A fellow will say anything. Klüpfel’s easy conversation, his admiring looks. He had walked her to his carriage, or had there been an arbour—? She remembers sweet flowers, trees—
No, no. That was the book-Julie.
Isabella crawls onto the bed beside her, kicking off her slippers and producing, from the folds of her bedgown, one of the volumes of Julie. “What I cannot understand,” she says, thumbing through the pages—as if she can read them easily, though Julie knows she has to sound out the words—”what I cannot understand is what gets them so stiff? All these people do is write to each other. And the things they say!” Her voice rises to a mocking falsetto. “You profane me by loving me too much. Your virtues are the last refuge of my innocence.” She bursts out laughing. “His lordship’s pantry was the last refuge of mine. Monsieur Rousseau must be as strange as they say, to find pleasure in this bullshit.”
But Julie only turns towards the wall, tears welling in her eyes. Like hearing something deep within herself put into words. His words. Save that they weren’t right, they made everything different…
“Rousseau,” Isabella says. She tosses the book aside and leans over Julie, peering at her. “Rousseau, Rousseau—ah! That’s it, isn’t it? He screwed you! He screwed you and now he’s wealthy and famous and he’s forgotten all about poor little Lilas.” She clambers over Julie and snuggles close, propping her head on her hand. “Tell Mama Tulipe all about it. What did he make you do? Does he really talk like this?”
But when Julie opens her mouth only a sob comes out, and Isabella grows sombre. “Tell me,” she says more gently, wiping at Julie’s tears. “Tell Isabella everything.”
1749
When it hurt, or when she was tired or ill, Julie would pretend she was somewhere else, living another life. That she had married a farmer close to her village, or a soldier, in the colonies perhaps: a good, strong husband and father, happy to work the land. Like Adam and Eve in the garden.
That night, however, she hadn’t yet learned the trick of pretending. Also, the room had not stopped spinning. At first Friedrich tried to tease her into some kind of playfulness, but she was too dizzy to respond; she managed to smile out of habit, but for a moment she couldn’t understand why he was even there.
Only later did she realize he hadn’t even bothered to take his shoes off. He had simply propped a knee on the bed and rolled her on all fours. The sudden change of perspective made the wine lurch in her stomach, but at least she could close her eyes.
She could close her eyes and wonder, what was Klüpfel doing? Didn’t he realise that once her aunt found out she would make Julie leave him?
And the she understood, as swift and vicious as a slap: he did realise. He was finished with her.
She began to cry, her tears pattering on the bed rug. Behind her Friedrich paused, then withdrew and began pulling up his breeches.
I’m sorry, he said.
But she waved him away, weeping, what did it matter now? Klüpfel had finally come to the end of his means, or perhaps he had come to the end a long time ago.
Or perhaps he simply no longer wanted her, a girl who would part her legs for any man he brought back, young or old, handsome or ugly.
When Jean-Jacques came into the room she lay on her back, trying to smile despite her tears. They would need money for new lodgings, after all.
But instead of simply taking her, or caressing her first as Friedrich had done, he had paused and glared at her, swaying a little. Then he seized her by the hair, pulling her face towards his while she gasped and struggled to balance herself.
You all look at me like that, he mumbled, his breath thick with drink. You all think I’m nothing.
Before she could think of what to say he kissed her, his eyes locked with hers, her head throbbing where his hand was still gripping her hair. She could taste wine and some kind of sour stew and when she closed her eyes he gave her head a hard shake.
Am I not good enough? he demanded. You like Klüpfel well enough, you liked Grimm. Everyone likes Grimm. But you’re too good for me? He exhaled, whether in laughter or anger she couldn’t tell. I’ll show you. I’ll show you that Rousseau is a man, a real man. He let go of her head and she fell backwards with a cry. Look at me, he said, unbuttoning his breeches. I won’t be insulted by the likes of you. You understand? Now look at me.
She opened her mouth to call for Klüpfel, but she realized that the garret was deathly quiet, the only sounds Jean-Jacques’ huffing curses as he struggled to get his breeches down. Klüpfel and Friedrich were gone.
