The Moon is on Fire
(A Titanic Fanfiction)
Disclaimer: Jim Cameron owns these gorgeous characters and everything to do with the 1997 film Titanic; this story is meant for entertainment purposes only!
Chapter 8: In the Ceiling
Just a few weeks after my father died I asked Ruth what she'd loved about him. I was walking wounded, I needed something to grasp on to.
It was a fairly innocent question, I felt, appropriate because grief seems to open up previously-sealed dialogue like an egg cracking suddenly on a counter. You can't clean it up all the way, the messy emotion that seeps out when there is a corpse brought from the house. Once you've smelled death that close. We'd never spoken of such things before, Ruth and I, of feelings. I'd watched my mother and father co-exist in peaceful sighs and (less often but notable) cold stares and silences, which emitted volumes. Their marriage had been largely arranged, yes I knew it, but I held out hope that they'd honed in on each other enough over the years to learn to love one another. They'd lost one baby before me, a stillbirth, a boy, and from what I gathered out of hushed information passed in the maids' quarters, had several earlier-term miscarriages after me as well. To go through these tragedies together. And for as smart as my father was, and sweet, smelling of sugary cigar smoke and his beard somehow as soft as feathers when others were harsh and brittle.
Surely she'd been blissfully broken by it all, by him.
"I suppose I admired him, for his ability to stay calm in most situations, though it is foolish sometimes to stay so optimistic, I fear," she said plainly. She said it with none of the distress or violent fanfare one might expect after a spouse of over twenty years had fallen from a heart spell in the garden, cracked his skull on a jagged rock in precisely the right spot to cause the most pain, and died three minutes later while screaming out for mercy. "And he was a wonderful father, of course you know that." Ruth's voice remained flat. I was the fool, in fact, for thinking I'd get anywhere; she'd always been a tunnel, a void of sorts, I'd just never known it to stretch to such great lengths as this.
She was cutting flowers. Hydrangeas, powder blue ones with tiny flecks of purple at the center of almost every petal. She looked beautiful in the mid-morning light of our parlour, how it fell across the jewel-tone of her auburn hair and I was reminded of how much I resembled her, was a part of her. Which is why I tried. This is why I always tried. God damn it, she'd birthed me, cradled my tiny head when I came out three weeks early with already enough of that same hair that it startled the midwife (or so I'm told).
"Surely it's more than that, and how you feel right now, Mother?" My voice strained, and I wanted to reach across the mahogany table and shake her. Shake the life out of her instead, somehow flail it back into my father's body even though he lay six feet beneath wet ground now, away from me forever; his funeral had been so drenched in rain that the pins in my hair had fallen out one by one from the fierce accumulation of water.
I wanted to come from love. I wanted to have come from passion! I wanted to imagine that they'd had breathless moments like in a painting. Because paintings can get away with exhibiting the carnal, can't they, the moments frozen in which a man and woman might be about to climb on top of one another, become a part of one another. Like in the Hunt painting I'd examined in a giant tome on the floor of my father's emptying study (damn you more, Ruth!) just the day before. Something about awakening consciousness...a mistress and her lover caught in the middle of a sentence, practically, and also in the middle of the daily ministrations of their love. The woman, almost on his lap.
Was it possible that I was simply a product of duty? Of a slide in lieu of a punch?
"Rose, take your head from the clouds." She stuffed stems into vases mindlessly.
This was a moment we separated, when it all broke, even more so than it had ever before.
"I'd really rather not," I slammed an extra pair of scissors on the table, and the sound reverberated for what seemed like a long time in this huge, silent house. This waste of space. "I much prefer it up here, Mother."
I woke when it was barely morning, when the break of day is simply how the black of night lightens to gray and the streetlights begin, in earnest, to seem inconsequential. It was warm and my skin prickled and sweated beneath my nightgown even though I wore nothing under it. My skin, suffering in gladness from the million pores that felt only like nerve endings right now. My hair clung to the sides of my cheeks. I looked up at the ceiling, saw floaters dancing, felt how you feel in a daydream and you can't quite realign your vision or focus.
