The Mercury Waltz (18 page)

—as Frédéric’s flight continues into the black humidity of the streets, while the lobby orchestra plays on, their bows’ horsehair snapped and trailing, shirts stuck to their bodies with sweat, the music rising over the crowd and the constables and several men with placards protesting the decadent opera, placards no one can actually read in the darkness, the men themselves uncaring whether an opera takes place or not, but caring very much for the money passed to them by Costello, himself heading home now, snuff-stained and tired, for the night has been a long one, and a hot one—

—presided over by the heatless moon, who like a faraway sentry watches them all, bravos and broken hearts and many lusts fomenting, the emptying square to the crowding boulevards to the quieter streets of open windows, the windows of the Mercury, where Rupert sits, tepid tea and shirtsleeves, beside Tilde at the table with her divining cards. Surprised by his entrance, she moved to hide them, but his interest bade her pause: “Those cards, they are what is called Tarot?” and “Taroc, Sir. I can show you,” laying out a spread just for him, as she has longed to do from the first. Hares and crowns, doves and flowers, a year’s panoply distilled into flight and battle: see the lords and knaves embracing, the queens presiding, those knaves and queens so like the puppets in their obliquity, their ferocity, their capacity for showing the truth; that fact seen by Tilde in her very first sight of Mr. Pollux and Mr. Castor, up on the stage like figures sprung from a living deck, refracted now back to Rupert watching her small, soap-chapped, supremely competent little hands separating, like strings untangled, what is from what might be and “You will want to watch this one,” she says, tapping the knave of crowns, his sly-eyed glare from the painted paper as he hides a diadem beneath his coat, a crown to which he holds no right. “He is a bad one, Sir.”

And Rupert looking from those eyes to hers so very blue and unblinking—Istvan calls it her Jeanne d’Arc stare, there at the stake and
She’d burn for you, you know, poor poppet. In fact she does now
—himself kindly and half-serious to ask, “But how shall I know the fellow?” as she, all serious, holds his gaze and “Oh, Sir,” she says. “Already he knows you.“

And, still holding that gaze, she sees in startlement another thing, however has she missed it, that his left eye differs from his right, that he turns his head, slightly, carefully, to keep her two eyes in sight with his one; why, he must have a blind side, Sir, a sight to touch and terrify her equally, that he can only ever see half of what awaits him. Well, she must keep double watch then, on him, and that flighty M. Stefan, on this place and its puppets—

—those characters now like cards undealt, the silk-draped two who need none other but that other two, their moving human avatars; and beyond them that sadder, separate pair, the angel and the devil freighted with so much force and thwarted joy, unboxed, careless to lie together in the darkness, what springs to life when angels breed? And both the cards and the puppets the sideways gift, perhaps, of that other, greater, more elusive Mercury, the god of the third ear, the lord of three letters, of filth and laughter and deception, of word and wood and flesh the triple fulcrum that tips the stars.

“Cleopatra’s Rapsodia”

Contributed by Seraphim

Opera is the art form closest to the heart of man, and yet the simplest, for all its glorious machinations. That painful simplicity was fully displayed at the Civic Opera’s staging of
Cleopatra’s Rapsodia
, a classic tale of true love and despair. As Queen of the Nile, Miss Annelore Bart was in fine voice, and ably partnered by the great Tomas as Antony, and as Dolabello, Mr. Samuel Gunst made a worthy opponent. The stagecraft, if flawed at times, was adequate to its task. And the deepest import of the lovers’ story, as beauty is destroyed by open lust and exile to Hell itself becomes the only course, was amply, tragically in evidence in the course of the evening’s performance.

Your angelic correspondent must conflate that tale with our city’s political drama, as the Morals and Standards Act, approved by those who feared to oppose it, takes full hold. Many venues have already suffered: the
Palais des idées
salons are listless and poorly attended; the Literary Leopards are no longer allowed into the Park; the Gentle Friends of the Ballet have canceled all performances of
Salome’s Sister
in favor of
The Tale of Ruth.
Even at the acrobats’ circus, the female tumblers’ Oriental costumes were deemed too diaphanous for public viewing and were replaced by muslin shifts, to the sad detriment of their tumbling. And at the Mercury Theatre, those wooden heroes of the boards are still unfairly suppressed into silence: exactly how and by whom, our readers are urged to consult the
Globe
to learn.

