The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (2 page)

My throat ached; the lump on my brow throbbed; my belly gave a hollow stab and a rush of heat rose behind my eyes . . . Paris.
City of light, center of the World. Of civilization; of art.
It took several matches, cheap and smoldering, to ignite a taper that revealed the attributes of room 12 atop an interminable stair: a scrap of carpet worn down to the threads, walls spidered with cracks, and a sagging mattress on an iron bedstead. A wooden chair, a candle stand. Freezing, dusty with neglect; the very walls closing in with a reproach.

I wedged the back of the chair under the knob. Then after a while, lay stiffly on top of the bedcovers in my street clothes and under my cloak, listening to my heart pound and the blood surge in my ears; crashes and yelps from the alley below. Cold seeped up through the floorboards.

Of all the damp gloom and dusky shades I had so far encountered, the void next to me was the most disconcerting and lonely of all. But Stephan would know, as well as I, this gaping emptiness; my lover would be feeling my absence just as I felt his. Yes, I had gambled; exchanged all that had defined me in the world—a rustic life in a distant province (where anyone who had ever been to the capital at all was called a Parisien for life)—the rutted road and antique habits of church and village, the goose pens, the obligations of a daughter—for Stephan's kisses and his promises, murmured like silk to my neck and imprinted on every part of me, stamped into the wax of my being. Yes, I had contoured my life to his since Saint Martin's Day last November, with not much to show for it but a promise and some borrowed finery against the January winds—but still.

“Don't doubt me, Eugénie,”
he had said.
“Doubt, you know, is contagious.”

The last echo before I drifted under seemed to be the voice of my mother, Berthe, mocking behind my ear . . .
You think your eggs are on the fire when only the shells are left .
.
 . !
An old country saying, never-turn-your-back. Maman felt closer, in that instant, than Stephan
,
though I had left her farther behind. And in the moment of collision between what I had imagined and the clamoring consequences of my real actions came the ache of foreknowledge, like the bump on my head, and the simultaneous etherizing of it deep within.

 

I woke to the sound of church bells; insistent, unstopping, pulling me from the shallow marooning shoals of a dream. Dirty light filtered in through the window; a wafer of ice lay on top of the water in the pitcher.
Paris.
Blackened stub of wick in a pool of wax; an aching head and skirts pulled up and rumpled as though I had been ravished by something unseen in the night. I reached up gingerly, felt the bump above my eyebrow, glanced toward the door. The chair was in place. Splash of icy water, skirts pressed smooth with the palms of my hands. No maid, no Léonie; no iron nor fire to warm it; certainly no pot on a silver tray outside the door of number 12.

From below, the dim clink and clatter of crockery held out the promise of hot coffee, at least, so I followed the sounds down to a dull, high-windowed room. Four men in coats and cravats pushed back their chairs; and a kitchen door exhaled a cloud of steam and the odor of spent coffee grounds. A sullen boy scraped down pink tablecloths, steering around bud vases containing fabric flowers, their stems stickily coiled with green tape. Madame had said nothing about breakfast. Was it included with the price of a room?

Over the coming days, I would learn that the help spoke no French; nor did most of the guests. As unaccompanied ladies never set foot there, my appearance on that morning set off a ripple of glances that sent me slinking out to a street cart, an old woman with a coffee urn, and a tin ladle meant for workmen. She too looked fisheyed at my gloves and hat as the wind luffed up. A strangled giggle rose in my nose and I tossed back the bitter stuff. If Stephan were here, it would all be a terrific joke—all of this unfamiliarity would disappear in a puff of smoke. Meanwhile, I must make the best of it. With the black brew in my hollow guts, I fished out my
Nouveau Plan de la Ville de Paris
1860,
with its indigo-marbled covers. My key to the capital.

