Beast (34 page)

He glanced back into his dark bedroom again, toward the bed, and, as each time before, his chest constricted as if the blood in his heart were suddenly turning to lead. He was going to have to mess the bed linens up more than they were. But not yet. He couldn't imagine doing this in any way other than he'd intended, not now, not alone. Not a further ruse.

He was tired of games.

He felt estranged, not only from Louise, but from himself: Who was this man who apologized for touching a woman he adored, then threw her dinner on her? Who couldn't even use her name, a name he was so fond of, because—the coward—it sounded, he realized, exactly in French as it did in English.

Louise, Louise, Louise, Louise
. (If she didn't recognize who said it the first time she heard it, she would when he lost control of the beautiful sound and repeated it endlessly.)
Dear God
, he thought,
I even
smell like someone else
—different soap, different
eau de cologne
, all for fear she would sniff out his duplicity. Different, different, different…

When all he wanted was for things to be the same.

Well,
merde de merde
. you stupid bastard. Tell her. Walk into the sitting room now, shake her awake, and tell her you're the one.
I am your lover from the ship
.

Except Charles couldn't. And it wasn't simply that he didn't want to tell a prideful young woman that he had deceived her, not anymore. A new—and more monstrous—fear had loomed up. The joke of having her awaken to find a monster in her bed had taken on the proportion of a nightmare. If she recoiled so dramatically—into another part of the house—when he only tried to kiss her, what appalled, shuddering reaction might he have to face if she realized… well, all the places he had already been, all the particular locales he had already kissed?

No. He had died a thousand deaths when she had begun to question him tonight about his English and the ship. For he simply could not have borne the sight of her disgust at knowing he had touched her, had already pressed his weight upon her and spent himself—relinquished body, mind, and possibly heart—into the sweet and scornful, soft and iron-willed, not-so-maidenly contradiction called Louise…

Come, my languid, sullen beast.

Come lie upon my heart;

I want to plunge my trembling fingers

Into the thick tangle of your mane.

I want to bury my aching head

In the heavy perfume of your skirts…

I want to sleep in a drowsiness

as sweet as death.

There I will spread my unrepentant kisses

Over your skin as smooth and lustrous

as copper.

For nothing swallows my sobs

Like the gulping abyss of your bed:

Oblivion lives in your mouth

And rivers of forgetfulness flow from between your lips…

Charles Baudelaire

33 of
Les Fleurs du Mal

DuJauc translation

Pease Press, London, 1889

Charles told himself, he had leapt off the starting block ahead of the gun. He knew Louise and was ready to begin where they'd left off, which sexually included rushing into the dark with her, stripping them both down, throwing her—flinging her literally through the air—onto the bed, then leaping on top of her. Yet to her. he was a stranger, a stranger rushing her like a randy adolescent.
Fool, fool, fool. Slow down.

She is not entirely without grounds for her displeasure
. He was a stranger, an ugly stranger—And here his reasoning stumbled. His vanity hated to admit that he was anything other than fabulous to look upon.
Ugly. Repulsive. Horrifying
. He shuddered at these words. Yet he could not completely face his banishment from Louise's bed without them. Snarling, dragging his heels through the emotions these stirred, he owned up. In a limited way. In time she would see how handsome he was, once she developed some discernment for the finer attributes of men.

So. What he needed to do, he decided, was cultivate her a little. He would start from scratch and stop making unwarranted assumptions based on a history she didn't know they shared. He must behave as what he was to her: an odd looking man she didn't know-very well. The point was, he knew
her
. He knew how to woo her. He knew how she thought, what she liked.

When Charles came downstairs that morning, he looked for the pearls he had failed to give Louise the night before. They weren't on the sideboard where he had left them. They had been cleaned up. He would have asked the housekeeper what had become of them, except at that particular moment he was too ashamed. She was there in the dining room with the maid, both women on their hands and knees, washing and clucking over the carpet.

Then the business of the day kicked in with all the grace of a motorcar backfiring, then shimmying to life—Tino came in with the dogs he had housed with his family overnight. Charles's own dogs, two French pointers, did laps about the front salon and dining room, then up the stairs to the bedrooms, while Louise's dog whined fearfully from all the excitement and peed on the floor. Chaos. Which Charles intended to leave behind him. He stole a baguette of bread from the breakfast table, biting the elbow off as he took it with him out the door. He wanted to arrive early at the greenhouse, so he could fuss with Maxime over the newly grafted jasmine.

In the driveway, however, he heard Louise calling her dog. She was outside on the west terrace. Charles immediately veered.

The dog had gone out the back door. Charles could hear him as he ducked under the arching passage through six feet of stone wall, then walked out into the sun. The dog immediately noticed him and changed course. He came running toward Charles, who bent onto one knee, holding his bread in the air.

