Between the Shadow and the Soul - 37
“I feel that look upon your face.
You're thinking about some place where memories can be a way out
of life that feels too spread out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Love Under Key
Everything still felt like December when I twirled my way through the door and let it click shut behind me. The imported carpets were just as plush between my toes when I removed my shoes and thoughtlessly discarded them near the decorative tea table in the foyer. The furniture was arranged in precisely the same open-ended way when I strode right through the living area and the floor-to-ceiling view of Manhattan's electrified skyline. The stairs led to the same broad, dim hallway, and to my pretty new bedroom.
I had lived in several bedrooms throughout my sixteen years, but the one in Chuck Bass's penthouse was by far my favorite.
Because his room was just down the hall.
It was a good thing the staff was out celebrating the New Year in...whatever way hired help celebrated any holiday of significance. Probably with cheap confetti or those weird cracker things or a fire in a barrel. Regardless, it was a good thing they were out celebrating the New Year, because that put them someplace else - some place where they could not peek around the corner and watch me turn airy pirouettes across the marble tile.
I took the stairs at a brisk little flounce, the kind that makes a girl's satin Easter dress flutter about in wispy clouds of embroidered petals on crinoline underskirt beneath tulle overlay. In my stocking feet, it was easy to prance on the tips of my toes and, without a second glance around to make sure the place was really empty, stop on the landing to clench my fingers around the railing and pretend it was the barre at my old ballet studio in Lyon.
The skirt fanned out and settled back around my hips and brushed against my legs when I glided down into a well-formed plié.
“Eyes forward, back straight, chest out, stomach in,” the Madame would demand, rapping us sharply with a crop when we got out of form. Then, it had been a way to feel like a real lady, sophisticated and poised and pretty enough to paint a picture of.
At sixteen, it sounded more like the kind of advice that might lead to a real lady getting really kissed.
“Plié,” I sighed, then shifted my weight to rise up on the balls of my feet. “Elevé. Battement tendu, devant, à la seconde, et derriére. Et rond de jambe.”
I had once dreamed of becoming une danseuse étoile pour Ballet de l'Opéra National de Paris. Being a ballerina meant pretty dresses, and floating through the air on wings of gossamer; endless series of chaîné tournes, alternated with piqué and galloping chassé springing up into bounding jeté... Gravity was inconsequential, and sometimes it did not even exist.
But, had I known then that the very same feathery feeling of weightlessness and angelic splendor could be achieved merely through one heady New Year's kiss...
I would have given it up for martini-soaked make outs much sooner than nine.
My lips were pleasantly chapped, a fact I did not notice until I skimmed across the threshold of ma chambre and was descended on by an eager Moppet. I touched the delicate skin to see if any lipstick still stained them a glossy ruby red, and was a little smug to find that a certain midnight kiss of mine was very likely rubbing the same spot at that same moment and wondering how to wash it off.
“I would like to thank the Academy, merci beaucoup.” I did a sprightly pas de bourrée, then spiraled into a flat-footed arabesque to sweep the silk robe out from under by haphazard bedclothes. A bubble bath sounded sinfully heavenly, for the first time in weeks. “Et, bien sûr, moi. Je suis fantastique.”
The rejected party ensembles were still in their artless piles on my closet floor. I added to the mayhem with my patterned tights and triumphantly well-received cocktail dress, then perched on the edge of my eiderdown vanity seat to start removing jewelry and applying my faithful skin care regimen of washing, cleansing, toning, moisturizing, and masking - it was time to worship at the feet of the impeccable Renée Rouleau.
The reflection I saw in the mirror stalled my reach for ginseng and rosemary mint. I was enamored with the sight of myself, Narcissus kneeling reverently beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He gazed into the mirror-like water, and saw himself reflected in its tide. He knew not that it was his own image, but thought that he saw a youth living in the spring. He gazed on two eyes like stars, on graceful slender fingers, on clustering curls worthy of Apollo, on a mouth like Cupid's bow, on blushing cheeks and ivory neck.
It was a face I had seen once before in a photograph: a porcelain doll in a sturdy display case, her fading chocolate locks caught up in brilliant red silk. A painted smile between rosy moons, thick eyelashes and sparkling dark irises beneath finely arched eyebrows.
