fic: mantels for golden idols
mantels for golden idols
rpf. the pretty gold trinkets can be found next to the gift bags - be sure not to leave them behind when you go. marion cotillard/javier bardem. 4968 words. rated r.
notes: firstly, i think we all know this is fic and not truth. so, by no means whatsover is this meant to be offensive, blah, blah, blah. secondly! this is for thisisironic! i finally finished! thirdly, the headers used throughout the fic are title from past best picture winners. i know. i'm so cheesy i can't even handle it.
i always believed in following the advice of the playwright Sardou; he said, “torture the women!’”
(alfred hitchcock)
the best years of our lives.
So once they handed him a camera.
“Get a feel for it,” someone says, and he nods, his left leg enclosed in a large plaster cast. He stares blankly at the camera for a moment, there is a smirk, and he tinkers and toys with the varying settings and dials.
“Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?” Jimmy Stewart asks; the volume on the television is turned up too loud.
There isn’t any film in the camera.
“He likes the way his wife welcomes him home,” Grace Kelly answers, her voice filling the small dressing room.
The camera makes a clicking sound and he looks down, surprised. Out of the corner of his eye, backlit in the reflection of the mirror, he catches a flash of white.
“Is it broken already?”
He smiles, turns around. Marion is slumped against the doorframe, her left hand fiddling with the doorknob; she turns it forward and then back, forward, her figure a slight cut in the open doorway. Her white robe is tied tight, hair loose at the nape of her neck.
His mouth widens in a deeper grin and he turns awkwardly in his chair to face her, his left leg mostly immobile. He holds the camera up, presses down on the shutter. There is a click.
She laughs; he appraises her before he speaks. There is a natural stain of pink to her cheeks and there are red rubber thongs on her feet.
The camera is heavy in his lap, and she’s watching him too.
“I guess not, huh?”
His voice twists with Jimmy’s in the little room; she leans.
my fair lady.
Before Vanity Fair and Hitchcock and white robes and cameras, there were introductions.
They first meet on a carpet stretched out in red; it is formal and awkward and nothing the pages of People would lead you to believe. She is shy and he is supposed to be something of a gentleman. Cordialities result, as such, and after first names and handshakes are exchanged, she blushes as she says, “You are a very good actor.”
“Thank you,” and his eyes flash, “but you? You are excellent.”
Later, it’s -
“Aren’t you just a pretty little thing, huh?” and there is an open bar, which is a dangerous proposition on its own, and she is against it and he is against her. She drinks white wine and he drinks whatever is close at hand.
She blushes.
She doesn’t move away.
the greatest show on earth.
It’s like this:
Awards season and they start spinning in the same circles and familiars, the international imports taking the podiums, statues and thank-you speeches by storm. He’s That Spanish Guy (Who Is Supposedly Fucking Penelope Cruz) and she’s That French Girl (Who Doesn’t Look Like Edith Piaf At All Without The Make-Up Crew, and Oh Yeah, Was In A Bad Russell Crowe Movie That One Time, Remember?), and neither of them are Daniel Day-Lewis so there is more latitude to slip off to the side. Anyway, it’s all acronyms and alphabet soups - the SAGs, the BAFTAs - well, he could have sworn there were more.
This time it’s the British handing out prizes, and as fate, luck, votes or whatever that final determining factor might be, they are both recipients.
She has her own award clutched tight in her hand, and he in his, and they’re shouting for pictures in too many languages to decipher, and she keeps talking in French despite the fact he is almost positive that she knows he doesn’t speak it.
She stumbles, and he extends a hand to her, and she almost takes it - a brush of her fingers across an outstretched palm as balance is regained.
There is her French slipping threads into English, and there are the cameras and the pictures and he slides an arm around her waist as she slides one behind his back.
She is laughing again, her legs crossed, hips angling towards him as she shifts a little closer. His hand drops a little lower, off her waist and astride her hip.
