by Robert Levy
“June, please. You must listen to me.” I place a firm hand upon her shoulder and hold her in place, the way you would to ensure the attention of a child. “You cannot be here tonight. This theatre, it is not safe.”
“Don’t you know? It isn’t safe anywhere.” She laughs wryly. “The world is a great big terror from one end to the next. Always has been, and always will be. Especially for women like me.” She extends her long stockinged legs, her feet coming to a rest on the table edge. “For women such as yourself, however? The ones with means, who can afford to keep their heads above water? Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that now, would I?”
June gestures toward me dismissively. “Sure, you play at a kind of bohemianism, typing up your little stories while you trade bon mots with my husband. But it’s just a fantasy of poverty, of feeling. You daydream your life away, until it’s safe to go home again to your banker husband, your beautiful house in the suburbs. Because you’re free. Free to live in your safe little world, to hide yourself away at the first sign of trouble. You’re too fucking sheltered to know real danger.”
“Once, perhaps. But no longer.” I lean over her, and we stare at each other in the mirror, our faces inches apart. “Since I have last seen you, I have experienced things I have never known before. Terrible things. Believe me when I say that I have felt fear I never thought possible.”
“That’s what this whole place is about, isn’t it?” she says, and waves her hand in a wide circle. “The famous Grand Guignol! Step right up, and have a look at the freaks behind the curtain. The poor, the deranged, the perverse. Get yourself a little thrill, a safe thrill, because nothing here is going to hurt you, not really. That’s not real life, though, is it? Because real life is never safe. Real life is merde.”
She places her hand against my face, long fingers stroking my cheek. “Remember when we came here together?” June says. “You were so excited! Like you were a child again. I could care less, of course. All the fake blood, the phoniness and melodrama. I still managed to have the time of my life, though. You know why? It was because I was with you.”
“I think of that night more than you can know.” I crouch beside her, and take her hand in mine. “It was as if a hidden part of myself had only just made itself known.” I think of the sealed room at Louveciennes, and all the many secrets inside. “It was like nothing I had ever experienced before. Or since.”
“I told you I’d do anything you asked of me, if only for a night. And I still would.” She smiles again, tears forming in her eyes. “That’s because you saw me, Anaïs. Really saw me.”
“And you saw me,” I say. “We will always have that. No matter what.”
A single tear falls from her eye, and streaks her cheek with black mascara. “I wanted us to be together. But then you and Henry...”
“I am so sorry that it happened this way.” I kiss the back of her hand, nuzzle against it, hold it to fast my chest. “I never meant to hurt you, you must know that. How I wish things had been different.”
We kiss, her wet lips glazed with the taste of raw honey. “I still see you,” I whisper, the words their own invocation. “And I always will.”
Maxa lurches into the dressing room. Beads of water cascade from her hands as she closes the door and leans against it with her eyes shut. “All the arrangements have been made,” she says in a panting breath, and I wonder if Therese’s revitalizing tonic has worn off altogether, if she has even an hour left in her.
Maxa widens her palm beneath the nearest lamp, her fingers blackened with a gangrenous rot. “This entire plan of yours is utter insanity. Even if Guillard does arrive, you’ll only have a short time to pull it off before... I mean, would you look at this? I am beginning to fall apart.”
She holds her hand this way and that, until she finally notices June, who stares back at her with undisguised irritation. Maxa hides her hand behind her back and waits, wordless. June does nothing to relieve the silence, only looks Maxa up and down as one appraises an eggplant or a cut of meat.
“Who the hell is this?” Maxa finally says, her entire body stiff as a rod.
“A friend,” I reply. “June Miller, this is Paula Maxa.”
“June Mansfield.” She stands as she corrects me, and retrieves her hat from the table. “The pleasure is mine. Unfortunately, I was just about to leave.”
“Wait,” I say, and grasp hold of her arm. “Maxa, a moment, please. I need to speak with June.”
“Be my guest.” She drops into the chair between us and rests her head against the table, her skin sallow in the mirror. “But I don’t have all night. As you well know.”
