It was weeks before I was able to face him. I heard the quiet gasps and screams. There was the sound of Laurent's shaking voice and Dasius's patient, desperate whispers. I slept in Dasius's office, under the desk, hidden in shadow with a pillow and two of Laurent's long silk dressing gowns, smelling his smell and drifting away into comforting dreams. I dreamed with the foggy, dissolute peace of memory, of events so taken over with nostalgia that they were no longer true. I dreamed of kissing his neck at the opera, sucking his soft skin, hidden by a cloud of his blond hair. I dreamed of the rustle of taffeta gowns and the stroke of peacock feather fans, of scenes two hundred years past, when things seemed less mad. But I know that things have always been mad.
And finally, one evening, when winter had come, I felt hands taking me from under the desk, and it was Laurent, shaking and seeming smaller than himself, face a plaster of concern and frank love. When I opened my mouth to speak he shook his head, brow knit and mouth a puckered line. He boosted me into his arms and I tucked my face by his familiar neck, where I had kissed him so many times. I drew my private, secret section of his carotid with my nose.
He huffed out syllables to me that in my foggy state I didn't hear. I shook my head against his skin.
"Forgive," he said.
"No."
"Forgive," he said, more forcefully.
"But no, my angel," I said, voice shivering with the shock of waking, "what you've done. It is impossible."
"What happened, it has nothing to do with you."
"The gall."
"He has forgiven it."
"I am no slave, me." My eyes were closed against him. I could smell him. He wore no cologne. I made no effort to resist his comfort. Oh, beautiful, rotten fate. He was combing my hair roughly. He was sweeping dust off of my clothes. I refused to look at him, my eyes shut.
"Be lovable," he said, wiping rouge onto my lips with his thumb.
"Shut your whore mouth. I am sick of everything." Ta toi, salop. J'en ai marre.
He went quiet. I felt the soft stroke of his white powder puff on my cheeks. But I was ready to go out. I was ready to pretend I loved him the same as I did in beautiful dreams, to play the child, and he knew.
Outside, snow was falling. I played with his hair while he walked, listening to the click of his heels on the cobblestones. I kissed his collar, and turned up my face to the pale sky. I wondered why he didn't go alone, and then wondered again how he had lost his eyes, and I asked him. He told me, voice soft and sweet, with the earnestness of apology.
He told me a story of going out alone to the new little cafes and coffee houses, the cocktail bars of old Paris. He said that he was angry then, but that it was an exciting time anyway, how everything seemed new then, everything seemed possible, how at the end of the revolution, the whole madness of the city gave old curiousities new life, and how he had been there to catch curious eyes. "Sitting in scrolling chairs out of doors," he said, quietly, "legs crossed and flirting with innocents in the open air. My God, they loved the bite. Nicky, imagine how free they were."
"Go on."
He talked of hands, of wandering fingers, of pearl buttons and pulled hair, of hot mouths on cool skin, of the way a thin rivulet of blood looks pooled in the hollow between collarbones, spoke names of lovers I had never known, of Dasius in his study taken into dark rooms and forced to kiss pretty boys, of feigned resistance and real devotion, and it lit him with fever. I felt the quickness of his pulse against my cheek, my fingers tangled in his hair. "That sort of passion," he said, "it breeds fools who forget to be careful. There is an agency to love, which throws reason out. There was a young man in old clothes, but his body was long and I imagined him made mine as always, how easy it would be."
Laurie said that he was upset at Dasius, about what? He couldn't remember.
"I was alone when it happened, without your brother, who has protected me," Laurent said, his voice plaintive, begging for my forgiveness for his very self, who is too passionate. "The boy, sweet young thing, wanted to touch me, so I let him touch me. He wanted to kiss me, so I let him kiss me. But when I wanted to unbutton his collar, he put his knife in my eye." Laurie touched his right eye. "Oh Christ, I thought, What's happened? Oh Christ. And he said something about money and I thought, Money? Blood of God, money? and I whispered to him to take anything, all of me, please, oh sacred heart, take all of me, I have nothing, I am nothing, take it, but I couldn't speak. Nicky, I could taste my blood in my mouth, and he knocked me to the ground then, and put his knee on my belly and I couldn't hear him at all, and then he put that little knife in my other eye, and twisted it. I wanted it, too. Oh, I thought, just stab me and stab me until the whole great world is gone as well, put your knife into me until there's nothing else but pain, let me go away from this, from everything there is, but he was gone, fled, and I lay there. And your brother came, and beautiful Dasius, beautiful, devoted Dasius, put some others in, blood bleeding terrible human eyes, the wrong color and growing rotten with time. How I wish for time to pass, so that I will know what I should do."
By then we were standing, leaning against a garden fence, because his legs were weak, and I took his face in my hands and licked his tears away. "Mad, gorgeous, wonderful," I whispered.
He was shaking, desperate to be win forgiveness.
"Now tell me where you come from, and I shall forgive you for everything."
And he did, his nose pressed against my forehead, in a tone hushed by despair, like a scolded schoolboy confessing under the rod. Because he knew I knew then that he had used me for revenge against Dasius for not being there when the knife came, that he had neglected to tell me my brother had not butchered him when he knew I would go for Dasius under that assumption. He had let me think Dasius had dug his eyes out, and used me as a weapon of revenge for an imagined sin a century gone. So I listened to his story under the gently falling snow, lulled by the intimacy of hot breath in cold air, and when he surprised me, I made no sound. And believe me, I remember every word, because I am a keeper of secrets. I tell you now only because he is dead.