Virtuoso

by Yelena Moskovich

  *

  “Come to bed . . .” Aimée coyed, but Dominique was undressing too slowly and too silently, while Aimée got on her hands and knees and serpented across the soft mattress towards Dominique as if she were still wearing the dress, as if the dress could formulate language for her, use her voice to whisper into Dominique’s ear, Do you still want to fuck me?

  *

  It was the last time she’d wear this dress, Aimée decided as she put it on, and as she walked around and gathered the faint condolences at Dominique’s wake, she realised – it finally fit, this dress, it fit her body and the occasion. It engulfed her and it erased her, it made her a silhouette of just the right woman. A black hole, a lapse in memory, someone else’s orgasm, someone else’s blood-rush, someone else pumping for life, heart, pelvis, nervous fingertip on the table restrained, aligned, and polished nails catching the light – the rest of the body, standing up, sitting down, waiting, waiting for someone else’s gaze to fill her ellipsis.

  Aimée could almost grasp it, the cohesiveness – her, occasion, context – but it unthreaded on contact, strings of feeling, mysterious, as it had been throughout her life: a moment of seemingly unfounded fury or an arbitrary dunk of despair or an erratic spasm of repugnance, at her, the occasion, the context, at the fact that something of her womanhood was failing her like a sickly organ, the mysterious rage, whose scream always came out in a wheeze, a sigh, a yawn, her breath unable to grasp the source or reason for the lack of air.

  Not continents, but also. Not urine, but also.

  *

  Not silence, but also. Betrayed by language, we use phrases like tunnels.

  *

  Years back, when Dominique was rehearsing late and Aimée couldn’t stand to be alone inside the apartment anymore, she texted her friend, Mathieu, who told her to come by and have a drink with him and see his cousin, who was a bassist in the jazz quartet playing at a bar near Gare de l’Est. When she arrived at the steps of the terrace, the passageway glowed between the chatting smokers as if, through this doorway, everything between her and Dominique would be okay.

  On stage, the blonde jazz singer was wearing a tight-fitting black-lace dress from head to toe. Aimée watched her sing and thought without thinking, when she goes home and takes off the dress, what of her leaves her body? But the thought quickly lost its words and became an unreadable sensation, a prickling of humiliation for that blonde jazz singer standing so openly in front of the public in her lace container, betraying something of herself so deeply in the lines of that threadwork pressed into her flesh, souring in the spotlight.

  “My cousin says, apparently,” Mathieu whispered to Aimée as they watched the singer, “she’s sucked them all off in the band, even the bald piano guy!”

  Aimée jabbed Mathieu in the rib.

  “Don’t be gross,” she said.

  “Hey I’m not the one who’s doing it, she is – and you’re killing the messenger . . . !” Mathieu nudged back, then made an angel with both hands fluttering up as he whistled a small gunshot and let the angel plummet down to the counter, wriggling his fingers and warbling in a cartoonish voice, “Help, help, angel down! I’ve been shot by a feminist!”

  “Grow up . . .” Aimée said and sipped her beer.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I was just trying to cheer you up, you know . . .”

  Aimée glanced over at Mathieu without a word. Then, she moved her eyes back to the stage.

  “Hey, listen . . .” Mathieu tapped her arm gently. “It’ll be okay, Aimée, it really will, I promise.”

  “But in the meantime, seriously . . .” Mathieu pointed a low finger towards the stage, “she does have a ridiculous rack, right?”

  *

  Between nature and artifice, there was blame. Herself, or, herself through someone else, or herself through herself through herself, until it became someone else.

  *

  Dominique’s mother and her Catholic face, always wiser than someone else’s pain, too wise for emotions and for the body, too faithful to be fooled by mortality – was this the face she made when Dominique’s father slit his wrists over the book of saints?

  This woman who had refused to go to their wedding but was now attending Dominique’s funeral. Did death make your daughter a heterosexual in the end? Aimée tried not to cringe as she exchanged glances with the woman, feeling suddenly irate and stubborn, she wanted to go straight up to her and tell her that this sexy black dress that she was wearing was Dominique’s favourite in fact, and as Aimée imagined the tense exchange that would ensue, there was a jolt of vengeful innuendo, pleasing her body, a muscular clutch of satisfaction, but after a couple of hard flashes, it was all gone, bravado and purpose, and the rest of her was left, a floppy carcass, held together by the dress, a fistful of sadness.

  *

  Sadness being an opaque word, a stone in the mouth.

  Sadness like a language dubbed over our lives, to which we are moving out of sync, our feeling swaying outside the lines of our speaking and doing.

  Sadness like the eye on a cooked fish, like the eye of her father when he takes off his glasses to look at her, like her own eyes in the mirror when she catches herself without meaning to.

  Sadness like the inanimate objects that look as if they so desperately want to be able to say something – that wooden chair with a rounded back, the heart-leafed plant, the top potato in the yellow-netted bag. Sadness like dead matter hoping for voice, and like living matter yearning to be rid of it.

