I don't really know what to say about this chapter except that I'm so excited that we're finally at this part. The final scene has taken me almost 9 months to write and rewrite, which is a really long time, but I wanted it to be good. This is a long chapter for a reason--I didn't want the Hatter to leave. I'm very fond of him. I'm fond of you too: thanks for your thoughts and reviews, you know I love to hear from you.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
Graham Greene
Alice was not really the sort of girl who publicly participated in that peculiar sport known as goggling like a cod, which made her open-mouthed surprise upon her alighting into the marble entryway all the more archly enjoyable for the Hatter, who really began secretly to triumph when the apples of her cheeks appeared brightly and she smiled rhapsodic, actually showing her teeth for the first time since he'd seen her. She let loose the silk ruched opera cloak hooded about her and promptly forgot its existence as it was spirited safely away.
Everything for a ball becomes elevated into an excess we welcome with open arms, for gloves are not mere gloves but opera gloves, and great coats must be Inverness, and shirtfronts made of nothing less than marcella, and there are ribbons and opera hats to be appointed with precision, silk dress scarves and pure silver cufflinks the shape of trumpeting elephants, hothouse gardenias to be slaughtered en masse for a roomful of boutonnières on spinning lapels, and along with all the stock Earls and Dukes are the Marchionesses, Chevaliers, Sahiba, and Grandees. Every punch bowl is filled with claret-cup so calm and serene that the floating mint sprigs are as contemplative as lily pads, but they will remain untouched tonight, for there is that king of wines, champagne, that hazy golden gazing pool into which the Bacchanalian will soon find a version of themselves staring back that they had forgotten about in the daylight hours, or missed terribly, or never been formally introduced to.
The villa on the lake was a very large and charming rectangular house, and it was just a little serendipitous, but likely planned, that the invitation had apparently instructed that the dress be white tie. Every ceiling space had been set a-glister with chandeliers as tierful as cakes inverted, and Alice's gown began to shed its sober bluish white and hint harmoniously with the warm glow that radiated outward from the very essence of the white and cream and black and gold gathering already at hand. Ceilings high and moulding delicate, she could have stood on that same precise tile where she had stopped the clicking of her court heels to stare all night, but the Hatter began to coax her forward, toward the sound of the overture and a rising din of the vox populi.
If Alice had felt upon opening her wardrobe that morning a certain embarrassment at the sheer opulence of her own gown, white and flounced and ruched and flowing silently out from her, the newly arrived women here had put the 'crowning touch to their own audacities' with more ribbons and ruffles and extraordinary lengths of train that she wondered at their ever being able to sit for dinner. Further within was a double staircase, bursting at the railings with coteries of the well-born and bred, who were so bedecked with opals and sheenful silks and quizzing glasses that the walls were set to a bright flame by the swinging pendants' sharp reflections. She had been striding quickly—or at least the Hatter was, he was always striding about a place and Alice found herself practically running taking skipping steps to keep up—toward the epicenter of things when a human form reared up on the horizon before Alice, but before she could either stop or apologize for failing that, the person there embraced her in a startlingly continental fashion and then pulled Alice back to have a good look at her.
"This is La Contessa," said the Hatter, and it was a few ticks before Alice realized he was introducing her. La Contessa was a great hearty black-haired blossom of a woman in about five hundred yards of unruffled thick pink silk and hung with pearls, breaking the dress code in a very prepossessing sight as she stood out in the crowd. She might have been the hostess or some viceregent for whoever the host was, for she was receiving people, smiling at everyone in exactly the same way, as if to ask rhetorically why there hadn't always been a party here, and why haven't you been here all this time anyway? This was the face she gave to Alice, and she said as if to confirm something,
"You are lovely, dear, absolutely," in a strange accent Alice had never heard before.
"Oh, ah," said Alice, who was still recovering from this exchange of something like formalities. The woman's mouth moved again, and she was saying something, but there began quite a wall of sound, and then Alice was alone in the crowd.
The source of this clangor came from up above near the railing at the landing, and Alice followed the waving gloved fingers. Now, the only way to properly start a ball is to send up a welcome flare that addresses the business of the evening, which if you are well-heeled and experienced is the business of drinking. And the best way to say "what ho" to a lot of already chummy people who are about as taciturn as a foghorn to get on with the thing is in the form of a drinking song, and this was precisely what the Hatter had either taken upon himself or had been recruited into doing, for the woman called La Contessa stood next to him at the top of the balustrade as he launched into his cue. Alice could follow the words, and this is the translation of what he sang:
Let us drink from the goblets of joy adorned with beauty,
and the fleeting hour shall be adorned with pleasure.
Let us drink to the secret raptures which love excites,
for this eye reigns supreme in my heart.
Let us drink, for with wine
love will enjoy yet more passionate kisses.
He had a fine voice, the twirling sways and dips clear without much effort—it really was a fine voice, she thought. The light seemed to change on the pair at the top of the staircase, for the Hatter's white was crisp, the black depthless. It was the contrast between the two tones and the lack of a hazy shimmer, perhaps, that set him aloft, Chairman of the sybaritic ritual. Alice wondered if he opened every fine ball with this florid petition to drink, drink, drink. But then he paused, and with a throaty voice and a full heart, La Contessa sang the responding call, hailing the ancient paired virtues of love and wine, and Alice was following down with her eyes the patterns in the iron wrought bannisters when she startled and jumped a bit; everybody around her sang back to the pair above, which again translated was
Be happy--wine and song
and laughter beautify the night;
let the new day find us in this paradise.
This entreaty from the chorus was a pretty sentiment, and then Alice realized that everyone here really truly hoped and knew in their hearts that tomorrow would find them in a comfortable way. These people lived in a world removed from even the detachment of the Wonderland, some gorgeous rooftop panascape of society where the music was always in a swell, where parties ran into parties and merged effortlessly upstairs and downstairs in glowing halls and castles, where the champagne flowed in great tiered waterfalls, where the orchestra never grew tired and played one's favorite waltz every hour, where the flower arrangements never wilted with the dawn, where the host was never to be found, and where the only memory one could possibly draw from it all was that it had been the best years of one's life, no matter how long it all was. It was an epoch apart from all others, and if it ever ended, it could never be called back through any number of nostalgic seances or afternoons spent wondering whatever happened to Vicomte So-and-So.
A deep, throttling bassline pop accompanied the final note, and with that the crowd gave a great whoop at seeing the hiss of smoke from the evening's first foamy champagne bottle held over their heads, La Contessa pouring and sipping, the Hatter bowing theatrically to her, and everybody sinking back into excited chattering as they gushed full-blown into the ballroom, already tipsy with anticipation. She watched them go, a cavalcade of wealth and aigrettes and crystals and sheen. There was a sliding feeling under her right elbow and she looked up to find his ever-sunny smile and then La Contessa leaning forward to reveal herself and smile in an equally magnanimous fashion on the Hatter's right arm. Alice pulled her back very straight and let herself be guided into the room with endlessly high ceilings.
