It’s the shaving cream I swirled in the old-fashioned bowl before I left for California.
Nina looks down at her hand and sees she’s been holding my toothbrush. She turns to face the vanity. We can both feel what’s coming. A door slams in another apartment and then it feels as if we’ve entered the eye of a great storm; a single drop plops into the empty tub. Then another. I remember reading Sophocles at Juilliard. I remember thinking as I read Oedipus Rex that he must’ve been a really, really, handsome guy. That’s the only way for me to forgive Jocasta for sleeping with her own son. But then I realized she didn’t even know at the time that Oedipus was her son. At least Jocasta had an excuse. My real mother had none.
“James told me everything, Nina. He told me everything that your sis—our mother did to him.” I almost said your sister—I do that to blame my Nina, and I’ve decided I can’t do that anymore. But I blurt out mother—loudly and unapologetic—as if I’m standing in her place, and my brother is still in the tub that afternoon he told me about our mother and the secrets to becoming a vampire. Nina tucks her head down as if she’s trying to retreat into a shell. She stands in the shaft of light that has appeared through the steam and pushes her hands against her hips as if she were some lost figurine trying to escape a snow globe. She fishes in her pockets for a Kleenex, wipes her nose. We wait in the silence as if Jeanne might just intervene.
I close my eyes and remember that feeling of a hand on my shoulder—that sound of wings thumping beside my ears as the pulley swerved. It’d all been magic, the kind of tricks we went into a darkened multiplex to see.
I let out a long sigh.
But what about my hand with that sword?
The sword was fake, Cease.
What about the voice I heard as Eve wound up and punched me?
I was scared, the same way I was when I fell. My imagination was in overdrive.
Nina hands me the toothbrush.
“I tried to believe, Nina. I really did. And as far as this girl is concerned, Francis probably learned about her and fed it to the press, who called Esme and a detective.”
“I’m going to call the police. I’ll call Esme. No one can allow such things.”
“Nina, c’mon. We can’t do that.”
“Why not? It’s illegal, it’s—”
You’ve got to tell her why she can’t do that, Cease.
I look at the bathroom door. I try to imagine what my fans are going to write after seeing the latest scene tonight; that I didn’t have the range—that I got lost in my adolescent anger and missed the heart of a girl who spoke to God. I’m desperate and the only line that comes to me is the one Nina used after we got back from James’ funeral and I got the call from my agent. As one door closes…well, it feels like all the doors are closed now, at least the ones we wanted open. I need to ask tell her about Peitit Fleur. I want Nina to dismiss her as a fraud.
“Nina. A girl keeps writing me online.”
“It’s good to have a fan. You’ll have other fans in other shows, too, my precious.”
“Can saints put curses on people?” I ask.
“No.”
“But look what happened to the judges who put Jeanne to death.”
“Nina, all the clerics involved in Jeanne’s trial met untimely ends. Cauchon died suddenly in 1432 while a barber was trimming his beard; d’Estivet, his close friend and co-counsel, disappeared mysteriously and his body was discovered in a gutter in Paris. And Nicolas Midy, one of the judges, was stricken with leprosy and consumed by the disease.”
“Saints are bequeathed by God to help us,” Nina insists. “You’ve got to let go of all that anger now, my precious. Your character is about faith and forgiveness.”
“My character’s dead.”
I close my eyes, see all those famous people on Claude’s trailer wall and think saints are nothing but the fame-hungry stars of another age. I feel my shoulders let go, as if they’d been pinned to my ears for the last four months. I study my bruises in the mirror.
She’s just some crazy girl whose done a lot of research on my character. But I can’t let it go.
“Where did the scapular you gave me come from?”
“Domremy.”
“Where Jeanne lived? Where she was born?”
There’s a long pause before Nina says, “Yes.”
“She wore it, didn’t she?”
No answer. I know why my Nina’s backing off…I remember when she first put it round my neck, before she allowed me to make out with that boy at the callbacks.
