The Accommodation — Monday, 8 January 1990, 10:00 PM

The Torch / Modius’s Mansion / Fifth Avenue Gary, Indiana

Victor Salonika was drying a glass when he said it.

“Your friend in Roselle. The painter.”

Sable had been sitting at the bar for twenty minutes, nursing a drink she couldn’t taste, watching the door the way she watched every door, with her body angled away and her attention locked on the mirror behind the bottles where the reflection showed everything the room thought she wasn’t looking at. Monday night at The Torch. Four mortals at a table by the wall. A woman alone in the corner booth with a cigarette and a crossword puzzle. The jukebox playing Sam Cooke low enough that the song was more a feeling than a sound.

“What about him,” she said.

Victor set the glass down. Picked up another. The bartender’s rhythm, the metronome of a man who measured his life in clean surfaces.

“Word is his wife caught him in something. Took it to the Primogen. He’s been called to answer.”

The word wife landed first. Then Primogen. Then the distance between what Victor was saying and what he meant, which was this: Michael Payne, the man who made her, the man who put the curse in her blood and left her in Gary like a painting hung in a room nobody visits, had been dragged before the ruling council of Chicago by the woman he’d left.

“When,” Sable said.

“Nobody’s seen him in a week.”

“Who told you?”

Victor’s face closed. He set the second glass down with the precise care of a man who had decided the conversation was finished.

“I already said more than I should’ve. Heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s bar talk. Either way, it’s Chicago business, and I pour drinks in Gary.”

He didn’t look at her again.

She fed on Broadway.

A man at a bar who was drinking the way people drink when they don’t want to think, which was the only way anyone drank in Gary, Indiana, in January. She sat next to him and didn’t have to work. The face did the work. The face always did the work. That was the arrangement: God or whoever had given her a face that made men forget things, and in exchange she’d spent her life remembering everything the face made them forget. Every hand. Every debt. Every name she’d learned to answer to that wasn’t hers.

Twenty minutes. The alley behind the bar. His neck warm against her mouth, his pulse slowing under her fingers, his breathing going shallow and sweet the way breathing went when she drank. She stopped. She always stopped. She was good at knowing when to stop. It was the only skill from the old life that translated perfectly to the new one.

She left him sitting against the brick wall with his face slack with something that looked like peace but was just blood loss, and she walked to the Buick and drove to Miller Beach with her mouth tasting like copper and cheap bourbon and someone else’s life.

The mansion.

White columns in the dark. The lawn surrendering to January. A ghoul answered the door. Male, middle-aged, the vacancy behind his eyes that came from years of someone else’s blood running the show.

“The Prince is not expecting visitors this evening.”

Sable pulled the fur coat tighter and dropped her shoulders and let her chin fall and looked up through the geometry she’d learned at The Oasis, the angles that said help me, I’m lost, you’re the only one who can. She said, “Long night? You’ve been polishing something. I can smell the lemon oil on your hands. He keeps you busy.” The half-smile. “Tell him his new ward is here. He’ll want to know.”

The ghoul closed the door. Two minutes. Three. The lake wind cutting through the fur coat and the slip and the skin that didn’t feel cold anymore but remembered what cold meant the way an amputee remembers a limb.

The door opened.

“The Prince will see you in the drawing room.”

Modius was standing by the fireplace. No fire. The mantel framing him like a proscenium, and he knew it, and that was the thing about Modius: he was always performing the role of prince, even alone, even in a dead city, even when the audience was one fledgling in a slip who’d come to sell him the only thing she had left.

“Sable.” He tasted the name. “Three nights since court and here you are. I wasn’t expecting you until February.”

She let the coat fall.

It landed behind her in a heap of fur and satin and she went to her knees and the slip was thin and the floor was cold and none of it mattered because this was the performance, the one she’d been rehearsing since The Oasis, since the first man who thought he was buying something she was choosing to sell. The difference between a great performance and a bad one was that in a great performance you believed it yourself, at least while you were doing it, at least until the lights came up.

“I just couldn’t stay away, my Prince.” She touched his hand. Cold on cold. “It’s so thrilling to be part of something real. Something with beauty and tradition. Not like the streets. Not like the men who never leave me alone.” She looked up at him. “A beautiful flower in a vase. That’s all I want to be.”

