Ben non. It’s a movie, cher. He’s acting.
Okay, I whispered. I loved Grand-Maman then. I was so close to telling her that Tom Cruise was my boyfriend. That I was the only one who knew his true name, Seth. I was the only one who knew about Tom’s eyes. How they could go red in an instant, then back to blue-green again when he was calm and happy. But then I remembered that it was a secret. Our secret, Tom said. There were times when we were watching that I felt Tom looking right at me from Grand-Maman’s dusty TV screen, and I thought the screen was a mirror and that Tom would step through it in his varsity jacket or in his pilot jacket or in his white shirt and underwear and sunglasses.
?a va? Grand-Maman asked me. You’re breathing very funny.
Because Tom’s taking my breath away, I thought. But of course I didn’t tell Grand-Maman that. All I said was, ?a va, oui.
Once, in the middle of Top Gun, I saw my face reflected in the screen’s glare, right next to his. Tom was flirting with Kelly McGillis in an elevator, so sometimes it was Kelly on the screen, sometimes Tom, both of them beautiful and smiling beside what I saw was my very unsmiling face, which looked hideous, warped with want. What’s wrong? Grand-Maman said. She turned off the TV suddenly and then I just saw myself. Close-up and cross-legged on her scuffed floor, Grand-Maman rocking beside me in the dark. My face was dreamy and open like Mother’s when she watched her movies. But my dreaminess wasn’t at all pretty like hers. It was terrible. It was nothing Tom could ever love. I’m going home now, I said.
* * *
After seeing the movies, it really seems like Seth is Tom Cruise. But if Tom Cruise wants me to call him Seth, then I can do that. I’ll do anything for Tom Cruise. Seth, I mean. We’re getting so close. Every time Mother is out these days, I go to her bedroom closet and he’s there, waiting in the mirror. She told Grand-Maman to absolutely not let me go into her room ever again after the last time. It is of the utmost importance, do you hear me? she said to Grand-Maman, and Grand-Maman told Mother, I heard you. But the minute Mother leaves, Grand-Maman always turns a blind eye. I walk right in and surely Grand-Maman hears my creaking footsteps going down the hall, surely she hears the turn of that wobbly doorknob. Maybe she turns a blind ear, too.
The next time I went back to Mother’s closet, I didn’t see the mirror at first, and for a minute I couldn’t breathe. Then I saw it glinting behind her row of dresses red as blood. The glass was turned to the corner like it’d been bad. So I picked it up, I turned it around, it wasn’t so heavy really. I always take off Father’s golden bracelet first. That Eye of Horus. Father’s eye, Mother said. Watching me, it feels like, and I don’t like it. The minute it falls to Mother’s floor, the mirror begins to shimmer, and he appears on the other side of the glass like a dream. Blurred around the edges at first. Rippling like water.
Tom, I whisper.
And then he comes into blinding focus, his smile a flashing white that burns me. Hello, Belle, he says. Can I come in? He is so beautiful, I have no words, though my mouth’s wide open. My breath is taken just like the song. But Tom hears the yes in my pounding heart. And he walks through the glass with a sucking squid-like sound. And the song, our song, is all around us. He asks me if he can have this dance. Even though of course he knows he can have it. He can have anything. And then we dance and talk, for hours sometimes. I’m surprised Tom Cruise has so much time on his hands. Shouldn’t he be so busy making movies and doing interviews and things? What is he doing here in the dark of Mother’s closet dancing with me? But I don’t dare ask. I talk about other things, mostly because I’m so nervous to be slow dancing with Tom Cruise. I think of my face reflected in Grand-Maman’s TV screen, ugly and distorted with dreaming. I look nothing like the girls in his movies, and yet he’s looking at me like I’m Kelly McGillis in the elevator. I’m Rebecca De Mornay wandering into his living room like a literal dream. Honestly. Tom’s hands on my shoulders. Tom’s eyes on my face. It’s so much. Too much. When I find my voice to talk, I barely know what I say. I tell him dumb things. How much I hate school, I don’t want to go back this fall. How Stacey has a boyfriend now, Gabriel Gardner, and he told her she looks just like Christie Brinkley. That my turtle died last spring and I’m afraid I killed him somehow. Tom seems amused but annoyed by my chatter.
Stacey sounds like your run-of-the-mill slut, he whispers.
School is a waste of time, Belle. You’ll learn nothing there except lies.