Instead she made herself smile at him, meeting his eyes. And tried to keep looking at him, keep her expression pleasant, as he wanted. If she so much as blinked he would stop and shake her, or give her a slap: look at me, look at me like you looked at Klüpfel. Do you think yourself better than me? Comtesse Julie? Princesse Julie? A dumb slattern like you, better than Rousseau? Damn you, look at me.
And there was something in his voice, something that terrified her, and she had looked until her eyes hurt, not daring to so much as blink, until she wept simply to keep her eyes from shriveling in her head.
1761
“Poor little Lilas,” Isabella whispers. “So you think, what, there is something of you in his Julie?” She hesitates. “Only you know there must be a thousand Julies in Paris alone…”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Julie cries. “Only why my name? Why make her blonde? And some of the things they say, I know they were things they spoke of that night. Why would he write such things, why would he call her Julie?” Isabella shrugs. “Why do they do anything?” She squints at Julie, her expression becoming sly. “Though if it’s as you say, and he did use your words? Just imagine! A night with the real Julie, hear the true story, how you loved your Reverend but he was too poor to keep you, now you are fallen from innocence, you pine for him…ah! You would make a fortune!”
But the thought only makes Julie cry harder.
“Oh, Lilas. Was it really so bad?” Isabella hushes her before she can reply. “Only it was years ago, now. And he didn’t really hurt you, did he? It could have been much worse.”
And it could have been, Julie knows this. She has seen the bodies in gutters, heard the screams from behind the hospital’s high walls. Girls turned up begging at the brothel door all the time, their faces scarred, their minds made simple from prison. While Jean-Jacques hadn’t even marked her, had even seemed ashamed as he left, unable to look at her.
And yet. All these St Preuxs demanding that she speak Julie’s words, speak his words. Declaring his words the truth of love, Rousseau has given voice to love. As if he were a saint.
All these St Preuxs asking for Julie, as if they bought her when they bought his book. She has so little she can count her possessions on her fingers, her name among them. Yet Jean-Jacques simply gave it to this other woman, a woman who has everything—a husband and a lover, children, money and security—and sold her to everyone.
And there is something else, something she cannot find the words for, only the feeling that some part of herself has been terribly, permanently lost.
“What do you want, Julie?” Isabella’s fingers wiping at her endless tears.
“I want everyone to know what he’s really like,” she whispers. “That he is a hypocrite, that his story is a lie.” She takes a shuddering breath. “If another man comes to me and asks for Julie? I’ll go mad, I cannot bear it!”
She clutches her head as if to push the words out once and for all—
“I know someone who can help you,” Isabella says, her lips petal-soft against Julie’s cheek. “You need to go to Lyssa.”
II.
It is just before dawn when Julie slips out, drawing her cloak tightly about herself. Never has she walked alone at such an hour. The quiet broken only by her clogs banging against the cobblestones, as loud as pistol-shots. She clutches a small, sharp knife in her hand and whispers to herself, animal noises that make no sense but comfort he
r nonetheless.
I had a man bothering me, Isabella said. Always forcing his way in, never paying for it. And she helped me to…to drive him away. I cannot explain how, it was like a dream, or a fit of madness. But I made him go away, and later they pulled him out of the Seine. And it was because of Lyssa. She can make things happen, even for women like us.
In the little yard before the church there is a row of houses, small and old. As Isabella said. The plaster crumbling, the timbers dark with age. There is a black door and another and then a green door, slightly open, the paint peeling to reveal the paler wood beneath.
As Isabella said.
Julie lays her hand upon the mist-slicked door and pushes, her breath audible, blood pounding in her ears—but inside there is only a room, long since abandoned. Floorboards missing, the walls pocked with holes, windows gaping like open mouths ringed with glass fangs. In a far corner is a mattress smelling of piss and empty bottles and what looks for all the world like a crushed and filthy bonnet.
