by Robert Levy
“What is it?” I ask. “Is there something the matter?”
“I was just thinking how very lucky I am,” he says. “Not only to have a wife of such exquisite beauty, but one so devoted to her art. You are in every way an inspiration to me.”
I laugh, and the effort feels false, an attempt to conceal an essential dissatisfaction behind a veil of mirth. “If I am able to brighten your mood in this way, and after all this time,” I say, “then I shall consider it an accomplishment. You know how important my writing is to me, that I cannot live in the real world alone. As for your admiration of my appearance, that says more about the kindness of your eye that it does about my looks. Paris has many ladies who are far more alluring.”
“You do yourself an injustice, Anaïs. You are the most ravishing woman I know.”
“All this?” I gesture with lacquered nails at my painted face, my silk dressing gown. “It is but an illusion. Feminine inventiveness, if you will. As for my art, well...” I smooth the pulped pages of my journal. “I believe in myself, and what I do. But as there are greater beauties, there are greater writers as well. Important ones, whose work will one day change the world.”
“Like Henry.” The hint of betrayal is plain in Hugo’s voice. It is a strange relief to hear Henry’s name, since in a sense he was already here with us, a vaporous phantom lingering smoke-like between us. It is to Hugo’s great credit that he can acknowledge my needs outside our union, that in his own quiet way he allows me the freedoms I find necessary to live a life of bohemianism, of excitement. But what good can come of these liaisons, when the anguish they inevitably yield proves as robust as the passion itself?
“You know how much I respect Henry’s dedication and talent,” I say. “I have no need to compare myself to him. Not when there is so much more for us both to accomplish.”
“You have great faith in him.”
“I do.” I close the cover of my diary, press it hard to my chest like a holy object. “I understand Henry on that level, and he understands me in the same manner. We recognize the artist in each other, and see ourselves for what we are.”
“He may see the artist inside you, but I see the woman.” Hugo kneels beside my chair, his spectacles catching the amber light from the fire. “Let us do something special together this evening. Something gay, just the two of us.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer to spend the evening at home?” I cup his eager face in my hands. “You have been gone the better part of a week.”
“First a night out, and then the whole of the day tomorrow lazing in bed. I want to show you off to the world.”
We kiss, tenderly. “How can I refuse such flattery?”
“Wonderful. So. Where is it you would most like to go?”
I inhale, and, in an instant, I find myself startled to return to a certain cold December night. It was my first outing with June, not so very long ago but still part of some other era, another age. Dinner at Louveciennes, and then a car into the city to the theatre. Hugo and Henry discussed politics, while June and I nestled together in the back, huddled close and whispering shared secrets like schoolgirls. When we reached the theatre, she extended her hand, beckoning me from the car like a siren to my own shipwreck.
I knew in that moment that I would do anything she asked. That perhaps I always would, no matter where her destructive spirit took me. She is Thanatos, braided through Eros in a tightly knotted rope.
How appropriate, then, that we had decided that evening to visit the holy palace of such matters. That night in the theatre, I was so taken with her I had barely paid attention to the show. Seated between her and Hugo, it was only June that I watched out of the corner of my eye. Her face contorted in skeptical bemusement as ghastly scenarios of bloodletting and torture unfolded before us, only to roll her eyes once the act ended and shifted into the next. Even in my state of distraction, I laughed and cried out in revulsion along with the rest of the audience, swept away in a tide of emotion that June seemed unable to access. My heart near bursting with feeling, with a rapidly unfolding desire for her that was so overwhelming it threatened to engulf the world. In that perverse theatre and under the cover of its luxuriant darkness, I had felt more alive than ever.
“Darling man.” I smile at Hugo, and take his hands in mine. “I want to go to the Grand Guignol.”
I stand in front of the theatre and smoke as Hugo waits on line at the box office to retrieve our tickets. The dark and narrow street outside 20bis Rue Chaptal is bustling, the cobbled court glutted with preening couples, high-heeled women on the arms of their companions to steady them as they negotiate the uneven stones. The Theatre du Grand-Guignol is nothing if not an ideal night out for the amorous, lovers who innocently enter the small Pigalle black box only to cling to each other in paroxysms of laughter or fright, the emotionally heightened scenarios blossoming like poisonous flowers upon the stage.
