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“The way the ego defends itself against the admission of the unbearable idea is by repression. This power of repression is reflexly automatic, like the contracting of the pupil at a flash of light. It is this power that induces Freud to characterize consciousness as a perceptive organ. Just as the eye may refuse to see, so may consciousness refuse to know.”
Men in this decade wore boxy wool suits with shoulder pads, starched collars, tapered trousers, ankle boots with a heel. The pocket watch was beginning to fall out of fashion, replaced by the wristwatch popular with soldiers. Losing the pocket watch felt like losing a friend. It had persisted in one form or another even longer than Louis himself had, its core mechanics remaining relatively consistent year to year, equally useful in every age up until this one.
Armand had accumulated an eclectic assortment of hats: bowlers, top hats, boaters, fedoras, flat caps, Panama hats. He didn’t like to wear them as much as he liked to collect them, a whole closetful of pristine hatboxes. His favorites hung from hooks on the oaken rack in the foyer of their rowhouse. Sometimes when Armand wasn’t home Louis touched each of them in sequence, running his fingertips slowly and deliberately over the fibers: a disguise for every occasion.
Skirts shrunk in volume after the turn of the 20th century. They fell straight about the legs from a lower waistline, a more natural shape. Some women wore shirtwaists and skirts instead. Some even wore suits of a sort when they went to work or to study. The more fashionable among them donned outlandish hats, floral, colorful, confectionary. They were generally much less subdued in manner. They seemed to be outgrowing shame, evolving away from it.
“One cannot help but be struck by the ethical implications of hysteria. Hysteria is essentially a disease of personality… In Palmer’s classic work, ‘The Nature of Goodness,’ the first of the four fundamental characteristics which he finds necessary to personality, is self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, however, is exactly the thing the hysteric refuses longest to face.”
They had seen Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 at the 1913 Armory Show. It was a controversial piece. To say that Armand had been unimpressed by M. Duchamp’s work would have been an understatement; he had narrowed his eyes at the large canvas, radiating his purest, most lethal disdain. Louis had been disturbed as well, though he wasn’t certain the feeling sprang from the same root. He’d stood in front of the painting for a long time, withstanding the flow of mortal men and women around him like an anchor dropped into the middle of a school of fish. He would have stayed longer had Armand not taken his arm and gently dislodged him from his position, pulled him along to the next work.
Later, he struggled to pin down just what about it had unnerved him. Maybe it was the way that time collapsed on the canvas, suggesting not a linear march but the cacophonous coexistence of a never-gone past and an already-arrived future that converged endlessly, nightmarishly on the present. Maybe it was the way the figure cut into itself with every step, unrecognizable in form yet somehow undeniably human. Maybe it was the atheistic audacity of the endeavor, the breaking of the mold. Maybe he’d just found it ugly, crass, boring.
A new gallery seemed to appear out of nowhere every week, some official and airy and full of known names, others cramped and strange, the artists seemingly having blinked into existence along with the space. They saw the watercolors of Charles Demuth, which made Armand laugh and Louis curl his lip. They saw the realists, the Ashcan School oils of John Sloan and George Luks. They saw Alexander Archipenko’s sculptures, spare and intimate. They saw the colorful, striking, moving work of Matisse. They rarely discussed the exhibitions after they left. They made their way home in silence, Armand distracted by the frightful mechanical taxicabs clogging the street, Louis staring over at the rows upon rows of uniform windows, some black holes, some yellow and crawling with silhouettes.
Armand had made a favorable impression on the charming Ms. Florine Stettheimer—an artist in her own right as well as a prominent salonnière—and so they sometimes found themselves at the evening gatherings in her glamorous Manhattan apartment, holding etched sherry glasses, circulating with loud women brazenly dressed in trousers and jackets and men who grinned at the two of them as if they all shared a secret in common. Part of the art.
These outings were exhausting. The politesse that had once flowed naturally through Louis now took a great effort to call to the surface. Not that it mattered to anyone in New York; all mainstays of etiquette decayed with the trash in the gutters. Conversation was vulgar and grating and gauche. Everyone was preoccupied with a war that was abstract and uninteresting to Louis, its cause rooted in politics the intricacies of which he did not particularly care to trace, its catastrophic weapons too new for him to accurately imagine. If they weren’t discussing the war, then they were discussing themselves, openly gossiping in the way only old women and schoolgirls had in Louis’ day. It was all he could do to follow Armand’s lead like a high-strung animal on a leash.
