The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (34 page)

“Come and lie down,” she said.

“I’m still dressed for a party,” he replied.

“Take a few things off,” she said. “I won’t look.”

He came and sat on the bed. He took off his shoes methodically, folding his socks neatly inside. Then he removed his coat and waistcoat and lay on his back. Isobel settled next to him. Their heads were on adjacent pillows, and a net of Isobel’s hair spilled onto Louis’s shoulder. He wanted to hold it to his face and smell it, but he felt timid. She reached for his hand, then rested her head on his chest. She could hear his heart thud. She had expected it to be steady and regular as a waterwheel, but it beat sporadically, fading in and out like a tired waltz from a previous century.

“I’m sorry I ever doubted your intentions with my daughter,” she said.

“It’s nothing. Any good mother would be suspicious.”

“She was such a wonderful child, you know. She used to bring me daisies and leave poems on my pillow.”

“I can picture it.”

In the island of lamplight they both felt a deep calm. From outside came the distant call of a screech owl.

“Are we to be lovers?” Isobel asked.

“It seems that way.”

“Well, we should approach this matter like adults. I have not made love with a man in ten years, Louis. I have no intention of doing so beneath the weight of this difficult breathing.”

“I understand.”

“Ridiculous.”

“What?”

“Lovers at our age.”

“We’ve been brought together.”

“You tracked me down like a bloodhound.”

“I was guided here. I think perhaps I have always been guided.” He thought of a boy being led into a forest.

“You sound like a man of faith,” she said.

“Yes, but in what?”

“I lack faith.”

“You always have,” said Louis.

“Yes.”

A silence.

“Louis?”

“Yes.”

“I think I could grow to love you.”

Louis leaned on his side. He touched her face so tenderly that he resembled a man roused from prayer. He kissed her forehead, then her closed eyes, her cheeks, and her neck. Isobel let out a low sigh. She took his face between her hands and brought her lips to his. As they kissed, she felt them mingling in a broth of brandy and solace. These were the kisses of the old, she thought, born of a mutual empathy for the frailty of time. Their bodies were neither allies nor enemies at this way station of sentiment; they were like neutral nations being called upon in a moment of war. The kisses would stay on the roof of her mouth, burned in. She would allow herself to be infected with Louis’s love; it had dogged her into the far reaches of widowhood. Love was, finally, a decision. They lay beside each other, half clothed. They took sips of water in the small hours. Every time one of them moved, the other reached out, maintaining the bas-relief of their union. They stayed like this until morning, until the blue light of dawn bled into the room and changed everything.

Twenty-Eight

L
ouis and Isobel slept in the same bed each night. They refused to acknowledge the growing illness, the bloody sputum that swam in the bedpan every morning. It became a conspiracy, a pantomime of life. Chloe brought her mother breakfast each morning, but by then Isobel had emptied her bedpan onto the rosebushes outside her window. Between the hours of eight and noon Isobel could summon her brightest face, but by midafternoon she was fatigued and slept under a tide of laudanum and damp-lunged dreams.

Nonetheless, Louis was buoyed by hope. He took no photographs and the absence of mercury granted him bouts of lucidity. Then, because the mercury was now blended in his blood and bones, he would do something inexplicable—stop speaking in the middle of a sentence, gripped by an ineffable thought, or dress without socks, or give off a shudder in the middle of the night. Isobel was not alarmed by these moments; she accepted that his mind was worn in places. She wondered, in fact, if any man could love the way he did and be mentally sound. Each day he showered her with wildflowers, with strange and half-finished poems.

They woke sometimes together, in the middle hours of the night, and lay awake talking through a reconstruction of the past. There were so many gaps to fill. They smiled at the surprise of a person unfolded, of secrets and lies offered up to the yewlatticed ceiling. Life had brought them together in this final chapter, and their task, they both felt, was to discover what had happened to the other in the middle of the book.

“I will of course want to know all about your lovers before we ever make love,” announced Isobel one night.

