There were several editions of “La Belle et la Bête,” each one an antique volume with pages as fragile as butterfly wings. She liked the oldest version, printed forty-nine years before the French Revolution. So did he. Occasionally they watched the film—the original, an oldblack-and-white print, in French. He told her that ordinary girls—the other girls who came to the party—liked the animated version, but that she was not an ordinary girl.
There were tall windows with long pale-blue velvet draperies tied back with gold cords. But the window glass was wavy, the kind that gave privacy, that allowed light to enter the room but did not allow her to see anything outside. The only thing she was sure of was that a tall tree grew close to the house, and sometimes she saw the branches moving in the wind, and the light would cast shadows of the leaves on the blue-and-white carpet.
She imagined breaking the window glass and jumping on the branch closest to the wall, shinnying down and escaping.
The woman had instructed her about many things. There weren’t many rules in her bedroom, but there was one that had to be obeyed without fail: She had to close the curtains at night—or anytime she turned the lamps on. If she did not obey, if she forgot, she would be taken to the boat and left there until she was too weak to lift her water glass.
So she never forgot and always obeyed.
He told her he would love her until one of them died. That the rule about the curtains was to protect her—to protect him too. To make sure they could stay together. Because if light escaped the room, and someone saw the windows illuminated, they would be torn apart forever. He said that the last girl who had stayed here—not the party visitors, but one like her, who had been his special girl—had disobeyed and opened the curtains after dark. He said that after she did that, she had gone away.
Gone where?she asked.
It doesn’t matter, he said.The point is, we couldn’t be together after that. I don’t want that to happen to us.
She acted as if it would be the worst thing in the world, to be sent away from him. But she didn’t feel that way at all. Sometimes, when she lay awake in the warm bed, she felt as if she might explodewith anxiety and rage. She would think of things he had told her: that tragedies sometimes happened on the boat. That she should be glad it was dark in there, so she couldn’t see dark swipes on the walls, where the woman had tried to clean up the blood. And that tree outside the window would beckon.
He had said there were layers of disobeying, that not closing the curtains was just the first layer. He said that she wouldn’t want to find out what the deeper layers were, as Girl #2 had found out before her.
Did Girl #2 drown?she asked.
No, she died in a different way.
What about Girl #1?she asked.
She is fine, he said,she is just fine. But in the way he blinked hard and looked away, she didn’t believe him.
He would always assure her that she was his favorite by far, the most beautiful of all the girls who had come before her. He would tell her that her beauty was intoxicating, more powerful than the richest wine. His words slipped and slid; he couldn’t keep track of his lies. He told her whatever he thought she wanted to hear—if only he knew how pathetic she considered him, that she never believed one word he said.
She would think of the boat, and the restraints, and how she knew the girl before her had died there. And those thoughts led to this plush bedroom—all the luxuries, even the marble bathroom and the lavender-scented bath oil, and the thick white towels—and she felt as if this bedroom was even worse than the dank, cold, smelly place with its rust-red streaks and grimy windows.
He told her that this bedroom was her castle—their castle—but she knew that wasn’t true. It was her prison, her tomb. He said they would be together until one of them died, and deep down, she knew that she would die in here or in the place, just like Girl #2. Even if she tried to jump to the tree branch, it was a long way down to the ground; she could fall and die.
But she could try.
And then he told her how she could be set free. He told her she only had to do one thing.
It was time for her to graduate. She would no longer be a pupil; she would be a teacher.
She pretended to go along with him, because maybe “graduation” would take her to a different place, somewhere she could escape from. And she would take him down—for herself, and for all the women.
15
Sunday, July 4; 8:00 a.m.
Instead of staying with Hadley and CeCe again, Kate had slept in the Tower Suite on what should have been her wedding night. She woke up, reached across the bed to touch Conor, and remembered. Her heart fell, and she lay there staring at his pillow for a long time. She heard his voice answering her question last night. Yes. He had slept with Belinda. She turned over and tried to go back to sleep.
But of course, she couldn’t. She wanted to face him again and hear the whole story as soon as possible, and at the same time, she never wanted to hear another word out of his mouth. She hated the way she was feeling: distrustful of the love of her life, jealous of a poor, murdered crazy woman. She got out of bed and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She looked nuts.
She had once had a therapist who advised her to practice self-acceptance, to gaze into her own eyes and sayHello, I love you, Kate.
That wasn’t happening this morning.
Get over it, idiot, she said instead. But that didn’t feel right either.
When she eventually went down to the lobby, she saw that the thunderstorms had cleared out the heavy air, and it was another sparkling blue-sky summer day. She stepped outside, onto the verandah. It was the Fourth of July, and a row of American flags attached to the hotel’s south-facing side fluttered in the sea breeze. The ocean wascalm, with gentle waves tumbling onto the beach, advancing up to the tide line.
A crew of workmen was efficiently disassembling her wedding tent. She leaned against one of the staid white columns, watching them lower the wooden poles, fold the enormous white sailcloth canopy. It disappeared before her eyes into the back of a truck. When the truck drove away, she returned to the lobby and walked to the sleek Italian coffee machine.
