The Chinaman bowed again, smiled broadly, and began to move hastily around his dark shop, pulling phials of powder from one shelf, milky liquids from another, collecting the ancient and secret reversals of terrible and vengeful substances. Now and then he stopped and smiled as though he were telling a joke.
“Brandy,” he said. “Keeps his belly warm.”
“Opium,” he said, “to calm the stomach. Make him happy. Make bad dreams go away.” He cut out opium in tiny, waxy balls.
“One every day, until his dreams are clear and clean. Fresh dreams.”
When he was done, there were eight bottles, and they cost a lot of money and Catherine paid, carrying the bottles and jars in a plain brown sack from the store. She buried it deep in a big black bag she was carrying, and offered India dinner.
They ate at a grand hotel, Catherine never saying that she would sleep the night in a room upstairs. India was ravenous, her eyes wide, the huge menu in front of her like a shield. She ate oysters, lobster thermidor, a cold soup, and a guinea hen. She drank a great deal of wine. Catherine ate little and drank no wine. She had no taste for it.
“You look different,” said India, waiting for the smooth waiter to reappear. “You look like a lady. Like…” she nodded her head. “Like one of them.”
“He likes a simple way. They’re simple people there, not like us. I try to be what he wants me to be.”
“And he gives you money?”
“Yes.”
“A lot of money.”
Catherine was embarrassed. “Yes.”
“Give me some. You have a sweetheart, a husband for God’s sake, he gives you money. I want money.”
“Not here. But, yes, of course, whatever you need.”
“I need a lot of things. I need some twenty-eight-year-old man with white teeth to fall in love with me. I need a winter coat and a little dog to sit in my lap. Bet you got a little dog.”
Catherine smiled.”No. But I have a winter coat. You can have it if you want. I’ll get another. Or we’ll get you one you like.”
The waiter came with dessert, a huge mound of whipped cream and cake and fruit. “You think that’s the answer. You think it’ll make me pretty or get me a sweet man? It’ll just give me the idea, on cold nights, that I could have one of those men, that my face was pretty like yours, that it wasn’t all so goddamned endless and stupid and boring. Money. That’ll be enough, for now.”
Catherine had spent so much of her life on the other side of the glass, the India side, the Alice side. She found it extraordinary to be the one who had the things people wanted. And she, now, wanted only one thing, and the way to that thing lay in her black bag.
Catherine walked plain India the long way home, tried to give her the black seal coat she was wearing, but India refused it, saying it would make her look like a fool. She gave her as much money as she could, knowing India wouldn’t spend it on drugs or foolishness or fripperies.
She spent the night in her narrow bed in her plain room in the grand hotel. She thought of Truitt, of Mrs. Larsen sitting up by him all night, nursing him through one more grief. Mrs. Larsen who never once had a bad dream, she said, even after she watched her husband chop off his own hand for no reason at all.
Catherine dreamed of Antonio. He was like a spider, everywhere at once. His skin was in her skin, his organs were connected to hers. Her heartbeat was his heartbeat, the flutter of her eyelids moved above his drugged terrible haunting black eyes. He was her passion and her violation, and it brought her sharply awake.
She smoked one opium ball from the Chinaman and fell asleep into bliss, into cool water and her mother’s arms and the water trembling on her mother’s hair, the lilac blooms in May. She fell into a dream of her garden, of how it would smell on summer evenings, the jasmine trees white with bloom, the koi darting in the pond when she bent over to sprinkle bread crumbs on the water, Truitt sitting in a white chair in a white suit, playing with a child.
Catherine woke up, and she knew she was pregnant. She felt luxuriously tired, although she knew she had slept.
At her mirror she pulled her hair back tightly, put on her simple traveling dress, and sat on the train for hours. As she ate her lunch, she wondered if she could see the remains of her red traveling suit. She stared out the window, but nothing was there, nothing left that she could see. When she had finished her lunch, she vomited it into the bathroom sink, washed the sink out with a cloth, then threw the cloth from the train. It fluttered away like a stiff heavy white bird. She felt light-headed. She felt grateful. She was beyond gratitude, beyond any understanding of it, and lost in a bliss the opium could not have produced, in a sense of being in the right place, a feeling she had never known. There was, at last, a chair for her to sit on, and Truitt would live.
At home, Mrs. Larsen ran to the door.
“He’s quiet, now,” she said. “He had a terrible night. Screamed with the pain. Screamed from what he was seeing when he was asleep. I forgot where I was. He slept all morning. I had to tie him down.” Mrs. Larsen looked terrible and old, shaky and bleary eyed.
“Go home now, Mrs. Larsen. Go home and sleep. I’ve brought medicine.”
She walked through the long sunroom, the glass conservatory. The first roses had arrived from Saint Louis, tagged with cardboard tags, roses and orange trees and jasmine and fuchsia and orchids, waiting to be put into the enormous terra-cotta pots that lined the hallway. It was hot here, hot and damp, although the snow still lay in its blinding blanket outside, less pure now, more pocked and dirty, but endless.
He sat quietly in a high-backed chair, a lap robe over his legs, her sunglasses on his face. His eyes were shut.
She knelt beside his chair. His hand strayed idly through her hair. “Hello, Emilia,” he said softly. “Welcome home.”
“It’s Catherine, Truitt,” she said. “Catherine Land. Your wife. You were dreaming.”
“Of course. Catherine. I was…”
“You were dreaming.” She reached into her black bag, gave him one of the opium balls. “Swallow this,” she said. “Swallow this and dream some more.”
For days the two women ministered to him, sleeping in shifts or not at all. For the second time, they bathed him together, holding him in the steaming water until the chills had passed, rubbing his stomach endlessly so that the terrible cold would go away. He was drunk on brandy, sedated into joy with opium, and he was getting better.
They sat together in the nights and watched him roll in his sleep.
“Larsen cut off his hand because… because I asked him to stop.” It was the first time she had said his name.
“Stop what?”
“Just stop. Ten years ago. To leave me be. He couldn’t stand it.”
“You miss him.”
“He was all I ever knew. I miss him, yes.”
“You never go to see him.”
“I wouldn’t. It’s my fault.”
They sat through the long night in silence. Mrs. Larsen had said about her husband what she needed to say. In her own quiet way she had driven her husband, also, into the far reaches of madness and death. She had known because she had seen it before, she had done it herself.
Catherine took the dark glasses from Truitt’s eyes. They were still fierce blue, but ringed with deep, haggard shadows. They were unfocused and wandered unhitched inside his head. His forehead was a mass of pustules that had begun to heal. There would be scars. He looked ten years older, as though some boundary had been crossed and he would never again be young or completely well. She had broken his youth and left him floundering on the shore of old age, his power gone, his ambitions stilled.
His hands, when she unbandaged them, lay quiet in his lap. He was neither cruel nor kind; he was simply waiting for whatever the next thing was. He grew less cold, his dreams became softer and subtler, more filled with shapes that embraced him. He described his dreams to her in the morning when he woke up, and she listened patiently, although the dreams did not make sense and he had the same dreams over and over. They were memories of events he hadn’t described to her yet. They were ideas he had had but never acted on. They were dreams.