Seeing the young woman’s eyes fill with tears, and her delicate mouth tremble, Tristram was stricken to the heart. He set his glass down hurriedly and took her hand, both her hands, in his. He whispered passionately, “I love you. I do want to help you. I will do anything for you.”
Fleur gave an involuntary little cry of surprise or fright at Tristram’s sudden gesture. Her natural instinct was to shrink from him but she forced herself (so Tristram sensed, to his chagrin) to remain still and unresisting. She was trembling badly but she said, in a small hushed voice, “I love you too, Angus. As you know. I … I love you too … as you know.”
“My darling, don’t be frightened! I won’t hurt you.”
“Oh I know, I know,” she whispered. She allowed him to kiss her on the cheek, sitting very still, ramrod straight in her chair. “I know, Angus … you would not.”
Though weak with desire Tristram knew he must restrain himself. How like a wild animal she was, a young doe, quavering in his arms! And how brutally Grunwald must have treated her, to have frightened her so! The conviction rang suddenly in Tristram’s head—You must kill the man, you have no choice.
Fleur struggled to her feet, and backed away, shaking her head, murmuring, “No. No. No,” as if Tristram, or another person, had spoken aloud. In a high rapid voice she said, “I think you should leave now, Angus. I think this is a wrong time. I don’t feel well. I feel very tired. My head aches. My eyes. My body. I am his wife,—I am a married woman. I am his. I am his by law. I think you should leave now. Please leave. Now. Please. “Tristram followed her, scarcely knowing what he did, taking hold of her arm, towering over her as she cringed before him, saying, “Fleur, what do you mean? You asked me to come here, and I’ve come, and I do want to help, and I will help,—you know I adore you—” Fleur tried to push him away, sobbing; Tristram held her fast; hoping, with that part of his brain that seemed to have detached itself from their struggle, that he would not lose control. She invited you here; she came to your hotel room; she has offered herself; she is yours for the taking.… These words sounded strangely in Tristram’s ears.
“Leave me alone! Don’t touch me,—I cannot bear to be touched!”
Tristram released the terrified woman, and stood back from her, to show her he meant no harm. He was panting and his face burned with a complex of emotions: frustration, shame, sexual desire. He felt oversized and clumsy; oafish as a performing bear; in, even, the attractive outfit he had assembled out of his and Markham’s clothes … Tristram’s shirt and well-worn trousers, Markham’s blue linen coat and blue-striped tie. He began to apologize, and offered to leave at once, should she want him to leave, when Fleur started to weep uncontrollably, and begged him not to leave—“I have no one but you, Angus. I have no one but you.” It was a cri de coeur of such despairing passion, Tristram felt the very hairs on the back of his neck stir. Yet when he tried to embrace her, again, to his astonishment, she pushed him away; murmuring “No, no, no—” She wrenched herself free of him, fell against a chair, fell to the carpet, shook her head violently from side to side, thrashing about as if overcome by a seizure of some kind. Tristram looked on, horrified. Was the young woman an epileptic? Was she mad? “Fleur, my darling,” he said, offering to help her up, and she said, raving, slapping at his hand, “Get away! Don’t touch me! No one dares touch me! I cannot bear it!”
Then she fainted; and lay very still.
And lay in that posture—head turned to one side, eyes shut tight, jaws clenched—for the space of some seconds, while Tristram crouched over her, repeating her name. He dared not unbutton the collar of Fleur’s robe, dared not loosen the sash knotted at her waist.… After a moment she began to revive, however; blinking dazedly, as if waking from a long sleep. She stared up at Tristram, at first without recognition; finally whispered, “Angus—of course it is you.” She grasped Tristram’s arm, lifted herself into his arms, slowly, unsteadily, and allowed him to help her to a chair. She brushed her hair out of her flushed face, took several deep breaths, and, to Tristram’s astonishment, began to rock slowly to and fro, speaking in a low, throaty, singsong, seductive voice, her eyes fixed upon his face. “I am Zoe. I am here to speak the truth. This is the truth she will not speak, because she is such a little girl. But I am Zoe and I am here to speak the truth and Zoe tells only the truth because the truth is all that Zoe knows.”
