Collages Page 3

“We’ll sink if you don’t pump out the water, Bruce. Bruce.”

  “Let it sink,” he said and went back to sleep.

  Renate wondered if this were a symbolic indication of the pattern their relationship would follow. She went on pumping slowly until Bruce awakened.

  The deck was now almost level with the sea. Quietly Renate persuaded Bruce he must put the boat in dry dock and retire from navigation. The motor failing for the last time, Bruce was forced to jump into the sea and tow. As the little boat moved silently towards the dry dock, Renate still pumping slowly, sang a song remembered from childhood:

  Il était un petit navire

  Qui n’avait ja-ja jamais navigué.

  “From now on our travels will have to be inner voyages. You are only fit to be the captain of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre.”

  BEHIND RENATE’S HOUSE LAY THE MOUNTAIN. On top of the mountain a red-railed missile was planted in its steel cradle, pointing skyward, all set to soar.

  The sea had been there once, and left imprints of sea shells and fish skeletons on stone. It had carved deep Venusian caves into the sandstone. The setting sun deposited antique gold on its walls. People on horseback wandered up the mountain. Rabbits, gophers, deer, wild cats and snakes wandered down the mountain and came quite near the house.

  Renate’s house had glass all along the front. The sea lay below and at times she seemed to be standing against an aluminum sheet. On sunless days, she was profiled against a clouded pond, dull with seaweed trailing scum like sunken marshes.

  The sea varie moods and tones of the house as if both were mobiles in constant mutations.

  From Mexico she had brought shawls of unmixed colors, baskets, tin chandeliers, earthenware painted in childish figures, stone pieces like the gods of the Indians.

  And then one day at Christmas, the terrified animals ran down from the mountains. Renate saw them running before she heard the sound of crackling wood or saw the flames leaping from hill to hill, across roads, exploding the dry brush, driving people and animals down the canyons and pursuing them satanically down to the very edge of the sea. The fire attacked houses and cars, lit bonfires above the trees, thundered like burning oil wells.

  Planes dived and dropped chemicals. Huge tractors cut wide gashes through the forest to cut off the spreading fire. Firefighters climbed up with hose, and vanished into the smoke.

  Somewhere, a firebug rejoiced in the spectacle.

  Around Renate’s house there was no brush, so she hoped to escape the flames. She wrapped herself in a wet blanket and stood on the roof watering it down. But she could feel the heat approaching, and watch its capricious somersaults, unexpected twists and devouring rages.

  Bruce helped her for a while and then climbed down. She was still holding the hose and soaking the house when she looked down and saw what first appeared to be the portrait of Bruce walking. The large, life size painting was moving away from the house and two feet showed below the frame, two feet in shoes just below the naked feet of the painting.

  The first thing he had asked of her was to stop painting animals and women and to paint a portrait of him. He had shown her the long hairs which grew on his ear lobes and said: “You know that I am Pan, and I want you to paint me as Pan.” He had posed nude, in the red-gold afternoon sun of Mexico, always showing the same half-smile, the pleasure loving, non-human smile of Pan. He loved the painting, admired it every day. It was the god of the household. When they traveled, it was he who had packed it lovingly. He would say: “If any injury came to this painting, it would damage me, something fatal would happen to Pan.”

  And so today this was Bruce rescuing Bruce, or Bruce rescuing Pan in himself. At first the painting turned its luminous face to her, but as he proceeded down the hill she saw him behind the painting in dungarees and a thick white sweater. She saw a group of firefighters below; she saw the expression on their faces as the painting walked towards them, as they saw first of all a naked Pan with faunish ears, a walking painting with feet, and then the apparition of the same figure dressed in everyday costume upholding its twin, duplicate half-smile, duplicate hands; and they looked startled and puzzled, as if it were superfluous to rescue a mere reproduction of an original.

  So Bruce saved Pan, and Renate saved the house but the fire seemed to have finally consumed their relationship.

  But after a few days he returned to her.

