God's Fool (20 page)

At times it seemed he would be willing to endure the burden of our innocence forever. Not that I was uniformly willing to shed it. When Coffin, only a week earlier, had hinted about the possibility of finding female companionship for us—hoping, in this crude way, to compensate
us for our recent troubles—we had
both
turned down his offer. My brother, you see, was afraid, hence the tone of offended dignity, the vehement denials of any need or desire. And I? I was in love.

Perhaps we were simply tired that night. Or perhaps, given the strange, dreamlike existence we had been leading, what happened that night seemed no more or less real than a painter sketching a flayed horse, or the dreamed warmth of Sophia’s hip against my side, the rustling slip of her dress. Perhaps. More likely modesty and love, undermined by pain, simply went down under the gentle pressure of opportunity, the sweet tyranny of the moment.

What was she like? She was pretty enough, with pale round arms and calves and a wealth of creamy bosom that she framed in lace like a painting of a winter scene. Ten years older than us, perhaps more, she had none of the dissipated look of so many of her sisters; slightly plump, with knowing eyes and a fine, slim neck like the stem on a cherry, she seemed to have escaped many of the ravages of her trade. We knew none of this at first. We couldn’t see her. It was her voice, which addressed us from the dark of a shuttered storefront, that made us slow our step: low, almost coarse, it had about it a warmth, a teasing humor, that bespoke both curiosity and acceptance.

In spite of ourselves, we stopped, cringing inwardly at what we knew was to come—the involuntary backward step, the hand over the mouth, the small gasp of shock. No doubt she had thought we were two men walking side by side. Yet when she saw how things were with us, she seemed neither terrified nor unduly surprised. She had heard of us, apparently. A friend had seen us, she explained, painting a stage with her hands, then curtsying nicely to the canal by way of explanation. “Let’s go,” said my brother.

“Je suis Corinne,” she said, touching a spot directly below her throat, watching us.

“Chang,” I said, indicating myself.

“Chang,” she repeated.

“And this is my—”

“Let’s go,” said my brother.

“This is Eng,” I said, pointing.

“Enchantée,” she said, looking at him.

“I said let’s go.”

“No.”

Stepping forward suddenly she placed her hand directly against our bridge. My brother flinched as if he had just been bitten by a wasp, jerking me violently to the left. “Don’t …” he began, and then, to me: “Come
on
!” Before we could move she reached up and touched the back of her gloved fingers to the side of his face, then laid them against his mouth. “Shhhh,” she whispered. I could hear the canal gurgling quietly to itself in the darkness. A short cry came from somewhere above our heads. She smiled and rolled her eyes.

It would speak better for me if I could say that I struggled and argued with myself as we followed her up the narrow stairs and watched her slip the key into the lock. But alas, that was not the case. I felt dazed, drunk. I felt no remorse for what I was about to do at all. I drank in the slow shift of her skirts as she walked up the steps ahead of us, counted the dark curls that had escaped her pin. If I thought of anything at all, it was that there had been no talk of money. “We have four francs,” Eng whispered to me when, with a quick smile and an explanation we couldn’t understand, she stepped out into the hall, leaving us alone in the small, neat room. For a moment we both thought of escaping the way we had come. Before we could come to a decision, she was back.

Ah, the shamelessness of the innocent! Having no experience, we assumed that whatever came to pass was simply the way of things, and therefore watched, amazed but not surprised, as she first undressed us, slowly, tenderly—only the quickening rate of her breathing giving away her emotions—then unlaced and unbound herself, layer by layer, until she lay before us on the bed, shockingly naked, white as an almond slipped from its skin.

She seemed fascinated by our arms, our hips, by the muscled smoothness of our bridge, running her hands over us as though to confirm what
her eyes showed. Nothing surprised her. Whatever we assayed, she understood. When, wondering, unable to resist, I touched the taut softness of her breast with my fingers, she slipped her hand behind my head and gently pressed me down, then pushed herself between my lips. When she felt my brother, in an agony of shame, helplessly pressing himself against her side, she took him gently in her hand and caressed him, all the while gentling him like a nervous horse. And when, with a strange groan, he suddenly spilled his seed across her hip and stomach, she laughed with pleasure and kissed him full on the mouth.

