Chapter Text
Ellis supposed she was good enough as he leaned back in the pink velvet armchair. He certainly wasn’t one of those men who complained about a woman’s mouth when it was anywhere near approaching his cock, whether her skills were the most titillating or tedious; the end results were consistently identical. Her red-lipsticked mouth slid up and down, plunging slick over his length. Her lips were puffed with effort and the surrounding circle of skin was stained with Crimson Rose, but he didn’t have to watch her blow him to know what it looked like, so he kept his eyes on the gilded hotel ceiling. The place really was more than he could afford to rent, he mused, shivering appropriately when she grazed her teeth against his sensitive skin. With the utmost politeness, he squeezed her shoulder, and she pulled off, wiping the back of her milky white hand across her mouth.
“That’s how we do it in Paris,” she smirked, shifting off her knees to straddle Ellis’ lap.
He palmed her buttocks, each of his large hands fanning the expanse of one plump, silk covered ass cheek. When she wiggled in his lap, he smacked her bottom accordingly and slid that hand straight up her dress, landing dexterously in a thick thatch of hair.
“A lovely city, Paris,” said Ellis. Slipping his second hand up her dress was as simple as it was expected, and he did it with a lifetime’s practice at his back, smoothly and with finesse. “I’ve always said so.”
Her hips were wide and soft, and his fingers dug in firmly, causing her to throw back her head with a pleased sigh. Ellis thought that was rather a dramatic touch. He almost always thought theatricality had a limited place in the bedroom - or bar bathroom, or cat club, or wherever else Ellis found himself sexually engaged – and that when a woman threw her head back and sighed, or moaned to excess, or started panting anything along the lines of “harder, faster, more,” it took away from the authenticity, sullied the purity of the act. Gwendoline, when they had made love, would breathe heavy and hot against his ear, and sometimes she would say things to spur him on, sometimes she would scream, but that was alright, wasn’t it? Because Ellis had known it wasn’t a performance. But the woman in his lap, waving her cleavage in his face, was not Gwendoline, and her brand of enthusiasm reeked of the cheap showmanship he disdained.
Again, the woman that wasn’t Gwendoline Churchill tossed her head back, exposing her throat to Ellis, and although he now considered her a bit of a phony, he still wanted to fuck her, and so he smoothed one of his hands to cup her crotch while his other hand held tight around the small of her swayed back. His lips touched to her offered neck, kissing the skin obediently. She tasted like the chemical tang of perfume, and he pulled away from the kiss with a crinkle of distaste in his brow and a flare in his nostrils. She didn’t see, of course, because her bloody head was thrown so far back.
“Do you want me to show you how we do it in London?” he asked. She craned her neck upright at his question, perusing him with heavy lids. A rosy smudge of lipstick still haloed her mouth, her Parisian penalty, and Ellis wiped at an edge of it with his thumb. His other thumb rubbed in the space between her lace undergarments and damp heat. Her crotch felt humid against his skin, and he gazed at her imploringly.
“Show me,” she said, and he hoisted her from the chair. She wrapped her thighs around his waist with a squeal, and Ellis would have rolled his eyes but she was watching him now, waiting to be kissed. She had to wait for him to walk from the chair to the bed, which was the span of the sitting room, and then scant yards to the bedroom, thus granting them the chance to see one another before he threw her unceremoniously to the mattress and mounted her from behind. But on the walk, as his bare cock bobbed against the crack of her behind, he saw a buxomly brunette with flushed skin and smudged lipstick, and she saw a comely English fellow with strikingly blue eyes and a fashionable mustache.
She bounced when he tossed her to the bed, and he wasted no time climbing behind her, flipping her to her hands and knees and pushing her fleshy thighs apart, and although she did not throw her head back with a pleased sigh, she did hang it forward and groan obnoxiously. He took that as permission and proceeded to fuck her, after pressing the kiss she’d desired against her smooth and supple derriere.
