Commune of Women (17 page)

“Your only duty in life is to remain true to yourself,” she wrote in response to Ondine’s ten-page howl of pain, when she discovered her husband Richard’s betrayal. She was the only person who could say something so trite and get away with it; she, who’d followed her own dictates for more than nine decades.

So then, how could she know how it is with Ondine, who has no idea what being true to herself might entail, who is as soulless as an old shoe?

“Imagine that your own genius is at hand,” Tante Collette fired back, this time by telephone. Ondine could picture her at her desk, holding the ivory celluloid and gilded brass receiver of her 1920’s phone. “Nothing comes into being without imagination.
Imagine
yourself with a soul! What would a woman of your age, with your talents – with a
soul
–
want?”

“A bullet to the brain?”

“Oh, Child!” A rare burst of exasperation. “Don’t you know that pain and chaos always herald
Eros?
You have birth pangs, for heaven’s sake!”

“People die in childbirth,” Ondine intoned mournfully.

“Now, you listen to me!” Tante Collette’s voice was suddenly cold. “If it takes you through the very holds of
Hell
, you honor it. You honor this passage. Or you are a woman
without
honor – a thing which is an abomination to me.” And with more vigor than one would have guessed a nonagenarian arm could possess, she slammed down the receiver.

Now, the orchard lifts its un-pruned suckers like a wiry mauve haze in the westering light; wind soughs, indistinguishable from surf. Cindery trunks rise up all around her, brandishing black branches that scrawl a calligraphic account of her sorrows on the evening sky. She has come here to this wild Atlantic coast – to Tante Collette’s, to
Quatre Vents
– to begin the search.

Ondine seems fated to live her life at the edge of continents, as is only proper for a water sprite.

In southern California, where the ground shakes and waves periodically invade beachfront homes, while other houses simply slide down the cliffs with the first real rain, it all seemed evidence of the instability and marginality of her own life. It was proof that her psyche was neither here nor there – neither fully conscious, nor sufficiently immersed in the unconscious to be creatively endowed.

At Tante Collette’s, however, she considers a new possibility: that she, Ondine the water sprite, might find her soul here, close to the waters of the Atlantic. This is not the plasticized beach of L.A. with its carnival atmosphere and a heat she always found suffocating. While others lay out in it slathered in oil, worshipping it, it wilted Ondine.

The air of the Atlantic, though, is bracing, the wind like a god. That morning, walking along the bluffs, she looked down into a coffer of jewels – aquamarine, sapphire, emerald, citrine, and diamond – all caught up in lacy nets of foam that tear and are rewoven again and again. Such unbounded renewal must surely have the same effect on her.

Mustn’t it?

She finds as they become reacquainted that the house, too, is a treasure chest. One morning, looking for a coffee spoon, she pulls open a kitchen drawer and there is Tante Collette’s good silver where she had expected to find the everyday flatware – which is lovely enough, with its thin nickel silver spoons engraved with sweeping initials and its ivory-handled knives.

But this collection sends her instantly into a kind of reverie. Lying on deep green velvet are implements of wondrous proportion and weight, the tines of forks half again as long as usual, the spoons with deep, lustrous bowls, vaguely webbed in scars of use and age. The knife blades are broad and curved like palette knives, inviting the spreading of rich butter and slow-cooked jam. The silver handles are thick and bumpy with ornament – flowers, birds, leaves and ribbons – not engraved, but sculpted in low relief. Oxidation lies in the crevices like black shadows under the plantings of a magic garden.

Ondine is aware of the ticking of the old wooden clock on the wall, of the smell of coffee, and a thick atmosphere of silence and satisfaction. A damask linen tea towel draped across the Moroccan tile of the counter catches the morning light with a kind of promise – but of what? Blank canvas? The slow elegance of a life fully lived? The richness of everydayness?

All this, as she gazes into a kitchen drawer.

And every inch of the house contains these vignettes. At all hours of the day, sun sweeps through room after room igniting the soul of old wood, of silk draped into shimmering clouds, of softly knapped leather books with sparking gold edges and embossings. And especially, it incandesces the fabulous, bright images of the
Nabi
, glorifying the garden of
Quatre Vents
.

