She encountered herself in a door-length mirror.
"And look at me. I'm shameless. What squalor. I'll put something on."
He began to protest, to insist that naked she was perfectly fine, which was true enough. She cut him off.
"Get your good whiskey because I want some. We'll play a game. I'll get you something to cheer you up."
He got up and went downstairs to get the Irish he had bought and left, for reasons of deception, untouched. He put the bottle on a tray with two glasses and a wooden bowl of ice. There was a window at the turn of the stairs and Michael paused to look outside at the first landing. The dark road, snowfields lit by a pale quarter-moon. His excitement felt nearly childlike — anticipation, surprise, guilty fear.
When he went back to the bedroom he did not see her at first. She was in a dressing room beside the closet, an innovation — like the bidet in the bath — that Lara had introduced to the rambling, Yankee elegance of the farmhouse. The holding had been a prosperous one.
"Want to hear about the élan vital?"
He set the tray down.
"Sure. But I don't think I want to talk about it."
"Want to talk about the soul? Are you sure you have one?"
"Not anymore."
"I think you do. I mean have a soul. I don't."
"How can that be?"
"My soul is lost. I think someone keeps it for me."
He could not see her, but it did not sound like a joke to him. It sounded, in fact, distinctly odd and a little frightening. He poured two glasses of whiskey.
"Hear her?" Lara asked. "Marinette?"
"If you like," he said. He found himself listening. "Who's she?"
"She's my godmother, the keeper of my ti bon ange."
"Your good angel?"
"No, love. My soul, my inner life."
She came out dressed for the game. She had made a sleek black helmet of her thick hair. She had a vest of black leather, tight trousers that might have been deerskin or goatskin, only slightly off-white. Black boots.
Where do you get it? was what he wanted to ask her. But that was not how the game was played. Laughing was permitted in some games, not all. Vulgar questions, never. He handed her the drink and she took it, doing a graceful little spin. She was never portentous about it. She had a fairly keen sense of the absurd.
As for Michael, the business did not really incline him to jokes. Her games tightened his throat, shortened his breathing, set him aching. They also consumed him with something like superstitious dread. He had come to love the fantasies she played out — if love was the word for it — but they were rooted in the darkest, most secret and ashamed quarters of his nature. They were made of the things about which he never spoke, which as often as not he put out of his mind as depraved. As crazy. Weird hits from adolescence, narratives departing from some exotic touch, something that might once have taken his attention, derived promiscuously from anything between serious art and the lowest comic strip. Somehow, she knew what got to him.
Marinette? At that moment he was thinking of the Great Whore, the perennial figure. He was thinking of Lara.
She was the great whore of their schemes, The Woman set loose in the world. Out of control. Even in his schemes, in whatever it was he had once believed. But among all the fantasies and lusts, it also occurred to him, only for a second perhaps, that he wanted to love her.
"Come on, Michael. We have something good."
The something good turned out to be cocaine. The stuff was not exactly new to him; he had seen plenty in graduate school in New York. It turned up around the university from time to time, with decreasing frequency as the nineties advanced. But it certainly was not a regular feature of campus dinner parties, not even among the most earnestly bohemian. Or even of campus adulteries.
The coke was staggering and she had a lot of it, along with a couple of bedside spliffs, presumably for afterward. It made him dry-throated and jangling. The jitters somewhat dissipated his lust. He watched her walk away from him, moving quite lightly in her boots and soft-skinned pants. When she turned around she appeared to have a gun. She offered him her profile like a duelist, sighting him down the barrel.
Looking up at her from the bedside, where he had knelt to do his lines, a thrill of fear went through him. It seemed perfectly likely that she would shoot. She was stoned, crazy. Wild in the country. She would shoot them both. Stranger things happened on American campuses.
"Am I boring you?" Michael asked. "Are you going to kill me?"
"Could be," she said. "Could be, eh? Thrill killing." Delighting in the little trills and phonemes.
"Do I have time for an Act of Contrition?"
"Say it," she said. "Repeat after me. O my God, I am heartily sorry…"
"Fuck you," Michael said. "Kindly put the gun down."
She walked over and handed him the weapon.
"You take it."
He weighed the revolver in his hand, then opened it. There was a slug in every cylinder.
"Jesus Christ, it's loaded."
"A gun is no good if it's not loaded."
"I suppose you're a member of the NRA?"
"I'm not even Irish," she said.
He did another line.
"You know," he said, "the folks who tell you to keep your gun loaded? They also say never to point a firearm at someone unless you're going to shoot them."
"What else do they say?"
"I think," he said, "I think they say if you put a gun on the wall it should always be fired."
"How strange of them. The NRA?"
"The NRA," Michael explained, "are always confusing life and art."
"So I've violated all their rules. Will they punish me?"
"Yes," he said. "Now you've had it."
"Am I going to die?"
"I don't know," he said. "I think so. What kind of revolver is that?"
"It's a Belgian FN Special. Thirty-eight caliber. Five chambers. Firing Parabellum cartridges."
"Aha," he said. "What's special about it?"
"We'll find out," she said.
He started by taking her boots off. To take them off correctly he had to genuflect with his back to her, her leg over one shoulder while she pushed against his back with her other foot. His role reminded him of the servant in Miss Julie. Taking off the second boot, he felt cool metal on the back of his neck. It was the gun or it wasn't; either way, he had to admit, with all the goodwill in the world, that it did little for him in terms of erotic excitement.
He tried to remember who got shot in Miss Julie. She did, as he recalled. And what about the boyfriend? Him too? He was always getting Miss Julie mixed up with Hedda Gabler, Strindberg with Ibsen, a pathetic secret lapse for a man so involved with the phenomenon of the Scandinavian female. Even more compromising than his taste for armed women in skin clothing.
He allowed himself to touch the upper curve of the boot. The gleaming leather was discreetly mud-spattered, musky with the leather and the polish. Was Krafft-Ebing one person or two? Lara would know.
When he turned to her, he was relieved not to see the gun. He eased his way along the warm silky leather encasing her long legs, palms against her calves and thighs, fingering the creases of leather where the pants wrinkled behind her knees. She turned with him so he could caress the firm rotundity at the seat of those skin pants, find the cleft under the form-fitting leather.
She said something he could not understand. And how superlative it was to feel her tight turns so exotically sheathed and hear the sound of her voice and have the taste of her mouth, her whole body pressed against him. The entire sense of her concentrated where his hands explored. When she was out of the trousers, in her black bikini pants, already wet, he went down on her, obliging with his tongue the precision she required. And then she on him, and he felt quite in control but avid indeed.