With one part of his brain Tristram was utterly astounded; with another, rather more intrigued; not, strangely, so very surprised. He pulled up a chair close beside the disheveled young woman and said, gently, “Yes, Zoe. It is Angus. Tell him the truth.”
4
There followed then a remarkable hour during which, in a childlike yet sensual singsong voice, very different, in its cadence, modulation, and tone, from Fleur Grunwald’s voice, yet at the same time unmistakably hers, “Zoe” confessed to Tristram the bizarre details of her marital life; truths of a sort Tristram could never have imagined, let alone hypothesized in terms of Fleur Grunwald. For it was not to be believed! But it was to be believed!
“You see. His work. You see? His.”
As Tristram stared, Zoe slowly raised her right arm, as if defiantly; allowing the sleeve to slide down; revealing,—was it a tattoo? Tattoos?
“His work,” Zoe said.
“What on earth—?”
“No! Don’t touch!”
“But, Fleur—”
“No,” Zoe said curtly. “Don’t touch.”
“But Fleur—”
“I am Zoe.”
“But what has happened to you?”
Tristram went to her, to examine her other arm; but Zoe shrank from him. “No,” she said. “Zoe will speak.” She paused, licking her lips. Tristram’s response had clearly gratified her. “Zoe knows and Zoe will speak.”
Her eyes fixed almost greedily on Tristram’s face, Zoe raised her right arm; and again her sleeve slid down, revealing, to Tristram’s horror, another elaborate, multicolored tattoo. “My God,” Tristram whispered, “—are you tattooed like that over your entire body? Is that your secret?”
“Zoe will tell you what Zoe wants to tell you.”
“My poor darling—”
“Since she sleeps, Zoe will speak. She,—the piteous little fool.”
Tristram was staring incredulously at the young woman’s arms, which she held out, in the lamplight, with a curious sort of disdainful pride. She too was, it seemed, fascinated with her disfigured flesh.
“His work,” she said, smiling.
“You don’t mean Grunwald did this? This? With a tattooing needle?—It looks almost professional.”
“‘Woman is to be adored,’ says He.”
“What a madman!”
“He is never mad.”
“Does anyone else know about this? His family—?”
“They know what they know. And what they do not wish to know they do not know.” She paused. She laughed, yawning and stretching her arms. “It is a secret of Master’s cave.”
“Master’s cave—?”
Tristram thought it a hellish sight: the intricate, almost rococo pattern of tattoos in the soft pale flesh of the young woman’s arms: geometrical shapes, grotesquely stylized flowers and vines, hieroglyphic figures of a kind Tristram had never seen before. (Except perhaps in the margins of medieval or Oriental texts.) Most of the colors were rich and vibrant, with a look of being heated; red, crimson, yellow, gold-yellow, emerald-green, turquoise-blue; others appeared faded. Above the wrists the tattoos ascended in a mad gay tapestry of interweaving and reticulated forms, an indecipherable code. Tristram could barely speak. “Is there more?”
Zoe laughed; lay back in the chair, as if on a bed; and, with a moist mocking smile, began to undo the row of tiny black buttons. “‘Be still,’ says He, ‘and you will not be hurt.’ Says He.” Inside the oversized silk robe Zoe was naked; her slender, beautiful body grotesquely covered in tattoos.
She laughed again, seeing Tristram’s face.
Tristram’
s first instinct was to hide his eyes; shield his eyes; but of course he could not so much as glance away. Beautiful Fleur Grunwald barbarically disfigured!—it was the most astonishing spectacle he had ever looked upon in his life.
“My God! How can such things be!”
Zoe murmured, as if indifferently, “‘Like God.’ Says He.”
The symbols stitched into her tender young breasts and belly were sumptuously ornate, exotic; some of them resembling peacock’s feathers, with turquoise-blue eyes; jeweled eyes. Tristram blinked: the woman’s body was covered in eyes!—They were miniature, nearly hidden in the designs on the arms, then, in the torso, blossoming into life-size: the size of human eyes. He thought of the glass eye on his dresser, and shuddered.
Interlarded with these and other figures were occult symbols, like cuneiform, arranged in verselike patterns of three and four lines. The symbols were almost words; teasingly familiar; like words glimpsed in dreams. Where had he seen such figures before? Had he ever seen them before? Or did he somehow, as in a dream, “remember”?
