by Anna Adams
“Sorry,” Maude mumbled. She heaved a sigh and slumped on the bed.
Craaaaaaaackkkkkkkk.
The dreadful sound was heard all through the set as her dress split open.
There was no way Adrianna would ever let her eat a waffle again.
*****
“Girls, vous aviez raison!” Maude chirped, nodding her head with energetic agreement. “I’m glad I didn’t buy that dress. It made me look sooooo fat.”
They were walking on Fifth Avenue, a camera creeping up on them every now and then. Maude had traded the stilettos for comfortable Ferragamo flats after she’d tripped a couple of times and exasperated the last of Lola’s patience.
“No way were we letting our bestie look beastie,” Lila grinned. Maude refrained her impending eye rolling. Didn’t Lila ever pronounce words longer than two syllables?
Suddenly a homeless girl hobbled towards them, one arm outstretched like a walking dead.
“That’s not a part of the script is it?” Maude whispered to a visibly agitated Lola.
“Dyouhaveanickel?”
“What!” Lila yelled, covering up her nose. “I can’t understand you!”
Maude ignored Lila and peered into the newcomer’s eyes. She couldn’t be a lot older than they were. Yet her demeanor suggested she was older. The tip of her fingers stuck out from her worn-out mittens. The walls of New York seemed to have scraped them thin. Her nose was running like stagnant, putrid water from a sewer that nothing could stop, not even the persistent, loud sniffling she used to slow its flow.
“Get away from us please! Don’t kill us!” Lola shrieked.
“I’m hungry, please,” the homeless person moaned.
“I doubt she’s about to kill us on an empty stomach,” Maude retorted with sarcasm. “I’m sure we can help her.” Maude stepped towards the homeless person, but Lila grabbed her.
“Don’t go near it, Maude. It might be dangerous.”
“She’s not an it,” Maude answered. Anger gathered in her brow like a thunderstorm. She knew what it was like to be hungry. She’d never eaten a decent meal in Carvin. And now here she was spewing out French phrases like she’d been raised at Versailles!
She wasn’t about pass on the opportunity to help someone less fortunate. Someone who’d never had a James Baldwin to find her in a Parisian cafe.
Digging in her Prada clutch, her fingers fumbled over different flavors of lip-gloss. She handled cherry, plum, and watermelon before finding a couple of dollar bills. Two five-dollar bills and a twenty. She could buy maybe two meals but what then?
“Here,” she said with kindness.
The teen girl grabbed the money and walked a couple of steps back.
Then she came back at Maude and spat hard in her face, before running away. Shocked numbness paralyzed Maude’s insides and rooted her to the spot while whitish snot with bits of green patches slid down her nose. She stared at it cross-eyed and wondered if the girl had eaten broccoli because it sure seemed like she did, which would be really gross considering it was sliding down her nose and that it was the most ridiculous thought to be having when one’s brain was frozen in complete repulsion, and instead she should be wondering why the director was yelling “that’s a wrap,” and why the twins were laughing, and why the homeless girl was coming back, and would she spit on her again, and why she was taking off her worn-out cloak and dirty mittens and telling Maude she was her number one fan, and giving her back her money, while apologizing for having spit on her.
What had just happened?
“Sorry for having to spit on you, Maude Laurent,” she said. “I’m a great fan! Can I have an autograph?”
“This was all part of the script?” Maude asked incredulous.
“Of course,” Lila explained. “Do you really think we’d let an actual homeless person stand so close to us?” Charity was one thing, but she preferred fundraisers hosted at the Ritz where poverty was shielded from her and remained a distant, impalpable notion. Poverty was like air: she knew it was all around her but never saw it and wouldn’t care if she did.
“Yuck, go clean up your face. That spit makes me want to throw up,” Lola added, hurling imaginary vomit. An intern appeared with a basin of hot water and a towel for Maude to clean her face, which she readily did.
She had to leave, to go anywhere away from that camera.
“Maude, wait up,” Lila called out. “Where are you going?”
