She didn’t want to question whether the mermaid was real. She wanted to believe in it. She was looking for her reflection somewhere other than a mirror. And she had found it looking into the glass of the tank. It was all she needed to believe that she herself was possible.
Marie then thought about Sadie. Her friend was a weakness. She was fine with being alienated from everyone around her because she did not see them as her equal and found them frustrating and banal. But she had a longing for Sadie that had always caused her to act in rash ways that were her undoing. In order to be powerful and protected, she had to close that one door in her heart she kept wide open for Sadie but that others were able to sneak in through, the way her rapist had.
She needed Sadie to know. She wanted to tell her the door was shut. So she would stop wondering whether Sadie had forgiven her and might reach out to her. No, she wanted to quash any possibility that Sadie might want to be friends with her, even if it wasn’t going to happen. Then she could get on with the business of being herself and be done with that emotional part of her. The part of her that missed Sadie was soft and sensitive and might prevent her from doing what she needed to do in life.
* * *
Once again, Marie had no trouble finding out where Sadie was. Marie had enough money to know whatever she wanted to in the city. There were already spies at the factory. Every factory had them. Their job was to figure out what was going on in the heads of the factory workers. Her spy gave her Sadie’s address and, surprisingly, a phone number she could reach her by.
“Is this number in the Squalid Mile?”
“Of course it is, miss.”
“I wasn’t aware anyone had a telephone there.”
“It’s a high-class brothel, miss. They get what they want.”
Marie’s cheeks went red for a moment. She felt jealousy pounding like enemy soldiers at the gate. But she would not give in to it. Sadie was working as a prostitute. Men were enjoying her company for a paltry sum of money while Marie had tried everything to win her affection.
* * *
The phone was ringing. It sounded like a high-pitched scream of a woman who was being strangled. All the whores were staring at it. They were rather frightened by the idea of picking it up. They were superstitious about the new telephone. Sadie walked past them and picked it up herself. But the moment after she said hello, she wished she had done otherwise. Because she heard Marie’s voice from the other line.
“Hello, Sadie.”
Sadie didn’t say anything back. She was so excited to hear Marie’s voice, she felt her heart drop. It appalled her how she always had such a physical reaction to Marie’s presence. And now she had a reaction to just her disembodied voice.
“I wanted to tell you I saw a mermaid. It made me think of you. It made me think of all the magical poems we used to recite to each other. Remember when you recited the poem about the mermaid to me? It made me think of that day.”
Sadie didn’t say anything, but Marie continued, unaffected by the silence. “And no one knows where this mermaid came from. There is only one they have discovered. And when you look at it, you’re supposed to assume there are hundreds and hundreds more of it someplace. That it must come from a civilization of mermaids under the deep. But what if that is the only mermaid there is?”
“It wasn’t real, Marie.”
“I saw it so clearly I knew it was real. There was no way it couldn’t be. It was more real than anything else around me. It was more real than the trees and the dogs. More real than the garden. More real than my house and my father. More real than us.”
“That’s not what you called to tell me, was it?”
“I’ve decided to no longer be your friend. I will no longer be in love with you. I am letting you go. I am going to be my own person now. I am going to get what I want out of this world. This is my good-bye. I don’t want you to ever come look for me, and I will never, ever again seek you out. I wish you well, but I hope never to see or speak to you again.”
* * *
Marie put the phone down in her bedroom. Then she stood on her large balcony. The five-o’clock shadow began to appear on the chins of men all over the city. The sky was outrageously pink and blue. The night would soon arrive and a full moon was expected. How fantastic it would look! The moon shone because the sun looked at itself in the mirror. Would we even exist if we weren’t vain?
Marie felt an incredible coldness. She had stopped pursuing, even on an imaginary level, the one person she loved in the world. Sadie was no more. Sadie was dead to her. But she was not mourning Sadie, she was mourning the part of her that had ever loved Sadie. She had put aside a love for a father and now she was setting aside the love of her youth. In the coming days she knew she would become a monster. She stood on the balcony letting the metamorphosis happen.
* * *
In less than two months, the sun had beckoned all the flowers from the ground. It was making everything else more brightly colored too. It made Marie’s dress redder, her jacket bluer. It made her hair a wild gold color.
There were two smaller sugar factories in Trois-Rivières and Quebec City. She went to visit each and bought them. Although one of the factories had asked whether it could maintain the family name, Marie was adamant it be changed to her own. When they explained the importance of the name, she looked at them coldly and said no. And they looked into her eyes and saw there was no emotion there. They signed the papers, shook hands, and departed from the room, hoping never to see her again. Marie signed quickly, her pen making the sound of a fencing sword slashing through the air.
When she took over a factory, she fired all their previous foremen. Why would she continue to employ people who had allowed the company to be run to the ground? She docked the salaries at one plant, saying they repeatedly missed the new quotas she had set. She made a point of hiring children, especially young girls. They were not strong, but she could get away with paying them half. She made sure her sugar was the only one being distributed in Quebec. She did this by cutting operating costs and temporarily lowering the price of her sugar. This forced competitors from other provinces out of business.
She turned on the lamp on her desk in the evening and the stars in the sky all turned on.
The moon was like a clown who hadn’t completely wiped the makeup off his face.
CHAPTER 32
The Pensées of a Whore