Loves That Bind

Book by Rios Julian

Emil Alia, the narrator of Loves That Bind, has been abandoned by the woman he loves. Wandering the city in search of his fugitive lover, he writes twenty-six letters about the twenty-six women who have preceded her, in alphabetical order by their names. Each woman bears an uncanny resemblance to a famous heroine of literature, and Emil's letters adopt the tone, style, and substance of the great modern novels in which those heroines appear. Are these, in fact, past love affairs, or jealousy-fueled fantasies?

The following passage is from the fourth chapter; "D."

Derry
& Tom's, I believe, the old name of these large stores recently made into a Babylon of bibelots and multicolored bagatelles, which, one might say, meant revisiting better days, the mad twenties, with the disjointed Charlestonant of this thé dansant thundering across to me here in the Babylonian terrace of Biba. I thought this hanging garden was the ideal setting for plucking the petals of the day's daisy and telling, perhaps, the tale of the enchanting fay who was turned into fate. Seriously: I decided to come to this tea for two thousand as I passed the Empire this afternoon, I even looked for you in the line of Robert Redford fans, and I told myself you too would probably fall by here. (If you are not in London, I trust you are not inopportunely trysting in Oporto or Lisbon, where, according to the Times, new cases of cholera have been reported.)

Pleasant to a high degree (73°) today on this roof garden of delights. You marveled when we discovered it this winter: under thick sooty clouds, among chimneys and dark roofs, a luxuriant Eden, complete with apple trees, for the fruitful enjoyment of forbidden fruit. Now a garden of desperate waiting, though I am not too hopeful. Not a soul on that icy afternoon, but one would think you feared the eye of the great Voyeur. Golden or wax? You did not want me to bite the apple of discord, or your lips like blackberries. Darkly mordant, amor. And I feel as if I were in Bedlam, not Biba, when I recall that lost kiss. It was so hard to get you to part your lips. Until, at last, to prove your experience, you decided that the shrub wrapped in plastic was a wild pear tree. Oui, duchesse! I made so many wily wordplays with apples and pears in pearadise, remember? that you had to plant your feet firmly and protest. Enough! Another pearouette, no . . .

The wail of the aphonic saxophone, blues for a blue Monday, at gray teatime, made me realize: I came to this art deco bazaar to decorate my nostalgia, to find you perhaps as I told the story of love damned in New York.

I would tell you this story ab ovo: Once there was a summer in West Egg and East Egg, the shape we give to the prominent capes of Great Neck and Glen Cove, those two Long Island promontories. There I could see how the rich lived and played--in mansions with parks, marble pools, and private beaches--so different from us poor mortals. That summer burned away in princely parties, and a woman was the incandescent center--and cause--of the blinding blaze.

All these mannequins in white dresses who flit past and pose and flutter now in the garden remind me of her. In particular the beauty in the mauve hat with a lock of hair like a dark brushstroke on her cheek, who allows herself to be carried like a queen, lighthearted and haughty, on the crossed hands of two beaux in white flannel suits who laugh. She has twisted her ankle . . . , and set her delicately on the divan-swing at the far end of the garden. She is the queen of the garden, of this summer-afternoon tea, and from time to time beauties and beaux come to pay homage and swing beside her. I thought of the Queen of the Fairies in a Victorian painting of A Midsummer Night's Dream we once saw at the Tate. The magic of pale cheeks and cheekbones like rose petals. Poor thing, she's paralyzed, I thought for a moment before I heard the laughter of her wellborn bearers, and I remembered the first words I heard from the lips of my Louisville beauty the first time I saw her, on a hot, windy summer twilight when I came for supper to her East Egg mansion in the company of a distant cousin of hers, a college friend of her husband's: "I'm p-paralyzed with happiness," she laughed and greeted her cousin after attempting to rise from an enormous couch where she lay next to another girl, who was slimmer and looked athletic and also wore white, and was the one who truly seemed paralyzed, though not with happiness, lying in precarious balance. I remembered her first words, but in fact at first it was her voice, that voice so typical of her, caressing or disturbing, thrilling with a tremor of a thrill, soft or husky, modulating so, that all of us who have fallen in love with her can never forget. Hushed at times with emotion, suddenly bright and warm like a flame at the climax, languid and dreamy in repose, with a bitter touch of indolence or boredom, silvery and instantly bubbling, breaking into laughter and almost childish stammering in happy situations, at other times insinuating in sinuous murmurs, as if to make us lean toward her. A rich voice, and (was that her secret?) a rich girl's voice. As her new rich lover saw and heard very well: Her voice is full of silver . . . jingling, tingling, singing, full of splendid music.

