Beneath Ceaseless Skies #108 Read online

  Issue #108 • Nov. 15, 2012

  “Liaisons Galantes: A Scientific Romance,” by David D. Levine

  “Seeking The Great Raymundo,” by Jamie Lackey

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  LIAISONS GALANTES: A SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE

  by David D. Levine

  The Tuesday night salon was held at the home of Monsieur and Madame Dumouchel. Zéphine, as usual, was among the last to arrive—between her wretched situation at the stationers’ and the erratic performance of the new electric trams, it was a good week when she made it to the 11th arrondissement before seven in the evening.

  This had not been a good week. It was nearly eight o’clock and Zéphine found herself tired, cross, and starving as she knocked on the tall lacquered door of the Dumouchels’ elegant town house. But, as always, Mme. Dumouchel greeted her with a warm “enchantée de vous revoir” and, even more welcome, a tray of delicate pastries. Zéphine selected several of her favorites, working hard to savor each bite despite the fact that they would serve as her entire supper.

  The salon was already in raucous full swing as she followed Mme. Dumouchel through the double doors into the living room, Mme. Dumouchel’s galanterie for her husband padding contentedly along beside them. It was a docile little thing, with a cute pug nose and large soulful eyes, and Zéphine could not fail to notice with a pang of envy how similar it was to its counterpart, M. Dumouchel’s galanterie for his wife, which dozed placidly at M. Dumouchel’s feet. The two creatures were as alike as two little peas in a pod, reflecting the comfortable stability of the Dumouchels’ marriage. As Mme. Dumouchel settled into the chair next to her husband, the two galanteries merged without the slightest fuss into a single creature that looked exactly the same.

  Zéphine sighed at the charming domestic tableau. Her own last romantic liaison had produced an ill-starred pair of galanteries—her galanterie for her beau had been sleek and black with pointed ears like a fox, while his for her was a mangy gray thing resembling a cross between a wildcat and a basset hound. Upon meeting, the two galanteries had circled each other warily before merging into an awkward, lopsided creature that seemed ill at ease with itself. Perhaps it should not have been a surprise when the relationship ended after only four months.

  She shook off the dispiriting memory, drew a cup of coffee from the urn, and settled herself on one of the remaining open chairs, content for now to listen and observe. It always took her half an hour or so to shift her mind from the mundane cares of the working day to the more pleasant intellectual pursuits of the Dumouchels’ salon.

  Intellectual and emotional.

  Darius, of course, held court from the most comfortable chair in the center of the room. Multiple conversations swirled around him, but he seemed to be engaged in every one of them, evoking laughter and appreciative nods with his germane comments, incisive questions, and witty remarks. Then, at just the right moment, he raised a single eyebrow, causing the whole crowd to burst into laughter and delighted applause.

  Zéphine sipped her coffee and gazed over the cup’s brim at Darius, admiring the perfect curl of his hair, the porcelain smoothness of his cheek, the oh-so-blue depths of his ever-darting eyes. Those eyes caught and held hers for just a moment, causing her pulse to flutter in her throat, but then he smiled, nodded a merely companionable greeting, and continued conversing with the talented sculptress Madeleine.

  No galanterie for Zéphine lazed at Darius’s feet, of course, nor for anyone else. Though many women had sought his special favor, he seemed to exist on an intellectual plane above such merely human pursuits as romance. And no amount of pining would change that situation tonight.

  Almost, Zéphine rose. Almost she crossed the parquet. Almost she bent and whispered in Darius’s shell-like ear the secret she kept locked away from public view. But for the hundredth time she pushed her feelings down, sure that nothing but embarrassment could possibly result, and remained seated where she was.

  Discreetly swiping the last crumbs of pastry from the plate into her mouth, Zéphine set plate and saucer down and drew her notebook, already half full of observations of café society, from her purse. She waited, listening, with pen poised. It was a rare Tuesday evening when she had to wait more than ten minutes for some bon mot to fall from Darius’s mouth or for Matthieu to make some oh-so-characteristic gesture which she might, in future, incorporate into her keenly observed and of-the-moment roman à clef.

