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Esmé Squalor, darling, love of my life.
That is a thought to start the day with. It does not matter that Jerome has no idea which of the many bedrooms his wife has spent the night in. The penthouse is so large that if they are not together, it is like living alone.
Jerome thinks that perhaps Esmé would like to live alone, though even in moments of unkindness, he does not sincerely believe this to be true. She is hardly a solitary creature, even if she does not choose to sleep beside him - or with him. The thought occurs in the stillness of a very warm blanket in another dark morning, for dark is in and the blackout blinds installed throughout the penthouse jealously deny all light. Only Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps, could do justice to the impenetrable darkness that Esmé Squalor has managed, for the sake of fashion, to draw inside their home.
But that is not a thought to start the day with. For he loves his wife, who prowls through the penthouse with sinister glamour. The hard sound of a heeled shoe clipping the floor or a manicured nail drumming a marble counter arouses in him an infatuated lurch of trepidation. He loves the scratch of a gramophone record player in Esmé’s forbidden powder room and, although there is something that feels perverse about it, if she begins to sing he stops outside the door to listen. She is neither tuneful nor talented, but there is a vivid presence in the flamboyance of her voice that resounds in the slight shifts of bathwater and heavy steam of the air. When he assumes she is out, he sits with the Callas records and feels his heart clench with painful affection, for there is a well-articulated drama in the tremor of that powerful voice that will always makes him think of his wife in her powder room.
Esmé does not care for the opera. She speaks of it with repulsion: opera is out.
But these things are subjective, Jerome thinks. He cannot claim to know, like, or understand the world of fashion in which she is immersed, but he has loved her nevertheless throughout variations of designer eyebrows, clothes embellished with ethically questionable furs and jewels, drinks so heinous that they ought to be banned - and of course, utter darkness.
Such things do not change her arched smile, or the oval decline of her cheekbones, nor the way her slender fingers weave and twist around themselves, glinting with silver rings. He is happy to indulge her fashions even if he never believes them. Jerome Squalor has watched his wife shriek at the mere thought of being caught ugly and has seen those slender hands smooth out hundreds of expensive dresses, fiddle with coats and cloaks, rearrange a perfectly arranged hairdo or reach with slight anxiety to confirm the placement of a statement hat.
Who was that poet who called beauty truth?
Jerome inclines his head more deeply into the curve of a pillow. It is only six o’ clock, and the Veritable French Diner will not open for another hour. The room is warm and dark and he is reluctant to move, for on sentimental mornings such as this, when the cloistered warmth of the bedsheets embraces him too tightly, he knows exactly where his mind will lead him. He closes his eyes against a pillow, presses his face into it, and remembers their wedding.
He remembers firstly the bruising richness of grapes hung on the vine, plump and darkening with a deepening pigment of black tinged purple. The sun was sweltering that day and seemed to melt the green vineyard into an impressionistic blur of smeared greens, some watery and yellowed in the sunlight. Esmé had regarded his own ruddy faced demeanour with distaste, for it wasn’t long after the ceremony that he was jovially forced to discard his tie and his waistcoat. He couldn’t for the life of him understand how she managed to glow in the intensity of such a summer’s day – and yet she had.
Jerome would not be surprised to learn that the sun laboured that day only to unearth the peach tinged hue of his wife’s cheeks. He watched her drink a red wine as they toasted and saw her bottom lip tinged with a bloodied stain that enticed him. Though Esmé would loathe the suggestion – the slander! – of it, her body did that day eventually glisten with too pointed a warmth. The heat was so engrossing that she could on occasion expressly feel the roll of sweat curl down her exposed back. It felt vulgar and delightful to her.
They had been so tired that evening! Too hot and made languid by wine, they walked together to the vineyard’s chateau and found the bedroom. Esmé shut the curtains sharply on the blue night and told Jerome to get the zip of her dress. He did. And he bent his nose to the back of her neck and allowed his eyes to close. His clumsy hands embarrassed him and he kissed her shoulder with great, slow tenderness to apologise for something less than beauty.
Unbeknownst to him, her lips shirked in a grimace. Jerome felt particularly soft against the angles of her shoulder.
Though they had not slept with each other that night, at least they had slept beside each other. Esmé chose her side of the bed and stood beside it, removing her earrings and other adornments. Wherever she slept, Jerome knew she would be sleeping on the right, as she did the night of their wedding.
“My wife,” Jerome murmured when she joined him, eyes both shocked and sentimental. “Mrs Squalor.” He brushed the curve of her cheekbone with only the very edge of his thumb. “This has all happened so fast I can barely believe it.”
“Mrs Squalor it is,” she replied, stilling his hand with the clutch of her own, almost like a squeeze. His hand came to lie on the duvet. “This is very much reality, Jerome. We are absolutely, contractually married.”
He had smiled bashfully at her technicality. She had a dry sense of humour. His hand was moist with nerves and heat; he brushed the bedsheet with strained tenderness, pressing his thumb to a knuckle on occasion. The wine had swollen his heart with quivering affection.
