Eva’s foot thumped against Julia’s shin. “Why did he have to do that? I thought he’d never know. Now he thinks I betrayed him.” She pressed both hands over her mouth. “Oh Lord.”
“He might return it if you promise to take out that rape scene,” Julia said. The book was still only in manuscript. If Timson feared readers would guess he was the novel’s rapist, he might not object if she deleted the most repugnant scenes.
“What?” Another frown curdled Eva’s forehead. “It’s too late. I can’t, anyway. Pablo thinks it’s the most important part.” She took a powerful drag. “Damn damn damn damn. He’ll be so angry.”
Who would be angry? Timson? Pablo? Goldsmith? Puzzled by the shifting pronouns, Julia watched Eva inhale the calming fumes. She remembered Eva’s fearful glances toward Jerome and the stony countenance that refused to meet them. Maybe it was Jerome’s anger she feared. Like so many women, Eva saw her lover’s brilliance, not his demons. Men like him always had demons.
“It’s so unfair,” Eva said. “Jerome writes beautiful poems and gets a drawerful of fancy awards with ten-dollar prizes. But it’s nothing to what people pay to see my titties. That’s really what Pablo wants too. Only he wants it in writing. Even in books, they think Negroes are best for this.” She patted her crotch. “Not decent things, not fine, decent literature.” She pronounced the word with four syllables.
“Then just go,” Julia urged. “Get away from this place. Worry about Goldsmith’s contract later, once you’re safely across the Atlantic. Maybe you could write another novel there. He’d have to wait, but at least he’d get what he paid for. Are you working on anything else?”
Eva squeezed her lips together. Nothing. “I suppose I could try. But wouldn’t that be dishonest? Like stealing?”
Julia felt a sting of surprise. Goldsmith had witnessed Timson’s crime; surely he’d understand Eva’s predicament, that she was the victim, not the thief. Eva’s concern for honesty seemed a dubious virtue in the circumstances, like patriotic honor to those soldiers flinging themselves over the trenches at Gallipoli. Didn’t protecting yourself come first? Wasn’t that more important, more morally imperative, than the harsh laws demanding all debts be paid?
Eva took a quick, deep breath. “No, I’ll just have to ask him. Leonard’s not afraid of my book, not really. He only made that stink because he heard Mr. Goldsmith wants it, and he hates to think I might work for anyone else. Like he owns me or something. But I know what he likes. If I beg right, he’ll give it back.”
She lifted her arm and touched the greenish thumb-shaped bruise emerging above her elbow, visible through her sheer chiffon sleeve. “This will help.”
An image of that unspeakable rape in Eva’s novel swept unbidden into Julia’s mind. Was it true? Had that actually happened? “Does he . . . ?” Julia hesitated before choosing the least ridiculous euphemism she could think of: “Does he force himself on you?”
Eva’s forehead puckered, the first harsh expression Julia had seen her make. But before she could answer, the toilet erupted in a noisy flush. Over its rush of water they heard Dolly’s muffled exclamation. “Jeesh!” And a moment later, “Doll, you’re a mess! Jeesh!”
Eva pushed two fingers up from the bridge of her nose, smoothing the furrows in her forehead. “I can’t think about this now. I have to get ready.”
She lowered her feet to the floor and watched the transfer of weight, as if uncertain they would hold her. Without a murmur of modesty she slipped off her gown and let it fall across the bed. She wore nothing beneath it but the gold loincloth. Where the halter had been were etched raw grooves across her collarbones and reddish slashes alongside her breasts. She crossed to the dressing table’s white padded bench. She switched on both lamps flanking the table and peered at her reflection in the huge mirror looming like a vacant halo before her.
Julia was not new to public, even casual nudity. In London and Paris she’d frequented avant-garde theaters and cabarets. She’d observed models sitting for painters and had once briefly modeled herself. She saw beauty in the honest human form, freed from the sheer volume and poundage of Victorian modesty. But this was different.
Eva’s body had a false pallor to it. Her skin looked waxy, dull, with the artificial sheen of something lifeless. Except for the chafed stripes, her torso was a single tone, molded by layers of stage paste as if she were a mannequin. In contrast the areolae of her breasts—stained or painted a garish dull black—seemed frightening, brutal. Onstage her body had looked elemental, a gilded Venus, but here was only the artifice. She’d become a kind of high-style Hottentot, a carnal exotic wrapped in chiffon, satin, and ruby lipstick: styled by men and for men. She’d been made into a caricature of everything female, effacing everything human. Eva the person was as submerged beneath this costume of sculpted flesh as she’d been by yards of chiffon and hollow chains.
“I’ll get it back,” Eva said matter-of-factly, examining the pink welt beneath her cheekbone. “Even if Leonard’s a beast, I’ll get it back.” Raising her right arm, she peered at the bruise. “I’ll do whatever it takes.” She mouthed a silent Paris and smiled at Julia in the mirror.
She shook lotion from a tall opaque jar onto her palm and feathered it over the red blotch on her cheek. A fine layer of face powder followed. She twisted to check the results from several angles, inhaled, and, apparently satisfied, arched her shoulders. Then she clapped her hands softly and poured more yellow lotion into her palm. With long circling strokes she smoothed it onto her shoulders, arms, breasts, and down over each hip, under the lip of her gold loincloth. Hidden beneath it was an odd pattern of five pea-size scars on her left
