Work Text:
“Lure of you, eye and lip;
Yearning, yearning,
Languor, surrender;
Your mouth,
And madness, madness”
-Angelina Weld Grimké, from “El Beso”
The longing is a paramour, these days. Mischievously familiar, it comes in with the tide, squalls like a hurricane with the seaside storms. It rises with the fishermen, returns on their boats, bobbing in the mist and the waves. Héloïse finds it in the sand, the stitches of her skirts, sees it swirl in the dregs of her wine. She tastes it in the back of her throat. Imprinted everywhere, it’s oil stains in her classics, her own fingerprints, unused paints made decorative on the windowsill. It’s the letters on her desk, kissed and creased to a fault. It’s the underlying meaning in her diaries, with sentences so vague and unintelligible she might as well have written them in a foreign tongue. She’ll hold it late tonight, in the cold space between her body and the edge of her mattress. Meanwhile, her husband, her Milanese man, will snore less than a foot away.
The feeling isn’t Marianne, but sometimes Héloïse will press on the bruises it leaves and hear the soft exhale of her laugh. Sometimes it's ache will feel like her lips, famished but careful, with the precision of only an artist. Then, the yearning is as much of an animal as she has always known it to be, unsatisfiable and ungovernable.
For ten years, Héloïse has treated her absence like a loss, like true grief, like the separation of realms rather than just countries and marriages. The town’s dark-haired visitors are phantoms, memory wrapped in wool scarves and disappointing individuality. Two days ago she stopped a fifty-year old woman because her laugh sounded familiar. Yesterday’s humiliating affair was tapping a man's shoulder, one with a short, lithe build and canvases beneath his arms.
“Can I help you?” He’d turned with a scoff and a raised brow; Héloïse could only imagine what she had looked like. Disappointed, infuriatingly desperate.
“No,” She’d said, as the ache settled in. “No you- you look like someone I used to know.”
Understanding had overtook his expression, and his previous superiority softened to pity. His gaze flitted to her hands, bared raw in the cold, where her wedding wing rested. Where a stick-and-poke of a certain two-digit number sat just below it.
“A widow, are you?”
The question (or rather the implication) had rendered her somewhat speechless, unsteady. Héloïse almost corrected him, until the flash of a different future overtook her. A sink with two wine glasses and paint stains, calloused but feminine hands cupping her face, twin flats in the closet. Easels in each room, kiss-marks on her wrists. Love, in every corner of their corner of the world, swallowing and untouchable.
The fantasy had encompassed her for quite some time, more fallacious than dragons and mermaids and all the myths and legends she’d dreamed of as a little girl. It felt like a game, one she would have deemed much too good to speak aloud. One she’d have kept secret in the hollows of her mind, whispered and explored strictly in solitude. Now, unlike her youth, the impossible was no longer exciting. It did not feel like an opportunity for imagination, it just felt hopeless.
“Yes,” The whisper had been absent, a mere gust from her lips. “Yes, something quite similar.”
He nodded, sympathetic, taking a hand to her shoulder before moving on to the next shop.
Héloïse stood on that side of the street for quite some time.
Truthfully, Héloïse has exhausted the poet’s ending. Estranged lovers, separated by time, by distance, and most of all by idiocy. Admittedly, there had been something so devastatingly romantic, so intimately tragic about their farewell. The two women’s moment in Brittany was a capsule, a wrinkle of memory that seemed fatal to tamper with. To Héloïse, the days were valuable, applicable for frequent visitation. Antidotes for cold nights and mornings of explicit loneliness. For a long while, Héloïse prided their past over their future.
Now, she frees a piece of parchment, wets her pen, flips through her brain like a picture-book. She scribbles out sentences, doodles the teapot on her stove, and perfects the way her M’s slope against her vowels. Eventually, she crosses out and circles words to form her message, and recopies the plea she couldn’t help but utter.
There are twenty-eight words in the letter she writes, save the greeting and the farewell.
Dearest Marianne,
My mother tells me your work has occupied you in Florence, not far from Pisa. It has been too long to not advantage this closeness, I request you.
