Inamorata

by Megan Chance

  I quoted it, because I was vain enough to want to impress her. “‘She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self . . .’”

  She turned her head into my chest so I felt her smile. I felt her lips move against my skin, felt, rather than heard, her say, “Yes. That one.”

  “She truly must have been his inspiration then. It’s a beautiful poem.”

  “I have always thought so,” she said. “Though like all poets, he exaggerates.”

  “Like all poets?” I teased.

  She ran her hand down my chest to my navel, slowly, steadily. “No one knows about the woman. They believe he was inspired by a dream or a vision. No one sees that it was really about her.” Her hand crept lower. I felt myself stir, aroused again so quickly. “And, like every woman, she did not receive her due.”

  It was all I could do to say, “Yes she did. She was immortalized in ‘Lamia.’”

  “Spoken like a man,” she whispered into my ear. “Will you forget me that way, I wonder? When the poems you’ve written for me are published, will you tell no one my name?”

  I had written so many in these days with her. My best work, I knew. She fired me like nothing else ever had. I could not write quickly enough. “I’ll tell the whole world,” I said, rolling her onto her back and plunging into her so she stiffened and gasped in pleasure. “I’ll let no one forget what you are to me.”

  She told me of Byron, of how many women he’d had in Venice, and the one among them who had been the most important of all, the one who inspired Don Juan, but who had gone unrecognized. “He wrote a hundred lines or more a night,” she told me as she stood against the window, silhouetted in the early morning light. “He was insatiable—both for her and for words. It was as if he found them in the very air.”

  I was impressed that any man had the strength to write a hundred lines in a night.

  “The story,” she went on, “is that she made him an offer. She promised fame and fortune. She vowed to be his greatest inspiration.”

  “And what did he say?” I asked.

  “He disdained fame—or so he said. He wanted everyone to think he hated it. He wanted to pluck fame out.” She made a sharp, fast motion with her fingers to illustrate. “He said he did not want to be beholden to a woman. They had already caused him such problems.”

  “His wife, you mean. It’s said he hated her.”

  “He hated what he’d done to her,” she corrected softly. “She alone knew his cruelty—how could he forgive her for that? But no, it was his sister’s betrayal that burned most painfully.”

  I frowned. “His sister?”

  “They were lovers, you know,” she said, turning fully from the window. “It was why he left England. It wasn’t the scandal of his marriage, but his affair with his sister. Ah, no . . . that’s right . . . she was only his half-sister. Does that make a difference?”

  “Not in England.”

  “Well, in the end, even she was no match for his new muse. He was . . . overcome. Or so the story goes. And while he needed no more fame, he wanted immortality. He wanted to guarantee his genius would live on. And he could not deny the inspiration she brought him. Once he’d felt it, none other could compare. So he accepted her offer. But he grew arrogant and left her before Don Juan was finished, and so . . . it never was. A pity, isn’t it?”

  “Is this true? How do you know it?”

  She came to the bed, which was covered with my papers, covered with words, and kneeled on the edge. “Why, everyone knows it, my love. If you go to Venice, you’ll hear whispers of it still.”

  But I was confused. “Her offer, you said. What offer was it he accepted?”

  “I told you. She inspired him to immortal genius.”

  “And in return?”

  “His very soul, of course.”

  She pushed aside the papers and pulled up her chemise to straddle my hips. “Would you have taken such a bargain, if she had offered it to you?”

  “Why not? Isn’t that what inspiration is? Losing your soul to something more sublime?”

  She pushed away the sheet between us, wriggled so she was against me, burning hot. Her hands were on me, and I let the notebook and the pencil I held fall away. She kissed me softly. “Oh how well you understand it, my love.”

  But the truth was that I didn’t understand at all, not until much later.