“Shall we go inside?” Hugo says, returned to my side.
We file through the heavy oak doors alongside the other patrons, traverse the crowded foyer and stop at the bar for a drink. As we enter the theatre proper, we are handed our programs, and I inhale the room’s heady and contradictory scents, what D.H. Lawrence might refer to as fug: perfume and cigarette smoke, must and alcohol, greasepaint and dry ice. The building was once a chapel, and the space still carries something of the sacred, tapestries hung from the baroque wood paneling and arched beams decorated with carved gods and monsters, angels and demons, the vaulted ceiling thatched with fleur-de-lis and pierced by iron chandeliers. Special patrons watch the performances from the row of confessional boxes at the rear of the theatre, where the amorous are free to hide behind ornate mesh screens and carry on their dalliances unseen.
We pass beneath the balcony’s low overhang, make our way to our seats in the pew-like rows at the middle of the house. We wait, and soon the lights dim, as a backstage accordionist squeezes out a jaunty tune upon a weathered concertina. A portly master of ceremonies appears in front of the red velvet curtain. He is dressed in formal evening wear, top hat and all, though the attire is shabby, a worn pose from the hazy past. He walks the half-dozen steps to the foot of the small stage, where he clears his throat, rocking on his scuffed heels until the accordionist ceases to play.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says with great portent,
“thank you for joining us this evening in the bastion of pleasure and terror, virtue and vice. Tonight, your most hidden desires and private fears will be conjured upon our humble stage, so that you may delight and despair in the darkest corners of your imagination. Welcome to the Grand Guignol!”
A renewed squeal of song, and the curtain rises upon a pastoral scene, a busty shepherdess standing in front of a backdrop depicting an alpine idyll of rolling hills beneath a bright blue sky. She wears a traditional taffeta dress and bears an oversized crook, and she glides across the stage while singing a sprightly little song, an echo of the accordionist’s opening number.
“Oh, how lonely is the life of a shepherdess,” she bemoans in a girlish falsetto, a lace-gloved hand pressed to her brow. “If only I had a handsome man with me as I tend to my flock.”
A broad-shouldered herder in lederhosen and a feathered cap enters to boisterous appreciation from the audience. “Oh, how lonely is the life of a goat herder,” he calls out. “If only I had a fair maiden for company as I see to my goats.”
Hugo strokes my hand, and he smiles over at me, a smile I am only too happy to return. He laughs when I laugh, I whistle when he whistles, the both of us taking care to ensure the other is enjoying themselves, engaging in the playful camaraderie that Henry disparagingly calls our love antics. But inside me, the swirling question makes itself known, the one that says:
How can you pretend to be fulfilled, Anaïs, when the aching emptiness still lurks inside you? The void that took shape when you were a young girl and first drank of the deep well of loneliness, it remains, and will stay with you until your life is finally over.
Only then will the pain cease at last.
I twist in my seat, as if upon an instrument of slow torture.
Not three minutes pass before the goat herder has the shepherdess stripped to her undergarments. He thrusts himself upon her, their interlocking bodies only somewhat obscured by stuffed goats and sheep rolled in by stagehands on poorly disguised casters, tufts of cotton and fur billowing out into the pews as the audience hollers and cheers their approval. This is the light, before the darkness takes over.
I allow myself to fall into the familiar rhythm of the Guignol. The ludicrous machinations of the sex farce giving way to the degradations of a rosse play depicting a cruel soldier as he menaces a negligee-clad prostitute, and then a return to broad comedy again, the jarring dissonance leaving the audience delirious and hungry for more. It is the theatre’s signature method of alternating between extremes, the acts vacillating so that we are taken from hilarity to terror, from sexual libertinism to sexualized violence. The audience is provided with the effect of une douche écossaise, and indeed I blush with the force of each novel sensation, blood rushing to the surface of my newly awakened skin.
