“This play is profane, even for us,” Sabine said. “The police will come.”
Camille looked helplessly at Maxa, but she was smiling at me. “Don’t be afraid, loves,” she said. “This is going to be the best show we’ve ever performed.”
* * *
The night of my play’s debut, I arrived at the theater early only to find Maxa and Marcel drinking on my old cot.
Maxa’s eyes glittered. “I’ve had an idea, Bess,” she said. She lifted up a cigar box and opened it; inside were lines of francs.
“Maxa,” I breathed.
She sent me down into the house to place the bills on the seats. I did, and when I had leftovers I turned and showed them to her. She made a scattering motion, so I swung around and released the bills everywhere. When I had rid myself of every scrap, I returned to the stage and to the peephole where Maxa stood.
The audience began to enter. The Guignoleurs moved with swiftness, and others flinched and rolled their eyes upward, taking it all in. Then, a woman in a beaded dress noticed the franc on a chair and lifted it to her eyes. She turned to her companions, who were laughing. “It’s real!” she said. “It’s real!”
Her musical voice ran through the crowd like a swift illness. Others began to echo her, unthinkingly at first, and then it took, as they saw the paper scattered at their feet.
“Let me see,” said Maxa.
Marcel, Maxa, and I stood there, taking turns at the peephole. Maxa laughed wickedly, and when Marcel looked I saw his muscles tense, like a cat about to pounce.
“Please,” I said, and pressed my eye socket to the peephole.
In the audience, the patrons tore at one another. The ladies abandoned their hats and handbags, crawled over one another, their skirts riding up. The men punched one another in the jaw, cracked chair backs against skulls. They did not look human, but rather like a group of feral cats I had once seen swarm over a horse who had fallen in the street—liquid and animal both.
Maxa’s breath was hot in my ear, and I felt her pressing against me. It was only when the pressing became rhythmic that I realized that Marcel was behind us both, and Maxa’s skirt was drawn up to her hips. My breath quickened, and I braced myself against the wall, so that I might slip away. Maxa grabbed my wrist.
“Please don’t leave me,” she begged into my ear. “Please don’t.”
A woman who had been rummaging about on the floor sat up, a fistful of francs in her hand like a wedding bouquet. But instead of pocketing it, she threw it back above the crowd, refreshing the chaos. I heard Marcel make his groan of culmination, and then he was done, disappeared into the back of the theater. I turned around and saw Maxa there, looking disheveled. Sabine came running up to us—“Maxa, you need to change!”—and then I went and sat in the audience.
And so the play began.
* * *
I had, as Maxa commanded, written the most degenerate play I could have imagined.
Jean—a kind and solid man I’d forgotten existed before this moment; a man whose face I would not remember after this night—walked to the center of the stage. “I am your host for the evening. Tonight, we will not be showing The Blind Ship. Instead, we have the debut performance of a new play, by a playwright brand-new to our stage. A virgin, if you will. The play is called The Star.”
The audience tittered. Jean lifted his arm and walked to the edge of the stage, bowing as he did so.
“The village of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin,” he announced, “at the end of the world.”
When the curtain rose, Maxa was standing atop a swelling slope, a falcon on her arm. Behind her, a servant lifted bits of bloody meat to the falcon’s beak, which the falcon seized with a quickness. Beneath the stage, attendants used water and mirrors to send soft and glittering orbits into the room, as though she stood on the ocean’s shore. She smiled. Her lip curved like a hooked finger drawing a viewer into a room.
“It is the end of the world,” she said. “See, the comet in the sky. It tears down toward us, threatening. I am the last queen that reigns over man.”
Jean dropped to his knee. “I’d do anything for you, my queen.”
“A comet in the sky,” Maxa repeated again. “I thought it was the moon, but it is coming to end us. It bears down on us like a disapproving eye. It reveals truths and dispels illusions. It causes us to remember what we never knew we forgot. It causes us to forget what we never knew. We are small, we are small. Mankind’s theater is wasted on our smallness.”
We arrived at the part of the play where the dialogue and stage direction ceased. The actors were instructed to turn to the audience.
“What do we do with our final queen?” they said, in unison.
There was silence among the audience. I waited for five breaths before opening my mouth to command: “Worship her.” I imagined an orgy of bodies. Indeed, even Jean was unbuttoning his cuffs, preparing for the audience’s lust.
But in the same instant, a deep voice bellowed from the audience, swallowing my own. “Strike her down.” There was a beat of silence, and the actors did not respond.
Another voice, higher this time. A woman’s. “Subdue her.”
“My people,” Jean said, rolling up his sleeves. “The comet arrives. The end of the world is nigh. Perhaps…” He flicked the edge of Maxa’s breast suggestively. Beneath the fabric, her nipple hardened to a pebble, but she did not move. She continued to stare at the audience, impassive, her face slack as dough.
“Beat her,” said another man.
Jean looked at me, but I did not know how to intervene. My play felt alive, less created than born, and I had no more control over it than any being.
The first blow was soft, like a parent wishing to frighten a child instead of hurt them. Maxa barely moved; the hand seemed to sink into her. Jean turned back to the audience, a troubled expression moving across his face like clouds before the moon.
