(Lest They Leave - Chapter 8)

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CHAPTER INDEX

CHAPTER 8




They said, the theatre would probably shut down soon, too little revenue, it had been struggling for years. That was how Sylvie heard two men speak to each other a foot away from her, standing close together and whispering, thinking themselves discreet, but she caught the words anyway and looked over at them with interest. They were busy with the hors d’oeuvres and didn’t notice that either. Eating the theatre into bankruptcy, as it were, then.

On her other side, Armand and Charles were pulling a similar number, talking to each other in lowered voices that excluded her, and it would have made her nervous, if she wasn’t so impatiently awaiting Eloisa’s arrival at the scene.

The scene which involved the reception hall at the back of the theatre, a small but grand room with vaulted ceilings and decent copies of famous French painters’ work on the walls. Sylvie could understand if they were on the edge of foreclosure, these things were expensive to maintain. You needed backers like the Dubois family and her brother, but her brother was only here for ‘mademoiselle Paolo’ and Armand was only here because of her. As far as Sylvie gathered, neither thing landed money in the theatre director’s pocket. Three single tickets only cost so much, if the purchasers never returned.

Herself, she would come every night for Eloisa’s Cleopatra; it was an adequate play on its own, but the actress’ interpretation of the Egyptian queen was haunting. Another ghost to Sylvie’s collection. When would it end?

At that moment, the room erupted in clapping and shouts of admiration, when the main cast arrived in evening wear with Eloisa at the front, sporting a long, ruby-coloured gown, no flapper style. Bravo resounded among the men in the crowd, a few of them rushing forward to throw flowers before the Italian actress’ feet, which made her wrinkle her nose noticeably, though she didn’t cease smiling with a kind of lenient forbearance and let the nearest man kiss her hand. A superb, stupendous interpretation, he said so loudly, everyone could hear. Sylvie shifted from one foot to the other, burying her shaking fingers in her skirt and looking, looking her fill, wanting very much to be the one to kiss the back of Eloisa Paolo’s generously extended hand.

Next to her, Armand drew closer, worriedly putting an arm around her waist. Was her total nervousness so obvious? “It’s all right,” he whispered.

Sylvie didn’t know what he thought was all right. Nothing was all right!

Catching sight of Charles, Eloisa told the gathered handful of guys off and sauntered over, leaving the flowers for the rest of the cast to deal with, if they saw fit. Or, Sylvie could imagine, the actress would be fine with it all just remaining on the floor in chaotic disarray. She was like that. Chaotic disarray and cigarettes. As she drew closer, Sylvie’s heart only pounded harder.

“Charles, tesoro,” Eloisa muttered as she halted right in front of him, at first completely ignoring both Armand and Sylvie, instead leaning up – though not by that much, she was taller than Sylvie, the same height as Armand – and kissing first his one cheek, then the other. It could’ve been a very classic la bise, but it lingered too long. Without thinking about it, Sylvie pressed herself closer in against Armand’s side. Her eyes didn’t leave Eloisa, however. Like that, she was in two places at once, the place of her body and the place of her mind. “You came to see me in this little hellhole, how kind. And you brought friends!” Finally turning towards Charles’ two guests, she looked first Armand up and down, then Sylvie, same treatment, she felt it like a caress. “Monsieur Dubois and little Sylvie who has never seen a redheaded Italian before.”

Blushing, Sylvie gave up and lowered her gaze.

Charles chuckled, muttering a low, “Be nice, now,” to his girlfriend. His. His.

“That’s fine, topolina. I like being a girl’s first.” Eloisa laughed loudly; she was the only one, and she didn’t seem to mind at all. When Sylvie looked back up, she was hanging off her older brother’s arm, leaning her chin nonchalantly on her hands, where they were folded over his shoulder. She tilted her head to the side a little, staring right back when she caught Sylvie looking.

Armand disrupted the awkward atmosphere, saying with a smile, “You were ravishing as Cleopatra, mademoiselle Paolo.” Eloisa’s head tilted to the other side as she looked him over again, his arm around Sylvie’s waist.

In turn, Sylvie found all the courage that Claire had sent her off with and said, “You look wonderful.” Not in the past tense, not as Cleopatra, but now. In this moment, looking back at Sylvie with big, dark, pitiless eyes. That was what she meant.

Frowning, Armand glanced sideways at her. It was their code language, after all, it had a meaning to him, too. Sylvie almost wanted him to guess, to know, yet she didn’t meet his gaze. Another part of her was frightened out of her wits.