Maude refused to answer her. She no longer wanted to speak to the girl whose asymmetry was now blatant, and it had nothing to do with her face.
“It’s the price to pay,” Lila said with unaccustomed gentleness.
Maude glared and kept walking. Her feet weren’t swift enough to carry her away from the madness, throttled as they were by the quicksand of this ignominious mess.
“Not just to be a star, but to keep that candle burning. You must sacrifice everything even the truth. Keeping people entertained is what we do. Don’t you wish you could stretch those fifteen minutes of flame endlessly? I know I do. Once snuffed out, that candle is impossible to light again. Try as you might.”
She paused waiting for Maude to answer. Maude didn’t, but counted her steps in her head. She’d made thirty-four steps and still Lila followed her.
“I’m sure you do, too. Or you wouldn’t have admitted to dating Thomas Bradfield. A very good marketing decision, if you ask me.”
“What?” Maude finally croaked. Forty-five steps before being sucked back in.
“Come on, Hollywood Buzz TV made the announcement this morning. They said your representatives confirmed it.”
“Non.” Maude said staunchly.
“Oh, so you’re reverting back to French now for real,” Lila laughed. French sounded so pretty. What a good idea it had been to have a French guest star. It gave their show more credibility and a certain je ne sais quoi, whatever that meant.
“Non, non, non, non.” Maude’s head was about to burst with anger. And the only word she could summon was a desperate non.
Adrianna walked towards Maude while Lila walked away. Maude was mad, and Lila didn’t want to deal with it. Thomas Bradfield was cute and famous. There was no reason to hide such a connection.
“Tell me you didn’t do it!” Maude spluttered, deciding to revert back to English.
“I didn’t do what?” Adrianna asked.
“Tell me you didn’t tell the press I was Thomas Bradfield’s girlfriend.”
“I didn’t,” Adrianna answered.
Maude heaved a sigh of short relief. But it didn’t last.
“Uncle Alan did.”
“What are you talking about? Why?”
Adrianna took a deep breath, which had become a habit in her dealings with Maude.
“Your image. That’s what we’re working on, Maude.”
“And you need to pimp me out for my image?” Maude replied with anger. This was unbelievable. Another thought sank through the depths of her mind like granite.
Matt. Had he heard?
“We’re not pimping anyone out. You agreed to this.”
“When are you going to stop slamming that contract in my face every time you want to see me jump through rings of fire?” Maude cried out in desperation. She wanted to see that contract burn, and Alan with it, his Armani suit licked by voluptuous green and blue flames.
“When you signed your contract you agreed to let Soulville manage your promotions. Don’t worry, Soulville and Glitter Records have the same interests at heart. And I heard Thomas was very pleased with this outcome. He’s even willing to give an interview in two days on Karrie’s Korner. You’ll be there, of course. Matt will also be there to announce he’s working on his new album so that might be a little awkward, but I’m sure you can handle it.”
“No way,” Maude shook her head.
Adrianna peered at Maude with a stone eye.
“You can try to fight this, but it would be futile. You’d be wasting my time and yours. Drop your wea
pons,” Adrianna articulated as if Maude were deaf. And maybe she was. A storm of fury came over Maude’s face. She refused to go through it again, the scandal, the press if she denied her nonexistent relationship with Thomas. Trapped and cornered, every move she made was on Alan’s permission, his choices, his decisions. Her time, her looks, her voice were his.
Her voice.
Then, just as Adrianna thought her reluctant protégé would start lashing out, Maude’s turmoil ceased.
She suppressed a smile she didn’t want Adrianna to witness and instead adopted her most sullen face.
“Fine,” she finally replied. “Do with me whatever you please, Adrianna. My career is entirely in your perfectly manicured hands.”
Adrianna’s perfectly manicured hands were pleased.
*****
Maude hadn’t set foot in this place in weeks, yet she knew it still, just like she knew the tiny creases her face formed when she smiled. Morningside Theater was, and remained, a majestic building, built in an Italian-Renaissance style, rows and balconies flaming with red velvet seats. She could sense its strong walls under the tip of her shadow’s fingers, could hear the distant echoes of her vocal exercises reverberating in the room.
