Divine Sarah

he hadn’t seen, but still he never did get that one story to hang his hat on. In his day he had covered it all, from politics to crime, all of it being relevant to the times, but he had never managed to capture a defining story like so many of his colleagues had. He saw himself as a good defensive second baseman who made the plays day in and day out but was never the hero of the game. But the guy knew this town. He had really hit his stride when he moved to the editorial side. He had a knack for organization and, perhaps most importantly, the unique grace to balance between the needs of his reporters and the demands from the upstairs Mahogany Row boys. That was why he liked Vince Baker. With his work everybody looked good.

Baker didn’t bother to announce himself. “You called?” he said.

Scott didn’t even need to point to the paper. “Why this shit when there was a real story?”

“If there is any real story in this nonsense, then the boycott is it.”

Scott shook his head. “Come on, Vince.”

“Politics. Manipulation. Greed. All the basic ingredients for cooking up any story.”

Scott straightened up then leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over a recently acquired potbelly. “One of the most famous stage actresses smothers a fish over her face, and that’s nothing? Politics. Manipulation. Greed. When the other three idiot papers here report on it, doesn’t that give you a sense of its newsworthiness? Everybody in this town is talking about Sarah-on-the-Pier except for the ignoramuses who subscribe to our paper. Why? Because they don’t know about it. From now on, give me the stories as they happen. If something real comes up again about the boycott, then by all means give it to me. But it appears that the story is elsewhere.”

Baker sucked in a deep inhalation. The burst of anger had exhausted him, it withdrew the last bit of stamina he had from only fours hours’ worth of sleep. He sat down, leaning forward on Scott’s desk. “Please just take me off the story altogether. Give me something that matters.”

“Vince.” Scott leaned forward paternally, his old-man breath suggesting a vintage and proof more high-falutin’ than what was being served at Willie’s last night. “Take a look at all the other dailies. This matters…You’re on the assignment until she leaves town.”

“Why not Seabright? That’s his circle.”

“Because I don’t want to get scooped again. I want the story no one else has—which I suppose I got this time. From now on, just give me your usual. That’s all I am asking for.”

Baker left Scott’s office with half the stride he came in with. Fuck me, he thought to himself. He just needed to rest. Have a smoke and a sleep. Forget about things for a while. Maybe a trip down to Willie’s later would do him good. See if Muriel is still at the bar. Figure out how to build a house without the foundation.

He sat down at his desk and laid his head on a stack of notes, wishing he had never awoken Muriel.

SARAH LAY ACROSS THE BED in her room at the King George with the afternoon edition of the Register spread at her side. Black smudges from the tips of her fingers streaked the linen sheet like ashen snakes. The picture looked terrible. Caught her back, with that imbecile Kinney obviously intent on trying to block off the cameras. It could have been anybody sitting on that pier. She felt disgraced. As per usual these days, nobody talked about art in this article. There wasn’t a single mention of the play, or even a tidbit to suggest the notion that Dumas fils unknowingly had written La Dame aux Camelias especially for her. Instead it focused on her at the pier as though she was merely engaged in the antics of her history. Clearly the reporter wanted nothing other than to witness the return of the younger Sarah. The only other focal point was on Abbot Kinney pissing a line across the beach and daring only the enlightened to cross it.

