Bound in Moonlight (9 page)

That's all for now,
mon coeur
. Please do consider coming clean about any little trysts you may have engaged in this past year. By “coming clean,” I don't mean to imply that it will be a confession of guilt, because, of course, there would be nothing to feel guilty about. I just think I have the right to know. I mean,
I
'fessed up. Not that there was anything to confess. Yes, there's that word again, but I don't mean it the way it sounds, I swear, and I won't give you a hard time if you tell me there have been other women, or should I say
when
you tell me, because I'm beginning to think there must have been other women, or you would have told me there hadn't been. Why else would you keep mum? I
would
like to know if any of them have been friends of ours, because I think I have the right to know if I've been betrayed by my own friend. And, of course, I hope you have the good sense to use rubbers, because bringing VD home to me would NOT be all right, nor would I take kindly to the notion of your fathering a child on someone else, especially since you might end up being strong-armed into marriage. You do realize there are women who trap men that way. An open relationship like ours can be very complicated, I don't know if we you've really considered all the possible repercussions.

I love you so very much, Rèmy. You're everything to me.

Je pense tout le temps à toi,

Em

Five

Y
OU ARE A
betrothed woman, for pity's sake!”
screamed Lord Hardwyck as he climbed the tower stairs toward Emmeline, spittle flying, hands balled into fists. “How dare you consort with that bloody gypsy likesome common dollymop.”

“He's Atlantian!” she shot back, looking down on him from the landing with arms akimbo and chin thrust high. “And I didn't consort with him. I fucked him. I
fucked
him, Archie.
And I loved it!”

“Whore!” he spat out as he came to loom over her, face purple,eyes wild with rage. “Strumpet!”

“Because I have desires that I'm not afraid to satisfy? What's good for the gander is good for the goose, I say.”

“You've made a fool out of me,” Archie growled as he wrapped his hands around Emmeline's throat and squeezed.

“You'll pay for that, you little trull. I'm Archibald Dickings, Baron of Hardwyck and the future Earl of Upswinge. Who are you? You're nobody.
Nobody,
I tell you!”

On the verge of unconsciousness, as she feebly clawed at Archie's hands, Emmeline heard Tobias calling from below,“Emmeline? Darling, is that you?”

“The gypsy.”
Archie, his face twisted in fury, turned toward his rival's voice, loosening his grip just enough for Emmeline to push him away. He stumbled backward, tumbling down the winding stone stairwell amid a battery of sickening crunches and screams as Tobias flattened himself against the wall.

Looking down toward where Archie had landed with a heavy splat, Tobias winced. “Don't look, my dear,” he said, holding up a hand to halt Emmeline as she started down the stairs. “Not till they get it all scraped up and mopped.”

“Is he . . . ?”

Still gazing down at what remained of Archie, Tobias nodded and said with a sigh, “Why does everyone always think I'm a gypsy?”

February 14, 1922

Steamboat Springs, Colorado

My beloved Rèmy,

Happy Valentine's Day,
mon lapin,
or should I say Happy Belated Valentine's Day, because you won't be reading this for a few days.

Well, it's a happy day for me, that's for damn sure.Guess what? Dr. Horney cut the casts off ! I know it's a terrible cliché, but I feel as if I'm walking on air.

This will be a shorter than usual letter, because Kitty and I are spending the day packing, with the help of Nils. He finally worked up the stones to ask out that girl from church, by the way. I credit his newly acquired guts with his newly chucked virginity. Tomorrow we'll set off for the trip by rail to New York. First stop: Cunard. As soon as I've booked passage, I'll cable and let you know what ship I'll be on and when it's due to arrive. But remember, don't meet me if you don't want to be charged with committing whoopee in public, because I meant what I said about jumping you the moment I see you again. Ride 'em, cowgirl!

There's so much to respond to in your last letter. First, about the fellatio in the landau scene. Clever you, asking me why, if it was so “perplexing” and “pedestrian” of you to object to a male-male cocksucking scene, I went and turned it into a male-female scene in the book.The reason had to do with all those bawdy novels I'd read at Grotte Cachée, and the fact that although there were loads of scenes featuring two women, there were very few with two men. Since my aim was to get
Emmeline's Emancipation
published, I didn't want to put anything in there that would repulse male readers. So, you're right in saying that I knew perfectly well why you responded as you did to that scene, and that I was being disingenuous by challenging you. I can be a real pill sometimes, and I apologize.

Apology number two: so sorry to have committed the grievous sin of “rolling the credits” at the end of my little château narrative without “wrapping up the final act.” (Spoken like a true filmmaker.)

I suppose the true dénouement was, as you say, my decision to write
Emmeline's Emancipation
. The idea actually came to me after Aunt Pembridge and I had set sail for New York. As you've already figured out, Inigo gave me the Renoir parrot tulip painting as a parting gift when we said good-bye, which was actually harder than I'd thought it would be—for him, too, I think.