“Congratulations,” he whispers, “again,” and more cameras flash and the more dedicated of the reporters are angling for an impromptu interview or soundbite above the din.
“And you.”
His hand slips lower; her hips angle in.
the french connection.
She is shorter off the red carpet, but never diminutive in her presence.
She picks at the bread on her plate and he coats his knife in butter. She is talking, rambling really, and somehow she has carried the conversation from French politics and Sarkozy to sharks and the Atlantic Ocean back around to France and the Cannes Film Festival and is now trying to explain the plot of an American cartoon she caught on TV the other morning and how the ending didn’t really make any sense at all.
“You do not just end things like that. An ending has to have the pizzazz, it has to have something worth remembering. To treasure.”
He swallows a bite of salad, narrows his eyes at her.
“We are talking about cartoons, yes?”
"Just because they are little drawn pictures for children does not give them an excuse, okay?"
He studies her for a moment. “I find it hard to believe you are really this sweet, or this, I don’t know, sincere. It’s almost inhuman,” he laughs.
“You think this is acting? Some kind of…how do you say, campaign trail? Vote for me!”
“I think,” and he leans in, “that this is as much a role for you as it is for me.”
“Perhaps you think me a far better actress than I am capable of.” She isn’t drinking white wine; it’s coffee, it’s afternoon and it is strange. “But, well then we both know they would all like their French women to be charming and not conniving. It makes them too nervous.” She smiles wide. “Makes them think I might steal their men, or something.”
“Or something,” he chuckles.
“Yes, well,” and she sighs around a mouthful of coffee, “no one is here to watch us now.”
the sting.
There is a random luncheon (no, not that one), and it doesn’t really matter where or when, just know that salmon is one of the dishes served. There are huge tables and white tablecloths and flowers that make eyesight of one’s own lunch party difficult to master.
There is the chatter of small talk and Marion is to his left, Casey Affleck to his right (“you’re awesome, bro, completely awesome,” Javier had said, and it was a teasing, “yeah, yeah, may the best man win, right?” Casey offered in return, a heavy-lidded smirk).
Halfway through the first course the lighting of the room wavers, the background music misses a beat. Someone mutters about construction, another about random power outages. Marion raises her eyebrows comically at him, a stain of red lipstick left behind on the clean lip of her water goblet.
The lights flicker, and then, out. There are a few muffled oh!’s that carry and random shouts, not really out of alarm but more so out of surprise. There is a muffled giggle from her and even though he can’t see her clearly - the emergency lights cast weird shadows around the room, faces stretched gaunt along bone where normally there would shade skin, flushed - he imagines there is a light hand pressed against her mouth, maybe a flash of white teeth, the pale pink of her nails as she laughs. It’s a nice image, it really is, and the heat starts to creep now that the air conditioning has been silenced, or maybe there are other reasons, reasons like white teeth and pink nails and full cheeks, and the starched fabric of his shirt slicks damp against his back, under the weight of his suit jacket. He kind of loses himself in it (the image, the heat, her profile in the dimmed red light) for a beat, the scrape of sliding chairs against the floor, murmured concern and rising laughter for ambience, his collar bordering on the too tight, the choking, and he absently pulls at his tie.
There is a voice calling out excuse me! excuse me, please! over the din but goes mostly ignored. When quiet does collect it is sudden and all at once and a small man with gray hair and large glasses, a suit with shoulders too wide for his own frame, announces a stern, “ahem, ahem,” over the crowd. There is that soft giggle from her again; he doesn’t let himself turn to look, his neck still, chin raised, but his eyes do cast out into the periphery. She has her left elbow bent, resting on the table.
The little man tells them not to panic, to stay seated, something strange about firemen on their way that Javier doesn’t really understand, and everything the man says is curved in some kind of indiscernible accent - not that he is one to talk or anything. The man - he feels like he should know who he is but is failing miserably at conjuring a name or a title or something for the little guy - laughs nervously and says something about free drinks, not that they were paying to begin with, and the noise of the room starts to crescendo forth again.
