“What if I don’t want you to honor it anymore? What about what I want?”
“Would you like to be tossed on the street?” He cocked his head. “Would you? We can arrange that. How long before you were in Montmartre for real? It’s one thing to be a spectator and to be able to leave Montmartre, but what if you had no other options? Oh, you wouldn’t start on the street. No, not right away. You can read and you look good so you’d work at a restaurant or delivering flowers, maybe a laundry, but that wouldn’t pay the bills, so you’d have some encounter with a man who’d give you the money you’d need to meet your expenses for the month. Just once, you’d tell yourself. Until the next time and then the next. Is that what you want?”
“I might get your attention that way.” She didn’t know what made the words spill out, but she knew it was the truth. Once she’d worried that he would have expectations of her, but now she found herself trying to be in a room with him, to see if he would notice her. The truth was, it had bothered her that Varnier had never once indicated desire for her.
“You want my attention?” He laughed. “I do nothing but give you attention. This house, this life, the opera, Italy, the piano lessons, the tutors…”
Juliet wasn’t aware of what registered on her face, but she felt her cheeks flush. She met his eyes and noticed a change flash across them. “That isn’t what I mean.”
Varnier put his hands to his face as they stared at each other in silence. Juliet felt her jaw tighten and she was determined she wouldn’t cry. Instead she focused on her chest lifting up and down as she began to breathe harder. Varnier looked at his hand for a long moment and then at the floor. She thought she could see the color draining from his face.
“Oh Juliet,” Varnier said in nearly a whisper as he stood and walked out of the room, his hand touching the skin on her neck as he passed her.
14
Helen Lambert
Washington, DC, June 5, 2012
The carousel at Glen Echo Park was freaking me out. In all the years I’d lived in Washington, I’d never been to Glen Echo Park and had no idea where to even find it on a map. Not that it wasn’t lovely with its art deco architecture, art center, and Spanish Ballroom, but it was all the effort to re-create the turn-of-the-century flavor of the park that so unsettled me after a night of reliving the real Belle Époque Paris in my dreams. I’d fainted at the Kennedy Center, blood spilling all over my Reem Acra dress from another nosebleed. Poor Luke had managed to clean me up after I’d come to. After the last dream, the colors of Paris were swimming around me today, from the flower stands to the gold-leaf architecture. Montmartre had the same carousel spinning in my dreams, and the exaggerated organ music was like a hellish soundtrack to me now.
Juliet’s story had left me shaken. Marchant’s rejection at the masked ball was as raw to me this morning as it had been to Juliet back in 1898. I sat numbly on a bench at Glen Echo with Mickey beside me, both of us holding our morning coffee in our hands. Juliet’s images of Marchant—the line of hair that ran from his navel to the top of his trousers, the arch of his back, his stained fingers from the paint he used—were mixing with my own well-worn images of
Roger, the small things I’d missed from our marriage: from the way he chewed on a pen while he was taking an important phone call to the way he wrapped himself around me after we had sex. This was the painter, Auguste Marchant. Maybe a carousel was the right symbol, because as I watched the painted tiger spin by it seemed the images both past and present were circling in my head. My nose had bled again this morning, but I didn’t confide this to Luke. I also suffered a throbbing headache that two Advil had not fixed.
My thoughts shifted again to Roger with his big green eyes and the dimple on his left cheek when he smiled, so eerily similar to Marchant in both look and mannerisms. My ex-husband’s ten-year effort to bring Auguste Marchant’s work to the Hanover Collection haunted me. His relentless passion for those paintings only reinforced my suspicions that I wasn’t the only person who was reliving a life. I suspected that Marchant and Roger were, indeed, the same person. This was madness.
We waited for Madame Rincky’s cousin, Malique, outside the old bumper car pavilion.
I don’t know what I had expected, but an old, thin man with wire-rimmed glasses approached us and introduced himself in a thick Jamaican accent as Malique. He motioned for us to follow him to the picnic tables, which were, unfortunately, directly in front of the carousel.
Malique sat at the picnic table with his back straight—no easy feat, given how uncomfortable the seats were. A man sold barbecue chicken at a stand next to us, and the smell was normally something I’d have found pleasant on this summer day. Malique, who looked like a retired high school math teacher, cut right to the chase.
“Raquel tells me that you have the mark of the devil on you.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s the mark of the devil.” I closed my hands protectively. Mickey eyed me suspiciously as he stuffed a wad of cotton candy in his mouth and looked back and forth from Malique to me. This was high theater for Mickey.
“She definitely said it was the mark,” Malique countered with no emotion, like he was a plumber who’d just discovered I had a clogged toilet.
And the fucking Glen Echo Park carousel kept going around and around with that out-of-tune organ as images swirled of Auguste Marchant making love to me; walking away from me at the Palais Garnier; Roger breaking up with me at Pho 79; and Lucian Varnier’s fingers on my neck as he walked out the door in 1898, leaving me alone at the breakfast table—all these images spiraled around in my head like a trippy View-Master. My nose began to bleed again, and Mickey scrambled to get a wad of napkins. Having no shame at this point, I wadded one up and stuck it up the offending nostril, turning back to Malique, not caring how I looked.
Malique took my hand and turned it over. Mickey, sensing his cue, began to point out the lines, helpfully. His touch was sticky from the cotton candy. I swallowed audibly.
“Do you want a Diet Coke?” he asked, edging out of the picnic table.
“Sure,” I said to get rid of him. He dutifully headed down the hill.
I turned to Malique. “I need your help.”
He kept his eyes on my palm. “You are not looking well, if I may say.”
“You may say.”
Malique studied the lines on my hand and then held it with both of his, closing his eyes. He seemed to tremor. He released my hands and took my face in his, looking into my eyes—except he wasn’t exactly gazing back into mine. His pupils were gone and I saw only the whites of his eyes. Freaked, I tried to pull away, but he held my head firmly with a strength that had me praying for Mickey to return. The carousel went around one time before Malique let me go.
He looked exhausted and out of breath, but he spoke quickly. “As I suspected, it is a binding curse. But not a normal one. It was poorly constructed… rushed… angry. No witch should bind so angrily.” He pursed his lips and shook his head, with a distasteful look. “Darkness comes with it—it takes things along with it. Curses should be built with care and precision. It is an art, making a curse. Not this…”