The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  “Come and have tea,” he said. “Did you before?”

  She nodded. She didn’t take his hand. She looked cold, and when she stepped out of the doorway, he took her arm and slipped it through the crook of his elbow.

  “I liked it better tonight,” she said as they walked. “The song. I liked it best tonight.”

  “The song?”

  “She Moved Through the Fair.” She phrased the title as though she were singing it—she moooved thro’ the faair.

  “I’m glad.” Then they reached the corner and she stopped suddenly and he squeezed her wrist tight. Her arm fluttered under his, like a bird, and he did not let go. “What is it?” he asked, knowing the answer.

  “Where? Where are we going?”

  “There’s a café around the corner,” he said. “You look cold.” He affected a deadly serious concern, as though her comfort were his single goal. He had discovered that too much smiling, or possibly incorrect smiling, made young women self-conscious. They sometimes accused one of mocking them if one smiled too readily. They hated the suggestion that this—this thing—might be absurd, arbitrary, amusing.

  “A café?”

  “Yes. Ah—we haven’t been properly introduced, have we? My name is Liam Manley.” He turned to her and held out his hand. “And you are Miss Hazel Lyon.” He shook her hand solemnly. “May I buy you a cup of tea?”

  This time, she let him thread her arm through his elbow and lead her two slow blocks to the café. When she stopped resisting, there was something limp and abstract about her, as though she’d only just been struck deaf by some explosion.

  He was meditating on conversation topics—they must be appropriate but suggestive, so she might feel important, even desired—when she seemed to rouse from her rag doll state. Her arm alive again under his as she dragged a bit, made him stop and face her.

  “We met,” she said, “ages ago. A long, long time, before. When I was little. Just after the war. We heard you sing. We came to the theatre in the morning to take your picture, and we heard you sing. Then we heard you again, later, and there were pink roses.” She said it firmly, as though it was a very particular message trusted to her. “We heard you in the theatre, and Dad took your picture.”

  It would have been the Kilgour business. It would have been 1920 or ’21. He tried to remember and thought there was something—a man, a child, the empty stage. But then he thought of going to the Castle again— perhaps tomorrow or the next day—and speaking with Mrs. Kilgour, and how it would feel to do that in his old suit, with his hat held carefully in his hand so that he hid the place on the crown where the felt was discoloured. He could not think of that. Instead he allowed a light of memory to rise in his face, then he smiled though he found himself irritated with her, wanting something from him like that. He laughed. “You remind me of my age, my dear. I hadn’t thought I was such an old man as that.”

  “You look just like you do in the picture. I brought it with me. To show you.” She fumbled in the bagged pocket of her coat and pulled out a crumpled handkerchief and a white card. She pushed it at him. He dropped her arm and took it, fastidiously avoiding the handkerchief which she crammed back into her pocket.

  It was him, though he didn’t recognize the picture from among those they’d used in publicity. Quite a good one. He looked fragile but masculine, leaned forward slightly so that one lock of heavily Macassarred hair fell across his forehead. His eyes were dark without benefit of kohl.

  He smiled again, but more seriously this time. “Thank you, Miss Lyon, for the reminder of what I once was.” He looked deeply into her eyes for a moment, as though searching them, and when she looked away, he turned them again toward the café. He waited for her to speak first. She still held the photograph in her free hand.

  “Do you remember?” At first he didn’t say anything, just nodded, but she was watching him so closely. “Do you remember?”

  He lied. “I remember.”

  “Good,” she seemed satisfied. “I’m a bit hungry.”

  Again Liam wondered if he’d misread her, but dismissed the thought before they’d even opened the café’s door.

  “Of course,” he heard himself say as he leaned across a table near the back of the café, “of course this is not what I think of as my real career— who could think of the recital platform in those terms? I have a few years left and I would like to spend that time with a real company. The allure of the road—” had it ever had this allure he spoke of?—“is certainly fading. A good company, a tour each year, through the west, or to South America, those I would enjoy, but not this constant travel. I have the itchy feet of my race certainly.” He drank from his cup to cover his embarrassment. He was coming across quite Oirish he thought, which appealed to women for reasons he never quite understood. He was glad he’d learned a passable accent from his father, and picked up some phrases from vaudeville-Irish comics out of New York. She was still watching him. “But I’ve had my fill of wandering.”

