*
The stage was so high, and the perspective so sharp, and both actresses’ matching nighties so short, that young Aimée spent the whole play inadvertently glancing up the two sets of thighs above her, between them to the end point, then blinking hurriedly away.
After the show, young Aimée kept mispronouncing the leading actress’s name. Her father corrected Aimée – Fanny Ardant, Arhdaen – but Aimée kept saying Arendt so her father had to explain that “Arendt” was someone else’s last name, Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher and theorist. Then he felt that he should explain Arendt’s essay “On Violence”, and why it was such an important gesture to question the relationship between violence and power, and the quintessence of defining terms like power, strength, force, authority and violence. “Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together,” whereas strength is individual, force is contextual, and authority is vested and carried. “Out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience.” Immediate and immediately unsustainable. So what is violence, her father asked thirteen-year-old Aimée. She glanced up blankly at her father, then back over to her right, where the stage had been and the actresses’ matching pair of thighs became one.
*
The following weeks her father got increasingly agitated because he was trying to educate Aimée further on Arendt’s ideas, but kept accidently referring to her as Hannah Ardant and his mind snapping immediately to that film with Fanny Ardant alongside Gérard Depardieu, Truffaut’s La femme d’à côté, The Woman Next Door. In the film, Bernard (Gérard) is living happily with his wife in Grenoble until a new couple move in next door. His new neighbour’s wife (played by Fanny) turns out to be a past lover of his.
Aimée, who had by this point been mispronouncing both the actress and the philosopher’s names out of nervousness, began to stutter in addition. Her father switched to his role as the Doctor; though he was not a speech therapist, he felt that cases of dyslexia and speech impediments were analogous to ghost pains of phantom limbs, and he just had to make his daughter understand her own body – that her tongue, her mouth, her throat operated in full function within each pronunciation. His diagnosis was that Aimée’s oratory mechanics still somehow felt the attachment of previously pronounced sounds to those she was currently trying to voice.
*
Aimée was sent to her room to recite the name “Fanny Ardant” clearly and coherently 100 times before bed.
Night after night she said the actress’s name 100 times like a bedtime prayer, and by her fourteenth birthday her stutter was gone.
*
When Aimée was sixteen, she heard about a new club that had just opened on Boulevard Poissonnière, near the Rex cinema. Like a struck match, the word spread quickly, girls, ladies, dykes, cunts . . . It wasn’t shy or hidden like most places one crawled into to be gay between their walls. It was unapologetic, loud, messy, the place to be for girls who liked girls, and boys who liked boys if they came with a girl, and punks and actors and musicians and anyone who wanted to dance hard. Wednesdays was rock, Thursdays electro, Fridays more experimental, and Saturdays Girls Only.
Le Pulp.
A couple of Saturday evenings she passed by it, not daring to go in, veering into the métro station right in front and going home. But then her father prescribed himself some sleeping medication and Aimée began to sneak out.
*
The entry way had a large slab of black-painted wood hanging off two metal chains, with the cut-out letters in a dirty, scraped pink, yelling out PULP. There was no entry fee, part of the motto, anyone was welcome – well, any girl or any boy accompanied by a girl.
Inside, it was murky with people, wallpaper peeling off the walls, armchairs in cherry-red imitation leather with a couple of slashes across the cushion, and the dance floor with its scuffed floorboards.
A tall girl leaned into Aimée and asked if she wanted codeine and Aimée yelled over the music “No thanks,” but the girl shrugged and yelled back “No, I asked if you had any . . .”
Aimée walked away and got onto the dance floor. She found a shadowy spot and began to dance, glancing around her at flashes of faces, rounded cheeks, sloped noses, dark eyelashes, frizzy hair, straight fringes, short crops, red lips, purple lips, plain lips, mouths slightly open or pinned shut or exhaling cigarette smoke.
She was scanning the room for a girl she’d like to kiss.
