The Secret Book of Paradys (108 page)

Leocadia left the neck of the dress loose. She brushed her hair viciously. But then there was a noise at the door. She laid down the brush. Her face was smooth as an egg.

Van Orles came in, shut the door. He was all alone, as before, pale and puffy and agitated, trying to be bold and lofty. The warning light around him was like a dry white neon.

“Now, now,” he greeted her. He sounded more silly than she had ever heard, like a caricature of himself. He did not light his pipe. He glared, and Leocadia laughed. At that, he backed away. “No violence!” he squawked. “I have warned them, you may be out of control. Someone will come with an injection.”

“And spoil our fun?” asked Leocadia.

Van Orles’ silly face became a pudding of startlement.

“At least,” she said, “you came back alone. I expected you days ago. What a man. What a tease.”

Van Orles looked uncertain. He blinked.

“You were unhelpful,” he said, “contrasuggestive, previously. You misunderstood my intention and became hysterical.”

“I understood everything,” said Leocadia. “It was you who made the mistake. Letting me chase you off, when all it required was a little strength. A little manly firmness.”

“Your meaning?” demanded Van Orles. His voice was indeed stronger. He sat down on the couch, took out the pipe, and began to toy with it.

“Why should I explain? Are you simple?”

“Be more respectful, Leocadia. In my position –”

“Oh, hush. Such nonsense. Your position is, you’re a man, and I am a woman. Do you agree?”

Van Orles assented.

“I was – playful,” said Leocadia, sadly, “and you took fright and ran away. He will return, I thought, sweeping all before him. What did you do? You stole my canvases.”

“I –”

“Naughty man.”

Leocadia offered the unsuspecting Van Orles a grin she had seen displayed in the painting of a famous whore of bygone times. To her irritated
unsurprise, Van Orles mellowed immediately, and smiled upon her. What a fool, there in his orb of almost blinding, radioactive light, the light that showed her where the danger was, brighter by the second.

I shall try to see him
, she thought,
as a pie with legs and a head
. Just so she would have painted him, if she had been forced to paint him.

“I meant to make a miniature of you,” she said. “I meant to paint it on my thumbnail.”

Van Orles sniggered.

“What a woman you are, Leocadia.”

“Instead I have to paint penguins on the walls. Will it be allowed?”

“Whatever you want, dear Leocadia.” Van Orles patted the couch. He slipped the pipe lasciviously into his pocket. “Let me take your pulse.”

“Once you brought me a clockwork cat,” said Leocadia. “And a fruit that bled.”

“Did I, dear Leocadia?”

“Then you won’t tell me why.”

“Oh, Saume,” said Van Orles, “his little experiments. But truly. I don’t recall a fruit that – bled, you say?”

Leocadia allowed a button of her cream silk bodice to come undone. Van Orles was riveted.

“My pulse as yours,” said Leocadia, “keeps temperate time.”

Another button.

“My pulse,” said Van Orles, grinning now like the whore, “is quite fast, Leocadia.”

And another button. Van Orles puffed, without aid from the pipe. His small eyes bulged.

Leocadia let slip the silk, inch by inch, along the contour of her breast. She waited, and Van Orles made a tiny sound. Then the silk slid over and the globe of whiteness appeared entire, round and pointed too, with its tawny nipple like a sweet or nut.

Leocadia cupped her breast in one hand.

“Do you think,” she asked, “I’m losing my looks?”

“Oh – Leocadia –”

Van Orles got up like a stuffed chair on two legs and blundered toward her.

She allowed him to catch her, to rub his face into her naked breast and rub at the other with his hand. In her turn she caught deftly at the fuming doctor. Through the material of his clothes, the familiar bulge amused her experienced fingers.

Van Orles writhed in her grasp. “Ah – no, Leocadia –”

“And here is the other breast, not a stitch on it. And what is here. Look.
My legs are long, don’t you think? I’ve been told they are. And white. But all this bad black hair …”

“Ah – Leocadia – I can’t –”

“I can feel you moving. What a strong man. You can’t resist me, can you?”