I looked into the lake and saw not Elle, but Blair.
The smile melted from my lips, but I did not wilt; I sat a little straighter on the pouf, my forehead puckered and pupils wide in the filtered light. The melted cocoa around them was not so very different in shade from hers after all, and neither was that sloping jaw - not when my mouth bowed upwards and parted to reveal rows of pearly white. My fingertips moved from bottles and lotions to brush across my cheeks, flutter down the column of my throat, sweep my bangs back from my brow.
And to think, I had once believed she was not my mother.
Believed it ardently.
Believed it so fiercely that I had been quite cavalier with precious years of storybooks, hugs that lasted mere seconds but stretched on for golden days,
Tiaras and pearls and sterling silver, painted toenails and fruity drinks with too many croissant sandwiches, new porcelain dolls the night before my birthday because she just could not wait to see the delight in my eyes.
A white silk headband from a specialty boutique when I was five.
Kisses on the forehead, secret smiles during Dorota's multilingual rants, stern punishments when I deserved it, desperate love with every breath she drew.
I leaned forward, my elbows bearing the weight on the vanity, and pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes.
“Maman,” I called in a whisper, my voice as light as a sleepy child asking resolutely for another bedtime story. Had she been in the room with me, she would have heard as clearly as if my plea had rung from within the cavern of a grand cathedral bell. Maman would have bee at my back to press her warm hands into my shoulders and lay her secret kisses on the crown of my head. “Tu me manques.”
I sank down onto my arms and buried my face in their solace.
“Je t'aime. Je suis désolé. Je t'aime, je t'aime, je t'aime.”
Something hard met my hand when I leaned forward across hand carved gathered wheat and acanthus leaves. Then, with a clatter, that something hard met the ground. And before I could lift my head to survey whatever damage I had just caused to whatever expensive piece of cosmetic finery, the tenderly slow peals of a slightly off-key melody as a chipped ballerina tried valiantly to dance for her reflection.
“Maman,” I had begged one night after the bittersweet conclusion of Le Petit Prince, my lower lip puffed out to enhance my depiction of a sad little waif. “Teach me the words?”
She had leaned across the feather down, her curls tickling my collarbone, and tucked the covers in around me with a sad, pensive look on her face.
“It's time for bed. Bons rêves.”
“Sucre?” I had tried to sit up and pucker my lips for a nighttime kiss to send me down the stream to dreamland, but she put her hands on my shoulders and placed her kiss on the upturned tip of my wriggling nose. “Sing me to sleep.”
Then, maman had reached across me to the bedside table and the same jewelry box that had crashed at my feet. Then, it had been brand new, with the sheen of personalized craftsmanship and the cleanly carved elaborately cursive letters EW winding and cutting across its glossy lid, and it had required a darling little key to unlock its treasures. Years later, it would suffer an accident much like the one that befell it that ungodly early New Year's morning, and the key would become useless; but then, when it was fresh and clean and delicately handled, maman had worn the key on a chain around her neck.
The lid had opened of its own accord, allowing me to see the vision of the jewelry box dancer in painted dresses with a ruby smile and diamond clear eyes.
The melody it sang had always soothed me, whether papère or grand-père hummed it to me when maman was out for the night, or whether I tried in vain to remember the notes when I was frightened of the dark or of the cold or of falling off my horse. It rocked me to sleep as the woman who gave it to me had once cradled me in the crook of her arms and done in the Waldorf nursery chair. It was my lullaby, and it always ensured bons rêves.
But, it had always troubled me that ma mère never stayed to sing it to me, or even to hum it. I had hoped that night that the magic of her birthday might infect her and prompt her to surprise me, but I was desolate as she rose to leave. Just as she always did.
“Please?” I had stuttered in my awkward, empty English. A last-ditch effort to pull her back into my glittering web and oblige me.
And she had stopped at the bedpost, then turned to smile at me. It was one of those times I could remember counting on one hand.
The mattress sprang underneath us when she jumped on top of the covers beside me and pulled me into her embrace. I had squealed and giggled with delight the way only a little girl who wants to stay up past her bedtime can manage, and she in kind had squeezed me so tight and pressed me against her chest that I felt the thumpity-thump of her heart beating in time with the rhythm of her favorite song.
