My Mother, however, did not have to guess. Inveterate in her nosiness, she walked in on me once without knocking, holding a razor to the underside of my forearm. I was fifteen, I think; maybe fifteen-and-a-half. It was in my bedroom at the cottage. My back was to her. I sat cross-legged on the edge of my little twin bed. It must have been close to Christmas. There was a smiling snowman on her sweater. In my memory, at least, that entire house was slathered, floor-to-ceiling, in white—the linens and curtains, the floorboards and wainscoting, even the mishmash of heirloom furniture, all banished, like myself, from Doctor Foster's more fashionable domicile in Asheville.
She shouted something. She startled me. And the blade sank a little deeper than I'd intended. I started bleeding all over the bedspread. Queen Anne of England pricked her finger... She was shocked, I'm sure, but outwardly her reactions were almost robotic. She barely said a word while she helped clean me up, nor while wiping away the little cobblestone trail of red I'd left, like breadcrumbs, in my staggering route to the bathroom. When the bleeding still wouldn't stop, she led me silently downstairs, and put me in the passenger seat of our station wagon, with a ruined monogram towel wrapped round my arm.
We drove for forty minutes, and she never once asked me a question. We passed right by the hospital without slowing down. I didn't bother asking her why. I knew. I knew she didn't want us running into anyone who might know my Father. Word has a way of getting around in those places. Instead, in the sandy side-lot of some obscure and rundown urgent care clinic, we crunched to a halt, and she cut the ignition.
To the cut itself, I really think she was overreacting. It had all but stopped seeping by the time we checked in, and a sullen physician's assistant sewed in a few interrupted stitches simply to appease her nerves. As for why it was there in the first place, she answered for me each time someone asked. Apparently, I'd caught a loose nail along the handrail of the boardwalk. 'It's getting downright treacherous out there, isn't it, Penelope?' She'd been saying for three seasons now that it needs refinished. I suppose Doctor Foster will have to listen to her, won't he? 'It was just a matter time before someone got hurt.' Just a matter of time. And thank goodness, really, it wasn't any worse than it was...
That fabrication came so naturally to her that by the third or fourth time I'd heard it, I almost started to believe it myself. Certainly, the story didn't raise any eyebrows at the clinic. They gave me a tetanus booster, and sent us on our way. Our return journey was as wordless as the one that preceded it, and as far as I could tell, in her mind the elegant lie had already replaced what actually happened. She even went so far as to have the boardwalk refinished that fall. We never once spoke about it. Why would we? I'd caught a loose nail. That was all. End of story.
Of course, it wasn't the end. I still would cut myself from time to time throughout high school, and while I was studying at Wake. No one knew. No one needed to. No one wanted to. No one, that is, but Dmitri. He still had his hand there. It was barely even visible by now—just a ghost-white em dash below my elbow, as slender as a stray thread of hair—but he still saw it. He saw me. He saw me better, sometimes, than I saw myself.
It's strange. By the cool dew in his eyes, I knew that my story upset him. And yet, somehow he didn't seem especially surprised. He wanted to know more, of course, and more than anything else, to know whether I'd cut myself since coming to live with him at Lacoste. I told him I hadn't. I told him I hadn't done it in a long, long time—at least, not since moving up to Montreal two years ago.
I wasn't lying to him. But I also wasn't telling him what he really wanted to know. After breaking off my engagement—after the accident—I'd taken, briefly, to burning myself with cigarette ash instead. The burn hurt a lot more than the blade, and at the time, it was something that made a tremendous amount of sense to me. I was punishing myself. I needed to let the tension out, but I needed to make myself suffer as well. I didn't want to feel better. I barely even wanted to exist. I would roll the red ember in between my fingers, or my toes. I'd leave a searing cicatrix even more inconspicuous than my cuts, and one that would sting me, for days, with every little motion I made.
He gazed down at me fixedly, searching for the slightest sign of subterfuge. His eyes remained misty. He must have known I was holding back. But for the moment at least, he didn't push me. He just drew me closer, and laid a light kiss my forehead.
"Listen to me," his voice was steady as stone, "so long as you reside in this house, Penny, you are mine. Your body is mine. And not a soul on this earth will abuse your body, but me. You no longer possess that privilege." His hold around me tightened, and I shrank a little smaller in his arms, "However," his words softened, "should the time come when you feel you need that relief, you must tell me," he stroked his hand through my hair, and held my head against his chest. "I'll understand. And I'll help you."
