Dry Your Smile (54 page)

“Those were the only flowers. I wonder what her mother would have thought. I wonder if, after all, Hope would have understood. I think of all those hours of Julian speaking to Hope as she lay dying. How useless it was. How she never got through.”

“How little any of us ever get through to anyone, ever.” Celia contemplated her friend patiently, then murmured, “And all this time, you—?”

“I was watching. Witnessing. Waiting. The next day was the memorial service. You would have liked it,
vieja
. The music was unusual, especially for a temple, I gather: Bach's Air in G, and the English Suite No. 2—and Brahms' Lullaby.”

“Eclectic for the organist,” Celia observed with a smile, thinking of all her church jobs over the years, in order to survive as a keyboardist.

“What was magical was the cantor. A woman's voice gave the chants of mourning a new dimension … All the people attending were Julian's friends. Her mother had ended her own friendships years before her life itself closed. No, it was for Julian we all came. That day she seemed to recognize it. Dignity she had, gravity, graciousness, self-possession.”

And an audience, Celia thought but did not say.

Iliana sighed. “Perhaps that was when it began. She started to distance herself from all of us, exquisitely, giving no offense. But not from
me
, I was certain. I was sure there would come a time when she would break and sob and I would hold her. It never came. Other times, yes—times of … rebirth. Times when she learned herself, from
me
, from my reactions to her as she began to play again, learning
how
to play. From
me.
”

“It's unwise,
tonta
, to be too much the mentor.
Or
the audience,” Celia ventured. She glanced at her watch. “Let's get some air, eh? We have less than an hour until rehearsal.”

The other sighed and rose obediently, sliding into her coat. They wove through the clusters of small tables, paid their bill, and stepped out into the street.

“
Merde
, I
never
get used to the cold,” Celia winced, slipping her arm through Iliana's and guiding her toward the Boulevard St. Michel. “Thirty years in exile and I
still
miss Managua non-winters.”

Iliana stopped in front of a small building.

“Celia. This was it, no? The little hotel where all us Latin American refugees congregated? The very one?”

“Sí, niña
, the very one. When you and I both were staying alive by giving piano lessons to bourgeois French brats. Even then, God help us, you were recovering from love.”

“You have no mercy,” Iliana chided. “That was after the affair with Talavera … and the abortion. Ach, what we put ourselves through … That was just before I got to study with Boulanger, may she rest in peace.” Iliana cast a nostalgic look back at the building as Celia firmly led her away.

“
And
before you began to compose seriously.
And
before the first commission. And
long
before—”

“Long before the fatal commission for ‘Avíos para la Eternidad'—the one that was my excuse for returning to New York for the third time. To her.”

Celia hugged her friend's arm and fell into matching strides. “I always liked that piece. Jesú! A suite for synthesizer, strings, and bone percussion. When we performed it here, I thought my fingers would fall off from all those arpeggios. My dear, you may be an emotional mess but you are a fine composer.”

They walked in silence for a block. Then Iliana laughed—a short, cynical sound. “You will be amused to know,” she confided, “that I am not a composer. I am now a photographer.”

“A what? Watch
out
, you know Paris traffic—You are now a what?”

“An art photographer. In the novel she's writing.”

“Who's writing? The ghost of Nadia Boulanger?” Celia steered Iliana across the intersection, knowing all too well who “she” was. Julian, the ghost of Julian.

“In the novel Julian's writing. About this whole period.”

Celia stopped short as they reached the curb, a look of outrage on her face. “She's put you in a novel? For
another
audience? That's—that's unspeakable,” she sputtered.

“No, no, you don't understand.” Why do I invite her attacks on Julian and then defend Julian against them, Iliana wondered, slipping her arm through Celia's this time and moving them onward. “Julian's an artist, after all. She has to use her pain, the way I've done with the requiem. Besides, what she writes is all disguised to protect—”

“Protect
her
. And she makes you a
photographer
. Taking pictures of
her
, I warrant. Still
another
audience.”

“I'm beginning to regret I ever told you she was an actress,” Iliana snapped.

