◊
Do you suppose I was anything more than a phantom to myuniversity classmates? And less, to all the sweet-faced and cultivated girlswho brushed past me nearly soundlessly at parties, opening their mouths only toutter appropriate remarks at modest intervals. I will admit now, in the privacyof our hospital room, that sometimes I would find these suitable girls in theshadow of the stairwell and disprove their innocence—nothing ruinous, onlykisses, trying to locate on their necks or foreheads a lifted vein, trying toreopen the wound that festered within me. My advances were clumsy, and I alwayssaid your name either by mistake or on purpose, the syllables slipping loose. Itold you, Isabella, always you are there. I met a girl with what they term agood head on her shoulders. She was a Jesuit, she was pale and dark-haired. Isuppose I must have been thinking then that I could possess some part of you. Iasked if she was convent-bound and she said, “I thought you were going topropose marriage to me,” and then, without trying, without meaning it in theleast, I did.
The first of your letters came shortly afterward. I havethem all, bound in black ribbon, the soft chalky odor of myrrh clinging to thepaper. Do you remember the poetry you would write me? Desperate words, thetails of the letters coiled like sea serpents, but the particulars don’tmatter. You meant, I am assured, what you said. They tell me you were caged inthe depths of the house by then, a dark corridor directly beneath an airywhite-floored room where hothouse lilies bloomed year-round. Rats scurried withrepulsive liberty from the latticed door to the subterranean tunnels in whichthey conducted their inglorious rodent lives, and only you dwelled in thebetween shade-colored world where neither rats nor humans wished to linger.
At first they sent you meals on porcelain dishes, delicatespoons and silk napkins and full tea service. But you had to earn those things,and the conduct books too, and the abridged copy of Clarissa, and thenightgown in good sturdy material so you wouldn’t be too cold. The moreprivileges they revoked, the more passionately you adored me. Tear me looseyou wrote with the o’s curled ribbon-like into one another, the spressed fetally against the e. I would hold them and then I was inMarseille again, beneath the boardwalk. “A seagull will choke,” I was saying.“I don’t care, I don’t care, you were telling me.” You were beautiful and bleakand terrifying. I shut my eyes and could see you, unveiled, hyacinths sproutingthrough the stone floor at your feet. It was that image which brought me to thehouse at Christmas. I was engaged to be married. I was five years pastMarseille. I reread your letters on the train: not the words, but thehandwriting. You looped your l’s like I did. I had a broad-tipped blackpen, and I crossed out, one by one, all your troublesome mentions of the word nunnery,until there were no more.
◊
I reached the house at night and thought at first that thetaxi must have gotten it wrong: this collapsing pile of wreckage was not thehouse of my childhood summers. I wore dove grey and white, costumed as my frailboyhood. My fist shook when I went to knock on the front door.
A Christmas tree had been stuffed into one corner of thegreat room, ornaments and garland hung dutifully, but your aunt was alone andage-stooped and something had caved within her. I could see on her face whatshe and you had done to each other. “Take off your shoes,” she said, “if itisn’t too much of a bother.” She had tea waiting for me in the observatory. Istood before the windows and saw how the garden was buried in a three-day-oldmass of snow.
“It’s cold downstairs,” I said across the brim of a teacup,and she knew I was thinking of you in your underground prison, and we soundlesslycalculated each other across a coffee table until she said she would go to bed.You cannot have known these things occurred, above your head, while you pacedthe confines of your cell and dreamed of rats and nightgowns and the plot of Clarissa.I almost had you lower than me then. I could perhaps have seen you love meback. I came close then, if ever I did. But that wasn’t the you I knew to love.I crept down the staircase barefoot, maiden-like; I was still wearing my whiteclothes, I was still inside a house that wasn’t mine. And there you were,nothing like I remembered. And the bile rose in me, the hideous consumptivefeeling of homecoming, and I pushed my body into the iron bars until the coldseeped inside me, because it was almost like holding you again.
We have never been since as we were then. There was a frigidperfection to how we loved in that subterranean grave. Poets have ruminated onjust this sort of thing, but they have only been able to make vague gestures atwhat I knew with certainty, for no man has ever loved a thing like you besideswhatever man was your father and whatever man dares to love the one who comesafter you. But we haven’t reached that yet. We must maintain some sort oforder. Let me remember you: unveiled, wearing a nightgown thin as onion-flesh.Blood glistening on your face, putrid overflow creeping free from yourgarments. You were not a woman, you were a blade held to the hollow of mythroat. My pulse thundered for you.
You were not speaking much by then and you had lost theability to read, or pretended you had. I carried a candle downstairs and readto you in the shaky golden light, watching the shadow of the flame leap inragged lines across the text. You tried to make a veil for yourself out ofwriting paper. You wailed and wailed and some nights the sound remained in meeven when I retired to my bedroom, three floors up, on the other side of thehouse. I