Help me? I quivered coldly. 'I'd rather sink than call for help.'
I murmured, my face still buried in his chest, "...help me how, sir?"
He raised my chin, and answered coolly, "By bruising you. I can hurt you when you need to be hurt. But we're finished breaking your skin, Penny." He slid his hand softly along my shoulder, "The thing about bruises—they fade. You watch them blossom, and wilt. You watch yourself heal." He squeezed, "You have enough scars, I think—enough for someone with twice your years. You'll not be deriving any more from me. Do I make myself clear, Miss Foster?"
Comme l'eau de roche, Maitre. I'd rather drown... I nodded my silent assent, and let my tears dry against his chest, darkening the prickly grey wool of his jacket. It was not easy for me to accept that this conversation was real. It was not easy to believe that he'd stolen away this piece of me so easily. The elder of a small, hooded conclave in the shaded chambers of my heart, it was among my darkest secrets, and one that theretofore I had willfully surrendered to no one. Still, with him, it hardly mattered. My will was nil; my secrets splayed and displayed like the crisp, particolored wings of his private butterfly collection; each one of them skewered, labeled, and encased in glass.
But I trusted him. It's true. For better or for worse, I trusted him to take care of me, whether I needed it or not. And now I was trusting him to hurt me as well. Whether I needed it, or not. And it helped, I think, not only that he was already able to intuit whenever I was ruminating, feeling uneasy, or on edge, but that there were times like this when in spite of all conventional evidence to the contrary, I honestly believed he might love me.
Too often it was less what he said than I what I heard in his voice, but there was a shadowy warmth emerging from the ice—subtle, but unmistakable. I could hear it in his diminutives; whenever he called me his sparrow, his darling, his dear. I was still 'Miss Foster' for him in the morning, when our sparring was at its most tasteful. I was 'Miss Foster' while we flirted, quarreled, and whenever I'd made him cross. I could become his 'good girl' whether I'd been brave for him, obedient, or both. I was often his angel. I was always his slave. But it was when we were merely two people—two, too-guarded people, floundering to hold onto each other; to hold onto what fragile, prelapsarian paradise we had, and not ruin it all with a lot of nasty and haphazard falling in love—then, I was simply Penny. His Penny. And he, in turn, my Dmitri.
He tried to teach me, once, how to pronounce it correctly. We had collapsed on the floor together, languishing in the amber-warm glow of another post-coital stupor. I don't recall what he'd done to leave us both so breathless. Like a bleary afternoon rainbow, memory has smudged much of that advent and venery into a single, spectacular blur. But I know I was feeling close to him, and uncommonly impish as well.
He was sitting up, shirtless, sipping scotch from a smoky tumbler. I was nestled against him, swaddled in his blue button-down, with a folio of Leon Bakst prints perched upon my knees. There was a strange inscription inside the first leaf, with the first bit scribbled out in Cyrillic, the second in French.
'для Анна Кейн. мой рай, мое сердце,
Je suis maudit, etant donne que je suis banni du ciel. Je suis mort, parce que mon coeur m'a abandonné.
Danser, mon coeur, partout où vous irez,
R——'
I squinted, blundering my way through the latter half, and lifted the book for him to see.
"This first part," I murmured, "Do you know what it says, sir?"
"I do," he sipped, nodded, and set aside his drink. "For Anna Caine," his brow tightened slightly, "my heaven, my heart."
My face grew pale. Had I even suspected, I would never have dared to ask him.
"Anna..." I repeated mousily, "she was your Mother?"
"Natürlich ," again, he nodded, "hence, her beloved Bakst."
I bit my lip, turning through two or three dozen pages, "she was a ballerina. With the Bolshoi, in Moscow," I remembered idly the several spartan details he'd already divulged. "Was she beautiful?"
"Jawohl. A critic in Berlin called her a silent swan—beating her white wings above the snow-scattered the Volga." He smirked nostalgically, and cocked his head. "White emigre overtones aside, I suppose Bakst might have painted her had their ages overlapped. By nineteen or so, she had a modicum of fame among balletomanes," his smile sank, "though she never quite made premier sujet."
"No?" I pursed my lips, tracing a lazy finger along the serpentine skirts of Ida Rubinstein's outfit for Cleopatra, "Why not?"
"A great beast, slouching toward Bethlehem," he tapped his nose, "I hear it has a way of upsetting one's center of balance."
Come again? I shuddered coldly, and turned the page.
"So does that mean R——?" I whispered. "I mean, I mean, he wasn't?"
