God's Fool (15 page)

By the time we had turned ourselves about, my brother walking backward as I pivoted in place, wheel rim and spoke, Dumat was there, bowing, introducing, explaining: “Permettez-moi … de vous presenter …”

She stopped him with a smile. “I am very grateful, monsieur, but I
believe these gentlemen and I would prefer struggling along on our own.” She extended her hand to my brother. “Sophia Marchant.”

A decade younger than anyone else present, lost in a sea of tailored waistcoats and silk cravats, Eng and I had been entertaining the company (in pairs and small groups) with a small, harmless act that seemed, somehow, to be expected of us. We had stumbled onto the idea quite accidentally when, at the beginning of the evening, a young woman had offered my brother her hand and I, unaware, had reached for it first. The group had laughed at this apparent competition between us, and as our host took us around, always accompanied by Dumat, we quite naturally, and almost unconsciously, expanded on our early success. Feigning innocence, pretending to be unaware of what all the laughter could be about, I would now snatch at any feminine hand that came our way and bring it to my lips, murmuring “enchanté,” my eyes closed as if—like a Hottentot at a symphony—I found it all simply too intoxicating, too wonderful, while my brother, playing the role of the frustrated second, would shake his head and mumble imprecations or, better still, pretend to jerk me slightly just as my lips were about to touch the soft white skin of my latest enchantress.

None of that was possible now. I let my brother take her hand, then kissed it in turn.

“I saw you looking out the window,” she said. “I did not know it was snowing.”

“I have never seen … snow, before,” I answered, since she seemed to be speaking to me.

“It is very beautiful?” she said, looking over my shoulder.

“It is,” I said, unable to turn around. “Very beautiful.”

She was quiet for a moment, setting the world to her own time. Far off, I could see her bare back and auburn hair in the mirror; behind her, the blue wall of the curtain, the fissure of falling snow. “As a little girl I should put out the lamp and sit by a window and watch the snow fall.” She paused, then looked around the room, where a number of faces, having turned in our direction, now attempted to look away without calling attention to themselves. She seemed not to have noticed. “What
can they be thinking, missing this?” she said quietly, and then, turning to Dumat, still hanging about with his hands clasped behind his back like a child afraid of spilling something: “Tell us, Monsieur Dumat, what do you think they are saying that is so very important? No, don’t tell us. It would be too distressing. We do not want to know. Do you not agree?” she said, looking at me.

“I do,” I said. “It would make us all very sad.”

She laughed, turned to Dumat. “You see, monsieur? We speak English
très bien
. Together, I think, the three of us make almost one English person.”

“Not so many, I think,” said my brother, her warmth having thawed his natural reticence.

“Then we must practice until we are at least two English people.”

Dumat smiled, sensitive enough to know when he was not wanted. “I will leave you to your English, my friends.” He bowed. “Mademoiselle.”

We watched him walk away, his hands still clinging to one another like lovers conspiring behind his back, his head and torso turning, first left, then right, as if welded from the same recalcitrant block of steel.

She waited until he’d crossed a third of the floor before she turned and looked at me, her eyes moving over my face with a familiarity neither brazen nor discomfiting, studying me as though we had known each other long ago and parted, and she was now trying to recall the features that had once been so familiar. It lasted only a moment before she looked directly into my eyes and smiled—almost as if, indeed, she
had
recognized me.

“Hello,” she said quietly.

“Hello,” I answered.

How strange that I should hardly remember her anymore, and yet the loss of her, the absence I felt when she had gone, should remain vivid these sixty years and more. Like a live coal thrown on the winter ice, she burned through and was gone, leaving only a dark hole, gulping at the water beneath. What did we talk about that night? It hardly matters. Snow, I suppose. And Paris. She insisted we have a glass of wine. Others
joined us briefly, drifted away. We talked about going out for a walk, sweeping clean the straight, snowy ranges piling up on the fences, building a snowman, but didn’t. She found my brother funnier than she did me—not surprisingly, for Eng, with his dry delivery and slightly bewildered expression, could be very amusing and, like any man, appreciated a good audience. I didn’t mind. I could afford to be generous. During the course of the evening—so unobtrusively, so gradually that to this day I am unconvinced she herself was aware of it—she had aligned herself with me, turning her body so that, if not quite parallel, together we formed a wide angle on the world.

