An Embarrassment of Riches (25 page)

“Did you not promise to critique my watercolors, monsieur?” she asked, stepping yet closer until I could feel her hips and her breasts against me.

“Madame, I—”

“Why don't we go to my studio at once?” she suggested.

“I must have a word with my uncle first.”

“Do you require his permission, my little
voyageur
?”

She held the dahlia right beneath my nose and diddled it maddeningly about my nostrils. I bit the blossom off its stem and spit the petals on the flagstones. Madame's face tautened with emotion.

“Come,” she said.

As a man ensorcelled, I followed her back into the chateau.

She led me up a winding stairway in a hidden corner of the floating palace, then threw open the door to her salon.

“Why look, here's a real man,
bawk bawk
,” cried a voice, its source unseen, as I stepped inside the large room.

“Who's there!” I barked back in alarm, braced against the jamb.

“Hush your filthy mouth, Arlequin!” Madame shouted across the room, and then I saw the object of her wrath: a large glaucous parrot in a wire cage shaped like a Muhammadan mosque. “Don't be afraid, monsieur. It is only my pet bird.”

“
Bawk bawk!
I love you, Madame Marie,
bawk bawk
.”

“Silence! Or I cut out that ugly black tongue of yours,” she warned it again. “It is as bad as Lou-Lou, no? Come in, please.”

The studio was decorated like a seraglio, with a Baghdad rug on the floor, a beaded curtain across the windows, and pleated silk fastened to the ceiling, so that one had the impression of being in an Arabian tent. At the far wall was a heap of cushions and pillows. Madame took me by the hand and led me to them.

“Sit down, Monsieur Sammy,” she said, and I could not help but obey.

“Brandy?”

“No thank you,” said I, remembering our last tête-à-tête.

Before the cushions stood a low, squat-legged table of Oriental manufacture, and upon it a folio of papers bound in pink satin ribbon.

“Here they are, my little critic,” Madame said with a knowing smile.

I untied the ribbon and opened the folio. My eyes nearly flew out of my head at the first page. The watercolor, done in the fluffy manner of Watteau, depicted a man pushing a woman on a swing. Both were naked. The man's puzzle was the size of a small cannon, and it was about to be inserted in the courtesan's hypogastric cranny. Both wore expressions of the sheerest delight.

“What do you think of my technique, Sammy?” Madame inquired. “It is not too academic, I hope.”

I knew not what to say. “The subject matter is so … unusual, madame. Do you just … dream it up?”

“Heavens no. I try to reconstruct scenes from memory,” she said. “Go on.”

I turned the page. The next painting was of a group of men and women in a wooded glade. All were engaged in various acts of copulation, the males endowed with scepters like unto those of bulls.

“How is my proportion?” Madame asked.

“H-h-heroic.”

“Do you think so? One tends to remember the scenes of youth in a highly romantic manner.”

“This is certainly the case here.”

“Go on, monsieur. I hang upon your every word, I assure you.”

I turned the page. The next tableau was of a statue of Hermes, his virile member the length of a krummhorn, and a nude woman orally engorged upon it with hands grasping the shaft as though she were playing etudes.

“Egad!” I exclaimed.

“I am delighted that you approve, Sammy. How sad it is for the artist to toil in a vacuum, with no public to admire or scorn her work.”

She continued to turn the pages, each picture more bacchanalian than the one preceding it, until my head fairly swam. She closed the portfolio.

“You don't know how much your approbation means to me, Sammy,” Madame said, drawing her fragrant body closer to mine on the yielding cushions. Her eyes searched my face, lips parting and warm breath like roses. “A real artist,” she murmured and then her lips found mine. It was no use trying to resist. My arms opened to her. Her tongue ventured into my mouth and explored its recesses like a dragon entering a cave. Suddenly, she stopped and tore her face away from mine, leaving me gasping.

“Would you excuse me a moment, my little critic, while I slip into something more comfortable?”

“
Guh
… Not at all, madame.”

She slipped off the cushions and flew across the room to a closet, then vanished within.

Still gasping for breath, and all but out of my head with desire, I reached in my shirt for the letter outlining LeBoeuf's treachery, folded it in quarters, and inserted it in the pocket of my breeches.

The door to the closet swung open. There stood Madame LeBoeuf in “something more comfortable,” namely, the flesh that God had endowed her with to issue upon the earth. This and not a stitch more.

Lightning flashed through the beaded curtains.

“More storms,” Madame said. “I love a rainy day, don't you?”

“
Guh
….”

“What are you waiting for, young man. Off with your clothing. I want to see that American bayonet of yours.”

I was helpless except to comply. Off came my shirt. Down fell my breeches.

“
Bawk! Bawk!
You beautiful savage!” the bird said.

“Shut your mouth!” Madame rebuked it. She advanced toward me, all curves and perfume. In a moment, she was upon me, wetness, warmth, and womanhood. Thunder boomed outside. She seemed to turn inside out.

“Ooo, monsieur, a blood sausage!”

“Guh….”

“Bawk bawk!”

“Mount me like a ram upon an ewe!”

I seized her and rode her all about the chamber, stars in my eyes and my brain full of fire. We returned to the cushions. Her squeals filled the room.

“Eeeeeee…!”

“Unnnhhh…!”

“Fa … fa … fa … aster…!”

“Whu … unh … unh unh…!”

“
Mon dieu
… OOOOOooooo…!”

