24.
There was a part of us that wanted another world, a twilight world, wintry and forgotten. I often imagined us living there, me and Gabriel, in that place I could not quite see—in a room the width of a tree, our bed a canoe, the walls lined with mirrors that looked out on different lands in different times. Not gravity, but music would hold us in place. The night would sing; the bells would never cease.
In the beginning, Simon left me for days to prepare his ship, the Blue Rose, to hunt the seas around Lyra for his treasure. Ethel left by five each afternoon, and from then until nightfall I was with Gabriel, in his arms. There in the old shed Simon had given him at the edge of the property, on the very precipice of the swamp, we made love, we slept, we made love, as the alligators growled in the grass around us. And then he carried me—running zigzag away from the beasts, as he had been advised to do—back up to the house before my husband returned. Every morning I looked over the lawn at Gabriel’s quarters, afraid I’d find him torn through by alligator teeth, but that wasn’t how his story ended.
Time passed. The temperature grew warmer and then colder, the alligators withdrew, and I ran home through the fall grass alone. Gabriel’s body began to feel heavy, and not because he had gained weight—he had lost so much. The sadness I suffered for the rest of my life, which Madera tried to conquer, I contracted from Gabriel. His contagious melancholy, our pretty violet twilight, remained with me long after he had gone. Years after he passed, I awoke one morning to find my body had become as heavy as his. The line between us had finally vanished. Days passed into years. There were the white sheets, alternating blues in the sky, soft, pale food. Shadows on the cave wall. Simon’s face, a nurse’s, Ethel’s. It’s one o’clock, Mrs. Ranier, time for your pill. No, Mr. Ranier says there’s to be no more electroshock. It’s four o’clock, time for your pill. It’s January, Elle. It’s April, it’s July. It’s 1963. It’s 1987. We have entered a new millennium. For a while, life remained in my bright dreams. Waking hurt my heart. For there were mermaids still in that other realm, a person could fly, love shook the veins, months and years and days were irrelevant, wars and pandemics did not rage, Simon’s business could not fail. But in time I lost that paradise, too, and the dreams faded to murmurs. I had exhausted them; my memories had receded. It has never been pure blackness I craved, just beauty. Always beauty. Gabriel was the same.
Back in his time, on an evening in 1941, Gabriel stood up from the bed mid-sentence, completely naked, and walked out of the old shed into the swamp. His figure darkened as he walked on in the crepuscular light, and as the grass rose around his hips, it became difficult to distinguish him from the trees. For a few moments he stood there in the middle of that cold field, quietly beholding the early stars. But then he let out a scream that must have carried for a mile. When he had depleted his outrage, he returned to the little room as if nothing were the matter.
“What in God’s name is happening to you?” I asked him. My growing fear, the obvious one, was that there was another woman somewhere, someone he had left behind, someone he now knew was not worth sacrificing to be my fake cousin. Perhaps, I thought, it could even be someone he had met on Lyra?
“How I am less than a man,” Gabriel said, looking back out onto the swamp as if it stored the equation for solving all that was unfair in this life. “All I have is you. I’m just a ghost here, lying beside you. Keeping you company. Even if it makes me sick to work for Simon, at least there’s purpose in it. But he has no real use for me. I suppose I’m not the type he likes around. I try and try to please him, but for some reason or another . . . he doesn’t trust me. It’s been the same with every boss I’ve ever had. A man without work though isn’t a man. Back in New York, I . . . at least knew the right places to rob. I’m a thief, Elle. That’s what I’ve always been. That’s what all men are. But I’m an innocent, petty thief. Not like the rich folk. They’re professional criminals. Even your Simon. How is it you think he got us both out of the draft? Whatever he did, it wasn’t aboveboard, I’ll tell ya. Maybe, maybe, I should go off to the war after all,” he threatened. “There’s some honor in dying with a weapon in your hands.”
He walked back over to me, and that intangible, thick cloak of his seemed to settle upon me. “You live in this world,” he went on. “You’ve always been better at it than me. And in this world you’ve got to have a roof over your head. I don’t blame you for marrying Simon. You got us both a roof in the deal.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, against everything I felt. “Maybe you should go. To the war or wherever. Or back to New York.”
