Chapter Text
One morning, the sun in Claudia’s tangle of hair as they meandered away from the table after eating pancakes still a little too drunk to have properly slept, Claudia was going on about the house her father had bought, a total and complete death trap, it must have been condemned. Rotting wood and peeling wallpaper, makeshift columns holding the vaulted ceiling aloft, and did Madeleine want to see it? Sure.
So they drove, in Madeleine’s Impreza. It was a hideous ice blue, but at least it fit a couple of dress forms. In fact it fit a lot, this car, the backseat full of things Madeleine had found at the Crescent City Creative Exchange. Madeleine never had anything to exchange. Instead of buying the scraps of fabric and sequins on “pay as you wish,” an utterly absurd system, she had started offering workshops for them: how to make a little lamp out of mismatched bathroom tiles and plastic beads, or how to make a pot for a tiny echeveria out of colored wires and popsicle sticks. This way, she got her supplies for free, or at the discounted rate of her own minimal labor, and kept the full materials fee every time she had a commission. This time, a funny new hotel opening in Mid-City wanted her to make something for nine guest rooms, since the gimmick was that every room would have something from a local artist. Madeleine’s willingness to contend with this brief was limited to hot-gluing together the art-supply detritus that caused Claudia to frown as she got back into the car, perhaps more attuned to it now that she was a little more sober, and perhaps a little less embarrassed.
Anyway, she now had time to go on about her favorite topic, her parents.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she was saying, of Louis showing her the house last week. “Armand is always flipping properties, but I don’t think they’re gonna flip it. I think they’re gonna live in it.”
“Well, Armand will not live in it,” Madeleine said, focusing more on the lush streetscapes than on the details of Claudia’s parents’ drawn-out breakup.
“Course not, but I think Louis’ gotta be competing with him, right, or why else would he buy this shithole of a house? You don’t know Louis, he comes off as real rational, but he can’t just dump someone, he’s gotta beat him at his own game. I’d almost feel bad for Armand, if he weren’t a little rat.”
Madeleine did not think Armand was a rat. He was more of a pampered house cat, if anything, or a little lap dog that got the exact amount of exercise the trainer demanded, grooming twice a week, and an endless supply of stiff leather collars.
The house was in Uptown, or so Claudia had said, just a block from the park. The “for sale” sign that had hung on the iron gate in the picture Madeleine had seen was gone now, replaced instead by the placard of an architectural firm. There was nowhere to park, really, except on the street in front of the driveway, whose gates were closed — but of course, Madeleine knew no one lived here. Everyone had to know no one lived in that house, as it was immediately and obviously uninhabitable.
“Come on,” Claudia said, reaching through the gap in the iron to release the phalange.
“I don’t think we should trespass,” Madeleine said, knowing that they would, of course. But someone had to say it.
“It’s my dad’s house, it’s not trespassing.”
“Yes, but you don’t live with him, you live with me.” Even as Madeleine said it, there was a warm feeling at the back of her brain: this little thing, all hers. The mess of Claudia’s hair, her outfit, the fine powder under her very heavy lids after a night of blessedly free drinks in the front row of Lestat’s bar, or just the bar, as Madeleine thought of it, as if they all had a little piece of ownership. Madeleine was behind on about six different costumes for various performers. Claudia, Madeleine supposed, was the matchmaker, in that she’d brought her father there, and now they were standing (illegally, perhaps) on the grounds of the home (“home,” the thing was as dilapidated as the shack they ran the Triple-C-E out of) he’d bought to live in with the bar owner, Madeleine’s patron, or patroness. Whichever side of it Lestat was playing. Neither of them could be sure. Lots of he/she-ing around lately, a far cry from the man in selvedge denim and sheer button-up Madeleine first met, ah, when exactly, surely not as many as ten years, no, that was frightfully long ago. But not so few as five, either.
“It really is a heap of shit,” Claudia said, kicking something, a little rock or other bit of yard detritus, across patchy grass and paving stones, crookedly awry in the earth as the great root of an oak snaked up. “I don’t usually question his purchases, you know, Louis’ got a pretty good eye.”
