The Binding Chair (12 page)

The candle, relit, blew out again, and instead of groping for matches, he lay next to her, singing in Russian.

“What do they mean?” she asked. “The words.”

But he wouldn’t translate. “It’s not good, to answer every question.”

“Isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “Not conducive to love.”

Alice wheedled; he didn’t relent; she offered certain payments for information, fingers hinting as to what these might be; he was obdurate; she flounced out of bed. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Don’t.” But she’d stalked over to the window and to its view of the sea. He got up as well, pulled on a dressing gown.

Alice was leaning naked out of the open window, and the moonlight fell on her back, made it luminous, so white it was blue. Evlanoff put his left hand on her waist; with his right he guided himself back inside her. She drew in her breath, and for a moment, neither of them moved, they stared out into the night. It was late enough that the city slept, they could hear the waves as they turned over on the beach. The wind had unknotted one end of the tobacconist’s awning, and it flapped furiously, dropped, and then sailed up again, a striped wing.

On a bench overlooking the beach was the solitary figure of a woman, next to her a bag or a bundle. Brave to be out alone in the dark, Alice was thinking. To be a woman sitting alone in the cool air. Contemplating the light on the water, or perhaps just listening to the noise of it, eyes closed.

“What are you looking at?” Evlanoff asked. “What do you see?” Slowly, he began moving inside her.

Alice held on to the sill. “Nothing.” She moved against him, off tempo for a moment before finding the stroke. A picture of herself at eight or ten, trying to skip into the turning rope, catching it between her knees, clumsy. One end tied to the plane tree’s trunk, the other in Uncle Arthur’s hand, May watching from her chair.
Try again. There, you’ve got it, just don’t lose the
 … Alice put her forehead on the windowsill. “See what you’ve done,” she said, in answer to Evlanoff’s moan. “I’ve forgotten the word.”

He paused, breathing. “What … word?”

“The yes word. Swahili for yes.”

Passersby could see them, if they looked up. But there were so few, and they looked straight ahead, intent on a late destination. Even at the nearby Negresco, pouring yellow light onto the pavement, the doormen were looking at each other rather than out into the street. The one on the right chopped the air with his hand, making a point. Evlanoff pulled back too far and slipped out of her. When he thrust forward again, the tip of his penis had moved, ascended. It bumped against the tightly furled muscle of her anus.

“Oh,” she said. “You’ve lost your way.”

He stepped back. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” She reached back, felt for him. “Why are you?”

“I don’t want … it might hurt.” He held his hands on her hips, not moving.

“Try. See. If it does, I’ll tell you.”

Once inside her, he stayed still, still and hard, growing harder. She could feel his pulse. It quickened her own, to feel his heart beating there. He didn’t start to move until after she did, her fingers exploring herself and him, too: the angles of this new geometry.

“
Ndio,
” she said.

“You … remembered.”

“
Nnnn. Diiii. Ohhhh. Ndio.
” Alice laughed; she did sometimes, after she came, a little something for him to get used to. Evlanoff tried, unsuccessfully, to restrain his growls. Afterwards, he was barely more articulate. “Did you …? Was it …” He faltered. “You liked it? That.”

She turned around. “I mightn’t with anyone else. With you, whatever you do just makes me love you more.”

“But,” he said, “that was something you did.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then, whatever I do just makes me love you more.” She retied the sash on his robe, lay her cheek on its slippery lapel. “If your family were still living, they’d disapprove of me.” Evlanoff said nothing. “They would, wouldn’t they?”

“Perhaps.”

“Because I’m a Jew?”

He put his lips to her hair. “They would think you wanted to buy a title.” Alice was silent. “Aren’t you cold?” He offered his pajama shirt to her, and she took it, buttoning it unevenly, so that the two sides of the collar didn’t align. She frowned; her eyes had their narrow, stubborn look.

“Does she need to get an X ray first?” she asked, as he undid the shirt and rebuttoned it.

“You’re speaking of the shoes? Your aunt?”

“Yes.”

Evlanoff drew his fingers through the dust on the windowsill. On it were imprints of Alice’s flank, her hands and forehead. “Why is it that … that woman is forever finding her way into my bedroom?” He turned away.

“Don’t be insulted. Please.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” Alice hesitated. “Aren’t there always more than two people in a bedroom?”

He looked back at her. “I don’t think so.” Scratched his chin through his beard. “I didn’t invite any.”

“But surely I remind you … I … Other people must come into your mind.”

