Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [8]
In her younger days, she had known the world was cruel, how people judged you by first appearances. How that childlike prejudice against the unnatural could continue into adulthood as people merely found a way of better hiding their revulsions.
She pushed herself off him slowly, and then reached for her dressing gown. Walking over to the window, she looked out across the spires and bridges of Villjamur as if she was now trying to put the greatest possible distance between the two of them. In the opposite corner of the room, covered canvases of various sizes were stacked against the wall. She could still smell the chemicals from the painting she had begun yesterday evening.
“Wow,” he said at last. “By Bohr, you’re amazing.”
She now gazed at the bruised skies hanging over the city, the last of the rain driving lightly across its architecture. Lifting the window sash, she could hear a cart being drawn across the cobbles, could smell the scent of larix trees from the forest to the north. She looked up and down Cartanu Gata and the Gata Sentimental, alongside the art gallery—a place where she doubted her own paintings would ever hang. People merged with shadows, as if they became one. Directly under her window, a man stumbled in and out of her vision, his sword scraping against the wall. For some reason she couldn’t understand, each of these qualities of the city merely heightened her sense of loneliness.
“Your body … I mean, you move so well,” he was saying, still praising her performance like they often did when it was clear they had little in common.
She eventually spoke. “Tundra.”
“Sorry?”
“In the tavern, last night—the lines you used to get me back here. I suppose politicians are good with words. You said my body is like the tundra. You said I had perfect, smooth white skin, like drifts of snow. You even said that my breasts are as dramatic as the crests of snowbanks. You admired my breasts and my smooth skin. You said I was like ice incarnate. Yes, you fed me lines as awful as that. But what about my face?”
She immediately ran her hand along her terrible scar.
“I said you’re a very attractive woman.”
“Horses can be attractive, councilor.” She glanced back at him. “But what’s my face like?”
“Your face is lovely, Tuya.”
“Lovely?”
“Yes.”
He lifted his head up to take a better look at her as she dropped her gown to the floor. She knew what his reactions would be as the dreary light seemed to gather momentum on her bare skin. She reached over to a tabletop, picked up a roll-up of arum weed, but she waited until certain he was no longer looking at her before she lit it. The intense smell of its smoke wafted across the room, drifted out the window.
Still in vague shadow to his visions, she walked over to the bed, offered him the weed. He involuntarily grabbed her wrist, rubbed it gently between his fingers and thumb. His gaze was weak-willed and pathetic.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “Delicious.”
“Prove it, Councilor Ghuda,” she said, climbing on his smile, watching him submit.
The roll-up fell to the floor, exploding ashes across the tiles.
Later, when he had fallen asleep again, she thought about their conversation just before he drifted off.
He talked a lot, which was unusual for a man after sex. She reflected deeply on what he had said, about the details that he had gone into.
He had shocked her.
A man in his important position should surely refrain from talking so much, but he was probably still rather drunk. They had been drinking vodka for much of the dawn. He didn’t leave her until the sun was higher in the vermilion sky, the city fully awake, and her breath sour from alcohol. When he did, there was no fond good-bye, no intimate gesture. He had simply slipped on his Council robes and walked out the door.
But it wasn’t his casual exit that caused her upset, it was the words he had spoken before he slept, those simple statements he had maybe or maybe not meant seriously.
Already his words were haunting her.
Afterward, as he did frequently, Councilor Ghuda imagined