Director's Cut (22 page)

Gala averts her eyes.

“I've had offers.”

“You?”

“Why not?” she adds indignantly. “Do you think I'm too repulsive?”

“From who?”

“I turned him down.”

“Who??”

“I turned him down, but you know, in different circumstances …”

There is something provocative in the look they exchange. Gala knows he likes how she says such things. He knows she does it to get him going, and the dumbest thing he could do would be to act narrow-minded.

“I'm glad to hear it,” the young woman interrupts them, “you're open-minded. People have such wrong ideas about our profession. Especially when you're operating in this class.”

“This class?”

“Interesting men. Not just cheap tricks, but men who travel the world, politicians, guys with influence and opinions. They don't want a dummy, they want someone on their level. It starts as an intellectual challenge—fast, stimulating, and nine times out of ten that's as far as it goes. The cliché of call girls is complete nonsense. Most of us are students or have good jobs.”

“I thought
that
was the cliché,” says Maxim.

The young woman stands up. She belts her fur coat.

“Maybe I've gotten you wrong. This is only for the extras. Extra clothes, extra adventure. If it's a matter of paying the gas bill, the street corner will do.”

She rummages through her purse and throws two of her agency's cards down on the table.

“Do yourselves a favor …” Before heading into the morning, she runs her fingers through her hair and puts on a pair of sunglasses. “There's only one thing worse than being used.”

“Could you fuck someone you didn't love?” Gala asks on New Year's Eve, cuddling with Maxim in bed.

Shared warmth is twice as warm.

“Why not?”

They've spread their long coats over the blankets they've pulled up to their chins.

“Do you?”

“I don't fuck that many people,” Maxim replies.

They're silent for a while. They don't often discuss these subjects. In the quiet room, it's easy to believe that people who love each other are each other's lovers. But things aren't that simple. Gala and Maxim grew up free enough to be able to believe one thing yet give themselves over to another. Those were times that virtually demanded that they develop separately in love, so that a chasm soon emerged in their intimacy, that unassailable dream, and what they got up to by themselves.

The rare occasions they mentioned these escapades were undeniably exciting. They had to work up the nerve to abandon the solidity of silence, and then to balance the desire to not wound the other with the need to match them. It's an odd game, and those who play it can't count on anyone else's understanding.

That afternoon Maxim filled two liter bottles with barrel wine. One has already been dispatched. He opens two paper packets from the
salumeria
on the
corso
. One contains Parma ham; the other, olives. Oil drips on the sheets.

“Yes,” he brags, “I could do that. No problem. It'd be easier with someone who meant nothing to me.”

“Sure. Maybe even better. Maybe that's it.”

He briefly wonders whether this is what she wants to hear, and whether it's actually true.

“I've done it before,” he says, to convince himself. Sometimes he longs so passionately for shamelessness. It wells up in him like warm sulfur in a cold spring, seeping through old cracks in the crust of his consciousness. “People I don't know at all, who don't interest me, whose names I don't even know. Without a single word. Sometimes without even looking at each other.”

“Women?”

“People I wouldn't even think of talking to. Not even ‘Hi, how are you?'”

“Men?”

“Would a woman do something like that?”

It's as busy on this festive night as it was quiet at Christmas. In every room, men are visiting girls. Gala and Maxim listen to their footsteps. In the hall. On the stairs. Above their heads. Doors.

Gala lays her head on his chest. She curls up and throws a leg over
his. She's looking away from him. It's a game, but they wouldn't dare face its possible consequences. It's dangerous, like the trials of strength of her childhood. Maxim is a worthy opponent. She won't back off: instead, she ups the stakes, hiding her face behind her hair.

“So you really don't care if it's a man or a woman?”

He knows what she wants to hear.

“Not when I'm horny.”

Gala doesn't answer.

“You've slept with women.”

