Pyrexia – Chapter 26
It was a stroke of luck running into the Thenardier girl when he did. Out of all the people he knew, Eponine was the only one he could trust to not ask where he had been for the past few months, where he had been hiding himself. She acted like she hadn't even noticed he was gone, which, coming from her, didn't seem like an insult.
Montparnasse had been picking his haunts carefully of late, staying clear of the usual places. He didn't want to see anyone, not yet, but Eponine found him anyway. He was half-drunk when she did, not unpleasantly so, and as he watched her cross the floor of the public house, to the little table in the rear corner that he had staked for himself, she swayed and wavered like a mirage. She projected the aura of an off-duty whore, and he was damned if every man in the place didn't leave her alone. They barely even looked at her.
Eponine stared at him for a while. Her eyes were huge, unblinking, so round they were almost perfect circles. They were brown, but one of her irises had a big shapeless blob of blue floating in it. She was a weird looking kid. Not ugly or anything, but the kind of pretty that you had to get used to before you could appreciate it. Montparnasse didn't mind her. She talked too much, but it was almost never anything you had to listen to. Being with her while she talked and talked was almost the same has having quiet.
"What are you doing?" she asked him.
"Slumming."
"Can I help you?"
When she smiled, the corners of her lips squashed in and her mouth became as round as her eyes. Three perfect circles hovering on her face as if suspended in thin air.
Montparnasse weighed his options. He was bored, and Eponine was practically never boring. He had Enjolras' kiss-off money burning a hole in his pocket. Though he had been contemplating in the vaguest way doing something constructive with it, hell, why not just have a party instead?
"I don't care."
She sat with him, not across the table but all the way around so that she was at his side. Their knees touched shamelessly, and they were short a glass so they drank from the bottle instead.
"You've had a stroke of luck," she said. "Well, so have I. But I won't tell you his name, only that you should know he's no threat to you. I'd have better luck with a fairy prince or a statue in a garden. Sometimes I dream about him, but that isn't anything, really. I just do it to stay warm. And even then, I am always sure to say, 'Dear husband,' (we're married by then) 'You must let me have my friends.' And so he does, and also he tells me, 'By the way, my eccentric old uncle has died, and I am to inherit his title.' So that is the story of how I become the Duchess. Do you like it?"
She smiled that tight, close-lipped smile of hers. Montparnasse figured that she did it to hide her teeth. She'd lost another since the last time he had seen her, but it didn't matter much. It wasn't as if they were eating filet mignon every night.
"Why stop at Duchess?" Montparnasse said. "You deserve a Marquis, at least."
"No, I' m sure I'd make a better Duchess. It pays to know these things, Montparnasse. Now, I've told you my dreams. I want to hear about yours."
"If you're a Duchess, then what am I?"
"Bastard son of a prince," Eponine answered easily. "Don't try to change the subject. Tell me what you dreamed about last night."
Montparnasse took a swallow from the bottle before he answered. "Last night, I dreamed I peeled all the skin off my face and I was a different person underneath."
"You must be one of the most interesting people I know."
Her eyes darted quickly, up to his face and then away. The whites flashed sickly colors in the candlelight. Montparnasse could not tell if she was joking, could not tell anything about her. She was a stranger to him, but at least she was accommodating. All at once, he wondered what Enjolras would make of her. All her education; her reading and history and figures. It hadn't gotten her anything, except for a bigger vocabulary to describe her misery, a firmer grasp on just what fate awaited her.
What if things never get any better? That was what he had wanted to ask Enjolras before he left, but Montparnasse was relieved now that he hadn't. It would have hurt him, and all for nothing.
He didn't want to hurt Enjolras. When he thought about it, it seemed to Montparnasse that he had never really wanted to hurt anyone. He had just done it, as if by accident, through neglect or momentum. He had looked at their pain without really seeing it; their suffering had been to him as the theatrics of characters in a play.
