Wilde West (39 page)

A scrum of Manitou Springians stood huddled about, all of them leaning slightly forward, as though Oscar were standing at the bottom of a shallow crater in the parquet floor. All of them wore evening dress, and all of them looked at least as well fed as Mr. Muggs. No watercress and celery for this lot, except perhaps by the troughful.

They were all wealthy enough to have paid twenty dollars apiece for the lecture and for this “intimate” champagne party. With the others milling about the ballroom, they were the elite of Manitou Springs—according to Vail, everybody who was anybody in the town. (“In other words,” Oscar had said, “nobody.”) And at the moment none of them, alas, was Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

“Not personally,” Oscar said to the mayor. “Although of course I know his works. I find them admirable. But I do sometimes wonder at the unusual number of pathetic little waifs he dispatches. In a novel by Mr. Dickens, one has only to come upon a pathetic little waif to know that the poor moppet is doomed. Sooner or later, usually after wasting away for several months, and for several chapters, he will breathe his last wretched little breath.” Oscar frowned thoughtfully. “Do you suppose it possible that Mr. Dickens secretly dislikes children?”

The mayor turned to his wife, she evidently being the authority on literary matters.

“But I thought I read,” she said, frowning, “that he's got children of his own? A lot of them, I believe. A big family.”

“Ah,” said Oscar. “Perhaps that explains it.”

As Mrs. Muggs (or Mudds) assimilated this (or failed to), and as a few uneasy chuckles, all of these male, sputtered through the crowd, a female voice to Oscar's right asked him, “Do you mean to tell us, Mr. Wilde, that
you
dislike children?”

Oscar turned. Beneath a sculpted mass of blue-white hair which possessed the dull seamless glow of a conquistador's helmet, the woman's jowly face was eloquently puckered in distaste. She was all combative shoulders and cannon-barrel breasts, and for a moment he felt like the owner of a skiff who looks up and discovers that a frigate is bearing down upon him on a collision course.

“On the contrary, madam. I think they are one of life's great treasures. A joy to us when we are in our prime, and a solace in our decline. As soon as I can afford to do so, I intend to hire several of them.”

More laughter this time, some of it shocked. The frigate's face remained shuttered.

Oscar glanced over at Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

Still gaily smiling with her entourage.

The least she could do was look over in this direction.

He swallowed some champagne. What was it that Holliday, the dentist-gunman, had called that bourbon? Donkey piss.

“Mr. Wilde?”

Oscar turned. A small silver-haired man, warm brown puppy eyes peering out from a tracery of amused crinkles. “Jim Cathcart, editor of the
Sentinel.
I'll bet you've heard this before”—he smiled an engaging deprecatory smile—“but I guess you can understand that I've got to ask you anyway. What are your feelings so far about America?”

Oscar beamed down at this pleasant little man. “I can scarce describe my feelings. And of course I can scarce describe America. How
could
one describe a thing which by its very nature is indescribable? The vastness, the richness, the splendor—they boggle the mind and beggar even my own powers of description.”

Around him, heads nodded in complacent agreement. His puppy eyes shining, Cathcart asked him, “Would you like to comment on which parts of it you've liked best?”

“I can answer you without hesitation,” said Oscar. “More than any other I've enjoyed this Colorado country of yours, filled as it is with splendid vistas and noble prospects.” Not likely that anyone in this flock knew Johnson's comment to Boswell.

Clearly not. The remark had set more heads abob, and had apparently even taken some of the wind from the frigate's sails. Her jowls had unclenched appreciably.

“Does that mean,” casually asked Cathcart, his brown eyes still warm and shining, “that you don't care for the cities of America?”

Oscar smiled again. So: not a puppy after all: a fox. Ah well, Reynard, no nasty quotations from me tonight. “Not at all,” he said. “I found Denver, for example, altogether fascinating.”

