“I brought you, remember? I’ve been waiting out here to take you home.”
Oh, yes. She patted his neck.
Her son, her sturdy, handsome son, picked her up into his arms and carted her bodily out into the sunshine. She blinked as she was loaded into her own brougham, then David climbed in afterward.
Mistakenly, her phantom James tried to get in too, but, ha, David was so clever. No more ill-behaving dreams. He blocked the dream’s way. “You leave her alone,” he said. “You and Phillip have done quite enough, I think.”
“Indeed,” she added from the back. Then, “Wait.” She stretched her arm out. “Here,” she said. She dropped her tooth into the dream’s hand.
He took it as if not certain what to do with her gift, then stepped away, looking suitably dismayed. Oh, the vengeful joy of dreams. She had to remember to have more like this. James looked terrible. Thin and prosperous and abjectly discontent. Good, good, good, she thought. He misses me. He is lost without me. Perfect. Oh, this is perfect!
As the carriage door closed, he called to her. “What do you want of me? What for godssake do you want?”
She laughed uproariously at this, because an idiot knew the answer. “The fairy tale,” she told him. “I want the fairy tale ending of course. If you can’t give it to me, then go away.”
The carriage lurched forward, and she swayed against David. At some point, her jaw began to hurt, really hurt, and her tongue found a specific place,
the hole where her tooth had been: a soft, mushy pit that ran deeply into her jaw, huge and tasting of metal. It felt like a cavern. Yes, indeed. The tooth was gone. She missed it. She was sad. She would never be the same.
But she could get along without it; that was fact.
The Thorny Forest on Fire
In Africa, in some of the denser jungle, a man can step off the footpath and suddenly lose his way completely. The path is presumably there, a few paces away. Yet it could take hours to find it again. Or he might not find it at all; this is always a possibility. The way he meant to go can disappear like a piece of sunlight behind a turn in the trees. There, but vanished. Frustratingly, invisibly close, but no longer an option. Ultimately, he may have to make a new way; his journey may take a day longer, a week longer, a year longer. Or forever: He may never get to where he’d been going in the first place
.
From the Earl of Bromwyck’s
African Travels
Pease Press, London, 1878
W
ell,
she
was certainly jolly. Hardly the Coco James had expected to find. He had bullied his way into the dentist’s surgery—heroically, he had thought at the time. Though now he accepted that guilt and worry had driven him into London. He had feared that by ignoring Coco he might have destroyed her. James had imagined finding her crushed, distraught.
Well. So much for
that
whimsy.
Meanwhile, here he was, King of the World, Head of Everything. A man of substantial success. Michaelmas Term, it looked like, was going to bring a permanently endowed chair, one being created
ad hominem
for James. He would have his own lifetime Professorial Fellowship, one of less than a hundred in all the university. There was no higher that he could go, not academically, not administratively, not even socially, so far as he knew, unless Queen Victoria decided to marry him.
Only a little exaggeration of his possibilities these days: the Queen herself was vocally unhappy over James’s name having been scratched from the list
of her annual birthday honors. Her birthday was past, but she’d let it be known that she intended to do something about what she saw as injustice.
He had it all, James thought.
And all anyone expected in return—aside from a lifetime of commitment to knowledge, teaching, and the running of the establishment that supported both—was for James to announce today that reefs of gold, as if poured along one side of the continent, had been revealed in samples brought back heroically from Africa.
You are the perfect one to say, James. People will be so enamored of you, your discovery, and the possibilities, they will forget all about our disgrace
.
Right, James thought. Let’s forget about disgrace.
Thus he stared out the window of an administrative office, awaiting the arrival of two reporters from the London
Times
. In the room beyond, several men privately thought they knew what James would be telling the reporters in half an hour.
James himself, though, wasn’t so sure.
He stood by the window, looking out onto the Backs. The trees had begun to change color, but the grass was still rich and green as it rolled down to the Cam. Distantly two punters poled slowly on the river. His eyes glazed then. He saw nothing. Just the glare off the glass of the window. And Coco. He could see her in his mind’s eye.
