Dry Your Smile (34 page)

“This is your birth certificate. Perhaps you have never seen it.”

She started to speak, then stopped herself. How suddenly irrelevant to explain to him that there
was
no certificate, that there had been a fire in the city registry and all the records had been lost, that it had been necessary for Hope to swear a deposition to a judge years ago so that a new certificate could be issued. She stopped herself—one last helpless gesture of protection for the young mother whose despair, she now realized, must have been all-encompassing.

But there it was, in her hand. The real one, the original one, the one with the seal. Julian, female, born to Hope Baker, née Hokhmah Broitbaum; father unknown, October 7, 1941.

“It's … a strange feeling. To suddenly lose a year of my life.”

“Your mother lied to you? You thought—?”

“No … No. She's … never lied to me. She—I think we both knew that it was helpful in my career. To, well, shave off a year. But as time went on I must have … lost track myself.”

Not enough to have had your own radio program at age five; more precocious at age four. A whole year that you lived somewhere, somehow, doing what, utterly lost, vanished forever. To cover the shame of a woman who did the only thing she could do—pretend. Pretend the real into being, by pure will. And he speaks of pride.
Nothing
about you is real, Julian. You are a figment of the imagination of Hope Travis. You are a hallucination, an invention, a
golem
.

“Would you like to have this?” he asked gently.

“I—yes, I would.”

“Keep it, then. I have no use for it. I do not know why I saved it all these years.”

He began to straighten out small items on his desk. It was time to exit before the room spun completely out of control.

“Well. Thank you, David. For seeing me and telling me what you've told me. And, for this,” gesturing with the paper. “I—wish you well.”

“Thank you,” he replied formally, “And—may I ask—what you intend …”

“I will never bother you again. I agree with you. Our … relationship seems irrelevant.” She lifted her chin and smiled, both prides—her mother's and her father's—alive in that smile, but recognized by neither, nor by their daughter. “And I don't intend to tell Hope of this meeting. Not for a while, at least. It would only—distress her. So. Then. I'll be going.” She rose to her feet, her eyes sweeping the room to record it a last time. “Oh, there is one thing more.”

“Yes?” he asked, and with a final burst of longing in some vessel of the heart she thought she heard an eagerness in his question.

“David. Why does the man who only saw his child once and never ‘followed up' still keep, ninet—twenty years later, her baby photograph framed in silver by his desk?”

If it could have been said—
I exist, look at me, tell me, let me know, speak it once and for all O my father, let free whatever shred of love for me you might have hidden all these many years
—if it could have been spoken, that which resonated in her question, poised waiting in her eyes, spined her whole body upright as she stood by the door of his office while her nerves hummed like tuning forks for his answer,
if
. If it was ever to be learned, let it be learned now.

He looked at the picture. When he turned again to her, his expression was tinged with what once might have been grief, and something else she could not perceive: the addictive self-contempt known only to a survivor.

“That photograph is not of you. It is of my son. He is three years younger than you. I am sorry, Julian.”

“Thank you, David. For—Goodbye.”

You smile, she directed herself. You exit with dignity. You thank Minna in passing, you do not break your stride, get out of this corridor now and this stained-glass door and to the street and walk in the general direction of the bus depot somehow you do it a bastard a year lost wiped clean out of your past a brother one child she'd said on the phone how could you have thought wishful hearing 1941 half-crushed insect a year the son he always wanted she was right she lied he never loved her never wanted you he lied she never wanted you a son she did want you she lied you were wrong wrong always wrong. The only real choice in your life is a choice between mendacities.

But by the time the bus deposited her back in New York, she had remembered that there was one human being on the planet in whom she could confide these bleeding new truths. One person who would hear her, understand, still be able to see something real, something Julian, in her. One person so scarred from his own bleak and violent family love that he would care. One person who knew that if you could turn it into something of use, into art, into politics—yes David damn you naïvely save the whole vile hateful lying ravaged bloodsick world with it—then you could do more than just survive it, callous and brutalized. Then you could understand it, forgive it perhaps. And not repeat it.

She ran to the first phone booth she saw after disembarking the bus, and dialed. Please god let him be in, please god.

The familiar voice answered.

“Laurence? Oh thank god you're there.”

