Chapter One Hundred and Two
“I don’t want to be a muse.”
Lapin-Défunt and Deirdre were strolling around the dark, empty ballroom.
“But you’re already my muse, you see. You can’t help it. There’s nothing you could do to change it.”
“I don’t want to be anything.”
He held her to him. “Let’s try again,” he whispered.
“I’ll do it to you.”
“No. I mean, I want you to.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I never will.”
“You’ve just got to clear your head.”
“Of what?”
“Of whatever it is you’re always thinking. Your father, or whatever.”
“You can do whatever you want to me. In my throat, in my rear; you can hit me, you can—”
“But I don’t want that.”
“You can strip me in front of all the guests, at supper, and do it on the table. Humiliate me! I don’t care.”
“But I don’t want to do any of that. I just want to make you happy. I’d just like to see you smile, once, before I die.”
She thought about it seriously. “I can’t see that happening,” she concluded.
He glowered at a chair. “Did you hate my poem so very much?” he asked softly.
“I told you I admired the sentiment. It was your first poem; you can’t very well expect to have mastered all the intricacies of form without having studied the greats, nor refined an immortal tone without having lived a life baring your soul to the more wrathful of the elements.”
He shrugged. “I never conceived such behaviour could yield anything of use.” And he proceeded to meditate upon yet another new vista unfurling before him.
Later, in her room, between thin bars of moonlight on the bed, he entered her tenderly, but tenderness was not what she wanted.
“What’s your greatest wish?” he asked, while she pulled him deeper in.
“Never to have been born.”
“Barring that?”
“Obliteration.”
“Why?”
“There are no victories to be had on Earth. That’s the only victory I could bring off.”
“What if you don’t?”
“Then this life will drag on endlessly.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“Of course. There’s always that tiny chance.”
“Of what?”
“Of finding something in life. Something worthwhile. Something I haven’t been lucky enough to find—or somehow worthy enough to be granted.”
“Nothing else?”
“Or that there’s something after this life—some torture, like in the storybooks, which would make the torture on this side a walk in the park.”
“Nothing else?”
“Only. . .”
“What?”
“That it would somehow. . .invalidate. . .this.”
“What?”
“My love for you.”
He burst ecstatically inside her. She wept.
“Are you happy?” he asked, uncertain how to interpret her tears.
“No!” She shook her head as if she were shackled from the waist down, and all she could do was thrust her head from side to side in despair. “I feel as if you’ve given me life!”
“Do you mean—metaphorically, or. . ?”
“A baby.”
“Really?”
“I feel it.”
“Uh—already?”
“Don’t you know what this means?”
“That—that you’ve found purpose in life and want to marry me?”
“No! That we have to do it now! Now! Before we doom another!”