Coco listened to the orchestra warm up from high overhead in her opera box, where she sat with Jay Levanthal and his friends—already a breach, since mainly such boxes were occupied by families or, in the case of single individuals, women sat with
women and men sat with men. For a woman to sit in a London opera box with four gentlemen, none of them husbands, brothers, or fathers, was risque. But such was Coco’s life. The risque Parisian
belle
with the house on the Bois. It was an old notion, as antiquated as the Second Empire, but she carried the freedom of her ruin inside her. She didn’t
want
to live it down. She liked what it wrought.
She sat back in a dress that rustled when she moved, leisurely spreading the ivory ribs of a silk fan. Jay chattered at her now and then. He would woo her if she’d let him; so would two or three of his friends. They might have enjoyed the excitement of her accepting one of them, yet she couldn’t help feel that—like herself—they counted on her to refuse, to maintain the status quo. They were all happy to be exactly as they were. Content. Making the same plays for each other as they had for a dozen years. Flirting safely. Stirring gossip when they got bored.
It was a lovely evening, a good evening for gossip. The Alhambra Theatre was packed. Within five minutes, the orchestra would strike up into the opening overture of the newest operetta by Strauss.
Die Fledermaus
, a production that had opened in Vienna already, and closed in short order. Still, London was keen. The waltz from the second act was becoming quite popular; it was melodious enough to draw in by droves the people who would dance to it the most, high society.
Across the vast space, between her box and those boxes that rounded their way along the opposite wall, Coco could see the heads of the several Members of Parliament she happened to know as well as
a banker or two. The far box that sat nearest the stage held a Queen’s minister. Coco raised her opera glasses and, with an ironic laugh, realized that sitting beside him was the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. She couldn’t resist scanning every member of this box, yet would not admit to herself who she really looked for.
Coming upon the rosy-nosed face of Tuttleworth, she lowered her small binocular glass instantly and sighed in disgust. Of course, it was not Tuttleworth she had hoped to see. Of course. What an imbecile she was! But then she sat back again, thinking, Well, at least my tooth doesn’t hurt.
The orchestra stopped its whining and dissonance all at once. The gaslights lowered, dimming, dimming. In the silence the audience seemed to hold its breath as one. A light, the spotlight that normally was focused on the stage, swung wildly up suddenly into the high dome of the room.
And there in the spotlight a black drape of some sort was whisked off a contraption and with a swoop—as the bass drum in the orchestra pit suddenly rolled into a rapid chest-vibrating rhythm—a bat, indeed, a four- or five-foot bat cruised down in a rapid descent over the audience. Women shrieked, then laughed, thrilled. The bat.
Die Fledermaus
, indeed. A mechanical
fledermaus
, with widespread black wings, soared over everyone’s heads on a network of wires operated somewhere by a puppeteer.
Coco began to laugh. It was too good. It was just too strange. The mechanical bat flew within feet of her box. She felt the wind in her face off its kitelike wings. Oh, if James could only see. James. James,
James, James. He would die in his tracks. He would be immobilized.
Actually, what he would do was nearly crawl up the back of a doorman who had just informed him that he must take his seat or return to the lobby.
James had already been at the Alhambra for nearly ten minutes and had no intention of returning to the lobby, where he’d scanned the faces of those who hadn’t found their seats; he had prayed to find Coco before the operetta began. When the very last people had straggled into the theatre itself, however, he still hadn’t seen her. So he had gone in the central doors and stood at the rear, trying to recognize the back of her beautiful dark head. That was when the lights had dimmed.
He knew she had an opera box in Paris and would not have been surprised to learn she had one at Covent Garden, but now here, he reasoned. She hadn’t been in England that long to have established herself at all the theatres. Thus, he was looking in the orchestra seats, trying to spot her while trying to talk the doorman out of grabbing him by the collar, since he didn’t have a seat to take, when out of nowhere a bat—a bloody sodding bat as big as he was!—cut down through the air and came straight for him.