Alice was not a foolish girl; she had been to many balls before and was well-versed in the subtle machinations that society contrived to impose upon her and other young women of a certain age and class. People who threw balls—the well-to-do, those of a certain named status—often in these times repurposed a rather large drawing room for the occasion, keeping the white chairs stacked in the attic. Few had true ballrooms, tiled golden miniature palaces kept in quieted darkness for most of the year, only opened and pulled from the hush and into their high station for these peerless events. She had never the occasion to attend one like this. The orchestra was pitted rather formidably on one end, and had easily swept the couples there into a closely-timed revolving sequence of tulle and silk so that they all looked like the tiny figures in a music box on a grand scale.
"Do let's have some caviar," the Hatter was saying, "Oh, but you don't mind, do you?" Alice was already halfway through the thought of how to navigate closer to the table when she discovered that her escort for the evening and the woman in the thousand yards of pink were ten feet away and heading through the black and cream crowd to dance. "I'll be right back!" he called over his shoulder before disappearing.
Alice let her arm drop to her side and straightened her back, standing very still. This sudden retreat and leaving her alone by the punch bowl was not what she had signed up for, and not only that, it was exceedingly embarrassing and it was not—she swiftly stepped out of the tracks of a particularly zealous couple and moved with force and grace over to a table covered with strawberries and petit fours arranged in a great wedding cake of a tower. She chose one with black and white pinstripes and turned to look through the plaster moulded archway nearby, curiosity determining, no, demanding that she wasn't going to hang about to feel like a sheet of the wallpapering. Alice looked over her shoulder; she couldn't even see the Hatter now, and anyway it was a rather long piece to open the dance floor—he couldn't possibly miss her, she thought. Not even a whit. She passed through it, and into a small marbled hallway, and then through a door where she could hear voices.
It was halfway into the dark room with the black-walnut moulding panels before she realized that the only light was spotlighted on a meeting or brain trust of sorts, all gathered in very dark red finial-topped chairs with a lot of hazy smoke hanging over their heads, all around a long oval playing table. The first man she saw rise was very neat, with parted black hair, a pencilled mustache, and an opera cigarette holder extending rather comically out of him, for he was very thin, and this only lent itself to further reflection on his size. The other men were very large and teardrop shaped, their mustaches neatly waxed and curled so securely at their ends that before Alice stumbled backwards through a door repeating quiet apologies, she had to press down the wondering thought of whether they would fall over if she stuck a knuckle in each loop and gave it a good tug.
But the passage she had gone through was an egress (for she certainly didn't want to go back through there), and Alice found herself at the base of an imperial staircase this time. She could hear people milling about upstairs, and followed a pair of young men up the landings. One of them was showing the other a peculiar walking stick he had, which contained inside it a long bayonet, and with a grating shhhank he produced the heavy sharp blade and nearly took off his friend's ear. She passed their ensuing argument quickly, hoping to reach whatever was going on up above with her head mostly attached.
There was an odd, earthy smell at the top, and Alice followed it into a white conservatory at the roofline, one whole side of which was nothing but tall plate glass windows overlooking the blackened lake. There were no lights beyond to suggest people in their regular homes living their normal lives (whatever that meant); the forest was dark and sleeping. She hoped it was sleeping anyway, and not busying itself by devouring creatures. There was enough to do already, and here she was at a party in some grand house, and... she felt guilty for feeling guilty, which in turn felt silly. Alice sighed and went over to a long cushioned seat edged with glaxinias to taste the petit four, which turned out to be quite good, as it had buttercream inside and the pinstripes were actually part of a pleasing semi-shell of chocolate.
"Here you are," said a quiet voice, and the Hatter handed her one of the shining coupes of bubbles, "I thought you had tripped along outside, fallen into the lake and got inhaled by a shark or something." She did not reply but took the glass into her hands and watched the tiny streams of fizz that seemed to come from the glass neverending. He seated himself at the other end of the white banquette and they sat like that, in the long golden humidity of the belvedere, looking out over the lake from high up above, and Alice counted the tiny electric lights above them, strung like ship flags. She couldn't voice the complaint growing from suspicion; if he wanted to dance with someone, it was a ball and that was what people did. It was peaceable here, but for a few murmuring voices that drifted into a vague brume of distant sound. He seemed to be waiting, though.
"Your sartorial choices are along the paved path this evening. I daresay you disappoint me," said Alice after the long quiet. He looked at her and said genuinely,
"I exceed—or rather, don't quite match—your expectations of me, I gather. You thought I'd wear something... flashy, or in clashing colors, perhaps, and here I am, monochromatic all over. Your own armoire knows how to make you fetching as ever." She looked down at the swishing and roiling folds at her feet that shifted and wavered halfway between white and pale gold now.
"And you follow rules and logic so easily? You are not as mad as I thought," she said, and then reached and poked him in the shoulder teasingly before cupping both hands around the bowl of the glass.
"A small price to pay for an invitation the next year, and it certainly isn't as if I suffer," he said, shifting down the cushion so that there were only two buttons between them instead of five, "The luxurious way others are swanking about in this world, and the fact that one may easily share in that gilded light, is quite reassuring."
"And you come despite no tea to drink?" He had the cup at his lip but turned at her words and put a wrist to his forehead with a grave expression.
"How shall I withstand this horrific imposition upon my very soul? Oh that there was something else to drink," all drama, and then brightened suddenly. "Chin-chin!" said the Hatter with glee, and tipped back the glass.
Alice glanced over her shoulder at the sudden rustling noise there, and pulled back one of the large waxy leaves of the succulent only to carelessly let it whipsnap back. She turned and began a staring contest with her glass. The couple there behind their bench seemed quite engaged, and she spoke again to tone them out of mind.
"You say you get invited back every year, are you the charming wit of the night?"
"Perhaps, perhaps." She briefly considered sipping the champagne. "I've never had anyone complain that I was upright, within my boundaries, or on an even keel of a temperament. My dress is one thing, my juggling the apéritif glasses every time the head footman tries to pour is another. Sometimes the clothes don't make the man." And then he cocked his head to the side. "And that must be what surprises you, I think. You anticipate oddity, and when there is normalcy, you raise your eyebrows—it's all very amusing, you know."
"I am glad I provide you with something to chuckle over in that fashion of yours," she said with a wry look at him sideways, "And I understand that the only constant here is chaos--"
"--for which you are admirably clever. But, philosophically, isn't normalcy a part of chaos? If all you see coming is more chaos, that leads to complacency. You begin to predict nothing but surprises, and it becomes reasonable, rational, normal--those words and concepts you have such an attachment to." His tone was not unkind. "Oddments of what you understand from your life or that you find usual astonish you, perhaps, because you've adjusted. Dear girl, you've arrived," he said, and chuckled broadly, and then smacked the broad leaf behind them so hard that a high pitched squeal broke the ensuing congress, and they heard a pair of fast retreating footsteps.
