Radiance

[laughs softly] And Andromache. I bet she was sprawled on Percy’s bed, too, cooing and flicking her tongue at the pillows. Sometimes I think Amal was having a last joke at his expense. Percy complained about Andromache noon and night, but he grudgingly gave her soft-boiled eggs at breakfast when she came nosing at his bathrobe and called her a hell-bitch just like he called me sweetheart. I caught him rubbing her nose just once, and he looked ashamed of himself. But really, I think Andromache would have lain down and died if she’d been parted from her Percival. I think Amal left a lizard in lieu of a wife.

ERASMO

And then Faustine.

SEVERIN

[Her eyes take on a faraway, clouded expression. She chews on the inside of her cheek.] And then Faustine, my fifth mother. She only lasted a year. Opera singer. She started out a soprano, but she was an alto by the end. Chest like a barrel of bourbon. Everyone adored her. She was like laughter turned into a person.

ERASMO

And a baleen addict.

SEVERIN

Well, who isn’t? [SEVERIN peels a rind of af-yun with her fingernail and sucks on it ruefully.] But Faustine grew up on Venus. I’d never met anyone who’d been born on Venus. I thought she was magic. A real life Vespertine Hyperia come to live in my house and lie on my bed and tell me tales of pirates on the callowseas. Her parents were divers, then homesteaders. She floated in callowmilk in utero—literally. Her mother tapped a huge lode on one of the outer whales when she was six months along. We think it’s in everything here, but on Venus…on Venus it is everything.

ERASMO

Baleen, though…

SEVERIN

I know. A lady can smoke her af-yun on the steps of the Actaeon and still be called a swan in girl’s clothing, a gift to man and the stage. It’s delicate, pure callowmilk, nothing added but a little cacao-butter, a little ergot, a little cocaine. A drawing-room vice. Baleen is the whore’s luncheon. Have you ever seen a piece of baleen? When you’re married to my father you can afford the best. She had it brought in on a jade tray every morning. On a piece of black lace. It looks like a white piano key. About that long, about that thick. It snaps like cold chocolate. Smells like Monday laundry. Raw callowmilk protein cut with soya, industrial bleach, sugar cane, a dash of oleander, a whiff of boric acid, and a healthy lashing of heroin.

ERASMO

She gave it to you.

SEVERIN

Well, of course she did. I was fourteen. Do you have any idea what a fourteen-year-old girl will do to be loved? I wasn’t any kind of innocent at fourteen—she didn’t corrupt me. If you could pour it down your throat or stick it up your nose, I had managed to get my hands on it and give it a go. Percy didn’t care. Experience, he said. Experience is the only reason and the only master. I asked Faustine one afternoon what Venus was like. She put a stick of baleen in my hand and said it’s like this, baby girl. I ate it and curled up into my tiger and went to Venus with my mother.

ERASMO

And what was it like?

SEVERIN

It was like being inside a star. Like a star turning on inside of you. And then Faustine sang and that was like a star, too. A blue one sizzling down the dark alongside the red star of me. I remember she sang the opening aria from Her Last Nocturne and I saw the night sky pour out of her mouth. Every time I went to hear her sing afterward, even months afterward, I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars flooding her mouth and splashing onto the boards in great gouts. Galaxies and the void dripping off her chin. Her teeth burning. I told her about it on a night in December and she whispered: I know it, baby. I see it, too. That’s my insides coming out. Sometimes I see it so clear I pull back my feet to keep my shoes clean. But that’s what it looks like when you’re doin’ okay up there. Maybe you’ll do okay someday and I’ll get to see your guts blown out. That’d be nice. Wouldn’t that be nice? And then she put her head in my lap and died. Miss Faustine had so much baleen in her stomach that it backed up her works and she was poisoned to death by her own fluids.

[SEVERIN and ERASMO are quiet for several seconds. The displays tick on, lights faithfully flickering like candles.]