“Moon River,” she had breathed when the tinkling tune caught up to her intentions. Her voice was a sweet breath of honey in the shell of my ear, and it had tickled my goose-pimpled skin with its almost inaudible wisp. “Wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style someday. Oh, dream maker, you heart-breaker... Wherever you're going, I'm going your way.”
And that was when the river ceased to be imagined, and came flooding forth from the corners of her dewy eyes. I twisted around in the downpour, a steady stream of one drop, then another, and another, reluctant summer rain. It was some incredible grown-up feeling that I could not decipher from the polished blankness of her stare - her eyes were on the same level as mine, but they looked straight through me into another place or time.
“Two drifters, off to see the world; there's such a lot of world to see.”
Tears meant sad. I had deduced she was sad, because that was what tears were supposed to mean.
So, I had kissed her cheek.
And maman had shut her eyes, pained at the contact. The honey was sucked from her throat and her whispers were scratched and torn.
“We're after the same rainbow's end, waiting 'round the bend. My Huckleberry friend, Moon River...”
I cradled the misused jewelry box in my lap and gently thumbed away the film of dust that had settled over my initials. “And me.”
I had once asked ma mère why the end of Breakfast at Tiffany's always, always, without fail, made her reach for a handkerchief with which to dry her abundant tears. She had seen the movie easily a thousand times, could quote it silently and reverently (because she never dared speak above Audrey in her finest moments), idolized it, dreamed about it, lived it every day - it should have been old hat, just an entertaining story to admire and enjoy.
But something happened when Holly told Paul that she wanted to bring her little Brazilian kids back to New York someday, so they could experience the magnificence the city she loved. And when she threw Cat out into the torrential downpour, maman's eyes grew just as stormy and wet. And her lips moved along in synch with George Peppard's as his eyes lit on fire and he too went into that dark and flashing night.
“Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness.”
“Well, baby,” she would sometimes advise, “you're already in a cage. You built it yourself. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
And it was clear. She did not just admire Audrey Hepburn or Holly Golightly or Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Blair Waldorf was Breakfast at Tiffany's. She not only lived it, but breathed Manhattan air and ate Cracker Jacks right out of the box and slept in a backwards tuxedo shirt and drank milk out of a champagne glass and bathed in the bathtub someone had cleverly crafted into a couch, and when she got the mean reds she hopped in a yellow taxi cab and went right to a quiet, proud place were nothing bad could ever happen.
And if she could just find a real-life place that made her feel like Tiffany's, then... she'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name.
I shut the lid, but the clasp did not click. The false bottom had come out of it, and I looked down at the same picture whose memory had so addled me mere moments before.
An ache replaced the uproarious heartbeat that had been resounding so beautifully in my chest, and all was a breath before the dawn and a gray lament.
I scrambled through the vanity drawers, looking for one of my new embroidered handkerchiefs so I could dab off my runny eye makeup and shrink into the bathroom for some mental recuperation. Why did I have so many shades of eyeshadow? And did one fille really need that many blush brushes? Being in America had really changed my values on the matter of concealer... What on earth was that doing in my makeup drawer? Ew. I made a mental note to berate someone on the staff for not doing their job - whichever one I saw first, probably.
Maybe I hadn't left them in my closet?
As it was officially le Jour de l'An, I felt comfortable drawing up a mental list of mes bonnes résolutions. Number 1: Be more organized!
I dug through my armoire, which was full of all sorts of things that do not belong in a wardrobe, and fluttered my cracked lips in frustration. Number 2: Get rid of some of my stuff.
My knuckles rapped against something sturdy. Ooh! Christmas chocolates. That would most certainly help me feel better.
But, when I set the box on my lap and probed the edges for a seam, I realized that I had judged its shape too quickly. Its dimensions were too narrow and deep to be a conventional container of confectionery goodies. And, as I sat there with my back against the wall and stared down at the paisley-print white and gold wrapping paper, I could not remember touching a single sweet since the long-gone Fauchon macaroons (Mm, I would definitely need to remember to order some more of those since I was out...) with Serena, and that had been days before.
Serena. Speak of the angel, and she doth flutter from the glorious heavens in the form of a name on a wrapping tag.
