He sulked in the distance and she felt him.
Her eyes flashed, looking at the strangers (she imagined benevolent strangers) in that crowded someplace. And she danced, occasionally glancing at the sulking figure in the red velvet armchair. He was opacity, penumbra.
She ruminated, clicking her tongue, mouth and head full of champagne.
I am so selfish. A smile. It’s not fair to keep him in my thoughts for so long. A snatch of laughter and a luxuriant gesture to the garlands. Can’t he just notice me? A friendly kiss on the cheek of an acquaintance. There was nothing shameful.* There is nothing wrong with me. Dance. Dance. The music raked its fingers through her hair. Turn turn turn. Turn.
She left the dancing foray with a group of her more respectable associates. They were taken to a parlor via horse-drawn taxi. They ate. They drank champagne. They reveled. They left. They kissed the night as the taxi ambled through old haunts, streets occupied by the living. The lights, gazing subtly and lovingly at the drunken revelers, spoke in supernatural languages that only they could decipher. They drank in the night, the city of light and magic, steeped in meaning that Anna could not decode. To home. “To home.” Home.
She dutifully tore off her bedclothes and shrugged them tenderly over her tingling form, settling into bed, pitching on the sea of revels. Bacchus. she stretched her legs eternally and cyclically, dissipating into the dark nimbus of this night, all nights.*
The venous hand of a cruel individual entered Anna’s dreams. A red velvet armchair was mocking her. Mocking me! Of all the nerve! Something jutted into place and air rushed past her ears. She felt him, sulking in the mutable shade, invisible and unadorned.
She lay, paralyzed in the half-wake. Could she be so bold as to breathe now? She gasped and felt something. She swirled.
Her eyes seeped water and salt, which dried in miniscule crystals as she struggled to sleep.
*from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
