She looked up at him, then turned away from the immediate boredom that he inspired, and finished bringing in her fish.
“I see you caught one,” Kinney said, sounding not fully surprised.
“You are a very astute man. I should think you’ll go places.”
He smiled and then coughed to clear his throat. “We’ll get that fellow cooked up for you right away. You’re quite an angler.”
The fish lay still on the deck. No flopping or fighting. One black eye round and protruding, looking upward. The end of the glistening silver hook poked through the side of its cheek, stained by a patch of blood. Sarah dropped the pole to her side. “I have never seen a fish so resigned before,” she said.
“I’d say you caught yourself a sea bass,” Kinney said. He leaned forward a little more to inspect the catch. “That would be my guess.”
She ignored him.
“Chef Louis can do amazing things with a fish.”
She propped herself up on her knees and crawled to the bass, pulling on the line to drag the fish closer to her. She crooked her index finger into its limp mouth, delicately wriggling the hook, then slid it out like a jeweled earring. The thin steel dropped against the wood. In silence.
“Madame Bernhardt, you don’t need to trouble yourself with the messy stuff. Chef Louis…”
She took out her room key from the King George. Long and thin, with sharp jagged cuts, and hooked to a metal-banded slip of paper with the number 511 handwritten in the middle. She rolled the fish to the side. Then placed the tip of the key just below its neck. Catching the sunlight.
“No need to soil yourself.” Abbot Kinney’s voice trembled for the first time. His hands grabbed with no true sense of purpose or direction. He looked back to the crowd at the end of the dock.
Sarah pierced the skin with her key. The flesh popped, and a thin clear fluid washed over her hands. A stale, saltwater smell followed an outpouring of heavy syrup. She drew in a deep breath. Her grip tensing around the makeshift blade. To imagine that anybody would challenge the morality of her life. Especially in the name of God. The same God that she had nearly married. Prayed to. Paid penance. And even had her soul, half Jewess and all, cleansed in his holy water. Accusations destroy and damage. Like a stray bullet fired from hatred straight into her heart.
She drew her hand forward, ripping an incision that seemed more of the genus mutilation.
“Madame Bernhardt, there are reporters back in the crowd.” His pleas were lost against the siren chirps of vigilant gulls.
“It is amazing that they can see the dimness of this star.”
She wasn’t originally cast in Tobie Recouverant la Vue those fifty-odd years ago. But she had begged. The Mother Superior told her that she was too pure and withdrawn to get on a stage and act. That her meekness was a virtue. Something she had interpreted as recognition of her closeness to God. “I could play the fish,” she had suggested with a trace of desperation in her tone. “You can wrap me in paper. Paint it. I can bring it to life so that the angel’s work seems more meaningful.”
The Mother Superior had bowed her head. Her eyes softened then turned strict. Almost manlike. “You will not be given a part in the play. We have assigned a dog to play the part of the fish. He’ll walk on, then walk off. It is that small.”
“But I want to—”
“You don’t need to be in the spotlight. Stay fragile for God.”
Sarah could not make eye contact with the nun. She had turned on her heels and walked down the red stretch of carpet that rolled atop the marble floor. The eyes of a dozen Jesuses looking down on her. Knowing the Mother Superior didn’t understand. She didn’t get it. Sarah did not want to be cast in the play from vanity, or even as a public declaration of her faith. She wanted to feel the power of the angel. To experience the true strength of God that poured through that fish into the blind man’s eyes. To feel some connection of spirit. That’s all.
Abbot Kinney’s complexion turned pale. He edged back a step and averted his stare away from the fish carnage. “Madame Bernhardt, please. The kitchen staff has graciously offered…”
She looked up at him. Her hands still hewing the fish. A thumb slipped beneath the skin, reverently stroking. “Then help me gather my things, would you. Be a good boy.”
Kinney straightened up and looked back to the crowd slowly inching their way up the pier in line with the auditorium. His hands turned jittery. He scooped up the fishing rod. The line swung. The silver hook glowed, then dangled capriciously at his loafers.
“You’re not doing me much good just standing there.” She spoke without looking at him. Her hands now cleaving the fish’s belly into two halves.
Kinney wrapped the line around the pole, securing it with the hook. He tapped the butt of the rod against the pier, and then checked back to the crowd. He sighed. He looked down to see Sarah cradling her face in the fish’s innards. Her nose and mouth engulfed. The bass’s body spread like open wings across her cheeks. “For the love of god.”
The insides were warm against her skin. She swore the heart still pumped. Stomach grinding. Its lungs pressing for air. Blood and fluids that reeked of life on the edge of decay pooled across her cheeks, then leaked in slow streams down to her neck. Nearly fifty-three years later she has finally played in Mother Superior’s Tobie Recouverant la Vue. But she has been cast as neither the fish, nor the angel, nor the blind man, nor his son. Instead she has played all the parts in a one-woman show. Rocking back and forth on her knees. The eviscerated bass held taut to her face as she tries to gain sight. To understand some face of God.
THE CROWD GASPED. Boots and shoes inched forward. One could almost hear the scribble of reporters’ pencils. There was a contemplative silence, as though most people were still trying to decipher what they were witnessing. Maybe the light was playing tricks. Baker stood on his tiptoes, vying for more detail. He watched as Abbot Kinney fruitlessly positioned himself between the heathen and the onlookers. A stupidly long eclipse with a fishing pole in his hand, looking helpless and unusually voiceless.
But Sarah obviously heard the anticipation of the audience. She twisted her torso so that her face had peered around Kinney’s frame, the fish mask cupped over her nose. Then she rolled her eyes with a tragicomic smile up to the sky where just a wisp of cloud hung lightly, in order to both bring about a laugh, and also to reassure her fans of her character’s confidence.
Baker almost laughed out loud at the defiant clown who at once mocked and acquiesced. The precision timing, the exact body language, an expression contorted for effect without being prey to exaggeration. He had never seen her before, hadn’t ever really known much about her before the bishop’s wrath, but he always had a slight admiration for public defiance. In her small act, he could see her commitment to her art, and her extreme confidence in herself. In watching her on the pier, one wouldn’t ever suppose the intense controversy surrounding her and its cancerous effect on body and soul. But as she turned slightly to the right, Vince Baker was able to see both her eyes, shaped like turned acorns, pupils like wilted buds, and in them he recognized the gem of celebrity. One that twirls in the spotlight of the sun, hoping to catch all the rays that will burst it into one startlingly magnificent light for all the world to see. He almost left. He didn’t have time for that shit.
WITH A SLIGHT CHUCKLE from the crowd, followed by some scattered hand-claps, Kinney exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, you’re killing me with this craziness,” in the same voice of all those self-indulgent, where-are-they-now directors who schemed to keep her off the stage because true talent always threatens the stability of mediocrity.