“Isn’t she sweet?” Eloisa asked Charles rhetorically, lips all but brushing over his ear at that angle, while she didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one either. Cooing didn’t need a verbal reply. Rather, Sylvie’s brother tightened his hold on his girlfriend in a way that had to count as a signal. She pretended not to notice. “Did you enjoy the performance?”

It was cold, the way she utterly ignored Armand’s existence, directing the question at Sylvie alone. Armand was graceful about it, luckily, but he still didn’t let go of Sylvie, not holding on to her in any possessive way, but definitely in a protective one. Again, a part of her appreciated it. Another recoiled. There was an angel and a devil on her shoulders, like Marguerite and Marceline had always gone on about. Listen to the angel, chérie, they’d reminded her every night when it was time for bed and prayers. At this point, she simply didn’t know.

Was Eloisa an angel or a devil? Was Sylvie?

“I could watch it over and over,” she heard herself reply, voice breathless and light and slightly shaky. They looked at each other, then, Eloisa and her, the actress’ eyes deep like a sea you could drown in, an ocean that ate ships, and not for the first time did Sylvie want to follow her parents into the depths.

“Really? This piece of rubbish?” Eloisa responded, raising both eyebrows in mock surprise, but there was a softness about her mouth now, a fondness to her gaze, like there had been that night, before she kissed Sylvie, which betrayed the sarcasm. It was affected, an actor’s trick. “Maybe I should invite you to come every night, in that case.”

“No,” Charles said, curtly. Sylvie’s heart, beating in her chest, stopped for a moment, the way things do at the loss of hope. It wasn’t a new feeling, her heart had stopped before, fifteen years ago – sometimes she wondered if it had ever really resumed its work again after that. However, Eloisa wanted her here! Eloisa wanted her, too! And her brother wouldn’t allow her to come, to attend, to see her.

Armand released her, carefully, and stepped back, looking over at Charles.

“It’s not in my place to say, but you should let her go, Charles.” He nodded towards the exit, in the direction of the parking lot where their cars waited. “If you need your chauffeur, I can lend out mine for the dates in question.”

“Listen to the good monsieur Dubois, tesoro,” Eloisa murmured, never once lifting her head from Charles’ shoulder, more or less breathing into his ear. Sylvie hated it. So did Charles, apparently, because he turned his head out of her reach with an irritated huff.

“I don’t care about chauffeurs. It’s about propriety. She isn’t going alone.”

“It’s a modern world,” Armand attempted.

“And she’s my sister.” Never had Sylvie heard Charles’ voice harden that way, it was steel, it was rock.

Swallowing heavily, she stepped forward herself, looking past Eloisa, eyes fixed straight at her brother, earnest but soft. Not pushing but offering. “Charles, I could take Claire with me.” A giggle. “Like a chaperone. She would love that. I would love that.”

A long time, they simply looked at each other, Charles’ dark, midnight eyes and her own daylight blue ones, and she could see him harden further at first, turn into lava stone and diamond, but after a while, from the pressure of Eloisa on his shoulder and his little sister pushing against all his barricades up front, he gave in, shaking his head with a low hmph and waving one hand dismissively. “Fine, take the maid. Get Armand’s chauffeur to drive you.”

Beaming, Sylvie clapped her hands.

“You just made her week,” Armand commented, smiling widely as well, for some reason that Sylvie didn’t understand. Looking down at her, his gaze was nice and bright and ducky, as always. There was no coarseness to him, opposite Charles who was nothing but coarse surfaces. If he knew, why? And if he didn’t know, why?

Eloisa stepped forward, then, releasing Charles and drawing to a slow, sultry halt in front of Sylvie, bending down slightly to put her hands on her shoulders, looking right into her face, eye to eye. Sylvie’s heart was in her throat now. Her chest was empty. All air. “You are sweet,” the actress said, softly, a softness that didn’t seem to come naturally to her, but there it was. There it was, between them. “Come see me, little Sylvie.”

When the other woman kissed her cheeks, it was briefer than the kisses she’d given her brother, but still not la bise. Sylvie found a strange kind of satisfaction in that. In being close, but not close enough, never close enough. Not in any way she knew how.

Maybe Eloisa would teach her, in time. Come see me, she’d said, after all.


~*~


Don’t you need the ladies’ room, little Sylvie? I think you do, Eloisa had said.

