Director's Cut (24 page)

With great emotion, he stares at the misty conservatory windows, as if he could see their noses pressed against the glass. Then he stands up, calls to rouse his chauffeur, and orders him to take him home immediately.
He has the youths taken to a hotel room, where they can sleep it off together. Wrapping his coat around his shoulders, he bids goodnight and opens the conservatory door. The wind gusts in, tugging at the palms. Sangallo pauses in the doorway without turning back to Silberstrand and Maxim.

“The Grüftes take every chance they can to harm us, but we mustn't fear them. They can destroy our world, rob us of everything, but they can't touch us. Not really. They can't touch our souls.”

While the old man walks away and the cold air spreads through the winter garden, Silberstrand bends over Maxim and kisses him. First his eyes, then his nose, then his cheek and mouth. She tastes of steel, her tongue and teeth sticky with wine. She pulls open the bathrobe, licks him on the throat, covers his chest with nipping kisses. She hardens his nipples between her teeth. Then she sucks them while impatiently squeezing his erection.

“I knew you'd come,” she whispers. “You're made of the right, shameless stuff.” Can she really be skillful enough to know exactly the words he wants to hear? The words to make him believe in his role?

He briefly imagines himself moving his hands over Gala's body during the first rehearsal of
The Mannequins' Ball
. Just like then, he's encouraged by the idea that he is acting. He juts his pelvis forward and feels his partner react. He now knows that it doesn't matter how you act as long as people believe you.

The singer's breathing quickens. Wildly, she shakes her locks away from her face, but when she drops to her knees before Maxim, she loses her balance and slides off the sofa with a bump. They look at each other for a moment, almost surprised to find themselves entangled like this, but the moment passes and they slip into their own fantasies. Growling, she bites into his jeans and claws savagely at his belt. He exposes himself and feeds her, leaning back, a shameless whore at last, his head resting on the ancient sculpture.

It's sweating. Drop after drop runs down the marble curves. Nothing holds them back on the muscular torso, but the drops all converge on the same place. Squinting, Maxim can make out the grooves from ancient chisels that lead the condensation down the abdomen to the groin and the amputated thigh. At long intervals, one tepid drop after
another drips from the stone wound, straight down onto the furiously bobbing head of the woman who is fellating him.

It's his own disengagement that excites Maxim. Nothing else. More enjoyable than the sweet glow between his thighs or the warm sucking is the realization that he can let his body be used without the intervention of his mind. The discovery that he can separate the two enraptures him.

In his youth, his flesh and his soul had been fused by a searing sense of shame that was aroused within him; but now, in the steamy winter garden, they are soaked loose, liberated one from the other. This is why shamelessness is so addictive, so triumphant: it undermines the dictatorship of small-mindedness. As long as he can separate body and mind, Maxim knows, he can do anything. This realization is the sole source of his ardor.

He pulls Silberstrand away by her hair and takes charge in just the way he thinks she wants him to. She gladly consents, fighting her way out of her evening gown, letting him position her on the plush on all fours and, with a resounding groan, leading him into her from behind. She grabs him by the balls and tugs to her desired rhythm. Businesslike, she puts his hands on her breasts and shows him how hard to squeeze. Sex and love, thinks Maxim, cursing aloud with delight at his own hardness, how little sorrow there would be in the world if more people could separate the two. The singer tries a couple of times to look back, hoping to heighten her own excitement by seeing his pleasure in mounting her, but Maxim averts his gaze before their eyes can meet.

After they've come, tenderness wells up in him for the woman he's just fucked. She lies on her back. Her breasts don't look as firm as they felt, and flop to either side. He cups one in his hand and gently kisses a swollen nipple that still bears the imprint of his nails. He kisses her waist, rests his head on her well-trained solar plexus, and strokes her loose skin, which moves as his fingers caress it.

The difference between the two bodies could not be greater. Yet he is overcome with a trust he's never felt with another woman. Fucking without love; friendship without admiration: an equality that reminds him of two schoolboys lending each other a hand in the showers at the gym. They both know exactly what the other needs and can give. There
are no explanations. No illusions. There are no games. No conflict. They know their desires and give what they can, neither demanding anything unavailable. They touch without being bound. Friendship.

