by Robert Levy
“Can’t argue with that. You’re the boss, after all.” He slides up his glasses with a thick finger and returns his gaze to his typewriter. “But don’t think I haven’t noticed you’ve lost a little bit of your swing as of late.” By which he means since June left.
“Yes, well, so have you. As of late.” I begin to type again, and soon enough he does the same. We fall into a familiar, if not altogether comfortable, silence.
For while it is Henry at Louveciennes who plays the role of the invisible specter that hovers between Hugo and myself, here in Clichy we are haunted by June, who has written Henry to announce that she will not be returning to Paris. He has taken his own childish revenge by removing her picture from the wall and replacing it with one of his lovers, a beautiful dancer from the Bal Nègre. Too complicated to unravel our cat’s cradle of affections and recriminations, our seductions and our passions and our hurts, though Henry and I are united by more than our fucking (another of his favorite words).
I jolt anew at June’s rage when she discovered our affair, her drunken and tearful declarations of betrayal that evening in their flat made all the more painful because I was not just another one of his nameless dalliances. She must despise the very thought of me, if only because she misconstrued the unspoken arrangement in which we all found ourselves. June and I shared our own voluptuous fantasy, of course, our own distinct form of intimacy. I wonder if I will ever manage to find that same closeness again.
After a lunch of sandwiches at Café de la Place Clichy, I leave Henry to browse the shops, the first perfume blush of spring washing over the city in a tide of pink and yellow and green. I wander aimlessly as if ensorcelled, until it dawns on me that I am traveling in a specific direction, one that soon becomes clear the farther I stroll. Eventually, I must admit to myself where I am headed, and find myself drifting up the narrow street that opens onto Rue Chaptal and the Theatre du Grand-Guignol.
A lone woman, small and dark-haired, stands smoking in front of the shuttered entrance. It is only once I get close enough that I realize it is the actress from Friday evening. In the light of day, she looks nothing like June, and must have been wearing a blond wig as she lay captive and mutilated upon the mad doctor’s operating table. Reflexively, my nipples begin to tingle, the mere sight of her enough to trigger a commingled sensation of pleasure and pain. I do not want her to catch me staring, and so I lower my head as I move to cross the street.
“You,” the actress calls out. She steps from the shelter of the entryway, her brown eyes searching my face. She appears roughly my age, a few years older perhaps, her face less full without the benefit of stage lighting and theatrical makeup. “You were in the audience here this past weekend.”
“What? Oh. Yes. I was.” Apropos of nothing, I giggle like a fool, my cheeks flushing. “I enjoyed it very much. The hospital play especially. It was quite disturbing. Gruesome, even. The depravity of the doctor’s cannibalism was astounding.”
“That?” she scoffs. “That was nothing. A common and sensationalist trifle at best.” She lights another cigarette from her last and flicks the spent stub into the gutter. “It is only when we are able to draw from hidden wells of fear that true fright is made known. Your first time at the Guignol, I take it?”
“Far from it.” June beside me in the pew, her bare arm pressed against mine, the dual scents of her perfume and natural musky odor intoxicating. Delirium, darkness, delirium anew. “The Guignol is always a special experience, no matter how often I attend.”
“Then you have seen your fair share of horrors. What is cannibalism, then, when compared to uncontrollable lust? Or compared to wanton betrayal? Next to that, eating human flesh is nothing.” She exhales in a scattered burst of smoke. “My name is Paula,” she says, “but everyone calls me Maxa. Also known as The Maddest Woman in the World. If you’ve been to the Guignol before, then you’ve also seen your fair share of me.”
“I am sure that I have. Only this was the first time that I...” I shake my head and glance at a poster on the theatre’s façade, its image that of a lingerie-clad woman on her knees as she cradles a man’s severed head, a coy smile stretched across her blood-red lips.
“Tell me.” Maxa’s eyes narrow, intrigued and wary in equal measure. “Go on.”
I search for the proper words. “It was the first time I found my own story intermingled with that of the proceedings. I saw a friend of mine, violated upon the stage during the hospital scene. I saw her, in your face.”
