It was an innocent mistake. Perhaps the only innocent mistake he had ever made in his sordid little life. One born out of a very sincere and very real moment of panic and concern—the sort of thing any good husband would have been compelled by, had it been for their good little wives.
He had been sitting by the fire in the parlor in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, his swallowtail jacket stained and reeking from the wine his little Beatrice had thrown into his face at dinner. The bottle itself now sat upon a jiggling knee, one hand clawed around the neck with a grip that threatened to splinter glass. There was little need for propriety, not with Christine locked away in her room like an anchoress, the sound of the running bath water signifying that she was thoroughly exhausted and finished with his companionship for the evening.
Let the pipes burst. Let this whole god-forsaken house be washed away into the lake, and this whole farce with it. He raised the bottle to his bloated maw and, taking long pull, sunk lower into his armchair. It was deeply unfair of the monster to make those insinuations about his darling for the sake of reading a book—even one so piquant as Nana—and yet, he could not help but fall into a simmering rage.
Perhaps not at her, no.
Never at her.
Another pull of wine.
Was he also not a naïf in his own right, palms pressed against glass, thirsting for knowledge that no one would rightfully deign to give him?
He lingered in this self-pitying torpor for some time, too tippled to physically move and too mortified with himself to want to. When he turned the bottle up yet again and found it empty, he dropped it on the rug beneath him in disgust and sneered before throwing a gloved hand over his eyes.
Macau came to him, or the memory did. So to did the image of Dom Guilherme, a crusty-nostriled antiques dealer and wealthy pack rat who liked the monster's conversation and ability to "mysteriously" come across highly-coveted goods more than he cared about his gruesome nature or eccentricities. Likewise, Guilherme also appreciated his unusual friend's disinterest in asking the wrong sort of questions—thusly, dinner and endless games of xiangqi at Dom Guilherme's large, ramshackle house had become something of a fixture. The recollection of their short but amicable relationship was almost enough to make him smile. He had been so very young then, hardly any older than his Christine—still untouched by the little Sultana, still left with the smallest sliver of hope he'd one day get to live like everyone else.
The otherwise quaintness of their little soirées—from the food, to the chipped and eclectic plates, to Dom Guilherme and his wife Dona Wei's superhuman ability to bicker with each other in Cantonese from across their large jacaranda dinner table, falsely assuming he could not understand them—left a strange, sad warmth in what remained of his heart. Dinner would end, and at his host's urging, he would sit at the beautiful spinet in the parlor and play whatever fashionable Portuguese ditties Dom Guilherme requested, until the promise of more wine and a good match of xiangqi became too much to resist. But in the moments where only music spoke, the boisterous old man would go quiet, the permanent frown on Dona Wei's face would soften, and the monster himself could imagine that this was normalcy. That he was their gifted son, home from university for the summer, as eager to impress them with the fruits of his study as they were to receive them.
And so he delighted in Dom Guilherme's company, even if he rolled his eyes at the man's aristocratic airs and proclivity towards terrible pet names.
"Oh, my dear Dico," Guilherme would usually sigh after two or three glasses of port into the evening, rubbing his perennially runny nose across his sleeve and batting his eyes. "Whatever will I do when you go? You shall leave me and my dear darling in absolute penury."
"What makes you think I'm leaving you, senhor?" he'd dutifully respond in turn, a smile curling across his face, or what little of it was visible. On most evenings, Guilherme's answer would consist of some theatrical flattery regarding his clever hands or quick thinking. But on one particularly humid August night, it was—
"Because you're a young man! Oh, Dico, I don't need to see your face to know it, not when we're in the presence of a beautiful woman, if you catch my drift!" At this, the dealer would slap his knee and rumble with laughter, enough to lightly startle the woman sitting and scowling at them both from the corner of the parlor as she sewed. "A young man can't be trusted to stay put when he's in want of a wife. Wouldn't you say so, fofinha?"