“Where did you get it Nina? I need to know.” I don’t want another fight about the past.
“Etienne Fierbois, the bishop who gave me the prie-dieu, gave it to me.” She turns away and searches her pockets. When she turns back to me, I stare her down.
“Tell me. I need to know. This girl…she knows my whole life.”
“No one knows where it really came from. You’ve read the history, child. Jeanne left her things with a Benedictine monk who heard her last confession and he turned them over to her younger brother.” Nina returns my cold stare. You’ve seen the documents in her rehabilitation files. You know her history. I’ll let you decide.”
Nina follows me down the hall in that same protective, plodding way as when she played my Lady Capulet. I lie on my bed as she steadies an ice pack on my swollen jaw. She fishes through the closet for my pajamas.
“Nina? I have to admit something.” I rise, feel the ache in my head and lay back. “But don’t worry, it’s not about that girl. I thought I couldn’t live a day without James, but when I got on that plane to go out and play in Vampire Grrls I felt free. Free from his problems.” I feel guilty saying it after everything he’d helped me with. But it’s true.”
Nina shrugs, shifts her gaze to the wall above me. I can tell she’s thinking about that genealogy that sits behind the locked screen in the living room. I can feel the secret sitting between us; one of those dark, toxic holes you think can only happen in Greek tragedies. But as I give her my doubtful look, Nina stares me down in a way I’ve never seen before.
She says, “You weren’t the first to play the game.”
I think my Nina might be senile; how could anyone else play a game that we created? Nina stands by the door. I don’t want her to go.
“Do you know James snuck into a matinee of Romeo and Juliet?”
Nina says, “Oh really,” in that lost, hopeful way she gets when she thinks I’m changing the subject.
“He said I was good. He said it in a way I totally believed him.” I start to cry. “He’d never said that to me before. After all the hard work, all the rejection, he was telling me that I could be good on my own. He was telling me I could conjure that magic we’d created together.”
She gropes for the light switch.
“Nina. I know you’re happy that I got to play a saint. I’m sorry I didn’t make it. But Jeanne made me feel real.”
She nods solemnly, plods up beside my bed, hugs me, and says, “It’s a blessing in disguise.” That’s what she always said when I’d come home after another rejection and find her waiting with her brownies and her faith.
I’m exhausted—too tired and wounded to sleep.
“As one door closes,” I say, and my voice feels as if it’s echoing from a room that’s been locked for ages.
“Good night, Nina.” I hold her in a tight hug. I want to tell her that being with her feels better than standing on the podium beside Brad or any other guy or even a pantheon of Hollywood saints.
I don’t set the alarm clock beside my bed. No more early morning calls. No more of those crappy protein drinks. No more rich-bitch putdowns and assaults from Eve—I mean, Susan. And no more time travel—which means no more having to dwell in the past.
But I still can’t sleep, and after I hear Nina shut her door at the end of the hall I turn on the light, squint in the mirror—try to picture myself as a woman, but all I see are my bruises. The girl who’d slugged her way
across battlefields four months ago is gone, but I know becoming a woman goes a whole lot deeper than just losing my virginity.
I know what I have to do. I swore when this crazy show ended for me I’d finally suck it in and get the courage to open a book that I found beside my brother’s body. It’s one of the three volumes of our genealogy Nina keeps behind the gold mesh screen of the armoire in the living room. I creep down the hall and unlock the cabinet. My hand trembles as I reach for Volume III of my bloodline. It was the book my brother held on the last night of his life. The book I knocked to the floor when our fight began.
