Isadora Read online

  “What fun,” Elizabeth says, taking a healthy step back. The men excuse themselves down a side path. The red-haired one gave me a frank smile at breakfast back at the hotel. His skin is the color of a cloth-bound archive, as if cutting him open would release reams of pages. Bury all boys, burn the earth, and pave a road over the lot of it.

  The guide stretches his walking stick to prod us forward.

  “All right,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

  “Ob-serve the earth’s boun-ty,” he repeats, going back into his pocket and coming up with a pair of figs this time, months before season and green as grass. He chews one of them without seeming to register its bitterness. “Be a guest to my land,” he says.

  The wind roars vertically up the cliffside. The horseshoe stone is more precarious than it looked at first, bits crumbling sideways in the wind. I wonder how quickly the surface of the sun would end us were it to fall upon the planet, if we would have a moment of fear or pain or even a sense of warmth before we were crushed into the void. My hand catches the wind when I reach for the chain. The guide ejects a green knuckle of pulp over the edge, and it sails awhile before falling.

  Elizabeth calls out bland warnings, seeming not to understand the simplicity of one step and another, as in all things, gaining ground, leaving only footprints to suffer the company of the fools who didn’t try. The chain jangles on its rail, which rises only to mid-thigh in a way that would aid a fall rather than hinder it, turning a body right-side down. And so the things designed to keep us safe will kill us in the end. Such is life! Such is every day of life.

  The guide continues, so drowned by the wind that I have to read his lips:

  “Ob-serve the boun-ty of the earth, your step under-taken by only the bold-est man in the face of gods”—this amalgam presents itself, its meaning unclear—“boun-ty step and brave the farce of God.” He says more, which I can’t register.

  “What’s that?” I call out.

  Sand scatters across the path. They sent the children’s ashes after the service, and I insisted on taking them with me to Greece. Of course I wouldn’t leave them with Paris to dump over some garden. I claimed I would release the ashes here, but as the days passed, I wanted them closer and closer. I was greedy for them and didn’t want to share them with the world, and so when the time came to take this walk, I gathered ash from the fireplace into a jar from the kitchen. Elizabeth will see them go and feel some comfort, and it will stop her from asking me what we must do with them.

  The real ashes have another fate: when I can get away with a sprinkle or a pinch, I take them in, bit by bit. I mix them with my food and drink. I feel exceptionally heavy these days, saddled down with potatoes and fish dunked in butter, my gut stratified with filo and sweet wine, courses taken at midnight and all hours of the day. It has come to be that I can eat only when the flavor is attended by the subtle ash of the children in my mouth.

  The sun’s steady burn dulls my vision to striations of gray and black. A sickly blue vein tries to creep across my squinting eye but is stopped by the relentless light, a swift and brutish elimination, so that every object within the walled city of my gaze is stripped of its variegated charm and bundled in soothing stone. The wind shifts to roar across the arch, bringing the guide’s voice with it. “This is what she did,” he says. “Think of this woman Sappho on the altar of love—”

  Elizabeth runs up to him, shouting something and throwing her arms wide, the pink sail of her dress unfurling as she wraps both arms around his waist. They engage in a strange scuffle, where she seems to be trying to pull the man’s staves away. I suppose she has never held much affection for Sappho.

  “The broken heart’s only cure is the leap,” he calls, struggling against her grasp. “Feet bare on the warm stone! The sen-sation of that final flight—”

  Elizabeth releases the man and rushes to the rail. She calls my name and speaks in a steady stream, and from what I can hear, she is accusing the man of inventing a story to keep people touring his old pasture, dismissing his apocryphal story for lack of romance, and insisting that I should already know that the true pleasure of life is in waking each morning to slice an apple, to enjoy a nice strong coffee with your dear and loving sister while brother reads the news aloud, stories of brave men saving women from burning row houses, of explorers on intrepid journeys to various frozen norths, all of them living to tell the tale. She reaches for me, calling my name.

