She looked at him. “I know it’s hard. I know he did terrible things to you. You have to forgive now. Unless you do, he can’t forgive himself.”
“You tried to kill him.”
“And then I stopped. I couldn’t do it. Something in me changed. I couldn’t hurt a fly, now.”
“Once you would have done anything for me. You made me a promise.”
“I was another person. Another person made that promise.”
“And that’s it?”
Her eyes flashed. “What do you need that you don’t have? You have his love. You have his money. You have his attention. Make something of that. Make a life for yourself.”
He touched the hem of her dress. Fire shot through his fingers and up his arm. He touched her shoe.
“Don’t do that.”
“It means nothing? Nothing at all?”
“It means nothing. Don’t do it.”
He got up and walked away, the heels of his shoes sounding on the marble floor. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was going to do.
She couldn’t mean it. She couldn’t separate her long past from her present as easily as that. She couldn’t deny what they had been to one another, the things they had done, the plans they had made.
He sat in his room and drank brandy. If he wasn’t going to have his father’s death, he wanted his old life. She couldn’t turn her back on the pleasures of the vices as easily as that. He wanted her. It went off like a gunshot to his brain, and after that he knew nothing. It was all darkness after that.
He walked swiftly back through the corridor and down the long steps. He walked through the great hall under the Venetian chandeliers and into the conservatory. She was still sitting, but she knew he was coming, she must have known, because she had put down her sewing. She sat quiet and calm, waiting for him, her eyes large, the mixed desires she felt written on her face.
He grabbed her hands. She pulled away. He grabbed her arms and pulled her up to him. He pressed himself against her, the full length of his body against the full length of hers, his mouth on her mouth, his hands around her, moving across her shoulders through the fabric of her dress. She was trembling.
She pulled away. “Antonio. Don’t do this. I’m begging you.”
“I have to. I’m so sorry. I have to.”
He kissed her again. He put his hand up along her face, while with his other arm her pulled her close to him. He put his hand beneath her dress, he felt her skin, her warm smooth skin, and the fire was in him and he knew there was no turning back. She wanted this. She had to remember, and she had to want it. He said it over and over to himself.
Then he lost all thought, he lost the ability to think and became pure motion as his mouth and hands took her back to the days and nights in his room in Saint Louis, the days when she had been somebody else, somebody who lived for her body and its delights, somebody who gave herself because she had no care for who or what she was. She had laughed, then, she had been scornful of the ordinary world with its ordinary moral scruples, and he had been part of that, her diversion, her own wild love. They had been twins in their desires, rising and falling on each other’s breath, and he had covered her body with kisses, and there was no part of her that was not his.
She was the delight and the agony of his youth, yet she had not mattered, he now realized. She was only the portal to this sensation of being lost, of floating unmoored high above the earth, and he wanted that back again. It was as close as he could come to death.
She was new. She was a stranger. It was as though she had come to him in disguise, the trappings of her old life gone, the dress and hair and clean face of her new life a costume she had put on to amuse him.
She struggled against him. She fought, and this too drove him on, made him feel unbound. He could have her when she didn’t want him. He’d done it before. When she was angry with him, he could still have her. When he had been too rude or too drunk or too late, she would still come creeping into his room while he slept and lie down beside him and let him take her, because she had nowhere to go, because she believed that her life was in the gutter and he was the gutter in which she lived.
He tore at his shirt, and her hands scratched at his body, her nails drew blood, and she started to scream, to call Mrs. Larsen. He held his hand over her mouth and lifted up her skirt, tearing at her stockings and her underclothes until her flesh was beneath the palm of his hand. Then things grew calmer. He breathed more gently. For just a second, there was no sound except the twittering of birds, as his hand moved toward her sex, as he covered her mouth and she didn’t make a sound.
He took his hand away from her mouth and kissed her, violated her mouth with his tongue and bit at her lips and still she didn’t make a sound, still she stood twisting beneath his arms, but soundlessly, only the rustle of her skirt on the floor, only the sound of the flapping wings of the birds and the rustling of the palm fronds where the birds alighted. He kissed her eyes, the skin of her forehead. He licked her face and bit at the lobes of her ears. It felt as though he were on fire.
He needed her to want him. He needed her never to have gone away, never to have abandoned him in this insane scheme they had concocted, never to have slept with his father. She was his lover. His. She was the desire of his childhood, the woman on the trolley car, the young girl in the restaurant, the whore at the end of the dark street.
He ripped at her dress, and it tore open in his hands, two quick pulls and it was open. He tore at her thin camisole until he could see her breasts, the dark nipples full and erect. He fell to his knees and pulled her forward, her breasts in his mouth, his teeth biting her nipples. He knew he was raping her. He knew this was not her will, not what she wanted, and he found that erotic as well.
He tore at fabric, and he saw the dark triangle of hair. She was still standing, her hands on top of his head. His hair was wild, it was slick with sweat from the exertion of doing this thing he didn’t want to do, this thing he had to do to bring himself one step closer to his own death.
She was crying now, and he could hear her breath coming in and out as she cried, and he rose and licked the tears from her face as he undid his pants and pushed himself into her, against her will and he knew it and didn’t care. She wasn’t Catherine anymore. She was someone he didn’t know, and he didn’t care if he hurt her or defiled her or made her ashamed. She was the last one; this was the last time. He would never see her again.
She stabbed him twice. She stabbed him with her sewing scissors out of a basket on the arm of the chair. She stabbed him in the back and then she stabbed him in the shoulder when he lurched back in shock. Her dress hung open in the front, her skin exposed; her camisole was a rag around her naked torso, just beginning now to round, to show a fullness. Her body arched forward as she howled in pain and rage and despair.
“Why?” was all she screamed. “Why?” Again and again.
Now he began to cry, blood pouring from his shoulder and his back, he howled in pain for all that was lost, everything that was broken now for good, everything he could never get back. He had wanted something, but now he couldn’t remember what,
“He killed my mother! I saw it!”
“He didn’t, Antonio. That never happened.” Drawing her ruined dress around her, trying to hold it closed with one hand and sweep her hair away from her face with the other, her eyes dry now, her mouth hard and unyielding and her voice hard, too, hard and filled with the truth.
“He let her die. She was sick, Antonio. You dreamed it. You imagined it so much, out of hatred, out of… I don’t know, out of something, that you thought it was real, but it wasn’t. She was sick. She was alone and dying, and he took you to see her and she didn’t even know your name, and he turned his back on her and walked away and in that, yes, he killed her, but not the way you think.”
“No!”
“Yes. And he has spent a lifetime regretting it, wishing he could have felt otherwise, but he didn’t, and he let her die and you have to let her die, you have to let her die in peace and not look to find her, not wonder where she is. She’s gone, that’s all. She was always gone. Long before she was dead.”
He was bleeding badly. He was in pain. He didn’t care. He fell to his knees and buried his head in her ruined skirt and wept, wept for himself. And then they heard the sound in the door. They heard Truitt’s footsteps in the hall, but it was too late. Her dress was ruined, Antonio’s blood fell to the marble floor and Truitt would know everything that had happened, and know, too, that he had finally been betrayed beyond his ability to endure it.
Then he was standing in the door. Then he knew.