  That is, if she would ever stop taking notes and actually begin writing the thing. But how could she begin when there was still so much research to be done?

  Darius was still wearing his peacock-blue cravat, she noted. He’d been the first to adopt the color, months ago—the fabric imported from Turkey at his express request—and since then it had swept the cognoscenti. Even M. Dumouchel, among the least fashion-conscious of the group, had begun carrying a handkerchief of that color in his waistcoat pocket, and that was a sure sign that Darius was about to become bored with it. But tonight, apparently, was not to be the night when its successor was introduced.

  Nor, as the conversation went on, did it appear that any new or exciting works of art or literature were to see their debut tonight. Darius was talking about his play Daphnis et Chloé, still stalled and seeking a resolution to the third act; Matthieu hadn’t laid brush to canvas since his Minette had left him; and Madeleine worked so slowly it almost didn’t matter that she couldn’t afford a new block of marble. Tonight even the galanteries seemed content to lounge at their masters’ feet.

  Zéphine sighed and cast her eyes around the room. Perhaps one of the lesser lights—those like herself, who flitted like moths around the electric illumination of Darius and his inner circle—might be wearing or doing or saying something that she could adopt for one of her minor characters. But, alas, even the usually volatile Fauchon was engaged in a quiet game of trictrac in the corner.

  A game of trictrac with... whom? Zéphine leaned forward in her chair. The gentleman peering intently at the board was not one she’d seen before in this company. Not a particularly distinguished-looking fellow; his dark hair was disordered, his jacket at least two years out of style, and his posture atrocious. But just as she was about to turn away, the stranger pounced. “Six and five!” he cried, calling out the pips on the dice he’d just rolled. “Par puissance!”

  Fauchon stiffened at the move, which garnered an astonishing number of points and blocked off half the board from his own pieces. “I see, Monsieur,” he sniffed, “that your skill at trictrac is far in advance of my own. I resign!” And then he slapped the pieces from the board, sending them clattering across the parquet floor.

  “But— but—” the stranger stammered as Fauchon swept imperiously from the trictrac table into the dining room, no doubt to salve his wounded pride—and rounded abdomen—with another of Mme. Dumouchel’s delicious pastries.

  Zéphine herself had been the victim of Fauchon’s overbearing pride in the past, and her heart went out to the poor innocent who’d just received its full brunt. Tucking her notebook away, she walked to the trictrac table. “I’m terribly sorry about that, Monsieur. Monsieur Fauchon has a... tendency to the dramatic.” She extended a hand. “Zéphine Dufay.”

  “Henri Broch,” he replied distractedly. His hand was warm, his skin rough, his grip firm but not unpleasantly so. A man who worked with his hands, then, but not without grace. “I only moved according to the dice!” he protested.

  Zéphine nodded. “Don’t worry yourself. He’ll be back in a few minutes and will have completely forgotten the incident.” Despite the man’s protests, she
knew that there was a great deal of skill in selecting from among the possible moves after each roll of the dice. Intelligent, but modest. “So what brings you to our little salon?”

  Henri licked his lips and swallowed, his eyes flicking anywhere but Zéphine’s face. “I was told that it would be a good place to meet... ah... interesting people.”

  “Indeed it is.” She smiled. “I believe you will fit right in.”

  Then he did look her in the eye, and returned her smile. “Merci... is it Mademoiselle?”

  “Mademoiselle indeed... Monsieur.” This with a pointed glance at his ringless left hand. Nor did he have any galanterie at his feet. Promising.

  Of course, one’s galanteries did not always accompany one everywhere.

  He took her hand again, returning her attention to the here and now, and gave it a light kiss. Dry, but not too detached. Very nice. “Enchanté. May I perhaps bring you a cup of coffee?”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “No thank you.” She patted her waist. “My figure would never forgive me.”

