The Secret Book of Paradys (91 page)

“All the better, I’d have thought. Maybe I’ll die, and then the cousins won’t have to pay for my place here. One less annoying little expense.”

She had wondered, at first, if they might poison her, and of course they did, but only in subtle ways that would not be disallowed. Beams of light that penetrated the brain, and sounds she could not, or could barely, hear. Some nights, all through the dark, a slender bell chimed far away.

The walls of the room were a pale, soft dove color, restful, but against them, when her eyes were tired, she saw things in the fluid of her sight, disturbing and worrying, which, against a jumble of objects, textures, and colors, would not have been visible.

They destroyed her, inch by inch. Meter by meter. But she would not be destroyed. She must rebuild what was chipped away.

“There are no figures at all in your painting,” said Van Orles.

“Alas,” said Leocadia.

“Should you care for visitors?”

“Visitors put me here.”

“Surely there’s someone you would like to see?”

“I’d tell them how you torture me.”

“Now, Mademoiselle. You’re thinking of terrible crimes of the past. The
old
asylum. You mustn’t dwell on that.”

“There are drugs in my food. Unseen lights and unheard noises crisscross this room. I’m kept so docile.”

“
You?
Mademoiselle, you
? Docile?
’

“You sedate me,” said Leocadia, offhand. “How else is it I don’t fly at you with my palette knife, my fork, the file for my nails?”

“Because you are civilized,” said Saume, “and you don’t wish to sully your art, your food, or your person by an artifact used in murder against, merely, us.”

She regarded him. He was sometimes quaint and caught her attention.

“I shall need another canvas,” said Leocadia.

“Oh, yes,” said Van Orles. “It will be arranged. Everything for your happiness.”

“Then let me out.”

“Oh. Dear mademoiselle.”

A week after the advent of Nanice at the house, Leocadia had forgotten her.

Asra, in an effort to energize Leocadia, had taken up with another woman, and Leocadia was quite pleased, getting her house to herself without the effort of making a scene. She intended to remove Asra’s code from the automatic door, but she gradually forgot this, too.

One afternoon, Saume called. She would not have let him in, but she had been out walking in the park under the Roman wall, staring at the remains of gravestones left standing in the grass, and the sides of demolished houses up which ivy had been trained. She found Saume on her steps.

“Yes?”

“I am here to see you, mademoiselle.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I am going to go in, and you are not.”

Saume only smiled – he had dreadful teeth, like something medieval, for generally teeth now were universally excellent.

He held out a slender book.

“You wish me to sign it?” asked Leocadia, for it was her collection, the only one, of short stories.

“I am simply intrigued by the content. Girls who turn into vampire owls. Raccoons who romantically subdue their jailers in prison and tickle ladies with their stripy tails. Where does your inspiration come from?”

“The City,” said Leocadia. “These are old stories of Paradis.”

“Indeed? I haven’t come across them.”

“Goodbye,” said Leocadia.

She went in and shut the door in his face. He did not attempt to intrude further. Just then.

Summer came, and Leocadia lay under a white sunshade in her overgrown garden, which she had planted to a kind of jungle. Sometimes Asra called her, but Leocadia was noncommittal. She was in a phase when she was more than content to be alone, not realizing that soon this was to become a permanent arrangement.

Her house was supposed to be haunted. Robert said he had seen someone
walk out of a wall. Many of the houses near the old wall were reckoned to have a psychic persuasion.

Leocadia painted a ghost standing on a rooftop, looking lost and slightly belligerent.

But when she had finished a painting, generally Leocadia grew a little restless. She had finished one. Now it was a landscape with dancing figures, lit by far high hills in sunset, pumpkin-colored, radiating heat and menace.

Leocadia dressed in a long, pale beaded frock, preparing to go out and dine in the City. And as if on cue, Pir called her. He asked, begged her to come to a dinner at the Surprise Restaurant. “So many people,” said Pir. “Lots of champagne.”

Leocadia decided she would go, because sometimes, at a painting’s end, she liked to move among crowds, experiencing to the full her total difference from them.