“Don't be. It's central. She's—
used
you in every way, the bitch—”

Iliana raised her voice, oblivious to passers-by, “I won't have you talk about her like that. You have no idea—”

“An art photographer from Nicaragua. How preposterous.”

“Not from Nicaragua,” the other muttered into her turnedup collar, striding along now at a pace that made Celia breathless, “from Argentina.”

“
Argentina!
I can't bear it. To turn you into one of those stuffy arrogant Argentinians who think that they own—”

“
No
, dammit. Stop leaping to conclusions! I know why she's doing that. She wants the reader to have instant sympathy for the character, so she made her a refugee from a right-wing dictatorship instead of—”

Celia stopped again and faced Iliana. “Instead of the truth, you mean. Which is that poor fools like us happen to be refugees from a country plagued by both right-
and
left-wing dictatorships. Poor fools like us—who fled from Somoza's hell, rushed back all dewy-eyed with hope for the so-called revolution of '79, and then, sick at the soul, found the
same
corruption, the
same
censorship, with different uniforms and slogans. Poor fools like us,
double
exiles!” Celia's eyes blazed with an old indignation. “You know how many hours I have had to spend explaining to French intellectuals why I do not return to Managua to live happily ever after in the revolution? Me, a lesbian avant-garde electronic musician? Ha!” She spat into the gutter.

“Don't you think I also have those conversations? Don't you think—”

“I'll
tell
you what
I
think,” Celia yelled. A Parisian tripped past them without a glance, unruffled by two women standing on the street waving their arms and shouting in Spanish. “I think your wondrous Juliana lacks all capacity for political and aesthetic complexity. I think she has a simplistic North American mind capable only of cheap sympathy with victims of traditional despots. I think her attitude is as shallow in its own way as her country's entire Latin American foreign policy—a policy created by some creature who was a cross between a sadist and an ass! One more well-meaning tyrant and I think I go
mad!
”

Celia fell silent, glaring at Iliana. A gust of wind inspired them to move, and they began to walk again, not touching. Iliana was secretly basking in the warmth of her friend's rage on her behalf, a solace which lasted until they reached the boulevard. But as they turned onto it, she caught a glimpse of the Luxembourg Gardens, lavish even in their winter-stripped state, across the street. A perilous glimpse, because any garden, any flower, conjured up Julian in a haunting more vivid than all the miles that lay between them. Desire in the eye, in the hearing, in the memory. Julian, during a weekend in the country, returning from a dawn walk in spring rain with her arms full of wildflowers; Julian, coming like a vision of splendor back into bed, skin cool and damp with the rain's freshness, hair faintly ringleting, smelling of grass and dew, flinging blossoms all over the bed for the sheer elation of it. Julian, listening to Rachmaninoff's “Trio Élégiaque No. Two” and Messiaen's “Oiseaux Exotiques” for the first time. Julian eating an oyster, lips wrapping the fortunate creature in their fullness. Julian, diving and splashing like a berserk dolphin at the seashore. Julian, lifting from its box the gift of a white silk kimono. Julian, tipsy on champagne, lying on the sofa for three hours scowling at the ceiling and arguing aloud with God. Julian, sleeping in her arms—these arms now hugging only herself against the January wind—Julian asleep after love: small-boned body with skin finespun as gauze, limbs sprawled but never quite in abandon … always something maddeningly virgin about her, something withheld. Iliana reached up to her own throat, to touch the gold women's symbol Julian had given her. Julian. Juliana.

Celia glanced at Iliana surreptitiously and spotted the soundless tears. She moved closer and again linked her arm with her friend's. The gesture brought forth a cataract of words again.