Yours, Héloïse
Camellias are drawn in the margins, simple but shaded with the crushed-up dye of the ones from her garden. Ink is flecked from her hasty signature, and she lowers her mouth to where Marianne’s nails will pry open the folded message, irons her identity in spit and the print of her hands. Héloïse gathered the delivering information from a recent mail exchange with her mother, who’d included it with a multitude of questions. She hadn’t answered any of them.
When she takes the note to town, she is lashed by the wind-spun beachgrass, ridiculed by the chatter of low-rumbling thunder. The March winds cause her to tug up her shawl, tight and snug, just how she tied it in her youth. How she wore it in Brittany, how it hung the last time she fell in love.
Weeks pass. It goes unanswered. Héloïse may have feared rejection if it weren’t for the overwhelming insistence in her chest, in the very core of herself, to see the woman she let herself lose. Despite their similarities and Marianne’s painting themes, she was no Eurydice. Héloïse would not linger in her Limbo: a ring, and a title, and a life by the sea. No, she was determined to feel the sun again.
In the quiet of the night, she writes another.
Dearest, Marianne,
Come, please. You can sketch out my window-boxes, me if you desire. Wine and fresh-baked bread await you. At the very least, tell me you are receiving these.
Yours, Héloïse
In her dreams she is twenty, slim and with enough strings to dance around the opportunity of romance, to waltz with it in smirks and stares and symbolisms. She’s exhilarated, a witness to fondness she’s only imagined, and she knows only anger, not loss. In the wee hours of the morning she is flushed and elated, envisioning sharp remarks and a weight against her waist. Of course, her cheeks are still cold, as are her hands, and the delusions eventually make the absences in her body impossible to ignore. In this empty state, Héloïse writes once more.
Dear, Marianne, I see you everywhere I look. I cannot blink without you in my peripheral. I admit, I want to see you in a way that matters.
She stamps the note without signing it, weary and heart-worn.
…
Unanswered, unanswered, unanswered. Héloïse considers outright visitation- would her presence be an intrusion? Her mother is in Florence, attending an Opera she’s been raving about for months. It’s a feasible excuse if Héloïse is unwanted, if the lack of responses is not the misunderstanding she’s hoping for.
In the mornings she reads again, turns often to that bind-soft page, and tries to picture how those soft, dark eyes have aged in the past twenty years. She mirrors her own sunspots, the grooves of her skin. Unintentionally, she sees smudges of paint on that forehead, a part to those lips as they breathe from the mouth. Old habits die hard, she hopes.
“Héloïse? Dear?”
Snapping the book shut, Héloïse turns to her incoming husband. Sleep tousled and unshaven, he stumbles into the kitchen for their pitcher of water, hands grasping at the handle. They are elegant, uncalloused, barely used from his work in the tax courts. Large and soft when they hold her, they are directly antithetical to Marianne’s. The differences, and her notice to them, have always twinged.
“Hello,” Héloïse says, polite. With age comes control, and she’s hardly angry anymore. It’s obvious her husband appreciates it. “There’s muffins under the cloth; eggs in the cabinet.”
He blinks, drinking, “Good.”
Héloïse chews her lips, bits of skin flaking on her tongue. Rain pelts the windows. He pays no attention to her, an avid interessant of the weather and its consistent habits. Héloïse mirrors his gaze, watching the incoming storm cloud over the ocean.
“How would you feel if I went down to Florence for a few days?”
“What?”
“To see my mother,” Héloïse explains immediately, unfortunately a mimic of her rehearsal.
He squints, asks, “Is she not in Milan?”
Christ. “She’s travelling at the moment. You know how she is.”
He nods slowly, not even fully paying her his mind. Héloïse leans forward, careful not to portray too much of her eagerness.
She says, “I’m afraid she may not have much time left.”
A beat.
A crow sings, rather symbolically, to the north of them.
He sighs, dramatic as ever. “Go on, then.”
Grinning, Héloïse stands to kiss his cheek, “Two days. No more than that.”
“Héloïse?” Her husband asks, his breath echoing off the nearest window.
“Yes?”
Craning his neck, he turns to her, “Wait till the storm has passed.”
….