“Well,” Madeleine said, as she felt the dust of the yard brush across her purple-suede buckled heel with a chunky sole. “I thought Armand was the real estate one? Maybe he just doesn’t know. I mean, Louis,” she clarified.
“Right.” Claudia kicked another rock. “That’s what I’m saying, this is mercenary. Winning-the-divorce juvenile macho revenge fantasy. His dick’s bigger.”
And Claudia kept going, as Madeleine stood staring at the house. It was, after all, a real heap. A pile. A tear-down, they called them. And yet: fine bones, this place. Victorian, with its big windows. Overhangs. Gracious.
Also, it was pink.
“What do you think of the color?” Madeleine took a step back. “Like for a baby girl.”
Claudia shrugged. “They’ll repaint it.”
Madeleine adored the sweet naivete. Not together-together again, not yet, but Madeleine could feel it. They would be, soon. First it was “let me crash with you” so Claudia didn’t have to move back into Lestat’s condo with her father. At Madeleine’s, the pretense of the couch was quickly dispensed. The better part of the year in Europe hadn’t made Claudia any wiser, only bolder. She ate whatever was in the refrigerator without concern for why Madeleine had stocked it, appropriated whichever items of clothing were at hand, and lit candles free of regard for any other environmental factor, including whether Madeleine was working at the time, or cooking something that did not pair well. For example, Diptyque’s Friandise holiday candle, the only left in the set of three Lestat had given everyone working in and around the bar last Christmas. Madeleine treasured this about Claudia, the rude little bitch, with her pout and her wide eyes. Standing there in the wasteland of a backyard, she seemed soiled, despoiled, some fallen angel in her shapeless-drab overalls (but in the way that shapeless-drab was a little fashionable, probably something from the top floor of Dover Street Market).
They absolutely will not repaint it, Madeline knew, or if they did it would be the same color. Claudia was scowling at it, unaware of how her future would unfold on this very site. Not that Madeleine herself knew, at the time. But she did have a sense, that bright morning, still a little too drunk for it to have been wise for her to drive over here, that Claudia was not seeing everything.
“Come on.” Tugging on Claudia’s baggy overalls. “We’d better see the inside.”
“Are you nuts? I saw the pictures, it’s disgusting in there. It’ll probably collapse on us.”
She is like her father, Madeleine thought, all but carrying Claudia into the, yes, stale air of the vaulted pink Victorian. She knows how to cultivate an idea of the value of art but she is always appraising. An artist would see the vision. See the ceilings. The ornate carvings. The way the stale air moved from room to room, sweeping around corners like an empress exalted in her throne room. It smelled of promise, not of friandise.
But, it would soon enough.
Madeleine has seen the plans, the architectural renderings. She’s had questions, but knows better than to ask them anything. Every couple of weeks, or once a week, Lestat would have a fitting. At the fittings, she would show pictures: we are building a second story and the staircase will go here. This will be a foyer now. A veranda. My grand piano in this corner, don’t you agree? Louis had bought it for — god, something, it is always some reason for an extravagant gift.
“Our fifth anniversary,” Lestat says, when Madeleine asks for the reminder. This math does not really make sense, does it? Five years ago Claudia was dating Madeleine, and as far as Madeleine is able to recall Lestat was paying her extravagantly to make gowns and sleeping with a whole cast of characters, Antoine mostly, and pressing Madeleine’s patience at fittings with insights into what she kept calling “dykery.” Louis was married to Armand and Madeleine kept finding herself at dinner with them, everyone playing family, Madeleine herself contending with Armand’s nosy questions about whether her line of work was stable, and which residencies had she done, and what was her visa status? No answer ever satisfied, and she could barely restrain herself from getting up with a “go fuck yourself” and upturning her goblet of ice water over his head. Had they really started sleeping together five years ago, Louis and Lestat? And if so, did that really make an anniversary?
But queer anniversaries are like this. Surely Madeleine did not imagine the little nymphette she found to model would be warming her bed after all this time. Madeleine would have imagined herself elsewhere by now: Jakarta, or Athens, or CDMX — all places, incidentally, they have on their long list of honeymoon destinations.
