I sit for a minute, then close the file. But the images remain with me. The scared girl, the cage. Báthory describing herself as an angel.
But there’s no description of the actual murder, and Maria’s only given me a half story about how she supposedly found the diaries. She hasn’t sent or mentioned any photos, any documentation proving she’s seen the real, original volumes. This fragment could be from anywhere; she could have written it herself.
On the other hand, she could be telling the truth and have actually found them. She has a background in curatorial studies, knows libraries and archives. She’s always mentioning museums she hopes to work for or has been on contracts with, conferences she’s attended. Always around successful, seemingly well-connected people. She could have met the right professor at a museum reception, learned about a yet-to-be-catalogued stash of papers in a university rare books library. Maybe she’s poring over her transcriptions right now and translating more and more into English, building her manuscript for publication. I feel a flutter of jealously.
I became fascinated with Báthory years ago. During under-grad I’d often look through a plastic milk crate of one-dollar giveaways at the used bookstore in the strip mall behind my apartment. The bookstore was one of the only good things about living in the suburbs on a bus line that ran only until midnight, in an institutional, faux-wood-linoleumed, excessively scrubbed and whitewashed apartment block. One day I found her, in a book called
Weird and Wicked: Women You Never Want to Meet.
I read and reread the chapter; she caught in me like burrs. The stories of her tortures, the images of what she committed, pricked me when I was walking between classes, shopping for a new dress, sitting under the dryer at the salon while my highlights developed.
I have been mostly lucky, or maybe unlucky, in that I’ve never experienced anything horrifying in my life. When I was about fourteen, one of my friends at school told us about her tabby cat, Frisco. She found him lying under the potentilla with three of his legs cut off, bone splinters and ground flesh at the stumps. He was half conscious, his pink tongue clamped between his front teeth. He had been roaming in the field; her dad was swathing the wheat and Frisco got caught in the blades. That he made it back to the house was pure adrenalin, homing instinct. He stayed under the potentilla until her mom wrapped him in an old bath towel. Her dad had to get off the tractor, find the rifle and shoot the cat.
It became a story boys at school would retell, one or two hunching over and flailing, miming the de-limbed cat, another pretending to hold a gun, aim, shoot. And shoot again and again until they were all laughing, playing charades with their imaginary guns and the memory of a cruelly injured cat. The rest of that year I’d sometimes see my friend stare blankly at nothing during class or at a party. I thought it had to be Frisco and the boys’ constant re-enactment of the incident that made her chew her cheek, made her eyes fix on empty space. I imagined that the world was never exactly the same for her after she saw her pet maimed and dying. I’ve never had an experience like that, something that gnawed at me in every pause and that changed the taste of things. I know I should be grateful, but I’m curious, envious to see what it’s like to pass through a version of reality and to see your world differently than you are able to understand it right now. Reading about Báthory didn’t completely change me, but it spurred me, dug in just enough to encourage my curiosity of what it might be like to experience the horrific.
After that book I searched further in the library and online. I took a course called “History of Eastern Europe, 1450–1600,” where we mostly learned about the Ottoman Empire, but I managed to put her in a footnote for my term paper. I kept
Weird and Wicked
on my desk at home. She was my spectre, my something sparkly amid the faux hardwood, the white walls, the never-past-midnight bus rides.
Technically, I was fixated. Though now I don’t necessarily think about Báthory every day. I don’t idolize her like Foster does. There’ve been long stretches when she hasn’t even crossed my mind. But what my interest in her churned up is something that goaded me. What makes somebody lie, steal, kill? And how do you know who is capable of what?
It’s hard to know for sure. Are people innately normal, genius or insane, if you can even define these terms? Or can these things be nurtured? The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
—the DSM, we call it—was first published only in the fifties. The
International Classification of Diseases
—the ICD, which they more often use here—has a longer history, but its goals are similar. With every new edition of these texts, new disorders are “identified.” A disease is shaped and given a name. Someone decides that if you have certain traits, you have Disorder X. But open the most recent editions, the DSM-IV or the ICD-10, and you discover we all have traits classified as maladaptive. How many people do you pass on the street in a day? One in a hundred has psychopathic tendencies. When do tendencies and traits add up to an absolute, a diagnosis; when do traits prompt actions; when do those actions cause others harm? Where is the line between healthy and unhealthy, and who gets to draw it?
