Title: La Bon Moulin Rouge

Author: Laura Fones

E-Mail: rb46628@aol.com

Distribution: Red Windmill, the Penniless Poet, whoever else, simply ask.

Spoilers: Of course! You can't have a Moulin Rouge fiction without horrible, horrible, and shameless spoilers pertaining to the ending of the film.

Rating: PG-13

Content: Christian/China Doll, Toulouse

Feedback: Think of it as a much less costly way of paying your favorite authors with small tokens of ego.pretty please?

Summary: One must always depend on the kindness of strangers, for a man's salvation lies in an unfamiliar hand.

Disclaimer: I do not own and am not affiliated with any part of Baz Luhrmann's production, and I most definitely assure you, I am making no money from this.







Chapter 5

"My god China Doll!" Toulouse took great pleasure in berating me, this fact was becoming readily apparent. "What have you done?"

In a less than somber tone I readily spat the words at the condescending dwarf. "You know, I asked Christian that very same question, but he had no answer for me."

"But don't you see that it's wonderful?"

"What?" His tone changed too quickly for me to emit wit.

"Well, consider it," He was dizzily pleased by my encounter with Christian and was coming frighteningly close to the edge of giddiness. "You've made him see that he is capable of loving another woman, I tried for weeks to make him realize that. By god, you're brilliant!"

"No, I'm incredibly stupid." I clasped a cold hand against my forehead, where a migraine threatened to form. "Beside that, I'm a horrible wretch, and I know it as well as he does."

"Don't criticize yourself China Doll," He said, "It doesn't suit you."

"Doesn't it?" I snarled, pain having now traveled across the better area of my skull. "I came here to escape Christian and all you can do is endlessly babble about his progress. I can't help but feel as if my own pain is being ignored."

"I'm sorry," He whispered reprehensively and tried to sooth the soreness in my head with the cold washcloth he held at his side. "My dear, it's not as if you're--"

"I think I'm falling in love with Christian," I cut him off as he dabbed my forehead and I stared off into space. "God, I can't believe it." A woeful chuckled escaped my lips, "I'm terrible. We all loved Satine, and you would have thought it would be Nini, but I'm the one to betray her."

"She's in the ground," He said harshly, "There's nothing you can do that will affect her now."

Surprised by his untactful harshness, my eyes widened a bit. "You think that justifies it?"

"Why should you need justification for such an guiltless action?" Toulouse had the heartrending look of a man scorned, and I touched the side of his face. "What on earth is more innocent than the act of love?" He was so soft now in the darkness of his apartment, and I nodded.

"You're right Toulouse," I conceded, "I know you're right.but it doesn't really matter, does it." I leaned a bit more into the plush chair and dangled my hands over its edge. "I can't go back now, having done what I did." I laid down across the chair's width and held a pose. "Perhaps this can be your painting of a perfect love: an impossible one. The Unhappy Whore.has a bit of a ring doesn't it?" When Toulouse did not move, I leaned up on my elbow. "You've begged me to sit for you Toulouse.I'll be your model now."

He nodded dejectedly and quickly gathered his paints. I picked up a Chinese mirror on his side table and held it up to my face. My eyes looked entirely absent of any real emotion and just stood empty, as if haunted by the apparition of Christian's touch. Toulouse returned and I set the mirror down upon the floor, stretching out against the chair in a semi-natural position.

"Toulouse?"

"Yes?"

I said one final thing as my chemise fell off my shoulders. "You loved her too."



I kept track of the days subconsciously. I would have thoughts usually that ran along this line: And ten days since Christian, I am now eating breakfast, without him. walking on the streets of Montmartre, without him.going to sleep in a bed without him. My mind now had a vicious obsession to power my writing, and I finally finished a story that had bewildered me for months. So, logically, I sold it, erasing piece by piece the bits of Christian that I had brought with me.

Hours turned to days, and days into fortnights, fortnights into months, and one not so very special day I sat aside, my gaze lingering on the expanse that was the empty page.

"You know that trite, hackneyed phrase that everyone uses when saying good bye to someone they care about?" I said to Toulouse, my heart sickly from lack of use. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." He nodded with disinterest. "It turns out it's true. Christian. I hate missing him this--"

"Oh for Christ's sake China Doll!" Toulouse interrupted my angrily. "You're just as bad as he was. You moan and cry and beg because you've lost the one you love; you're sick with grief over the fact it can never be!" His melodramatic tone cracked momentarily as he confided. "I felt that every night without you and I felt that every single time you'd collect your wages for a job well done. I cried and I begged and I did everything I could to make you love me, but it didn't help." He clasped my wrist. "But Christian returns your affection, he wants you just as much as anyone ever could, and you deny your own happiness because of a corpse who was once your friend! It's like you enjoy your own misery."

"Toulouse." Tears bit into my eyes at his tone.