“Well, where would you go?” Madeleine asks, when Lestat scoffs at each one of them.
“I wouldn’t wait for my honeymoon to go where I wanted,” Lestat sighs, as Madeleine pins the hem up a little higher, above the knee. Death-defying short, she thinks, even as she notices Lestat tucked very tightly under there, with a rose-silk and ivory-lace Brazilian that is entirely unnecessary for this routine fitting. So too with the full face of makeup, however: it’s years after she first showed up at Madeleine’s door with everything contoured. When Madeleine had asked, Lestat said, “Well, don’t you think it makes everything look more real? In terms of the costume?” In principle, Madeleine does agree. But she does not think that is why Lestat is doing it.
Thinking, again, of the first time she saw Lestat: in lusciously tight Japanese jeans, but men’s jeans nevertheless, and a gauzy white shirt so sheer her little tits shone through it, pink like the delicate innards of polished seashell, and one with a little gold hoop. It made her seem lopsided, until she bothered to get up off the stage, where she had been lounging against the edge. Hair in a messy bun. The moment she’d said, “Yes, hello, I’m the dressmaker?” Lestat had snapped into French, asking, “Paris?”
“Banlieue,” she’d said, “Saint-Cloud.”
“I have spent some time,” Lestat told her, “in the Bois de Boulogne.”
Madeleine had been taught not to touch things like that. Safe topics with someone you might want to do business with included: the last book you’d read. Anything in the newspaper. The upcoming theater season. New places to get a Chinese takeaway. And so on.
By the time you have your nose practically touching someone’s genitals on more than one occasion, however, there’s very little you can’t ask them. For instance, how much will the brocade wallcovering for the inside of the front hall coat closet cost?
“That’s a good question,” Lestat says, playing idly with her phone, probably wishing she had a cigarette. “I don’t want to find out or I might tell Louis, and then he might not want brocade in there. But you have to have it, the coat closet is the first thing your guests will see. I’m not suggesting we put it in the linen closet upstairs or anything.” Finally, she lights one.
At this point Madeleine is surprised to learn Lestat is limiting herself to just one upstairs linen closet.
Madeleine’s life was standard. Boring, even. Nice parents. Siblings. She went to school and came home and did her hobbies, her doodling and her reading and her video games. They gardened in the spring and summer and had their weeks of holiday like everyone. Her mother and father were homophobic in the easy, tolerable way of their class: thoughtless comments balanced with over-extension into acceptance, yes, our lesbian daughter, we love her so much, we don’t care who she marries, it’s all the same to us. It might have fed her creativity a little if they’d been more dramatic about it. Sharpened her into a better artist. Over the years she has certainly noticed Lestat’s scars, to say nothing of her pithy notes about growing up some fifteen years earlier in the massif. Mentioning some boyfriend often enough that one day Madeleine finally asked, “So where is he now?”
“On his parents’ mantelpiece,” Lestat had said, the arch belying the utter sadness in her pond-blue eyes, dressed that day with just a little silver-gray on the waterlines. Pausing to take a long drag off her cigarette, and then: “Or he was the last time I saw the parents, they had me for tea when I was there for my father’s funeral. I’m not in touch with them, however, so maybe they finally left that miserable little town. I don’t think that’s where Nicki saw himself, ultimately. I would have dumped those ashes at the Cite de la musique, you know, that’s where he should have ended up. Of course, nobody offered them to me, did they? I would have done better than a brass urn.”
Still, Lestat was the only person Madeleine spoke French to, outside of her Sunday call home. Did it matter that Lestat’s accent was trash, as Madeleine’s mother would have described it? No, but she had a funny, throaty way of saying things that never stopped sounding bumpkin-y, to Madeleine’s ear. To that extent, when Madeleine thought to herself, it sometimes began to take on the outsider quality of Lestat’s voice: not the big-city ho-hum tone she’d heard in her school, but a sing-song as deep as the dark waters of the bayous, or as tall as the volcanic rocks of the parts of the motherland Madeleine knew only in passing. The whole language was a joke, the longer she was severed from it. Just a honking flap of a language.
