by Adam Braver
Baker left Scott’s office with half the stride he came in with. Fuck me, he thought to himself. He just needed to rest. Have a smoke and a sleep. Forget about things for a while. Maybe a trip down to Willie’s later would do him good. See if Muriel is still at the bar. Figure out how to build a house without the foundation.
He sat down at his desk and laid his head on a stack of notes, wishing he had never awoken Muriel.
SARAH LAY ACROSS THE BED in her room at the King George with the afternoon edition of the Register spread at her side. Black smudges from the tips of her fingers streaked the linen sheet like ashen snakes. The picture looked terrible. Caught her back, with that imbecile Kinney obviously intent on trying to block off the cameras. It could have been anybody sitting on that pier. She felt disgraced. As per usual these days, nobody talked about art in this article. There wasn’t a single mention of the play, or even a tidbit to suggest the notion that Dumas fils unknowingly had written La Dame aux Camélias especially for her. Instead it focused on her at the pier as though she was merely engaged in the antics of her history. Clearly the reporter wanted nothing other than to witness the return of the younger Sarah. The only other focal point was on Abbot Kinney pissing a line across the beach and daring only the enlightened to cross it.
There was no talk of artistry. How she had made the commitment to growing her craft when she could have easily retreated and relied on her celebrity. Nothing critical and worthy about how a sixty-one-year-old woman had renovated the signature role of her youth in La Dame aux Camélias into a near-perfect hallmark for aging women (if she could only nail down that ending). As the visage of youth clearly receded, Sarah had managed to transform that wayward sixteen-year-old girl into someone who defied age. In her younger days Sarah had enveloped the role with her own girlish exuberance, swift movements and coy expressions, delivering sardonic lines between shallow breaths as though a head full of ideas would explode like an un-tined baked potato. She had embodied the very essence of untamed youth. Girlish energy that sailed off the skin without depth, and the only time the heart was truly accessed was when it had been unsuspectingly fractured, leaving little room not for analysis or reflection, but rather for the buoyant reaction of passion and lust. But at age sixty-one, she had revived her character beyond the reactive and into the mindful. As she drifted off into sleep she had thought to herself the other night that she was really no longer playing Marguerite Gautier, but that she was now playing Marguerite’s soul. Onstage, her delivery was slow and deliberate, as though she had taken each line and wrapped it in silk, then let it glow under the moonlight. She considered. Contemplated. She transformed reactions into thoughtful analysis. She let go of Marguerite’s body and only took her eyes. All anybody in that audience needed to do was to look deep into her gaze for one moment, and then they could know Marguerite Gautier. They would know her pain. Her confusion. Her sorrow. Marguerite Gautier was no longer a sixteen-year-old who would die at twenty embittered by the disconnection between love, survival, and success. She was the embodiment of mature human emotion. And maybe that was where the problem lay with the final scene. She did not know how to concede that emotion to something beyond her—like disease. It was too wrapped up in itself, layer upon layer, to fall prey to any outside influences. She had always played Marguerite from the perspective that the disease was some incarnation that had come to battle for the rights of Marguerite’s soul—of course calling into question the idea of “right” and “pure.” But now she started to wonder if the disease was nothing more than a haphazard bump of luck. Sure, Marguerite had chosen a life that was looked down upon by others, but not all kept women are cut down by disease as a divine act of retribution, just as they are not all given to finding true love. Maybe that is what was troubling Sarah so much. She couldn’t find a connection between the virus and the life.
Sarah rolled to her side, again looking at the paper. Merde. She swatted it off the bed, where the pages fluttered down to the short teal rug. She told herself to remind Max that she didn’t want to see the papers anymore.
