Collages (4 page)

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 smoked,
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.”