“Something was collecting in Claudia, revealing itself slowly to the most unwilling witness in the world. She had a new passion for rings and bracelets children did not wear. Her jaunty, straight-backed walk was not a child’s, and often she entered small boutiques ahead of me and pointed a commanding finger at the perfume or the gloves she would then pay for herself. I was never far away, and always uncomfortable — not because I feared anything in this vast city, but because I feared her. She’d always been the ‘lost child’ to her victims, the ‘orphan,’ and now it seemed she would be something else, something wicked and shocking to the passers-by who succumbed to her. But this was often private; I was left for an hour haunting the carved edifices of Notre-Dame, or sitting at the edge of a park in the carriage.
“And then one night, when I awoke on the lavish bed in the suite of the hotel, my book crunched uncomfortably under me, I found her gone altogether. I didn’t dare ask the attendants if they’d seen her. It was our practice to spirit past them; we had no name. I searched the corridors for her, the side streets, even the ballroom, where some almost inexplicable dread came over me at the thought of her there alone. But then I finally saw her coming through the side doors of the lobby, her hair beneath her bonnet brim sparkling from the light rain, the child rushing as if on a mischievous escapade, lighting the faces of doting men and women as she mounted the grand staircase and passed me, as if she hadn’t seen me at all. An impossibility, a strange graceful slight.
“I shut the door behind me just as she was taking off her cape, and, in a flurry of golden raindrops, she shook it, shook her hair. The ribbons crushed from the bonnet fell loose and I felt a palpable relief to see the childish dress, those ribbons, and something wonderfully comforting in her arms, a small china doll. Still she said nothing to me; she was fussing with the doll. Jointed somehow with hooks or wire beneath its flouncing dress, its tiny feet tinkled like a bell. ‘it’s a lady, doll,’ she said, looking up at me. ‘See? A lady doll.’ She put it on the dresser.
“ ‘So it is,’ I whispered.
“ ‘A woman made it,’ she said. ‘She makes baby dolls, all the same, baby dolls, a shop of baby dolls, until I said to her, ‘I want a lady doll.’
“It was taunting, mysterious. She sat there now with the wet strands of hair streaking her high forehead, intent on that doll. ‘Do you know why she made it for me?’ she asked. I was wishing now the room had shadows, that I could retreat from the warm circle of the superfluous fire into some darkness, that I wasn’t sitting on the bed as if on a lighted stage, seeing her before me and in her mirrors, puffed sleeves and puffed sleeves.
“ ‘Because you are a beautiful child and she wanted to make you happy,’ I said, my voice small and foreign to myself.
“She was laughing soundlessly. ‘A beautiful child,’ she said glancing up at me. ‘Is that what you still think I am?’ And her face went dark as again she played with the doll, her fingers pushing the tiny crocheted neckline down toward the china breasts. ‘Yes, I resemble her baby dolls, I am her baby dolls. You should see her working in that shop; bent on her dolls, each with the same face, lips.’ Her finger touched her own lip. Something seemed to shift suddenly, something within the very walls of the room itself, and the mirrors trembled with her image as if the earth had sighed beneath the foundations. Carriages rumbled in the streets; but they were too far away. And then I saw what her still childish figure was doing: in one hand she held the doll, the other to her lips; and the hand that held the doll was crushing it, crushing it and popping it so it bobbed and broke in a heap of glass that fell now from her open, bloody hand onto the carpet. She wrung the tiny dress to make a shower of littering particles as I averted my eyes, only to see her in the tilted mirror over the fire, see her eyes scanning me from my feet to the top of my head. She moved through that mirror towards me and drew close on the bed.
“ ‘Why do you look away, why don’t you look at me?’ she asked, her voice very smooth, very like a silver bell. But then she laughed softly, a woman’s laugh, and said, ‘Did you think I’d be your daughter forever? Are you the father of fools, the fool of fathers?’
“ ‘Your tone is unkind with me,’ I answered.
“ ‘Hmmm… unkind.’ I think she nodded. She was a blaze in the corner of my eye, blue flames, golden flames.
“ ‘And what do they think of you,’ I asked as gently as I could, ‘out there?’ I gestured to the open window.
“ ‘Many things.’ She smiled. ‘Many things. Men are marvelous at explanations: Have you see the “little people” in the parks, the circuses, the freaks that men pay money to laugh at?’
“ ‘I was a sorcerer’s apprentice only!’ I burst out suddenly, despite myself. ‘Apprentice!’ I said. I wanted to touch her, to stroke her hair, but I sat there afraid of her, her anger like a match about to kindle.
“Again she smiled, and then she drew my hand into her lap and covered it as best she could with her own. ‘Apprentice, yes,’ she laughed. ‘But tell me one thing, one thing from that lofty height. What was it like… making love?’
“I was walking away from her before I meant to, I was searching like a dim-wilted mortal man for cape and gloves. ‘You don’t remember?’ she asked with perfect calm, as I put my hand on the brass door handle.
“I stopped, feeling her eyes on my back, ashamed, and then I turned around and made as if to think, Where am I going, what shall I do, why do I stand here?
“ ‘It was something hurried,’ I said, trying now to meet her eyes. How perfectly, coldly blue they were. How earnest. ‘And… it was seldom savored… something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.’
“ ‘Ahhh…’ she said. ‘Like hurting you as I do now… that is also the pale shadow of killing.’
“ ‘Yes, madam,’ I said to her. ‘I am inclined to believe that is correct.’ And bowing swiftly, I bade her good-night.
“It was a long time after I’d left her that I slowed my pace. I’d crossed the Seine. I wanted darkness. To hide from her and the feelings that welled up in me, and the great consuming fear that I was utterly inadequate to make her happy, or to make myself happy by pleasing her.
“I would have given the world to please her; the world we now possessed, which seemed at once empty and eternal. Yet I was injured by her words and by her eyes, and no amount of explanations to her which passed through and through my mind now, even forming on my lips in desperate whispers as I left the Rue St. Michel and went deeper and deeper into the older, darker streets of the Latin Quarter — no amount of explanations seemed to soothe what I imagined to be her grave dissatisfaction, or my own pain.
“Finally I left off words except for a strange chant.
“I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under the indifferent stars like a seam. ‘I cannot make her happy, I do not make her happy; and her unhappiness increases every day.’ This was my chant, which I repeated like a rosary, a charm to change the facts, her inevitable disillusionment with our quest, which left us in this limbo where I felt her drawing away from me, dwarfing me with her enormous need. I even conceived a savage jealousy of the dollmaker to whom she’d confided her request for that tinkling diminutive lady, because that dollmaker had for a moment given her something which she held close to herself in my presence as if I were not there at all.
“What did it amount to, where could it lead?
“Never since I’d come to Paris months before did I so completely feel the city’s immense size, how I might pass from this twisting, blind street of my choice into a world of delights, and never had I so keenly felt its uselessness. Uselessness to her if she could not abide this anger, if she could not somehow grasp the limits of which she seemed so angrily, bitterly aware. I was helpless. She was helpless. But she was stronger than I. And I knew, had known even at the moment when I turned away from her in the hotel, that behind her eyes there was for me her continuing love.