The opium was wearing off. The emptiness settling in. An overwhelming sadness that was not solely tied to her mental state but was instead a pathos that embodied every fiber of her body. Her thighs felt bad. Her skin anguished. Her ribs bereaving. She was thankful to be lying down now, because next the craving would take over, driving and commanding her to do anything she could to smolder the poignancy, which meant usually another hit of opium or a long dreary sleep. It was that exact moment of indecision where it seemed that everything that haunted her took place. The moment when the sadness became too much to bear. Where she lifted her skirt and showed her bare legs to a world too intrigued to turn their heads, yet too paralyzed to do anything except abandon her in Christian fear. Maybe she should have been more private over the years. Perhaps those moments of public display would not have been the executioner to her career. People probably wouldn’t have assigned so much meaning to the roles she had been playing, instead they would have watched them for the beauty and artistry. But it wasn’t just about opium. She had lived her whole life flirting with those moments of sadness. The drugs only gave a false sense of medication when it became too much to handle, then served to heighten the feeling when the numbing wore off. She tried to tell Max that a thousand times. In fact, they had just had the conversation two weeks ago on a train leaving Chicago. But Max didn’t seem able to understand. Even when she had said that she lived her whole life with these feelings. Even in cushioned seats, face-to-face in a private car, not two feet from the intense heat burning off her skin was he able to see beyond the effects and control of narcotics. He loved her that much.
Maybe this really should be her farewell tour of America. That was something she and Max had cooked up one night in Paris to add some drama to the tour, and more importantly to add some revenue. They laughed about the Americans’ craving for establishing some form of history, and that they would always gladly buy it at top dollar. The Divine Sarah Bernhardt’s last tour of America. The last show in Chicago. The last performance in New York. In Los Angeles. Where each farewell was a moment of history, and every fully paying audience member a part of that history. They laughed when they discussed the idea. Giggled in delight at their shrewdness, with the private duplicity of children outwitting their parents. But maybe it wasn’t so clever anymore. How quickly the hypochondriac becomes the diseased, the punch line its own joke. She could end it now silently. Take the last bouquet of roses thrown to her feet, hold them up beside her head, sweet perfume overpowering the bitter sweat of performance, smile coyly to the standing crowd, squint her eyes in the footlights and graciously bow to the auditorium center-right-left-center, gesturing an offer of the roses back to the admirers, and step away slowly off the stage into the maze of ropes and darting stagehands and massaging sycophants. She wouldn’t say good-bye. Treat it as just another night. Only there would be no tomorrow. Strike the stage. Bury the scripts in a trunk. Cancel the train tickets. A slow boat back to France. Retiring to the fluff of her bed, where she would run her thin fingers along her parsed and calloused heels, digging her nails deeply into the leathery skin, amazed that she feels no pain, until she finally reaches over and grabs the skin cream and massages it into her heels, thinking about how great it is to not be an actor anymore. She could give it up.
Sarah dangled her arm off the bed and swatted at the newspaper. Max was due soon. And she had not changed out of her nightgown yet. The entire walk back from Kinney’s office he had implored her to rest, sleep to take the edge off of what he had described as a “frightful yet manageable bump in the arse.” Then a good dinner would help settle things. A gastronomic cure can always heal the ills of the mind. “Anything other than the King George,” she had said.
“Kinney spoke highly of it. He said your recommendation would back him up.”
“Anything other than the King George.”
Max had assured her that he would find a different restaurant. S
he could tell by the deliberate pauses between words and the evenly stressed syllables that he assumed her doped beyond comprehension. Still he had been gentle and nonplacating. She allowed him his concern. She didn’t protest with annoyance or insult. She had just looked down, smiling at the misted walkway and repeated, “Anything other than the King George.”
