Collages (3 page)

Renate interrupted with: “But that’s the hotel
where I stayed.”

“Read on.”

“A woman arrived in an orange dress. It was not
only the orange dress which aroused attention. She radiated joy and her
laughter was warm and spontaneous. The patron knew she was alone and he often
hovered around her cottage to catch the foreigner at some unholy hospitality.
One night there was a man’s laughter mingled with hers, but the ‘patron’ did
not hear it. A neighbor heard it. He stayed awake to listen, saying to himself
he must warn the girl in the orange dress if the ‘patron’ came near. She was
fortunate. The man remembered being all stirred up by the laughter, by the
intimate quality of it. And the next morning he examined the girl in the orange
dress with more attention, as if he had failed to notice in her face or in her
behavior what would create such laughter at night. She was having breakfast,
with her eyelids lowered. And then a chambermaid came in, breathless, and
talked to the ‘patron,’ and the ‘patron’ came and talked to the girl in the
orange dress, and the girl got up blushing and rushed away. It seems that she
had left the visitor early in the morning, that he was to have dressed quietly,
unobtrusively, and be gone by the time she came back. But as she left, she
unconsciously locked the screen door and imprisoned him, so that he had to call
the maid, and the maid, thinking she had trapped a bootlegged occupant had
reported him while he rattled the door in anger and thus let everyone know…”

Renate began to laugh. She laughed until Bruce
began to laugh with her, though he was not as certain of the meaning of the
incident as she was.

She saw that he was laughing from contagion,
with trust in her comic spirit, and this made her laugh all the more as a
touching form of love.

“I must have been thinking of you, Bruce. You,
and how quietly you slipped away at night. It must have been you I wanted to
lock up!”

“Did you love him?”

Renate laughed. “He looked like Pinocchio at
the piano, but sang like Caruso, only more lightly. He was just back from
visiting his mother, so beautiful he said, with a luminous skin and eyes just
like mine. He had her all to himself, he told me, his brothers and sisters
being married, and he loved her, he realized he loved her (and me because I
resembled her) so much in the way Freud said!”

A few days later she brought Bruce a peace dove
she had found pinned to the wall of a Swedish shop. It was carved out of
paper-thin wood with transparent wings as light as a breath.

Renate said: “Let’s hang it up by a thread so
it will spin.”

Bruce climbed on a ladder and began to hang it
up. He asked Renate for thread which she brought him. It broke. The peace dove
fell to the ground. Bruce said: “Now I know why my buttons never stay on. You
sew them with such a weak thread.”

Renate brought stronger thread. She went to
light a fire in the fireplace. She prepared dinner. She prepared food for the
dogs, Tequila and Sake.

“Why didn’t you buy a whole flock of doves? I
would have liked a whole flock of doves flying around the room.”

“A whole flock of doves wouldn’t bring peace to
our relationship.”

“You know the consequences of opening Pandora’s
box,” he said.

“You never give me any warning of your
departures. You call all amenities balls and chains. You take the only car we
have so that I cannot even escape.”

“To find other Pinocchios?”

“To find anything that will make me forget
you.”

“You know that what I give to others is nothing
I take away from you, nothing that belongs to our relationship.”

“But Bruce, it’s not what you give to others
which hurts me, but what you don’t give to me, your secrets.”

The big log in the fireplace was damp and
smoked so heavily that Renate had to open the doors and windows. They both
stood shivering in the cold wind that blew from the sea.

Renate said: “I’ve always loved garden
parties.”

“Let me tell you my dream. I was listening to
music. My body became compressed into a column. At the top of this column grew
antennae of science fiction design which threw lassos of blue electric lights
in circles. In their centrifugal motion they captured other waves. The waves of
the brain? Seeking to contact other vibrations? The radiations of my brain not
only designed fever charts but they were neon-lighted and threw off sparks like
electric short circuits.”

Consolation was a Christian act, not Pan’s
profession. Bruce could only smile when she could not laugh quickly enough to
give her threatening tears time to evaporate. This time they rose to a
dangerous water level.

“We can’t live our Mexican life here,” said
Bruce. “Let’s get a sailboat and sail around the world. You can paint while
we’re traveling and I will write my novel. I saw an advertisement that
sailboats are very cheap in Holland, and they sell a kind of sailboat which can
travel both by sea and by river. I will learn to sail it. You rent the house
and meet me in Holland when I am ready.”

“I can’t imagine you as a captain of a
sailboat.”

But she felt that perhaps this was the mobility
Bruce needed, the fluid, changing, variable way he wanted to live.

He was gone for a month. In his letters he
described the old captain who had sold him a sailboat and who was teaching him
to run it. The sailboat had a motor too, in case they were becalmed. There was
only room for two on the boat so the old captain would not sail with them. But
by the time she arrived Bruce felt he could handle it alone.

