Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

“Claire, I swear to God, if you finish your sentence and that sentence is that you lo—” Aimée swallowed.

“You’ll what?” Claire said, sliding the cake knife across the table towards Aimée.

I never asked—

The evening closes itself gently like a storybook, and Aimée takes one of her father’s pills and drifts between the covers as if rolling unhurriedly around her eyeball.

The dream unfolds as if it has been waiting for her, and her hand is reaching for the long blue curtains and pulling them open and stepping inside.

The string of blue lights begins to flicker, then jolts to a halt and becomes a blue-lit line around the walls. The customers at the tables are speaking to each other and sipping their glasses, all their voices brushed together, not a single strand sticking out. The bartender is standing behind the bar with one hand on the counter, blue rag, soft palm, wiping in slow circles.

From the blue speakers, an accordion squeezes a solemn chord and the dry voice of Yves Montand tells the story of those who love, those who are separated—

The bartender stops her wiping and looks up at Aimée.

“ Bonsoir ,” she says.

“ Bonsoir ,” Aimée’s voice emerges from her mouth, as the bartender is putting a glass of red wine on the counter and Aimée is glancing down at her lap, two legs, touching at the knees, sitting upon the bar stool, her right hand is reaching for the glass of wine, the ridge against her lip, the liquid somehow syrupy and bitter.

The accordion stretches and folds back together, but the sound feels like it’s coming from her organs. Aimée is placing the glass of wine back on the counter. She is lowering her eyes, loosely gazing, and there, a small, clean hand is tugging on her leg. The little girl is wearing a powder pink baseball cap too big for her head. When she tilts her small face up towards Aimée, a blonde princess in a blue gown is sweeping on the front of her cap, beneath the princess’s feet in embroidered cursive, the teal threading spells out Cinderella . The large beak of the cap shadows the girl’s face down to her nose, and at each young-lobed ear, her blonde hair is gathered in two neat pigtails that balance like sunshine above her ironed cotton dress with an eye-lit fringe. The fingertips of her other hand are reaching at the edge of the countertop, trying to get up.

“Here,” Aimée lifts the little girl up and places her on the stool beside her.

The girl fixes her oversized cap upwards, so that she can see. She looks over at Aimée and her eyes are glittering blue.

“ Děkuji ,” the girl says politely in Czech. Thank you , a distant voice translates between Aimée’s ears.

When the girl lowers her chin to smooth out the fabric of her dress with her delicate fingers, the baseball cap falls back down over her forehead.

The girl fixes her cap again and looks up at Aimée.

“ Proč jste přinesli citrony ?” the little girl asks in a curious voice. Her eyes are sparkling impossibly. Why did you bring lemons, Miss? the translation echoes.

Aimée looks down, her hand is gripping the blue plastic bag full of lemons. She lifts it over the counter and hands it to the bartender. The bartender takes the bag and nods one simple nod.

Aimée looks back over to the girl. Her back is straight and her gaze is fixed upon something just beyond Aimée, her small arm, perfectly horizontal, pointing past Aimée’s shoulder to the dance floor.

The disco ball is turning sleepily, sprinkling shards of light onto the blue dance floor, where, in the middle, the naked woman in dark leather heels is swaying to the music. Her back curves right, then left, she is stepping back and forth in her pumps, shifting the weight of her nudity, back of the knees, thighs, the buttocks tense, release, she is dancing, her spine bristling through her flesh. At her nape, the ends of her rich brown hair are jagged like a shriek, sticking out from a clear plastic bag suctioned over her head, held in place with a thick rubber band.

The woman turns around as the music sweeps, her arms floating to the singer’s voice. She is looking at Aimée, the plastic bag clinging to the contours of her face, cheeks, eye sockets, between her lips. Her right hand lifts, fingernails dig beneath the rubber band and she tugs the bag off, as if undoing a mask, the plastic peels up, and her hair drops over her shoulders. The dancing woman opens her eyes and exhales through her nostrils, strings of blue smoke.

Aimée is reading her lips as the blue smoke is lacing and unlacing out of her mouth. Aimée is walking towards the woman, reaching out her hand, touching the woman’s skin now. She is trying to find her own hand with her eyes. It is inside the woman’s hand. And her body, against the woman’s body, below the disco ball, swaying to the music.

Aimée lowers her head to the woman’s shoulder and her fingertips begin to trace the woman’s back, spine and hip. The skin is a perfect temperature, so conscious to her touch. Aimée pushes her face deeper into the woman’s neck, until the woman’s lush hair falls into her eyelashes and cheeks, the scent of branches. She is tightening her arms around the woman’s waist and holding her against her stomach.

Aimée’s lips are moving into the woman’s throat. “Come for me…”

Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant Fanny Ardant

Aimée woke up into the gaunt light seeping through her curtains, her eyes opening and settling upon the face in front of her, still sleeping upon the adjacent pillow, the eyelashes in a delicate arc, the faint brow, the loose, light-brown hair, fair skin, and those serious lips, even in her sleep, somehow determined – then there is a prickling across this woman’s face, around her nostrils, between her brow, and—

Jana’s eyelids begin to flutter, then lift.

“Good morning,” Aimée murmurs across the small white valley between their faces.

Jana shifts from her pillow, her ear lifting then pressing back into the cotton, sinking with the weight of her head.

Good morning , her thoughts are swallowing up Aimée’s voice.

There is something hardened about me, yes. It started before the Soviets, before my birth, before the Jans, before. I was always afraid to kiss you. I don’t like melancholia. But I suppose I’m something of that shape. A fleshy grudge. Isn’t it funny, yes, what we do, with our freedom. Last night, yes, I was afraid, because I have been afraid for so long, to kiss you. Would you understand something like that?