Under the Poppy (16 page)

“We? Meaning Miss Decca and yourself?”

“Who else?”

Silence. Jürgen Visor’s cheeks are mottled, a measled flush. “What did Georges want of you?”

Rupert seems to weigh whether he will answer, or answering, tell the truth. Finally “He seeks to quarter himself here,” he says. “With some of his men.”

“
And you agreed?”

Whether Rupert would have answered once more, or not, told the truth or not, becomes moot as Istvan, crossing the floor, pauses smiling at their table, standing very close behind Rupert, like a man-at-arms, a lover, a familiar, neither deliberate nor wise. “A very good evening, gentlemen,” he says, with a flourish of a bow. “I trust you enjoyed the show?”

Jürgen Vidor looks at him, looks him up and down and “Felicitations,” he says. “Your wooden wonder was a wonder to behold.” His own smile stretches, shows itself as false, means to show it. “How exceedingly—boyish one becomes, with such a plaything in hand.”

“Many thanks,” says Istvan; the pulse is beating in his throat. Rupert has gone very still. “I do seek to please.”

“No doubt why you tarry: the Poppy is a haven of pleasures. Is it not, Rupert?” A precipice pause, his smile becomes a crocodile’s, one finger leveled to point—“I’ll have your boy”—past Istvan, to Laddie quick and graceful, heading toward the bar. “And a better drink than this filthy bootblack’s gin. If you
please
.”

Istvan can feel it, Rupert’s anger coiled in his stillness, feel it when he pauses for a steadying breath and “I have some brandy that I will gladly share,” Rupert says, “it shall be brought to you directly. But Vladimir—Dr. Adderley has forbade him, just now, to receive. You must choose another.”

A moment’s long silence, very long, Istvan’s hand drops discreetly to his side, nearer his pocket and the gutting
knife until “That one,” Jürgen Vidor pointing this time at Jennie, oblivious and drifting, breasts bobbing loose in her chemise. “Send her up with the bottle. Alone.” With the barest bow, barely civil, he leaves the table, leaves Istvan to let out a hiss and “ ‘Only the devil hears wishes,’ ” as his hand rises to Rupert’s shoulder, a claiming pressure. “Don’t you be alone with him tonight…. Is that true, about Laddie?”

“It was.” Rupert frowns, lines deep in his forehead, as he beckons briefly to Jennie. “Jesu. She’s barely awake, and not at all to his taste, but still. I’d rather he have none of them.”

“I’d rather someone shoot him in the fucking face.—Oh thank you kindly,” as a passerby thumps his shoulder—“Damned good show, sir! A bit of fun, eh?”—and hands him a shot of gin that he downs at once, a little smile growing, irrepressible, as he turns again to Rupert: “You liked the show? We did well together, yeah?”

“Very well.”

“Just like before, yeah?”

“Yes.” Rupert’s smile is slower, but sweet to Istvan when it comes, as he rises from the chair to stand face-to-face, Istvan’s gaze a boy’s when he murmurs as sweetly, “Shall I come to you? Later on?”

Madness even to go near him, with Vidor there in the house—but Rupert’s look in return is one of helpless heat, and cherishing, calamity and love: what Jonathan calls the kismet.
If you’re going to drown, do it in deep water,
yes, deeper even than the sea. “When I can, I’ll come to you. Wait for me.”

Unseen by either, unnoticed all night, Decca watches from beside the bar, her face as white as the plague mask, her hands hidden like foundlings in the black folds of her skirt. Her thoughts are of fire.

The acquisition of a new familiar must not be done in haste. First was mourning for the lost, disjointed Marco, irreparably cracked by the burghers’ sons, singed by some unknown heat, his coffin-box scorched too and
Jesu,
Istvan fuming, up to his wrists in wood shavings and sticky gut,
why not just throw it all up and make my way as a broadsman, yeah? I’ve fingers quick enough for any cards. Or as a God damned highwayman, just take what I want, and miss all this, this—

Have some brandy, bébé,
soothingly from the goddess on the chaise, a slightly raddled goddess, true, but with her bluebell eyes and curls deluxe, aided only a little by the dye-pot, Lucienne is a comely vision still, and still much in demand on the avenues, especially by those who prefer their ladies plush. Istvan does not, prefers nothing at all these days, these nights, these many many months since, bereft, he packed his kit and left his sister to await an advent that he now knows will never come; never. Waiting at the window like Ag used to do, like an urchin, a fool, a baby crying for the moon, for Mouse who has taken his impossible wants and unfathomable rules and has gone. Gone away. As if he had never been.

