Free The Green Muse by Jessie Prichard Hunter Page B

the freshness of the taste, does it not?” he asked, and I nodded. I did often drink absinthe undiluted, out of the flask I kept in my pocket. This practice was rare because the taste was bitter indeed. Normally I used only one sugar cube at a time. But this was not the place to argue the fine points of the ritual, although I could see that Verlaine wanted to, wanted to discuss at length his love. That he had seen instantly in me another lover and known him.
    The poet removed the spoon and tipped the cubes over into the glass. He then used the pointed tip of the spoon to crush the sugar; I could hear it. The liquor went paler, to a pleasing creamy green, then to an opalescent cloud. Verlaine took a long time about this, delicately seeking out and tapping down stray crystals while V and I watched.
    â€œSurely you would like a glass,” he said at length, darting a keen eye toward me. “I have enough here for two.”
    There was no point in denying my desire. For V, for the green drink, for Verlaine’s poetry. Although she had told me she did not drink absinthe, I asked her. “That is not one of my vices,” she told me lightly, and I resolved to make it one, before the night was out.
    I filled the cup. As I watched the river of green I heard the poet speak: “In the old park’s lonely grass two dark shadows lately passed.” It was his “Sentimental Conversation.” It was my favorite poem.
    I put three rough cubes of sugar on the shining odalisque. I heard V’s silvery laugh and Verlaine’s slow, calm voice: “Do you remember our former ecstasies? Why would you have me rake up memories?”
    Already, the world around me was taking on the quality of a dream, as in anticipation I separated myself from everything around me and entered into the realm of the Green Muse. I became acutely aware of the cold outside the water bottle, the way the glass fit the palm of my hand. The way the glass could have been skin.
    â€œDoes your heart still beat at my name alone? Is it always my soul you see in dreams? Ah, no.”
    The light fell down on the table in a sharp-­edged circle that cut the darkness in an arc against the dark green tablecloth. The absinthe waited, dark in the glass. I poured the water much more slowly than Verlaine had, savoring the tiny sounds: metal, water, sugar, glass. Slowly the liquid turned milky and spun. V was watching me. “Oh the lovely days of unspeakable mystery, when our mouths met! Ah yes, maybe.”
    I put down the carafe and shook the spoon lightly, and the remaining sugar toppled into the green.
    â€œHow blue it was, the sky, how high our hopes! Hope fled, conquered, along the dark slopes.” I stirred my drink languidly, as I always did, enjoying the moment before I drank; my mouth filled with saliva and I caught V smiling. I smiled back.
    â€œSo they walked there, among the wild herbs, and the night alone listened to their words.”
    I drank.
    â€œPaul, that was beautiful!” V said, her voice fresh with admiration. It was as though she had never heard the poem, and yet I knew she must have heard it many times. The old poet looked at her with affection while the room shifted under my feet. The absinthe pulled at my ear, as Theo always said of that first rush of feeling. Verlaine was looking at me but I could not tell him what I thought of his poem; I could not speak at all. The room receded, and I receded from myself and hung suspended just above and to the right of my own head. There is nothing like that first moment: All of God’s creation is clear to you. It is all yours. There is nothing you need, because there is nothing you do not have. I was Verlaine’s ghosts in the moonlight garden; I possessed the light that hung in V’s hair. I was no mortal thing; I would not die. Then V was looking at me catlike, and Verlaine was staring into his glass, and I was only myself, and thirsty.
    â€œIs everything to