  “After being with you, Renate, other women seem like baby foods after being on heroit;

  He had spent the time searching for a remedy for their relationship.

  “It is my secrecy which makes you unhappy, my evasions, my silences. And so I have found a solution. Whenever you get desperate with my mysteries, my ambiguities, here is a set of Chinese puzzle boxes. You have always said that I was myself a Chinese puzzle box. When you are in the mood and I baffle your love of confidences, your love of openness, your love of sharing experiences, then open one of the boxes. And in it you will find a story, a story about me and my life. Do you like this idea? Do you think it will help us to live together?”

  Renate laughed and accepted. She took the armful of boxes and laid them away on the top shelf of a closet.

  The time came again, when she felt she did not possess a love; that a love which was mute, elusive, and vague was not really a love. So she brought down the Chinese boxes, scattered them on the table, picked one at random as a man plays roulette, and began with patience to slide the polished slats. The beige wood painted with abstract designs of dark brown created a new design each time which did not guide her through the baffling labyrinth of panels and slats. But finally after long shuffling, sliding, turning, she found the compartment and pulled out a tightly folded sheet.

  She read: “When I first met Ken I was seventeen. He was only a year older but because his father had been a missionary in China and he had been born there, he possessed a maturity I did not have. He very soon dominated my life. He had no connection with the daily world, only with dreams and fantasies. I stopped swimming, surf-boarding, mountain climbing, gave up my other friends to be taken wholly into his magic world. What imprisoned me, restricted me had no power over him. He was not even aware of jobs, careers, studies, parents, duties, ties or responsibilities of any kind. He confessed that he was helped by opium. But I refused to take it with him. He admitted that since his return from China, unknown to his father, he had been taking too much of it. Every now and then he would pass out. I would come to his room and find him deeply asleep, but with a pinched nose, and unhealthy pallor. I would return a day later and he would still be asleep. He knew the opium was bad for him but he could not stop. I tried to help him. I became very firm. I said if he did not begin to work on his film project which we were going to carry out together, I would leave him. This frightened him. I was his only friend. We took a trip to Mexico together. There I thought he was cured. We were working on our film and he took such pleasure in photographing me and in inventing situations. One night I stayed out later than usual at a native wedding. He had pleaded fatigue and had returned to the hotel. When I returned, he was in that deep sleep I could tell apart from normal sleep. He was still sleeping the next day. I did not like his color. He had the ivory wax color of death. I called the village doctor. He took one look at him and said: ‘He’s had too much opium. I’m not a doctor for drug addicts. He may never wake up.’ I had heard that in such cases if he could wake up enough to smoke a pipe he would come to. I prepared a pipe exactly as I had seen him do it. I was frightened. His breathing was so feeble I could hardly hear it at times. But I could not wake him up sufficiently to make him smoke. Deserted by the doctor, all alone in the Mexican desert, I wondered how to save him. I began to remember the time I had been closest to death. I was swimming and I had been carried too far out by a riptide. I stayed too long in the water. I did not remember being rescued, but I did remember the lifeguard who gave me mouth to mouth respiration. Mouth to mouth respiration! I took Ken’s pipe and I smok
ed, absorbing and holding the smoke and then I leaned over, opened his lips and blew the smoke into his lungs several times, until he finally breathed deeply again and opened his eyes. That was the beginning…”

  Renate sat in the sunlight which, reflected from the sea below, made the ceiling and walls dissolve in waves of lights and shadows. The stripes on walls and on the table seemed to place her inside a Chinese box compartment, too, as a figure in Bruce’s past. When he returned she was still sitting there with the puzzle box open on her knees. She received him with tenderness and with a silence which did not resemble his, for his eyes when he was silent resembled the cool colorless spray of fountains, whereas her eyes showered him with gold specks like those which fell from the fireworks in Mexico on the night they had felt welded like twins.

  “You say I only love myself,” he had said then, “that I love Pan, and Pan is me; but you, why have you only painted women?”