"He was," he cut me off, and lifted the book from my lap. "It's funny, him finishing up in French. His Russian was always piss-poor."
Funny? I blinked, watching his eyes as he reread the inscription. So why aren't we smiling, sir? I blinked again, my eyelashes asking in Morse code. It was so seldom that he spoke of his parents, of the murky circumstances from which he, Dmitri Caine, had sprung. I wanted to hear more. I wanted it badly, but was loathe to goad him on too eagerly. Each time I tried to study him under my magnifying glass, he had an uncanny way of spinning its lens upon me instead, and scorching what he found there beneath a focused, white-hot beam of moonlight.
"They weren't married, though. Were they?" I queried cautiously, laying my head once more on his shoulder. "He sounds like a hopeless romantic."
"Hopeless, anyhow. And no," he flipped to the end, where a full-page panel depicted Nijinsky, mid-leap, as a blonde and half-shod faun. "Schiessbefehl. Bars and barbs to Eastern bloc emigration. The world was not their oyster. But I think it's too charitable to call them star-crossed," he snapped the tome shut. "Even if she'd joined him in Bayonne, he would hardly have given up the cloth for her," with a vulgar emphasis on et filii, he pantomimed the signum crucis. "R—— always dreamt himself a redbird in Rome."
My head bobbed dizzily in the wake of his riddles, but I think that I followed him. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'd honestly managed to forget for a moment that his Father had been a bishop. Caïssa of Thrace. Bishop captures queen. He handed back the book, and I shook my head, marveling.
"Star-crossed..." I murmured, setting it aside, "do you know how they met?"
"I do. It's the stuff of grim fairytales," he reached again for his glass. "He was her confessor one night while the Bolshoi were performing in Biarritz."
I balked, "her confessor?"
"So the story goes," he shrugged, "though Anna Caine was apt to embellish." He drank, and I watched him grimace as the bitter liquid burned its way down his throat. "Their affair lasted eleven years. Every time the Ballet was arabesquing its way through Europe, he would find some ecclesiastical excuse to rendezvous." He narrowed his eyes at the last amber lays of the glass, "The Annunciation in Zaragoza. The Ascension in Venice. Legend has it I was conceived in Calcata, just after the parade of the Holy Prepuce."
"Allons donc," I grimaced, gathering my hair into messy bun, "you're full of it."
"Ah, but it's true, my dear. Or it might be," he smirked at me slyly, his tongue and lips loosened by the smoky poison pulsing through his veins. "En fait ma fée, I can tell you with complete confidence that just to dispel suspicions, he wore a disguise when meeting her in public."
"Stop," I sniggered, spinning around onto his lap, and straddling his legs, "Tu me fais marcher, Maitre."
"Non, sur ma vie," he bared his teeth, and clasped his hands over my hips, "mais je vais te faire ramper. I swear," he drew me closer, and nodded toward the towering shelves all around us, "there's a photo in an Italian tabloid somewhere—likely lost to antiquity. But it showed them together at a little al fresco cafe in Florence. She wore a foulard, and a pair of Goldsmith sunglasses. He wore a false moustache, and a straw fedora."
"You're terrible," I sank against his chest, giggling until I lost my breath, "and you're making this up. He couldn't have been her confessor—she couldn't be Catholic," I raised my chin, nibbling softly at his neck, "She was Russian, wasn't she?"
"Only topographically," he closed his eyes, sighing as I descended further down his throat, "her parents were Swiss French. Physicists, actually. They left Geneva just before the curtain closed to split atoms in Obninsk."
Swiss French? I quit kissing him, and narrowed my eyes, rustling through the barren boughs and branches of his pedigree.
"So... I guess you're really not Russian at all, then, are you?"
"Begging your pardon, Penny," he sprang forward, softly tackling me to the floor, and pinned my arms against the ground, "your master's name is Dmitri Romanovich. My blood may be continental, but I'm as Russian as the rasputitsa."
I giggled again, and gasped as he dragged his own set of fangs over my throat. Up until that moment, I'd known the initial, but never his middle name.
"Mmm," my toes curled as he worked his way lower. "Dmitri Romanovich..." I purred for him, poorly mimicking the folds and inflections of his accent.
"Try again," he slipped free the first button of my shirt, "it's deeper. From the back of your throat."
"Dmitri," I simpered at him, and rolled my eyes, "Romanovich."