It went as well as expected, Ellis thought, for both parties. He ejaculated all over her silk dress, and she may or may not have achieved an orgasm. He didn’t ask and she didn’t tell him, and when it was done, Ellis lit himself a cigarette and went to smoke it by the open window. He switched his attention between watching the street and watching the woman as she swiftly passed out on his bed. Usually, he preferred to sleep alone, but, on that night, he lacked the energy to expel her from his space. Request of her departure may have required him to remember her name, and he couldn’t quite, at the moment, remember. So he smoked his cigarette and enjoyed the laxness in his muscles he knew would soon give way to trauma.
When he had burned the slim cigarette down to the smallest nub, he flicked its remainders out the window. It was too dark to watch it hit the street far below, but he watched it until it disappeared from his view, and then he joined the woman on the bed. He was relieved when she didn’t try to snuggle him, and he kept clear away from her, settling onto his back and staring at the ceiling and hoping, hoping desperately, that tonight would be the night he’d finally find some sleep.
--
Hours later, in the deadlight of a cloud-covered moon, Ellis, in a desperate quest to escape the rotting hands clutching at his ankles, awoke with a shudder. He shuffled his body to sitting, scurrying backwards on the mattress until his shoulders banged the headboard. He folded his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them as he shook. Sweat dripped down his face, and already he could feel the breeze from the window cooling the soaked bangs that fell over red-rimmed eyes. With a pained shiver, he reached for the cigarettes on his nightstand. His hands were too weak, too unsteady with tremors for him to strike the match on the first attempt, nor could he achieve flame on the second or third, and on the fourth, successful though it was, the repetition of noise culminated in the waking up of the woman whose name he couldn’t quite remember. He didn’t bother to mask his groan of displeasure when she rolled to her side and faced him with sleepy eyes.
“What are you doing?” she asked, lifting to lean on a knobby elbow.
Ellis rose from the bed and stormed from the room. His feet guided him to the bar in the sitting room where he proceeded to pour himself a copious fill of brandy. It burned down his throat and he collapsed himself on the pink velvet chair beside the liquor tray. Brandy sloshed over his hand and he unconsciously licked it clean. He had hoped that spending himself into another warm body before bed might exhaust his brain and prevent the nightmares. It hadn’t worked. It never worked. But he never stopped trying. And perhaps, he ventured whilst pouring himself more brandy, the scorch of drink would burn away what human company could not. He drank down more peachy-tinted liquid, welcoming the punishing burn that coated his insides, but the rotting hands, the field of corpses he traipsed through, still reached for him at every shutting of his eyes.
When his cigarette was sucked to its halfway point, the woman came peeking around the bedroom doorframe. She appraised Ellis, cowered and shivering, his emptied tumbler clutched to his chest with a white-knuckled hand. He did not turn to her, but he could feel her staring at him, sickeningly doe-eyed and curious toward the piteous grown man wrenched from bed by nightmares.
“What’s wrong?” she asked sweetly, and it was that cloying taint in her voice, so unlike Gwendoline’s, that crushed his desire to be nice.
“Get out,” Ellis said with a voice low and graveled.
“Pardon?” asked the woman, stepping from the shade of the doorframe to reveal her naked form. The golden glow from Ellis’ oil lamp threw ominous shadows across her body, casting odd shapes beneath her bosom and making the triangle between her legs appear black and bottomless.
“I said,” whispered Ellis, his hands shaking so horribly he had to slam down his glass and throw his cigarette into the ashtray so he might tug at his hair to steady them, “I’d like for you to leave. Please.”
She gawked at him and struck a hand to her hip. “You want me to leave?” she asked, the sweetness gone from her voice. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I know what time it is,” Ellis growled. Sweat poured down his face. Nausea squeezed his gut with rotten fists. He needed her gone, and he needed her gone that second, but she only stepped closer, as if revealing more of her naked body would inspire Ellis’ desire to have her stay. It did not. “Get out!” he yelled, holding his head in both hands and staring heatedly at the rug. Its patterns swirled and spiraled and he had to shut his eyes to keep his rising bile at bay, but the sight behind his eyes was worse. The putrid hands reached for him. He opened his eyes, stood from the chair, and pointed toward the door. “You need to leave,” he demanded, his voice shrill and pleading.