Heads nodded, indicating that this was not an unpopular opinion. Everybody seemed (rather annoyingly) content to let Cathcart continue playing the part of inquisitor.

“Is it true, Mr. Wilde,” Cathcart asked him, “that you're traveling with a servant and two steamer trunks packed with clothes?”

Probably none of the Manitou Springs gentry gathered round would be in any way ruffled by the idea of Oscar's traveling with a servant. Those who didn't employ servants themselves doubtless envied those who did. Some of them, possibly most of them, doubtless looked back with fondness to the good old days of slavery. Cathcart was plainly pursuing some plum he could present the rest of his readership, the simple untutored yeoman, the honest untutored laborer.

“No. I have only one steamer trunk,” Oscar said. And then, on an impulse which he knew he might later regret, but could not now resist, he added, “The other four were unfortunately lost at sea. As for my valet, he's a charming fellow. His name is Henry—he's floating about here somewhere—and we often sit together by the fireside and discuss the merits of republican democracy.”

“Excuse me,” said a familiar voice.

Cathcart, who had opened his mouth again, suddenly clamped it shut as Elizabeth McCourt Doe appeared at Oscar's elbow.

She was, of course, stunning. Tonight she was swathed in clouds of bright beaming scarlet, like a rising sun. The color should have clashed with her titian hair; but nothing in the world could have clashed with her titian hair. And when she looked smiling up at Oscar with those luminous violet eyes, and laid her slender hand upon his arm, he felt a curious weakness at the knees, as though his joints were liquefying.

“Excuse me,” she said to the group. “But may I steal Mr. Wilde away from you for just a moment?”

Immediately, and without physically moving, the group had divided itself into two separate camps. Among the men, Cathcart smiled a courtly smile and graciously lowered his silver head in a small bow. Mayor Muggs beamed in delight around his pomegranate and announced, “Ah, Mrs. Doe!” Among the women, Mrs. Muggs lifted her meager chin and, disdain making her bones shrink away from her skin, miraculously acquired additional creases. The frigate, sails snapping, ponderously wheeled her heavy guns about.

“I'll bring him right back,” said Elizabeth McCourt Doe, and, with a gentle pressure on Oscar's arm, she led him off.

Her silks rustling beside him, her scent fluttering beneath his nostrils, they passed several chattering coveys of
lumpen
aristocracy. (Silver barons, cattle barons, timber barons and their respective baronesses, some of the men in costumes so stiffly starched that their occupants appeared to have petrified.) By the time the two of them had located an open space, a pocket of privacy, Oscar had remembered that he was an aggrieved party. His knees were still weak, but he had determined to himself that the weakness was galling rather than curious.

He must maintain his aloofness; he must firm his resolve.

She stopped and he turned to face her.

She smiled and tapped him with the hand she held upon his arm. “Oscar, you've been ignoring me all evening.”

Coolly he said, “I ignore you? Madam, I assure you I have not.” How dreadful. He sounded like a butler. But his pride could see no way to escape the role which circumstance, and Elizabeth McCourt Doe, had thrust upon him. “Permit me to point out that it is you who have been ignoring me. For two days, I might add.” Dreadful. Worse than a butler. An insufferable Prig.

She leaned toward him, leaning on his arm, and she smiled.

“This is fun, isn't it? Can we do this in bed sometime?”

In a flash, firmness drained away from his resolve and began to trickle into another (potentially more visible and embarrassing) part of his person. “Ah, Elizabeth,” he said, and in his voice he heard passion and yearning, which he was pleased to convey; but also a kind of tremulous whimper, which he was not.

“Oscar,” she said, and canted her head to the side, her brilliant curls trembling along her scarlet shoulders. “I couldn't get away. Horace had all sorts of horrible business meetings and he needed a hostess.”

“A hostess?” So perhaps they had not been, she and Tabor, skidding naked one atop the other for the past thirty-eight hours. As Oscar, for the past nine, had been busily imagining them; or busily attempting to avoid imagining them.

