First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (24 page)

I lay back, drawing slowly on the pipe. Before my eyes stopped focusing on the world outside of me, they happened to settle for a moment on a form stretched out on one of the mattresses nearby. A woman.

That was a surprise. I’d never seen a woman here before. She was small and dark, and wore dark clothes. How thin she looked, lying there. When the candles guttered, her face became a death’s head, with black hollows for eyes.

Soon, my mind drifted away from her. My eyes closed and I saw nothing but marvels. I lay in that state for at least
three hours. When I got up to leave, I noticed that the mattress the woman had occupied was empty. I went home and slept a few refreshing, dreamless hours.

I saw her the following Wednesday night, just after midnight, walking along Weber Lane. She had a stiff walk that somehow seemed right for her, and was headed in the opposite direction from me. She didn’t look my way. Later that night I saw her again—at the turreted mansion.

After that, I kept seeing her on my Wednesday prowls. She’d be walking along the street, or sitting alone in the corner of one of those seedy bars, drinking. She was not a woman whose face attracted company. It had a molten look, a sheen, as though it was covered in a quarter-inch of wax. She always wore a headscarf, tied under her chin.

Once, I saw her in a bar just after midnight. When she left, around one o’clock, I left too. She headed, as I’d hoped, for the turreted mansion. I followed her inside and chose the mattress next to hers. When I took off my coat and lay down, I saw she was watching.

“My name’s Andrew,” I said, and held out my hand.

“Amber Tristesse,” she said, not taking my hand. I thought she’d said something in a foreign language.

“Pardon?” I said.

“My name’s Amber Tristesse,” she said.

What an artificial, stagey name, I thought.

Her voice was as gruff as a man’s, surprising in that slight body, and coming from thin, tight lips. It was barely above a whisper—a conspirator’s voice. She had taken off her headscarf. Her hair was dark brown, cut very short so I couldn’t help noticing her left ear. It consisted only of a hole in her skull surrounded by a ridge of shrivelled flesh under the hairline. Her eyes were almond shaped—I couldn’t see the colour in the candlelight.

We didn’t talk any more. But every Wednesday night after that, I kept an eye out for her slight form, her awkward, stilted walk. She even began nodding a greeting to me if we passed on the street.

One night, I was already in the mansion when she arrived. Several of the mattresses were vacant. She looked round, saw me and came over and lay down on the mattress next to mine. I was pleased.

The following Wednesday night, the weather was unpleasant: a tired rain, occasionally livened by a gust of wind. I went into a bar just off King Street, and saw her sitting alone in a corner. The bartender said she was drinking mulled wine, so I ordered two and took them over. She gave me a thin smile and I sat down at her table. We sipped in silence for a while. She spoke first.

“I rarely talk to people,” she said. “And I never go out in daylight.” I could see her eyes now. They were a greenish yellow colour, and the irises were like flowers, the petals opening and closing rhythmically while she talked. I’d never seen such eyes. They seemed to know things most human beings could never know.

I was trying to figure out how old she was. Depending on how the light caught her, that molten appearance made her face as smooth as a baby’s. From another angle, it was like an actor’s mask. Any emotion had to be expressed through the voice, and the peculiar eyes.

She was the daughter of an architect, she said. “He built our house on a hill overlooking the Grand River.” She began to tell me about the house, and I didn’t interrupt her, only nodded encouragement when she’d pause for any length of time. She spoke very deliberately, choosing words as though they were gold nuggets. I was finding this willingness of hers to unveil herself to me very flattering.

This house her father had built, she said, wasn’t so much a house as a dome—a glass dome. In fact, it was a conservatory with a little tropical forest inside and living-quarters in the middle of a bamboo grove. A steam-heating system allowed him to grow palms and exotic fruits—guava, papaya, mangosteen, rambutan, akee and tamarind—they were available all year long. He stocked his forest with cockatiels and parrots that squawked noisily in the treetops. At the centre of the dome was an aquarium. Coral heads grew in it, little cities for populations of guppies, platies and tetras, sea horses and goldfish, angelfish and Siamese fighting fish.

