As she was driven, a little too fast, along the dusty road, Felixity was saturated by an incoherent but intense nervousness.
She had never had any female friends, but she had read a number of books, and she guessed that her unease sprang from sexual apprehension. Never, in all their courtship, had Roland done more than press her hands or her lips lightly with his own. She had valued this decorum in him, even though disappointment sometimes chilled her. At the impress of his flesh, however light, her pulses raced. She was actually very passionate, and had never before had the chance of realizing it. Nevertheless, Roland had told her that, along with her kindness, he worshiped her purity. She knew she must wait for their wedding night to learn of the demons of love.
Now it seemed she was afraid. But what was there to dread? Her reading, which if not salacious, had at least been comprehensive, had given her the gist of the nuptial act. She was prepared to suffer the natural pain of deflowerment in order to offer joy to her partner. She imagined that Roland would be as grave and gentle in lovemaking as he had always been in all their dealings. Therefore, why her unease?
Along the road the copper-green pyramids of coffee trees spun past, and on the horizon’s edge, the forests kept pace with the car.
By midnight, Felixity thought, I shall be different.
They arrived before sunset at the villa, where Felixity had spent some of her childhood. Felixity was surprised to find that no servants came out to greet them. Her bafflement grew when, on entering the house, she found the rooms polished and vacant.
“Don’t concern yourself with that,” said Roland. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
Felixity went obediently. Roland had somehow given her to understand that, along with kindness and purity, he liked docility. They moved up the grand stairway, along corridors, and so into the upper regions of the house, which were reached by narrow twining flights of steps. Up here, somewhere, Roland unlocked and opened a door.
They went into a bare whitewashed room. A few utilitarian pieces of furniture were in it, a chair or two, a slender bed, a round mirror. In one wall a door gave on a bathroom closet. There was a window, but it was caged in a complex if ornamental grill.
“Here we are,” said Roland.
Felixity looked at him, confused.
“Where?” she asked.
“Your apartment.”
Felixity considered this must be a joke, and laughed falsely, as she had sometimes done in her society days.
“I have you at a disadvantage,” said Roland. “Let me explain.”
He did so. This room was where Felixity was to live. If there was anything else she wanted—he knew she was fond of books—it could be supplied. Food would be put in through that flap, there, near the bottom of the door. She should return her empty trays via the same aperture. She would find the bathroom stocked with clean towels, soap, and toothpaste. These would be replaced at proper intervals. Whatever else she required, she should list—see the notepad and pencil on the table—and these things too would be delivered. She could have a radio, if she liked. And perhaps a gramophone.
“But—” said Felixity, “but—”
“Oh, surely you didn’t think I would ever cohabit with you?” asked Roland reasonably. “I admit, I might have had to awhile, if your father had survived, but maybe not even then. He was so glad to be rid of you, a letter from you every six months, dictated by me, would have sufficed. No, you will live up here. And I shall live in the house and do as I want. Now and then I’ll ask you to sign the odd document, in order to assist my access to your money. But otherwise I won’t trouble you at all. And so, dear Felixity, thank you, and au revoir. I wish you a pleasant evening.”
And having said this, Roland went out, before Felixity could shift hand or limb, and she heard the key turning in the lock. And then a raucous silence.
At first she did not credit what had happened. She ran about like a trapped insect, to the door, to the window. But both were closed fast and the window looked out on a desolate plain that stretched away beyond the house to the mountains. The sun was going down, and the sky was indelibly hot and merciless.
Roland would come back, of course. This was some game, to tease her.
But darkness came, and Roland did not. And much later a tray of bread and chicken and coffee was put through the door. Felixity ran to the door again, shrieking for help. But whoever had brought the tray took no notice.
Felixity sat through her wedding night on a hard chair, shivering with terror and incipient madness, by the light of the one electric lamp she had found on the table.
In the villa, far off, she thought she heard music, but it might only have been the rhythm of the sea.
Near dawn, she came to accept what had occurred. It was only what she should have expected. She wept for half an hour, and then lay down on the mean bed to sleep.
For weeks, and probably months, Felixity existed in the whitewashed room with the grilled window.
Every few days books were put through her door, along with the trays of meals. The food was generally simple or meager, and always cold; still it punctually arrived. A radio appeared, too, a few days after Felixity’s internment. It seemed able to receive only one station, which put out endless light music and melodramatic serials, but even so Felixity came to have it on more and more. At midnight the station closed down. Then it was replaced by a claustrophobic loud silence.
Other supplies were promptly presented through the door on her written request. Clean towels, new soap, shampoo, toothpaste and toothbrushes, Felixity’s brand of analgesics for her headaches, and her preferred form of sanitary protection.
There was no clock or calendar in the room, but the radio station repeatedly gave the day and hour. At first Felixity noticed the progress of time, until eventually she recognized that she was counting it up like a prisoner, as if, when she had served her sentence, she would be released. But, of course, her freedom would never come. Felixity ceased to attend to the progress of time.