“A couple of times,” she says curtly. “Friends I've known for years. It's familiar. It's not the same thing.” Her head rises and falls with his breathing. She hears his heartbeat. Suddenly, she sits up, drinks her wine. She sits there with the glass wedged between her breasts and her pulled-up knees.

“Any man, any woman? It doesn't matter to you.”

“Of course it does.”

“A girlfriend, a complete stranger … You don't care when you feel the urge.”

“Of course I care.”

“So when you do love someone?”

“That's completely different.” He sounds annoyed, but grabs one of the coats from the foot of the bed and drapes it carefully over her shoulders. She pulls it tighter. When he speaks again, it's gentler. Thoughtful.

“Friendship paralyzes lust. Love kills it. Being horny is wanting to own, take possession, be taken. Penetrating, forcing entry, imposing your will. That's hunting, not love. I want to worship the one I love, not spear them.”

Gala looks at him over her shoulder.

“A lot of good that does her, the worshipped one,” she answers laconically, flopping back on the pillows with a sigh, playful. She spreads her arms, lets the glass slip out of her hand to the floor.

“I want to look up to her,” laughs Maxim, “not down on her!” He really means it. His own words have turned him on. He sits astride her, takes her wrists, presses them down.

“Loving, Gala, isn't about simply fucking, it's about admiring.”

She looks at him.

“Not about real life,” she says, “but about a dream.” The mockery slowly drains from her face and she frowns, suddenly furious, shaking her head, trying to fight him off. Maxim only realizes the game is over when she shrieks and shakes her head so violently that it slams against one of the bedposts. Shocked by her ferocity, he immediately lets go.

“You can't enlarge people into idols. That's cruel.”

“Why should I leave them small?” he splutters, grasping at a defense.

“The smaller you are, the bigger the world. The more imperfect a person is, the more chance he has to develop.”

He lays his hand on her head where she bumped it.

“You're drunk.”

They sit there, unsure what else to do, like children who have gone too far and are waiting for someone to rescue them.

“An ideal is a caricature. Instead of accepting the ugly parts, you blow the beautiful things out of proportion. How can anyone ever live up to that?”

For a second, Maxim thinks she's crying. Her head twitches against his hands a few times, but he doesn't say a word. He doesn't move, and when she continues speaking she's calm.

“It's awful when someone makes you prettier, or better, or bigger. His unconditional faith in you makes you all the more aware of your shortcomings. He doesn't see you as you are but as you could have been. That's where a lot of people's anger comes from. Only when you're soaring in someone else's eyes do you realize you're really stuck in the mud. That's the ‘mire' in admired.”

After New Year's, week after week passes without a sign of life from Snaporaz or even his lowliest minions. The disappointment lies like a boulder in the stream of Maxim and Gala's Roman life, collecting more silt each day. They don't talk about it, trying, each in their own way, to bypass the growing island of frustrated expectations. Maxim, as usual, takes the safe side. He can't yet admit it to himself, but he'd rather go back to the Netherlands. The wound of his rejection is not healing, and he's only remaining for Gala's sake. Since it doesn't look as if she'll end up any better than him, he wants to spare her further sorrow. If it were
up to him, they'd spend their last lire enjoying the city and then go home at the start of springtime, a dream poorer and an experience richer. They'd be more satisfied with their Dutch lives, and in a few years they could look back at their adventure and laugh at their naïveté.

Gala, meanwhile, is consumed by doubt. Frame by frame, she runs through the scene in the office above Studio 5.

She keeps thinking that Snaporaz must have changed his mind. “I was too boring. I should have said something funny, witty, brazen. Something to stimulate him, even to annoy him, anything that would have made an impression. I had my chance and of course I blew it, ‘cause I'm just a silly little girl, a born disappointment! But … well, the great man showed some interest. Yes, he really was interested. It might have been only for a second, but there's no doubt he was. So it must have been something later that made him change his mind. Too fat. Of course. I've got to go on a serious diet. But he loves voluptuous female flesh. Maybe not fat enough? Should I put on some weight? Or maybe I'm too ugly. Too weird-looking. My head is too big anyway. That's it, my head's just too big for my body. It's a little grotesque. I look like a cartoon woman, but, you know, he loves extreme characters. Maybe I'm not extreme enough? I'm probably just too ordinary. That's why he's not interested in Maxim: he's too handsome, and there's nothing special about being good-looking. But I'm not good-looking—I'm just too boring, is all, so he's shoved me aside with all the other dime-a-dozen actresses …”

She goes down a brambly path of self-recrimination, and when she finally surfaces, she's clinging to one overpowering, painful idea.