Modius didn’t move. He looked at her the way he looked at everything worth looking at: the collector’s inventory, the appraiser’s patience, the long slow cataloguing of a man who had been acquiring beautiful things for longer than Gary had been a city.

He put one finger under her chin.

“You’re very good at this.”

Not an accusation. A compliment. One craftsman to another.

Then the negotiation. The carriage house, which she declined. Gently, with the specific calculus of a woman who understood that proximity to the current favorite was worse than distance from the prince. She’d seen Allicia stand at Elysium. She’d seen the crack.

“I don’t want to be a disruption,” she said. “I want to be an asset.”

Modius looked at her for a long time. She’d surprised him. That was worth more than the kneeling.

“There’s a building on Fifth Avenue. Near the Palace. Second floor. It was a dance studio, once.”

He gave her a key. Brass, old. His fingers closed over hers for one second.

“Court is the first Friday. February second. I will expect you.”

On the way out the hallway was empty and the piano room was dark and the house was silent in the way that houses are silent when someone inside them is listening very carefully to the front door closing.

Fifth Avenue. One in the morning.

The alley door, the narrow stairs, the key turning in a lock that hadn’t been opened in years. The studio smelled like dust and wood and the particular absence that fills rooms where people used to move and then stopped.

Her eyes adjusted. The hardwood floor, warped maple, the kind they’d laid when buildings were built to last and Gary was a city people came to instead of left. High ceilings. A utility sink. A radiator against the far wall, cold.

And the mirror. One whole wall, floor to ceiling, the glass clouded but showing everything.

She saw the pointe shoes before she understood them. Hanging from the ballet barre by their ribbons, pink satin darkened with age, the toes worn down to the board. Someone had danced in these shoes until the shoes gave out.

On the back wall, near the office door, a framed photograph. Small, dusty, the glass cracked in one corner. Black and white. A woman at the barre, in this room, in front of this mirror.

Allicia.

Sable stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the photograph and understood what Modius had done, whether he’d meant to do it or not. This was Allicia’s room. Before the mansion. Before the piano. Before she became the thing on the mantel he’d stopped seeing. Allicia danced here, on this floor, in front of this mirror. Then she stopped, or was stopped, and Modius held the room the way he held everything, not because he needed it but because ownership was the only verb he conjugated, and now he’d handed it to the next one. The new acquisition. The upgrade.

Sable left the shoes on the barre. Left the photograph on the wall.

She drove to Polk Street. Took what she needed, left the coat. The fur coat stayed at the green door, the real door, the one nobody knew about, the exit she’d need when everything Modius gave her turned out to be everything Modius could take away.

Back at Fifth Avenue she braced the office door and checked the walls for light and lay on the hardwood floor in the dark, and the mirror showed nothing because there was no light to show it by, and outside the boarded windows Gary was doing what Gary did at two in the morning, which was dying, which was the same thing it did at every other hour, only quieter.

She thought about Michael. The painter. The sire. The man who’d put his teeth in her neck in a loft in Roselle and whispered I’m sorry while he did it. Gone now. Called to answer by the woman he’d left, and the answer would be the kind of answer given in a room full of old things that had stopped pretending to be alive.

She thought about Modius. The key. The drawing room. The finger under her chin. You’re very good at this. She was. She’d always been good at this. The question nobody asked, because nobody wanted to hear the answer, was what this cost the person who was good at it. What it took out of you to kneel on a cold floor and mean it and not mean it at the same time, to perform devotion so well that you couldn’t tell afterward which parts were real. The Oasis had taught her that. The Embrace had just given her forever to practice.

She thought about the pointe shoes and the woman who’d worn them down to nothing, and she wondered if Allicia had knelt on this same floor in a different year, in a different slip, and said the same words to the same man, and whether the words had worked then the way they worked tonight, and whether any of it had ever worked for anyone, or whether the performance was the whole thing, the only thing, the floor and the mirror and the silence and the slow accumulation of roles that fit so well you forgot you were wearing them.

Dawn was coming. She could feel it the way all of them felt it. Not light but weight. The sun pressing down on the world, pushing everything dead back into the ground.

She closed her eyes.

The floor was hard and the room was cold and somewhere in Miller Beach a woman who used to dance was not sleeping either.