“She’s really not what I expected,” June says to me, staring down with distaste at Maxa’s crumpled form. “Nice to see you still like them rough around the edges. Always on the lookout for a fixer-upper, am I right?”
“June, listen to me.” I take her hands in my own, and draw her attention back toward me. “What you said that night, about doing anything I asked of you. Do you truly still mean that?”
“Why, are you calling me a liar now?” she says, and scowls. “I thought you knew me better than that.”
“Answer me. Please.”
“Cross my heart, Anaïs. Whatever you want. You know that’s the truth. Honest to God.”
“Good. Because I need you watch over me this evening. To act as my guardian angel, no matter what dangers may present themselves.” I take June’s face in my hands, our gazes locked together. “The Guignol is about to see its most unforgettable evening yet.”
The audience begins to file inside for the performance. I take my place, not in the usual rows but in one of the confessionals at the rear of the chapel, the enclosed and private spaces lovers are known to occupy for their trysts; Maxa has commandeered a box for me. I settle on the bench and close the confessional door, the mesh partition raised so that the theatre beyond is transformed into a chiaroscuro of light and shadow. I look around the dark box, and my pulse quickens. Perhaps it is the ecumenical setting in which I find myself, but it is all I can do not to clasp my hands together and pray for a steadying hand.
The house lights dim, and soon the sharp pull of the accordion ushers us into the world of the Guignol. The master of ceremonies takes to the stage, and it is only once he has done so that I see just how far I am from the footlights, from where Maxa will deliver her performance in only a few brief minutes. There will be no helping her, just as she will be unable to assist me in my own grim undertaking. The roles have been cast, the twin stages set. There is no turning back.
The curtain opens and I force my breath to lengthen and slow, eyelids fluttering as if I am falling into a waking dream. The first act begins in a classroom setting, Maxa’s understudy Hélène as a schoolmistress correcting papers at her desk. A handsome young student peers through the door, his head a halo of auburn curls. “You wanted to see me, Madame?” he asks, and “Yes, George,” she replies. “Come in and shut the door, please.” He approaches, awkward and stiff, nervous hands clutching a stack of books over his groin.
“What is it you have beneath your books?” she asks, and the audience titters.
“Nothing, Madame,” he says. “I swear.”
“Do not lie to me.” She glares at him over the top of her spectacles. “You are my very best student, but you have been distracted of late.”
“I have been distracted, it is true,” he says, and scratches at the back of his head. “But that is only because of you.”
The crowd continues to laugh as the farce unfolds, and soon the teacher and her student begin making passionate love. Through the crosshatch of the screen, I catch glimpses of their bared flesh: his freckled shoulders as he arches his back to better position himself beneath her, the pale meat of her thighs as she straddles him atop the desk. All the while, my heart races ever faster, the confessional walls are so near I begin to have trouble breathing.
I close my eyes, and caress my face with the back of my hand. Allow my f
ingers to travel down to my neck and across my collarbone, spidering beneath my cape and bodice, along the curve of my breast. My desire stirs, and I focus on my own powerful sensuousness. It powers an erotic phosphorescence made brighter by the light of others, yes, but always mine to command. It is as essential a part of my being as breath itself.
Come to me, as you came to me before, I sing in silence. My hand slides down my belly to the cleft between my legs. The bench is hard against my buttocks, only a thin sheen of silk separating my flesh from the rough grain of the wood. Come to me in this still-holy place, and let us share this dance of death together.
The door to the confessional slides open. A tall figure crosses the threshold and closes the door, the darkness returned. The bench groans beneath his weight as he sits, a cold and heavy hand dropping down upon my thigh. I stifle a gasp as his fingers interlace with my own, and I dare not glance over. My eyes are fixed upon the stage and the carnal scene unfolding, even as my suitor’s seawater scent engulfs me, his breath rolling like the tide, in, out, in.
