Together, they gave Dominique her lightly tanned complexion, her almond eyes full of night-time, a full mouth, a sloping nose, cheekbones curving up to her dark eyebrows, her rich brown hair, and her love of any topic or space that could transcend the institutions of religion and academics.
She had been scouted by Mr Pio Pinheiro, who was almost always accompanied by his tall, close-shaven black poodle named Gary Cooper, and who would later miss his opportunity to sign the future Porto-native supermodel Sara Sampaio. Mr Pio P. had the necessary soft-spoken elegance to convince the screw-driver-eyed mother and her delicate-livered father that Dominique’s godly and mortal call was to be in front of the camera. Nine-year-old Dominique, her parents and Mr Pio P. took the trip to Paris, where she shot her first catalogue ad for a spring collection. Dominique had the racial ambiguity and yet European pureness to fit the demand for the “third wheel” in many catalogue shoots after that.
Whether by chance or prophecy, her mother was sent back to Paris to the Catholic organisation headquarters. Her father was hesitant but dropped his position at the university and came jobless as a leap of faith. Teenage Dominique fell in love with the city.
Nine months later, her father opened up his faded blue Book of Saints, cut his wrists, and bled so much that droplets came through the old wooden floor through the crack in the lighting fixture of the downstairs neighbours, making their living-room bulb flicker for hours before they heard the ambulance.
There was a lot of speculation about the motive for her father’s suicide, both psychological and theological, but everyone came to their own conclusion, and Dominique’s conclusion was that she belonged on stage.
Dominique and Aimée, lovebirds, grabby, giggling, immersed. In the spring of 2013, France had legalised mariage pour tous, and Aimée and Dominique celebrated the equal-marriage right with their favourite shared scepticism, making jokes about the history of bartering wives, then kissed in between an anecdote they were remembering, then just kissed for a while, then opened their eyes and knew.
They were officially married the following autumn. They kept it small, went to the city hall, signed their papers and had their friends over for brunch.
“Can you believe we’ve been together since I was sixteen!” Aimée was telling everyone at brunch.
“Cougar!” Olivier said and winked at Dominique.
“Hey, I was only twenty-six myself… and it was dark…” Dominique grabbed Aimée by the waist and whispered something in her ear, then bit her lobe.
In bed, Dominique read out loud to Aimée from her favourite plays. Especially the roles that she’d never get to play on stage, because they were for a man, or for someone younger or older or whiter or darker.
The Night Just Before the Forests…
They were having dinner at home. Dominique took the call. She went into the bedroom. She came out. She sat back down. She ran her fork in the spaghetti, around and around, not catching a single strand.
Ever since Dominique turned forty, she’d been coming out of the bathroom saying that she’d started to look like her father, then pulling down on the skin beneath her eyes. It’s true that Dominique had become much paler over the years, and her eyes – which once held that rich, dark heat – were now colder and filled with doubt.
Dominique kept assuring Aimée that “theatre was going down the drain” and no one wanted to see real people on the stage anymore, soon it’ll be videos and music playing all the parts…
“No baby, you don’t get it. At twenty-three, I thought I wanted to be a star – but I don’t want any of that. That’s not what I want at all. I just want to – feel it – again.”
Dominique was shouting “no no NO!” at Aimée, trying to explain to her that she was too good to be in another “student production” as she called it, which meant the playwright and the director were both in their mid-twenties. “What do they know about life?… And they are telling me where to stand, where to sit, where to ‘exit’ offstage…!”
Her insomnia had turned to parasomnia and she was screaming in her sleep, then falling out of bed. Or else, lying with her eyes open in the dark, as thoughts mummified her body.
They had just had sex. Dominique lay in bed sleepless, while her wife was full-bodied drowsy. Dominique started talking about Foucault. Aimée tried to listen to Dominique as she explained that Foucault’s father had been a surgeon, and that Foucault himself had told this story from his deathbed to Hervé Guibert, who then transcribed it: Foucault was just a boy and his father called him in to observe an amputation in the operating room of a hospital in Poitier. The boy watched his father saw off the man’s leg, and apparently it was this that stole the boy’s virility from him.
Aimée mumbled in her sleep, “My father likes you very much, you know… he’s only trying to help…”
Dominique was in bed, reading more Bernard-Marie Koltès. The titles of his plays sounded so tender to Aimée, like In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, The Night Just Before the Forests, Tabataba… but the lines Dominique read to her out loud were nothing tender, full of revolt and choking fury.
Dominique put down the book, curled around Aimée who was already asleep, and held her like a doll against nightmares.
In their early dating days, Dominique had admitted that she talked in her sleep. Somniloquy. Aimée kept pronouncing it as ‘soliloquy’, which Dominique kept explaining was when a character in a play goes to the side of the stage and confesses something.
“Like in Shakespeare baby… where Othello sees a huge eclipse, or Antony the ghost of Cleopatra, or where Lady M can’t wash the blood from her hands, you know…”
But what Dominique had was not the type of somniloquy where one mumbles to oneself to buy more bread or answer an email, but where one shrieks, jolts, thrashes and jumps out of bed.
Aimée could not help but think of her disorder as soliloquy, because Dominique went to the side of her stage, where the light hung low around her, where she stood upon a surface that reflected like a black river, and where she emitted the words and sounds of the hot-eyed animal inside her, frantic for language.
“That’s the difference, Aimée! I’m not bad at what I do. I’m a good actress, I know I am. They just don’t want me. I could analyse every which way. If I were mediocre, I could just admit it to myself. But I am good, Aimée. I am really good and they just don’t want me.”
Aimée loved to watch Dominique on stage. There, where Dominique was charged, where she was holy. Like that first night when they didn’t even know each other and thirteen-year-old Aimée stared at those dangerously bare thighs. Aimée loved Dominique when she was acting, because then both of them felt like they fit perfectly into the world: Dominique pulsing in the light, Aimée privately watching. Aimée also loved when Dominique was sleeping, not fretfully, but softly, unsuspicious. She could look at her face and see everyone she had been, all the girls and women she had grown through, resting together, curled up into each other.