But they weren’t ghosts.
Ms. Tragent’s students were present and warming their voices, albeit under their teacher’s freezing glare.
The theater seemed grander to Maude now her ear had been deafened by the piercing absence of music in her life, her eye deprived of Ms. Tragent’s extravagant skirts, her melodies muted by the rhythmic sternness of Alan’s metronomic schedule.
Maude took a seat in one of the theater’s front rows and waited for whichever one of Ms. Tragent’s insults would fall first.
They were all worthless.
Position!
She didn’t know why she bothered with them.
Her ears had had enough of these strident howls.
They were never to step into an opera house again as singers.
They were to go back to their father’s supply store and beg him for forgiveness.
Class dismissed . . . until further notice!
It was definitely more entertaining to watch this spectacle than to be a part of it. But as she watched Ms. Tragent’s students scramble heads hung low by the weight of their teacher’s animosity, no pity, no sympathy cleaved her heart. Instead, envy gnawed as she faced what she’d lost.
“Hurry along all of you. Don’t you see I have a visitor waiting to speak to me? Another worthless singer,” Ms. Tragent croaked, turning away so Maude wouldn’t see the gleam she struggled to extinguish from her wearied eye.
Maude’s pulse danced a joyful jig. If Ms. Tragent called her worthless, there was still hope.
Ms. Tragent, a retired French soprano, was more famous by her students for her acrid tongue than for her dazzling classical career, a career that had spawned for over twenty years and filled seats at the Opera Garnier, the Scala in Milan, and the Metropolitan Opera.
“What does the great Maude Laurent want?” Ms. Tragent asked, walking back to her Bösendorfer piano. “Hasn’t she abandoned enough people from my family? Broke my nephew’s heart?”
“I didn’t . . . ” Maude started to protest, but to no avail. Her nephew, Matt, whom Ms. Tragent called Mathieu, could do no wrong in her eye.
“Sent her teacher packing with a note from Alan.”
“I never wanted that.”
“Do you know how many individual classes I give, Mademoiselle Laurent?”
She knew the answer to that one. Maude had been the only one to receive the honor, although many had attempted the same prowess only to be met with scalding failure.
“Alan forced . . . ”
“Tsss, tss, tsss. I’m not finished.”
Maude shut her lips into a tight line. She knew how much her teacher hated interruptions. And at this point, she was happy she deigned addressing her in any manner whatsoever.
“I took you when James Baldwin swore I would fall in love with your voice.”
Ms. Tragent sat behind her piano like a queen.
“I trained your untrained voice to make it something I could bear hearing.”
Maude had to smile at the compliment, and she made no mistake that it was.
“I let you have the lead in my Cenerentola opera and watched you nearly sabotage my evening because of your personal struggles.”
Maude squirmed. Definitely not her proudest moment.
“I took you under my wing nevertheless, and gave you private lessons I refused to give to students who offered more money than you had at the time.”
Why had she ever come to see her?
“And I told you, I WARNED you, to watch out for Alan!”
Maude remembered that conversation as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.
How was she supposed to have seen any of this coming?
“You ask how you could have foreseen all of this?” Ms. Tragent asked.
Maude repressed a groan: she’d forgotten Ms. Tragent’s uncanny ability to read minds.
“I don’t read minds, Ms. Laurent, but yours is an easy read. You splash around Manhattan like you’re in a blue pond and don’t even see the sharks coming at you. Just because you’ve had a hard life in that little French village of yours, doesn’t mean you get to let down your guard and live happily ever after in New York.”
Village! The arrogance of the Parisian mind, Maude huffed in the halls of her soul. Carvin was a small town, but a town nevertheless.
“Now, tell me what you want.”
“I want to take lessons with you again,” Maude answered with firmness.
“Is that all you want?” Ms. Tragent asked sternly.