"Awfully crowded up here," he said to just Alice in the conservatory, vastly amused with himself.
"I suppose so."
"You know, everyone is inside, which means that no one is outside. Do you want to see something?" Alice rose and contemplated his proffered right arm for a moment before they stepped out.
"You don't seem to much like the Duchess," said Alice quietly, swinging herself in a circle, stepping gently round one of the lampposts on the outdoor tennis courts and hoping that this was not too blunt a declaration. It was raining gently tonight, perhaps on account of there being a party, for the tinselly sound of mist on the striped canvas pavilion was sweet and pleasant.
"What do you mean by that?" He did not seem offended, merely curious as he followed her trail around the post from the ground like a horse following its trainer in circles, or to catch her fall.
"Well, I admit I assume, but she certainly does use her position to influence you. Helping me, and then her censure of your costume choice. I don't wonder at your preferring these foreign peers. She does command you."
"Does she?" The Hatter seemed struck by this idea, sounding for all as if Alice had just told him the Duchess wore sparring gloves at court.
"But I would not think that you would enjoy her ordering you about the countryside here and there—you do not seem to be of the classic feudal spirit. I imagine you a far more independent soul." He handed her down lightly and they walked arm in arm, the Hatter stepping in great leggy lengths over the net while steering Alice to its endpost.
"I am not hers to command—her demands are merely the last vestiges of reparations for past transgressions." He actually sounded tentative, diplomatic.
"Oh, is that how you've come to this arrangement? What a turn of phrase. You were in prison, that's right." She could not help but smile a bit; out in the open air it came easier again, with warmth and temerity.
"Ah, yes, there was that unfortunate stint spent under lock and key," this said with the slightest of winces. "The mark upon my brow. Deuced painful and all that," he added.
"But she did not put you there—surely she doesn't have the authority to tell you what to do?"
"We parted brass rags some time ago on the subject," he replied with sobriety.
"How dangerous and satisfying it is to be close companions with a convicted felon!" Alice said, half-joking. "Very good of you to not bend to her will." It was the principle of the thing, and here Alice, with greatly understanding appreciation for the sort of fortitude it took to stand up to royalty, found herself in concert with the Hatter, who seemed to cheer a bit on hearing this.
"Indeed, I told her something to the effect that we would meet again at Philippi—and she raised her chin as you women are wont to do, and with iron in her flashing gaze said, 'Buzz off, then, you beezer!' And I replied, "Right-ho," and heartily buzzed away." He looked absolutely delighted at the story, and Alice laughed in perfect appreciation.
"You see, I told you those books would come in handy."
"It's funny," said Alice conversationally, "I don't remember that at all. In fact, if I do recall, you declared yourself 'the most boredest man alive' when I began going through them."
"Well, you're here now, living history at its finest. Let no one say that I do not make efforts toward the proper education of today's youth." Alice smiled at him sardonically in the dim light but turned back to the large white thing at the center of the hedge maze regardless. He held the torch closer; they had picked it out of a wrought iron sconce at the entrance that didn't want to give it up, so what had started as a simple maneuver wound up involving pinched fingers and nearly singed eyebrows.
"His Imperial Highness The Argot," she repeated from his earlier pronouncement. It was a marble statute of a young man in an odd suit with a sort of obstreporous slouchy look, not exactly the regal bearing of someone she thought would have restructured the kingdom.
"This is the one who 'cleaved the lands in twain,' as they say. He only split it north and south, but there's four sections now. Every leader follows in his footsteps by overhauling the government just as it's gotten settled down and we're all used to it, I think just to keep things zesty."
"What's out past the Wonderland?" she said. The Hatter reached up and began to rub at something in his eye.
"Oh, not much. Swamps, I think, or something. Anyway, there's our first great ruler in statuary form. What a riot he was. The history books always describe him standing at the top viewing window where the crowds came to bask in his glory. He would just stand there yelling, so people didn't bother with respectful silence or anything like that. I think most of his political speeches involved reading off the costermonger's bill for the palace. Very inspired."
"I see. And how does your friend, La Contessa, how is she involved in all of this?"
"Oh, she's among these foreigners. That was all him, he let them build here. This whole estate is a bit of an embassy, one might call it, a safehaven for the sort of rot we all get up to at these wingdings."
"I thought you said they didn't speak English—everyone here just has a funny accent."
"Oh, that. They can't write in English for anything, but they picked up on the speaking, double-quick."
"What sort of an accent is that, anyway?"
"An indescribable one, I think." He was looking into the clouds as he spoke.
"Who is she?"
"Who?"
"La Contessa."
"She's very kind."
"Well, yes," said Alice a bit stilted, "But who is she?" He wrinkled his nose at this and seemed to have a growing suspicion that it was a trick question.
"A... foreign... peer?"
"No, no." Now he stared at her blankly. "How do you know her?"
"Oh." And there was a pause, but Alice couldn't really understand his expression in the contrast of shadow and light. "People get around to these parties, you know. They all wind up being the same lot if you don't start bringing in fascinating outsiders for everybody to speculate over." Alice felt distinctly that she wasn't really getting anywhere with this, much like a lot of other things she was trying to get on with. Running in circles and getting nothing done except a party, she thought, and then pushed the guilt down and wondered if it was learning to float. Could guilt be drowned?
"What is she like?" she said after another pause in which he shifted his weight on the correspondingly crunching gravel. "Besides kind," she was quick to add. He looked up and over at the hedges surrounding and she watched a diffused glow from the flame in his farside hand come softly round to the broad freckled cheek she was closest to. He was so serious, it was almost comical, him with a complexion like a boy in knickerbockers.
"Maternal," he said finally. They two were quiet for a moment.
Alice took the still-warm tailcoat he had given her in the slight mist from about her shoulders and held it out for him, not in a handful of limp cloth, but by the collar and with both armholes at the ready, and he stooped to awkwardly backward into it, having to eventually stuff the torch's point into The Argot's open coat pocket. They both slowly smoothed out the coat, and then she took his arm again and they went back into the party through the portico door.
Alice and the Hatter hung back near the archway, waiting to step into the criss-crossing lines and splendid grid of whirling couples, carefully timing their entry as they would if standing on the curb of a heavily trafficked road, and he put her arm about her waist and they waltzed like that, right along with everyone else to the Imperial sound. He spun them both as one in concentric twirls across the dance floor, for the orchestra played Wein, Weib Und Gesang just as though some Empress herself was about to enter from the broad-side staircase to lead the whole of the party in some charming new boxstep. There was plenty of room, and they eventually weren't even waltzing, just sliding on their soles, sometimes catching their feet perfectly, sometimes tripping over each other and stumbling, laughing. Her skirts flipped over on themselves and she caught them out the side of her eye, just a flash of white somewhere over there like she was chasing herself, just out of reach around bending corners of a maze.
"Where did you get those earrings?" he said as he leaned slightly over and looked just a tilt up into her face. The golden light from the chandelier was making his eyes an odd navy color instead of their uncanny aqua. Alice raised her hand to her ear and fiddled with the hook a bit awkwardly, having extricated her arm from where he had it gently pinned under his own to lead her off the floor.