“Oh, hi, Julian. You okay?”

“Laurence. I—I need to talk to you. And Laurence, can we take that walk across Brooklyn Bridge you always said we might someday? I've still never been.”

“Uh, yeah, sure, Julian. Wait a minute, you mean right
now?
Aren't you at work? Oh, I couldn't poss—”

“Right now, yes, right now if that's humanly possible. Please. There's stuff I've—I've got to tell somebody. Meet me in fifteen minutes at the Manhattan side of the bridge? Please?”

And he said he would. And he wasn't lying.

He did.

CHAPTER SIX

Autumn, 1982

Emerging from her darkroom, Iliana de Costa blinked at the afternoon light slanting through her windows. Large, she supposed, bemused at the notion that windows of such size could be clucked over reverently in Manhattan, while they'd be considered average to small in Venice. There, her flat had cost one-quarter of the rent this one did, and had been almost three times the size. There, the incomparable light had lavished itself through floor-to-ceiling French doors that opened onto her terrace-balconies on the Riva degli Schiavoni overlooking the laguna. There … But what was the use of comparing? Venice was past. Like the Paris years. Like those in Barcelona, in Rome, and the abominable month in London, which she disliked almost as much as New York.

Yet here she was again, back in New York: this massive impersonal city where the light's repertoire was usually limited to charcoal through slate, the textures on which it fell flattened to steel, concrete, granite. What New Yorkers called “the” park, she thought, would not be “central” but one of several in almost any major city in the world, nor did she find this lack ameliorated by the scrawny trees pathetically lining some (only the more affluent, she noticed) blocks. This time, however, Manhattan seemed more tolerable than it had in that first devastating encounter with the city almost thirty years earlier, when she had arrived from Buenos Aires with the equivalent of twenty-five U.S. dollars in her pocket and not a soul to contact. The cherished Hasselblad had to be pawned after three days. Later, when she returned to retrieve it with her first week's salary from the factory job, the pawnbroker refused to honor her ticket. No use shouting at him in clear English; to him a Spanish accent meant a Puerto Rican and a drug addict. Nor would she assert that she was neither, feeling that would constitute a betrayal of the thirty-nine Puerto Rican women with whom she had shared that first week of hell, all of them hunched over sewing machines in one drafty room.

This time she had returned to New York in what they said was triumph. The reviews of her one-woman show at the Focus Gallery were uniform in their praise. Her work sold well. This time, all the cameras and lenses remained with her; no pawnbrokers need apply. This time, she could afford a high-ceilinged sunny flat in Greenwich Village, assemble her prized record collection from storage in three different cities around the world, purchase a fine set of components, and hear music again. This time, she was back as Iliana de Costa, and nobody dared ask why.

Nobody but Julian, of course—who had leaned across the table at their first lunch after her return last spring, inquiring earnestly just that: why had she returned, hating the city as she did? The answer had been easy enough, Iliana remembered, plumping down now onto her cocoa velvet couch, the still curling prints of her darkroom session in her lap for sorting: the Focus show, naturally. And then again, how weary she was of Venice.

Weary of Venice! Where every object extolled the light, which in turn wooed everything it caressed! But where the light never lingered its glance on Julian Travis. That, to be sure, she had
not
said to Julian. And never would say.

“Never.”
Iliana commanded aloud, an order to her solitary self.

But Julian lay now in her lap, new photographs, the first contact sheets from the session for the jacket picture of Julian's next book. Roll upon roll—she, who never descended anymore to “portrait photography,” who had volunteered this, as a friend. And a flesh-and-blood Julian would be walking through the door in fifteen minutes.

Iliana cast a practiced eye around the room, then screwed her mouth up in a pout of distaste. Too little a space, too bland an architecture. Here, what had been the artlessly graceful dishevelment of her Venetian rooms became mere clutter. The Murano blown-glass vase on her coffeetable loomed too large for its setting and sparkled dully as if sulking at the quality of light it was given to reflect. Books, recordings, and tapes spilled over from their shelves onto every tabletop, onto some of the bentwood chairs, onto the floor itself. She could never find anything in this ridiculous flat about which everyone oohed and aahed. No space in the bedroom for a proper dressing table; her colognes and lotions had to balance, living dangerously, in the bathroom medicine cabinet or on the back of the toilet commode. No room in either of the postage-stamp-size closets for her Cerutti suits to hang without creasing, for the silk shirts to emerge without their sleeves fixed in freakish gestures—refugees from the work of a Diane Arbus, perhaps, not from a de Costa.

