Wilde West (13 page)

Yes, so long as one of them doesn't eat.

His play.
Vera.
It
would
be produced. All he needed was the agreement of that wretched woman in New York who labored under the misapprehension that she was an actress.

First New York, great success, his name emblazoned across the marquee, Jimmie Whistler gnawing his liver in a paroxysm of envy back in London; and then the West End. Money gushing into Grosvenor Square. He could burn the stuff to light his cigarettes.

Yes. Convince her. Tonight. Convince her to leave Tabor, a decent chap certainly but clearly wrong for her. Convince her to leave Denver, come along to finish up the tour, and then sail with him for England. Together, they would burn their bridges behind them.

But what about Mother? How would she react to a daughter-in-law who was not only American, which was accidental and therefore possibly forgivable, but also penniless? Which to Mother was an indication of willful stupidity.

We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

He smiled. He rolled over, lifted his fountain pen from the notebook lying atop the mattress, opened the book, and wrote:

Burn that bridge when we come to it.

At one-thirty he had been waiting on the north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets for three quarters of an hour. It was an empty, cold, and exceptionally inhospitable intersection. The wind moaned over the rooftops of grim brick buildings, mournfully, drearily, as though it had been reading Dickens. The air was chill. A skein of hard white stars winked overhead: so distant, so frigid, so utterly indifferent to the fate of Man that finally they had become quite irritating.

He heard the hurried clop of horses' hooves against hard-packed earth, heard the clack and rattle of a carriage. Looked up and saw the animals, two of them, suddenly appear at the corner in an insane gallop. Coal-black flanks agleam in the yellow light of the streetlamp, they dragged behind them a small black hansom that careened to the left as it reeled in its turn.

The driver, Oscar saw as the vehicle approached, was swathed in a long black topcoat and muffled about the face with a long black scarf that concealed his face and trailed over his shoulder. A black hat, flat-crowned and flat-brimmed, was pulled low over his head, its shadow masking his face.

Just before the carriage reached Oscar, the man reined in the horses and pushed down the wooden brake lever with a booted foot. Silently he nodded, tapped the gloved forefinger of his left hand against the brim of his hat, and then indicated, by a curt swing of his whip, that Oscar should enter the cab.

“Ah,” said Oscar. Elizabeth McCourt Doe had apparently laid on transport.

But he hesitated. He peered inside the carriage. Empty. He looked up at the driver. Extremely romantic, to be sure, bundled up like Dick Turpin; but what guarantee was there that the woman had sent this chap? Who knew what sort of villain he might be? A genuine Turpin, perhaps: a real highwayman. Plotting to cart Oscar off and plunder him at gunpoint in some dusky deserted alleyway.

But highwaymen, if memory served, didn't drive carriages. Carriages were what they robbed. They rode horses, or they bounded out of bushes.

Perhaps this was something else they arranged differently in American cities. A lack of suitable bushes.

The driver leaned over and impatiently slapped the carriage door with the tip of his whip.

“Are you quite sure,” Oscar asked the man, “that you've found the right party? Mr. Oscar Wilde?” The impoverished and entirely harmless poet, he almost added.

The driver nodded, a single brusque movement, and then again, brusquely, smacked his whip against the carriage side.

My heart and hand I will give to thee
…

Sighing sadly, Oscar opened the door and stepped into the cab.

Even before his other foot had left the ground, the driver cracked the whip and the horses bolted forward. Oscar's shoulder slammed onto the seat's back as his knee smashed against its front. His breath suddenly gone, he wrenched himself awkwardly around, clutched for handholds along the carriage's side. The carriage lurched to the left and he was thrown against the door, which sprang open and, for a frantic moment before he jerked it shut, revealed an expanse of dark, disagreeable roadway racing away below.

The carriage bounced and bucked, leaped and bounced as it plunged along. Oscar attempted to support himself, hands braced against the sides of the vehicle, feet braced against the opposite seat, while the darkened city of Denver hurtled by the windows. Dry goods stores, blacksmiths' stables, laundries, warehouses, small obscure factories, even a church or two skittered past. Conceivably, someone out there witnessed this mad dash through the empty streets; but no one called out, no one tried to save him.

At last, in a dark and dismal neighborhood of small, mean wooden houses shouldering each other along the narrow street, the carriage began to slow. Frowning out the window at the desolation around him, Oscar rearranged his cravat.

The vehicle stopped before a house that seemed somewhat larger than the rest, a two-story building looming up out of the starlit shadows. Its windows unlighted, its facade dark and blank, the place appeared abandoned.

Which showed, Oscar felt, excellent judgment on the part of the abandoners, whoever they might have been.

The carriage dipped as the driver vaulted to the ground. Peering out the window, Oscar saw the man's dark form glide through the gloom to the front door.

There must be some mistake. Surely Elizabeth McCourt Doe would never orchestrate a meeting in a place like this.

Suddenly a pale yellow strip of light pitched across the weedy lawn. Silhouetted against the opened door, the driver waved an impatient, beckoning arm.

Once again, Oscar hesitated.

The place could be thick with desperadoes. Thieves, thugs, cutpurses and, worse, cutthroats.

