When she heard the rumors Philip was spreading, she felt as though she were cringing in the corner like a beaten dog. Because everyone in the Golden Mile gossiped about what happened to her, she felt they were complicit. They were assaulting her over and over again. She tried to pull herself together one morning and put on a fashionable poufy white dress. She overheard two maids recounting how Philip had said she was insatiable. She leaned against the wall as though to become invisible. She slid down the wall onto the floor like a heap of snow and waited to melt into a puddle.
Marie watched the snow fall down through her window. It suffocated everything. It put all the plants and trees and gardens to sleep. It emptied the sky of birds and silenced the noises of people and animals. It was as though the snow were putting an end to all of civilization. And Marie wished it would.
She knew she herself was not allowed to talk about what had happened to her. Once again she was supposed to be quiet about something traumatic in her life. Everyone in the neighborhood knew and they would all talk about it behind her back. But she wouldn’t be permitted to talk about it herself.
Her idea of what it was to be a woman was being built all over again. You could not be pretty. You could not be cordial. You could not put the feelings of other people above your own. These were all instructions to make a woman weak so that any man could take her down.
She was like Mary Shelley bringing Frankenstein’s monster to life. Because being raped felt very much like being murdered. She was reanimating a dead body. She was animating each of her fingers. She held them over her face while she was in bed and began to wiggle them. She spent a day looking down at her toes. She raised one leg up in the air and then the other. She sat up and looked at her breasts as though they had presented themselves on her body for the first time.
Although she felt more alone than ever, there was something about the rape that made her cease to miss her father.
She reexamined all her memories of sex. She had seen maids coming out of her father’s room in various stages of undress with their hair a mess and their cheeks flushed. She had heard laughter from her father’s room. She had thought of sex as a lark. She didn’t know there was within it the seeds of such darkness and humiliation. She had always seen it from her father’s point of view. She had seen it from the man’s point of view. The man was in control. What power men had over women! Before, she had considered all the women coming out of her father’s room to have been engaged in consensual behavior. What shame they must have felt, returning to their rooms.
Now she had a dream of crowds of naked women trying to get out of her father’s room. Their nudity was not at all charming. It was grotesque. It was like looking at the bodies of looted soldiers on a battlefield.
She had always believed she and her father were on the same side. They were both wealthy and the maids were poor. But now here she was in the same position he had put the maids in.
And somehow this cured her of her grief for her father. The girl who had loved her father and had been so close to him had also died. She grieved the girl more. But somehow she no longer mourned Louis. As a philosopher once noted, you feel the loss of something until it is completely lost.
CHAPTER 23
Sometimes There Is a Pearl in an Oyster
After her initial euphoria about her freedom, the reality of Sadie’s situation began to sink in. She was so filled with shock, she couldn’t feel anything yet. She knew her emotions were going to come back. She was terrified of them. It was like expecting an abusive, drunk husband to come back from the tavern.
Her rage, almost to her surprise, wasn’t directed at her parents. She had always known they were idiotic fools who despised her for no reason. How could she be upset with them? Instead, she felt enraged at Marie. She had expected so much of Marie, and her old friend had let her down. She couldn’t help but feel Marie was responsible for her being in this tiny room, forced to figure out how to exist in the world on her own.
How could Marie have turned over her life’s work to her mother? It had been right after a moment when Sadie had let her guard down. When Sadie had shown her affection. Marie pretended to love her, but then she would get her into these circumstances. Marie was always living in the same cozy home while Sadie suffered the consequences of their weird passion. As a noisy cart filled with bottles passed her, Sadie lifted her face to the sky and yelled, “To hell with you, Marie Antoine! Your stupid games are going to kill me.”
Sadie starting weeping. Her tears were boiling hot, as if they had been heating up on a little pot in her brain and had been boiled by her rage.
She had to find a way to deal with her outrage toward Marie. She went to the general store and traded her silk gloves for a notebook and a fountain pen. To make up the difference, the store owner put several coins in her hands. She would be able to eat and find a hotel later, she thought. She went to a small church and went to sit on a back pew to write. She would spend time with Marie on the page. Writing was a form of exorcism. It made whatever was happening in your mind exist in another realm. Somewhere where it could be contained and you could make philosophical sense out of it.
It would be fiction. The only way to capture the strangeness of that relationship was through allegory and make-believe. She would describe what might happen were they actually to spend their lives together, acting out their desires. Perhaps it could never come to be in the real world, but it was the type of thing that could happen in fiction.
Her feelings for Marie were all tangled in a huge knot. As she put her pen down to the paper, a string came out. She was unraveling that great ball of twine into a story. She paused for a moment. She needed to come up with two fictional names for the characters. She settled on Justine and Juliette.
* * *
She had lost track of time writing all day when she became aware of how ravenous she was. When she stepped out onto the street at eight o’clock one night, the darkness seemed as wet and tense as a deer’s nose. Sadie knew the Squalid Mile was dangerous. She felt it for the first time now.
Sadie wasn’t used to eating all her meals standing up outside at stalls, especially in the cold. But they lined the streets of the Squalid Mile and she was frightened to go into one of the noisy taverns or chop shops. The only thing she could afford at one of the stalls without selling another article of clothing was oysters and a pastry. She slurped them at the oyster shack on the corner ravenously. She quite enjoyed knocking back a bowl of soup in the cold wind. Everything tasted saltier outside. Table manners were entirely irrelevant, as there was no table to sit at. It was definitely cheap.
There was a group of women around her under the awning of the oyster shack. They were eating and seemed indifferent to the cold. The dust from the coal in the air made their skin sparkle in the evening. They began talking about work that evening, and it was clear they were prostitutes. For the purposes of her book, Sadie’s curiosity was piqued by the women’s profession. Sadie asked a slender, curly haired prostitute about it.