Or then again, maybe it was just Lestat. Sometimes, in a dream, Madeleine heard a whisper, or a throaty come-on. As if from her mother, or her first girlfriend. The sounds would uncoil like the sensuous tongue of a lover, licking endearments across Madeleine’s brow as she slept. She’d had to come to this overripe, overfed kingdom of hypocrites before she could turn around and gaze back at the Old World fondly. Two summers ago, amid a heatwave, Madeleine found Claudia in the arrivals hall at Schiphol, and they sweated with their ice creams melting down narrow cones behind the train station, seated on the concrete in front of the IJ. In the Sarphatipark, Claudia took her shirt off in the grass, the day so hot even the green blades seemed to be weeping chlorophyl onto them, and Madeleine watched the moistness gather up under the little handful of Claudia’s breasts as she breathed heavily in the heat, five huge bottles of beer clinking between them.
“They’re divorcing,” Claudia said, her fingers pressed to the glass of her phone.
“It’s back-and-forth all the time with those two,” Madeleine said, both earnestly believing it, and not quite sure if what Claudia wanted was for her parents to stay together.
“Louis got a lawyer,” Claudia had said. “I mean, another one. A divorce lawyer.”
They spent the next five days mostly in bed, fucking in front of the wide-open windows, barely a breeze coming into Claudia’s Airbnb, or whatever place this was she’d rented, off of the Prinsengracht. Eventually their fingers puckered up, they spent so long entangled. This was when Madeleine realized she’d been brought over as a distraction. Back at Centraal, waiting for the Eurostar, Claudia said, “Thanks for coming out here,” as if she hadn’t paid for the ticket. Around them, hundreds of moistened American tourists and slightly sleepier party boys heading home from their debauched weekend languished. Perhaps it was because it was so hot that they didn’t draw near to kiss goodbye.
With a beer on the fold-down table in front of her, Madeline spent the ride wondering why she hadn’t asked Claudia to come home with her. It would have been so easy. They weren’t dating then, but why didn’t she? Had she thought Claudia wouldn’t go?
Well, Madeleine thinks, back in the present. We have a lifetime now. Or perhaps my parents will lay eyes on the pink monstrosity playing host to the reception and they’ll turn away in disgust, so then I’ll be done with them. And if they’re not put off by Lestat, maybe the house will do it.
“But I think she is jealous,” Lestat is saying, probably about some queen or another, one of the treasured daughters she treats like a footstool. “Living in that squalid abomination of an apartment with seven people, like this is a reality show?” Ah, this is Feefee. Madeleine has no hard opinions on her.
“Not everyone is so fortunate,” Madeleine says, looking around Lestat’s drag room. There is a little sun off the balcony, which overlooks a courtyard, which has a pool in the middle. All she is doing today is taking up a hem, so fine, she can let the light go. They were supposed to meet at Madeleine’s, but Lestat had texted to say (in rough translation), I’m so hungover, will you come to my house? By which Madeleine presumes she meant, “I’m feeling lazy and I want to smoke,” which Madeleine doesn’t even allow herself in the studio. Perils of textile art — you don’t want it to smell like Gauloises or watermelon ice or whatever.
So Lestat is smoking, bending over to snatch the cigarette from its tarnished baroque perch in between pins. Madeleine’s sketch for this was a floor-length sequined gown, body-hugging with corset detailing, low back and long sleeves, as described by Lestat on the basis of a Dolce & Gabbana she coveted but apparently couldn’t fit into “no thanks to my shoulders,” which, fair enough, they are quite broad. Off-the-shoulder and high necks work well for her, in Madeleine’s opinion, but Madeleine’s opinion is little if anything to Lestat. She marched up to Madeleine in the middle of a shower last week — again, a shower, technically Madeleine’s shower, for Madeleine — and started drunkenly going on about the tuck she’d perfected recently, and wouldn’t Madeleine bring up the hem on the Dolce rip-off, wouldn’t some kind of red lace thong Lestat was waving around on her phone look fantastic with the black sequins?
