The apparition hovers in the doorway. “Come with me now,” she says.
I try to squeeze my eyes shut but find them frozen in a lidless stare.
She waves her cigarette impatiently in a gesture that I recognize.
“I know you,” I say. “You’re Chase. You’ve come back cute.”
“That name sounds familiar,” she says, “but I do not remember it.”
“Are you Chase?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are you, then?”
She is confused for a moment and sinks slowly to the floor. “Don’t ask me to remember,” she says. “I have forgotten all of that, the sufferings of clay. This is what I looked like all along, in life. Funny how no one could see me this way, no one could see through the shell. The living are so blind.” But for a moment superimposed on her death-perfect face is another one, broken, familiar, half eaten by deformity, uneven as a Picasso.
“Is there more to death, Chase?” I say. “Or do you just waft around like that all the time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Am I dead?”
“No. But close. That is why we can talk like this.”
“Will I die soon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are we?”
“In your apartment, of course.”
“Chase …”
“Stop. You must come with me. They want me to help her before I go on.”
“Help who?”
“The one who lingers here. She’s asked for your help many times. In your dreams, along the secret ways. But you have refused to listen to her. So they sent me to help you listen, to help you across the threshold for a little while.”
“Why does she want me?”
“She has been waiting years for you to come. She will only talk to someone from home. You two are tied together on the loom.”
“What loom?”
“You ask too many questions. Come …”
And there is something warm in her voice, a memory that makes me rise. She holds out her hand, and the phosphorescence drains from the rest of her body to cup there in her palm. Soon that’s all there is, a handful of light in the darkness.
I take hold of the glowing hand and feel a happy looseness as I pull away from the body in the bed. It lies there, stretched out on the stained mattress, eyes half open in an unconscious glitter, breath a faint raspy sound, lips black with dried bile. A horrible sight, but I don’t feel anything except relief and a little bit of pity for human frailty. The glowing hand of Chase or the young woman who was Chase leads me across the living room around the piles of stuff on the floor.
Now I hear the low, sexy sound of a woman singing in French and the strumming of a guitar coming from Molesworth’s room. Through the half-open door I can see a large four-poster bed and an oval standing mirror reflecting rumpled sheets and more clothes in piles. The woman singing is just out of sight to the left of the door, but behind her voice and the vibrating sound of the guitar is an utter black stillness that is the stillness of death.
“Remember, she is very confused.” Chase’s voice comes close in my ear. “She does not know if it is today or yesterday. She does not remember her own death or the years in between.”
Then the glowing hand winks out, and I am standing alone in the wedge of yellow light, and the woman inside the room stops singing and says, “Vient’ens … I am ready now, monsieur.”
The last few feet seem to take an effort I do not understand. I step into the humid yellow of the bedroom drained of everything. In here there is the thick burnt tallow smell of candles and the familiar smell of sex. Beside the big bed, in one corner, the woman sits at a low stool before a vanity crowded with bottles of perfume carelessly uncorked, and ceramic jars of powder. On either side of the mirror, bronze griffins hold candles, the wax trailing slowly to the floor between their claws. She wears a thin shift, which is open over her breasts. A small Spanish guitar is cradled in her lap.
Now she bends forward in concentration, her fingers picking out a fast Spanish melody full of dramatic chords. Her thick black hair obscures her face. I stand for a while, politely, and listen to her play. She hesitates on a difficult part, picks it out slowly, and goes on. In the moment before she speaks again, I notice that I am not reflected in the mirror of her vanity. The doorway is empty. Here it is I who am the ghost. At last she flips her hair over one shoulder and looks up. Her gray eyes are cloudy and curiously unknowing. Her skin is white and hollow. But I’d know that pretty face anywhere.
“Antoinette,” I say.
She smiles; there are thin, unfamiliar gaps between her teeth which have never experienced the miracle of orthodontics.
“You may call me by that name if you like,” she says. She is not so much talking to me as through me. “Some of the sailors off the ships like to call me by the names of their wives or sweethearts who are waiting in ports far from here. It makes them feel they are not lying with a whore. Last week one brought a bonnet and a calico dress for me to wear while we lay together so I would remind him of his wife. He paid me in gold, so I wore the bonnet and the dress, but I detest calico.”
The likeness to Antoinette is remarkable, the same eyes and cheekbones and hair, the same mannerisms, but now I see differences around the chin and mouth.
“I’m sorry,” I manage to say at last. “You look very much like someone I know.”
“Your wife?”
“No.”
“Your mistress?”
I am silent.
She frowns and strums the guitar a bit. When she looks up again, her eyes are confused and frightened. She puts the guitar aside suddenly and crosses to the window, where there is nothing but a boiling blackness. The boards creak beneath her bare feet.