In this dome, Amber Tristesse was born. She and her mother, her constant companion, rarely went outside.

But it was an odd kind of divided life for her father. He still had to go to work. Winter was especially hard on him. Some mornings in January he had to leave his tropical paradise and face blizzards that heaped ten-foot drifts of snow against the side of the dome.

Amber Tristesse looked at the clock behind the bar. I sensed it was getting near time for the turreted mansion.

“Let’s go,” she said.

We went outside, but we didn’t go to the mansion. She took my hand and we walked through the rain, northwards along unlit alleys, the buildings on either side like bookcases in a darkened library, past railway yards. After twenty minutes, we came to an old warehouse on the corner of Bridgehead Road. She unlocked an iron door and we went inside and along a cement floor. Only a little light came through the high, sooty windows; but still she held my hand and guided me. At the far side of the warehouse, we climbed a staircase. She opened a door and switched on the light. This was where she lived.

The room was long and white with high windows, a few paintings, two chairs, a bed with a black iron frame, a rug on the polished wooden floor. A low partition enclosed a kitchen in one corner, and a toilet in the other with a shower. The only notable colours were in the paintings, which were all scenes of a crowded tropical market-place. And the rug on the floor by the bed was scarlet.

Amber Tristesse gave me a moment to look round the room, then she switched off the light and led me, in the almost pitch-black, towards the bed. We undressed in the dark.

She surprised me with her love-making. Not because of any particular weirdness (though I was ready for anything). But I hadn’t expected her to be so energetic. She used her wiry body like a gymnast, extracting as much from me as I was able to give. At the end, she was astride me, no heavier than a bird, kneading my breasts, which were as big as her own, moving violently up and down, crying and shuddering.

She then lay down beside me in the dark and was quiet. After a while, she began again to tell me more about herself.

“My mother died in the winter, when I was seven. After the funeral, my father and I went back to the dome. He took out a rifle and I thought he was going to kill us both, but he started shooting at the roof of the dome, pane after pane, till there was a big hole in the top, and the snow was falling down on us and the parrots and cockatiels were screeching.

“I phoned for help. But by the time the police arrived, a lot of the birds were already dead from the cold, lying around us, and the others were huddled on branches, shivering. The vegetation and the tropical fruits were
shrivelling up. The fish in the aquarium were swimming slower and slower as the water cooled. A few birds and the fish were saved by the police. But that was the end of our little paradise.”

She and her father moved to a regular house in the city. For the first time she discovered what it was like to live like everyone else. She went to school, she did all the things other young girls did. That lasted till she was seventeen, when her father died.

Since then, she’d lived in her warehouse, seldom going out in daylight.

“Everything’s so lurid in the light of day,” she said. “Things that are full of mystery at night become tawdry.”

I wondered if her aversion to daylight had anything to do with her face, and the way people looked at her.

She’d been lying down as she talked. Now she sat up and began running her fingers over me in the darkness: through what was left of my thin fair hair, down over my face and plump cheeks, circling my nipples, then over the swell of my belly, fondling me as I held my breath.

“I’ve waited so long,” she said, softly.

She got out of bed and I heard her clothing rustle as she dressed herself in the dark. Then she switched on the light, dazzling me for a moment. For the first time she saw the purple stain on my chest, and came over to examine it. Then she leaned over and kissed it. She turned her head to let me have a better look at her shrivelled right ear.

“A man did this to me three years ago,” she said. The petals in her eyes were tightly closed. “You’re the only one who’s been up here since.”

I wondered what had happened, how such a mutilation had been done. She looked as though she might tell me more about it, but instead, she said it wasn’t too late, and
she’d like to go to the turreted mansion. I said that was a good idea.

T
HROUGHOUT MY
relationship with Amber Tristesse, she never again spoke about her past. I kept waiting to hear more, in vain. Nor did she ever ask about my life, or show any interest in what I did when I wasn’t with her. We met only on Wednesdays. Usually we’d go to her warehouse first, and the love-making was raw and loud. But sometimes we’d make love after we’d been to the mansion. Remnants of the smoke would still be in us, and our love-making would be a silent ecstasy.

