Forever (36 page)

“Yes,” M. Breton said. “Cognac.”

His tone was dismissive, and he turned to the countess. “You’re playing again,” he said.

“Yes. I tried to give it up, but—”

She shrugged and gestured toward a chair. M. Breton looked in an inquisitive way at Cormac, who was returning with a small glass of cognac. He did not take the offered chair. In a sacramental way, he placed the bow and violin on a table, then sipped the cognac, thrust a hand in a trousers pocket, and stared at the countess. Cormac thought: Too theatrical by far.

“You look well,” M. Breton said to the countess. “Better than I expected after, what? More than five years.”

“Thank you,” she said, but did not return the compliment. M. Breton stared at her.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“I looked. I asked. Someone told me you were in New York, and I thought, She could only be a whore.”

Cormac’s stomach churned. He felt something new: that he was an intruder in the suite of the Countess de Chardon. Who denied the past, and now clearly had one.

“And how was prison?” she said.

“I survived. I’m here. It doesn’t matter.”

Now he turned on Cormac.

“Bring me another cognac,” he said.

Cormac gestured toward the bar. “The bottle’s over there. Help yourself, Monsieur Breton.”

The Frenchman turned to the countess. “Is he the butler?’ “No, he’s my lover,” she said.

Cormac could hear himself breathing now. And the countess breathing. And M. Breton too.

Then M. Breton stared into his drink, laughed, and shook his head.

“Well,” he said, “every cunt must have its servant.”

Cormac stepped before him, anger quickening his pulse.

“You can leave now, my fiddling friend. There’s the door.”

“I don’t think so,” M. Breton said.

The countess stepped between them.

“Cormac, this is my husband.”

76.

T
hat night, as on every night, he retreated to his room down the hall.
But now everything was different. No word had passed to him from the countess, but it was clear from her posture, her silence, and her eyes that he must stay away from the suite. This was a complete change. Before the arrival of M. Breton, after food and music and water and bed, they had always kissed good-night and retired to their separate beds for the replenishments of sleep. She wanted it that way, and he came to luxuriate in his own solitude. Alone in his room before sleep, he could read, he could imagine, he could paint, he could hum vagrant melodies. He could think, too, about the strangeness of his life, the long years, the old vows that were printed on him, the names and brief lives of the dead. He could indulge in the secret pleasures of philosophy. He could exercise blankness, wiping away all imagery and all regret.

On the second night, the countess stopped him in the hall and kissed his cheek.

“He’ll stay with me,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

He said, “Fine, no, no, I understand. I don’t mind.”

But, of course, he did mind. Part of it was the impression made upon him by Yves Breton. He was arrogant and vain, convinced, it seemed, of his genius as a violinist and the superior rights that must be granted to him as a result. Who the hell was he to show up after many years and move back into his wife’s bed? Cormac lay in his own bed thinking these things, and felt his anger growing in spite of his attempts to control it with his will. How could she take such a man to her bed? She had never told him everything about her past, and that was all right with Cormac. The past was the past. It could not be changed. If she did not tell him everything about her past, then he had no obligation to reveal his own, even if what he told her was an elaborate lie concocted to hide the truth. She would have laughed at the truth and suggested he take a room in the madhouse. But the past never completely passed, and here came her past, embodied in M. Breton, walking into their present.

He told himself that the countess might only be testing him, creating through this surprise a way to see whether Cormac was indeed free of jealousy. If so, she was playing a silly and dangerous game. Too French by far. He told himself he was not jealous but angry over a breach of manners. And then realized that he was indeed suffering from a slippery attack of jealousy. To his own complete surprise.

His ruminations were interrupted by a knock on the door. He got up quickly and cracked it open.

Fiammetta was there, in a sheer nightgown, holding a candle.

“Madame says you need me,” the girl said.

“Thank you, Fiammetta,” he said. “But I don’t.”

Her face was trembling.

“I can help you sleep,” she said.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Okay, Mister O’Connor. Sleep tight.”

“I’ll try.”

He did not sleep well that night or the next night or the night after that. He plunged into reporting, moving from hearings into the Croton water project to the murder of an apprentice boy on Baxter Street to the burning of a ship at the dock on Coenties Slip. He was cut off from the piano in the closed suite of the Countess de Chardon and put his energies into painting. He did not see M. Breton. He saw the countess on the fourth day after her husband’s arrival in their lives.

“I can explain,” she said. “But not now.”

Jennings was in the doorway of the house on Hudson Street when Cormac arrived. His face looked pale and wasted, his eyes rheumy with horror. He was smoking a thin rum-soaked cigarillo.