“I still don't understand what
happened
, Celia. I try and try but … Julian always said she wished to live alone, at least for a while, to reassemble the fragments of her life. But I didn't want to believe that. We were actually
living
together, you see, and I
wanted
that: a real life. Rising together and making coffee, chatting about nothing in particular over breakfast, going off in different directions to do different tasks during the hours of the day, reconnecting at evening to prepare dinner together, to sit by candlelight, share food and talk of the day, read perhaps or play some music, enter the nighttime smoothly, through an act of love or of simple curling together, body to body in sweet weariness, in our mutual bed. I craved that proximity, that continuity. After so many years of wandering, I
wanted
that. She once turned to me and lectured me that I kept saying ‘a real life.' ‘Who
doesn't
live a real life?' she fumed. ‘The convict, the prostitute, the Carmelite, the Bedouin nomad, the paraplegic—their lives are just as real to them. Either none of us lives a real life or all of us do.' But I meant something different, you know, Celia? Something rooted in its own sweet daily rhythms. Was it such a sin to want that, and with her?”

For answer, Celia only pressed Iliana's arm. Let her talk, she reminded herself; you're a good friend, bear with all her retrospections; don't argue, let the last of it cascade out.

“Understand me, Celia.
She
never said it was a sin. But every time I spoke of it, she reiterated her own desires—space, time, solitude, freedom. How had I ever constricted her freedom? If I could only understand … Then, when she began it all again—the whirl of activity—I knew it was a reach toward that freedom. And yes, then I did fight it. There was the work in untangling what shreds were left of her mother's estate. There were speeches, meetings, travels. There was her editing job, which she kept on top of everything else to put money away for her own apartment. There was her book. There was the anxiety about her husband, even though it was clear by then no reconciliation was possible. There were the world's poor and dispossessed, there were letters to write and phone calls to make … Yes, I became jealous, of her colleagues, her friends, her time. I fought her over time for
us
. The more I fought for that, the more she withdrew. I don't
understand.
”

Celia sighed. “You tried to possess her,
tonta
. It sounds like she wanted that and also didn't want it.”

“But when all the rhetoric about loving in freedom is spent, isn't it true that at heart every lover wishes to possess the belovèd? Possess and be possessed by, utterly, eternally—no matter how unrealistic and hopelessly romantic that seems to our modern, psychologically sophisticated intellects?”

“That,” Celia smiled, “is part of an unfinished discussion you and I have had many times. But however that may be, I do think perhaps North Americans are fearful about … commitment.”

“But she
is
committed to me. Like family. Friends until we die, I know that. Maybe even periodic lovers, though not in the way I would have wanted. Yet something in me
still
believes we will one day have that—that lively, ecstatic serenity together, that—coming home to one another.”

Celia debated injecting a note of realism into the delicacy of the confessional moment. What was it her friend really needed to hear, in order to heal?

“It sounds to me,” she said slowly, groping for the right approach, “as if your Julian must let herself experience what she has been denied for so many years—in the childhood, in the marriage. She must go into the … exile of herself, you know? Perhaps she will have other lovers; perhaps other women lovers, perhaps men. It may be just as well. If she'd stayed with you she'd have coveted her freedom. Wouldn't you rather she have her freedom and covet you? You say you don't foresee her living with anyone again for some time. I wonder … But
you, niña
. You
must
cease the waiting.”

“By ceasing the waiting one risks losing the hope.” There, she had admitted it. “And Julian would neither fully claim me
nor
fully let me go. Were she a composer, Celia, she would write music redolent with hemiolia. You know? The rhythmic ambiguity—?”

“I know. That all time values are in the relationship. Are six notes of an equal time value three groups of two or two groups of three?” Celia recited, “Dunstable, Dufay, Schumann's ‘Spanische Liebes-Lieder.' I know, Iliana. I
know.
”

“I didn't want the waiting to erode my love for her. I didn't want to abandon her—like her father had. That is the way of the exile. After suffering so total a severance, one goes through life protecting oneself against ever feeling too much again.
You
know that, Celia,” she said gently. “But I also did not want to be like the husband, waiting
too
long—until violent expulsion seems the only pure act. I didn't want to be like the mother, clinging, demanding, smothering—though it was in this direction the greatest danger lay. Because Julian evoked precisely that form of loving.” Iliana lifted a blasted face to the winter sky, crying out, “What models are
left
us, we women?”