In the relief of the rowhouse’s relative quiet, Louis lowered himself into an armchair with a sigh. He scarcely remembered moving into this place. He let Armand take care of the particulars: the terms of the lease, the décor, the upkeep. Louis had long since lost (let go of?) the ability to care about minutiae. Armand lit the stove or he didn’t; he had someone scrub the floors and wax the furniture or he didn’t; he opened the windows to the city’s smoke and clamor or he didn’t. It was all the same to Louis.
Armand shrugged off his tailcoat and flung it carelessly over the banister. He looked younger without it to square his shoulders and fill in his shape. He kept his auburn hair short this decade, parted it crisply to the side, tamed it with pomade. It wasn’t difficult for Louis to call up the affection he’d felt the first time he’d laid eyes on him, to hold it softly in the front of his mind, but it was impossible for it to permeate any deeper than that. He could contemplate it like an idol, but he could no longer feel it.
“Did you know,” Armand said suddenly, tone colorless. “That there are parties in this city—balls, really—where men dress up in women’s clothing?”
Louis was cast abruptly back into another era, reliving a hundred propositions and a hundred refusals, manic blue eyes observing his torpor from across the room. He picked up the newspaper from the coffee table and snapped it open: more grim news from the Western front.
“I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time attending unaccompanied.”
Armand did not savor his discomfort the same way that Lestat so obviously had, but he was fascinated by it, curious about it. He seemed to want to map it out, to discover and note its boundaries for later reference. He was not frustrated, but nor was he patient. He stood in the doorway long after Lestat would have stormed away, staring.
What do you see? Louis wanted to ask. He did ask. Armand could always hear him. He received no reply.
“In our patient, beating her head upon the floor, tearing out her hair, was not an intellectually chosen conversion symbolizing self-punishment, but it was the concrete living through of an action which gave, at once, sexual satisfaction and self-punishment.”
Louis bedded down in his grief like an animal in its nest. It surrounded him, a dull, staticky roar. To pass the infinite time, he read Yeats. He read Gertrude Stein, Freud, Emma Goldman, feeding it all through his mind like endless ticker tape, skimming the ideas from the top of the world without having to live in it. Standing at the bottom of an obelisk, grand but foreign, a monument that did not mean anything to him and perhaps never could. Squinting at a far-off meadow through a dirty windowpane.
He’d made a deal with his appetite. It relocated itself, moved down deep, buried itself under so many layers of petrified, inert tissue that on days when he didn’t move too much, he didn’t feel it at all. When it was time for Louis to fulfill his end of the bargain, it erupted to the surface, jutted through his body, impaled him. The agony was so terrible that he wanted to reach inside himself and tear his veins out like roots. He convulsed. He bit through his own bottom lip and sucked on the pulp. It felt like a long death, the rhythmic undulation of insects separating layers of purpling skin, the futile muscular contractions of coffin birth, the swelling, pulling, splitting of bloat.
For Lestat, blood drinking had always been pleasure. For Armand, it was a rite. They never fed together, but Louis could well imagine those clean, sanctified corpses, anointed, incorrupt. Louis was a jackal in comparison. He woke with little memory of what he’d done the night before, blood crusted black in his hair and on his clothes. He’d cast the monster out of himself: whatever that thing did, he did not accompany it on its ravings. When it crawled back into his body, the pain abated, but that was all. There was never any satisfaction.
To give himself any illusion of continuity, of time moving in a forward trajectory the way it should, he read Proust, Theodore Dreiser, Joyce, Mann, Kafka, Edith Wharton. He read Dr. Emerson’s report about Miss A, the young hysteric who had tried to bite off her own hand to prevent herself from masturbating in the night. He wondered which had been harder for her to stomach in the end: the inescapable, suffocating sex drive or the unsanctioned taste of flesh.