“Even
you
don’t want to see this one, Cormac,” he said, a tremble in his voice. His eyes wandered to the small crowd on the sidewalk, and the horse-drawn carts beyond, and the old black men huddled in the doorways. Jennings clearly wanted to see something banal and comforting and familiar on this morning gray with the threat of rain.

“How bad is it?” Cormac asked.

“Two babies, their brains beaten out of their skulls. A woman shot three times in the face. A man with a bullet in his brow. They think he’s the woman’s son, and the babies belong to him.”

“Oh, God…”

“The babies…” Jennings had lost all his mannerisms. His mouth trembled. “Oh, Jesus, Cormac…”

He seemed about to cry, then clamped the cigarillo in his teeth and slipped a whiskey flask from his jacket pocket.

“Who’s on it?” Cormac said.

“Ford. Who else?”

“I don’t envy his dreams.”

Jennings took a swig from the flask, offered it to Cormac, who declined.

“How do you handle
your
dreams—without drink?” Jennings said.

“I don’t.”

Cormac patted Jennings on the back and entered the house of the newly dead. A young doctor pushed past him, climbing the stairs to the third floor. Children and adults peered from the partly opened doors, white faces and black. The odors of soup and shit and sewage filled the air. On the second landing a thin mustached cop blocked his way.

“Who are you?” the policeman said.

Cormac showed a press identity card. The cop squinted at it and handed it back.

“It’s pretty bad up there,” he said.

“So I’ve heard.”

“All niggers,” the cop said. “And a lot of opium too.” Cormac moved past him up the stairs. The egglike odor of soft coal now mixed with the stench of shit and blood. Another policeman blocked his way.

“Not now,” he said. “They’re still working.”

“Ask the inspector if he can give his friend Cormac some names.”

They were not friends, but he wanted the names.

“Ask him yourself,” the cop said.

Cormac leaned past him, glimpsing blood on polished plank floors. “Inspector Ford, it’s Cormac O’Connor…. I need some names.”

Ford emerged from another room. His face was pale too, as if the crime were draining blood from the living.

“Come in, Cormac,” he said softly. “I think you know this woman.”

That night, his story written coldly and set in type, his stomach empty to fight off the nausea, he made drawings of Beatriz Machado. He drew her as she was in life. He drew her as a young woman in the bookstore in Lispenard Street. He drew her as she was at Quaco’s funeral, an American in the presence of the oldest Africans. He drew her rich with fat, as she sold corn and oysters and opium from her stall on Broadway. He drew her with charcoal and sepia chalk, pulling her into life from memory, from the river of time. He hummed music as he used line and shadow and volume to make her as she was in life. He hummed the melodies that came from the hands of the countess. He hummed music that had never been written on paper, music that came from gourds and fiddles in a lost year in a vanished century. He worked in a kind of anguished frenzy, sweat pouring from his body.

Then, his hands black with chalk, he fell on the narrow bed, pulled a pillow over his face, and wept. He was sick of the things human beings did to one another. He was angry too. Too many people were chopped out of the world before you had a chance to say good-bye.

He did not hear the door open. But he felt the bed sag as she sat on its edge, felt her hands in his hair.

“Poor Cormac,” the countess said.

He looked at her, expecting some gloss of irony. All he saw was care.

“You’re hurting,” she said.

“I am.”

“And I’m one of the reasons you’re hurting.”

He sighed in a reluctant way.

“Yes,” he said.

“But she—the woman in these drawings—she’s a reason too.”

“She is,” he said. He sat up now on the edge of the bed and stared at his blackened hands.

“Tell me the story.”

He stood up and went to the sink and began washing his hands.

“I knew her for many years,” he said. “She sold oysters and other things from a stall on Broadway. She was warm and human and funny. At some point last night, she was murdered.”

“My God.”

The black would not come off his fingers. He pulled at it with a towel.

“Her own son killed her, along with two of his own children, and then shot himself in the brow.” He heard his voice as if the voice alone were the cold teller of a tale. “He beat out the brains of the children. He shot off his mother’s face.” Then he took a deep breath, not looking at the countess for the effect of his words. “He told a woman on the first floor that he hated his mother because she laughed at him. That was probably true. She laughed at everyone and everything. She laughed at me, as well she should. She laughed at life.” He paused, turned to look at the countess, whose face was lost in imagining.“The same woman on the first floor saw the son yesterday, in the morning. He told her he had been out of work for eleven months. He was tired of depending on his mother. He was tired of being black.”

He glanced at the black lines dug into his fingertips, and the sanguine chalk red as blood. The countess looked up at him.

“Sit down,” she said.

