpses in the halls, as she escorted one important client or another.

“Why?”

“Why not? A broken heart in the Josephine Room is more interesting than another hand of cards with the Mignons. And Banage is no fun this afternoon, she is like a rainy day.”

“Who
are
you?”

“‘Mademoiselle Something-or-Other, I think. Like all of us?” She laughed, stuffed a pillow behind her back, lit another cigarette lying down—it seemed as though she might always be lying down, sprawling like a big cat in front of a fire—and studied me with half-closed eyes. “What will you call yourself? You aren't a Mignon or a Ninette, or anything-
ette.
Or an English Fanny. You're not fey and sweet but proud and dark and a little Spanish. I will have to call you after the woman on the postage stamp. The empress.”

“Oh, don't! My name
is
Eugénie, like hers.”

“I know it is.”

“You'll make the others hate me, even more than they do now.”

She just smiled, like a big cat. “Now, come. We have our worlds to conquer. More than, I'd say.” She reached under a pillow and retrieved a man's pocket watch, gold and with decorative engraving on the back, and flipped its cover. She sighed; her voice dropped so low it was nearly a growl. “What, do you expect to eat and sleep for nothing, around here?”

“I don't know!”

“If you don't, I'm sure someone can find an answer for you.”

She stared at me as if about to ask a question, but then thought better of it. “We can come back if you'd like, sometime . . . Would you? I have a key to the passageway.”

She knew she didn't have to ask.
She had startled me back among the living.
Even now, color was seeping back into a landscape that had become sepia-toned, like a
carte de visite.

“Don't make fun of me, please don't.” I turned toward her and felt my fingers reach, as if by their own will, to touch her hair, a tangle of scent and softness. A tremor moved through my body, a spasm. She slipped on a gown and was halfway across the room when she paused to open an armoire, pull out a robe, coral-colored like the bed covering, like the orange peel left behind. She tossed it in my direction and it slithered through my outstretched hands to the floor, like a puddle of oil.

“You can call me Jolie, if you'd like. Come on now, behave yourself.” She slipped out the way she'd come in; and then the room was empty, as though the very air had been sucked from between its walls. Her timing was precise; seconds later a knock announced a different maid, shy and polite—maddeningly so, with hair skimmed back in a net and a spotless pink apron around her waist—and asked if mademoiselle required anything, and now, did she wish to be escorted downstairs?