Title: Life as an Idol
Chapter Two: In Which I Meet Madam Djzeidjz
Author: mao
Disclaimer: I take no credit for the creation of the character of Jack Fairy, the other characters from the film, their likenesses, or the original plotlines – just for the backstory explaining Jack, his personality, his motivations, and the characters surrounding that. I am making no moolah off this – if I were, I wouldn't be posting it for free on the internet, now would I?
Author's Notes: Sorry this took so long, but I was lacking motivation because I got little feedback. If this totally sucks, please have the balls to tell me so I can fix it or scrap the project, ok? No love, that's what I get…gumble grumble gripe gripe. Besides, I promise it'll get more interesting. I do, in fact, have a plan.
Warnings: He's gay, so guess. Also: language.
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The next day, my mum and I caught a cab and headed across town to a rather imposing Tudor-style house in the center of the city. It had a verdant garden in front, the view of the house blocked by luxurious trees in a neighborhood where none of the other homes had even grass, let alone trees, shrubs, or the lusch pink and red rosebushes that grew up around the dark molding on the front windows.
We got there at teatime, and sat in a faded sitting room decorated in delicate pink velvet and yellowing ivory lace. My mother politely sipped cheap, milky tea from an ivory cup with pink flowers about the rim while I quietly munched a chocolate biscuit like a good boy as we waited.
"Who are we here to see?" I asked Mum, but she just shushed me and looked at the paper cuttings on the walls. I asked again, my voice whining, curious.
"You'll see in a moment Jendric," she told me, using her pet name for me, and I sat still on the tired sofa. I was well into a second biscuit – taking tiny, polite bites, nibbling as quietly as I knew how – when Madam Djzeidjz made her entrace.
Madam Djzeidjz was a bizarre, Miss Havishamesque character. She wore only black, as opposed to an ancient wedding gown, and during our whole visit she did hardly anything but smoke cigarette after endless hand-rolled cigarette. Although my mother had taught me it was rude to stare, I peeked up under my fluffy bangs to watch her as she sat slowly, removed a cigarette from a flat silver case, followed by a match from a similar silver case, and lit first the match (a single scratch on the edge of the silver teaservice tray), then the cigarette.
"Claudette," she said to the maid, "Open the window. We don't want to suffocate the boy and his mother." I would later find out that she had spent some time in Paris during the war, during which she had an affair with a high-ranking official. She knew all these things about France's defense during the war while it was happening, and had since developed an utter loathing for the French, thinking them a ridiculously stupid bunch of people.
Naturally, this had led her to hiring a French staff, as she assumed they would be too stupid to steal from her.
"So this is the boy?" She said to my mother, switching effortlessly from French to Polish, exhaling a plume of smoke, and whipping a pair of thin-rimmed silver spectacles onto her nose simultaneously. She examined me carefully, and I kept my eyes on the floor, flicking them up every so often to get a glimpse of this strange woman.
She had silvery blonde hair that gave away nothing of her age, all piled loosely atop her head in an imitation of a Victorian Gibson style, and she wore delicately applied cosmetics, making it difficult to see how old she might be. Any bags and wrinkles she may have had were concealed, discguised, or convinced they were something else. She was dressed in a black evening gown, as she always was, and, as it was just after five, she'd put on all her diamonds – she fairly shone in the weak afternoon light, every inch of her it seemed, sparkling whereever a single glint of light hit her.
She examined me closely, puffing away on her cigarette, then, just as quickly as she'd pulled out her spectacles, she put them away and asked my mother to tell her about me. She spoke not another word for the rest of our visit, simply puffed at her cigarette and allowed my mother to speak (which she proceeded to do, at great length) about my talents, how precocious I was, and my love of music.
Madam Djzeidjz, I should explain, was a teacher. Though she'd never been married she'd been, as she would tell me years later, much "lived with" by various men. It was by virtue of her age and status in society (read: how much money she had) that she was called "Madam" and not simply "Miss." She'd been quite notorious in Poland in the thirties, and when the war started she'd done quite a lot of work with the Polish Resistance Army before fleeing. As I would find out (again, years later as I was only six at this time), she'd been the woman responsible for my mother's flight from the country – otherwise it was quite likely she would have been killed.