"I wouldn't know," she shot back at him in Cantonese, lowering her needle. "The way you obsess and moon over our guest, I'd think you were the young man and he the beautiful woman."
Dona Wei's words had the sort of sting he naively thought could no longer hurt him, and the monster jumped up from the floor cushions to make a hasty and embarrassed departure. The already emasculating conversation was beginning to circle back to his face and the possibility for it to escalate to disaster was thick in his mind—heaven knows it would have not been the first time.
"By God, our lad's quite the polyglot!" roared Guilherme, laughing and standing to stop his guest by clapping him about the shoulders. "Don't mind that one, she's only mad that you've clocked her words properly... and that our business takes your's truly away from doting on her. She'd do well to remember that our business supplies me with the means to worship her properly. Now, now, now, Dico—" and here he nudged the corpse back down towards the floor, his laughter dissipating into an almost paternal gentleness. "Nothing was meant by it, nothing at all."
When Dom Guilherme was convinced his guest was not going to leave and spoil his good mood, he sat back down and cleared his throat. As he reached for the decanter to refresh everyone's glasses, a shadow passed across the dealer's wet face when he realized it had been drained entirely.
"Pah," the older man exclaimed, throwing a hand into the air. "Empty! A tragedy!" The monster cringed slightly, the overly-apologetic theatrics only heightening his anxiety. Sweat was gathering beneath his bottom lip, the only exposed part of his face, and suddenly he remembered the shame of a cage. Over the increasingly loud thrum of the blood running through his veins, he vaguely heard Dom Guilherme demand his wife fetch them a bottle of baiju, the sorghum liquor any good Macanese house would have at the ready. It was only the slamming of Dona Wei's palms on the game table and the way it caused the ivory xianqi pieces to clatter across the board that slowed his heart.
"Sim, Dom Guilherme," she grimaced, snatching their port glasses away before the monster could point out that his was still half-full. "Dom and Dona, my fucking foot. You're nothing but the son of a conman and a whore, and I'm the wretch who married you." And saying so, she left the room, leaving the two men in uncomfortable silence, Guilherme flushed with embarrassment and unidentifiable emotion, the monster torn between laughing and slipping out the window.
"If you don't mind me saying so, senhor," the monster started, when the silence became too much for even him to bear, "for such a finely bred woman, your lady has quite the tongue on her."
This had apparently been the correct thing to say, for the morose, curdled expression on Guilherme's face lifted quickly and was replaced by a broad, golden-toothed smile.
"She's quite the hoyden, my darling," he replied, picking up the tiles and trying his best to recover their game, however in vain. As he slapped them back down, Dom Guilherme looked the younger man straight in his masked face and leaned closer. "But I must say, as a man of experience, Dico, it makes me love her all the more." The monster's astonishment must have been evident in his eyes, for the other man continued—"The pleasant, quiet women, ah, well, they are nice enough as sweethearts, I suppose. But it's the ones that spit fire that make the best lovers. They know how to get under your skin, how to burn you, far more than any pretty little virgin. And when a woman has that kind of knowledge—oh, Dico, you've never felt such a thrill."
It was at this moment that Dona Wei returned, bearing the liquor and two clean glasses, and the monster had never been more grateful for her. While Guilherme's lack of propriety was normally a source of amusement, in this moment, it had just crossed a boundary that almost felt physically painful—it stiffened and leadened his thin body, and caused the drum in his heart, his ears, and his groin to resume.
"Your drinks," Dona Wei spat at her husband, setting the glasses down with enough force to rattle the tiles again. "Pour them yourself, why don't you?" She then turned to face the monster, and bowed slightly. "My apologies for my husband, Senhor Eurico," she murmured in Portuguese, and it was here he made the mistake of meeting her gaze. The usual contempt was still there, but it had been softened by pity, as if Dona Wei could sense the extent of his deformity and a fraction of the life that came with it—so heavy was the mortification emanating from the monster over nothing more than mere schoolboy chatter. "You are, at least, one of the more pleasant brigands my husband brings here, at least."