"Oh, they weren't terribly dear, they are awfully small," she said. It had been his money, after all.
"Diamonds, that's nice," he said. "Very lucky, you know."
"Lucky that I found them?"
"They are lucky, they bring luck," he said, and gently brushed her earlobe with his glove-tipped thumb to have a better look at its white fire, putting his fingers in a row along her neck beneath that.
"I'm starving," said Alice softly, turning, and started toward a table nearby, where tiny iridescent colors beamed up in oily rainbows from the inner shells of half-oysters. She had sometimes wondered why their secret white sides were so beautiful when they were never really meant to see the light of day—so exquisite and colorful, and never intended to be caught and prised open. Well, but here was a delight and a delicacy; she raised one and had it when she turned and saw his expression.
He was standing exactly where she had left him, his arms folded over his middle and with a look of absolute revolted horror. He even seemed slightly offended. Alice was just furrowing her brow and tilting her head to ask him what was wrong when she remembered the mollusk in her mouth and swallowed quickly. The lingering taste was much worse than she remembered from the usual smooth one motion tilt-and-gulp, and flapping her hand at the table, managed to grab a nearby glass of champagne and bolt the whole thing to subsume the taste—it was tart and drying and sweet, and the flavor mixed well.
Alice recovered, feeling the fizz embrace against her tongue, and looked up a bit sheepishly, finding him with a clear expression. Well, I should certainly hope so, it said. That's what you get.
"What's wrong?" she called, for he would not venture near the table, and instead forced her in a roundabout way to come to him.
"What do you mean, what's wrong? How on earth can you possibly do that?" He had wrinkled one side of his nose as if her very presence rendered her toxic to him.
"Do you not like oysters or something?" He shifted a bit and looked annoyed, though not with her.
"No," he declared. "They're awful." Alice went back to the table and brought them near, but it was like holding up a jellyfish with a knife and a festered grudge as far as he was concerned, the way he bent back away from it, the whites of his eyes coming out.
"Look, they're wonderful." And she tipped it back.
"That's disgusting," he moaned, "Why are you doing this to me?"
"But it's not the shells," she told him, "It's what's inside. You don't eat the shells." She offered it again. "Come on, it's not that bad—whoever heard of eating shells, anyway? This isn't prison." He was beginning to have an expression she didn't have a name for—something like a cross between sulky irritation and growing curiosity. "Don't you want to be luxe?" she said, talking sweet, and held out the other oyster.
After the Hatter had finished his third chaser of champagne they wandered back out onto the side of the floor opposite the oyster table, where she took his hand and murmured soothing commentary on everyone else while they danced, but never approached anything like an apology, as she felt it would just indulge him a bit too well. He had enjoyed the champagne, after all, and his mood shimmered into cheerful clarity as they observed and were observed alike.
There was a man wearing a dressing gown over a rumpled tuxedo who swaggered about in the most bumptious fashion, eyeballing everyone with an up-down, up-down gaze. The rumor around the ice statute of a monkey in a fez, which was surrounded by toast points and slathery smears of softening cheese, was that he was a prince of sorts, but if he were, he took no care in introducing himself to anyone, but everyone seemed to know him anyway, for they gave him quite a large berth when he ambled too near the orchestra and decided that the piano bench would be the perfect spot for a bit of a lie-down, and they wound up dancing three waltzes and a polka without the instrument. One of the footmen passed among the couples bearing a tray of champagne, and they found they could dance without losing a drop, and so Alice had two more glasses besides.
She felt, of a sudden, rather terribly Viennese, and Alice knew somehow that tonight was going to be a very good night.
It is a difficult thing to get drunk on champagne unless you're really having a go at it. Alice did not have this sweet bubbling epiphany of a thought until she rolled over so that the breadth of her cheek was full against the cool black and white tiles on the balustrade above the grand palais ballroom in a house somewhere in... somewhere. She couldn't remember all of a sudden because the cockeyed way the beautiful lovely heads and dresses down below spun from her angled vantage point between the stair railings became incredibly amusing, and she lay there laughing in a melodious passage vivace con brio until her cheek was wet with tears.
Being drunk on champagne is another thing entirely: people don't stagger about, slurring their words in a fashion unbecoming of the going members of a fabulous ball. There is a curious dignified grace or style to it, a foaming fizzing way of finding everything amusing, of floating out on the waves of the Blue Danube Waltz and finding the shore somewhere between a trick snooker shot and the third seafood course at the late dinner table. One might compare it to oiling a frozen lock with a feather—there is a squeak, a budge, and then the world is shiny and well-lubricated, and everything flows smoothly, even if one doesn't remember the exact sequence of things in the morning. The night becomes a montage, hazily pieced together sequences of sound and sight at a clipping pace that may or may not match up.
Alice was speaking in round affected tones of Mayfair and Kensington, almost like there was a stutter in time and they had jumped forward to a punchline.
"Then I'm sure it was a... root awakening," and instead of polite high-pitched laughter from the croquet court, she and the Hatter both paused before bursting into peals of genuine, honest laughter, punctuated at least twice by some heady and completely unladylike snorts from Alice herself, which the Hatter found, for his part, terribly charming. The bottle closest to Alice tipped and rolled with a low rumble too close near the balcony, and when she gave a dramatic heave to go after it, it set them out both to another round of helpless giggling. They were bent over on themselves, and when the Hatter had got it all out and Alice was finally straightened, rosy at the roots of her hair and glistening at the eyes, they sobbed a few last sobs in a duet and sighed at last, effervescent in their blood and happy.
"Really, you minx, you have to stop," he said in a thick voice rimmed with the threat of more laughter, "I'm never going to finish this." He had long since lost his tails and was making an admittedly faithful reproduction of the Eiffel Tower out of spent agraffes (and he had quite a stock to pick from, it was almost shocking) and was halfway through with the second deck. "I shall have to tell the March Hare that one, and he will laugh. I think he will, anyway—we should wake him up and see what he says."
"I thought he'd left by now." She was tugging at her opera gloves—an unfortunate move, since she would lose them later in the night.
"No, the rain's got the road lines all mushy and washed out or something. He's leaving tomorrow week."
"Mmm." Alice leaned on one of her elbows to get a better look at the Hatter's engineering of the little replica. She had left her fan somewhere, and it took her a few moments to realize that she wasn't sitting as closely to the Hatter as the heat he seemed to generate suggested. Perhaps she was overtired and warm from the drink, and then wondered what time it was. She was feeling a bit sentimental and nostalgic toward her bed.
"I don't mean to sound rude, but out of curiosity, when do these parties usually end?" She was rummaging around in his waistcoat pocket, trying to find a watch. He pulled out the chain and she popped it open. It was about as late as she thought.
"End?"
"Yes, when does everyone go home?" She tugged on the chain and he smiled kindly in reply.
