Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

Their clothes were everywhere. Conny felt herself blush when she spotted her chemise draped over the green-shelled lamp on the desk. She caught his eye and they burst out laughing, Conny tapping a finger to her lips and made shushing sounds. “Someone will hear,” she said.

“Would you mind so much?”

“No.” Surprised at her own boldness, she reached for him.

“Wait,” he said, catching her hand and kissing her fingers. He climbed off her and went to the desk.

Crossing the study, Conny saw all at once how thin he was. Frail. His shoulder blades protruded and she could count each vertebrae. His skin gleamed like molten wax.

“I want to give you something,” he said, sitting down in her uncle’s high-backed chair. He searched the drawers till he found paper, then took Professor Carlisle’s ivory pen. He ran his fingers through his hair, closed his eyes for a moment, then began writing. “Something more than my exhaustion, anyway.”

Conny pushed herself up a bit and watched him. William Heath had written a novel, which he had sent off to a publisher, and he had shown her some of his poetry, published in The English Review. He was self-conscious about it, though, as if writing was the wrong thing for him, or that he was inadequate to the challenge.

It amazed her, after a time, how natural became the sight of him naked behind the huge oaken desk, intently scribbling away. Absurd and comic, yes, scandalous, and a little frightening. But while he wrote Conny imagined herself like this every night, watching him write, afterplay of their lovemaking.

“I love you, William.”

He hesitated just before he looked up. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

He seemed to think about it. “Good,” he nodded. “Good.” And continued writing.

Conny slid a hand between her thighs, toyed with her hair, then pressed her fingers into the moistness. The pressure began rising again. It was like the fear of a child doing something forbidden and expecting to be caught, a nagging fascination, like a warning impossible to heed. She moved on the divan, leather tugging at her, the air cool across her skin. The sound of the pen scritching across the paper, his breathing, the sensation of her own lungs filling and emptying, all seemed enveloped in the stillness outside the room, as if they had separated from existence and were drifting in a non-place, without time. If I open the door, she thought, there will be nothing…

The experience came like panic. Conny closed her eyes and held her breath against an almost intolerable urge to escape. Her muscles tightened in preparation, ready to send her running. She did not move, held in place by an intense curiosity to know what came next. And next. And next—she shivered at next, her body wanting to fold in on itself and stretch out at the same time.

When she opened her eyes he was squatting before her, a few sheets of paper in his hand. Everything is changed, she thought, and touched his knee. He offered the pages.

“I love you,” he said.

JUNE, 1920

He jerked his finger away and Conny laughed, grabbing for it. “Come on, ninny! It won’t hurt!”

“It’s macabre,” he objected, waving at the bottle of ink and candle on the floor of her room, and the needle in her hand. “Your uncle is already furious about this.”

“What does that have to do with anything? Uncle Francis would be furious with anyone taking his favorite niece from him.”

“And you want to compound it with this superstitious nonsense.”

“I don’t intend to tell him, William.” She snatched at his hand again and caught his wrist. He tugged but she held it firmly. “What am I going to say? ‘Oh, Uncle, I know you’re displeased that I’m marrying a writer, but it’s all right, we’re signing the certificate with our blood, so everything will work out.’”

“I think it’s silly.”

“As silly as the wedding itself?”

“Well…”

“Come on, open your fist. This will only take a second. Didn’t you ever do this with your friends when you were a boy? Blood brothers and all?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t have any friends.”

She squeezed his wrist. “Open.”

His hand unfolded and she shifted her grip to hold his index finger stiffly. She waved the needle through the candle flame again, then jabbed the fingertip in the center of the faint sworls. He almost pulled free, but Conny held on. Blood beaded and she brought the finger over the open bottle of ink. She pressed both sides of the wound to bring more blood and let it drip into the ink.

“Not so much!” he complained.

Conny dabbed his finger with a ball of cotton soaked in gin and released him. “Ninny,” she said playfully, then stabbed her own finger and added her blood to the bottle. She sucked at the tiny puncture while she took a piece of straw she had plucked from a broom and stirred the mixture.

“I don’t see what this is supposed to accomplish,” William said.

Conny capped the bottle. “What do you mean you didn’t have any friends?”