William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

“I am.”

“I mean others.”

“No.”

“Is anybody coming?”

“No.”

“You see how I still love you?”

“I see the contour of a sunrise.”

“Shall we go to the room?”

“If you like.”

“You’re not enticed.”

“I seem to be.”

“Then say it.”

“The room. Yes.”

We went to her rustic chamber: bed, dresser, commode, basin and pitcher, wallpaper with pink roses on a field of mattress ticking. We shed our garments and I remembered vividly what I felt whenever I took this journey; but I felt none of that now, could not invest my movement with the pelvic arrhythmia she would remember, if she could differentiate mine from others. She perceived the problem and initiated variations on the theme, but while I remained full-blooded, I did so with ice in my heart.

“You’re like a hanged man,” she said. “Erect but dead.”

“I am a hanged man. At the end of my rope.”

“You don’t look dead. You look wonderful. You look like the man I fell in love with at your dinner party.”

“That man is dead. Did you fall in love with your director? And what would he say if he saw you now?”

She was, just then, a moving picture, stirring the air with my verticality as if it were the tiller of a boat in a rowdy sea. My question becalmed her.

“Ah, you’re jealous. How silly.”

She always viewed my objection to her flirtations as the fettering of her soul.

“He knows about us,” she said, “but he assumes we’re a thing of the past.”

“Would this scene convince him otherwise?”

“He’s not important to me the way you are, and he’s not very good at this.” She jostled the tiller. “I told him we had a legal matter to discuss.”

“And so we do.”

“Not now.”

She went to the dresser and found a long strand of pearls, put it around her neck and knotted it so the knot lay in the deep fallaway of her breasts. She straddled the tiller and let the pearls caress my chest, my face.

“Those look like Felicity’s pearls,” I said, and she reacted as if I’d lashed her with a bullwhip.

“Why would you say such a thing?” She knelt up straight, then put one foot on the floor, so beautiful in her angularity, her pudendal equipoise. “You think I stole them?”

“Cully Watson says he didn’t take them, yet they did vanish. Odd he admits the money but denies the pearls.”

“Maybe the police stole them. What do I care? How could you think I took them?”

“I never saw you wear pearls like these before.”

“I loved Felicity’s pearls, so I got my own.”

“Saved your pennies, did you? Giles paid five thousand dollars for Felicity’s.”

“Mine were a gift from an extremely wealthy gentleman. You’re being rotten.”

“Cully contradicts everything you and Felicity told me.”

“Cully!” she screamed. “I’m sick of Cully. He’s a murderer. You take his word over mine?”

“Have you seen his statement?”

“Yes, and he’s a maniac. It’s all lies. all lies! all lies! ”

She was kneeling on a pillow. She stood up, grabbed the pillow, and threw it at me.

“You son of a bitch, you believe him, don’t you! You think I had sex with him! You think I was in the bathtub with Felicity! YOU’RE A MANIAC TOO IF YOU BELIEVE THAT! ”

She threw a box of body powder at me. It missed my head, hit the wall, and showered talcum over the bedclothes. She reached for the toilet water but I wrapped her fury in a bear hug and made her put it down.

“That cape Felicity wore,” I said. “I found the costumier where you bought it. I saw a similar cloak in his display window. He remembered you.”

Her body went limp in my arms. I eased her backward so she could sit on the bed, and she blanched, summoning a stroke, or the black plague, anything to solve this crisis of contradiction. She buried her face in her hands as she had when she wept for the dead horse on the Fourth of July.

“You don’t know anything,” she said.

“I agree with that. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

She fell backward on the bed and stretched her arms over her head, eyes closed, her cave of opulent nuances assisting her in negotiating a new reality.

“I gave Felicity the mask and cloak to wear for you.”

“For me?”

“She wanted you. Wanted to be with you.”

“Felicity wanted me ?”

“For years. She could never tell you.”

“Did it occur to her I might not want her?”

“You’d have wanted her if you saw her in that cloak.”

“I did see her in it. Alive and dead.”

“She had a beautiful body and she wanted to give it to you. I thought you’d like that. I said I’d arrange it. We made a game of how we’d both dress up for you.”

“You never mentioned such a thing.”

“It was new. We talked about it the week before. We wanted to surprise you.”

“But Cully was the surprise.”

“Yes.”

“And he, not I, put you both in the tub.”

“ NEVER! ”

She fumed in silence, stoking herself for an explosion of logic that would defy all argument. I pacified her with gin and in the ensuing half hour she cobbled together her story.

She bought the cloak for Felicity a week before the famous day, she said, kept it in a closet in our apartment (ours for the previous two months; but we were finished, for I’d wearied of her feigned illnesses, her absurd jealousies — over an actress who smiled at me at the theater, or a buxom waitress where we breakfasted — and her rage over these imagined dalliances. That rage would end as irrationally as it had begun: she on her knees asking forgiveness, I touching away her tears and reaffirming my loyalty with prolonged vaginal stroking). Melissa, having seen Felicity arrive in the hotel that morning, took cloak and mask to Felicity’s room, the proposed site of our ménage. She put the garments on a chair but saw no Felicity; nor was she in the bedroom. Melissa called out, “Your wardrobe mistress has arrived,” and from the bathroom came male and female voices, then Felicity’s voice saying she would see Melissa later.

“I left immediately,” Melissa said to me, “telling myself she was always something of a tart.”

“You didn’t hear any fear in her voice?”

“I suppose I should have.”

“Wasn’t that the bathtub rape in progress?”

“ If he raped her. He said he raped me too, but I never set eyes on the man.”

“You never told me any of this.”

“She came to our door in that cloak, crying and carrying her clothes, hiding behind that mask. She cried rape and I let her in. She lied to you about the cloak, but how could she tell you what it was really for? Maybe she still hoped to charm you with it. Tarts are tarts. And yet how could I doubt her? She said he held a knife to her throat, that she even feared for my life when I was outside that bathroom door. I couldn’t tell you this.”

“Not even after her death, to get at the truth?”

“ This is the truth! ”

Melissa stood up and began to dress herself and I too stepped into my clothing, told her I was going back to Albany.

“You make it quite credible,” I said. “I don’t doubt any part of your story. But I’m absolutely certain you’re a virtuoso liar.”

EDWARD ENTERED HIS home and from the hallway he called Katrina. The house replied with a stillness that plummeted him into gloom. He tossed his coat and hat on a chair and went to his library where Katrina would have left him a message, if she had been in a mood to communicate. He saw the letter from Melissa to Katrina, which lay unopened on his desk where Katrina had left it, along with two volumes of her diary for the years 1894 and 1908, their marking sashes emerging, presumably, from pages to be heeded. He pushed Melissa’s letter aside and opened the pages of Katrina’s mind.