“The next significant move that was made, in the matter of method, was putting my hands over the eyes of the patient in order to force her to look at the images that came before her mind… Where resistances manifest themselves, there effort should be made to overcome them. The resistance in this case consisted in the patient's absolutely refusing to keep her eyes shut more than a moment at a time. It was obvious that just as soon as she shut her eyes she saw something that was distressing. To look at this image long enough to describe it was essential, and it was for that purpose that I forcibly held her eyes shut.”
Something was different when Louis opened his eyes. It took a moment for him to place it: music. The soft mechanical whir and click and fuzz of Armand’s pretty jade-green victrola. The plodding, brassy melody of Let Me Call You Sweetheart, the Peerless Quartet’s sweet harmony sinister in its naiveté. Louis slid the coffin lid back and sat up.
The victrola had been placed on the table beside the untouched bed. Armand was busy with something at the old mahogany vanity across the room. He was dressed in one of his everyday suits, but his hair was loose, falling over his collar, bright copper in the gas light. He did not turn or speak, but Louis felt his unspoken summons.
Come here.
When he approached, he saw that the vanity was piled with boxes from the chemist, others bearing the stamp of upscale boutiques. Louis watched with mounting dread as Armand unpacked his purchases: several pots of rouge labelled with their respective colors (vermillion poppy, Persian blush, vermeil…), Marinello face powder in a golden tin embossed with an elephant motif, another small container full of a dark-colored cream, a short metal tube, a pencil of some kind, and a powder puff made of pale pink silk and feathers.
Sit down.
Louis reached for his righteous indignation like a trusty pistol, but it wasn’t in its place. He did as he was told, stiff as a department store mannequin on the stool. He did not look at himself in the mirror.
“Close your eyes,” Armand said aloud.
The smell of powder was familiar. Plenty of people, men and women, had worn it on their faces, in their wigs in his time. It was soft against his skin, pleasant, even. Each pass of the feathers sent a hot shock of humiliation through his body. He felt a powerful sympathy for dolls and corpses, helpless beneath preening hands. Armand applied the rouge carefully with his fingertip. It smelled floral, almost overpoweringly so. The mingled scents seemed to coat his nostrils, his sinus cavities, his lungs. Louis’ eyes fluttered when something blunt and waxy brushed his bottom lip, dislodging it from its tight, displeased line.
“Just a little of this,” Armand murmured. “If you wear too much, people might call you a whore.”
It was so casual, so cold that it made Louis’ breath catch. Armand probed his eyelid next, sliding the delicate skin around on the gelatinous orb underneath. He withdrew for a moment before the fine tip of the pencil touched Louis’ eyebrow. A wordless query rushed against his mind like a lacy wave sliding over sand, gentle but insistent.
What does this mean to you? it seemed to ask. Is it degrading? Liberating? Show me.
Louis didn’t know how to give him what he wanted. His mind was as wide open as it ever was, an empty field at sunset. Armand ripped back layer after layer trying to find whatever revelation he thought he wanted: a great buzzing numbness, thick hoarfrost of shame, shapes of black ash, scraps of brocade and silk, the sensation of strong hands squeezing hard around his waist, the sweet smell of the beeswax candles in his sister’s room on the night when she’d excitedly shown him her frothy white débutante dress. The brief stab of nauseous terror when he’d imagined himself having to put it on and stand in front of every man he’d ever met and some he hadn’t, all of them imagining what it would be like to fuck him.
“I didn’t buy you a dress,” Armand said regretfully. “I will, next time. Open your eyes.”
He obeyed. Armand tipped his chin up with his finger to force him to look in the mirror.
Louis didn’t look like a woman; that surprised him. He didn’t quite look like himself, either. His face, already pale, already smooth, had been given a slightly more lifelike texture by the powder. The rouge was a touch too dark, spread evenly from his temple to his nose and the corner of his lips, a dawn-like glow in the hollow of his cheek. His lips were berry-red, too full. His eyes looked larger than they really were, eyelids darkened, eyebrows a delicate, defined arch.
As he watched, Armand opened the last sealed parcel and slid out an oblong box of black velvet. Inside, there was a string of pearls, simple and elegant. They were cold against his throat. Armand deftly undid the top button of Louis’ shirt so that they could both see the way the pearls looked lying fetchingly against his collarbone, almost the same color as his skin.
