Isadora Page 13

  It wasn’t much later that night that Paris and I escaped the party and ran laughing down the stairs, bursting from the heavy doors to find the icy rain laced with thin strands of potential. His hands were so soft I could have pushed my fingernail into his palm to see it emerge from the other side, but he was strong, and he carried me gracefully over the water which surrounded his car in a perfect ring.

  He had ordered the car to be filled with flowers and they were blooming up the back window and encroaching on the passenger bench, thousands of stems piled without water. The air inside was lush and as thick as a jungle, petals soft against my bare arms, pollinating his cuffs as he pulled me near. The thorns of lesser blooms prized bits of my tunic into their thicket as I kissed him.

  We were gin soaked and immortal, and ready for a grand adventure. I turned to watch the night jolting by through the fogging windows. We crossed the Boulevard Saint-Martin, past a woman who stood on a wet trunk waving her arms, either calling out for help or advertising the bill of some show, nobody paying her any mind either way.

  On Corfu, the unlikely appearance of Paris Singer seated at the foot of the bed

  I should be thankful for the fresh sheets. The old ones were stained and gritty, scattered crumbs from breakfast and a few books splayed around. But I miss the smell of my own illness, my sickly nest. Soap makes a slick and unnatural perfume, it makes me forget my own body, and I come to wonder if I have lost myself in a dream.

  Paris reads aloud from a newspaper, opining at times as if the editorial board is located somewhere between his ears. I must be dreaming. The fever broke overnight in a drenching sweat, and in the ensuing hours I received more swabbing down from that damn nurse than a standard workhorse. The girls in the kitchen downstairs have been saying I’ll be up and about before the end of the week, and I do seem to be doing better, despite wanting very much to prove them wrong on principle.

  A leather valise resists against his calf with the day’s plots and sketches folded neatly on top: banks and bridges, dark beer with lunch, and an afternoon nap. We ought to have plenty to say to each other, many potential apologies, and plenty time to fit it all into an eight hour dream, but as how it happens in moments like this, the foundation is laid with simple slabs.

  “Hullo,” I say, as dull as a brick. “You’re here.”

  He shrugs, his presence being natural everywhere. “You came to me in a dream.”

  “So you’ve arrived to even things out.”

  This interest in fairness is a well-established trait. He likes to count the number of times a couple invited us to dinner and multiply that figure by some determiner to find the value of the gift he would bring to their wedding. In business, he is aware not only of who picked up the bill, but of the quantity and occasion; four beers on an early lunch is reciprocated with an engraved pen given as a gift to sign the contract, while a fine bottle of champagne warrants an invitation onto the Iris, his white-winged yacht. Equivalence as a social concept rules his life, and so it follows that he would trade my visit to his dreams with his own, his suit pressed despite the journey, his facial hair far too well-groomed to be real. Already the light seems to bleed through him; we should get to the point before I wake.

  “Darling,” I say. “Draw near to me, for I am dying.”

  Paris gives me that old look of patient dismissal, the same look he employs to return untouched baskets of rolls to the waiters unacquainted with his preferences, informing them in his polite but firm way that he would eat bread when he was poor.

  “You’re dying?” he remarks. “You look well enough.”

  “But you’ve only just arrived. You find me in a grave state, sitting in the grave itself.”

  “Your grave has lovely clean sheets then, and three meals daily.” Taking up his paper again, he considers the foreign press. “The nurse said your fever broke last night, and you might be able to have a little breakfast already today. She says it was quite a fast turnaround, actually.” He takes hold of my foot, giving it an encouraging little shake.

  “But it’s not possible you talked to her, she hasn’t come in yet.”

  “And you’ve made two healthy bowel movements since your fever broke, praise the Lord.” Holding my foot against its attempt to escape, he rubs its arch with his thumb. “I know you might believe the world ceases to turn outside the bounds of your experience, but they’re all gossiping endlessly about you downstairs. One of the girls in the kitchen has serviceable English, and the older ones know Italian.”

