The Unfinished World (10 page)

This is love for me, she said. I am not a good woman, she said. I am the end of all things, she said. This was at the beginning.

He shook his head. You are life, he said, and I invite you in.

She twisted her bracelet and smiled, thin gold band over those sweet white wrists traced with blue. Like Lilith? she asked. She had the thinnest skin, like paper; it was, she said, passed down from her mother, an Irish whore who birthed her in a brothel. I marveled at all that had been handed down from mother to daughter, all that was seeded and grown in the offspring: the thin white skin and the high blue veins and the gold hair and the talent for being the wrong kind of woman. No wonder Cope's father had chased her away. She was the kind of sickness a man would give anything to feel
.

I wanted to see the graves of monsters, she said, mouth pointed downward, when I said I could not take her on the next expedition. I said no, many times, until she put her perfumed hand over my mouth. Because I am not quite a lady? she asked
.

Because I am not quite a gentleman, I murmured from under her sweet palm, and she flung her arms around me and I could feel her smile press my cheek
.

Aug 31 1880

My dear Prof. Marsh
,

I received some time ago your very kind note of July 28th, and yesterday the magnificent volume. I have looked with renewed admiration at the plates, and will soon read the text. Your work on these old birds on the many fossil animals of N. America has afforded the best support to the theory of evolution, which has appeared within the last twenty years. The general appearance of the copy which you have sent me is worthy of its contents, and I can say nothing stronger than this
.

With cordial thanks, believe me yours very sincerely, Charles Darwin

We were still young when we set about proving we were done with gods
.

The West is full of a new kind of wild freedom. How can that compare with paved streets, a good restaurant, a vast library, a beautiful woman waiting in one's bed come moonlight? The West is full of painted skies, of sharp blues hanging over a sepia landscape. The West is full of vibrant cruelty, of dangerous and beautiful things.

Our bodies were flamed like the oil lamps, bones underneath rattling with the force of the explosion. At the climax, she puffed her cheeks out and smiled with her mouth and eyes squeezed shut, like
she was holding her breath. An old trick, she said; she learned it from a “friend” long ago. It makes it better, she said. More powerful. She was still shuddering as if to demonstrate the truth of this
.

A pink foot poking out from beneath a sheet. A bosom rising and falling. Golden hair fanned over a white linen pillow
.

You see, there are bad women who like good men, she told me
.

I'm not good, I said. I just prefer a quiet heart
.

I would prefer a new heart altogether, she said, and her eyes were like old stars as she spoke; echoes of stars burned out eons ago
.

It really began at Haddonfield, after he pointed out Cope's dreadful mistake with the
Elasmosaurus platyurus
. The head is on the tail, he told the team in private. He knows how it looked, knows how Cope and his temper took it. But he didn't intend to embarrass him, truly, though it was the beginning of the end. It was something too much for Cope, a needle in the throat. Cope's fierce rage would always be meant for Marsh, now.

All the nights spent with her wrapped round his chairs, round his sheets, round his tall, portly body. All those nights covered in dewy flesh, in violets and jasmine and glasses of wine. Nights of open windows, of soft air in waves, of dreams punctuated by crickets and faint piano wafting up from the dance hall.

He knows what they say at the club, at the university, at the dig sites in the Badlands. They say he cannot feel affection. They say Marsh, why, he is impossibly cold. They would be astounded to learn what music his nights are made of, how he has learned to love a
fallen woman like a fallen angel. How he has learned that they are nearly one and the same.

Cope spent far more time than Marsh did away at the digs, glaring at the bleached white, the bones an open puzzle. With him always: an obsessive, complete journal of Marsh's perceived misdeeds. Every one of them recorded faithfully in that terrible, cramped handwriting. Cope never had the handwriting of a naturalist, despite all his training.

Marsh thinks they are related to birds
, he wrote.

Marsh has stolen another discovery
.

Marsh has bribed my men to turn over the larger fossils to him
.

Marsh does not properly document his finds. He does not keep his books separate as he should
.

Marsh has stolen her, now. I hear she has stopped seeing other clients. Another set of bones once mine, now his
.

The sap and smoke and soot waft down the river in Hartford, and Marsh pours another glass of brandy. It is his fourth tonight. He has tired of reading about Cope's latest expedition. He will ask her to come to him. She will open him up and suck out the hurt, like a snakebite.

We were on a large liner at sea, the black sky falling on us like a blanket. I dreamt of hipbones and sockets, of locks and keys. She drew her dream for me: she was lying in bed, when a great wall of water swept over her and dissolved bedding, nightgown, underthings, left her naked in the salty damp of the water's wake. She tried to move but the wall
of water returned, it hurt, it scalded, and she was trapped like a fly in amber as it hardened, as it cooled and cracked. And there you were, Othniel, she said, there you were, chipping away with your hammer and chisel, trying to free me, and when you did my body was ruined, blackened, nothing but burnt bits. And you put me back together, pins through my bones, and stuck me in a case at your museum
.