Collages (6 page)

How intently he looked at Raven, her hair and
eyebrows matching his wings but seeming blacker by contrast with her moonlit
skin.

Posing for Renate, Raven contemplated her
painting of Our Lady of the Beast. In the late afternoon light a luminous naked
woman reclines beside a panther. The face of the panther shines, more brightly
with a phosphorescent light. They are the Beauty and the Beast after a long
marriage, both equally beautiful. But later, when it grew dark, it was the face
and body of the woman which began to shine with a gold phosphorescence and the
panther grew darker and more shadowy. It disappeared finally into the night,
leaving on the black canvas only the stare of its golden eyes. They had
exchanged souls.

Renate painted Raven standing nude in front of
a mirror. Her back was covered with her abundant, undulating black hair. Her
reflection in the mirror was smaller, the skin a shade paler, her eyebrows and
eyelashes touched with coal dust. The raven was pecking at the hem of her lace
scarf, with his wings closed as if the girl had become more powerful than the
raven. The quality of night, mystery and hidden violence had been absorbed by
her.

And the raven, sitting at her feet with folded
wings, had he absorbed her timidity?

WHILE DRIVING ALONG PACIFIC PALISADES, Renate
had stopped several times to offer a lift to an old man with his arm in a
sling. He was going to get his arm treated nearby and, very slowly, he
unraveled his story to her.

He lived in Malibu, the place by the sea which
the Indians called the Humped Mountain, and which in French, if you sang it,
sounded like Evil Owl
—Mal Hibou
,Malibu.

When he was a young man he became a lifeguard
at Will Rogers’ beach. He sat on a chair twelve feet high and studied the moods
of the sea. He had no need of weather bureaus. He knew by every undulation,
every contortion, every flourish and flounce of the waves, the sea’s exact mood
and whether it would be treacherous for the swimmers, or tender and mocking. He
knew the omens of the clouds, read the future in their colors and density. He
knew the topography of the sand covered by the sea as if he had mapped its
depths. From where he sat the cries of the gulls, of children and bathers all
fused together and made a sound he liked,
musique concrete.
He had never
been concerned with words.

He knew the entire coast, from Will Rogers’
beach to where Malibu became wild and solitary.

He married and had children, but he was
restless in the house. The static walls irked him. He did not like the smell of
enclosure, of cooking, of wax, nor the sound of the vacuum cleaner. He missed
the wind’s flurries, and the spicy smells of the seashore.

He felt entombed by the stillness of objects,
the unchanging landscapes in frames. And the torrent of words spoken by his
wife and children did not give him the stinging, whipping sense of aliveness he
felt at the beach.

He returned to his old job as a lifeguard. But
each evening he stayed longer at the beach. He liked it best when it was
deserted, and when he would start walking homeward along the coast. He
discovered the treasures of the sea which lay in the rock crevices, either
thrown there by storms, or growing there. The humid, never-withering sea-lemon,
the sea-lilies which did not close at night, the sea-lentils tied to giant
serpentine string beans, sea-liquor brine, sea-lyme grass, sea-moss,
sea-cucumbers. He never knew the sea had such a lavish garden—sea-plumes,
sea-grapes, sea-lace, sea-lungs. In the summer he began to stay on after dark.
He learned skin diving and stole crabs and lobsters people trapped. He cooked
his dinner on the beach. He came home rarely.

The rocks were continually filled with
surprises from shipwrecks, and the nights with sounds which the regular rhythm
of the sea orchestrated. The wind flung itself between the rocks, disheveled,
wrestled with the waves, until one of them expired. The sky put on its own
evanescent spectacles, a pivoting stage, fugitive curtains, decors for ballets,
floating icebergs, unrolled bolts of chiffon, gold and pearl necklaces,
marabous of oyster white, scarves of Indian saris, flying feathers, shorn
lambs, geometric architecture in snows and cotton. His theater was the clouds,
where no spectacle repeated itself.

On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was
stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.

One night he slept in one of the caves. He
thought to himself: Now I am a merman.

He passed the time detecting mild sea-quakes,
he made friends with the sea-lark, he collected sea-palms and made a rug of
them for his cave. But some element was missing. The friendship of the
sea-gulls was too ephemeral. Their visits were too short. They were always
impatient to be off in space.

One night he walked on to the end of a natural
rock jetty and came upon a shoal of seals. They swam, dived, clowned, but
always crawled back to the rocks to have their young ones there. They kissed,
barked, leaped, danced on their partly fused hind limbs. Their black eyes were
like mirrors reflecting sea and sky, but the ogival shape of their eyelids gave
them an air of compassion, almost as if they would weep with sympathy. Their
tails were of little use except for swimming but they liked to shake their
webbed flipper-like limbs as if they were about to fly. Their fur shone like
onyx, with dark blue shadows under the fins.

They greeted the man with cries of joy. By this
time he was an old man. The sea had wrinkled his face so intricately, it was a
surprise when his smile scattered the lines to shine through, like a beautiful
glossy fish darting out of a fishing net.

The old man fed the seals, he settled near them
in a cave, cooked his dinner, and rolled over and fell asleep with a new
feeling of companionship.

One night several men came. They wanted to
catch the seals for a display in a pool in front of their restaurant. A
publicity stunt which attracted the children. But the pool was small, it was
surrounded by barbed wire and the old man did not want this to happen to his
seals. So he warned them by an imitation of their cry and bark, and they dove
quickly into the sea. By the time the men reached the end of the jetty the
seals were gone. From then on the old man felt he was their guardian. No one
could get through at night withalking through his bedroom.

In spite of the tap-dancing of the waves, and
the siren calls of the wind, the old man would hear the dangerous visitors and
always had time to warn the seals in their own language.