“And now that she is softened,” he began, “perhaps we—”
“Again,” said a young woman who barely looked old enough to be in the audience.
Jean looked at his hand as if he did not recognize it, as if it was some creature that had climbed onto his limb for a ride. He struck Maxa again but did not look at her.
Now the audience was silent, but the command rose from them like a collective thought. Their white faces bobbed in the blackness like so many corpses in the river. Jean hit her again and again. As she fell, the falcon took off from her arm and swooped toward the woman with the scraps of meat. She shrieked and tossed them to the ground; the bird landed and swallowed them one after another.
Jean grabbed Maxa’s hair and lifted her to her feet.
The fifth time he struck her, a woman stood up in the audience. “Stop!” she screamed. Around her, a few glazed eyes turned upward. She grabbed the jacket of her escort, a dewy young man who looked at her as though she was making an observation about the weather. “Stop,” she cried again, and stumbled over the legs of audience members so that she might make her way to the aisle. “He’s hurting her, he’s truly hurting her!” she said, pushing over the bodies in her way. “Make him stop!”
Jean struck Maxa again, so hard I heard a crack, and she collapsed to the stage for a final time. The woman kept pushing her way through the audience, and in one swift motion a group of men stood and bore her body aloft. She shrieked in fear, and once again cried, “Stop, stop, he’s hurting her!” and the men passed her back, and men and women alike pushed her into the air, her body contorting like a puppet, and they passed her around, pulling the clothing from her like the skin from an orange. Segment by segment, her garments fluttered to the floor. Her body was white as pith.
She began to scream anew—no longer for Maxa, but for herself. The actors stood there, waiting out the stage direction that had so delighted Maxa: When worked into a frenzy, let the audience play out their desire until their exhaustion and natural submission.
Then the crowd opened up like an orifice and drew the woman int
o itself, and she sank as if in quicksand. There was a sound—a slurping, a yawn, as if she had entered into a giant mouth. Then, as suddenly as it had began, the audience returned to their seats. The woman was nowhere to be found.
Jean’s eyes were soft and wet as rose petals. He staggered past his cue. “It comes,” he said, though what was coming he did not say. “It comes.”
The effect of the comet striking the earth was twofold: light and sound. When the stage cleared, the actors had dropped down flat, and the falcon continued to eat, a hard eye turned to them all. Of course, they should have been nude, having fallen directly from whatever sexual position they’d been imitating. But instead they dropped from violence to death with nothing in between.
The audience sat there, as in a trance. Then they began to clap, and clap, and they stood. Cloth from the woman’s dress was strewn over the seats and their arms, and they clapped and clapped and clapped. It was only the lights coming up that stopped them from clapping unto blood.
Camille met me backstage. “We will switch back to The Blind Ship tomorrow,” he said. He pushed a pile of scripts into my hands.
When the audience had departed, I walked up the sides of the aisles, looking for the woman. I saw white scraps of dress, but no naked, crawling thing, not even a corpse. I walked the perimeter of the theater, but she was simply gone.
* * *
Many years later, when Paris was a distant memory, I asked myself if I had known that the audience would not encourage the actors to descend into an orgy, but would instead demand Maxa be taken apart before them? That only the intervention of a woman in the audience, a stranger who then lost her life at their hands, had prevented such a thing? I do not know.
* * *
When I arrived at Maxa’s flat that night, I found Athéna looping around the street, whining piteously.
I ran up the steps to the flat and leaned my ear against the door. Marcel’s reedy voice floated toward me. “I love you, my demon, my sweet,” he said. I heard the sound of leather on skin, but was not certain if they rang with rage or pleasure. Then, the cracking sound ended with the faintest of chimes—metal. I began to throw myself against the door.
“Bess,” Maxa screamed from inside. “Bess, help me, help me, please, God, help me.”
As the door gave beneath my shoulder, the belt buckle struck the side of my face. I spun blindly and pinned Marcel to the wall, yanking the belt from his hand. I struck his groin, and he crumpled.
“Get out of here,” I said. He stood and ran.
I closed the door and turned back. Maxa was sprawled on the divan, weeping. Her dress was torn, and welts bubbled on her skin as if she’d been burned. I wetted a cloth with water and brought it to her.
“Oh, Bess,” Maxa said, clutching tearily at my skirts. “He was mad, he was mad. I did this. I lit some wicked fire in him. He wished to purge my sins—”
“You’ll be all right,” I said, dabbing at the welts.
“I lit some fire in you, too. I created you, turned you into a monster.”
I lifted the cloth and let it drip onto the floor. Maxa gathered herself from her weeping and stared at me as if she did not recognize me.
“I am not a monster,” I said, “and you did not create me.” I confess here that my voice wavered a little, for I thought of my mother, and for the first time in a year longed to hear my name, my true name, in her voice.
Maxa laid her head against my stomach as if she were an exhausted child. I stroked her hair. “You love me, don’t you, Bess?” she asked. She looked, the goldfish of her mouth trembling. She smelled like le fruit défendu, like overripe apricots fallen to the earth, bitter smoke. I held her face in my hands; it was lovely and cold. “I must go,” I said, and she did not stop me.