  He settled onto the arm of her chair. “I can’t see that it has anything to complain about....”

  And so the conversation went, and soon the offer of coffee was forgotten.

  Later that night, they left the salon together.

  Much later, he did bring her coffee.

  * * *

  Henri was an engineer, the son of a clockmaker who’d saved every spare centime to send his promising boy to the École Polytechnique. He worked for the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus, designing switches and exchanges for the new electric trams. “Not glamorous,” he said, shrugging, “but it keeps the wolf from the door.” She chided him gently for the frequent service disruptions that made the tram schedules into works of fantasy, but he declaimed all responsibility. “The tracks I am designing now, you will rattle across in five years... if I am lucky. Today’s tracks were designed by yesterday’s men, and thus are inferior. So it ever was, in my field.”

  In their first weeks together, they spent together every moment that they could, or nearly. Zéphine’s landlady, a good old-fashioned Catholic woman, was scandalized when she saw Zéphine come strolling home at dawn, but so long as Zéphine paid her rent, the poor distressed biddy could do nothing about it. The café set, on the other hand, didn’t even blink; in fact, Zéphine and Henri’s uncomplicated liaison was practically too mundane to notice.

  For her part, Zéphine was not only enraptured but creatively energized. Perhaps there was something in the early-morning air, the birdsong, the cheery “Bonjour!” of the milkman as he clattered along with his horse, his jugs of milk, and his galumphing white galanterie. Or perhaps it was the quickening of her heart, the racing of her blood. But for whatever reason, she found herself writing—her pen scratching vigorously from the moment she woke until she had to pry herself away and hurry to her wretched job at the stationers’. Characters, settings, and situations seemed to flow directly from her heart to the page.

  To her surprise, though, Zéphine discovered she was writing a play rather than a novel. Something about the immediacy, the freshness of her feelings seemed to lead the work to unadorned dialogue and staging rather than the rococo descriptions she’d been so fond of before. The very strangeness of the form made it all the more appealing and exciting to work on. She felt a new kinship with the dramatist Darius and found herself beginning to engage with him on Tuesday nights as a peer, a relationship of professional to professional that she’d never experienced before.

  The whole affair was phenomenally exhilarating. And yet... one thing was lacking. One small yet very important thing.

  Their galanteries had not yet appeared.

  * * *

  It was October, nearly three months since that first eventful evening. They lay in each other’s arms in his bed, the sheets cooling in the evening air.

  “Something is wrong,” he said. “I can feel it in your shoulders.” He kissed the nearest one and massaged it, but she shrugged him off and sat up.

  “Where are they?” The duvet fell away, exposing her breasts to the cool air. She shivered and covered herself with her arms.

  “They will come.” He kissed the tops of her breasts. “They always come, when two people love each other.”

  She turned away from his lips, sat up on the edge of the bed facing the window. The cold pinched at her nipples, but she didn’t care. It matched her mood.

  What Henri said was the truth. Galanteries did invariably appear whenever one truly loved another... even, as she well knew, if that love was unwanted, inconvenient, and unrequited. Every love poem, every romance novel, every giggled schoolgirl conversation reaffirmed it: a love without galanteries was not really love at all, merely affection. Marriages had been destroyed, even dynasties had fallen, when galanteries had failed to appear or the “wrong” galanterie had been seen in public.

  So why did she have no galanterie for Henri? Why, instead, must she keep her secret locked away from him, from everyone?

  She turned back to Henri. His eyes glistened in the cool moonlight. “But do we love each other, Henri? Do we, truly?”

  “Je t’aime,” he replied. Was there a hint of pleading in it?

  Usually one did not begin referring to one’s paramour using the familiar tu, rather than the formal vous, until after the galanteries had made their first appearance. Zéphine and Henri had—laughingly, nervously, tentatively—begun their tutoiement three weeks into their relationship, when the creatures seemed merely a bit delayed. But now, months later, the use of tu was beginning to seem to Zéphine an affectation, a strained childish wish, like professing a belief in Saint Nicholas long beyond the age when one should let go of such things. “It’s not the same without them. We should have a warm and living friend to curl up with us when we are together, to remind us of each other when we are apart. Without them... it feels as though we are only pretending to be together.”