  She nodded as though she knew what he was talking about. He did not imagine she did, but he meant her to feel that way. He’d been talking for half an hour by then, his voice floating down melodious and carefully modulated, drifting into a chuckle or dropping an octave to his serious baritone. He listened as though it weren’t his own, to the way it chastised her, teased her, cajoling, friendly, flirtatious, desiring, all these shades of seduction. He saw the vision that voice built, describing offers he had not received, a life he did not lead, ambitions he did not have for a career he had lost fifteen years before.

  She looked into her teacup and then back at him. She had lovely eyelashes; they curled at the tips. Her skin was fine under the eyes, like pale kid leather with a purplish shadow; it would be cool and soft under his fingertips. Skin like that would line her thighs, her breasts— translucent, shuddering over the ribcage with each heartbeat. He could feel it, imagine handfuls of it, imagine gripping her shoulders, throat, thigh, the tight curl of her ear.

  If he had admitted to himself his anxiety regarding all kinds of performance, he would have recognized his relief when he felt the first, new pulse at the base of his cock and the familiar heaviness spreading down the whole shaft. He had been afraid—in a deep and secret place—that he had brought the girl along only to find he lacked real ambition. Now, though, he would not even mind if he found later in the evening that his pants were sticky with anticipation. It was rarer now, though when he was eighteen there had been a year of permanently damp underthings, the leak of fluids at the barest provocation: a woman in a low gown took a deep breath, a glance thrown backward over her white shoulder. He had not thought he would miss that, especially on cold nights in November.

  Her voice clogged, so she had to clear her throat before she spoke. “Will you take one of the offers, do you think? From a company? Will you sing in operas then?”

  Again he heard himself speaking. “Of course, I don’t want to presume anything. I must remember I am not as young as I was.” He looked to her then with a smile, waiting for the simper and the little shake of the head, a coy shrug. There was nothing, only that uncomfortably appraising blankness as she met his eyes again. “And the popular stage belongs to men younger than I am.” She offered no disagreement—she even nodded.

  He wanted, then, to stop, but didn’t know how, and his voice continued, as though reading from a script: “So I don’t know. I imagine I may join one of the companies—” (what companies? what companies do you speak of?) “But no—I spoke about how little I like the vaudeville life, but in fact it still has a hold over me,” he went on. “The recital stage is a different animal entirely.” He stopped talking. He suddenly wanted to apologize.

  She said bluntly, “I liked what you did at the theatre. I don’t know that I would like you in an opera. I don’t know anything about opera, but I like the songs you sing.”

  “Yes, you would like those songs, wouldn’t you?” he said, sharper than he intended. She knew nothing. She was a fool. She w
as looking down into her teacup then, her cheeks reddening. “There is no real art here, nothing pure or sublime, only this grovelling to the crowd.”

  She looked up at him quickly then away, and he saw for the first time a glimmer of fear in her eyes. He saw it in the way her hands shook, too. There was no judgement there, only her indiscriminate acceptance. She was only afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. She hadn’t any capacity to consider what he was doing at all.

  He didn’t even want to finish the speech. “Miss Lyon, you’re out very late. Will your mother worry?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she has time to worry.”

  “She’ll worry, no doubt. I’ll see about getting you home.”

  The next day she did not come, but he thought perhaps she would on the Friday. That afternoon he shaved carefully, and afterward stood in his underwear brushing his suit; his only other shirt lay on the high metal bed. It was a narrow bed and uncomfortable. She wouldn’t want to stay, anyway. She would have to go home. But still, he wanted it to look nice. That afternoon he’d bought a white rose and set it in a glass by the lamp, and taken care that the empty hearth was swept, and the coarse grey blankets smoothed over nicely.