For a moment she is furious: Isabella has made a fool out of her. The story was so fantastic, why did she believe it? Made a fool out of her and was probably in her room now, rifling through her clothes, perhaps even finding the secret pouch of money she had secured in the back of her wardrobe, all she had in the world—
her little pouch, and her name—
but then she remembers the rest of Isabella’s instructions.
She closes the door again. The yard is silent, the few gravestones glistening with the rising dew, the church windows as dark and empty as the sky. Past the church and the roofs beyond there is a hint of purple. She is nearly out of time.
And perhaps the purple is a sign: she shouldn’t do this. It wasn’t so bad, she has survived worse men since, why is she doing this? There were worse fates. There were far worse fates and she has heard them screaming in the night. What is she doing now, if not spitting in the face of her good fortune?
A dumb slattern like you, better than Rousseau?
Not by any standard she knows, yet every time she remembers his words a little voice inside her cries “yes”.
She holds out her hand. Smooth still, but her knuckles are already cracked and knotted just from washing, so much washing: herself between customers, all the costumes she has to wear, the laundry her aunt had taken in right after they left Klüpfel, before Travers agreed to keep her.
All these people, keeping her. All these bodies inside her, atop her. Julie, they pant in her ear. Object of worship, bewitching maid. And she reciting in turn, you have undone me. Empty words, their very utterance a mockery.
She takes the little knife and cuts swift and deep into the thickest part of her palm and she cries out at the pain. The blood spattering on the front step.
Clutching her hand closed, tears filling her eyes, she nudges the green door with her foot and there is only a warm darkness.
Her blood smearing between her palms. She takes a step forward but the room flashes white and green and yellow, one color after another like silent explosions, and she slips and falls headfirst into the dark.
###
When Julie awakens she is not in her bed, nor in any of the others she has known: childhood beds and rich men’s beds and the narrow ottomans of parties she was paid to attend. She awakens to a faceful of dirt, barely visible in the gloom, and for a moment she thinks she is dead.
Until her hand starts throbbing and burning, she can barely close it for the pain. She realises she has done something foolish, she has fallen into a hole and cut her own hand beyond use, how will she get out now?
“But you’ve only just arrived,” a woman’s voice says, low and rich.
Julie goes rigid, her heart pounding.
“Julie.” The voice utters her name with satisfaction, letting the vowels drag out. “Julie, Julie. Show Lyssa where it hurts.”
There is a rustling sound, as of feet on pebbles. At once Julie looks up, her mouth open in fright.
And just as quickly looks away. The woman towering over her is impossibly tall and broad and naked, a pillar of grey-hued skin and curling black hair. Her face is nearly hidden by a thick expanse of thigh and belly and breast, her hands and feet as large as a man’s.
Lyssa bends over and lays one damp palm atop Julie’s head, and Julie clenches her eyes shut.
“Am I that hideous? Or perhaps Paris has been a little too good to me, eh?” She laughs, a deep bellylaugh, and the smell that washes over Julie is of the brothel’s laundry in midsummer, the stench of a dozen women’s sweat and piss and courses. “Look at me,” she says mockingly, and her voice is his, all the intervening years gone at once. “You liked Grimm, why don’t you like me? Look at me, boo hoo hoo, why don’t you want poor ugly Rousseau?”
Julie scuttles backwards with a cry, cringing away from Lyssa’s outstretched hand. “But how did you—”
“I can read you,” she says. “You wear all your words right here.” Her squat finger circles her own lined face. “Your whole story fits on your forehead, did you know? Like a child…” She smiles, revealing broken, yellow teeth. “I know why you’re really here, Julie. Do you?”
Lyssa turns and walks away, the flesh of her buttocks shaking, and Julie rises as well, clutching her sore hand to her breast. She can see now that they are not in a hole but a large room with rough stone pillars, the walls interrupted by the mouths of black tunnels. A dim light fills the room, but where it is coming from she cannot tell.
