The First Actress

by C. W. Gortner

  Taking a moment to let my silence smother his ridiculous declaration, I piled up my hair, stabbing the ivory pins through it to keep the knot in place. Only then did I turn back to him. “Jean. Don’t you think you’re being childish? We are both adults—”

  “Childish!” He crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. “I not only aspire to a dead man’s repute, but now I’m a child as well? Is that what you think of me?”

  “Stop this.” My voice sharpened. “You know very well what I think of you. I chose you for the role. Perrin has stated he will cast us next in Zaïre. It’s a tremendous opportunity for us—”

  “And this?” He thrust his arm toward the bed, with a grandiosity reminiscent of his stage persona. “Does any of this mean more than a stage to you?”

  I was so taken aback that I didn’t know how to respond. My silence was enough.

  “I see.” He flung on a robe and lit another cigarette, making me wince. The room reeked of tobacco smoke, though it was his only vice. He rarely drank any alcohol, not even wine. “It is what you do.”

  “What I do?” I fought back a surge of sudden anger. “Are you implying that I’ve used you in some fashion?”

  “What else would you call it? All this time together, and not once have you said you love me, though I’ve said it countless times to you. I also know…things.”

  I was sorely tempted to walk out. But I’d encouraged liberties between us and we now had a lucrative partnership; our onstage pairing had reaped critical adulation and summoned audiences in droves. Every performance of Britannicus sold out, with Perrin adding an extra two weeks to our schedule, which caused Samson to bellow in protest and Madame Courvasel to plead exhaustion. With astounding alacrity, Madame Nathalie—practiced opportunist that she was—stepped in to play Agrippina, determined to gain some attention for herself. Not even Samson’s overwrought performance could dampen her vengeful empress. Her acting elevated the play, making it the most profitable Britannicus in the Comédie’s history.

  “Yes. Things,” he repeated. “About your past.”

  I had to smile. “I see. Has Marie Colombier been whispering sweet poison in your ear? Perhaps you should violate her next. No doubt she’d welcome it, though Perrin might not.”

  His cigarette quivered in his fingers. “I told you I was sorry. I never intended it.”

  “Instead, you intend to insult me.” I stalked past him to fetch my cloak.

  His hand reached out to detain me. “Sarah,” he said, his voice sinking, “forgive me. I can be such a brute. You…you make me say and do things that I don’t really mean.”

  I glanced at his hand clutching my sleeve. I wanted to tell him we couldn’t go on like this. Not only was it unwise for our professional relationship, but I had no idea what, if anything, I wanted of our personal one. Our passion was real enough, yet he’d been correct in saying what he had, despite his callousness. Love was a risk I couldn’t afford; it had too many unforeseen consequences, too many pitfalls and uncertainties.

  As I sought the right words to say as much, an urgent knock came at the front door. Jean’s flat wasn’t spacious—a rented bachelor abode, furnished with the bare minimum, yet I still stubbed my toe on a nearby footstool as I pulled away from him. Hastily fastening his robe about his waist, he went to the door.

  His concierge, a rodent-like man who always greeted me with a lascivious sneer, said, “This note arrived for the mademoiselle,” as if I didn’t deserve to be addressed thus.

  “Merci.” Jean handed me the note. I’d left his address with Caroline, in case of an emergency; when I read the few lines my maid had dispatched, my knees buckled.

  Jean grasped hold of me before I slid to the floor.

  “No,” I heard myself whisper. “No, please…”

  He threw on his clothes within minutes, barking at the concierge eavesdropping in ghoulish delight at the door to summon a carriage for us.

  “You don’t have to,” I said, as my entire world crumbled around me.

  “I do.” He steered me down the staircase into the street. “You need me at your side.”

  * * *

  —

  She lay so still, so quiet, that for an inchoate moment I thought there must have been a mistake. She was only asleep. How dare they cause me such anguish?

