Other Colors Ch. 19-20

I cast myself down on the bed, fuming from every flushed pore on my body. Mais non. Dealing in diamonds leaves Monsieur too little time, Madame. Vous comprenez. He could not be bothered by your rêves de midinette. Monsieur could not be bothered with romance, and whispers, and wine.

My molars began to grind, and I scraped my nails across the duvet. You know what he really wants, don't you? To let his pathetic, little slave girl languish here. Lying precisely where he left her. Pining after him at all hours. Already naked. Toenails painted. Her ankles tucked behind her ears. 'Baise-moi, maître. Fais-moi jouir, je t'en prie. Mon corps entier est a toi.'

Sick shit.Mais non. A blue fire was flickering behind my eyes. I closed them tight, trying to smother it. You, I reopened them slowly, carefully, and stared up into the folds of the canopy overhead, have been his perfect fool for him, Penny Foster. But you'll show him now, won't you? I rolled over slowly, my lips curling into a hateful and half-demented grin. You will. You'll show him what happens when he treats you like his fucking toy. I ran my hands through my hair, braiding the tousled strands between my fingers. Comme une bebelle. Something to play with until he loses interest, then cast away in the corner until he comes back.Mais non. Certes, Monsieur, il ne restera pas impuni.

I didn't know how just yet, but lying there, obsessed and steaming, I resolved to revenge myself upon him. It would require a little cleverness. It could not, after all, be something he could construe as insubordinate—not when I'd already come so far. I needed to have the high ground when I brought it all down upon him. I needed to stay chaste, angelic; guiltless as a virgin martyr. However heavily it might weigh upon my shoulders, however much it might hurt, I had to keep the halo upon my head, bearing it gracefully like some golden scold's bridle.

La Jeune Martyre. Peacefully sleeping. Diocletian drowned her in the Tiber. In pace, in idipsum dormiam.

My body, meanwhile, had its own ideas. All day the throbbing had been insufferably cyclical. Every time I thought I was finally rid of it, it rekindled itself like a malarial fever. By now, my misery was almost intractable. I sighed and writhed and moaned over the duvet, slowly incinerating in the flames of my own frustration. Anticipation/Algolagnia... Even the air itself put me in agony, with its heat, its heavy, asphyxiating fingers reaching over my throat, and choking me. Unless I could find some way to shatter it myself, the fever, I knew, would not break.

I suffered that way until just after midnight, when in a last act of desperation, I slipped out of bed and undressed, leaving a little trail of garments and linens on the ground as I crept my way into the bathroom. I flipped the faucet, and watched the cold water shoot from the showerhead, hissing against the porcelain tiles, and over the ice-white marble of the walls.

I shivered at the edge of the stream, gradually working up the courage to step in. It shocked me, really, realizing what I was about to do to myself. It seemed so iniquitous, so profoundly unfair. Had not I suffered enough already? Was it necessary, now, to add injury to insult? Truly, any day of the week I'd rather be burned than be cold. Yet trite as it was, a cold shower was the only improvised remedy I'd ever even heard of for the embarrassing malady that had beset me. Like an electroconvulsive pulse, I hoped it might shock my body back into balance. Camphor, too, can kill you. It can make you see things, and seize.

I shrieked when the water hit my skin. Each droplet pierced me like a liquid needle. It impaled me, and left me pale. Ex Voto. Zaraga's Sebastian, tied up and skewered through with arrows. But little by little, my body did begin to acclimate. I breathed a little easier. I no longer felt I was falling onto a bed of nails.

I shut my eyes, rotating slowly beneath the stream, and worked a snowy lather of suds into my hair. I let it trickle over me in rivulets of white lace. I felt the bubbles prickling my skin as they popped. I rinsed. I trembled. I stared at the water, glistening against me like shards of glass; like diamonds, dangling from my fingertips; from my nipples, lips, and the tip of my nose. Comerre's Odalisque. The portraits of Maria Feodorovna. Klimt's Judith, and the Girl with a Pearl Earring. I wonder... My skin might have flushed if it wasn't half-covered in sudsy hoarfrost. Does all jewelry descend from a collar, and fetters?

I sighed, and stopped the water, slipping out of the stall just as soon as I'd shaved my legs. I needed to extricate myself from temptation. Had I let it run much longer, there's little doubt in my mind that even the cold water, with its dull, rhythmic pulsations, may have lowered me into an unlooked-for and frostbitten climax.