The discovery moves him, as if it had brought him closer to something great.

Between him and the singer, there are none of the things that make men and women unequal. Pragmatism has eliminated any dishonesty. Their cards are on the table. She expects nothing more than what he's got to offer. There's no relationship getting in the way, and all thanks to the clear agreement they made beforehand.

But how clear has he really been? Maxim briefly wonders what they've actually agreed. She wanted him to come, and he came. Should he have set a price in advance? A time limit? The working relationship hasn't explicitly been discussed. But perhaps that would be too crude. And how would he describe his function? How much can you charge for something you like doing so much? And
when
should he raise the question? She'll probably do that herself; a woman of the world, unquenchable, a world traveler, must be an old hand.

Once again, that inexplicable emotion rises within him, and it annoys him, because it muddles his new image of himself. To get back into the role, he slips the fingers of the hand lying calmly between her legs into her, fiddling around inside. She wriggles a little, opens herself further, and pushes his head down. He briefly wonders whether this, too, is part of his duties, but when she pushes his face into her crotch, still swollen and dripping with lust, he no longer holds back, sinking his teeth into her with an intensity that hurts her but is nonetheless met with an astonished ecstatic scream.

No matter how coarsely he sucks and roots about, his emotion only grows. When he sits up, his eyes are as wet as the rest of his face. Silberstrand dries him off and kisses him, less fiercely now, tenderly. Gratefully. She presses her lips against his eyes as if to drink his tears.

In that instant, he disentangles himself. He walks among the bare tables and the potted palms, annoyed, indecisive, naked, trying to remember how they'd agreed on the payment. They did have an agreement, didn't they? More or less, even if it was partly unspoken. He'd have to learn to be clearer if he wanted to carry on with this kind of thing. But the longer he put it off, the less he could face it.

Silberstrand pulls on her dress and gathers his clothes. He looks through the glass wall while she drapes his shirt over his shoulders, pulls him against her, and rubs his sides, as if to keep him warm. He wipes the mist from the window to see something of the violence outside. The regularity of the lighthouse and the boulevard streetlights show nothing but the raging storm.

“Will you take me to bed?” she asks.

“I've got to get going.” Maxim takes his clothes from her and starts getting dressed.

“At this hour? Don't be silly. How were you planning to get home?”

“I'll take a cab.”

“You don't have any money.”

“I will soon.”

She shrugs.

“Either way, we're going to my room first. You can sleep for an hour or so, but then we'll run through the whole piece
da capo.”

Maxim buckles his belt with exaggerated fastidiousness.

“That's what you want, isn't it, you hot boy?” Silberstrand kneads his crotch. “Maybe a bit calmer the second time around.”

“Again?” he says, doing his best not to see her beauty and her pride in provoking him. “Fine.” He takes a deep breath and speaks his lines as coolly as possible. “But then the meter starts running a second time as well.”

The singer is still smiling, but he sees the pleasure slowly ebb from her eyes. She thinks she has misheard and shakes her head quickly to dispel a thought that seems so misplaced, but the truth comes crashing down just as she's about to ask her young lover to repeat his words.

“You want me to pay you.” She says it quietly because it hurts.

Maxim feels it too.

“We're poor,” he explains. “It's for medicine.”

“You want
me
to pay
you
?” says Silberstrand, as if the reverse seems more plausible.

“You've seen the state Gala's in. If this weren't an emergency, it would never have occurred to me.”

“Oh God!” exclaims the singer, almost motionless. Her eyes are frightened, wandering despondently to a point far behind him, as if she sees a terrible danger approaching. “Oh merciful God, it's come to this!”

For a second she stands there paralyzed, bewildered by the truth.

“I mean,” Maxim corrects himself, shocked by the intensity of her reaction, “of course it would have occurred to me to want to … um, with you, together … but, of course, completely free of charge … who wouldn't want to be with a woman like you? But considering the shortage of funds. I thought … because you said, ‘I'll reward you handsomely for the effort.'”

