the anatomy lesson

It takes a tremendous effort to act natural under strain. Bedelia knows this.

She can pass through her private rituals as she otherwise would — removing her makeup, safeguarding her hair from breakage, when it’s already porous and fragile from the way she has long been accustomed to wear it. She sleepwalks through her days as if she were in a pleasant state of ignorance, before she knew what she is capable of. She can pretend a nonchalant mastery in everything a thinking person should be able to do, in drawing a bath and in making love. But she cannot produce a simulacrum of spontaneity on command. She cannot act as if she were not observed when she knows she is being watched. He doesn’t conceal himself or tease her by playing the voyeur, he simply situates himself front and center in the doorway with his stylus and drawing board.

Roman and Lydia Fell are husband and wife. It would be strange to shy away from undressing in the presence of a spouse, with his semen still obscurely inside her. The various imperfections of her body are a non-issue — the bruises, the creases where skin and flesh are compressed into folds, the small scar beneath her left breast, the soft slack places where time’s war on elasticity has made an inroads. All flesh will one day fail its owner, even Hannibal’s fetchingly lean meat.

The stylus strokes over the prepared ground many, many times — Hannibal prepares his own sizing, fooling around with boiled rabbit skin and burnt bone, and its smell is more pleasant than one might expect. He’s marking out the shape of her in a thin deposit of silver. His dressing gown falls over his crossed legs just about perfectly — she’d been in a state of cold clarity while hurrying to prepare for their escape, and had brought little, while it seems he had all the time he needed to pack away his favorite beautiful things and budget for the requisition of others. What’s the use of international assets if you can’t spend them? Her purchases in Italy haven’t been entirely without their ulterior motives, but she’s tried to clothe herself in beautiful things. Plausible choices from a captor of exquisite, if excessive tastes.

If she speaks to him, he’ll want to come and touch her again. Her scrim of indifference won’t be able to withstand it, not tonight.