After a brief interval, the curtain opens once more, onto an ominous and candlelit stage. The scene is that of an off-kilter hospital, the sharp angles of the spare black-and-white set pieces jutting out at irregular angles akin to a small-scale reproduction of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. An operating table and surgical stand are positioned at center stage, and a murmur of appreciation passes over the crowd. This is what we came for.
Two uniformed attendants enter with a straightjacketed woman between them, the patient struggling against her restraints to no avail. They strap her down screaming upon the table, her hair a nest of unkempt blond curls, face gaunt with bulging and haunted eyes. In the flickering candlelight, she is odd-looking, but in her own way she is beautiful, with an air of the familiar. I suspect I may have seen her before.
A moment later a doctor emerges from the wings. Balding and extremely thin, he appears almost skeletal beneath his white apron and surgical clothes. “I see the nymphomania treatments have failed to yield the desired results,” he says over her cries, his tone disturbingly cool. “I will have to take more drastic measures to relieve our patient of her unquenchable cravings. Thank you, gentlemen, that will be all. I shall call for you again once the procedure is complete.”
The aides depart, and the doctor bends over the patient’s supine form. His hands roam her body, undoing the laces of her straightjacket and reaching inside the loose cotton nightgown beneath. He frees her breasts, which are fuller and less firm than my own, and he squeezes one of them, pinches the large brown nipple so that it hardens like a raisin. The woman stifles a cry, her eyes widening into round white circles. I am transfixed.
“You’ve given us all a great deal of trouble, Christine.” The doctor plucks a scalpel from the tray upon the surgical stand. “But now it is time for us to bring a halt to the hysteria, for your tragic condition to come to an end. It is time for you to find your relief at last.”
He brings the knife to the edge of her nipple and begins to cut into her flesh. She shrieks with wild intensity, bucking against the leather straps that bind her to the table. Blood trickles fast from her breast, her alabaster skin running red in a dark wet current. Stagecraft, yes, but with the illusion of sickening realism all the same. Hugo and I squeeze each other’s hands as the patient’s agonized face shifts in the candle flame. Beneath her powder and paint, past a damp sweep of tangled hair draped across her brow, the bloodied victim wears a new face. June’s face.
I gasp. A woman screams behind me, just as the stage lights blare brightly in unsettling patches of green and yellow. I dare not take my eyes from the stage, from the bleeding patient and her tortured expression, June’s eyes pleading for release from her perdition. As the blood-soaked nipple is sliced away and delivered as a delicacy to the doctor’s eager lips, all I can see is that it is June who is defiled. In this conjured vision of her degradation upon the stage, I feel only abandon, for the first time in far too long. In a most unexpected way, I feel alive again.
The doctor chews the nipple with noticeable relish, and the audience roars in disgusted horror, the balcony loudest of all, with the greatest vantage point of this particular carnage. The maniac physician swallows and laughs and sets to work on the other nipple, severing the brown tip with great gusto. A man rises from a nearby seat and stumbles into the aisle, where he falls in a dead faint, an usher rushing to assist him.
With a final cry of terror, June’s body slackens, and her head lolls to the side. For one brief moment our gazes lock, until her eyes close and the actress succumbs to a feigned unconsciousness.
“Now, my tender and delicious Christine,” the doctor says, “let us see what you have down between your legs, shall we?” He lowers the scalpel, and the crowd shrieks as the curtain comes down, Hugo squirming next to me as we applaud the sordid play’s appalling conclusion.
I bring his hand to my lips and kiss his knuckles, the room electrified with murmurs and movement as the patrons resettle in their seats. Like me, they are unsure how to feel, how best to absorb and respond to what has just taken place before them. Did they see their own objects of desire and longing in the patient, the way that I saw June? Did it make them feel the same exquisite satisfaction, the first twinge of a new and awakening pleasure inside?
The curtain rises upon another ribald comedy. The audience laughs and whistles, Hugo along with them, lulled into another scene of bawdy seduction and innuendo. Yet I am somewhere else now, inside my head. I am back in the operating room, the fiend standing above June as he grasps her breast in one hand and the scalpel in the other, a seam of yellow candlelight gleaming from the blade.