"Everyone goes home when the party ends. If you don't mind a bit of wisdom, a good ball can go on for days, depending on the sporting. Things don't really start until the back gaming rooms open." She watched him twist together the little spiderweb of tincoil. "Anyway, it's better to stay late, as that's when people get really interesting." He added a hunk of metal to the southern leg.
"Where did you learn to do all that?"
"Do all what?"
"You make hats, you build scale models of buildings, you wake up in fountains--"
"That wasn't my fault!" he cried, but with a bit of a laugh. "It was that Count, who is a premier fiend in human form! Sometimes I feel the urge to step on him, or drop things on him from a height."
"Mmm, like a grand piano?" said Alice, watching the couples dance again. "What a morbid thing that would be, wouldn't it? To be smashed into tiny pieces by a falling musical instrument."
"Splat," concluded the Hatter with all respect due to someone who had indirectly broken his favorite pocketwatch. "You'd be knee-deep in the bisque then." He had his long, long legs stretched out on either side of the little metal sculpture, a great big child at exceedingly sophisticated play, and his trousers had hiked up enough that she could see dark blue and black checked socks at his shoes. He was so intently concentrated, so charming in wanting to get all the details just right, the way he fiddled with a single piece, over and over.
"How shall I do the Edoux lifts?" he murmured to himself. "Hmm, hmm, hmm."
"Well, then, I suppose I must stay to see these games you're so on about," said Alice.
"As you should!" he cried, "There's nothing better than when the gloves come off and the games come out."
The whole house was playing at a treasure hunt of some kind, going through every room and turning it inside out for secrets, for a list of oddities to exchange with others for a prize.
Alice jerked open the drawer in a long fluid pull from her elbow, intent on gleefully spilling the contents across the parquet floor to display her elation at having found the only room in the house that hadn't already been ransacked in pursuit of twittish upperclass entertainment, but before she could finish the action, the intensity of the burning smoulder within made her draw near. The yellow glow, which seemed to come from the object within, even in the dark room, shone onto her face and cast Alice's fair eyes, wide with an almost hypnotized fascination, a hazy shade of green. She blinked and bent slightly to read the inscriptionκαλλίστη engraved there, blackened in the shine's wake. Her fingers were nearly around the round hard object when someone was calling her.
"Come on!" cried the Hatter from the doorway, his tie now undone, "They've found the music box and the sturgeon; we have to hurry or they'll win!" And then he was dragging her away from the beautiful drawer and into the hallway, where Alice grabbed her skirts and followed gracefully after him down the twisted staircase, her mind already onto other things, the discord which events had begun to set in motion held at bay for just a few more turns of the clock.
It was forty-five after the hour, and Alice sat up with a sudden intake of air upon hearing Westminster Quarters. A girl with a tucker full to bursting of violets had found the lampshade and won the prize, which turned out to be a lemon meringue dessert.
"What were we talking about?"
"Hmm?"
"Were we talking about something?"
"Oh, that was ages ago," said the Hatter, who seemed to be folding a rather complex admiral's hat out of several sheets of newspaper. "But yes, no, we were talking of the difference between Doges and Freiherr—I think we decided that the whole thing didn't matter because both of the ones who happen to be here are quite ugly, and you were giving a rather nice dissertation on why you like mousse pudding better than jelly when you fell asleep."
"I wasn't asleep," she replied. But she wasn't sure.
Alice let herself drop back down—there was too much gravity where she was, for some reason—and looked at him where he sat with legs outstretched on the floor making careful bone-edged creases, and then began to calculate her own position without moving. She was lying on some sort of couchette, and he appeared to be on the wall from this view. What struck her after several moments was how oddly crisp he seemed—the unruffled smoothness of the way he had rolled his sleeves—compared to her relative state of disarray, which she guessed at and confirmed when she unstuck a wilted lock of hair from her cheek.
"Well?" he said finally.
"Hmm?"
"Why do you like mousse pudding better than jelly?"
"Because it's delicious," said Alice, "Aren't you tired?" Her voice seemed unable to permeate the incredible sleepiness of the room, which had a lot of gold leafed elephants wearing palanquins on the walls, now that she looked at it.
"I don't sleep," he replied cheerily. "Don't you remember?" Did she? She thought about it for a moment. He stood and donned the large hat. "GOOSE ATTACKS RISIN—" said the headline above his ear. "Right," said the Hatter, and held out his hand. Alice did not rise, but clambered.
"What are we doing?"
"Your motivation is thus: you're the princess who's been taken hostage by pirates, and the Royal Navy is come to save you."
"Oh, we're onto another one--" Suddenly, a trio of men who were probably earls or dukes or something came bursting all at once through the open door wearing piratey-looking lampshades on their heads, having lost their tailcoats and collars at some point during a foray and brandishing the following: half a bedpost, an eggbeater, and what looked like a cocktail strainer--but Alice could not be sure about that last one. Soon joining their ranks was a tall, olive-complected woman who was about to fall over under the weight of her diamond-encrusted headdress.
"ARRGH!" cried one of them, who could not see through his makeshift headgear and promptly slammed into the door before becoming aquainted with the floor in a friendly way. The man holding the cocktail strainer lifted the shade from his brow and scowled down at his prostrate cohort.
"Hang it, man, I say, get up, we'll never get the cookbook back from that fortune teller if we don't kidnap a princess." He said it as only a puffed up, half-dressed, mostly juiced aristocrat possibly can, that is to say, with a stertorous drawl. There was a pause, and the man who spoke looked at the Hatter, who had two fingers tucked inside his waistcoat in a very dignified naval fashion. "Right? Is that right? Oh, dash it all, I've already forgot. Bloody games," he muttered as he and the other man stumbled over their comrade and down the hall. The woman in the headdress soon joined the man on the floor.
Now it was so late that the clock had stopped chiming the hours, and a ballet corps had quite suddenly appeared in the ballroom, above which on the landing Alice and the Hatter sat at their usual congressional headquarters, dangling their legs from the balcony and watching several baronets join the leggy company in a clumsy, crashing mockery of a kickline. The girls were doing their best, but the men with jiggling bellies and dandered-up handlebar mustaches were more concerned with whether they were sloshing champagne across their flipped shirtfronts than whether they were in unison. The Hatter was holding an empty bottle of the stuff at a tilt, looking up into it to see if there was anything left and looking a bit disappointed that there was no rush of bubbles into his face. He didn't even have to look at the men below to make a diagnosis.
"Bunch of consummate old asses." She laughed reflexively and dove into it too fast; it was a bit too funny, and there was a pause while she checked herself, trying not to cry.
"You have strong opinions about the ballet." Tears had already sprung up, and she blinked and tried not to set off giggling again.