But that last is not so, Istvan knows, can feel with every furious morning, every endless drunken afternoon, like a sea with no shore that no vessel can navigate, waking always back in port, the journey again unmade. Nights he is reckless and rude, even to his patrons, especially to his patrons, those lordly men and wetly smiling women who engage him for the entertainment he provides, the theatre, the drama, and not all upon the makeshift boards he fashions from whatever drawing room he finds himself; sometimes it takes place on the cobbles, sometimes in the beds, sometimes on the marble sills where panting aldermen wheeze for him to hurry, hurry, catching at his hair, a souvenir of passion, as he goes. Sometimes the aldermen’s wives enclose flowers with their billet-doux, rosemary for remembrance, blue violet for constancy, yellow tulips for hopeless love: what a joke! as he flings the litter on the floor, sifted first for the cash barely tallied before it is spent. Never has he made more lucre, nor ever will, yet never feels it earned or even honestly stolen: instead it falls on him like a grimy rain, barely noted; he is a ghost, playing behind glass for lesser ghosts barely glimpsed. Only Mouse is real, has ever been, through all the cold boyhood nights, the young men’s journeys, the play upon play upon play; and Mouse is gone.

But life, like the theatre, plays nightly. So: Dressing like a marquis, drinking like a disappointed king, he plays, with a sneer so close to the surface that only those who strive to cannot see it. Some enjoy it for what it is; some enjoy a private sneer in return, O mark the airs of this gutter-bred
artiste
, with his gift for mimicry, for venery, for mockery and mingled voices! Very well, let him play. But he had best enjoy his vogue now, before some irritated man-at-arms or spouse in red
flagrante
brings a close to his fantastical run.

In the end it is Lucienne who saves him, gives him a place to cool his spite, ease if not end his pain. He is not in love with her, will never, he knows, be in love again, who the fuck would choose to? when it ends like this? Every dark man he sees, every baritone whisper… He aches from aching, lies exhausted from his inexhaustible rage.

But if one is to live at all, in the end one must do something to make the time pass. In his puppets—wounded Marco, the tattered, stately La Duchessa, the grinning unnamed baby who can both shit and cry—Istvan finds the only respite possible: the calm of creation, the maker’s ease, refining their garments, their accoutrements, their simplicity of operation; he can (and does) sit by the hour, two, four, an entire evening given to the motion of an arm, a fluttering finger behind a fluttering fan, the way an eyeball rolls in its socket, smoothly, so one sees not the gesture but the impulse behind it. He refines his skills, he suffers his mistakes to make them better. He is learning, with the mecs as his pupils and pedagogues both.

Which is why the demise of Marco twists the knife more deeply in the wound. Repaired a dozen times since the foul attack, he breaks again, and again, once even in performance, calling forth the kind of laughter no performer ever wants to hear: the illusion suspended, the actor cracked onstage. The singeing and burning (and how the fuck did that happen? when he is so careful to lie down nowhere near fire?) has compounded the frailty of this faithful toy and avatar, and the grievous day comes when, the past night’s performance as near disaster as he can bear again to come, Istvan, who now is Dusan, tells himself the truth of what lies in his hands: Marco cannot be fixed, to play again as he was. Marco is gone.

This second bereavement brings back the fury of the first, though more brokenly; even for a young man, he is weary, Istvan-Dusan, these terrible months have burned him out like a rocket in the black night’s sky. Which is why, perhaps, it is possible for Lucienne, who finds him owl-eyed drunk in the Place d’Armes, yelling at the disinterested constables, to gather him up like any other stray, and take him home, to her bosom and her bed.

She is wise in the ways of strays, she does not nurse him so much as let him nurse himself, come back to himself in this place of safety, where he may bring all his traps and smelly glues and strange small weapons, knives and tools, and tussle and curse the exigencies of his trade, declare a funeral for Marco one day then change his mind the next, sorting for the thousandth time through the pieces until finally, carefully, Lucienne asks
Can you not salvage a portion of that one puppet, say, whatever portions may serve?

