fic: the game is worth the candle (rpf)
the game is worth the candle
rpf. the door swings both open and shut; he’s going to pass through both ways. mélanie laurent/august diehl. rated pg-13. 3503 words.
notes: oh good god in heaven as if this wasn't inevitable? um, as always these are lies, lies not intended to offend and instead are merely the product of my winter break induced boredom/tumblr addiction/excess of time on my hands. as always, my darling endearlings, i am pretty sure this would not have happened without you, *laughs*.
BERLIN, ALASKA IN WINTER // RUN, AIR // THE RIP, PORTISHEAD // SHILLER, RATATAT // MISTAKE, MOBY
We’re shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me
spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls
right out of my mouth.
(Dirty Valentine, Richard Siken)
In Paris there is a knock on the door.
It is a well-accepted concept that people are always leaving. People, like time, are things you can’t hold on to - they always wriggle free. But the thing to keep in mind is simple and yet often still ignored: in order to leave you have to come first. You have to let them in.
Their first time together in Cannes a reporter told Diane: “you’ve got the last nice bloke left, huh?” Diane had smiled and August had drawn his face in an expression of mock affront. Mélanie had smiled, too. Perhaps she knew.
There are no nice men, not here, maybe not anywhere, and there are no ladies. August isn’t a nice man. Mélanie isn’t a lady. August leaves open gaps in conversation and Mélanie tries hard not to fill them.
August is always leaving.
Mélanie opens the door.
-
At an event in Rome there is a pitcher of what they are calling limoncello, but Mélanie thinks it just tastes like rubbing alcohol mixed with lemons. She downs her small glass in one heady gulp and fights not to grimace as it works its way down her throat, warms her chest.
“You’re supposed to sip it,” Diane hisses, amused. On the opposite side of Mélanie, August laughs. Mélanie’s mouth is tart as she smiles at him.
Maybe it starts here.
Maybe not.
-
Nothing happened for a long time. Mélanie thinks that matters, even though it probably doesn’t because one thing holds true: it did happen. It’s still happening.
It’s probably Daniel’s fault.
-
It’s not Daniel’s fault.
-
At Cannes, Daniel pointed at August and said:
“You are my dear friend,” and he pointed to Mélanie, “and you are my dear friend. I want you both to become dear friends, too.”
Mélanie drank champagne and August drank what smelled like gin. She drank and he drank and they talked, and talking turned to laughing, turned to some twisted mash of English and French, never German (“I don’t speak the German,” she slurred at one point; “I know, believe me, I know,” he said), turned to more drunken stumbling than actual dancing and by the end of the night she told Daniel that it was decided and official.
“August is a dear, dear, dear friend of mine,” she said.
She didn’t see him again for three months.
-
“That is the problem with Hollywood,” Mélanie says with a laugh. “They are always throwing parties. And I find it so hard to say no.” She laughs again.
This time there is a party because there is a Special Edition DVD. More importantly there is a party because Quentin says there is a party.
There is a party and this is where it starts.
He is drunk. So is she, and this never works as an excuse but it does offer context. He is drunk and she is drunk, so when August leans forward and his mouth hits the corner of her mouth, more skin than lip, it is neither unwelcome nor a total surprise. There is still that jolt though, that flip of the stomach and complete lack of certainty as to what she is supposed to do next - if she will do anything next.
August solves the problem for her. His hand skims her neck around to the back of her head and grips tight, almost painfully so. His eyes are unfocused but meet hers and his lips slant in a crooked smile. He leans forward again and this time does not miss his target. He kisses her firmly, his mouth hard against hers, but Mélanie does not kiss him back. She stands there, her arms loose at her sides, and August grips her right shoulder tightly (the curve of bare skin fits neatly in the enclosure his hand creates), his fingers burrow deeper into her hair, tangle, pull.
Mélanie opens her mouth to breathe, and as she does, August makes a soft sound, and his mouth opens too. His open mouth closes over her open mouth and his tongue is hot against hers; she can taste the sour sticky sweet thickness of the beer he drank earlier, and she is kissing him back. He deepens the kiss even more, both hands now clutching the sides of her face as her own hands grab at the front of his shirt.
