Dry Your Smile (56 page)

“Yeah, well … you live in a dream world, Jule. People aren't just subject matter, you know. Life's not all plots and characters and politics.”

“Well. That's debatable. But when it is, then for me at least it helps make the impenetrable remotely intelligible. Anyway, I do know that life is lived a lot differently than it comes out on the page. Well, thanks for reading it, anyway. And … I'm glad you came through in your own work.”

“I know you are, Jule. And I wish you the best.”

“Sure, Larry. When you get your land, you break open some champagne and celebrate, okay?”

“Well—”

“Oh, sorry, forgot. A half glass of wine and you always fell clunk asleep, like the doormouse with his head in the teapot.”

“'Fraid so. But I'll celebrate in my own way. So … take care, Jule.”

“You too. 'Bye, Larry.”

“Yeah. 'Bye.”

She hung up the phone. Goodbye, she thought, goodbye my first love and only husband. You stand now on the far side of some bridge we once claimed as our own. But may you live and breathe, may the stone sing into something beautiful under your hands.

She might have been one of his statues, standing there beside her desk, looking at the Julian head, neither of them stirring. But then she remembered she'd been on her way to make a cup of tea. She went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Lovely kitchen, lovely table, chairs, stove, sink. Hers. Lovely leftovers in lovely refrigerator—her own chicken tarragon with Dijon mustard sauce. Lovely to cook again, just what she wished and when. Lovely fragrant tea leaves. Lovely melodic burble of the kettle coming to a boil.

That novel. She smiled and shook her head. That perpetually unfinished novel. Other books of hers would come and go, but that novel would continue to haunt her, no matter how many new rooms she moved into and through. Months had passed since the completion of what felt to her like the hundred and seventieth draft, and she still didn't know how to end it. Not for lack of an ending, but because there were too many possibilities:

Ashley lives self-sufficiently and happily-ever-after alone in her new apartment, The New Woman On Her Own. Julian wrinkled her nose in distaste. Trite. Sounds as if it had been penned by Maxine Duncan Brewer.

Leigh reconciles with Laurence and they have a child. Unrealistic. That character would never do either.

Leslie reunites with Iliana and together they journey to Nicaragua to foment an authentic revolution which embraces both feminism and art. Utopian. They'd be shot dead in a day.

Blair, finally left to her own devices, has a nervous breakdown and takes to wearing organdy pinafores and pink hairbows. Predictable. Besides, the character hates to polish her white maryjanes.

Julian sighed and poured the steaming water over her tea leaves.

Shawn falls wildly in love with an entirely new—

The doorbell rang.

“Who can
that
be?” she asked Vita, who had followed her into the kitchen and was butting against her ankles in hope of a snack. “I'm not expecting anybody, are you?”

She pressed the buzz-back and peered down the stairs. It was a familiar blue uniform.

“Hi,” she called, “What are you doing about? Mail came.”

“Special Delivery Express for you. From France, looks like. No rest for the weary mail deliverer.”

“Sorry,” she grinned, signing for the delivery and waving goodbye. It was a thick envelope. Iliana.

Julian sat down at the kitchen table and opened the letter. The familiar handwriting scrawled over many pages. She sipped her tea and read.

Only the ticking of the wall clock broke the quiet of the kitchen. Julian turned the last page. The letter lay in her lap.

The lady does have style, she smiled to herself. The lady had definitely been too impatient—and also too patient—for too long. The lady was now back in control of her own life. The lady definitely had style.

“I'll miss you,” she soliloquized aloud to the scribbled pages. “I'll miss the character I drafted—”

Virginia stalked into the kitchen, Vita at her heels, both of them now loudly demanding high tea. But Julian stared at the letter, her mind elsewhere.

It's not one novel
, she thought.
It's two
. She put down her teacup.
It's a novel within a novel, nested Chinese boxes, the action behind the curtain, backstage, off-camera
. Scenes began to whirl in her brain.
It's … all the fragments beginning to fall into place. Levels of reality
…

The phone rang again. But she was not about to let herself in for the remotest surreal possibility that it would be
her
, briskly accusing:

“Hello, Baby. You didn't call or come by today.”