*
She went as many nights as she could. Kissing, groping, hoping for the next song, the next drink, the next cigarette, and the next touch.
*
It was electro night and the bodies were jumping, with their heads hooked down and their hair swinging over their faces. Hips and elbows. Hands in the air, cutting through the lights.
At the bar, a guy in a dark-green T-shirt was arguing with the bar woman. Aimée stepped to the side, waiting to order. The bar woman leaned over the counter.
“Out there,” she pointed to the door, “the world’s yours. Dick around all you want. But these 100 metres squared in here, they’re ours. So if you hear my cunt say No, it’s NO. End of story. Enjoy your night.” She stamped her palms on the counter and turned to Aimée. “What can I get you, darling?”
*
Aimée had been stuck on a girl name Céline with eyes the colour of absinthe and mean-looking lips protruding into the flashing lights. She had kissed her and they had fondled each other on the dance floor but Céline seemed to be neither interested nor disinterested. Which made sixteen-year-old Aimée desperate for her attention.
*
Aimée had reached the tautness of her longing. She lay in bed masturbating, thinking of Céline, when her hand froze and her breath cut off.
She had a vision of the Seine, pushing dully forward, the top skin wrinkling over itself, the skylight a pinkish white, the water like mud. Aimée exhaled and got out of bed. Without deciding, she pulled on her jeans, clipped on her one sexy black lace bra from H&M, pulled over a loose grey jumper and snuck out. She thought she was going to the Seine to jump in. She went to Le Pulp instead.
Céline was on the dance floor, moving her body like a wrench, her wavy dark bob behind her ears, her eyes lined with black, and those glimmering green pupils, always as if she’d poisoned herself. Her lips, thickly coated with red, were staining the cigarette hanging from her mouth.
Aimée watched Céline dance. She stared. She went over every part of her with her glare. But Céline wouldn’t even glance up. Her eyes were nowhere. They were diamonds being cut from smut. Aimée felt the chiselling in her chest. She felt the mud of the Seine. All the times she had glanced at a girl in school and clenched her gut. All the words she had stumbled over in her life. All the ways she hated herself and everything she couldn’t bear to leave behind. Céline, her eyes of green venom glowing in the spotlight, smoke crawling out of her red mouth.
*
Don’t we all ask for death before we know how to ask for what we really want? Usually it’s night-time – out of its stem, a rose blooms open with a fragrant scream.
*
Aimée stood there and swallowed. Over and over again. Watching Céline. An oracle. A knife’s blade. Petal by petal, to the moon. Then someone else spoke.
“Oh la la . . .”
Aimée turned around.
“Don’t tell me . . .”
The girl was taller, her features velour in the darkness. By the way she stood, Aimée could tell that she was not only older, but already knew who she was and had some agreement from the world about it.
“Pardon?” Aimée said.
“That girl. The one you’re watching. Elle est chiante. She’s a waste of time.”
Aimée glanced over at Céline, then back at the girl.
“But you like her, huh?” the girl continued.
Aimée nodded without meaning to.
“What else
do you like?” the girl asked.
Aimée hesitated. “. . . Gin and tonics.”
“Now that’s interesting.”
The girl knew the DJ and bought Aimée all her drinks. The girl was no girl either, but twenty-six to Aimée’s sixteen.
“Hey Dominique!” the girl’s buddy Olivier called out to her. He opened up his cigarette box and pulled out a small baggy with two blue pills. Dominique took the baggy out and tucked it into her bra, then pulled out a cigarette and offered one to Aimée.
Olivier turned to Aimée and said, “You know you’re smoking with a star, right?” and gave her a wink.
*
At that time, Dominique was a star and felt like one, though her main claim to fame was that theatre piece she’d co-starred in alongside Fanny Ardant, at Théâtre de la Madeleine, which Aimée’s father had taken her to. Fanny Ardant, with her dark brows and dark hair and buttery eyes and her lips imbued with that voice, assured and coy . . . Fanny Ardant, the woman who was always wearing red, even when she was not. Dominique had assumed that she had the makings of a woman like that, who owned a colour all to herself.
