The walls are black, the water a crystal looking glass, framed in the white enamel tub. In the watery mirror: her legs. Pale, and shapely. She's shaving.
One hand is sliding down the razor, one, red nailed hand follows, feeling wet, impossibly smooth skin. It's a habit, checking for missed hairs, but really, in an absent-minded sort of way, she's enjoying herself, stroking those thin, sleek shins. Perfection.
In the other room, the new painting is still leaning at the wall, opposite the bed. A powder blue square, adrift in a sea of nail enamel red.
In the bath, it's the opposite: red nails floating across the pale, crystal mirror. The whole scene, the entire flat, is clad in black; black walls surround the bath, the bed. Black walls all around.
The painting is finished. She worked on it all week. Today, it's done. It is, she thinks, the best she can do. The canvas has gone from sketch to tunnel. It's gone through various stages of representation. Started from a drawing, after a photo, of the London Underground: a dead end, black-tiled walkway. Today it's a glistening abstract: a blood red vortex. There it sits, in the other room. La Vide. The Void. She can picture it perfectly. The painting has come, to her mind, alive.
She's in the bath now to scrub off paint, her turpentines. Like an infusion, they're in her hair, in her skin, her pores. She floats in the tub, soaking in essential oils: bergamot, cinnamon and tuberose.
They're expensive, these oils, and despite the global recession, she sprinkles them in liberally, closing her eyes and lying there in the dark of her own shutters, her own shades. Her head is tipped back, floating in the water, dark hair snaking out around her in the pale, lapping mirror. Her ears are submerged. They, too, are shut against the world, against its clamor, against its markets raging around us. She drifts in silence, in tuberose, in the dark.
Nouche has a Brazilian waxist, a young mother, still fat from delivery, working out of her council flat. The waxing room is carpeted, a faded pattern of purple and dust. The cauldron is crusted. The place is around the corner from her gallerist, another East End art hub.
How did she, she wonders, drifting in her crystal sea, end up on a whitewashed wall in Shoreditch? She's Parisian. She was destined for the Salon.
Actually, this is an edited version of her story. Nouche did not grow up in Paris. She's from Lille. Or, to be more exact, from around Lille. Even there, she's embellishing. Nouche is from Marly-Gomont, population 429, an hour south of Lille. An hour spent, as a teenager, every weekend, up and down, winding through Picardy, riding shotgun in some peasant boy's Renault. Marly-Gomont sits in the country-side like a chocolate box in a giant, green crater, an infinite saucer, she thinks, of nothingness, where the only sound, on a summer's day, was the toll of the church bell, once, on the hour, resounding in the empty plate, and dying away, only to be revived, at last, fifty-nine minutes later.
She hated that church. She hated that bell. She hated Sundays, when, late and long after the party, like the village women, it got animated, at last, and vicious: clamoring, clubbing her over the head, the very essence of her migraine, her hangover--her skull throbbing with every godly, hateful toll.
She hated the women. She hated the silence in the one street, as she rode in beside the acned friend of the hour, those early Sunday mornings, hated the silence as she stepped from her mother's doorway on Sunday afternoon for a pack of smokes, hated the silence in the one cafe, where they stared at her, those women, their men, mute, until she slammed the door back shut behind her. Yes, she thought, she had managed to fuck the village's single black teen, a beefy kid with nappy hair, eldest son of the hamlet's one, utterly lost, Congolese family. That's how she learned posture. Not just gyrating in the front seat, to fit both their limbs between the gears and the doors and the dashboard, but right there in the cafe, those Sunday afternoons, little Minouche, clicking in and out in her heels to buy a pack of Gaulloise Blondes, from the door to the bar and back, parting like Moses the sea of dumb-struck villagers--her shoulders back, chin up, lip curled.
The kid had gone on to become a rapper, later, long after she'd moved to Lille, and then, to Paris, where she'd been, simply, Nouche. A famous rapper, actually, she smiles to herself, thinking of his nappy-haired head pulling faces in the Marly-Gomont video, the song making fun of the village. It was edited in some friend's Lille flat a few years ago, that video, uploaded on YouTube, and promptly went viral, ending up a phenomenon: French, 'rural' rap, written up in Time magazine.
Fame. She, herself, had been sort of there. Almost, she thought. Half-way, pitched somewhere between the infamy of her teens and the fame she'd imagined for herself in her thirties. Here she is though, approaching the end of that decade. Here, in the Brick Lane bathroom. Her work not, as she'd envisioned, at the Pompidou, or Tate Modern. But around the corner from the waxist, on the wall in Shoreditch.
Her work has become strangely dormant, buried somehow, as though she herself is trapped in some long, dark, winter sleep. She is now, officially, more famous for who she's slept with.
Nouche lathers a handful of conditioner into her hair. She looks pale, not her own china tone but the flat white of her Dead Sea facial. Her eyes are dark, giant pools. She is looking at her own hands. The blood enamel of the painting, on her nails. On her own china-toned ring finger, a narrow band of that same Dead Sea white. That white band, an absence, an imprint of the past, a redux, is pretty much all, she thinks, that's left of her fame. A negative.
She married Alain Mouille when she was twenty-three. The Mouille, the big, hairy host of Soiree, the France4 TV show.
Nouche sinks back again in the water, careful, this time, as she lies steeped in sea algues and conditioner, to not submerge the creamy beehive. She stares up at the ceiling. She'd met Mouille at twenty-two, still in art school, when he'd been a psychoanalyst with a degree in philosophy and art and a small, exclusive practice. She had been impressed, like the other girls, at his lectures, unravelling the inner lives of Gaugain, of Godard, of the grand names of the public realm. Unlike the other girls, though, she'd had the fortune of possessing both posture and an air of ruin, clicking in and out of the auditorium in her heels, shoulders straight, hint of a smile, nose up in the air.