To: Ellie belly bo jelly
From: Serena bean =)
So this was the package she wanted me to open when I was alone.
Which reminded me...
The whole place was empty, devoid of watchful eyes or well-meaning hallway lurkers, and Teddy popping in at the most inconvenient times, incessant phonecalls from would-be handmaidens who had gotten my number from someone else because I certainly wasn't the one arbitrarily handing it out like a flyer for a one day only multi-designer sample sale, et cetera. That meant I could finally take what I needed from daddy's safe and put it to good use, and that was what I really needed to do to get rid of the wrenching feeling in my stomach. I fisted a handkerchief against my palm and wriggled into my bathrobe as I patted at clumps of damp mascara and goopy moisturizer.
It was no time to cry like a pathetic little girl.
It was time to open a certain box. It was time to do, and do I was going to do.
And well!
Manhattan had to be that place - that place that made Blair Waldorf feel like Tiffany's.
At least, I hoped it was, not for the city's sake, but for the sake of the man who owned most of its most important buildings. Once, she had found solace and love and happiness in his arms, and I just knew she could be convinced to come back and join or family and make us complete, give Teddy a flesh and blood mother to hug and love and fight with and roll his eyes at. I deserved a chance to make things right, because I was after all just sixteen and couldn't be expected to make the best decisions.
And maman... maman deserved to have the prince I had always hoped would come for her.
The box would help speed that ending forward.
I padded across daddy's office in my wooly slippers and tapped in the numbers of their wedding date with the tips of my nails. The clacking sound the buttons made when they popped back up was deafening in the stillness that had fallen over the Bass home, and for a brief childish moment I felt something I had not felt since I was six years old. It was a moment of significance - like pushing apart Brazilian rosewood doors and gallivanting through a treasure trove of knowledge and enchantment, or turning over a photograph for the first time to see two smiling faces in love.
There were no white ribbons to tug nervously as I tried to savor the feeling, but I did remove the clip from my bun so my hair could fall loose around my shoulders.
It was odd that I should feel so sentimental about something I had seen before, a mahogany box with a gold clasp tucked in the very back of the safe, unassuming and unadorned. It was buffed to a stunning shine, which of course was the butler's doing, seeing as it was his duty to maintain the object that lay between velvet cushions inside it. The mahogany was interrupted only by a gilded clasp, which meant all I had to do was pop it open and -
“Now would be the moment when I ask what you're planning on doing with that.”
There was a tumble of ice clinking against glass, then the splash of amber liquid filling in the cracks.
“But I won't insult my own intelligence. Or yours, for that matter.”
Something at the stem of my brain told me that I should revolve slowly on the spot, brown eyes wide and doleful, pleading for understanding and a chance to explain my actions so that they cast me in the most flattering light. I should put the little box right back where I found it, snap the safe shut, and tell him he needed to change the combination before I was tempted to keep snooping around where my pointy little nose did not belong. I should be penitent, graceful, apologetic, angelic. Hell, even remorseful. I should feel like my hand had been caught in that pesky proverbial cookie jar.
But I never had liked clichés.
“Daddy,” I walked around the desk so that it was not between us. “I thought you were still out.”
“I came home early. Headache.”
Then, daddy stretched his right hand out to me. I silently crossed the room to set the little mahogany box in his waiting palm.
We had both neglected to press the light switch. Me, because I had not needed any illumination but the stars flickering through the window; papa because...well, probably because he preferred to sit in the shadows just in case I too came home early and he needed to catch me in the act of breaking into his private safe to snatch a possession he held very dear because it was so very guarded.
Did he feel I had broken a trust? Was he angry with me? I could not tell because he had never been angry with me before. That pinched look on his face might just have been a normal expression. With ma mère, it had always been a stoic expression broken only by a telltale arch in her left eyebrow... Was his 'angry face' different with family than it was with members of the board or incompetent help? How was I supposed to know any of this?
Where was Teddy when I really needed his advice? Making out with his internationally beloved supermodel girlfriend! What a terrible brother.
“You get this from Blair, you know.” He set down the tumbler of Scotch and recapped its crystal decanter, but the box stayed firmly within his grasp. “Scheming and plotting and planning, snooping around at all hours of the night.”