"No, listen to me," He cut me off. "Christian isn't unreachable, he hasn't died and left you without the will to live. Not yet. But if you keep up with your melancholy and your meaningless reasons of why, he might as well join Satine as you obviously believe he's suited for no one else!" He leaned in and spoke with softer intensity. "You've always been the strong one, and if you're defeated by the simple prospect of love, what hope is there for the rest of us? You can't do this to him. You can love him and stay with him forever; you'd do him no injustice by that, but at least try to humor the humanity that I'm sure still exists in you. You know, it's not as though it takes some great sacrifice of life or liberty, just let him love you."

"I'm not her replacement, Toulouse." I admitted, "I can't fill the void that she's left. You see, that's why it can't be. I can never be her."

"If she was all that he wanted, he would have indulged in necrophilia long ago," Toulouse's acid tongue continued. "You're not meant to be her replacement, just his lover. Surely you can manage that."

"But Toulouse, there's so much more to it," I stood and paced around him. "Love causes misery, indelibly more than I'm in now. And if something were to happen to him, what then? All my love and adoration skewered, and for what? A day or two of happiness?"

"Isn't that the point?" Toulouse defended.

"But all of it," I began to falter, "All of it is just.every second is so miserable and agonizing--"

"Yes, love is agony," Toulouse interjected, "And it's misery, and it's suffering too. It's hard and it's painful, and it's everyday.but, God, everything else about it is so wonderful that it's worth all of that just to have those one or two days."

"How would you even know?" I spat with fervor.

"I loved you, didn't I?" He spoke sagely, "And it was worth it, even without reciprocation."

I chuckled awkwardly. "God, how did all of this happen?" I realized my laughter sounded more like sobbing and I bit into my lower lip. "You think I should go and see him, don't you?"

"I think you'd be horribly bourgeois if you didn't." Toulouse answered with his trademark line--years had done nothing to change his battle cry.

A brief pause before I let loose a tear. "But you know that I'm not going to."

"I didn't expect you would, no." Toulouse affirmed as I walked away.

I stepped over to the side table. "I'm going to the post office," I told him as I donned a shawl. "Is there anything you need?"

He shook his head, "Nothing."

I smiled ruefully, "Of course not."



As I sifted thought the correspondence packed so neatly in a bag by our friendly postman Jean-Paul, my thoughts lingered continuously on Toulouse's outburst, and how deserved it was. I was being foolish, and he was right that I enjoyed my pain; a writer feeds off such a thing. And that is what I've decided that I am, only a writer. As far back as I can remember I never called myself anything but 'author'; not girl nor woman nor lover nor human being, simply 'writer', and we are all absent of normal emotion. Our scenes and stories are contrived, our speech pompous, and our lives as dreary and uninventive as our books and plays. Christian was an exception, one that I was probably not worthy of. He was an innocent who believed so much in the power of one simple emotion that I am sure he would have died for it.

I'm quite surprised that he did not.

He's everything that we heartless, hopeless hacks would wish to be, but could never--

I stopped as I came upon a thick binding of papers at the bottom of the stack. "China Doll," I whispered the name of the intended recipient and pulled back the cover. The bold title read 'The Moulin Rouge' and a folded stationary sheet dropped from the pages; it also bore my name.

I didn't squander even a moment of debate, and quickly unfolded the letter:

Dear China Doll,

It's taken me this long to find you, and if I even have I don't know. I don't know how I lived before, I can't remember the hours spent without any goal or consolation, but I'm certain that I couldn't have survived much longer if you hadn't convinced me to, what was it, 'expel my sorrow onto the page'. I didn't realize at the time that my heart would be broken once more before the book was completed.

I found a copy of your story at a bookstore in my weeks spent wandering the streets after you had left. I knew it was yours only because of the dedication on the cover. Thank you for that. I could fill page by page if I was to critique it, but that would be a waste, wouldn't it? Instead, I chose to fill this brief, ill-advised letter with unnecessary, childish sentiment.

I love you China Doll. Do you even need to hear me say that? And I know you will never believe me, and I'm not going to beg you to come back or steal you away in the night, I just need you to know that I am here. For as long as I can possibly be, I am here.

You hold now, no doubt, in your beautiful, painted fingers the only copy of the manuscript that exists. Do with it what you will, I don't want it. It's a horrible, glitzy epitaph to the dearly departed, one that has no proper place in the binding of a book. I loved Satine, with all my heart I did. And just as no one else will ever lose feeling for his or her first lover, I will never stop loving her. But she's gone, dead, while you still live, and I feel such ardor for you that I cannot ignore it. If you burn the book without ever reading it or never again wish to see my face, I will not blame you. You have your own right, and somehow I'll find my place without you.

Christian

I almost did burn the book, but it was Toulouse who stopped me. He held my arm down and explained something to me that I cannot even recall; I only remember that I sat down and read it afterwards.

On the last page, beneath the final words, he wrote a tiny dedication:

'I never wrote for myself, I wrote for her.'

THE END