Now she hoped that he didn’t pick anything too nice. An advantage to eating in the United States was that one did not always have to dine. No meals where course upon course was delivered throughout the evening. The European edict of civility and formality was eschewed in the American restaurant. You could eat because you were simply hungry. Any time of day. Sit down and read the menu and order to your heart’s delight. In America you can get “a bite.” She looked forward to that on all her tours. But of course most people wanted to entertain her at the finer restaurants that replicated the European experience, either run by displaced emigrants or born-and-bred citizens bored with their American-ness. Tonight she wanted simplicity. She wanted to forget the doting and camaraderie and deference. She wanted to figure out how she could leave all this behind. Roll up her blouse sleeves, put her bare elbows to the table, and lean forward with a prejudice for honesty. She didn’t want to just blurt out a statement that seemed derivative of thoughtless passion, and watch Max’s face drop before he settled into a logic marathon that eventually converted her out of nothing else other than pure boredom and wear. Not this time. Now she wanted an understanding built. Even if nothing changed. If she ended up doing the same thing until she was one hundred and one years old, at least there would be an understanding of why she decided to continue. And Max probably wouldn’t get it. He would likely do one of his Molly gestures, swatting his hands around, rolling his eyes and pursing his lips. (Max Klein would have made a hell of an actor, because he understood the importance of gestures and their use in making the finer points. She told him that often. He never listened.) But she knew this time that he would be absolutely mad with fear, and his arms would fly in a pedestrian rage. She would tell him not to worry. They could still continue on. There is more to life than acting. It’s just one thing. They could run a hospital. She had done it before. She had put acting aside during the Franco-Prussian war and started a military hospital at the Odéon. The establishment and the reporters all had had a good laugh about it. Wrote stories about the dainty little stage star traveling to the Ministry of War and requesting the authority to open a military hospital. Some thought it was cute. Others a show of patriotism that would last as long as the next curtain’s rising. But months and months went by. She held the hands of the infirm. Patted cold towels on feverish foreheads. Sought food for the wounded brave. Met the ambulances at the front. Carried stretchers to the basement when Paris was bombarded. And the whole time she made sure the flag always flew, all the way through the armistice being signed. There was nothing darling or adorable about what she had done. It was sweat. It was blood. And acting had been the furthest thing from her consciousness until the war had ended. The Divine Sarah had walked offstage and been hung on the costume rack as the stage was struck, waiting until the marquee shone again, while the real Sarah (or was it Henriette-Rosine?) held her breath in constant fear, trying to steady her hands and voice in the name of calm and comfort. There is more than just the theater out there, Molly. She would tell him that. More than just the stage life. All kinds of roles to play. Even for a Molly House boy trying to belong.
Sarah stared up at the ceiling, admiring the smooth plaster. A hotel room new enough that there were not even cracks yet. The ceiling reached higher than she had imagined. Almost as arching as the prayer room had been at the Grandchamps convent where the budding novices were corralled daily, taken from being giggling squeaky girls and transformed into silent, respectful conduits of God’s word. They would be marched in single file out of the butter-lit fields and placed an arm’s length apart on dark wooden pews where candle shadows often made strange and ghostly images. Then they would kneel. Forget the girl next to them. This was just about you and God, until there was no you. The real weakness, the true temptation for most of the girls, was not to laugh. Something about the abject silence and the forbiddingness of the room tempted hysterics. The trick was not to look at your neighbor. If you could resist eye contact, you would soon be absorbed into the wholeness of God. But if you laughed, you would be absorbed into the Mother Superior’s ire, which usually concluded with a strap across the hand, followed by an excruciatingly long silence from her that might last through two meals. When the pressure became too great, Sarah’s trick was to pinch her leg. She would move her hand up her dress until it touched her inner thigh, then she would squeeze a tuft of skin until the urge to laugh had subsided. The privacy of her thighs covered the shame of black bruises. Sometimes she left her hand there. In the cavern of piousness, where all was sacred and guarded by unseen powers, the softness of her skin left her reassured that her corporeal body was connected to God’s comfort. She knew if she were ever caught that the Mother Superior would think her dirty, and though she might not actually say it aloud, would assume that this was the result of the Jewish blood that had flowed down through Sarah’s grandmother. They were a dirty people who could never know the cleanliness of truly loving God. They left Christ to be killed on that cross and never washed their hands again. Mother Superior as much as said that once to Sarah, hoping to undermine Sarah’s unspoken ancestry. Sarah had nodded politely, thinking to herself that if there wasn’t that Christ hanging off the cross, what would there be left for the church to talk about? Still the fear of being caught never stopped Sarah’s hand. She secreted her fingers to her thigh with every prayer. And she never once felt dirty. Nor afraid. Nor was there anything sexual about it. She still spoke her prayers. But felt a little more whole. More connected to herself.
