Sometimes those memories comforted her and put her right back to sleep.
Sometimes they only served to backlight the life she had ended up with, revealing all the contradictions and terrors that faced her each day.
Sarah couldn’t fall back to sleep that morning. She closed her eyes again, picturing the newspaper headlines from two days ago. She imagined the planning and rallying going on in that church under the same moonlight. Worst of all, she kept seeing that young promising actress named Sarah Bernhardt at the Odéon being crushed under the mountainous rubble of what she had dreamed of being.
Ten past five. She kicked the covers off and walked into the bathroom. Bent her tired frame over to run the bath.
VINCE BAKER SLEPT FITFULLY. The night shot up at him in flits, reminding him that he was no longer dreaming. Each time he awoke the room was deep in a purple hue. And nothing felt familiar.
That’s a lousy hangover for you. The kind that makes you think you’re going to kick the booze forever.
The room smelled of locked-away boxes. His compass uncertain of which direction he actually faced, having to remind himself that he was even in Los Angeles and not Phoenix or someplace in between. But as the purple began to recede, some of the familiar forms started to take shape. The outline of the pile of unpacked boxes neatly stacked, the top one edged on a slight tilt. The almost unrecognizable rectangle of his couch, where the loose threads stuck out like hair from an old man’s ear and beamed with unusual clarity. And the odd, almost phantasmal cone that he initially took for a mysterious apparition turned out to be nothing other than a pile of clothes overdue for drop-off at the Wash-Rite Laundry around the block. He sat straight up and looked to his side, where the familiar form of a female body lay under a solitary white sheet. Propped on her side, an even line from the peak of her shoulder to the curve of her hip, with the sheet sinking in four distinct wrinkle-waves. Her legs pulled back at a slight angle from her side, flowing straight down until the last bit of form was the slight crest of her foot, toeless under the sheet, cutting like a dancer’s form. He looked at her and said the name Fay, drilling it into his head, as though reinforcing their artifice of familiarity.
By 5:00 A.M. he figured he repeated that same routine at least four times over the course of the night. No wonder his dreams were not evidence enough to convince him that he had actually had some sleep.
Baker gingerly lifted the covers to slide himself out. He parted the checked yellow curtains, the stained insides faded by sunlight, the dust rising, swirling, and twinkling in a strange mixture of fairy dust and filth.
He couldn’t imagine the day extending any further than this moment. Maybe that’s what suicides think before they actually turn out the lights. Perhaps their demise was not always due to a deep dark desperation that masked any inkling of hope, but instead a rational realization that they have hopped into the last possible square and it is literally impossible to imagine stepping anywhere beyond where they stand. He’d covered one suicide. A woman made memorable only by the fact that they shared the same last name was found slumped at the side of her bed in a nightly prayer posture, only her face had been crushed into a white duvet, stained red like a tissue from a bloodied nose. A small black gun rested nonchalantly at her side, as if it were supposed to be there, and when the detective gripped her hair and pulled her head up, there was a clean black hole through her right temple. A simple cease-fire message to the brain. Everybody knew that the female Baker had been pissed at G. G. Johnson and had intended to say something publicly. The problem was nobody knew what, and whatever it was had leaked out that little passage in her skull and spread thin across a bed that everybody knew Johnson had not-so-secretly shared. The LAPD reluctantly ruled it a suicide. Baker’s story was boiled down to something resembling an obit that only ended up running in the Saturday bulldog edition. Both of the Bakers’ story.
Today he just couldn’t imagine going into the newsroom. The same musty smell, ragged smiles, and temporary pressures. It was a job that was practically impossible if you didn’t submit to the illusion of it. Because once you faced that mirror, and for just one moment caught a glimpse of yourself, the ridiculousness of your righteousness and determination became laughable. Another living, breathing cliché. It was the deadlines with the intense pressure that kept the treadmill going. The sense that the moments were ticking away faster than you could keep up with them, daring you to fall behind and become completely lost and obsolete. Your snout had to sniff the ground at all times, tracking every scent, digging up every bone just in case one of them turned out to be something other than a butcher’s scrap.
Baker’s chest sank.
He couldn’t imagine it. Not today.
He regretted not talking to Bernhardt last night. He could have accomplished two things: killed the story, and found out what the goddamn fascination was.
He crawled back into bed and curled up beside Fay. Holding on into the morning. Or at least until the next time he woke, almost screaming.
FOLLOWING A BATH that seemed merely functional, Sarah walked out of the lobby, past the sleepy-eyed desk clerk who between yawns probably only noticed the shadows, into a crisp morning whose breeze seemingly lifted right off the whitecaps. A pause held the pier.
She was alone.
Quietly and momentarily.
Her crew was due to arrive in the late morning, and Max would make sure the set was constructed to a workable phase in order that run-throughs could begin as soon as tonight. He was such a priss about things like this. They needed rehearsals, not run-throughs. They had done this play a hundred times already, and she had already meticulously blocked every movement and nuance down to the number of breaths per beat long before they had opened the tour. Everybody knew where they were supposed to be. But on a dramatic level the play was not quite working. After she talked it out with Max, the cast would need to work the changes through, scene by scene.
Marguerite Gautier was flat and the play was lifeless.
Yet the audiences didn’t seem to care. They cheered because it was her. She could stand there speechless for three hours straight and they would still give her a minimum of ten curtain calls. Her presence had overshadowed her art. Why bother? She should just put it on celluloid for the Americans and forget about it. But until then the Sarah Bernhardt Company needed an organized and back-to-basics rehearsal. But Max would insist on a quick run-through instead. Just enough to make sure the set was comfortable for all. He would tell Sarah not to confuse the actors with her search for interpretations, that it was her approach that mattered, and that the actors would undoubtedly play their parts the same, only making the occasional emotional adjustment when necessary. But to concern them in a theoretical and philosophical discussion on the motives of Marguerite would only serve to confuse them and throw everything off-kilter. There were obligations to be met, and time did not allow for full-blown rehearsals. Max’s rule was that everybody needed to be present at the run-through, even her dresser, Sophie, as though some siren wail of a costume emergency might sound, causing a needle and scissors resuscitation (along with the hairdresser, Ibé—which for him was no chore, as he literally spent every other night sleeping backstage on top of the wigs to protect them from lord knows what). But she knew Max was doing more than watching the crew, he was watching her, as well. Keeping sure that she didn’t slip away. That’s probably why he wanted her private railcar parked right down there on the pier. Always best to expose the hiding places.