We had climbed, with some awkwardness, onto the bed with her. Trying as best I could to support my weight on my arms I hovered above her body, my brother, forever next to me, pressed tight against her side. Still kissing him, her arm around his neck, she reached around my back and quickly, firmly, pressed me down and into her.

The rest—the increasingly unbridled urgings of her hips, the strangled music of her cries, the reception of my crisis by the expectant, frozen look on her features—all this was a blur to me. I could feel the ecstatic rubbing of her hands across our bridge and then it was there—announced by a quick gasp, a receiving stillness—and for the space of a few moments the two of us joined in the sweet, sudden breaking of walls that had stood too long. Lost in that lovely wreckage, I could feel her placing a necklace of kisses along my collarbone.

But all was not done. Disturbed by the activities, my brother, it seemed, had been resurrected. Hardly had I returned to myself before I felt her gently easing me to the side. Unprotesting, I slipped off, thereby pulling my brother onto her. This, it seemed, was precisely what she had intended. Still half dazed, running my hand almost absentmindedly along her side, I watched as, raising her hips slightly and guiding his luckless explorations with her hand, she proceeded to give him the exact duplicate of what she had just given me. It was a gift my brother, no longer protesting, quite enthusiastically accepted—a fact I would have occasion to remind him of, more than once, in the years to come.

•     •     •

Do I blame us for the pleasure we took that evening? No, I do not. Life offered itself, and knowing that, for such as ourselves, another opportunity might never come, we took it. Do I blame her for tainting it? For wanting us because we were the way we were? Because the fact of our doubleness excited her? No, I do not.

I do not blame her even though at some point that night, hearing an odd scuffling as of mice in the walls, I looked up and found the doorway full of wondering women’s faces and understood why she had stepped into the hallway when we had first arrived. Yet again we had been seen as nothing more than freaks on a stage. Thrusting her away, ignoring her frantic entreaties and explanations, we lurched out of bed—boys that we were—and ran half-dressed down those narrow stairs and out into the darkness, where, catching my toe on an upturned stone, I tripped, bringing us crashing heavily to the cobbles.

Would that I had known then what I do now: that the heart is large, large—enough to house all manner of contradictions. That sinner and saint sleep in adjoining rooms there, and walk hand in hand through its gardens. We might have stayed. Put off our lives for an hour. Asked them, simply, to close the door.

We were what we were, after all. How absurd, it seems to me now, to want to be desired for something you’re not! Or to blame someone for wanting you for what you are, when all the world over generations of men and women have lived and died dreaming of precisely that.

And yet that is what I did. Perhaps because I didn’t want to admit who I was, would never admit the justice of it. But she was not at fault. Better, infinitely better, to blame the Maker for having made me as I was. Or Sophia, for having shown me a love I could never have, a love so all-consuming I would want it for my own.

VIII.

Paris was ending for us. We knew that. The petals had browned and dropped; the bloom was off the rose. With Ritta-Christina there to draw off the few who might still have come to see us, we watched our situation grow more desperate by the week. One day, we knew, the theatre would simply be empty. And yet we did nothing. We had not seen Dumat in weeks; apparently we had no need of a translator anymore, and as for tutoring, well, that too seemed to have ended. Days would pass without us speaking to either Hunter or Coffin, who seemed to be spending more and more of their time away from their lodgings. Often, a folded note, slipped beneath our door, would give the address and time of that evening’s performance. Nothing more. More often still, there would be no note.

And so we sat by the hearth, we talked, we read—as best we could—the English novels we had begun reading with Sophia. I had developed a strange affection for them. They had been by our bed the morning I woke still believing I would be with her in an hour’s time; they had lain on the table next to me as I had hurried my brother through breakfast, worrying we would be late. Outside on the avenue, a hard wind etched the cloaks and shawls of passersby against their owners’ backs, revealing the shape—like fingers in a wet glove—beneath the carapace of
cloth. Gentlemen hurried by with their hands to their hats. Shoved along by an unseen hand, ladies in bonnets would suddenly hurry their steps, then slow.