He had laughed politely at her backhanded compliment, enough that he caught the corner of her mouth turning up momentarily. That night, after stumbling to his cramped flat by the Leal Senado and falling upon his pallet, the monster pondered Dona Wei's words, as few and curt as they were, and the disquieting expression that accompanied them. Senhor Eurico, she called him, so formal and so familiar. She was not quite the Venus Dom Guilherme made her out to be, but when he thought of her dark eyes locking onto him and the slight dimpling of her mouth, he thrust a hand down his trousers and spent himself quickly to the memory of her voice around his name. Senhor Eurico. Eurico. Erik. My hideous Erik.
That was the thrill Dom Guilherme cherished, he supposed, staring at his hands in exhausted disgust by the gilt moonlight. Being at the mercy of a woman who had the power to hate you and love you at equal lengths, and the pleasure of knowing she decided to give you the latter when she wielded the former just as intensely.
When Christine threw that wine in his face at dinner, it was all he could do to keep himself from clawing at her dress like an animal. She had shared in his music and seen him at his most ugly, yet it was an ordinary glass of Gewürztraminer and the vaguest insinuation that she was not quite the little nun he styled her that had Erik so painfully hard and so utterly miserable. He was struck by the sheer Baroqueness of the situation, how love and spite wove around one another, tighter and tighter, the longer she stayed with him in his queer house on the lake.
It had been safe to love Christine from afar, to listen to her voice and enjoy the childlike trust she had in the angel. To know there was nothing but chaste adoration in her heart. But this Christine—this fuming, pitying, funny, fast-thinking, and achingly real woman—would surely be his death.
Just as he began to entertain the idea of going to bed, if only to fuck into his hand for the 800th time since he had spirited away his little tempest, the monster heard a loud sloshing noise. He was deep enough into his cups to imagine it was the siren at first, come to drag him down to the watery hell he deserved—that was, until a loud, earthbound cry accompanied the commotion. One that was most assuredly coming from within his home, and from Christine's quarters at that.
He jolted up in his seat and twisted around in the direction of her voice, the silence squeezing at his heart. When he heard her cry out again, still accompanied by the heavy sounds of splashing, all of his darling's gutless talk of suicide flew back to Erik, and he wondered how he could have been so stupid as to have ever, ever left Christine alone with herself.
His gifts of discretion and privacy were dashed to the rocks, so quickly did Erik move to disable the lock on her bedroom door. Her wrenching moans, muffled through the walls of the house, now engulfed him utterly, compelling him to the brass handle that open way into the inner sanctum of her bathroom. He rapped on the heavy door with a sharp knuckle, sweating, and when Christine failed to acknowledge it with anything besides more anguished keening—it was poison, he knew. She had managed to pilfer something to put an end to her suffering, or else open her veins or else—
What Erik saw when he threw open the door, however, was both far from death and yet grotesquely similar—her golden head damp and half submerged in bath water like Ophelia, lips slackened and red, eyes shut, her little left hand diving into the nexus between her thighs, two nipples jutting through the surface of the soapy water—
He wasn't sure how long her stood over her, wraithlike and suspended in lust, but some small movement must have caught her attention behind those rose petal lids. Christine opened her eyes, uncomprehending and wondrous for a moment that felt longer than the sum of his whole despicable existence. And then—then she truly screamed.
It was an innocent mistake.
And a thrill.
A horrible, horrible thrill.
I am so sorry for the long delay. Inasmuch as I have a roadmap of where this goes, I really struggled to write this next chapter—until I decided to write it from Erik's point-of-view, and then suddenly everything else felt unlocked and easy. Next chapter should be coming shortly now. Amazing what a small, but significant decision can do.
Dico is a nickname for Eurico, which, if I wasn't clear enough, is the Portuguese equivalent of you-know-who. Muito obrigada pela sua paciência xoxo.