Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

They went out to dinner that night at the restaurant called Oberland, recommended by Klaus, who urged them to try the potato rösti. Dominique even put on her favourite heels that she was always packing and never wearing, the shiny leather pumps.

Although the younger man, the previous owner of the house, is the only one in the near vicinity, his visit unravels the anxiety further. He could come back at any time and say Hello again. He could invite them over or invite himself over. And did one of them, within the couple, secretly hope that someone would indeed come?

On the train back, Dominique fell asleep in the crux of Aimée’s shoulder.

When she woke up she said she had had a dream where she tasted something sweet, so sweet…

“Do you ever taste in your dreams?” she asked Aimée.

“…so sweet, like honey, but somehow… bitter… at the end.”

Then Dominique told Aimée about Homer’s Odyssey , when Telemachus, Odysseus’ son is depressed after failing to find his father, and Helen comes to him and mixes a substance into their wine so that “…all sense of woe delivers to the wind.”

I Am the Wind

Dominique started rehearsal, and she was a completely different person it seemed, always in a whirlwind of her thoughts and ideas and explanations.

“It’s my favourite Fosse play,” she kept adding when she explained what she was working on, “excluding, of course, his most recent, I Am the Wind , but that’s for two men stuck at sea, and the casting is not flexible apparently, they have to be men, because only men can be lost souls, women – women are ghosts…”

One afternoon, after having lunch with her father in the 16th arrondissement, Aimée passed by Café du Trocadéro. On the terrace, she spotted Dominique sitting with Claire, two espressos on the table. Dominique was speaking with so much light in her face and Claire was listening with delicacy, sliding her hand up and down Dominique’s forearm.

“It’s not like that, Aimée…”

Dominique explained that Claire was doing the make-up for this show as well.

Aimée bit her tongue and dreamt that she was trapped in a car sinking into the ocean. She was pounding at the windows but they wouldn’t break. Then she looked over and in the passenger seat, buckled in, already unconscious, was the platinum blonde scalp and freckled face. Claire!! She was shaking the body. Claire!! Where is Dominique?

Dominique’s 42nd birthday was in March. They invited everyone over and Dominique wore her favourite heels with a new tight-fitting wine-coloured dress, the fabric sleek, almost rubbery, with a heart cut out at the chest.

“Hope I’m not too old for this dress…” she mumbled to herself in the bathroom.

Aimée snuck up behind her, slipping her hand up her skirt, whispering, “You make me so wet…”

Dominique pulled her hand out and readjusted her dress.

“Baby please…”

Dominique took her pills and slept like a log. Aimée sat up in the darkness and leaned over towards her. She kissed Dominique on the mouth very lightly, so as not to disturb her, then licked her own lips, trying to see if she could find the sweet taste.

“I’m not going to explain myself every time I come home!”

Aimée closed the bathroom door and pulled down the thick grey towel from the rack. She pushed her face into the bunched terry-cloth she was gripping and screamed into folds.

“Baby, baby, baby – guess what? I have a surprise for you…”

Dominique was rehearsing the whole end of spring and early summer, but they decided to take advantage of the small holiday before the opening night, as a treat for all the hard work (for the show and between them as a couple). It was their last chance to be together before the show went into intensive rehearsal for its première at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, late September.

Dominique brought up Portugal, she hadn’t been in years and Aimée had never been.

“But not the city, I don’t want to go to any city,” Dominique insisted. So they booked their tickets to Estoril, a resort town in the south of Portugal.

They landed just before noon, slammed the door to their hotel suite at the Albatroz Hotel on the beachside, which they had booked disregarding the price, and ran straight down to Praia da Conceição. The sand was yellow and warm, already filled with colour-blocked umbrellas and towels. Children sank their small feet into the swampy sand of the waterfront and shrieked, then fell onto their butts and spotted a shell and stared at it. Groups boozed in the sun. Parents rested. Tan people tanned. Aimée and Dominique dropped their blue and white striped unrolled towels and hurried forth, over the sprawled resting bodies, towards the water, which was rising in its lenient waves, folding towards them, foaming in greys and whites. The women nudged each other forwards, saying desculpa for each other when they stepped on someone’s towel edge, then pushing the other again. Around them curved the bumpy mountains, which were thinly coated with the fur of low plants, boulders sticking out this way or that, as the women sauntered right and left, and Aimée slapped Dominique on the side of her thigh and Dominique turned around and managed to flick her back right between her legs. Aimée shrieked and the children on the waterfront turned their heads, but they both ran forwards into the water and by the time they were swimming, they were already reaching into each other’s swimsuits.

Dominique swam away. Aimée called out for her, but Dominique dunked her whole body under and pushed herself far through the thick water into glimmering blindness.

Through the tall, open windows of their hotel suite, the sun was setting heavily as if being ground into the horizon, leaving amber shards of light inside the salon, on the dark-wood table and the cushioned footstool and the glass-tiled lamp.

Their swimsuits lay abandoned and sopping, Aimée’s red and white striped bottom and stringy top soaking over each other in a pile on the lime and red carpet of the hallway, and Dominique’s one black clump in an outline of water on the white tiles of the bathroom floor.

In the salon, Aimée was naked, wet hair on the floral sofa, her hand grabbing the oval coffee table next to it, trying to grip it, her fingertips sliding off. Dominique on top of her, her dark hair letting go of droplets of water down her back, as she was twisting into Aimée, kissing her neck, biting her flesh, reaching for her mouth, which fell open and Dominique licked the contours inside.

The heavy bronze curtains were pulled to the side, the golden tassels from them swung with each bit of breeze, the palm trees cut into the setting sun.

Aimée’s head was tilting off the sofa, her mouth open, catching the sky. She was glancing over at Dominique, watching her brim with eagerness. She felt elated by Dominique’s breath, by her touch, the wetness of her tongue upon her skin. It was almost like falling in love again. I forgive everything , the phrase raced through Aimée.

But when she reached her hand between Dominique’s legs, there was a dryness there. Before she could find her eyes, Dominique had pulled Aimée’s hand out and flipped her over.