In the center of the room, incongruously, is a pink damask sofa atop a thick Turkish rug, the colors bright and fresh, the pair seemingly transported from a fine Paris salon. It is on the sofa now that Lyssa settles, much too large for the seat, her hands spilling over the sides when she stretches her arms along the back, crossing her sprawling legs like a man. Blushing, Julie averts her eyes. It all has to be some terrible joke, some crazed scheme of Isabella’s. How else this woman, here, how else could she know—
“All your words on your forehead,” Lyssa repeats dreamily, watching her. “It’s no wonder they write all over you. But you can tell a different story.”
The room grows warm as she speaks, the air becoming close; nervously Julie glances at the tunnels, trying to think on what to do—run? But there are shapes moving in and out, trotting to and fro, their eyes and teeth gleaming.
Dogs.
“Don’t be afraid of my girls,” Lyssa says. “They understand all too well, Julie. They can help you, if you let them.” Her smile broadens. “A bitch always hunts better than a dog.”
Julie tries, and fails, to smile in return. It takes much for her to walk up to the edge of the rug, her eyes darting to follow every shadow. Now she can see the animals more clearly, see the flecks of foam on their muzzles.
“Isabella,” she begins, but the name comes out as a squeak; she swallows and clears her throat. “Isabella said you could help me.”
Lyssa just looks at her.
“Only—only he took my name.” Her eyes are welling. “Like it was too good for me. He took my name and he took things we said and did and he gave it all to her. And yet they speak of him as a great man, when he is just a thief, when he wouldn’t even see me, he looked at me and he made me feel disgusting—”
She is weeping, the words so jumbled even she cannot understand herself.
“So you want to make him pay, is that it?” Lyssa scratches idly at her foot, her fingernails streaking the caked dirt on her sole. “He has no pleasant future, I can assure you. Injury, death, a public confession, all these things will happen at their time. Though we could make it worse, you and I, we could drive him to true madness, we could destroy his reputation…” Her hand flutters lightly over her stomach. “He will fall at his time and no other, there are rules about such things. But how he falls, what pushes him over the precipice? You can be that which undoes him.” She drawls the word out.
“Yes,” Julie says. Her own voice strangely doubled in her ears, until she understands that it is the small
voice inside her as well, crying out. A dumb slattern, better than Rousseau. “Yes.”
“Then you must give me something in turn.” Lyssa’s hand settles into a rhythmic stroking, rubbing the flesh of her stomach back and forth, ripples forming around her fingers. “Everything you need is already inside you, but you must be honest with me.” She pauses, watching Julie closely. “You want him to suffer, but not because he took your name, not really. Tell me why, Julie. Tell me why and I can make it all happen.”
Julie just looks at her, her eyes running, running.
“Tell me.” Lyssa’s smile broadens, baring her sharp teeth. “Tell me, Madame Klüpfel.”
She flinches as if Lyssa struck her, her cheeks flaring red. “Don’t call me that!” she cries. “Don’t call me that. Only, I…I thought he wanted me.” Understanding fills her, making her tremble. “I thought he wanted me, but no one even sees me, they only see a, a whore…and now everyone says they love Julie, they would die for Julie, and they look right at me but they only see her.” She presses her palms to her eyes.
“Two Julies, their whole lives spent hoping for love.” Lyssa’s tone is light, almost mocking. “Even with the years, their circumstances, still hoping it might happen, that they will both want and be wanted. Now Rousseau sells your hopes out of every bookshop in the continent. And that isn’t the worst of it, is it?” She leans forward, inhaling deeply. “The worst of it is that even his Julie doesn’t get to have it, does she? A girl like her, wealthy and adored, her story written by the famous Rousseau: if she can’t have love, what hope does Klüpfel’s whore have?”
Julie is sobbing now, her tears stinging the raw wound on her hand and she cries and cries. No love. Already her courses uneven, her body starting to slacken. The men’s eyes passing over her in Travers’ sitting room. No love for her. Around her skirts the dogs press in, panting against her legs, smearing the linen with their foaming spit. No love in her life, ever.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 21
