Director's Cut (6 page)

Maxim had made sure to sit far enough away to avoid being drawn into the conversation, but no less than three times he thought he noticed Gala looking at him. Twice their eyes met after one of her quips, as if she were trying to reassure herself that he had heard it. The third time was around eleven thirty. The bar filled up with people who had seen the second showing of the film, and the theater club was crushed into a corner. Some of them thought it was time to leave, but a small group stayed behind and ordered a bottle of wine. Maxim watched Gala give two guys the brush-off, firmly, almost bluntly, but strangely enough with a smile that seemed almost to promise the opposite, so that they slinked off hopeful rather than disappointed.

Maxim had a train to catch. He had stood up and was waiting for a lull in the conversation to say goodbye, when Gala caught his eye for the third time. Her mood seemed to have changed completely from one moment to the next. Deeply sorrowful, she sought his support, as if no one else would understand. “How far we are from all this, you and I,” Maxim read in her eyes, and although he told himself at the same time that he was deluding himself, he hung his coat up again, slid his chair closer, and poured another glass of wine.

Gala wasn't the main reason he decided to miss his train. While hanging around in the bar, toward midnight, he felt a rising sense of freedom. If this was what people sought in places like this, maybe he could understand it after all. As long as he could remember, Maxim had cherished the idea of a grander life to come. As a child, he would lie in
bed listening to sounds and voices, imagining a party in full swing somewhere in the big house. He didn't go out and look for it, because the idea that he was expected there was enough of an adventure. This disquieting expectation had sustained him throughout his childhood. Whenever his character and circumstances prevented him from participating in real life, snatches of consolation from everything that was still possible reached him like distant music through an open window. It had always been an abstract passion, formless, without a name and without an end, but tonight, for the first time, he felt he had recognized someone who had also been invited to that future celebration. In Gala he saw something he had probably known forever: how exciting it could be to feel alone when gaiety was all around.

When he was shown the door at closing time, Maxim was completely plastered. While the rest of the group said goodbye, he tried to read his watch.

“Ten minutes ago, and I would have made the night bus,” he mumbled to no one in particular, and the next thing he was sitting, without knowing exactly how he got there, on the back of Gala's bicycle, seasick from the view and feeling somewhat unsure about how fast he seemed to be catching up on life.

He tried to find something to hold on to, but didn't quite dare to seize the flesh bobbing up and down in front of him. Earlier that evening, he had simply pulled those same buttocks up against him, as if he did it every day. Obviously it didn't matter how you acted something, he thought, as long as you were convincing, and he clamped his fingers around the steel frame.

“Sometimes,” Gala said, “people bore me so much with all their talk that I can no longer restrain myself.”

“I can always restrain myself,” Maxim replied. “Yes, if you have anything that needs restraining, I'm the one.”

“There's no reason for all that … Don't you know that? People are so full of themselves they can't possibly believe you're not interested in them.”

“What most surprises me is how heavy their words are. The lighter they are, the more they weigh me down.”

“It's like they make you dirty, as if their stupidity sticks to you.”

“But you still stayed till the very end.”

“It only looked like that. I was miles away.”

There were potholes in the road and Gala was too heavily laden to dodge them. Maxim had to grab on to her waist. It wasn't as soft as it had been earlier. Under his hands he felt her flanks harden and relax in turn, as she strained against the pedals.

“Shut up, I shout, when their lips just keep chattering, shut up, you're driving me up the wall, but they don't even notice. Sometimes I imagine slapping them in the face. You should try it, it's such a relief.”

“And what if they keep going?”

“Then I scratch out their eyes.” Gala clawed the air with one hand. “I have to. If I don't follow my whims, they'll explode. In the end I see them babbling away with their skin hanging in shreds from their bloody faces.” Gala laughed. Just to be on the safe side, Maxim decided not to say another word.

The last bus was still waiting at the bus station, late for no reason, but just as they rode up, the driver started the engine and took off at full speed. Gala didn't hesitate for a moment, turning her bike crossways and forcing the driver to stop.

