Divine Sarah

by Adam Braver

  The trembling panic in his voice was becoming annoying. “What are your suggestions?” she asked, trying to calm down the almost girlish frenzy.

  “I am lost, Madame Bernhardt.”

  “Are you paid to be lost?”

  “I mean in options. I suppose that we could construct a thrust stage. Then at least you can carry your blocking out into the audience. Just bring the stage out to them.”

  He was talking like an idiot now. But at least a calmer, slightly more rational idiot. “And how long would that take?”

  He thought for a moment. “Provided we get the supplies, I think by the end of the day tomorrow. Assuming we can get the wood easily.”

  “Then that leaves one day to reconfigure the design to meet your requirements?”

  “I suppose that is right. And we may need to make a rake stage to give the thrust some dimension. But, yes, that would leave about a day. You are right, Madame.”

  “And then, Alexandre, you are suggesting that that allows one more half day for the actors to readjust their blocking to accommodate your new stage.”

  “That is what I am saying.”

  She supposed that all men innately wanted to be mothered. That they wanted the women in their lives to listen, to hold, and ultimately to scold them. That in fact they were incapable of making decisions and acting without brooding, before the conciliatory nuzzle at the maternal bosom. She imagined that at some point it would become tiresome for the men, because god knows it was for the women. But nevertheless, she gave Alexandre what he wanted when she told him he was being foolish. “You think that this production is one that can just be manipulated and twisted to fit your convenience and vision of the day? Do you think that Renoir just alters his paintings because the room that they happen to be hanging in isn’t the perfect dimension? You think he just adds an extra foot to the bottoms, or adds a slight triangle off to the sides for that salon? That that is the only way for him to ensure that his audience has the proper experience.”

  Alexandre started to turn away out of instinct, not rebellion.

  “You cannot expect the actors to restage the entire production based on the house that we are in. There are subtleties to each movement. Purpose behind each footstep. It’s not a matter of moving the masking tape a few feet in this direction or that direction. Every inch has motive. Every inch has emotion. Every inch retells the story.”

  And now that his head had significantly hung low, she came back with calming, reassuring words. (Isn’t that what he expects Mommy to do?) “Trust me and the actors. If the fourth wall is deeper, then we will have to make the intimacy of our lives that much louder. Trust that we will not drown in this giant bubble, but rather that we will fill it. Don’t be such a man, Alexandre—where you have to knock things down all the time to have them make sense to you.”

  He nodded without any more words and walked away, looking partially relieved and partly ashamed. And for Sarah, she wondered if there was any part of her life outside the privacy of her hotel room when she didn’t have to act (as though her conviction to the current performance could be that strong). Everybody saw her in whatever roles suited their needs: from the true professionals to the conductor tearing her train tickets, to the man trying to run his tongue along her thighs. Shakespeare was right when he said that all the world was a stage. A real performance for the ages at all times.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kinney at the back of the house watching the whole thing. Hands on his hips, his expression loaded with sternness and judgment. There is nothing worse than a promoter that wants to be involved. They all try to sculpt art out of wadded paper bills. Then Max walked up to Kinney, and she couldn’t even look. She paced the stage back and forth, looking up into the rafters.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Waiting for what?

  She didn’t notice Max until she felt the gentle touch of his fingers against her forearm. He had a woman’s hand. Long, delicate fingers, slender from the base to the tips, that moved with a detached fluidity, with a grip that could only tease and never spank. She turned around with a slight degree of irritation, hoping that he had come to offer a furlough from this ridiculousness of pre-preshow anxieties. “Things are looking good” was all he said.

  “Don’t start with me, Molly. You know that I love you too much for what I could possibly say. But for now, I can give you a whole list of things you can address to free me from the nonsense. Like you can ask Ibé why he is being so insolent about not having a proper dressing room. He has screamed at me twice: once that the wigs will be visible behind the masking, and twice that he is being set up beside a makeup station and that the pancake bases and cream blushes will ruin his wigs. My wigs, he pointed to me. Do you agree that I should not have to put up with this?”