As she remembered, she found her hand resting on the same spot on her thigh where it lay fifty years ago. The skin no longer held the smoothness. It had loosened, leaving more sinew and bone for the touch. Her poor thigh. Too many uncaring hands that could never pause long enough to feel the comfort and solace had touched it. It had merely become part of the route where fumbling fingers carelessly floundered in search of greater pleasures. Perhaps she had started to believe that as well. She never stopped those hands. Never insisted on a pause to luxuriate in the comfort. Instead she had bought into the myth of male pleasure, that there were only three parts of a woman’s body that brought satisfaction, and the inner thigh was not one of them. She stopped questioning. And though she couldn’t really recall any specific moment—maybe it was all as part of a gradual fade—she had nearly forgotten the calming and connectedness brought to her by that part of her body. A place where no man’s calloused hand should have ever touched anyhow.
There was a knock on the door. “One moment, Molly,” she answered, recognizing the waltzing percussion of his announcement. She didn’t want to move, at least not for another moment. She didn’t want to think about acting. About business. About renegade Catholic causes. She just wanted to be Henriette-Rosine back in the convent again, surrounded by silence and wholeness. Her hand on her thigh, feeling the stillness of her breath, the minuscule sounds of knees shifting and noses sniffling, where solace was the only success. Washing herself of all those who had touched her and tried to make her peace their peace. Just being still again. And feeling her own feelings.
Max’s knock turned impatient.
She forced herself up from the bed. Her head felt light. She could feel the weight of blood pushing to her feet. She stepped over the newspaper, one more time looking at that useless page-eight picture. She put her heel right over the smudged image of her back and scattered the newspaper under the bed with a series of short kicks, like a dog trying to cover up his shit. She patted the side of her hair into place. Ran her fingers like a comb through the back, snagging on a small tangle that she impatiently crooked with her index finger and broke. She looked tired. She knew it. Max would assume it was
the aftermath of the opium. It was impossible for him to just see her as tired. She knew that, too. In fact, how he saw her was probably her fault. She had cultivated and appropriated all the details of the actress Sarah.
He was smiling when she opened the door. The light caught his hazel irises just enough to bring out the green. He looked at her in her gown. Then back to the mussed bed with the edges of newspaper peering out from underneath. “Good gracious,” he said. “I figured you would be ready by now.”
“Did we set a time?”
“About ten years ago.”
She laughed. “We manage everything, don’t we?”
“To the last detail.”
Max walked into the room, slipping between her and the door. He sat down at the blond desk placed directly across from the matching headboard, the dented pillows reflecting in its mirror.
She closed the door, stood still for a moment, and then sat down at the edge of the bed. She ran her hands over her cheeks, feeling the tenderness of her skin. “We are not going to the King George, are we?”
“There is a driver downstairs waiting to take us to a restaurant downtown that the concierge recommended.”
“I need quiet.”
“Supposedly it is.”
“That is my one request.”
“Only one?”
“And no Abbot Kinney.”
“You think that I would do that to either of us?” He looked at her in the mirror with a slight smile. “Besides, that is two requests, and we need to go. The car is waiting.”
“If you want me to change clothes, then stop looking at me. You think this is the Moulin Rouge? No free show here, Molly.”
“Frankly, I would rather have pitchforks in my eye than be caught unawares by a female breast.”
“Then look the other way, or go ask your friend Abbot Kinney for a pitchfork.”
