“Well, someone cuts a girl in half, doesn’t he?”
“A lot of someones do. Kellar, certainly. Atwood. Burlingame.”
“And a dozen more. So I’ll cut someone in half. Why shouldn’t I?”
He looked at me blankly. He didn’t have an answer.
I kept going. “But not a girl. The girls can’t defend themselves. Cut a man in half, and see how he likes it.”
“Arden, are you all right?”
I bristled at the question. I’d expected him to embrace the idea, but he was clearly made uncomfortable by it, and I wasn’t sure why. He was usually head over heels for sensation. I said, “Of course I am.”
“You almost died.”
“Yes, I remember that,” I said with a touch of frost. “But I’m fine now.”
“I don’t like this,” said Clyde. “It’s not you.”
“It’s me. Truly.”
“No. I know you.”
He sounded more than confident. He sounded territorial. It rubbed me wrong. Accusingly, I said, “Do you?”
“Arden, please, don’t be like this. I love you, and everything I want is your happiness.”
“That’s not even my name,” I said.
“Arden. Ada. Miss Bates. Whatever you’d like. It’s you and you’re mine.”
“Yours? I can’t talk to you about this anymore. I need to go.”
“No, no, don’t run, not from me, please,” he said and grabbed my arms, the worst thing he could do, and I ripped my body out of his grasp and stood.
He started to rise from the bed, and I held my hand up, blocking him.
“Don’t. Don’t.” I stepped into the dress I’d worn the night before, a forest green gown too fancy for the circumstance but the closest thing to hand.
“Don’t go,” said Clyde. “You can’t very well wander the streets alone.”
“Oh, can’t I?”
“I mean—Ada, please—at least let me go.”
“No, I’m leaving. I don’t care what you do. Please yourself,” I muttered, closing the top button of my dress on the way to the door, which I left hanging open behind me.
***
I threw myself into revising the act. The excitement of the Halved Man was bubbling inside me. I stayed after Clyde with all my might—wheedling and cajoling, then insisting and demanding—until he agreed to find someone to make the new trick for me. The mechanics of it were relatively simple. The construction itself didn’t require a master, as an intricate cabinet illusion would. There were no hidden hooks or mounts. This only called for a competent carpenter with a bit of imagination, absolute discretion, and two weeks’ time.
Hundreds of illusionists were cutting women in half, and despite the differences between men and women, they came apart just the same way under a blade. Or, rather, gave the impression of coming apart—of course no one was really getting severed. Men’s bodies could be reflected by mirrors or hidden under the false bottom of a trunk, just like women’s. There were as many different ways to stage the illusion as there were illusionists, but I chose one of the simplest, knowing the shock of seeing a man in a woman’s place at the end of the blade would be shock enough.
The cabinet design I chose was a coffin-shaped box in which the body would appear parallel to the ground, on four narrow poles that raised the box to the level of my waist. The poles were wheeled so the cabinet could be freely moved about the stage. But the cabinet was actually two cabinets, the separation in the middle cleverly concealed with thin panels of veneer. The saw that seemed to sever the cabinet only slipped into the existing gap, cutting nothing at all. One of the twins would lie down in the top half of the cabinet, jackknifing his legs up and to the side, and Hugo would lie down in the bottom half, curled tightly and carefully so only his legs protruded through the cabinet’s holes. When the cabinet halves were pressed together, it looked like one man’s body, but it never was. Any viewer would assume Michael’s or Gabriel’s angelic curls connected to Hugo’s polished black boots, but they were entirely separate. The audience was off the track from the beginning.
Even after I healed the cut Ray had made on my thigh, when Clyde and I made love, I always insisted on darkness. Whenever his hand roamed too close, I shifted and stirred to keep his fingers from touching me there. I knew my wish had worked and the cut had healed completely, leaving no sign, as my cuts always did. But I could still feel it there, burning against the tender skin, and I couldn’t stand the thought of my love’s fingers resting on that unholy spot.
I was so careful in this respect I became careless elsewhere, and Clyde found among my things Ray’s straight razor, which he took for a gift I’d brought him. He loved the smooth unadorned bone of the handle and exclaimed over its perfection. He kept it on the sink and used it every single day he was with me. It made me sick to my stomach to see it in his hand, but there was no question of setting the record straight. I couldn’t even begin to explain. So I let him think it was something lovely when in fact it was something awful. For his sake. And every time I saw it, I tried to force myself to forget what that blade meant, what its sharp edge had done, but I always remembered. Always.
***
The night before the new act was to debut, there was a long, heavy thunderstorm. Clyde was next to me, and I was idly stroking his hair while we lay on the floor of the railcar together. The bed was far more comfortable, but sometimes we were too eager for it, and this had been one of those times. We’d drawn the shades against the lightning. I could hear the steady patter of rain on the roof, and it made the world inside seem small and dark and private. I reveled in the feeling.
Clyde said, “I need to talk to you.”
“So talk.”
“Please. It’s serious.”
I set my shoulders and turned toward him. I was ready for another fight. But he didn’t look angry, not exactly, and I tried not to rush to judgment.
“I love you so much, you know that?”
Soberly, I nodded. “I know that.”
“And I think you love me.”
“Yes,” I said, and my voice cracked, because for a moment, I realized he was a little unsure. That maybe I would say I didn’t love him. But I did love him, as much as I loved myself, probably more.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “If we love each other so much. Maybe we should do something about it.”
“What?”
“I want to be with you. I’ve been waiting for the perfect time, to have everything settled, and now I realize maybe that’s no way to live. Maybe we should jump at the chances that we have. You’re my Juliet, my Rosalind, my everything. My Arden. I want to be with you.”
“But you are with me.”
“Not in the way I want.”
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, so I asked. “Do you want me to come off the road?”
“Not yet, no.”
I was growing more confused, not less. “Then I don’t understand. If you don’t want anything to change, what do you want?”
“I want you to marry me.”
The minute felt like an hour as I searched his face. He looked sincere. There was no trace of guile, no angle. And yet. I couldn’t help but think of the last time he’d proposed marriage to me, years and years ago, under circumstances that knocked me flat. He hadn’t meant it then, and he hadn’t looked any less sincere. He’d always been a good actor. The only difference was that now, unlike then, I knew it.
I had the same feeling I had the first time he’d proposed: an overwhelming instinct to say yes, throw myself into his arms, mold my body to his. But this time, I didn’t give in.
As soon as I got my breath back, I asked, “I see. How would that change anything?”
He looked down. “It wouldn’t, really, I guess.”
“Then why do you want to?”
“Arden,” he said, a pleading note in his voice that I’d rarely, if ever, heard. “This is absolutely not very romantic. I had pictured it very differently.”
I reached my hand out, cradling his beloved cheek in my palm. “You know I love you. Completely. And desperately.”
“And I love you.”
I said, “So you don’t need some certificate to tell you that. It wouldn’t make a bit of difference. We belong to each other already. Don’t we?”