In response, Charles told her to ‘be good’ again, and Sylvie wanted to tell Charles to shut his gob, but she said nothing, simply followed Eloisa out with a nod that should’ve been a shake of her head, but it didn’t dare to be anything but affirmative.

She didn’t dare.

The ladies’ room at Théâtre Femina was a dark-tiled, small space with two booths for tinkling and one sink placed under a large mirror, put up specifically to accommodate a row of at least four women, so they could powder their noses and apply new lipstick in the same reflective surface. Once they had entered together, Eloisa paused briefly to lock the main door behind them, walking over to the sink to wash her hands, pull out her cigarette canister and, from that, retrieve a smoke. She caught it between her lips and lit up, all in one elegant motion. Sylvie stood by the door and watched, enchanted.

Here I am, she wanted to say, you asked me to come, and here I am.

At the reception, the four-leaf clover of people, Charles, Armand, Eloisa and Sylvie, had quickly fallen into idle small talk, discussing the price of coffee, cigarettes and champagne, all the C’s, Eloisa called them. All expensive, like living was expensive, right? The atmosphere had been easy and forthcoming, until Eloisa had turned her large, dark eyes on Sylvie, cocked her head with a sharp, hard-edged smile and asked that question. Don’t you need the ladies’ room, little Sylvie?

Sylvie didn’t need the ladies’ room, but she’d hardly even looked back as she left the party, at her brother who was undoubtedly busy engaging Armand in a new round of business talk, and Armand who was maybe glancing after her, hastily. She couldn’t tell, she didn’t see.

“I thought I’d managed to scare you off completely,” Eloisa commented, smoking her ciggy without any holder, leaving lipstick marks on the end of it and blowing one smoke ring after the other, the sensual arch of her lips looking soft and inviting as she rounded them into a perfect O. “How silly of me.”

“I was scared for a while,” Sylvie admitted slowly, finally pushing off the door and walking over to the mirror as well, looking at herself, her still flawless finger waves and the hint of powder to her cheeks, but only a hint. She liked the natural look. On herself. On Eloisa, any look would do, of course, but she was no Eloisa Paolo, she was Sylvie Gallard, and she didn’t know what to do with this urge to fling herself at the other woman, pin her to the wall and kiss her again, feel her body against her front, undress her…

She blushed.

“Topolina,” Eloisa murmured, sliding up next to her, their shoulders brushing then bumping. “It’s okay, everyone’s scared at first.” There was a care to her voice, speaking these words, which almost made Sylvie want to cry. From sadness. From relief. From desire. From love. Pick one, any one or all of them.

This close, Sylvie could smell her perfume in the air, a heavy, floral scent, familiar but unplaceable, wafting around them. She wanted to bathe in it, have her own skin permeated by it, until it could never be scrubbed off or washed away.

“You mean, there are others… like this?” Like us, she wanted to say, but didn’t have the courage, despite Claire’s well wishes, to make the connection. No, Sylvie didn’t know how best to phrase it, it sounded so dirty and uncouth no matter what description she thought of using that she’d heard before. Eloisa hummed softly, reaching up to caress her cheek with her free hand. The rest of her cigarette ended up on the tiled floors where she stubbed it out under her heel. Sylvie remembered the burn marks on the windowsill at Armand’s house, in that room she could never go back to, but maybe. Maybe now she wouldn’t have to. They stood so close, the Italian actress and her. Sylvie’s breath was bated.

Giving her a long, questioning look that Sylvie had no idea how to interpret, what to read into, Eloisa eventually barked out a hard laugh and gently patted her cheek, mimicking a light slap, once, twice, before withdrawing. “More than you could ever imagine.” No pet names this time.

Whether to take it as a compliment or the opposite, she couldn’t tell.

Eloisa didn’t specify. Instead, she said, “We don’t have much time. Kiss me now if you want.” It was said so nonchalantly, it almost sounded like she didn’t care, like it would mean the same to her, whether Sylvie kissed her or didn’t kiss her, except Sylvie caught a slight breathlessness to her tone, an airy quality and a pronunciation of her French that was slipping a little bit, sounding rawer, Italian around the edges. Topolina. Tesoro. Ciao, bella. Ciao, ciao.

It was Eloisa who wanted Sylvie to kiss her.

Just as much as Sylvie ached to kiss her again.