The woman took a step back at his outburst, her mouth hanging wide from the surprise of his capricious mood. When he directed his hot gaze to her, she retreated fully, scampering back to the bedroom to gather her things. When she came back out, she was dressed and slipping on her second high heel.
“You’re a bastard,” she hissed in his general direction as she stormed past him for the front door.
“There’s cab money on the stand,” he said, meeker now that she was on her way out.
She turned to him with a flushed, red face. “You’re fucked up,” she spat, but when she turned to leave, her little hand still darted out to the table and scooped up the money. He watched her stuff the cash haphazardly into her flashy, beaded handbag before the door slammed.
He clutched his stomach helplessly and walked quickly to the bathroom where he vomited up a quarter bottle of brandy. When he rinsed his face in the sink, a hollowed stare greeted him in the mirror. His reflection was scarcely recognizable, so dark were the circles under his eyes, so pale were his lips. A glance at his pocket watch told him it was only three in the morning. He passed the time before dawn smoking cigarettes, watching the tendrils of smoke waft from his nose and filter through the hairs of his mustache. His features drifted behind the clouds of smoke, obscuring his eyes and hiding him from the corpses that still reached with bloodied flesh and splintered, bleached bones.
--
And so Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett passed another night, much the same as all nights previously passed, all nights post his time spent in Gallipoli, chilled by his terror-sweats, unable to sleep longer than a few meager hours. But when the sun came up, he bathed, took special care parting his hair, grooming his mustache, and tying his tie in a whimsically stylish knot. By the time he met his friend for breakfast at the café on the corner, he was back in considerable control. He crossed his legs beneath the patio table and winked at the waitress taking their drink orders. He sipped his tea and smoked his cigarette and laughed loudly at his friend’s jokes as if he’d not spent the night warding off the horrifying images of violent days past.
“Christine thinks you’re a bastard,” said Perkins, his subtle French accent twisting teasingly as he buttered his toast. “Now, why ever would she say such a thing, Bartlett?”
Ellis grinned mischievously and knocked an ash from the end of his cigarette. Christine, then, he thought, had been her name. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said.
“You didn’t toss her to the curb in the middle of the night?” Perkins asked, his voice far from accusatory and lined with ample amusement. Ellis was thankful for his friend, who found such entertainment in his romps that he encouraged them with gusto. It was Perkins who had suggested Ellis come to Paris, to escape the spotlight aimed toward him in London, not entirely flattering. To get away from the Churchills and the newspapers. A well deserved break, Perkins called it, and he consistently threw a multitude of social events in Ellis’ direction, and every event was chased with a different escort, always pretty, always French, always willing to succumb to Ellis’ English charms. And Ellis, for all his faults, was dangerously charming, when he wasn’t kicking women out of his hotel room at three in the morning. At least, he used to be.
“That would have been unforgivably rude of me,” Ellis said. He crunched into a bite of toast, narrowing his eyes at Perkins, who was practically brimming with good humor.
“Well,” Perkins said, “you’ll have to find another date for tonight.”
Ellis lifted a brow, a self-proclaimed expert at feigning intrigue. “And what, daresay, is on the agenda for tonight?”
“I’m glad you asked,” said his friend. “Tonight, you and I are attending a ballet.”
“A ballet, you say?” Ellis asked with a spark of genuine interest. He was a fan of music to be sure, having recently purchased a gramophone, a rarity even amongst the elitists of the elite. “What’s the nature of this ballet? Why are you so keen on attending?”
“Because it’s not just any ballet, my friend,” Perkins said, polishing off his tea. “It’s a Russian ballet. Isn’t that grand? The composer’s supposedly a real up and comer. I can’t remember his name, but it’s predicted to be quite the to-do. Everyone will be there.”
“Oh, then we must attend,” Ellis agreed.
“We must, we must. Excellent,” said Perkins. “It’s decided. How exotic of us.”
