you have a male witch to command. I make the offer. Perhaps it was my destiny. Come into me, I invite you. I lay myself open to you. You have certainly been close enough to me.”
“Don’t mock me,” he said again. “When I make love to you it is men with men as always.”
I smiled. I didn’t say anything. But I was powerfully amused by this show of male pride, and it fitted with my entire picture of the childish nature of the thing. I thought to myself how I hated it, and how I had to bury that thought in my soul. So I dreamed of it soothing me with kisses and caresses. “You can reward me after as you always have,” I said.
“This will be hard for you to bear.”
“For you, I’ll do it. You’ve done much for me.”
“Aye, and now you fear me.”
“Yes, somewhat. I want to live. I want to educate Mary Beth. She is my child.”
Silence. “Come into you…” it said.
“Yes, do it.”
“And you will not roust me with all your power.”
“I’ll do my best to behave like a perfect gentleman.”
“Oh, you are so different from a woman.”
“Really, how so?” asked I.
“You never really love me as they do.”
“Hmmm, I could digress on all this,” I said, “but be assured that you and I can further each other’s aims. If women are too squeamish to say such things, then let us trust they have other ways of gaining their ends.”
“Laughter.”
“You can laugh when you’re in me. You know you can.”
The room grew perfectly still. The curtains seemed to die on their rods. The rain was gone. The gallery shone in the light of the moon. It seemed I felt an emptiness. The hair tingled all over my body. I sat up, struggling to prepare myself, though for what I couldn’t imagine, and then whoom, the thing had descended upon me, surrounding me and enclosing me, and I felt a great drunken swoon, and all sounds outside were melted in one single roar.
I was standing, I was walking, but I was falling. It was shadowy and vague and nightmarish, the stairs appearing before me, the shining street, and people even waving their hands, and through a great rolling ocean of water, voices echoing. “Eh bien, Julien!”
I knew I was walking because I had to be. But I could feel no ground beneath my feet, no balance, no up, no down, and I began to sicken with terror. I held back. I did not fight, I tried with all my might to relax into this thing, to fall into it, even as it seemed I was losing consciousness.
What followed was an eternity of such confusion.
It was two of the clock when next I had a coherent thought. I was sitting in the Rue Dumaine, still, but in a café, at a small marble-top table. I was smoking a cigarette, and my body was exhausted and full of aches, and I realized I was staring at the bartender, who stooped over me to ask again, perhaps for the sixth time:
“Monsieur, another before we close?”
“Absinthe.” My own voice came in a hoarse whisper out of my throat. There was no part of me that didn’t hurt.
“You damned son of a bitch,” I said in my secret voice, “what the hell have you been doing with me?”
But there came no answer. It was too damned exhausted to answer. It had possessed me for hours and run about in my form. Good God, there was mud on my clothes; look at my shoes. And my pants had been taken off and put back on and badly fastened. Oh, so we’d had some woman or man, had we? And what else did we catch, I’d like to know?
I took the fresh glass of absinthe and drank it down, and stood up and nearly fell over. My ankle was sore. I had blood on my knuckles. “We’ve been fighting?”
I managed to make it to my rooms in the Rue Dumaine. My servant, Christian, was there, a man of color, a Mayfair by blood, very well-paid, very smart, and often very sarcastic. I asked if my bed was ready, and he said in his usual way, “What do you think?”
I fell into it. I let him pull off my clothes and take them away. I asked for a bottle of wine.
“You’ve had enough.”
“Get me the wine,” I said, “or I will climb up off this bed and strangle you till you die.”