He kissed my collarbone, "Almost. Pretend the vowels are so heavy," he kissed the other, and slid open the second button, "your tongue can barely lift them out of your chest. Like raising a pail from a well."
My brows arched, but I jutted my jaw out, and gave it a try.
"...Dahmeetriy," very carefully, I articulated each syllable from somewhere near my carina, "Rheumahnofish?"
His face tensed as he tried to stifle it, but a grin split over his lips, a crack in a pane of red glass, and he started to chuckle. My face flushed, and I wriggled my wrists free from his grip.
"Damn it," I slapped him hard on the chest, giggling a little myself as he chuckled harder, "You've got me all in my head now."
"Here," he caught hold of himself sharply, and pressed his hand to the jugular notch of my neck. "Right here. As deep, and as dark you can."
Deeper? It felt foolish, but I committed, rolling those three stony syllables like Sisyphus up the smooth, circumvellate slope of my tongue, "Dm-it-ri. Duh-miya-trey. Dehm-ee-triy. Doo–mee–treeeee..."
Each time I said it, I dropped my voice half an octave, until by the final iteration I sounded like an inebriated Louis Armstrong, and he had fallen onto the floor beside me, laughing so hard he could barely breathe.
"Je suis désolé, Monsieur," I smirked at him, rolling over, "It seems my Russian is piss-poor as your Father's. But you're a really lousy teacher."
He wiped a bright tear from his eye, gradually regaining himself, and gazed over at me. Our noses were nearly touching. Our eyes were locked. He grasped my hand in his, and intertwined our fingers.
"Once more," he murmured, "for me. Just ignore what I told you."
I blushed scarlet, and squeezed his hand, "...Dmitri."
"That's perfect, Penny," he swept his palm across my cheek, and brushed a stray strand of hair from my eyes. "Just perfect."
We kissed, then. We made love on the floor. We started all over again. That was all. That was everything. And it was perfect, at least, in the way that things in a vacuum often are. It's a myth that Eve in Eden was satisfied, but I still believe she might have been happy. In my mind's eye, I picture a primeval woman, walking alone beneath the garden wall. Even on tiptoe, she's still too short to pluck an apple from the branch above her; too short to peer her green eyes over the hedges, and glimpse the wide, blue world she's been missing.
I suppose most happiness is a matter of focus, of foveation. Like a songbird asleep beneath her silk blanket, Dmitri kept me in a gilded cage, mastering my field of vision in every sector and secant. The circle enclosing my panopticon, the patina of its bars between the radians, the ice-blue freckles and folds of his irides; they were the hedge maze walls that marked the edges of my jardin d'hiver; the rose windows and Catherine wheels of my glassed-in Eden.
And trite as it sounds, it was enough. The world beyond Lacoste could crumble and rot while I was with him. I would hardly have known the difference. I would hardly have cared. The wooded hills of Asheville, and the reed-daggered dunes of Nags Head, my shattered engagement, my entire existence in Montreal before Dmitri—all of it seemed eons ago, and whatever echoes still emanated from the past passed by me like descants from decaying carbon. Petrified. Fossilized. Reduced to dust, and stone.
Perhaps that's why—perhaps that's why after seven straight days of silence, the the first half-muffled buzz of my phone that night barely fazed me. I was still nestled against him, still undressed, unwilling to move. Perhaps it's why I didn't stop him, or even open my eyes, when he slipped the interloping contraption out of my castaway pocket, and answered it in my stead.
"Caine speaking," his tone was clipped, and cool, "I'm afraid Miss Foster is tied up at the moment."
My eyelids parted, slit-like, and I gave him an envenomed glare. Sans context, I suppose the idiom was innocent enough, but I still had fresh rope marks on my wrists and ankles from our frolics earlier that evening. And regardless, if there was any chance in hell that Dmitri Caine was making obscene insinuations to my Father, I think I might have dropped dead on the spot.
"Je vois. Voulez-vous qu'elle vous rappelle, Madame?"
Madame? My glare darkened, and I made a pitiful pass at stealing the phone away, but he moved it to his other ear, and used his free arm to hold me still. I squirmed, I grunted, and ceased my struggling with an indignant and rhetorical huff. Much as his gall annoyed me, I admit, regrettably, that it seldom failed to excite my senses—to feel how easily he overpowered me; how easily he held my whole body in check. Caissa of Thrace. Dryad. Diad. 'Der Anatom', and 'La Autopsia'. I sighed lightly, shutting my eyes once more as he pulled me closer, and slipped his hand beneath the silk band of my panties.
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