“Exotic, indeed,” said Ellis. He finished his toast and speculated on the idea of the ballet, finding himself in the strange position of both dreading and anticipating the fall of night.
--
The theatre was crowded, an assembly of Paris’ High Society, costumed in their finest gowns and diamonds and coat tails and starched collars. Ellis and Perkins enjoyed drinks in the parlor across the street and would dine after the show, as was tradition, but for now, they slinked through the clustered, glitzy Parisians, stopping occasionally to speak with someone or other that Perkins maintained was of the utmost importance amongst the this or that, Ellis shaking hands and smiling so often his jaw ached, smoking cigarette after cigarette, desperate to busy himself and fill the void that loomed imminently upon the approaching darkness.
It took ages to reach their seats, four in total for their personal assembly. Ellis and Perkins sat beside each other in the center, their dates boxing them in on either side. Accompanying Ellis for the evening was a slim redhead whose name was Viola. He made an effort to repeat it several times, to ingrain it in his memory, but by the time the lights were flashing, alerting the audience the show was about to begin, he had already forgotten, his mind too full of a childlike excitement. He did love music, and found himself clenching his hands anxiously as he waited for the curtains to open.
The orchestra announced itself in the box at the foot of the stage, tuning their instruments in a rising crescendo of competing tings and strums and thumps. Ellis turned around in his seat to have a look at the audience, just in time to spot a figure entering through the back doors, a masculine shadow that slipped into an aisle seat in the very back row and steepled his hands beneath his chin. Ellis turned back in his chair as the lights began to dim.
The curtains whispered open, rustling to the outskirts of the stage. On a dark arena, a girl crouched beneath a solitary spotlight. Ellis leaned forward in his seat. And then the music began.
It was jolting. Ellis sat up straight in his chair, rapt in his attention toward the stage. The young girl unfolded, a bloom unfurling as a pulsating rhythm of music was struck. More dancers entered the scene, dressed as savages, encircling the girl, their bodies moving in strange, jerky motions. Ellis heard movement in the row behind him as a man tilted his top hat down over his eyes in jest. A woman seated in front of Ellis’ date was leaning to whisper in her companion’s ear, but her volume was loud and uncensored. He heard her insults, and so did everyone in all the surrounding rows.
On the stage, the young girl was jumping up and down, high on her heels, while savages danced a ring around her. Ellis tried to ignore the jaunts and jeers picking up swiftly throughout the audience. He strained his ears to listen, for the music was haunting and unpredictable, and it had Ellis’ heart racing. Erratic pulses, building and building, growing louder and louder. It was like nothing he had heard before, the ballet like nothing he had seen before. He couldn’t look away, not until the aggressive booing began and people leapt from their seats.
“I’ve never seen a reaction like this!” Perkins raved beside Ellis, and Ellis tore his eyes from the stage to face his friend, who was standing up with everyone else. A couple behind them was trying to squeeze their way to the aisle, but they were blocked by jeering men with canes, which they began waving above their heads as they shouted at the orchestra to stop playing.
Ellis’ date grabbed his forearm. “Let’s get out of here,” she begged, touching a hand to her stiff red curls to test their fortitude. He raised a brow at Perkins, who shrugged his acquiescence, and at that the foursome began their descent from the theatre. It was no easy feat. The music still played, booms of sound exploding, and Ellis kept an eye on the stage as they pushed through the rioting wildlings that were supposed to be Paris’ finest, fur-lined elegants. The girl was still jumping and spinning, faster and faster, to the beat that joined her in a frenzy of blood-pumping energy. Ellis was thoroughly distracted, so much so he was nearly hit in the head by a weaponized gentleman’s cane. His gloved hand came up to block it before it struck him in the nose, and it was then he realized the extent of the audience’s negative reaction. The room had truly turned on the performance, the dancers and musicians both, and before long Ellis could no longer hear the exquisite detail of the music for the yells and screams of anger. The lights began to flash. He heard a siren.
