Space Is Just a Starry Night Read online

  “How that color suited your mother,” he remarked to Felixity, as she crossed the room in a gown of translucent lemon silk, which made her look like an uncooked tuber. “I remember three such dresses, and a long, fringed scarf. She was so partial to it.” Again, he was not being cruel. Perhaps he was entitled to be perplexed. They had anticipated an exquisite child, the best of both of them. But then, they had also expected to live out their lives together.

  When she was thirty-three, Felixity stopped moving in society and attended only those functions she could not, from politeness, avoid. Her father did not remonstrate with her, indeed he only saw her now once a week, at a rite he referred to as “Dining with my Daughter.” Although his first vision of her was always a slight shock, he did not disenjoy these dinners, which lasted two hours exactly, and at which he was able to reminisce at great length about his beautiful wife. If anyone had asked him, he would have said he did this for Felixity’s sake. Otherwise, he assumed she was quite happy. She read books and occasionally painted rather poor watercolors. Her teeth, which had of necessity been over-filled, had begun to break at regular intervals, but aside from this her life was tranquil and passed in luxury. There was nothing more that could be done for her.

  One evening, as Felixity was being driven home to one of her father’s city houses, a young man ran from a side street out across the boulevard, in front of the car. The chauffeur put on his brakes at once. But the large silver vehicle lightly touched the young man’s side, and he fell in front of it. A crowd gathered instantly, at the periphery of which three dark-clad men might be seen looking on. But these soon after went away.

  The chauffeur came to Felixity’s door to tell her that the young man was apparently unhurt, but shaken. The crowd began to adopt factions, some saying that the young man was to blame for the accident, others that the car had been driven too fast. In the midst of this, the young man himself appeared at Felixity’s door. In years he was about twenty-six, smartly if showily dressed in an ice-cream white suit now somewhat dusty from the road. His blue-black hair curled thickly on his neck; he was extremely handsome. He stared at the woman in the car with amontillado eyes. He said, “No, no, it was not your fault.” And then he collapsed on the ground.

  The crowd ascended into uproar. The young man must be taken immediately to the hospital.

  Felixity was flustered, and it may have been this that caused her to open her door and to instruct the chauffeur and a bystander to assist the young man into the car. As it was done, the young man revived a little.

  “Put him here, beside me,” said Felixity, although her voice trembled with alarm.

  The car door was closed again and the chauffeur told to proceed to a hospital. The crowd made loud sounds as they drove off.

  To Felixity’s relief and faint fright, the young man now completely revived. He assured her that it was not essential to go to the hospital, but that if she were kind enough to allow him to rest a moment in her house, and maybe swallow a glass of water, he would be well enough to continue on his way. He had been hurrying, he explained, because he had arranged to see his aunt, and was late. Felixity was afraid that the drive to her house would prolong this lateness, but the young man, who said his name was Roland, admitted that he was often tardy on visits to his aunt, and she would forgive him.

  Felixity, knowing no better, therefore permitted Roland to be driven with her to the house. Its electric gates and ectomorphic pillars did not seem to antagonize him, and ten minutes later, he was seated in the blond, eighteenth-century drawing room, drinking bottled carbonated water with slices of lime. Felixity asked him whether she should call her father’s doctor, who was in residence. But Roland said again that he had no need of medical attention. Felixity believed him. He had all the hallmarks of strength, elasticity, and vitality she had noted in others. She was both glad and strangely sorry when he rose springingly up again, thanked her, and said that now he would be leaving.

  When he left, she shook all over, sweat beaded her forehead, and she felt quite sick. That night she could not sleep, and the next morning, at breakfast, she broke another tooth on a roll.

  Two days after, a bouquet of pink roses, from a fashionable florist, arrived for Felixity. That very afternoon Roland came to the gates and inquired if he might see her. The servants, the guards at the gate, were so unused to anyone seeking Felixity — indeed, it was unique — that they conveyed the message to her without question. And of course Felixity, wan with nauseous amazement and a hammering heart, invited Roland in.

  “I’ve been unable to stop thinking about you,” said Roland. “I’ve never before met with a woman so gracious and so kind.”

  Roland said many things, more or less in this vein, as they walked about the garden among the imported catalpas and the orchids. He confessed to Felixity that his aunt was dead; it was her grave he had been going to visit. He had no one in the world.

  Felixity did not know what she felt, but never before had she felt anything like it. In the dim past of her childhood, when some vague attempts had been made to prepare or alter her, she had been given to understand that she might, when she gained them, entertain her friends in her father’s houses, and that her suitors would be formally welcomed. Neither friend nor suitor had ever crossed the thresholds of the houses, but now Felixity fell into a kind of delayed response, and in a while she had offered Roland wine on the terrace.

  As they sat sipping it, her sick elation faded, and a mute sweetness possessed her.

  It was not that she thought herself lovable; she thought herself nothing. It was that one had come to her who had made her the center of the day. The monumental trees and exotic flowers had become a backdrop, the heat, the house, the servants who brought them things. She had met before people like Roland, the gorgeous magicians who never saw her. But Roland did see her. He had fixed on her. He spoke to her of his sad beleaguered life, how his father had gambled away a fortune, how he himself had been sadistically misled on his chances of film stardom. He wanted her to know him. He gazed into her eyes and saw in her, it was plain, vast continents of possibility.

