ERASMO
I like thinking about a version of you that doesn’t look for a camera all the time.
SEVERIN
Amal said once that I needed her tigers more than I needed a mother. That I had all the wildness of a plate of cheese. And a little tiger shit was good for a girl who lived in a fairy tale.
ERASMO
[His smile is enormous, frank, warm.] I can be a tiger if you want. What big teeth I’ve got.
SEVERIN
[ignoring him] She left anyway. One of the younger tigers, Cortez, bit off most of her hand when they were doing The Jupiter Circus. She was putting the bellhop’s hat on him and he just took it off at the wrist. No matter how you think you know a beast, she said in hospital, no matter how much love you’ve spent on him…then she waggled her stump. But she had an extra-wide bed brought into her room so that Cortez could lie next to her while she recovered. He rested his big old head in her lap and never moved from her side. She slept with her good arm around his scruff. Percy didn’t come to visit once. I suppose a twelve-year-old can’t begin to guess what goes on inside a marriage, most especially a marriage primarily concerned with lenses and the half-tamed. But when Amal got her clean bill of health she went to her chalet on Mount Ampère and sent for the rest of her animals.
ERASMO
Except two.
SEVERIN
Except Gloucester. I found him sprawled on my bed with his belly ready for scratching and a note round his neck that had instructions for his slurry on one side and on the other: No matter how much love you’ve spent.
ERASMO
And?
SEVERIN
[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