The mix of sounds rang disturbingly in Ellis’ ears, and he had to stop on the stairs to grasp at the rail. Perkins and the women didn’t see him, and he didn’t stop them from abandoning him to his own devices on the steps, quietly beginning to fall to panic. The screams surrounding him sounded too familiar. The elbows and hands brushing his arms as bodies passed by to reach the exit felt too familiar. A rotund man rammed into his side as he pushed past, and Ellis shut his eyes and flattened himself against the wall.
Dead bodies everywhere. Gunfire. Wails of the dying. Limbs flying, detached, blood splattering the muddy trench, hot on his cheek.
Ellis pried open his lids and barreled through the surging crowd, shoving and clawing his way to the emergency exit. He rushed down the hall until he reached a door, any door, and he went through it without hesitance. When his eyes unblurred from the nightmare around him, he realized he was outside, in a back alley behind the theatre. The ground was wet from a rainstorm, and it drizzled still, cool enough and steady enough to bring forth a sigh of relief from Ellis’ mouth. He tilted his head to the falling few drops and leaned his back wearily against the bricks. He breathed in, deep, harrowing breaths, thankful that he alone had found the isolated place to hide. At least, Ellis thought he was alone until he heard the strike of a match. He looked about, not seeing anyone at first. He had to take a few steps from the wall to spot him, the man standing around the corner and bringing a cigarette up to his lips.
Not a bad idea, Ellis determined, reaching for his own cigarettes and trying to keep quiet and unnoticed by the other man, whose back was turned in Ellis’ direction, and whose head was bowed low, his only movements the lifting of the cigarette to his lips and the inhale and exhale of smoke. Upon surveillance of his own smoking case, however, Ellis discovered he’d lent his matchbook to Perkins, damn him, and was suddenly at the necessary mercy of the mysterious man ‘round the corner, who definitely had matches and definitely, judging by the defiant stoop of his protective posture, did not want to be disturbed.
Ellis did not savor the notion of bothering someone so obviously bent on being alone, but he savored even less the freedom of his fingers to clench and tremble with nothing to hold. He needed a cigarette to calm his nerves, so violently intent on clawing their way out of his chest that Ellis was moved to hold a hand over his heart to steady its bothered beating. Decidedly distressed, he took the needed steps to bring him around the curve of the building. As politely as he could, he asked, in French, if he could please borrow a match.
The man started, clearly taken aback by the sudden company, and turned his head to glimpse over his shoulder. He stared for a moment from behind small framed, circular spectacles, and then turned around to face Ellis completely. To say Ellis was unaffected would be a lie. Beneath the dark gaze of the man, Ellis nearly took a step backward, so consuming was the other’s presence. He was several inches taller than Ellis, who had never been a man who took up much space, but this man loomed beyond his superior height. The very air around him seemed to tingle, and Ellis drew in an unsteady breath, compelled to apologize for being such a bothersome wretch. But the man reaching into his coat pocket stunted Ellis’ words, and he waited silently. At the retrieval of a pack of matches, the man stepped forward, lit the match, and brought it up behind a cupped hand. Ellis slipped his cigarette between his lips and leaned into the offered flame, sucking gently at the tip until the end began to smolder.
“Merci,” whispered Ellis, unable to look away from the man’s face. It was intense and strange, with high cheekbones and a stern center part, dark hair sweeping behind each ear. His eyes, past the veil of his glasses, were set beneath a prominent brow, pale eyebrows as severe as his pursed lips. And it was the lips Ellis found himself struggling the most to look away from, because they were unusual, exaggeratedly bowed, the upper lip especially plump as the stranger placed his own cigarette between his teeth and took a drag. Ellis wasn’t sure if it was a handsome face or not, but it was peculiar, specific, and it demanded attention.
“You’re welcome,” said the man in English, though his accent was certainly other.
“Dear God, is my French so poor you instantly pegged me as an Englishman?” Ellis asked with a forced breath of laughter. The man didn’t smile, or make a pronounced expression of any kind, but Ellis did think his eyes softened a touch. Then the man turned, not completely putting his back to Ellis, but excusing himself nonetheless to lean against the cold brick wall, where he resumed smoking his cigarette quietly.