And if she
were
there? Surrounded by assassins, gunmen, skulking felons?

Enough of this.

Perhaps these louts imagined that an Irishman, and a poet, would be easy pickings. They deceived themselves. The blood of Cuchulain surged in his veins. And he knew a thing or two about the Manly Arts. Self-defense was something a poet quickly learned in an Irish public school.

He did rather wish, however, that he possessed somewhere on his person a small but powerful handgun.

He unlatched the carriage door, pushed it open, stepped down. Head held high, he stalked across the lawn to the house.

The driver watched him approach, then turned and entered the building.

Oscar trailed resolutely behind.

Just to the left of the door, startling Oscar by his presence, stood a small Chinese man in sandals, black silk pants, a black silk top, and a round, black silk skullcap. He might have been thirty years old; he might have been fifty. Grinning with enormous enthusiasm, bowing as rhythmically as a metronome, he shut the door behind Oscar and gestured for him to follow the driver.

Oscar did so, feeling as disoriented as if he had somehow entered into another universe. The hallway was broad and airy. The floor was oak, spotlessly clean, draped along its center with a runner of Oriental carpet, black and scarlet, so perfect in its elegance and simplicity that it must be authentic. Brass sconces along the walls provided a soft gentle light. The walls themselves, unadorned, were wainscoted with some dark, rich wood, teak or mahogany.

There was a smell in the air of jasmine—incense, doubtless—and of something else, something darker, heavier, more penetrating.

Oscar followed the driver's back. The hallway ended where it met, perpendicularly, another passage. Here a small alcove set into the wall held a wonderfully wrought bronze Buddha.

The man turned to the right, down a hallway longer than the first. His boots thumping on the carpeting, the driver passed several closed doors, stopped at one, opened it, and stepped inside.

Behind him, Oscar entered the room.

It was a large, uncluttered space. White walls, white ceiling, a gaslight softly glowing overhead within a white paper globe. Bleached oak floors, a strategic scattering of Oriental carpets in subtle shades of cream and pearl. Against the far wall, where the window might be hidden, a tall and broad Chinese screen displaying painted vistas of dreamy mountains strung with waterfalls, steep remote valleys draped with mist. Against the wall to the left, a large double bed framed in brilliant red-lacquered wood, covered by a quilt of red embroidered silk. Against the wall to the right, a low, red-lacquered table, atop which sat a slim ivory-colored vase containing (Good Lord!) a single white lily. Lying beside the vase, a teakwood box and a long narrow smoking pipe of elaborate Oriental design. Next to these, a silver salver holding two crystal tulip glasses and an iced-champagne bucket; inside this, a bottle of Krug.

Very inviting, very charming, all of it. But it lacked, manifestly, one rather important item.

Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

Where was she?

Oscar looked at the driver. Silently, churlishly, shoulders hunched, hands in the pockets of his coat, the man stood with his back to Oscar.

Really, this was too much. The fellow's maniacal steeplechase through the streets of Denver had been bad enough. But this insolence was altogether intolerable. The oaf deserved a thrashing. And unless he produced an explanation, and right now, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was just the person to give it to him.

Abruptly, the man turned and tore from his head the broad, flat-brimmed hat. Rich red glistening curls cascaded down his shoulders, and his bright violet eyes sparkled, and suddenly he was a she, and she was laughing.

Over the course of the next few hours, he had somehow neglected to ask Elizabeth to leave Tabor and come away with him. At first, the hurry of passion had distracted them both. She was naked beneath her disguise, no underclothing whatever, her lambent skin once again a revelation; and as soon as he could wrestle the denim trousers from her long elegant legs, the two of them collapsed like felled trees to the red silk quilt.

Later, the novelty of smoking opium had diverted him. With the quilt wrapped around his middle and falling in Neronian folds from his shoulder, Oscar sat plumped against the headboard as Elizabeth McCourt Doe, perched cross-legged atop the mattress, prepared the pipe. She still wore her man's denim shirt—its metal snaps had been ripped apart during the proceedings (by him, by her, who knew?), but the shirt had remained on her shoulders—and in its opened front her bare breasts swayed slightly, teasingly, as she moved.

The smoke from the drug was thick, milky, at once sweet and acrid, and it seemed to insinuate itself almost immediately into the joints and interstices of his body. Soon a warm luxurious languor had settled over his entire frame. His mind was lucid and buoyant and utterly relaxed. The colors in the room, he noticed, had somehow acquired a clarity and an intensity that he had observed before only in dreams, but which he had not realized, till now, that he
had
observed in dreams.

“You like it?” she asked him.

“Ah well,” he said gravely, “I am morally compelled to.

Look at Coleridge. Look at Poe. At Baudelaire. The modern poet must know as much about opium as he knows about dactyls and iambs.” He smiled suddenly. “How convenient. Making a vice of necessity.”

She laughed and held toward him his glass of champagne. “Try another vice.”

“You tempt me, madam.” He took the glass.

She smiled. “My intention exactly.”

“And whatever shall I do with all these new temptations?”

She put her hand along his naked thigh. “I believe that the only way to remove a temptation is to surrender to it.”

He laughed.