In the beginning, too, she went on with her normal routines of cleanliness and order. In her father’s houses, her bathrooms had been spectacular, and she had liked using them, experimenting there with soaps and foams, and with preparations which claimed they might make her hair thicker, although they did not. With only the functional white bathroom at her disposal, Felixity lost interest in hygiene, and several days would sometimes elapse before she bathed. She had also to clean the bathroom herself, which initially had proved challenging, but soon it became a chore she did not bother with. Besides, she found the less she used the bathroom, the less cleaning it needed.
Felixity would sit most of the day, listening with unfixed open eyes to the radio. Now and then she would read part of a book. Occasionally she would wander to the window and look out. But the view never changed, and the glare of the distant mountains tired her eyes. Often she found it very hard to focus on the printed word, and would read the same phrase in a novel over and over, trying to make sense of it.
After perhaps three months had gone by, an afternoon came when she heard the key turn in the lock of her door.
She was now too apathetic to be startled. Yet when Roland, gleaming in his ice-cream clothes, came into the room, she knew a moment of shame. But then she acknowledged it did not matter if he saw her unwashed in her robe, her thin hair and unpowdered face greasy, for he had never cared what she looked like; she was nothing to him.
And Roland approached with his usual charm, smiling at her, and holding out some papers.
“Here I am,” he said, “I won’t keep you a minute. If you’d just be kind enough to sign these.”
Felixity did not get up at once only because she was lethargic. But she said softly, “What if I refuse?”
Roland continued to smile. “I should be forced to take away your radio and books, and to starve you.”
Felixity believed him. After all, if he starved her to death, he would inherit everything. It was really quite good of him to all
ow her to live.
She went to the table and signed the papers.
“Thank you so much,” said Roland.
“Won’t you let me out?” said Felixity.
“Obviously I can’t.” He added logically, “It’s much better if you stay here. Or you might be tempted to run away and divorce me. Or if you didn’t do that, you’d be horribly in my way.”
Roland had, prior to their drive to the villa, sacked the original servants and installed a second set, all of whom were bribed to his will, served him unquestioningly, and held their tongues. Roland now lived the life which ideally suited him, answerable to no one. He lay in bed until noon, breakfasted extravagantly, spent the day lazily, and in the evening drove to the nearest city to gamble and to drink. Frequently he would return to the villa in the small hours with beautiful women, to whom, in a great scrolled bed, he made ferocious love, casting them out again at dawn, in their spangled dresses, like the rinds of eaten fruits.
“But,” said Felixity, “you see I’m afraid—if I have to stay here—I may lose my mind.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Roland. “The servants already think I locked you up because you were insane.”
Then he left her, and Felixity went to gaze from her window. The mountains looked like the demarcation line at the end of the world. Felixity turned on her radio.
That night, as she ate a piece of hard sausage, she broke a tooth.
She felt curiously humiliated by this, yet she had no choice but to set the fact down on a page of the notepad, and append a request for a dentist. This she slipped out through the flap in the door with a pallid misgiving. She did not suppose for an instant Roland would permit her to leave the house and what kind of mechanic would he send in to her?
For nine days, during which the broken tooth tore at her mouth and finally made it bleed, Felixity awaited Roland’s response. On the tenth day she came to see he would not trouble to respond at all. He had spared her what suffering he could, under the circumstances, but to put himself out over her teeth was too much to ask of him.
This, then, was where she had sunk to.
Four hours passed, and Felixity sat in her chair listening to a serial about a sensational girl who could not choose between her lovers. Behind her the window became feverish, then cool; and darkness slid into the room.
Suddenly something strange happened. Felixity sprang to her feet as if she had been electrically shocked. She rushed toward the cheap mirror on the wall, and stared at herself in the fading crepuscule. She did not need light, for she knew it all. She reached up and rent at her thin hair and a scream burst out of her, lacerating her mouth freshly on the sharp edge of broken enamel.
“Nononononono!” screamed Felixity.
She was denying only herself.
She jumped up and down before the mirror, shrieking, galvanized by a scalding white thread inside her.
Only when this huge energy had left her, which took several minutes, did she crawl back to the chair and collapse in it, weeping. She cried for hours out of the well of pain. Her sobs were strong and violent, and the room seemed to shake at them.
At midnight, the radio station closed down and the shattering silence bounded into the room. Felixity looked up. Everything was in blackness, the lamp unlit, and yet it seemed there had been a flash of brilliance. Perhaps there was a storm above the mountains. Or, incredibly, perhaps some human life went over the plain, a car driving on the dirt tracks of it with headlights blazing.
Felixity moved to the window. Night covered the plain, and the mountains were like dead coals. Above, the stars winked artificially, as they had done in the planetarium where once she had been taken as a child.
The whip of light cracked, again. It was not out on the plain but inside the room.
Felixity was still too stunned for ordinary fear.
She walked back slowly to her chair, and as she did so, she saw her reflection in the round mirror on the wall.
Felixity stopped, and her reflection stopped, inevitably. Felixity raised her right arm, let it fall. Her left arm, let it fall. The reflection did the same. Felixity began to walk forward again, toward the mirror. She walked directly up to it, and halted close enough to touch.
