Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

0_hotgirlAmy_0: All of it.

0_hotgirlAmy_0: I can feel your knuckle.

Dominxxika_N39: Suck me.

0_hotgirlAmy_0: I’m sucking you.

0_hotgirlAmy_0: Put your other hand down my jeans.

0_hotgirlAmy_0: Put your fingers inside me.

Dominxxika_N39 has gone offline.

0_hotgirlAmy_0: U there?

Jana came home from the medical trade show, set her keys down, took her heels off, opened the window, lit up a Gauloise Blonde and smoked it, leaning out of her window.

She felt the corner of a business card etch into her stomach through her blazer pocket. She leaned back, slid her fingers into her pocket and pulled it out.

THE BLUE ANGEL

Bar à vin.

It was the card Mr Doubek had given her, a stark blue-black with the letters embossed on the paper. No telephone, no website, just a street address. Rue de Prague . Prague Street. She flipped the card over.

9pm .

She had finished the early dinner she had made for herself, the last piece of an oven-heated quiche Lorraine with a salad of lamb’s lettuce and cherry tomatoes, and two pieces of toast with margarine. She drank a full glass of water. Then made tea. Then poured herself the rest of a bottle of Brouilly, then considered making another cup of tea, but she knew she was not craving that taste or consistency, but could not pinpoint what it was her palate desired. She decided to ignore the craving, pulled out another cigarette, opened the window, and lit up the Gauloise Blonde.

As she smoked, she felt the craving, more of an agitation, like fibrous threads being pulled through her muscles. She found herself mumbling:

To inhabit a habit, our bestowed skill ,

It replaces happiness with will.

It was from one of the passages she had memorised in her youth. This one from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin . She remembered clearly now, standing with her grey socks on the carpet so that each of her toes touched a maroon curl in the carpet’s design, looking up at her mother, and reciting the passage in Russian. The next week, she went back to French.

These endless stanzas, aphoristic sentences and smug proverbs she had memorised in her scholarly youth began to flutter in her mind as if someone had just opened a window there.

She unzipped her skirt and pulled it off her body, then took out a pair of midnight blue trousers. Coat off the hook, heels back on, keys in hand, Jana slid the blue card into her trouser pocket.

To sigh and furl with eager thought:

When will the devil end your fraught!

She walked down Rue Monge to the next station, so she could get one cigarette in before getting on the métro. Passing her, people chatted with voices above them, like birds. The fabrics they were wearing folded, wrinkled, blew back in the breeze. Jana took out her packet of Gauloises Blondes, pulled out a cigarette, lit it and slid the packet back into her purse.

She passed these people, as if behind a glass wall, where no one saw her, and if they did, she was just an unperceivable mistake in the scenic exhibition of their lives, a misspelling in their autobiography. But they were to her, as well, a scenic exhibition, a dreamy mass of ways of belonging, which she was not a part of. It was a languorous experience of her loneliness, to be an observer of a world for which she was both too special and not special enough.

Qui s’excuse, s’accuse. Who makes excuses, himself accuses.

She quickened her pace – 9pm if he had meant it sharp – and veered towards the green metal railing holding up the pale-yellow sign of the métro, flicked her still burning cigarette the way she had learned to in Paris, and descended the damp, oil-stained stairs of the métro.

In the mouth of the entrance, she heard the echo of a micro-phoned voice. She tapped her métro card, and walked through the turnstile towards the voice, which was not so much singing as speaking with moments of melodious bruising. She turned left to go northbound, and went up a flight of stairs then turned onto the platform. There, next to the vending machine, a woman was holding a microphone with her sallow, shaky arm, the wire of the microphone twitching as she shifted side to side and spoke-sang. At the top of the small amp into which her microphone was plugged, there was a paper cup taped with slick brown packing tape.

The woman was waddling to the music, her hair thin, almost wet, brushed back and gathered limply with a blue velour scrunchie, revealing patches of her pale scalp. She spoke the lyrics out, pulling at certain words, as if trying to make them sing. Every time a person passed her on the platform, she gave them a wink, and continued speaking melodically.

Jana was slightly taken aback by the lyrics, but no one else on the platform seemed to be bothered by their narrative. The woman tapped her right foot emphatically four times, then raised her other hand, palm wide open, and swung into what seemed like the refrain. “Oh la la…” she spoke. “Ooohh laaa laaa,” she sang. “Oh la la!” she proclaimed. “Ohh l’la,” she admitted.

Two young women, tourists, with a tan complexion and pitch-black hair, stood on the platform. One wore a jean jacket with stylish tears, the other a mid-waist fuchsia coat bearing multiple zippers, at the cuff, waist, breast pocket. They watched the woman and swayed their heads playfully to the singing, not understanding a single word. Then the jean-jacketed woman with her slippery dark hair crimping over the collar, reached into her orange leather purse, and took out her iPhone, the plastic cover with a pouch in the shape of a wine glass filled with purplish liquid oscillating as she moved her phone. Aiming the camera at the singer, she snapped a couple of photos, then her friend unclipped her large magenta wallet, scraped out some coins, approached the woman, dropped the coins into her paper cup and returned to her friend.

“Merci,” the woman winked, then picked up where she’d left off.

Jana glanced at the two women, who were listening to the singer, blissful for the sounds of the French language, as if the music was foretelling a romance awaiting them in the city. The singer tapped out another count of four, then just as she began swinging into her refrain, two shrill lights came from the dark tunnel and the train shoved into the station.

Jana and the two women stepped into a métro carriage.

“Oh la la…!” the singer’s voice echoed as the doors closed.

Inside the carriage, Jana glanced over the jean-jacketed woman’s shoulder as she flipped through filter options for the photo she just took. She stopped at one, showed it to her friend, who replied, “ Claro, querida !” with an adorned, vowel-stretched Portuguese.