  Sadness like the dream, where people are just people, and we let them come and go, without realising that in real life, these people are gone, some long gone, and it was only in the dream that they came back, and we did nothing to savour their presence – we just let them – come and go, like perhaps, in real life.

  Exactly like that, sadness, that dream, where she is calling on the telephone, you know it’s her, ringing, and you don’t pick up, where she is outside the door, and you know it’s her, knocking, and you don’t open – and then you wake up, and you curse yourself and you spend all day checking your phone and opening and closing doors, windows, cabinets and drawers, a badly dubbed slapstick on rerun.

  *

  Dominique’s mother put her palm on Aimée’s shoulder and nodded, then she took her hand off and went down the hallway. Aimée heard the door close and she glanced into nowhere, as if to seek out eye contact with oblivion, to be released of the sensation of her body, of her shoulders, or at least of that shoulder, the one Dominique’s mother had just touched.

  “Have you eaten something?” her father’s voice asked.

  *

  Somehow the day had turned into each attendee bringing something or saying something or doing something that was “Dominique’s favourite”, as if everyone, all together, were pitching in to reconstruct Dominique through the history of her singular tastes.

  *

  The foil was crinkling like stars fighting to keep their light. Claire was unwrapping the carrot cake as Aimée came into the kitchen.

  *

  “Olivier asked me to come,” Claire said.

  “Did he?” Aimée replied from the doorway.

  “Yes, he did.” Claire gave a half-smile and let her glare thin out. “I brought her favourite cake.”

  *

  “Pethidine – Demerol and Dolantin,” Aimée recited.

  Claire stopped cutting the cake into squares.

  “That would take what—seventy-two tablets of fifty milligrams each, that means you’re unconscious within fifteen minutes or latest by fifty minutes, given the lack of oxygen provided by the bag.”

  Claire’s brow pinched upwards.

  “Or Methadone – Dolophine and Adanon,” Aimée continued, “300 milligrams, sixty-ish five-milligram tablets . . . Or . . . just morphine, that’s about 200 milligrams, thirteen fifteen-milligram tablets, no fourteen to be sure . . .”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Aimée,”
Claire interrupted.

  “It’s just that there’s a procedure to these things, Claire, they don’t just happen magically, it’s quite meticulous, I mean, you really have to think it through, like how would she know that she’d have to drink something hard with it, Claire, and take an anti-histamine so she doesn’t vomit it all up, and put a bag over her head—”

  “Aimée, I—I’m really sorry . . .”

  “Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Did you come here to say that? Is that what you told Olivier you’d like to say to me and he said, you know what, you should come in person and say – just let me finish, even if I am the puppy dog at Dominique’s side, the one she shooed and kicked away, the one you are all laughing at, the one who keeps coming back with her wet nose – but she was my wife and I get to be her widow now, and it’s my right, it’s my goddamn right, Claire!”

  “Listen, I’m—I guess I shouldn’t have come.”

  “You guess so? Is that your wildest guess just now?”

  “Mais merde, Aimée! You know, you’re not the only one who—”

  “Claire, I swear to God, if you finish your sentence and that sentence is that you lo—” Aimée swallowed.

  “You’ll what?” Claire said, sliding the cake knife across the table towards Aimée.

  *

  I never asked—

  *

  The evening closes itself gently like a storybook, and Aimée takes one of her father’s pills and drifts between the covers as if rolling unhurriedly around her eyeball.

  The dream unfolds as if it has been waiting for her, and her hand is reaching for the long blue curtains and pulling them open and stepping inside.

  The string of blue lights begins to flicker, then jolts to a halt and becomes a blue-lit line around the walls. The customers at the tables are speaking to each other and sipping their glasses, all their voices brushed together, not a single strand sticking out. The bartender is standing behind the bar with one hand on the counter, blue rag, soft palm, wiping in slow circles.

  From the blue speakers, an accordion squeezes a solemn chord and the dry voice of Yves Montand tells the story of those who love, those who are separated—

  The bartender stops her wiping and looks up at Aimée.

  “Bonsoir,” she says.

  “Bonsoir,” Aimée’s voice emerges from her mouth, as the bartender is putting a glass of red wine on the counter and Aimée is glancing down at her lap, two legs, touching at the knees, sitting upon the bar stool, her right hand is reaching for the glass of wine, the ridge against her lip, the liquid somehow syrupy and bitter.

  The accordion stretches and folds back together, but the sound feels like it’s coming from her organs. Aimée is placing the glass of wine back on the counter. She is lowering her eyes, loosely gazing, and there, a small, clean hand is tugging on her leg. The little girl is wearing a powder pink baseball cap too big for her head. When she tilts her small face up towards Aimée, a blonde princess in a blue gown is sweeping on the front of her cap, beneath the princess’s feet in embroidered cursive, the teal threading spells out Cinderella. The large beak of the cap shadows the girl’s face down to her nose, and at each young-lobed ear, her blonde hair is gathered in two neat pigtails that balance like sunshine above her ironed cotton dress with an eye-lit fringe. The fingertips of her other hand are reaching at the edge of the countertop, trying to get up.

  “Here,” Aimée lifts the little girl up and places her on the stool beside her.