“Never.” He laughed, a low laugh, the kind he laughed at himself when choosing to be amused rather than angry. Hurt. “You don’t put me in mind of anyone. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“Really?” Alice said the word again: “Really?” She frowned, and now her eyebrows were drawn together and upward; the expression conveyed both wariness and surprise. “I always seem to be reminding people of someone. I’ve grown resigned to being the kind of woman people mistake for—”

“For what?”

“For someone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” Alice put her hand on his chest. “I’m sorry. Please don’t be insulted.”

He nodded slowly. “All right. I think.” Then he sighed, loudly enough that it wasn’t just a sigh but also a reconciliation: he was making fun of himself, his sensitivity. When he spoke again, it was about May.

“It would be better, of course, to have X rays. But Dumonteil can work from impressions alone.”

“I’ll take her.” Alice pressed her lips together, truculent in advance of any contest. “I’ll get her to go. She will if I insist.”

“But why? Why insist? If she’s not willing …”

“She doesn’t understand.” Alice shook her head. “Half the trouble with her is her feet. If she could walk more easily. If she could
walk
. Life wouldn’t seem so … impossible. She’d—She’d be less bad-tempered. With me.”

Evlanoff took Alice in his arms. “And what happens,” he said, “if this doesn’t work? If she still rages and despairs? Comes uninvited into your head, and my bedroom?”

“Then I’ll have been proved wrong.” Alice looked up at Evlanoff, the clean margin of cheek above his beard. What a naturally distinct line it drew, the angles of his face as sharp and tidy as if he shaved. But he didn’t. Once or twice a week, a judicious trim, using whatever scissors came first to hand—nail scissors would do. The small sink over which he barbered himself was sprinkled with dark hairs that inevitably escaped the bowl’s confines, insinuated themselves into Alice’s lipsticks and powders and creams. She complained about this; she came to him petulantly when a hair got into her eye. “Can’t you be more careful? Why won’t you rinse them down?” But she liked any reminder of their intimacy, even sharp little itching ones. Once he’d used his tongue to retrieve from under her red lid what turned out to be an eyelash. Delicately, he transferred it from tongue’s to finger’s tip. “Unjustly accused,” he said, holding it out for her to see.

Alice put her cheek back against his chest, stared out the window. “Shoes would have to help,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “How could they not?”

O
UTSIDE
, hunched on the black wrought-iron bench, the small, eccentrically dressed figure held her arms before her chest as if fending off an attack. She was counting backwards in an attempt to slow down her anxious breaths.
Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen
, when I get to
one
, I will be calm. I will think clearly. I will make a decision.

It was a warm, dry night, but Suzanne Petrovna was wearing high boots and two sweaters, a wool coat. In her head, she subtracted and resubtracted one number from another. Not that there was any point in it; she hadn’t enough money for even a third-class ticket back to Paris.

She’d arrived in Nice the previous month, on the advice of her physician. She’d had pneumonia that spring, and had not regained her strength. Even on the sunny coast, she wheezed as she walked. The round pebbles of the beach seemed as big as boulders as she picked her way toward the water; she barely had the energy to bathe in the blue sea. And on top of everything, she’d been a fool and left her money in her room at the pension and come back upstairs from breakfast to find it missing. A stupid mishap. She’d moved the bills from one hiding place to another so many times—from her purse to beneath her bed’s mattress, from there to behind a picture frame, then into the toe of her boot—she’d lost track; she’d gone down to breakfast thinking she had her money with her, back in the pocket of her purse. All she’d brought with her, all the money she had in the world, was gone. The owner of the pension had been no help; he’d berated her for implying that the chambermaids were dishonest.

Since ten o’clock this morning, Suzanne had been without anyplace to go or to stay, wearing as many of her clothes as possible, so that she wouldn’t have to carry them. She’d pawned her mother’s amethyst necklace and received fifty-five francs, which so far had afforded her a glass of orangeade and several hours of useless calculations. Then, at teatime, sitting on the same bench she occupied now, she’d been approached by a very astonishing woman, an Oriental in a sort of a litter carried by two old men. The woman had introduced herself as May-li Cohen, an unlikely-sounding name, but there it was on the calling card she’d given to Suzanne. The woman had written her telephone number and address on the other side. “In case you should need it,” she said.
Odd. What an odd person
, Suzanne had commented to herself after she departed.

But then, I suppose I am odd, she thought. I suppose that I am. She was nearly fifty-four years old. Her hair was still auburn, but it was thinning. She had never been in love. She looked at her feet. The only conclusion that could be drawn from shoes such as her own was that the woman who wore them had given up on romance. Before her, the sea opened endlessly. This wasn’t so bad during the day, when the faintly curved line of the horizon implied a boundary, however illusory, but it was horrible at night, when the licking black waves merged into the black sky.