The subdued sob, very low, of a banjo. Am I blue? This blues can't be trusted, it goes right to my head, as you would say.

Though it is only a dull teatime, I would like you to bring me bourbon, ice, sugar, crushed mint leaves, and fix a julep. The cool sweetness of a sweltering New York August. And it wouldn't be bad either if you showed up now in a short beaded skirt and pearls looped three times around your neck, shimmying over with a glass of Scotch in one hand and a gin fizz in the other, to coax me out on the dance floor. And raise a glass first to our drinker. Drink, dance, and be merry, our essential watchword. Save me the last waltz, please, though it's three o'clock in the morning, before the embalming begins. Another danse macabre?

Don't tell me "The Prisoner of Zelda" doesn't appeal to the poor boy from the midwest, prisoner and prey of that mad wife, his chastising Zelda, though she was the one confined, I told you in my mind a few hours ago in Leicester Square as I passed the posters outside the Empire advertising the film. I imagined how miffed you would be, accusing me again of macho mockery.

Leaning now against the wall of this hanging garden, enveloped in aromas of cool jazzmine, orchids and orchestra, surrounded by swains and maidens in white who think of themselves as doubles of Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, I think again of the unfortunate Scotch "Gin" Fitz, as we alcoholized him once in defiance of the dry law, still lost in thought one hundred feet above the centipedal scurry of the crowd along Kensington High Street. And in fact I see her again: her sad, seductive face, eyes filled with light, passionate mouth blood red, the gleam of her dark hair that I kissed beside the fire that cold afternoon the day before I left for Europe, when she spent a fleeting eternity in my arms. Her face was a changing mask that could assume a bored expression, and then her lips would form a scornful fold. A shallow person at the edge of an abyss? Again I caviled as I looked around me. I could guess at her figure on the divan-swing as I watched her shapely slender legs sheathed in white silk stockings.

Thanks to her cousin Nick, I began to know what she was like though I never really got to know her (did anyone?), I learned about certain episodes of her past, her origins as the daughter of a well-off family in Louisville. Although I was never in Louisville, Kentucky, I can recall the streets where her footsteps echoed alongside the military ones of a lover in uniform one November night when leaves were falling, I can relive in a vicarious way certain critical moments: I am the lieutenant who kissed her for the first time, standing fast on a white sidewalk in the moonlight, under the stars; I, the lieutenant-come-lately who had her on another quiet October night, the same one who two nights later kissed her again on a wicker love seat on the posh porch of her house. She was chilled and her rather husky voice sounded especially seductive. That month of love could not last forever. After some failed attempt at rebellion, she yielded to the wishes of her affluent family and left the soldier with no future for a better future and greater profit: a wealthy heir from Chicago who would give her everything she deserved.

I didn't doubt it when I found myself in her gorgeous Georgian colonial mansion, but I also understood immediately that her large, athletic husband--"hulking," as she called him, driving him mad--could not provide the sophisticated emotion she sometimes needed. (Sophisticated, yes, she considered herself sophisticated though she was only twenty-three.) Luxe and calme, with no volupté. Perhaps she sensed that, five years earlier, in a moment of lucidity--or was it remorse?--the night before her wedding, when she drank a bottle of Sauternes, became drunk for the first--and last--time, and threw the gift from her future husband into the wastebasket: a pearl necklace worth, if my calculations are correct, $350,000. (But she needed to be free, freed from her possessive family.) After a cold bath and a few sniffs of spirits of ammonia, she recovered her senses and the necklace, which she displayed at the marriage supper. The wedding was lavish and they lived happily ever . . . until five years later, when her former impoverished lover made his appearance, transformed into a magnetic magnate endowed with great powers of attraction. Money is a powerful magnet. The mysterious magnate bought a huge gloomy mansion in West Egg--the less fashionable of the two Eggs--an almost exact, extravagant replica of some medieval Hôtel de Ville in Normandy with a tower on one side, all of it right across the bay from the cheerful East Egg red and white ma...