Later - much later, much, much later and not tomorrow - she will find herself across a sales rack on Rodeo Drive with Marion, a dark green dress in hand, and Mélanie will tell Marion:
“The boy’s no good. And I know that.”
And Marion will say:
“The boy’s a man.”
Mélanie won’t buy the dark green dress but she will toy with the thought of August taking it off her body. She buys the blue slacks instead and calls them sensible. August never sees them.
-
They make another film together.
He is playing a Nazi again. And she is playing a Jew, again. Only this time they get to fall in love. Only this time the film is about the two of them. And maybe no one will see it, no one will want to bother with the subtitles without Tarantino’s name behind it all, but they make the film and this time they get to fall in love.
(Don’t get lost in ambiguous phrasing: we are still talking about their characters here).
(We are also talking about the actors, but you knew that already).
(We could stop here and imagine everything bright and happy and perfect, Nazi uniforms and film crew aside. We could do that, but that’s called living a lie and maybe that is the heart of acting but no relationship has ever persisted on a foundation of lies, no bright and happy and perfect one that is. So we can’t stop here, we have to move forward. They have to keep moving too, because maybe that is what attraction is: that freight train boring down on top of you and if you don’t move fast enough, if you don’t dodge it - you know how Anna Karenina ends, everyone does, splat).
(The thing is that no man can outrun a train).
(They’re not going to outrun this; they will deny they were ever chased).
-
“You look good,” he said the first day of filming.
She blatantly looked him up and down and raised an eyebrow. August laughed.
-
In this film he kisses her on the mouth like their lives depend on it.
In this film when he kisses her full on the mouth he does not taste like beer and he does not taste like so many smoked cigarettes, but instead he tastes warm and male and like something she remembers.
She kisses him back. This time Mélanie kisses him back immediately but there is no small sound from him as their mouths open in unison and fuse together.
August’s arm is heavy around her waist. She presses her body to his and the cold air bites them both.
They only need one take.
-
They sleep together for the first time their second time together at Cannes.
Their film fares well enough. People like it, people don’t hate it. Both their characters die and she remembers the sticky feel of the fake blood on her hands as she grasped for what was supposed to be August’s dying body. She wears a purple dress with an open back to the premiere and August’s hand is warm against her skin.
She smiles for the photos and he does too, and the entire event has the eerie, muted feeling of the year before. “Déjà vu!” she says, then laughs. August jerks his head to look at her and then he laughs as well.
At the presscall a reporter says: “You two knew each other well, knew how to work well, from your previous film, yes?”
“Of course,” Mélanie said smoothly. August smirked.
They had worked together for all of one week, all of two scenes together.
-
In Cannes it happens for the first time.
It is not night, she is not drunk and neither is he. It is morning, their premiere the night before, and he has a flight to Berlin and she has decided to stay on in Cannes. “I like it here,” she says to him, his eyebrow arched, the question unasked.
It is morning and her hotel room is a mirror image of his though she does not know this. He does. August kisses her first. He has a suitcase and he brings it to her door.
He knocks twice; she opens the door in the hotel’s robe.
“Safe flight, oui,” she says and August does not answer. She cocks her head to the right and this is when he kisses her.
(Mélanie will later think it matters that they took the time, that they paused, that this wasn’t entirely frenzied and thoughtless, because they stopped, they paused and they brought his suitcase in from the hall).
She doesn’t see him again until he shows up at her front door five weeks later.
“Can I come in?” he will ask.
-
“You going to sing a song about this?” he sneered.
Mélanie grabbed the nearest thing - her jacket - and threw it at him.
August ducked and laughed.
-
Mélanie meets Diane for lunch in New York City. It is late autumn and rain turns to sleet against the restaurant’s windows.
“You ever think about having kids?” Diane asks aburptly.
“Hmm?” Mélanie hums and then puts her fork down. “You are asking me if I think about babies?” she asks in English.
“Sure,” Diane shrugs. “You ever think about having one?”
