Other Colors -- Ch. 15 (part 1) - Sex Stories

Other Colors -- Ch. 15 (part 1)

... locked up in a sumptuous dungeon of my own. Besides … I took one last look, and moved away, it wasn’t his wealth that seduced her. Right? At the far end of the gallery, I found a pair of large, lacquered doors overlaid with a wrought iron filigree. I smirked, and rolled my eyes. Saint Peter must have stepped out. I grasped the twin handles, but paused before turning them. Like every other door I’d encountered at Lacoste, the locks on these two were conspicuously missing. I knelt down, running my finger over the spot where the iron hardware had been excised, and the wood patched up, and painted. Why in the world? My brow furrowed. It chilled me a little, and I’m not sure why. I leaned forward until my nose was nearly touching the knob, as though a closer look would help to elucidate the mystery. ‘ I have heard the key turn in the door,’ Eliot's words—derived from Dante—rattled around in my head, ‘ and turn once only…’ I squinted. Something caught my eye through the keyhole; something that didn’t seem to make any sense. As best I can recall, the first frost came early to Montreal that fall, and all the florid flower baskets along Place Jacques-Cartier were withered and dead by mid-September. I hadn’t seen anything green in months. And for that reason, the fact that on the other side of the keyhole there appeared to leaves left me just two possibilities. Either I really had lost it, and all of this was a magnificent hallucination. Or else … The glasshouse? I stood up slowly, ...

... and turned the handles. Holy. The warm, wet air rolled over me like an ocean wave, and I stepped forth into a kind of crystal cathedral. On either side of me ran a series of tiered stone troughs, each brimming calla lilies, ivy, and red orchids, while a few rows of moss-laden date palms formed a botanical colonnade. Even the light was sort of soft and ethereal, filtered through the snow-capped glass of the ceiling. It reminded me of sitting on an airplane as a little girl, when I'd glanced out that oval window for the first time, to discover we were flying through a cloud. For more than a moment, I was stunned into ataxia by the sight of it. And then my ears pricked to the sound of trickling water. I bit my lip, and descended a few crescentic steps into the garden, the paving stones smooth and warm on the bare soles of my feet. Amid a bed of blue dahlias, I found a sculptured bronze fountain, with a kneeling woman for its spout. ‘δάκρυα της Νιόβης ’ I touched the raised inscription at its base. It was Niobe. And she was weeping. I watched the water pour from her eyes, and down the flaking, green patina of her cheeks. The hair at the back of my neck prickled. If images of Danaë were done by absolutely everyone, then no one on God’s green earth depicted Niobe. I think it’s because her story is too sad. Hers is worse than Daphne; worse than Lucretia, Persephone, or Syrinx. 'Like Niobe, all tears… It is not nor it cannot come to good .' I shuddered, remembering Hamlet’s grave ...