Her back is straight as she roots through her handbag, her head proud and upright throughout, though it's obvious that she can control her muscles only with the greatest effort. She finds a few notes and hurls them at his feet. Then she suddenly collapses, as if she's been kicked in the gut, sinking to the floor, slow and jerking, like an actor in a film that's coming off the reel. There she remains, curled up, almost lost in the puffy taffeta of the red dress, which spreads slowly over the marble, quietly shivering like Silberstrand herself. Maxim drops to his knees before her. He wants to hold her, soothe her with pleas for forgiveness, but she looks so fragile that he's afraid she'd fall apart at his touch. Slowly she raises her face. It is twisted with sorrow. She suddenly looks so old, so soullessly desolate, that Maxim shrinks back a few steps. He is the one who has broken this woman. She throws her head back like a wounded animal, opening her mouth wide, like a wolf about to howl, and she does, with all her strength, but no sound issues from her. Maxim, who was about to cover his ears in expectation of the voice that can normally drown out a symphony orchestra, drops his hands in astonishment. Her neck muscles are bundled in thick strands, her larynx is vibrating, and the veins in her throat are standing out, but the singer emits nothing but silence.

The only thing that swells is the storm, which fiercely buffets the glass construction with a number of quick gusts. Windowpanes bulge in their frames. They both feel the danger. The singer's eyes follow the roar passing over them, but this cannot dissuade her from her soundless shrieking: to the contrary, she fervently notches up the tension of her inaudible tones, as if to make the champagne flutes vibrate.

Just then, something slams against the top of the windows, five or six times, in quick staccato, before finally smashing through the glass with tremendous force. A large seagull, numb with fright and pain, falls into the middle of the room, trailing blood over the marble tiles. The
sudden displacement of the conservatory's air rips doors open all around, rushing to the lobby, to the boulevard, to the beach. Glass shatters. The palms' heavy leaves are at the mercy of the wind. They wobble. One tree topples over, dragging a blossoming orange tree down with it. The gusts blow in seawater and sand that scours Maxim's skin.

Above all this, the gull is screeching. Silberstrand stands and walks over to the animal. She picks it up with two hands, strokes the head that flinches in fear and the beak that snaps at her. She presses kisses on the wounded body while combing its feathers for pieces of glass.

From the boulevard, Maxim looks back. All over the hotel, lights come on and people peer from behind curtains to locate the source of the uproar. In the distance, he sees the singer who was the beginning and the end of his new career. Erect in the storm, the white seagull's broad fluttering wings pressed against her heart, she stands among the glimmering shards of the winter garden.

“I know that girl,” Gelsomina exclaims one morning. We're having breakfast on our balcony, and I'm sketching my dreams on a napkin. I always keep felt-tip pens within reach so I can scribble down the remnants of the night before they drown in the light of day. Gelsomina joins me under the parasol and slides my plate aside for a better view.

“Betty Boop perhaps?”

Like so many of the women I draw after they've appeared to me in the night, this character has a big head, high heels, and a small body with full breasts, but Gelsomina shakes her head.

“She's on your bulletin board at Cinecittà.” She turns the drawing around. “Is she in our film?”

“Not as far as I know.” I give her a plunging neckline and a yellow dress with black leopard-skin patches.

“Why the scarf tied around her head?”

“She's probably got a headache,” I tease, “from all your questions!”

Playfully, Gelsomina snatches the napkin, even though she sees the drawing isn't finished. I try to grab it back, but she won't surrender it without a fight. She ties the napkin around her head and assumes the exaggerated pose of the young woman I've just drawn: one hand on the back of her head, the other on a hip she sticks out so far it looks almost deformed. She parades around, taunting me, and breaks into a run the moment I give chase. When I catch her, she demands a kiss in exchange for the napkin. I bargain with her until she allows me to give her three.
Gelsomina's eyes are closed and her lips pursed when I suddenly jerk the napkin off her head.