Mai at the Predators' Ball (4 page)

feeling it gave her over all these tin-pot despots, when the one she really wanted to harm by her words and actions was her father; unfortunately he had the strength to resist and she could never defeat him, just look at those arms, that frame, she, she could do nothing about his loving another, the immunity she thought he had to love, this old grownup, and Robbie, tired of Reverend Stone’s oratorical flights, walked back to the Porte du Baiser Saloon with Petites Cendres, thinking how much fun life with Fatalité had been, not like this weepy, prayer-laden evening they’d just had imposed on them with orchids and rose petals cast onto the sea, no, life with Fatalité was quite simply a farce, a comedy, and nothing sinister about it either, not like tonight’s performance all wrapped up in prayers, masquerading in sermon, merely Fatalité in all her reality, Robbie’s friend, laughing hysterically together, the two of them opening every door in the saloon so passersby and tourists could just drop in and sing and dance with them that night, join in their ramblings and trances,
kiss me, love me
, a very corpulent woman was zeroing straight in on them, oh my darlings listen to the sound of my voice, let me writhe like a snake with you all onstage, so close to the stars and in the divine hysteria of tonight, and listen to this deep voice of mine from deep in my heavy guts, isn’t it wonderfully painful, oh God my husband’s watching from across the street, I do hope he doesn’t come and stop me singing with you my sweet scatterbrains and nutbars, boy this bra is killing me, what a straitjacket for a woman to haul around, hell, just let it fall where it may, anything so I can sing with you my starlings, and here we go headfirst into the earth and its bare breasts after balancing them on the end of our noses, so you see how much I love you my sweet good-for-nothings,
kiss me, love me
sang their bounteous Madonna while her husband urged her with a glower to put her bra back on, now is that any way for a woman to act he thought, so disconcerted that he said nothing, she just went on that way for quite a while, singing as she held our faces and hair against her ample bosom, o blessed domain, at least until her husband roughly ordered her out of the bar, and this was Robbie’s true Fatalité, calling love and the generosity of sharing down upon him, a wild woman dancing across the boards between purple velvet curtains, the whole luscious banquet of sex and the senses, my own Fate, a risk to be run without trickery, life, unbridled frenzy, perhaps I loved it too much, Robbie confided to Petites Cendres, and the way we live, it’s better not to get too attached, even if we are a family, non-attachment is a law that can’t be broken except at great risk, believe me Petites Cendres, a danger that brings you back to life all the better to cut you down again, you see, don’t you, the way she is, your desirable Yinn, inaccessible even in our arms, I kiss you and fly away, belonging only to Jason, my round-armed tattooed one with vests even in the cold, maybe a flattened straw hat when he’s singing, sharing with Yinn the long Bermudas with cargo pockets, one glimpse of Yinn’s coquetry and show-off style is e
nough to make him spurn the slightest bit of decoration, he lives and breathes Yinn’s rich diversity, her batting eyelashes, the shift of her shoulder blades under the orange straps of her evening dress, he says she’s my princess or she’s like this or like that, he doesn’t know what to say anymore, Jason the man is not very talkative, except certain demonstrative words or outrage, and it is all for Yinn, Jason says, Yinn preferring to design outfits she can show off down in the street, a prince flying over the abyss on a silken sail or climbing the wooden stairs to the cabaret every evening and night, no longer parading herself but standing upright and lifting a fold of her dress, wondering if she had to go on with these shows, invited to New York and Los Angeles, if we had to repeat all our gestures endlessly from night to night in a decor that just intensified and can be broken like the set around Fatalité and her voice and laughter, Fatalité, once so vivacious, that flower of mine, but the game with men, whether exercising their charms or not, the voices of Jason and Yinn and their dances onstage, whether Yinn be indifferent or given over, had first and fore
most to survive, sordid as the misery of so many bizarre creatures may be, incongruous species Robbie said to Petites Cendres, that’s what I think, we have to perpetuate ourselves, fly over the gulf and the abysses end to end, like Yinn, without asking too many questions, touching without touching, running between clouds and earth but not breathless, as eagles fly, gliding in a straight line like Yinn at some ancestral plane unique to the race perhaps, and you have seen her eyes, both fixed and disoriented all at once, a hardened look she must have learned early on, though still tender at times, you’ve seen how she looks at us, a blue arrow of a look, haven’t you Petites Cendres, that impassive oriental gaze, so brother, remember the look disappears as easily as it came, Petites Cendres again saw the refugees on the Thai beach, all of them tied