Ellis retreated a few steps back himself, leaning against the brick just around the bend, close to the other man, but separated by the partition of the corner angle. They smoked in silence, and Ellis found himself listening for the other man’s inhales, so that he might match them to his own.
Upon the twilight of his cigarette, the man flicked his finished stub to the ground and stepped on its ember with a shiny-tipped shoe. He did not stop when he passed by Ellis, but noticeably slowed, and he did not look straight at him, but tilted his head marginally in the direction of the wall on which Ellis leaned, and then he vanished through the Emergency Exit and was gone.
After his departure, Ellis released a sigh of tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He toiled a bit longer in his solitude, lighting a new cigarette with the end of his old one, and smoking it idly before deciding it was time to head back in and find Perkins. There was a dinner to consider, after all, and an after party for the ballet which would be impolite to ignore. He straightened his hair, his tie, swallowed the last lingering flutters of anxiety, and braved his way back inside.
--
The party was held at a popular piano bar, and Ellis moved through the smoky room with a trained smile on his face. His redheaded date had gone home, as had Perkins’, leaving the bachelors to attend the party freely, which was always a plus for two single men after the supping hours in Paris. The women danced like spirited little nymphs, long pearl necklaces jingling about their necks as they shuffled their feet to the suspiciously American, ruckus tunes bursting forth from the piano player’s fingertips. The men all smoked cigars, standing in cliquish circles, talking up their individual grandiosities, and everywhere, in every hand, was a drink, overflowing and bright.
The mood was crazed with heightened chatter, and everyone wanted to talk about the riot, and what had caused it. Had it been the music that had so disturbed the gentiles of Paris? Or had it been the indecently writhing dancers, hopping savages, despicably inappropriate? As Ellis overheard chunks of these conversational smatterings, he thought it absurd. Surely the dancing in that very piano bar was as risqué as the ballerinas. And the music, though conspicuously unusual, had been scintillating and exciting, like the jazzy ragtime jangling the black and ivory keys that very moment. In fact, the more Ellis considered it, the more he thought it wildly unfair that the ballet had been, in his opinion, rioted against in protest to its Russian savagery, the quality Ellis found the most poignantly genius about the whole affair.
Perkins guided Ellis by the elbow, twisting them through the busy, buzzing room, past several huddles of men, until they arrived at a particularly well-dressed set. Important looking men of the arts, with plush, velveted top hats tipsily strewn on their heads and stiff, high collars beginning to sunder to gravity’s whims and reveal stark, sunless flesh. Perkins rounded himself and Ellis into the boisterous bunch with a hand clapped to the closest man’s shoulder and a mutually shared guffaw customary of two old friends seeing one another after a long time apart.
“Claude, you old dog!” the man bellowed with the confidence often accompanied by too much drink.
“Rumfeld!” Perkins answered, voice clanging and overly loud.
“What of the performance tonight? I haven’t seen you in far too long,” the one named Rumfeld said, grasping Perkins’ hands to shake them fondly within his own. “You spent too much time in London, I think, and forgot about us.”
“Ah, but I’m back now, and I’ve brought a celebrity to entertain you boring lot with!” Perkins exclaimed to many sated grins and lifted glasses. With a nod to Ellis, standing to the side and trying to follow the rapid French - which he was fluent in, but beneath the level of confidence to be completely at ease in social situations - Perkins called for the group’s attention to focus on his companion.
“And who did you bring us?” asked another man with a colorful silk scarf looped around his neck.
“None other than Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett,” said Perkins with a flourish of drama that had Ellis flinching. “The journalist who changed the tide in Gallipoli this year past.”
“The very same?” Rumfeld asked with a greedy grin. “The one that went up against the Churchills with Murdoch?”
“That’s the one,” Perkins verified, giving Ellis a nod of appreciation. “A very good friend of mine. He’s staying at one of my properties in the city for the season.”
