The Ring 💍 Paris
The Actress
August 17, 2018
As he opened the door to the café on Rue Marcadet, Ken could smell the fresh croissants and baguettes. The scent mingled with the pungent aroma of espresso to create a sort of heaven on earth. Light, yet earthy, a sort of French yin and yang. Yet the sound in the air wasn’t right. He expected to hear Edith Piaf or Serge Gainsbourg. At least something with an accordion. On this northern side of Montmartre, devoid of tourists, he expected to hear something French. Something resonant with yearning and angst — like Alain Bashung’s Si la Terre est ronde et qu’ils s’agrippent, au delà c'est le vide / If the world is round and they cling to it, beyond lies the void.
As a result of his expectation, Ken was unpleasantly surprised to hear an American pop song. He knew it by heart, having suffered through the 90s as a high school nerd. In his parent’s basement he’d listen to Radiohead and 60s acid metal, dreaming of a long-gone age of psychedelic abandon and a world without AIDS. He was tortured by the notion of girls without bras and haunted by lyrics about free love.
The song was called “The Age of Aquarius,” by a band called The Fifth Dimension. “When the moon is in the Seventh House / And Jupiter aligns with Mars / Then peace will guide the planets.” He used to have those idealistic dreams, but twenty years in Academia had battered some sense into his head. The fifth dimension, he thought to himself, as if four dimensions weren’t enough! “Mystic crystal revelation / And the mind’s true liberation.” If that was liberation, Ken thought, then everything I do is a step backward.
And yet he couldn’t deny that something in the song also pulled him backward, to a time when he was sitting in his basement stoned, thinking about a better world.
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On the low table in front of the sofa he had a purple lava lamp in the shape of a crystal ball. As the red lebanese hash danced on the edges of his occipital lobe, he thought he saw the bubbling purple waves blur into hot pink on the left and navy blue on the right. He shook his head and remembered that he had taken two caps of organic mescaline two weeks ago. He could only conclude that he was having a flashback.
Ken looked across the crowded café and saw Martine, and forgot all about those years.
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Martine had been waiting for Kenneth, as an actress waits behind a curtain that’s about to rise.
Martine loved acting, even if what she was acting was also real. It reminded her of when she was thirteen and started to try on different personas, just as her mother had done as an amateur actress, in and out of marriage. At thirteen, the chemicals flew around Martine’s body, crashing into other chemicals that told her completely different things about who she was.
Her mother couldn’t tolerate her thirteen-year-old daughter a minute longer. She yelled, “If you don’t stop acting like such a slut, I’ll throw you out on the street where you belong!” Martine yelled back, “I guess there’s only room for one Drama Queen in this apartment!”
So it was a great relief when Martine signed up for a weekend drama class and no longer breathed the perfumed air of the cramped green living-room of the apartment.
In this class Martine realized that she didn’t have to decide on a specific human personality. She also found out that she was spectacularly good at pretending to be someone else. Even before getting her baccalaureate, she starred in several shows at the local theatre, the Funambule. After this, she was asked to audition at the Théâtre Édouard VII.
Her mother was rabid with jealousy and pride.
The adult world of drama confirmed to Martine that there was a type of human being that couldn’t be pigeon-holed and that didn’t play by the rules. She could be Beatrice one week and Medea the next. She could even take Medea further, and drink her mother’s blood while snorting cocaine from the low table in front of the director’s couch. She could act out her hundred selves and still be a single unified being: The Actress.
The big difference between then and now was that now she was in control, playing each role, not becoming each part. She had a critical distance which came with her 32 years. And the critics, whether at the Funambule or the Comédie Française, loved her. She had even been to the Élysée Palace for breakfast.
It was rumoured that the President had fallen for her latest triumph. Her mother read all about it in the society pages. She burned the reviews and accused the critics of ageism, of punishing la belle France with the flower of youth, which would only disappoint them in time. But Martine didn’t care much about such honours. She told the President that all she cared about was the art of dissembling, and then gave him a wink.