  Putting on the last white shirt, he glanced at his face in the mirror, black-shadowed by the bare white bulb in the ceiling. Candles would have been nice, but possibly the half-darkness of streetlights was a more soothing choice. It did not do to look at these things in too a clear a light. All the same, he thought he would buy candles on the way to the theatre, just two for the empty sticks on the mantel.

  He finished with his tie, carefully adjusted his pocket handkerchief, and looked once more into the glass over the sink. He didn’t look bad, he thought carefully, a bit worn maybe, but not unattractively so. Leaving the boarding house, he felt buoyant for the first time he could remember, wondering where she was just then, if she was having supper, or sitting with her mother. In thinking of her and the evening ahead, he had forgotten his previous gloom, hardly concerned with the difficulties of performance. He felt, even, that he could face Mrs. Kilgour and that he would do so, perhaps even the next day. That he would knock on the door—yes, older, yes a little worn—and smile at her and find her receptive as she had always been. He would go there tomorrow, in the afternoon, and they would sit together in the huge, hideous drawing room that overlooked the garden, and he would let her talk about Clive all she liked.

  And he only felt more certain when he saw Hazel. He hadn’t asked her to wait, but there she was across the street from the stage door. Well, he thought, they had known one another for years. No one else was waiting for him, but that almost didn’t matter this time. She crossed the street to join him, and he took her limp arm. She still had the trembly look of a rabbit, but she had done her hair prettily, he noticed, and her mouth was painted, and he liked the hard, clean line between red lip and white skin. She pushed a lock of hair behind one ear.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” he asked. “Where shall we go?”

  “I’m not hungry. I ate already,” she said. “Let’s walk a bit and talk. Then.” She said nothing else, but met his eyes unapologetically, defiant.

  He swallowed. “Alright. We’ll walk a bit.” He led her toward Mrs. Qualey’s respectable establishment, forcing himself to let her set the pace. No rush he thought, no rush at all. She hardly spoke, and he kept up a light patter, though he was never quite sure what he was saying. Really, no rush.

  Two other guests were in the drawing room when they arrived, one sleeping under a handkerchief, the other reading close to the fire. Mrs. Qualey, thankfully, was not sitting up with them. Liam glanced around as he opened the door, holding Hazel back with one arm, not thinking as he threw it across her chest; he felt the pressure of one breast through the fabric of their coats. He dropped the arm.

  “There’s no one here,” he said abruptly, then regretted it. The implications were too obvious.

  “Good.” She looked relieved and nodded, a real smile now.

  He glanced at her again, unsettled by her pragmatism. “We should go in.”

  They climbed the stairs together, and she let him take the lead only when they got to the top and he opened his door. He took the two white candles from his pocket and lit them on the mantelpiece. He opened the small bottle of port wine he had in his other pocket, bought before the performance.

  “Would you like some?”

  She nodded, and sat down on the hard chair beside the hearth.

  “I wish my rent extended to fires, but I’m afraid the lady of the house does not think they’re necessary in bedrooms.” He sat on the hearth itself, stretching his legs in front of him, then he laughed and added, “She thinks it’s healthier, anyway, all this fresh air.”

  “Coal is expensive,” she said, sipping the port. She made a face (and hid it quickly) at the little mouthful and set the glass down on the floor beside the bed. “Very expensive. I bet she worries about money. I mean. I mean. I expect she does. Do you always stay here?”

  “Mrs. Qualey is well-known to those in my profession. She is a formidable woman, but I respect her. And given the state of the world at the moment, I am thankful to have a kind of home here,” he said, and looked into the empty fireplace. Mrs. Qualey was a parsimonious old sinner. He hated this soggy city, and his “engagements” anywhere were fewer and fewer. Sometimes he thought it was only habit that kept him going round in circles, through these cities. Just as it was habit that kept his bookings intact and people showing up. But even that was fading, a broken habit. Would he keep arriving at stage doors for years after the last audience member had turned away and bought tickets to a Hollywood musical, or stayed home to listen to the radio? Probably, like a ghost in black serge, not dead, but forgotten. He looked up from the empty fireplace to find her staring at him. He was surprised again by the frankness—or the blankness?—of her gaze. He wondered what was on the other side of her eyes, or if there was nothing but what he saw in front of him. He did not permit that thought; it suggested too many things he did not like.