  When did things begin to change? It’s hard to remember now, but it couldn’t have been more than a month. For days before that, words had been jumbling in my head. The simplest things eluded me. Angel became goddess because suddenly I could not remember how to spell the former, and the rhyme never came right after. I could not find the words to describe her mouth. I reached back through my memory, trying to find inspiration from others. Songs of Solomon. Keats. Byron and Browning and Coleridge and Shelley. I could not retain more than fragments of what I’d always known. Then one day I woke before she did. I sat up, noting the way the morning shadows fell across her face, feeling the beginnings of a poem stirring in my head, and grabbed my notebook and my pencil. But the moment I touched the lead to the page, the whole thing fell away, leaving me only with one word. Love.

  It was all I knew. Love. Love love love love love.

  When she opened her eyes, I was in despair, and I saw some fleeting emotion cross her face, something I couldn’t read, soon gone.

  Everything unraveled. The inspiration she’d brought me that had me sitting up all night, making love to her and writing down the words that flooded me after, was gone. Melting away so swiftly I doubted it had ever been. I was insatiable, unsatisfied and aching even after I came. The only thing to do to start over again, one endless round of lovemaking, as I searched desperately for what she’d brought me so easily before. But the gnawing dissatisfaction that had disappeared for such a short time always returned, worse than ever, and nothing she did could appease it.

  She was as compelling as ever, it was only that she no longer quenched my raging thirst. She never complained of it, no matter how I used her. She became for me every whore I’d ever bought, every woman I’d seduced, every one who had seduced me. I was angry, unmoored, wanting to punish. “What happened to it?” I demanded, time after time, pounding against her, aching with frustration. “Why don’t I still feel it?”

  She said nothing, but I began to see myself in her eyes, an image that sickened me, a man weak and desperate, spent, a failure. I began to hear my father’s voice in my head. You’ll never be important, Nicholas. You haven’t the talent. Desire fled; when before all it had taken was the scent of her to arouse me, now nothing did, no matter how she or I tried. I became nothing, impotent and empty, no words, no will, no sex.

  I began to hate her.

  And still, I could not leave her. The memory of what she’d been for me was too strong. I could retrieve it, I knew. I could not have lost it forever. I stared down at the papers I’d written, lines upon lines of my handwriting, though they were words I no longer recognized as mine. How had they come to me? I felt weak as a worm. My lungs would not work; my limbs would not carry me. It went on like this for days, weeks. Perhaps longer—even now, I’m not certain how long I was with her. Even now, that time is like a dream.

  It was some time before I realized she had left me, that she was not coming back. I didn’t believe it when she told me she was going, you see, because I no longer trusted what I saw in her eyes, or who I was speaking to: her, or my father. It was weeks before my strength returned to me, before I woke one morning to see the sun streaming through curtains I hadn’t had the will to close, before I smelled the rotting oranges on the table, before I saw mold growing like a skin on a cup of half-drunk coffee.

  She left me nothing but a small leather sack full of coins, as if I were a whore to be paid. The note she left with it was written on a scrap of paper torn from the corner of a poem I’d written. Five words: Take this and take care. I pitched the note in the fireplace, into dead coals
. I took the money and the sheaf of poems I’d written. I left the apartment, but I didn’t leave Paris. I should have left. I should have forgotten about her.

  But I could not rid myself of the scent of her. I could not just let it go. She had turned me inside out, and I was looking to find myself again, to find the words that eluded me. I was convinced she was the key. If I could find her, I would write again. I had never been so inspired as I was with her, and I wanted that again. With her help, I knew I could be the man I was meant to be.

  I went through the motions of my life as it had been before she came into it. I spent time with my friends, I got drunk. But other women left me cold. I wanted only her. And then a group of us went to the exhibition at the Salon. We stumbled into a room where people were gathered reverently around one work. It was large, probably four feet by six, in a gilded frame. I waited my turn to see it, growing impatient at how silently people looked at it, how struck they seemed, the way they tore themselves away as if they’d been under a spell. And then, finally, a group left and my friends and I surged toward it to take their place. When I saw it, I understood what had kept everyone so spellbound, why they stared in unabashed adoration.