To serve what fucking purpose, Madame?

To build another.

His howl—
I am not a God damned cannibal!—
but she has cannily planted the seed, the idea that there can be life in the ruins.
And sure enough, he begins to collect what he needs, the wood and the wires, the scraps of silk and leather, the pointy white pebbles that Lucienne dislikes to see, why she cannot say, but
They are his teeth, madame,
says Dusan, his own teeth white in a sardonic smile
. Wooden or not, he needs to eat, yeah? To bite?

As Dusan’s work overtakes him, she sees more of him, and also much less: present he may be, fingers in the glue, but absorbed in his toil he ignores the world, accepts no invitations, forgets to sleep, or take nourishment above a glass of tea—

Pea soup, just a cup, bébé, you’ll be ill if you don’t.

Stop mothering me, Madame.

—and certainly to feed his passion, at least with her: though she has glimpsed a boy or two outside their lodgings of a morning, when she returns from her own assignations, tall dark surly-looking boys who slouch away when she calls to them; Dusan’s attempt at another sort of puppet, to assemble from what is at hand what is not.

He is far more successful with his new toy, though this one, this Pan Loudermilk, bears a weight the fallen Marco never did, serving as it, he, does as the hiding-cask of Dusan’s heart. More accomplice than mere tool, as the entertainments Dusan devises grow from lusty slapstick and of-the-moment japes to hot little, cold little morality plays, far more intricate, far more arousing—and disturbing, too, as this Pan seems to honor no limits, to see with his bright blue gaze whatever secrets one would most keep hidden, and to toy, yes, with exposure, as his high, fierce, insinuating voice seems always to hover on the brink of a raptor’s cry, and Dusan his falconer equally feral, though his morning coats now cost a fortune and the lover’s eye he wears could purchase a small chateau—this last a gift from a patron, a blue-eyed marchioness with a taste for peculiar amusements, in whose succession of country houses Pan Loudermilk is a rousing succès de scandale. Sometimes, in those drawing rooms, Pan’s master is Dusan, sometimes Hanzel or Marcel, always with a tale to tell of his one true name, hidden like Rumpelstiltskin’s, as he spins the endless straw of his loneliness to gold.

He uses as well the other puppets, La Duchessa and the awful baby, and putters about with a mournful death’s head that one day will be known as the Bishop. The Chevalier he takes almost whole (though headless and without his most distinguishing member) from the workshop of a man Lucienne has introduced to him, a distinguished patron of hers called Laurent—
He has all sorts of dollies, bébé, you must come and see—
who, she tells Dusan in a whisper, has taken a real interest, might even make a protégé of him
If you are only courteous,
she pleads.
You can be so sweet, when you choose to.

His smile to her then is courteous indeed, but remote; the farther away he moves from her, into the mysterious landscape of his labor, the kinder he becomes, as if he has transferred all the truths of his heart to the puppet in its black-masked coffin, and need no longer show her what he truly thinks or feels.

What Laurent feels, when his large soldier-puppet is abstracted, can be inferred, while Lucienne’s wrath at Dusan’s larceny is heard all the way from the carriage-house where she struggles, restrained by the sniggering footmen—
You let me take the lash for you, you little shit! You bastard!—
to the gardens where the marchioness and her guests, Dusan among them, sip their black-currant cordials, the marchioness coquettish to scold:
What naughty fix have you ’scaped, Marcel? Tell us true, now!

It is true that I am a bastard,
Marcel, Dusan, Istvan says musingly.
Born to a poor lass seduced by the silver moonlight, born on St. John’s Eve. You know about St. John’s Eve, my lady? The equinox balance, when the powers of light and darkness hold equal sway?

They certainly do in you,
says the marchioness with feeling
.
Her husband laughs softly. Dusan never sees Lucienne again.

This night be premieres a new playlet,
Castor & Pollux
, after the Gemini sons of Leda, brothers from myth, wherein he and his new familiar, himself named from myth, enact a fraternal union of a different sort, with La Duchessa its springboard and a giggling cousin of the marchioness its foil. If few in the audience take to heart the deeper import of the piece—a defiant affirmation of affinity deeper than blood, harder than lust, stronger than any method meant to part it, sung in eerie twain to the tune of Dusan’s feet beating time on the drawing room’s rosewood floor—