(In answer to your question, no, I never returned to Grotte Cachée, and no, I don't believe that it was an enchanted place populated by sexual demons—but I don't exactly
not
believe it, either. What happened to me there was like one of those strange and lovely dreams from which you awaken feeling as if the world has become a better, clearer, more perfect place than it had been the night before. You can't relive a dream like that. All you can do is tuck it away in a special place in your memory, and move on.)

In any event, I hung the painting in my stateroom, where it was a constant reminder of Grotte Cachée and everything that had happened there. I thought about writing down my experiences, and then I thought,
Why not turn them into a novel?
There was really only one kind of novel it could be, of course, and I would have to publish it anonymously, but why not? I couldn't be any worse at writing pornography than “Walter.” I also thought it might be fun to write a book like that from a woman's point of view. As you know, I'd been having trouble getting a novel started, but once I turned to smut, it really freed up the old muse. The book was half-finished by the time I disembarked in New York.

Now, last but not least, about this whole disclosure business: Whereas I appreciate knowing that you haven't slept with anyone else (and thank you for telling me that), I want you to know that I'm not as easily manipulated as you seem to think. When you say you'll probably start sleeping with other women now that you realize how serious I am about free love, and that “monogamy really is pretty meaningless outside of matrimony,” all you're doing is trying to scare me into marrying you. Not that I'm frightened by the prospect of you sleeping with other women, as you seem to think. What frightens me is getting locked into a marriage that limits my freedom and stifles my soul. I know you're not Hickley. You don't have to tell me that again. But you can understand how a man like that could turn a woman off to the entire institution of marriage, can't you?

At this point,
chéri,
we really need to discuss this face-to-face. I'll be home in less than two weeks. In the meantime, why don't you hold off on this new resolve of yours to sleep around until we can come to some sort of meeting of the minds? Not that I'm trying to tell you what you can and can't do, I just think it would make for a more productive conversation if we kept things as they are until then. And after all, what's the hurry? You've remained faithful to me this long. I hate that word—“faithful”—in this context, with its implication that monogamy is somehow theologically correct, but you know what I mean. Why rush into something that will only hur complicate things at this stage of the game?

Must run. Nils is getting ready to go into town, and I need him to mail this letter for me.

Until we see each other again (Yee-haw!),

Je t'aime,

Em

From the
New York Times:

EMILY TOWNSEND BINET
KILLED IN INDO-CHINA

Famed Author-Reporter Dies
in Rebel Attack on Dienbienphu

By The Associated Press

HANOI, Vietnam, March 15, 1954—Pulitzer prize–winning novelist and war correspondent Emily Townsend Binet was struck by artillery fire at the French outpost of Dienbienphu yesterday and killed instantly.

She was 76 years old.

Mrs. Binet was on assignment from
Le Monde,
CBS News, and this newspaper to report on the progress of the Communist-led Vietminh toward Laos. It was to curtail that progress that the French established the air-supplied outpost of Dienbienphu last November.

Late yesterday afternoon, after two days of sporadic harassment by artillery and mortar fire, the Vietminh escalated the attack, pounding the outpost with fire from 105-mm and 75-mm guns hidden in the surrounding wooded hills. It was during this barrage that Mrs. Binet was killed.

Colonel Christian de Castries, who commands Dienbienphu's force of foreign legionnaires, Moroccans, and French and Vietnamese paratroopers, describes Mrs. Binet, who wore fatigues in the field, as “brilliant and charming,” with “an
outré
sense of humor that endeared her to the men.”

An expatriate American individualist who had made her home in Paris for over half a century, Mrs. Binet was best known for her novels, which have been praised for their psychological sophistication and subtle skewering of the manners and mores of the upper classes. The most famous of these is
A Rarefied Air,
for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1949.

It was her second Pulitzer, the first having been awarded to her a decade earlier for her reports on the Spanish Civil War, during which she drove an ambulance with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Her first wartime reports were published during World War I, while she nursed wounded men in a frontline French hospital. She reported on World War II also, while aiding the French resistance. Between wars, she published, in addition to her novels, myriad accounts of her adventures and exploits all over the world.

Mrs. Binet is survived by her beloved husband of 32 years, French film director Rèmy Binet, her stepchildren, Jules Binet and Inès Langelier, both of Paris, five step-grandchildren, and her niece, Kitty Cavanaugh of Boston, Massachusetts, and Arlington, Virginia.

Mrs. Binet resided with her husband in a town house in the beautiful and historic Marais district of Paris. Last night, as news of her death reached the adopted city she loved so much, the Parisians who loved her back began to leave flowers, notes, and candles on her doorstep.

This morning there appeared, in addition to these tokens of affection, a veritable mountain of multicolored parrot tulips tied with a wide red grosgrain ribbon, but there was no card to identify who they came from.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me,
shall never be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne

“The Wandering Outlaw”

For he through Sin's long labyrinth had run,
Nor made atonement when he did amiss,
Had sigh'd to many though he loved but one,
And that loved one, alas! could n'er be his.

From Canto I of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
by Lord Byron, 1812