“I want to enter into resistance,” Maude added. She knew the word would resonate in Ms. Tragent’s French mind. How could it not? It resonated in every French mind. The French didn’t fire cannons when a powerful oppressor outnumbered them. They hid in the shadows and organized a quiet, fleeting resistance, biding their time. If it’d worked during World War II, it could work for her, too. And she wanted to stand up to Alan, in a way that would make her parents proud.
“I want what I’ve always wanted. I want my voice to resonate. I want to be a pop artist, but I don’t want to give up my classical background just to please Alan’s musical taste, or lack of it. You told me I could do both, that I didn’t have to give up one because of the other. You yourself created this program to allow pop artists to have a classical foundation, a solid foundation to a pop career.”
“What are you willing to do?”
“I’ll wake up extra early to meet you here every weekend.”
“How do you know I don’t lounge around on Sunday mornings?”
Maude smiled at the image of her stern teacher lounging anywhere.
“I’ll bring you breakfast. I can make some mean pancakes.”
“I’m French, Ms. Laurent. I don’t eat pancakes.”
Maude loved pancakes, but offered to make her crêpes instead.
Ms. Tragent considered this, then shook her head. Instead she turned fully towards her young protégée and growled.
“Maude Laurent, enough with your silly jabbering. What do you know about Verdi’s opera Aida? Or has Alan turned every classical bone in your body to dust?”
Chapter 4
“Maude, you’re up in ten,” a woman from the Karrie’s Korner crew reminded as she popped her head through the door in her dressing room.
She wore a short Dior ecru dress with a V-neckline and a gathering at the waist Adrianna had chosen, delighted as ever now she knew Maude had surrendered her weapons of mass destruction.
She didn’t look too bad, and at least she didn’t have to wear stilettos.
Having not seen Thomas yet, she knew he was being briefed as she had about their appearance on the show. They were to perform “Sunrise” together, then answer all of Karrie’s nagging questions with a smile encrusted on their lips.
A loud
knock struck the door, and Maude, expecting Adrianna, was startled when Matt instead entered the room.
They hadn’t spoken since she’d learned his decision to stay in New York. She wondered if he’d really stayed for her, if she hadn’t imagined the thoughts dancing in his eyes that day.
Now, all she could see in those grey pearls of ice was an indecipherably still expression.
He went over to her and faced the mirror where their shoulders barely kissed.
He asked if this was how far she was willing to go to avoid scandal.
She couldn’t answer, refused to answer the soft tone of solemn reproach that leavened a lump in her throat.
She could only nod with slow, but determined assent.
Before he could reply, the door unwrapped another visitor.
“Maude, are you all set to . . . ” Thomas’s voice trailed off when he noticed Matt standing beside her.
Maude peered at Thomas with undisguised displeasure. He’d strangled their silence. He shattered everything all the time.
“Matt,” Thomas greeted. “Karrie’s asking for you. Guess she didn’t search the right corner,” he sneered. He opened the door wide for Matt.
Matt glowered, but Maude held him back, then walked towards Thomas in slow, deliberate movement.
“Thomas Bradfield,” she started, holding her head high. “I don’t care what your manager told you. If you dare to do so much as pucker your lips for a kiss tonight, I swear you will eat nothing but soup for the rest of your pathetic life after I’m done with you.”
Thomas’ blue eyes plunged into seas of confusion and disappointment. Could this be the same Maude he’d spent hours joking with after Ms. Tragent’s lessons not so long ago?
“And I’ll wear a necklace with your busted teeth,” Maude finished before walking with swift disdain out of her dressing room.
Matt suppressed a snort, Thomas a shudder and they headed for the set.
Karrie’s Korner, one of America’s most beloved talk shows, aimed at making its guests feel at home without quite succeeding. Ecru was the dominant color: the host’s seat as well as the guest’s sofas and the dresses Karrie wore. Even her perfume smelled ecru in a falsely comforting way. The homey impression was jarred however by the TV cameras, prompters, and the rows of audience waiting with impatience for Maude and Thomas to make their entrance, perhaps expecting Thomas to jump on the sofa expressing his undying love for Lady Maude.