She sighed and poured herself a glass of sherry. The one worthwhile taste England had taught her—and
that
, she smiled, originated in Spain. Hot-dogs and pizza and garlic bagels learned from New York. Schnitzel and
Café mit Schlag
from Vienna. Fresh-baked baguettes and
café
with a
grande crème
, from Paris. Sensual pleasures. But no flavor like the
asado
from home.

Home
. What an insipid notion, she reminded herself. If a revolution occurred tomorrow, she still couldn't return to Argentina. Even were there to be an end to the shifting military coups and corruption,
her
revolution would still be a long way off. As a woman, a Latin woman, a Latin woman artist.

She picked up the magni-viewer and began squinting at the contact sheets. Yes. And yes. There. Oh yes. She had caught it again and again, the quality Julian always tried to project but no one except she, Iliana, had managed to see, much less catch. Here it was, captured, an ultimate possession in black-and-white, forever. Smiling, serious, brooding-author-fit-for-book-jacket-shot, impish, sullen, enticing—
there:
laughing so hard as to be almost unrecognizable, smile unplanned, hair tousled to a loveliness no comb could elicit, throat arched back and free. Possessed. Iliana savored the memory of that session: of taking Julian as she wished, telling her what to wear, how to sit—then surprising her
between
poses, from every angle, the challenge of mating unhinted passion with technique to focus on this particular subject! It had electrified the result, as Iliana guessed it might.
This
perspective of that belovèd face was now forever Iliana de Costa's.

She sat back and sipped her sherry. It would be interesting, now, to see which of the shots Julian would gravitate to, as opposed to which she might ultimately pick for the bookjacket, which involved other considerations. But there would be a message in which print would shock its subject, rivet her, make her uneasy—deliciously so. Most interesting.

All the Julians, she concluded with satisfaction, were on these sheets, stripped bare by the perception of her lens, as if the subject of that lens herself, luminously naked, lay open, laughing, ready for love, on the bed in the small room beyond. At least all of the
so-far
Julians. The one she had first met almost ten years ago during her second New York sojourn—the period volcanic with Seventies politics and personal epiphanies—the Julian she had encountered in that early CR group, where the North American women were irritatingly astonished at how “feminist” a Latina could be. Patronizing
gringas
, she scowled. But there had been Julian. Who was not in the least surprised, who loved the writings of Sor Juana de la Cruz, whose eyes widened with recognition when Iliana mentioned that back home she had studied—the only woman student ever—under Enrico Martínez.

“The ‘Latin Stieglitz'!” Julian had exclaimed. Then quickly added, blushing, “Oh, I'm sorry, Iliana. I didn't mean to define him in such ethnocentric terms.” Amazing, for a Nordeamericana. Then, later, there had been all the other Julians.

Images poised one by one before Iliana's memory vivid as the contact sheets in her lap. She shut her eyes, the better to see them. She and Julian, the compulsive ones left at 3
A.M.
after the rest of the group had begged off—husbands, kids, a hard day tomorrow—left alone to finish mimeographing leaflets for the next night's demonstration. The two of them giggling uncontrollably in karate class, to the frowns of their feminist classmates and the fury of the Sensai. The two of them, sharing literary and artistic bonds beyond what either shared politically with the rest of the group. The two of them, sometimes just walking around the Lower East Side—Iliana furtively snapping her camera at certain street faces, objects in the gutter, doorways of boarded-up tenement buildings; Julian learning to see with Iliana's eyes; Iliana refining her English by getting Julian to talk about poetry. The two of us, she remembered, comprehending each other across chasms of culture and language—finding in that an exhilarating victory, a promise for humanity. She opened her eyes and peered again at the spectrum of expressions in her photographs. The pity of it. Hidden somewhere behind those smiles there was a secret smile waiting all this time to fling itself across the face with an abandon no motive but desire could provoke.