Still dripping, still bare, I blew my hair dry before a beveled mirror. Even under a jet stream of hot air, I never quite managed to get warm again. The cold, I suppose, had cut into me too deeply. My teeth chattered. My shoulders shook. But worst of all, the shower itself had failed me. I was still thinking of Dmitri—perhaps even more now. I was thinking of how he'd mistreated me, and of my dazed, undiminished desire to have him back. I still wanted him. I wanted him to take me. I wanted him to make me come, over and over, until my body turned to cinders, and smoke. Then, at least, you'd be warm, Penny.

Those were the thoughts that had flooded my head, drowning out all the others. Two Plantagenets, in the Tower of London. Like frozen water, cooling off had only made them more crystalline; more solid, voluminous, and clear. I imagine someone wiser than me might have just cut her losses. She might have skulked back to bed, and buried herself beneath the blankets. She might have known how to salvage what shreds were left of her psyche. Poor, pretty Psyche. Blindfolded in her bridal bed. She might have closed her eyes, and let a black veil of sleep put her out of her misery.

But like Psyche herself, my compulsions and my idée fixe were doomed to destroy me. I kept my eyes open. I got myself dressed. I snatched a fresh paraffin candle from the nightstand, and sauntered for one final time toward the glasshouse.

Moving through the halls took me much longer than it had the night before. 'Jambes lourdes', they say, is a strange ailment in that only afflicts the French. They say it's a terminal sort of ennui; that it feels like your limbs are made of lead. My limbs, meanwhile, had been injected with another element entirely. I had hydrogen instead of marrow in my bones. I was wan, ignitable, and lighter than air. I kept the candle at arm's length, fearful of combustion, and let it lead me downstairs like an ignis fatuus into the garden.

I set the flame aside at the easel, watching the shadows swarm around me as it settled. Already, the painting was too dark. I intended to make it much darker. I poured a pool of phthalocyanine onto the palette, and smeared my streaks into a sunburst. I blended flecks of white titanium, and two dismal penumbras of ivory black. Gradually, a pattern emerged, although I didn't quite notice it at first. I had to step back to see precisely what I was painting, blearing out of the whirling blue chaos. But by then, it was already too late.

No. No, no. No, no, no... My lips parted, and my brush fell to the floor. Leering back at me from the candlelit canvas were a pair of piercing blue eyes—eyes that I recognized all too well. The limbus, the iris, and the pupil; the contours, and the colorations—it was unmistakable. Without intending to, and with blood-chilling accuracy, I'd depicted the eyes of Dmitri Caine. I gazed at them, and they gazed back, watching over me like the Eye of Horus. Like Dr. Eckleberg, denuded of his enormous spectacles. Like the all-seeing eye of God.

I sank down, and tucked my knees beneath my chin. It scared me. It did. It scared the living daylights out of me to discover how deeply he'd penetrated, how intensely he was dominating my imagination. I suppose if I'd been dreaming it might have made a little more sense; if I'd been trapped in the midst of some dreadful, Renee Magritte-style nightmare. But I wasn't. I was awake. I was sober. I was ostensibly sane—all of which made me feel all the more psychotic when I started laughing. The sun was just starting to rise, and I sat there, curled up on the paving stones, sniggering to myself like a mental patient.

By midmorning, I was essentially hysterical, though at least by then I was beginning to quiet down. Like the pinprick of a spinning wheel, exhaustion had finally succeeded in ensorcelling my blood, and inflicted upon me a full two-thirds of the Kleine-Levin triad. Sleeping Beauty syndrome. Sex. Sleep. Insatiable appetites...

I possessed neither the desire nor the wherewithal to eat. Had he found me, I'm certain Jules would have had a very different idea on the matter, particularly after I'd gone in absentia for dinner the night before. To keep him from discovering me, and giving me gavage like some hunger-striking suffragette, I snuck sleepily into Dmitri's study again, taking Rupestrian along as my accomplice, and quarantined myself inside.

The memory of how I survived that afternoon is hazy, but I seem to remember lying on the floor for at least a dozen hours, a book straddling my nose, and my head propped up on Rupestrian's huge, furry haunches. I don't think I quite read, per se. I just thumbed indolently through some several thousand pages, letting the words spin past me like the shadows of a magic lantern. It was an idle pursuit; a ploy to keep my hands occupied, and out if trouble. There's a sinister adage about idle hands.

