Mata Hari's Last Dance(13)
She has mistaken my reluctance for piety. I’m about to decline, to impress upon her the strict religious nature of a snake dance, when I recall how furiously Bowtie was scribbling. If he were to write about Mata Hari dancing with a living snake in Madame de Loynes’s famous salon in front of an audience composed exclusively of “certain” women . . .
“Please,” Jeanne says. She is actually begging.
I take her hand. “For you—and only you—I will do it.”
All throughout India men charm snakes. It can’t be that difficult to dance with one.
*
I inform Edouard that my new dance requires extra time to rehearse and he has given me seven days. But I still have not solved the problem of working with a snake. It has started to rain and the cream-colored walls of my apartment feel as if they are closing in on me whenever I think of reptiles. What am I going to do? My thoughts turn to the purse with the hundred francs. Perhaps I should visit the Champs-élysées? I can shop, distract myself. I desperately need a new pair of gloves and also some boots for the winter. I look out the widow to judge how hard it is raining when the sound of the phone startles me from my daydreams. I hurry to answer it, feeling like an actress in a fancy movie. It is such a luxury to have a phone.
Guimet wishes to see me.
*
I watch from my window as the chauffeur opens the car door. As always, Guimet is impeccably dressed. Today he wears a long black coat against the rain and an expensive fedora. When he arrives at my door, I greet him with kisses and notice that he is wearing a new wristwatch.
“My God, I’ve missed you,” he mumbles into my hair. And then he says, “I hear you are dancing for Jeanne de Loynes next week.”
If my marriage to Rudolph MacLeod taught me nothing else, it schooled me in the ability to recognize jealousy in an innocent comment, to interpret a tone. When Rudolph asked, “Where have you been?” it always meant trouble. I could hear the tenseness in his voice as he sat at the table without his paper or drink, staring at the wall, waiting for me.
“I said, where have you been?”
“At the market,” I hurry my words. “At the market—”
“I told you not to go there anymore, goddamn it!” He pulls his arm back and hits me. “You think you can defy me? You think I don’t see the way you look at the men I command?”
“Yes. The performance is for a small group,” I say, forcing myself back to the present, ignoring the tense quality of his voice by imagining the Buddhas of Borobudur calmly meditating their way to Nirvana. “The gathering is for women only.”
“Jeanne will want you for herself, you know. Once she meets you.”
I did not realize Guimet was the type of man to be jealous of a woman. “A woman will woo me away from you?” I tease. I don’t like this ugly aspect of his personality.
“She’s no longer a beauty but she can still be very convincing.”
I want to ask if she has ever “convinced” him, but decide to distract him instead. “It’s only a dance,” I say. I lead him to my bedroom and we make love. Afterward, he isn’t angry. But he’s not happy, either, and he doesn’t offer to take me to dinner.
I spend the night alone, feeling anxious. I am unable to sleep for the longest time, and when I finally do, my dreams take me to my darkest times in Java.
*
I’m in no mood to rehearse the following day. It is a clear day and I wander the boutiques along the Champs-élysées with the money Edouard left for me. I can hear his voice in my head, scolding me. “Only for important expenses!” But today everything feels tremendously important: the hand-painted silk scarf in aquamarine, the stunning citrine ring and matching necklace, the bronze incense burner I discover in a shop run by an Egyptian man and his son. Nothing could feel better than this. Then I see a young girl begging outside of an expensive clothing shop and all of my happiness turns to dust. The girl has dark hair and wide dark eyes. Her arms look thin. She holds out her cupped hands and I tell her to wait while I go inside. When I come out, I wrap a new cashmere shawl around her shoulders. She begins to cry. “Thank you, madam. Thank you,” she keeps saying.
“It’s nothing, little one,” I tell her. “Where are your parents?”
“Maman is gone.” Meaning dead. “Papa is working.”
“What does he do?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
I buy her a warm baguette and several slices of meat. When I return home, my purse is empty, but Guimet has completely vanished from my thoughts.
*
Comtesse de Loynes phones to tell me that the snake has arrived. Edouard is sitting across from me, looking completely at home in one of a pair of aubergine chairs he bought for my apartment. As soon as I click the receiver back into place, he wants to know why the wealthiest woman in France is calling me at home.
“Why isn’t she calling me at my office?”
“Perhaps because you’re not there,” I offer. He doesn’t find my answer humorous. I can see by the look on his face that he is concerned. “Don’t look so grumpy,” I say. “I’ve planned a surprise.” Or a disaster.
He fixes me with his eyes. “I don’t like surprises.”
*
“Mata Hari!” Jeanne moves swiftly down the steps and kisses both of my cheeks. We walk arm in arm into her foyer, and for the second time in a week I am surprised by how little taste she possesses for furniture. The mirrors are ridiculously ostentatious. Her ornate chairs must have started life in Versailles; they look too complicated to sit on. She leads me into the foyer where the walls are frescoed with pasture scenes. Waiting for me is a man standing next to a crate. I smell straw and hear rustling. If I live to be a hundred, I vow silently, I will never boast about snake handling again.