She ignored the ringing. She rose abruptly, pages fluttering from her lap. She ignored the cats. She moved to her desk like a woman in a dream, a woman possessed, a professional who's been told that she has only a half hour until showtime. She yanked a piece of paper from its nook and swiftly rolled it into her typewriter.

Never mind the drafts, the variants. Never mind the repetitions, failures, rehearsals. Nesting boxes, masks under masks. Yet each a performance. Each one an expression of love
.

She began to write.

PART FIVE

October, 1983

It's me, Momma. Julian. I'm here right beside you. I'm staying with you. I won't leave you.

They say you can't hear me, Momma.

But I'll go on talking to you like this, whatever anybody says. Because coma or no, I think you're still inside there.

Maybe some of these words might sink down to where you are. So you'll know you're not alone. So you'll know you're loved.

Try not to be afraid. That must be very hard. And you've had so many hard things to do already, for so long. But you did them all the best you could. You've always had courage. I want you to know I know that. It's me speaking to you, Momma, Julian. Your only child.

Try to hear me.

Try. Up through the layers, the smoke, water, distance, the roar, the silence, whatever the space is between my voice and where you are.

I know you're in there. You know my voice, Momma. It's me.

I'm trying to help you through this with the only tools I have: my love for you and your love for me. And some … words, Momma. And my body, too, right here. Sitting on the edge of your bed close beside you. My touch on your body. Try to feel me.

It's Julian. It's my hands that are touching you. One of my hands is holding both of your tight little fists. My other hand is stroking your forehead, smooth, steady … try to feel that. I know you may not be able to make a sign, but I want you to know I'm here.

Everything I am strains toward you at this moment. All my energy, consciousness, love.

You are my mother and your name is Hope.
Hope
. You have another name, too, Momma. You were called
Hokhmah
, which in Hebrew means wisdom. Wisdom and hope might be the same thing, Momma, so you can claim both as your own. Both are your own names.

My name is Julian, Momma. Speaking to you, reaching into you, touching your surfaces with my hands and my breath. This is your daughter's voice, these are your daughter's hands. Flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone, blood of your blood.

Can you reach back to me? Can you understand you're not alone? Try, reach up up up through all that space and silence. Grasp the me that's reaching down into you. It's Julian, Hope. It's me, Hokhmah.

Now. Let's try, you and me together. Against the whole world.

Let's try to unfist your hands.

Let's gather all our selves into … something like a beam of light or energy. Let's focus it directly at your hands, way way up here on your surface. Try to feel them.

Try to feel my hands on yours, flesh of your flesh caressing your flesh which is my flesh. One flesh, Momma. My hands won't force yours open, don't be afraid. They want to help you relax your hands, just a little. They want to slip a few fingers inside, so you can grasp my fingers the way a newborn baby in a crib holds on, by reflex, for comfort. It's safe with me.

Shall we try? Together.

We can do it. We can be anything we want to be, we've always known that. Can we try to hold hands and go through this together? Helping each other, not being so alone or so afraid, not hurting so much?

Trust me. Hear me.
Now
. Reach, strain up up up to meet me straining, reaching, down through the whole world to find you wherever you are in there. Try?

Open now, little Momma, open now, little hands, let yourself bud open. Think of your hands as trying to flower. It's really so easy. Let it be easy.

Yes,
easy
. Feel me, I'm here with you,
easy
to relax and let them petal by petal
yes
begin to unfold themselves, relax, open, spread, flower,
yes
you're doing it, what beautiful flowers they're becoming, petal on petal, so lovely … so
lovely
you are.
Yes
.

Now we're holding hands together, Hope and her baby, Hokhmah and Julian. Feel that. Take my warmth down into your chill. Take what I send down to you through these hands, this voice. Reach up up up for this love
yes
.

You did it, yes. You and me, against what they all said.

Now we can go on together and be anything we want to be.

Now, holding hands, we can do the rest of it.

So she's dying, the Vampire Mother. She hung on until something malevolent in the universe told her, as of last night, it was finally too late. So she can die in peace, safe in the knowledge that her daughter is free now from the puny male love with which that poor dumb sculptor Laurence Millman tried for two decades to win her. And in the process, lost his soul.