“This night,” she says, a terrible despair in her voice, “this same night always. No stars and the moon hidden by clouds, and not a light burning except for my own. I am so far from home, monsieur.” Then she swings toward me, and she is angry. “You are late! My girl, Mimine, said eight o’clock, and I canceled another appointment because of you. It is now past midnight! I had a supper ready as you requested, but it has long since gone cold.” She steps forward, faltering, clasping her hands together, the white fingers intertwining like snakes. “Please, you must forgive me, I am not myself. It’s just that sometimes, I feel so terribly lost.…”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say.
She takes a breath and in a moment is calm. “Mimine told me that you are from home. I did not need to be told. I can see by the way you carry yourself that you are a Creole gentleman, one of my own people. Please, do you mind if we sit and talk awhile before we lie together? S’il vous plaît, parlons notre propre langue.” She goes on in French, and I respond in kind,
“Certe. C’est juste …” but it makes no difference; the language we are using has no real words.
“Of course, I am just a whore,” she says, “and one does not pay a whore to talk. I am usually strong and cruel—many of the men like it that way—but tonight I am weak, and I am yours, body and soul, if you will only talk with me a little while.”
She steps over and takes me by the arm and leads me to the bed. Her touch is not cool and feathery, as you would expect from a ghost, but warm and solid. She puts me between the sheets and goes to get a shawl from the vanity.
“There is an old axiom that clothes make the gentleman, but not in your case, monsieur,” she says as she wraps the shawl around my shoulders. She lifts up the sheet for a moment, and we both look down at the erection thumping against my stomach. It is only now I remember I am naked. With a coy smirk she reaches down and gives me a squeeze that I feel in my guts. “Still, it will be that much more pleasurable if you restrain your gamecock for the present and hear me out.”
She is eager as a child. She disappears into the dark outer room and returns with a squarish bottle and two small crystal glasses. She hip slides her way onto the mattress and tucks her legs unde
r in the same way I have seen Antoinette approach a bed. She sets the glasses on a flat pillow between us, pours out the thick red wine from the bottle, hands me a glass, and fills her own. The stuff is strong and sweet and like fire. She readjusts the shift to reveal her breasts more completely and leans back against the carved baseboard, stroking a nipple with an idle finger.
“I like to get drunk,” she says. “It is the whore’s solace. But only on good wine, so you don’t feel so terrible in the morning.” She takes a greedy gulp of the wine. “This is a fine Madeira, don’t you think?”
I nod.
“The captain of a merchantman who sometimes comes to lay with me brings a few bottles as a present when his vessel puts in from Spain. My father was very fond of Madeira. He used to have cases of the stuff brought downriver from New Orleans. Did you know my father?”
“I don’t think so.”
“My father was well liked. They respected him up and down the river from Natchez to Pointe de la Hache. He was that rare thing, an honest and successful man. But he put too much faith in the inherent goodness of people. And he betrothed his daughter to a monster, and now his daughter is a whore.”
We drink for a while in silence. She refills our glasses several times. I am getting drunk. The walls of the room are painted a vaginal pink. There is little by way of decor except for the vanity and the bed, and I recall Molesworth’s old Z.Z. Top poster with some nostalgia. Above the headboard hangs a small oval portrait of an arrogant and familiar-looking olive-skinned man in the uniform of the Spanish kings. He stares down at us with malevolent black eyes. On a sash across his chest are pinned the platinum and diamond stars of a few forgotten aristocratic orders. Two dueling pistols stand in an open box beside him.
Soon the bottle of Madeira is done, and there remains only the sediment, grainy and bitter as coffee grounds at the bottom of the glass.
The ghost is waiting, her eyes as lightless as stones.
“Tell me,” I say at last.
“What do you wish to know?”
“Everything.”
Madeleine’s Story
My name is Madeleine Hippolyte Félicité de Prasères de la Roca. I was born to riches at Belle Azure Plantation in Plaquemines, Louisiana, a few years after General Jackson defeated the English at Chalmette and sent Pakenham’s body home in a barrel of rum from which, as the story goes, his soldiers drank unknowingly on the way back to England. I am told we are all equal under the wings of the American Eagle, and I have seen a painting in the governor’s house to this effect, but I don’t believe it. I insist with pride, as my father insisted, that the royal blood of both France and Spain runs in my veins and that I am better than most. Strange words from a whore, but my story is a strange and sad one.
My mother, Emmeline Françoise d’Aurevilley, was born in France in Normandy in an ancient château and came to Louisiana with her family during the Terror of the Revolution. She met my father at a ball at the old Marigny Plantation in the second week of May, five years before the Americans bought Louisiana from France. At seven in the evening they danced once to an old-fashioned gavotte à la polonaise and were married on the lawn the next afternoon, as the sun went red over the river. All the guests cried when my parents knelt before the priest, because they were both so beautiful and so young—and you know the open way our people have when they are happy or sad. Always the tears and the handkerchiefs.
My father was tall and robust with reddish hair. My mother was both fair and dark, with the thick black tresses and gray eyes that you can see I have inherited. Mandeville himself gave his own bedroom for the wedding chamber and a thousand Spanish gold dollars as a wedding present. And the Spanish governor, Señor Salcedo, who was present, exempted the newly-weds from taxation for a year.