Thunder reigns the storm, but rain conquers the aftermath. For days, buckets of it drench and rattle the roof shingles, drown the streets in mud and a sandy-paste. There’s a leak in their bedroom, Héloïse’s stockings are waterlogged, and a week passes before the roads are clear enough to travel.
The next Tuesday she takes a carriage, cramped with two young newly-weds that weren’t keen for verbal conversation. They leave her in Fucecchio, trailing off into the city hand-in-hand, and nothing but particularly large potholes can distract Héloïse from the reality of her journey.
Two days spend, and Héloïse and the footman’s last stop ends right outside of Florence. With the darkening skies, the roadside inn is much more attractive than finishing their travels, and they both flit off to snag rooms for the night.
After bartering for a single, Héloïse takes her key and, in fashion, shimmies down to the alehouse across the street. It’s warmer here; crickets chatter in the grasses. Gnarled oaks curl towards her, reaching branch-bridges over the road and casting shadows where her feet fall. With stars and a low-hanging moon, the sky soothes its nightly explosion and the last scraps of daylight escape over the hills.
Héloïse climbs the steps creaking beneath her weight, hears the laughter behind the incoming door. Like a mouse, the handle squeaks when she opens it, and she’s warmed by crowded tables and a distinct tune, liquor in the air.
There’s humanity here, if it's anywhere at all. Encased in gold, people laugh with their teeth, hold tightly to the people beside them and take up space. Their glasses are filmed with spurts of youth, drops that lower their fear of themselves, their inhibitions, the irons that guard their selves. There’s raw spirit here, as unbroken as newborns. Women and men alike interrupt each other, speak so rapidly their tongues slip, sing off key, sway and swing between the tables. The buzz is lackluster compared to the thrill of adolescently learning the world for the first time, but it's enough.
Héloïse has learned: A child sees what she wants and chases it. A woman turns her head, lest she watch it walk away from her.
Suddenly, the absent chair across from her seems pressingly more empty.
“Dining alone?”
The question comes from behind her, and Héloïse shudders at the familiarity. She’s grown accustomed to this trick by now- the way her mind twists and tangles each voice she hears to the only one she ever thinks about, how even the highest of feminine speaks are reduced to a low, playful hum.
She looks up, and Marianne is sat across from her.
Héloïse blinks. Squeezes her eyes shut. Opens them again.
Oh. Oh.
The quirk of a grin, exhales from the mouth. Still, she is close enough to touch.
Age has kissed her: Sun spots on her neck, the bridge of her nose, fine lines near the wells of her eyes. The woman is all the beauty in humanism, in art, her skin holds all the light in the room. She’s every last bit of the vision she was twenty years ago, scraps of heaven nestling in the sharpness of her collarbones and the cascade of her hair.
Marianne begins: “It has been-”
“Hold.” Héloïse murmurs, without much thought. “Please. Let me look at you.”
The sight of her is fictitious, something of a storybook, a hasty and unrealistic ending to keep young tears from flowing. She breathes, and Héloïse can feel it settle on her cheekbones: wind on roughened cliffs. Her perfume is muskier now, succumbed to cedar, but still with that underlying floral, as if she’d been dipped in rosewater.
Metal wraps her ring finger, devoid of a diamond. Héloïse is cotton-mouthed.
“Marianne.” All her writings, her odes, her regrets and mistakes, condensed to a name. All that has tempted her, all that she couldn’t have, all that she gave up. At last, it’s syllables clash against her teeth again, and their keeper watches her in her anguish, in her wonder.
“Héloïse.” There , that smile again. “Your letters, I received them. I’m sorry- I’d planned to leave for Pisa weeks ago, but the storm delayed me. And now-” She gestures, “Well, here you are.”
Then, as if this is just as unbelievable to her, “ Here you are .”
Her fingers dance the table, and Héloïse fears to reach for them, as if the tangibility of the heat radiating from her body -the gusts of her speech- could be vanquished by a single touch. Relief rolls through her like water, like the sea in Brittany against a hot body.
“Has Florence treated you well?” Héloïse asks, knowing the question is redundant. Useless, with all that their bodies and eyes are catching up on.