“What is it you require?”

“Names, for a start.”

“Let’s see. The first was Matilde, then Claire, Rose, and Audrey. Then came Madame Treadwell, an English widow with a penchant for theater boys.”

“How many were there?” she asked.

“More than five and less than ten.”

“Oh.”

“Are you horrified?”

“I’m afraid you’ll find me dull and unpracticed. I have made love to only one man my whole life, and that was like tending the compost—a few scraps on the pile. Poor man, may he rest in peace.”

“Those women meant nothing to me. They were auditions of the heart.”

They held hands and waited for the next phrase to arrive. They watched the ocean of night at the window.

“What are we to do with Chloe?” asked Isobel. “She is so lonely.”

“We will find her a good man.”

“In these parts they’re all drunks and farmers hard of hearing.”

“One has to trust life.”

After a long pause, he turned to face her. She had fallen asleep. He stared at the sibylline calm on her face.

The next morning Isobel sat in front of the silver-backed mirror. Louis stood behind her, a bone-handled brush in his hand. She sat in her negligee, staring at her own figure. It came to her as if from a very long distance.
This
was her body. Her eyes were sunken, her skin waxy. The youthful quality she’d had in the early stages of the lung fever had vanished, and in its place there was a dryness, a withered look to her neck and mouth. She visibly shivered as she looked at herself. Louis pretended not to notice and began brushing her hair.

“Oh, God, Louis,” she said. “Look at me.”

Louis looked at her reflection in the mirror. There was no denying. She carried it now—the chromatic suggestion of death. Their eyes met in the hologram of the mirror. They both looked away.

“Fetch me a shawl, Louis.”

He went to her armoire and took down a cashmere shawl. He wrapped it around her shoulders and knotted it in front of her neck. They couldn’t look each other in the eyes.

In the afternoon Louis sent for the doctor. He arrived smelling of ambergris and snuff, apparently prospering from the revolution. He sat beside Isobel in her darkened room, the curtains drawn at her insistence. Having this man see her wither seemed like an insufferable affront; would he ridicule her herbal ways again? Here, science, another footnote in the argument against folk remedies. But, to her surprise, the doctor became moved in her presence. She glowed, a jaundiced blue. Louis watched at the foot of the bed as the doctor unwrapped Isobel’s nightgown and examined her chest.

“My dear woman,” he said. “You should have been dead weeks ago. This is the worst lung fever I have ever seen.” His voice was gentle, almost reverent.

Isobel smiled weakly, somehow flattered. She had not given up. The brine in her lungs was proof of her struggle to love Louis Daguerre.

“What can we do?” asked Louis.

The doctor said, “If you are religious, pray.”

A sudden sob came from behind them. Chloe stood in the doorway, her hands folded across her front. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“From the way this has flared up, I’m guessing she’s had the fever for years,” said the doctor. He turned to Isobel. “You have a remarkable grace in illness, dear lady.”

Isobel looked at him solemnly. “I have given myself over to love, Doctor. I recommend you prescribe it to go with laudanum.”

The doctor squeezed her hand and closed her nightgown with great tenderness. “When the pain and the breathing become intolerable you may increase the dosage. I don’t want you to suffer anymore.”

“Thank you,” Isobel said.

Louis ushered the doctor outside to his carriage.

“She is a remarkable woman. May she find peace.” The doctor gathered the reins and rode out into the road. Louis stood there and watched the doctor disappear into the chalky-white distance. An enormous weight gathered in his chest, but he could not bring himself to cry. He had wept like a stage actress at the sight of a well-made shoe just months before, and now he was losing the lamp of his life and he stood there stoic, tearless, unbelieving. Death seemed dismissive, an arrogance of a distant God. Why bother with this ritual of transfiguration? Then a horrifying thought came to him: that he might live to be ninety without Isobel and the world would continue to spin, unfettered by angels, forever. He stood there stricken by the thought of infinity. Finally, he went back inside and found Chloe and Isobel embracing on the bed. He closed the door and went to light the fire for evening.