She rests a hand on his arm and it startles, her fingers stretched against the length below his elbow, before his wrist. Her fingers press in, and he watches the sheen of glossy nail polish catch rare bits of light and reflect them back to him. When he lifts his eyes from her hand to her face he can see the bright bite of a smile in the dark, and feels first rather than hears the soft rumble of a laugh from her, traveling through her fingertips into him. He chuckles despite himself, her mirth contagious, and he is unsure as to what they are even laughing at, be it the dark, the anxious energy of the room, the red lights that spell EXIT, the little man with the gray hair, the texture of his suit beneath her hand, everything.
“It’s so silly,” she says, her shoulders hunched as she leans forward to say it loud against his ear, the pale skin of her face ghosting against his own, scratchy and scruffy - he hadn’t shaved that morning; “ah, the dangerous sex appeal!” Josh had called it, a joking leer, perhaps too self-conscious of his own clean-shaven visage, who knows, man - and her fingers curl a little tighter around his forearm upon that first brush of impact, skin on skin.
What comes next is stupid, and he knows this, he really does, somewhere in there, rolling and rollicking around in the back of his mind, he knows this is ridiculous and dumb and beyond stupid on his part, but he brings a hand of his own up to her face, his fingers digging deep into her hair. He murmurs something like, “Crazy, ridiculous, right?” along her face, and she laughs a little, her breath tickling his ear. He is kind of cradling her head as though the two of them are deep in conversation, or something, the power still out and the heat still catching; his fingers press at the bare nape of her neck, beneath her soft curls.
Their faces are too close. She pulls back, just a little, his fingers more insistent along the back of her head; he can feel the slight pressure of manicured nails along his arm. Even in the dark and the red, he can see her, all wide eyes and watching. She bites her lip and nods her head like encouragement.
He leans forward and her eyes flutter shut and then open, her teeth withdrawing, lips ripe, and he could kiss her, yes, he could kiss her, it’s dark and her eyes are full and her fingers have slid to the crook of his elbow, gripping tight, and maybe they could kiss and maybe it wouldn’t have to mean anything because it’s dark and there are red lights and somehow that matters. Her hand looks so small and fragile against the bulk of his arm, a tiny wrist and the jut of the bone under skin (he is playing by memory, the light gone from the room).
He doesn’t kiss her. He does lean forward, he does let the curve of his lips brush past her ear a little and he definitely does relish in the quick shudder from her, the way her fingers pull at his jacket when he mutters thick, mindless things like me ha dicho un pajarito… then loses the rest in a hum along the column of her neck and lets light laughter move him. He shifts his hips forward, one hand still stationed under loose curls of hair while his other slides below her waist, expensive fabric catching.
Whereas everything up until this point had the quality of time dialed down, freeze-frame, slow motion, unbearably slow, it all picks up again. He slides forward in his seat, a knee between her legs; it doesn’t take much more prompting than that, and she starts to rock steady against him. Her own knee brushes too close to him (let’s be embarrassingly honest here: her own knee brushes his rapidly hardening cock). She is fast, time is fast, and the room is dark: she cups him, briefly, a mischievous grin cracking her face, and just when the heel of her hand starts to press just there, just right - the lights flicker first, and then, on.
She studies her fork with great interest; he is really trying desperately not to laugh.
He fails.
going my way.
The leather of the booth is red and it’s slick. There is old disco playing, which is strange and out of place, but almost kind of fitting, filling the spaces in places time seemingly forgot. Everything in the bar feels old (not them though, no, never them).
The rest of their party has slipped away - dalliances in restrooms and bad dancing to bad disco and tequila shots at the bar. She is slumped, long legs dangling off the edge of the booth, one last sip at the bottom of her glass.
She starts to laugh, drunk with long fingers that crawl.