By this time Tristram was kneeling on the carpet before Zoe, spreading open her robe with shaking fingers. He stared; he swallowed hard; it was a feast of a sort, demonically seductive. He said in a choked voice, “What kind of monster is your husband, to have done such a … perverse thing?” Zoe said, “He is her husband, not mine. Zoe has no one. Zoe is free.”
“What do these symbols mean?”
Zoe was allowing Tristram to examine her as if there were not the slightest shyness between them; as if she were not a naked woman, and Tristram not, though clothed, a clearly excited and aroused man. Yet Tristram, always the gentleman, made an effort to control himself; to comport himself with dignity, of a kind; even though the thought ran savagely through his brain, She is yours now, she has given herself to you, now there can be no going back.
He considered the hieratic figures stitched so luridly into flesh … triangles, octagons, hexagons; dozens of peacock’s-tail eyes; these twisting writhing coiling undulating forms. It was a text of a kind but what did it mean?
Each of Zoe’s breasts was cupped, from beneath, by a floral design in which words, hieroglyphic and unreadable, were enchased; giving to the soft flesh a marbled, textured appearance that was really quite beautiful. It was hideous, ugly; yet beautiful. That, Tristram thought, swallowing hard, could not be denied. On Zoe’s belly, below the navel, were more verselike blocks of symbols, larger and clearer though no more intelligible than elsewhere. He said, “What is the language? What do these words mean?”
“Says He, ‘I alone know the charm.’”
Then, in a more sober, accusatory voice, “She never dares to look; bathes with her eyes averted, or shut tight; dresses in the dark. Zoe alone dares look, because she is free; but can see herself only by way of a mirror; thus cannot truly see. ‘A charm,’ says He. ‘Writ in a tongue that has long gone by.’”
“And all this … mutilation … done against your will?”
Zoe laughed as if gaily. “She has no will. She is only consent.”
“But why didn’t you—she—leave him years ago? Why did she ever marry him?”
“She was so young, she knew nothing. She thought, ‘Because I am beautiful, and weak, someone will love me; someone will protect me.’”
Languidly, Zoe stood; stepped away; let the robe fall slowly from her. She turned, as if coquettishly, to show Tristram her back … the slender waist, the hips and buttocks gently swelling … the smooth perfect envelope of flesh covered in the rococo pattern: figures, flowers, eyes, word-symbols. Tristram drew in his breath sharply. Zoe said, taunting, “‘It is love,’ says He. Says she, ‘O do not hurt me.’ Says she, begs she, ‘O no’ and ‘O yes.’”
She went on, in a flatter voice, “Grunwald wants her beautiful, as he says, in his eyes. For his pleasure. She is a silly sad little thing who deserves her hurt.… So you are thinking? Yes? So you are thinking?” She paused; Tristram did not know how to reply. “If it were Zoe and Zoe alone she would have fled a very long time ago; would have perhaps exacted her revenge. Take what you can of the man’s wealth, as other unhappy wives do, fleeing their husbands; unable to endure the terms of their captivity. If it were Zoe and Zoe alone she would take such lovers as Angus Markham with no compunction; no hesitation; no conscience. ‘Appetite,’ says He, ‘is all that is.’”
Tristram daringly traced with his forefinger a curving twisting imbricated pattern of flowers, tendrils, vines, and small staring turquoise-blue eyes that ran the length of Zoe’s back, beginning at her left shoulder and undulating its way down to her right buttock. He had never seen, he was thinking, a sight more monstrous, yet more beautiful. And this, though some of the tattooing was clearly an amateur’s work, executed with a wavering hand. “How much you have suffered,” he said softly, kissing Zoe’s back, “—these needles must have hurt.” “She is there to be hurt,” Zoe said contemptuously. Tristram closed his arms around the woman, swaying over her. She was so much shorter than he! so much smaller, as if belonging to another species! Rapid and glimmering the thought passed through his mind that, beneath his superior weight, she would seem to be smaller still: and that this would be part of the pleasure of her body.