In other words, though it was a bit pretentious of my mother to ask for help now – namely, tutoring me – Madam Djzeidjz had a vested interest in my success.
And so Mum rambled on and on, listing my accomplishments, embellishing my talents and interests, doing her best to make me sound good as I sat there wondering what I should do with my rather sticky, chocolatey fingers. Silent, Madam Djzeidjz handed me a napkin and puffed on her cigarette.
And so it was that I began going to her house every day instead of the private school. For the first few years, I continued the basic education every child receives – I learned arithmetic, writing, French, history, basic science. I learned to draw, to paint, to play the piano.
That turned out to be my great talent. It was several years later, shortly after my fourteenth birthday, that Madam Djzeidjz took me off the main course of study.
"This bullshit is alright for everyone else," she told me, puffing away. "You need to do what makes you happy. You need to make music, Jack," she told me. She was the first person ever to call me that, and I loved the way it rolled off her tongue, the rest of her sentances thick with her accent but that one word – "Jack" – bitten off, precise, and completely British.
I loved the way it sounded rolling off her tongue like that. It was more playful than my name, more distinctive…I couldn't figure out what about it exactly I adored so much, but there was something new and different about being called Jack instead of John. At first, I thought I might ask my mother to call me Jack as well, to bring it up to my parents as a viable option, I just loved the idea of becoming a new person with a different name so much.
But I could see the expression Mum would give me – the way her nose would wrinkle, how she'd laugh and say, "Really, Jendric," in such a way as to make it clear that this would never happen.
I still drew constantly. If I wasn't playing the piano, plunking out little melodies of my own, I was drawing. Only now, instead of little childish doodles on the edges of my workbooks, my sketches took shape in charcoal on expanses of fresh white paper. I'd color them sometimes with watercolor and kept them in a drawer of my desk, hidden from view.
I continued drawing and painting fairy tale versions of my life and even now – eight years later – I continued using the well-worn, horribly faded of the blond boy from my father's classroom as the inspiration for my prince. His hair took on the sheen of straw in moonlight, his skin as pale as my mother's china plates, his eyes the deepest brown I could make by mixing all my paints. I painted the cleft in his chin delicately, the pale freckles on his nose nearly invisible as the paint I used to keep them so light was mostly water.
I didn't show these paintings to anyone, even though I realized, as I looked at them later, that they were technically quite brilliant, if the content a little controversial. Just the same, Madam Djzeidjz pushed me to work more on the piano than on my watercolors, and so it came to be that I played four, five, sometimes six straight hours a day, warming up with Chopin, practicind Mozart, and then plunking away on my own for a while, making up melodies and harmonies as I went, one corner of my mind always thinking ahead a measure, a line, to the next page of what I might want to play.
Often, Madam Djzeidjz would have people over for tea during our lessons. I spent a lot of time observing her during these visits. She still smoked constantly, one cigarette after another, lighting them all with a wooden match, pulling them from her silver cigarette case, which she would then place delicately on the end table.
She rarely spoke during these visits. I was not allowed to speak; it would have been bad manners for a boy of my age to say anything, as children were to be seen and not heard. She, however, as the hostess, was very ususual. She'd greet her guests with a polite smile and a nod of the head, sweeping her skirts out so she could sit delicately, perched on the edge of her faded loveseat.
She would say nothing through most of the visit, but her guests never seemed to notice – they'd talk and talk, babbling on and on about the most inane topics such as the weather or price of beans at the market. They'd continue on, nattering in horrified voices about the state of the world until she'd stub out a cigarette, light another, and exhale smoke towards the ceiling with the words, "Let's listen to Jack play the piano now."
Her guests would politely close their mouths as I played song after son, whatever I wished from piano concertos to versions of popular songs that had been rewritten for the piano, and on and on until it was time for them to leave. At that time, Madam Djzeidjz would stand, smile at them and, lighting another cigarette, sweep out of the sitting room. They would pick up their things and leave, silent.
Afterwards, Madam Djzeidjz would always give me one of her cigarettes and we'd smoke together in silence. It was from her that I learned the cardinal rule to being mysterious, the one rule that would later be called (in a major magazine – you know the one – no less) the Rule of Cool: Keep quiet and smoke your cigarette.