She smiles. “To many patrons, the Guignol functions as a mirror onto their secret desires. I function as a mirror, especially for women of a peculiar disposition. The passionate. The artistic. The... conflicted.” A coil of smoke slithers out from between her lips. “And how did it make you feel, then, to look upon your friend in such a horrifying predicament? To see her violated like that. Used as chattel is used, treated as if she were but a plaything for a madman. Such demonstrations of sadism and perversion, did they cause you to realize they are mere reflections of what is already inside of you?”
“Yes. Yes, they did.” My throat goes dry, and I swallow. A wave of displacement overtakes me, as if I should be back in Allendy’s office, answering these invasive questions upon his couch. Only I find that it is here and with this bold actress that I can fully answer from my heart. “It also made me... excited. And it made me feel wholly alive, for the first time in far too long.”
Maxa smiles, a blush of evident delight coloring her face. “If you want to feel more alive yet, come back and attend the show this Saturday night. I’ll ensure you have an excellent view of the proceedings.”
“Wonderful,” I answer at once. “I will be here.”
“I will see you on Saturday, then. Mademoiselle…?”
A fleeting scent of spice, her perfume perhaps, and my eyelids flutter before I force myself to maintain her gaze. “You may call me Anaïs.”
“Until then, Anaïs.” Maxa drops her cigarette and crushes it beneath her heel. “Stay safe,” she says, and with that, she turns and retreats through a side door. I am left alone on the street, the yellow sun beginning to lower over the distant rooftops.
Even now as I write these words—Hugo lying asleep beside me, with the dogs huddled in the corner upon their pillows, the fire crackling in the hearth—I cannot escape the fathomless pools of her brown eyes. Flecked with swirling amber, they threaten to reduce and absorb me beneath their mystical gaze. Surely I am coping with June’s absence by forming a schoolgirl fascination with another woman, what Dr. Allendy might refer to as sublimation. Regardless, the thought of Maxa and her enveloping attraction is too alluring and powerful to repudiate.
My hand travels down my chest, across my belly and to the inside of my thigh, and I touch myself there. My fingers seek out the wet folds, the sacred core of my being. I count the days until my return to the theatre, the holy temple of nightmares and lust that awaits me as its own breathless lover. I count the hours and minutes as well.
On Saturday night, I return to the Grand Guignol. There is a single ticket waiting for me at the box office, as if Maxa knew I would be alone, sensed my need to open myself to her without the distraction of a companion. Either that, or she wanted me all to herself.
I settle into my third-row seat and leaf through the evening’s bill; last week I had left my program behind thinking I would be returning from the intermission, only to be swept away by Hugo and his abrupt and demanding amorousness. This time I find her picture, the size of a half-page with her face in profile as she peers over a pale and exposed shoulder. Examining the image leads me to believe I may indeed have seen her on the stage in the past, though I have no specific memory of it. No wonder, really, as everything inside the theatre seems so very different now, as if I am glimpsing it all through new eyes. The house lights lower, the audience applauds before hushing, and I once again fall under the spell of the Guignol.
After three preliminary productions—a comedy of mistaken identity that tak
es place at a nunnery, followed by a harshly realist play on police corruption and an elderly couple evicted and thrown into the street, as well as a sex farce in an overgrown greenhouse in Marseilles—it is time for the bill’s featured attraction. La Famille du Péché, the title printed in the program’s largest lettering. The Family of Sin.
The curtain opens onto a dimly lit stage, where a girl of perhaps eighteen is asleep in bed. She rolls back and forth in the sheets, and as she does so a bespectacled and middle-aged man enters. He approaches on the tips of his slippered toes, a flickering candelabra in his outstretched hand, and he slowly circles the bed. He peers down admiringly at the sleeping girl’s figure, and reaches across the bed to stroke her long hair upon the pillow. At last she rouses, and she stares at him in wonder and doe-eyed confusion.
“Father?” she says, and sits up with the bedsheets clutched to her chest. “What are you doing in my room at this late hour?”
