Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

They were officially married the following autumn. They kept it small, went to the city hall, signed their papers and had their friends over for brunch.

“Can you believe we’ve been together since I was sixteen!” Aimée was telling everyone at brunch.

“Cougar!” Olivier said and winked at Dominique.

“Hey, I was only twenty-six myself… and it was dark…” Dominique grabbed Aimée by the waist and whispered something in her ear, then bit her lobe.

In bed, Dominique read out loud to Aimée from her favourite plays. Especially the roles that she’d never get to play on stage, because they were for a man, or for someone younger or older or whiter or darker.

The Night Just Before the Forests…

They were having dinner at home. Dominique took the call. She went into the bedroom. She came out. She sat back down. She ran her fork in the spaghetti, around and around, not catching a single strand.

Ever since Dominique turned forty, she’d been coming out of the bathroom saying that she’d started to look like her father, then pulling down on the skin beneath her eyes. It’s true that Dominique had become much paler over the years, and her eyes – which once held that rich, dark heat – were now colder and filled with doubt.

Dominique kept assuring Aimée that “theatre was going down the drain” and no one wanted to see real people on the stage anymore, soon it’ll be videos and music playing all the parts…

“No baby, you don’t get it. At twenty-three, I thought I wanted to be a star – but I don’t want any of that. That’s not what I want at all. I just want to – feel it – again.”

Dominique was shouting “no no NO!” at Aimée, trying to explain to her that she was too good to be in another “student production” as she called it, which meant the playwright and the director were both in their mid-twenties. “What do they know about life?… And they are telling me where to stand, where to sit, where to ‘exit’ offstage…!”

Her insomnia had turned to parasomnia and she was screaming in her sleep, then falling out of bed. Or else, lying with her eyes open in the dark, as thoughts mummified her body.

They had just had sex. Dominique lay in bed sleepless, while her wife was full-bodied drowsy. Dominique started talking about Foucault. Aimée tried to listen to Dominique as she explained that Foucault’s father had been a surgeon, and that Foucault himself had told this story from his deathbed to Hervé Guibert, who then transcribed it: Foucault was just a boy and his father called him in to observe an amputation in the operating room of a hospital in Poitier. The boy watched his father saw off the man’s leg, and apparently it was this that stole the boy’s virility from him.

Aimée mumbled in her sleep, “My father likes you very much, you know… he’s only trying to help…”

Dominique was in bed, reading more Bernard-Marie Koltès. The titles of his plays sounded so tender to Aimée, like In the Solitude of Cotton Fields , The Night Just Before the Forests , Tabataba … but the lines Dominique read to her out loud were nothing tender, full of revolt and choking fury.

Dominique put down the book, curled around Aimée who was already asleep, and held her like a doll against nightmares.

In their early dating days, Dominique had admitted that she talked in her sleep. Somniloquy . Aimée kept pronouncing it as ‘soliloquy’, which Dominique kept explaining was when a character in a play goes to the side of the stage and confesses something.

“Like in Shakespeare baby… where Othello sees a huge eclipse, or Antony the ghost of Cleopatra, or where Lady M can’t wash the blood from her hands, you know…”

But what Dominique had was not the type of somniloquy where one mumbles to oneself to buy more bread or answer an email, but where one shrieks, jolts, thrashes and jumps out of bed.

Aimée could not help but think of her disorder as soliloquy , because Dominique went to the side of her stage, where the light hung low around her, where she stood upon a surface that reflected like a black river, and where she emitted the words and sounds of the hot-eyed animal inside her, frantic for language.

“That’s the difference, Aimée! I’m not bad at what I do. I’m a good actress, I know I am. They just don’t want me. I could analyse every which way. If I were mediocre, I could just admit it to myself. But I am good, Aimée. I am really good and they just don’t want me.”

Aimée loved to watch Dominique on stage. There, where Dominique was charged, where she was holy. Like that first night when they didn’t even know each other and thirteen-year-old Aimée stared at those dangerously bare thighs. Aimée loved Dominique when she was acting, because then both of them felt like they fit perfectly into the world: Dominique pulsing in the light, Aimée privately watching. Aimée also loved when Dominique was sleeping, not fretfully, but softly, unsuspicious. She could look at her face and see everyone she had been, all the girls and women she had grown through, resting together, curled up into each other.

Although she told her father, the Doctor, that she didn’t want to talk about it, he took both of her hands and told her, as clearly as he could, “She is exhibiting what any medical professional would call alarming symptoms.”

And so finally she let her father get Dominique a prescription of the sleeping pills that let her sleep a full night.

In addition, by her father’s suggestion, Aimée had to put a lock on the knife drawer and a bell on the door handle of the bedroom.

Aimée took it as a good sign when Dominique veered away from Koltès’s texts and began reading a Norwegian playwright back to back and taking interest in saints’ lives.

“What does it feel like, when you are having one of your night terrors?” Aimée asked, putting the cold compress lightly to Dominique’s forehead.

“I guess it’s like… Like someone is going to come, any second… and I don’t know who… but I know it will be unbearable, when they arrive.”

When Aimée came home from her work at the gynaecologist’s office, they were all laughing in the living room, Guillaume, Claire, Eric, Olivier and his boyfriend Angelo who had worked on last season’s Wajdi Mouawad production.

Claire was leaning on the counter with her butt facing Aimée. She coiled her head around and said, “Hello”.

Aimée put her keys down and walked over to kiss Dominique on the lips.

“Stop it, stop treating me like I’m stupid because I’m young or naïve or however it is you justify it—”

“I don’t justify it—”

“Wait, ok, wait, so you admit it?”

“No! You’re being ridiculous.”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh great, bravo!”

“What am I, some little quiet secretary by day and stage puppy dog by night you got following you around your shows—”

“I never beg you to come.”

“Well I want to, how about that, I want to see you!”

“Baby, you want to have someone to follow around, at first it was your father and now me and—”

“That’s what you think, baby , that’s what you really think of me—”

“Wait, Aimée, come on, I’m trying to say that – Benoît’s doing what he wants in Thailand, and your sister’s set herself up quite nice in London, and your mum’s—”