I’m supposedly trained to address these questions in a measured and professional manner. Even when I interview forensic patients, the situation is extremely controlled. I read about a patient’s history in a file, I go sit in a room across from him or her for a few minutes, ask questions from a script, calculate a score and stick one more piece of paper in the case history. It’s my job to observe and to record. To be detached. I’m getting good at it. I can interview a criminal who shot someone during a robbery, then ran over two people with his truck during his failed getaway, write up the report and not think about him or his victims ever again.
But it’s different with Foster. And Báthory. Twenty minutes after reading Maria’s attachment I’m entering test scores in a spreadsheet, but my mind lingers on the image of the countess: platinum blonde, dressed in white, the cage with the spikes. No clinical assessment, no sanitized environment. Hot irons and a dirty basement and Báthory welcoming the blood. No limits on money, power or resources. For a time she was above any law or church. She was evolved into a perfect manifestation of her disorder. Unfettered and terrifying beauty. Compare her to this spreadsheet in front of me, the patients corralled into small grey siderooms, the clockwork
click-click
of the nurses’ med cart, all in some way necessary, perhaps even good, things. But not beautiful.
I pull up Maria’s email message and hit reply.
I suggest a lunch date on Saturday with her. Henry’s started to teach a Saturday class, so I’m on my own for most of the day, anyway. “Only for a while,” Henry says. “Just to make a bit of extra cash.”
Maria picks the place, a vegetarian restaurant near Covent Garden. The area will be overrun with tourists and shoppers, on a Saturday especially, but Maria assures me we’ll have no problem spotting each other if we meet directly across the street from the tube station. I still feel like a tourist myself, really, even though we’ve been here over a month now. I leave the house about an hour early to allow time for getting lost, tube delays, other unforeseen emergencies.
But I arrive at Covent Garden without incident and with over an hour before I’m supposed to meet Maria. I head to the market and kill twenty minutes in a makeup store that sells gloss and eyeshadow in tiny jewelled pots. I’m looking in the mirror, holding a bright teal shadow beside my eyes, when I see a quick flash, a blonde darting behind me. I turn and accidentally step on a salesgirl’s toe.
“Oh, no, excuse me,” I say. I look down and see that her shoes are open-toed.
“Not at all,” says the girl, biting her lip. She looks at me. “You have interesting colouring. Very peaches and cream, but with your eyes, I’d suggest something gold,” she says. Her lips are carnation pink. “Here, we have a few things that might work for you.” I feel bad about crushing her foot, so I sit on a stool and let her pick out a colour. She dips a makeup brush in a glittering pot and swabs my eyelids. “This is called Be Bronze. Golden tones bring out the light in amber eyes. Look.”
I glance in the mirror. Not bad, actually.
“Now, tell me if you like this.” She dabs at my lips. “It’s called Carney.”
It looks like she’s taken an orange highlighter to me. “It’s a little bright,” I say.
“Not to worry. But it’s good to give something new a go. You never know.” She hands me a tissue and I wipe off the lipstick, then check to make sure I haven’t smeared it all over my face. In the mirror, another flash. Platinum hair. I turn quick, see the back of a coat, high-heeled feet rushing out of the shop. Maria? I throw the tissue in the garbage and step off the stool.
“Have you tried any of our fragrances? This is one of our classics, Make It Fluffy.” The girl sprays a strip of paper and some of the perfume hits my sweater. It smells like musk and artfully rotting flowers.
“Um, thanks,” I say. I give up the idea of following the woman and move towards the cash. “I’ll just take the eyeshadow.”
The salesgirl wraps the pot for me in red tissue paper and sets it inside a petite gold bag. I twirl the bag between my fingers and head back to the street.
It’s overcast but not raining, so I walk back towards the tube station and cross into Seven Dials. The musky perfume sticks to my coat and hair; I walk quickly to try to shake it off as I weave through the thick, quick crush of Saturday shoppers. A woman nudges past me, four-inch heels effortlessly clicking on cobblestones. I hear another set of footsteps pushing behind me. Foster’s words rattle in my mind.