Further, your correspondent now finds himself pursued by that very same Morals Commission, which aims to drive him, too, into silence, though Herr Konrad, the
Daily Solon
’s
publisher, and Herr Hebert, its editor, have both refused to bend to this outrageous pressure. Today it is a theatre critic. Tomorrow it may be a constable, or a legislator, or perhaps Mayor Eszterhaus himself. Where else can such fearful censorship finally lead?

As citizens it is surely our duty to obey our leaders. But if those who lead should prove unworthy of our trust…? Let the darkness of the Mercury continue as our beacon, let the bare stage become our home! Cry freedom, dear fellow citizens, cry the Mercury! And your correspondent will continue to offer his dispatches for as long as freedom shall permit.

This dice house smells of spilled malt and burned hair, a drunkard’s head too close to the flame of a broken lamp, a tankard left on the table where Istvan sits with bad wine and a pair of dice so warped that they barely move when tossed, but lie sullen as old stumps, as tedious as the gamblers surrounding him tonight, with Mouse at home steeped in work and growling, more crossed-out than written in—

You’re nearly done—why not treat yourself, and take a quarter-hour off? I won’t tell.

And let the last speeches write themselves, is that it? Go on, go lose some coin—

—in the midnight streets as warm as the desert and nearly as deserted, the evening’s first venue all gin and nudging elbows, a half-dozen so-called friends of the Mercury who could not seem to decide if there was more glory in trouncing the famous M. Hilaire at dice or in buying him drinks; the next, a solemn spot of drawn draperies and horsehair chairs, nearly too solemn to admit a man of his unpleasant notoriety, though they took what money they could from him before he took his leave, and took pleasure in his attendance, too, as if they mean somehow to own him by proxy, to rub at his luster, boasting if they best him to their comrades in the offices or shops; do they think they so possess him, these players, either way?

And now, in this box in a row of boxes, each smaller and more noxious than the last, squats a motley crowd of tumblers, some too timid to fully stake—why play at all, then, if loss is such a bugbear?—and others too drunk or irascible to take their falls with equanimity. One big fellow has been glaring at Istvan for the better part of an hour, played out of the game but still its self-appointed marshal, watching with suspicion as if this fancy man, this theatre fellow—for here, too, they all know him, as if he wears a laurel wreath or Bottom’s ears—might be cheating them beneath their very eyes, for “A magic-man’s first cousin to a broadsman,” the big fellow speaking as if to the air, saying it once and then again until finally Istvan must swivel in his seat to ask if “You call me cheating?” his voice as neutral as the knife in his pocket, his eyebrows faintly raised but “Roll on,” growls the old man at his left, an unbuttoned vest, gray teeth as stumpy as the dice. “I need to lose and go home.”

Istvan rolls; Istvan wins: Istvan loses; the old man takes the dice. A slim figure passes the open doorway, all blond pallor and trailing scarf: is it the
bébé?
but no, just another not half so lovely, lovely Luc missed more by Istvan than he had thought the boy could be, his kisses and his chatter, even his tears; and where does he keep himself these nights? Never at the Mercury, closed or open, nor at the Heads or Tails or any of the usual card-havens, or the Cocked Hat or Cemetery, or loitering amongst the boys who belong to the kit; he is simply nowhere, like a sunbeam whose clouded light fails to fall—

“Whoreson dice!” the old man snarls, slamming them down to the table as “He’s not got your luck, Your Honor,” nods the man next to Istvan, a wall-eyed smiler, and “
If
it’s luck,” says the big fellow, staring at Istvan who sighs, who puts his hands to the table prepatory to violence, but “Fuck yourself standing,” calls a voice from the doorway, “you grimy ape,” and “What you say? To me?” the big fellow’s face almost a-grin at Haden glum in scarlet and gray, some hideous posy jammed into his lapel, he looks like a sad scaramouche but when he breaks an empty bottle on the big fellow’s neck it shatters straight enough, the dicers scattering in blood and glass as Istvan clubs the fellow with his forearm, boxes his ears, and “There’s your luck,” with a last stiff cuff across the face, up and out then as nimble as Haden’s boys waiting in the doorway, who hoot and dash between and around Haden and Istvan and the roaring fellow now staggering broken-nosed into the street, a cat’s cradle of taunts and tripping feet, and “That Hercules,” Haden frowning, leading Istvan down one sideway and up the narrow next, past black puddles and a dented bin, ”you shouldn’t even have played him. An’t you know his game is battering, not dice?”

