Wilde West (48 page)

Oscar chose to withdraw himself from the contest—which clearly served only to drag him down to her level—by turning away in disdainful silence.

From the corner of his eye he saw her reach into the pocket of her fur coat.

“Oscar, this is the key to my hotel room. It's on the third floor, room 303. You can get to the third floor of the hotel directly from the Opera House, without going out into the street. There's a connecting passageway at the back of Horace's box.”

“How convenient that must be. For both of you.”

“Here, Oscar. Take the key.”

“No, thank you. I already possess an abundance of keys.”

“Oscar, come and see me after your lecture tonight. I'll be waiting for you. Here. Take it. I have another one.”

“I daresay. Many more of them, I'll wager.”

She laughed, surprising him. “No,” she said, “just the one.”

He felt her hand dip into his pocket and then slide out. “If you change your mind,” she said.

“I frequently do change my mind. A mind is a thing, like a cravat, that is designed to be changed. But about this I am adamant.”

“I'll be waiting,” she said.

“You shall wait, I'm afraid, in vain.”

Neither of them spoke again until they arrived at the Woods Hotel. There, wordlessly, Oscar handed her the reins and stepped down from the carriage. He turned and looked up, at the beautiful mass of titian hair, the beautiful violet eyes, the beautiful wide red mouth, and he felt something wrench, irrevocable, within his chest. “I shall probably never forget you,” he said. “I will, however, attempt to do so.”

It wasn't as eloquent an exit line as he would've liked; but after having discarded four or five others over the past ten minutes, this was the only one which remained.

The wide red mouth smiled at him. “I'll be waiting,” she said, and softly flicked the reins against the backs of the horses. The carriage wheeled away.

Upstairs in his room, Oscar saw that Henry had already packed everything. An hour remained before he had to catch the train to Leadville. He spent most of it retching into the toilet; and he did not know, he could not tell, which sickened him the most: his horror at the death of Biff, or his grief at the loss of Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

W
HAT HAD FALLEN AS
rain three days ago in Denver had fallen here, in the jumbled heights of the mountains, as snow. Alongside the railroad tracks it lay dingy and dirty, peppered by the cinder and grit sprayed from the smokestacks of passing trains; along the steeply sloped ground before the steeply sloped pine forest, it lay a brilliant white, dazzling in the late afternoon sun. It draped the drooping boughs of the trees and it lay blue and gray beneath them and, even muted by shadow, it turned the tall shaggy trunks to silhouettes.

The carriage was climbing at an impossible angle, the trees all leaning drunkenly in the direction of the train's passage, the entire world atilt. This seemed to Oscar, after the events of the morning, altogether appropriate. A universe that so easily admitted, so easily permitted, betrayal and sudden death was a universe which was patently askew. He would not have been surprised to look out the window and see the trees dangling, topsy-turvy, from the sky.

He glanced around the carriage. Once again, most of the others had withdrawn into themselves and their silences. Opposite him, von Hesse and the Countess were reading: von Hesse, his Chuang Tzu; the Countess, Stendhal's
Charterhouse of Parma.

Sitting in the left front seats, facing back, were O'Conner and Ruddick. Ruddick was scribbling across the pages of his notebook; at the window a subdued O'Conner was playing gin rummy with a subdued Vail, who sat opposite him in the window seat to Oscar's left.

Oscar sighed. (Discreetly; he had no wish to advertise his distress.) All the others, even the perpetually inebriated O'Conner, appeared complete within themselves. Whole. Entire. Sound. None of them seemed to be, as Oscar felt, adrift and rudderless, storm-shattered, bobbing and yawing mindlessly, helplessly, hopelessly.
Le Bateau Ivre.

He looked out the window at the crazed, canted trees of the forest as they dropped down the slope behind the slowly moving train. Perhaps he should retreat to some hermitage in those woody depths. Perhaps he might find, deep within the hushed forest, a lasting peace. He could build himself a small comfortable cell amid the pines, and there, surrounded by only a very few beautiful objects—his Bokhara rug, his Meissens, possibly a lovely brass samovar like the one he had seen last year at that cunning little shop in Belgravia—he could commune with nature. He would have for company only the birds and the squirrels.

And the bears. The dead bears.

Once again, Biff's battered hat sprang skyward and a third eye winked open in wonderment at his forehead. (The Eye of Wisdom this was called in certain Oriental traditions which at the moment Oscar was unable, precisely, to identify.)

And now, buried (presumably) beneath damp earth and brown pine needles, that unblinking eye stared up at … what?

At nothing. At the Void.

It stared at the Void and the Void stared back. One mirror contemplating itself in another.

“Oscar?”

Ruddick, looking up from his notebook.

“Yes?”

“When we're in Leadville, will you be going to see the Ice Palace?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Evidently pleased to be the bearer of good (or at any rate hitherto unborne) tidings, Ruddick enthusiastically fluttered his long eyelashes. Sometimes, truth to tell, Ruddick could be a bit much. “You mean you don't know? Oh, well, really, I heard all about it in Manitou Springs, and it sounds
wonderful.
It's a real
palace
, with rooms and towers and courtyards, like a Norman castle, but it's all made out of
ice.
They cut the blocks out of the lake up there, and they had a big celebration, ice sculptures and a band and
everything.
That's all over, naturally, but the palace is still there. It's
huge
, I heard, absolutely
enormous
—three whole
acres
of it. Can you imagine? A whole great big
castle
made out of ice? It's definitely the first thing I'm going to go see tomorrow.”