Mélanie frowns. “I guess I think of them,” she says slowly. “I think of them the same way I think of things like, I do not know, what if I was born a man instead of a woman? What if I was born last century not this century? What if,” Mélanie leans forward, excited, “I am not the real Mélanie and there is another, how you say, universe out there with the real Mélanie and I am just a phony copy.” She leans back and picks up her water glass. “I think about babies like that,” she says, an afterthought. “What If I was a mother?”
“But you don’t want to be one?”
“I would not know where to keep a baby!” Mélanie says. “I do not know who I would want the father to be. I do not know too many things.”
Diane is silent.
“Merde,” Mélanie curses. “You have a baby now? Or, you are going to have a baby now?”
“No,” Diane says quietly. “But sometimes I wonder.”
Both women lapse into silence and the restaurant is crowded, hot and loud.
“August has a baby now,” Mélanie says. The way she says it, it is directed at no one in particular and she stares straight ahead, just past Diane’s head. Diane does not answer. Diane does not know what to say. For one reason, in her mind this conversation had been about her, and for another she has never understood Mélanie and August, however loosely their names might be paired in her mind.
Mélanie turns her attention back to Diane and offers a small, shy smile. “Quentin called me the other day.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. I tell him that his movie was the best and the worst thing to ever happen to me. He laughed at me. He tells me that it is how it normally works, that this is no surprise.”
“He’s probably right,” Diane says drolly.
“Probably,” Mélanie echoes. And that is the end of it. In the next minute Mélanie is picking the radicchio out of her salad with a grimace and Diane is telling her about Josh’s show and the sun is shining behind the rain and the sleet and the women at the table next to them are laughing, and in that next minute the two women join the rest of the world.
-
For half a week (read: three days) Mélanie is sick with food poisoning and convinces herself she is pregnant. She buys three tests, but she does not take any of them. In the end, it’s the shrimp cocktail’s fault and not August’s but for three days straight she entertains the thought that maybe it was him, that maybe there is something inside her.
She knows it’s not disappointment she feels, but it isn’t relief either.
She thinks it’s called wanting something more for herself, but these are things they do not talk about.
(“What is this exactly, hmm?” she asked once from behind her kitchen counter. He was shirtless and disheveled at her kitchen table.
He pointed at her hand.
“A coffeepot,” he said).
-
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Daniel says.
August concedes.
-
“You only fuck the men you work with?” August asks her with a smile not exactly kind. They are in her apartment in Paris and BBC News is on the television.
“That bother you?” she asks with a similar grin.
“Where is Damien?” he asks quietly.
Mélanie stretches her arms in front of her, rests her hands on her knees and hunches forward.
“Ireland. Home. Not that it’s any of your business.”
August fixes her with a mock scowl. He leans back in his armchair, away from her.
“And what the hell’s that supposed to mean, hmm?”
Mélanie considers her next words carefully. She looks at her hands, she looks at her knees. When she looks back up at him he is smirking. She decides not to consider her words carefully.
“I don’t ask you about your wife.” August’s face darkens slightly, just enough, and Mélanie picks at her black tights.
“No,” he says evenly, “you don’t. Is that not part of the arrangement?”
“You see Belle de jour too many times,” she says in heavily-accented English.
“‘You only come in the afternoons,’” he quotes in French, and he leers.
Mélanie lays back on the couch and pushes her hair off her face. “I don’t go anywhere,” she says. “You come to me.”
August lights a cigarette.
“So it would seem.”
In the next five minutes the following will occur: August will put his cigarette out in an untouched cup of coffee and Melanie’s skirt will ride up as she slouches lower on the couch. He will kiss her first, he is always the one to kiss first, and her shoes will be heavy and loud as they fall from her feet. He will rip her tights. He will fuck her on the couch and she will come with her face pressed against the black leather, and Mélanie will have been right:
She does not go anywhere. He always comes to her.
-
He visits her in Paris. He visits her in New York. He will call her and say: “Are you in town?” and she never knows which town he means, but he always already knows the answer is yes.
Five minutes after the call August will knock on her door and Mélanie will open it, wary and nervous to appear too happy, too eager. Despite her profession she does not mask her own emotions well.