I imagined him at the foot of the bed in this half-darkness. As if he'd been asleep with me but woken to go to the washroom, to check something at the window, anything. And then as if he'd come back to the bed with a sly grin on his face, not a stitch of clothing on his body because why would he wear any after we'd made love, creeping back up to me but hesitating. His golden body, flecked with dappled light, with a plan. A plan! He'd have a plan, to startle with something new. Slinking along these sheets, fabric the color of butter and made of satin, and he would look so out of place but not really because despite his lack of owning any thing he is so innately sophisticated in how he encompasses everything.
His eyes, those eyes, how they look so different when he is hungry for my kiss, when he is hesitant to show how much he wants to devour me. As if some small bit of him still wants to protect me from the wanton part of us; we are in love but it is with both the heart and the flesh and it is almost too invigorating at times. I've thought, of course, about his past existence, his transient times in Paris, London, in the underground world he drew and lived in and I am not naive; I know there had to have been other girls, other women (I cringe, I cringe), because the way he touches is sweetened and gentle when it needs to be, hesitant, even, when it needs to be, but it is not innocent.
And through hazy, sleepy eyes I could also feel his hands, slightly rough, nudge a knee. Nudge both my knees, quivering knees, and in response to even thinking something so provocative I felt my hips buck upward to nothing. Nothing but empty air because he might as well have been a ghost right now for how little I knew of his plight, of where he lay his head this night.
This morning.
I elicited a moan at it. A quiet one but I raced to put one hand to my mouth, bit down, equally mortified and exhilarated at the idea of being caught. Could I be caught anymore, anyway? My father, gone. My mother, gone from me. Cal, finally as removed from me as he should have been all along. I was a woman freed. Molly, she was on some level a chaperone for me these few days but with the understanding that I stood on the precipice of never needing one again; I blushed, now, remembering, because last night over a late meal of fruit and cheese she'd broached the subject of how women must be careful. Careful. She'd said the word softly several times. I nodded, I told her I knew. I wasn't afraid to speak of these things anymore, and I believe she was impressed that I was emboldened enough to face it all head on.
I clamped my hand down tighter, let my other dip to where I felt the ache. Would he say anything, when he touched, when he moved closer? Would I even be able to take it, his mouth closing in? Where was this coming from?
"Good Lord," I breathed it out hurriedly and jumped to my feet, ran to the window and looked for something outside. I wasn't quite sure what. In the faint light I could just make out the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Down below the street was dead still, and for a city that had the reputation of never stopping, of hoards, of the sounds of modernity, it was eerily quiet at just past six in the morning. I saw a bread truck with clouds of flour bouncing behind it. A man running with his hand on his cap and he looked worried.
I was worried. I leaned on the sill and I caught my breath and as much as I wanted nothing more than to think of Jack's head settled between my thighs (who have I become!), the more pressing anxiety concerned when I would see him at all. I wondered if Cal had called in favors, made Jack's passage through Ellis Island something more dangerous than it would have been otherwise. Did his vindictiveness have those kinds of legs?
"Where in the world are you going, then?"
He sat on the settee in the parlour room still in his crimson robe, the one with horrid gold piping at every seam. I heard the crinkle as he straightened a paper because this ship, unbelievably, makes almost no noise. He'd brought papers from twenty cities, removed their finance sections and discarded the rest for Trudy to swoop in silently and dispose of. He glanced down at the bag in my hands. I suppose it was obvious I planned to be gone for much of the day. As gone as you can be on a vessel out at sea. "All I heard from Ruth, from you both, was that you would relax on board. Recover from all the obligations abroad, you said. You've been overly tired, you said. You'd be a new woman here, you said."
His words meant so much more and we both knew it. This thing between us, it wouldn't exist merely floating along the surface anymore. Cal had considered himself patient, I knew, up to this point. I suppose he was right. I suppose I'd been leading him on so long that I'd forgotten all ruses have an end. Or, more likely in this case, an implosion. Last night in my room I'd almost relented, with the cold stone of the necklace pressing on my throat and his eager eyes peppered with a hint (for once) of compassion. One of his hands had brushed my arm, then gently traveled to a thigh. I'd almost given in to the inevitable. The slide. But something stopped me, which is remarkable considering the anxiety of the night, the way I'd felt almost in a psychosis from the stress. Most women would have capitulated, if only from the fatigue of it all.