“Oh yes. That city,” Starry-eyed, Marianne lays her hands flat on the table. “No matter how many times I do it, sketching that sky-line will never get old. It’s marvelous, Héloïse. You would love it, art and music on every corner-”
She keeps on about the bounties of life in Florence while Héloïse listens, fond and afflicted. Marianne’s life, brimmed with calico cats, sunshine, painting pallets, and pretty strangers seems straight from a romanticist piece. Héloïse feels vaguely pathetic, committed to her misery by simply doing nothing to quench it. For a long time she’d thought that was her punishment, her payment for making the wrong choice.
“How’s the ocean?” Marianne asked, unfettered by Héloïse’s sudden silence. “I have been so occupied in Milan, with my work, and my patrons have remained stubbornly inland. There’s paintings hung up in my flat of it, but it’ almost impossible to capture even when you’re staring right at it-”
“You're married.” The glint of metal had caught her eye again, and Héloïse couldn’t help blurting. It was carefully crafted, lovingly formed, but un-flashy and cheap in value.
A blacksmith, She mused suddenly. And a poor one. A marriage for love.
Marianne raised her eyebrows, lifting her hand to study it herself. She seemed to notice Héloïse’s incessant staring and slipped it off, reaching for the other woman’s hand. Fires pricked where her fingers touched, pressing beneath the crease of her fingers and leaving her limp, open-palmed, and short of breath, a ring of warmed metal in the bowl of her hand. It burned, heavy as the years on their shoulders, pinning her hand to the unfurnished wood.
“George,” Marianne said, soft-eyed and smiling. “His name, it’s George.”
Héloïse still remembers the look on Marianne’s face, near the end of those weeks, the guilt that shrouded her. The want that settled in her eyes, dark and unfamiliar, the anger Héloïse knew from the lengthy cracks in her own composure. She held it in her breastbone, the way she swallowed. Her frustration was kept in her lips, chapped and bleeding. She was a litany of emotions, and she wanted Héloïse enough to protest her engagement. To dream of another ending, and to even consider it.
` Now, her softness is juxtaposing, content and comforted.
The edges of the ring are worn, rusting. It’s presence is no new commitment. And yet, Héloïse does not ask “How long?” or even “When did you give in, as I did?” or worst of all “Do you love him?” . No, she asks what is important, what is sensible , what leaves hot-iron strips when it rises from her throat.
“Does he take care of you?”
Marianne meets her eyes, as if attempting to convey an ulterior meaning to her answer,
“We take care of each other.”
Un-privy to whatever in God’s name that look means, Héloïse swallows. “Good.”
“And how is your Milanese man?” Marianne asks, and humor dances between her eyes and lips.
Héloïse laughs, and almost tells her. Tells her that they hardly speak, that he’s an explanation and she’s his prize, that she leaves him unsatisfied and he leaves her disgusted, that her imagination has been deteriorating since she was a little girl but she still manages to pretend, in the night, that he’s a girl from her youth, that she softens his features, his hands and build, darkens his eyes and hair, blocks out his speech. How it works, sometimes. How when it doesn’t, she is a ghost in her own house, reminiscing and mournful.
Héloïse says none of this. Héloïse says, “Quiet. Dim. He’s hardly there at all.”
The words are hot in her mouth, leaving tenseness between her brows. The image of her husband, her life, has her fists clenching.
Relief plasters itself against Marianne’s jaw, she says, “There it is.”
“What?”
“Your temper,” And she says it like it’s admirable, something to note in fondness. “I’d missed your fire.”
Héloïse notes it, can feel it curling. Hot and ugly and unfamiliar these days, fury between her eyes and the space of her shoulders and the bite of her words. It is tense, encompassing, it feels like summer, ages ago. Has she become so docile that her anger has become a stranger? Héloïse remembers when she used to wear it on her sleeve, braid it into her hair, and face every day with a blaze of her own.
Roughly, she whispers, “I’d missed it too.”
Héloïse pushes back her chair, standing. The room is suddenly much too loud, stuffy, warm. Marianne looks up at her, and Héloïse shivers, reaching out a hand to guide her.
“Come,” She says, and Marianne follows.
There’s a bonfire in the midst, dangerously abandoned. It’s the only light in the darkness, save the alehouse and inn, flickering between two trees. Héloïse is heading for it before she knows what she’s doing, reaching back for the body that then presses against her, arms linked. The night meets them in shadows, in hidden tree roots that cause them to stumble into each other, laughing like children.