  It was a portrait of her.

  The artist had captured her perfectly, playful and sensuous, captivating, and he’d done it in a way I’d never seen, with brushstrokes and a technique so new and vibrant I knew she’d inspired him as she inspired me in the beginning.

  I knew the painting would be famous. I knew it would still be spoken of in a hundred years, two hundred. She had given him what she hadn’t given me: fame, immortality, and I knew—though of course it made no sense at all, it wasn’t the least bit rational—that she’d withheld such things from me deliberately.

  I discovered the artist’s name and left the exhibition in a fury. I searched him out, knowing that where he was, she would be too. But when I arrived at his studio, it was only to find him distraught and disheveled. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  “She has left me,” he said to my query. He pointed to the canvases scattered about the room, all of them half finished, all of them bearing her likeness. “Three days ago, God save me! If you find her, please . . . bring her back to me. I need her. I will die without her.”

  “You don’t know where she’s gone?”

  He shook his head. “She promised to be my inspiration forever. She promised it, if I would give myself to her.”

  I had been turning to go, but something about his words caught me; something I remembered. I frowned, searching for the echo. “She said that?” I asked slowly. “She promised to stay?”

  The artist dragged his hand through his hair, leaving streaks of paint. In despair, he said, “She told me she could bring me fame. She said my work would be known forever. What else should I have done? I loved her. She was my muse! Should I not have taken the bargain?”

  Now I remembered her stories of Keats, of Byron, of the woman who had inspired them, the offer she had made. “What bargain? What bargain did you make with her?”

  He pointed again to the canvases. Tears filled his eyes. “How beautiful she is! How could I say no?”

  I left him there with his unfinished canvases and his dreams of her, the stories she’d told me ringing in my ears. Byron’s story. The woman in Venice. She inspired him to immortal genius. And in return? Why, his soul, of course.

  It was impossible. It couldn’t be. Byron had died more than forty years ago, Keats before that. She wasn’t old enough to have known either of them. She could not be the woman in the story. It defied all logic.

  But the idea plagued me. I haunted the streets of Paris, mulling over every word she’d ever said to me, certain there was something there to find, something to help me make sense of this puzzle. The artist exhibited nothing else; I began to hear stories of his despair, and I thought of his unfinished canvases. I thought of Byron not finishing Don Juan. God, what nonsense! Such bargains were only fiction, Faustian tales; there could be nothing real in it.

  I lost track of her. It seemed she had simply disappeared, but I was obsessed. I did not forget her. It was two years before I heard of her again. Everyone was talking of Vienna, of a composer there and his new opera that had astounded all who’d heard it. The fever to see it moved through Paris like a storm. It was about a woman of great mystical power, a muse like no other muse. It was said to be based on truth, that there was such a woman, the composer’s inspiration.

  I knew who it must be. Who else?

  By then, I’d published my second book of poetry, the poems I’d written under her spell. The reviews, again, were good. Better than for my first, though some spoke of a certain weakness in the rhymes. But I had written nothing new since she’d left me, and the months had brought me only frustration. It was her fault, I knew, that the poems I’d written weren’t good enough, that I could not collect my thoughts enough to write again. My anger with her grew. I wanted back the talent she’d taken from me. I wanted answers. But more than that, I wanted her. The publication brought me a little more money, and so I set off for Vienna to hunt down the opera’s composer, to find her.

  When I went to his rooms, he was bent over a pianoforte, sheaves of paper strewn across it, the polished wood dotted with ink. His eyes were bleary; as sleepless as the painter’s had been, as mine. He said to me with a despairing hope, “You know her? Ah, then, you know why I must have her back. To bury myself within her again—she did not tell me she would go! It wasn’t part of the bargain! I didn’t know!”

  The bargain, again.

  “Where did she go?” I asked.