“Hello, Anaïs.” His voice velvet, as soft as his shirt sleeve is coarse, the fabric harsh against my bare arm. “I am pleased that you called for me.”
“Hello, Monsieur Guillard. I am pleased that you answered.”
“Oh, George!” the schoolmarm cries from atop the young man. “You truly are my very best student!” The audience applauds, and she tosses high the work from her desk, a swirl of papers cascading across the stage in a wide arc as the curtain draws closed.
“Ah, how wonderful to be back, in the theatre that Maxa once haunted,” Guillard says. I attempt to shift down the bench, but his grip tightens so that I am fixed in place. “She was a gifted performer, was she not? A pity I could no longer sustain her talents.”
“How can you say that you sustained her, when all you have done is draw away her vitality? Does a parasite cease leeching from its host, only to claim it an act of charity?”
“Maxa summoned me, and I complied. The same way I complied when you called.”
“Tonight, I did summon you, it is true.” Though paralyzed with fear, I want to face him in all my righteous fury. “On that we can agree.”
“Ladies and gentleman, may I have your attention,” the master of ceremonies declares from the footlights. “We have an unannounced performance this evening. Our very own Paula Maxa, The Maddest Woman in the World, is about to grace the stage in a once-in-a-lifetime appearance that will amaze and astonish you.”
“Ah. Maxa.” Guillard’s face nears the partition, and I look over at him now, silver-yellow eyes narrowing beneath his heavy ridged brow as he gazes into the dim of the theatre. “One final performance, then.”
“Oh yes, Monsieur. One final performance indeed. And it is dedicated to you.”
“To me?” He grins, a mouthful of silver teeth flaring in the scattered light. “This should prove amusing. I thought Maxa no longer fit to walk this world.”
“Her pain, it is intoxicating to you, is it not?” I whisper. “You take pleasure in it. The way an alley cat takes pleasure in toying with its prey, before finally killing and consuming it.”
“I do take pleasure in her pain, yes.” His fingers feel their way up my body, and he finds my collarbone, where he taps with a single sharp fingernail. “But only to a point. Far be it from me to deny Maxa an end to her suffering.”
In a flash, his arm clamps tight about my waist. He pulls me onto his lap, the crown of my skull near the top of the confessional, a narrow band of space between the partition and the ceiling so that the screen no longer obstructs my view of the stage.
“Now, I will possess you fully,” Guillard says through clenched teeth, a promise he intends to keep. “I will carve my way inside you, into depths of yourself that you have yet to fathom.” His long hand moves up my stockinged leg, my body arching as his fingers slide inside me. “I will possess you to your very core.”
“Prepare yourselves for a performance unlike any you have ever seen, not even upon this legendary stage of appalling vice and ruin!” the announcer cries, his hands thrown wide. “Here she is, in a tour-de-force that will defy all reason and explanation. I give you The Most Murdered Woman of All Time, The Crown Princess of Blood and Horror herself, the Great Maxa of the Grand Guignol!”
He steps into the wings as the curtain opens on Maxa at center stage. Lit by a single chalk-white spotlight, she stands motionless in a black dressing gown, her head lowered and face obscured, arms cradling her midsection as if in attempting to hold something inside. The audience stills, the absence of sound deafening as they await that which is to come.
“Possess me then, demon lover.” I reach behind me, hands raking fistfuls of his untamed hair until I take hold of the twinned knobs of his horns. “Wash over me, the way the ocean subsumes the shore.”
“So it shall be,” he says, his words a ravenous taunt as he hardens beneath me. “As the earth relinquishes itself to the tide, so too shall you know what it is to give yourself over. Every part of yourself, each inch, within and without.”
“Look!” a patron shouts. A gasp from the front of the house, followed by a series of screams as Maxa lifts her head to face the crowd. Now in profile, a green shadow falls over the curvature of her cheekbone. As I writhe against my would-be conquest, my dress yanked to my waist while he frees himself from his trousers, I am able to view Maxa and her greatest performance of all.