“I came to check on you, my darling. To make sure you’re not suffering too much on this cold winter’s night, what with the stove heatless and in need of repair.”
“I am quite cold in here, it is true. Would you lay with me, and help make me warm?”
“Oh yes, of course. I will lie with you all night, if that is your wish.”
The father rests the candelabra on the nightstand and pulls back the sheets, climbing into bed beside his daughter. He presses himself against her back, runs his hands up and down her arms, along her sides and her narrow frame, until he starts to undo the buttons at the front of her nightgown. Is it a trick of the imagination that, for a fleeting moment, the man resembles my own father Joaquín? That the daughter he touches in such a seductive manner might also pass as a younger version of myself? I shift in my seat, newly unnerved.
“Father,” the daughter whispers, aghast. “What are you doing? This is against God’s will!”
“Come now, my pet. You know what it is I am doing, why I came to your room this evening. Just as you are aware that you have matured into an exquisite womanhood, and have blossoming desires of your own. You know what it is I want, because you want the very same thing yourself.”
“But…but what if Mother should hear us?”
“That old cow? She was in the wine all night, and fell fast asleep long ago. We have nothing to be afraid of, nothing in the world. Believe me, dear daughter, this is just as God intended. Now, lie down on your stomach. Go on.”
He finishes undressing her. Soon, he enters her from behind, his trousers dropping to the floor as he thrusts against her. “I have never felt this wonderful before!” the daughter cries, her bared breasts dangling from the foot of the bed as he continues rutting away. “Is this what love is meant to be, at last? If so, this cold winter’s night never end!”
A square of dim light materializes on the wall, upstage from the bed and the incestuous pair. An opened doorway, filled at once by a shadowy figure, and the audience murmurs in equal parts trepidation and excitement. From the wings steps Maxa, barefooted and clad in a silk robe. Wild-eyed and crazed, she gazes cursed upon this scene of perverse and unspeakable horror, one beyond any real mother’s sane comprehension. She slowly approaches the bed, as father and daughter proceed heedlessly in their dance of lust and forbidden desire, oblivious to her ghastly presence.
“Are you warm yet, my little darling?” the father pants, bent over his daughter and grasping hold of her breasts in his large hands. “Can you feel me hot inside you?”
“Oh, yes,” she answers, “yes,” and she arches high her body, the carved figurehead of a mermaid rendered upon the prow of a ship. “Keep warming me, Father. Keep warming me! And promise that you’ll never stop.”
“I promise, sweet daughter,” he says, his eyes rolling back in his head as he approaches orgasm. “I promise…”
“You dare!” Maxa thunders. The blaspheming pair separate and scramble away from each other, toward opposite sides of the bed. “Such flagrant sin and depravity, under my roof? The only warmth you’ll know is from the infernal pits of hell itself!”
She takes the candelabra from the nightstand and dashes it to the ground. In a loud rush of wind and heat, a blast of heat and light explodes from the front of the stage, and the crowd gasps as a scrim of fire leaps along the footlights in a barbed circle. The vindictive mother throws her head back and laughs a damned laugh, while father and daughter shriek in terror as the bed appears to go up in flames. I lean back in my seat, amazed by the effect, another of the Guignol’s astonishing stage illusions.
Maxa lowers her head, her contorted grimace dancing in the bright flames. Her righteous gaze falls upon mine, and our eyes meet through the wall of fire, her stare so piercing I am forced to shut my eyes from the sight of it. When I open them again, however, it is my own mother who stares down at me, just as surely as it was June that I saw upon the operating table last week. Only this time, I do not peer out from the audience, but rather from the stage itself. Now, I am looking out from inside the terrified daughter’s burning body, my mother beside the bed and laughing at my well-earned pain.
Panicked, I turn to face the audience. I glimpse myself seated in the pew, where I smile back through the wall of fire. Or is it Maxa who smiles from behind my eyes, using my very own lips? I lean forward, but the heat from the flames causes me to retreat, and I hold my breath in abject terror.