He shuddered, and buried his face in her neck. Zoe squirmed free of him while not precisely repulsing him; she laughed, easing away, light on her feet as a dancer. Her ashy-brown hair, loosened, swung about her face; her cheeks were prettily flushed. Tristram dared not look upon the full length of her body; her splendid nakedness; fearing that the sharp-eyed young woman would see (but of course she did see) the desire in his face.
“My darling Fleur—”
“I am not she,” Zoe said sharply. “I am I.”
“Zoe—”
“I am Zoe: look at me!”
“You are so beautiful, even—”
“Even as I am disfigured? Say it!”
But Tristram could not look. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief; blinking, and frowning; and said, in a nearly normal voice, as if they had been engaged in a conversation of an ordinary, if spirited, kind, “Tell me, please, if you can, Zoe, why did Fleur stay with Grunwald for so many years?—or, having stayed with him that long, why did she decide to flee when she did?”
Zoe’s answer was direct, and derisory. “Because Grunwald threatened to do at last what, for a very long time, he had hinted, in jest, of greatly wanting to do.”
“Which was—?”
“Is. For Grunwald means to do it now, when the little fool returns to him.”
“When she returns—? You can’t mean that you—that Fleur—will go back to Grunwald, after all this?”
“She will. I know. This flight, this ‘break’ for freedom, is short-lived. He will discover her here, and bring her back home. And, out of sheer cowardice, and terror, she will consent.”
“Consent to return again, to that horror?”
“To her it is scarcely horror, but her life,” Zoe said imperturbably. “At its worst the ‘charming,’ as Grunwald calls it, makes her cry out in pain,—she is a physical coward too: most pretty women are—but for the most part her ordeal is mild discomfort, a malaise kept hidden inside her expensive clothes and fey, silly, ‘ladylike’ demeanor. She will, in time, I predict, find salvation in God the Father; who, with all His faults, will not ‘charm’ her while she lives a mortal existence.”
“‘Charm’—?”
“The inscribing of charms.”
“The tattoos are charms?”
“The tattoos contain charms.”
“What kind of charms?”
“Says He, ‘I alone know the charm.’”
“Is it magic? The occult? Is Grunwald some sort of devil-worshipper?”
Zoe shook her head and said, with a sneering smile, “That, Angus, you must ask him yourself.”
“The man is a sadist; the man is mad!”
“You must ask him yourself.”
“But what was it, that finally d
rove you—”
“Fleur.”
“—drove Fleur away?”
Zoe coiled herself into the cushioned chair again, closing her silken robe carelessly about her. Her legs were exposed to the thigh, and beyond; beautifully shaped, rather long in proportion to her body, they too were covered with the eerie anquine designs. In the soft lamplight a kaleidoscope of colors gleamed, like jewels; rich carmines, emerald-greens, golds, purples, blues of many shades.… The tiny eyes winked, and stared; stared, it seemed, at Tristram, who stood as if under an enchantment. Since Zoe, insolent and suggestive in her smile, as in her posture, seemed to force him to it, he repeated his question: “But what was it that finally drove her away?”
“‘For chastity’s sake,’ says He.”
“Yes?”
“‘To purify, to purge, to extirpate,’ says He.”
“Yes? What?”
“With his favored surgical instruments: ‘Instruments of sanctity.’”
“But what?”
Zoe beckoned to him. “Zoe will whisper in your ear. Zoe too would blush, were she obliged to say such things aloud.”
Tristram bent over her, his breath warm and quick. He felt her arms close about his neck, as in the most delightful of dreams; he laughed in sheer startled pleasure and arousal, as Zoe tongued his ear. How could he bear it! He could not bear it!
Zoe then whispered her secret in his ear and he froze in horror. So quaint was the woman’s language, so circumspect, he did not at first understand; or did not at first wish to understand. He swayed over her, sickened. “I have never heard of such a thing,” he said. “I have never—heard of such a thing.”
Zoe gave him an impatient little nudge, pushing him away as one might an animal, without precisely repulsing it. “Have you not?” she said coyly. “Then ask him. Gain admittance to Master’s cave, and ask him.”
Tristram’s face was burning. “The man is mad. You—she—must never return to him; never so much as speak with him again. Grunwald is a monster and will have to be dealt with by the law.”
Zoe made a show of yawning, showing her shadowy armpits. In her mock singsong she said, “‘I am Law. I am all that is.’”