Between the Shadow and the Soul - 22
“There is a way of falling into error while on the way to truth.”
-- Victor Hugo
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Missing Frame
“What are we celebrating?” I asked, looking at the empty champagne glasses littering the table in front of us. I wondered briefly if Teddy had perhaps drunk a bit too much before my arrival, but the steady way his eyes flitted from scantily clad burlesque dancer to scantily clad burlesque dancer betrayed no intoxicated stupor or struggle for focus.
All the same, I switched to a less-carbonated gin martini before the bubbles could go to my head.
“Hm?”
I pointed to the empty flute dangling between his fingers. “Champagne, kind of celebratory. What are we celebrating?”
He lifted the glass to eye-level and peered at the dancers through its handle like he would stare through the lens of a telescope. “I just like champagne.”
It was then that I realized that, yes, he was in fact quite inebriated and had been for several uninterrupted hours. The calmness in his gaze was born not from sobriety, but from a very mellow buzz he had no doubt cultivated with the help of some other alcoholic beverage - sherry, if I had to pose a guess. Nothing in his body language gave it away, no droop of the eyelids or slack in the joints; in fact, he hid it very well, talking quite clearly and never once losing control of his motor skills.
The only reason I noticed, and I hated that I noticed it for that specific reason and hoped I could one day forget anything that had to do with that reason and the memories I had made while in the company of said reason, was because as much as Tristan Marchand fulfilled every Frenchman’s duty in his devout love of our nation’s own wine, his favorite poison was Amontillado, a dry dark amber sherry from southern Spain that turned him from the devil incarnate he was into a perfectly well-behaved upstanding member of society. I remembered all the times I had asked him to have a glass or two of it before even thinking of showing his face in my doorway, and promptly wished I could hire a mad scientist to infiltrate my brain and erase a selective few memories...
Teddy didn’t strike me as the type of person to drink only champagne all night, mostly because of the careful way with which he handled his glass’s stem, even when the flute was completely empty. He was clearly a wine person, which meant he and I would get along very well, as long as he didn’t do like Tristan and switch to spiritueux à base de plantes d’absinthe when his melodious buzz hit its stride.
“I like champagne too,” I held out my olive garnish to him and, seemingly without thinking, he took it. I had never liked olives in my martinis.
“We could celebrate my misery, I guess.” He heaved a sigh and bit into the olive with a despondent snap if his jaw.
I dipped a finger into my martini and swirled the liquid around in its wake, trying not to smile. “And why are you miserable?” I already knew.
Another heavy sigh and his head rolled slowly from shoulder to shoulder until his dark, hooded eyes met my comparatively bright and vigilant ones. The champagne was taking its swift effect. “I’m in love with her.” The emissary from the bar arrived with a glass of Scotch and, without interrupting the flow of our conversation, set it atop a folded napkin in the palm of Teddy’s hand, before nodding his head once and leaving in silence. “If red is the color of desire, then I am black with despair.”
“Les Misérables,” an instant smile blossomed to every corner of my face. “You like Broadway musicals.”
“Anyway,” Teddy took a slow, appreciative sip and closed his eyes in pain when the lights on stage illuminated the lounge area in a brilliant combination of red and white, that was accompanied by a fresh burst of smoke from the unseen fog machines I knew were hiding just out of sight in the wings. “I love her and I might as well not exist. So I drink and drink and smoke and smoke, but it doesn’t make a difference. I still don’t exist.”
I had never felt as much empathy for a living human being as I did in that exact moment, when the blue veins in his eyelids stood out so powerfully under the heat of the garish lights, when his mouth was weighed down with the burden of his very pathetic heartache and his jaw tensed and relaxed alternately as the thought of his plight became more and more unbearable. I felt his pain in the very tips of my toes, and wondered if it was even scientifically possible that two human beings could connect and tap into each other’s emotions so quickly. I had heard the stories of best friends reading each other’s thoughts, finishing each other’s sentences, communicating silently with just the intentions in their eyes, but the closest I had ever come was whatever warped bond I had shared with Tristan on quiet nights hidden beneath covers or cast in the spotlight of the moon.
It was nothing like the way I knew exactly how ashamed Teddy was of his invisibility.
I wanted to help him.
I also wanted to kick him in the teeth.
“Of course she knows you exist, you go to school right next to each other. She was at Thanksgiving.”
Teddy groaned and shook his head. “She doesn’t want me to exist. I ruined everything.”
