BY midnight she was asleep in Mother’s bed—our bed—and I was painting downstairs in the old place again. I was racing, trying to finish the last rough spots in the old canvases. Tomorrow I’d get the darkroom supplies, use the servants’ bathroom by the kitchen. Everything would be perfect.
When I finally knocked off, I went outside and felt that embrace of motionless night you never never know in San Francisco.
The great hulk of the house seemed to list like a ship in the dark, its twin chimneys swallowed in ivy. And scents of the flowers rose—the thick dizzying perfume you encounter everywhere here. Oh, why did I ever leave? I just took it with me in all the work I did. Charlotte and Angelica, even Sleeping Beauty, yes, especially Sleeping Beauty under her gauze of spiderwebs. But now everything is different. The past is alive. I am alive.
I looked up. She’d come to the back screen door. She wore just the slip again. And the kitchen light behind her burned through her hair.
Not a child. A woman standing there.
BY the weekend she was getting around just fine in the van, she knew the whole city. She went out to the shopping centers just to feel America down here—sometimes hard to do. And the Quarter she loved, of course. And there were several good movies in town we hadn’t seen. We had to see those, she said. And from what she gathered, the list of restaurants was endless.
I had started Belinda in Mother’s Bed two canvases that I was working on simultaneously. One was silk slip, the other bra and panties. And these were clearly the most erotic works I’d done so far.
I’d known the new direction would present itself, just as it had when I did the Cafe Flore painting, but now the mystery deepened. I was a man in the middle of a waking dream.
I could hardly keep at it when I was painting in her breasts and the panties. I’d knock off, go out into the yard, and let the heat lay me out flat. September in New Orleans. Summer still.
BUT it was working out, oh, so fine. Continuation of the grown-woman series. And if I’d doubled my usual speed in California, well, I was at hurricane speed here. I was back to five hours sleep a night at the most. Sometimes only three.
But the afternoons were perfect for napping. Miss Annie slept then. Belinda went riding in Audubon Park, hung around Tulane catching a class or two. She started a diary and sometimes wrote in it for hours in the library. I dozed on Mother’s bed.
She was busy and content just the way she’d been before. The books were piling up. The new television sets and the VCRs and the cassettes were proliferating. We were set up in the bedroom and her room down the hall and the library downstairs.
ON Wednesday night she watched “Champagne Flight.” I was soaking in the bathtub. The door was open. She never said a word to me about it. She just sat on Mother’s settee, in a pair of tight white shorts and a pink halter-the kind of casual clothing she had never worn in San Francisco—and stared at the screen. I heard Bonnie talking. Then Alex. Then Bonnie. This must have been Alex’s big bow-out for the young punk lover. Bonnie crying. Loathed the sound of it. I don’t ever want to see her again.
A FEW more days passed before I remembered Dan. I had to call Dan! Everything else was going splendidly. I’d checked with New York from a pay phone downtown.
Rainbow Productions had paid the $350,000 for the rights to Angelica. My accountant was already allocating taxes, investment. Rainbow wanted me to come to LA for lunch, but that was out. No phone calls either. Take her away, gentlemen, please.
And now Dan. And having to tell him the last chapter, the awful chapter, that woman in the sterile room at the Hyatt with the cigarette like a prop in her hand.
But Dan deserved a call. Probably going crazy.
I went to a phone booth up on Jackson and Saint Charles. And I got his personal answering machine in San Francisco. “Leave a message of any length.” Well, for the first time in my life I could take advantage of that. I began recounting the whole thing in veiled terms. “Not two hours after I talked to you I look out the window and—” I think that’s when it started. The doubts. That moment when I was telling it.
I was standing in the booth and I was watching nothing outside, just the long brown wooden streetcar gliding by, the domed top all wet from rain uptown that wasn’t falling here.
And I heard myself saying: “—like I was being kidnapped in a black limo, if you can believe it—” and “somebody had broken into the house, got the negatives and—” It hit me right then that it sounded preposterous.