up with Yinn among them, then thrown into the sea, and when the young dealer approaches from the street, the drug gangster asks Yinn if he’s got any salt, meaning a quick fix, no, Yinn’s definite, a quick little bit of salt the dealer repeats, when a blue-arrow glance from Yinn transfixes him and sends him on his way before Jason does it for him faster and dirtier, and Yinn announces enough of this shit, enough, he imposes his authority, and Petites Cendres once again sees them tied up in the waves, one upon another, Yinn with them and looking at him while the blue of the sky blurs their being sucked down into the shark-infested depths, and Robbie says Yinn’s mother told me three guys tore him apart, who were they, do you know, who before Jason could have broken through her obstinate resistance, who, three boys Mama Yinn said, three broken hearts, three lesions, finally it was too much, he married, then when it was done and Jason had a wife and three kids, the other woman, Yinn, shows up in all her celestial androgyny and falls in love with him, and Jason finds himself racing in all directions at once: his first wife, his children, Yinn and Mother, could that be what caused the fourth trauma, my son, heartbreak, no I won’t have it, and here she is, playing queen to her prince, stitching his outfits, showing him how to design and sew, she doesn’t like him taking on these lowly jobs, cleaning up after all those men and their secretions at the saloon, the sauna, the Jacuzzi, still hot from steam, carrying a bag of other people’s laundry on his back to be washed, bent under its dark weight of humiliation, her son shouldn’t be subjected to that primitive legacy, no he must not she says again seeing the face of Yinn leaning down, and repeats no that must not be, not you my son, beneath the anger of this filth, why him and not Jason, still he continues bowed, unperturbed and unseeing, toward the street, unrecognizable behind the mask of a child slave said Yinn’s mother, yesternight’s prince nowhere to be seen in him, nowhere the silks and finery, and she rushes to help him but he says no Mother, no, Yinn says you’ve been like this too, even heavier loads on your back in the days when we hadn’t a thing in the house, and so he went on, bent double, three lesions, three heartbreaks, three boys Robbie said to Petites Cendres, I’d love to know who they were, how they could get through to him like that, three wounds to fell him, Yinn, Robbie said, and Petites Cendres thought of getting that black bag off Yinn’s back and onto his own, those rags and whores’ underthings from the cabaret, Petites Cendres would get him out from under this servitude with dignity, the sequined mermaid’s dress, the most sparkling of all, Yinn had told Petites Cendres, kissing him on the cheek as they paced up and down the streets before the evening show, while Petites Cendres hustled in the passersby and sent them up the wooden stairs to the club, no he told Petites Cendres, this is a job I have to do, I mean there’s always underwear to darn and sew, painstaking and thorough as Yinn was with every scrap worn by his girls, Robbie, Cobra, and the others . . . his mother saw to them too, and the night was already enough of a shambles she said, so little sleep poor kids, some of them so young they could almost be growing still, all living together five in a house as if working together at night wasn’t enough for them, and she too had a room but still shared the bathroom with them, at her age that was something to be annoyed about, and she tried to ride herd on them odd as that may be, rather touching too in its noisiness, her own brood of children sometimes, dissolute maybe but hers just the same and an open book, it was a rewarding love but when she lost one of them, Fatalité for instance and how many more in the past, it was always a disaster, what a bounty of nightly metamorphosed bodies and yet what a tumult of sadness in this house, she didn’t know which one to console or pacify next, God what a mess, oh Fatalité, Fatalité, they sang all through the house, farewell Fatalité and
au revoir
, we’ll keep the light burning in your apartment night and day always,
Fatalité, au revoir Fatalité
, and Yinn’s evening kiss on Petites Cendres’ cheek out there on the sidewalk, sure he did that with everyone, lips red and smiling, but Petites Cendres latched on to him in mid-air, catching a breath of his skin and resting his head on Yinn’s arm, considering this to be his transgression against the laws of sadness that had governed his life so far and against the johns who mortified him by day, a kiss that for Petites Cendres meant a redeeming hope in defiance of the mocking nastiness he was bound to undergo from one and all as he walked the streets alone or set off to meet some scummy customer, but here Yinn’s offhand kiss buoyed him he thought, especially the way he felt now, but he always felt obliged to amuse Yinn, distract him when he was melancholy, distract him from the images of those trussed up on the Thai beach then sunk to the bottom, distract him from a deep bitterness that only his mother understood from their wanderings, a sudden lassitude as well that distanced him from both the man and the woman, the boy and the girl, whether running in high heels