  “They are your crew.”

  “As only you could say to me. But I thought that I had hired a professional entourage, not a contingent of panicky schoolchildren. His wigs. And all of this seems like idiocy and distractions until we can get to the heart of the play, Molly. We are just hammering away. Pretending that all is normal. The truth is that we don’t have a play here anymore, Molly. We have a set and script filled with lines. And a Marguerite that nobody knows anymore. Once more, I have to be forced to manage all this childish behavior.”

  Max held on to Sarah’s forearm, gently releasing his grip, and turning it to a mannered stroke. Like that of an old matron with her favored but finicky pussycat. “You more than anybody know that it is part of the art of theater,” he said. “The panic is the basis of the nervous energy that instills the emotion into the performance. From the stagehands’ frenzy about the mechanics to your irritation. It is as much about the play as the final production. You understand as well as I do that the day that this is all laissez-faire is the day when we put on the flattest show ever played.”

  “This seems like excrement. Not excitement. Perhaps it is no longer my reading of the play. Maybe it is just that I am too old, Molly.”

  “Let’s not talk of old today. We’ll run through the play tonight to calm all fears and concerns of this strange house. And then later you and I will cozy up in your room and try to find the soul of Marguerite Gautier. You heard Kinney, the initial troubles are behind us. Now we just go ahead. Like one, two, three.” He tapped her arm in cadence. “One-two-three.”

  “You are such a molly’s Molly,” she said. He could manage to make light out of anything, and it could not ever occur to him that feeling old and useless was more than the end effect of a crisis. For Max, depressive states were symptomatic reactions to situations easily rectified. Problem. Sad. Fixed. One-two-three. It will devastate him when he finds out how real she is. More real than he could possibly ever have imagined.

  “Just a little while longer?” he asked.

  “You will pardon me if I’m too exhausted for this.”

  There were no words. She truly was exhausted and not just delivering a dramatic exit line to extinguish the conversation. She could not believe that Max wouldn’t see it in her eyes. That there was almost a refusal to look with any depth, like looking into an eclipse, afraid that what he sees may blind him. It was as if he thought he had to stand guard for both of them, knowing that one sign of weakness, one inkling of surrender, would permanently drop the curtain. So maybe Max wasn’t so unaware of the crisis that was igniting her. He was merely trying to smother it, through feigned ignorance and disbelief.

  “Molly,” she said, “I really don’t need to be here right now. They will figure it out better without me here.”

  “Maybe you are right. You can go to your car to rest for a little while until we need you.”

  “My railcar is here?” She smiled.

  “Let me just tell Kinney that I am going to walk you out there. He’s like a chessmaster patiently waiting for one errant move.”

  “You don’t need to walk me there.”

  “But I have the key.”

  “I can certainly
hold a key, Molly. What, are you going to lock me in there? Cage in the unpredictable lioness?”

  Max’s face softened from Max Klein, international manager for the world’s greatest star, to Molly, the lost tragic little gay boy who found a home in the world of the diva whom he worshipped, the envy of the lost little gay boy world. His eyes squinted in a genuine smile, sending out little lines that betrayed his age to his boyish demeanor, but nevertheless looked as innocent and scared and hopeful as the day she first met him. And in that moment she wanted to forget Abbot Kinney’s theater in the middle of nowhere, forget that barn that needed to be miraculously reconfigured to the intimacy of the Parisian stage (for God’s sake, the place was large enough to hold all of Paris), allow the musty, moldy smell that had seeped into every slat of wood from the moist air to leave her senses, and just hold Molly like she had in the early days. When a simple eye-to-eye signal had sparked an all-day ticket for mayhem and laughter and reckless indecision, one that instantly took their seriousness of the theater out for a few breathing hours. It seemed like they were living more before they tried to get serious about living. And she really had fallen in love with him in a way that nobody could understand. It was so much deeper than anything else that she had ever really known in her life because it was a love based on pure selfless trust. The church hadn’t offered her that successfully. Nor acting. Not her family. Nor her romances. Only her Molly. He had no motives. No ambitions toward something greater. Only pure, exonerated love for the passion that was her soul. But like most relationships, it seemed to have turned to business and the management of life. Keeping track of schedules. Money. Futures. Policing each other. And only occasionally could it be broken up with a quiet intimate dinner, but even then the business of the relationship slowly seeped in. They were a partnership now. Overtaken by comfort and routine. Something that even their past respective romances hadn’t been able to destroy.