“Well, this is really the capper,” I went on, “but I got them back from her, the negatives, and—” No, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense either, did it?
And the dream came back, the one I’d had the first afternoon in Mother’s bed, of Alex telling everybody the story. What had been the feeling in the dream? I don’t believe it.
“Well, Dan—” Mumble mumble. I found myself recounting how I’d checked the locks when I got back home in San Francisco. I could not figure out how the bastard got those negatives, even knew how to sort them out of the rest and—”You know, these guys are professionals, crack professionals, I guess.” Is that true? “And the lengths these people will go to.”
Better wrap this up.
“But you see, whatever happened with her and the stepfather put the cards in little B’s hands. I mean, they didn’t dare have the police pick her up, naturally—” Hmmmm!
“And that’s what it’s like, a house of cards. Because everything is so precariously balanced. They screw me. Little B screws them. We all go down. Nobody’s going to do anything to us until I decide to show those paintings—”
Had I told Dan about the paintings? “Later on the paintings, old buddy. I’ll call again.”
GLAD to be finished with that. Very glad. I hadn’t told him where I was. Nobody would know that.
Whenever the phone rang in the old house, it was Belinda calling me or it was for Miss Annie—her son, the drunken cab driver, or her brother Eddie, the wraith of an old man who hammered nails in rotting boards on the side of the house.
I WENT down to the bar of the Pontchartrain Hotel and bought a drink. Had to get out of this muggy green weather for a little while.
Disgusting to have to backtrack like that even for Dan. But I couldn’t cut Dan loose without a word, that was unfair.
But the story. It didn’t make sense, did it?
[27]
SLLOXV dreams. I checked the lock on the darkroom again. The negatives were in the metal file cabinet in the darkroom. That’s where I put things when I’m finished. Don’t want them to burn if the house burns. Did I put them there? Thousands of sets of negatives in white envelopes. Marked what? Don’t remember.
I was trying to pry loose the dead bolt and the oak door wouldn’t even splinter. Like chipping at stone. No marks on the door. None.
Wake up. Eyes wide. Heart racing. The dream gone totally. And Mother’s bedroom with the gold wallpaper, stained from the dampness, stains gleaming like snail tracks in the moonlight.
The streetcar passed outside. Smell of the jasmine coming through the French doors. Flash of headlights from Saint Charles Avenue. Where was she?
I went downstairs. Light in the kitchen. Sound of the ice box. She was sitting at the white metal table eating ice cream right out of the carton. Barefoot. Shorty baby-doll nightgown, V of violet panties underneath. “Can’t sleep?” She looked up at me. “Rather paint for a while.”
“It’s four o’clock in the morning.”
“You still feel that way, that when you’re eighteen, I can show the paintings and you don’t care?”
“I love you. You’re insane. You never talk like other people. Other people sidle into their subjects. You just come right out with it. Like chalk strokes on a blackboard.”
“I know. You said it before. My friends call it naiveté. I call it stupid—
“Show the paintings when you’re ready. And for your information, Jeremy, I care passionately because I love the paintings, and I c
an’t bear to think of waiting two years if you want to know it. In November, however, on the seventh, to be exact, I will be seventeen. One year from then, Jeremy. Or sooner, if you decide to just take it on the chin—” Big spoon of strawberry ice cream. “Think I should?”
Eyes hard for a moment.
“What would they do?” she whispered. Then she shook her head, shuddered, closed her eyes for a second. “Leave them out of it. You do what’s right for you.”
Another spoon of strawberry ice cream. Teenage shrug. “I mean, you know, be careful and all.” Pure teenager. “I mean, you know, down here—” She looked around the high-ceiling kitchen. “I mean, down here you think you’ve just got God to worry about or something. The world’s just gone.”
“Yeah, God and ghosts, and truth and art,” I said.
“Chalk strokes again!” She giggled. Then serious. “Those two In Mother’s Bed are going to drive them crazy.”
“What’s so good about them?”
