13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [51]
There is a man sitting in the seat across from her reading a newspaper, unsuspecting of the silent female storm within arm’s reach. She wants to tear the newspaper from him and open her coat to display her body to him. She wants to ask this stranger: if this woman here were offered to you, would you refuse? Why would a man refuse if it’s easy?
Why would a man signal that he is accepting, that he is ready to pluck the overripe fruit from the gnarled branch of the forbidden tree just as it is about to fall? Why would a man do that and then toss the fruit aside without even deigning to step on it as he walks away, to grind its corrupted flesh into the earth where it belongs?
This is funny, after all, all this useless comedy.
She turns her head and looks at herself reflected in the black glass of the train car. Her face is pale and set in an expression she herself cannot read. Her features feel heavy, almost monumental: it seems that even an effort of will cannot move them. She tries to understand whether what she is feeling is sadness or anger, but comes up unknowing. She decides that she will smile at herself, that a false expression is better than no expression at all.
She forces this smile, and it creeps across her numb red lips; it creeps across and stops. She is frozen for a moment in this willed rictus of contentment, and sees that her grin is small and lopsided. It looks like Xavier Langlais’s smirk. She is struck to the core by this similarity.
Ah, but she can see her wet eyes drowning in her dark reflection. She registers her own distress and looks elsewhere, turning away her rising feelings—her rising feelings always turned away. There is nothing to be done about this. This repression is as inexorable as the rot that turns the body of a beloved man into mulch for the scrubby grass on his grave.
A beloved man of her own blood, a beloved man hardly more than a boy. Taken by war, taken by sickness—what does it matter? Two bodies that grew strong tussling with each other in the backyard. Two pairs of ears arrested in the staircase by the call of her piano-playing, on the way to the kitchen to fill two stomachs with crusty bread and chocolate. Play it again, Louisette. That was pretty. Did you make that up?
Which one of them asked her to play it again?
What does it matter? They’re both gone now. Dissolved into the earth.
She closes her eyes and listens. As the train plows through the tunnel, the tracks moan beneath it and reverberate all around. It is not an entirely unpleasant sound: all-encompassing and multitonal, but almost flutelike, almost beautiful.
One note rises above all the others in the echoing swirl of metal melody, and its mournful swoon sinks into Louise’s body like the heat from a warm bath. It is an A-sharp.34 As the train turns and the tracks grind, Louise hums along with this one note deep in her throat, as if responding to a musical greeting. The man across from her does not hear her since her hum matches the tone of the train so perfectly—her gentle release, completely undetected.
Possession, bis
THAT AFTERNOON, XAVIER’S TEACHING is on fire. He reads Flaubert’s letter about the Oriental woman to his boys. They are mesmerized. They stay completely silent because they don’t want to break the stride of his words; they are afraid that should he pause, he will realize that the secrets he is giving them are utterly inappropriate (he even utters the word “orgasm” into their stunned and elated ears). They are afraid that should he pause, he will get flustered and stop.
They don’t know that his momentum is too strong to be stopped by mere decency. They don’t know that passion grips his brain like a disease and that he is helpless against it. They follow his dreamy gaze as he speaks about sex and the shuddering fevers of possession to see what he sees, but they