If I hadn't hung from that stern and met Jack Dawson, smelled him, hated him and admired him and craved him all in the span of seconds, would I have woken up this morning in Cal's bed? Sweaty from him? Definitively his?
"I certainly have been trying." I looked down at the floor. Lies. I knew I shouldn't be going where I was going, not if I had to look away from the man I'd promised myself to and lie. Lies! Last night made me, strangely, want to swim in them. Could I possibly lie myself out of this entire retched engagement? "But I'm antsy, nauseous, the way the rooms feel. Being on deck during the day helps, it does relax me." More lies. "I'll be back soon." Another lie.
I took up a post waiting in the lobby (on a tiny jacquard ottoman, for somehow a whole chair was too much).
Molly had openly discouraged it, the idle sitting and waiting, with that signature heave of a sigh and her weight shifted to one side. Lips curled. I adore her. She reminded me ten times that Jack was more than capable of walking through the glass doors (the ones now safely tucked into my line of vision) and up to the front desk. She'd given the concierge and two managers (one for daytime, one for the evening) such specific instructions re: expecting Jack that bellhops' faces were turning tomato red around us. Molly also had a room on reserve for him, a fact which made my whole body feel as if on fire but also angered me because she of course had no intention of my being in there with him. There were limits to even her liberalism, or altruism, whatever one might call it.
The whole staff, here, on some odd alert. The Waldorf at attention for the sake of our little madness. And undoubtedly some of the ship's former passengers, lingering in New York as well, buzzed like bees with the honey of it, this scandal. But no one so much as me, sitting there in a silk moire dress the color of a ripe Georgia peach. My favorite. The only one I'd made absolutely sure to grab in the frenzy of leaving my mother's presence, somehow now days before; it was made on special order in Philadelphia, from a bolt of fabric that had belonged to my father's mother and sat in storage at the foot of her bed for years and years. She'd bought it in Geneva, he said, when she was still in her forties and vivacious. Her name was Helena. I knew her only in her frail seventies, for she'd had her children later than was the norm, but she always reminded me: "Rose, I stopped men dead in their tracks, until I'd say...until I was about fifty. Then it turned." And I'd laugh and sit at her feet and trace the jewels in her rings with my tiny hands.
That's what they'd said about me. When I came out. That I stopped men in their tracks. At the cotillions I was a vision in white. I danced with ten, fifteen men, young men, men with chiseled jaws and perfect posture and warm bodies lean in tails. Never in my life, as I'd paraded around with a champagne head, would I have considered that it would be Caledon Hockley who swooped in and gripped my hand, plucked me from the sea of white and flowers and booze and took me out of play. For it was all a game, wasn't it?
I held my hands in my lap. Listened to the clicking of canes on the tiled floor. Watched as those with early checkout times glided by. But it was quiet, for the most part, as most of the people staying here would have little reason to rise before ten. I'd had a hot cup of black coffee and one croissant and I was willing to camp out on this ottoman all day with no additional fuel.
Just to think of him, of Jack, on his way to me. That was enough fuel altogether.
I was so focused on the doors, on my own adrenaline, that looking back now I'm not surprised I didn't hear an approach. Even though his shoes are loud. He clamps down on a floor. Owns a floor. Owns the room.
"Will he be here soon, then?" I startled and it took a full ten seconds before I realized that the imposing male figure settling in on the couch was Cal. He wore a barley-white vest, tan trousers, he basically blended into the furniture. "He'll walk through those doors and then what, Rose? What in the world comes next?" He leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. "After the fantasy fades, it's the streets, eh?"
Molly must have known he was staying here. That's why she hadn't wanted me alone in the lobby, some sitting duck. God bless her but perhaps she should have just bit the bullet and told me.
"Is my mother here?" I felt bird wings inside my fucking chest, somehow, flapping. I stared straight ahead, but I felt the pulse and the heat of his scent bearing down on me. I wished it was a dream and I could wake up in the bed in the suite again. Hide away. Wait upstairs. "Is she?"
A standstill.
