What I remember:
Gigolette is a professional diver, whose circus routine has her plummeting into ever smaller containers. Audiences across Europe are astounded and agog, and every show’s a sell-out: sooner or later she’s going to fall to her death, and people want to be there when it happens.
There’s a downturn in the business, that sets Gigolette and her partner Gigolo at odds. I do remember that Gigolette is left no more or less at risk than she was when the story started, except that she has come to dissociate from herself. She views her death dispassionately now: the eventual, inevitable malfunction of a human mechanism. She has died already, and we somehow missed the crucial moment.
What I forgot:
Gigolo is Cotman and Gigolette is Stella. Their fortunes are actually going in the other direction — they’re improving. Getting Stella to dive into a bucket has brought the couple success after years on the bread-line, scratching a living in dance halls and hotels and, by the way, failing to break into the movies. Cotman, we are told, is sincerely in love with Stella, and though he probably believes this, we certainly don’t. After the life they’ve had, love is an uncertain proposition. Hunger and exploitation hollowed the pair of them out, years ago.
Here’s the last line:
“‘I mustn’t disappoint my public,’ she sniggered.”
That “sniggered” is a master-stroke.
First published in Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan, May 1932, and collected in Collected Short Stories Vol 1, Penguin, 1963, now in Vintage Classics, 2000
A Personal Anthology 