“It never needs to get boring,” she sighed as the doors slammed between them, and then louder, “The possibilities are endless.”

When Maxim raised his hand, he thought he saw her pursing her lips to blow him a kiss, but he couldn't be sure because he could see his own reflection in the window as well, and, when the bus drove off, he immediately lost his balance and flew backward down the aisle.

Ah, movement!

In Amsterdam in the seventies, two people cycling off into the night together could only mean one thing. At the next rehearsal, Maxim noticed the other young men looking at him with envy. Although his prestige was unearned, he still caught himself feeling a certain pride, as if he had come a little closer to Monsieur Arnaux. When Gala finally arrived and they were able to rehearse their scene, the kisses he planted on her neck were calmer, so prolonged that they no longer reminded anyone of a poultry inspection.

Slowly but surely over the following weeks, Gala and Maxim grew comfortable with each other's bodies, but only in the roles of Solange and Monsieur Arnaux. One night, when he ran his hands over her
breasts, he felt her nipples responding under the black crepe of her dress.

THE MANY FACETS OF AMSTERDAM,
screeched the neon letters on the facade of the diamond factory, which flicked on behind the actors every night at this time. Somewhere inside the amphitheater someone giggled, but the two actors had eyes only for each other.

Gala spoke her lines as they were written, and a little later Maxim delivered his speech without a moment's hesitation, even though his fingers had gone back to those same places, as if they couldn't believe what they felt there. It made him dizzy with pleasure, not only from the power with which his heart was driving the blood to his loins, but above all because of the violence of the realization that he,
he
, had been able to evoke a reaction like that. It moved him. Perhaps, yes, perhaps, for just a moment, it wasn't so much that his excitement moved him, as that being moved excited him.

Maxim wanted to disappear.

Maxim wanted to let himself be seen.

That was why he wanted to act. He saw acting as the only possible way to unite the forces conflicting inside him. It was a childish longing. A lineless drawing. An idea, nothing more. He was full of such ideas, grand but vague, and he trusted them like friends, while he saw facts as enemies. As long as you don't focus on something, he thought, there's still a possibility that it can become anything you want. In that same shapeless way, he felt he carried other lives inside him. He had so many desires and they were so extreme; they could never possibly fit into his own image of himself. Now he thought that this was the actor's paradox: hiding yourself behind your own possibilities.

So it was tonight, at last, running his hands over the curves of Gala's body, that he broke through his own limits for the very first time. Maxim felt bigger, stronger, more brazen than usual, and Gala sensed it too. Her body responded to his dream. When others believed in him, he believed in himself. Here was Maxim's ecstasy. Tonight more people could see him than ever before. In his role, for just a moment, he had disappeared.

•  •  •

The following Tuesday, during the seduction scene, Maxim was wooden and inhibited. All week he had been dreading it. The sweeter that moment became in his memory, the less enthusiastic he grew about trying to perform the same trick again. When the evening arrived, the idea of someone as shy as himself trying to play a seducer seemed completely absurd. Even the Pole's psychological approach—“So grab ze rutting beach, you are a dog, so take her!”—failed to help him.

It took a few weeks before he dared to rest his fingers on her breasts again, but when they finally reached them, now lingering longer and more emphatically, no effect was discernible. Gala had now repeated her lines so many times that she no longer heard them. Even her intonation was almost unchanged from one rehearsal to the next. In the absence of any significant response from Maxim, she felt no need to draw on her emotions and lose herself in her performance. She went through the motions as if they had been fixed from the beginning. The underlying passion was gone.

Maxim was shocked. First by her coldness, and then by his own ferocity. His sense of betrayal at her indifference was as intense as if she were cheating on him. He was angry, he was saddened, disgusted, and he could no longer bear having her body pressing against his own; viciously he shoved her away. On the sidelines the few people who were watching snapped to attention. He slapped her bottom as hard as he could and immediately took another swing at her, now at her face, but she blocked the blow with her arm.