When she came the captain had waited to greet
her and to install her in the small cabin. Then with a salute and a smile he
was off.

The boat looked freshly painted and swayed
gently by the Dutch pier. Renate loved the lightness of it. She began to
unpack, and even set up her painting material.

Bruce called to her. He was tangled in a mass
of cords. Renate had not foreseen that she would have to become his assistant.
She unknotted cords, pulled at the sails, ran from one end of the boat to the
other, watched their swelling, adjusted a hundred clasps and fought for balance
against changing winds. Bruce had absorbed little from the Dutch captain. He
read directions from a book. He gave orders to Renate in technical language, which
she did not understand. By the time they sailed into the first harbor for the
night the graceful sailboat seemed more like a wild, unmanageable bronco under
their feet.

The constant rocking kept her from sleeping.
She felt her hair would wear off completely from the constant friction on her
pillow. Duties on board were endless, even when they were not sailing. Renate
wanted to return and ask the old captain to help, even if it meant sleeping on
deck. But Bruce’s pride was offended at this capitulation. At the same time he
had never concentrated on any occupation for such long hours and she would find
him asleep sometimes under a dangerously swollen sail which would almost tip
the boat over.

They decided motoring along rivers might give
them more leisure. They folded the sails and used only the motor. When they
cast off anchor Renate could not unfasten the thick wet cord at the other end
of the boat. Bruce came to help, and as he straddled it to uncoil it from the
shore, he fell into the water, and the boat began to drift away from him. He
caught up with it only by swimming furiously.

They traveled for a while down the rivers and
canals, admiring the soft landscape, the browns and greys so famliar from Dutch
paintings. Then the motor sputtered and died. They were in the middle of a
swift flowing river, becalmed.

The boat ceased to follow a straight course.
Every now and then, like a waltzer, it took a complete turn in the middle of
the river.

Its erratic course did not discourage the
barges passing by with cargoes and racing for the locks. They traveled at full
speed alongside the sailboat, not noticing that Bruce and Renate were
rudderless, and that they might at any moment circle in the path of the swift
sliding barges.

At one moment the sailboat skirted the shore
and Bruce maneuvered it towards the right into a small canal. At this very
moment the motor revived and pushed them at full speed under too low a bridge.
Scraping this they continued to speed past quiet small houses on the shore.
Bruce now could not stop the motor.

It had regained its youthful vigor. He stood on
the bridge and remembered his western movies. He picked up a coil of rope and
lassoed one of the chimneys of a passing house. This stopped the runaway
sailboat but drew a crowd around them.

“Crazy Americans,” said someone in the crowd.

A policeman came towards them on a bicycle.

“You damaged a historical bridge.”

“I didn’t know it was historical,” said Bruce.

“You will have to appear in court.”

That night, like contrabandists, they sailed
away (pulled by a tugboat) to a dry dock Bruce had heard of. There he had the
boat taken out of the water and loaded on a train.

“What is your plan,” asked Renate.

“We’d do better with plenty of room around us,
so I thought we’d take the boat to the South of France and sail around the
Mediterranean. I’m putting it on the train.”

The boat occupied an entire railroad car. They
could see it from their carriage when they leaned out of the window. It was
exposed to the sun, bottom up. The rigging was dismounted and tied to its
sides. The sails looked like folded parachutes. The journey was long and hot,
with many stops along the way.

When they reached the South of France it looked
to Renate, a painter, exactly like a Dufy poster, all light blue and cream
white, sea flags, dresses undulating, brown bodies, music in the cafes,
intimate corners for lovers surrounded by oleander bushes, flower vendors at
every corner, mimosa, violets, carriages with umbrellas opened over them.

The railroad had taken them to the dry dock
with their boat. It was put on wheels.

“We are going to do some spherical sailing,”
said Bruce. “In spherical sailing, the earth is regarded as a sphere (usually a
perfect sphere, though some modem nautical tes allow for its spheroidal shape)
and allowance is made for the curvature of its surface.”

“Couldn’t we do some parallel sailing,” asked
Renate, who had been reading the same book. “Perhaps we could just sail
parallel to the shore. Then we’d never get lost.”

The boat was sliding down into the sparkling
sea. The men secured the anchor and returned to call for Renate and Bruce and
place them upon the deck, and then left them. It was Renate who noticed that it
was taking in more than the usual amount of water.

(How could the innocent sailors have known the
hot Mediterranean sun would melt the caulking in the boat’s bottom during the
interminable railroad voyage.)

Bruce turned to the index in the book and read
all about pumping. He pumped for a while and fell asleep. Renate pumped for a
while and then felt exhausted and tried to wake Bruce.

“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 etait un petit navire

Qui n’avait ja-ja jamais navigue.

“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.