This is all pretty standard. There has been an extended series of showers. Their friends, then Louis’ friends, then Grace got one in — frankly, it’s good that they aren’t at the studio today. All the work surfaces are covered in half-unboxed Georg Jensen and Ginori. They are halfway to the full twelve settings of Granduca Coreana. No guesses who made them put it on the registry.
What is Lestat’s role here? Well, that is a good question. A self-described mother of the bride, she has mostly taken to escalating the costs by first suggesting, and then insisting, on ludicrous extravagances. Claudia is a very willing partner in this. Much as the coat closet should have some absurd brocade lining (to attract moths?), the tablecloths must not be synthetic, only real silk will do; the walk down the aisle must have a string quartet but the cocktail hour, a full band, and the after-dinner dancing, a second band, and the after-after, some DJ, and so on. Cire Trudon tapers, we are buying them in pallets. I don’t like the silverware the catering will provide so we must buy a new set, it has to match the silk tablecloths, hammered copper — no, this iridescent one, et cetera. Claudia’s interjections are typically mediating: the catering silverware is fine. But they are going to use the most expensive set. It is matte gold.
Like most people, Madeleine has considered her own wedding, if not exactly fantasized about it. She has carried the assumption that she would one day be a wife — then, of course, discarded it, at least nominally. But they linger in the background, these things. She would have thought her own wedding a quiet affair, the little church where she was baptized to satisfy the parents. Instead it will be in the backyard of a pink mansion. The timeline seems precarious: the house is supposed to be done by now, but it is not. Its owners have not moved into it. If Madeleine has understood correctly, there was a massive argument pertaining to how it was awful to have to spend another Christmas in Lestat’s condo. It’s odd, this condo, but Madeleine doesn’t find it so bad. It’s large, for one thing. There is a pool steps away, for another. Outdoor space, that’s always nice. It provides parking in the tourist area, what isn’t there to appreciate about this? The biggest problem, of course, is that the entire place is stuffed with Lestat’s miscellany, her lingerie on racks and her junk-shop finds hammered to, or set upon, every surface: doll’s hands in the Blue Willow dish on the windowsill. Years of candlewax clinging to not just the towering candlesticks and abra, but to the scarves, scarves everywhere. There is nowhere to put a tree. They have been to Claudia’s aunt’s house for Christmas, so why Lestat needs a tree is unclear. Just to look at it, probably.
As an aesthete herself, Madeleine sympathizes. But the flat is already quite claustrophobic. It’s soothing to slide the pins in, rhythmic even, as her kneecaps scream and she stumbles over the memory of the week Claudia spent here, after Madeleine first proposed they marry. The hallways were so narrow, and all of them filled with Louis, shooting meaningful looks but saying nothing helpful, really. What were either of them supposed to do? A challenge to my authority, Madeline thought of it. Our life like this, tantrums and fainting spells. Claudia is not usually like that, just sometimes. At least now that they are planning the wedding there’s a distraction.
It says very much about Lestat’s character (neutral assessment) that she is not embarrassed, that she keeps inserting herself, looking perpetually down on Madeleine — who is shocked that Lestat even bothers to lean over and ash cigarette after cigarette into a dish instead of onto Madeleine’s head.
“There,” she says, slipping the final pin into the new hem. “Take it off, I’ll bring it home with me.”
Through a mouthful of smoke: “When will I get it back?”
“When do you need it?”
“It’s for the new year’s number.” She puts the cigarette down and lifts her arms. “Mistress of ceremonies, with a little tiara.”
Dutifully, Madeleine rises to assist. “I’ll bring it to Grace’s.”
“Are you going to wrap it up, put it under the tree?” Lestat pulls her hair out and it falls limply. She snatches a robe from the back of the chair at her vanity and snakes her arms into it, posing like a dancer. “All those aunts love a little show. We should kiss each other’s cheeks every time we pass in the foyer, lean into the Euro of it all.”
Madeleine is sure there are only two aunts, although Pointe du Lacs do have a way of proliferating. She gets through it by saying little and following Claudia’s lead: typically outside to have a little breather and a smoke with her cousins. “Tell me about the new year’s show,” she offers, to avoid having to discuss Claudia’s family with Lestat, so that Madeleine doesn’t have to laugh at anything Lestat says about them.