or platform boots with jeans and a white vest tied over his stomach, nothing more, from the Porte du Baiser Saloon to Decadent Fridays, in sudden, panicked flight with his wavy hair flying in the January wind, captive in whichever sex he felt like and freeing himself from the gaze of Petites Cendres, although his catch basin of friends still held him, eagerly awaiting his unfailing presence at the nightly 2:00 a.m. show, the wooden staircase was already filled with bodies of those hungry to see and hear him, teens approaching him in the street begging for a picture taken with him smiling by their side, he held them close by the waist, supplely managing their overwhelming youthfulness, but Petites Cendres knew one needed to look below the surface for the melancholy ennui of one held captive, just then, on a wild impulse, Petites Cendres approached Yinn or let him approach, and the cheek kiss distracted Yinn, liberating him in a flash, it happened, thought Petites Cendres, as he passed (in his conservative boy outfit) on this very bit of sidewalk just in front of the saloon where the steel bars on the open window take the shape of a bird, here no one recognized him smoking cigarettes and wearing sandals, his hair drawn back down his neck and ending in a slip knot, now he looked like a boy struggling with his wayward temptations, maybe even whistling between his teeth or spitting on the ground, so resembling that boy with the black sack over his shoulder that his mother came toward him and said this is how I raised you my Thai prince, like a street urchin, and for god’s sake cover your mouth when you yawn my boy, where on earth did you learn such manners, maybe from the kid with the black bag or this kid hanging out in the worst places (though nothing in Yinn was like that), which drew Petites Cendres, when all of a sudden Yinn’s trembling lips, his whole body, expressed delight as his masculine and graceful hands described Jason’s charms to Robbie, and Petites Cendres, whom no one desired with
this kind of passion, listened rapt as though the incarnation of Jason’s languid body was offered up to Yinn’s lips then and there, just a passerby on the fringes of desire and with the most vulgar of men. Actually I often stroll through this golf course to keep company with Adrien, Daniel told his daughter, just so he’s not lonely ever since Suzanne left for Switzerland, so, thought Mai, here he is talking about leaving, visiting, that’s what was on his mind as he drove along the foggy road, twisting words to suit himself again, always the same sly tricks that adults use to hedge round the truth, the only trip the ageing writer’s wife had taken was one her father couldn’t really name, a one-way trip for an assisted suicide
, so why not say so Papa, it is what she wanted isn’t it, so why not just spit it out she said to him, but all her father did was drive faster and avoid looking at her, boy what a fog he said, and Mai felt darkly that she would never hear Suzanne’s voice again, never feel her arms around her, where every earthly traveller she loved went, especially the women: Caroline, Suzanne, her father’s frequent companion for breakfast by the sea, little Mai joining them even though she didn’t understand a thing they were talking about, now tell me my young friend what you think of this poem said Suzanne, always radiant and beautiful, I don’t dare read it to Adrien, I’m afraid as a critic he might diminish it somehow, but with you it’s different, actually it’s barely anything at all, just a moment of essential solitude, quintessential that’s it, just a moment in a woman’s life, read it dear friend then forget it right away, they stared at one another for a long time before her teasing laugh sliced through the air, Daniel, not that you aren’t someone I take as seriously as my husband the accomplished writer, oh no, still don’t you believe, though I’m always afraid his poems turn out a little too four-square, pontificating, I mean he’s always right you know, which means, like many women, I’m always in the wrong I suppose, how was it that Mai remembered this perennial expression of Suzanne’s courage only now, far too late ever to see her again, could it be because this was exactly what she meant by quintessence, you know Daniel, I’ve been reading the life story of a young writer who hanged himself at forty-seven, he’d long been a student of philosophy and the medication was no longer helping to relieve his chronic, really chronic distress, and now here you see my own strength, this same body that might fall apart tomorrow, if it were to cause me pain and deep humiliation like that young writer, would I be able to withstand it I wonder, I’m entrusting you with this poem that says as much, you know I’ve been so spoiled my dear, would I agree to it, perhaps not, and Mai heard these words, treated well by life and love, shouldn’t things just be left untouched as they were at their epiphany, now above all say nothing, absolutely nothing to Adrien, this is strictly between you and me, silliness my friend, this young man, as Adrien has written, mastered an infinity of words, but does that matter if their force is diminished, no Mai’s father said again, no I don’t want our friend Adrien out alone on this golf course, because