“No, I did not…. Well-played by you, at any rate. A drink to even us?” nodding to a tavern across the way, a mildly dingy den below a painted white flower, the Drooping Lily, where no women are admitted, where men sit matched or solo at the tables, where both Istvan and Haden are known, though not together, a wash of snigger and speculation as they take seats by the door, and “Not that bilge,” Haden scornful to the serving boy approaching with two lagers. “Brandy, quick it.—But we’ve played together before, an’t we?” with a gloomy smile, the brackish brandy drunk as soon as it is set to the table. “‘Regno, regnavi, regnabo,’ remember?”

“You did not,” says Istvan, unpleased by the memory, that flashy houndstooth dealer, all those lucky red cards, “and if you did, why, fuck yourself standing. I don’t need you to make my play—”

“You do,” belching in the second round of brandies, so much liquor today and no food at all, nowadays Haden does not care to eat, everything tastes like silt and straw; and at night when he tries to sleep he dreams again and again of that kiss, that bolt from the blue, Frédéric’s mouth so sweet upon his own—and then Frédéric’s eyes wide with despair, or disgust, or whatever it was that drove him off and away, as if the opera building were ablaze around him. Two weeks, now, without a word or a whisper, two whole weeks of Haden pacing the bridge, and passing the rooming house, and ghosting at the
Solon
’s offices and the theatres, wondering if the silent Mercury shelters Frédéric somehow, for surely he can be found no place else…. Himself barred from there by Bok, Bok and his little blue-eyed bitch, but this foxy Hilaire—“Let me in your play, uncle, don’t say no. I’m better your friend than your enemy, believe it.”

“Oh, and I the same,” coldly, tossing back the inferior liquor. “I have been playing a long time, I was watching men cut to ribbons when you were still mumbling at your nurse’s tit.“

“I’ve cut a few myself,” his inner gaze to memory’s gutter, amethyst and blood, “since that tit—the first tit
and
the last for me, I think you are the same. In fact, I know it.”

“You do?” The third round arrives; they eye each other, Istvan through his lashes, Haden sucking at his scar, both feeling the spark between them, a sharp heat that is not lust, or chooses not to be: rather one mirror opposed to the other, in malice, humor, a testing of the will until “Well,” says Istvan, now wearing half a smile, “I suppose one picks up plenty as close to the ground as you are, groundling, whatever ground it is that you hail from—”

—to bring from Haden a wandering tale with signposts of real truth—the stench of the burning city, the self-made orphan on the war-torn road, the corporal’s hand heavy on his shoulder—as does Istvan’s own retold, an origin in echo except “I hadn’t,” says Haden, “all your advantages,” does he mean Rupert, the puppets and the shows? so “No,” agrees Istvan, “you did not. But nor did I, at first…. At first I sang,” with another smile, a different humor, “so that my mother and my sister could eat. Men like a little singing boy, have you ever marked that, kit?”

“I have,” says Haden; he is not smiling. “I have marked that. It’s why I keep watch on my own boys.”

“Like the
bébé?
Where is he, these long days?”

“Disappeared,” with a darker shrug. “I keep watch on my boys, uncle, and I fucking well don’t like to lose them, or have them poached out from under me.—Brandy, quick it.”

“There’s no more,” says the server, tugging his damp taprag. “You two gents drank us out.”

“Out? You fucking twister. Here,” offering his flask, “Calvados,” Istvan drinking, Haden drinking, until that drink is done as well, Istvan then producing his own flask of fine Armagnac as “He taught me to play, yeah?” thinking of Rupert, of the rooftops and the roads, all the roads that lead to the room where Rupert sits struggling, alone with his paper world. “Who taught you? Your military man?”