August tells her that’s what he likes about her. He also tells her he’ll be back, soon.
She knows better than to ask, “When can I see you again?” and she knows better than to travel to Germany. She is at the mercy of him, and she knows it. So when he leaves, it is sad, she is sad, and her bed will smell like him and her body aches in a hard and used way.
She thinks it the saddest story she has ever heard and it is probably why she only speaks of it once, and the reasons for which she speaks of it are simple: she is drunk and it is Diane.
-
Diane says: “And here I always thought it would be Daniel. Shows what I know.”
She shrugs and Mélanie grinds her back teeth. They are back in New York City. It is almost spring.
“Daniel is a friend, yes,” she says and Diane’s smile consumes her face.
“Oh, come on. You were QT’s Romeo and Juliet. If anyone, and I mean anyone, was to get it on behind the scenes, I would have bet on you two. You had that spark!”
“Anyone can have spark.”
Diane waves a hand and continues as though uninterrupted. “You went for fucking Mercutio instead.”
The nicotine is sharp in her mouth as she takes a drag from her cigarette. It has burnt halfway down to ash and she reaches for her bread plate.
“I never cared much for Shakespeare,” she says offhand.
Diane’s smile grows.
-
In Cannes his teeth were too white and blunt against her skin. She can remember how her chest felt full, how full he felt inside of her, the way her wrists were small and fragile in his hands. She doesn’t remember what she said to him in bed, all small profane prayers and his name twisted with desire, and she doesn’t remember what he said either. She imagines it was more of the same, soft chants of Mélanie and the word fuck.
“You have a plane to catch,” she said at one point into his chest, and he said, “there are other planes to catch.” She felt it more than heard it and shifted against him, both bodies still damp and sticky with sweat. The mood had changed, Mélanie had thought. His suitcase stood mocking at the foot of the bed and even though August ran a hand through her hair, his mouth traveling from her ear along her jawline, she knew she was waiting for him to leave.
He made his flight. She stayed on in Cannes.
-
He calls her once while she is in New York. She is in a coffeeshop.
“Where are you?” he asks, and Mélanie opens up in a laugh.
“If you are in this city, right now, and if I turn and look out that window and you are standing there, on the phone, waving at me, I swear, August.”
August laughs too.
“I’m at home,” he says.
“Oh,” Mélanie says. “Oh.”
“Oh,” August repeats, a slight edge of friendly teasing to it.
“Just calling to chat then?” she asks.
“If you have the time.”
She thinks it is then that she knew. She had a small white mug in her hand and the coffee was bad and there was a folk artist trying to sing Joni Mitchell on a small makeshift stage. Mélanie had a notebook open in front of her but she did not write anything down.
She thinks she knew she loved him then.
She thinks he knew too.
-
“Sorry I haven’t called,” August says, out of breath.
“Are you here?” her voice sounds small.
“You have a fucking ton of stairs to your place, Mélanie.”
She opens the door.
-
It is Paris where she should have learned.
“You think history’s going to just keep repeating itself until we get this right?” Mélanie drawled from the bed.
“I don’t want to talk about these things,” August said, so they didn’t. Instead she tucked her knees in to her chest and lit a cigarette. He was naked and she was naked. When he is with her, he is always naked, more boyish than seductive.
He stood before her and crawled his way up the bed to her. He pried her left leg off her right leg and opened her legs to him, dragged her body down the bed a little. He pressed a kiss to her stomach and then rested his head there. Her hand dropped into his hair and he reached for the cigarette.
Later she stood in front of the window in her kitchen, one arm wrapped around her waist. She could hear August getting dressed and her fingers itched for another cigarette but she did not move to fetch one. She imagined her bed would smell like him once he was gone, she would smell like him. It made her crave a cigarette all the more.
“I’m gonna go then,” he said from behind her. She turned slightly and nodded, a small smile.
“Alright then. Safe flight, yeah?”
August looked at her then, his face full of things she knew he wasn’t going to say, so she shrugged. He took a step forward and kissed her on the forehead. His hands settled onto her shoulders; he said, “See you soon,” and looked guilty for it.
And then he left.
-
She’ll open the door.