But he sighed, finally, and gave in; Cal shifted his weight back and sat rather casually, left arm draped across the couch. He looked tired. "She's already on a train, Rose." I let out a breath as he spoke, confused about whether I should be relieved or disappointed at this information. "First one out this morning. I had a car arranged for her. I believe she was quite frightened of running into you. Or the boy." I swallowed and my throat was dry, with a huge lump in it. I needed water. I needed Jack. I wanted Jack. I suppose it wasn't good, after this whole ordeal, if I needed a man in order to save me from my problems. Only I could do that. Jack had even said it.
"Are you going to help her?" I looked at him and as much as I loathe to admit it, I think I knew that my eyes, slightly hooded, had a sadness but also something bordering on sultry. Shameful, to be sure, but it was my mother at stake. For all that I hated the emptiness of her, the shallowness, her absence, she was still mine. "Cal, help her, something, a little something."
Our eyes locked and yes, Lord, it was there. Whatever little dark spark had infiltrated from him in the before. It was validation, I suppose, so that I could remind myself I wasn't insane; in the beginning, months ago, there had been moments when the way he smoldered turned something on in me. I bit my lip and nodded...in resignation of some sort, perhaps? That despite it all I would request this one last thing from him.
"We've struck a deal of sorts, don't worry." The darkness multiplied, but then he caught himself. "Rose, she'll be fine. Maybe not so much of the winters in France anymore, but she'll be fine." Was he even-toned, just a bit? I suppose I allowed myself to believe that even a man like him might have been affected by losing something he'd been promised. Someone he'd been promised. There was silence. A woman with a hat covered in a mass of peacock feathers walked by and I felt sick, really, sick at my core and as if I might vomit bile. "She seems to think your having your head in the clouds and your," he paused and there was the classic sneer once again, "attention in less desirable places will be the early death of her."
I steeled myself. "She will be fine, as you say," I looked straight ahead again, but the doors were silent, "she has quite a bit of industry in her when it's necessary."
"You wouldn't consider it once more then, Rose, fixing this?" I turned slowly, maybe after about twenty stark seconds, and his eyes were watery in a way I'd never seen, even when we'd sat in the world's most cigar-filled rooms and the smoke would infect our sinuses. Was he really having one more go at this? At me? "For the sake of her, for your future, for...propriety's sake?" He smiled a condescending smile and moved a hand brazenly to top both of mine. My skin burned and I hated how close he came to my body at all but my reaction time was pathetic. "I could forgive it all if you walked away now, from…"
It took me a moment. To process that a man like this would try again. He knew that I'd bared myself to Jack, that my virginity was in the wind. In his eyes I'd been soiled. And yet.
I suppose he wanted to win. "I always win." He'd said that to me before.
Not this time.
With the weight of his hand still on mine I nodded, confusing him at first. But I spoke low and even, as I didn't want there to be any question after today. Not for him. Not for or in myself. "Cal I'd say that propriety and I have an awful relationship now." I smiled, actually. This confused him even more. "I think perhaps we'll part ways indefinitely. As for my mother, she's been telling me my head was in the clouds for years, and that's one thing she's absolutely right about." I began to push against his grasp. But I was gentle. "So thank you, but no thank you, Cal. I know what I want, and who I want."
But he looked to the side and grinned and that didn't match any kind of reaction I'd expected from my words. I followed his gaze and...
Mortified, I stood and flung his hand from me in the same instant. That I hadn't done so minutes earlier, it confounded me, made me feel like I was in a coma and watching the world go by.
"Jack." My voice sounded rough but his name was like a hymn on my lips.
He stood there, so real, his knapsack over his shoulder in this hopeful motion but his eyes had fallen and looked cloudy. Another three seconds and his whole disposition slumped. Down, down, down. My heart broke into seven thousand pieces, fell down as well. His mouth opened and closed several times and then he settled into the silence. Looked to me for guidance but I'm afraid he misinterpreted where my guilt came from. He mistook what brand of guilt it might be, pleading, in my gaze. When Cal cleared his throat and said just his name, said "Dawson" confidently and with controlled venom, that was what sent the moment over the edge.
Jack looked into me in disbelief. Blue eyes, red marks in the white. He couldn't have slept. I thought of him up, awake and thinking of me through some dismal night on a pallet, on a floor. I started toward him but he turned. I heard his shoes slip just the tiniest bit on the polished floor and then he walked hurriedly through the doors he'd just entered.
Author's Note:
GET READY YOU GUYS...
xxRGD