She finishes that last sip with a slight grimace and a shudder. He laughs lazy at her, the bulk of his frame filling the other side of the table. He stretches his legs and his knees bump her thigh.
“I don’t know how to say…” and she hides her face, a cross between a hiccup and a giggle escaping nonetheless, “but you make me feel…like,” she pauses, searching the word out, her glass empty and eyes a little glassy, “like merry.”
He snorts at this, inhaling rather than swallowing a mouthful of cold beer, the neck of the bottle between his index and third finger, and he coughs.
“I make you feel like Mary?” he asks, his throat still tight and kind of spasming, his voice kind of breathy and rough with it. He can’t get the image of the Virgin Mary out of his head, iconic, and he doesn’t know what she can possible mean by that; he thinks Madonna, “Like a Virgin,” and that just strikes him as a little too direct even for her.
She nods, earnestly. “Yes. Like merry. Like, you know, like happy. And joy.” She looks away with a goofy grin then punches him weakly in the arm. “You make me feel like that.”
“Yes. And I take full credit, you know.”
Her smile is full blown, and someone, somewhere, is singing baby, baby, baby! The bartender drops a glass and the resounding shatter overrides the music and the conversation; she doesn’t look away.
“As you should.”
(By the end of the night they’re alone and on the same side of the table; the leather of the booth is still red and it is still sticky against them, bare arms and necks and the slide of jean against its surface.
She keeps slumping lower and lower, her mouth moving, at first indistinct, and then clearly in song.
“Tous les garçons et les filles de mon âge se promènent dans la rue deux par deux,” she sings. The next line dissolves in a soft laugh, her head against the back of the booth, gravity contributing to help her reach his shoulder. Her cheek rests against the fabric of his sleeve, his arm stretched out against the back of the seat and behind her.
“… où les yeux dans ses yeux et la main dans sa main,” she continues, her head turning in, wet lips moving against his shoulder, “j'aurai le coeur heureux sans peur du lendemain.” She shifts forward a little, a squeak of leather as she moves, a hand on his thigh for stability. His hand moves off the back of the booth to rest along her back. She’s still singing, all breathy and stuttering, eyes full, “le jour où je n'aurai plus du tout l'âme en peine, le jour où moi aussi j'aurai quelqu'un qui m'aime!”
“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, Spanish, a quick twist of his native language around the oath and she smiles wider, her hands sliding up to grip his shoulders.
“I don’t remember the rest,” she murmurs against his ear.)
the apartment.
Time passes, right?
Try as they might, it still retains a certain knack for doing so, the choppiest of intervals.
There is London because there are critics and there are important concepts like the arbitrary and its awards to be handed down. There are other cities too, little pinpricks on a map of the world, a colored globe, but for now the position of YOU ARE HERE resides among Big Ben and double-decker buses and the Queen.
For now, there is a hotel room and a sun that has already set and a red carpet rolled back up.
Whatever the reason, Javier likes to consider himself understanding, tapped into the passions and the tics of women, but that doesn’t really hold water now, now that Marion is across the room with arms folded and a pout drawing her features down.
“Don’t touch me,” she bites out.
She does anger and she yells just like she laughs - high-pitched and feminine and almost cartoonish.
She says things that sound like ooo-blee-ay, and he has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it sounds bad and like it might be his fault, so he’ll shout back in kind, words vaulted and loud, Spanish, naturally, and she frowns a bit, eyebrows dipping, hands holding her hips, a wide-legged stance and instead of yelling now, it’s an incredulous kind of muttering in French under her breath.
He just keeps yelling, and his arms might flail a little, far more bulk to him than her, but she doesn’t back away, just lets him propel himself forward, arms spinning, Don Quixote and windmills and offensively generic hotel rooms in cities with no passion to their names.
There is a lull, distance closed, the wall too near behind him and it could be so painfully easy for him to take that extra step, hands to her shoulders, propel her back and back and back against the wall, right there, next to the curtains and the window, the city lights around and below.