  “They haven’t spoken a word of Italian to me!”

  “You’ll be dancing to cross the room when we shove off at the end of the week.”

  I pull my foot so violently out of his grasp that the bed shakes. “You’re joking.”

  “It’s past time,” he says. “Elizabeth has selected a lover from a group of rowdy tenants, and Gus is preparing for an expedition down the Mamoré. They’re drinking the island dry between the two of them. The kitchen has worked its way straight through the wine, and two bottles of rye have gone missing from the front office.”

  His image splits clean in two, speaking in perfect unison. The man on the left gazes nervously at the one on the right. “All this is happening on my tab, I’m sure. I’ll receive the bill consolidated from the hoteliers and dock merchants in the spring.” Paris makes a strange set of twins. I picture them screaming in a pram.

  “We can’t go now. Gus only wants to sit and speculate, he’ll never make a trip. And Elizabeth would never enter into a casual dalliance—” I am overcome with a coughing fit, extended only slightly to garner sympathy from the visitor, who nods as if a worldly concept is being expressed in phlegm. “With whom?” I manage.

  “I’m only relaying information I heard from the girls downstairs. They had quite a bit to say, as you might imagine.”

  Unfortunately, shooting the messenger would require taking aim twice. The man on the right would be easy enough to strike, but his alter form shifts to watch the bed from different angles, menacing his newspaper in his hands.

  “Don’t give me any trouble on it,” says the man on the right, ignoring the other. “You said you needed time to think, and now look, you’ve had a month and a half to do nothing but turn your thoughts over and over. Come, let’s get you back to France. You’ll shock them with a solo series and set up a new school after that.”

  What would be the use in contradicting his method? Paris prides himself in downswing investment. And anyway, welcoming grief as a friend has only made it friendly, and now it has outstayed its welcome, settling into my lungs. Paris has been off overseeing enterprises, and planning my recovery while he’s at it.

  Men like Paris, which is to say great men and kings of industry, don’t just happen on this personality; they practice it from the moment it’s engendered into their boyhood. They mark plans on scraps of paper they steal from their fathers, binding the loose pages with twine and calling it juvenilia. As they grow older and more romantic, they write sprawling love letters to themselves disguised as fiction or philosophy. Great men anticipate their own greatness and consider almost every angle of it; except, of course, how their greatness will appear to anyone else. A woman might as well be alone when she is alone with a great man.

  Women pursue their own legacy in ways far more subtle, hedging their bets with culinary skills or self-effacing charm, though the etiquette lessons we suffer through don’t do us much good if we’re dead before we get a chance to enjoy the parties thrown in our honor.

  Paris goes back to his newspaper, waiting me out. Beside him, his shadow seems smudged at the edges like a hasty sketch made out of proportion, his torso wielding the dark wings of his shoulders. The shadow man glares with simple loathing at Paris, who ignores him, talking aimlessly of autumn in New York.

  Surely you don’t believe him, I address the shadow man. He’s only trying to convince himself. The shadow man bares his teeth. He is a dog beside the great man, beaten and cowering, neglected by his m
aster. He looks hungry. He wrings his bare hands, which I notice are missing both the onyx ring and the wristwatch Paris bought to seem more like an airman despite much preferring the piece in his pocket with its heavy gold chain.

  I have seen Paris Singer’s shadow man only once before. It was after a long dinner with friends, wherein a case of wine may as well have been poured into the toilet for all the good it did us. One of the men was engaged in an argument with a light fixture, which nearly came to blows. A woman locked herself in the bathroom and could not be cajoled to emerge again, and three girls nobody knew were singing Christmas carols beautifully while everyone yelled at them to stop. Memory draws a curtain over these nights, which might begin in the city but really get going when someone suggested we go sailing.

