In the next scene it was clear that this Lilith Weiss had come to possess the young man she’d desired in the nightclub. But she cast him off in the morning and ruined him with the woman he’d loved. And the movie went on, and she carried on in this same way. Selene played the modern succubus, seeking out men in the night and seducing them and then abandoning them and destroying them by exposing their deeds to their wives and to the world.
She had a long and sometimes delicate, sometimes horrific solitary scene in her own small room where she remembered her father and how he went out and destroyed women in just such a way and how he always came back home and beat her mother. And Selene rose after these memories and opened a drawer in her commode and took out a photograph of her mother and she looked at it and wept.
All of this was filmed in a severely stylized urban landscape, where nothing stood straight, where everything leaned and tilted as if to fall; where everything was stalked by or shrouded in shadow; where black and white abutted along razor-cut borders; where people appeared and vanished before your eyes.
And at last she saw a man in a park berating his wife and then slapping her across the cheek. And Selene — this Lilith — stalked this man, and she began the process of seduction, as she did the others, and she brought him back to her room. But this man she did not expose; this man she did not abandon. As he was eagerly stripping down to his union suit, she moved to her commode and opened the drawer, and for the first time we could see inside. There was her mother’s picture. And there was a pistol. She took out the pistol. And she shot the man to death.
Several times I looked at Selene as she watched herself from an aisle seat of the Cinéma De Pera. Each time it had been the same: her face was lifted slightly, in precisely the same angle; her face flickered softly from the light of the screen; she showed no emotion whatsoever. And I looked a last time when the man she’d shot on screen doubled over and sank to his knees.
This time she closed her eyes, not to avoid seeing this act but softly, as if to meditate. And then she lowered her face and she opened her eyes. She turned her face directly to me. As if she’d known I was there all along.
I nodded to her.
She did not nod in return. But neither did she take her face from mine.
I raised my hands before me and I gave her a slow-motion, soundless round of applause. When I finished, she turned her face away again. She lowered her veil and then she sat waiting, as did I, until the screen flickered dark, the piano fell silent, the house lights went up full, and the audience filed past us.
When the ushers rushed by, toward the front to prepare the theater for the next showing, Selene and I rose. I stepped into the aisle first and waited for her. She turned to me. She stopped. She even lifted her veil.
The face she presented felt recently familiar. It had a sense of an extinguished light, of a mind emptied of memory but full of its sad effects. It was the face of the solitary Lilith Weiss as she looked up from the picture of her mother in her hand.
“We have to talk now,” I said.
And she said, “Not till we are sitting at your table in the hotel salon.”
48
Selene Bourgani and I arrived at the corner table where I’d spent the afternoon. After four reels’ worth of piano music at the cinema tonight, another piano was playing at the far end of the salon. We settled into our chairs and Selene lifted her veil, but the piano’s slow, sad little waltz turned both our faces toward it.
Then she looked at me.
She shivered. Very faintly, but I saw it and I knew what it was about. I sensed it more than saw it, really. And I knew what it was because I felt a small, similar tremor myself.
“We both heard that,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
On the Lusitania the night we met. “Songe d’Automne.”
I laid my forearm on the tabletop, stretching halfway toward her, and she looked at it.
She slowly removed her black gloves, watching the process closely as she did so.
She sensed the incipient lift of my arm from the table, more intention than action.
“Wait,” she said softly.
I stopped.
She put her bare right hand on top of mine for a moment. She squeezed. She withdrew.
“I haven’t forgotten what you did,” she said.
I wished I could omit the talk for this evening, could just drink with her and take her to her room and hope for gentle please on this night, as uncharacteristic as I’d always thought that was for me with a woman.
But it was I who had to get rough now, in another way.
I think she knew it.
She was reading my face. “Let’s order some wine before we speak,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Something French,” she said.
And so we decided upon a white, a chilled bottle of an oakey Pouilly-Fuissé.
We took our first sips without touching glasses. We weren’t superstitious types. We both knew we had business to do.
“When did you see me tonight?” I asked.
“Before I stepped into the salon,” she said.
“I’m glad you’re taking precautions,” I said. “Things will get difficult now.”
She laughed softly. “As if they haven’t already?”
“I prefer surprises to unknowns.”
She nodded.
I said, “And there are too many unknowns ahead of us as it is. We can’t have any between us now.”
She looked at me. “I thought we had an agreement.”
“That lapsed,” I said.
She waited.
I had to play my possibilities as certainties.
“Why would an Armenian go to bed with a Turk?” I said. And even as her eyes flickered, telling me I was right, I added, “Especially a Turk with the blood of your people on his hands.”
She made her eyes go dead and she took a sip of her wine.
“I told you I’m only doing this for myself,” she said, though her voice was too soft, too much on the verge of a tremor.
“You need to hope the movies never start to talk,” I said.
She knew what I meant.
“I’m not acting,” she said.
“That’s why I can tell you’re lying,” I said.
“Don’t you think my people want to know his plans?”
That thought had continued to kick around in me and I figured it would stop kicking once she confessed it. It didn’t.
“What’s your name?” I said, moving away to the unexpected question for now, the easier question to answer. I would play this in that other persona, a role I found myself missing: Christopher Cobb, reporter. I missed simply getting a fragment of a fact here, another there, and then wedding them in my Corona, putting it on the street and moving on.
But my life was on the line. Hers too. I could do this like a reporter only if it worked.
“Selene Bourgani,” she said, but she played the lie now. Her voice said to me: Guess.
Selene was the Greek goddess of the moon. “What’s the Armenian word for the moon?” I asked.
She smiled. “My name,” she said.
I waited.
She leaned to me across the table. Her voice went very soft. She said, “Can’t we just go upstairs now and fuck?”
I am a man of words. Words and theatrics. King James for words. Shakespeare for theatrics. For both, actually. I love that forbidden word, to be honest. The possibility of that word. And at this moment her using that word felt as if she had just put her hands together at the center of her chest in this public place and ripped open her black bodice and exposed her naked breasts.
But I said, “No. We can’t.”