by Tanith Lee
The father said, “I would like you to have it as a gift.”
Vessavion smiled. He looked at Isobel. His smile for her, already, was feral and possessive, eager and consumed—consuming. Isobel lowered her eyes. Vessavion said, “Then may I give your daughter something? I know what would suit her. Do you remember the amber rose?”
The father felt a pang of agony—it was jealousy, much, much worse than the clawing of the cancer that now, anyway, was kept dumb by drugs. But he was glad too of the jealousy. It confirmed he had been right.
They went among Vessavion’s collection. It was rumored he had other things, hidden away, but here there was enough to astound. The Han horse, white as ice, the Roumanian chess pieces carved from a mountain, the banner from a war of 1403, the great unfaceted sapphire polished like a ball made out of the summer sea. And more.
Vessavion took the rose from its cabinet, and fastened the briar about Isobel’s white neck, lifting away so gently her wave of blond hair. His hands were courteous, they did not linger, but his color too intensified faintly, for a moment. He was a young man.
They sat long into the night, over coffee and wine. Soft music played somewhere, and beyond the conservatory of enormous flowers, that garden, checkered by enormous stars.
Isobel and Vessavion talked on and on. If it was a melody they made, each knew it, where to come in, and where to wait. They might have known each other for ever, and been parted for a week. So much to say. How they had missed each other.
Finally, deliberately, he murmured that now they must go away. He relished his cruelty, seeing their eyes clouded, and hearing their voices falling from each other like caressing hands.
Vessavion rose. He named a fabulous production, drama, opera, something for which it was impossible to get tickets. He, of course, had them. Would they accompany him? The father liked, too, this old-fashioned kindness to himself. He declined graciously. He said that Isobel must go. That was all that was needed.
They descended in the elevator, down into the snow world. She was very quiet and still. Self-conscious even. She avoided his eyes.
When they were in the car, she said, shyly, “Is it all right?”
“Yes. Wonderfully all right.”
“You’re pleased?”
“Can’t you tell?”
“You like him?” she said, hopeful as a child.
“Very much.”
“But he’s so mysterious. No one knows anything about him.”
“Perhaps that’s part of it.”
“Do come to the theater,” she said.
He said, laughing, “You’d kill me if I did.”
He thought afterward, it was a pity he had said that, although she, too, not knowing, had laughed in turn. It was a pity to accuse her, her, even in a joke, of something which was already happening by another means.
He believed she did not sleep that night. Across the court, he saw her light burning on, as he sat through the dark.
• • •
Isobel had only been in love in childhood. With characters in books, with the characters that actors portrayed on a screen or a stage. Later, she lost her taste for this sort of love. She was fastidious, and her standards had been permitted to be extremely, impossibly, high. She had, now and then, liked men. But the conquest which her beauty always allowed her to make, sometimes brought out in them their worst—foolishness, bombast, even, occasionally, antagonism. Besides, she did not recognize them.
Seeing Vessavion, she recognized him at once. Not only his personal beauty, which was, if anything, greater than her own. Also his demeanor, and presently his manner, his mood, his mind. When they spoke, of trivial or important elements, they seemed to glide together along the same broad white road. Each found new things there, and sometimes the same things, or things of a fascinating difference which, once shared, were accessible to both.
However, to be realistic, she had fallen in love with him on sight. And in his eyes she presently saw the same had happened for him.
Beyond all this, there was his mystery, and even though, from the first evening of the dinner, he spoke to her of his life, of events in which he had participated, of childhood memories, his air of seclusion remained, sweet and acid at once, luring her on. Could she ever know him? Oh yes—and yet, to be possessed by a handsome stranger that she knew, that she could never know—He did not kiss her until their third meeting. By then she was weak with longing, confused, almost in pain. At the touch of his mouth, his tongue, the pressure of his body, safe tethers of steel gave way in her, she fell all the distance down into the heart of him, and lay there drowning.
She was a romantic who had dismissed her dreams, a young woman with a young woman’s libido, who had found no stimulus, until now. She trusted him completely. Yet he was a shadow. It was more wonderful than anything of any sort she had ever had in her life before.
After their eighth meeting, he took her into a vast bedroom that was like a dark blue cave, and here all night, all day, they made love over and over, sometimes drinking champagne, sometimes eating food that magically arrived without trace of human participation.
At first her orgasms were swift and tenuous, flickers, shudders, butterflies of feeling. But he taught her, with his hands and his mouth, lips and tongue, every inch of his honed and subtle body, the sword of his loins, his white hair, his skin, to writhe and to wait, to simmer and to flame, so that ocean-rushes of pleasure dashed her up and up into a steeple, a vortex, where she screamed, where she died, and he brought her slowly back to life, gentle then as the mother that she did not recall.
After they had lain on that great blue bed, the few single silver wires of their separate hair, torn out in frenzy, lay like traceries. Once there was a broken nail, white as a sickle moon. Or a spot of silken fluid. Or only the impress of their bodies, one thing.