Unfortunately I have no memory of my mother except for vague impressions, much like the dreams of a very young child. She died of the fever of the black vomit when I was barely two years old. The only picture of her that remains is a small cameo painted on bone by Mazzini, the famous miniaturist, during my parents’ honeymoon in Europe. This is the single item of any value that I took with me when I left Belle Azure for the North. I have the miniature hidden here beneath a loose board in the floor and remove it on occasion when the last man has left my bed in the evening.
As I gaze at my mother’s soft face, I think had this woman lived to temper my father’s judgments, my life might have turned out differently. When she looks down on me now—if we can indeed look upon life from the blackness of death—she sees a whore and not the virtuous daughter she had hoped to give the world. I am saddened by this fact alone. The rest I brought on myself, through jealousy and passion and pride.
But I was not always a whore. My story is first the story of two little girls. Myself and my cousin Albane d’Aurevilley. As a child I lived in the big house at Belle Azure—it seems like paradise now—surrounded by fields and bayou and river, by the green gifts of the Plaquemines delta.
When I was ten years old, my cousin Albane came from the city to live with us because her father and her mother, who was my father’s first cousin, had died of the fever. A terrible epidemic swept through New Orleans that summer, and the streets were full of wagons loaded with corpses. I heard the house slaves talking about this, and some said it was the curse of God on that city for its wickedness. Perhaps this is true, for it is a wicked city. From the top gallery, if the wind blew downriver, you could hear the plague cannon going off and see the smoke of the tar barrels rising into the sky like black ribbons on the horizon.
I remember that summer well because of Albane and because Papa returned from his trip to Paris unexpectedly in early June. He had been gone many months. He was mostly gone from Belle Azure in those days, and though I did not know it then, I was a very lonely child. I was surrounded by people, it is true. There were at various times in the house maiden aunts and spinster cousins who made a show of affection for me, but who really did not care one bit whether I lived or died, and of course, there were always the house slaves.
Zetie, the light-skinned mulatto who nursed me when my mother died, possessed, I think, some genuine feelings for me, but the condition of bound servitude is not one that fosters untainted emotions. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she was very cruel indeed. She beat me where it would leave no marks, and she stole my pretty things—little trinkets and bits of lace—and gave them to her own children, who lived in the quarters behind the house with the rest of the slaves.
Once, when I asked Papa why he was so often away, he replied that life at the place where he had been so happy with my mother saddened him greatly. But he never took me with him when he went on his travels, and I suspect that it was not the house or the plantation that saddened him but my own countenance, for it resembles my mother’s almost exactly. We are all alike, the women of the d’Aurevilley line. We are both fair and dark, an unusual combination of qualities. It has been so since the days of Marie de France and shall be so as long as there are women to look beautiful and men to chase after them.
But this time, when he returned from Paris, perhaps because he felt a little guilty, Papa brought me many fine gifts: painted fans and dresses, a mechanical bird that sang when you wound it up with a silver key, and a splendid china-faced doll purchased at Joquelin’s, the famous toymaker of the Faubourg St.-Germain. The doll came with a box of fitted gowns, all satin and frills in the latest fashion, and her hair was black, like my own. I named her Emmeline after my mother and carried her with me everywhere. It seems ridiculous now as a grown woman to be talking about a child’s doll, but the fate of that doll is a cipher for what happened afterward.
The day Albane came to live with us, Papa took the doll away from me and gave it to her. Not an hour after she set foot in our house, Albane saw the doll in my arms, coveted it, and merely asked Papa in that quiet, mysterious voice of hers if she could have the thing. He consented without a thought for my feelings because, as he said later, I had so many playthings
and poor little Albane had nothing. What he did not know was that I loved the doll very much and would have given up everything else I owned to keep it for myself.
I can still recall the peculiar light on the afternoon Albane came to us. The sky was purple over the river, and rain lashed the lattices, an appropriately theatrical entry for the creature who would become the villain of my young life. She was unattractive, pinkish and pinch-faced and all bones. The mourning dress of cheap black tulle hung limp and wet on her sharp frame and dripped stains of dye on the Gobelins carpet in the front hall. I stood on the polished stairs, clutching my doll as Papa took her to his bosom, and I shall never forget the look on her face over his shoulder—arch, possessive, and preternaturally wise. I shivered at the sight of her, and I could not meet those eyes which were an odd, unforgiving shade of blue and which even then concealed unknown powers of persuasion.
Within a month Papa moved Albane into the large bedroom opening on mine, which had been my nursery and playroom. He gave her half my clothes and had Zetie tailor them to fit the child’s skinny limbs. He gave her the extravagant gift of a body slave, a young Negro girl of her own age, and he gave her his unadulterated affection.
And in the sad years that followed, Papa seemed to become even fonder of that miserable little orphan. He took her twice to performances at the French opera in New Orleans. I went with him to the city but once, and just to see a poor play of marionettes in a stall in the Place d’Armes.
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