  But my mother was already there with Rosine, seated by the bed where Madame G., a wreckage of grief, had draped Régine’s wasted form in a tarnished white veil, like a bride on her nuptials. Flowers pulled from our garden were scattered about her body; at the foot of the bed, Clotilde lay with her head mournfully on her paws.

  “Must you keep that beast inside the house?” said Julie peevishly, with a sidelong glance at Jean where he stood on the threshold.

  I ignored her, moving to the bed. So serene. It seemed impossible for a girl who had never shown an instance of calm. The bones of her skull showed under the envelope of her skin; I pressed my hand to my mouth to stifle my sob.

  “When?” I whispered.

  “Early this morning,” Julie said. “Caroline sent us urgent word. We arrived just in time. It was a mercy that she at least had family with her in her final hour.”

  As I turned to her, thinking of how Régine had always despised her, Julie added, “We did try to reach you at the theater. We thought you must be rehearsing….” She let her gaze linger again on Jean. “Apparently, you were occupied elsewhere.”

  “The play closed last night.” I wouldn’t let her anger me. Whatever she said or did now was of no importance. With Régine gone, the threadbare chain that bound me to my mother had disintegrated. I no longer cared if I ever saw or spoke to her again.

  She let out a sigh. “Funerals are so expensive these days. At least we have a casket.”

  I stared at her, aghast. “No.”

  “Why ever not? Surely we needn’t spend any more than required.”

  Before I started shouting her out of my house and my life forever, Madame G. interjected weakly, “Régine so loved to see you in it, Sarah. She—” Her voice broke. “She would like it, I think.”

  “It’s old and dirty. The lining is torn….” I couldn’t believe I was saying these words. None of this seemed real. It couldn’t be real.

  “Linings can be replaced.” Julie glanced at Rosine. My aunt nodded, voiceless, her eyes brimming with tears. “We’ll see to it.” Gripping her cane, my mother came to her feet, her movements awkward, no longer the polished courtesan who’d sacrificed us to her welfare. “I’ll speak with the parish this afternoon. We must veil her today, but with the summer heat upon us, we mustn’t delay. Providing there’s no other objection?”

  “None,” I said. “But I will pay for a new coffin.” I wanted her gone. I wanted everyone gone so I could be alone with my sister. Then I remembered. “Where is Maurice?”

  “Caroline took him to school earlier,” said Madame G. “Before it happened. He left a book here to read to her later. He’ll be beside himself, the poor boy.”

  I didn’t want my son to see her like this. It would devastate him. Swallowing the bitterness in my throat, I said to Julie, “We must veil her at your flat.”

  “In my salon?” She regarded me in astonishment. “Absolutely not. Jeanne was to receive callers this evening. I’ll postpone, naturally, but I can’t guarantee they’ll oblige on such short notice. Imagine what they will say, should they arrive to find—”

  “Never mind.” I turned away from her. “I wish to be alone with her.”

  She limped from the room, Rosine hastening behind her. Jean stepped aside to let them pass. Madame G. gave me a sundered look, the years of loss she’d kept at bay, with her industriousness and unending devotion, fallen upon her like an unbearable burden. As much as she loved me, Régine had been most like the child she’d never borne. I feared she would never recover from this, that none of us
would ever recover.

  “Go,” I told her. “Attend to that woman. I want the service to be perfect. It’s the very least she can do, after how very little she has done.”

  Madame G. shuffled out. From the doorway, Jean said, “Sarah, she’s at peace now. God called her to His side.”

  He actually believed it; I could hear it in his voice. Rage overcame me. “She was seventeen! How could God have wanted such a travesty? All she ever knew was hardship.”

  “She had you.” He didn’t step forth to console me, as if he knew I couldn’t abide a single touch, that it would destroy the last remnants of my strength, which I had to maintain for the dark days ahead. “She had her sister at her side.”

  “Not enough.” My voice fractured. “I wasn’t at her side when she most needed me.”

  He retreated. I whispered to Clotilde, “Come here,” and my puma crept to my side, licking my fingers. That innate animal instinct to heal finally roused my tears; as they streamed down my face, I took my sister’s inert hand in mine.