“He taught me fuck-all but the cards,” says Haden; he is so drunk that he can think, in this moment, without any rancor of the corporal, with an owlish dispassion, almost affection. “They showed me to do—what I do. But he knew that I could do it. It’s why he picked me, picked me up on the road—”

“Though you didn’t know your right hand from your left in that lords’ box, now, did you?” in the operatic dimness, that young missus in her silk so like the lost Madame as to make one blink; and the kit dazed but rallying, though plainly never knowing de Metz from a hole in the ground, yet what a fine shot in the dark to have said so before! Instinct; no one can teach that…. And Benjamin, yes, still young but Puck no longer, fully fled into a kind of wasteland, mute to stare at Istvan with open antipathy, until at last
I barely knew you, Monsieur, you look so much older now
and
Time will accomplish that,
Istvan’s own cold smile, his courtesy as cold to add
You’ve missed M. Bok,
to those dark dilated eyes: Pluto’s son, yes, but Pluto having no real issue call him Phaëton instead, the reins of power fully in his hands, what heaven does he think to cross, here? And how soon must it be, when he himself comes calling on Mouse? One might have guessed him to come already, from whatever local eyrie he bides; his visit is in all the papers, which may be why Mouse is so unsettled. “Did the fine lady frighten you, with all her pretty jewels?”

“Nice jewels,” Haden nods, “a nice lady. She looks just like a horse. And she knew you plainly,” and that greekish lordship did, too, though no one said much of anything, just drank the figgy wine from the sweating silver cups and nodded at how hot the night was, and how fine the singers had been, and how hot it was, truly, until
You’ve missed M. Bok
to bring that heat to that lord’s eyes: was it a gambler’s throw, or did he know, Hilaire, that that would send them packing from the box, with the horsy lady watching them go, watching everything, no flies on her—

—as “
Here
you are,” a man in green linen tottering up to their table, scrub brush beard and the smell of soda cologne, as a pair of drinkers wobble past and out the door, one singing the “Cupid” song, the other pausing to blurt some piss just past the threshold. “The great Hilaire,” he says coquettishly to Istvan, dropping down a
Solon
folded open, “immortalized in the ed—the eda—the edi
tor
ial. I’ll help you cry the Mercury, my dear, if—
ugh!
” as Haden tips him backward with a stiffened palm to the brisket, just like felling a half-chopped tree, and “Many seem to know me,” Istvan says, bemused, watching the whiskered man climb clumsily back to his feet, but “No one fucking knows you, or me either, uncle. No one knows anyone,” Haden staring at the
Solon,
half-mournful, half-enraged, so “Your friend,” says Istvan helpfully, pushing the paper toward him. “
He
knows, or means to. See how he stirs the pot.”

“What?”

“Your angelic friend.—You’ve never thanked me, by the by, for the introduction.”

“What in hell’s name do you mean?”

And Istvan seeing, then, that the kit does
not
see, does not know the real provenance of the journalistic Seraphim: oh, a double-door farce, he had called it plain the first time! So to cheer the young felon, that farce is made plain, as Haden’s face goes pale, then red—

“But how the fuck do you know this? That
he
is the writer?”

“How can one not? Read the words, you see him,
pile ou face—
”

—as Haden’s face changes again, leavened by the lie, the small glorious lie,
felix culpa
of this dear and moral Frédéric, who, less moral, is all the more dear for “All this time,” says Haden, “he’s been funning me! All this time I’d thought it was someone else, that Seraphim fellow using him like I use my boys—”

“And I my mecs; he’s mec to himself, a singular economy of effort, yeah?” but Haden is in no shape to parse this nicety, is staring at the paper as if Frédéric-Seraphim himself might spring forth from its pages, as Istvan winks and “No doubt there’s not been time to talk it out between you, what with all the lovering and suchlike?” to bring the tale of another
commedia
farce—as the tavern continues to empty around them in pipe smoke and arm-in-arm departures, as the server slumps yawning at the bar—Haden head in hands to tell in murmurs of those moments on the bridge, on the rooming house stoop, the fantastic moment at the opera where “He kissed me, he—and then he
ran.
And has been running ever since.”

“Fleeing Eden, like a good seraph should. Go and get him, then, tell him what you know—”

“But I do
not
know,” with enormous drunken furious precision, one finger raised as if for balance. “Where. He is.”

“If I were you,” Istvan says, “I’d try the church.”

The yellow eyes widen like the dawn about to break and “Yes!” says Haden, “
yes,
the church!” Levering himself upright in fumes of liquor and clouds of joy, his face a feral boy’s, that strange combination of scoundrel knave and loyal jack and “I’m gone, then, uncle,” with a backward glance of honest gratitude, half-gallop, half-stumble into the dark, and “Our Lord loves a drunkard,” Istvan calling after with amusement, capping his flask, yawning to his feet as the other last customer approaches, an odd man with clean-shaven cheeks and a semblance of a smile and “You say,” says that man, “that the Lord loves a drunkard?”