"I'd be the majestic bird of paradise. Nobody is more alive than I am to the fact that I've got gorgeous legs a mile long." He swung his feet back and forth as if to demonstrate them to their greatest advantage. Alice leaned back slightly and looked at him—he was awfully big, now that she thought about it. Not fat or thin, some strange in between. Her face only came up to the roundoff of his shoulder, even sitting here like this next to him, practically reclined. She looked down at the dancers with their tall plumed marabou headdresses, who were madly, wildly hoofing about the tiling all in time with each other, bouncing all in a flock. The earls had still not caught up to the beat, and one had collapsed to the floor while another ministered champagne—they were both laughing.
"If you're so good, you should go and join them."
"I am good, but I'm not leaving you," he replied with a laugh, "Not with those stockings on." Alice looked at him, startled, and turned to find that one of her limbs had snuck out to flash blue and cream in the candlelight. They were the stockings she'd bought at the clothier—stockings were all white and always had been, but these, these were lovely pale colors to wear under a gown, never to be seen, never for anyone to know about that kind of secret purchase. There was something vaguely... French about them that she liked. Some silent excess she had admired modestly in the mirror while dressing.
"Those were never meant to see the light of day," he declared. "And you of all people going about in such a provocative fashion—I should say this party is a success," and intended to follow this up with a toast of sorts, but once again found the champagne bottle empty.
"They haven't," Alice said a bit archly, "We're in candlelight, and anyway, it's not like anyone is lucid enough to even realize." Still, she moved to cover the filmy vertical blocks of color with the long white train. He replied with his usual absurd chuckle.
"One of these Cavaliers will be after you if I don't play sentry, you know. This is a completely true fact." He went on, as if telling an epic story. "He's ever so lonely, and you're positively sublime in this light, or any light, really, with your hair in a soft halo of curls, and the way your dress flows from you like waves off some nereid never to be caught, and he's been ogling you from behind the waterfall all night, collecting up the liquid courage to come over and stammer at you in all your winsome charm." Alice was only half-listening to him as he looked out over the expanse of the room; in this light the fleshed-out curve of his mouth was rather fascinating to watch when he spoke. He had a strange habit of starting to say something else when he paused, but then he would reconsider, so the very top part of his lip moved almost reflexively, unconsciously, with some words he was thinking but wouldn't say.
"Soon he'll have you cornered in one of the back gaming rooms--" and here Alice opened her mouth to voice a bit of outrage, but he raised a glove palm to go on, "And be on his knees begging your beauteous mercy to accept an offer. You'll be coquettish behind your fan, have a toast, go through his entire fortune at the roulette wheel, and then you'll both be honor-bound and stranded at some awful pokey cottage out in the middle of nowhere with a coke fireplace," she was giggling so hard she could hardly breathe and he was laughing now, "Broke, busted, disgusted, and miserable in a canvas apron while he stares broodingly out the window all day, wondering if he should pawn his pocketwatch and head for parts unknown to bathe in aqua pura and leave you relieved at not having to put your hair up every day out of lingering formality." He ended nearly out of breath after all this. Alice looked up and composed herself, and said in her most falsely serious voice,
"I'm so glad we have these conversations, otherwise I think I might wind up actually settled, or even worse, returned safely home and happily reunited with my family." He waved a dismissive hand, but before he could retort, there seemed to be a reshuffling of the parties below, and they both leaned over to see what had attracted so many people.
Somewhere, a voice was singing something soft and low and sweet that she couldn't understand, appealing to the gathering almost plaintively. The beautiful aristocrats below, even after their strange vulgar displays, were moving about the floor as if in a dream, blindfolded, reaching out tentatively. Kissing each other, everyone and everywhere. Alice's heart felt exhausted suddenly, and she wondered if she'd been just a bit too loud this evening, running up and down the stairs for no reason, and watched them from high up above on the balcony.
"He's asking them to be as brothers and sisters in humanity," said the Hatter, but Alice kept watching the people down below. A woman in black and gold brushed her hands against a young man's collar, and he dipped his head low to inelegantly brush lips with her. Her throat hurt, her palms twinged—what an odd practice, almost obscene in such an open display of crossed boundaries, yet so intimate that no one could possibly know, wandering as they all were, indiscriminate, a paradox of public and private. Alice felt as if she were ten miles from them, looking through an inverted spyglass, watching them pantomime something foreign.
She couldn't look at him, and so instead when she turned to ask why, she looked at a spot beyond, past the curvy upturn of his nose, and instead found him with a far, far gaze, not looking at anything before she focused on his face and he turned and looked at her. Something in the air, she thought. There was a curious pattern of freckles above his left eyebrow, and then Alice felt that tremendous vent of heat too near her, even though he wasn't that close. Or was he; was he leaning toward her? She couldn't tell, his face was filling up the room around them so that she could study his freckles and the curve of his mouth faithfully, and she could see the rise and fall of his breath in his entire being, and there was a bang below so big, so monstrous, that she could hear glass shattering and a few surprised short screams.
"What are they doing down there," said the Hatter, and rose and disappeared. Alice looked again—one of the gentlemen had pulled the blade from the walking stick and sabraged the top of one of the green bottles, exploding it with dramatic flair and sending a lady nearby into a paroxysm of scolding, yelling at him in a language she couldn't catch. Apparently he had taken a slice out of her bouffant. Alice didn't stay on the balcony long after that.
There was an odd change of things putting her to a whisper of nervousness. Perhaps everyone was too tired, having spent so many lasting hours under the same roof, putting themselves on display and going through the gestures of polite society. It wasn't as subtle as before, and it wasn't clear enough for her to tell what was happening, but Alice detected it in the way people were talking, the slosh of drink, the footmen fast asleep against the doorways. Above all, she couldn't find the Hatter again, and she couldn't tell if bumbling about the villa into random rooms was helping or hindering.
Moving through the halls, she followed the sound of warbling voices and found the great breadth of the kitchen, where a startling mixture of people had gathered to clash with the floor, collars undone, plumes adrift, filled glasses aloft, and in she walked to the midst of their forceful singing, launching headfirst into the hills and dales of the song, like a great carnival:
--would waltz with a strawberry blonde,
As the band played on.
He'd glide cross the floor with the girl he adored,
As the band played on.
But his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded,
The poor girl would shake with alarm.
He'd ne'er leave the girl with the strawberry curls,
As the band played on.
It was a bright, amusing tune, but their rendition was almost cruel, sarcastic. As Alice reached the door again, she heard a young girl say to another next to her as she held up two identical bottles,
"Do you think this smells like almonds? It smells so bitter, I've never heard of this stuff smelling like almonds before."
"Oh, I'm sure it's fine," said her friend, who rolled her eyes and rejoined the chorus.
Alice peered into a room papered with golden octopi looping their tentacles together across the wall, where a bridge game was going on. The women there were gathered about the card table watching the four at hand, and the general mood was just a bit predatory. She guessed them to be playing high, and she was right. There was a triple strand of pearls carefully looped into a tight swirl around an emerald for the pot, and the players had removed their gloves and sapphire rings, gently sipping from the clear coupes set near their wrists and eyeing it in what they thought were devious, undetected looks.