Van Orles struggled now, but Leocadia held him firmly in her clever hand, caressing, goading. He stared down between them at her loins, screwed up his eyes, and made a spluttering noise.

“Alas,” said Leocadia.

In horror now, Van Orles peered down at the wetness spread upon his upholstery.

“Such is your effect – er – this is – I –” Gravely embarrassed, annoyed, cheated, and overheated, he limped toward her bathroom. “Excuse me.”

Leocadia wiped her hands with turpentine and did up her dress.

When Van Orles emerged he was in a worse state, the wet patch now a soaking extravagant monument to vast incontinence of apparently every sort.

“Hurry and hide, before anyone sees,” said Leocadia. “If you were noted in your present state –”

“But I –”

“I’m afraid,” said Leocadia, “you do look such a sight.”

Van Orles’ face was now florid. He perambulated about the room in total confusion, staring at things wildly as if they might assist him. Reaching the door he flung himself on it and bolted out.

Leocadia glanced at the wall of ice crags, the dark glimmer of the penguin.

Had she shamed Van Orles sufficiently to safeguard her work?

She walked to the wall, and taking up her brush, loaded it with whiteness whiter than a breast. She was exhilarated. She smiled in a painful rictus, and created mountains.

During the night, Leocadia dreamed that Asra, her hair full of bleeding orange paint, stepped out of the refrigerator. Nothing else happened in the dream, but the next morning, a visitor was shown into Leocadia’s room. It was Nanice, her ugly cousin, the inheritrix who had ousted her, put her into the madhouse,
cunning
ugly Nanice, who had had Asra murdered.

Nanice was a picture.

Not that she had grown beautiful, but someone had dressed her as though she might be. Her lusterless hair had been permitted to grow and it had been curled. She had put on a long “artistic” frock, patterned stockings, and un-usual shoes. From her left ear dangled a second ear, made of silver, from which, in turn, hung a single polished diamond. Nanice spread her hands in a theatrical way. On her fingers were silver rings shaped like fingers wearing rings.

“How are you?” asked Nanice, beaming.

“Not dead yet. My apologies.”

“Always so tragic,” said Nanice. “I can’t stay long. It was my duty to see you. I’ve tried before, but they said you were violent. But here I am. Though my friend is below.
She
hates to wait.”

Leocadia deduced that Nanice was implying her friend was a female of the intimate sort.

“Art,” said Nanice, savoring, “is very freeing. I understand you now so much better.” And she removed from her bag a flask, and drained it. Nanice hiccuped.

“And what do you want?”

“To show you how well I am,” said Nanice promptly, like a precocious child – and with such a true and perfect malice that it was both naïve and blameless.

“Yes, you’re well. But who runs the firm of assassins you hired to dispose of Asra?”

Nanice blushed. She said, “How can you speak so lightly of that terrible crime?” She added, “Artistic license can only go so far.”

“It was clever of you,” said Leocadia, “in a filthy, muddled way. And then, did you wait in the street until Pir and Jacqueline and the others had broken down the door? How much were
they
paid?”

Nanice flounced and the silver earring danced. “Your horrible uncouth friends burst in your door for their own edification. Pir was howling that you ruined his dinner, and that woman Jacqueline said you had run out with a knife in your hand and must be stopped. They hated you, and were impossibly drunk – drunk in the wrong way. They’re vandals. But yes, we were on the street, Monsieur Saume and I. I told you, you were being watched. I too was afraid for you.” For a moment, Nanice looked her old pious self. Then she smiled, kindly.

Leocadia cackled.

Nanice said, with the air of a canny child changing the subject tactfully, “Robert has been sick in your studio. Robert is always sick, isn’t he?”

Leocadia felt a dim rush of fury, but she held herself against it and it sank.

“I have an urge,” she said, “to pull off your ear.”

“Isn’t it wonderful? This jewelry is very fashionable.” Nanice was not ruffled. She said, determinedly, “It was such a pity Robert was sick in the studio. I’ve begun to paint there.”