  The first time I saw the shadow man, it was after that long dinner, the night that German fought a lamp and lost, as I recall. I can’t remember for the life of me who the man was, but the lamp was a beautiful old brass piece with tassels hanging from the shade, apparently imposing enough to start a quarrel. Paris gazed at the man strangling the lamp. He looked at each of us in turn, as if forcing himself to observe the human scene would allow him to describe it fully to an interested third party. The women had moved on to fellowship-style hymns. A plate of ice cream melted into a puddle on the carpet. Someone was scraping candle wax from the wall, and I had just begun a serpentine dance to the accompaniment of a fellow playing a toy piano when I saw the shadow man appear for just a moment beside Paris, his eyes skewed and loathing. I feared him and was glad when he absorbed back into his host, at which point Paris excused himself, lifted one of the heavy sash-weight windows at the front of the room, stepped out onto the ledge, and jumped, dropping two full meters to the road below. We had been fighting bitterly all week, so I declared Death to Tyrants and went back to my dance. Someone rushed to the window and reported that he had fallen hard but lay for only a moment before getting to his feet and running down the road. He turned the corner without so much as glancing back.

  It was an unusual move for the man typically content to serve as grand marshal to our little parade of disordered malaise. We all gossiped viciously about him for the rest of the night, and though I would claim in the morning that I had harbored a secret concern and gone out to search for him while the rest of them slept, the truth was that I lodged a few of the worst jokes at his expense and even pulled some secrets out of the archive, such as the fact that he wished most of all to be rid of his father’s house in Paignton, and also that he fully believed that in a prior life he had been a dire wolf.

  He was gone for two days, returning on the morning of the third wearing a new suit and bearing a bolt of velvet that I made into a touring curtain. We never spoke about the rest of it. After that, I encountered the shadow man only in my dreams, his sullen gaze following me through the labyrinth.

  Though Paris and the shadow man both seem to resent their presence in the room, neither attempts to escape; Paris wouldn’t fit through the window, and his shadow probably doesn’t want to fall into the sea and have to contend with the divisive properties of jetsam threatening to spread him without distinction across the strait.

  Paris recites a few ferry departures and connecting trains. We could go through Brindisi and take our time working through the hills, resting before we arrived back in the city. I feel a tempting pleasure of a new hotel: the staff and their labor, the soothing course of daily tasks.

  A quick knock precedes Elizabeth with the basin. She comes in midway through a monologue about my health and has already asked after the sore on my rump before she sees we are not alone, startling so violently she nearly dumps the whole liquid operation in the process. “Paris,” she says.

  “I am having a dream,” I explain. “This is a spirit man and a shadow man in addition.”

  “Hullo, Elizabeth,” one of them says.

  “Good Christ,” she says, setting the basin down and bracing herself on the counter in a pleasantly dramatic way, Elizabeth not typically given to dramatics. Perhaps she has taken a lover after all. “And so in this dream,” she says, “I am bringing in a bath?”

  “Apparently so. I’ll say honestly that your presence destroys any sexual element that might impose itself on the scene, but the way things were going, he was more likely to hand me a gourd filled with secrets than take me in his arms—”

  “I have not arrived in a dream,” he interjects, dubious but insistent, in the same tone he uses when he doesn’t fully remember giving an order to a member of his staff but has not quite decided to commit himself against the idea of it.

  “You probably did,” Elizabeth says. “We are already bound on the vector of her whim. Doesn’t it follow that we would be called to serve in her sleep as well?” She looks him over. “You look like you came straight from Ghent.”

  “I was trying to remind her of the merits of France.”

  “How perfect!” she says. “Come to my dreams next with a croissant.” She wrings out a rag. “Now, Isadora, quit shifting about, you’ll exhaust yourself. Let’s see that great wide forehead of yours.” The rag is pressed in turn to my forehead, cheeks, behind my ears, the nape of the neck. The shadow man seems preoccupied. Elizabeth talks at length about her day so far, but it’s possible to gently shift her voice out of the conscious mind, much like one could push an old, worn brick back into the wall from which it had begun to hang. “Never mind me,” she says.

