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I was a prodigy, so declared everyone who heard me play. I supposed that was why he’d chosen me, out of all the fashionable young women, let alone the pale flowers sprouting between the cobblestones in shabbily genteel arrondissements like the one we inhabited.
Prodigious. I had to be prodigious to justify such a man’s eye lingering on me, with his veiled promise of a multitude of appetites concealed beneath his smooth, tailored suits and his smooth, seamless face. His face was like wax paper, I thought back then, or a Pierrot mask. Was he sad, under his unreadable face, and needed a very young woman to cheer him up, to enliven him? Could he not see how ill-suited I was to play the role of an important man’s wife?
He’d brought me another gift. He was taking us to the opera that evening, an afternoon visit beforehand would have been considered extravagant, but then we were engaged and so Monsieur le Marquis could be forgiven for wanting to keep an eye on his latest prize acquisition. I’d taken off the ornate, cumbersome ring with the large fire opal while I played Chopin for my own enjoyment and to soothe my nerves, laid it on top of the piano so it would not impede my fingers’ swallow-like flight over the yellowed keys. The Marquis’ scent of rich leather and tobacco tipped me off, so I had just enough time to slip the ring, the mark of his claim on me, back onto my finger before he caught me in flagrante in my ingratitude.
I wondered, what would he have done if I’d surprised him with my petty defiance, this assertion of the only paltry independence I’d ever had? Would he have been pleased, amused, enraged? Did he find me entirely predictable, because I played so well, and what is music but the mathematical application of beauty, the precise capture of that most elusive of entities, sound, like caging a firebird in flight? Or was it simply because I never told him no, for what else should a wife or a young woman hoping for a good match do? I’d never yet had cause to recoil from or to resent any of his offerings, even as the persistent thought haunted me: I did not require this, I did not request this. It was his choice to offer me the flowers, the sweet treats enjoyed by those with plenty to eat, the jewels, the new expensive clothes, the dark gaze of his leonine eyes. My only option in response was compliance, for what would be worse in the eyes of society, my snobbish old nurse, perhaps even my mother, her magnificence worn down by poverty, than ingratitude, as though I did not know what happened to young girls who desired something nebulously better out of life and got it and then said non merci, this was not quite what I meant, this was not precisely what I wanted.
I did not know what I wanted. I knew that his gifts made my fingertips tingle, my insides feel queasy. I did not know where to look when he placed yet another bounty in my lap, nor how to thank him with appropriately intense sincerity.
He laid a flat jewelry box of Morocco leather and a potted orchid before me. The sheen of the leather resembled old blood when sunlight fell upon it, and the orchid’s lurid flower was streaked violent crimson and yellow. A fly buzzed past idly, and the orchid snapped its petals like luscious lips to catch it, and missed.
I stared at the flower, feeling spreadeagled between an ill-defined embarrassment and the already-familiar pressure to express my gratitude. In the silent privacy of my mind, I cheered on the escaping fly like I’d wagered on it at the Hippodrome. I had not yet glanced up to meet the penetrating gaze of my fiancé’s eyes, merely sat, twisting the opal ring on my finger, a nervous habit I found impossible to break. He caressed me then, his oddly cool fingers passed like a silky ghost down the long, exposed column of my neck, for I’d put my hair up while I washed the dishes earlier, and so I could not be entirely sure he’d intended to touch me, and he could easily deny it if confronted by my outraged virginity.
But no, I could not deny him this, not when he’d brought me another present. This was the bargain we’d struck, even though I’d only understood it in theory when I told him yes and his sigh – of relief or anticipated pleasure? – gusted over me like an Atlantic gale.
His fingertips circled my neck, from back to front, described the length of my throat and lingered on my pulse. I curdled like milk, like spilled blood, the slithering insides made visible after a disembowelment.