“Ow,” screamed Gala, “ow!”—but it was Solange who turned around slowly as if to spit fire into his face. Maxim went back to the start of the scene. Their words ricocheted through the lecture theater. He pulled her up against him again. A man like Monsieur Arnaux, he decided, does
not
allow himself to be betrayed a second time. From now on, he would be less restrained. He would rub her nipples between his fingers until they were hard. He didn't have long to wait. Solange gasped for breath.

Their concentration did not wane again. No matter how many rehearsals followed, one of them always succeeded in provoking the other by being brazen, taunting, shameless … Some of the pinches and groans remained secret—when she nipped his earlobe or when his
tongue shot out to lick the salt from under her arm—but otherwise Maxim and Gala played their excitement openly to the auditorium, where the other students sat and watched politely as if they were learning something. Only the Polish Shirley Temple seemed to have figured out what was really going on. She didn't mention it during rehearsals because the unsolicited eroticism added a little zest to her directing, but afterward she sometimes looked at Maxim and Gala while sardonically raising the eyebrow over her walleye.

“Dat shows de real amateurs,” she sneered one day. “They don't know where de life starts and de acting ends.”

Strangely enough, the complete lack of restraint that Maxim and Gala displayed was confined to the rehearsal room. Beyond it, Maxim's shyness descended like a bell jar. Even his breathing became shallower, as if to preserve the air he had left. On the way to the bar on the other side of the road, he sometimes walked beside Gala, but once inside they invariably sat apart and sometimes at different tables. None of the people there suspected that Gala and Maxim were still feeling each other out from a distance. Generally they would both listen to someone else's conversation while Maxim practiced the kind of quips that came to Gala so easily. With the odd word and an amiable smile, he tried to master his boredom. At first he would glance at his female lead to harvest a smile after each triumph, just as their eyes met now and then in search of support when someone had said something incredibly dull. At times like that they both felt so withdrawn that they might as well have been floating up from their chairs to gaze down on the others. A glance, a gesture, a few nails clawing the air was enough to acknowledge their complicity. And eventually they were so attuned to each other that they could drop the nods and winks. They were so convinced they could read the other's thoughts that they no longer needed confirmation.

This intimacy was much more important to Gala than physicality. It excited her more than the moments during rehearsals when they were entangled in each other's arms and his arousal was pulsing against her body. Then she'd just give a naughty smile and brush against him with a hip or thigh, because that happened to be the role she was playing. It was only teasing and meant almost nothing to her. But the idea that someone could be so taken with her thoughts as to harmonize his own
thinking with them—that excited her. It stirred her senses and kept her awake at night, as if he were always somewhere nearby and might lash out again at any moment. It spurred her to stay one step ahead of him in everything she did. She was determined to keep surprising him.

After that first night, Maxim never missed the last train again. He left on time, often before anyone else, disappearing wordlessly, if possible. Outside he caught his breath, relieved to have his own thoughts to himself again. The cackles and guffaws tumbling through the bar's open window reassured him, just as the sounds in the big house had reassured him years before: there was a party somewhere!

Gala watched him go, but he never waved, at least not as far as she saw, not before he disappeared behind the black window in the corner. No doubt, he turned back once he was there. To make him jealous, she leaned a little more heavily on the student who played Mannequin 2.

At home in his provincial town, Maxim closed his eyes, called Gala to mind, and took pleasure in her image as young men do. Then, while recovering, he tried to reconcile his image of himself with everything that was happening to him.

One day toward the end of June, Maxim's dreams suddenly gathered momentum. It was Mannequin 2's birthday, so instead of adjourning to the cinema bar after rehearsal, the whole troupe headed off to his place, nearby, above the old diamond factory warehouse on a lane ending abruptly at the canal. There were no chairs or sofas in his attic, only cushions and shabby mattresses. The Pole held out her arms and flapped her hands until two men lowered her onto the cushions. She kicked off her shoes, slid the straps of her top down a little, spread out the fur she invariably wore draped over her shoulders during rehearsals, and lay back like a baby on a bearskin.