T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Or rather, she encountered him. He was walking down an unfamiliar street near the Gare du Nord at the time, wondering what to do first, and not paying a bit of attention to his surroundings. Should he go out for a meal at any restaurant that struck his fancy, and no one there to debate or belittle his choice? Or have a drink at a café and watch the people stroll by? Or he could go to a show, one of the titillating ones he’d heard so much about at college, or even, if he could work up the nerve, find a little shop where he could purchase a deck of those playing cards with the pictures on the reverse and steal silently back to his rooms to examine them at his leisure before Mrs. van Pele could get hold of him and coax him into singing hymns till bedtime.

Of course, just as keenly as he was tempted, he was struggling with his impure desires, thinking of how pious Mrs. van Pele really was, and what good company, and how generous it was of her to praise his voice, when Mireille Sancerre bumped into him. But this was no ordinary bump, the sort of casual contact one might encounter between acts at the opera or at a gallery or museum — it was a head-on collision, with plenty of meat and bone behind it. One minute Stanley was loping down the street in a daze, and in the next he was entangled, arm-in-arm and breast-to-breast, with a young woman, a female, whose entire repertoire of scents exploded in his nostrils while her huge quivering eyes seemed to burst up out of the depths of her face like buoys pinned beneath the waves and suddenly released. “Oh, monsieur, pardon!” she gasped. “Des milliers de pardons!”

And then, he never understood how, she convinced him in a matter of seconds to throw over every principle he’d ever held sacred and every last drop of the ethical and religious training he’d imbibed since birth, and come with her to her apartment. There were no introductions through mutual acquaintances, no recitations of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning or exchanging of coats of arms, no preliminaries of any kind. Within a hundred and eighty seconds of their encounter, Stanley found himself walking off down the street with this magnificent glossy thing on his arm, this little painted poupée, going he knew not where but prepared to kill anyone who might stand in his way.

“And so,” she said again as the red sheaves fell away from her like the petals of a stripped flower to show all that chilling nullity beneath and the severed breasts and the black bull‘s-eye of hair right in the middle of the canvas, “do you like maybe to watch?” and in that moment her index and middle fingers disappeared inside of her like a magician’s trick, right there in the center of that black bull’s-eye, and he said no, the voice caught like a burr in his throat, no, he didn’t want to watch, he couldn’t watch, he was feeling faint and his blood was rushing like the famous cataract where all the brides and grooms of America went to celebrate their honeymoon and would she please, could she please, turn out the light….

In the morning, he didn’t know where he was — or at first, even who he was. He was a creature of nature, that was all, a pulsating nexus of undifferentiated sensations, and he had eyes, apparently, that opened and saw, and ears that registered the sounds filtering up from the street, and a groin that lived entirely on its own. He saw that he was in a cheap room, cheaply decorated, empty wine bottles on the dresser, discolored plates soaking in a tub on the floor, eggs in a basket, apples, a border of faded crepe tracing the perimeter of the ceiling, female clothes in a heap. For a long while he just lay there staring, and he was outside himself, he was, because there was some dark place inside him that knew what he had done and reveled in it and wanted to snuff it up and snuff up more of it, and he refused to let that dark place see the light.

Finally, after the sun had invaded the curtains to illuminate the foot of the bed and trace a series of parallelograms across the floor, he sat up. He was alone. He’d known he was alone from the moment he’d opened his eyes and begun to absorb sensation like a sponge, but he hadn’t wanted to admit it because to admit it would be the first step in recalling the name Mireille Sancerre. But now he was up and now he recalled that name — it was on his lips like a fatal kiss — and everything he’d done came hurtling at him in a shriek of accusation. He wasn’t wearing any clothes. He was naked. He was naked in a strange woman’s bed — Mireille Sancerre’s bed. Slowly, with the dread and reluctance of the fear that verges on hysteria, he let his fingers creep across his abdomen and touch the hair between his legs, caked and crusted hair, laminated with the juices of Venus, and then, in a panic of hate and renunciation, to his penis.

His penis. It was there, whole and alive, and it began to grow in his hand until he pictured it like some terrible uncontainable thing out of a fairy tale, the beanstalk that would sprout right up through the roof and up into the reaches of the sky, and he snatched his hand away. Oh, what had he done, what had he done? He was venal. Doomed. Condemned to hell and perdition. He wished he was back in college again, back safe in his rooms with his books and pennants and his leather harness — the one he’d fashioned for himself when he first discovered the sin of self-pollution. He was only a sophomore then, but that was the start of it — and this, this was the end, all of life dirtier and progressively dirtier and every one of us an animal rooting in it. The first time he’d ever awakened with the wet evidence of his depravity on the sheets he’d gone right out to the nearest saddlery and brought himself a bridle and a set of leather-working tools. Ignoring his classes, he worked furiously at the thing, working through trial and error and with every particle of his perfectionist’s zeal, until, by suppertime, it was done. Two cuffs for his hands and two for his ankles, joined by the knotted strips of the shortened reins, and he wore it every night, his harness, so that he would never — could never — touch himself while he slept and dreamed or woke in the groggy sensual limbo of dawn. And how he wished he had that harness now….

But it was too late. Of course it was. The damage was done, he’d given way to his bestial instincts and he’d ruined a woman, ruined Mireille Sancerre, and there was only one thing to do: marry her. For the sake of his soul and hers. Yes, of course. The only thing to do. The realization gave him new life, and all at once he was up out of the bed and fumbling for his clothes — but what time was it? He couldn’t seem to find his watch or his stickpin, the one his mother had given him on graduating Princeton, the one with the three winking sapphires she said were no match for his eyes… and then, as he pulled on his trousers and his jacket and felt through all his pockets, he was amazed, in the way of a man staggering out of a train wreck, to find that his wallet was gone too. But of course, he understood in an instant that Mireille Sancerre had taken his things, as a down payment on the mortgage of her ruination, and she had every right to them, every right to everything he owned…. After all, she was the one, the only one: she was his wife.

Stanley stayed on in her room through the hobbled morning and the decrepit afternoon, afraid to show his face on the street, the corruption festering in his flagitious eyes and sensual mouth, and though he was so thirsty he could have crawled a mile for a single drop of water and so gutted with hunger he was like a mad howling carnivore in the jungle, he never moved from the bed. Sometime in the late afternoon he found himself back in the wardrobe in the linen closet on the day before his father’s funeral and there was a rasping harsh voice excoriating him there, a disembodied voice that raked the flesh from his bones, and he couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. The sun shifted, paled, died. At long last, when it was dark, fully dark, he came back to that bed in Mireille Sancerre’s cheap room that smelled of fermenting vegetables and scraps of rotting meat, and he saw his chance. In an instant he was on his feet and leaping at the door he’d been staring at all day, the door that gave onto a gloomy sweat-stinking stairwell, and before he could think he was charging down the stairs, oblivious to the startled faces on the landings and the cries at his back, down the stairs and into the street. He stumbled then and fell, a searing nugget of pain in his left palm and his knee too, but he picked himself up, found his legs and ran, ran till he could run no more.