For the other six days of the week, we lived our own lives. I became dissatisfied with that, and so, one night when Amber Tristesse and I were together, I said I’d like to meet her more often. She said no, that our relationship would sour if we made it an everyday affair. I accepted this, though part of me was a little jealous that she could so easily do without me. I loved those Wednesdays. I loved being with her. When I wasn’t with her, the very thought of her strange life excited me.

But everything was not as it should be.

One Friday night I was walking down Weber Lane. I saw Amber Tristesse. She was coming directly towards me. There was no mistaking her emaciated figure and odd shuffling walk.

I stood in the middle of the lane.

“Amber!” I said. “What a surprise.”

She didn’t even look at me. She walked on past as though I wasn’t there.

The following Wednesday night, I met her at the warehouse. We made love strenuously and went to the old mansion later, and carried on as though nothing odd had ever happened.

That should have been a warning to me; but I paid no attention. She was an exotic creature—my wounded Bird of Paradise—and I loved her.

By the end of March, the weather was becoming milder. At dinner-time one Sunday, I strolled down to The Prince for dinner. I ordered a scotch and sat at the bar looking over the menu and, as always, half-thinking about my next meeting with Amber.

“May I have a word with you?” A thin-faced man had sat on the stool next to mine. He was about my own age, with brown hair slicked back, eyebrows like little wings, and a short pointed beard.

I didn’t really want to talk. Perhaps some instinct warned me this might not be a pleasant conversation. But there I was, and I could do nothing but listen.

“I understand,” he said, “you’ve been seeing my sister.”

He then, in a curt, methodical way, began to tell me about the enigma I loved—Amber Tristesse. Not her real name, of course—that was Gladys Brown. Nor was she born in an exotic dome, the daughter of an architect. Nor was anything else she had told me about herself true. This serious, bearded man was her brother, a lawyer who tried his best to look after her. He paid the rent on the warehouse for her. He only allowed her to spend one night a week there—Wednesday—on condition that for the rest of the week she lived in his house, under his care. I didn’t doubt that I was hearing the truth.

“The shrivelled ear?”

“She cut it off herself.”

“What happened to her face?”

“Fire. She set a mattress alight in the Smithsville Institute for the Deranged. She spent six years there.”

I asked no more questions.

“She broke our parents’ hearts,” he said. “They both died much younger than they might have. My own wife left me after I insisted on taking her in. She was afraid of Gladys.” His face was stern, but he had soft eyes. “I thought you ought to know these things,” he said. “I have nothing against you, personally. She’s had a string of men over the years and it always ends badly.”

I felt awful.

“I’d like to talk to her, one last time,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” he said. “It might be better that way. She’s at home right now. I won’t be back for a couple of hours.”

He gave me an address in Woodsides.

Outside, it had started to rain and the night was colder—at least it seemed so to me. I took a taxi and was at my destination before I’d time to think of what I’d say.

I rang the bell. No reply. I checked the doorhandle: it turned. I took a deep breath and went inside.

From the hallway, I could see under the arch of the staircase into the living-room. She was sitting on an armchair, facing me, wearing a green dressing-gown. She showed no surprise at seeing me, but didn’t speak.

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said, feeling uncomfortable before that unreadable face.

“I only see you on Wednesdays,” she said. Her voice was cold.

I moved towards her.

“Stay there,” she said. “Don’t move another step.”

I stood, awkward.

“I met your brother,” I said.

“You came here to tell me that?” she said. “Fine. Goodbye.”

I didn’t really know why I’d come, but I kept on.

“I only wish you’d told me the truth,” I said.

If a face as incapable of expression as hers could sneer, she was sneering.

“Truth?” she said. “That’s a laugh, coming from a man like you. What do you care about truth? I told you things you wanted to hear.” Her words were cutting. “Truth?” she said. “Does a lover of truth prowl around the backstreets after midnight and do the things you do?”