Earlier, in the twilight, the mirror had reflected Felixity only too faithfully. It had shown the apex of her ungainly figure, her drab, oily complexion, her ugly features and wispy hair. Now the mirror contained something else. It was illuminated as if a lamp shone on it out of the dark room. In the mirror, Felixity’s reflection was no longer Felixity.
Instead, a woman stood in the mirror, copying exactly every gesture that Felixity made.
This woman, to judge from her upper torso, was slender, with deeply indented breasts. Her skin, which was visible in the low-cut bodice, at the throat, and the lower part of the face, was the mildest gold, like dilute honey. Her tightly fitting gown was a flame. On her upper face, across her forehead and eyes, she wore a mask like yellow jade, from which long sprays of sparkling feathers curved away. And above the mask and beneath ran thickly coiling gilded hair, like golden snakes poured from a jar.
Felixity put both her hands up over her mouth. And the woman in the mirror did as Felixity did. She wore long gloves the color of topaz, streaked with scintillants.
The flash of brilliance snapped again. It was up in the black air above the woman. A lyre of sparks came all unstrung: A firework. As it faded, an entire scene was there at the woman’s back.
It was a city of steps and arches, plazas and tall buildings, through which a brimstone river curled its way. But over the river, slim bridges ran that were fruited with lamps of orange amber, and on the facades all about roared torches of lava red. All these lights burned in the river, too, wreathing it with fires.
Figures went across the levels of the city, in scarlet, brass, and embers. Some led oxblood dogs, or carried incandescent parrots on their wrists. A bronze alligator surfaced from the river, glittered like jewelry, and was gone.
Felixity saw a large red star hung in the sky.
Within the woman’s mask, two eyes glimmered. She lowered her hands from her mouth, and Felixity found that she had lowered her hands. But then the woman turned from the mirror and walked away.
Felixity watched the woman walk to the end of a torchlit pier, and there she waited in her gown of flame, until a flaming boat came by and she stepped into it and was borne off under the bridges of lamps.
After this the scene melted, all its fires and colors spilling together downward, and out by some nonexistent gutter at the mirror’s base.
Felixity took two or three paces back. In sheer darkness now she went and lay on her bed. But the afterimages of the lights stayed on her retinas for some while, in flickering floating patches. The mirror remained black, and in it she could dimly see the room reflecting. Felixity closed her eyes, and beheld the alligator surfacing in a gold garland of ripples, and as it slipped under again, she slept.
In the morning, when she woke, Felixity did not think she had been dreaming. It did occur to her that perhaps Roland had played some kind of trick on her, but then she quickly dismissed this idea, for Roland had no interest in her; why should he waste effort on such a thing? Had she then suffered an hallucination? Was this the onset of madness? Felixity discovered that she did not thrill with horror. She felt curiously calm, almost complacent. She took a bath and shampooed her hair, ate the meals that were shunted through the door, ignoring as best she could the difficulty with the broken tooth, and listened to the radio. She was waiting for the darkness to come back. And when it did so, she switched off the radio and sat in her chair, watching the mirror.
Hours passed, and the mirror kept up its blackness, faintly reflecting the room. Once Felixity thought there was a spark of light, but it was only some spasm in her eyes.
Eventually Felixity put on the radio again. It was midnight, and the station was closing down. Felixity became alert, for it was at this moment on the previous ni
ght that the mirror had come alive. However, the station went off the air and that was all. Felixity watched the mirror from her bed until sleep overcame her.
Somewhere in the markerless black of early morning, she awakened, and over the mirror was flowing a ribbon of fire.
Felixity leapt from the bed and dashed to the mirror, but already the fire had vanished, leaving no trace.
Felixity set herself to sleep by day and watch by night. This was quite easy for her, for, rather like a caged animal, she had become able to slumber almost at will. In the darkness she would sit, without the lamp, sometimes not looking directly at the mirror. She let the radio play softly in the background, and when the closedown came, she would tense. But nothing happened.
Seven nights went by.
Felixity continued her bat-like existence.
Only one magical thing had ever taken place in her life before, her betrothal to Roland; and that had been proved to be a sham. The magic of the mirror she recognized, as sometimes a piece of music, never heard before, may seem familiar. This music was for her.
On the eighth night, just after the radio had announced it was eleven o’clock, the mirror turned to a coin of gold.
Without a sound, Felixity got up, went to the mirror, and stared in.
It was a golden ballroom lit by bizarre chandeliers like the rosy clustered hearts of pomegranates. There on the floor of obsidian a man and woman danced in an austere yet sensual fashion. His were sophisticated carnival clothes of black and blood, and he was masked in jet. She was Felixity’s reflection, and now she wore a dress of sulfur beaded by magma rain. There was a tango playing on the radio, and it seemed they moved in time to it.
Felixity felt herself dancing, although she did not stir, and the man’s arm around her.
In a tall window was a sort of day, a sky that was coral pink and a huge red sun or planet lying low.
The tango quivered to its end.
The man and woman separated, and all the colors pooled together and sluiced down the mirror. Felixity made a wild motion, as if to catch them as they flushed through the bottom of the glass. But, of course, nothing ran out.
Sisters in Fantasy Page 18
