“Would you come with me, please?”
“I will not!”
“You will,” he said. “You’re under arrest. I’m Officer James Gould of the Poughkeepsie Police Department, and you will come with me right now.”
“Your badge?” was all I could manage. He produced it.
And that was how I found myself arrested for assaulting a man who had assaulted me first, and spent my first night in prison.
I never found out whether my attacker was mad or drunk or simply mistaken. Officer Gould hustled me off the premises with dispatch. As the only female inmate of the local jail, I spent a chilly night in a silent cell, pretending to sleep, fully dressed in a gown and corset with a cache of flash powder still wedged uncomfortably up my sleeve, against my elbow. At least it wasn’t a dove. I whispered a wish under my breath to heal the weeping burn on my shoulder, and within hours, it was a shadow. I was released the next morning, not much worse for wear. The next show, just up the river in Kingston, sold out. By the time we got to the Smith Opera House in Geneva for the show after that, there was a line out the door and down the block. And we began to book larger venues, at ever-better billing, with the added notoriety from my run-in with the law.
While I wished the assault had never happened—how could I enjoy being in fear for my life?—I was grateful to Officer Gould. The publicity from my arrest was better than a thousand posters. Some headlines boldly declared sides: the Albany Argus chose “Innocent Female Stage Magician Victim of Unprovoked Assault,” which I appreciated, while somewhat less generous was the Schenectady Gazette’s “Illusionist or Pugilist? Woman Magician Beats Audience Member Who Dares Challenge Authenticity of Her Magic.” When the news spread wider, the Philadelphia Public Ledger decided on a more neutral “Female Illusionist Attacked Midshow By Doubting Patron.” I remembered what Adelaide had said: As long as they say something and in large type. The type got much larger after Poughkeepsie.
Clyde, who had been in New York at the time, was furious upon hearing the story. He made a special trip to tell me so. He berated me for confronting the man instead of turning tail and fleeing, and he turned so red that I wanted to laugh at him, but out of politeness, I kept my face grave. I fibbed about how serious it had been, leaving out a number of details, but even so, he insisted I had been in true and unacceptable danger. So he added two bodyguards to the company entourage, just in case. My fame had grown, and I reveled in it, but somehow it felt like it was happening to someone else and not me. I barely recognized myself in the photographs and illustrations that appeared next to the newspaper stories. And despite the moment in Poughkeepsie where I was convinced that Ray had found me at last, there was barely a shred of Ada Bates in the Amazing Arden. Only the eye was the same, and its unique coloring was invisible in black ink. Everything I did celebrated the new person I had become.
I didn’t mind the bodyguards; actually, they were nice boys. They fit in well enough, always watchful but rarely obtrusive. And when several months had passed without further threat—the newspapers continued to growl their same stories about the dangers of a woman taking a man’s role onstage, but their tone grew more and more admiring—I offered the big-shouldered one a job as a prop hauler and the long-fingered one a position onstage, and they both accepted.
It was the night after I released the bodyguards that things changed with Clyde. It had been exactly a year since I’d become the Amazing Arden, and I was in New York for just one night, going over our accounts in the office. We’d planned to go to Keen’s to celebrate the occasion with mutton chops and red berry bibble, but we got to talking and lost track of the clock. By the time he checked his watch, we decided to content ourselves with sandwiches and keep working.
Truth be told, we hadn’t spent every minute talking true business. I’d come to look forward to talking with him on my return visits, sometimes for hours. He confessed his greatest dream was to build a theater of his own, and we fell to talking about it when other business was done, dreaming it grander every time. We changed the name over and over—the Perennial? Garber’s Grove? the Modern Taj?—but settled on the Carolina Rose. Each time we talked, we gave it ever more prestigious addresses, furnishing it with chairs and curtains and carpets, down to the last detail. I advocated for a streamlined, elegant scheme of black and white furnishings, but he wanted something more baroque, full of scrollwork and ornament. It was a subject of fun, but also something we shared with each other and no one else.
In a way, it was intimate, a word from which I once would have shrunk where Clyde was concerned. I found I minded that thought less and less. There was still a wall between us—the wall I had put there to guard against being hurt by him again—but it had sunk lower with every passing month, and after all this time, I could see over it. We could laugh together once more. But there was no hint of anything romantic, not until the night he chose to declare himself.
We’d finished the sandwiches, and I’d asked a question about our receipts for June, so he reached into the middle of a stack of papers, and the top of the stack toppled and fell. I leaned over to begin picking them up, but he shooed me back. So I sat in the desk chair and looked down at him while he gathered up the sheets of figures and neatly squared their edges again. When he was done, he handed the papers to me, and I put them back where they belonged, but he didn’t get up. Instead, he removed his eyeglasses, folded them slowly, and placed them on the edge of the desk. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose as if it pained him and sat back on his heels.