I make some green tea and jump into bed and anxiously turn the pages—hand-sewn and flecked with gold, heavy as the door my Nina tried to close and lock after my brother died. The faded ink points at me like a desperate, accusing finger. Nina’s tucked another ribbon between the pages; this one azure. I recognize a name in the margin—Etienne Fierbois—beside the wax stamp inscribed in Latin and French. He was instrumental in providing to the Holy See all the documentation that cleared the way for Jeanne’s beatification. I’d read something about him in the research she’d given me—his family, a great, great, great, great…(OK. I really don’t know how far back) uncle had testified to Jeanne’s character at her rehabilitation. Etienne was born in 1940. He was the bishop who’d given Nina the prie-dieu. There are hand-scrawled notes from the genealogists who’d done the research; there must’ve been at least one for each generation who had confirmed the names were real, the dates accurate. Their annotations are all in French and the lines they drew are easy enough to decipher. The lines and boxes that cascade down each page look like every genealogy I’ve ever seen. Vertical lines are descendants; horizontal lines immediate family.
What was Nina trying to get me to see? I look down at the names and try to see their faces. Jeanne’s older brother and sisters having children, and the names given to them, and the names those children had given…on and on. All those names like determined armies marching across the pages of history. I feel the centuries pass with each turning page, as the Gaulish surnames get replaced, crossed over, smudged out with the great migration from Old to New World. I’m not related to a saint. Jeanne d’Arc died a virgin. I’m related to her elder brother, Jacques, who safely guarded his sister’s private possessions and last words.
I pull at my pillow, shift my wounded thigh, and study the slow proliferation of my bloodline across Europe. I open to another bookmark, this one in purple; almost three hundred years later, the marriage of Sophie and Peter III. The bishop Fierbois had been the first to discover the d’Arc family relation to the royal house of Russia. Royal houses across Europe were inter-related by arranged marriages for political reasons. It’s no surprise that our bloodline was caught up in all the strategizing. Some biographers even believe Jeanne d’Arc was the love child of a Bavarian prince.
I was chosen? I feel it rise in my chest, small but growing like an insignificant bubble rising from the depths. I take a deep breath. It felt like a stranger was standing behind me, not the one I’d long expected would appear at my door to take it all away, wearing the smug look Francis wore as he gave me the axe…I’d never really deserved it in the first place. I didn’t deserve any of this, not alongside the rich, like Eve, and the perfect, like Stephanie.
The turning a screw on that bolt of grief, only instead of tightening the crude instrument of torture I’d felt since the funeral, she was loosening it, telling me I was chosen for this role the same way all these other girls in my bloodline were chosen. I was chosen to give a message to the world. I just have no idea what that message is supposed to be. Noblese oblige…I can’t make out the rest of it. I remember the way James used to say it—reverently, the way Father Laurence, the priest in Juliet used to speak on stage, after he’d hatched a plan to save my dear Romeo from banishment. I want to jump into Nina’s bed and have her explain everything over cups of hot chocolate, but the look she gives me tells me that time has passed.
You must study it alone, child. You must reach your own conclusion. Nina said that to me the day after the funeral when I picked up the volume. (It was the first thing I took from beside my brother’s body before the police arrived.) It didn’t come out cryptic at all—she said it the same way she reminds me to turn the lights off and check the stove before going to bed. I needed to know what he was trying to get me to see that night, but the next day I got the call and I’m suddenly this strange character I never thought I’d be able to play.
I raise the book to my lamp and try to find some clue that it is a recent forgery, probably by some charlatan who duped my mother, tricked her into thinking it contained a rare incantation that would restore her lost youth, give her that irresistible presence my brother and I had found in a game. Wind buffets my window and I jump. I think these pages are better kept locked away. Nina must’ve known keeping them locked away, but still in plain sight—would help me heal. Our mother had left them with Nina (had Nina insisted on this?) before she went out west to remake herself. She probably needed the same thing my brother had pined for: a rich, storied history that could make us appear as aristocratic as our name implied. James had unboxed them from the clutter in the linen closet when we lived uptown. Peering over his shoulder about a week after I’d gotten into Juilliard—looking down at all those lines and boxes containing names—watching my brother pore over each page with that earnest, solemn look and hoping they were real. I turn the pages, hold the book up to the light, trying to find a way to dismiss them as fake, but that facsimile of a wax stamp, dated and inscribed in Latin and French by a bishop in Paris, looks real—this is the stuff of legends—of cryptic crosses on Jeanne’s sword and knights Templar—all those Hollywood storylines I’d dismissed as stupid.