I hunch over in the pew, and in the dark I seek out the soft pebble of one of my nipples. I pinch it until it stiffens, so hard that I am afraid it will burst.
At intermission, Hugo and I hang on each other as if we are drunk. Once we exit the theatre, he immediately leads me through the crowd and raises his hand to flag down a taxi. “The show is not yet over,” I say as he opens the door for me, but it does nothing to dissuade him. He need not say why, the lust plain on his face. I recognize it for what it is, almost as well as I am capable of recognizing my own. He provides the driver with directions, and the moment the car pulls away from the theatre he is upon me. His tongue in my mouth, teeth tugging at my earlobe, lips sucking at my neck until he lowers himself onto the floor of the car, his head foraging between my legs.
“Hugo!” I whisper, startled as he slides my underwear down to my ankles. Though a passionate lover, I have never known him to give himself over to such public and impulsive displays, not in all our many years of marriage. He kisses at my thighs, his enthusiastic tongue wriggling inside me, and I tremble and hold tight to the seat’s hard and cracked leather.
As I roll my head back in pleasure, I catch the driver’s gaze in the rearview mirror. He watches us, watches me with silver-yellow eyes: it is the stare of a carnivorous beast, malevolent and ravenous. It is the animal gaze of the creature from Allendy’s box, a macabre fragment I unwittingly carry inside me as a jagged splinter beneath my skin.
Flush with fear and desire, I begin to moan. I force a knuckle into my mouth, squeeze my eyes shut as I shudder and thrill, Hugo’s tongue and lips seeking out the softest and most tender parts of me. With a suppressed cry of joy, I convulse as the car rumbles through the cool Paris night, street lamps streaking past in molten waves as we are delivered back to Louveciennes.
Once we are home, Hugo possesses me completely, his ardor undiminished. I wince as he enters me, and this time I find that I welcome the pain of his penetration. Pain, mixed with pleasure, and I think of the actress on the operating table. The way I had imagined June into the scenario as well, the same way a child daydreams those closest to them as figures in a puppet show, in order to make meaning of a world beyond control. The woman’s pleading eyes, her fa
ce both June’s face and not, commingled by some strange trick of the light. I see her as my husband thrusts inside me. Her and the leering eyes in the taxi’s rearview mirror that watched me with such hunger, a demoniac lust that helps quiet the seething void within.
I close my legs about Hugo and bite down on my lip until I begin to draw blood.
I meet Henry in the afternoon. We have his flat to ourselves, and we write at the kitchen table and comment on the other’s pages, discuss Joyce and Lawrence and Dostoevsky until we are breathless. How pleasant it is to work across from each other at our respective typewriters! Eventually, however, he takes the opportunity of our close proximity to place his hand beneath the table and between my stockinged legs.
“Please, Henry, I am trying to work,” I say, and brush his hand away.
“What if we just have a little quickie?” He lowers his glasses down his nose and delivers one of his pleading looks. “Hey, I gotta at least ask, okay? Don’t fault me for asking. A man has his needs, after all. You might not understand that, but it’s true.”
“A man has his needs, but not a woman?” I scowl and cross my arms. “You seem to have forgotten the rest of your Eliot, Mr. Miller. Or at least the source mythology for his poem. Remember the hermaphrodite Tiresias, who was cursed by Hera? And why? For revealing that it is in fact woman, not man, who is the more sensual creature.”
“Screw Tiresias,” Henry says. “And screw Eliot too. I never liked that guy anyway. So. Maybe just a little hanky-panky after we write a couple more pages?”
“I said no.” I make a face, though I cannot help but laugh at his persistence. “That is not what I need from you right now. I need your insight, your raw intellect. Today, I require a different aspect of your potency. I need the attention of your brain, and not your... prick,” I say, borrowing one of his favorite words, and now Henry is the one laughing. “Although if I change my mind, I promise you will be the first to know.”
