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She was in bed in a compromising situation when she realized that things could not go on this way. Her arms were wrapped around a barmaid’s naked torso, her face buried in her soft red-black hair, but there was something about it that was mechanical and unsignified. She did want to finish—she felt somehow that it would be unkind of her not to finish—but beyond that there was not much more. She was struck by the cold and clinical function of it, the chilliness beneath all this panting and all this sweat, the desperation to put as far away as possible everything that reminded her of where her treasure really was. There was something unspeakably distant and coldly calm, she suddenly got the feeling, to this sort of lustful abandon.
She got up and got dressed. In some church tower nearby the clock was striking eleven. The flat was dark, a dingy tenement, with very little to liven it. She herself had lived in such a place for most of the past seven years, but she could not believe that this was her kind of place or her kind of people because, for her, it was choice, it was option, it was display and performance. “Is there for honest poverty?” Burns had asked. There was nothing honest about her poverty. There was nothing honest about doing this with herself, with by her count the twenty-ninth girl since she had come to Paris.
She should have come this understanding years ago, when in the throes of passion with an older lady from Marseilles she had found herself having, intrusive and ineradicable, the vision of cool violet eyes, the sensation of dancing in a ring. But she had wanted to be free and had wanted to press on. It had been so cold, so devastatingly painful, to think that she might not be able to press on, that her whole life might be spent moping around on chaises longue crying about Pippa. It rendered her separate, chilly, out in the night, on the outside looking into this world of what other women like her were able to attain. So she had kept trying, and as she stole through the streets back to her own flat she kept having the impulsive thought that she could press on even further and try yet again. The barmaid probably felt abandoned.
She got to her flat and collapsed down onto her narrow bed beneath the cracked plaster of the buckling ceiling. How had she let her run come to this? She had run so far she had found herself exhausted, her legs on fire beneath her and a stitch in her side, yet she had not moved at all. Still as ever she found herself gazing pensively at the doorway to the Realms, with no way in. She still saw it in her mind’s eye. She still saw into it and through it and still saw those eyes, those staggering eyes. She fell asleep thinking of those eyes, little rivulets of tears trickling out from her own.
The next morning she did a painting—from memory, freehand, pastel paints—and stood looking at that cameo-ivory face: The perfectly bowed lips, the perfectly domed forehead, the perfectly curved cheeks and chin. It swam up into life within the anatomy of Felicity’s eyes. She could almost see a quirk of a smile there, the lingering aftereffects of a laugh. She had run, she had pressed on, and it had come after her, that face, the Hound not of Heaven but of Faerie. She had shut herself up in adamantine towers with woman after woman—one of them really loved her, it seemed, one she had just ended things with, on the simple and horrific exigency that the barmaid was prettier—but that face had bombed and battered the towers down. (She wasn’t sure she would ever forgive herself for that exigency.)
The bombed and battered towers lay in ruins around her for the next several days as she tried to puzzle through where she ought to go from here. She had friends; people respected her; she was twenty-five years old and beginning to be famous. She was not in want of things to do, things other than love (or its bodily equivalents) to occupy her mind and time. Yet somehow it was a hard and jagged pill to swallow, this fact that she could no longer resist, this knowledge that she could no longer try to move on.
To cease struggling against her grief and let that cessation of struggle therefore free her was hard to sell to herself. For so long the idea of not moving on had been an idea that was of failure, that was of misery, that was of dread and repulsion. She had let it wash over her and splash over her prone form in her mind’s eye many times but always with a view towards getting it gone. She had thought that it had to be sent into the abyss and crushed and made small, this weight that the grief still and this pull that it still exerted on her. She had tried everything that she could think of to paper over that grief but it was still so shallow and so freezing, the fringes of the lake at Spence in winter.
A few days later she sought out that woman she had been avoiding. She found her in one of the salons, and marched up to her, and said “I’m sorry.”
The woman—Amelie, her name was—looked up. “What do you have to be sorry about?” she asked, and then got back to her cup of coffee.
Felicity sighed and sat down across from Amelie. She let her weight down into the chair as heavily as possible. “What I did to you was not right,” she said. “I don’t care that it’s what a lot of people would have done. That should be of no concern to me.”
“Other people would—”
“Other people do any number of things.” She thought back now to classes, to what Spence had put up the picture-perfect claim that it was there for. “I don’t want to act like other people, not really. I should’ve been better to you.”
Amelie raised her eyebrows in skeptical disinterest and took another sip of coffee. Her free arm sprawled down over the arm of her chair. “That’s easy for you to say now, Felicity.”
Felicity lay under some sort of deep obligation that she still did not really understand. At least it was an obligation that she had defined for herself and taken on herself by her own actions within her own heart. That implied that there was something that she had to do for Amelie. She crossed her legs and leaned forward, raising her eyebrows in conspiratorial glee. “The truth is,” she said, “I’ve just realized—I’ve been in love with someone else entirely this whole time.”
The truth really was that she had not at all just realized it. It had been twisting and worming its way around inside her heart for seven years, this thing, this feeling, that held her back and brought her under obligation. That worm had hot fresh blood; it had been there the entire time, lively and vital and terrifying as one of the snakes on Gorgon’s head long ago. It had throttled her, because she had struggled and fought against it, because she had needed the idea that she could escape it in her head in order to continue. She had to find a way to continue without that idea in her head now. Amelie could not help her with that, so she lied that this was a new realization.
“This whole time? Since we were intimate? Since I knew you?”
“Since before I have been in Paris.”
Amelie whistled. “Have you seen her at all? Or him?”
Felicity winced. She hadn’t had those kinds of thoughts about men for a while now, and while she did not mind terribly being reminded that they were there within her, she could not remember ever telling Amelie that she had them and wondered what it was about her that Amelie saw to guess. “Her,” she said, though she qualified with “in this case.” She bit her lip and started to wonder if somebody would be around soon to serve her coffee. “I’ve not seen her. Only in my mind’s eye. I have painted her, many times. I should have realized sooner that I still love her.”
“I was very fond of you,” said Amelie softly, and Felicity was filled with sudden amazement at how selfish it was of Amelie to be saying so right now. It was however a selfishness for which she felt a certain respect and towards which she felt a certain camaraderie and fellow-feeling. Life could be more than this. Selfishness could be more than this. Envy and penitence and mourning could be more than this.
“I’m sorry,” Felicity said. “I do like—I rather like spending time with you. I like it but I ran because I didn’t realize that I had to be kind to you and I had to tell you—to tell you that I was going to respect the feelings I really had.”
“Which are that you still love this woman, and don’t want to move on?”
“That I can’t move on.”
“Have you been trying to?” Amelie asked.
“Of course I’ve been trying to,” snapped Felicity. “Of course I’ve been trying to…” She clutched her forehead. “I have to stop,” she said.
“Stop doing what, exactly?”
“Stop trying to.”
Felicity got up and left the salon without drinking any coffee (she’d have to go talk to the barmaid at some point). It was a surprisingly welcome conclusion to come to and say out loud. Yes, she would stop trying to move on, and that end to her struggle would itself free her. She could stop pretending now, stop pretending that those stunning eyes would ever let her go. She could surrender herself to the rich embrace of what was passed away. If she followed it far enough she might even find her innocence somewhere.