Rouge(86)

“Beautiful,” I agree, looking from the man to the creature. Though I don’t know that it is anymore. It looks scary to me. Hideous. But the man in the mask doesn’t seem to think so. He’s lost in looking at it, like it’s a dream.

“Is it really so beautiful?” I ask him, jealous maybe. “Just a jellyfish.”

“Oh, it’s more,” he says, still smiling softly like it’s telling him a secret. “It’s something else now, thanks to the treatments. Can you guess?”

I stare at the creature. Its red bell pulsing like a strange heart. The hairy tentacles undulating. I shake my head. The man smiles his smile of long white teeth. His smile is a constellation. His smile is a movie and I’m in the dark, dreaming. Gently now, he takes my hand. “It’s the story of you and me.”

Inside the tank, the red thing begins to pulse more quickly.

“You and me,” I repeat. There’s a shiver in my voice now. The touch of his hand is making me cold. Something black and closed and buried deep in me opens. “What story?”

I look at the jellyfish, a pattern like roses on her back. Her eyes, I see she has eyes, translucent and red like her body, are wide and afraid. What story? But somewhere inside me knows. Knows exactly. I feel the knowledge pulsing just like the red thing in the water.

“What story? Oh Belle, Belle, now you’re hurting my feelings. Now you’re wounding me.” He presses his gloved hand to his chest like I stabbed him there. But he’s still smiling like the movies. His eyes in the mask flash from blue-green to red to blue-green. He brushes my hair away from my face, and I shiver.

“It started the day you found me in Mother’s closet, remember? Beastly little thing in Mother’s lipstick and cheap sex heels. Dreaming of another self, a princess self, in a castle by the sea. Dreaming of me. And I heard you. Dreaming on the other side of the glass.”

He squeezes my hand, that cold, slightly sticking touch that dives me in dark water. He’s standing over me now as I sit hunched on the table, cold coursing through my body.

“You heard me,” I say, and I’m shivering, shivering.

“But the story’s not over.”

“It isn’t?” I say. I’m so very cold. He lifts up my chin with a hand of ice, so I’m looking right into his flashing eyes. Still smiling that smile that burns me.

“Let’s finish it together, shall we?”



* * *




We’re lying together now on the table, he and I, and in the glass, the jellyfish is beating wildly like my own heart, like the black buried thing inside me. He’s taken his mask off so I see his face. His face lights up the architecture of me, my cage of bones brightening. Not just his smile, but his whole face is the movies. As beautiful and unreal as a dream, but somehow right here with me. I must have watched those movies a thousand times in the dark, on dusty TV screens. I’ve seen him on another kind of screen too, a screen of glass. Smiling like he is right now.

“We lay together like this once, remember?” he says. “In your silly pink room with the dolls and spiders. Under those dumb stars. And you made some promises to me. Do you remember?”

“No,” I say. My lips find it hard to make the word.

“Let’s remember together.”

“There’s supposed to be a cold white paste on my face,” I say with my half-numb lips. “The whisper woman puts it on. And black discs on my temples. There’s supposed to be an oil I breathe in and she breathes with me.”

He shakes his head. “We don’t need her tonight. We don’t need the fucking accessories, you and I. The oil, the discs, the paste—those are just flourishes to impress the idiots. The essence is just this. Just you and me.”

And he takes my hand again, my first love. Somehow I know that he was my first love. How nice to know that I am holding the hand of my first love and I’m not cold anymore or I’m so cold, I’m burning. It was a troubled love. There was something between us, always between us, what was it? A kind of wall. Shiny but smeared. Made of cracked glass. Hiding in the dark. Turned toward the wall, until I turned it to me.

“I would come through it to be with you, remember?” he says.

His name is nearly on my tongue. And my heart is frantic inside me.

“Yes.” It’s all so familiar, there are tears in my eyes. He tells me to look up at the glass ceiling exposing the Depths. At the red jellyfish floating by like comets with fiery tails.

“What do you see? Tell me.”

The table we’re lying on floats up now toward the sky of water. The small tank with my red jellyfish floats up with us. Beating fast and wild as my own heart is now. I am burning with cold and very still. There’s a movie playing up there on the ceiling glass like a screen. I see a young girl. Lying in her pink bedroom. Night outside. A low moon lights up the room. She’s not alone. There’s a man with her in the room. Lying beside her. She’s holding him tight. There are tears in her eyes. She’s saying, Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.

“Who’s that?” he asks me.

“Her first love. She’s holding her first love,” I say with my mouth that’s so very hard to move now.

“What’s his name?”

I look up at the little girl on the glass screen. Her eyes shut tight. Tears streaming down her face as there are tears streaming down my face. I feel them tingling on my skin. Her mouth saying his name again and again. And I remember. I start to say the name along with her with my now dead mouth. Together, we’re mouthing his name like a refrain in a song. And the man beside me is smiling at the sound.