The director had cast Dominique to play Mme Ardant’s younger ghost, somewhere between herself as a child and her daughter. It was a symbolic mise en scène, both women wore sleeveless grey tweed dresses, ending at mid-thigh, then in the last scene both women were in white satin nighties. Fanny Ardant was “Femme”, Woman, and Dominique was “Fille”, Girl.
The last night, the curtain fell and with it descended a vexation within Dominique. Back stage, both actresses washed off their make-up. FEMME went back to being Fanny Ardant, the acclaimed French star. FILLE went back to being Dominique, not quite a shooting star and almost just make-up powder rising into oblivion.
Months after the show, she couldn’t sleep. She’d get up in the middle of the night, turn on the bathroom light, and recite her lines from the show into the mirror.
FILLE (facing FEMME, who is still looking out at horizon)
You scare me.
(takes step closer to FEMME) I never asked to be your likeness.
(another step closer) I never asked the Maker to make me in your image.
(another step) I never asked to spend my whole life carrying your features.
(another step) I never asked to be young when you are already old.
(another step) I never asked for you to grow old before me.
(another step) I never asked for you to die first.
(pause)
I never asked to hear your voice again. (bumps into FEMME)
I never asked to remember your scent. (thrusts more deliberately)
I never asked to feel your hands. (thrust)
I never asked—(thrust)
I never asked—(thrust)
Dominique took off her nightshirt and underwear. Naked, she ran her fingers over the faint bruises on her sternum and just above her pelvis, where she had ‘thrust’ into FEMME in the show. She could almost feel Fanny Ardant’s shoulder and hip ramming into her, as she thrust against her fixed body, pinned to the stage like nails. She could almost hear her own voice, peeling, screeching, her face both humid and icy, her armpits clutching, her legs stiff, and her tear-streaked face and bare feet on the cold stage floor. It was bliss.
*
Everything changed for Aimée with Dominique. The Seine was made of buoyant water, not mud. She smiled at things just for being there. Céline was no one, an indistinguishable figure among the others.
“Baby, baby, baby . . .” Dominique was pulling her in from behind.
*
Just as Aimée was turning seventeen, feeling full of all the things she could do as she was peeling off childhood, Dominique was turning twenty-seven and realising she was no longer the star she had been four years ago, in fact, perhaps, she never had been at all.
When Aimée turned eighteen, Dominique asked her to move in with her.
*
Aimée traced her finger behind Dominique’s ear as she was standing in front of the large white bookshelf, looking across the spines, choosing which one to pull out. Aimée kissed her neck, and just then Dominique pulled away. She crouched down and ran her finger across the line of spines, and began to pull at the sky-blue hardcover binding of a book wedged in the bottom row.
*
Dominique’s mother was a vigorous altruist with a shy polyglot hobby from a Catholic parish just outside of Lyon. She had casually managed to acquire a conversational level of Serbian, Spanish, German, Polish and Portuguese. Reaching her thirties with an unintentional pact of celibacy while working for the French Catholic organisation in Porto, she met the Portuguese university fellow of social psychology at Sunday mass. His regard like a troubadour’s guitar without strings, hers, a saint’s lawyer.
Together, they gave Dominique her lightly tanned complexion, her almond eyes full of night-time, a full mouth, a sloping nose, cheekbones curving up to her dark eyebrows, her rich brown hair, and her love of any topic or space that could transcend the institutions of religion and academics.
She had been scouted by Mr Pio Pinheiro, who was almost always accompanied by his tall, close-shaven black poodle named Gary Cooper, and who would later miss his opportunity to sign the future Porto-native supermodel Sara Sampaio. Mr Pio P. had the necessary soft-spoken elegance to convince the screw-driver-eyed mother and her delicate-livered father that Dominique’s godly and mortal call was to be in front of the camera. Nine-year-old Dominique, her parents and Mr Pio P. took the trip to Paris, where she shot her first catalogue ad for a spring collection. Dominique had the racial ambiguity and yet European pureness to fit the demand for the “third wheel” in many catalogue shoots after that.