He certainly did not sound furious or ready to kick me out into the bitter street. I tilted my head and studied him carefully. “Don't you have a private investigator on speed dial?”
Daddy's mouth quirked at its right corner, and he gestured to the wide open safe. “Who told you the combination?”
“No one,” I said proudly, because I had come upon that information just as I had come upon everything else: by myself. “The 27th of December, 2010. The day you married maman.”
His eyebrows knit together, which signaled his need to take a long pull from his glass. “And I suppose no one told you that either?”
“No one has told me anything, except you.”
I bit my lip and moved to sit against the windowsill. The moon filtered through the panes and cast us in squares of silver.
And it all came spilling out.
“Dorota pretended she was deaf the one time I asked her. Nate told me he could not say anything. Aunt Jenny said she would not say anything, and neither would anyone else. Eric tried to help, but all he could do was get me invited to the cotillion so I could ask Serena, who turned out to be a no-show anyway. But then, it was okay, because you were there and then I was here, but mère is still there,” I pointed in the direction of the East River, meaning France, but not articulating it very well, “I found a picture of you when I was six inside of maman's diary, which I learned English to be able to read, and then I Googled you and found you on Gossip Girl, and I came here to find you, and I found Teddy in maman's bedroom at Thanksgiving and found out he was a Bass and knew that he was my chance to get to you, and while we were in there I found a copy of the wedding picture in her vanity desk, and it said December 27, 2010 on the back. Oh, and I found the one in the antique frame behind the photo of... grand-mère?”
It was not so much a question about her identity as a trial to see how easily that particular title flowed across my tongue.
“And that was how I knew I was your daughter and not slowly going clinically insane, because I read the diary again and it all fit, and my middle name is Misty, and maman changed my name when I was little, and Teddy's middle name is Theodore, so I had figured it all out before the ball, but I was not sure what to do. And there you were! Poof! Ta da! Like magic, just there after ten years and I am obviously very happy about that, but... mère should be here too, do you not think? Is there not something missing?”
Daddy pinched the bridge of his nose, then swept his hands through his hair and uncorked the decanter to immediately freshen up his drink.
“I take it back,” he mumbled, his voice low and gravelly in the bottom of his throat. “You get it from me.”
He removed his hand from in front of his eyes, and our gazes met.
“The ingenious part, not the emotional outburst part.” Daddy closed the gap between us and sat next to me on the ledge. “That, you definitely get from Blair.”
“Emotional outburst?” I repeated doubtfully. Classic Waldorf meltdowns were one thing, but true emotional outbursts were another. “Are we talking about the same Blair?”
The chuckle came from somewhere deep in his chest. It was earthly and musty, rife with age, because he let it sit there in the dust and mildew for years at a time without letting it breathe.
“Do you really want to use this?” He held the mahogany box between us.
Of course I wanted it. I had not traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, abandoned my Paris and my dignity and my life as I had always known it to go on a long-shot wild goose chase, and succeeded in finding the man I had been dreaming of since I was six years old against most odds and the hindering wishes of others, to give up when I was so close to fitting the last piece in to place at the heart of the jigsaw puzzle.
I was so close. All I needed was that little box and the even smaller thing inside of it, and all my unanswered questions would find peace.
But I bit my tongue and withdrew.
“Not if you do not want me to have it, papa.”
Instead of applauding me for my moral standing and rewarding me with a big bear hug to show his approval, daddy rolled his eyes. “Don't lie to me.”
“Accord!” I did not realize it was an instantaneous recanting until almost five seconds after the exclamation sprang out of my mouth. Daddy and his damned eyebrows looked at my belated throat-clearing and gracefully penitent nod with a little too much smirking amusement. Rather than commenting on his smugness, as I so desperately wanted to, I sat as primly and straight-backed as I could, playing the part of a demure and patient daughter. “Je suis malhonnête, I really do want it.”
He scratched the stubble on his chin and for the first time since he had made his presence known, I noticed that his bow tie was undone underneath his down-turned collar. The tuxedo jacket I had seen him in earlier that night was draped across the leather armchair across from the bar; it was not wrinkled or even loose in the elbows to imply that its owner had been out on the town and looking debonair, but as pressed and pristine as it might have looked in the garment bag it had been delivered in.