 

By hard frost of that year—now past—the goose-girl from a tiny village hugging the Pyrenees had tasted defiance, and with it what she found she preferred: afternoons in a library sprawled on a carpet thick with Turkish flowers; a stack of leather-bound volumes pulled from the shelves. Cream with chocolate, yolks of eggs; the meat of the bird and a lover's attentions. Instead of hoarding coals in a brazier and poking the ashes on a frigid morning, as the goose-girl had once done, she enjoyed fires laid by a maid (Léonie). All of it an extravagant taste of what had, in sixteen years of living, been skimmed off the top, plucked and gathered, measured and weighed; priced and packed and sold off down to the bones and renderings. My new life fit like a tailored bodice, a dressmaker's creation tossed my way after the original wearer had cast it off. Indeed, there were corsets dug out of the chests and armoires; petticoats, bonnets, and stockings; past-fashion dresses belonging to absent relatives. In short order I learned to delight in
foie d'oie
rather than sell it; and soon greeted the rural folk at the Saturday market, the flower girl and the bread man, and chattered of our domestic affairs to Léonie, who uttered only murmurs of assent.

My seventeenth birthday had passed just after the New Year. We had celebrated it in Stephan's bed—or rather his uncle's bed, to which we had made profound claim—dining on brandy plums,
foie d'oie,
roast chicken; market cheeses, crusty white bread. The carpets were littered with corks and bones and plum stones and
Bovary,
its binding splayed over a mound past due for the wash. Stephan had tossed it there.

“In Paris, you know, girls your age are not allowed to read
Bovary.
”

“What do they read?”

“Works of moral improvement that encourage them to uphold the social order!”

He laughed and threw back the bedclothes. Drowsy and effervescent, I slipped into the warm furrow his body had left. The windows were fogged from the heat of the fire; Stephan shed his robe. Water slapped gently against the sides of the bath as he stepped in. The taste of
foie d'oie
and the musk of his flesh lingered on my tongue, a touch of salt; champagne tingled through my veins. Our sprig of Saint Nicholas mistletoe still dangled on the bedpost, its white berries now dried to husks. Outside, the gardens lay under a glittering sheen of frost, the last of the roses long gone; the lush foliage of the borders stripped of color. The day's diminishing light fell through the diamond panes of mullioned glass.

“Little goose, wake up! It's nearly nighttime.” My lover parted the bed curtain and stood clothed. He picked up
Bovary,
passing his fingertips along the spine. Emma, as I had left her, was bankrupt with dresses, running from lover to lover. I slipped beneath the sea of linen, awash in a strange irritation. Stephan lounged on the edge of the bed, picked up a knife from the litter on the carpet, and began peeling a winter apple. That knife drew a line between us, as he ran the blade across the fruit's surface, flaying it of its rosy skin. Then he told me a story, better than
Bovary
because it was our own. It was set in Paris and there were parties, dances—masked balls in gardens. Ice skating on frozen lakes inside the city; fires with crackling wood and hot drinks with rum. Horse carriages along the streets, with bottles of champagne. We would fool them all, delight and convince them—
who?
—I did not ask.

He dropped the paring, an unbroken spiral, to the floor. Cut a thin, perfect slice to the core, a sliver like a new moon. An owl hooted, a gentle but worrying
hoo-hoo,
very near. Toast crumbs from our bed feast pressed uncomfortably into my flesh.

“So, we will be—married?” I ventured. We had discussed it on our long flight from my home province to the chateau—it was not so much a promise as simply an understanding, clear as the sky was blue, which it was, once we left the southwest's clouds and smoke.

“But we must avoid
Bovary
at all costs, don't you think? A stifling life, both of us miserable and bored.”

I giggled. “It wouldn't be; you are nothing like Charles Bovary. A dull doctor.”

“I'd rather not find out if marriage transforms me, then.” Stephan assured me that Paris was nothing like a tiny, convention-bound provincial village; the capital was law unto itself. I hesitated—never having considered Tillac, the place I was born, in that light. I did not miss the odor of the goose pens, though.

“Why can't we just stay here? The days will lengthen soon. The ice will melt and we can plant a kitchen garden.” Fingers in the dark soil newborn from the frost, sieving it to breadcrumb size, nestling tiny seeds—carrots, lettuces—tucking them in a moist, well-aired bed, and watching for the first pale green shoot. “I'd like to eat something besides
foie d'oie.
A radish.” Its taste fresh and sharp, like a slap of spring wind . . . “And if not married we should be engaged.” Stephan pulled himself up and gazed into my eyes, and with all the earnest belief that this slate-eyed scion—heir to difficulties I could only imagine—could muster, he summoned up what he could.

“I will be your protector. It is—you know, how things are arranged. In Paris.” And then the heavy beat of wings and a flustered scuffling above our heads, and another wavering cry.