Her fingernails clawed furrows in my back. Her spine arched. An elongated cry issued from her lips. We both subsided. The stars blinked out my brain as I opened my eyes and daylight flooded back in. I rolled off her. She lay there, glistening and panting.

“You are dismissed,” she said eventually in the husky voice that evinced both wide experience and a certain weariness with the world.

“I beg your pardon, madame?”

“Go on. Get out of here.”

“But I—”

“Can't you see I want to be alone now!” she said fiercely and flung my breeches in my face. An instant later, she threw herself face down upon the pillows, sobbing. Though I had heard that the love act stimulates unpredictable emotions in some women, I was surprised to behold such an extreme manifestation of it. Only then did I remember that in the past forty-eight hours all of Madame LeBoeuf's hopes and dreams for a glorious future as wife to the vice-consul of Louisiana, and for a life at the summit of New Orleans society, had been utterly dashed. And then I almost felt sorry for her. But not before I also recalled the pathetic pawn whose life she would have bartered for that future of glory and wealth untold.

“Where is Lou-Lou?” I now asked her as I climbed back into my clothes.

“In a special hell for idiots, for all I care,” she replied, still sobbing.

“What!” I gasped. “Is he dead?”

“I wish I were dead.”

“Madame,” I seized her by the shoulders and forced her to look at me, “I implore you. Where is he?”

She looked pale, frightened, drawn, and for the first time since I had laid eyes upon her, old.

“Do you want to make love with him also, monsieur?” she remarked brazenly. “Is that why—”

“Madame!”
I exclaimed.

She stopped sobbing and commenced to laugh, a harsh, pained, lunatic's laugh.

“Where is Lou-Lou!” I shook her and asked again.

“In the bilges,” she said.

I flung her back upon the pillows, her laughter rising higher and higher in pitch, like a tocsin.

“
Bawk bawk!
What a man!” the parrot cried.

I quit the chamber and hurried off to find the King of France.

The spiral staircase from Madame's third-floor studio communicated directly to the dank corridors beneath the theater. No sentry was visible. Here and there a candle burned weakly in a tin wall bracket. Fetid water sloshed over the treads of the wooden walkways, then slowly ebbed as the huge palace rocked on the storm-tossed lake. The treads were slippery and more than once I found myself ankle-deep in the rancid slop.

“Lou-Lou…!” I called hoarsely. There was no reply but the drip, drip, drip of bilgewater. “Lou-Lou…!”

I passed by the rank, windowless rooms where the Negro actors had removed their face-paint after the play. There were several candles inside. I lit one and jammed two more in my breeches pocket, then forged onward.

“Lou-Lou…!”

I turned a corner. The red eyes of loathsome creatures glinted from the shadows. A splash—and they were gone as I stepped creakily forward. I recalled LeBoeuf's discourse on bad atoms and imagined the squalid air as warm with the disease-bearing motes. Spiders the size of snuffboxes clung to the moldy wooden walls.

“Lou-Lou…!”

My call was answered by a sob. I shivered—and from more than the cold and damp.

“Lou-Lou…?”

More sobs. I crept ahead, the candle held flickeringly aloft. About three quarters of the way down that long, dismal, foul-smelling corridor, I came to a massive wooden door. Just above eye level was a small, barred window. The bars were iron, as thick as my finger, set in timbers a foot square. I had to step off the wooden treadway and stand on tiptoe in the cold, stinking water to peer over the sill, and even so, it was too dark to see much inside.

“Lou-Lou? It is I, Sammy.”

“O, my friend…” he sobbed weakly, in the utmost despondency. I could not help but thrill that, whatever his shortcomings, I was now speaking to a personage of huge historical importance, the rightful heir of one of the earth's grandest thrones.

“Are you all right?” I inquired.

“I am lonely. And hungry.”

“Don't worry. I'm here to get you out. You shan't be lonely hungry any longer.”

“O, Sammy, my genius friend! How kind you are to me. But I cannot come with you. I must suffer my punishment.”

“No you needn't. We're leaving this place. I have come to help you escape from Chateau Félicité.”

“Did you ask Uncle Fernand for permission?”

“No. You do not require his permission.”

“But he will be angry.”

“That will be his affair.”

“He will punish me more.”

“No he won't. You will be far away from here and he won't be able to punish you ever again.”

“But where will I go?”

“You will come with us, Uncle William and me.”

“Can he be my uncle too?”

“Yes.”

“Will he punish me like Uncle Fernand?”

“Certainly not. Why should he punish you?”

“Because he is Uncle Fernand's great friend, and he will do what Uncle Fernand would like, no?”

“My Uncle William will not punish you. Here, I am going to pass your locksmithing tools through the window. Reach up 'til I feel your hand.” I held the tools between the bars, but he failed to take them. “Lou-Lou! Come now. Take these things!”

“I am afraid.”

“I know. But soon you will be free of all this cruelty and unhappiness.”

“Where will you take me?”

“To our keelboat. I will fetch Uncle William Then we shall all bid adieu to this place.”

“Can I not say goodbye to my Uncle Fernand?”

“No.”

“Please! Please!”

“Don't be an idiot, Lou-Lou!” I rebuked him with unexpected severity, then regretted it. “He will not consent to your escape.”

“Why not?”

“Believe me, there are reasons he would never permit it.”

“Then I must not do it.”

“Lou-Lou! Try to listen to reason, for goodness' sake! Where are you?”

“I am here. With you.”

“You are in the bilges. In a dungeon.”

“Is
this
a dungeon?”

“It most certainly is.”