Leocadia now felt wooden, almost lifeless. She had never fainted, but perhaps this was what the sufferer experienced in the instants before awareness went out. Hollow, adrift yet fixed, immutable and flowing. She could not explain this. She said, stiffly, “I suppose you paint little images of pretty ladies you think are yourself.”

“Oh no. Not at all. I’m painting a woman with the head of an elk, riding on a horse on wheels.”

Nanice did not, as she had vowed, stay long. Her visit had been improbable, as if maybe the friend-enemy doctors had requested her to come: one more test. Or – and for a minute or so after the visit, Leocadia seriously considered this – had she hallucinated Nanice? But would a mad woman conjure something so trite?

Yet the creature who was Nanice was no longer precisely trite. Nanice had taken over the role that Leocadia had played so well and so diligently for thirty years, in the City of Paradis: The bad woman, the eccentric, drinking artist.

Leocadia sat on her couch, turning her brushes in her fingers. On the wall the penguin stood amid the snow, large and three-dimensional.

Leocadia thought about Van Orles coming stupidly outside her body, and the warning light, which had faded as he rushed out of the door. She thought of Thomas, who had begun to look so like Michelot, her uncle, who had been kind to her. And of Asra, of course of Asra, whom she had never really liked.

But Nanice had taken Leocadia’s life from her, her persona, her obligations of thought and deed. Her memories? And if Nanice had done that, was Leocadia relieved of Leocadia? No more duties to Leocadia. Leocadia, like a bundle of heavy clothes, rolled up and packed away.

Who am I?

She, whoever she was, rose and went to the refrigerator and took out the tall bottle of vodka. Then, with a sigh, she put it back. She did not really want it. She did not have to drink it.

Who
was
she now?

Strange, she must still paint. The painting on the wall drew her like a window full of light and air. Perhaps, then, like Mademoiselle Varc, and Thomas, she was now a conduit for the madhouse. Whoever she was, she smiled at that. And anointed her brush.

At the Cockcrow Inn, the blackish scum of the alleys had risen to the surface. Outside, the hovels of Paradys clung and clustered to the rainy bank, dark mounds with slitted, small, dull eyes. The interior of the tavern was raucously alight with oil lamps and thick with the smoke of pipes and the foulest cigars. When the tall man entered, heads lifted up into the avaricious glow. They knew him, he had come in before, several nights now. They knew him also as a confidence trickster, a deceiver like themselves, but honored in his profession, as they were not. An actor.

He had not spoken to any of them. Those few who had recognized him had informed the rest. This did not make them like him, or his silence.

When the bar girl had initially told him, pertly, there was no brandy, but only the popular drink, raw gin and sugar, he had taken that. He drank a great deal, and when he was drunk, sitting in his corner, he had muttered things from plays.

Citalbo the poet had once drunk at this inn. It was an old inn, and had had other names.

Perhaps Johanos Martin had been curious about the madman who had given line for line to him. Perhaps he had meant to visit the inn only to see if some essence of Citalbo, or of Citalbo’s ultimate fate, had lingered there. Or maybe Citalbo had put a spell of magic upon Martin that had driven the actor down into the inn as another might be sent into Tartarus.

On this sixth night of Johanos Martin’s appearance, two of the other deceivers got up from their places and went and sat with him.

“You’re the great actor, aren’t you? Martin, of the Tragedy.”

They spoke of it as if it were a sort of jest, something he might laugh at. But Johanos the priest looked down upon them from the high altar of lamplight and gin and said calmly, “I am Martin.”

“Well met,” said the bigger of the deceivers, a robber who had once slit
throats as regularly as two a night. “Allow us to buy you another drink, monsieur.”

“Very well,” said Martin. “But what do you want?”

“Oh, the pleasure of your company, monsieur, before we go off on our evening’s labors.” And with a whistle the cutthroat summoned the bar girl, and bought from her a brown bottle with a penguin on its label. “The best drink in Paradys. This will add fire to your turns on the boards.”