Lunging herself at the other woman, they more or less staggered up against the back wall, Eloisa getting pushed up against it while Sylvie sought her mouth desperately, feeling the moistness of lipstick, newly applied, and the even hotter wetness of her breath, bated, just like Sylvie’s was. Sylvie whimpered and kissed her, kissed her lips, pushed into her with her tongue, hands blindly sliding up along the curves of her body, the dress jingling with its sequins and its little, deftly applied stones. Beneath all that, though, was Eloisa’s outline that she could draw, if she wanted, with her pencils, with her fingers, and Sylvie was hungry for that, too.

When Eloisa gasped against her lips, as Sylvie cupped her breast, nothing in the world mattered more than teasing that sound out of her again, again, again.

Feeling her wrist gripped hard, however, Eloisa twisted her hand away, then twisted herself out of reach, making a dark sound at the back of her throat, her hair mostly unscathed, but her dress needing some corrections, which she gave it indifferently. Slowly and thoughtfully watching Sylvie panting across from her.

“What you have to learn,” the Italian actress muttered, sliding up close again and kissing her cheek, before returning to the mirror to save what was left of her lipstick, “is that we have to create the right opportunities ourselves, chérie.” A pause, a look in the mirror. “Fix your mouth, you look like you’ve been eating pomegranate.”

Sylvie looked at herself. Her mouth was stained with Eloisa’s lipstick. Her scarcely powdered face was looking sweaty and flushing.

“Here.” Eloisa handed her a face powder box, her own, a puff and her lipstick, the same colour as the streaks across Sylvie’s mouth now. It felt like a gift. “Get yourself in order.”

Charles would have said that, she thought. She felt frozen all over, and only automatically washed her face, reapplying powder, more than usually, and lipstick, a thick layer. She looked like another person afterwards. As if one Sylvie had entered the ladies’ room, and another was leaving it in a moment.

“What is the right opportunity?” she asked Eloisa, after a second. She was still cold. She didn’t like to think about where the actress picked up these mannerisms, turns of phrases or just the money for her beautiful dresses and expensive beauty products. Because she knew where.

Another Gallard than her.

“To get us alone, of course, silly,” Eloisa sighed, making Sylvie feel stupid and unsophisticated. “Why do you think I invited you?”

Looking at her wordlessly, Sylvie felt a certain joy grow in her abdomen, a heat in the pit of her stomach. Eloisa did want her, she wanted her to herself, she wanted her on her own! Eloisa wanted her back. What did the rest matter, then? Charles didn’t care about his so-called girlfriend, he only cared about his business, and he didn’t care about Sylvie either, the world he’d shouldered was tumbling down anyway, parents died, wars happened. Not that any of that mattered either.

This did. This moment. Sylvie beamed.

“No, don’t look at me like that, you make me want to keep your lips otherwise occupied.” Eloisa caught Sylvie’s chin between thumb and index finger, angling her up towards her face, leaning in to place the lightest, most chaste of kisses on her mouth, leaving her lipstick completely intact.

She’d done that before, Sylvie thought, to others – and she remembered the slapping girls the other woman had referred to, suddenly.

Come see me, Eloisa had said. And – “Come see me,” Eloisa said now, stepping around Sylvie after only releasing her reluctantly and unlocking the door. “We’ll figure something out, topolina.”

That was how they left it. The ladies’ room.


~*~


In the days that followed, Sylvie often thought of the aunties, how they would say, listen to the angel on your shoulder, mon chou, and now that Sylvie felt she’d done just that, it was truly Heaven that opened up to her. She felt on cloud nine, and she wanted nothing more than to tell everyone about it. Claire, who had agreed, when offered a slight and temporary raise in salary by Charles, to come with her to Théâtre Femina all twelve additional nights that Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra was playing. Charles, who didn’t care about Eloisa enough anyway. Armand who didn’t demand that they were exclusive, who didn’t want to own her but only to help. Yes, even the aunties, she’d have loved to tell.

Nevertheless, in the end, Sylvie couldn’t tell a soul and oh, it was tormenting her utterly.

So, she took it to her sketch pads instead.

Sitting around all her various old hide-outs, the kitchen, the library, the spot in the gardens that Charles knew about but never visited, Sylvie brought her little box of charcoal and managed to finish more than a couple of sketches of the other woman in the four days between the Friday premiere and the Tuesday showing the following week. Even in black and white, just smoky lines on cream paper, Eloisa looked vibrant, stunning. The long dress that Sylvie replicated most often, because she’d felt it beneath her hands, she knew its exact structure, what little stones and sequins to draw, looked reddish, like lipstick and passion, even without colours.

