The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (164 page)

“I couldn’t imagine how old you are. I hadn’t even thought about it.”

“I can see why you wouldn’t.” Babette lifted her mirror again and looked at herself. “All this makeup covers everything. It’s
hard to tell what I look like at all. I think I’m pretty, anyway, but I only realized this week that I’m not going to age well. Some women I know look like girls their whole lives, and I suspect that it’s on account of their skin. From a distance I still look fine, and onstage I’ll look wonderful for years, but if you come close to me, you’ll see the change already.”

She jumped up and ran in two steps to the opposite corner of the room from my grandfather.

“You see, I’m just heavenly from here,” she said, and then leaped right up to him so that their noses almost touched. “But now look at me. See the little lines here and here?” She pointed to the outer corner of each eye. My grandfather saw nothing like lines, only quickly blinking lashes and makeup. He noticed that her breath smelled of cigarettes and oranges, and then he stopped breathing, afraid that he might touch her somehow, or do something wrong. She took a step back, and he exhaled.

“But it’s like that with everything you look at too closely,” Babette continued. The green dress that she had worn earlier was hanging over a low ceiling pipe. She pulled the dress down and backed into the far corner again, holding it up against herself. “Just look at this lovely green thing,” she said. “Onstage it’ll turn a man’s head, won’t it? And I looked so swish in it, didn’t you think?”

My grandfather said that he had thought just that. She approached him again, although, to his relief, she did not stand so close this time.

“But you can see what a cheap thing it really is,” she said, turning the dress inside out. “It looks just like a child sewed those seams, and it’s all kept together with pins. And feel it. Go on.”

My grandfather lifted a bit of the skirt in one hand, although he did not really feel the material as he had been told to.

“You can tell right away that it’s not really silk, that there isn’t actually anything nice about it at all. If I wore this to someone’s
home, I would look just like some kind of street girl. It’s pathetic.” She turned from him, and, over her shoulder, she added, “I will spare you the smell of the thing. I’m certain that you can imagine it.”

Actually, he couldn’t begin to imagine what it smelled like. Cigarettes and oranges, he suspected, but he had no way of knowing. Babette let her pink towel slide to the floor, and then turned and faced my grandfather in only her slip and stockings.

“I would guess that I look very nice this way,” she said, “although I don’t have a large mirror, so I’m not sure. But if I were to take this slip off, and if you were to come over here next to me, you’d see that I have all sorts of bumps and hairs and freckles, and you might be very disappointed. You’ve never seen a naked woman, have you?”

“Yes, I have,” he said, and Babette looked at him in quick surprise.

“You have never,” she said sharply. “You have never in your life.”

“I have. It’s been three years now that my aunt can’t care for herself. I keep her clean, change her clothes, give her baths.”

Babette winced. “I think that must be disgusting.” She picked up the towel from the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders again. “She probably can’t even control herself anymore. She’s probably all covered with nasty messes.”

“I keep her very clean,” he said. “I make sure that she—”

“No.” Babette held up her hands. “I can’t listen to that, any of that. I’ll be sick, really I will.”

“I’m sorry,” my grandfather said. “I didn’t mean—”

“That doesn’t disgust you? To do those things?” she interrupted.

“No,” he said honestly. “I think it must be just like taking care of a baby, don’t you?”

“No. Absolutely not. Isn’t that funny, though, that I would be so disgusted by what you just told me? I’m sure there are things
in my life that would shock you, but I didn’t think that you could shock me.”

“I didn’t mean to shock you,” he apologized. “I was only answering your question.”

“Now I’ll tell you something shocking,” she said. “When I was a little girl in Elmira, we lived next to a very old man, a Civil War veteran. He’d had his arm amputated during a battle, but he wouldn’t let the surgeon throw it away. Instead, he kept it, let all the skin rot off, dried it in the sun, and took it home. A souvenir. He kept it until he died. He used to chase his grandchildren around the yard with it, and then beat them with his own arm bone. And one time he sat me down and showed me the tiny crack from where he’d broken it when he was a boy. So do you think that’s disgusting?”