“I got costumes for all the girls,” she says, leading Madeleine downstairs. The steps are narrow and Madeleine can’t grasp the banister for the heavy, spangled bundle in her arms. “Off the rack, unfortunately, but there isn’t time for anything else, what with all the renovations and the packing and the wedding, I’m simply so busy.”
There is not one cardboard box that Madeleine can see anywhere in this condo, but, all right.
“Do you want a coffee?” Lestat asks, heading straight to the kitchen. “I’m going to have one.”
“Oh.” An unprecedented gesture of domestic hospitality. “All right.”
“I don’t know how to work this,” Lestat is saying, as she all but strokes the wooden handle. “Louis’s machine, but I’m sure you can figure it out.”
Madeleine barks out a laugh. “You don’t know how to use it?”
Lestat says, “No.”
“Well, take this,” she says, pushing the dress into Lestat’s chest. “Put it in a bag, or something.”
Madeline does not herself know how to use an espresso maker. She had always had a moka pot, even brought one from home after visiting over her first Christmas back, and then when Claudia moved in she brought a very nice drip machine that hasn’t broken. Madeleine has been drinking American filter coffee ever since, with a little almond or oat milk, really whatever milk-imitation product looks appealing on the shelf at the coffee shop when they need more.
There is something endearing and frustrating about learned helplessness, she thinks, as she retrieves her phone from her coat pocket and Googles a string of words that terminate in the phrase “user manual.”
Lestat, meanwhile, stands there holding the dress and criticizing. “Don’t drop that little cup, it’s from some Japanese artisan who lives in Canada and only makes espresso mugs, Louis would be devastated,” things such as this. It is a nice cup, eggshell-thin, its glaze crackled. Madeleine knows dozens of ceramicists who make cups such as these. She is reasonably confident they could have a new, nearly identical thing for Louis by Christmas. For that matter, there are about 80 mismatching mugs stacked upon each other in the kitchen cabinet. Maybe they should be packing some of them. Maybe it would obscure what’s broken and what isn’t if some of these things were being packed up.
It occurs to Madeleine as the coffee is percolating, or whatever espresso does, and Lestat is going on about the matching costumes (gold sequins, and not as short as Lestat’s). Also, that she and Louis will probably hire someone to pack for them. Madeleine cannot summon a visual of Lestat, or Louis for that matter, going to U-Haul. Buying a carboard box. Putting it in the backseat of that violently pink sportscar. Carrying it into the house. Unfolding it. Realizing there is no tape. Trying to unstick the end of the tape from the roll with bejeweled nails. Of course they will be using professional packers — which does nothing to explain why packing would contribute at all to having no time to have dresses made. But Lestat’s reasoning doesn’t have to make sense. This is simply not the point of Lestat.
“So how do you make coffee,” Madeleine asks, “if you can’t work the machine?”
“Louis makes it.” When Lestat sips out of the delicate cup, her robe lifts to reveal more flesh. Once upon a time she asked Madeleine, what color are your nipples? or something to this effect, grasping at an indication of what color makeup Madeleine should wear, but in a bawdy way. Lestat’s are rosaceous, and Madeleine has seen them many, many times. Something about the robe skirting one, the opening of it catching on the little golden ring, makes this seem filthier than it is.
It’s not cruelty but some misplaced sense of curiosity that pushes Madeleine to say, “Why don’t you make coffee for him? Aren’t you the wife?”
Lestat licks the inside of her teeth without opening her mouth. Finally, she says, “The two of you are getting very bold. Why are you playing these games? But I can play along. He does these things for me because of some wounded sense of masculine pride. This need for control he has. Some sex thing, like he had with Armand, I don’t fully understand it.” She reaches into a drawer now, and finds — ah, interesting, a rolled joint. Not even a proper cigarette. She lights it, and inhales from it, and without offering any to Madeline, finally says, “Not that I care to understand it, whatever awful arrangement they had, it obviously wasn’t very good or we wouldn’t be here, for any of this, now would we?”