  He stayed with her until the dinner hour and begged that he might be able to return. He had not told her she was beautiful or any lie of that nature. He had said she was good, and luminously kind, and that never before had he met these qualities in a young woman, and that she must not shut him out, as he could not bear it.

  On his second visit, under a palm tree, Felixity was taken by compunction. “Six of my teeth are crowned,” she said. “And this — is a wig!” And she snatched it off to reveal her thin cropped hair.

  Roland gave a gentle smile. “How you honor me,” he said. “I’m so happy that you trust me. But what does any of this matter? Throw the silly wig away. You are yourself. There has never been anyone like you. Not in the whole world.”

  When Felixity and Roland had been meeting for a month, Felixity received a summons from her incredible father.

  Felixity went to see him with a new type of courage. Some of her awe had lessened, although she would not have put this into words. She had been with a creature of fires. It seemed she knew her father a little better.

  “I’m afraid,” said Felixity’s father, “that it is my grim task to disillusion you. The young man you’ve made your companion is a deceiver.”

  “Oh,” said Felixity. She looked blank.

  “Yes, my child. I don’t know what he has told you, but I’ve had him investigated. He is the bastard son of a prostitute and has lived so far by dealings with thieves and shady organizations. He was in flight from one of these when he ran in front of your car. Obviously now he is in pursuit of your money, both your own finances and those that you’ll inherit on my death.”

  Felixity did not say she would not hear ill of Roland. She thought about what her father had told her, and slowly she nodded. Then, from the patois of her curtailed emotions she translated her heart into normal human emotional terms. “But I love him.”

 
; Felixity’s father looked down at her with crucial pity. It was a fact, he did not truly think of her as his daughter, for his daughter would have been lovely. He accepted her as a pathetic dependent, until now always needing him, a jest of God upon a flawless delight that had been rent away.

  “If you love him, Felixity,” he said, “you must send him to me.”

  Felixity nodded again. Beings of fire communicated with each other. She had no fears.

  The next day she waited on the terrace, and eventually Roland came out of the house into the sunlight. He seemed a little pale, but he spoke to her brightly. “What a man he is. We are to marry, my beloved. That is, if you’ll have me. I’m to care for you. What a golden future lies before us!” Roland did not detail his conversation with Felixity’s father. He did not relate, for example, that Felixity’s father had courteously touched on Roland’s career as crook and gigolo. Or that Felixity’s father had informed Roland that he grasped perfectly his aims, but that those aims were to be gratified, for Felixity’s sake. “She has had little enough,” said Felixity’s father. “Providing you are kind to her, a model husband, and don’t enlighten her in the matter of your real feelings, I am prepared to let you live at her expense.” Roland had protested feebly that he adored Felixity, her tenderness had won his heart. Roland did not recount to Felixity either that her father had greeted this effusion with the words: “You will not, please, try your formula on me.”

  In the days that succeeded Roland’s dialogue with Felixity’s father, the now betrothed couple were blissful, each for their own reasons.

  Then Felixity’s father flew to another city on a business venture, the engine of his plane malfunctioned, and it crashed into the forests. Before the month was up, his remarkable but dead body had been recovered, woven with lianas and chewed by jaguars. Felixity became the heiress to his fortune.

  During this time of tragedy, Roland supported Felixity with unswerving attention. Felixity was bewildered at her loss, for she could not properly persuade herself she had lost anything.

  The funeral took place with extreme pomp, and soon after the lovers sought a quiet civil wedding. Felixity had chosen her own dress, which was a swampy brown. The groom wore vanilla and scarlet. When the legalities were complete, Roland drove Felixity away in his new white car, toward a sixty-roomed villa on the coast.

  As she was driven, a little too fast, along the dusty road, Felixity was saturated by an incoherent but intense nervousness.

  She had never had any female friends, but she had read a number of books, and she guessed that her unease sprang from sexual apprehension. Never, in all their courtship, had Roland done more than press her hands or her lips lightly with his own. She had valued this decorum in him, even though disappointment sometimes chilled her. At the impress of his flesh, however light, her pulses raced. She was actually very passionate, and had never before had the chance of realizing it. Nevertheless, Roland had told her that, along with her kindness, he worshipped her purity. She knew she must wait for their wedding night to learn of the demons of love.

  Now it seemed she was afraid. But what was there to dread? Her reading, which if not salacious, had at least been comprehensive, had given her the gist of the nuptial act. She was prepared to suffer the natural pain of deflowerment in order to offer joy to her partner. She imagined that Roland would be as grave and gentle in lovemaking as he had always been in all their dealings. Therefore, why her unease?

  Along the road the copper-green pyramids of coffee trees spun past, and on the horizon’s edge, the forests kept pace with the car.

  By midnight, Felixity thought, I shall be different.