As I left, I opened the door, and before I left whistled for Athéna, who loped up the stairs and went straight to her mistress.
* * *
The next morning, Maxa was gone. No one at the theater knew where she was, though she’d left a note, and Sabine was preparing to fill in. Marcel, they told me, had been arrested in the night for his drunkenness—he’d assaulted a woman outside a hotel after he’d left Maxa’s flat. An officer lingered in the doorway, having been making inquiries about a disturbance, and a young woman who had not returned to her dormitory.
“What kind of theater is this, exactly?” he asked, squinting nearsightedly at the poster on the wall.
“We perform religious plays,” I said breathlessly. “Excuse me.”
When I arrived at her apartment, I found it full of her possessions and empty of life. It was only when I asked her landlord that he procured a piece of paper with her thick, cramped handwriting—a forwarding address in Rouen, and several months’ rent. I caught the next train.
When I arrived, I hired a driver. A steady rain obscured the details of the landscape except for turning of the wheels and the road unfolding behind us.
* * *
It seemed like an age that I stood at Maxa’s door, my wet hair wrapped around my throat like a noose. The yard was quiet as a cemetery. Beneath a willow tree, loose soil bulged with new death. A shadow slipped across the window, and I knocked. She did not answer. I threw myself against the entrance but slipped and fell into the mud. I stood and lifted a stone, intending to break the lock, and the door opened. I saw a single, liquid eye. She opened the door farther and took me in. She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before. I pushed past her and into the warm little villa.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me. She looked frailer than I remembered her, wrapped in a bloodred kimono limned with blue-and-gold cranes. She turned toward her window, and then her eyes seemed to land upon the grave in her yard. “Athéna died. Her back legs went soft and she shit herself and then she left me in the middle of the night. Sickness follows me wherever I go.”
My jittering fingertips missed the buttons before it found them. I undressed before her and pressed her hands against my gooseflesh. I thought they would be warm, but they were cold, even colder than me.
“Strike me,” I said.
She stared at me as if I were mad.
“No,” she said.
I grabbed her hands and placed them around my throat. When I released them, they fell limply to her sides. Water dripped down my body.
“You asked me if I loved you.”
“I—”
“I don’t need you to tell me you love me,” I said, “but you do need to tell me that I will not be limping after you for our entire lives. That my humiliation is not your only pleasure. I don’t want your performance or your persona. I just need to know that you need me, or some part of me.”
Her eyes filled with actress’s tears, and when my face did not soften, it hardened to real anger. “Need you for what?” she said flatly. “I’m not an invert.”
The slap I delivered to her cheek was not hard, but she crumpled to the floor like a kicked animal anyway. There, I heard a high, keening sound, and I realized that she was weeping. I had never heard her truly cry before. She clawed listlessly at the wooden floor, as if it were earth and she could bury herself there. I pulled up my dress. She stayed on the floor, curled into herself. I would never see her stand again.
“I’ll find you, Bess,” she said. “On the distant shore, remember? I will find you, when I can be better than I am.”
“My name is not Bess,” I said, leaning down to her. “And you will never know what it really is.”
As I walked back to the train station, the rain began to dissipate, and the clouds faded like breath dissolving into the winter air. When I arrived at the station, the bustle of it was strangely muted. I looked up into the sky. A bright new star glittered next to the waning moon, and the people on the platform pointed to it in wonder, faces all turned equally toward this new sight.
Watching the countryside flit past the fixed window, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in a long time: the first time I saw Maxa, decomposing on that stage.
How she had let herself dissolve away.
* * *
I drifted west, to London, where I worked as a seamstress like my mother had and spent what little discretionary money I had on the movies.
I loved silent films—perhaps because the dark eyes and expressive faces of the actresses, which commanded with so little effort—but when sound arrived I felt a fluttering moth of excitement. The world was advancing forward, in its own way. I did not know then, sitting there in the darkness, that under the dialogue I was hearing the death knells of the Grand-Guignol from across La Manche, one pleasure traded for another.
Then the war came—men doing what men did. When it was over, and the newspapers were filled with humankind’s unspeakable horrors, the Grand-Guignol had nothing new to show us anymore.
* * *
I emigrated to the United States a few years before Hitler’s occupation of Paris. My life settled into some manner of routine. Montmartre was in my past and would remain there.
One afternoon, a letter arrived for me from Algiers: my aunt, searching for me.
I have sent a dozen letters after you, she wrote. Many years have passed since we have laid eyes on each other. It was terrible to lose you, beloved creature; I hope to find you soon.
The letter was soft from its travels and, when I placed it against my nose, smelled like incense. My mother had dabbed an oil onto her wrists when she was alive, at night, after I’d always gone to bed, though it lingered on her in the morning. It smelled like this, like a fire in a cedar grove. I had not smelled it in so many years. My body seized up with distant grief, and that was how my lover found me—sitting in an armchair and clutching the letter to my breastbone, spasming with anguish. She brought me a pen and the stationery with my name embossed at the top. “Write back,” she said.
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