Things were different now. He was different. He watched Eponine throw her head back and drink, and realized for the first time that her skin looked like wax, that her hair had become very thin and fine, like the hair of an old woman. When she coughed, it sounded dry and futile; a handful of stones rattling in her chest. Montparnasse felt the extent of his newfound awareness, as if all of his senses had become suddenly and terrifyingly enhanced.
If this was the result of Enjolras' education, then he wanted no part of it. For how could he go on now? Seeing everything, knowing all…
They left the public house, her arm hooked in his. They had not talked of where they would go now, but Montparnasse knew that she was waiting for him to take her back to his room. He had one now, paid three months in advance. It was even furnished. But what good was a table with no food to go on it? Or a stove with nothing to burn?
He'd be out of money soon enough, but he had never let a little thing like that worry him before. Something would come up. It always did.
Eponine's shivering was agitating him. He could feel her bony elbow knocking up against his side, catching him under the ribs. He shook her loose, and she sprang away from him. Her bare feet rose up from beneath her skirt, then plunged back beneath it again. He saw them in glimpses. Like small fish coming to the surface of a pool. Now like birds. Now fish again.
She jerked her head as if listening to some faint song that only she could hear. Then she picked up the tune.
"Les pêches dans l'été
Les pommes dans l'automn
Je ne peux pas garder la fille que j'ai
Je ne peux pas la garder à tous"
Montparnasse realized that he was still thinking about Enjolras, wondering whether he surfaced much these days from his fugue of books and plans to spare a thought for what he'd had. It had been no small feat that he'd gotten Montparnasse to play at domesticity, but it hadn't been coercion or anything like that. For a while at least, Montparnasse had wanted it to be exactly like it was.
He was not lonely without Enjolras, not exactly, but he felt, even now, something lacking. He had always wanted nice things, and nothing more.
Eponine was peering up at him, giving him a sly sideways look, her gaze slanting out from between the strings of her hair. She'd been watching him all along, taking note of the way his lips moved up and down with his moods, as if he were humming along to a song of his own.
"What is it?" she said.
Montparnasse shrugged. He didn't want to talk.
She twisted her face into a pout. On a prettier, fresher, more innocent girl, it would have been charming. "I only want to help."
"You want to help anyone who catches your eye."
"You're right, of course," Eponine said. "Helping you poor useless men makes me forget my own troubles. You're all so much worse off than me."
"I like you better when you're not trying to be funny."
"I'm not trying to be funny. I like you better when you're not sighing and sad-eyed."
She seemed to realize that he was debating the merits of slapping her senseless, because she sprang away again. She took up her song, not where she had left off, but a few lines on, as if the music she heard had kept playing without her.
"Il est en haut de ici de penser
Et il est contrebas y de danser
N'est pas le façon contraire"
They came to the rooming house where he was staying. There were still a few lights on in the ground floor windows. No one stayed on the upper levels – the floorboards were all rotted through. The landlord was too afraid to walk on them even long enough to bring the furniture night long, Montparnasse could hear the floors creaking under the weight of abandoned beds and dressers, and he waited for the moment when they all came crashing down on him.
There was a porter. When he came to let them in, his eyes roamed over Eponine's bare arms.
"She's my sister," Montparnasse said, a lie that did nothing but embarrass all of them. It made Montparnasse think of Abraham and Sarah going down into Egypt, which was about as far as he'd read into the Bible that Enjolras had thrust on him.
It kept coming back around to him. The harder Montparnasse tried to push his thoughts of Enjolras away, the more tenaciously they clung. One thing he had always liked about Eponine: she'd do just about anything he asked her to. In bed, she was impersonal, efficient; a body without a soul. With her, he felt as close to nothing at all as was possible, but she could never be the wedge he was hoping for.
They went down the dark hallway to his room, and Montparnasse abruptly said, "It's money. That's all. I've been thinking about money."
"That's what old men worry about," Eponine scolded.
He showed her into his room. They didn't bother with a candle.
"Come back and do a job or two with your old friends. You'll soon remember what you thought you forgot."