Giving a man dependency feels pathetic, as a man or a woman or whatever in-between thing Lestat now considers herself. It also strikes Madeleine, while accepting and thickly drawing on the joint, as out of character for a person who has pulled herself from the pit of France into the footlights of her own glittering stage. Madeleine had a qualification from les Beaux-arts de Paris and an extremely prestigious residency that carried her overseas. She earned these things, she supposes, but it was a well-trod path.
Lestat takes the joint back and when it’s between her fingers, Madeleine can see the telltale if faint purple smudge on the end of it, and she licks her lips for it but doesn’t find anything. Instead, she asks, “So, how’re you going to keep him? By needing him a lot?”
“This is a stupid question,” Lestat says. “This game the two of you are playing is trying my nerves. Men are such simple creatures, we really need very little, and I assure you he is getting it from me.”
“What game are we playing?”
In a falsetto: “Lestat, you’re a woman, you’ll wear a dress to the wedding, why don’t you put on a frilly apron and make him a pot roast.” A beat. “It’s almost simplistic, it’s disappointing, this cattishness from you girls. You think I don’t know what you’re on about, but I know. This lesbian humor, I can play at that. Which one of you is the man?”
“Me,” says Madeleine, without missing a beat.
“Yes,” Lestat agrees, “which is why she dresses like she’s selling trinkets off the highway.” She does not return the joint. “This is such suburban middle-class American thinking.”
Something Madeline finds so interesting about Lestat is how she never really says anything. It’s all teasing and intimations with her, the shapes of concepts. As an artform, Madeleine finds it a little intriguing: the suggestion of what isn’t there. Using the song and the costumes to gesture at some larger question, well, this is what drag is, after all, a wag at the unspeakable.
But, eventually, it all comes bubbling up in some form or another. That agonizing week could not have been for nothing.
Madeleine is about to say as much, but this is when Louis comes home.
“Mon cher,” Lestat says, reaching. Before Louis can get the door shut, Lestat pulls the joint from her lips and extends it to him, walking around the kitchen island for the door. “You’re rescuing me, thankfully, Madeleine was just leaving.”
Louis accepts both Lestat and the joint, albeit putting only one in his mouth, at least right now.
“How was the fitting?” The smoke always seems to waft around Louis elegantly, almost a veil.
“Fine, fine — she is leaving,” Lestat repeats.
At home, Claudia is in her usual position: on the sofa, chewing on the end of the cord on a sweatshirt, and nose pressed to phone.
“Have you been here all day?” Madeleine asks, although she has only been out for a couple of hours, and Claudia at work when she left.
Ever impudent, Clauda rolls her eyes. “How is Madame?”
“Seeking a very short skirt.” Madeleine drops the bag with the dress on the parquet near the front door, hanging her light trench, and sauntering toward Claudia. She cards through the details of the fitting, trying to decide which to focus on. She settles on, “Do you want to see it when it’s done? She is planning some new year’s show, she says she got matching dresses for all the girls, we could do that instead of Stevie’s party.”
Claudia sniffs like she can’t decide if she likes the aloeswood burning on the low table before her, nestled in an olive dish to which Madeleine has glued a thousand seed beads on the underside. The vape is prone beside it. “So long as she doesn’t wear it to Christmas. It’ll be all anyone talks about.”
“Mm, and what do we hope they talk about?”
“Not whoever my dad’s fucking,” says Claudia, “for once. Please, god.”
“The wedding,” Madeleine says, matter-of-fact, settling beside Claudia on the couch as she reaches for the vape, feeling the edges of everything dulled just slightly already from whatever she was given by Lestat. “Or the house?”
“The wedding’s just a proxy for the house.” Claudia sighs, finally relinquishing her phone to settle against Madeleine, the soft cotton of her sweatshirt against Madeline’s scratchy second-hand sweater vest. “And the house is just a proxy for whoever my dad’s fucking.”
“Well, fuck him,” Madeleine says, only because she doesn’t know what else to say.
“Yeah,” Claudia agrees. It’s night already, being winter, but it has always seemed to grow darker later than it did for Madeleine growing up — because they’re so far south, or pushed to the right position in the time zone, or whatever it is that makes life here brighter more often.
Happenstance. Beauty. Luck.