He always knocks.
-
fin.
rpf. the door swings both open and shut; he’s going to pass through both ways. mélanie laurent/august diehl. rated pg-13. 3503 words.
notes: oh good god in heaven as if this wasn't inevitable? um, as always these are lies, lies not intended to offend and instead are merely the product of my winter break induced boredom/tumblr addiction/excess of time on my hands. as always, my darling endearlings, i am pretty sure this would not have happened without you, *laughs*.
BERLIN, ALASKA IN WINTER // RUN, AIR // THE RIP, PORTISHEAD // SHILLER, RATATAT // MISTAKE, MOBY
We’re shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me
spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls
right out of my mouth.
(Dirty Valentine, Richard Siken)
In Paris there is a knock on the door.
It is a well-accepted concept that people are always leaving. People, like time, are things you can’t hold on to - they always wriggle free. But the thing to keep in mind is simple and yet often still ignored: in order to leave you have to come first. You have to let them in.
Their first time together in Cannes a reporter told Diane: “you’ve got the last nice bloke left, huh?” Diane had smiled and August had drawn his face in an expression of mock affront. Mélanie had smiled, too. Perhaps she knew.
There are no nice men, not here, maybe not anywhere, and there are no ladies. August isn’t a nice man. Mélanie isn’t a lady. August leaves open gaps in conversation and Mélanie tries hard not to fill them.
August is always leaving.
Mélanie opens the door.
-
At an event in Rome there is a pitcher of what they are calling limoncello, but Mélanie thinks it just tastes like rubbing alcohol mixed with lemons. She downs her small glass in one heady gulp and fights not to grimace as it works its way down her throat, warms her chest.
“You’re supposed to sip it,” Diane hisses, amused. On the opposite side of Mélanie, August laughs. Mélanie’s mouth is tart as she smiles at him.
Maybe it starts here.
Maybe not.
-
Nothing happened for a long time. Mélanie thinks that matters, even though it probably doesn’t because one thing holds true: it did happen. It’s still happening.
It’s probably Daniel’s fault.
-
It’s not Daniel’s fault.
-
At Cannes, Daniel pointed at August and said:
“You are my dear friend,” and he pointed to Mélanie, “and you are my dear friend. I want you both to become dear friends, too.”
Mélanie drank champagne and August drank what smelled like gin. She drank and he drank and they talked, and talking turned to laughing, turned to some twisted mash of English and French, never German (“I don’t speak the German,” she slurred at one point; “I know, believe me, I know,” he said), turned to more drunken stumbling than actual dancing and by the end of the night she told Daniel that it was decided and official.
“August is a dear, dear, dear friend of mine,” she said.
She didn’t see him again for three months.
-
“That is the problem with Hollywood,” Mélanie says with a laugh. “They are always throwing parties. And I find it so hard to say no.” She laughs again.
This time there is a party because there is a Special Edition DVD. More importantly there is a party because Quentin says there is a party.
There is a party and this is where it starts.
He is drunk. So is she, and this never works as an excuse but it does offer context. He is drunk and she is drunk, so when August leans forward and his mouth hits the corner of her mouth, more skin than lip, it is neither unwelcome nor a total surprise. There is still that jolt though, that flip of the stomach and complete lack of certainty as to what she is supposed to do next - if she will do anything next.
August solves the problem for her. His hand skims her neck around to the back of her head and grips tight, almost painfully so. His eyes are unfocused but meet hers and his lips slant in a crooked smile. He leans forward again and this time does not miss his target. He kisses her firmly, his mouth hard against hers, but Mélanie does not kiss him back. She stands there, her arms loose at her sides, and August grips her right shoulder tightly (the curve of bare skin fits neatly in the enclosure his hand creates), his fingers burrow deeper into her hair, tangle, pull.
Mélanie opens her mouth to breathe, and as she does, August makes a soft sound, and his mouth opens too. His open mouth closes over her open mouth and his tongue is hot against hers; she can taste the sour sticky sweet thickness of the beer he drank earlier, and she is kissing him back. He deepens the kiss even more, both hands now clutching the sides of her face as her own hands grab at the front of his shirt.
