Read Online The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. by Carole DeSanti - Free Book Online

curtains surrounded us like fog. One could get lost in a bed like that, or fall from the height.
    â€œYou’ll stay with me, then, little goose?”
    What else, where else—in the world?
    Â 
    We broke into our stock of
foie d’oie,
what Stephan had held back from the shipment. The rosy brown
bloc
was flecked with gold, nearly melting in the warmth. Stephan cut into it with a penknife, raised the blade to my lips, but teasingly, pulling it a little distance away as though it might scald.
    I took the blade from his hand and licked it, allowing the rosy morsel to grow moist on my tongue. The stuff tasted like salt tears, like the dusky flavor of rain on earth, or morning light slanting, dustily, through the forest. Sun on the fields, purple clouds over the Pyrenees. Something so terrible and familiar like my own bones and skin, the milk from my own breast—the stuff that made me, had made us all, in that rough corner of the world. I tasted, and tasted again, tears rising. I had hardly ever tasted it. He took the knife and dropped it to the floor, moving his body closer, seeking my mouth with his.
    â€œThe candles are burning, we mustn’t fall asleep”—I slipped from bed to blow on the tapers, then licked my fingertips and extinguished an orange-glowing wick. The taste of smoke and tallow on my tongue, as I wet my fingers to put out each tip, joining the bouquet of salt and rain and goose fat.
    â€œDon’t worry so,
come
—”
    We slipped between linens softer than spring grass, the heaven of our bodies pressed together: musk, licking flames, tangled sheets. Made love half-dreaming amid the damp linens until I fell into the void between flesh and nothingness, a refuge of sweat and perfume, where the certainty of flesh answered a surge of breath and blood and heart. It was a shimmering field, a breeze rippling across golden stalks.
    And so that night I began to shed, hardly knowing it, the fur-matted, pond-bathed, forest-floor earthy roughness in which I had lived all my life. The old things I’d thrown off were like animal skins, dark and coarse, thrust down in a corner; a gentle humid ferment of the fields. While below, more deeply, but sunlike too; a pulsing arose, sure and steady, pressing from within . . . A window flung open; perfume of late summer roses, the last blooms of the year. Beneath him, I burst like a September rain cloud.
    Â 
    The pool, the trees, and the cold, voluptuous marble of the Luxembourg—it was all as it had been moments before. Too chilly now, too dark; time to go. A turning, then; a quickening deep inside me. Not hunger . . . not fear or cold, but something warm, fluttering, tingling, a touch like a sigh. Feathery, winging pulse.
    ***
    Back at the Tivoli, no Stephan and no word of him, not that day or the next, nor the one after that.
No word
 . . . When did I realize that there would never be a letter? That my erstwhile lover would not gallop through the Passage, or alight from a cab, nor would any of the other hundred imagined scenarios unfold?
    The fairy eye has closed,
my aunt used to say, when the forest fountains ceased granting our wishes. When luck ran out, or went rotten. There was a familiarity to it, this sense of loss. I searched my memory for omens of betrayal missed, ignored, shoved aside by an urgent heart, but the candles guttered out before I found any answers.
    And in some sense, it did not matter, the whys and hows of it. But of course, love does not believe or understand that; love simply weeps; it is bereft. A deep current of movement, and from below, from some uncertain interior part of me, rose a question, an unsteadiness. For the barest moment, the wisp of a desire to reverse the course of events, those of the present moment but perhaps others as well; events from long ago. A crumbling wall, the music of glass shattering, falling onto a stone floor in a million tiny fragments. The tearing of old