I close my eyes; turn my head slowly until the pain shoots up my neck. I wish I’d died in that snow for the entire world to see. I go back to reading email: A message from my agent with an attachment:
Cease,
I still believe in you. We’ll get the next one. An expose´from a sick fashion zine out of Chelsea, called SPASS.
A SAINT WHO’S PAID HER DUES
Cease de Menich may have gotten the biggest break any unknown can hope for by landing the role of warrior-saint Joan of Arc, but don’t get too jealous, wannabes; she’s had to pay her dues, according to publicist, Jenny B. Goode. “She was in a car crash when she was twelve. It killed her mother and nearly killed her. And only a few days before landing this role, her brother died.”
So how does this tough upstart play a saint? “Cease isn’t afraid to let her personality shine through into the character she’s become,” the head of casting for MacDonald Productions said. “She refuses to use her virginity as a virtue; that was the tiresome choice for most actors we saw for the role. It’s more like a cross she has to bear, as she waits for the right boy. I think young people are attracted to that ambiguity, as if she’s struggling right alongside all those who are on the fence about having sex.”
Already earning comparisons to Hepburn for her magical presence, Cease earned a Tony nomination last year for her Juliet in the Barry Mendes off-Broadway production.
But will she survive temptation? Brad’s hot in that boyish way girls just can’t resist. And there’s a rumor going round that the Latin heartthrob Francis MacDonald just signed to join the cast is an Alister. And what about the competition from the other superheroes? Susan B. Anthony (Eve Lonnia) isn’t afraid to take it off for the boys, and she’s got a body that makes them drool. And there’s no question, Great Cate, played by Stephanie Coombs, embodies the ethereal beauty of her character. She isn’t afraid to hurt the bad boys; the recent scene of her taking out two ex-cons in an alley has now hit the news and sparked an investigation into violence on the set of History’s Superheroes. A Teenage Reality-Drama, the working title for Francis’ super-secret vision.
I wished I’d survived just so I could give this article to Nina, to see the look of motherly pride she had when she put
down that rave I got from RHI a few weeks ago. When was that? A week? How far back does all this weirdness really go?
To the day you got the call four months ago? No, before that—maybe long before that. When were you really chosen for this role? When were you really chosen for this character?
Long before I got the call.
I don’t deserve this. I don’t belong. It’s crazy, Cease. And if you start to believe it, you’ll wind up just like your brother did. Wandering around the West Side, wearing that brown sack, reciting stupid prayers, trying to redeem our threadbare lineage by deciphering stray notes and discarded playbills you find on Broadway. Don’t go there. Be glad you’re off the show. It’s a blessing in disguise.
I close the book, and hobble down the hall and lock it safely in the armoire. Tomorrow, there’ll be no early morning calls, or punches from Susan. I’ll get up, help Nina with all the cleaning I neglected. Maybe take her to that French bistro in Chelsea she read about. Then what? Come home and talk about what happened between my brother and me on the last night of his life? Share a few tidbits about what mommy dearest did to us?
Life without fiction is a dangerous thing in the House of de Menich. It’s time to say goodbye to Petit Fleur and her soulless dog.
Dear Petit/Jeanne,
Are you there?
Cease,
I’m here. Do you only half-believe in me?
Petit,
Why do you say that?
Cease,
Look at your salutation.
Petit,
No. I don’t half-believe in you. After what happened today, I don’t believe in you at all. Oh, and by the way, little Miss Saint, I guess you approve of violence and graphic sex. Funny, last time I checked I thought saints swore off all that shit.
cease and desist Page 13