We knew we had to do something, and yet, trapped by indecision, tired of talking endlessly about a situation that seemed to have no remedy—where could we go? whom could we turn to?—we did nothing. For four days it rained, trapping us inside. The cobbles were slick with mud, the country roads impassable. We could have taken the opportunity to speak to Hunter and Coffin, to demand what was owed us. We did not. We stayed in our rooms. Had the black boughs scraping against the outside wall been exchanged for palm fronds, we might have been back in Saigon. As soon as the rain eased we took to the fields and woodlots, once again circling the immovable core of our predicament like small muddy planets unable to escape the gravity of their situation. I can still recall the irregular orbit we walked—along broken, cracking streets, past stone walls and statuary black with rain—guided less by whimsy than by a simple lack of will, turning left or right on the basis of nothing more than the vague play of light on a warehouse wall or the suggestion of a smell—a smell like wheat and ash and wetted wool—brought in on the breeze.

We were drowning, of course. Years from home, in a foreign land, at the mercy of two men apparently intent on defrauding us of all that was rightfully ours, we were in more danger than we realized. Unable to turn to the authorities—how could we explain our case?—unlikely to receive a sympathetic audience if we had, we sensed the situation was growing desperate, yet seemed strangely unable to struggle. It was easier to do nothing. The rent on our rooms was still being paid, we told ourselves; the envelopes slipped beneath our door every two or three days still contained enough money for us to feed ourselves. To move at all might tip the balance. Nearly thirty years later a man I never met would write the words that would capture for me, as accurately as any daguerreotype, the helplessness of our lives that spring: “For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough
they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;—nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”

On the afternoon of April fourth, my brother and I had found ourselves in a district of Paris unfamiliar to us; a well-kept neighborhood of respectable homes and carriage houses protected by huge, muscled trees that spread their budding branches over the street. Soon enough, however, the trees began to fall back, their branches parting over our heads. The streets grew slovenly and disordered. Warehouses and vague, unnamed buildings—offices of some sort, we assumed—rose on both sides. We continued on. A thin drizzle wet our faces, then stopped. We watched a small, three-legged dog hunch-trot along the side of a wooden building, then raise its stump to the wall. It began to rain in earnest. Before us stood an imposing edifice with a huge glass dome. On either side of the entrance stood a pair of small, snarling lions, once bronze, now green with time. Gargoyles with monkey faces grinned down from the pediment, slow ropes of rain dripping from their jaws. A small sign above the portal read
MUSEE DE L’HOMME ET LA NATURE
.

Was it some vague, undefined curiosity or just the thickening rain that made us seek shelter there? Both, perhaps. Except for the dog, at that moment disappearing around a pile of broken bricks, the street was empty. Passing between the lions, we grasped the heavy, two-handed knobs. Nothing. We tried again, this time bracing ourselves against the left portal and pulling on the right. Slowly, the huge, intricately carved door swung open.

We found ourselves in a vast, cathedral-like hall, cavernous and still. Strangely enough, there seemed to be no one about. No lamps had been lit. No one answered our calls. We looked up. Clouds were rushing past the glass ceiling. Massive steel girders rose and arched above our heads, as if bearing the vault of heaven on their backs. We moved further in, our footsteps echoing against the marble. On either side, circular, wrought-iron stairs connected narrow wooden balconies that rose, one
atop the other, nearly to the ceiling. Extending the length of the hall, each balcony contained two tiny alcoves with just enough room for a desk and a chair; the balcony walls themselves appeared to be lined with glass-fronted display cases and cabinets. From the third level up, reflecting the ceiling overhead, these appeared as long, broken strips of cloud, or, stranger still, as rows of windows onto some other, tilted sky.

At the center of the room, towering nearly to the ceiling, was a pyramid unlike anything either of us had ever seen or dreamed: a pyramid of life itself, or death, rather; tier upon tier of antelopes and zebras, foxes and wolves, yellow-tusked boars and long-tailed monkeys. Miraculously preserved, they stared out of glass eyes so liquid, so dark and lifelike, one half expected them to turn and blink at any moment. Inspired by nature’s profusion, the creators, whoever they were, had seemingly gathered specimens from all four corners of the earth. One side of the pyramid contained no fewer than thirteen reclining zebras, another a small herd of chestnut-spotted antelope with long, whorled horns. Here was an entire pride of snarling lions; here a pack of hunched and bristling wolves. Four seated leopards marked the corners, their tails turned around their frozen haunches.