Was I nineteen? Indeed I was. Was I young and impressionable? Yes and yes again. Had the wine (and the snow and the lilies and the Persian patterns of the carpets) gone to my head? No doubt they had. And yet I did not behave like a fool. I did not grow embarrassingly loquacious, or spill my wine on the parquet floor. I did not grow taciturn and silent at some perceived shift of affections. There was no need. A great calm seemed to have settled over me. And though it is true that I wondered, more than once that evening, what was happening to me, it is equally true that what I saw and felt was as incontrovertible as the descending snow. There it was. The horses shivered themselves black, the music stopped and began again, the sleeve of her dress brushed past my arm, and then, as unbelievably as if a butterfly had suddenly settled on one of the lilies reflected in the glass, returned.

It is only fitting that others found it inconceivable. We did. She was, well, everything she was. We, on the other hand, were the curiosity du jour, no different really from the “man-monkeys” and the “missing links” who in those days so regularly caught the attention of the entertaining class. She was known throughout the capitals of Europe. We were a small joke masking an involuntary shiver. She was beautiful. The sight of us, Dumat had been told by the French authorities who had initially denied our visa, could affect the shape of the unborn, breed monsters in the womb.

And yet, incredible as it seemed to me then, as it
still
seems (even had I been one man I would not have been in danger of being called handsome),
there was an immediate understanding between us, a comfort, that neither of us could deny. An hour passed, then two. We seemed to naturally take each other’s side, and at some point I heard her say, in response to some question or other I have long forgotten, “We would rather not, thank you,” then pause, as though her words had said too much, glance quickly over at me, then just as quickly away. Are there words to describe the intoxication of that glance? Or my emotions when, on the pretext of making room for someone passing, she moved next to me and remained standing by my side—say it!—as naturally as a wife stands beside her husband; no, more than that: as a woman stands by the man she loves? Through the fever I could see Dumat looking at us, now from between two heads, now over a bare shoulder. He seemed very far away.

Later, I would torture myself by wondering what she could have thought, that first evening. Did she stop and wonder, perhaps, at the grotesque comedy unfolding before her, the enormous joke that the gods, chuckling in their beards, seemed to have determined to make of her life? Did she appreciate the sheer impossibility of it, or ask herself, in a lighter moment, what could have been slipped in her wine that she should fall in love with a bristly-haired Bottom on this midwinter night’s eve? Did she suddenly realize—from my stunned expression, my horrible dignity—that I had utterly misread her intentions and, feeling sorry for me, or not knowing how to correct matters, decide to humor my absurd presumption? Did she despise me (and herself) as I not only feared she might but believed, in the ignorant outlands of my heart, she should?

Even now I have no way of knowing what she may have thought to herself those first few hours in the drawing room. Against the flood of doubt and self-recrimination that rose the instant she was gone, I had only the words she had said when Dumat, apologizing profusely, had come for us at last: “You may call on me tomorrow at ten if you wish,” she had said, holding out her hand. “I will take you for a ride in the country.” And then, to Eng, “You will see. By spring we will be at least three large English persons.” Light, unrevealing words, tailored to the
presence of others. But later that evening, pressing my forehead to the carriage glass, and all through the night that followed, listening to the whisper of flakes on the sill, I held to them the way a drowning man clings to a splintered bit of wood, half wishing to be saved, half hoping the waters would close above his head at last and take him swiftly down.

III.

No one could have expected it to live. It was too unlikely, too delicate. The very air seemed to conspire against it.

Consider what fertile soil we were for scandal: a society beauty—elegant, cosmopolitan—inexplicably infatuated with a pair of monsters. Had she no shame, no decency, no regard for even the most minimal standards of feminine deportment? Was she determined to scandalize all of Paris, then? Or was she … but no (this whispered in the shocked, intimate tones reserved for only the most succulent speculations), was she, perhaps, driven by some genuine perversity of body or soul, governed by unnatural appetites?