Every one of these drawings, she hid in the bottom drawer of her chest, not to be shared with anyone else.

The rest of the time she waited for May to turn into June, for summer to arrive, her birthday with it, she’d turn twenty-three by the end of the new month. It seemed like a distant date, another reality, in which she would be older and wiser and still understand so little, she thought. Charles didn’t ask about it, what birthday wishes she had, or how she wanted to celebrate, they’d never celebrated it together before, after all, Sylvie would usually visit in July, when the semester had ended. Part of her did want him to ask, though, just so she could look at him and go: I want to kiss your girlfriend between her legs, I want to taste all her secrets, also the things she doesn’t tell you. It was a small part. The rest of her remembered birthdays with cakes from the good bakery in inner Marseille, Marguerite and Marceline always buying her a new, increasingly more conservative dress each year as a morning gift, the kind of life that had been simple but familiar. Back then, she hadn’t wanted another woman’s sex. She hadn’t wanted things she couldn’t even explain. Both because the words escaped her, and because there was no one to explain it to.

She didn’t hear anything from Eloisa. How could she? They had no means of communication, Sylvie didn’t even know her home address, and the telephone was out of the question, everyone would hear, everyone would know. Besides, she didn’t know where to call. Meanwhile, Charles continued to return home late in the evening, which she could tell, even if she didn’t wait up for him any longer, she was well aware where he went.

That, too, was torturing her.

Tuesday night, Sylvie dressed herself, then helped find a dress for Claire as well, they were almost the same size and one of Sylvie’s more loose-fitting dresses was sure to fit. It would look good on her, she told the maid, finding a cute, green thing, emerald, that accentuated Claire’s brown hair and her even browner eyes. Claire was demure and nervous through the whole deal, but wore the dress nicely regardless, and once she’d got used to the idea, she fixed her own hair up in a tight bun to match. Sylvie added the perfume which made Claire sputter, “No but, mademoiselle.”

“It’s just this one time,” Sylvie insisted, meaning every time from now on until the closing performance that was playing in a couple of weeks. “Please let me do this for you, I have no one else. I don’t have any real sisters.”

Claire bit her lip briefly, then nodded and rubbed her neck with her wrist, smelling her thin-skinned pulse point afterwards. “It’s so nice, mademoiselle Gallard,” she murmured, stars in her eyes.

Sylvie smiled.

Out front, Edgar watched sourly from his spot by the garage; like promised, Armand’s car was waiting, the automobile one of those new 5CVs that he’d been raving about when they were driving down the Champs-Élysées last. Charles didn’t care about new cars, his was a much older model, almost an antique, Sylvie knew they joked about it among the staff.

Though it wasn’t as ancient as their parents’ old automobile that still stood at an off-grounds storage facility downtown, protected by a large cloth, for all time.

When Sylvie and Claire exited the house, Edgar’s expression changed, however, and his jaw quite literally dropped, the chauffeur staring at the maid turned Cinderella for the night, Sylvie was just happy it wasn’t her for once, having to hurry before midnight approached.

“Blimey,” he cursed, taking off his hat in astonishment. “You look like a film star, Claire.”

It made Claire blush. Sylvie took her hand and squeezed it, smiling wider. “Come on,” she said, leading the other woman to Armand’s car, his chauffeur opening the door to the backseat for them. Out the window, they could see Edgar waving, still scratching his head with his other hand, the one holding his cap.

The drive into town was passed mostly in silence, Claire nervously wringing her hands and Sylvie doing much the same, though undoubtedly for a very different reason. Once at the theatre, Sylvie led them inside, gave her name at the box office, after which a tall attendant led them to the same loge they’d been occupying last time, showing them inside, Claire trailing constantly behind even if Sylvie tried to convince her, they were here together.

And once they sat there, in those seats, red and velvety against her back, her arms, the parquet filling below, Sylvie was overtaken by a nervousness so violent that she felt like throwing up, like getting incredibly sick right then and there, and she paled completely, Claire gripping her hand firmly in both hers.

“Is everything all right, mademoiselle?” she asked in a hushed whisper, looking anxiously around as if in search of someone to call for.

The lights were beginning to dimmer, however. “I’m seeing her soon,” Sylvie muttered back, taking a deep breath. Deep breaths, little Sylvie, she could almost hear Eloisa.

She could almost hear her.

Claire patted her hand once, then let go.