  “Have you come here before? I mean, after the time I saw you?”

  “No. Not since that first visit.”

  “I could have seen you if you did. Like I saw you when I was little. Dad would have known—he was at the Temple until this summer.”

  Liam paused. Perhaps that accounted for the impression she gave of one perpetually waiting. “No, but it’s only just this time I’m back to the Temple. I played some other circuits in-between, you know. When did your father die?”

  She jumped. “This summer. June.”

  “I’m sorry, my dear.” He did not like how quickly and accurately he had recognized grief and abandonment.

  “Yes.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. He wondered if he had made some mistake, whether she was just the rag doll she seemed to be, but then she drained her glass and slid to the floor beside him. She did not touch him. When he held out a hand she didn’t take it. He touched her wrist, picked up the hand and touched the cracked skin of the palm—a charlady’s palm, a dishwasher’s. He kissed it.

  She was limp as he raised her head and kissed her, but he did not mind as he stood and helped her to stand. She fell against him, abruptly as though the strings that held her upright had been cut. She was a little thing, smaller than he had imagined as he felt her chin pressed into his chest before he turned her mouth to face his, and kissed her again. He let his hands drift to her hair, though they wanted (desperately) to wrap right around her breasts first. Instead he ran down her back to her waist, where he could feel the line of her underthings through the fabric of her skirt and blouse. None of the armour he was used to on nice girls, he realized, which was pleasant, if shocking. Getting a girl out of a corselet was awkward and unattractive, especially with someone as inexperienced as Hazel appeared to be. He was relieved again to feel that familiar heaviness in his cock as his hand brushed the tops of her thighs, his balls tightening
and rising as he pushed his tongue between her lips.

  He tried not to rush, but then his hands moved over her breasts—so small under her blouse—and slid down her back, and he paused at the base of her spine over the cleft between her buttocks. He breathed relief into her hair as he felt himself grow, straining against the fabric of his trousers. He wondered what she would think when she saw him fully erect, or if she would be the kind who didn’t like to look. He worried that she—being inexperienced, having nothing with which to compare— would not be cognizant of his unusual size. He worried, equally, that she would be frightened. Once a woman had taken one look at what was between his legs and turned him down, saying “none of that, laddie!” And he had been both angry and pleased and lay beside her, throbbing even more painfully at the implications of her refusal.

  Having successfully removed Hazel’s clothes—an ungraceful and awkward procedure that made her blush and sweat under his hands—he hung above her on the bed, balanced on one elbow and his knees, his bare bum stuck up in the air from his arched back, his right hand on the base of his cock, which was stiff and wet and aching. He lifted his head from her neck and looked in her eyes. Her lips were wet all around from his kisses, though her mouth was dry and sticky, tasting faintly of peppermints and unbrushed teeth under the port. She did not smile, but watched him, heavy-lidded, as though through a thick pane of glass. He was breathing sharply now, and with his right hand he pushed his fingers between her legs and rubbed at the hooded little bump above her cunt. Her eyes flew open wider. He rubbed harder, but then she grimaced and made a pained noise. Sometimes he found it hard to tell which sounds were pain and which were pleasure, but often the two blended in his ear.

  Then he was in between her thighs and pushing, pushing inside her. She was so tight that at first he could not move, and they clung together very still and awkward, and he felt that if he thrust and pulled out he would leave the skin of his cock inside her, like a discarded French letter. They lay like that a long time, with Hazel whimpering with every pulse, her mouth small and wet against his throat. He turned his head and kissed her and slowly—slowly!—she relaxed around him, until he could not stop himself and he moved, and moved again.