“Come on! You want some ice cream?”
“No.”
Talking with another mouthful: “You realize I grow up in the pictures, don’t you? I go from Charlotte’s nightgown and the First Communion and—”
“Yes, of course. But you’re not the one who grows up. I am.”
She broke up. Soft laughter. Shaking her head.
“I’m living with a madman. And he’s the only sane person I ever met.”
“That’s got to be an exaggeration.”
I went out onto the glassed porch. Turned on the overhead bulb. Good God, these canvases. Something—what? In the first few seconds I always see new things. What?
She was standing behind me. Shorty top so sheer and short it wasn’t even a garment really. Violet panties trimmed in lace. Good thing nobody from the outside world could have ever seen through the domestic jungle around us.
“I don’t look so innocent anymore, do I?” she asked, looking at the canvases.
“How do you mean?”
But I knew. It was in the shadows around the eyes, the subtle lines in the face. The young woman was ripe as a peach is ripe underneath the white slip, arm resting on naked knee. Even the toes looked sexual, pushed into the wrinkle of the spread. I felt a little tremor of fear. But the painter in me was ruthlessly delighted.
[28]
Four o’clock. It was getting regular. And the dream right before was getting longer.
I wasn’t just examining the darkroom door anymore. I was trying to force the lock on the attic. Or was I trying to make it so nobody could get in? No, I was trying to prove that nobody could have gotten in without my knowing it. Hidden keys. Where had they been? In the spice jar on the rack in the kitchen. The one marked rosemary, that was made of white opaque glass.
One chance in a million the bastard would have found them. I counted the jars in the dream: rosemary, thyme, oregano, on and on it went. Most of them empty. One had the keys to the darkroom and the attic.
And I always locked the doors, didn’t I? Always. The thieves could take the dolls, the toys, the trains, the crap. But not the paintings upstairs or the pictures in the basement.
And I had shown her the white spice jar. “Here are the spare keys. If there is ever a fire, don’t use them. Call the fire department and give them the keys when they come.”
“Well, I’d try to save them,” she said.
“No, no. But I just want you to know where the keys are.”
And she had laughed. “You’re always here. When am I here that you’re not here?”
Had that been true?
And when was the house empty? When we had gone to Carmel? I had locked up and double-checked. Always. Or had I? What about that last time, when she had been so anxious and we had hurried. No, I checked.
Four o’clock. I went downstairs. The old black phone was in the little room beneath the stairs. That was where you had to go to talk on it when I was a child. You had to sit at the little wicker table and hold the stem in your right hand and the earpiece in the left. And the little room smelled like phone. No smell now. Just one of those smooth white things with buttons.
I imagined myself calling California. She’d answer in that slow Texas voice. Too sophisticated to be called a drawl. I’d say, “I just want to know, how did your man get into my house? How did he find the negatives?”
* *
AT five o’clock I was sitting in the living room when she came down. “What’s happening?” she asked. “You can’t sleep at all anymore?”
“Come here,” I said. She sank down on the couch next to me. “When you’re here with me, everything is OK,” I said.
But she looked afraid. She started brushing my hair back from my face, sending little chills over me with the touch of her hand. “You’re not ... worrying again.”
“No ... just a little adjustment,” I said. “My clock’s off. It’s on Pacific time ... something.”
“Let’s go out, go downtown. Find that coffee place on the river that stays open all night. Have breakfast down there.”
“Sure. OK. We’ll take the streetcar, OK?”
“Come on.” She tugged my hand. “Ever miss it, the movies? Susan?”
“No. Not right now. Come on. We’re going downtown. I’m going to wear you out today, then you can sleep tonight.”
“I’ll tell you how you can do that,” I said. I put my hand inside the elastic band of her panties. My knuckles grazed her pubic lips. Immediately hot.
“Right here in the parlor?”
“Why not?” I asked. I pressed her down on the velvet pillows. The light was seeping through the lace curtains, getting caught in the baubles on the glass shade of the lamp. “Artist and Model,” I whispered.