They skid to a stop near the coals, skirts flapping close to the flames swallowing the clearing. Smoke glazes them, sparks crackling and flying every which-way. The trees are distorted through the haze, and the moment feels like a dream. A welcomed one, where Marianne’s hands are low on her waist and Héloïse remembers what desire feels like.
There is no room for shame when she turns, bathed in amber with sweat prickling the crown of her head. Marianne’s eyes are wide, alive, crawling with reflected flames and stars. Before, Héloïse didn’t think women like her got things like this. Second chances, ecstasy unfurling in their chests. She thought her fortune lied in those few gathered moments, her damnation their parting, and her fate the rest of her life in solitude. But she’s older now, no longer enamored with tragedies, and the woman beside her is real . She is breathing . They have been separated by mere concepts, and they can leave tonight.
Héloïse expects flames to be crawling up her skirts, cinching her waist, based on the heat that has fettered across her spine.
“Kiss me,” She pleads, but Marianne shakes her head. Instead she holds her, pulls her lower with strong arms and tip-toes, presses their hearts together. They are unsteady but one, twined by sweat and skin. Héloïse wonders how a document could be more uniting than this. She wonders which is stronger: the metal on their fingers or the aches in their bones. Swaying, she is hungry. She feels like the foxes in the dunes, ribs showing, lithe and shaking and unaware of their malnourishment. Héloïse remembers when marine carrion washes up, how their snouts look bloody with barbarity, eyes hooked on satiation. They gnaw to the bone and circle the area, as if the single meal was their salvation. As if it had banished their hunger forever.
She feels (or perhaps hopes) that this too has no end, no after, that this is their Last Dinner, whether it lasts for a night or for the rest of their lives.
“Kiss me,” Héloïse says, because she has always been demanding, and desperate, and- oh god.
Lips press to her neck. The ecstasy is unbridled, quaking from her like something divine, something unprocessable by an ephemeral body. With a mouth working against her pulse point, Marianne inflames her.
Then, as if that was somehow not nearly enough, they crack, mouth rising to mouth, curling together like paper over a flame. It is spit and savagery, not at all pretty, it is rashness, and it is animosity, it is open-mouthed and dastardly disarming. Héloïse feels, in this moment, the rawness beneath her skin, the sentient behind the paintings, and the mass that has been rotting in the dark. Fire flickers above her like a halo, there’s a buzzing within, and she understands (little, but still) that this much heaven might have been alarming enough to be mistaken as sin. Touch rains in lipstick smudges and sweet exhales, there’s a hand in her hair that leaves Héloïse choked and wanting; another holds their hips together. They end up laid out-sprawling- dust in their eyes and teeth and kissed away, filling the cracks of their lips.
Marianne clears her throat, says (and it is shaky, it is low), “I feared you’d forgotten me.”
“Forgotten you?” The question comes with a shudder, there’s a crack in Héloïse’s voice. “You are all I could remember.”
Remember- the smile Marianne makes then, all dimples and crows feet. Remember- the liveliness of her own body, alight and expressive, beating quick and breathing hard. Remember- hands in hands, fit together like roots in soil, what lovers look like. Remember- the cold nights that followed, and the apathy of eternal loneliness.
Marianne hums, and Héloïse relaxes, loosens. They kiss again, and Héloïse digs her nose hard into the other woman’s cheek, brutal enough to sting, before falling victim again.
The night goes on. Yes, they make love, and yes, Héloïse remembers how bodies should fit together, but the important part is this: Marianne, forty-two and twenty-one, cradling her like a dream she’s been chasing all these years. Héloïse, knowing she’s lived. Knowing purpose and existence and having it in skin and bone beneath her fingertips. No one has been here before- has anyone? Has anyone done this, has anyone had this? Héloïse can’t imagine the case- as no one would be anywhere else. Everyone would be moving, snakes beneath the moon and smoke, or searching the darkness for their chance to do so.
The important part is when she asks with bated breath,
“Can this be real?
Can this be real- She means as in Can they do this? Can they love this way? Can they give up their lives and defy every guideline? Can they forget the endings they had recoiled for? Can this be theirs?
