Re: Gatsby: Clementine & Irene
The woman in crumpled cotton that smelled of a man who had discarded the shirt, Irene knew wanted truth instead of stage-lights. She demanded direction, but she wanted the simplicity of needing none at all, for all to be arranged like furniture upon a stage-set but for that arrangement to be in place when the lights went down and the false embraces on center-stage to be replaced by arms that wanted, instead of reciting lines. It was a softer, gentler dream, and Irene wasn't made to dream that way, but oh she could see the appeal. Clementine wasn't hard, for all her knowing, and that was no less difficult than becoming untouchable. It was more feminine, and Irene admired femininity that wasn't weakness and the honesty.
But what that painfully young woman had been looking for in the false sunshine of the stage and plaudits from the raked seats and a face turned upward toward the boxes seeking nourishment, Irene didn't care to think about. It still stung, and she had given up being herself, what little that remained packed away in tissue paper, but the jaded man seated in the dust of a temple that had forgotten worship of false gods on a stage, he'd recognized the draw of wanting so very badly.
"What do you think?" but Irene thought Galatea knew. She had, after all, taken direction so very readily. But that laugh rang out above the throng and turned male heads toward the candle of a woman in soft blue and yes, Irene approved of that sentiment exactly. When you were believed to be pinned down and shut into a box she didn't mind at all because it was precisely safety, to be considered so well understood. "And you know them," and her smile was a conspiratorial curve, stained red as poppies, "You know them from what they think of you, from what they say, from what they paint you as. What they think of you says far more about them than it does about you. And once they think they know who you are, they stop looking for you, darling."
But of course, Clementine knew that. And then Irene stopped thinking of the theater of everyday life as the movie theater widened from a packed mouth into a wide room filled with seats and a mob at the back that smelled like sweat under sweet perfume. It looked enough like the theaters she had known herself to be comfortable, and wasn't it grand? And she knew, too, that in places like this, the back was cheap, and discerned immediately that sitting at the very front like this was like the boxes in the opera-houses, a gesture. And gestures, a woman like Irene liked very much.
She sat, and it was elegance the way she hooked her foot behind her ankle, and stroked the folds of that red gown into smoothness. And she tweaked the sea-foam into straightness over Clementine's knee in a gesture intimate enough to draw attention and she looked directly into the eyes of the man seated next but one, who stared and she smiled, satisfaction at scandal.
"You like to see the craft for what it is. For it to be beautiful artifice, instead of dull truth," Irene guessed. She thought she knew a little of the woman next to her, and she agreed with the sentiment entirely. Stages and productions were enjoyable because they were not life, rather than mimicking it so completely that nothing tied off satisfactorily. "Or am I wrong?" Warmth knowing in that voice.