This prompted me to set down my martini and gaze unblinkingly at him. “What do you mean?”
“I spilled a drink on her dress and she’ll never speak to me again.” The comedy I might have found in that mournful statement was diminished by the brokenhearted tone in which he said it. He really believed his entire future with her was ruined because of one mistake - an accident he could easily apologize for and probably use as the springboard for an entire flirtatious conversation. He really needed my help, and fast.
“I wouldn’t speak to me again if I spilled a drink on my dress.”
“I don’t think anyone else would speak to you either,” I said, torn between amusement and sympathy. His misguided lovesickness was very endearing. “Especially not Scarlett.”
At the sound of his beloved’s name, Teddy downed the rest of his Scotch in one long swallow that brought a phantom pain to the cords along the shaft of my throat. His hair, somehow sensing his rapidly deteriorating state, drooped and tangled around his ears, effectively managing to turn him from the portrait of a sober gentleman into a study in drunken idiocy in less than thirty seconds. If that wasn’t bad enough, he had a habit of raking his hands across his scalp, ruining whatever maintenance he might have done in the mirror at home, and efficiently squashing any feelings of compassion he had inspired in my heart. Yes, he was suffering, but his hair did not deserve to be so hideously punished.
“Will you stop it? We aren’t nine years old. If you like her, tell her you like her.”
“Noooooo,” Teddy dug his fingers into his hair and let them stay buried there. “I don’t like her.”
“Oui, oui, je sais.” I waved a hand and yanked his empty glass from where it perched in his temple, above his left ear. “You love her, I heard.”
“I do.” He tried to take another sip of his Scotch, and didn’t realize until I waved the empty glass in front of his face that he had already disposed of it. “I really, really do. And it’s hell. On earth.”
Before I could expound the details of how wretched he sounded, his eyebrows tapered in two dark, tilted lines, and he was suddenly in full possession of the poise and focus I had witnessed him lavishing upon the most talented dancers Victrola had to offer. The effect of his heavy lids throwing umbrella shadows across the blackness in the centers of his eyes, added to the stony line of his mouth and the twitching tic in his jaw was altogether rather comical, but I let it slide and appreciated the pale imitation of the somberly passionate expression he had intended.
“And you said you could help me.”
The real lights dimmed around us, leaving our couch in the shade of the balcony above us, but the lights in both our eyes glimmered brightly enough to see by. His reflected a foolish young man’s hope that the brutal pains his heart had endured in pursuit of love were not in vain, and mine twinkled with the girlish happiness of getting exactly what I wanted exactly when I wanted it.
“I did.”
The smoke thickened as a new act prepared to take the main stage, but I could see his face as clearly as if we were standing in a meadow on a cloudless afternoon. “Then...do it. Help me. With my ‘Scarlett problem’, if you think it’s a problem you can solve.”
“I can solve it,” I assured him, crossing my legs the better to flatter the cut of my dress and the elongated shape of my calves where my stiletto heels angled my heels, narrowed my ankles, and lengthened the curve of my thighs. This was something I was good at, and had perfected: looking sexy in a club, holding a martini, and scheming in a smoggy haze just thick enough to mask my deceitfulness from any far-away onlookers. “Et oui, I would call it a huge problem.”
“Great.” He waved to the bar and had another two flutes of champagne brought over. “To celebrate,” he clarified, when I raised my eyebrows.
“Teddy,” I sipped some more of my martini and declined the proffered champagne when it appeared at my shoulder. “I’m not doing this for free.”
His own champagne flute fell short of his outstretched lips and a dark stain spread over the fine material of his shirt. “What do you want?”
What I wanted was not the thick wad of cash he was probably expecting, because I had more than enough of my own money to keep me in champagne and martinis for however long I chose to order them; I didn’t want a business favor, or a pity friend, or even an explanation as to how he had found himself so deeply embroiled in love for the understandably enticing Scarlett Rose - or, Scarlett Kennedy, as she was legally known. Business dealings were of no interest to me, I had plenty of time to turn him into just the kind of pitiless friend I liked to have at my side, and Scarlett Rose was quite possibly the most beautiful girl in the Western Hemisphere. I would have been worried about his masculinity if he didn’t find her physically attractive.
What I wanted wasn’t even tangible - at least, not what most people would call tangible. To me, it would be as solid and real as the couch beneath us, or the ground under our feet, even if it could only be as wispy and out of my grasp as the smoke that swam in billows over our dark heads.
“Tell me about your mother?”