 

The next morning I left for the train with the sheaf of bank notes that Stephan had laid out on the library escritoire, a cache of borrowed gowns in my traveling bag, and visions of blue silk dresses.
(
“Paris skirts are very wide.”
) The bolt of fabric, another New Year's gift, did not fit into my luggage; we stood awkward, the cloth between us, and tears threatening. Finally Stephan promised to bring it with him when he came. “Our first stop shall be the dressmaker,” he said, planting a kiss on my brow; rather more like a father, or an elder brother, and in fact—now that I considered it—in the very place that had been smacked and was now a bruise.

Flashing, blue-fledged hue of a teal; the last of the wild-breeding ducks to appear, fast and wary of hunters in the ponds and rain-filled ruts of southern France . . . the fowl's colored feathers appear in December, briefly against his mottled brown. After that, he molts, flightless.

In this world, a girl like me, brought up with her knees regularly pressed to the flagstones, the church's incense mingled with the pine-needle scent of the forest floor—the oldest daughter of ambitious parents—such a girl did not dare her destiny, her parentage,
everything—
and lose. The consequences of would be so catastrophic, so utterly beyond the imagination—even a rich, rebellious one like my own—that they did not, even for a moment, enter my waking thoughts. But I had begun, again, to dream.

 

I stepped past a used-book stall, its offerings stacked like slices of bread, moldy at the crust. English hymnals, cookery books, cheap novels, and
Bovary
in two volumes, bound together with a band advertising it as
BANNED! CENSORED!
Somewhere in those pages Emma was in midflight, but I had lost my appetite for her travails.

The streets spiraled inward and tightened toward Notre Dame and the city's beating heart; peddlers hawked chestnuts and tobacco, coffee and thread, paper and dried fishes, songbirds and window glass. Pyramids of dusty wine bottles. Passing the shops I saw signs of my lover everywhere, tying invisible strings between Stephan and what he loved: chestnuts in honey syrup; racked bottles in a wine shop; in a patisserie window, a tower of raspberry tarts. These stood out like flags, those of the nation to which I belonged. We had brought home just such oranges in a string bag; those brandied apricots in a bottle.

Now, choppy January currents ruffled the gray waters of the Seine. I nibbled chestnuts and sipped at another coffee, bitterer than the first. Nearby a gang of workers in blue
cottes
were packing up their spades and turning their horses. The wind picked up; I shivered under a paisley cashmere, borrowed warmth. Blisters already chafed under my boots, very nice kid ones that buttoned up the side, barely worn, recently white.

Back at the Hôtel Tivoli,with no knife to cut a loaf of bread, peel an apple, or pare a portion of sausage and cheese so as not to have to bite off chunks with my teeth like an animal—with no cup nor table at which to drink from it, I took out a thin sheet of paper from a fresh, new stationer's package. With a sharp-nibbed pen atop the shaky candle stand, I wrote,
Dear Stephan, I saw the Seine today, and a cart full of Seville oranges
.
 .
.

In the wavery, pitted mirror of number 12 was a young woman, myself, certainly—dark hair and pale skin; not so badly off in her borrowed finery. The soft hair, the curve of cheek and shine of my eyes—violet-gray (a shade off Stephan's)—were as they had always been; but the calluses and rough edges of a faraway province had been buffed away in recent months by some chemistry of love and unaccustomed kinds of bathing. Staring, I willed blindness on myself; insistent, willful ignorance. The holes in the story I told myself, pinpricks of truth like the quills sticking through the mattress ticking of number 12, would become rips as long as those my petticoats would show in a few weeks' time. But doubt, smaller than a tiny seed, sown somewhere deep—had not yet sent its root tendril; had no thought, yet, of unfurling its leaf.

A
NY PAINTER'S DAUGHTER
(and I was one, of course) knows that a picture requires constancy of place, climate, care, and conditions to maintain and protect its surface, to prevent its color from cracking and falling away. But to apply these principles to life—to shield it from the ebb and flow, the shifting and carrying on, the wearing away—this knowledge my mother, Berthe, did not pass on. She never explained what substance hours and days are made of; nor how time wears on the mind when one is in love. How a lover, once present, becomes a story you tell yourself—although I believe that she knew these things.