Читать книгу Virtuoso - Yelena Valer'evna Moskovich - Страница 16

Global Plastics

Aimée shifted in her plastic seat in front of the stage across from N39. Four men were on stage, wiry mics hooked up to the table. Framing them, two banners spotted with logos, each bearing the title—in leaning blue lettering—Global Plastics.

*

“… to most accurately mimic the strength, resilience and flexibility of a human hand …”

*

Aimée shifted again. There was an odd sensation, as if right behind her shoulder. She turned discreetly around and glanced at the seated public in the rows behind her, suits and blazers, attentive to the lecture. Everyone’s eyes were on the speaker. She turned back to the stage and tried to listen.

*

“Yes, metal devices are durable, but they are frustrated by their limitations—”

The speaker had a small head with white hair and pinkish lips at the center of his graying beard. His bright-red tie spotted with white dots stood out against his pale-blue shirt and his dark-blue suit-jacket. The name-card in front of him read: Docteur de Saint-Pé.

*

“… more supple, coated with polyurethane.”

*

Next to the doctor, the man in the black suit nodded dutifully, his brown hair thick and neat. On the other side of the doctor, a long-faced man with deep indents leading to his mouth pursed his lips like a question mark, his thin blond hair catching the overhead lighting. The last man at the end of the table in the asphalt-colored suit flared his nostrils as if punctuating the doctor’s speech.

*

“And, of course, injection molding technologies …”

Aimée tried to concentrate on her father’s words, but she felt as if her seat was being budged. She glanced down at her hands holding her mobile phone on her lap, and gripped the device more firmly.

“… this biofeedback is precisely what the amputee has to rely on in order to determine how much pressure to exert in any given movement … something metal devices don’t and can’t offer …”

The doctor gestured to the brown-haired man on his left and smiled.

“Like the V3 Remotion Knee in California …”

Both men smiled at each other. The asphalt suit itched his nose.

“These plastic sockets are based on vital primary anatomical principles.”

*

She was clutching her mobile phone, trying to force her eyes forward, but her head was drifting over her right shoulder again, resting on the man sitting beside her, with long earlobes, who was jotting something down on his notepad. Behind him, there was a woman, dry skin coated with layers of make-up, dark eyebrows colored in, her eyes loyal to the speaker. Aimée twisted her torso farther round in her plastic seat, sweeping over the faces of the sitting people, looking for the source of her agitation. But not a single person’s eyes were on her, everyone was looking straight ahead at the speaker.

“… as with Touch Bionics,” the doctor continued.

It was there though, the feeling. Behind the audience. A man had halted his step. Gray suit, eggish body, balding head with a thin pair of glasses on his nose. His head was facing the stage but his eye was directly on her. She met his stare and the two held each other’s gaze. The man lifted his left hand and began moving it toward his chest. Aimée watched his hand disappear between the jacket lapel and his button-down shirt. She felt her own blouse shift and wrinkle at the ribcage. Then she saw his hand reappear, first wrist-bone, then knuckles, and she exhaled as if he were pulling something out from inside her. He held a square sky-blue silk handkerchief and put it to his mouth to cough. He coughed several times, then crumpled up the handkerchief and began sliding it back into his jacket pocket. Aimée’s shoulders shriveled into her heart.

Then the man was walking away, into the rows of stands, toward the internationals section.

Aimée unwound herself to turn back toward the stage. She lowered her eyes to her lap, where her hands were still gripping the mobile phone, as if sensing it was about to ring between her two palms. She looked up again to the panel and saw a different stage altogether, an elevated theatre stage, deep in its black-painted floor, framed with a heavy curtain drawn open, lights crossed and fused over the body of a woman standing barefoot in a white satin nightie. In her shadow, a younger lookalike, white satin nightie, thighs, knees, spread toes.

FEMME (facing audience, looking at horizon)

I was young once.

FILLE (facing audience, looking at public)

I was old once.

*

Aimée was a miracle child, meaning her mother had had her when she was deemed past her prime, and it was the last mistake her parents had shared. Their other two children were already grown up and making their own lives when Aimée came into the emptied nest, and not two years in, her parents filed for divorce. Her mother moved to London in a sweeping gesture, underlining how many years her father had kept her from doing what she had wanted to do all along. Incidentally, she had a beau waiting for her there.

Her older sister, Sylvie, followed suit, calling Paris a dwarfish stone-hearted city, but looking directly at their father. Her brother, Benoît, had always had a thing for South-East Asia, and long before the women of the house proclaimed their British leanings, he turned his medical volunteering into a stable job at a hospital in Thailand, half a world away from the father who could not help but mention that he thought Benoît was too sharp to be a generalist for coughs and sneezes. Over time, the mother and sister and brother became less family and more painted figurines, shrunk and motionless, from a childhood Aimée had too abruptly outgrown. And so, she and her father grew closer together as if it had always been just the two of them in their family unit.

*

Her father tried his best to cultivate the girl, whom he promised himself would be different from Sylvie and by-God nothing like his wife.

*

He had gotten them front-row seats at the theatre for a show starring the French film actress Fanny Ardant, which was getting some buzz in the papers. Aimée was 13, her thin blond hair brushed and tucked behind her ears.

*

One woman came on stage wearing a white satin nightie, barefoot. It was Fanny Ardant. The public sat up in their seats. The famous actress took a breath and said, in her velvet voice, “I was young once.”

From the other side of the stage a younger woman came out, also wearing a white satin nightie, also barefoot. Her dark hair was brushed out like Fanny Ardant’s and her face held a resemblance to the actress’s sagely luscious features. The younger woman came forth and stopped at Fanny Ardant’s level. Looking out into the audience with an invigorated glare, the younger actress proclaimed, in a broad voice, “I was old once.”

*

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 13-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 moves in next door. His new neighbor’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 14th birthday her stutter was gone.

*

When Aimée was 16, 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 metro 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 bangs, 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 meters 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 color 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 16-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 gray sweater, 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 chiseling 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 26 to Aimée’s 16.

“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 color 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 gray 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, pealing, 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 17, feeling full of all the things she could do as she was peeling off childhood, Dominique was turning 27 and realizing she was no longer the star she had been four years ago, in fact, perhaps, she never had been at all.

When Aimée turned 18, 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 30s with an unintentional pact of celibacy while working for the French Catholic organization 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 catalog ad for a spring collection. Dominique had the racial ambiguity and yet European pureness to fit the demand for the “third wheel” in many catalog shoots after that.

Whether by chance or prophecy, her mother was sent back to Paris to the Catholic organization 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.