  “Je t’aime,” Henri repeated, and now it definitely did seem a bit desperate.

  She didn’t reply in words. Instead, she kissed him.

  Using words would have required choosing a pronoun.

  They went on without words for a while.

  * * *

  Later, she lay awake in the darkness, watching the moon dance in a puddle on the roof next door and listening to the scratching of the pigeons in Henri’s neighbor’s coop.

  In truth, Henri was not everything she had wished for in a lover. He was kind, yes, and gentle, and charmingly passionate in his enthusiasm for electricity and all other things modern. And generous; very generous indeed, by comparison with the impoverished artists she’d dallied with when she first had come to the city. But his looks were unexceptional, his tastes uneducated—he adored the voyages extraordinaires of Jules Verne—and his artistic sentiments entirely lacking. He had neither talent nor ambition in any of the creative arts, claiming to be content to observe their performance and creation. Sometimes she wondered what had drawn him to Darius’s salon in the first place.

  He was a very nice man, but he was no Darius.

  But... but that didn’t explain why her galanterie for him had failed to appear. She’d had many a galanterie as a girl, scrawny stumbling things though they were, spawned by pathetic unrequited crushes and misguided teenage romances that came and went like summer storms. Surely her feelings for Henri, whatever flaws he might have, were at least as deep as any of those? And it’s not as though she had lost the ability to form galanteries as an adult, far from it....

  “You’re awake,” he said.

  Startled, she rolled over to find him leaning on one elbow, looking at her. “So are you.”

  He smiled, his teeth very white in the moonlight. “You called me tu.”

  Indeed she had, without thinking. As this sank in, she threw herself upon him and squeezed herself against his warm and downy chest. “Je t’aime,” she admitted. “Je t’aime beaucoup.”
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  * * *

  “So then....” Darius opined, with one hand splayed across his chest and the other finger held high, “so then the Mayor should declare a public holiday! That way no one can get married!”

  “No, no, even better!” Zéphine cried. “He should order Claudette to marry Pierre.”

  Darius grinned broadly. “And because that’s precisely what she wants....”

  “She can’t!”

  And then Darius, Zéphine, Dahlia, and Jean-Michel all yelled in unison “Because of the curse!” It was the explanation for every ridiculous plot turn.

  Everyone laughed hysterically, even Henri, who usually just sat letting the conversation wash over him.

  The evening had started quietly enough, with Zéphine shyly presenting a folio of pages to Darius for his perusal at the Dumouchels’ salon. Despite all the discussions they’d had in recent weeks about her play, a boisterous farrago of fairies, curses, and star-crossed lovers now titled Le Progrès tortueux de l’amour, this was the first time she’d shown him any actual text. She never would have done it if Henri hadn’t talked her into it, and as Darius had scanned the pages with deeply furrowed brow, she had become more and more convinced that the whole thing had been a mistake and that she would have no alternative but to strangle Henri for even suggesting it. But then Darius had turned the last page. Forehead still deeply creased, he’d looked up at her and said “This is good.”

  Zéphine had been thrilled beyond words, for so many reasons. But, of course, she wasn’t sure where to go next with the plot, and the resulting discussion had gradually escalated to a raucous, wide-raging torrent of ideas.

  When the Dumouchels had retired at ten, the conversation—still raging fiercely—had adjourned to a nearby café. Now most of the chairs sat inverted on the tables, a pile of galanteries lay asleep in the corner, and the one remaining waiter stood yawning and pointedly looking at his watch. But Zéphine and Darius and their hangers-on didn’t want to go home—didn’t want to let go of this hilarious, incandescent surge of creativity—and as long as Henri kept paying for round after round of coffee the café would not close.