He felt her slipping beside him each night. Her lungs hooked on the out-breath. Her skin grew cold to the touch and her camphored fragrance turned to night sweat. It seemed to Louis that they were beginning their old age together, holding hands in the carbide quietude of Isobel’s bedroom. They allowed all the nuances of age to filter through the days. In half a week they lived out half a century. They talked of houses they might have owned in Marseille, of Louis’s studio in Paris where they might have stayed when they went to the opera.

“I abhor the opera,” said Isobel.

“It’s not possible.”

“Bores me to the eyelids.”

“Well, then, we’d better call the whole thing off.”

“Is this really our fate?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

He could not bring himself to answer.

“Louis, we haven’t squandered our lives by not being together.”

“Nothing is squandered,” he said.

“Because I was never before ready. And this”—she paused for breath— “is perfection in its own way. I have given myself wholly to you these last few days.”

“I know.”

“We haven’t made love. Will you forgive me for that?”

Louis leaned up in bed and took her face in his hands. “In my mind I have made love to you a thousand times.”

“Better in the mind, then. Because it would kill me.”

Louis looked away.

“Allow me my gallows humor, even now.”

“What is going to happen to us?” he asked.

“This might be all there is. This bed. This room.”

He looked at her. Somehow they had skipped the trials of nuptial life to arrive here. They had skipped the excitement of newlyweds, the tedium of middleweds, the rancor of old married couples with their ritual resentments kept aglow like rubbed bronze. What existed now was a love based not just on life but on the certainty of one’s end, the winnowing of all emotion down to the care of another.

They slept, gripped by dreams. Isobel woke in the middle of the night to find Louis standing at the end of her bed. He appeared fully dressed—trousers, shirt, waistcoat—with a glazed look in his eyes.

“What is it?” she asked.

Louis made no reply. He looked slightly stunned. His eyes were on the luminous windows, the rectangles of wan moonlight. She realized he was sleepwalking. He began navigating the room, a hand touching the walls. “My shoes. Has anyone seen my shoes?”

“Louis,” she called.

He walked barefoot over to the closed door and stood there, waiting. “I need my shoes,” he said. “It’s very cold down in the mixing room.”

Isobel got up slowly from the bed and crossed to him. His face was unblinking, the startled look of a dog roused from sleep.

“Louis,” she said, “you’re having a dream. Come back to bed.”

He did not respond. For a moment she was chilled by his countenance, by his dead-white stare. She took his hand and led him back to the bed. Without resistance, he lay down. She curled beside him and felt a terrible loneliness; she held his cold hand and cried. She understood these tears were for herself, not for Louis nor Chloe, but a kind of self-grief for the woman she had not become. She reached for the laudanum and took several swallows. The opium softened her remorse; it calmed her glands and swam up her spine. She doubted the existence of God, even now. Perhaps there was benevolence, sometimes an invisible kindness that intervened. She kissed Louis on the cheek.
He saw who I could become. He loved what I wanted to love in myself—a woman of the earth, a healer, someone who carried passion, who yearned for grace but found pride instead. Pride is a house locked from within.

The next morning Louis sat up in bed, baffled by his waistcoat and trousers. Isobel told him of his nightwalk.

“You stood at the door, asking for your shoes.”

“I see,” said Louis.

“We had quite a conversation.”

“Did we?”

“No.”

“What a relief.”

“I have a favor to ask,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I’d like you to take a portrait of the two of us.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“As strange as this might sound, I have never appeared in a photograph. It’s an old superstition, something about the conjurer looking back into the mirror.”

“It’s time you changed your superstition. Is noon a good time for the light?”

“Yes, of course,” said Louis. “Are you sure you are well enough?”

“Quite certain.” But Isobel could feel her lungs sag like dampened cheesecloth. It hurt to breathe.