“I have a plan. I need your help.”
“Of course,” Jeanne-Pauline said. Her mouth formed into an expression. Ordinarily, it might be called a smile. But it was so calm and deathly that it seemed to need a new noun.
Mary left the shop with a paper bag under her arm. She took a small snuff box out of her pocket and opened it. She held it in her right hand and then tipped the contents onto her left fist. She took a deep snort and her eyes filled with power and glory.
CHAPTER 48
The Winter Ball
There was a snowstorm raging in Montreal in both the Golden and Squalid Miles. The ground was slippery. It made you slide backward as you walked forward, as though you had to keep going back to the beginning of a sentence in a book. The wind was being vicious. It was banging at the windows of the houses of the poor like a landlord who hadn’t been paid. The slush made a sucking noise as boots stomped through it, like the sound of a noisy beast eating.
The women down below in the Squalid Mile were waging a war against Marie and Sadie. They had denounced them as oppressors. But the two young women sitting on their couches, their satin-embroidered slippers perched on ottomans, did not identify themselves as such. No oppressor actually sees themselves as one. They, like everyone else, are too busy identifying themselves as victims. Drops of water were falling off the icicles above the heated windows like the fangs of wolves salivating.
It was Sadie’s idea to throw a ball.
They used to sit together in the park. They liked to sit on the roots that surrounded a giant tree as though they had been tossed into a den of snakes. All the other girls would observe them and be so jealous. They were like two little witches working on their magic spells. No one else had magical powers, so no one was invited to join them. Sadie wanted to reclaim that feeling.
It was as though this were their wedding. She wanted to pay honor to their friendship. She wanted everyone to know they were now a unit. They would not be separated again. It had been easy to always come for the two of them separately. But they were untouchable now.
Sadie wanted all of the Golden Mile to see how happy she and Marie were. She wanted them to see her family had been thrown out. They had had to leave the Golden Mile and live in the middle-class area below the hill. She was all that remained of the Arnetts now, and it was her morality that would reign over the party. They say the best revenge is living well, but does that mean living well in itself, or does it mean letting your enemy suffer by seeing how well you are living?
And Marie said, yes, why not, bring them all in. She was no longer afraid of the judgment of anyone in the Golden Mile. They seemed irrelevant to her. She wasn’t ashamed of what Philip had done to her. He had enacted his violence on another incarnation of her. She wasn’t a person who could be touched now. Men sometimes had trouble looking her in the eye because they felt intimidated. In her years of seclusion, she found that she hadn’t become more sensitive or wary about people in her neighborhood. She had become indifferent to them. They seemed to hardly exist. Her parameters of experience now extended far past the Golden Mile. Women were expected to have such narrow circles of reference. They seemed very middle-class to her.
Marie realized her friendship with Sadie was the thing she was most proud of in the world. She would really do anything for it.
* * *
Sadie saw the ball she was staging as revolutionary. From now on, they would determine the new morality of the neighborhood. Marie had the financial capital and Sadie had the cultural capital to be able to usher in a new era. They would no longer be afraid of the small, petty morals that made women into mindless centerpieces at a dinner table. They would show everyone that ambitious women ended up with the same rewards and power ambitious men did. They would not be filled with shame. They would be admired and envied, she was sure of it. If you had money, she figured, why wouldn’t you be a decadent libertine? Money should be able to buy you moral virtue in this new age of capitalism.
Naturally, there was no one in the city who could resist accepting an invitation to this ball.
They were tempted by seeing the interior of the mansion that had been closed completely to the public for so many, many years. They were going to be meeting Justine and Juliette in person. How many times in their life would they have the opportunity to live in a novel?
* * *
Marie had decided to dress as Marie Antoinette. She didn’t want to wear a wig. She could create a confabulation with her real hair, she was certain. She was blessed with a wonderful head of hair. It would be like desecrating something, like ruining a public statue, to cover it up.
Everything was working out for her. It was as though the evening fit her like a glove. It was a myth that money couldn’t buy you happiness. The snow was coming down like sugar sprinkled onto oatmeal so that it would be sweet just as she liked it. The whole world was going to be just as she liked it.
As she stepped out of her room into the hallway, she saw Sadie waiting for her, dressed as a young Marquis de Sade. She had on a white wig that swooped up into a pompadour, with a small ponytail at the back with an enormous black ribbon affixed to it, and a long black cloak that swooped out at the bottom and black leather boots that went to her knees. She looked dashing. They interlinked their arms and headed down the hallway and the stairs together. They would enter the ballroom as an inseparable, triumphant pair.
There was a sigh of admiration when Marie and Sadie stepped onto the ballroom floor dressed as the beautiful couple. Marie’s gorgeous hair was entwined in braids and loops with small birds and cherries and a boat perched on top as though riding the waves. And her enormous dress had so many shades of pink, it was as though the world’s most beautiful garden had been condensed into it. Sadie’s long cloak spilled onto the floor around her as though she were leaking black ink. She looked so intimidating and superior to them all.
Perhaps what Marie had done that had most befuddled the denizens of the Golden Mile was that she had risen far up above them. She had created a class for herself. In the same manner that they didn’t actually care about the working class because they didn’t see them as people, Marie no longer really thought of the Golden Mile residents as people or cared whatsoever about their ideas or opinions.
She and Sadie had invited them over as a sort of audience. They were creating a new form of theater. It was one in which they played themselves. They invited and encouraged people to come and tell stories about them.