Martine ignored the critical acclaim of the established theatre, and focused instead on the art of improvisation. She started experimenting with the creation of complex real-time existential scenarios. These were linked to other scenarios that even the actors playing the main roles had to guess at. They seemed like impromptu works of art, with clear settings and stage directions, yet designed to lead anywhere.
Every time Kenneth got involved in such a dramatic experiment, he told her that she was creating a scene. She blushed, but not from embarrassment.
In the cafe scene, she sat up straight in her chair, although she still wasn’t entirely sure why she wanted to provide her audience with an insight into her motives. Perhaps it had something to do with the way Kenneth made her feel. He was a visiting professor at the Collège de France, and it had really got to his head. Last week at the flea market he told her that she couldn’t tell the difference between an original Isis and a knock-off of the Virgin Mary. He seemed serious, but then he said he was joking. But she couldn’t tell the difference. She was a hundred times smarter than he was, but he refused to admit it.
She thought, I’ll meet him at L’Etoile de Montmartre and give him the ring. He’ll have to wear it, or it’s over. And when he wears it, it’ll remind him of the story that goes with it. He thinks he knows everything.
Martine got to the cafe early in order to get the table by the front window, the one in the spotlight of the sun. She didn’t want him to miss a thing.
As usual, Kenneth was on time. She knew he would arrive on the dot, as English people love to say, she thought sarcastically, as a replacement for spontaneity. So she had his favourite, a café crème, on the table thirty seconds before he sat down.
Between her espresso and his café crème lay a sparkling ring, blue and silver. He started to say “Salu—” but she looked at him sharply, as if he were late for the show. The curtain was already half way up the stage.
She put her fingers to her lips and pressed them until the blood flowed away, from ruby to crimson, from scarlet to coral. It was as if she was mastering her emotions and could finally speak again. She pitched her voice an octave higher than usual, and inserted jagged breaks, to make her emotions seem even more real than they were.
She started abruptly, yet obliquely, like when the heroine blurts out the most significant details before the eyes of the audience have adjusted to the light: “There’s no way I could’ve known. I was having a drink with Antoine in the Quartier Latin. At La Maison de Verlaine, fifty blocks away. I had just bought this ring, this beautiful light blue ring. It’s exactly the same colour as the pendent my father bought me for my sweet sixteenth.” She pronounced the last two words with a Southern belle accent, which Ken thought was a wonderful thing to hear at any time (he could almost hear the echo of Tennessee Williams). It was especially wonderful coming from the lips of a stylish Parisienne.
She pointed between her considerable breasts and said, “This one.” But the pendant, on the end of its silver chain, was lost down there somewhere. She opened her blouse further so that he could take a better look. It was a foamy, light blue rock onto which Aphrodite herself might have emerged from a smooth white swell.
Something in its crystal lattice spoke to her. Would it speak to him too? She looked deep into his eyes, as if to draw them upward to the eyes of the protagonist on the stage. After a pause, she said, “I want to give you this ring. It will connect us. It matches your eyes. The dealer said it’s kyanite.”
She stared at the ring for several moments before continuing. “Antoine was telling me something about a course he was teaching. Japanese Anime and the Art of the Postmodern Something or Other. I was just pretending to listen. All of a sudden I looked at the ring, which seemed for a fraction of a second to become darker blue and brighter white, both at the same time. I said to myself: My mother is dead.”
“At first I felt a heaviness, as if she were pressing down on my chest, like when I was in my teens. But then I realized I wasn’t responsible for what she did to herself. Why should I feel guilty?”
Martine looked introspective, then hurt, then defiant, then continued: “I was sitting there, drinking with Antoine the whole time. We’d been there for three hours and were at the end of our second bottle of wine. He was saying something or other about manga — or manganese, or anomie, or anime, qu’importe! — while my mother was draping herself for the last time over her velvet chaise-longue, long past plastered, in her velvet and crimson living-room across from the theatre.”
Martine’s pronunciation was perfect, her intonation nostalgic yet precise. She was facing the existential drift of our tiny planet. Staring straight into Kenneth’s eyes, she said, “Her eyes were fixed open, looking at the theatre across the street. Le Funambule, The Tight-rope Walker. It was as if she had attached a rope from the theatre to the apartment, and had walked from one stage to the next.”
