Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“GREAT MAN’S WHORE,” James said to her when they were alone. Her eyes filled with tears but he wasn’t moved. “Just don’t think,” he went on, “just don’t think for a second you’re not as black as black.”

“I don’t think that,” she insisted, “I’ve never thought it. I would be even blacker, if I could.”

“Liar!” James said. They were upstairs standing in the hall of the hotel. Patsy had gone out and Thomas, who was now American ambassador, was at Versailles. Polly was in another part of the hotel with the concierge. “You’re a liar or a fool,” James said, “to wish to be even blacker in this world.” He leaned in so close it frightened her. “Remember this, little sister. He’s not your father or your husband, and never will be. So don’t get into your head any such foolishness. No silly-young-girl ideas. He’s your master, and all his white jism will not make you white enough to be the wife or daughter of a great man.”

Sally turned and ran, crying. She hurried to her own room but, looking at her bed, she could barely stand to be there. So then she ran to James’ room. When he came into the doorway she searched for anything she could throw at him; grabbing his chamber pot, she hurled it. The morning’s piss slopped all over James and the door. “Damn!” James cried, and lunged at her. He flailed at her as she covered her face with her hands. He would have kept flailing but stopped when he realized he’d have to account for the marks on her beautiful face. “Christ, I can’t even hit you,” he said disgustedly, “it would only bruise his property.”

She sat on the edge of his bed glaring up at him. “Oh, don’t let that stop you, James,” she said, “don’t you worry about that. He can’t tell anyway. He comes to me at night and I’m still black enough he can’t see me. So you just go ahead and beat me, because I’m still black enough that he’ll never know.”

In the middle of his room, looking at his sister, James put his face in his hands and let loose a convulsive sob. After a moment she got up from the bed and put her hand on his hair. He pulled her to him and they stood together, the reek of urine rising around them. They spent the afternoon washing down his room and their clothes; they didn’t talk anymore except at one point when James, on his knees scrubbing the floor, suddenly said, “We’re not slaves here.” He said it to the floor that he was scrubbing. She had wet clothes in her arms. When he looked up at her from the floor, she rushed with the clothes down the hallway.

Thomas returned from Versailles the following day. He called Sally and James into his chamber, which was still dark from the. period of his headaches; he was sitting not in his reclining chair but in an upright one, behind a desk. His hands were on his head, and all Sally could see of him was the same red-gold hair she’d clutched so fervently in the night. Thomas told Sally and James he had decided to pay each of them thirty-six francs a month in wages. He said he regretted not being able to pay them more, his debts being what they were. He rose from the desk and walked around the room, his head barely missing the low ceiling; he went on to explain that he’d arranged a tutor for Sally, who would learn French, and for one of the city’s finest chefs to teach James how to cook, so that on returning to America they wouldn’t have to leave behind them the pleasures of Parisian cuisine. Sally could see how her brother wanted to leap over the desk and kill Thomas. She saw it on James’ lips: we’re not slaves here. I could kill you, she knew he was thinking, and in Paris it wouldn’t be a slave killing his master. They might hang me for it, but in Paris it would be hanging one free black man for killing one free white one.

That afternoon Thomas and Sally rode through the city in his carriage, from one clothes shop to the next. Never concerned about his own attire, always wearing old pants and threadbare shirts and coats, Thomas was particular about choosing for Sally dresses that were elegant and simple. He bought shoes for her and an expensive pair of wine-red gloves. Sally wore the gloves in the coach on the way back to the Hotel Langeac. “Do you like them?” he said, the first words that had been spoken intimately between them, and she answered, “Yes, I like them,” and she was astounded at how his face lit up. “They’re beautiful on you,” he blurted, “all of these clothes are lovely on you,” and then, embarrassed by himself, he withdrew into silence.

She didn’t thank him for them. In the time she’d been in Paris she had come to construct the first foundation of who she was. Used as she was by him and abandoned as she was by the rest of them, the only one she could turn to was herself, and when she’d first turned there and found no one, she had no choice but to make a person where nothing but beauty had been. The person she’d made wasn’t going to thank him for a pair of gloves and a couple of dresses. They weren’t compensation for anything; they were the gestures of a man taking care of his possession. That night she wore only the wine-red gloves as she lay naked on her bed. She believed that when he came to her, when he took her wrists to bind them with the blue ribbon that hung on the bed post, the generosity of his having given her the gloves would be desecrated by their sex. Lying for hours on the bed she began to touch herself. It was in the early morning that her door opened. “Sally,” he said to her in the doorway. He’d never spoken on these occasions.

“Yes, Thomas,” she answered. The familiarity of his name shocked both of them.

“I want you to come with me,” he said, and she raised her hand to him from the bed. He took it, and as he pulled her from the bed he could feel the wetness of the glove’s fingertips. She brushed up against him as she stood and looked into his eyes to taunt him.

“Are we going somewhere?” she said.

“Get dressed,” he answered in the dark. Twenty minutes later they were in his carriage again, riding through the city with dawn still an hour away. When Sally shivered in the cold Thomas moved from the opposite seat to sit beside her, a thick blanket pulled up around them. They rode in silence beyond the city walls and then on the road east out of Paris, passing along the way the farms and villages that lay beneath the winter snow. Finally the sun came up over the trees. Sally could see an abbey on the other side of the valley. Sometimes, when she arranged the blanket around her, Thomas looked at the gloves on her hands. As they approached the abbey he broke the silence. “I received word last night,” he said, “that Patsy has requested to join the convent.” He added, “She’s angry with me.” The carriage stopped at the abbey gate. An old stooped abbess trudged wrathfully out into the snow to meet them.

“I’m Patsy’s father,” Thomas said to her in French, stepping from the carriage.

The abbess regarded him coolly. She peered at Sally over Thomas’ shoulder. “Christendom knows you too well, monsieur,” she said. “Your visit is irregular. The girls are already underway with their chores and duties.”

“I’d like to speak to my daughter, please,” Thomas said.

“For a moment,” the abbess answered. She led Thomas and Sally into the church. Sally continued to shiver in the cold. The church was also very cold, its stained windows gray on one side and colors squinting through the ice on the other side where the sun was rising. The abbess and Thomas did not speak. The abbess vanished and Sally sat in one of the pews as Thomas paced up and down the church aisle. When the abbess finally reappeared in one of the doorways, Patsy was with her. Near the altar the abbess hung back, watching. Patsy began to cry when Thomas took her in his arms. He gave her a handkerchief and, after she’d wiped her eyes, she looked at Sally. “You bought her some clothes,” she said in a small voice.