He was not even wearing shoes. When I did not smell the telltale musk of lightly applied cologne, I realized that daddy had not been out that night.
“Here,” he said, thumbing the box open and removing the latchkey from its depths. “Don't tell anyone I've gone soft.”
I shook my head reverently and accepted the little gold trinket when it was presented to me. “Never.”
He pushed away from the wall and slid his fingers around the planes of his best Baccarat crystal on his way to lock tight (and probably reprogram the security passcode on) his safe. The key turned itself over between my palms, and I felt in its cold metal the thrumming opportunity to see what daddy secreted away in his bedroom, where not even Teddy or the maids or Moppet were allowed to go. Ever since the first time I had set foot in his private office and seen that taunting light on that then-imposing safe, I had dreamed up what kind of place Chuck Bass might consider a sanctuary, what things he might secret away in its dark corners.
The precipice I was standing at was a breathless one. Whatever I found in there could very well solve the mystery of what had driven my parents to keep an ocean between them for 16 years.
But with him in the room with me, like I had wished and prayed for him to be on many a twinkling star, even before I had known he was him and what that meant to me, it was hard to tear myself away. He had been Chuck Bass to me for so long, mythic and symbolic, shadow at the edges of my hopes and desperation, light at the forever elusive horizon, but now he was papa. Daddy. My father. Life was allowed to be romantic again.
We were very much alike, he and I; more so than I had surmised from our superficial resemblance.
“You kept track of us,” I called to his back, referring to the collection of information he had accumulated in the safe, and he paused with his hand on its door. “Of me. All those years.”
“Of course I did.” The safe snicked shut and he cranked down its handle to secure it in place as steady green flickered back to blazing red.
I looked back to the glass book case that had struck such a chord with me the first time I had browsed its titles. Long had I wondered at what the purpose of those particular novels and books and stories might serve him, especially the macabre tales of that dreadful Edgar Allen Poe that had once cemented my belief that Chuck's one true love and beautiful wife must be really, truly dead. Now that I could reflect on it in the crisp dawn of a new year, I let my eyes run once again down the spines; Les Misérables, The Fly-Truffler, Chocolat, Notre-Dame de Paris, Les liaisons dangereuses, and many others. French provincial life, classics detailing the country's storied and vividly colorful past, entertaining modern literature.
He had really cared. And, since he had not been able to speak to me, he had read and amassed quite a library. He had gotten Teddy a French tutor when he was six.
Daddy had known we would meet.
I smiled, feeling watery again, and decided the moment had definitely come to tear myself away. I couldn't have him watch me crying again; once was enough.
Halfway between the hallway and his still form, however, I turned and clenched the key in my fist. The shadows draped across his face like well-cut cloth, and when he inclined his head in my direction to nod me off, the light played with the boundaries of his temple and gleaming eyes like a sudden and brilliant explosion of fireworks back dropped by inky black sky. He would have made a wonderful character in a film noir.
No wonder maman loved him so, because she just had to. Nothing would be right if Blair Waldorf did not love Chuck Bass.
The silk of my robe slid across my arms and prickled the little hairs that stood on end when I told him, in the truest tone I had ever spoken, “I love you, daddy.”
Daddy's maelstrom eyes met mine, and that was when the river ceased to be imagined, and came flooding forth from the corners of my dewy eyes. His eyelids bit down on his lashes, bending them out of shape, but only for a moment and not to block me out - to inhale deeply and let go of the tense pull between his shoulders.
Then, I got my big bear hug.
The way maman had once kissed my forehead to tuck me into bed, daddy did so to encourage me to stay awake. The way she had stroked my hair as I laid despondently in her lap at the lowest point of my life, he did so with a true sunbeam of a smile as I laughed at the way all the breath had been knocked out of me as soon as his arms wrapped around my ribcage. He drew back to let me mop the tear tracts away and collect my dignity.
“I love you too, Ellie.” Daddy squeezed my shoulders. “Now get out of here and snoop around before I start worrying about your health.”
3 words, 8 letters. And I really finally had a father to say them to, who would say them back.
It is amazing what that can do for a girl's aching heart.