The old man discovered the seals’ names. They
answered to Hilarious, Ebenezer, Ambrosius, Eulalee and Adolfo. But there was
one seal whose name he did not know, who was too old when they first met. The
old man did not have the courage to try out names on him, to see which one he
answered to, for the seal could hardly move and it would have humiliated him.

One severe winter the old man’s children began
to worry about him, as he was growing old and rheumatic. One rainy day they
came and forced him into their car, and took him to their home and fixed him up
a bedroom.

The first night he slept on a bed, he fell off
and broke his arm.

As soon as his arm was well again he returned
to the cave.

One night when he felt minor quakes were taking
place in the area of his heart, he thought he was going to die, so he tried to
crawl nearer to the seals, into the crevices where they slept. But they gently,
compassionately, nosed him out of the place.

By then he resembled them so much, with his
mustache, his rough oval eyebrows, his drooping eyelids, and his barking cough,
that he thought they would help him to slide down the rocks and be buried at
sea, like a true seal.

WHEN RENATE DID NOT SELL ENOUGH PAINTINGS she
worked as a hostess at Paradise Inn. The nightclub, built of rocks and wood,
stood high on a rock above the beach. Palm trees and cactus gave it a semblance
of tropical softness which was belied by the sharpness of the wind. It was more
pleasurable to sit inside near the big fire in the fireplace, and to
contemplate the sea through the enormous windows.

Renate wore a purple dress she had made herself
and so it did not have the shapelessness of fashion but followed the natural
contours of her body like a second skin.

She was always in movement, throwing her long
black hair back away from her face, moving forward to greet the visitors, and when
she turned her face towards the bar it seemed as if she set the whole
glittering mechanism in motion to satisfy hunger and thirst.

She was so gracious in her gestures of welcome
that the diners often stopped talking and drinking to watch her, as if she were
the spectacle they had come to see. The bar man looked at her while he shook
his potions, the old chef looked at her over his charcoal pit, the musicians
sang for her, looked at her over the black wings of the piano, and one thought
of the French word for hostess,
entraineuse
,which meant to pull, to
magnetize, to lure in her wake.

Eat, drink, talk, she seemed to whisper as she
placed the menu into the visitor’s hand, as if she were giving them the secret
to all delights, and often they moed aside to make room and said: “Renate, sit
down, have a drink with us.”

Animator, bringing animation to silent tables,
staying long enough to light the candles.

They arrived in disparate costumes, formal and
informal, summer coats, furs, gloves, sport shirts, Hawaiian shirts,
Harper’s
Bazaar
plumes, racing-car goggles, motorcycle helmets, dancing pumps, or
leather boots. They arrived heavily made up, with false eyelashes, wigs, or
unkempt, ungroomed. No one was surprised. It was the movie colony, at work on
films. It looked as if they had snatched a few items from the costume
department: beards, gangster’s raincoats, the star’s false jewels. It matched
the jumbled styles of their homes, imitations of the styles of other countries
which, bereft of their natural atmosphere, looked like stage sets.

Nothing seemed to belong to them organically,
to be stamped with their own identity, but no one seemed to expect that. Even
the painters and writers wore disguises which outdid Venetian masked balls. The
beards of men shipwrecked for years on desert islands, the unmatched clothes
from thrift shops, the girls with hair uncombed, and black cotton stockings,
and eyes painted a tubercular violet. In this costume they meant to convey a
break with conventions, with the stylish mannequins in Beverly Hills shop
windows, but it created the impression of merely another uniform, which they
bore self-consciously, and it did not portray freedom, nonchalance. They wore
them stiffly, as if on display, like extras for a Bohemian scene, proclaiming:
look at me.

All of them were impatient to drink the
dissolvent remedy which would loosen the disguise, disintegrate the
self-conscious shell, to drink until the lower depths of their nature would
rise to the surface in sodden debris, brash words, acid angers, to shatter the
mannequins they stifled in, to shatter the disguises.

“Renate,” they called, not because they were
hungry or thirsty, but because she knew who she was, and as she knew who she
was, she might also be able to identify them, with a smile and a word, just as
with a smile and a word she had said to Bruce: “You are a poet.”

There was food on the table, and the glasses
were full, but who was at the table? Would Renate know? They were at sea, and
Renate was more than a woman, she was a compass. What confused them did not
confuse her. If she did not answer their distress signals, if she left them
stranded in the vacuum they lived in, then to assert their existence they would
have to begin a quarrel with someone, anyone.

The features became muddied, the facades
collapsed. When a glass broke, Renate appeared as if this were a signal of
danger, the start of a drama, as if the restaurant had become a ship at sea,
and they all floundered on waves of anger. Strangers were flung together and collided
in tidal waves of alcohol, in incoherent quarrels.

I am a star, I am a director, I am a cameraman,
I am married, I have two children, I have discovered oil, I have built a house,
I have written a script, I won the Oscar, I bought a horse, I rented my ranch,
I started the fashion of boar hunting, I am having an exhibition, I am sailing
to Acapulco.

But none of these facts the full-bodied power
Renate had when she said: “I am a painter.”

Her painting had been born from within just as
her son had been, organic, part of her flesh, whereas for the desperate
anonymous, they were adopted accidental children, not truly their own, and they
were not certain of paternity or reality.

There was one more personage who was not
foundering in anonymity like a pilot in weightless space, and that was Leontine
who was singing by the piano.

Her hair was cut in a boyish style with bangs
over her eyes. It had been dipped in a red glow. Her skin was of a creamy
chocolate, her eyes black and highly polished. Her fingers were long and
sensitive when she touched her long neck, to feel where the voice came from, as
if to coax it pure, and out it came honeyed and heavy, warming, tender, at
times like silk, at other times like zephyr wool on the skin.