“It’s a thrill to meet you, Bartlett,” the men said in drunken rumbles and variations, and then Rumfeld settled his hand on a man yet to catch Ellis’ attention, half-hidden by the angle of his shoulders, and he said, “We have something of a celebrity with us tonight, as well.” He prompted the man to turn with a squeeze of his shoulder, and Ellis found himself, for the second time that night, looking into intense, dark eyes, sequestered behind circular spectacles. “Gentlemen, meet the artist of the night, the composer of the ballet himself, Igor Stravinsky.”
Ellis was positive his eyebrows shot straight up his forehead, so shocked was he to see the man from the alley again, let alone discover he was the brain behind the bewitching music. But it made a poetic sort of sense that the man so intense Ellis could hardly bear to look at him would be some form of mastermind, the Russian savage with the oddly alluring face and the dark eyes currently blazing in his very direction. Ellis puffed out his chest and thrust out his hand, which Stravinsky took hold of at once, and they shook hands a single time before releasing. Ellis immediately slid his hand into his jacket pocket to fish for his cigarettes. He took one and held it between his lips while he patted his breast pocket for the matches he knew he didn’t have on his person anymore. And like a heady daydream, the stony-faced composer struck up a match from his own pack and stepped toward Ellis. Ellis cupped the flame himself as he leaned in to suck, his skin brushing lightly against the other’s hand, powerless to look away from the steady amber beam of the Russian’s eyes. All of this passed, mind you, in slow motion for Ellis and in the blink of an eye to everyone else in their party, and then the moment was over, and Stravinsky stepped away as Ellis inhaled a deep pull of cigarette smoke.
“So you’re the madman behind the disaster tonight,” Perkins said, second in line to shake the man’s hand.
“Madman is a strong word, I think,” said Ellis, reaching casually behind him to accept a drink from a passing waiter’s tray. He glanced at Stravinsky with tempered reverence. “I thought it was inspired.”
Perkins laughed and began talking nonsense with Rumfeld, but Stravinsky caught and held Ellis’ eyes, and amongst the talking heads he crossed the circle to stand at his side. “You enjoyed the performance?” he asked, his voice so low Ellis had to lean close to hear.
“What I could attend to, I enjoyed,” Ellis said. He rolled the long, slim cigarette between his fingers. “I do find it regrettable these Parisians can’t handle their scandal. I would like to have experienced it in its entirety.”
“The dancers ruined it,” Stravinsky grumbled moodily, and Ellis couldn’t help but laugh at the sour expression, receiving his own disapproving look as a result.
“The dancers were spirited,” Ellis said. “But it was the music, I think, that moved the audience to outrage.”
“There was nothing wrong with the music,” Stravinsky harrumphed.
“I agree,” Ellis said with a crooked grin. Stravinsky paid him a look at that, an unexpected look Ellis couldn’t quite explain. It involved the tilting of his head and the slight parting of his lips, followed by the gesture of his hand reaching up to straighten the rims of his spectacles over the bridge of his narrow nose. “Stravinsky,” Ellis said, testing the name on his tongue and chasing it with a sip of champagne. “The world will thank you for your music one day,” he said with a tip of his glass. “Accept my singular praise in the meantime, weightless as it is these days.”
Stravinsky nodded stiffly, that same unreadable look shining in his eyes, and Ellis touched a hand to Perkins’ side.
“I’m going to have a walk about,” Ellis told him. Perkins nodded and turned back to Rumfeld, who had claimed him utterly with his irrefutably irresistible conversational skills, leaving Ellis to bow politely away from the circle, saving a final fleeting look for Stravinsky before he spun on his heel and sauntered into the mingling crowds of the party-goers.
It happened, as it often did in the later hours of the evening, that Ellis’ anxiety began to return. He flit about the room in a daze, mind unsure of where to settle. In one hemisphere of his brain, he could sense the inevitable reaching of dead hands and the lifeless glare of hundreds. In another, a severe face haunted him behind a puff of smoke as dancers jumped about him. Ellis drowned the tremors with more free drinks. He spoke to many pretty women and even allowed himself to be coerced into a dance with one especially lovely blonde. Her hair swung loose and long down her back and it reminded him of Gwendoline, which only proved to make him more drunk, as the thought led to an immediate downing of several more drinks. Thus it came to pass that Ellis stumbled into the men’s room to relieve himself, an unlit cigarette dangling carelessly from his lips.