  It’s fine it’s fine, our ticking clock insists, it’s fine, says steady heart and mind made for finer things than daily life; it’s fine, the smallest parts declare, it’s fine, rays screaming from the open breast; it’s fine, the water a slab; it’s fine, it’s fine, a bird in the cage worth three in the car, it’s fine my dear, it’s fine!

  The men have returned, waving their spyglasses like copper cudgels. One of them holds a dead squirrel bound at its feet with red twine. The man with the squirrel is handsome enough, with a flat nose as if broken by a punch. They stop and take in the scene, all of them smiling in the same deranged way, which must mirror my own smile. The squirrel watches from its dying eye.

  Elizabeth’s foot drags a gentle half circle in the dirt, its sandal cutting a scalloped edge. It makes a nice counterbalance with her arms, which reach for me; I must want to live if I’m motivated enough to think in choreography. The men watch her limp and pull herself onto the arch.

  “Come on,” she says. “Think of the good piece of meat we’ll have for lunch.”

  “You know I don’t take meat with any meal.”

  “Let’s go,” she says, trying to sound reasonable though her hands are shaking madly. On the other side of the world, Mother feels a chill down her spine as someone tries to take her place.

  “I’ll stay here for a while longer, thank you.”

  “Look there! Your shadow has already come down and is heading home for a rest. See it going down the hill?”

  Sure enough, darkness leads.

  “The water is cold along the strait,” notes the guide, who has come up beside us. “Warm wind all through the year, many beach-going days.”

  “Oh shut up,” Elizabeth says.

  The men watch with amused disinterest. I’m snagged by their hooks, suspended on an invisible line. I’d rather they throw me back, my wounds healing in salt water, but they have darker aims. They want to flay me while I’m still alive, working their hands into my gut to find golden locks of hair and sandwich crusts and ashes, baby teeth and rattles, soft shoes and acorn caps. Open me up and find the full strata of my love! Serve it on a piece of toast!

  Their hotel on Corfu, over a series of heavy meat courses prepared midday for the tourists

  “You would not believe our adventure,” Elizabeth said. Lunch was served, the last dregs of morning chased off by steaming plates. They returned to find Gus in the parlor room, where the hotel kept its collection of overstuffed furniture smelling faintly of dogs. Gus had apparently not moved all morning, even when the kitchen staff came in to lay down a tablecloth and settings for the meal.

  The staff had been overextending themselves in the kitchen to make the tourists feel welcome, and the heavy courses seemed to trouble Isadora, who had been off meat for some time, eating fish and vegetables like the principled little sophisticate she was. It made Elizabeth uncomfortable, which she expressed by making an aggressive effort to eat everything served and remarking often on the fine quality of the food. She swiped a forkful of steak through a sopping pile of mashed potatoes. “Wonderful,” she insisted to nobody in particular.

  “Look here!” Gus said, folding the newspaper around a photograph. “Our darling immortalized in stone.”

  Sure enough, the marble muse resembled Isadora very well, reaching to touch the sky beside Apollo, who seemed to be teasing her with a length of sculpted silk. The frieze had been three years in production for the new Champs-Élysées theater. Bourdelle, its sculptor, had come by Isadora’s flat so often with his sketchpad that even his subject tired
of the attention and encouraged him to go on working while she slept, her arms stretched above her on the bed.

  Gus examined the photograph, sampling a kumquat from the center bowl. All of the Duncan siblings had been scheduled to appear at the opening ceremony, and the lilies the sculptor sent to the flat after the accident included a subtle note expressing the hope that he could offer his condolences in person soon enough. It was a disappointment to miss the party, but of course it couldn’t be helped.

  Gus deposited a bit of macerated kumquat into his napkin, examining the pulp before folding the napkin and placing it daintily aside. “And Jeux premiered, the sporting motif. Can you believe they pushed it through?”