“No,” my grandfather said. “It’s interesting. I never met anyone from the Civil War.”

“Now that’s funny,” Babette said, “because everyone I ever told that to was shocked, but it never shocked me. So why can’t I listen to you talk about cleaning up your old aunt?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Except that your story was a lot more interesting.”

“I didn’t think I still could be disgusted,” she said. “I’ll tell you another story. The church in my hometown used to have ice cream socials for the children, and we would eat so much that we would get sick. But it was such a treat that we wanted more, so we used to go outside, vomit what we’d eaten, and run back in for more. Pretty soon all the dogs in town would be at the church, eating up that melting ice cream as fast as we could throw it up. Do you think that’s disgusting?”

“No,” my grandfather said. “I think that’s funny.”

“So do I. I did then, and I still do.” She was quiet for a moment. “Still, there are things that I’ve seen in the last few years that would make you sick to hear. I could shock you. I’ve
done things that are so awful, I wouldn’t tell you about them if you begged me to.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I don’t want to know,” he said, although when he had left his home that evening, he had wanted just that sort of information, desperately.

“It’s not important, anyhow. We won’t talk about it at all. You’re a funny one, though, aren’t you? I feel just like an old whore saying that. There are so many old whores in this business, and they all look at young men and say, ‘You’re a funny one, aren’t you?’ It’s true, though, with you. Most men get a sniff of a girl’s past and want to know every single thing she’s ever done. And you keep looking at me, but not like I’m used to.”

My grandfather blushed. “I’m sorry if I stared,” he said.

“But not just at me! You’ve been staring at the whole room. I’ll bet you’ve memorized every crack on these walls, the rungs on the bed frame, and what I’ve got in the bottom of my suitcases, too.”

“No.”

“Yes, you have. And you’ve been memorizing me. I’m sure of it.”

He did not answer her, because, of course, she was absolutely right. Instead, he nervously shifted his weight back and forth, suddenly acutely aware of the different sizes of his feet. Not for the first time in his life, he felt unbalanced from the ground up because of this deformity, almost dizzy from it.

“Now I’ve made you flustered,” Babette said. “I think that’s easy enough to do, so I won’t be proud.” After a pause, she added, “I believe you really are an artist because of how you’ve been staring. You’re a watcher, not a listener. Am I right?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Hum me a bar from my song tonight, or even tell me a line from the chorus. Go on.”

He thought back quickly, and at first could only come up
with the sound of the faceless man beside him demanding the time. Then he said, “You sang something about being blue because someone left, a man, I think . . .” He trailed off, then added weakly, “It was a pretty song. You sang it well.”

She laughed. “It’s just as well that you didn’t listen. It’s a stupid song. But tell me, how many couples were dancing behind me?”

“Four,” he answered without hesitation.

“And who was the smallest girl onstage?”

“You were.”

“And how big was the orchestra?”

“I couldn’t see, except the conductor, and the bass player, of course, because he was standing.”

“Yes, of course.” Babette walked to the sink, and spent a few moments doing something with the toiletries there. Then she turned and approached him with one arm outstretched. She had striped the white underside of her forearm with five short strokes of lipstick, each shade only slightly different from the one beside it. She covered her mouth with her other hand and asked, “Which color do I have on my lips right now?”

My grandfather looked down at her arm, unexpectedly alarmed at the slashes of red across the white skin. He paused before answering, because something else had caught his eye, a faint, bluish vein that ran diagonally across the inside bend of her elbow. Then he pointed to the second lipstick stripe from her wrist and said assuredly, almost absently, “This one.”

He looked up at her face only after she had let her arm drop, and the intriguing blue vein vanished from view. She was still holding her other hand to her mouth and staring at him with eyes so wide and spooked that it seemed as if her hand belonged to a stranger, an attacker. He slowly pulled her arm down away from her face and looked at her in silence. He looked at her lips and confirmed that he had chosen correctly. Without thinking about what he was beginning to do, he lifted her chin so that
her face was out of shadow and studied the shape of her forehead, nose, and jaw. Babette watched him.