It was a winter wedding. Her father was there, and the witnesses, that she did not know and never saw again. They ate a sumptuous meal in a towering restaurant above an ice-blue sea that perhaps was not real, she did not know or care.
A few days later her father was gone. He vanished, leaving only a mild and friendly letter, which Vessavion read her as she wept. The house in the lowlands of the city was now hers, and once she went back to it, alone, Vessavion’s man waiting for her at the outer door. But the house, where she had always lived since she could remember, seemed unfamiliar. She saw to her father’s things, what was necessary. It occurred to her she did not weep enough. She tried to force out her tears by thinking of his goodness to her. He had been a dedicated yet not a passionate parent. He had made her too sure of herself. She found that this section of her life, her years with her father, was over, and she could fold it away, neatly, and now it did not matter.
Sometimes she and her husband were apart for an hour or so, or he might be absent for a portion of an evening or an afternoon. She assumed he must attend to his business interests, as her father had done. These separations were tantalizing, nearly enjoyable. Vessavion’s mansion had, besides, so many rooms. She was always finding new ones. It was like him. In the winter garden grew winter flowers that burned and seemed to smoke. Rivulets flowed and tiny bells chimed among the hair of vines. Sometimes too Vessavion took her away to other places on a private plane. They saw enormous mountains clad in green fur, marble columns, and waterfalls that thundered. But generally they returned quickly from everywhere, back into the blue cave. They made love almost without cease. They made love as if famished.
She said to him one night, in the dark, chained by his hair, locked to him still, “Was there anyone before me? There must have been.” “Why do you want to know?” he said, “surely you understand.” “Then no,” she said, “I’m the first for you as you were the first for me.” “Exactly,” he said. “How could there have been anyone? I was waiting for you.” She said, “Will it ever end—this wanting—this electric tingling
, this hunger?” “If we grow very old,” he said, “perhaps.” “Not till then?” she said. “I’m glad.” They made love again and again. She was hoarse from her own crying. She said, “But won’t you ever leave me?” “How can I leave you? You’re myself.” She thought, Supposing the inconceivable took place—if I should leave him instead? She said, “If someone made me go away from you—” He said, “I’d die. I’d stop like a clock.” She recollected her father, whom she had left and who had disappeared. She believed Vessavion. She held him fast in her pale arms, wound him with her long pale legs and slender feet. Inside her body she held him. If they died, it must only be together.
• • •
In March the snow was still solid and thick upon the city. From Vessavion’s high windows, she could see across a polar landscape, all ice and glass, broken only here and there by roadways and obstinate steel turrets.
He returned in darkness, her husband, and as he walked into the tawny chamber that was their drawing-room, she saw on his face, so white and calm from the snowscape he had been traveling through, a jewel of scarlet. It was on his cheek, like an ornament. She did not mention it at first, and then it trickled down like a tear.
“You’re bleeding.” She was concerned but went to him coolly; her frenzies were never for such things.
And he only smiled, and reaching up, wiped the scarlet tear away. “No.”
“But it was blood.”
“Was it? How strange.”
“Did something happen—out there on the street?”
“It must have done. I don’t know.”
Carefully she led him to a couch and sat down beside him, examining his face that still was not familiar, although recognized from the first.
“Where do you go in the city?”
“All sorts of places.”
“Please tell me,” she said.
“No,” he said, “it would bore you.”
Isobel leaned close to him and breathed him in. He was scented by the freezing dark he had come from. And by something else which she had sensed before, but only once or twice outside a certain situation. Animal, the aroma, spicy and intent, not truly human. It was rather like the smell of him in sex. It aroused her and she put her hand on his breast. But when he moved to kiss her she said, “Not that. You have a secret.” And she wondered if there could be another one, another woman or a man, someone he went to when he was not with her. But even as she thought this, she knew it was not credible, it was a lie. What then, the reason for this excitement?
“Tell me,” she said.
“I tell you everything.”
“Not this.”
However, he took her to him, and there on the couch he undressed her, unsheathing her body like a flower from silver wrapping. He drew her up on to the blade of his lust, and they danced slowly in the rosy firelight. She stared into his face, remote with pleasure, taut with the agony of holding back.
“Where do you go?” she moaned.
But her blood curdled in fire and her womb spasmed open, shut, open, shut, and arching backward she knew nothing was of any consequence but their life together.
When they were eating dinner, the goblets of blond wine at their finger-tips, slivers of vegetable blossom and white meat lying on porcelain, then, he told her.
“I have an interest sometimes,” he said, “in people. I watch them a little. Would you believe, I follow them.”
“Why?” she said. She was puzzled. People did not really interest her, only he interested her. She had never found people equal to what she was. Only he was that.
He said, thoughtfully, “You see, you’re perfect, Isobel. You’re like—like the moon. You change, and yet you remain constant. Every line of you, angle of you, the turn of your head, the way you lift your eyes, your voice—all perfect. But most people have nothing of this. And then again,” he hesitated, “sometimes there are attractive people who, without any true beauty, are quite marvelous. But, it isn’t these that intrigue me. No. Now and then there is someone . . . very ugly, who has one beautiful feature. Their eyes perhaps, or their hair. Their teeth. Their fingers even—Do you understand? The discrepancy.”