Pir was eager and came to collect her in his long car, which moved slowly, as was the City habit now, save on the dangerous fast highways.

The Surprise lay on the lower bank, a block of bright buildings, perhaps (or not) erected on the site of an old tavern. The river glimmered down below, and above the hills lifted from the City with their crowns of new and ancient architecture. The Temple-Church was floodlit, and owls nested in its upper galleries. No bells rang from it now – they had lost their voices – yet sometimes in sleep, Leocadia heard them.

The people of the crowd in the restaurant were stupid and drunken, already stuffing themselves with dishes of quail in jelly and black caviar. On the tables of the private room where the party went on were tall cones of treated meltless ice containing flowers.

Pir led Leocadia to a table. She sat down and drank a champagne which had too much head, like stomach salts.

“All the world says ‘never,’” said Leocadia.

“What?” asked Pir.

“An old song. Everybody says ‘never,’ always ‘never.’”

“I don’t understand.”

“None of them have anything to say, and all of them want to say it.”

Pir grimaced.

“You’re too clever for me. What will you eat, you beaded monster?”

Leocadia selected a dish from the menu.

Gradually people flooded around her. She found herself the center of an odd type of attention, bantering and fulsome, with undercurrents of insult.

Asra was not there, and presently Jacqueline Degot remarked on it. “She
says she’s afraid to be where you are, Leocadia. She says you terrify and intimidate her.”

“Not noticeably,” said Leocadia, who was finding the food rather bland.

“But yes.” Jacqueline was insistent. She was clad as a huge blond nymph. “Asra says you have frightened her so much she can’t go anywhere near you.”

“And yet,” added Pir, “one can see she
longs
to do exactly that. Can’t you relent, Leocadia?”

Leocadia found this incomprehensible and did not bother to reply. An idea for a short poem was beginning to come into her head. She realized the dinner was ghastly. Inebriated women already lay over the tables, with tiddly men nibbling grapes from their cleavages, and elsewhere. The waiters came and went like well-behaved penguins. Which was foolish, for surely no penguin would ever be so idiotic.

Leocadia considered penguins. She must visit the zoological gardens of Paradis.

“And Asra complains,” added Claude Ful, “that you’ve treated her roughly. That you struck her.”

Leocadia took no notice of this either. For some reason the image of penguins had taken hold of her, or rather of one especial penguin, a nun of feathers, upright and perfect on a raft of ice.…

She rose to her feet.

“No, no,” cried Pir, “you mustn’t leave yet.”

“But I must.”

“Stay – at least until midnight.”

“Certainly not.”

Pir pushed against Leocadia, trying to refill her glass and grab her arm.

Normally people had learned not to treat her in this way. She thrust him back and he stumbled against a cavorting couple. “Oh! Oh! Don’t be so violent, Leocadia.”

“Then don’t make me so violent.”

Pir slipped aside, but others formed a garland around her. She went through them, and their gloved hands broke away, the sliding doors of their bodies slid.

“Stop her!” exclaimed Jacqueline, as if Leocadia were a thief who had snatched something.

Leocadia had never, since childhood – when she had vanquished it – felt fear. But now there was an unease that, in another, might have amounted to fear.

The dinner guests were swarming at her like a herd.

She plucked a silver knife from a table and held it up.

And the wall of flesh crumpled back with tiny sounds of disapproval and drunken laughter. “What’s the matter with her? She acts as if we’re the enemy.”

At the door, three penguins (or waiters) let Leocadia pass without trouble. And she descended the noisy, lighted restaurant and went out.

She was on the street, the river flowing somewhere and the pure lamps of Paradis, which now never failed, shining upon her.

She walked idly, toward a bridge.

But something was happening. What was it? The new and the old areas of the City, rubbing their unliking flanks together; she had seen and moved through this before. Occasionally difficult persons might extrude themselves and attempt a woman on her own, but rarely, for the watching TV eyes of police surveillance were scattered about, and besides, Leocadia did not look a natural victim. Once when she was fifteen a mugger had come at her in an antique lane. She had punched him on the point of the jaw with her slim, steely hand, bruising the joints of her fingers but knocking him out. And now she had forgetfully kept the knife from the restaurant. Doubtless it would be best to throw that in the river, for a woman wandering Paradis by night with a table knife might also be suspect.