  “Please walk me to my railcar, Molly,” she said. “I can’t imagine going there without you.”

  Max reached down to take her hand. There were grunts and moans from the crew as they lifted a wall of painted bricks and cutout windows to stage left. And high up in the grid another pair of men were tying down the pulleys that would raise the interior of Marguerite’s anteroom, and lower the walls of the country house in Bougival. The hammers banged away, shooting disjointed echoes across the hall like ricocheting gun blasts. Nails were held in waiting between teeth. Men hovered with hands on their hips. An occasional melody hummed from an indecipherable corner of the room that suddenly stopped and then was picked up unconsciously from another corner of the house. It all worked in a mechanical rhythm like the most sophisticated piece of machinery the age could offer. All coming together beautifully, as do the actors onstage.

  Max forgot to tell Kinney where they were going. They walked right out of the theater. Temporarily two young lovers.

  IT WAS DARK INSIDE THE RAILCAR. The plush black curtains, faded velvet stained purplish by dust streaks, were pulled tight, allowing only a sliver of light to slice through the part in the middle, leaving a dirty darkness. The twenty-five-by-ten-foot container smelled like it had been locked up tight for the past three days, which it had. The normally nondescript smells that flavored the essence of the furnishings emanated their own brand of staleness when left alone. The scent of inertia bled from lack of breath in the cluttered single room. Max once referred to it as an abandoned whorehouse, and another time as a gypsy fortune-teller’s lair. A long, wide bed blocked off the back, fluffed up by a rumpled comforter with random brown stains that splattered out like haphazard sunrays, and bordered by a heap of threadbare pillows covered in what once had been the finest spun cotton. Behind it hung bright cherry wainscoting that was more funereal than royal. Along the right side sat a red velvet provincial couch, its richly cherry-colored legs standing like lazy soldiers on duty, buttressed against a rosewood table that held a Chinese vase and a Saxe statuette. Opposite it was a vanity with the mirror expanding up and wide in an ornate frame, carelessly brushed white more than once (its master carver surely would be horrified to see his detailed craft mauled by thick brushstrokes). The desktop was littered with small bottles of perfume made of cut glass and with silver tops, surrounded by jars of makeup and pills and brushes and clips and combs and traces of forgotten jewelry.