You don’t look over your shoulder? Before we were in here, we were out there.
It’s only bothering me because I’m anxious to see Maria, to get her full story of the diaries while fending off her inevitable questions about Stowmoor.
I window-shop mostly. But I can’t concentrate on the displays. No matter what speed I walk there’s a sound of steps at my heels; someone keeping pace with me for blocks. Then someone elbowing past. A man’s late-morning coffee breath warm on my skin as he shouts on his mobile phone. Each time I duck to the edge of the fray to look in a storefront, I see the window’s reflection: a horde of translucent bodies and heads jostling behind me. A head with blonde waves like Maria’s bobs close, then pulls away. I turn, watch solid walking bodies, dozens of blonde, grey, white, brown heads, a few pink and green ones. No Maria, no one paying me any attention except to step around me as they hurry to their next destination.
Exhausted by my own neuroses, I go into a boutique. I peel off my rotten-flower smelling clothes and try on things the saleswoman suggests: a black dress, short, with a tulle skirt and corset-like ribbon ties in the back. A grey angora sweater. A billowy sequined purple minidress. I survey myself in the mirror. As my mother would say, it does nothing for my waist. I look like a sparkly eggplant.
Someone in the change room beside mine pulls the brocade curtain back six inches, but doesn’t come out. She must be waiting for the mirror. I scurry into my change room, put my clothes on and leave the outfits behind. When I come out, the curtain of the next change room is wide open. A long, white, iridescent dress hangs at the back. The clerk takes the dress off the hook, holds it in front of her. “Your friend had to rush off?”
“My friend?”
“Yes. The woman who was in here.”
“No, I...I didn’t know her.”
“Oh, I thought you two came in together. My mistake.” She whisks the dress away. The slinky material glitters as she walks.
I look back at the empty change room and involuntarily shiver. I’m being ridiculous. What was so odd? Someone using a change room beside me? Get it together, I tell myself. I walk out the door.
Still a half-hour until I’m supposed to meet Maria. I merge into the flow of pedestrians, accidentally bump a woman who’s carrying a takeaway coffee. The lid of the drink stays on, there’s no spill, but she looks at me like I tried to push her in front of a bus. I apologize repeatedly, slip back into the crowd. I jostle along for a few minutes and spy a pink storefront with a clear Plexiglas double door. The window display is rose and cream and serene. I step inside.
Another cosmetics store. I pick up a sample jar of cream, dab a bit on the back of my hand. Dragonfruit Surprise Body Lotion. I sniff my hand. Mouldy fruit smell, mixed with the bad flower perfume. I smell like a compost heap.
A raven-haired salesgirl pops out from behind a caddy of bronzing products. “Are you familiar with our services?”
“Um, no. This is my first time here.”
I’m struck by her perfect ponytail, the crispness of her pink blouse. Lip gloss so shiny I swear I can see a shadow of my reflection. “Our list is there,” she points behind me, “on the wall, or you can pick up a pamphlet to take home with you. We take appointments or, if we have time, walk-ins. This week we have a special on lash extensions—partials are half-price.”
“Partials?” I say.
“Yes, we attach the lashes to only the outer half of the eyelid.”
“Attach, permanently?”
“Semi-permanently. The service comes complete with a care sheet, extra glue and a special solution to dissolve the adhesive if you wish to take them off.”
“Oh, sounds interesting.”
“If you want, I’m open right now. It only takes about ten minutes.”
I think of Maria’s doll lashes. I look at my watch—still a good twenty minutes until I have to meet her. “Sure,” I say, and follow the girl to the back of the store. I sit in the makeup chair; she swivels me to face a mirror lined with bright, round light bulbs.
“I’ll just grab the supplies,” says the girl. “Here’s some information about our services. I’ll be back in a sec.” She leaves a lavender pamphlet on the counter and skips away, dark hair bouncing.
I peruse the list of services that will make me more attractive, or happy, or both. The various treatments promise
rejuvenation, glow, definition
of my skin, my eyes, my very soul. You don’t need a degree in psychology to know they’re trying to create a feeling of lack in the consumer, one they will happily correct, for a fee. Still, I notice that they have eyebrow shaping on the list too. I look in the mirror. I should pluck mine more regularly.