Hello, tape recorder, old friend and brother solipsist. You know who this is, your faithful spirit of the man who was: sculptor, never-father, longtime but nevermore now husband of Julian Travis, daughter of Hope Travis who lies dying. How many times have we sat like this, tape recorder—in my studio, alone together? You, a machine, and me, a human being trying to find out if I still had a voice? How many times have I talked to you while I was a bit drunk, waiting for her to come home?

So here I am again, still sitting at the same worktable, dawn squinting through the skylight, other members of our old circle present. Brandy bottle. Little twisted rust-metal cages all around. And monolithically mute, still waiting, still hulking massively in its corner:
It
. The untouched now-antique block of Carrara marble. It.

Except something's different. I'm not waiting for Julian. Julian's not coming home. Not tonight or ever, I think. Just about twenty-four hours ago, Laurence Millman finally drove her away. He got his point across, and without right this minute being dead or behind bars—jail bars or loony bars or liquor bars, what's the difference.

So this is the voice of a man who isn't waiting.

I'm not even waiting for Vampire Mother Hope to die. I used to wait for her to die. Not necessarily in the flesh—though I'd have settled for that—but to die in her daughter's flesh. I thought Julian and I could outwit and outlast Vampire Mother, see. Well, now I'm not even waiting to hear that Hope finally left us alone. For all I know, she's already dead. Julian called—when was that, last night? No, it was daylight. Yesterday afternoon?

Simple conversation: the dead speaking to the dead about the dying. Julian called to tell me Hope was really dying and she was at the hospital keeping the vigil. Then she asked how I was. I told her okay. I asked how she was. She said she was okay. You have to understand, tape recorder, how this all went; I mean, there were silences between each of these exchanges.

For all I know, she might've been trying to reach me for hours. But I'd left the phone off the hook in here, and forgotten about it. I wasn't in here, you see. I was lying on the floor of her study, for hours, holding on to that little foam pallet of hers that already held the indent of her body, already smelled of her sleep. I think I fell asleep myself and then I'd wake up and remember and the room would go black even though it was daylight and then I guess I'd sleep again and wake and cry and sleep, over and over.

But finally you can't sleep or cry anymore and you begin to separate out Julian from life because in the long run life is even more demanding than she is—which is really saying something. So after a point, Life demands you go to the bathroom or you'll pee all over yourself. Partly you obey from training, and partly 'cause something in you doesn't want you to pee on yourself and become more wretched than you already are. So you get up and go.

Now, that's where Life gets sneaky. Because once you're on your feet, Life has you by the balls.

Suddenly, Life says: You're hungry. Life says: A cup of fresh coffee? Life says: You're a wreck,
but
(this is in a tempting whisper)
if
you take a shower and shave and throw on fresh clothes you can go to the coffeeshop on Ninth Avenue and have coffee and scrambled eggs and hash browns and toast with butter and you won't even have to fix it yourself. Now what you
really
want to do, tape recorder, is go back into the study where the woman you loved and lived with for years used to sit and write love poems to you. What you really want to do is crawl back down on that floor and hold on to her smells and not look at the splintered doorframe and sleep again forever this time.

But Life already has you by the balls 'cause you blew it when you went to the bathroom to pee. You may not have known it at the time, but from that point on, you were stuck, you were going to have to stay alive.

So one thing leads to another which is always the hell of it. Before you know it you're back from the coffeeshop and a brief walk that you also got conned into by Life. So then you have to face the loft. At this point, see, you
still
want to go lie down on her pallet and die, but by now Life has siphoned energy into you—all that fucking food and coffee, soap, water, fresh air. So you know damned well if you lie down you won't sleep. You'll think. And that's one of the absolutely worst things Life can do to you. So you get the brandy bottle which might help but there's nothing left in it. So you look around and say to yourself, Well, before I go out again, maybe I'll clean things up a bit so I won't trip on something later when I finish the next bottle which I'll go out and get myself as a reward for cleaning things up. See? See how it works? Life, I mean? See what a conniving sneak it is?