The idea of a castle constructed of ice—cold, bleak, and transient: like life—nicely complemented Oscar's mood. Perhaps whoever owned the thing would lease him a room. The dungeon, perhaps.

“Wilde's got better things to do with his time,” said O'Conner, looking up with a comfortable leer from his cards.

Oscar turned to him. “Have I, indeed. And what might they be?”

Still leering, O'Conner said, “I saw you last night, after the lecture. I couldn't help noticing that you were getting along real well with Baby Doe.”

“Mrs. Doe,” Oscar said, “is an acquaintance only. And scarcely even that.”

“Yeah,” said O'Conner, nodding with mock earnestness, damnable man. “Right. Then I guess you didn't know that Tabor's carriage is hooked up to the train we're on, and that she's in it, but he isn't. He's staying over in Manitou Springs. And I guess you didn't know that she's got a permanent room at the Clarendon Hotel, room 303. And I guess you didn't know that the third floor of the hotel, her floor, is connected by a passageway to the Opera House, where you'll be lecturing tonight.” He nodded again. “I guess you didn't know any of that, right?”

Vail was glaring over at Oscar, a scowl on his round pink face.

“No,” said Oscar. “As a matter of fact, I didn't. And if I had, I should have utterly forgotten it. But tell me. How did you learn so much about Mrs. Doe?”

O'Conner shrugged. He produced a variation on his leer, an extremely irksome smirk. “I'm a reporter. I ask people for information, they give it to me.”

“Ah.” Pity he hadn't asked, with the same success, for lockjaw. Or coma.

Still smirking, O'Conner said, “You ever notice that when people say
as a matter of fact
, they're usually not telling the truth?”

Oscar smiled. “No,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I haven't.”

O'Conner nodded. “So you're saying there's nothing between the two of you?”

“Only distance. Which is as I prefer it.” As soon as he said this, he knew he had said too much.

“Oh yeah?” said O'Conner, looking interested. “Why's that? She turn you down?”

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said the Countess. Heads turned.

“I do not wish to interrupt, but I find myself suddenly quite hungry. Oscair, would you be so good as to accompany me to the dining car?”

“With great pleasure,” he said, and realized that this was the first true statement he had made in some time.

“Now, Oscair,” said Mathilde de la Môle as she sat down opposite him, across the white linen of the dining table and facing the rear of the train, “you must tell me what is wrong. You look entirely disconsolate.” She sat back in her seat and put her hands in her lap.

“It's nothing,” he said. “Something I ate must have disagreed with me.” This was, he realized sadly, yet another statement of fact—although several days had passed between the occasion of his eating and the occasion of Elizabeth McCourt Doe's disagreeing.

“Oscair,” she said, gently chiding, “Come now. Mr. O'Conner was not the only person to see you with the beautiful Madame Doe last night. You seemed so happy then, both of you. What has happened?”

“ Ah,” he said sadly. If only he
could
unburden himself, accept her sympathy, halve his pain by sharing it. Impossible, of course. A gentleman never complained about a lady.

“Get you folks some food?” The Negro waiter hovered beside their table, looking as resplendent in his whites as a society surgeon about to perform wonders in the operating theater. Teeth agleam, eyes asparkle in the friendly black face, he was really quite appallingly cheerful.

“Only some coffee, please,” said the Countess.

“Have you any tea?” Oscar asked him.

“No sir, we surely don't.”

“Coffee, then.”

As the waiter left, Oscar looked back at Mathilde. “Ah,” he sadly said again.

She smiled softly. “Tell me, Oscair. Perhaps I can help.”

Well, after all, Elizabeth McCourt Doe was no lady …

Oscar told her slowly at first, elliptically, avoiding specific details; and then gradually, as though for some curious reason he needed to feel his own pain even more acutely, as though he needed in fact to flaunt it, he began to elaborate and embellish his grief and humiliation (pausing only to accept the coffee when it arrived, and then impatiently to thank the smiling waiter). He told her of the house in Grosvenor Square and in the telling he made the cherished dwelling seem so real—its extensive and expensive wooden furnishings all gleaming with beeswax and lemon oil, its mortgage paid off—that its loss now was as crushing as if he had sipped sherry beside its cozy fireplace for a lifetime. He told her of those splendid trips to Italy and France and Germany; and to Greece, where, although he had not realized it before this moment, he and Elizabeth McCourt Doe would have sat on the steps of the Erectheum and gazed in mutual love and shared awe at the sun-soaked pillars of the Parthenon.

Finally, omitting any mention of Darryl and Dr. Holliday and the (presumably) buried Biff, he told her of the woman's treachery. Of how, all along, she had kept Tabor informed about her relationship with Oscar. Of how she had permitted Oscar to lose himself, his heart, his soul, in visions of their future together when, all along, from the very beginning, they had had no future together.

“And not much of a present, either,” he said forlornly. “A few stolen hours here and there. And those, as it turned out, had not been stolen at all. They had merely been borrowed, with his consent, from Tabor.”

The Contess had listened in silence, merely nodding her head sympathetically now and then; or, from time to time, pursing her lips thoughtfully. Now she said, “But Oscair, of what, exactly, do you complain?”