“You can't believe how boring it's been,” she said. She smiled and put her hands behind her hips, which caused her pert perfect breasts to lift up and strain against her bodice, as though reaching out for him like the hands of a child. “Have you missed me?”

“Of
course
I've missed you. Elizabeth—”

“I talked to your friend, the Countess.” Smiling her Gioconda smile, she narrowed her eyes slightly. “Should I be jealous of her?”

“Jealous?” He produced a laugh which he intended to sound light and airy; it came out giddy and shrill, nearly hysterical with relief.
She
jealous?

“She's a very beautiful woman, Oscar.” Still smiling. “And French. And ever so much more cultured than I am.”

He laughed again. More successfully this time: blithe, debonaire, almost avuncular. “My dear Elizabeth. No. I promise you. There is no woman, anywhere in the world, of whom you need be jealous. I only wish that I could prove that to you, just now, just at this very moment.”

Her smiled widened. “How?” she said. “How would you prove it?”

Oscar glanced to his right. The nearest bevy of barons and baronesses stood twenty feet off, all their pink faces staring frankly at Oscar and Elizabeth McCourt Doe. Instantly, in unison, like a troupe of minstrels, they turned away. Oscar glanced to his left. Saw Ruddick leaning earnestly forward as he talked to a young waiter with a silver tray tucked beneath his arm.

Oh dear. Discretion, Wilbur.

He turned back to Elizabeth McCourt Doe and lowered his voice. “I prefer showing you to telling you. May I see you tonight?”

She sighed sadly. “I'm sorry, Oscar. I can't tonight. Horace has another boring meeting.”

Oscar felt his facial muscles wilt.

“Poor Oscar,” she said. “And poor me.” She smiled. “But tomorrow morning let me show you the sights of Manitou Springs. I'll rent a carriage.”

“You're the only sight I care to see.”

“I know a place, up in the mountains. It's beautiful. It's shaded and quiet and there's a little brook nearby. We can lie down on the pine needles.”

Oscar was willing to lie down in the brook. “But the train to Leadville leaves at one o'clock.”

“I'll come pick you up at nine, at the hotel.”

“Nine o'clock, then.”

He smiled, delighted.

She smiled, reached out, put her hand lightly on his arm. “I've missed you, Oscar. I'll see you tomorrow.”

“I look forward to it. There's something I wish to ask you. Something rather important.”

She smiled again, gently pressed his arm with her fingers, then turned and rustled off.

Tomorrow!

The ballroom, despite its size, was suddenly too small to contain both Oscar and his elation. He glanced around once more. Ruddick had gone missing, but after an anxious moment (SCANDAL IN MANITOU SPRINGS!) Oscar spied the young waiter serving champagne to Colonel von Hesse. Four or five yards to their left, O'Conner stood talking to Mathilde de la Môle, the Countess wearing a lovely blue gown of taffeta and lace and an expression of heroic politeness. O'Conner had dressed for this occasion, as he did for all others, in his brown scarecrow suit.

At the moment, no one seemed to be paying Oscar any attention. He crossed the room, nodding politely to the gaggles and bevies and coveys. He opened the French door and stepped out onto the veranda.

But someone
had
been paying attention. As Oscar spoke with Elizabeth McCourt Doe, an intense pair of eyes had watched the two of them.

I know you, slut. I know you, harlot. For all your expensive clothes and your expensive perfumes and your red red hair, you're no better than any streetcorner whore riddled with pox. No better than any alleyway trollop sour with stale liquor and the stink of a thousand squalid couplings.

I know you, Elizabeth McCourt Doe. I know you. I've learned about you. Left your husband. Ruined one marriage already, and now you're ruining another. And still you you prance and whinny with Oscar Wilde.

Shameless bitch.

You sicken me.

Whore.

Oh yes, walk away. Walk away while you can, you vile stinking hole. Walk away now. One day you won't be able to walk away.