The important part is that Marianne does not answer, just laughs, and Héloïse becomes pliable beneath her hands.
…
As it does, morning comes. Héloïse is alone. Coals burn beside her, there’s smoke in her lungs. She is cold, exponentially so, and her cotton layers are not near enough to shield her despite the morning light. Coughing, she tastes the filth in her mouth, pressing against her aching head.
“Marianne?” Héloïse calls, knowing she couldn’t have gone far. After that reunion, she would have woken her up. “Marianne?”
Frost has coated the dirt, absent in the human-sized blotch where Héloïse had been laying. They had been intertwined so closely, it made room for only one body.
“I’m sorry.”
Héloïse jumps. Unnoticed, a man has been crouched, poking the dying fire. Middle-aged but gray, he looks somewhat sophisticated, with an elegant nose and sad eyes. His hands gloved, he watches her guiltily, like a large dog with something in its mouth. Héloïse stands, and-
“I don’t mean to startle you,” The man holds out his hands, bare and unarmed, like he’s approaching a hissing cat. “You were passed out, late last night. Must have had a bit too much to drink; I really did try to wake you. And when you wouldn’t budge- well, I wasn’t just going to leave you out here.”
Héloïse places the sour taste in her mouth: cheap alcohol. Strange, she doesn’t remember drinking last night. Perhaps she had a few before Marianne showed up- really the details are starting to blur together.
“Well, thank you, I suppose,” Héloïse says, and yes, it is crass. Forgive her, the morning’s barely started. “Have you seen another woman around?”
He answers with a question, a ridiculous but concerning feat, “Are you Héloïse?”
Héloïse pauses, “Why do you ask?”
Pursing his lips, the man stands. His fingers clink together, bony and worry-etched. There’s thin lines that mark a frown about his mouth.
He says, “I’m George. Marianne’s husband. She’s spoken of you highly for- during all these years.”
Well, she did not expect that answer. Still, Héloïse does not move. She does not allow recognition. She can feel the tight-rope beneath her feet, knows the genuinity on the man’s face could switch to cruelty in the nick of an eye. Why would he be here? Where is Marianne? She thinks, fearfully, that he’s messing with her, that he overheard them, that he’s one of those men who likes to watch women before having his way with them. His expression says every bit otherwise, but Marianne is still nowhere to be found and Héloïse has heard all kinds of horror stories.
He sighs, outwardly, digging into his pockets. A sparrow caws, and he steps forward, presenting a small charcoal drawing. It’s of another man, stressed but smiling, collar rumpled and hands splayed. There’s love in the lines, rough as they are, and Héloïse raises an eyebrow at “George”.
“Marianne and I, we had an arrangement,” He explains like he’s revealing a secret. “She had the women she’d bring home, I had Henry. He’s my- um.” He clears his throat, coughing, “She’s my greatest friend.”
Heloise has no idea why he’s telling her all this, when Marianne ought to be close by, when the two of them could both catch up with her over a cup of tea at the inn. Honestly, the panic has started, and a casual “ Where’d she go? ” came out as a harsh:
“Where is she?” Héloïse says, demands really, and George cowers. Admittedly, something had softened at the implications of his sketch, a million questions and hopes rising in her head, but Marianne’s absence was predominant.
Wincing, he whispers, “She painted you all the time. She talked in her sleep- your name, over and over.”
Tears slip down her face, and Héloïse does not know why. “ Where is she? ”
He is crying too, ugly and unmasculine, and Héloïse does not know why. His nose is pink, his chin is wet. She wants to throttle him, carve the answers from him with a butcher knife, grill his tongue and guzzle his words through the beads of fat that roll off.
“You were the love of her life.”
The sentence should have made her chest soften, but the use of past tense has understanding settling in the hard divots of her shoulders, between the creases of her aching forehead. There’s an emptiness, a nothingness that she hadn’t noticed before, one that had followed her all the way from Pisa. It was the same emptiness that told her that her sister was gone, before anyone could say a word.
Héloïse says, “She’s dead.”
