Uncuffed, he was a dubious ally. Loafing in attendance while the Queen eddied, motionless and leisurely, from one proud display to the next. Here, in Venus’s armory, her drift was of some moment and he, collared mastiff, trailed her in all her 5’7” mystery, gathering, with his retainer’s spotless hands, the bundles of samples, the gifts and trinkets pressed on her, the rare and much applauded purchase. He felt himself sized up in whispers, knew too little of this world and its ways to diagnose the burn in those averted eyes as contempt or envy. The light, the impossibly high ceilings, the air’s long sough forward and back, clean and narcotic in its layered coalescence of the unmistakably feminine, all this kept his daydream a docile one, the screaming in his brain restricted to one slim imagined tower far from the stables and the Bernini excess of the ancestral crypt.
She drifts and stops, and returns. She removes her gloves and all draw imperceptibly nearer, to witness her display of prodigy among the unmarked perfumes. He stands back, dazzled by their multitude, rank upon rank of glass bottles, from pale blue to cognac, from parrot’s emerald to urine gold. Unlabeled as the bottles are, the Queen must ask the name of this or that particular scent, tilting her milkwhite profile to the chosen shopgirl’s reverent response, framed each time in the form of a question, as though she might be, almost surely should be, wrong. Though framed with a touch of pride, as he notes, noting Shopgirl Number Eleven well, the ball-bearing brightness of her irises, the pride of an instructress asked for the pedigree of an eye-catching pet put through his or her recitation or tumble, shy as navy blue or pearl white. Each admission of ignorance (‘what do you call this one’) reveals by its confident modesty the Queen’s all-surpassing ease within these walls, the invitation, however sweet the undercurrent of dissuasion, that those around her, ranged in their practiced attitudes of service, might relax, billowed and blessed by the praise of one whose labor is anything but skilled. And yet, each stroke of tapering appreciative finger, the smoothing of uncallused thumb, each word both soft and clear, elicits upcast eyes that fawn, lips that purse to suck.
And is his role that of death’s head on the velvet blotter? Here to keep humility with striking distance? Or is he merely the cardinal of her entourage, here to carry the more priceless of her packages, to return to the counter on some invented errand, there to chat up Shopgirl Number Eleven, once the crowd’s passed on?
The Queen is possessed of the psychic abilities more commonly found in women less attractive than herself, perhaps has seen his Brancusi hulk made liquid in the mirrors of the shopgirl’s eyes. She summons him to her side, lifts her bared foream to his nostrils. Tell me what you think. Keep your voice low and your tongue pristine.
Ashes, fog, a spritz of honey.
And this?
A ship at sea, a fire on the moon.
And this?
A swollen glans, most likely mine, ruffed in the chill of whipped cream.
This then.
A beauty grown impatient. Most likely yours.
And she selects one of each, and her tips are generous but not vulgar, and her gloves restored she thanks the gathering with a gesture so serene it may not have happened at all. Time is what she buys, offering top dollar for a handful of moments, their separate richness or poverty no longer her concern. The world is a violent place and like a wild beast is kept off the lawns and out of the nursery by spells and bodyguards. She watches him perform what tasks she sets him, waits for a pattern of elevenses to emerge, trumpeted with smiling insubordination.