By nightfall, I had Les Miserables on my lap, and I'd been stranded somewhere in the center of the book since early afternoon. I shut it up, sighed, and set it aside. I couldn't recall what else that author had penned. I had an embarrassing habit of getting Hugo and Dumas mixed up. Perhaps it's because they both were French, swashbuckling, and vaguely gothic. Perhaps it's because they both wrote about people who were desperate, imprisoned, and alone.

Moi tout seul. Mutterseelinallein. I crossed my arms, and let my eyes lose focus. Cosette, confined to the convent. Quasimodo, banished to the bell tower. L'homme au masque le fer, in the bowels of the Bastille. My brow creased. And then there was Dantes, locked away at Chateau d'If, plotting his elaborate revenge. Him, more so than any other, I seemed to identify with that evening; though I suppose his Haydée may have been more apropos. Slave girl to the Count of Monte Cristo. Doted upon. Degraded. Forbidden from leaving his home.

I scowled. Her circumstances were eerily familiar, but I didn't especially wish to be his Haydée. Too many of those harrowing 19^th century novels had a way hammering their women down to cramped and suffocating clichés. Maiden, mother, crone. Mostly maiden, I suppose... They were shapely shadows, or contrived devices; the means to an end in tales already overdetermined by men. Most of those ladies could be replaced by a scarecrow. So long as it wore a corset and crinoline, I doubt anyone would really notice.

No. I pursed my lips. No, not tonight. Tonight, I'll be Dantes instead. I even had Rupestrian for my reluctant Jacopo. I craned my neck, gazing into the Newfoundland's enormous, black eyes.

"So what shall we do with him, boy?" I rubbed his ears. "Shall we call up the police? Tell them he's been holding me hostage?" I smirked, "That he's a menace? A sexual deviant? Get him locked up for a while, and see how he likes it?"

He shuddered, and shook his head, scratching at the spot where I was patting him.

"No?" I cocked my head, "Well what would Dante do with him?"

Contrapasso. I closed my eyes, wondering which particular crime the Florentine would find most damning. The lustful in the second circle, blown to and fro by tempestuous winds. Seducers in the eighth, whipped by demons while they trudge in endless circles. But treachery lands you in the lake with Lucifer. Frozen forever beneath a blue sheet of ice.

"What do you think? Too pontifical?"

I stroked his throat softly. He yawned at me, and raised his leg to lick himself.

"Yes. I suppose you're right," I nodded, "I should probably just kick him in the balls instead."

Kastrationsangst. Why do the Germans have a word for that? I curled my toes. Freud was such a fucking pervert. Rupestrian stretched, and gazed up at me, whining.

"You're hungry, aren't you?" I ruffled the fur over his chest, and struggled stiffly to my feet. "Fine. Go get fed. Just don't tell Jules where I am, okay?" I cracked the door for him, "you promise?"

He stared up at me wearily, and snarled his assent.

"Alright, then. Bon appetit, Monsieur," I gave him a scoot, and closed the door behind him.

No sooner had it latched, though, than I saw suddenly and with bitter clarity how pitiful my existence had really become in Dmitri's absence. Are you able to grasp, Penny Foster, the full gravity here? Are you? Are you really? I banged my forehead against the door, dizzied, and almost choking.

You waited around all day for him, didn't you? You just laid on the floor like his fucking house pet. But you're not his pet, are you? You're less. You're lower. You are, I swear you are. And the worst part is, you're clearly okay with it. Qui tacet consentire videtur. You fucking fool...

I shut my eyes as tight as I could, crushing a few caustic tears before they could fall.

But do you know what the real fucking tragedy is? Even the fucking dog knows when it's time to fucking feed himself. He knows how to take a fucking nap without his master's permission. Consider that, Miss Foster—exactly how pathetic you are for having been here. For letting him have you. For letting him have every last little thing he's fucking wanted. Seriously. You don't pass for a person anymore, Penny. You don't even pass for a goddamn house pet. Pity. Pathos. Pathetic. What. The. Fuck—is wrong with you?

I swallowed tensely, trying frantically to steer myself away from a total emotional meltdown.

Alright. I breathed in deeply through my nostrils. Alright. It's getting late again. It's after eleven. Let's just be reasonable about this, shall we? I raised my head off the door, but my eyes remained sealed. He stood you up once. There's no reason to think he won't do it again. Is it really worth staying up? Just to be disappointed? Just to be humiliated? Betrayed? I sighed, and opened my eyes. I could feel them burning in the dry evening air. Is it really worth staying at all?