Something changed in her face. Her eyes locked. All the expression went away. Then she lowered her lids.
My heart was pounding. I felt a tightening in my belly.
She was staring at me in this cold, listless sort of way. Much much resemblance to Bonnie. So much resemblance to the last moment in Carmel, when I had told her everything, and she had broken my heart with her sadness.
“Kiss me,” she said, her voice deep and beautiful. And there it was, the imploring look, so like her mother. Am I losing my mind? I am.
I had pulled her up before I could stop myself.
“What is it?” she asked. Flash of anger, red cheeks. She jerked back away from me, glaring at her arm where my fingers had left white marks in her tan. The blue of her eyes went dark, the first sun making her squint as it came through the blinds.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
She had her mouth set in an angry way, lower lip jutting slightly. And the color pulsed in her face. Then she looked sad, hurt, as if she was going to cry. She looked desperate. “What’s wrong now?”
“I’m sorry, baby darling,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Is it this house, Jeremy?” So worried. So sweet. “Is it, maybe, all the old things—”
“No, darling. I’m OK.”
THAT afternoon I took her walking in the old neighborhoods. We went through the quiet shady streets of the Garden District past the fantastical Greek Revival mansions and across Magazine Street to the barren crowded Irish-German waterfront neighborhood, where my mother had been born.
I took her to see the magnificent churches built by the immigrants—Saint Alphonsus in the Romanesque style with its gorgeous paintings and stained glass windows—this built by the Irish from whom my mother had been descended. And Saint Mary’s, the more delicate Gothic church with its splendid wooden statues of the saints and its soaring arches. The high narrow steeple was of curved brick, a craft now lost—this built by the Germans right across the street from the great gray facade of Saint Alphonsus.
Like treasuries, these were in the narrow treeless street, doors opening on sanctums of astonishing beauty.
I told her about the rivalry of the two groups and how the same priests had tended both churches. An
d once there had even been a French church on Jackson Avenue only blocks away. But that was gone before my time.
“The old parish was really dying by the time I was a boy,” I explained. “There was always a sense of things passing, of the moment of high vitality being only a memory.”
Yet there had been the May processions, yes, and the splendid feast days and the liturgical Latin still, and the daily masses in both churches to which you could go early in the morning and sit alone and in quiet until time for communion.
You didn’t have to speak to other Catholics then. Old ladies scattered throughout the giant nave said their rosaries with lips moving in silence. Far off at the white draped altar where the flowers stood in shimmering banks amid the candles, the tiny bell tinkled in the altar boy’s hand when the priest raised the host. You came and went in blessed privacy without a word uttered.
Not the way it was now with Catholics shaking hands and giving the “kiss of peace” and singing saccharine English lyrics.
We walked together back the narrow streets towards the river.
I told her about the old aunts who had died one by one throughout my boyhood. Dim memories of narrow shotgun houses, as we called them, with their rooms opening one upon another, and the oilcloth on the kitchen table, and cabbage and ham cooking in a big pot. A small painted plaster holy water fount fixed to the doorframe. You dipped your fingers and made the sign of the cross. Faded napkins, many times mended, smelled still of the hot iron that had pressed them.
Always people dying, though. Funerals. An aunt sick in an enameled iron bed in a rented room. Stench unbearable. My mother washing the plates patiently in a corner basin. Sitting patiently beside an iron bed in the charity hospital ward.
Finally only Mother was left.
“But, you know, it died for us when Mother moved out. I mean, it was never more than obligation, her taking me to visit. She had left it all behind when she went to night school and got her degree, and then marrying a doctor with a house on Saint Charles Avenue, well, that was the stratosphere to her people. And the novels? They’d go downtown and just stand there looking at her books in Maison Blanche department store. They wanted her to use the name Cynthia O’Neill Walker. But she wouldn’t. She didn’t like the three names. Yet we didn’t even know the Walker family, never knew them at all.”