“I should have gone alone,” she reproaches herself. “Without Maxim. Since Snaporaz wasn't interested in him, he's not interested in me either. He thinks we're a couple, of course, whereas if I'd gone by myself … He's an Italian man, after all. He doesn't notice you unless he thinks you're available. Maxim is a sweetheart, he means well, but in a situation like that he's a ball and chain.”

The loneliness of this thought shocks her out of her weeklong reverie. She's disgusted with herself and pities Maxim at the same time. When she finds him again in the middle of the rapids, she seizes his hand as if she'll never let go; thus, after rounding the obstacle each in their
own way, they are, temporarily, closer than ever before. But, strangely enough, Gala, unlike Maxim, never feels the slightest aversion to the man who caused all this turmoil.

In the opera house, Maxim goes through the daily rehearsals with the resignation of Napoleon confined to Elba forced to listen to his guard's lectures on strategy. Swallowing his pride, staring into space, determined to remain above the folly, he paces across the cardboard Forum in a crepe de chine tunic that leaves almost nothing to the imagination.

He spends the breaks in the telephone booth on the Piazza Gigli. He calls agencies. His dissatisfaction has ignited his old passion for acting, also known as “hoping for work.” Anything is better than serving as human scenery.

In the afternoon, after going through the choreography—three steps forward, two to the side—he waits in the wings with the other extras until the stage manager calls. They are all tall, well-proportioned young Romans, dressed by Sangallo to bare their powerful neck and chest muscles and to expose their well-trained thighs almost to the groin. They all seem assured of their own worth. Enviously, Maxim watches their easy preening, their constant discussions of their own and the others' beauty. They have no other interests. They don't listen to the music. They don't discuss anything significant. At first, Maxim felt like a truffle on a pile of gravel. “They have their looks,” he thought, “I have my talent.” But he gradually realizes that the other young men see him as one of their own and judge him according to
their
standards. The first time he's asked to roll his chest muscles, he is so self-conscious that he is glad he's just put on his T-shirt. In these surroundings, he feels his intellect diminishing in value; he wants only to measure up physically. When the group compliments him on his thighs, he's flattered and explains the rigorous exercises that produced this result at the Amsterdam Theater Academy. When they ask him to stand beside the group's gymnast for a comparison, Maxim positively enjoys it.

I can't possibly be one of them, he thinks. It must be the bad lighting. But, well, I don't want to be shown up either … With a certain pride, he closes his book and lifts up his legionnaire's tunic.

The young men spend day after day like this, beneath the sweltering spotlights. Fresh air seldom penetrates the curtains that make an improvised
room for the extras. Sequestered behind a set representing one of the Forum temples, they never appear before the choir or soloists without being summoned. In Italian opera, dominated by a hierarchy stricter than the Vatican's, these worlds have been separated for centuries.

Perhaps that explains why Maxim jumps at the fresh wind that blows across their scantily clad bodies halfway through the second week of rehearsals. Annoyed, he turns around to find himself looking straight into the eyes of Liliana Silberstrand.

“So this is where they keep you hidden away!” says the mezzo-soprano. “I was beginning to wonder whether I'd only seen you in a dream!”

Silberstrand is the Swedish court singer and, rumor has it, the Swedish queen's dearest friend. That would explain her style. Tall and slim, she is standing there with a hand on one hip. The light entering through the curtain she's holding open with the other hand has cast a reddish brown halo around her.