Feeling, no doubt, that a bit of scandal could only encourage the public’s interest (that all that was needed to ensure success was notoriety, as Phineas Barnum would put it some years later), Hunter and Coffin agreed to lend us the use of their carriage. And so we would arrive—the wheels slipping a bit in the wet snow that first time—at 40, rue des Nonaindières, blissfully unaware of the storm that now raged about her life. She had called it up herself, they would say, summoned it by her shamelessness. If so, it didn’t take long to arrive. By the time our carriage brought us like doubled suitors to her door the next morning, though the sky had torn through over Paris and the sun now flashed like a blade on snow still clean of filth, the winds were gathering force.

Being who she was, she must have anticipated what was coming. Must have known that those who hated her for her masculine range of interests and the protection of her wealth, who had chafed for years under her irreverent humor and her disrespect for the opinions of those—like themselves—whose importance was so patently self-evident, would now gather into a force and collectively seek to bring her down. Hers was a monstrous unwillingness to acknowledge being hated, and for this, above all, they would make her suffer.

Or try. Imagine their fury when, having successfully summoned the tempest, their victim simply sat in the deluge, her wet hair streaming back in the wind, sipping tea. Glorying in the agitation of rain in her cup, the sensation of her clinging dress, the drops streaming off the nodding flowers on her hat.

Afterwards, there were some who maintained—and it is a testimonial to her strength—that there was no pretense to this, that she genuinely neither knew nor cared what others said. That she sat in the rain, so to speak, not in order to spite the spiteful, but simply because she liked it. Perhaps. But I always believed that, though this was true, there was some small part of her that reveled in the storm simply because it made her feel alive. Though I’ve never met a gentler soul, there was something about her that needed to live in extremis, to fight. And I loved her for it.

Of course, we knew nothing of this at first. In the mornings, the carriage would simply deposit us at her door. We would enter. There, we would spend the next three or four or five hours in much the same ways we imagined people everywhere spent theirs—talking in the huge, sunlit drawing room (how I loved it when Claudine, showing us in, would throw open the doors on that sudden brightness), playing Pope or cribbage, listening to Sophia play Beethoven on the pianoforte, attempting to read aloud, despite our laughter, the sentimental English novels she had decided would aid us in our quest to become English. We took long walks in the cold, she striding, despite her skirts, like a man (her arm in mine, or at times my brother’s), blithely ignoring the turned head, the
surprised second glance, the carriage slowing across a busy street. We spent an afternoon (could it have been only one?) taking turns peering through the eyepiece of a microscope into a world in which ordinary newsprint—the word “plus”—shouted like a banner (the vestigial tail at the top of the
p
alone filling half the view), and a single strand of her hair became a cord as thick as a ship’s hawser.

But all this was just the visible. How do I sum up the language of gestures, the eloquence of silence? Where do I find the alphabet into which I could translate the sudden surrender in a pause, the nakedness of an answer not given? Words, like signposts on the frontier of meaning, simply mark the limits of their own domain. We spent a dozen mornings together, no more, most of them within a circle so small a ten-year-old boy could have thrown a rock from one side to the other. And yet, in that brief time, she and I … no, let me say it: In that brieftime,
you
and I, my love, crossed half a continent together. Was it our fault that we never made it to the other side? That our journey was interrupted?

Perhaps it was, but consider the armies arrayed against us. In the mornings we sat on your divan and ate dainties off the trays that Claudine so gently set down before us. In the evenings we performed for the crowds that filled the small wooden halls that had now become our main venue, doing what was needed, playing to their expectations like the trick monkeys that we were. In the mornings we were allowed to pretend we were men like any others; by supper, we had stripped that pretense bare. You remember the bandage around my hand that morning, how awkwardly I drank my tea with my left, our unconvincing explanations of what had happened? How could we own up to the fact that I had split three knuckles on the head of a man who had claimed that we were a fraud, that our bond was nothing but a section of horse flesh daily stitched to a flesh-colored bodice, that he could tear us apart like a badly sewn shirt? How could I begin to explain that I could have clubbed him to death like a rat in a barrel
not
because he was wrong—no, not that—but because part of me wished him right? Because I myself, in the days since I had met you, had dreamed his lie was true? I ask you—how was I to bridge these worlds? Every morning you saved me, and every evening,
baptized anew in the spittle of the crowd, I was reminded of our calling.