There was barely any hesitation in the bob of his Adam’s apple. “What do you want to know?”
The hummingbird returned, but its wings beat feather soft in the hollow of my chest. Either the champagne and Scotch and possible sherry had affected him much more than I had theorized, or Lex and Lux had painted a far too dismal picture of him and his closely-guarded memories. He never talks about her, they had told me, clasping their golden hands together and bowing their golden heads to their knees like portraits of earthbound angels speaking of their Lord and God.
Maybe because they had never thought to actually ask.
“The picture,” I turned my body so our knees came a breath from touching. “Can I see the picture you carry around?”
I, likewise, had a picture that never left my side. It was safely wrinkled in the interior pocket of my purse. Teddy’s was in his wallet, creased and folded so carefully that the lines running from its top to its bottom and from its left to its right were perfectly straight lines, faded milky white only very slightly in the pristine creases. He unfurled it as I did mine, up and to the left, and suddenly I beheld the smooth and perfect face of a smiling woman with dark, dark hair.
She was breathtaking, the very definition of a classic beauty with pin curls and a pale, swan neck that arched from the embrace of two bare shoulders bent asymmetrically around her ears as she posed in a relaxed sitting position in the middle of what appeared to be a very vast, very green park. Her full lips, dark gray because the picture was black-and-white, spread wide over rows of teeth whose slight imperfections made her uneven smile more charming than even the straightest, whitest smiles I had seen in every toothpaste advertisement in the world. The wind caught her curls in an updraft, lifting them just so to reveal pearl earrings in her ears and a tiny beauty mark beneath her left eyebrow. The crinkles around her eyes were not from age, but from the unpracticed way she laughed, because she was so very clearly laughing at something that made her glow and radiate the very youth those false crow’s feet tried to rob her of. She couldn’t have been more than 25, petite and soft around the edges, with a sharply pretty little chin and a high forehead hidden beneath pin-up style bangs.
The best word to use for her, perhaps I had used it too much, was perfect.
I dared to dream I had seen that same chin in the mirror, maybe even the thin shape of that same nose beneath my eyes, which perhaps were the same shade of brown as hers - the quality of the photograph prevented me from really being able to tell for sure. Clearly I was no match for Teddy’s mother where raw and natural beauty was concerned, but perhaps we shared something in the beauty mark or the thin arms or the lopsided smile. Something in her eyes caught me in a spell, and I was unable to look away from the perfection under her elegantly sloping eyebrows.
I stared perhaps a bit too hard, because Teddy folded the picture right, then down, and affectionately ran his thumb across it before locking it back in the safety of his wallet. I didn’t mind, though, because the image was baked into the back of my eyes, broadcasting twice as large on the projection screen that was my mind’s eye.
“She died in the delivery room,” he offered, when I didn’t ask any of the questions I had implied I was going to.
“I heard that,” I nodded. Offers of condolence stayed safely behind my teeth. “What else do you know?”
Teddy shrugged, patting the wallet into place in his pocket and leaning back into the folds of the couch. “Dad doesn’t mention her much.”
“Does he say anything?” I knew I was bordering on the desperation I had felt the first time I heard Nate say Chuck Bass’s name at that fateful luncheon, a lifetime ago in another world. But I didn’t know if I could hide the curiosity in my eyes or the hopeful upturn of my lips, so I allowed my voice to dip in earnest interest, no matter how much it deterred Teddy from answering straightforwardly. At least he was answering.
“Not anymore...” The pleat in his brow returned, and with it came the same discomfiting pull in his jaw. “He used to.”
“Why did he stop?” I felt breathless, but the inquiry came out clearer than anything else I had said that night.
He loved her too much...It hurt too much...He didn’t want you to miss her as much as he does... As usual, my mind took off before the starter pistol, and I anticipated any number of answers to my question. Why did Chuck Bass keep secrets from his son? I hoped it wasn’t the same reason ma mère kept them from me, because if so, I was likely to never find out the truth. And that disheartening thought rekindled my derelict interest in the half-finished martini in my lap.
“I guess I asked the wrong questions,” he mused, staring once more at the stage through the filter of his bubbly champagne.
I urged him on, lips pressed against my martini glass in preparation of a long sip. “Like what?”
His shrug was not noncommittal or infuriating, as it had been in the darkly lit remains of ma mère’s childhood. “Where she went, why she left...”
“Do you know her name?” I knew it had to be pretty and whimsical, like her.
I was right.
“Misty.”