“Mrs Squalor,” he said. “I know as the city’s sixth most important financial advisor that you are in no need of money. There is nothing I can give you that you can’t already have, I’m sure, aside from perhaps the penthouse that you took such a liking to. But being as you are, Esmé-” he said her name with a depth of reverence that threatened to tremor “- and that is exquisite and captivating, like nobody I have ever met before, I will give you anything and all of what I have. You won’t want for anything, Mrs Squalor.”
As he spoke, she smiled at him in that severe, jagged way that made his stomach clench and melt. Her eyes occasionally lay between them, hidden by the ashy ridges of a long-warn mascara, and she fiddled with the bedsheet, allowing long, curved, and provocatively rich red nails to scratch against it. She was exactly the type of woman who would wear long red nails to her own wedding. The light of the bedside lamp only half lit her face, rendering her smile dark, and there was a twist to her lips that Jerome couldn’t recall seeing her wear before.
“Jerome. Darling,” she added, as her eyes found his again. The smile was pleasant enough. “I don’t expect a thing from you. We are married, darling.” That word was more effusive the second time and tumbled from her lips like a spool of silk. “As you put it yourself, there isn’t a thing you could give me other than that rather splendid little penthouse, and you have already been so kind as to sign my name on it. Married life is absolutely blissful.”
She thought of the stark, black ink and the huge flounces of her signature. Her eyes gleamed brighter in the dimmed room.
“I believe there is more to marriage than shared property, my sweet,” Jerome replied, drawn to the ember of her eyes. If it weren’t for his wretched, clumsy hands, clammy still and indelicate, he might have drawn the courage to stroke the ridged curves of her hair. “I’ve fallen completely in love with you.” And he half thought the passion of it was making him sick.
As his wife drew back her head, brows raised and her smile stretched incredulously, Jerome felt something putrid spoiling in his stomach. The lobes of his ears burned heavily as he felt a swarmed heat rising in his cheeks.
“You’re in love with me, Jerome?”
“I – yes. I should say so.
“Really!” Her voice sounded something like a piano dropped from a very great height.
“You are my wife, after all.”
“And why, may I ask, do you love me?”
It struck him as an odd question. He watched her and she watched him, side by side in bed together. The sting of his blush seemed to be fading, and he allowed himself to be drawn into her suspicious smile. He also allowed himself to rest his hand on her arm, and not being removed, his hand stayed there.
“What can I say?” But his thumb stroked her skin and his eyes were earnest and unyielding. “You know all the things that make you you. You have complete confidence in what makes you the brilliant woman you are. I’m just glad to share in that.”
“But what makes you love me?”
She seemed strangely persistent and emphasised the verb with a sort of distaste, as if she had realised there was a cheap brand of spirit in the cocktail she was drinking. Something in his gut became gelatinous and eel-like when he saw a white glinted gleam to her eyes, that caught the light like a diamond earring in good weather.
“You don’t believe me?”
“Of course not.”
He wasn’t without an argument, but he no longer felt quite solid. Only his hand upon his wife stayed, and squeezed her shoulder - and was then shrugged off.
“Beautiful women,” Esmé said, sitting up in bed, craned over her husband, “are used to men thinking they love them. To this date I have yet to meet a man even slightly capable of loving a woman who is so obviously his superior in every way imaginable.” Her lip puckered momentarily before she leant over, eyes very firmly placed on her husband’s, and yet lacking a severity Jerome had expected. “Love will make you a very, very lonely man. Don’t bother.”
And with that, she uncoiled like a cobra to lie with her back to her husband. And he, like an idiot child who had already suffered wounds, slowly and cautiously crept to her side of the bed, heart beating far too quickly.
He touched her arm. She didn’t move.
His fingers curled in a slow squeeze. And as she didn’t move, he let his hand smooth over the tense muscle of her arm, the hard bone of her forearm, and over, around her stomach. Not wanting to press on her hair, he tucked his head politely near her shoulders, far down enough the bed that a foot dangled over the end.
“Thank you,” Jerome murmured, closing his eyes and focusing on his wife’s perfume. It was intoxicating and he felt proud in the den of a lioness.
“I am warning you, Jerome, that if you sleep there then I am going to get far too hot in the night and it won’t be my fault when I kick you right out of bed.”
“That’s quite understandable.”
He didn’t move. Nor did she kick him, for the time being.
Eventually, her body settled into the soft hold of her husband. Her spine curved and he curved to accommodate her. She grew too hot and shoved back the blankets and he pulled them further away, having seen how hideously those nails gripped anything.
She turned to him in the dark, unable to sleep and uncomfortable. That irritating conversation had scratched out a peel of nausea in her stomach that she couldn’t quite shake.
“Jerome, will you move,” she hissed in the dark. She gave him an encouraging nudge, inclining her hand to suggest that he roll away from her now.