  “Forgive me, Régine,” I said into the endless silence. “You must forgive me.”

  I didn’t know if she could hear me. I didn’t believe she could. When I was a girl, I’d believed in the saints and heaven; now, death seemed to me a chasm without redemption, a senseless whim of fate. But as I stayed beside her and tried to say farewell, I knew the person from whom I most needed forgiveness was the only one who couldn’t grant it.

  Myself.

  VIII

  Voltaire’s Zaïre was indeed a tremendous opportunity, and the one role Provost had assured me during my training at the Conservatoire that I should never play. My old instructor had died, mourned by all of us who’d had the privilege of suffering under his baton, but his advice persisted. Though I’d proven myself at the Comédie and had been elected as junior sociétaire with no one dissenting (Madame Nathalie abstained from the vote), taking on the titular role of the Christian slave who falls in love with her captor, the Sultan, the role assigned to Jean, kindled all my insecurities and fears.

  I’d always found the prose overwrought and the plot ludicrous, but the play had enjoyed immense success at the Comédie since its premiere in 1732. To capitalize on the attention stirred by my pairing with Jean, Perrin opted to present Zaïre in its original costumes and sets, stored in some moldering warehouse. He also refused to allow us a break, setting us to intensive rehearsal, as he’d dredged up a copy of the play with Voltaire’s personal staging instructions and he was determined we must adhere to them.

  I had no time to grieve for Régine, whom we buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. To my surprise, my mother had acquired plots for the entire family years before. Though my sister’s absence left a vast hollow in my heart and in my house, where Clotilde went off her food for days, Maurice refused consolation, and Madame G. started to fade before my very eyes, I had to devote myself to my work. But the grief was always there, like an oil stain underwater, a distortion that was invisible to the eye but obscured clarity.

  Jean took it upon himself to rally my spirits. On Sundays, the one day we had free of rehearsal, he organized excursions for Maurice and me, taking us on outings to the countryside surrounding Paris or visits to the Tuileries Zoo, now fully refurbished and a constant source of delight for Maurice, who shared my love of animals.

  “Can we get an elephant?” he implored, standing on tiptoe by the paddock where a new pair of the majestic creatures had replaced the much-beloved ones slaughtered for meat during the siege. When I laughed and said we had no room in the flat, he pouted and turned to Jean. “When you’re my papa, you’ll let me have an elephant, won’t you?”

  Jean ruffled his hair, smiling, even as the remark caught me off guard. As soon as we returned home, I steered Maurice into my salon.

  “Why would you say such a thing to Jean?” I asked him. He was growing so tall and lean, the blood of his father starting to show. “You must know he can’t be your papa.”

  Maurice toed the carpet with his boot. “Why not? You like him, don’t you? He likes you. We spend a lot of time with him, so I thought…” His voice faded.

  “What, my son? What did you think?”

  He lifted his gaze to me. “I thought you might wish to marry him. Then I’d have a father and you won’t have to worry so much about me anymore.”

  My heart cracked in my chest. “Oh, my child. I’ll always worry about you.” I paused, seeing him turn away, as if to deflect a blow. “Do you miss not having a papa?”

  That he might have suffered from the lack of a male figure in his life had never occurred to me. We’d never had the conversation; not once had he asked me about his father and, I realized in belated guilt, I’d never thought to broach the subject. I had neglected to recall how keenly I had felt the absence of my own father in my childhood.

  “All the other boys at school have fathers. They say it’s not normal that I don’t.”

  I took him in my arms, pressing his head to my breast. “You have me,” I said, biting back my tears. “Your maman. You always have me. Isn’t that enough?”

  I felt him nod. “Yes. But I’d like to have a papa someday, too.”

