Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

Not continents, but also. Not urine, but also.

Not silence, but also. Betrayed by language, we use phrases like tunnels.

Years back, when Dominique was rehearsing late and Aimée couldn’t stand to be alone inside the apartment anymore, she texted her friend, Mathieu, who told her to come by and have a drink with him and see his cousin, who was a bassist in the jazz quartet playing at a bar near Gare de l’Est. When she arrived at the steps of the terrace, the passageway glowed between the chatting smokers as if, through this doorway, everything between her and Dominique would be okay.

On stage, the blonde jazz singer was wearing a tight-fitting black-lace dress from head to toe. Aimée watched her sing and thought without thinking, when she goes home and takes off the dress, what of her leaves her body? But the thought quickly lost its words and became an unreadable sensation, a prickling of humiliation for that blonde jazz singer standing so openly in front of the public in her lace container, betraying something of herself so deeply in the lines of that threadwork pressed into her flesh, souring in the spotlight.

“My cousin says, apparently,” Mathieu whispered to Aimée as they watched the singer, “she’s sucked them all off in the band, even the bald piano guy!”

Aimée jabbed Mathieu in the rib.

“Don’t be gross,” she said.

“Hey I’m not the one who’s doing it, she is – and you’re killing the messenger…!” Mathieu nudged back, then made an angel with both hands fluttering up as he whistled a small gunshot and let the angel plummet down to the counter, wriggling his fingers and warbling in a cartoonish voice, “Help, help, angel down! I’ve been shot by a feminist!”

“Grow up…” Aimée said and sipped her beer.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I was just trying to cheer you up, you know…”

Aimée glanced over at Mathieu without a word. Then, she moved her eyes back to the stage.

“Hey, listen…” Mathieu tapped her arm gently. “It’ll be okay, Aimée, it really will, I promise.”

“But in the meantime, seriously…” Mathieu pointed a low finger towards the stage, “she does have a ridiculous rack, right?”

Between nature and artifice, there was blame. Herself, or, herself through someone else, or herself through herself through herself, until it became someone else.

Dominique’s mother and her Catholic face, always wiser than someone else’s pain, too wise for emotions and for the body, too faithful to be fooled by mortality – was this the face she made when Dominique’s father slit his wrists over the book of saints?

This woman who had refused to go to their wedding but was now attending Dominique’s funeral. Did death make your daughter a heterosexual in the end? Aimée tried not to cringe as she exchanged glances with the woman, feeling suddenly irate and stubborn, she wanted to go straight up to her and tell her that this sexy black dress that she was wearing was Dominique’s favourite in fact, and as Aimée imagined the tense exchange that would ensue, there was a jolt of vengeful innuendo, pleasing her body, a muscular clutch of satisfaction, but after a couple of hard flashes, it was all gone, bravado and purpose, and the rest of her was left, a floppy carcass, held together by the dress, a fistful of sadness.

Sadness being an opaque word, a stone in the mouth.

Sadness like a language dubbed over our lives, to which we are moving out of sync, our feeling swaying outside the lines of our speaking and doing.

Sadness like the eye on a cooked fish, like the eye of her father when he takes off his glasses to look at her, like her own eyes in the mirror when she catches herself without meaning to.

Sadness like the inanimate objects that look as if they so desperately want to be able to say something – that wooden chair with a rounded back, the heart-leafed plant, the top potato in the yellow-netted bag. Sadness like dead matter hoping for voice, and like living matter yearning to be rid of it.

Sadness like the dream, where people are just people, and we let them come and go, without realising that in real life, these people are gone, some long gone, and it was only in the dream that they came back, and we did nothing to savour their presence – we just let them – come and go, like perhaps, in real life.

Exactly like that, sadness, that dream, where she is calling on the telephone, you know it’s her, ringing, and you don’t pick up, where she is outside the door, and you know it’s her, knocking, and you don’t open – and then you wake up, and you curse yourself and you spend all day checking your phone and opening and closing doors, windows, cabinets and drawers, a badly dubbed slapstick on rerun.

Dominique’s mother put her palm on Aimée’s shoulder and nodded, then she took her hand off and went down the hallway. Aimée heard the door close and she glanced into nowhere, as if to seek out eye contact with oblivion, to be released of the sensation of her body, of her shoulders, or at least of that shoulder, the one Dominique’s mother had just touched.

“Have you eaten something?” her father’s voice asked.

Somehow the day had turned into each attendee bringing something or saying something or doing something that was “Dominique’s favourite”, as if everyone, all together, were pitching in to reconstruct Dominique through the history of her singular tastes.

The foil was crinkling like stars fighting to keep their light. Claire was unwrapping the carrot cake as Aimée came into the kitchen.

“Olivier asked me to come,” Claire said.

“Did he?” Aimée replied from the doorway.

“Yes, he did.” Claire gave a half-smile and let her glare thin out. “I brought her favourite cake.”

“Pethidine – Demerol and Dolantin,” Aimée recited.

Claire stopped cutting the cake into squares.

“That would take what—seventy-two tablets of fifty milligrams each, that means you’re unconscious within fifteen minutes or latest by fifty minutes, given the lack of oxygen provided by the bag.”

Claire’s brow pinched upwards.

“Or Methadone – Dolophine and Adanon,” Aimée continued, “300 milligrams, sixty-ish five-milligram tablets… Or… just morphine, that’s about 200 milligrams, thirteen fifteen-milligram tablets, no fourteen to be sure…”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Aimée,” Claire interrupted.

“It’s just that there’s a procedure to these things, Claire, they don’t just happen magically, it’s quite meticulous, I mean, you really have to think it through, like how would she know that she’d have to drink something hard with it, Claire, and take an anti-histamine so she doesn’t vomit it all up, and put a bag over her head—”

“Aimée, I—I’m really sorry…”

“Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Did you come here to say that? Is that what you told Olivier you’d like to say to me and he said, you know what, you should come in person and say – just let me finish, even if I am the puppy dog at Dominique’s side, the one she shooed and kicked away, the one you are all laughing at, the one who keeps coming back with her wet nose – but she was my wife and I get to be her widow now, and it’s my right, it’s my goddamn right, Claire!”

“Listen, I’m—I guess I shouldn’t have come.”

“You guess so? Is that your wildest guess just now?”

“ Mais merde , Aimée! You know, you’re not the only one who—”