  They arrived before sunset at the villa, where Felixity had spent some of her childhood. Felixity was surprised to find that no servants came out to greet them. Her bafflement grew when, on entering the house, she found the rooms polished and vacant.

  “Don’t concern yourself with that,” said Roland. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  Felixity went obediently. Roland had somehow given her to understand that, along with kindness and purity, he liked docility. They moved up the grand stairway, along corridors, and so into the upper regions of the house, which were reached by narrow twining flights of steps.

  Up there, somewhere, Roland unlocked and opened a door.

  They went into a bare whitewashed room.

  A few utilitarian pieces of furniture were in it, a chair or two, a slender bed, a round mirror. In one wall a door gave on a bathroom closet. There was a window, but it was caged in a complex if ornamental grill.

  “Here we are,” said Roland. Felixity looked at him, confused. “Where?” she asked.

  “Your apartment.”

  Felixity considered this must be a joke and laughed falsely, as she had sometimes done in her society days.

  “I have you at a disadvantage,” said Roland. “Let me explain.”

  He did so. This room was where Felixity was to live. If there was anything else she wanted — he knew she was fond of books — it could be supplied. Food would be put in through that flap, there, near the bottom of the door. She should return her empty trays via the same aperture. She would find the bathroom stocked with clean towels, soap, and toothpaste. These would be replaced at proper intervals. Whatever else she required she should list — see the notepad and pencil on the table — and these things too would be delivered. She should have a radio, if she liked. And perhaps a gramophone.

  “But —” said Felixity, “but —”

  “Oh surely you didn’t think I would ever cohabit with you?” asked Roland reasonably. “I admit, I might have had to awhile, if your father had survived, but maybe not even then. He was so glad to be rid of you, a letter from you every six months, dictated by me, would have sufficed. No, you will live up here. I shall live in the house and do as I want. Now and then I’ll ask you to sign the odd document in order to assist my access to your money. But otherwise I won’t trouble you at all. And so, dear Felixity, thank you, and au revoir. I wish you a pleasant evening.”

  And having said this, Roland went out, before Felixity could shift hand or limb, and she heard the key turning in the lock. And then a raucous silence.

  At first she did not credit what had happened. She ran about like a trapped insect, to the door, to the window. But both were closed fast, and the window looked out on a desolate plain that stretched away beyond the house to the mountains. The sun was going down, and the sky was indelibly hot and merciless.

  Roland would come back, of course. This was some game, to tease her.

  But darkness came, and Roland did not. And much later a tray of bread and chicken and coffee was put through the door. Felixity ran to the door again, shrieking for help. But whoever had brought the tray took no notice.

  Felixity sat through her wedding night on a hard chair, shivering with terror and incipient madness, by the light of the one electric lamp she had found on the table.

  In the villa, far off, she thought she heard music, but it might only have been the rhythm of the sea.

  Near dawn she came to accept what had occurred. It was only what she should have expected. She wept for half an hour and then lay down on the mean bed to sleep.

  For weeks, and probably months, Felixity existed in the whitewashed room with the grilled window.

  Every few days books were put through her door, along with the trays of meals. The food was generally simple or meager, and always cold; still it punctually arrived. A radio appeared too, a few days after Felixity’s internment. It seemed able to receive only one station, which put out endless light music and melodramatic serials, but even so Felixity came to have it on more and more. At midnight the station closed down. Then it was replaced by a claustrophobic loud silence.

  Other supplies were promptly presented through the door on her written request. Clean towels, new soap, shampoo, toothpaste, and toothbrushes, Felixity’s analgesics for her headaches and her preferred form of sanitary protection.
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  There was no clock or calendar in the room, but the radio station repeatedly gave the day and hour. At first Felixity noticed the progress of time, until eventually she recognized that she was counting it up like a prisoner, as if, when she had served her sentence, she would be released. But of course her freedom would never come. Felixity ceased to attend to the progress of time.

  In the beginning, too, she went on with her normal routines of cleanliness and order. In her father’s houses her bathrooms had been spectacular, and she had liked using them, experimenting there with soaps and foams, and with preparations that claimed they might make her hair thicker, although they did not. With only the functional white bathroom at her disposal Felixity lost interest in hygiene, and several days would sometimes elapse before she bathed. She had also to clean the bathroom herself, which initially proved challenging, but soon it became a chore she did not bother with. Besides, she found the less she used the bathroom the less cleaning it needed.

  Felixity would sit most of the day, listening with unfixed open eyes to the radio. Now and then she would read part of a book. Occasionally she would wander to the window and look out. But the view never changed, and the glare of the distant mountains tired her eyes. Often she found it very hard to focus on the printed word and would read the same phrase in a novel over and over trying to make sense of it.

  After perhaps three months had gone by, an afternoon came when she heard the key turn in the lock of her door.

  She was now too apathetic to be startled. Yet when Roland, gleaming in his ice-cream clothes, came into the room, she knew a moment of shame. But then she acknowledged it did not matter if he saw her unwashed in her robe, her thin hair and unpowdered face greasy, for he had never cared what she looked like, she was nothing to him.

  And Roland approached with his usual charm, smiling at her and holding out some papers.