  Weeks passed before she felt the need to open another box. Bruce was acting in a film. His director took him fishing. She did not like fishing any more than she liked the hunting of birds. She was alone for three days. During those three days she thought that her imagination had created the image of a greater union between Bruce and young men than he had with her, but now she was not sure. She felt that Ken had not been able to win him to his world of opium. She felt the isolation of Ken. She felt the need to know Bruce intimately even if it was not today’s Bruce she was discovering but yesterday’s.

  The second box took longer to open. She had made a pyramid of them, and then opened the one at the top. She read:

  “In Mexico Ken and I found many beautiful boys. We hired them for a few pesos. We taught them the pleasures of whipping each other. Ken’s knowledge of the art was incredible. He was a virtuoso in gradations. We started with gentle lashings and ended with wounding bamboo. The ritual we preferred was going out into the woods at dawn, cutting down selected branches of bamboo and playing at pursuing and capturing the victims. Somehow or other one morning we became separated. I was left alone with the youngest boy. I had promised him he could beat me this time. He kept touching my skin, amazed at the whiteness, and expressing what a pleasure it would be to mark it up. He dug his nails into my arm. When we got to the clearing and cut down the branches, I was roused by the boy’s anticipation of pleasure and I turned upon him and beat him. We did not notice some peasants who were walking to work. They spotted us first and silently surrounded us. They were at first amazed by the spectacle of two naked boys, and then they were angry. I was holding the bamboo. I saw them standing in a circle looking at me. All their eyes looked fiercely angry. I panicked and said the first thing which came to my mind, out of fear: ‘I’m beating him because he stole my watch.’ The boy was put in jail for three years. As they took him away he shouted at me: ‘When I come out I will kill you!’ I had to leave Mexico.”

  Renate took the pages, folded them as tightly as they had been folded to fit into the compartment, pushed them into the opening, and slipped the various slats back into place, as if she would bury the story forever. She walked down the hill with the box. She stood on the edge of the rock, and threw it in a wide, high arc, into the sea. Then she returned home, placed the pyramid of boxes inside the fireplace and set fire to them.

  RENATE GATHERED TOGETHER ALL THE LINEN of the house stained with marks of love, dreams, nightmares, tears and kisses and quarrels, the mists that rise from bodies touching, the fogs of breathing, the dried tears, and took it to the laundromat at the foot of the hill.

  The man who ran it mystified her. He was tall, dark-skinned, dark-eyed. He wore a red shirt which set off his foreign handsomeness. But it was not this which made his presence there unexpected. It was the pride of his carriage, and his delicate way of handling the laundry. He greeted Renate with colorful modulations of a voice trained to charm. He bowed as he greeted her. His hands were long-fingered, deft.

  He folded the dry sheets as if he were handling lace tablecloths. He was aloof, polite, as if laundry were a country gentleman’s natural occupation. He took money as if it were a bouquet. He returned change as if it were a glass of champagne.

  He never commented on the weather, as if it were a plebeian interest. He piled up the laundry as if he were merely checking the contents of his own home’s closets. He was proud and gracious. He pretended not to see the women who came in hair curlers, like a high born valet who overlooks his master’s occasional lapse in manners.

  For Renate he had a full smile. His teeth were strong and even but for one milk tooth which gave his smile a touch of humor.

  Renate also handled her bundle of laundry as if it were pastry from a fashionable shop.

  The rhythm of the machines became like the opening notes of an orchestra at a ball. She never mentioned the weather either, as if they both understood weather was a mere background to more important themes. They agreed that if human beings had to attend to soiled laundry, they had been given, at the same time, a faculty for detaching themselves, not noticing, or forgetting certain duties and focusing on how to enhance, heighten, add charm to daily living.

  Renate would tell him about each visitor who had come to see her, describe each costume, each character, each conversation, and then hand over the bundle as if it were the discarded costumes which had to be re-glamorized for the next party. While she talked they both handled the guest towels from Woolworth’s as if they were lace tablecloths from Brussels.

  He looked over the bundles lined up on the shelf and ready to be called for as if he were choosing a painting in an art exhibition and said: “I always recognize yours by its vivid colors.”