  The girl fixes her oversized cap upwards, so that she can see. She looks over at Aimée and her eyes are glittering blue.

  “Děkuji,” the girl says politely in Czech. Thank you, a distant voice translates between Aimée’s ears.

  When the girl lowers her chin to smooth out the fabric of her dress with her delicate fingers, the baseball cap falls back down over her forehead.

  The girl fixes her cap again and looks up at Aimée.

  “Proč jste přinesli citrony?” the little girl asks in a curious voice. Her eyes are sparkling impossibly. Why did you bring lemons, Miss? the translation echoes.

  Aimée looks down, her hand is gripping the blue plastic bag full of lemons. She lifts it over the counter and hands it to the bartender. The bartender takes the bag and nods one simple nod.

  Aimée looks back over to the girl. Her back is straight and her gaze is fixed upon something just beyond Aimée, her small arm, perfectly horizontal, pointing past Aimée’s shoulder to the dance floor.

  The disco ball is turning sleepily, sprinkling shards of light onto the blue dance floor, where, in the middle, the naked woman in dark leather heels is swaying to the music. Her back curves right, then left, she is stepping back and forth in her pumps, shifting the weight of her nudity, back of the knees, thighs, the buttocks tense, release, she is dancing, her spine bristling through her flesh. At her nape, the ends of her rich brown hair are jagged like a shriek, sticking out from a clear plastic bag suctioned over her head, held in place with a thick rubber band.

  The woman turns around as the music sweeps, her arms floating to the singer’s voice. She is looking at Aimée, the plastic bag clinging to the contours of her face, cheeks, eye sockets, between her lips. Her right hand lifts, fingernails dig beneath the rubber band and she tugs the bag off, as if undoing a mask, the plastic peels up, and her hair drops over her shoulders. The dancing woman opens her eyes and exhales through her nostrils, strings of blue smoke.

  Aimée is reading her lips as the blue smoke is lacing and unlacing out of her mouth. Aimée is walking towards the woman, reaching out her hand, touching the woman’s skin now. She is trying to find her own hand with her eyes. It is inside the woman’s hand. And her body, against the woman’s body, below the disco ball, swaying to the music.

  Aimée lowers her head to the woman’s shoulder and her fingertips begin to trace the woman’s back, spine and hip. The skin is a perfect temperature, so conscious to her touch. Aimée pushes her face deeper into the woman’s neck, until the woman’s lush hair falls into her eyelashes and cheeks, the scent of branches. She is tightening her arms around the woman’s waist and holding her against her stomach.

  Aimée’s lips are moving into the woman’s throat. “Come for me . . .”

  *

  Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant

  *

  Aimée woke up into the gaunt light seeping through her curtains, her eyes opening and settling upon the face in front of her, still sleeping upon the adjacent pillow, the eyelashes in a delicate arc, the faint brow, the loose, light-brown hair, fair skin, and those serious lips, even in her sleep, somehow determined – then there is a prickling across this woman’s face, around her nostrils, between her brow, and—

  Jana’s eyelids begin to flutter, then lift.

  *

  “Good morning,” Aimée murmurs across the small white valley
between their faces.

  *

  Jana shifts from her pillow, her ear lifting then pressing back into the cotton, sinking with the weight of her head.

  Good morning, her thoughts are swallowing up Aimée’s voice.

  *

  There is something hardened about me, yes. It started before the Soviets, before my birth, before the Jans, before. I was always afraid to kiss you. I don’t like melancholia. But I suppose I’m something of that shape. A fleshy grudge. Isn’t it funny, yes, what we do, with our freedom. Last night, yes, I was afraid, because I have been afraid for so long, to kiss you. Would you understand something like that?

  You said, Come for me.

  Even before, do you understand, before my brother started losing his hearing and before Milena was dug up, before my petty life, before the Berlin Wall was built and smashed, before the borders were proclaimed and violated, I don’t know if you would understand, I mean before Jesus Christ, before microbes, in the astrological gases, wasn’t there something of me, and wasn’t that something of me already coming for you?

  But then that something got a body and such, and you know, matter and non-matter, to align all that, it takes a lifetime, at best, most of the time it’s just us, finding matches for our doubt. But everyone wants to believe. I mean, everything, everything believes.

  Even a stone, yes, believes itself a bulb waiting to bloom. Even that stone, the one in the palm of a violent intention, the one that is swung and that breaks the skin of another, even upon contact, the stone believes it has a gentle face that will . . . petal . . . out . . . one . . . day . . .

  So I spent my childhood waiting. Waiting for a significant sort of pain like a starting point. To begin. I wanted to finally begin. All that being, without a beginning – girlhood was a too-hot cup of tea I had to keep carrying back and forth without spilling and, of course, the ridges of my hands burnt, a banal inflammation, not yet the Great Pain, the starting point. Womanhood was our solution. Not just in Prague, everywhere, everywhere, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it like that for you, too? Our solution to the anxiety of non-being, of waiting to begin. I couldn’t wait to have a grown woman’s body, do you understand, so life could finally, truly . . . hurt.