He did, and he caught her frowning at him with a firmness in her jaw that both intrigued and distressed him. He turned his head and lay with his back to her. He curled an arm beneath a pillow and held it.
The wedding hadn’t been so long ago. When Jerome woke in the apartment of 667 Dark Avenue and recalled it in the morning, he retrieved it faithfully, summoning it beside him in the warmth of the bedsheets. He often thought of his wife with her soft eyes and her hard jaw: the way she had frowned at him in the dark and swiped her tongue underneath her lower lip, as if denying herself a remark. He studied the image carefully and felt more and more aggrieved when he could not imagine what more she might have said to him that night, when her eyes had been lucid, soft, ashen.
Nevertheless, now was not the time. He drew back the covers and raised himself, washing and dressing. Fortunately for him, men’s fashion was nowhere near as volatile as the world of women’s wear. Business suits were never designed too outlandishly. Loud and floral was in, and so he wore a shirt his wife has bought him beneath the black of his blazer. Though he did not enjoy the garish orange print of the fabric, he enjoyed that his wife had bought him five shirts of differing, hideous designs. He wore them with embarrassed pride that was only soothed when she cooed at him the first time he wore the latest trend.
This morning, he could not hear heels in the halls or fingers on the counter or the scratch of a gramophone. The sound of his own footsteps seemed to echo, so he was naturally surprised to turn into one of the many kitchens to find none other but his wife.
Esmé had a hip leant against a kitchen counter and was flipping derisively through The Daily Punctilio, doubtlessly scanning for new news in the fashion world. Even first thing in the morning, she was in: a silk red robe embroidered with chrysanthemums was wrapped around her and knotted at the waist. She was standing barefoot but her toenails matched the vivid red of the silk.
“Esmé! Good morning, my dear.” Jerome stood before her and smiled expectantly; he was rewarded with a slow lift of the chin and a reluctant, if charming, smile. When he kissed her, the response was curt and puckered.
“Jerome, you make me claustrophobic when you are like this in the morning.” Esmé set down her newspaper, if The Daily Punctilio can be described as such, and poured the boiling water she had been waiting for into an expectant teacup. A spoon lay beside it on the silver tray was used to stir the drink. This morning, sugar had been left in the jar. “Now, this,” she emphasised proudly, “is the in-nest drink in the whole city. Tea made from dried, smoked periwinkles. Look at that colour! Isn’t is just…?” She seemed to end that sentence with an odd smile and hurriedly went on to pour another cup. “For you, darling. I wouldn’t want you to miss out, would I?”
The smell of this murky liquid was immediately repulsive. It smelt potently of the burnt scales of a fish, and the liquid seemed to loathe itself, with a soft foam of white scum rising to the top of an otherwise blue and oily concoction. Yet they both took apprehensive sips.
“Wasn’t that just – divine?” Esmé trilled, swallowing with a twist of a grimace that didn’t match the elaborative flourish of her hand. “Really so delicious.”
Jerome couldn’t argue, though he did have to splutter a cough into a very fetching yellow handkerchief printed with daises before he could answer. “Absolutely, my darling,” he agreed, clearing his throat and setting his cup down on the silver tray. “But I am going for breakfast at the Veritable French Diner and I would very much like you to join me. Any more tea will spoil my appetite. What do you say?”
“Oh!” His wife could only laugh. “I haven’t the time at all, darling. I am the city’s sixth most important financial advisor! And besides, I am beginning to think the Veritable French Diner has fishy service and won’t be in for much longer. I might even say that is basically out.”
Damning words. She always said that word, ‘out,’ as if she was spitting something untoward out of her mouth. Jerome raised his hands in defeat and smiled into his chest. “Well, I wouldn’t want to argue with you, dear. But I do hope I’ll see you later. Dinner, perhaps? Somewhere – in.”
The adjective left his mouth quite unnaturally and uncertainly, as if it had been wrenched out by a dentist.
“Perhaps so.” She took another sip of tea that made her lips shrivel. “But I can’t guarantee it.”
He closed the door behind him when he left that kitchen, whichever of their many kitchens it happened to be. He could faintly hear Esmé beginning to hum as he left and realised that it was, in fact, the botched tune of an aria she must have heard from his gramophone. Of course, she wouldn’t hum it had she been conscious of its origin.
Breakfasting alone wasn’t dire. Jerome read the newspapers over an omelette and an unfashionable and banal choice of a flat white. His eyes glimpsed the other diners and he wondered what Esmé could be doing in that huge penthouse; he thought of her rituals in in her powder room, the heat of steam, and how she sung in private.
Of course, people had warned him not to marry an actress. But that had almost seemed a prejudice, and how he loved her! He loved her in her freedom, her solitariness, her moods and withholding attitude.
He thought of her on their wedding night with a stain on her lips and sweat on her face and softness in her eyes, if there had ever been softness in her eyes, as she caught him squarely and warned him without misdirection.