The curtain closes, and with a sudden snap of heat and light, I am back. Returned to my seat and to my body, in time to see the curtain shut from the audience, my view of the stage occluded as if by storm clouds shuddering across the moon. The crowd cheers all around me, and I clench my hands together, palms wet with perspiration. I cough and struggle for breath, and swallow at the air as if I am drowning.
After the show is over, I wait nearly an hour for her to appear outside the theatre. Finally, the stage door groans open and Maxa emerges, accompanied by her fellow actors, two men and a woman. I recognize them from the cast, the father and daughter from La Famille du Péché as well as a gentleman from the greenhouse scenario, who also had the role of the lascivious goat herder during my last visit to the Guignol. I stand stiffly nearby as they bid one another goodnight, and the younger gentleman, the goat herder, offers to walk Maxa home.
“That will not be necessary.” She points her chin in my direction. “I have somebody waiting.”
The other actors disperse, and Maxa approaches. She puts a cigarette to her dark red lips, which I light before lighting my own. “Thank you,” she says with an air of nonchalance I first mistake for superiority, but soon recognize as being closer to inevitability.
“How do you do it?” I say, no longer sure who or what it is I am dealing with, be it woman or something else altogether. “How did you capture me in the performance tonight? Draw upon my private thoughts, so that you were able craft that deviant scenario to begin with?”
Maxa exhales in a whistle between her teeth, smoke dispersed in the dim shine from a nearby street lamp. “Everyone sees what they want to see,” she answers at last. “Especially the lonely, and the self-consumed.”
“You play at knowing me. My hopes, my dreams? My passions. You seem so very sure of yourself.”
“If only that was the case.” She smiles. “Perhaps everything you saw tonight was a fantasy of your own making. You, who wants so desperately to be a part of something larger than yourself that you forced a connection to the piece, one in which you could live out your darkest desires. The association between you and the performance was only in your imagination. A simple delusion.”
“That was no delusion.” A drunkard staggers across the street, bleating out a tuneless rendition of “Parlez-Moi D’Amour,” and I wait until he is out of earshot before I continue. “I could feel the flames upon my skin, the starchy touch of the bedsheets upon my bare flesh. Not only that...” I swallow hard, draw deeply off my cigarette while I wait for the words to order themselves, for their meaning to become clear. “I could feel a once-empty space shift ins
ide me. It was as if I were making room for you, as if we became undifferentiated, two individual souls fused together as a single spirit. I feel it even now.”
“Go home,” Maxa says. She stares down the block, in the direction of the drunkard stumbling his way around the corner. “While you still have a chance for it all to make a strange kind of sense, so that you may pack it deep down in a solitary corner of your memory and forget we ever met. Tell yourself that you were simply tired, or anxious, that you were enthralled by the great horrid spectacle of the Guignol to such an extent that it overwhelmed you. Perhaps you drank too much, or you fell faint, like so many others before you. Make a story of it for yourself, one satisfying enough to put it all out of your mind. Just go. Now.”
Her words resound in my ears like a pagan incantation. Instead of repelling me, they have the effect of a soothing balm, patching over the prickled shock of experiencing the unexplainable. An offer to forget, to smooth my harsh edges as one would polish an unearthed gemstone. I shake away the sedating effect, however, and focus with a renewed sense of purpose. This offer, it is for her benefit, not mine. If she rids herself of me, then she will no longer have to submit to human connection, to her own raw vulnerability. I know this kind of woman all too well.
“I shall do no such thing.” I take another step closer to her, near enough to kiss. “Not until you tell me who you really are, and how you were able to entrance me with whatever strange magic you are capable of conjuring. And I will not leave you be until you do so.”
Maxa shakes her head, dark curls grazing the collar of her coat. “Some secrets, once fully excavated, can never be reburied. Once you cross certain thresholds, the journey cannot be unwound.” Unmoved, I fold my arms across my chest and we stand in silence. Finally she sighs, a smoky laugh hissed between her lips like steam from a boiling kettle.