He positioned himself at a urinal and leaned an elbow against the wall while his other hand freed his length from his trousers. When the flow of relief streamed free, he sighed and rolled his shoulders, which ached, and that’s when he finally saw the man occupying the urinal beside him.
“I must really be bonked not to have noticed you,” Ellis said.
Stravinsky zipped himself up and walked to the sink. Ellis followed, washing his hands, but leaving them beneath the faucet longer than was necessary, losing himself in the cool whoosh of water. He looked up through his lank lock of hair hanging in his eyes, and met that increasingly familiar unfamiliar face in the mirror. His blue eyes looked grey in the dim light of the bathroom, and the dark circles beneath them were prominent and bagged. Ellis looked, he mused morbidly, like a corpse from his nightmares.
A hand reached over to shut off the flow of water, stirring Ellis from his ghoulish reverie. He shuffled his feet and turned to the stormy Russian beside him offering a hand towel. When his hands were dry, Ellis waggled the cigarette between his lips and leaned forward, stumbling and falling into Stravinsky’s broad chest. The composer did his best to steady Ellis, and then brought out his pack of matches for the third time that night to light his cigarette, one for each of them this time. In unison, they inhaled the first dense drag, and then Ellis grabbed Stravinsky by the back of the neck and pulled his mouth roughly down against his own.
It was less a kiss than a smoky grinding of lips, and it lasted only as long as it took for Stravinsky to push him away. Ellis staggered back, wide-eyed, as surprised by what he’d just done as Stravinsky looked to be. He couldn’t think of what to say so he continued to smoke his cigarette and stared at the tiled floor. Seconds later, after copious deep breaths of shock, he heard Stravinsky’s footsteps hastily exiting the bathroom.
“Fuck,” Ellis sighed once he was alone.
Sufficiently drunk, he decided it was time to call a cab.
He wavered on groundless feet to the cobbled street and threw himself into the backseat of the car, somehow accomplishing the difficult recital of his address to the driver, and settling into the realization that he would spend yet another night too afraid to sleep and too drunk to keep his eyes open. Ellis pushed a finger against his lips. At least he had the memory of Stravinsky’s mouth against his own to keep him company.
--
Later that night, or rather, later that very early morning, a multitude of city blocks away from Ellis, Igor Stravinsky sat at his piano, banging haplessly at the keys, sending a flurry of discord into the air to knock around the thin walls. His wife and children were sleeping and he was seething. “The Rite of Spring” had been a disaster. The party had been an abominable joke. He slammed his fists against the piano and bent his head low, listening to the failing tune as if for unknown secrets. Igor remained stuck in such a position until he was moved by an irrational thirst. Vodka sprung forth into his glass, and he fingered the matchbook in his pocket before bringing it out to ponder. When a match was pulled and struck, an image floated up from the mud of his mind: the man who had haunted the entire evening, his continuous presence coating the experience with a sticky sweetness that smelled of smoke and sulfur.
Igor had first spotted the man when he’d entered the theatre and seen him twisting around in his seat, a pure face in a den of sparkling facades. He’d paid the face no mind until he met it again in the alley. Such a face, so vulnerably open and strategically closed, his mouth twitching constantly between smiles and frowns, his voice edged with a smooth hysteria. Such a face. Igor had thought on that face wondrously, after their parting, wondering if he might ever spy that likeness again. And then there it was once more, serendipitously appearing through a haze of cigarette smoke, and again, mashing against him in the bathroom. Igor downed his vodka in a single, stinging swallow and puffed at his cigarette. He sat down at the piano with that face curiously bright in his memory, and he began to play, his fingers lightly stroking, coaxing forth an easy melody, unhindered by any thought beyond vexing blue eyes and soft pink lips.