Whether by chance or prophecy, her mother was sent back to Paris to the Catholic organisation headquarters. Her father was hesitant but dropped his position at the university and came jobless as a leap of faith. Teenage Dominique fell in love with the city.
Nine months later, her father opened up his faded blue Book of Saints, cut his wrists, and bled so much that droplets came through the old wooden floor through the crack in the lighting fixture of the downstairs neighbours, making their living-room bulb flicker for hours before they heard the ambulance.
There was a lot of speculation about the motive for her father’s suicide, both psychological and theological, but everyone came to their own conclusion, and Dominique’s conclusion was that she belonged on stage.
*
Dominique and Aimée, lovebirds, grabby, giggling, immersed. In the spring of 2013, France had legalised mariage pour tous, and Aimée and Dominique celebrated the equal-marriage right with their favourite shared scepticism, making jokes about the history of bartering wives, then kissed in between an anecdote they were remembering, then just kissed for a while, then opened their eyes and knew.
They were officially married the following autumn. They kept it small, went to the city hall, signed their papers and had their friends over for brunch.
“Can you believe we’ve been together since I was sixteen!” Aimée was telling everyone at brunch.
“Cougar!” Olivier said and winked at Dominique.
“Hey, I was only twenty-six myself . . . and it was dark . . .” Dominique grabbed Aimée by the waist and whispered something in her ear, then bit her lobe.
*
In bed, Dominique read out loud to Aimée from her favourite plays. Especially the roles that she’d never get to play on stage, because they were for a man, or for someone younger or older or whiter or darker.
*
The Night Just Before the Forests . . .
*
They were having dinner at home. Dominique took the call. She went into the bedroom. She came out. She sat back down. She ran her fork in the spaghetti, around and around, not catching a single strand.
*
Ever since Dominique turned forty, she’d been coming out of the bathroom saying that she’d started to look like her father, then pulling down
on the skin beneath her eyes. It’s true that Dominique had become much paler over the years, and her eyes – which once held that rich, dark heat – were now colder and filled with doubt.
Dominique kept assuring Aimée that “theatre was going down the drain” and no one wanted to see real people on the stage anymore, soon it’ll be videos and music playing all the parts . . .
*
“No baby, you don’t get it. At twenty-three, I thought I wanted to be a star – but I don’t want any of that. That’s not what I want at all. I just want to – feel it – again.”
*
Dominique was shouting “no no NO!” at Aimée, trying to explain to her that she was too good to be in another “student production” as she called it, which meant the playwright and the director were both in their mid-twenties. “What do they know about life? . . . And they are telling me where to stand, where to sit, where to ‘exit’ offstage . . . !”
Her insomnia had turned to parasomnia and she was screaming in her sleep, then falling out of bed. Or else, lying with her eyes open in the dark, as thoughts mummified her body.
*
They had just had sex. Dominique lay in bed sleepless, while her wife was full-bodied drowsy. Dominique started talking about Foucault. Aimée tried to listen to Dominique as she explained that Foucault’s father had been a surgeon, and that Foucault himself had told this story from his deathbed to Hervé Guibert, who then transcribed it: Foucault was just a boy and his father called him in to observe an amputation in the operating room of a hospital in Poitier. The boy watched his father saw off the man’s leg, and apparently it was this that stole the boy’s virility from him.
Aimée mumbled in her sleep, “My father likes you very much, you know . . . he’s only trying to help . . .”
*
Dominique was in bed, reading more Bernard-Marie Koltès. The titles of his plays sounded so tender to Aimée, like In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, The Night Just Before the Forests, Tabataba . . . but the lines Dominique read to her out loud were nothing tender, full of revolt and choking fury.
Virtuoso Page 5