She was coming down toward the river, pausing to gaze at the ghost image of the owl-like floodlit Temple-Church aloft. It seemed balanced on a mound of darkness, and the river coiled below, a snake.

The night was warm and clean. Scents of vacuumed rooms and automatically swept squares. And the antiseptic water.

Parked across the road was a large truck, permitted the pavement, as it was in the process of delivery. Some other club or restaurant, for which vast blocks of treated ice were being brought, imbued with flowers.

Leocadia became aware of a noise behind her. It had been cloaked until now in the humming murmurs and squeals of the City.

She looked back.

Leocadia widened her eyes in contemptuous astonishment.

Pir had followed her through the narrow byways, and Jacqueline the obese nymph, and a tirade of others, all squashed and teetering in their polished or satin shoes, tight pants, and fishtail skirts. They bore their glasses of antacid champagne and laughed and called to her.

“Come back, my Leocadia!” howled Pir.

The two men unloading the truck stared at Leocadia. Between them they tilted a block of ice filled with a glowing fan of marigolds.

Leocadia came to the men and hauled the ice, burning,
burning
, from their gloved hands.

“Pardon me.”

She flung the heavy chunk across the exit from the thin street, into the shoes and ankles of the approaching herd.

The ice shattered and smoked, and white sparks burst up from the chemicals of the ice treatment, causing Leocadia’s pursuers to leap backward, some squawking and falling down.

The delivery men did not protest, they guffawed.

Leocadia saw marigolds, frozen flawless, the flowers of the eternal deathless soul, glittering in heaps and shoals like flamy fish, and splinters of ice, one of which had torn the fat knee of Jacqueline Dagot so she roared.

And then Leocadia lifted her skirt in her hand and she ran. For the bridge, the upper bank, over the river, into the night, toward the house and her sanctuary. Not knowing why, and not even particularly stung or startled. Instinct. Hunted. But so far, arrogant.

As she entered her street close by the Roman wall, Leocadia saw the darkness of the houses under the flare of the lamps that never failed. Rituals of decorum had come back to the City, and its fashionable quarters rose and bedded early. The manners of a century before, as with clothing, furnishing, but not always thought.

Yet on the street of dark houses, one light burned. It was in the attic room that Leocadia had made her studio.

She did not think for a moment she had left it on. She had shut the studio door upon the finished painting (removed from the easel) at four – sixteen hours by the abandoned scale. Then the daylight had still been rich and full.

Was the light another challenge?

She walked up the steps and put her finger to the required panel. Recognizing her, her door let her in.

The hall was in blackness, and only her touch on the proper switch woke up the hall lamps.

She paused. There was nothing in the air to alert her, only perhaps a faint scent of ozone. And she recalled another tale of Paradis, where shells from the ocean had been found at the doors of the Temple-Church, some manifestation of the primeval days when the City had been covered still by a hot and saline sea – or else a practical joke.

Leocadia climbed the stairs softly. Her hands were empty but flexed.

On the third landing she sought the smaller, crooked stair that went to the attic.

There was a faint electricity there, as if something had passed swiftly, voltage rather than presence.

Leocadia turned a fashionable enamel doorknob.

Her studio opened before her, a cave covered now by a black glass roof
without even the moon. But the work lights shone down pitilessly, casting out shadow.

Leocadia’s eyes went intuitively to her easel, a big bulky frame of metal that would support her largest canvases.

There was a new canvas there.

It hung by the crooks of its elbows, a sort of parody of a crucifixion. The head was thrown back and the neck arched. The breasts jutted erotically, but …

The nipples of the breasts were a blaring raw orange, and between the hapless female knees, emanating from the secret zone of sex and life, a curl of orange bled with a menstrual suddenness.

There were orange patterns, too, on the white flesh. Abstractions, looking like a map of unknown islands.