"Oh," sighed North, whose dark golden locks were shaped into a pincushion updo, "I'm not sure." She looked at the girl with the brown ringlets across the table and gently mocked her partner. "Keeping your bid?" South nodded a bit. "Really?"
"I think she's lying to us," said the young woman with the bright silver hair sitting at East. West had dark bronze hair; they seemed to be twins except for their garish, almost costumish, hair colors.
"Ow!" shrieked West suddenly. She had been fiddling with her hairdo and came away with bright red fingertips, the blood dripping onto the baize table in a soft splatter.
"What happened?" said East, snapping her cards onto the table as the observers clustered about her sister, wondering aloud whether they should call for a doctor.
"Stabbed myself on the end of that ivory hairpin—could've taken a finger off, those things are vicious..." They continued their concerned discussion, which ended with a handkerchief and careful staunching, but no one gave the dark spots on the table a second look. North leaned forward and spoke quietly to South, but Alice could not hear her.
"Well, don't blame me, it's no one's fault but your own!" East was shouting at West.
"You'll just have to trust me," replied South. Alice looked over the girl's shoulder at the spades grand slam and with a smooth expression left the room.
Eventually Alice found herself back in the room with the dark panelling and red chairs, this time finding not the brain trust but a poker game in progress. There were none of the teardrop shaped men, but the prince in the dressing gown was looking terribly bored where he sat between a man in a turban and a man with heavy, dark eyelids. The Hatter was sitting in a casting shade of too-white white under the lamp; his disheveled hair and his collar undone mixing together made him difficult to look at. She rested her hand over the back of his chair and observed the play, and when he turned his head to look back over at her, his face thrust into the darkness and she could see he was beginning to look tired and wan too. Where had he been? The marquis in the green visor dealt, and the Hatter picked up the nine of diamonds, and then he pulled double Aces and eights.
The Hatter turned the cards over and rose, and when they reached the hallway, Alice said,
"I've been looking everywhere for you. Have you been in there the entire time? That wasn't that bad of a hand." But he was looking around with a curious kind of energy, wiggling his hands in his pockets, brow furrowed.
"I'll be right back," he said, and was gone for the third time that evening.
If the change in the air had been subtle before, it was a detectable taste now, and beginning to overpower. Alice wasn't really worried about the commotion in the front hall until she got there and had to stare for a few moments to comprehend what she was seeing. One of the men in the fine black and white suits had a set of knives in his hand, throwing them underhand with aplomb and a grim, mocking laugh, at the brass chain between the medallion in the ceiling and the large chandelier. He laughed, and there was a distant thunk, and he laughed again, spinning them like it was a game of Russian roulette. The tall woman in the too-large crystal headdress was talking at him in another language, and then reached up to her neck and wrenched on the choker there. A white exploding cascade of pearls, mythological tears, came away from her throat, giant white drops of blood, and the woman watched them backspin along the tile. Alice turned to back out, and was nearly bowled over by a man pulling one of the young women along by her hair, who had removed a steel hairpin and was swiping at him dangerously.
"Mulct me out of five clam like that," he was saying. The lady replied somewhat emotionally to the effect that she hated him, she had always hated him, and she hoped he hated her too, and the pair disappeared through an archway.
There was so much noise, a great wall of it come down to spoil the golden haze; the sounds of the party had evaporated and been replaced with the upswing ructions of chaos, come suddenly with a roar and a bang. There were voices upstairs, and voices downstairs, arguing and yelling in a din, and then she started to hear the sound of smashing china, pitched at heads but hitting the walls and the floors, vases and plates and everything tumbling down.
Alice couldn't think in the madness. How had these nice people turned on each other suddenly? Where was the host, where were the police to calm them down? Was there any sense of order to be restored? What had happened to their pact of humanity? She felt like the only person in the whole world who could possibly be sane. She went through a doorway, and another doorway, and then turned and ran out of that doorway, for she could hear someone crying hysterically nearby, and then Alice turned and found the Hatter pressed up against the wall next to the doorjamb, his hair white, his shirt white, palms splayed against the wall, his face very pale and almost gray, taking methodical breaths. One of his shirtsleeves was coming unrolled. He looked at her.
"We have to leave," he said, his voice hoarse and grave. And he began striding. Alice waited there to see if he would come back, wondered how everything had descended into... insanity. She slowed as this revealed itself. How silly it was, to think normalcy had any place in even the grandest houses in the Wonderland. The gunshot report was all it took to move her, though, and Alice kept thinking We are all mad here, we are all mad here...
If you see Alice in your mind's eye, flying down the low-angled front staircase of the villa, her skirts blown out from behind her in a long train, running steps rhythmic, her form gracefully urgent, her expression anxious and sober, the comparison between her and a princess whose time at the ball has run out ends when Alice's court shoes reached the gravel drive. She awoke then, and turning, saw the place lit with a strange haze; was it the foggy mist in the air, or was the house on fire? There was a fantastic crash, and the lights flickered once, the chandelier having been felled at last. The Hatter had reached one of the lit torches, and she could see him making wide gestures and heard him. Talking to himself.
"Got to go back there, not my fault this all got started like this, but it is my fault in the grandest way, but where do I go? Where do I go? Do I go there first? I've got to get home, I just need to get back..." She listened to him for a moment. It wasn't a word salad, but he was just there, talking to himself, sometimes loud enough for her to hear, and balling his hands into fists, flexing them out and balling them up, nervous tension and anxiety. "They can't find it, though, it is hidden, I should go and get it, I should get it and smash it up, smash it right up," she heard him say, "They're coming across the water, and then it'll be like it was before..."
When she managed to catch up, she said,
"Where are you going?" a bit too loudly, breathing a bit too hard. He was walking too fast, and got away from her again when she stopped to recover. "You left your tailcoat in there, aren't you going to get it?" she cried out, but he kept going, and she did not catch up with him until the lights were faded behind them at last and the door in the tree was closing, and even when they got out of the other side, he did not turn to look at her until she grabbed his shoulder and would not let go.
"...race to the bottom, this is so far gone, I didn't do that, that's not, that's not, that's not me, I mean--"
"What are you doing, what's going on?!" The Hatter stopped the stream of consciousness and turned and stared at Alice in the depth of the night, and she could see that he was surprised—had he not thought that she would follow him?
"You can't come with me," said the Hatter, clearly, slowly.
"What do you mean? Where are you going?"
"You can't come with me." He started to pace, and continued his monologue. Talking, arguing with himself, voicing every thought that raced through him, no more filtering out of societal obligation. Alice felt a strong cool wind come up through the trees, and with it the realization that he was what he was known for all long. Mad. Delusional. Paranoid. Those were words she could attribute to the people in horrible institutions, gray blocks of penury where minds slipped out the window and bodies got left behind. He started talking again, first loud and then soft, no control over the words, running his hands through his hair and rubbing his eyes and shaking, though it wasn't something she would expect a lunatic in a white jacket to do; he was just working a bit too fast, his brain was sped up, there wasn't that much wrong with him, was there?