The puppy leapt into his arm, enthusiastically licking his fresh-shaven face. Louise, in the center of the open courtyard, stood up.

She angled her head, looking at the two of them, then frowned. "Well," she said. "He'll leave me and the bacon I brought him from breakfast just so as to get dog hair all over your trousers." She was in her dressing gown, a thick, nubby thing of purple with a raised collar and long lapel, the whole sealed up with buttons and sash. She lifted the lapels up, holding it and her arms against her, the gown covering her from jaw bone to knuckles to ankles. Her blond hair lay over this, still in a braid, though mussed from sleep.

Charles picked the puppy up and carried him over to her, sitting both himself and the dog at her feet.

She folded herself down over her own knees as she nested into the thick layers of nightgown and wrap—her nightgown promised to be prettier, a froth of lavender lace that showed where the purple knit opened in front.

Charles offered her bread. She declined with a shake of her head. He pitched pieces to the dog, he and she petting the soft, fluffy fur. It was one of Charles's best ruses. The two of them sat there for a few minutes, their hands sliding together, his stroking hers, hers bumping his. as they conjointly pleased the puppy. The dog rolled over, offering his belly for a rub.
Oh, yes
, Charles thought,
clever fellow
. Louise accommodated him. scratching the spread between his ribs. Charles took the rise of his chest, the two territories colliding delightfully.

The west patio was nice this time of day. Cool, shaded by the house all the way out to the sundial in the middle. A quasi-garden of brambles and trees lined the perimeter, the foliage low to the south so as not to block the view to the sea. There were a few benches. It was a place for sunning or just sitting and staring across a few kilometers of France to the Mediterranean.

In the middle of this, at the edge of the sun, Louise smiled over the puppy's head and announced, "I've thought of a wonderful name for him."

"I thought he already had a name: the Bear."

"No, that is just what I call him. Doesn't he look more like a baby polar bear than a dog?"

"A little," Charles said. He liked the dog, its fuzzy, dirty-white fur, its floppy ears turning golden. He was funny, not at all like Charles's pair of pointers here or the hounds and mastiffs he had elsewhere. The Bear slept flat on his stomach, paws out, even his rear legs flat to the floor. In truth, he looked more like a bear rug than anything.

"He used to look more so," she said. "But he's growing up."

"How old is he?" He was starting to get leggy, rangy.

"Three or four months, I guess. And in need of a regular dog name."

"So what is it?"

"Charlemagne," Louise announced proudly.

Charles frowned. "Don't you think that will be confusing? I mean, you would probably call him Charle"—the same pronunciation as his name—"on occasion."

"Sometimes maybe."

"No." God, she would name the world after him, if she could, call everyone, everything
Charles
. "I would never know whether you were calling me or the dog." Except that she would say the dog's name perhaps more dearly.

She looked pensive, as if she hadn't thought about calling for
him
, about wanting Charles by name. Her brow creased. Then she shrugged. "Don't be silly. Families have members named the same all the time: Think of all the sons named after their fathers."

"Well, I'm not his father."

She frowned. She hadn't been making this connection.

Lord! he realized. It wasn't
him
she was naming the dog after. It was the goddamned man on the ship.

Which was him, of course. In a circular way he could barely follow anymore.

He stood up, dusting his pants, aggravated again.

Oh, fine
, Charles told himself.
You are so put out, so greedy for this woman, you are now jealous of
yourself.
And a dog
.

"No," he said adamantly. "You may not have my name for your dog." He thought to add as he straightened his coat, "Nor will we name any of our sons Charles." It was like one's wife trying to name a baby after her lover. "They shall all have their own particular names."

He huffed off, muttering to himself, "If we ever get to the particular process that makes them, that is."

Louise remembered, two weeks ago, her mother saying, "Isn't it charming?" By "it," meaning Nice, the Riviera, Provence, France. "Isn't it the most delightful spot on earth? Isn't he the warmest, most elegant man you've ever met? Isn't his uncle priceless?" Louise's parents fully expected her to be mad for Charles Harcourt and for France itself, both of which they granted a kind of grace through translation. Perfectly vapid things said in French her mother would wave away as being much deeper or more insightful or more poetic "if we only understood all the nuances." She accepted the idiosyncratic, often bizarre French way of managing as innovation, when the same thing in New York she would have dismissed as makeshift and inferior.

In fairness, of course, almost
nothing
conformed to what they were used to exactly. The house in Grasse, for instance, had a new bathroom that contained no toilet. The toilet was in a separate room down the hall called the W.C., the water closet, after the British nomenclature (which didn't seem very French at all). Louise could not figure out the use of the other thing next to the tub, something called a bidet.