“Pretty.”
Louis shook his head minutely. Armand’s face was blank.
“I should do something with your hair. Have you seen the Gibson girls?”
He dug his fingers into the loose black waves and pushed them toward the top of Louis’ head, pursing his lips thoughtfully.
“Armand.” He stopped, met Louis’ eyes in the mirror. Louis leant back a little, resting his shoulders lightly against Armand’s unnaturally solid body. “Are you trying to hurt me?”
His expression broke, scrambled, reformed into something remorse-like.
“Why should I want to hurt you?”
Would you destroy me as easily as you let them be destroyed? he had asked after the fire in Paris, and Armand had blithely replied: Why should I?
“I’m trying to excite you.”
Armand curled his hand so that his fingernails bit into his own palm, four dark, perfect crescents blooming red. He smeared blood and powder and rouge in a rough, slow swipe over Louis’ face, momentarily deforming him. The blood soaked into Louis’ skin like rain into moss. It firmed instantly, flushing with natural color any New York socialite would have killed for. He was like some spineless, sightless creature in a subterranean cave, sucking up a slurry of nutrients through its greedy, mucosal skin. Base. Vile. Defenseless, soft.
The floral smell, the powder smell, the copper smell of blood, of food, so close nearly made him gag, but he stubbornly kept his mouth closed. Armand pushed his thumb against the tight seal of his lips, smearing waxy red over his chin: a theatrical facsimile of a messy meal. A small, indignant noise escaped him as he tried to turn his head away and found himself trapped.
He imagined dashing Armand’s beautiful face into the mirror, the way the glass would crunch in a halo around his skull, the way it would chew into his scalp. The savage pleasure of revenge, of self-defense, of a good fight. Armand caught the thread of this fantasy and pulled it sharply, replaying the moment of impact over and over, each pass a little more lurid, a little gorier. Do it. His mouth twisted in a silent snarl. He leaned forward. Louis glimpsed the licking of that barely-restrained inferno in his eyes. It had been so long since he’d seen it that he’d almost forgotten it was there, animating Armand like a vicious steam engine.
Louis was repelled by the desperation: it was too familiar. He felt the renewed urge to escape it, to push back against it, smother it, geld it. He wanted to give into it, dissolve like sugar in its heat. He had relented under the velvet weight of this passion before, the kind that destroyed something with the specious promise of making something else. The kind that could rearrange the elements of life, soil a person forever, close a circle or break a chain. No matter what, no matter what he gave or took, he knew there would be no satisfaction for him: only grief, the sight of more things he couldn’t bear to confront, ash in his mouth and his eyes.
The struggle between them was invisible. Louis gritted his teeth, clenched his hands into fists, pitched forward and slammed his own forehead into the mirror.
It broke just the way he’d imagined it would.
There was one tremulous moment of cool, green relief, divine. The pain hardly registered, but the carnage was impressive: fat drops of blood rolled down his cheeks, dripped from his chin onto the vanity, into the powder box, continued down the curve of his neck and collected against the pearls.
After a moment, Armand took him by the shoulders and sat him upright again. His face had melted into an exaggerated, saccharine expression of pity. Louis let his head loll to one side, face to face with the fragmented image of his own violence, primal and feminine and woefully impotent.
“Bichette,” Armand sighed. “You’re unwell, aren’t you?”
Louis said nothing. Armand pressed a chaste, cold kiss to his cheek.
“That must be such a relief to you.”
“That night she dreamed she was cutting herself up. She cut off her hands, legs, body, etc. ‘It seemed as if I was two people,’ she said, ‘and I was lying on the table, yet I was standing there cutting myself up.’ She woke as she was chopping her body into bits. The following night she dreamed of destroying herself. ‘It seemed as if I came out of myself and tried in a number of ways to get rid of my old self.’ (1) She tried to cut herself up, but could make no impression on the body; (2) she tried to set fire to the body with a torch, but it would not burn; (3) then she tried to drown herself, but the body would float, so she got a boat and brought it to shore, and (4) tried to bury it, but could not dig deep enough, or fast enough, because the earth kept filling in. Then she woke.”