SNAKE

Sun jerks in its eyes as it slicks through
grassblades, blood heating.

HAVING SEEN THE DANCER means I can’t go to him tonight. I make these interior arrangements. I need to see friends, laugh it off. Stunned that I am capable of violence. I know that hurt, I am dangerous to meet.

Tas, all I can think, that woman is so overtly sensual.

Tacita lights a cigarette and hands me one.

Okay, I, but that woman is not Lev’s wife. She’s a dancer. Her name is Ulyana.

Great. So now there are at least two.

I asked Istvan about the dancer. I think she’s from Leningrad. Istvan says that Lev found her beauty gratifying.

Is this supposed to make me feel better?

Her self-involvement is legendary. Istvan says before parties she makes herself cry because it makes her eyes bluer. He said her birthday is on Christmas Day.

God Tas, what does that matter?

She is used to ruining festivities. That relentless need for an audience. You know, if she were religious, she’d want to be Jesus.

I laugh and Tacita says, Finally.

Istvan also says she’s the sort of woman who can change the mood in a room with a single remark. He calls her a cage in search of a bird. She kills everything, including conversations by saying things like, I dance like no one.

What else do you know of her?

She once told Lev that when she has a blister on her foot before a performance, she shaves off a thin slice of raw meat, usually veal, and places it on top of the wound. After she dances, at the end of the night, the meat is cooked. It’s the only thing that works. She says all the dancers do it. Tacita winces. I think this image has possibly ruined ballet for me. She pauses and then says, She might be half crazed with hunger. Her only food is vodka and cigarettes.

Vodka and cigarettes are not food, they are an addiction.

I, let’s not talk about her.

After a moment, I force myself to ask, Do you know anything of Aglaya?

No. Istvan says that Lev never discusses her. Istvan doesn’t even know where she lives. She sucks in her breath. He wonders when Lev has long absences if he has gone to her.

An inward shudder.

I wonder if they have children.

There is only silence around everything with Lev. He does not want to talk about it. I, let’s not talk of it either. All of this. I wonder if it even seems like you.

Tacita—

She squeezes my hand. It was the dancer who went outside of courtesy, she says.

I reach for Tacita’s coat and my own, a cream wool coat, stitched by Mme. Tissaud, who prefers creating clothes of her own style rather than the fashionable thing. She has drawers of ribbons and fabrics and underclothes from bygone eras though everything she makes is unfussy. A wise man, she says, wears simple clothing and carries a jewel in his heart.

We walk to Le Dôme hand in hand. The cold air is sobering. For a moment I can see these unsettling things. The three-inch newspaper type. The sparse grocery stores. Museum collections slowly trickling from the city to the provinces. As I feared, each week another rare animal vanishes from the zoo. Monkeys. The python. The hyena is still there but the guard informs me, after much pleading, that she is soon to go. There is a danger of not taking danger seriously enough. And yet still my world exists only within my desires, and two arrondissements. We walk to a group who seeks mappable routes to the unconscious. The under-world preferable to the sliver of land we precariously stand on.

Istvan comes toward us and kisses us both warmly. My eyes flicker across the room. Lev is not here, though many of the women who look for him are. Unlike everyone else, he does not recount amorous episodes from the past. I hear about them from other people. I think of what Tacita said. That maybe he and Aglaya are together. I have offered myself up to my beloved. I am acutely aware of the geometry of desire. Of the fact that somewhere he too could be doing the same.

I excuse myself. In the toilettes women jut out their lower lips applying red lipstick, their mouths o’s while their eyelashes coat with black. Hair in waves. They wear complicated constructed dresses and garter belts and silk-seamed stockings. They are ravishing. They smell of perfume and cigarettes. I am overcome with love for them, for bothering. Of course beauty also destroys beauty. Like the iridescent peacocks now gone from the zoo. Tacita and I observe that they prefer to eat chrysanthemums and roses rather than the granules and grit consumed by the dust-coloured birds that nobody notices. I see myself glint across the mirror. Dark-circled eyes, angular lines, messy hair braided and pinned up around my head. A white dress with pleats that fall to the ground. I look wrong. Out of time. I have a certain ignorance in complex barters of social currency. With women, appearance is most definitely one. I know that solitaries look odd. It is mostly when I am in a room with people who have a common goal that I feel remote. I have grown used to being separate, but wonder what it would be like, just for a moment, to be them. Women who wash their hair in dead champagne to make it gold. Women who sleep with pins and strips of rags tied around their hair to wake up to curls. Women who wear the newest thing. Would I know which dress was the right one? Where to find a small mother-of-pearl mirror that clicks shut? Queenie had one, Mother, an army. I wonder if because I had only brothers I have never really understood why people choose to determine women by their outsides, and not by their brains or hearts. I don’t want to be admired like Ulyana. I want to be given space so that I can paint and record and unfold into what I’m making. Without that, I see that there are parts of my life that run thin. I see how the best things are made in solitude. These women who seem to live in front of the mirror, this flash of beauty, fleeting, like glitter at a party. But, I remind myself, I am not a solitary anymore. I have Tacita. I have Lev. And with him, I am alarmed that my words are stunted and rusted from being so deep inside of me I have no idea if they are even really there.

I emerge back into the noisy room, gather my coat and gloves, and kiss Tacita.

Oh Ivory, don’t go. We’re just beginning.

You must tell me what transpires.

We will re-evaluate in the light of day.

The walk back to Mme. Tissaud’s is rainsoaked and the lights get mooned in the dark rivers of streets.

I take my key and unlock my door, the damp cold is startling. In the dark, I see a thin film of water from the rain. I left the window open. But also sharp frilled edges of roses.

How? A locked room and only I have the key.

I can’t stop thinking about Ulyana. I can’t shake her image. Acting as though nothing has happened is like having to speak to a stranger in the morning, when there still exists the remoteness of an intense dream. I wish I could live without this interior drama. I think of Tacita and Istvan and the way they move together, without question, or conflict. Though I know living by comparison is living in shadows. I wonder if she experiences this. The feeling that if I hear from Lev, if he is in my room, or we meet in the street, it is a marvel. That he is even there. I cannot imagine a world that he inhabits sturdily, enduringly, without fail. I cannot imagine living together. A shared key, food, space. Instead we move like animals, cautious of coming in close. What is it that is feared? Capture?

There is a distant thrum of an airplane above. Lev once told me that he was interested in aviators, until he actually met one and then was disappointed to find that this person was just normal. A sportsman. No inward struggle, just a tightly focused mind with little self-consciousness.

What did you think they would be like?

Adventurers.

Well isn’t travelling adventure?

People who travel for recreation are limited by the part of themselves that’s only interested in elsewhere. Travelling is a substitute for real activity.

What would you consider real activity?

Anything you do with your mind.

Later Lev explains that he stood below waiting for me, and when I didn’t come out, he began to toss the roses through the open window. Without staying any longer, he left.

But that’s impossible, I say. They were placed there so perfectly. As though they had been arranged.