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makes me have to piss every five minutes. Does that happen to you?”
It’s only right then that she puts a name to what she’s feeling: panic and fear, like being up on the highest diving board. That emotion deep inside of her, anxiety mixed with a terrible desire to be elsewhere, to backpedal. And mixed with impatience, too, to feel its effect.
Pauline follows him backstage, asks, “Is it really possible for someone to give you a two-hundred-thousand-franc advance to make an album?”
“It’s possible, but it doesn’t happen to everyone.”
“You’d need to already be famous?”
“Yeah. Or make everyone really like you.”
SHE’S THREE STEPS from the stage, standing where there’s no light. First rows of the audience, people gathered together standing and talking, red tips of cigarettes, general commotion. Two sound guys are moving around again onstage, taping up one last thing, moving the floor monitor a bit. She no longer feels her legs, nothing but her throat, it’s like a chasm inside of her, she doesn’t want to go onstage. Yet she’s crippled with desire to be there, it makes her tremble through all her limbs.
Someone tells her she has to go on. She’s in another time, no consciousness of anything, a moment when she does things automatically, hypnotized.
The stage plunged into darkness, the people below form a sort of flow of faces, a murmur runs through the crowd when she walks onstage.
She won’t be able to do it. Or even move an inch, or even open her mouth. Spotlights on her, blinding, and the track begins. She has the time to think, I’ll forget the words and my voice will never come out.
She’s ashamed of being there and of everyone seeing her. She feels ridiculous, humiliated, exposed. And with absolutely no reason to be there, planted there, under the eyes of all these people. And where to put her arms and where to put her legs and how to disappear, not have to do this.
Nicolas looks at her, he’s in the shadows at the bottom of the stage doing her sound mixing. He worries that something’s going wrong but nothing’s going wrong.
It’s obvious that she’s uneasy, awkward. The majority of the people in the audience don’t even try to listen to her, they talk, wait for the real band. Some faces, in the first row, are attentive, heads moving a little. That’s a start.
Even so, that voice of hers is so fucking rousing. It’s not so much that it’s well trained, but that she knows how to unleash it.
PAULINE AND NICOLAS go back home on foot. The sidewalks between Pigalle and Barbès show no signs of emptying, storefront lights, a mass of people. Some going to the prostitutes, others to have a drink, others to a concert, to the movies, to visit someone, to eat somewhere. All kinds of people doing all kinds of things, like a big machine with everyone in their own track.
Nicolas drank quite a bit right after the concert, a backlash, the need to blow off steam. People around him, assailing him backstage, clamor of compliments, some sincere. Pauline was waiting for him, shut away in the can again. He claimed, “I don’t know where she went,” and so many people wanted to see her, puking up flattering words. Some insisted more than others, they really wanted to introduce her to so-and-so, playing the helpful middleman. He couldn’t even leave, a crop of business cards and numbers scrawled on packs of smokes. Small success. Overwhelming.
He suggested to Pauline that they go back on foot, he needed the night air, still a bit cold, the boundary between the seasons. He talks to her on the way, mechanically.
She hasn’t said a word since she walked offstage. Not one rude remark.
They turn down Boulevard Barbès, the street empties. To the right, the Goutte d’Or neighborhood like a chasm.
Fire truck sirens sound in the distance, get closer, turn into a racket.
Nicolas comments, “It sounds like they’re headed somewhere nearby, maybe someone died. Last summer a guy got stabbed right below Claudine’s window. They blocked the street, like in a Hollywood movie, and outlined the body in chalk on the ground. It was weird, you know . . . I was watching through the window, not the TV. They tinkered with two or three things, and then they removed the tape and in the blink of an eye people were on the street again. It was like life closing up over the dead guy.”
There’s a crowd at the end of rue Poulet.
“It’s on this street!”
He walks faster, excited, but also concerned. “I hope it’s not a dead body . . .”
Pauline listens to him blathering on, feels like he’s trying too hard to act like a kid from the streets for it to sound believable.
They arrive at their destination, orange-and-white plastic tape stretched between them and the door.
Nicolas lifts his head, looks for Claudine at her window.
“Oh, she’s not there. I’m surprised, with how nosy she is, this would be a jackpot for her . . .”
He signals to a guy in uniform, “Excuse me, we live here, can we go in?”
“Do you have ID?”
“No. We didn’t realize we’d need ID to get back into our apartment. But there’s someone waiting for us, who can—”
Pauline had pushed through the crowd, stopped at the tape. She turns toward Nicolas. “She won’t be able to do anything at all.”
He understands immediately, feels it in his stomach. One of the cops looks at Pauline, speculates delicately, “You’re family? My condolences.”
Stupidly, Nicolas reflects to himself that he really is the only one who doesn’t find their resemblance striking. She hesitates, should respond with the truth but, coming from a concert where she was supposed to be her sister, doesn’t know what to do. Her confusion passes for grief. The cop lifts the tape, signals for her to come through, announces, “She jumped. Some of the neighbors say they saw it happen.”
A man asks her name, she says, “I’m Claudine Leusmaurt.”
Nicolas flinches, a little belatedly, would like to intervene but she’s already ahead of him.
“I’m the one who lives here. My sister arrived yesterday, we almost never see each other. It’s a stupid thing to say but . . . I’m not all that surprised.”
The man asking the questions scribbles some things in a notebook. He’s doing what he’s seen done in a lot of movies, adopting the gestures and mannerisms that seem appropriate for the occasion. Except it’s obvious that he’s bored shitless, thinking only of the forms he has to fill out. He snorts, asks, “She was alone up there?”
“Yes, I just got back from playing a show. She didn’t like crowds, she didn’t want to come.”
She doesn’t feel any emotion, except for something like hostility—she always has to be a pain in the ass—mixed with a joyous remorse. It’s the third time she’s wished for someone to die and it ended up happening: first her mother, then her father, finally Claudine. An empty space all around her, those who had to pay have settled their debts.
It’s odd to see the living room completely filled with strangers busy with various things. Just like that, the room is transformed into a stage set, a normal place on pause, people fretting all around.
A man who must be a detective tries to get Nicolas to talk, but he’s leaning against the window, doesn’t say a word. Pauline is sitting in a chair, she intercedes, “He’s really emotional, he must be in shock.”
She gets up and takes him by the arm. “Go home.”
She takes his hand, squeezes it to the point of crushing it, and fixes her eyes on him. For the first time since her arrival, she plunges directly into him, he smells like metal. Her grip and her gaze, all authority. She asks, “Call me tomorrow?”
She