The affirmation does not echo, no birds scramble for flight. It is the quietest she has ever spoken. George chokes on his tears, suffocating in the clear morning air. There is a ringing. Strong, insistent, Héloïse can feel it in the root of her.
“How?” Héloïse does not think it is even her who asks the question. She does not wail, nor does she fall to her knees and weep. She stands there, breathing, heartbeat in her ears. There is a rawness to the moment, like someone had peeled back the skin. “When?”
George reaches out, like he means to console her, “She’s been very sick, some sort of poisoning. I found her Wednesday morning.”
Two days. Héloïse had missed her by two days . If she had sent the letters earlier, if she had made the journey first, if she had endured the storm despite her husband’s deterrents. Héloïse is old enough to know that love cannot change anything, love cannot save anyone , but it could have given her five more minutes. She would have taken seconds, a blink-of-an-eye recognition, long enough to hold a living body. Now, the only thing in her hands is smoke from a snuffed out fire.
Strangely enough, she does not question who was with her last night. Maybe it was paranormal, maybe her body knew what her mind did not. Maybe she was crazy, maybe she wanted to give herself one final night.
“She told me to find you,” George admitted, “To tell you. I found your letters by her bedside.”
He is blubbering, and he is hideous. The whole area is hideous, bleak and gray and peaceful, the same as it was before. Héloïse does not know a lot of things. She does not know why the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, why love comes from the places it is not supposed to. She does not know the existence of God, whether he can live with himself. She does not know, in that moment, that Marianne died of lead poisoning. Most of all, she does not know why she is still breathing, when she is the one without a future to live for.
Again, she feels like those foxes, in the hard winters when snow settles on the beaches. When they starve and drop like flies, till one is left matted and silent. When you can hear its breath in the quiet of the mornings, climbing the dunes, searching for anything in the nothingness of December. It is rare they make noise, but Héloïse has always sworn that she could hear them whimper.
“Here,” She is being handed a piece of canvas, thick linen, inked with a familiar scrawl. “Marianne's last painting was unfinished- but this was in the corner, where her signature would have been.”
Swallowing, Héloïse asks, “What was it of?”
George softened. “The ocean. She was always painting the ocean.”
The cursive is rough and pigmented, and it’s the same slant it always has been.
Je t’attends, H.
Héloïse goes home.
She goes to Brittany.
A phantom on the cliffside, she wades through the grasses, lets her legs stumble into a run and teeter at the edge. The estate is behind her, vacant of heartbeat but alive with the past, casting shadows with the setting sun. The liberty of solitude is as it always has been, bitter with absence. Sour behind the teeth. Héloïse feels herself unknitting, catching flashes of light like glimpses into the previous, convinced she can see footprints and hair ribbons and the sound waves of laughter.
She thinks on the timeline, how stupid she had been. How she had thought, for over half her lifetime, that love’s proximity, its existence, was far more deadly than its absence. Marianne’s death was no anomaly, very few lived to 50, and Héloïse had wasted twenty years. She could not blame time, God, or fate. The only one to blame was herself, twenty, and forty, and every age in between. The guilt was in her hands alone, for everything she had not done.
Shamefully, she thinks of the civil mores that kept her away all these years. An abomination, they’d said, is relation between two women . How? Héloïse mourns the same. Mourns more, than she ever would her husband. They will say Marianne’s death was an act of God, just as they say hell’s bastard is who kills the children. Héloïse fails to see the importance of the distinction. Death is still death, loss is still loss, it does not matter who does the taking.
After all, she is still breathing. It is a Tuesday, there is sun in her eyes and her throat is raw from crying out. Héloïse knows she’ll spend the rest of her days searching for the art, the residue that Marianne left behind. She will take memories, and paintings, and patch them onto the yawning maw that has erupted on the left side of her chest. Now though, now the sun is in her eyes and she knows where the edge is, where grass turns to plummeting.
In another lifetime she falls,
Down,
Down,
Down.
But in this one she stays, looking out at the sea. In this one, Héloïse understands:
Love prevails.
Only if you let it.
.
“Tremulous, breathless, flaming,
The space of a sigh;
Then awakening--remembrance,
Pain, regret--your sobbing;
And again quiet--the stars,
Twilight--and you.”
-Angelina Weld Grimké, from “El Beso”