“Your neck is like the flower stem, and your pretty head the flower,” he murmured, bending low to speak in my ear though we were alone in the salon. His beard tickled my ear. I remembered how he’d kissed me when I accepted his proposal, like I’d been engulfed by a holly bush, all prickles and tickles and a wet, beating, vegetal heart at its center: his mouth. He said, “What kind of flower, I wonder. One of these ravenous orchids, perhaps.”
A violet, sold a dozen for a sou on the sidewalk in front of the Opéra, I thought. Still I did not turn my head so he would not see my eyes and I would not need to see his. I feared the hunger I might find lurking there, in those depths where neither sunlight nor gaslight ever penetrated. My nervous fingers untangled themselves and lifted the lid of the red leather box. I must have been hungry too, hungrier than I liked to admit even to myself, or was I simply seeking to escape his attention by diverting it to his gift, the latest snare he’d brought me, and my reaction to it?
He’d ordered my wedding dress, an ocean spray of white lace, wave after cresting wave of it, as well as my trousseau, including the virginal yet vaguely unsettling column of white satin I was to wear that evening, the glossy material so thin it clung to me at collarbone and breast and pointed hip bone and looked like an invitation, a blank cheque. I hadn’t been invited along on any of these sartorial expeditions. The one who paid the piper got to call the tune, and he did like to show me off, but not as I was, a child dressed in gingham and flannel, my school uniform, my demure Sunday best growing too short at ankle and wrist. Only as I became when garbed and adorned in his presents, when I was done up to his taste.
The necklace in the leather box was exactly to his taste. The wide band would cling to my throat like a choking vine, the rubies flashed in the afternoon light. Red as berries; red as blood; ripe and freshly picked, or recently spilled, before rot began to set in.
He sketched out the tale behind the jewel: the Directory, the aristos who’d lived to see it dawn, the macabre fashions of the age après le déluge. His fingertips pressed the pulse point in my neck, just a mite harder than if he had been merely checking my excitement at the prospect of wearing this precious heirloom and all it promised about how he expected me to look on his arm, how he expected me to feel in his arms.
“Try it on,” he said in a sonorous whisper I hadn’t heard before, and I glanced up and caught him examining me from an angle, for he stood beside and over me, so he could see my profile, my eyelashes flying up like the curtain at the theater, in startlement at the naked, glistening hunger in his tone, his fingers at my throat.
Another man might have brought me blood-red roses as a token of his barely repressed passion, the sweet scent and the sharp thorns. He gave me jewels, yet it wasn’t really a gift, was it, he had given the choker away before, more than once. I dwelled too much on his previous wives as it was, for there seemed to be no common ground between us. I stood, as smoothly as I knew how, slipped out of his grasp and walked over to the speckled old mirror in its frame of worn gilt above the cold fireplace. I held the choker up to my neck without fastening its clasp, and turned a little to the right, a little to the left, watching the play of sunlight on the rubies’ polished surfaces, the dark shadows in the stones’ depths. A trick of the light, or a flaw in the rubies? Could they all have had the same flaw?
“Ahhhh,” my husband half sighed, half intoned, and I met his eyes in the mirror.
What I saw startled me, and more than that: his barely repressed passion was in his eyes, in the slow compression followed by a silent, voluptuous smack of his red lips when he looked at me, like he was tasting a rare delicacy. Or no, not tasting it: anticipating its taste, its texture, the rich, creamy melting of it in the wet orifice of his mouth.
I brought my feet together on the threadbare carpet and clenched my thighs together. I never used to dwell on the sensual before, except in music, and that could make my heart race and my spirit soar but not affect my flesh so.
“You like it,” he said, and it might have been a question but then again it might not. He had made a hefty down payment on me already; he knew what he was owed.
I regarded the necklace again, the cool weight of the rubies in my hands, how they looked held in front of my pale, long neck. This, I could believe they had liked, the singer, the artists’ model, the countess. It would have suited them, each in her own way: a threat, a promise, an invitation. Perhaps some women were suited to the guillotine, to the choker born. Was I? I couldn’t decide. I couldn’t have known, then.
“Yes,” I replied.