Later - much later, much, much later and not tomorrow - she will find herself across a sales rack on Rodeo Drive with Marion, a dark green dress in hand, and Mélanie will tell Marion:
“The boy’s no good. And I know that.”
And Marion will say:
“The boy’s a man.”
Mélanie won’t buy the dark green dress but she will toy with the thought of August taking it off her body. She buys the blue slacks instead and calls them sensible. August never sees them.
-
They make another film together.
He is playing a Nazi again. And she is playing a Jew, again. Only this time they get to fall in love. Only this time the film is about the two of them. And maybe no one will see it, no one will want to bother with the subtitles without Tarantino’s name behind it all, but they make the film and this time they get to fall in love.
(Don’t get lost in ambiguous phrasing: we are still talking about their characters here).
(We are also talking about the actors, but you knew that already).
(We could stop here and imagine everything bright and happy and perfect, Nazi uniforms and film crew aside. We could do that, but that’s called living a lie and maybe that is the heart of acting but no relationship has ever persisted on a foundation of lies, no bright and happy and perfect one that is. So we can’t stop here, we have to move forward. They have to keep moving too, because maybe that is what attraction is: that freight train boring down on top of you and if you don’t move fast enough, if you don’t dodge it - you know how Anna Karenina ends, everyone does, splat).
(The thing is that no man can outrun a train).
(They’re not going to outrun this; they will deny they were ever chased).
-
“You look good,” he said the first day of filming.
She blatantly looked him up and down and raised an eyebrow. August laughed.
-
In this film he kisses her on the mouth like their lives depend on it.
In this film when he kisses her full on the mouth he does not taste like beer and he does not taste like so many smoked cigarettes, but instead he tastes warm and male and like something she remembers.
She kisses him back. This time Mélanie kisses him back immediately but there is no small sound from him as their mouths open in unison and fuse together.
August’s arm is heavy around her waist. She presses her body to his and the cold air bites them both.
They only need one take.
-
They sleep together for the first time their second time together at Cannes.
Their film fares well enough. People like it, people don’t hate it. Both their characters die and she remembers the sticky feel of the fake blood on her hands as she grasped for what was supposed to be August’s dying body. She wears a purple dress with an open back to the premiere and August’s hand is warm against her skin.
She smiles for the photos and he does too, and the entire event has the eerie, muted feeling of the year before. “Déjà vu!” she says, then laughs. August jerks his head to look at her and then he laughs as well.
At the presscall a reporter says: “You two knew each other well, knew how to work well, from your previous film, yes?”
“Of course,” Mélanie said smoothly. August smirked.
They had worked together for all of one week, all of two scenes together.
-
In Cannes it happens for the first time.
It is not night, she is not drunk and neither is he. It is morning, their premiere the night before, and he has a flight to Berlin and she has decided to stay on in Cannes. “I like it here,” she says to him, his eyebrow arched, the question unasked.
It is morning and her hotel room is a mirror image of his though she does not know this. He does. August kisses her first. He has a suitcase and he brings it to her door.
He knocks twice; she opens the door in the hotel’s robe.
“Safe flight, oui,” she says and August does not answer. She cocks her head to the right and this is when he kisses her.
(Mélanie will later think it matters that they took the time, that they paused, that this wasn’t entirely frenzied and thoughtless, because they stopped, they paused and they brought his suitcase in from the hall).
She doesn’t see him again until he shows up at her front door five weeks later.
“Can I come in?” he will ask.
-
“You going to sing a song about this?” he sneered.
Mélanie grabbed the nearest thing - her jacket - and threw it at him.
August ducked and laughed.
-
Mélanie meets Diane for lunch in New York City. It is late autumn and rain turns to sleet against the restaurant’s windows.
“You ever think about having kids?” Diane asks aburptly.
“Hmm?” Mélanie hums and then puts her fork down. “You are asking me if I think about babies?” she asks in English.
“Sure,” Diane shrugs. “You ever think about having one?”