  Paris has always had a funny way of watching people, as if he is trying to determine and absorb their secrets. The shadow man is even less subtle about it as Paris roams the room. His shadow’s eyes rove across my rounded shoulders and the curve of my breast through my dressing gown, which I further cover with the blanket. He licks his lips.

  “Not much of an opportunity,” Paris says, tapping the window glass.

  “If you could carry some of that breeze to the bed, it will be the first I’ve felt in days.”

  “We should have them move this armoire,” he says. “It’s blocking a second window entirely.”

  “There’s a second window?”

  “They told me you were enjoying mornings on the terrace until the doctor determined that the chance of infection was too high.” He looks me over, and his shadow cackles to see my discomfort. I hate the both of them.

  “I’m starting to get the sense you’ve already interviewed everyone on the island. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have a sample of my stool?”

  Sensing the storm, Elizabeth makes a subtle exit.

  “I only wanted to make sure they were taking care of my dancing bear,” he says genially.

  “And moreover, you’re blocking the light.” He makes a better door than a window, but his presence is a door in itself; the hotel accepted the promise of his eventual arrival as implied credit on the account, which came to include meals and lodging both, afternoon tea and sundry items, including a small crate of wine that was far too sweet, which they would not allow us to return. They extended the credit to include my medical care, but the material cost mounted, and the nurse had her own expenses—she kept speaking of a family to feed, as if they were all kittens trapped in a crate—and though the hotelier was of course honored to serve, and in serving support the arts, there was, in the end, the question of the bill. The manager was well pleased to see Paris coming up the street that morning. He did very much resemble his father, whom the owner had seen in advertisements in the foreign press, the inventor hovering in an ink frame above his newest machines. Paris goes through life thinking of money the same way he thinks of the train schedule.

  “Come back with me,” he says. “They’re calling for you. I have three bound parcels of personal letters, most of them well-wishing.”

  “Show me the ones that call for my immediate demise.”

  He laughs, frowning, which makes him seem very Parisian.

  “Mills is bored at Oldway,” he says, changing the subject by bringing up employees and property, the two things he knows
very well are my least favorite subjects. He could fill a book with the people on his payroll and pass it off as the yearbook representing a class of homely misfits. “I’ve begun to think he’s inventing architectural extremities in order to occupy his mind. He just sent plans for reinforcing the ballroom floors to hold more people than either of us have ever met.”

  If he’s going to insist on conversation, let’s make it something substantial. “Have you been to Père-Lachaise,” I say, “to see the children’s memorial?”

  This straightens him up. “I have not.”

  “Because you couldn’t bear it.”

  “I could bear it fine. I simply don’t see the point when any corner of the city could be imbued with their spirits. And anyway, you have the ashes, unless you’ve lost them somewhere.” He comes and smooths my hair against the pillow, speaking gently. “Perhaps you were right, we should have buried them. Mother’s crypt is visited by mourners every day, and there is a stone to lay the flowers down. My sisters go there for guidance.”

  “They say any grave is right twice a day.”

  He leans back and observes my bed, as if calculating the cost of labor required to have it dismantled and rebuilt as a homesteader shack, the kind of place that might forever remove him from conversations such as this one.

  “Ashes are so economical,” I add, trying to soothe and attack him at once; nothing so intricate as a good fight.

  “If you didn’t want me to visit, you could have sent word to the effect.”

  “I wanted you to come,” I insisted, the sentiment falling flat because thoughts of him in truth have only just arrived to replace the blankness I felt after observing the ceiling and walls and the palms of my hands for weeks and, when thoughts of the palms become too much to bear, turning the hands over to observe their slight scars. That quackish doctor declared on his way out that my rest cure would be best confined to the bed, and when the meager surroundings exhausted me, I reluctantly entered the confines of my mind. At first I couldn’t stop going through the details of the accident, half-regarding the scene in memory as one might observe a room of cheap and embarrassing furniture. I could only distract myself from those thoughts once I realized that each mole on my forearm had a twin and that every one of those twins could be grouped into fantastic swarming colonies all over my body.