A gendarme stopped before her. “Madame?” he inquired. “It’s past the hour for a lady to be out unaccompanied. Perhaps—”

“I’m just taking a breath of air,” Suzanne said, her lie made the more obvious by the worn tapestry bag at her side.

“Yes,” the gendarme said, as if humoring a child. “Can I be of assistance?”

Inside her pocket, Suzanne felt the edges of the card on which the Oriental had written her address. It was after eleven o’clock, too late to arrive unexpectedly, even at the house of a friend. And May-li Cohen was not a friend of Suzanne’s. Still, where could she go?

“
Les voyoux. Les voleurs.
” Hoodlums and pickpockets. “The casinos, they attract all sorts. You will, I’m afraid, be prey to unsavory characters.”

Silently, she withdrew the card and handed it to the gendarme.

“Mme. Cohen’s?” he said, with what sounded to Suzanne like amusement. And then he sat down on the bench next to her and laughed, not unkindly.

“Well, yes,” he said. “
Bien sûr
. Why not? Come along then.” He picked up her bag, and she got up to follow him.

A V
ISIT FROM THE
F
OOT
E
MANCIPATION
S
OCIETY

A
RTHUR AND
M
AY MET ONE EVENING IN
1899. Afterwards, he was sure it was a Monday, the twelfth of June; May thought the fourteenth, a Wednesday. Expecting an overnight guest, she received him in her room on the fifth floor. What light there was came from under a dark shade. There was a smell of gardenias; an amah offered Arthur two trays, one with an opium pipe, the other with a teapot. He declined both.

“Are you difficult to please?” May asked.

“I beg your pardon.” Arthur took hold of his left earlobe and gave it a series of impatient tugs. “I’m a little hard of hearing.”

At Chiverly House School, in Melbourne, Australia, Dolly’s brother had been whipped. He’d been strapped, caned, and flogged. His ears were boxed so often and so violently that he developed tinnitus, a ringing in his ears that had never subsided.

Of course, many people hear what others can’t. They pray and hear answers; they sing and hear music; they hear their names called out in warning or whispered in secret messages. But what Arthur heard was a relentless, shrill whistle, like the noise of an approaching siren—except that it never arrived but trilled on, on, on, growing sometimes louder, sometimes softer, according to its own illogic and to certain aggravations. Fever made it worse; so did headache powders, as well as coffee, tobacco, chocolate, and drinking cold drinks too quickly. If he managed not to pay attention, it receded; but if he was listening for something, a bell or a signal, a song or a voice, it drew near, it blocked out whole registers of sound.

He was twenty-six. He hadn’t been able to read law, hated literature, was hopeless at mathematics. Pressed by his father, he had pursued architecture, and it fled from him. His drawings all listed, each line leaning off the page as if refusing to be fixed in the company of that vexatious, ringing, buzzing jangle of a noise. Since disembarking in the city of Shanghai—for a protracted visit with his sister, Dolly, and her new husband, one that had lasted, so far, nearly a year—Arthur had spent hours going for long walks, up and down the streets and even into the countryside, where the natives regarded him, not incorrectly, as just another British eccentric pursued by his demons.

“I asked if you were difficult to please,” May repeated.

Arthur answered by telling May that what had happened to her—he indicated her feet with a pained gesture—was immoral.

May looked at him sharply, blew air from her nose in an exasperated gust. “Immoral?” she said.

Arthur nodded, vehement. “Wrong.” He explained himself as a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, his first philanthropic association since having arrived in China. “You’ve been badly used,” he told May.

May smiled. “Really?” she said.

“Yes. Look at you. You’re lame.”

May leaned back into the cushion of her velvet chaise longue. She looked at the red-haired man standing before her, at his wide, round blue eyes, his black coat with its too-short sleeves that revealed wrists also sprouting red hair. She had encountered them before, the Foot Emancipationists; they hosted tea dances in the big hotels. During the orchestra’s breaks, they delivered homilies and passed a gleaming silver collection plate. Shouldn’t every woman waltz? Shouldn’t she, if she felt so inclined, leap, pirouette, even skip? The Chinese women in attendance, those few cosmopolitains who mingled with the Europeans, tucked their feet further under their chairs.

“What need have I to walk?” May asked. “I have boys who walk for me.” And before Arthur could answer, she called her amah back and asked for her pipe.