Her face is blighted by a swath of decomposition, a dark green infection that rapidly and impossibly spreads across her skin. Only this decay is no stagecraft illusion, no artful deception to horrify and delight the audience. This time, the disintegration is all too real, as Maxa rots onstage before the awestruck crowd.
Another shout from the pews as Guillard thrusts upwards, and I feel him inside as a frozen and inhuman thing, an icy convulsion wracking me. I grasp hold of the mesh screen, fingers scrambling against the metal interstices. Alternating waves of pleasure and pain crash over me, and my hands curl into fists, the partition rattling beneath my grip. A response to my excited state, yes, but also a cue, a signal to the one who watches and waits from her seat beside the aisle.
A wave of startled screams from the audience, and I emit a scream of my own. My dilated body rocks atop Guillard as a boat rocks upon a storm-churned sea, and I cannot help but moan in response. I am back, back inside the hull of the ship that bore me away as a child. Inside Allendy’s box as well, where my most monstrous and hidden desires were transmogrified. I inhale, and the aroma of wet sand and tidal pools and my own ripe sex envelops me in a divine alchemy of scent, powerful and fecund and above all alive. The dream turned nightmare has completed its course, spiraling forth to begin anew.
More shrieks from the pews, and a man stumbles from his seat before fleeing up the aisle. He rushes past the confessionals toward the theatre exit, his mouth covered by both hands. A woman in tears quickly follows, as Maxa continues to rot away onstage. Her face festers, the skin of her hands and fingers webbed with bubbling tissue that molts from her exposed musculature in thick droplets. She lets her dressing gown fall away, and a new outcry resounds from the house at the sight of her tumorous midsection, her belly swollen with distension until it puckers and bursts, the front pew splashed with rancid gore. She smiles at the audience, and a clump of flesh sloughs from her cheek like braised meat.
“Anaïs,” Monsieur Guillard murmurs. “Anaïs, you are driving me mad.” He gathers me in his lap and turns me toward him, his face between my breasts. “You are the only one for me.” How much his words resemble those of Henry! How much they resemble those of Hugo as well, or any number of men threaded through the tapestry of my life. Guillard may well prove a demon, but in essence he is only another man. Only a man, before the fall.
“You claim to answer the darkest prayers of desperate women,” I say, and grasp his shoulders as he bucks beneath me. “Only it is to your own needs that you respond. One would almost think you a real man.”
“I am greater than any man,” he grunts. “Greater than any being you have ever known.”
“You are demonic in nature. Indeed, you are quite powerful. Yet it is unfortunate that you can never feel true pleasure, not fully. Because pleasure belongs only to the realm of the living, and you cannot live as man lives.”
“Oh, but I can,” Guillard insists with a lustful snarl. “I do as I wish. I am able to make my blood run as hot as any man’s blood. I was once a man myself, and I can take you as one just as readily.”
“Show me then,” I say. “Show me, and we shall find out together, finally and at last. Fill me with your white blood, and take of my flesh. The way only the animal called man can take.”
I feel him warming inside me, the chill of his muscle and bone abating. I breathe him in, his ocean scent shifting toward that of the earth, of land and the living. He has become a man again, like any another. And it shall be his undoing.
“I am what my father made me,” he says, and he drives deeper inside me, with such force that I bite my lip and draw blood. “As you are yourself.”
A flash of movement outside the partition, as June approaches the confessional from her place at the rear of the theater. Despite his sensual reverie, Guillard is quick to take notice of my attention, and he leans forward to peer through the screen.
“Even now as I possess you, you have eyes for another?” he whispers. I expect him to be enraged, but a wicked smile forms upon his lips. “Your affection for her, it radiates from you like light from the sun. All heat. She is delectable indeed.”
“She is but another woman,” I say, and place my lips close to his ear. “With the same longings and desires and passions that drew you to me. The qualities that drew you to Maxa as well, to all of us. Only you will never have her obedience. You will never possess her as lord and master. And you will never have any part of her, either here in the waking world or in your land of dreams.”
