THE MUSICIAN methodically withdrew the carving knife from where it burrowed in the turkey's haunches, which sputtered in protest as he pulled it out. Rising with a sigh, he trundled down the length of the dinner table, and the room seemed to quiver with his seismic grace. The knife dripped fowl juices onto the tiles, leaving a trail of congealing fat as if M. Marais, like Hansel lost in the woods, might need to find his way back to his seat. Charlotte panted softly. My husband will slice me open, she told herself. And she imagined two identical wounds—the/^holes, the chiseled curves out of which the viol cries—inscribed in her own torso, curling up from her pelvic bones like a sly smile. Her network of organs and intestines would be pinkly exposed, like the wonderful wax anatomical woman she had seen last year at the fair. Charlotte's fingers began to scrabble at her laces.
She could smell M. Marais as he drew nearer—the fermenting scent of the enormously fat—and she bared her stomach, resplendent with black and horse-like hairs. But when her husband seized her, he gripped only her chin, tilting it in the air, maneuvering her head this way and that, and eyed her with the patience of a portraitist. Then the carving knife scraped down her gullet, and she watched as the shorn hair fell into her lap, plummeting in quick, sad clumps like lead-filled pigeons from the sky.