Mélanie frowns. “I guess I think of them,” she says slowly. “I think of them the same way I think of things like, I do not know, what if I was born a man instead of a woman? What if I was born last century not this century? What if,” Mélanie leans forward, excited, “I am not the real Mélanie and there is another, how you say, universe out there with the real Mélanie and I am just a phony copy.” She leans back and picks up her water glass. “I think about babies like that,” she says, an afterthought. “What If I was a mother?”
“But you don’t want to be one?”
“I would not know where to keep a baby!” Mélanie says. “I do not know who I would want the father to be. I do not know too many things.”
Diane is silent.
“Merde,” Mélanie curses. “You have a baby now? Or, you are going to have a baby now?”
“No,” Diane says quietly. “But sometimes I wonder.”
Both women lapse into silence and the restaurant is crowded, hot and loud.
“August has a baby now,” Mélanie says. The way she says it, it is directed at no one in particular and she stares straight ahead, just past Diane’s head. Diane does not answer. Diane does not know what to say. For one reason, in her mind this conversation had been about her, and for another she has never understood Mélanie and August, however loosely their names might be paired in her mind.
Mélanie turns her attention back to Diane and offers a small, shy smile. “Quentin called me the other day.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. I tell him that his movie was the best and the worst thing to ever happen to me. He laughed at me. He tells me that it is how it normally works, that this is no surprise.”
“He’s probably right,” Diane says drolly.
“Probably,” Mélanie echoes. And that is the end of it. In the next minute Mélanie is picking the radicchio out of her salad with a grimace and Diane is telling her about Josh’s show and the sun is shining behind the rain and the sleet and the women at the table next to them are laughing, and in that next minute the two women join the rest of the world.
-
For half a week (read: three days) Mélanie is sick with food poisoning and convinces herself she is pregnant. She buys three tests, but she does not take any of them. In the end, it’s the shrimp cocktail’s fault and not August’s but for three days straight she entertains the thought that maybe it was him, that maybe there is something inside her.
She knows it’s not disappointment she feels, but it isn’t relief either.
She thinks it’s called wanting something more for herself, but these are things they do not talk about.
(“What is this exactly, hmm?” she asked once from behind her kitchen counter. He was shirtless and disheveled at her kitchen table.
He pointed at her hand.
“A coffeepot,” he said).
-
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Daniel says.
August concedes.
-
“You only fuck the men you work with?” August asks her with a smile not exactly kind. They are in her apartment in Paris and BBC News is on the television.
“That bother you?” she asks with a similar grin.
“Where is Damien?” he asks quietly.
Mélanie stretches her arms in front of her, rests her hands on her knees and hunches forward.
“Ireland. Home. Not that it’s any of your business.”
August fixes her with a mock scowl. He leans back in his armchair, away from her.
“And what the hell’s that supposed to mean, hmm?”
Mélanie considers her next words carefully. She looks at her hands, she looks at her knees. When she looks back up at him he is smirking. She decides not to consider her words carefully.
“I don’t ask you about your wife.” August’s face darkens slightly, just enough, and Mélanie picks at her black tights.
“No,” he says evenly, “you don’t. Is that not part of the arrangement?”
“You see Belle de jour too many times,” she says in heavily-accented English.
“‘You only come in the afternoons,’” he quotes in French, and he leers.
Mélanie lays back on the couch and pushes her hair off her face. “I don’t go anywhere,” she says. “You come to me.”
August lights a cigarette.
“So it would seem.”
In the next five minutes the following will occur: August will put his cigarette out in an untouched cup of coffee and Melanie’s skirt will ride up as she slouches lower on the couch. He will kiss her first, he is always the one to kiss first, and her shoes will be heavy and loud as they fall from her feet. He will rip her tights. He will fuck her on the couch and she will come with her face pressed against the black leather, and Mélanie will have been right:
She does not go anywhere. He always comes to her.
-
He visits her in Paris. He visits her in New York. He will call her and say: “Are you in town?” and she never knows which town he means, but he always already knows the answer is yes.
Five minutes after the call August will knock on her door and Mélanie will open it, wary and nervous to appear too happy, too eager. Despite her profession she does not mask her own emotions well.
August tells her that’s what he likes about her. He also tells her he’ll be back, soon.