Gradually, the smoke seemed to clear from my head. I could leave in the morning. I could. I pushed a few strands of hair from my eyes. And maybe you ought to, Penny. You're in over your head. Your visa is about to expire. He's told you a hundred times to stay away from him. I stood up straight, pretending to salvage the last dregs of my dignity—that they hadn't been washed away down the shower drain the night before.

Maybe it's time. Maybe it's time you started listening to him. I wrapped my fingers around the door handle, readying myself to give in. To surrender. To vanish, and finally flee. I wonder... I started to turn. Will he really even miss me?

The door was barely cracked when a harsh and high-pitched peal split through the room. My heart quit beating. My face went ashen. I couldn't believe it. It was absurd—it was utterly and revoltingly absurd. It was as if he could hear me. It was as if he knew.

The telephone rang, and it rang again. It wasn't until the third or fourth tolling that I could bring myself to let go of the door handle, and edge my way sheepishly back to his desk. I gazed down at the accursed contraption, crying out for me like some shrill and colicky infant. Slowly, numbly, lifted it up from the cradle, and held it up to my ear.

"Penny."

I sneered at him, "Mr. Caine."

His greeting was brisk, but mine was solid ice.

"I'm glad I caught you. I wasn't sure you'd still be in the study."

I squinted. He sounded a little breathy, as if he'd been walking somewhere in a hurry.

"I wasn't waiting," I muttered.

It was a pitiful lie, but I wasn't about to tell him the truth. I glanced down to the warm, white rug where I'd wasted away the entire afternoon for him, and at the little mound of novels I'd erected, like a sepulcher, to inter his Emily Dickinson.

"I just came in to return your book," I crossed my arms. "I guess you got lucky."

"My book," his words were clipped. "Finished reading already?"

"You told me to read, so I read," my lips grew tense. "I did everything you asked me to, Mr. Caine."

I felt a pair of fiery red blossoms spread across my cheeks. Every fucking thing. There was a heavy and pregnant pause before he spoke.

"You're upset," his tone dropped half an octave. It sounded as if he'd stopped in his tracks, "You're upset that I didn't call."

Give the man a medal. I bit my tongue. Nothing escapes his colossal comprehension of the wide, blue world. What acumen! What stunning percipience, and wit!

"I may be a little miffed," I murmured, and switched the phone to my other ear. "It was rude of you, wasn't it?"

"It was," he admitted, "it was conduct unbecoming of a gentleman," he pause, "But then, I've never claimed to be a gentleman, have I, Penny?"

Is that true? My brow furrowed. Granted... he's certainly never been especially gentle.

"Well," I breathed hotly, "Are you sorry, at least?"

"No, Miss Foster. I'm not."

I beg your fucking pardon? My blood skipped boiling, and turned directly to steam.

"Would you care to know," his words were wolfish, "why I didn't call you last night? Would you like to know what kept me away?"

Oh, very much so. Please. Please, tell me what precisely gives you the right to treat me like shit. Impress me, Monsieur. Factum infectum fieri nequit.

I seethed at him softly, "do tell."

"The opportunity arose," his voice cooled, "to finish up much earlier out here than I'd expected. But to do so demanded my immediate and undivided attention."

"Earlier," I echoed, my frown slightly slackening. "How much earlier?"

"I flew out of Duerne this morning. I've just left the gate at Trudeau."

Trudeau? My knees nearly gave out underneath me.

"You mean—you mean you're back?" I stammered thinly, unable to breathe. "You're back? Already?"

"I am," he growled, "I'll be home in less than an hour, Miss Foster. Be ready."

Chapter 20

I've always taken a little too much pride in my gift wrap. I'm good at it—like, scary good. And honestly it's probably more than half the reason that Madame d'Aulnoir ever agreed to hire me on at her shop. Back in high school, I used to work every winter as the 'gift wrap girl' at this little department store up in Kill Devil Hills. It had an upscale bent to it, I suppose, but only if you squinted, and didn't look at any one detail too closely; like a plywood film set from some 1970's comedy about the shop clerks at Selfridges. It was the sort of place where women picked out sleeveless tennis shirts for some poorly-liked sister-in-law, and men bought their wives amber bottles of Chanel N° 5 after just barely remembering their birthdays.