She'd grown up in a hay stack. She'd grown up poor. She'd had nothing to begin with, not even her own body, which she'd lost, in that hay stack, before she could remember, to someone who possessed her like cattle, someone who considered her his own.
She closes her eyes in the Dead Sea mask. This is one thought she is not about to chase to its conclusion, to its source, its origin--her origin, her very genes, the seed of her beginning, her blood; original seed, original sin, blood sin. No. This is where this particular tunnel ends. Full stop.
A blood tunnel, she thinks, nonetheless. Bright red, blood red.
The painting sits in the other room, she sees it perfectly, in her mind.
Tubereuse, she thinks, for no reason. Tuberose.
Alain had been on to her, on to her scent, the hint of blood she carried with such insouciance, a second-hand cashmere sweater draped around the blades of her shoulders. He'd followed her into the hallway, and out the building, into the street, down the steps of the Metro. There, as she'd been waiting on the platform, he stepped out, and, without thinking, shrugged off an extra large Pierre Cardin jacket, and knelt down, to spread it on the tiles before her. There it lay, on the platform, a maroon mix of silk and wool, with a light sheen, shining up at her. It made no sense, it was foolish, it was crazy, but it was the sincerest thing he'd done in a long time, and even if he stood there knowing he didn't know what it meant, staring at his jacket, he knew that he knew that he meant it.
It may, in all its absurdity, have been the one gesture that Nouche could not have resisted, and she'd sailed out into the world somehow, on it--out into the next fourteen years, into marriage and couture and the whole Soiree set: lights, parties at the Pompidou.
She'd watch from the director's suite, as the camera would cut from red-lipped starlet to politician, and back to Alain. From painter to film director, novelist back to starlet, and back, always, to the center of the table, to Mouille. The table represented the nation, L'Île de France, City of Lights; Mouille at the heart, like a spider in a web, tying the acutely public, the entire domain of the happening, to the hidden selves of each of his guests, the world of the motive, of the private, the deep and static fount of desire, of heart and soul.
Nouche herself had been a bit of an icon, clicking around the studio. La Petite Mouille. Sold most of her work before graduation. She'd hung from the immaculate white of whichever wall happened to be happening, her name, La Mouille, at one point making the careers of her dealers as much as they'd make hers.
Nouche now, a decade and a half later, opens her eyes, her face rigid in the mask. She soaks in the tub, the oils, steeps in cream, ridding herself of her terps. The new painting is finished, she thinks: over, ready. Done. It seeps from her pores, her hard work, the constant worrying with layers of chalk and pencil, acrylics, the coat after coat after coat of oil. The final lashing of enamel, a bloody coat of armor, like a high-gloss, Chanel panzer. Done. Gone.
Ready, she thinks, with a note of despair.
Alain had been the Maitre d' of Motive. Diviner of Drive. He had hit on her scent, teased out her wounds. The deeper she buried them under her elegance, her nonchalant click-click across the studio floor, the deeper he'd dug.
He'd come up for air, panting, as she lay on their Saint-Michel bed, her chin up, the smile still on her lips, but feeling turned inside-out, outside-in. She was caught in his web, where her public self had been tied, inexorably, to her innermost self.
He'd been Diviner of Desire, Master of ceremony, Host of the salon. The spider pulling strings on Soiree. When he stopped loving her, the house came crashing down. Of course he'd slept with the red-lipped starlet.
She refuses to go into detail, Nouche, lying framed here by her East End bathroom walls. She refuses to go into the erroneous text message she received one Sunday morning, sent from his car. Je suis sur la Periphe, it read, I'm on the Motorway. She refuses to go into it, and she refuses to get out, out of its dull, shallow stupidity. Miss you.. he'd continued ..et ta bouche profonde. Your deep throat, she thinks, your deep dark mouth.
He'd no longer loved her. It wasn't her lips he missed, her deep dark mouth. Hers had not been anywhere near him, not that day, or the day before, or the days or weeks before that.
Hours later, or was it days--weeks, she really wouldn't know--she'd stood out on the Boulevard, gazing back at the massive double doors of their apartment. Maison Mouille. After fourteen years of marriage, this is where she'd found herself--divined, hosted, maitre-d'ed, her deepest, darkest self turned inside-out. Then his flat, callous error. And here she was, at last: just turned out.
It's not unreasonable, she thinks, in the London bath, frozen in her mask. It's la vie. Life, she thinks, death, whatever you want to call it. Hell.
Her hair sits in its cream and honey hive. From the bathroom door, a powder blue silk dress hangs. Sheer white panties dangle from the towel rack. She glances down her body. It is, in fact, time for the waxist.
She thinks of the purple carpet. The Brazilian is struggling, with the baby, with the fat, and probably, she shudders, with the rent.
She thinks of the Shoreditch street, her gallery, the new painting. Finished, over, a thing of the past already.
Ready, she thinks.
What for?
Her eyes, black, giant pools, close in the Dead Sea face. The painting, the newly finished painting, is stillborn, buried already in the silence around her, the winter sleep stretching out from her like the nothingness of Marly-Gonont.
It is a crater, this silence. It starts right here. In the crystal mirror of the bathtub, the black walls around her. It spreads from her pale limbs, adrift in water, adrift in tuberose. Spreads from her body, her heart, and out: to L'Île de France, to the Lights, to the happening.
Out, and out, it spreads: a tunnel of blood, and silence. Out. A deep dark throat, swallowing everything; cameras, lights. Money, she despairs. Fame. Out. It is an inner silence, her most private self, turned inside out, and stretching, stretching outward, to the very bounds of the nation, of the common, of the public domain.