She knows better than to ask, “When can I see you again?” and she knows better than to travel to Germany. She is at the mercy of him, and she knows it. So when he leaves, it is sad, she is sad, and her bed will smell like him and her body aches in a hard and used way.
She thinks it the saddest story she has ever heard and it is probably why she only speaks of it once, and the reasons for which she speaks of it are simple: she is drunk and it is Diane.
-
Diane says: “And here I always thought it would be Daniel. Shows what I know.”
She shrugs and Mélanie grinds her back teeth. They are back in New York City. It is almost spring.
“Daniel is a friend, yes,” she says and Diane’s smile consumes her face.
“Oh, come on. You were QT’s Romeo and Juliet. If anyone, and I mean anyone, was to get it on behind the scenes, I would have bet on you two. You had that spark!”
“Anyone can have spark.”
Diane waves a hand and continues as though uninterrupted. “You went for fucking Mercutio instead.”
The nicotine is sharp in her mouth as she takes a drag from her cigarette. It has burnt halfway down to ash and she reaches for her bread plate.
“I never cared much for Shakespeare,” she says offhand.
Diane’s smile grows.
-
In Cannes his teeth were too white and blunt against her skin. She can remember how her chest felt full, how full he felt inside of her, the way her wrists were small and fragile in his hands. She doesn’t remember what she said to him in bed, all small profane prayers and his name twisted with desire, and she doesn’t remember what he said either. She imagines it was more of the same, soft chants of Mélanie and the word fuck.
“You have a plane to catch,” she said at one point into his chest, and he said, “there are other planes to catch.” She felt it more than heard it and shifted against him, both bodies still damp and sticky with sweat. The mood had changed, Mélanie had thought. His suitcase stood mocking at the foot of the bed and even though August ran a hand through her hair, his mouth traveling from her ear along her jawline, she knew she was waiting for him to leave.
He made his flight. She stayed on in Cannes.
-
He calls her once while she is in New York. She is in a coffeeshop.
“Where are you?” he asks, and Mélanie opens up in a laugh.
“If you are in this city, right now, and if I turn and look out that window and you are standing there, on the phone, waving at me, I swear, August.”
August laughs too.
“I’m at home,” he says.
“Oh,” Mélanie says. “Oh.”
“Oh,” August repeats, a slight edge of friendly teasing to it.
“Just calling to chat then?” she asks.
“If you have the time.”
She thinks it is then that she knew. She had a small white mug in her hand and the coffee was bad and there was a folk artist trying to sing Joni Mitchell on a small makeshift stage. Mélanie had a notebook open in front of her but she did not write anything down.
She thinks she knew she loved him then.
She thinks he knew too.
-
“Sorry I haven’t called,” August says, out of breath.
“Are you here?” her voice sounds small.
“You have a fucking ton of stairs to your place, Mélanie.”
She opens the door.
-
It is Paris where she should have learned.
“You think history’s going to just keep repeating itself until we get this right?” Mélanie drawled from the bed.
“I don’t want to talk about these things,” August said, so they didn’t. Instead she tucked her knees in to her chest and lit a cigarette. He was naked and she was naked. When he is with her, he is always naked, more boyish than seductive.
He stood before her and crawled his way up the bed to her. He pried her left leg off her right leg and opened her legs to him, dragged her body down the bed a little. He pressed a kiss to her stomach and then rested his head there. Her hand dropped into his hair and he reached for the cigarette.
Later she stood in front of the window in her kitchen, one arm wrapped around her waist. She could hear August getting dressed and her fingers itched for another cigarette but she did not move to fetch one. She imagined her bed would smell like him once he was gone, she would smell like him. It made her crave a cigarette all the more.
“I’m gonna go then,” he said from behind her. She turned slightly and nodded, a small smile.
“Alright then. Safe flight, yeah?”
August looked at her then, his face full of things she knew he wasn’t going to say, so she shrugged. He took a step forward and kissed her on the forehead. His hands settled onto her shoulders; he said, “See you soon,” and looked guilty for it.
And then he left.
-
She’ll open the door.
He always knocks.
-
fin.