  As his brown, fine-bred hand rested on the blue paper around the package, she noticed for the first time a signet ring on his finger. It was a gold coat-of-arms.

  She bent over it to examine the symbols. The ring was divided into four sections. On one was engraved a lion’s head, on the second a small castle, on the third a four-eaf clover, and on the fourth a Maltese cross.

  “But I have seen this design somewhere,” said Renate. “Could it have been on one of the shields on one of the statues in a Vienna park?”

  “Yes, it could have been. I have some ancestors there. My family has a castle forty miles from Vienna. My parents still live there. The coat-of-arms is that of Count Osterling.”

  He brought out his wallet. Instead of photographs of round-faced babies she saw a turreted castle. Two dignified old people stood on the terrace. The man wore a beard. The woman carried an umbrella. One could see lace around her throat. Her hand rested on the head of a small boy.

  “That is me.”

  Renate did not want to ask: and how did you come here, what are you doing here when you could be opening bottles of old vintage wine from your own property, sitting at beautiful dining tables and being waited on?

  “After the war we were land poor. I felt our whole life growing static and difficult. Tradition prevented me from working at any job. I came to America. I went to Chicago. I was only seventeen and it was all new and elating. I felt like a pioneer. I liked forgetting the past and being able to work without feeling I was humiliating a whole set of relatives. I did all kinds of jobs. I liked the freedom of it. Then I met the Rhinegold Beauty Queen that year. She was unbelievably beautiful. I married her. I did not even know what her father did. Later I found out he owned a chain of laundromats. He put me to work as an inspector. At first we traveled a lot, but when he died we wanted to stay in one place and raise children. So we came here.”

  “You never went home again?”

  “We did once, but my wife did not like it. She thought the castle was sad. She was cold, and the plumbing was not efficient. She didn’t like so much politeness, moth-eaten brocades, yellowed silks, dust on the wine bottles.”

  Count Laundromat, she called him, as she watched the gold signet ring with the family coat-of-arms flashing through detergents.

  An enormous woman appeared through t
he back door and called out to him. She was as tall and as wide as Mae West. The beautiful eyes, features and hair were deeply imbedded in cushions of flesh like a jewel in a feather bedspread.

  “My wife,” he said, to Renate; and to her he said: “This is a neighbor who once lived in Vienna.”

  Then he took up her bundle of laundry and carried it to the car, opened the door, fitted it in the seat with care that no piece should be caught when the door closed, as if it were the lacy edge of a petticoat.

  From the day he told her the story of his title, the smell of kitchen soap, of wet linen, wet wool, detergents, became confused in Renate’s nostrils with the smell of an antique cabinet she had once opened in a shop in Vienna.

  The inside of the drawers were lined with brocade which was glued to the wood and which retained the smell of sandalwood. The past was like those old-fashioned sachet bags filled with herbs and flowers which penetrate the clothes and cling to them.

  Every time she visited Count Laundromat, the perfumes of the antique cabinet enveloped her, the smell of the rose petals her mother kept in a small music box, the smell of highly polished sandalwood of her sewing table, the vanilla of Viennese pastry, the pungent spices, the tobacco from her father’s pipe, all these overpowered the detergents.

  IN THE SMALL TOWNS OF CALIFORNIA the occasional absence of inhabitants, or animation, can give the place the air of a still life painting. Thus it appeared for a moment in the eyes of a woman standing in the center of an empty lot. No cars passed, no light shone, no one walked, no windows blinked, no dogs barked, no children crossed the street.

  The place had a soft name: Downey. It suggested the sensation of downy hairs on downy skins. But Downey was not like its name. It was symmetrical, tidy, monotonous. One house could not be distinguished from another, and gaping open garages exposed what was once concealed in attics; broken bicycles, old newspapers, old trunks, empty bottles.

  The woman who was standing in the empty lot had blurred her feminine contours in slacks, and a big loose sweater. But her blonde hair was round and puffed like the hair of a doll.