Isobel realized that, all the while she had been with him, she had glowed. Glowed actually like the amber rose, the first thing he had given her. It was like a halo inside her skin. It warmed when she made love with him, soothed and turned darker when they were at rest, talking, or even apart. Yet now, now the glow seeped out of her, and for a moment she seemed to see it shining in the air. And then she was cold.
“You always trust me,” she said.
“Of course. Who else should I trust?”
“You shouldn’t always trust me.”
He paled at that, in the curious way of someone who is already pale. His eyes were somber, heavy. He said, “But why should it effect you, if I talk a little nonsense.”
“It isn’t nonsense. You meant what you said. That certain people, ugly people, intrigue you because they have one beautiful feature.”
“And what does that matter?” he said, lightly.
“It matters to you.”
“Isobel,” he said, “let’s talk of something else.”
She smiled and drank her wine, nodding. It was the first falseness she had ever offered him. And he took it from her, without question.
• • •
She searched all through March, searched the mansion atop the tower of glass. At the beginning of April the snow held on, an ice-age, and she found it. The room. By then it hardly counted. She had been deceiving him all that while, betraying him. Pretending when they made love. Pretending when they talked. He had spoken of visiting some far off country, and she had pretended to be pleased. It seemed he was fooled by all her pretense, although his eyes had now a shadow in them. After all, probably he wanted her to find the room. He had not quite been able to tell her everything, and the room would do it for him. And it did.
A few days after their marriage, he had shown her the room of his hidden collection, the things he possessed which, until then, he had shown to no one—not from vanity, but more as if to protect his visitors. What he had was so fine, it might wound. But Isobel, his wife, now possessed these treasures, too; it would be safe for her to see. And there were panels from Medieval France, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci not reckoned to exist—a Madonna with sea-water skin and lilies in her hands. There were dolls made of emerald and gold, which moved. There were green pearls, and tapestries woven at the time of Christ, a dress of beads constructed for a child in ancient Rome, a shell that had formed in the shape of a castle, a statuette of an angel made from a single ruby. And—more. Much more.
She had liked it, his collection. She had played gently with a few of the items. She had worn the green pearls.
And in March, she searched out the other hidden room, and at length located it, behind a bookshelf which slid. There was a lock and Isobel broke this with an ordinary hammer she had asked one of the invisible servants to bring her. It was quite easy to break, the lock, it did not take much strength. Horribly, sadly, resignedly, she grasped all this was meant to be.
The room was quite small, and tastefully decorated, although not lavish like so many of the rooms of the mansion. There were no windows, only soft lighting, wisely placed, to point up the objects on display.
As with the other collections; everything was arranged exquisitely. Indeed, it was arranged tactfully. That, of course, was the whole substance of what he had done, what he had intended.
Isobel went about slowly, and thoroughly, an obedient child brought to a museum. She looked at everything. At the lustrous plait of red hair held in claws of gold. At the white teeth scattered, as the pearls had been, over a velvet cloth. At the two eyes gleaming in the crystal of protective fluid. At the small hand under its dome, one finger with a tarnished wedding ring. At the beautiful breasts, seeming to
float like sweets. At the ears. The solitary foot. And—more.
When she had seen everything, Isobel went out. She closed the door, leaving the broken lock hanging, and drew back the bookshelf which slid. Then she went to her bathroom and bathed herself, and washed her hair and dried it. She dressed in her dressing-room. She packed her bag with the things which were only hers. And on the pillow in her bedroom, which she had never used, she left the amber rose.
She met Vessavion in the tawny drawing-room, as the gray wolf dusk filled up the sky, and turned the ice-age of the city to iron.
Vessavion looked at her, and she said, “I have seen it.”
He bowed his head. He said, “What will you do?”
“I will leave you, obviously.”
“Let me explain.”
“What can you say?”
“Perfection,” he said, very low, stammering. “Until I saw you, I had never come across it in a human thing.”
“Even after you had me, you continued.”
“Yes.”
“Through the snow you hunted them and cut away what was beautiful, and their blood splashed you, and once you were careless, or uncaring, and I saw. But your money and your power protect you. No one will stop you.”
“I put what’s beautiful into its proper setting. I always have. It must be a mistake—when they have it.”
She said, “Good-bye.”
“If you leave me,” he said, “then—”
She closed the door, and presently she was descending the glass tower in the elevator, down into the iron snow.
• • •
There was a week after that like a hundred years. She spent it in her father’s house, safe behind the robot gates which would admit no one. She disconnected the telephones. When any mail fell through into the pillar at the gate, someone came and destroyed it.
She did things in that house she had not done for some while. She played the piano, and cooked cordon bleu meals she did not eat, and read books cover to cover, not knowing what they said.
