her wish
cloistered in m. marais’s estate, Charlotte grew lonely and wistful and depended more and more upon the companionship of her face, Griselda. When the violist took his afternoon nap, Charlotte would steal into his practice rooms and carefully lay the instrument down on its back. Stretching out beside it, she would slide her hands up and down the supine viol, delighting in its smooth expanses and the seven strings that hovered taudy down its spine. As she traced the fingers of her right hand up and down the viol’s strings, she would, with her left hand, mirror the same movement along her own body, trailing her fingernails from her chin to her mons. I wish, she said to Griselda, that I had strings too.
hirsute
AS THE LONELY days passed, Charlotte silently watched her body sprout resilient black hairs. At first it seemed as if only her brush of pubic hair had run amok, scaling up her stomach like a vine, but one morning, while reading an epistolary novel, she rested a bristling chin on her palm and realized that Griselda was granting her secret wish. By that evening, a dense, furry trail was already creeping up her decolletage. M. Marais, squinting across the lengthy dinner table, was dismayed.
inscription
the musician methodically withdrew the carving knife from where it burrowed in the turkey’s haunches, which sputtered in protest as he pulled it out. Rising with a sigh, he trundled down the length of the dinner table, and the room seemed to quiver with his seismic grace. The knife dripped fowl juices onto the tiles, leaving a trail of congealing fat as if M. Marais, like Hansel lost in the woods, might need to find his way back to his seat. Charlotte panted softly. My husband will slice me open, she told herself. And she imagined two identical wounds — the f-holes, the chiseled curves out of which the viol cries — inscribed in her own torso, curling up from her pelvic bones like a sly smile. Her network of organs and intestines would be pinkly exposed, like the wonderful wax anatomical woman she had seen last year at the fair. Charlotte’s fingers began to scrabble at her laces. She could smell M. Marais as he drew nearer — the fermenting scent of the enormously fat — and she bared her stomach, resplendent with black and horse-like hairs. But when her husband seized her, he gripped only her chin, tilting it in the air, maneuvering her head this way and that, and eyed her with the patience of a portraitist. Then the carving knife scraped down her gullet, and she watched as the shorn hair fell into her lap, plummeting in quick, sad clumps like lead-filled pigeons from the sky.
relic
after dinner, the musician retired and Charlotte, as was her habit, sneaked into Griselda’s chambers. The lovely viol languished by the windowsill, and Charlotte crept up on her from behind, her silver sewing scissors glinting in the starlight. When she snipped the lowest string, it protested plaintively, but as she severed one after another, the twanging grew hysterical and shrill. Forgive me, Charlotte wept, winding each newly cut string around her wrist. I only want a memento. She shed her filmy gown and rent it into shreds, which she spun into a filament as fine and strong as gossamer. And she lowered herself, spider-like, down the estate wall, with Griselda braced against the open window to anchor her. When her feet tickled the shrubbery, she looked up once more at the shorn viol, then she fled into the night, stark naked and stubbled.
fruit
papa grows impatient with the fruit that Jitters his orchard. The air assumes the rich rot of a winery; he complains that breathing alone will make him drunk. In the evening the children wander home, bloated and sticky, but still they cannot eat the pears as quickly as they fall. The local birds, too, are so fat with apple that they can barely reach their roosts at night, and when darkness falls, the orchard Boor bubbles as the sated birds make listless, halfhearted efforts at Bight.
preserves
mother decides on tarts and preserves. She hugs a cast iron cauldron to her belly and tells her children to feed its hungry gape. There will be apple butter for daily use. Fine pear jelly for holidays. Tartes aux pommes for neighbors who have been unusually kind.
stirring
madeleine STIRS in her sleep.
she dreams
marguerite sings the hero. In Venice and in Mantua. Breasts tamed by wide strips of muslin, a dulled sword rubbing warmly against her gams, she inspires in the composer his most fearsome arias. The tortured Radamisto, spying his wife’s fine white hand as it disappears beneath the currents. Sextus, hot with youth and vengeance, pleading with the shade of his murdered father. And brave blustering Tauris, defiant Tauris, the general who alone dares Theseus to battle. She sings them in Bologna and Reggio, in Milan, Parma, Naples, Florence. In London and in Versailles. She is adulated. George I and the Princess Royal stand godparents, by proxy, to the daughter who had strained, unforgiving, against the buttons of Tauris’s starched uniform. Marguerite is the primo uomo. She is the leading man.
imposter
until the arrival of an impostor whose very unnaturalness makes him all the more irresistible. Senesino, the celebrated castrato. A curious aberration. Even an abomination. Indeed, he is illegaclass="underline" against the law of God. How wicked that Rome, the fulcrum of excommunication, should be the home of the castrati. The city hides them away in its bowels, together with the whores and the Protestants, but if tenacious, one will find several there. In the Conservatorios they lie upstairs, by themselves, in warmer compartments than the other boys, for fear of colds. Influenzas. Inflammations. In the smallest hours of the night, the masters comb the sleeping quarters. A tender foot, which has twitched free from the bed linens, shadowkicking in dreamy repetition the demonic barn cat it remembers from home: this hot, tender foot is coveted, tucked jealously back beneath the counterpane. An acute sensitivity to boyish sniffles makes the conservatory staff anxious and high-strung. Colds might not only render the fragile voices unfit at present, but hazard the entire loss of them forever. And what a loss. These are the voices of angels.