  I wept myself to sleep that night, distraught by my sorrow for Régine and my concern over Maurice. Daily rehearsals, in which Perrin proved as dictatorial as Provost had ever been, didn’t help matters. Perrin was of the mind that his players had no right to decide how we should interpret our characters, insisting we obey Voltaire’s staging instructions, never mind that the playwright had been dead for almost a hundred years, or that I’d shown him I knew how to please an audience. He ordered me to restrict myself to the performance as ordained, and I suddenly found myself right back where I had started, locked in the prison of the Comédie’s established order, with Perrin criticizing my delivery of Voltaire’s lines until I stormed off the stage. Positioning himself between me and the exit door, he pronounced, “This is what I want. Zaïre is betrayed because her father makes her promise to be baptized. In keeping it a secret, she leads the Sultan to think she’s been unfaithful. She must show this same helplessness when she tries in vain to persuade him of her innocence.”

  I wanted to retort that Zaïre was an idiot for not explaining herself, but I was too enraged to speak when I saw Jean nod his agreement from the stage. My rage at his willingness to accept all of Perrin’s directions without debate, when he’d been so full of contradiction with me during Britannicus, seared off my voice.

  “Perrin is wrong about our final scene,” I harangued Jean that night in his flat, where I’d begun to feel almost as trapped as I did at the theater. “You mustn’t yell at her. The Sultan must confront her without emotion, as he’s already convinced of her guilt. Only after he kills her and realizes his error can he show rage. It will make his suicide more realistic.”

  “Perrin doesn’t think so.” Jean sat smoking by the window, his hair tumbled across his brow, the twilight beyond the glass etching his handsome profile in shadow. “He’s the director. He surely knows the nuances of the play better than we do.”

  “He’s not performing in the play, is he?”

  “That doesn’t make us more qualified.”

  “It does to me.” I stood. The entire room, suffused with stale smoke and the stale aftermath of our lovemaking, was making me ill. “I don’t accept his notion that we’re incapable of making decisions for ourselves when it comes to our performance.”

  “And you don’t accept his notion for our costumes or sets, either. Not even the playbill; you had to demand some unknown acquaintance of yours provide the design.”

  “Mucha is a talented illustrator,” I retorted. “What’s more, he’s a modern one. Our playbills are as antiquated as the stage décor. Even the Comédie must adapt to the times.”

  He ground his cigarette into the windowsill, scattering embers. “You’re a sociétair
e, invested in the company. Surely you want this play to be as successful as Perrin does.”

  “Being a sociétaire doesn’t make me his sheep. You’ve questioned me often enough. Yet if Perrin tells you to lift that finger instead of the other, you obey him as if he was your father,” I said, and as soon as I did, I knew it was wrong thing to say.

  His eyes narrowed. “I obey him,” he said, “because—”

  “He can promote you.” Though I knew I risked his temper, I didn’t care to mind my tongue. “While I’m but the upstart Jewess who used to be a whore.”

  He rose to his feet, suddenly seeming too large for the room. “Why?” He threw out his arms. “Why must you provoke me and everyone else around you?”

  “I don’t provoke you any more than you should provoke yourself.” I was gripping my bonnet in my hands. I’d not forgotten his physical strength. “I’m simply asking—”

  “When?” He took a step toward me. “When does this charade end? When will you finally admit that you’ve had what you wanted from me, and now you’re tired of it?”

  “Did I say I was tired of it?” Though I was, exhausted in fact, and now wanted only for it to end. I couldn’t abide this incessant quarrel between us.

  “You don’t need to say it,” he said. “I can feel it. Every day, every night that you’re with me. You—” His voice broke. “You cannot love me.”

  I went still. I hadn’t expected to contend with this now, yet the relief that suddenly washed over me was irrefutable. “My sister has died. I’m in mourning. I can’t focus on anything else.”

  “I know her death was a tragedy, but you’re about to perform one of the greatest roles ever written. Isn’t this what you always wanted, the reason for everything you do, to become as acclaimed as Rachel?”

  I met his stare. “I detest the play,” I said, terrified by my admission and his uncanny ability to pierce my defenses. “I just want time away to rest and be with my son.”