“Is that what you want, Elle?” he asked. “For once in your goddamn life, I want you to say what you want.”
The dusk was complete. Soon, I knew, Simon’s car would be climbing up the drive. I nodded my head, but Gabriel would not let me answer him. This world will end one day. He held my arms behind my body—a kind of ferociousness had returned to him—and we fell into the bed. His lips were waves upon my ears, neck, breasts. My body, within seconds, belonged completely to him.
That was the last night we ever made love. All I would keep from it is the pang of his hand, after pausing on my back or my belly, removing itself forever. The way he spoke to me throughout, imperceptibly, beneath his breath, words I’ll never hear again, so opposite to the force of his body, which was torrential, like his life was giving way.
And he had given me Zelda.
I had never slept in his arms. That night, by accident, I found myself in them still come dawn. Gabriel was watching me, willing me to wake. I opened my eyes and saw a firefly light just above his forehead, then disappear. It was the last of its kind.
“I didn’t think we had fireflies down here,” I said.
“I told you already, Elle, those ain’t lightning bugs,” Gabriel replied. “They’re fairies.”
“Did you sleep at all, Professor?” I asked him.
“With my eyes open,” he said. “So no dream could steal this memory.”
But the moment was ending. Life beyond us was returning. The curtains turned gray in the rising light, fluttering there. It became a memory as soon as I took notice of it at all—the perfume that came with the dawn wind, our own scent, the amalgam of our bodies. “Gabriel, I have to go,” I said.
“Oh, let the whole world burn,” he replied. “Let him murder us.” Still, he lifted me off the mattress and started running me home in his mad dash through the morning. The birds were already up chirping, gossiping over our affair. My heart was pounding with fear. Simon would see us; we would be found out. Gabriel’s lips were moving, his depression temporarily evaporated, but I was not listening. I leapt out of his arms and up the long stairway, into the house.
On the dining table waiting for me was a note sent by messenger the night before: Promising sight due east. Staying on the ship tonight. See you around lunchtime. Love, S.
Weeks passed. I did not need a doctor to tell me what was causing my spells of nausea, the lack of blood in the middle of the month. Quicksand had crawled inside our love. Soon I would be swollen. And Simon and I had still not consummated our marriage. The road had split ahead of me. I could choose to be free, live the vagabond life with Gabriel, digging in rubbish for our next meal. Perhaps run off to Los Angeles, as he’d always wanted, and find fame in Hollywood as George and Isabelle. But there would be no true revolution. I was a married woman and with child. I was only Elle Cumberland, a simple person with no extraordinary talent beyond a temporarily pretty face. The real threat was being forced to make a decision at all. To leave was a choice. To stay was to just stay. Most people stay in the world that has been chosen for them. Without Gabriel, I was no different from most people. The days I made love to him, my face changed in the mirror, had a supernatural glow. But that was Gabriel’s residue—his courage, his madness. He was the one who lived on the precipice. I have always lingered behind him. I have always remained human.
Simon drank profusely in our first year together, perhaps to avoid having to lie with me. Finally, I used his intoxication to my advantage. In those early weeks, before I was showing, Simon returned home, stumbling drunk. I poured him another Scotch and another, until he collapsed atop our blankets, glass in hand, his cigar still smoking. I pried off his underwear, then dropped my own atop his. I straddled my legs over his pale, elegant body and pressed his penis into me, all soft, barely alive. After a few moments, he shivered slightly. So different from Gabriel, even in this—so much more restrained, more refined. It had happened at last. It would happen like that a few more times in our life together.
In the morning, Simon’s face was pale when we awoke naked beside each other. “Darling,” he said. “Was everything all right?”
“It was,” I said.
“But are you hurt?” Simon asked.
“You could never hurt me,” I said.
Later that week, Gabriel emerged in the garden like a spook, wan and thin, as I attended to the roses. “You haven’t come to me in days and days,” he whispered harshly. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
I once believed that a baby comes into this world the instant a man and woman make love. But it isn’t true. A baby is conceived hours later, once the act itself is already a memory. Life is made in the aftermath of love, in its departure. Once it is already of the past.
“I can’t come to you every day, Gabriel,” I replied, like he was only a hired hand. “You forget sometimes that I am a married woman.”