“Look,” she said. “If you’re going to kiss me, just—”

She stopped talking as he released her chin and took hold of her wrist, turning it over and exposing where she had marked herself with the lipsticks. He stared for a long while, and she finally began to rub at the smearing red lines with the corner of her towel, as if embarrassed now by what she had done. But my grandfather wasn’t looking at that. He was studying that faint blue vein again, examining its short path across its cradle, the soft fold of her arm. After some time, he lifted her other arm and compared the twin vein there, holding her wrists gently, but with a thorough self-absorption that negated the lightness of his touch. She pulled away, and he released his hold without speaking.

He crossed the room and looked once more at the dress, carefully noting the alarming green again, frowning. Then he returned to Babette to confirm the color of her hair. He reached up to touch it, but she caught his arm.

“Please,” she said. “That’s enough.”

My grandfather blinked as if she had just woken him from a nap or delivered a piece of unexpected bad news. He glanced around the room as though searching for someone else, someone more familiar, and then frowned and looked back at Babette.

“You should know that there are ways to act,” she said evenly. “There are things to say so that a girl doesn’t have to feel used.” Her face was empty of expression, but she had lifted the hand mirror and was holding it tightly, as one might hold a tennis racket or a weapon.

He blushed. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean . . . I get that way sometimes, looking, staring like that—”

Babette cut him off with a sharp, irritated glance that crossed her face as fast and dark as a shadow.

“You can’t do that to people,” she said. He started to apologize again, but she shook her head. Finally she continued, “It’s going to be a very good painting, but not very flattering to me. Which is fine,” she added, shrugging cavalierly, “because I’ll never see it.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, feeling and sounding like a stranger, as if he was once more standing outside her door in the dark cobwebbed hall beneath the stage.

She shrugged one shoulder and lifted a hand to touch a red curl that was already in place. My grandfather watched, silent.

“Don’t you think you should leave now?” Babette asked at last.

He nodded, disgusted by the futility of apology, and left. He found his way through the dark hall and out of the nightclub alone, not needing, or even remembering, the young usher who had led him to Babette. Outside it had stopped raining. His overcoat had dried in her room, and he had already forgotten that it had ever been wet.

The widow with the bad knees was waiting for him when he got home. She did not question where he had been, but said only that his aunt was asleep in her chair and had been quiet all night.

“I gave her some soup,” she whispered as he unlocked the door.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’re very kind.”

My grandfather closed the door quietly behind him and took off his shoes so that he wouldn’t wake his aunt when he passed through the sitting room. In his own bedroom, he began working on what would be the first important painting of his career. He filled several pages with the charcoal-smudged, faceless crowd of the nightclub audience, leaving an empty white space in each sketch, always in the same spot. After several hours, he examined his work, irritated to see that all the pictures were identical: uniformly solid and dark, with a gaping opening in
the center for a singer he didn’t know how to begin to draw.

He laid his head down on his sleeve and shut his eyes. He breathed in the tobacco smell of his shirt, at first inadvertently and then with great purpose, as if his skill would be enhanced if he deeply inhaled that dank odor. After some time, he opened his small box of oil paints and began trying to mix the green of Babette’s dress.

Although later in his life his mastery of color would be considered unrivaled, that night, as a young man with a limited collection of oils, he was overwhelmed by the task of recalling the shade. He worked carefully and several times felt that he was close to success, but found that, as the paint dried, the effect was lost, the color dulled. He was struck by the inevitability of his own limitations.

His desk was covered already with torn pieces of paper and patches of sticky, inadequate green. He looked at the charcoal sketches again and thought about what Babette had said. She was correct to say that it would be a good painting, but wrong to think that it would not flatter her. My grandfather visualized the figure that he knew would eventually fill the empty white space, and he was certain that it would be a very appealing character. Nonetheless, the painting was destined, in his mind, to remain a clumsy rendition of a transient, fantastic moment. It was he, ultimately, who would not be flattered by this work. It was his misfortune to realize this so young.