He doesn’t. He lets his hands curl into fists, unfold and curl again. He lets the quiet consume for the moment and she just stares defiantly up at him, eyes wide.
“I do not know even what we are talking about,” she says softly, each word weighed then broken with a kind of gasp of a laugh.
“Los Angeles,” he deadpans and the fight not to smile is in vain anyway; his mouth catches upward as her own face scrunches up, amused.
it happened one night.
The Oscars happen and words alone will never fill a true retelling, that’s just how it goes.
There had been parties and gold statues and extended photoshoots kind of lost in a haze of enthusiasm and excitement. There had been the parties and the booze and the friends and celebrations that climbed to become a bit too heady.
The elevator up was lined with gold and mirrors as they rode it. She had leaned against the corner, shivered as her bare back met the cool glass.
“You think they noticed? That we left?” she had asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, between the seventh and the eighth floor, he kissed her for the first time.
It was heavy-lidded eyes and thick breathing, her trembling in his arms, when the elevator doors dinged and opened.
And now, and now, now, there is a room - his - and there is a bed and she almost fell, legs caught up in the train of her dress, her shoes kicked off and to the side.
Now, he’s gotta learn things fast here, right, because this might just be the dumbest and most self-indulgent thing he’s ever done and he’s trying not to think details, no, not now, not with the door shut and the television on, their own interviews being played back to them as the loose curls in her hair start to flatten against the pillow and her fingers pull hard at his tie, trying to loosen it or maybe just trying to draw him in, her lips hot against his as he bends to her will. It doesn’t matter where her boyfriend is, that French guy with the name he can’t train his tongue to fit around (his tongue, his tongue, yes his tongue is already occupied, wet sounds as mouths slick to open and her own joins his and now would be the time for analogies to tangos and twisting or riffs about the French).
Her dress is complicated and she keeps saying, “off, off,” against his jawline, but his hands are clumsy, they cover the widest span of her hips, her lower back. She peels his jacket past his shoulders and little fingers with pale pink nail polish fight for buttons and against white fabric; they fight for skin and when they find it, she sighs, a leg wrapped around his hip.
“No,” he says roughly into her mouth, “they did not notice.”
She bites his lip.
(He hasn’t fucked a woman like this in ages - stupidly, blindly reaching for something he has no right to ever call his own, desperate for desperation’s sake, silly and light-headed and wanting.
She doesn’t seem to care. The erratic bucking of her hips against him and arch of her back against the sheets spells a single-mindedness all its own.
It’s when the French babble starts up he can’t take it anymore. He doesn’t know what the fuck she’s saying, and maybe he doesn’t really care to know, but the words keep passing, all breathless and increasingly reckless.)
you can’t take it with you.
In the papers, they call the Oscar ceremony an exercise in mock United Nations, whatever - it’s completely overblown and too serious for men like him anyway. It’s too serious for this city they all like to warmly call a town.
There is breakfast at the hotel, a massive buffet packed with pastries no one ever touches and custom-made omelets, more fruit than could ever be necessary or eaten by this crowd. The inside dining space is mostly empty; the outside tables with the bright white umbrellas and wrought-iron chairs are mostly filled, the morning temperate enough, random wisps of cigarette smoke rising into the air.
The rain from the evening before is gone, forgotten, but the sky still hangs a little gray, a little threatening, and it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but he thinks he likes LA better this way, painted with a lighter, defter touch, a soft gauze over it as opposed to the city he had come to think he knew.
She is sitting on the patio and he catches sight of the flick of a lighter and that first inhale. She is barefoot and there is that silent bubble of a laugh as he reaches for a fork, thanks a server for the orange juice and plate of eggs, the heavy cloth napkin and there is an oil painting of what he assumes to have once been the Los Angeles of a different era, a different time, stuck up on the wall.