Oh, dear, a zealot, a reformer, a do-gooder: one of the inevitable drawbacks of her profession, and of Shanghai, crawling as it was with missionaries. Arthur sat with his hands on his knees, looking at May. His earnestness, his coat that looked as if he’d inherited it from someone else: both of these irritated her. Once again, here was a useless sort of foreigner, a man with big ideas and little money. She’d have to get rid of him; then she could go to bed and read.

“Unwrap them!” she said, suddenly and frantically angry, as she hadn’t been for years. Her voice shook with rage.

“I beg your pardon?” Arthur stammered.

“Unwrap my feet! Or one! Unwrap one!” May pulled up the hem of her blue cheongsam, a garment that had confused Arthur when he entered her room: its color matched that of her chaise so perfectly he couldn’t tell where woman ended and furniture began. She unfastened her left shoe and thrust her foot out at him, the end of its white bandage untucked, dangling.

Arthur hesitated for a moment, and then he kneeled. He took the end of the linen and began to unwind. It seemed to go on endlessly, dizzyingly. He was astonished to find that with every layer he removed he grew that much more eager to see beneath the next. Having missed the Emancipation Society’s indoctrination meeting and the lecture by Dr. Fallow, the surgeon who explained the crippling fractures of the binding process, handing around radiographs of ankles balanced on grotesquely folded arches, Arthur pictured May’s foot like that of a doll: Tiny. Perfect. It would fit in the palm of his hand. Absurdly—
What am I thinking?
he asked himself—he saw the two of them by the bandstand in the public garden, May dancing on fence posts and flower stalks.

The last loop of cloth fell away from May’s foot and revealed a warm claw of flesh, luminous and slick and folded in upon itself. It wriggled slightly, and he let it go, then grasped it again.

“You were saying?” May said.

“What?” Arthur spoke slowly, as if hit on the head. “I was saying what?”

The tiny foot in his hand shape-shifted. One minute it repelled him, the next it seemed suddenly to express the beauty of the whole female body. Wasn’t it all there, in May’s foot? The smooth white of her neck, the curve of her breast and hip, the crook of her smallest finger, the delicate, mauve folds of her most intimate places.

Arthur’s head felt hot inside. The thought sickened him, but he wanted to take the misshapen foot in his mouth. To swallow it,
her
, whole.

“That I am wronged and crippled and immoral?” May withdrew the foot from his grasp, her voice still shaking. She felt strangely capable of striking or even biting the man kneeling before her. “And if I am, what advice do you have for me? Is this something that can be straightened out? Fixed?
Undone?
”

“Oh, no. No. Don’t!” Arthur said.

“What!”

“I don’t want you to.” He looked at her, each black nostril dilated round with fury, her red-painted mouth closed over clenched teeth. A muscle in her cheek ticked.

Arthur groaned and sat back on his heels. He closed his eyes and dropped his face in his hands.
Those lips
, he thought.
What a color. So unnatural
. But determined as he was to dismiss them, their bright image hung before him as if burned into the backs of his eyelids. He felt intoxicated, lost. Inspired, bewildered. Perhaps opium induced amnesia, perhaps he’d smoked the pipe he’d been offered and then forgotten he’d done so. He had an erection of bewildering, almost insistent rigidity—what if she were to see it?

Arthur opened his eyes and stood clumsily, holding his coat closed. “Please,” he said, “I apologize.” And before May had a chance to respond, he’d backed out of the door to her room, he’d knocked into her amah and upset the tray and pipe she was carrying.

May lay back on her chaise and abandoned herself to a fit of silent tears. “Oh, what’s the matter with me,” she said to the amah, who, having picked herself and the tray up, held out her mistress’s pipe.

What was the matter? After all, Arthur Cohen was hardly the first man to have left in a hurry after seeing one of May’s feet. The amah, no more than fifteen, her cheeks pitted by smallpox, lifted her narrow shoulders in a gesture of muddled solidarity. She brushed a strand of hair from May’s white forehead.

“Tired. I’m awfully tired. That’s it.” May dried her face, and the girl nodded. Although she wasn’t mute, she might just as well have been.

“It’s just that I can’t do this all my life. Be insulted.” May watched dully as the girl lit her pipe for her. “It will make me ill.” She exhaled smoke as the girl pulled the combs from her thick hair, brushed it so that it hung in a mass over the chair back, so long it coiled on the floor. May transferred her pipe from one hand to the other as the amah unbuttoned and undressed her, brought her a long red-and-gold robe.

