January, 1861
With one of the signs crumpled up in my hands, I did not knock upon the door.
I went, with controlled violence, up the stairs. The Negro was waiting up top, just like always.
“Miss Conant,” he said. “Mist’ Mumler with clients. Why don’t you come inside and wait.”
“Detain me then,” I told Bill Christian, who took a step back and gazed after me, grinning.
I went at a clip through the sitting room door. Mumler’s back was turned to me; he was bent at his tripod as ever, inspecting.
“Mist’ Mumler, I tried, but she wouldn’t let up, and I told her—”
“—now, Bill, it is perfectly fine. I’m sure that she has got her reasons. Would you like to sit down and wait for me—”
“—in here. I would like to wait for you in here,” I told Mumler, indicating the very same room he was in.
His sitter, a flushed, older man on a stool, looked unnerved in my presence and then irritated.
“As you were, Mr. Baker,” said Mumler. “Just so.”
When the sitting was over, they confabulated, the man making grumblings directed at me, but by and by he took the stairs, projecting irate looks behind him. The Negro seemed to know at last that Mumler and I were to be left alone and, hooding his eyes with uncertainty at us, he too left the room to go wait in the stairs.
The room’s atmosphere calibrated to hold us, volatile and unconstrained.
Mumler sat on the couch with outrageous bravado, an aura of lewd and majestic dominion, exhaling roughly through his nose, his bicep cast over the arm.
Let him play Henry. Just let him, I thought.
“Won’t you take a seat?” he said.
I showed hesitation, the ladylike type. Then I went to the couch and I hovered above it; and I hovered, my bustle sublime in the air, before sitting down on the opposite end. As I arranged my skirts around me, I very lightly touched my throat.
“Where is Hannah?” I asked him.
“Out shopping with mother.”
“I’d thought she was your battery.”
“She is,” he said. He grinned. “She is. Though I don’t often need her past two or three shots. And besides,” Mumler said with an air of sad wisdom, “it is unrealistic to always have ghosts. Three with ghosts and three without—now those are what I call good odds.”
I considered his face and then looked to his hands. Today, again, he wore the gloves.
“Congratulations are in order?”
“This thing here,” he said. “Of course.” And he wiggled a copper or brass wedding ring.
It was sad tragedy for a jeweller to suffer. It was as though the wedding ring were merely an object to anchor the glove.
“Before,” I said, “when I came here, irritated with you for promoting your prints, which cost the Banner revenue, not to mention reflected disorderly on us— well I daresay that here, today, you have sullied my trust for the very last time.”
Astoundingly, he looked confused—as though in his mildness I really had struck him. And then it seemed to come to him. “The sign postings,” he said. “Of course.”
“The sign postings, yes, Mr. Mumler, I’ve seen them. Do you think I am stupid?” I said.
“Not at all.”
“Do you think then I didn’t know what you were up to? Having me endorse you, sir?”
For a moment the jeweller looked poised to cry “Outrage.” Then the impulse left his face. “If you knew I would beggar your interests,” he said, “then why did you agree to write?”
“I fear I thought the best of you. I fear I believed in our little alliance.”
“Yet clearly you didn’t,” said Mumler, amused, “if you are as wise as you claim, Madam Speaker.”
“You are staring at me, Mr. Mumler,” I said. “What is it that you think you see?”
“A woman to be reckoned with,” he said to me softly, absurdly.
I scoffed. “And you have reckoned—is that it?”
“I’ve reckoned,” he said, sitting back, “but ungamely. How would you have me put it right?”
“Describe me better than you have.”
“I see a coquette with a head on her shoulders who wishes to say how this shop’s to be run.”
“That is better,” I said. “That is plausible, even.” I touched the buttons on my dress. “Though I am sure that you see more.”
He paused for a moment and watched me, gone grinning. He pointed a finger at length, which he dropped. I looked around the studio to see was anyone still there.