Ondine stops to sip from a can of Squirt and glances around apologetically.

“All this about the house must be awfully boring...”

She encounters Heddi’s ferocious stare. Its message is unequivocal. Ondine sighs.

“...and besides...I guess I need to tell you what’s happened to me here in L.A., instead of hiding inside Tante Collette’s life. Heddi knows. It’s really hard to talk about...”

She looks tentatively at Heddi, who nods silently in response.

Ondine sighs again, heavily.

“It’s just that, one day when I was still married to Richard, I was returning to our house in Malibu, just above Point Dume. I’d just been to my aerobics class and I’d picked up my daughter Jackie’s cheerleader uniform at the dry cleaner’s. I was thinking about what to fix for dinner...”

On that terrible afternoon, Ondine runs up the front steps with Jackie’s uniform over her arm in a dry cleaner bag, throws open the door and prances in, still in her hot purple Spandex workout leotard, to find her son Kyle on the entry hall floor in a heap, screaming and flooded with tears.

She knows instantly that it’s disaster – but what?

She opens her mouth to ask, but her tongue is paralyzed like the warped leather of an old boot.

Kneeling, she scoops Kyle into her arms. This child who, since the age of five, has been Southern California cool is now a drooling, hysterical rag of a huge teenager. And she holds him and rocks him and croons to him, while her mind turns to razor blades in a blender.

“Baby! Baby! Kylie, Baby!” she says over and over, rocking and rocking.

Before she can calm him enough to tell her, though, there is Richard, looming over them with the most horrible expression on his face. He looks down on their pitiful
Pietà
like an Old Testament Jehovah, colder than an ice storm, his face clouded with incipient judgment.

“
What?!!!
” Ondine screams. Even Kyle, lost in his inner hurricane, jumps at the shrillness.

“You
cunt!
” Richard hisses, no trace of his handsomeness left, all viperous tongue and curled lips.

Ondine recoils but screams, again, “
What?!!!
”

“Jackie, you cunt. It’s Jackie.” His foot lashes out and he kicks her in the thigh. Then he kicks her again.

She’s holding Kyle. She’s screaming. She’s in a darkness shattered by jagged lightning bolts.

“What?!!! What about Jackie?”

“She’s
dead
, you cunt! You
bitch!
” He’s kicking her metronomically now – hard, up and down her – from head to foot.

She doesn’t remember it for a while. It’s a blur of horror. There’s pain, denial, terror, and sickness in the pit of her being that comes raging up like a rabid animal in ragged screams.

What she remembers next, very clearly, is Kyle clinging to his father’s leg, yelling, “
Stop! Stop!
Please, Dad! Please, Dad!
Stop!
” His face is red and gooey with tears and mucus.

Her family has metamorphosed in those instants into something unrecognizable to her, including Jackie, whom she knows to be, without any question – almost without surprise – dead.

She feels as outcast, as if Richard had kicked her, narcotized and without a parachute, out of an airplane over the open ocean.

Their nice, calm, prosperous life is blown up. In an instant, everything is changed forever. What is the
meaning
of that?

That’s what Ondine is grappling with now. Can it be that some hidden benefit is tucked into her being, something positive and strong that’s boring its way out from the middle of this catastrophic heap of rubble that she is?

And where does one begin looking for a lost soul? In what direction does one point oneself? What rituals does one perform; what obeisances make? What are the necessary sacrifices – as if more could possibly be required – and what is the desired restitution?

It’s no different, really, than if she had died and not Jackie. The first half of her life is dead. She went there, to Tante Collette’s, to discover if there is anything or anyone left to be reborn. Is there a Phoenix in these ashes? If so, she has no clue where the energy or direction or rigor might come from to resurrect it.

She’s caught in a
tsunami
of black ink; tumbling, not knowing which way is up, down, or sideways, in a rip tide that’s bearing her away from all known shores. Is this madness, or the very bones of realness, stripped of every shred of padding flesh?

They’ve all gone off to their separate camps to recover – if recovery’s possible.

Kyle’s in his first-semester dorm room at U.S.C.

Richard’s gone to his lover’s apartment, or at least that’s the gossip her friends tell her.