  Sitting above the couch was the press photo of her taken in her infamous coffin some years back, placed perfectly so that it reflected in the center of the mirror. Her eyes seductively closed, arms crossed, and her lips drawn apart partly in defiance and partly in childish restraint, under the light of a single candle, while near the bottom of the casket was the inscription Quand Même, the reminder that said she had fought against all odds. She loved that picture most. Her initial attraction had been to its smugness and defiance. How in a tongue-in-cheek manner she had managed to pooh-pooh the mores of the lingering reactionary class that fought tooth and nail to preserve the values of what they alone claimed as a stranglehold on decency. They perceived all change as a threat, and especially art that challenged thought, as opposed to merely memorializing. And as though insurgencies such as the French Revolution had never happened, these conservative moles turned their tiny little voices into megaphone thunder, declaring with undying conviction what was right for the rest of the world. Vocalized by currency and the politicians that they owned. Then imagine being a woman who challenges them. One who does not fear her femininity and actually bends and mutates it into hundreds of different forms that dare the country and then the world to think and reconsider. And sometimes it doesn’t matter that she has to take a man’s form or adopt a whore’s body or lash with a revolutionary’s tongue, because that is her calling. And then the little moles start to scamper back and forth nervously, crisscrossing, banging into one another, trying to get the machinery in an order that will at the very least shape this woman into something a little more docile and respectable—and, at the minimum, shut that bitch up! So they try to slander. Call for the death of this immoral insurgence. And what do they get?—Sarah Bernhardt posed in a casket. The slight grin on her face rising between two lips that have just told them to fuck off. And what the moles have failed to understand is the will of the people, and how much they love their actress. So when she poses in that casket, the entire new world bursts out a collective laugh that rocks the moles so hard that their little cave tunnels quake, eventually burying them in old unnutritious soil, dedicated to wiping the grin off that casket woman’s face so that they can stand back on the top of the mountain. All these years later the picture is still hanging, that perfect frontier between drama and defiance. Looking back down on her as a reminder of what making art is truly about. And oddly enough she did not recognize that patron saint of freedom of thought as herself. In fact, when Sarah first entered the railcar after bidding Max a quick farewell, she collapsed onto the couch and looked up at the picture with admiration. Almost speaking aloud to it for guidance and support. Calling on herself to find the same strength that the woman in the picture had.

  Sarah loved the railcar for its comfort. It smelled of Paris. The sooty air. Remnants of perfume bouquets. Sweet butter caked into the furniture. And the spilled red wine stains hidden by the matching burgundy carpet and well-traveled ashtrays smelled of the breath of every Frenchman she had ever loved. This was her home. A place to go when the pressure became too much. When she needed a warm comforting bosom to cuddle into. And each time she entered the railcar it seemed like she fell to that couch and let out a sigh that blew a deep breath from within her, extricating all the posture and strength and image and grandness that inflated the tiny being of Henriette-Rosine Bernard into the larger-than-life Sarah Bernhardt. And she could almost see the breath coming out of her, as though it had its own form, a perfect cylinder colored chalky gray with a faint light in the middle, bellowing out of her mouth and then dissipating over the room in millions of crystalline shards that floated down lone and powerless. Then she w
ould lay her head into her hands and cry. Sometimes for an hour straight. Sometimes less. Letting the warm tears stream down her cheek, mixing with the mucus that she didn’t bother to try to inhale. The gluey composite ran over her lips and sometimes her tongue, which made her cry even harder because she knew that she was tasting something real, that there was indeed flesh and bones sculpting this world.

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, Vince Baker rode the red car into downtown Los Angeles. He figured that C. C. Brown’s might not be the worst place to go. He could deal with Fay’s petulance, certainly more than he could with Scott’s hot-breath demands for the latest installment on the Bernhardt story.

  Once he had sat down, he thought about wanting to get back on his Hollywood piece—one that oddly enough also had involved Bishop Conaty. The newly growing Hollywood was a village whose confused identity was the soul of its intrigue. A locale that Bishop Conaty was desperate to preserve. A place torn between old-fashioned morality and innovation. The very collision of mores and new aesthetics. It was only last year that the city had voted to keep liquor out, in response to the area becoming a magnet for decadence. Bernhardt would love this tidbit for the irony: Bishop Conaty, sensing the need to protect the piety of Hollywood, bought the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart in east Hollywood and founded a new academy and novitiate of the sisterhood. Baker had interviewed the bishop while he politicked for his new academy (one that did not come cheap at $10,000), and Conaty had exclaimed joy at announcing the news that the liquor ban had passed with a vote of 113–96. The bishop never even considered that there were more than 700 people who lived there, and a total vote of 209 was barely more than a quarter of the population. As a reporter, all the vote told Baker was that there were only 113 people that the Los Angeles liquor industry could pay off to vote in their favor. After that, only 96 people really cared either way.