Courtney Summers - Defy the Dark

She is perfect where the light is.

In the darkness, I go mad.

It isn’t the heartrending, barefoot madness allowed to my sex, where I wander with bedraggled hair and dying flowers, wailing riddles of loss. My madness is the fierce melancholy of longing. It causes me to sigh through dinner parties and embroider hidden words onto bedclothes intended for part of my dowry. Mother offers excuses when I gaze out the window wishing to run past the horizon instead of making entertaining conversation; and when I don’t demur over tea but laugh at Colonel Chapman’s opinion, Daddy explains that my brother has always encouraged me too much.

But the sun sets. I strike a match and by candlelight don a tight suit of my brother’s. My breasts are easy to bind and I’ve little in the way of hips, as is best for the high-waisted fashions of New York. The vest cuts a lovely line under my black jacket, and pressed slacks I’ve only had to mend once fall perfectly hemmed to the shine of my borrowed shoes. I’ve stuffed them with cut-up stockings. Atop it all is a hat to hide my curls, though they’re short, anyway, to better show off choker necklaces and feathered headbands popular on women these days. And I wear gloves, of course, always gloves to disguise the delicate state of my fingers.

I sneak into Daddy’s library for a pocketful of cigars and five dollars from the hollow Book of Days . Plenty of cash for a single night’s escapades.

In the clubs nobody suspects who I am, because I’m tall enough, handsome enough, and my smoke is more expensive than theirs. I say that I’m a Polonius, let them guess I’m Lars or some visiting cousin. “Call me O,” I say.

“As in Osric?” asks a young man with a scarlet tie.

“As in Oliver?” guesses another with a swirl of his brandy.

I bare my teeth at them around my slim black cigar. Slowly, I pull it from my mouth and let smoke trickle through my teeth. “As in . . .” I lean toward them. “Ohhh . . .” I moan in a low voice.

They laugh and swoon, and from then on at Club Rose I’m called “Oh,” or “Oh, oh, oh!” or sometimes they buy me a drink and suggest other words the initial could represent.

I go once a week when I’m feeling mad, at midnight, to carouse with young gentlemen eager to ignore their home lives or futures or responsibilities, to dance with finely dressed but more common women and listen to the latest Rose. I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to arrive in a dress with my curls slicked to my cheeks and red on my lips. But one of these dandies from uptown might someday be my husband, and wouldn’t that crimp the engagement negotiations?

It’s late autumn, one in the morning. I’ve been here for nearly two hours, because it is oh-so-much easier to escape as winter approaches and the sun sets earlier, when the cold wind from Canada blows into the city, chasing upright citizens inside to fires and family. I can tuck my hat lower, wear a heavier jacket, and no one wonders why I hide my face while I wait at the cabstand two blocks from my family’s townhome.

I sit swiveling on a bar stool, my back to the liquor in order to watch Rose sing a song about steamy first kisses. A young man all in black, from his tie to his gloves, slides next to me and orders a bourbon and ice. He leans his elbows onto the bar, shoulder near mine, and opens a black-lacquered cigarette case. “Light?” he asks, and I lazily oblige without taking my eyes from Rose.

Her dress is the deep color of raw emeralds, with black fringe swaying as she twists her hips. I’m thinking how good she’d look with a tie around her neck when my neighbor asks, “What’s her name?”

I give him a poisonous glance. “Rose.”

He’s beautiful, though, and instead of curling my mouth I’m caught in a stare. All that black makes his skin glow in a ghostly fashion and his wavy hair falls over his forehead without wax to make it shine or slick back. Worst of all, I know him. Halden King, the son of our glorious mayor who died only five months ago.

“I’ve not been here this semester,” he says quietly, “and the last singer was Rose, only with darker skin and smaller tits.”

I take a drag to hide my blush. “They’re always Rose,” I say too harshly. The Roses are my favorite thing about this place, why I picked it over the myriad other downtown nightclubs. The patrons understand some kind of anonymity.

“Why?” Hal takes the tumbler that Tio—the barkeeper—offers.

“They’re here for the pleasure of money and art—names don’t matter.”

“I wish that were true.” He downs half his drink, and the ice clinks hard against the glass.

Leaning nearer to him, I say, “I’ll call you anything you want tonight.”

He studies me, eyes lingering on my mouth as I smile around my cigar. So long I feel a jerk of panic that he sees through my disguise. “Sir,” he murmurs, close enough I notice the strangely spicy smell of his dark cigarette. “You already know who I am.”

“True.” My heart pounds and I can’t decide if I want him flirting with me because he knows what I am or because he doesn’t. “I’m O.”

“Oh,” Hal King says, shaping his mouth around it. He pops his tongue so a ring of smoke escapes.

I laugh, forgetting to modulate my voice, but Hal doesn’t seem to notice how girlish it is. As Rose and the piano pick up, I stand and weave my way toward the dance floor. A girl named Patrice holds out her hand and I catch it. I spin her into the crowd and we leap into the fast fox-trot. She grins and I mirror it, teasingly keeping our hips apart.

Every time I glance toward the bar, Hal is watching me.

At song’s end, I kiss Patrice at the corner of her mouth, and Hal is there, standing beside the parquet dance floor with a tumbler in each hand. “Join me,” he says, and I do, throwing my arm around his shoulders. His free hand snakes around my waist and blood rushes my ears.

I’ve never been so lost in laughing and alcohol and hot, delicious conversation! Hal and I take over a table, and he tells me stories about his late father, about his mother and uncle who married her a mere month past the elder Mr. King’s death. Hal laments into his drink, and I moan and cry protest at the right moments, leaning in to cuss a wild streak about his obviously treacherous uncle. I whisper to him that my father’s said everyone expects Hal’s uncle to run in the next year’s election, and with Mrs. King’s support he’ll get in. Hissing, Hal slumps back into the booth. I gasp at his disheveled beauty and tell him I choose to come here because here I can be whoever I wish, not the person my parents expect.

“We can do anything here, Hal,” I say, and he immediately looks at my mouth.

“Brother,” he murmurs, “you make me believe it.”

I can’t breathe, but Tio yells out last call. Like Cinderella I leap up. “I’ve got to go!”

Hal catches my wrist. “Come back tomorrow.”

Two nights in a row is a thing I’ve never done. It’s too likely Daddy will notice I’m gone, too dangerous to think a cab driver would remember me.

But I say, “Tomorrow.”

Our second night together is more lavish and desperate than the first. Hal arranges a private booth and our own bottle of sixteen-year-old whiskey. Between her sets, Rose joins us, purring lyrics into my ear to make me blush because Hal loves it so. “It makes you seem like a sixteen-year-old virgin,” he says, caressing one long, bare finger down my jaw. “Do you even have a beard yet, O?”

I want to press my face to his and whisper my secret. “You’ve not so much beard yourself, my prince,” I say.