"I've had a long, strange life," he said quietly, almost to himself, almost to no one. "And I hope that when you think of me, years from now, you can think of something good, something good, something good." He put a hand over his mouth to stop them from tumbling out again and paced, back and forth, back and forth.
"What did you do," said Alice tersely. "You're acting like you've murdered somebody; what did you do while you were gone?" He wheeled around, took three steps, and was upon her.
"Nothing," he said, and he was so fierce and vivid that Alice began to take a step backward. "I didn't do anything, and when they ask you, tell them the truth." She paused.
"When who ask me?"
"The gendarmes, the crown guard," he said, looking all around the clearing as if they were surrounded.
"There's no one else here, we're the only ones." And then the Hatter did something strange. He laughed in an odd way, but it was mirthless and stilted and sounded more like a high-pitched hiccup, and he clapped a hand over his mouth and closed his eyes until it went away and was replaced by a dry, parenthetical smile of what was perhaps resignation.
"They will be," he said so quietly she came close to him again, not quite coming up to his shoulder but perhaps she could rest her cheek in the curve of his sternum. He folded his arms in a hug around himself and Alice honestly wondered if he would lash out if she tried to touch him. The clouds broke suddenly for the half-moon, and then so did he, a strange calm lucidity coming over him so fast that he looked young and pale and lost.
"I'm so sorry about all this," he said in a whisper. She was going to reply, demand what in all the worlds he was talking about, when he thumbed her earlobe again and spoke in a dry, dull voice. "You lost your earring. They didn't bring you much luck, did they?" He was leaving, he was forming up the words to tell her goodbye or something. Alice couldn't think of anything coherent to say—what did people say in situations like this?
"But where are you going?"
"I have to leave."
"Leave, but you're the only person around here who's any help whatever, you can't just leave. Don't you remember? The Duchess told you, you're supposed to stay here," she trailed off.
"You're not going to be alone," he said firmly.
"You're insane, this is absolutely absurd, you haven't done anything--"
"Listen," he said, bending down eye to eye with her and she had to look at him, it was embarrassing to be that close, but so serious. "You're going to have to do this alone. I can't tell you where to go, there are too many places, you're going to have to figure it out."
"How--"
"Don't," he said in a perfectly even low voice, "tell her anything. Cherchez la femme," said the Hatter, and then she knew he would leave.
He leaned forward slightly and this time their mouths caught.
A first kiss is a strange thing. In a fantasy against the foggy backdrop of a romantic bridge or crashing ocean, the hero grabs his heroine with a sudden jerk (for perhaps she has been resisting him for some time and has recently finished an eloquent and dramatic speech to the effect of not wanting anything to do with him) by the shoulders, bends her back in his arms and assumes control over her as she is powerless to do anything but weaken in his embrace and emerge breathless and deeply in love, already wondering if the token bauble is in his breast pocket. The proverbial fireworks mark their echoed reports in the skies beyond, and the romantic tension between the pair is at last released, validating them like a swelling theme song as all the problems in the world fade in the wake of their new love together, for they are sure to exit stage right arm in arm, together at last, their story coming to an end. It is a common and beautiful ideal, to be sure. But this story is not done.
Even the smallest kiss, the lightest and quickest gesture of affection can turn the world on its pivot when executed, one may note. A grand gesture is meaningless when something so simple carries a true and honest weight. And so Alice found herself brushing open lips for only a moment with someone who did not have his arms squeezing her tightly to his lapel, or mashing his face against hers with the intensity and application of someone tenderizing meat, and instead so lightly, with bittersweet ardor. He did not have his arms about her--they were neither of them touching at all but for that singular, transient flashpoint, in fact, and despite the lack of romantic surroundings one may hope for in such instances, dear reader, Alice would find herself, in days afterward, staring at nothing with a knot between her eyebrows and her arms wrapped round her, recalling the simultaneous closeness and distance of his entire being, stunned at how her memory had carved out such a particular space to purposely slow and stretch and revisit mere seconds of life.
Let us not mince words for the sake of Alice. The dip and curve of his philtrum was just hinted at the top of his lip, that upside-down bow, and it was there that she could feel the dimensions of him, not just a flat drawing or a caricature but the axis of him, the depth and texture and the way both their lips gave under the elastic light pressure, loose, not firm or agitated or tensed into a pair of battering rams. It was a lazy, relaxed, enjoyable kind of thing, and it felt like waking up in the morning in loose loops of bedclothes and cushions and sunlight, no reason at all to put her feet on the floor, but the overwhelming urge like a weight on her chest to stay there, molded into a perfect concave impression of Alice, and never go. It marveled her, this ounce of flesh so designed, finer and more delicate than even the fragile, ladylike porcelain white skin on the inside of her arm, imbued with so much capacity for feeling that it seemed a true detriment, not having thrown reason into the wind before. Kisses, you understand, are not stationary, except perhaps when we bestow upon others endearment by the dry, prosaic outer lip. When kisses become an expression of bonding fielty, a strange kind of genuflection, they are a kinesis of lips and mouth and flesh, holistic, that inner part sweet and curved, mouthing unspeakable words in silence.
Alice vaguely felt perhaps he were drawing some thin chain of memory out of her, over and over, breaking and recovering each link, drawing something from her nerves and warmth to have and remember, and tasting the strange unknowable spark of life moving just beneath that she could feel sometimes late at night when the world was quiet. She held her breath when he exhaled as he gently pulled away and then she finally breathed and suddenly flooded once more with blood, releasing it pouring in erratic waves from her heart and back into every corner of her before the vertiginous drop afterward and the pounding ancient grey and blue patterns obscuring her eyes. Words ran through her consciousness and they were hot and ripe and Alice came so close to leaning in further and just pressing her cheek along the concave depth of where the man's neck met his collar and staying there until she could process rational thought once more, which she felt somewhere in the clouded pulsing back of her skull would be never again. All this in such a small time; had there been minutes not moments, she could not allow for. She began to hear something distant and she felt his sad sigh against her own mouth like some new breath of life, humid and reassuring and raising every fine hair on its end straining to meet him again and he spoke very quietly at her cheek.
"Look after the hat." He had changed his mind about something, she could hear it in the tone of his voice.
"You wouldn't leave your hat here," said something that sounded like Alice's voice, her head only catching up a few seconds later. "You wouldn't, you wouldn't leave it behind. You wouldn't do that." He sighed again without looking at her, but instead somewhere past her ear into the darkness of the forest, and said simply,
"Keep it safe."
And then he stepped away, taking all the warmth with him and leaving a swirl of cold autumn air in his wake, and other footsteps and voices grew closer, and she saw his white collar fade between the trees, disappearing to wherever the future lay.
It was only when the guard reached the treeline, shouting and pointing and ignoring her, that Alice released her balled up fists from their stiff, pained clench and ran the turgid half-globes of her fingertips in the darkness over the dim shadowy crescents her nails had incised into the flesh.