  “It was a fine walk,” Elizabeth said. They were drinking wine from extravagant silver goblets. “If you wondered at our late arrival, we were simply enjoying the morning air and then a bit of the afternoon air as well.”

  “Can you imagine the reception, though? A tennis match!”

  “Our guide was so funny,” she said, patting her sister’s arm, as if some gentle handling might inspire her to remember a fonder version of events.

  “The dancers in sporting flannel. Avenue Montaigne would have burned on that alone ten years ago. And the ménage!” He removed his glasses, picking up one of the blue-striped linens to clean them. “My God, they’ll hang Vaslav from a rafter.”

  “You’ve been away from Paris too long. Everyone likes a scandal now.”

  He tongued a bit of kumquat in his teeth before employing the napkin on it. “I suppose you would know, stuck in Germany. I wonder if he got his car crash in, it doesn’t mention. Was it an aeroplane? My word.” He dug at the kumquat with the napkin, ignoring a lady seated nearby, who observed him in silence for a moment before covering her open mouth and turning away. “He wanted it to be three men, you know. I wonder if he even presented the idea. Do you recall him saying?”

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes in response. After a few days of Gus she missed Raymond’s guileless sensitivity, his ability to weep over nothing. She wished she could combine her two brothers into one man, practical in all things, with a caring and awareness for others. It was as if the four siblings had inherited a different quadrant of their mother’s heart, and each looked upon the other three as strangers, though they were separated by nothing more than a membranous wall. Elizabeth decided to change the subject.

  “The guide held himself so strange,” she said. “Between two tall sticks. You would have laughed and laughed. Of course we were just trying to stand upright ourselves after all the fun we had last night, isn’t that true, love?”

  Isadora was looking off. At Elizabeth’s question, she took up her fork. “A straightjacket could barely keep me together,” she said, spearing a carrot.

  “What a week to be away,” Gus said. “Sacre du Printemps next. Stravinsky himself came and showed us all the score one afternoon in London. He really did! Don’t make that face, it’s not flattering. I was sitting with the orchestra when he brought it out. He had the working score bound up in a case secured with three locks. We all came and had a look. I’ll never forget how quiet they all were. The oboe hummed a bit of it but trailed off, and there was no other sound but the composer turning the pages. The principal violin sat down and started writing a farewell letter to his family. And now we’ve gone and missed it. Will you look here, later this month—” He went on like that, down each item on the bill at the Champs-Élysées, moving on to the revivals and other acts of small significance at the Grévin, then the Palais-Royal, a one-man show featuring a man Gus swore he knew, though not well, he admitted.

  He was going through the student work they were missing at the conservatory as Elizabeth waited for him to lift his eyes. At last he did, buttering a second slice of bread.

  “We are missing nothing in Paris,” she said.

  They both looked at their sister, who was staring dully at a curtained window.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course not.”

  Morning lay behind them, paving the way for an afternoon of cards and visits from other guests of the hotel, which, if the previous week had been any indication, meant suffering through stories from dowagers about long journeys by rail, mistaking in the Duncans a sympathetic audience and launching into complaints of filthy conditions and the true lack of white flour, and at every stop sad, strange women selling faded bolts of fabric, the women’s flesh matching the material so cleanly they both might have been woven the same day and would all crumble into linen dust the moment they were touched. The old tourists clearly failed to see their own resemblance. They shook as they spoke, as if the trepidation that came with age had manifested in their bones.

  The dowagers tended to make their rounds the moment lunch was over. These women could talk all day about how similar every place looked to them, how unremarkable every parlor, and how much they missed their home every time they dared to leave it. One of them was working her way to the table to begin just such a story, dabbing the blood of a rare steak from the corners of her mouth. Elizabeth saw her coming and excused herself to the other room.

  Without Elizabeth to entertain, Gus does his best to make conversation with the little genius of the family

  The headache wasn’t helping, though Gus found some relief pressing the sockets of his eyes with two fists. “Luminous shards,” he said. When he opened his eyes again, Elizabeth had aged fifty years, smacking her lips as she started in on a story about the Dutch East Indies. A full minute passed before he realized it was one of the other guests of the hotel, the woman who had spent much of the morning trying to engage him in conversation while he dozed by the window.

