There was a general stirring among the crowd.
“What are the two of them capable of when they are together? They are capable of your worst nightmares. Do not put anything past them. If now you find yourself thinking, But they are just women, just like me, just like my sisters, just like my friends. They have hands and breasts and feet just like I do. They are capable of carrying children just like I am . . .” Mary paused and said, “I have personally been a victim of one of their sadistic crimes. In a game, for sport, for amusement, fourteen years ago, Sadie Arnett and Marie Antoine shot my mother in the heart and killed her.”
Sadie was startled by the accusation. She looked toward George, and at that moment their eyes met. Sadie was certain George would somehow tone down the statement, or subtly indicate how she was to escape this situation. She waited while George continued to stare straight at her.
“There she is!” George cried, pointing to where Sadie was standing. Everybody in the front of the crowd turned to look. Sadie also turned. So she would look like one of the crowd, desperately eager to catch sight of Sadie Arnett and to bring her to their new tribunal of justice.
Sadie began to move through the crowd quickly. Her cloak was a perfect disguise. Everyone would be looking for some outlandish clothing. They would not expect Sadie Arnett to be wearing a tattered, nondescript cloak.
She realized she and George were no longer on the same side. George could not be her friend.
She had somehow thought of herself as classless because she was an artist. She was a member of the bohemian class, at least. But the crowd was right. When women were this angry, they were always right.
She hurried into the carriage parked on the corner, where Marie was sitting inside leafing through some documents, waiting for her.
“The revolution is after me,” Sadie said, climbing in beside her friend.
“People have been pursuing you your whole life. They had always been trying to stop you from being yourself. You are a brand-new type of woman. More and more of you will be born in the next century. There will be an army of women created in your image. That is why everyone is making such an effort to destroy you. But you are back home with me now. I will protect you. I will make sure no one causes you to flee in the night ever again. You can spend the rest of your life writing. You can write all your wonderful novels.”
“Thank you,” Sadie said. And she meant it.
* * *
That evening, the two women decided to get high to nullify the effects of the collective rage directed toward them earlier. It was now the two of them against the entire city. They were both despised by the lower and upper classes. Marie thought it was the first time she had been happy since she was a child. Marie stared at the smoke rising from the opium pipe. The smoke began forming into the illustrations of children’s novels. She understood why sailors were attracted to smoking opium. The smoke told the story of a long voyage at sea all in the space of a brief minute. There was a ship on top of waves that was struggling not to capsize. A dragon reared its head out of the depths, a whale flipped upside down in the air, and mermaids reached from above the water for sailors. Enormous waves began to rear up and the ship tried to ride on top of them. But it could no longer manage and the waves rose up and swallowed the ship. Then Marie inhaled the small ocean and a sea of calm filled up her whole body. It drowned all her worries and left a great nothingness in its wake.
Marie was on the daybed. She raised her stockinged leg in the air like a cobra entranced by a flute. Sadie leaned on her stomach on the lounge chair like a caterpillar on a leaf looking at her pretty friend.
Marie never brought up men or marital prospects. Relationships with men seemed so common and mundane to Sadie, it hardly seemed worth inquiring into Marie’s reasons. When she did think about it, she assumed Marie had avoided marriage for the obvious reasons: whoever would marry her was bound to try to manipulate her fortune. Nonetheless, she wondered whether Marie had ever experienced any horniness, and how it was she had never been curious enough to experiment.
“Why didn’t you ever take a lover?” Sadie asked Marie.
“I thought it was too dangerous to be romantically involved with a man.”
“I could never be terrified of men. They are too inept and insecure. But I understand your reservations.”
Sadie had attributed Marie breaking off her engagement with her brother to her friend’s coming to her senses. There was hardly any mystery to that. But she found herself curious as to the exact circumstances of his jilting. And thought it would be an interesting story to hear.
“How did you ever break it off with my brother?”
“The only thing I ever liked about him was he looked so much like you.”
“How did he take it?”
Marie stared at Sadie. Marie was silent. A boiling tear dropped down Marie’s cheek. Her tear fell onto the page of a manuscript lying on the small table next to her and it turned the word it landed on into a black sea creature swirling around in the saltwater.
Sadie sat up. “That asshole.”
Sadie hadn’t spent much of her royalties. She went to the bank the next day and bought up the mortgage and the debt on her childhood house. It was the one thing they had that allowed them to live in the Golden Mile. This would effectively exile them. She quite liked the poetic justice of that. Vengeance is an art form when in the hands of women. She laughed at the beautiful stupidity of it.
Sadie planned to sit outside the house on the day her family moved out. She would then inform them it was she who had bought the house. But she found herself in the clutches of a hangover that kept holding on to her and begging her to stay in bed. So Sadie decided her family was not at all worth the effort of getting up in the morning, something she loathed to do. She called the solicitor and told him to inform her family of the purchase. She then lay back down, falling into a cloud of fantasies, picturing her family’s shocked faces in her head, and her laughter turned into giggling and then to murmuring and then she fell asleep.
* * *
Sadie didn’t have a cent left, but she wasn’t worried in the least. She sat down to write a new novel, one that would be wilder than Justine and Juliette and sell even more copies. She immediately felt the power of the new novel pulling her in. It was as thrilling as ever. The cursive on the page was like the yarn of a sweater unraveling. The more she wrote, the more naked she felt.