Someone claps a hand on his back, and it’s all, “Congratulations! We gotta talk, okay? You got my number, buddy, right?” and Javier hasn’t the slightest idea who this man is, but he nods all the same, offers a nod instead of a handshake, the morning paper still tucked under his arm, and manages to slip past with an, “Of course, of course, but I gotta,” and there is the jerk of his head towards the open French doors, “if you’ll, uh, excuse me…”
She only looks up briefly when he slides into the chair across from her. A smile pulls all the same, a few errant strands of hair across her face and he drops the newspaper down next to what looks like a half-eaten mango, or at least slices of it, and a bowl of soggy cereal. Her spoon rattles against the plate on impact and her smile grows a little.
He doesn’t know what to say, and this is absolutely strange for him. Words come easy enough, words come far too often. There is always something to be said, always some idea knocking against the corners of his mind, dropping from his lips without his bidding or cognizant approval. It’s different now - the woman at the table behind them is talking about how tacky and he thinks she invokes the word tasteless all that red was at the ceremony, and don’t these girls have any class anymore? “LA,” the woman sighs, “a never-ending pastiche of poor standing and vulgarity.” He bows his head a little, something like a grin tickling the corners of his mouth, and he can’t really help it (his eggs are getting cold, but they can wait, the orange juice will remain cool enough) but last night there was lipstick and last night there were white sheets and his tan skin and the remnants of that kind of wax against them both.
He thinks this woman has it all wrong, that she’s just tired and getting old, two things he never wants for himself.
“You know,” he says, his fingers brushing against the cold of her water glass instead of her hand. “I really like the color red.”
He says the words with the upmost seriousness and she raises her head at this. Her head cocks to the side a little, the bottom of her two front teeth visible as she adopts an expression of mock confusion.
“Well, that, my friend,” she says and she takes his hand in hers, albeit briefly, and they tangle together, his hand slightly damp and chilled from her full glass, “we both share in common.”
She drops his hand but not her head, and she watches, enigmatic expression there, as she leans back in her chair.
“You see the papers, huh?” he asks, because some subjects, no matter how unspoken they might be, are destined to be changed. “A union of nations!” he scoffs.
“And if they only knew,” Marion mutters; ash from her long-stemmed cigarette crumbles on a bare white breakfast plate.
Her mouth quirks up and she fiddles with her empty teacup.
He only laughs.
no country for old men.
Time passes more, still. It is different. His own face graces magazines, trash, things like speculation and romantic partners attached to his name and suddenly it all matters, it matters a lot. She receives much of the same treatment, at least while she treads L.A., New York, candid shots and all that dark hair and that wide mouth, her French boy, and the snow falls clear into spring.
There are still the random events, and with them, the random collisions.
He watches her excuse herself, her hand brushing past arms in parting as she slips out the backdoor, a pack and a lighter already clutched tight in her hand.
“I do not like that they are always watching,” she says, her eyes looking out and away instead of at him. “With their lens and…sharp eyes.” She looks over at him, a small closed-mouth smile and freshly lit cigarette. “Makes me want to become a ghost.”
“Boo,” he teases, lazy, leaning heavy against the wall, the rough texture of it catching at the back of his jacket, back of his head, his hair.
“Someday,” she says, carefully, the same way proclamations and denouements come down, “I want to own a house by the river. I don’t know what river and I don’t know what house, I just know that I want them both to be there, and that they both be warm.” She squints against the descending sun and the orange and the stretch of concrete, the rooftops in the curved belly of the hill; her lips fit around her cigarette, a red smear of waxy lipstick left in their wake as she pulls it away on an exhale.
He laughs, the sound full-bodied and rich; it echoes off the bare stucco walls of the alcove. “I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about, man.”
She scrunches her nose up, studies him, her elbow bent and half-smoked cigarette raised in the air.
“Yes. Yes, you do.”
He shakes his head, stamps out his own smoke.
Perhaps he does.
fin.