“I can imagine the drama in my mother’s head in those last minutes, after she’d taken the poison. She would play her final role as Gertrude, her favourite character from Hamlet. She had rehearsed this role for decades. Every time she was poisoned by her husband, who hoped to poison Hamlet instead. She said that Claudius was too cowardly to stop her from drinking the poisoned wine. After three or four glasses, she would shout out, Le Cochon! He lets me drink it because he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s to blame!”
“My mother blamed him for everything. Her death would prove it. But she also knew in her heart of hearts that he loved her, despite his evil ways. She whispered, Hamlet, the drink... and her head fell into a world of velvet.”
Martine looked up toward the café window, as if she might catch the meaning of Fate as it passed by. “My mother died as the ghost died, as Ophelia died, and as Gertrude died: betrayed by them all. She drifted upward to the stars, joining Ophelia among the crow-flowers and long purples of heaven. And at the same time she drifted downward, into the river, a creature native and indued unto that element.”
Martine turned her gaze from the window to the table, and stared into the tiny black well of her espresso. Death was only a moment in time. And all too soon even the thought of the great void — le grand abîme — would also be gone.
She looked up at Kenneth. It was time for the protagonist to end the soliloquy, and bring the audience back to the real world. The coffee was the transition, the objective correlative. She cast her eyes downward and slowly along the table, passing over the blue ring, to his café crême. “That’s how I think of it now. Back then, all I knew was that she was dead. The blue ring told me. I solemnly raised my glass to Antoine, and said to him, My mother is dead.”
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Martine had told Ken the story of her strange intuition a number of times. Each time, it bothered him to think of a mind that could experience such a thing. A mind he was otherwise enchanted by. But what bothered him this time was that her experience occurred while she was drinking with Antoine. That part of the story was new. Drinking for three hours straight.
Ken was never quite sure what Antoine meant to Martine. She often stopped herself short when she started to talk about him. Antoine kept calling her on his stupid pink cellphone with the Hello Kitty beep, which he called ironique. Ken wondered if there wasn’t something less than ironic about his irony. Martine said they were just friends, but Ken couldn’t get used to the way they kissed each other hello and goodbye, as if it were part of some great drama. He’d pull her toward him with one hand, his fingers creeping up her back and disappearing somewhere near the clasp of her bra. Then he’d pull her face to his lips, adding a mock gesture as if to say, Oh, darling, the servants have put out the candles on the veranda!
Martine loved that sort of thing. Ken didn’t know if it was because she was French or because she yearned to be back on the stage. Yet whenever she dipped into Antoine’s arms, she didn’t look into Antoine’s eyes, but into his.
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Martine was in tears now, the way she used to do it as a teenager at Le Funambule. She had it all balanced as if she were a tightrope walker: on one side she was thinking sadly about her mother on the crimson velvet; on the other side, she was remembering the time when she was fifteen and her father told her that she was the most beautiful girl in the world. She was heading out the door, angry at her mother and confused about who she was and how she’d make it through the school year. No one understood her, and she could never say what she really felt. She was like Voltaire’s Micromégas, just smaller and more confused. But still, she came from more or less the same planet. She was just as alien.
She saw the root of Sartre’s chestnut tree, dark and sinister, creeping out from the earth, making her feel slightly nauseous. Her nerves were shot and she had two small pimples above her left eyebrow. That morning she had a twenty-minute oral on Meaning in French Drama. Only the French could do this to their children. Her clothing was too tight in one place and too loose in another when her father stopped her and told her she was the most beautiful girl in the world. He kissed her on the nose, and watched her lift up from the floorboards and float out the door.
Three years later her mother had worn her father into the ground. Martine often saw him on her way to university, under the elevated metro at Barbès, hawking kaftans and leather hats from Senegal. He had a thing for African women. He called them the farthest thing from les salopes de Montmartre. She remembered seeing him a week before he died, disappearing down Rue de la Goutte d’Or, bewitched by the swaying hips of an African woman half his age.
Martine swore to herself that she would never be like her mother.
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