“Oh, Molly.”
Sarah closed her eyes. Inhaling the fantasy fragrance of red wine, pure chocolate, and savory meats. Imagining they were back in Paris and dreaming of possibilities. She rolled her shoulders forward in pleasure. “I swear,” she cooed, “if you were not such a Molly I could really fall in love with you.”
A STRANGE ANTICIPATION welcomed Sarah Bernhardt as she walked into the theater. The cast stood idly, scattered about the stage. Constant Coguelin and Edouard de Max were deep in thought, trying to recall their characters and hoping they hadn’t been left behind in Salt Lake City or some other stop along the way. Irma Perrot, Marguerite Moreno, and Sacha Guitry formed a triangle, walking a circle in metered breaths while training their eyes on the person directly across from them. Standing in the darkened back at stage right, Ibe was guarding his wigs like a devastated parent, cracking his finger like a whip at anybody who dared approach him without invitation or permission. The technical crew all scattered about, tying off knots, testing footlights, ensuring the spot would work with the calcium carbonate gathered from Pasadena. And to outsiders like Kinney, it must have looked frantic. Disorganized bumbling fools crossing paths, unknowingly holding ends of the same rope and pulling in desperate frustration. But to Sarah, who stood a pace behind her longtime confidant, the evening sea air still following her through the shutting door, this looked as magnificent as the play itself. Stripped away of all the
She stopped while Max kept walking. Nobody had noticed her yet. She held her hands flat against each other in prayer position, and drew her index fingers up to her mouth, resting the tips against her upper lip. She was truly going to make that announcement. Change the course of this whole drama. A play that had had a run longer than God knows when. And everybody drums up the same enthusiasm and emotion nightly, hearing cheers and applauding, but in the backs of their minds and the fronts of their hearts there is a nagging misery that they choose to ignore and then override it with rationales, forever fearful of breaking such a long string of success. But she was going to change the whole direction of this play of her life by rewriting one single scene. One simple scene toward the end of the final act (after all she was sixty-one now, and there should be no denying the realties of age), and she would breathe a new life into this drama that would inspire all to stop going through the motions, but instead start living.
Max stopped a full three paces ahead. “Come on, Sarah,” he barked with a stage whisper. “Come watch their eyes light when they see you.”
It was probably only one or two pairs of hands clapping. Then like an approaching train the volume increased, rolling across the stage. Even Ibe put down his wigs for a moment (spiking a comb through a long falling curl) and put his arms out with a walruslike clapping motion. And they were all standing, rising to their feet to see her—her own crew. It was the moment between the kiss and the sex. When he tells you that you are the most beautifully magnificent creature that he has ever laid eyes on—seducing you into believing his own myth.
Kinney himself was standing, breaking a commanding and paternal applause. Max stood beside him, his hands barely touching, avoiding eye contact with her. Maybe he was embarrassed to be found so quickly beside the Baron of Venice. Or perhaps it was his routine expression, the same predictable one that is known to accompany habitual lovers the morning after. She tried smiling at him with her dignified public smile, the same one worn by regals that gently stretches across the face like a fine line between invulnerability and the illusion of accessibility. She never could control expressions when they came from someplace real. She gave a subtle wink to let him know that Henriette-Rosine was hiding happily behind the curtain and waiting for him.
The crew stood side by side in front of the stage, forming a tunnel that led up to the edge. And she walked as far as she could, trying to keep up the eye contact with Max, trying to let him know that all would be okay; instead catching Kinney’s proud and demanding eyes, as though his browbeaten daughter had finally captured the prince’s heart.
Max stayed behind with the impresario while Constant’s and Edouard’s hands guided Sarah up to the stage and into the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, where Cesare Angelotti was about to meet the painter Mario Cavaradossi, and thus begin the tragic fall of the strong but vulnerable opera star named Tosca.
Framed by Cavaradossi’s mural in progress and Angelotti’s youthful ambitions, both of which would soon witness their demises, Sarah drew in a deep breath. And in that breath the tragic will of Tosca entered her lungs and refreshed her blood cells until she was neither Henriette-Rosine nor Sarah Bernhardt. Instead, somewhere in between. Just where she needed to be.
EPILOGUE
THEY ask her to sign playbills. And she watches them recoil into the awkwardness of newborns trying to touch the world. Patrons of the arts. The powerful. The elite. Shrinking into helplessness in her presence. But in the midst of this lazzo scene, Max Klein appears in the center of the room, spotlighted after Sarah gives the stage to him. He clears his throat and announces in a confident manner that this reception area must be cleared. The houselights have dimmed and everybody needs to find their seats or else risk missing the opening curtain. He encourages them to enjoy the evening’s performance, and reminds them Madame looks forward to meeting with them at the reception following the final curtain. They file out anxiously, fearful of missing the first act. And in that moment of silence when the last has left the room with the final breath of pageantry, it is just she and Max. And they don’t share a word. Barely acknowledge the other’s presence. After a passing of time Max looks up at her and speaks with a formality unique to the moment before she is set to take the stage. “Madame Bernhardt,” he says as though the appointed minion to a head of state. “It is time to take your position.”
SHE RUNS HER TONGUE over lips. Moistening them. The apron feels heavy. Black velvet curtains. She strokes them, watching the slow ripples that travel to the top. She is seventy-six years old now. She has lost her right leg to amputation five years ago, the result of a car accident (in Venice of all places), followed by a stage fall, and the subsequent gangrene. She sits in the chair that will be hers when she takes the stage. She rubs the stump from where her leg once fell. She swears that she feels her toes tickle. Strange, especially given that the opium has not been in her system since May of 1906. She is just out of view of even the most vigilant audience member. There is always one who is trying to look backstage. Trying to catch a glimpse in the wings. Waiting for recognition. A nod. A wink. Even a raised eyebrow. Imbeciles. One illusion is not enough for them. The last ripple finally reaches the top. Barely. Ridiculously slow. The curtain looks settled. She waits. Slowly sliding out of herself. Somehow she will slip into the character of Marguerite Gautier. It is kind of like dying. Where the life you know slides from your body, revealing each moment to you like a photograph in an album. An illusion of shadow and light, still and forgotten. From a distance it is nothing more than abstract images, imbued with relevance by the spaces you fill in. She sees the faces of all those hopeful girls who will never succeed. They flood her mind. Nervously standing backstage. Pushing sweaty hands against their dresses, waiting for the director’s permission to display their wares, those five minutes that can destroy years of dreams. And something so simple seems so complicated. It’s just art. It is just doing what you need to do, expressing things the only way you know how. But suddenly the artistic life becomes business. And every line that you learn has an impact on whether you will ever have the opportunity to speak the next one. And yes, sure, she could have said to hell with it, and paraded her talents down to some back alley theater and spoke the lines from a blacked-out room in a converted basement. She might even have had the same passion. Maybe more. But that is a possibility that she knows will never be answered. She never stood side by side with those hopeful girls. She was too busy being blinded by the footlights becoming who she is. The odd thing is that she never sees herself. Well, not quite true. Occasionally she sees images of Sarah Bernhardt, but they are no more she than they are Marguerite Gautier, Mrs. Clarkson, Jeanne d’Arc, or even Ethel Barrymore. Maybe that is what makes it so much easier to slip into character. She is forever naked.
MAX KLEIN WALKS UP TO HER. He shows her a note, and then pushes it deep into his pocket, the last swirl of curved ink disappearing. She can see him crumple it in his pants, the fabric bunching and