And Jackie’s gone to ash in an urn in a wall in a mausoleum in Forest Lawn...

What hour of any day hasn’t been haunted by her image? Those short, chubby legs, so cute under her cheerleader’s pleated skirt. That fragile blonde hair, striped white by beach sun. So her father’s daughter and so like his mother that she seemed to Ondine, sometimes, not her own.

With her tiny snub nose, her wide blue eyes that always seemed too empty of expression – not trusting, really, but just too little imagination to sense anything other than 365 days of sunlight, unlimited credit card usage and well-fed ease. There was not the smallest shred of angst in the child. No passion for the unknown.

How, then, could she be Ondine’s child? Where was
she
in her? Surely, some part of Jackie reflected her mother? Wasn’t it that little particle of Ondine in her that enraged Richard?

The bruises on her side were ripening from plum to sickly yellow but he felt no shame. He shouted at her for days, making Jackie’s death all her fault.

“You started her going there,” he snarled, jerking at the knot of his tie. The day of the funeral; his good black Armani suit; the tie of rich cerulean silk patterned in gold
fleurs-de-lis
, Tante Collette’s final Christmas gift; southern California sun beat back by the low, cool throb of air conditioning; the bedroom carpet innocent and pristine as a newly-born, pale-apricot lamb.

“What business did that kid have at a coffee house? All that poetry? Open mic, or whatever?”

She opens her mouth to protest:
Why not?
But she knows in the base of her empty being, it is pointless. Instead, she concentrates on centering the seam of her pantyhose in the exact middle of her crotch. Try as she will, there is always an S-curve right below her belly button.

“You knew. You knew it was bad for her thighs – but you did it anyway.”

“Her
thighs?
”

He’s describing the strange land he’s walking in, she knows. This is the road map of his thoughts, if she can follow. The coffee house is a landmark. Her taking Jackie there in the first place is a landmark. Jackie’s thighs are a landmark. How the dots connect is not marked. She’s in open country here, looking for a sign.

“All those
lattés.
All that cheesecake. You know what my mother’s legs are like! And cholesterol. And you let her do it anyway. How was she ever going to get a husband?”

All this addressed to his svelte and distinguished form in the full-length mirror. How long has it been since they met one another’s eyes?

A pale flame of protest licks upward in the bright sunlight bouncing off the Pacific, then falls feebly back. “But, you could have said something yourself, surely, if it...”

“You were her
mother
, goddamn it! It was
your
job! You know I’m busy. You know a doctor’s life is a goddamn living hell of work. Couldn’t you pull yourself away from the goddamn aerobics classes long enough to keep your daughter from
dying?
”

He has his back to her now, his foot up on her vanity bench, jabbing at a spot of dust on his mirror-finish black shoes. “Can’t you be trusted with
anything?
”

She’s drifting away now, aware that some inner part of her is being beaten, stabbed and strangled – but she’s leaving her behind, the silly wench. Why does she stay and take such abuse?

She had known the day she picked him up from the plastic surgeon’s, with his eyes stitched up, his face sanded raw, the paralytic rigidity of Botox injected into him, that they were through; that he’d donned an impenetrable mask behind which she was no longer welcome.

His voice is like distant thunder. Her head is round and empty and blue inside, like a pale spring sky on one of those tremulous mornings when anything is possible. She floats away into it, his angry voice like the diminishing drum of black rain.

What got her through that terrible time was thinking of
Quatre Vents
. Right after the funeral, she flew to France and spent three weeks there, just trying to put herself back together; trying to decide what to do next.

Part of the magic of Tante Collette’s house is its backdrop of constant sound from the sea. Her property extends over a little hill with an orchard, down through some low bushes and bunch grass rooted in sand, all the way to the beach where the Atlantic churns against the rocks.

Even when the garden is saturated in the smell of roses, as Ondine remembers it from her childhood, there is always the tangy under-note of brine. It gives the place a certain air of sturdiness – some suggestion of men in wooden boats putting out to sea with nets – and also of mystery, as if the fathomless deeps of nature have found a portal there, with the high garden walls as their
temenos
and the house, their temple.