  Isadora was watching the woman with an expression that suggested she was trying to solve a complicated mathematical problem. The old woman was telling a harrowing story of survival in a hotel with only one chambermaid.

  “You’ve been having headaches?” Isadora asked, watching the dowager but speaking to Gus as if she wasn’t aware the other woman was talking at all.

  “All morning long,” Gus said.

  “Maybe your body could properly breathe if you weren’t stuffed into a winter vest.”

  The old woman started in on a story about Charleston.

  “You don’t like the vest?” Gus asked.

  “Your shirtsleeves billowing out like that makes your torso look like a chimney.”

  “That’s precisely why I like it.”

  She adjusted the strap on her tunic, an elegant rose-hued silk. “It’s as if your internal organs have chosen a new pope.”

  The old woman was picking at the carrots from Elizabeth’s abandoned plate, squinting at each piece before bringing it to her mouth.

  Isadora took up the silver creamer and lifted its dainty lid to smell it. “You should pray to Saint Lucy for vision. Send word to your patron in London that you have come to consult the saints. Perhaps he will be inspired to send a little advance. Money always helps me with my headaches.”

  Wrinkling her nose, the dowager excused herself from the table.

  “Don’t tell Elizabeth,” he said, folding his paper and placing it before the empty chair, as if to suggest that the seat was saved for a man who would appreciate the daily news better than either of them possibly could. He took her hand. “I was thinking we could go on an adventure.”

  “But Gus, isn’t life adventure enough?”

  Across the room, Elizabeth and a cluster of Italians were looking through an album of photographs brought down from someone’s trunk. All travellers want a witness, Gus always said, something to put their stories in context. Without one, they became strangers to themselves. “I’ve been reading a book,” he said, watching the men. One of them broke from the group and strode purposefully across the room, his retreat drawing her frowning attention.

  The Italian approached with a smile and took the empty seat. “Your sister is a candid woman,” he said.

  “Hullo there,” Gus said.

  “Very illuminating, in
truth.” He reached for the discarded newspaper. “I wanted to make your acquaintance as well. But oh—”

  In hindsight, it might have all been avoided. Realizing his desire for a thing the moment it was desired by another, Gus tried to take the paper before the Italian got to it. The other man drew back, and in the confusion, one of them tipped a forgotten cup of tea across Isadora’s dress. All three stood at once in an ovation to the moment, reaching for place mats and cloth napkins to soak up the tea, a strong floral variety. Everyone in the room stopped to watch as a healthy quarter cup of it seeped across her.

  The men did more harm than good with the soiled napkins from lunch, leaving behind blots of oil and crumbs. A bit of the sour fruit Gus had spit out earlier dotted the very tip of her breast. The Italian desperately reached for a book from a nearby shelf, opened it at random, and pressed its pages to Isadora’s hip. “Dear,” he said, “oh dear.”

  Isadora, in the middle of it all, seemed the least bothered. She looked down at herself, where the soaked thin fabric stuck wetly to her skin, revealing with no subtle shading the expanse of her left breast.

  “That won’t do at all,” she said, and if she hadn’t had everyone’s attention before, she got it with that. One of the dowagers slumped forward in her chair. Elizabeth put her head in her hands. Someone laughed in the other room, having already heard the story. Isadora exited the room with a flourish, and if she had returned for a curtain call none of them would have been surprised.

  Upstairs at their hotel on Corfu, unseasonably warm and not much by way of windows

  A fat old rug runs from one edge of the hall to the other, folding over itself at the doorways to the guest rooms and offering thick shelter to cigarette ash and flattened crumbs, obliterating every hard corner and giving anyone walking through the hall the feeling of a blood cell squeezing through a fat vein.