It was a nightmare come to life. James screamed. No other word for it. The hero let out a wail and attacked the doorman who had grabbed his coat. No one but no one was going to stop James from evading a bat that big.
He half-climbed, knocked down, half-walked over the doorman, only to find himself running
down the aisle in the direction of the stage. All the while, trying to make shorter work of his ordeal, he began to call, “Coco! Coco, for godssake, where are you? Lucia said you were here, but where? Where?”
He heard, he thought, distantly from the other side of the theatre and above, the sound of his name. A tentative, disbelieving sort of voice, just once. “James?”
The bat swooped again. It wasn’t real. James distinguished this much, at least. Yet somehow that seemed an insignificant fact, since it seemed to be after him. “Unfortunate,” he muttered to a man with more eyebrows than hair. “So unfortunate. Pardon. But you see, I simply
must
get to the other side.” James slid into the row.
The man resisted when James tried to climb over him. He grabbed James’s trouser leg.
James simply slapped him down. “So sorry. I say, there, most unfortunate.” He then proceeded to scramble over the knees of the man’s neighbor, over shoulders and arms when necessary, making a dash through the entire line of seated people.
Two women stood, making a fuss. Honestly, if they would only be quiet…. But then the wrong people were quiet: the orchestra drizzled instrument by instrument to a stop. The lights came up.
And the bat came down, narrowly missing James’s head. He thought his heart would stop.
“James?” It was Coco’s voice.
He looked up. “Coco? Where are you?”
“Here.”
She was in a box near the front of the far side, if he could just get past about ten more people.
Someone else said his name, not nearly so nicely as Coco. “Stoker,” they said with surprise. Then another voice, “It’s Sir James Stoker.” Oh, fine.
Whispers, disapproval. Oh, and this was only the beginning. Just wait.
But it did hurt to hear them. “Stoker? What the devil is James Stoker doing here?” Like a little thorn that caught, then let go. “Making a fool of himself, it seems.” A bramble that slowed him, but didn’t deter him.
It would be a full scale forest by the end, he knew. Lit by his own hand into a full conflagration. Oh, the damage he had done himself today.
“Coco,” he called, still several people from the aisle. He wanted nothing so much as to look up at her while standing with some sort of dignity. “Coco, I have to talk to you.”
Using a wobbling, evasive head and shoulder for balance, James caught sight of her as she rose, stepped forward to the rail overhead, and looked down. Oh, God, she was radiant. Why had he let her go? How could he possibly have thought anything was better than the relief of knowing she existed, knowing she was there? His reverie was interrupted, though, when the bat dived at him again. He yelped and clambered over the last few people. Up the aisle all six of the theatre’s doormen now—like a wigged, stockinged, red velvet, gold-braided army—were coming toward him.
Meanwhile, Coco stared down, unable to believe her ears or eyes. James. As if she’d conjured him up. James being harried by a puppeteer. “Oh, James,” she said again. What in all the world was
he doing here? Looking down, she asked, “Are you all right?”
“No,” he said. “No.” In the aisle at last, he held out his arms. “Aside from the bat,” he said, “I can’t sleep. My lectures, when I get to them, are nonsense. I haven’t gotten to my rocks or notes or anything that matters to me in weeks.” He took a breath. Everyone about had grown noticeably quieter. “All I do is think of you,” he continued, “while I walk around feeling as if I just swallowed my heart, as if it were beating inside my stomach. Here.” He reached into his pocket, withdrew something, then heaved his arm back. He threw whatever it was up to her.
It was small, whizzing by, then landing with a little tap. Jay picked it up and handed it to Coco.
She stared at it in her palm: it was a tooth. Someone’s disgusting tooth.
Wait. It was
her
disgusting tooth. The disgusting tooth she had given to her Nitrous Oxide James, which the real James below had just tossed up into her opera box.