  He could not tell me. I left him with his despair.

  I stayed in Vienna, waiting to hear of someone else, some new sensation, rumors of another sublime work that would change the way we looked at everything. My obsession with her invaded every hour, my resentment grew like a disease within me. What had she seen in them that she hadn’t seen in me? She had given the painter and the composer a fame that would outlive them; their names would be spoken with reverence throughout time. It was what I’d wanted for myself, what I had always wanted. But she had not offered it to me. I needed to know why.

  That such thoughts were absurd escaped me; I was no longer rational. I had no idea then what she truly was, but she began to take on an otherworldly power. I was by then so certain she had been Keats’s and Byron’s muse that I no longer even asked myself how it could be possible for a woman to inspire a poet who’d died before she was born.

  Then I began to hear of Florence. Everyone wanted to go there suddenly; they spoke of dreams and visions. It was the sign I had been looking for. I had no doubt she was there. The only question was whether I would once again be too late.

  I found myself in Florence in the middle of the summer. As always, I ingratiated myself into a new crowd, and I began to hear the rumors of a beautiful woman who was cutting a swath through the city’s artistic crowd. I met a mediocre musician who’d had her—you would not believe this one, my friend. I could not stay . . . she exhausted me—and an immature sculptor—What breasts! To capture such a thing in marble . . . oh, but her beauty was too much for me. In the beginning, I was jealous; I could not believe these hacks had touched her. But then I realized that she had made none of them the offer she’d made the artist in Paris or the Viennese composer. They were like me.

  I did not want to think about what we had in common. I kept looking for her, and then, one night, in a crowded saloon, I found her. Her beauty stunned, as always. Despite my obsession with tracking her down, I had not thought what I would do if I saw her again, what I would say. I suppose there was a part of me that believed I never would. When she caught sight of me, she turned to leave. I dropped my drink in my haste to get through the crowd and out the door.

  I grabbed her arm; her scent came to me in a cloud that knocked me back. My desire for her rose as heedlessly as it ever had. I pulled her into the alley, pressed her to the wall. I was rough and unthinking. I
wanted to hurt her. But her expression was unyielding—she gave me nothing, even when I kissed her. The aphrodisiac of her surged through me, but with it came the vision of my impotence when she’d left me. My weakness, my humiliation. My desire withered; I pulled away only to see contempt in her eyes.

  “Why?” I heard myself asking, demanding. “Why them? Why not me?”

  And she said in words made even more brutal by her gentleness and compassion, “You haven’t enough talent to change the world, cheri.”

  The words resonated, I heard within them every review I’d ever received, my father’s criticisms. She told a truth I did not want to hear. When she pulled away and left me, I let her go.

  I went back to the artists gathered at the table I’d just left, the musician and the sculptor, the club of cast-offs I’d somehow joined without knowing it. Hacks, I’d called them—and here I was, one of them. I drank until the world swam before me. I listened to them talk about her latest conquest—a writer—though I remember little else about that night, or the next two. I only know that when I woke three days later to a just-risen sun, the effects of the drink lingering in a blistering headache and nausea, I was in a courtyard I didn’t know, collapsed near a well. I crawled to it on my knees, ragingly thirsty, and dragged on the rope for the bucket. The rope caught, and I cursed and went to the edge to drag loose whatever held it. I looked down into the dank, dark depths only to see a face looking back at me, pale and wide-eyed and bloated. I thought at first it was my reflection, but then realized with a shock that it was not, that it was a drowned body, and one I thought I knew.

  Bits and pieces of the nights before came to me then, but I pushed them away; I didn’t want to see. I staggered to my feet and left that cursed place, stumbling back to my rooms, falling upon the bed and into sleep, into a nightmare where I watched her through a window, listening to her cries of pleasure, seeing her shapely legs grasping the hips of the man driving into her, a vision that melted into dark stairs and a courtyard, a man with his head in his hands, a despair I could not lighten.