Then she told him some of her story: how she’d met Yves Breton in Paris, where her mother had taken her to study at the Conservatory. They were living then in New Orleans, which was still French, the place to which she and her mother had fled in 1802 when the slave revolt had come upon them. She remembered the cemeteries above ground because of the high level of the water, the porous soil full of writhing stone monuments, and how the one of her father was a kind of boast, because there was nothing of her father inside the tomb. His body had been hacked to pieces in Haiti. She was eight years old when her father was murdered, and her mother rose out of a cellar hideout a day later, packed up jewels and cash and some paintings and pastels, and left for Louisiana, dry-eyed and angry. She was angry in some obscure way at the countess (who was not, of course, a countess) and angry with her dead husband, for failing to take the black revolutionists seriously until they walked into his drawing room; she was angry with Napoleon Bonaparte, the consul for life, for failing to protect them; she was angry at leaving the life they had made in the Caribbean.

“She never stopped being angry,” the countess said. “And when Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans, she was angrier than ever. Anger kept her alive. It was her food.”

They had a small house with a garden on Royal Street and a piano in the front parlor. They had two slaves, both women: a cook and a woman who cleaned. When the Americans arrived after 1804, all wild and bearded and wearing the skins of animals, drunk and mean-eyed men, as they said, from the back of beyond, whooping and raising rifles in the air, her mother had added a male slave to guard the doors, armed with an ax. His name was Jacques. The piano teacher stayed on, and the countess played every day, escaping from the anger of her mother, and the growing disorder of the town. And finally, when she was sixteen, after pleading and sobbing and many tantrums, she convinced her mother that they must go to Paris.

“She sold the women slaves,” she said, “and freed Jacques, closed the house, and we sailed away.”

She met M. Breton at the Conservatory, where he was teaching harmonics and violin. She tried to explain to Cormac how handsome M. Breton was then, in spite of the way he limped (from a wound at the Battle of Wagram), how reckless he was, how charged with passion. He talked without pause, about Goethe and Schiller and Madame de Staël, names she’d never heard in New Orleans, about the endless possibilities of music, about painters, about the way Napoleon was changing all of Europe and all of history. He became the first man she ever slept with.

“It was like a summer storm,” she said, “without warning, without time for escape, and I have never regretted it. Everyone should fall in love in such a way, at least once.”

M. Breton was eleven years older than she was, twenty-eight to her seventeen, a brilliant violinist, his music brooding with regret or exploding into exaltation. He had been too young to savor the enormous excitements of the Revolution, but he remained, in that year before Moscow, a passionate follower of Bonaparte, who had repaired all the errors and excesses of the Jacobins and restored the nation to glory. Or so he said. The loss of three toes on his right foot and part of his right femur at Wagram kept him out of the Grand Armée. But as he limped along the marble halls of the Conservatory, and through the streets of Paris, he kept telling her that all French honor, all
European
honor, was now derived from Bonaparte. M. Breton played his violin for soldiers in hospitals and at the funerals of the fallen. He cheered at parades.

“That was the only thing he did without sarcasm: cheer,” the countess said. “And I cheered too.”

Then came Moscow, and the end of the myth of invincibility, and the long, slow, violent fall that followed. When M. Breton looked up with clear eyes, the streets were filling with cripples and widows, and Napoleon Bonaparte was on Elba.

“By then, my mother and I were gone,” the countess said. “We were back in New Orleans. We arrived three weeks after Andrew Jackson defeated the British, and my mother found her two women, and Jacques too, paid them for their services this time, and we tried to make the house a home. Now I gave lessons too, for there was not enough money, and my mother was still angry.”

Nine months later, M. Breton arrived like a corsair. He courted her again, courted her mother too, charmed their friends, who were enchanted by his music. And so they married. A year later, a child died stillborn. One rainy summer night, M. Breton sat down and wrote a letter to his wife, explaining that he could not look at her without thinking of death, and then he vanished. There were a few letters over the next few years, from Mexico, from Havana, from Italy. A few lines here, a few lines there. She did not see him again. Until now.

“All true stories are unhappy ones,” she said, once more protected by irony. “That’s the essence of the romantic.”

When she was gone, he fell into bed in the dark, thinking of the Countess de Chardon, and remembered where he was living when she was in Paris: that small sweaty room on Reade Street, and a woman whose face was now dim in memory and whose name was gone. Those were the years when he began thinking about women in categories that he knew were unfair: episodes, chapters, events, stories. As if each woman were a mere book taken down from a shelf, to be examined, pondered, and closed. He had no more women than other unmarried men, just more time. Year after year after year. All the time in the world. Everything could wait, including the possibilities of love. He learned in those years to avoid learning too much about a woman, because knowledge would make parting more wrenching, for her and for him. It was unfair, and in some cases cruel, but that came with the strangeness of his life.