There was no talk of artistry. How she had made the commitment to growing her craft when she could have easily retreated and relied on her celebrity. Nothing critical and worthy about how a sixty-one-year-old woman had renovated the signature role of her youth in La Dame aux Camelias into a near-perfect hallmark for aging women (if she could only nail down that ending). As the visage of youth clearly receded, Sarah had managed to transform that wayward sixteen-year-old girl into someone who defied age. In her younger days Sarah had enveloped the role with her own girlish exuberance, swift movements and coy expressions, delivering sardonic lines between shallow breaths as though a head full of ideas would explode like an un-tined baked potato. She had embodied the very essence of untamed youth. Girlish energy that sailed off the skin without depth, and the only time the heart was truly accessed was when it had been unsuspectingly fractured, leaving little room not for analysis or reflection, but rather for the buoyant reaction of passion and lust. But at age sixty-one, she had revived her character beyond the reactive and into the mindful. As she drifted off into sleep she had thought to herself the other night that she was really no longer playing Marguerite Gautier, but that she was now playing Marguerite’s soul. Onstage, her delivery was slow and deliberate, as though she had taken each line and wrapped it in silk, then let it glow under the moonlight. She considered. Contemplated. She transformed reactions into thoughtful analysis. She let go of Marguerite’s body and only took her eyes. All anybody in that audience needed to do was to look deep into her gaze for one moment, and then they could know Marguerite Gautier. They would know her pain. Her confusion. Her sorrow. Marguerite Gautier was no longer a sixteen-year-old who would die at twenty embittered by the disconnection between love, survival, and success. She was the embodiment of mature human emotion. And maybe that was where the problem lay with the final scene. She did not know how to concede that emotion to something beyond her—like disease. It was too wrapped up in itself, layer upon layer, to fall prey to any outside influences. She had always played Marguerite from the perspective that the disease was some incarnation that had come to battle for the rights of Marguerite’s soul—of course calling into question the idea of “right” and “pure.” But now she started to wonder if the disease was nothing more than a haphazard bump of luck. Sure, Marguerite had chosen a life that was looked down upon by others, but not all kept women are cut down by disease as a divine act of retribution, just as they are not all given to finding true love. Maybe that is what was troubling Sarah so much. She couldn’t find a connection between the virus and the life.

Sarah rolled to her side, again looking at the paper. Merde. She swatted it off the bed, where the pages fluttered down to the short teal rug. She told herself to remind Max that she didn’t want to see the papers anymore.

The opium was wearing off. The emptiness settling in. An overwhelming sadness that was not solely tied to her mental state but was instead a pathos that embodied every fiber of her body. Her thighs felt bad. Her skin anguished. Her ribs bereaving. She was thankful to be lying down now, because next the craving would take over, driving and commanding her to do anything she could to smolder the poignancy, which meant usually another hit of opium or a long dreary sleep. It was that exact moment of indecision where it seemed that everything that haunted her took place. The moment when the sadness became too much to bear. Where she lifted her skirt and showed her bare legs to a world too intrigued to turn their heads, yet too paralyzed to do anything except abandon her in Christian fear. Maybe she should have been more private over the years. Perhaps those moments of public display would not have been the executioner to her career. People probably wouldn’t have assigned so much meaning to the roles she had been playing, instead they would have watched them for the beauty and artistry. But it wasn’t just about opium. She had lived her whole life flirting with those moments of sadness. The drugs only gave a false sense of medication when it became too much to handle, then served to heighten the feeling when the numbing wore off. She tried to tell Max that a thousand times. In fact, they had just had the conversation two weeks ago on a train leaving Chicago. But Max didn’t seem able to understand. Even when she had said that she lived her whole life with these feelings. Even in cushioned seats, face-to-face in a private car, not two feet from the intense heat burning off her skin was he able to see beyond the effects and control of narcotics. He loved her that much.

Maybe this really should be her farewell tour of America. That was something she and Max had cooked up one night in Paris to add some drama to the tour, and more importantly to add some revenue. They laughed about the Americans’ craving for establishing some form of history, and that they would always gladly buy it at top dollar. The Divine Sarah Bernhardt’s last tour of America. The last show in Chicago. The last performance in New York. In Los Angeles. Where each farewell was a moment of history, and every fully paying audience member a part of that history. They laughed when they discussed the idea. Giggled in delight at their shrewdness, with the private duplicity of children outwitting their parents. But maybe it wasn’t so clever anymore. How quickly the hypochondriac becomes the diseased, the punch line its own joke. She could end it now silently. Take the last bouquet of roses thrown to her feet, hold them up beside her head, sweet perfume overpowering the bitter sweat of performance, smile coyly to the standing crowd, squint her eyes in the footlights and graciously bow to the auditorium center- right-left-center, gesturing an offer of the roses back to the admirers, and step away slowly off the stage into the