The Watchtower

could, a gaze she appeared to bask in.
    Then she gathered herself together again, more coldly. “And what of it?” she barked at Will.
    “You do have a certain elegant beauty,” he mused aloud. His eyes met hers for a lingering gaze. “In fact, I hear my poet’s voice speak within when I gaze at you:
    You are more elegant than any swan,
    or monarch, star: you make all numbers one.
    Alluring as sunlight in winter’s storm,
    you turn eternity so bright and warm!
    Sylvianne began to blink rapidly, and then her eyes were glistening once again.
    “Note that I’ve simply said before that there was another,” Will went on provocatively. “I didn’t say she was an insurmountable obstacle.”
    “You’ve painted her as the center of your world,” Sylvianne complained.
    “Ah, but women love a romantic,” Will explained. “So why shouldn’t I try to appeal to you? I am a poet. Poets exaggerate because they do not really live in this world.”
    “Are you saying there is a chance for me?” With an impetuous rustling of leaves, she took a few strides toward him.
    “As an immortal, I would revisit all the decisions in my life,” Will said coyly.
    “That’s not a lover speaking, that’s not even a poet,” Sylvianne said harshly. “That’s a clerk.” She flung her right hand at him, and it came dangerously close to slapping his face.
    Will knew a decisive moment had arrived. A dryad was a supernatural creature, so he could not question Sylvianne’s knowledge of immortality, but he doubted she would make him an immortal in exchange for mere words. “As an immortal, I know I would be strongly drawn to you.”
    “You’re not now?!” With a gigantic rippling in her leaves, she began to stalk off. Will gasped with disappointment; his one hope was leaving!
    But then he had a positively luminescent intuition. Maybe Sylvianne herself was the purpose of Marguerite’s directing him, through Madame La Pieuvre’s agency, to Fontainebleau. That seemed to contradict Marguerite’s love for him, but, maybe this was all the help she could render him.
    Will raced toward a wild embrace of Sylvianne. He flung himself at her as if she were Marguerite, utterly persuaded that Sylvianne was the gateway to his true love. And indeed the dryad’s leaves about him quickly became silken and sweet. He could hear her moaning softly, well above, almost in the sky. Her greenery wrapped around him as if in a whirlwind, and he felt as if he were in a merge of inner vision and outer ecstasy, at other moments making love to a voluptuous, black-haired woman whom his senses told him was Marguerite—but he couldn’t see her face—at still other times feeling as if he were a tree, sap in his veins on fire, woods whirling around him, a returned sun dazzling with summer heat, Sylvianne kissing the back of his neck while whispering, “I love you.” It was all confusing and fragmented, yet ecstatic and sun-bright.
    At the end Will found himself lying across the same rock where his adventure had begun, gasping and spent. He didn’t feel any more immortal than he had an hour before, shaking his arms and legs to make sure. No. Not that he had any idea what immortality felt like. But he didn’t feel anything but the spent afterglow of love.
    Sylvianne had gone back across the road where he had first seen her, staring down at him somewhat critically. “Do you love me now?”
    Will smiled as sweetly as he could. “Yes. As I have always loved you. As I will always love you. You are mine, Sylvianne. You are mine! ”
    Sylvianne’s look changed to lascivious. Her eyes took Will in greedily; she made him feel uncomfortable, and cheap, and disloyal to Marguerite. But the main thing was, now he was either immortal or about to become that—hadn’t Sylvianne promised? He gave her a penetrating gaze. “I don’t feel any different.”
    “Yes, you do. You feel the exhilaration of having loved me!”
    “Yes, that, of course. But I don’t quite feel … immortal. I thought I would know it when I felt it. I don’t.”
    Sylvianne cluck-clucked sympathetically, as if to a child. “Come here, Sad Boy.”
    With a sigh, Will got up, crossed the road, and tentatively approached Sylvianne. He felt none of the erotic rush of before, but he did feel a serene, pleasing sensation at coming so closely into her presence. The next thing he knew, it was as if he were swinging in a hammock, supported by two of Sylvianne’s lower limbs rocking him, and she