He kept thrusting into Flore harder and harder. He kept banging harder and she kept moaning louder with more pleasure. And then she came. And he felt her come so hard. His whole body rocked and shook with it. He felt his body seize up. She was crying out in joy and didn’t seem at all aware of what his body was going through. He was frightened by her orgasm. He looked into her eyes, trying to figure out if she knew what she was doing, but her eyes were squeezed shut. She had left him. She had forgotten all about him. She was imagining someone younger, someone more handsome, someone she would probably make love to next.
He couldn’t breathe. His chest tightened violently, as though he were being crushed. He wanted to get off of her. Her orgasm seemed to have struck him like a bolt of lightning. He couldn’t struggle against it anymore.
Louis had never properly grieved for his wife before. Everyone said he would. Everyone offered him advice about how it was going to feel and how he would be able to recover from it. They said it would take him about two years for the feelings of grief to lessen. And so he had waited for two years. He expected the emotions to come. But they never did. He felt no inkling of them. People said they could come out of nowhere, like a surprise. But they never did.
Suddenly now he thought back on his wife. Hortense had been the only woman who had been kind to him his whole life. Hortense, who had offered him the world. How could it be possible that grief was still there, after all these years, fully formed, waiting for him?
* * *
Three other maids burst into the locked room, responding to Flore’s hysterical screams. When they opened the door, they found her pinned beneath Mr. Antoine’s body. They ran in to shift the man. They pulled his body over onto his back.
They took a moment to stare at his naked body quietly, sharing a feeling of collective revulsion. It was strange to look at a body that had once been so vibrant and full of life but that was now a shell. A body without its personality always seemed too odd and unfamiliar. It was as though someone they had never met before was lying in the room. The features seemed like caricatures of Louis’s. It was like looking at a wax figure of him at a museum.
And none of them had ever seen him with a penis that wasn’t erect.
* * *
In the days following her father’s death, Marie walked down the hallway in her nightgown, looked pressed upon, as though she had been summoned by girls playing with a Ouija board.
And Marie, who had already been struggling with loneliness, gave up on the struggle. It seemed unkind not to suffer at that moment if she could. Whereas before she would have done anything to stop her loneliness, now she welcomed it in the room like a rush of dark water. And she spread her arms and allowed herself to be submerged in it. She floated through the house in the water. She floated above her bed. Her whole body seemed drenched in tears. And she never wanted to stop crying.
How could this be? She had thought she and her father were inseparable. She woke up sobbing at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night, as though she had just been born: A strange creature with only two arms and two legs, and one stupid single broken heart.
Marie was shocked how empty the house was without him. She kept calling out to her father and realizing he could not answer. She would suddenly sit up and wonder, Where is Papa? I haven’t seen him in so long. Then she would realize in a sudden gasp of recognition that he was not there. That he would never be there. And this sick, empty feeling inside her was something she would have to get used to for the rest of her life, and that seemed unbearable.
She realized how many of her daily rituals included Louis. She missed coming to the breakfast table, where the two of them sat half-dressed in their enormous robes, and giving him a big kiss on the lips. And they would eat piles of pastries smothered in warm jam and hot cream and be utterly content.
* * *
Marie was now in charge of all the money. The factory money, her father’s money, her mother’s money. Her immediate reaction was to begin spending it in an extravagant manner. The idea of spending as much money as she possibly could was comforting. It gave her a physical pleasure. She realized that was what funerals were for. The only way to counter the ugliness and uncertainty of life was to tackle it in an aesthetic manner.
When the funeral was held, there were twenty-five blond children dressed in black suits walking ahead of the horses under the white wintery sky. She had wanted them to be blond so their hair contrasted against their dark clothing. There was one very slim boy in front. He had a beautiful face. The most beautiful of children’s faces always looked sad.
Then came the row of black horses, each with black feathers on their heads. There was a white horse with black spots and a wreath of black roses in its mane being led by a girl in a black dress and an enormous black ribbon in her hair. The carriage that held Louis’s body was completely covered in white roses. Marie thought white roses were appropriate because she thought of her father as the most sensitive man she had ever met. In her mind, he was innocent to the darkness of the world, and always insisted on living in a light-filled castle.
She was almost glad that in some ways her father’s death coincided with Sadie’s disappearance. It was a distraction. A parent’s death was inevitable. The heart knew how to deal with it. Even if it was the most beloved parent in the world, the heart knew how to deal with it. But when someone you love abandons you, a sort of madness sets in. And to be honest, anything painful can be pleasurable if it distracts from the madness.
She appreciated being in a period of mourning.
* * *
In the days following the funeral, Marie sat at her father’s desk in his office at home. She held her back perfectly straight and crossed her hands in front of her. She made eye contact with whoever spoke to her.
There were lawyers around her who were talking all at once. In their dark suits they seemed like a forest surrounding her. Marie’s blond hair made her look like a clearing in the woods the light still managed to shine into. They were speaking about things she couldn’t quite understand and in a manner she couldn’t follow. She had learned so much about factories on her travels, and she was certain she inherently understood her own, but the reality of actually running one was, of course, quite different. They all had papers and documents and scrolls and portfolios. They were waving pens at her. Although every fiber in her body felt intimidated, she was not going to sign anything she didn’t understand. She knew that much. She knew not to give any of her power away.
Now that Louis was gone, the party was in many ways over. She could never get away with the things he had gotten away with. She could not act the way she had before. She was an unmarried woman. She was suddenly under a microscope. They were waiting for a single gesture to criticize and tear apart. If an itch sprung up somewhere on her body and she went out of her way to scratch it, she would be branded as loose. Everyone would be disgusted by her, no matter how much money she had.