“Clyde?” I prodded.
He didn’t meet my eyes. “Arden, do you know what you want?”
“Sure,” I said. “I want to be famous enough to make front-page headlines just for coming to town. I want to invent an illusion so original I’m forever known as its creator. And I want those marzipan candies they make in that little town outside Binghamton, the ones dipped in chocolate, in the box with the red ribbon.”
I was partly joking, but I watched his reaction, and he was serious. He knelt at my feet and laid his hands on the ground, his fingertips almost but not quite grazing the toes of my shoes. Awkwardly I looked down, waiting.
“I want you to forgive me,” he said. “That’s what I want.”
I knew what he meant instantly, of course. My answer took a bit longer to form. “It was a long time ago.”
“But you were right,” Clyde said. “I did you wrong. I never should have let you believe I was going to marry you. It was a trick, and badly done. And I’m sorry.”
I looked at his bent head, and my heart ached. I’d pictured this before, down to the last detail. If I’d been truthful when he asked me what I wanted, I’d have included this: him, on his knees, begging my forgiveness.
“So that’s what you want,” I said. “More than that theater of yours? More than the stacks of money you keep in the safe? You want me to forgive you?”
“Yes.”
There was something about the way he looked up at me that turned on a light. I’d been lying to myself. I hadn’t been enjoying his company just for conversation. I had wanted something more, something I didn’t want to let myself want, but if he was truly repentant? Maybe I could have it after all.
Boldly I said, “Is that all you want from me?”
He lifted one hand to hover over the hem of my dress, stared up into my face, and said, “No. It isn’t. But that doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“It only matters what you want from me. And you’ve said I can’t even touch you. So I won’t, until you give me permission.”
“Done.” I surprised even myself with how quickly, how eagerly, I said it. “Touch me, then.”
He gaped a little bit, taken by surprise. Seeing his shock was almost more gratifying than watching him beg. “I don’t know where to start.”
“I do,” I said and leaned down to him, cradling his face in both hands. I could feel the whiskers just under the skin of his cheek. After so long, it was almost too much, and I gave myself over instantly.
His lips on mine were warm and sweet. I parted my lips and felt his tongue slip in, shocking me a moment, and then the sensation took me well beyond warmth into a delicious, undeniable heat. I came down out of my chair, down to my knees, to meet him.
“Are you sure?” he said low in his throat, urgently.
“More,” I said in response and pulled him to me and pressed my hips against his hips as if I could pass my body into his like two magic rings struck together so hard they interlock. His lips were soft but insistent, and I could feel the scruff on his chin scratching me, making my face feel tender, then as he trailed fierce kisses down my neck, the scruff rubbed against the skin there, and my face and neck were aflame as surely as if I were standing in the Navajo Fire itself.
I pressed against him, feeling the delicious, unfamiliar heat of another person’s body against mine, chest to chest, waist to waist, thighs to thighs. We knelt facing each other for what seemed like hours. His hands twisted into my hair, his fingers wrapped around my head as he held my face to his, as if to devour me, and I wanted nothing else in the world in that moment but to be devoured.
When kisses were no longer enough, we both knew it. I could feel his need against me, and I lay back so he could have what we both wanted. He pushed at my skirt, sliding it up over my knee, and he was so maddeningly slow about it that I grabbed two fistfuls of skirt myself and hauled the layers of fabric out of the way. He smiled at that, and I kissed the smile off his face, shocked by my own boldness, but so gripped with urgency I couldn’t slow down.
I couldn’t say which of us unlaced the front of my dress, our fingers were both tangling and lunging, but when the front hung open, I felt a rush of cold air and then a warmer rush as he lowered his mouth. A wave of heat ran down between my legs and up my spine to the back of my head where it exploded, and I gasped out loud.
I had waited a long time without knowing what I was waiting for, and for all the months and years I’d waited, it was worth every minute.
“How beautiful you are,” he said, murmuring the words against my bare breast. The sensation was new and unfamiliar and wonderful, and the heat was everywhere at once. I couldn’t feel his hands on me so I reached out for them and found one at the waist of his trousers pulling them aside, and when I brushed something I didn’t expect to brush, I heard him groan. He sounded like an animal, but not in a frightening way. I wasn’t afraid. I reached out for him and he groaned again, lowering his hips onto mine. His skin was so hot. His face came up to mine, and there was a question in his eyes, and I tipped my hips up to meet his, pressing and pressing, which was all the answer he needed.
“Beautiful,” said Clyde, “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” as he pushed aside the last scrap of fabric separating us and plunged inside, and there was pain and joy in my answering cry, until neither of us were making words, only sounds, though at the end when we lay down next to each other, he ran his hand over my face and cupped my cheek in his palm and said, “Beautiful, beautiful Arden.”