D
OWNSTAIRS, OFF
M
ADAME
Grace’s parlor, was the water closet Arthur had used on the way up, and he slipped back behind its blue door, slid the latch into place, and unfastened his trousers. He held himself for a moment before setting to the task of dispatching lust with the hasty, pragmatic strokes of an habitual onanist—one who rarely indulged in fantasy, who had only enough experience to supply him with the most meager repertoire of worn, thin, homely images: the suggestion, while at the shore, of his cousin Amelia’s nipples, dark and erect and suddenly visible through the wet wool of her white bathing costume, and two stolen flashes of a housekeeper’s naked lower back, the set of nicely matched dimples over her less interesting buttocks. In the looking glass over the washbasin, Arthur’s reflection gazed mournfully back at him. Water dripped with dysphoric rhythm from the cold-water tap onto the roses painted inside the basin. No. He was not going to bring the lonesome act to its usual graceless conclusion.

With some trouble Arthur rebuttoned himself into his clothes and made his way back up the stairs. He stopped, four times—once on each flight—to reconsider the impulsive extravagance of losing his virginity to a Chinese temptress. What if he were to catch an exotic disease, or even a prosaic, domestic one? What if—but what was the point in trying to think when he was entirely and irredeemably overcome by desire?

Pausing outside May’s door, Arthur readjusted his coat so that it fully obscured the front of his trousers. He wondered if perhaps the other foot might be naked now as well. At his knock, the little amah opened and then looked back at May, who sat up and put her long pipe on the table by her chair. “Have you forgotten something?” she said, and now her voice sounded not so much angry as languidly sarcastic. “Some pamphlets, perhaps? A tract?”

Arthur, his thoughts newly disorganized by the sight of her hair falling down the front of her opulent dressing gown, shook his head.

“Well?”

“May I come in?” he asked, when he had regained the use of his larynx.

May shrugged.

“I’m sorry.” Arthur emptied his pockets, spilling coins on the floor, incidentally parting the front of his jacket to reveal the outline of his unmistakably erect penis. “I’m sorry. I’m very terribly sorry. Please, will you please, please, please undress?”

May looked at this strange white man, at the ginger-colored foreign-devil hair that sprouted not only from his head and face but from his arms and, if experience could be trusted, his everything else. She quoted a price five times the usual and watched him nod eagerly. “Anything to touch you,” he said. “If you would please just let me.”

“I may be lame,” she said. “You, however, are a fool.”

P
ERHAPS A FOOL
, but then, what virgin isn’t? It would be the same all his life: each time Arthur entered May it seemed to him that he was about to understand something, an important something—about himself, about her. About life or even about God. Of course, in the sudden glare of his orgasm this truth eluded him, but only just. He was always sure that the next time he would last a little longer, everything would become a little clearer.

It would because there was silence inside May—not just inside her, but inside his head when he was in her. For the first time since he was a child, since he was a child in his mother’s lap, Arthur heard what he’d been waiting to hear for all those years: nothing.

He tried to be patient, polite. The first dozen times he visited May, he tried to make conversation, to arrive and casually deliver anecdotes he’d rehearsed as he walked through the city and perfected on the way up the stairs to her room. But once the door closed, once he saw her, all he managed was to fall on the floor before her feet and beg her once again to unwrap them. How smooth she was. How absolutely smooth and hairless were her arms and her thighs and the nape of her neck, that sweet curve of leg just below her groin. He brushed his lips against her, pressed them wherever she would allow his touch, anointing his mouth with her taste.

Arthur had a horror of body hair. Once, at five or six, unable to sleep, he’d felt his way down dark halls to his mother’s room and as she got out of bed at the sound of his footsteps he collided with her, naked, reaching too late for a nightgown. He dove forward to bury his face where he always did and his mouth found his mother’s crotch, bristling with hair, rank and scratchy and wild. In his panic he thought first that an animal had attacked him, then—more horrible!—that under her clothes his mother was entirely hirsute. Though he later believed the incident a nightmare, he grew up repelled by women with body hair. He liked them smooth all over, with no more than three tidy triangles, in the right places. The sight of hair straying down legs or dusting forearms made him ill. A cousin’s collection of stereopticon cards included a Greek dancer whose navel was ringed with hair, and just looking at it, the saliva welled up under his tongue.

Arthur returned and returned to May. He quit the Foot Emancipation Society—How could he, under the circumstances, hope to convince any woman to unbind?—and devoted himself to May instead. He brought silk, he brought sweets. He borrowed from his sister and brought flowers, furs, perfumes. Each week he went to Kelly and Walsh, searching for new books.

May’s friend and mentor, Helen, watched him run up the stairs with his purchases. “Not that one,” she said after he’d left, arms empty. “He’s all wrong.”