I did not care a stitch for Hannah, Hannah’s mother, Negro Bill. So I worked at the first of my blocky cloth buttons, not breaking for even a moment his stare as I needed the air rushing in, rushing over, rushing into my neck from cool channels above. I stuck out my knees so they met with his knees and when he tried to move, I held him. It was an alignment of knees, and it pleased me, and I thought to myself, It is something unspeakable, and I rapped on his thigh, very sharp, with two fingers, my middle and my index, braced.
“Tonight we will have something straight that you would do better to never forget.”
And with those words I took the sign and mashed it, crumpling, in his face. I paid it with a crackling noise across his hot, accepting face and felt his features coming up beneath the rover of my hand.
I felt him through feeling his warmth and his breathing. I felt him though he was not there.
He made, then, to kiss me. I pushed him away. He flopped, awkwardly, on his end of the couch. And there, tumbled over, his hair in his face, not knowing at all what to do with his hands, I think I may have liked him best. I loomed in above him—unswerving, totemic.
“Eyes right here,” I said to him and did away another button. And when he moved again toward me, thinking at last I had given him licence, I shook my head at him. He lowered his hands.
“You may extract yourself,” I said.
“And I will watch your breast, so doing.”
“You will do no such thing,” I said. “Your eyes may rest upon my neck.”
He did not go about it quickly but lissomely, rather, as if I weren’t watching. I could not hear the sounds he made for the deafening sound of my blood in my ears. We sat there in silence but for his exertions, upwards of a couple of minutes.
“Do not finish yet,” I said. “So tell me then: what do you see?”
“See?” he said, still working. “See?”
“A woman to be reckoned with? A coquette, as you say, with a head on her shoulders?”
“A whore to be handled,” he said.
“Ah—there.” The blood in me was everything. “A partner,” I whispered, “that’s all of these things. A fraudulent queen among whores and coquettes.”
“You estimate . . . yourself . . . too high.”
“My neck,” I said. “My neck. Eyes here.”
Another button, two, three more and I felt the air rushing, alive, in between me. It was as though the force of him were prying at me to get in.
He groaned and he cramped violently and leaned toward me, and that was when he burbled forth. The milky gouts escaped from him from where he reared up through his shirt.
I leaned back from him not disgusted, not really, but rather confused at my role in the thing. How like a little boy he seemed in the bare aftermath of his gratification. He instantly went about cleaning himself, which consisted of mussing his shirttails together and tucking them into his trousers again. He draped his arm over the couch, breathing roughly “And that was your idea—of what?”
I sat leaning toward him, my dress halfway open. “Of being clear on where we stand.”
“But partners. But equals.” He laughed. “It’s absurd.”
“You are partners already,” I said, “with that Negro.”
“Which you’ll admit is different, Ma’am.”
A rage overtook me and then only shame. I clutched my dress lapels together. The room before me went askew behind an imminence of tears.
But then the man’s expression changed. His sadness and smugness turned into alarm. This was not, I discovered, because he’d upset me but rather because he had just heard a sound. It was the two women returned from their errand, letting themselves through the front of the shop.
“Please button your dress,” said the jeweller.
I stalled.
“Miss Conant, please, you’ve made your point.”
But in my pride I judged him wrong, I had not made my point by half and so I continued to sit there in silence. My hand fell away from the front of my dress.
He smiled at me stiffly, then looked to the door. But when he turned back he was no longer smiling.
“If you would cover up,” he said. “If you would,” he pantomimed at me, “your dress.”
He made the most helpless and asinine motions. I heard a mustering of locks—the Negro’s voice—the women, chatting.
“Miss Conant, now is not the time.”
“For coquetry,” I said, “perhaps. For terms of business perfect, really.”
“What business?” he blustered to ask me. “What business?!”
“Yours and mine,” I said.
“What terms?”
“My terms,” I said. “Always, my terms.”
As the locks fell away I was buttoning, quick, until I felt the final pinch.