Dry Your Smile (37 page)

“Hush,” she crooned, “
carissima
, hush. Leave be. Leave everything be. We deal with one crisis at a time, yes? Nothing more need be said. For now, we focus on the mama, no? And if you let me, you do not go alone into those hell-holes. Iliana comes with you, stiffens the spine, makes you eat a little something, maybe even makes you laugh for a moment. And we find for the mama a good place, where she will be comfortable, where you will be at peace to have her. Together we go through what you've told me is her koo-koo flat and dispose of things and clean it up and put it for sale on the market, and that will pay nicely for as long as she needs the home. You'll see. All that is necessary is not to take oneself too tragically. I know what I say.”

Julian blew her nose but didn't move from the comforting embrace. Her voice, spent, almost sleepy, floated up to Iliana from that ample bosom.

“God, you're good, 'Yana. How'd you get to be so goddamned wise? That's what I want to know. You're only six years older than me. It's mortifying.”

Iliana's laughter bubbled out, a spring of contentment fountaining in her throat. “I did want always to be wise. I hardly think I have attained my goal. But sometimes I think I show a
bit
of promise, I do confess it. You do, too. Your sense of humor serves you well.”

“But you …
clarify
things. You sort out the crazy from the sane, the real from the false. There's something so …
solid
about you.”

Iliana gave Julian a playful shove away from her breast and thrust another tissue at her. “Santa Lucia! Don't start that ‘what is real' whimpering again,
chica
. You go loco on the subject.” She studied Julian for a moment. “I want to show you something.” She went to the littered desk and shuffled through manila envelopes and cardboard binders. “Ah. Here it is, yes. Now look,” she commanded, returning to the sofa and thrusting a photograph at Julian. “What is that?”

Julian saw a play of light dappling a progression of fine and then coarse-grained textures in a windblown pattern, an undulance of motion and shading. “It's ravishing, Iliana. It's, well I can't be sure, but I think it's a branch of a tree, isn't it? Is this from your Black Forest series?”

Iliana let out a small hoot of triumph. “Ha! So, Ms. What-Is-Real!
That
is a microphotograph of a human hair, my dear. And this?”

“An incredible fast-speed shot of a whirlpool,” Julian guessed, her eyes beginning to sparkle with the game.

“Wrong again, you blind poet. It's a close-up of the gnarl, the—what is it called?—the
whorl
, in a cypress tree. And this?”

“Three strikes and I'll be out. Ummm, that must be a shot of the desert. A dune at sunset? Wow, is it breathtaking!”

“Breathtaking yes, desert no. It happens to be the line of a hipbone, nude female in dawn light.”

“Ta ta ta,” Julian retorted, raising her eyebrows roguishly. “Well who would have thought it.”

“Certainly not you,” Iliana parried with equal rascality. But the promise shuttered open again in her that Julian could tease this way. Gently, carefully, my heart. “You see,” she went on in a restrained voice, “dear fool, ‘real' is relative. All a matter of perspective, speed and exposure, proportion, shadow. Most of all, of light.”

“In a photograph, perhaps. Life's not a photograph.”

“To hell it's not. Even the sainted Marx said it was a moving picture, if not a still one. Look, my darling dense Julian. When I left Argentina, I did so by disguise. I think I never told you this. It's quite hilarious: I left as a nun, a virginal novice. The good sisters—the original ones, before the feminist ‘sisters'—helped smuggle me out. Under those venerable robes were negatives and cameras and whatever else was really ‘me.' It was most revealing, this concealment. Suddenly I was treated not as a woman, and not as a man either, but as a safe sexual cipher. I have gone to convent schools—and I assure you that nuns are not sexual ciphers,” she injected with a twinkle. “But a totalitarian country had as unyielding a perception of religious fanaticism as of political fanaticism. I should have expected that. Don't forget, I grew up with both the myth and the reality of Eva Perón. I was seventeen when she died. And she was neither the demon nor the angel she has been depicted as being. She gained divorce rights for women—and the vote. Even if it
was
always as appendage to Juan. She also did collaborate in his fascism. She affected us all, deeply, with her peculiar magic. Evita, my dear”—she chucked Julian under the chin—“was an unregenerate actress who turned political.”

“Thanks a lot,” Julian moaned.

“Ah, listen, gloomy one. Sometimes a disguise is the emergence of a new skin, as an old one is being cast off. To change, to grow, that can feel ‘unreal' because it's unfamiliar, don't you
see?
Dear idiot,” she sighed impatiently, “there's a Malraux line I once memorized, from
La Condition Humaine
. In English it would be something like: ‘A costume is … sufficient to permit one escape from oneself, sufficient to find an entirely different life in the perception of others.' You say you know of my attraction to you, and we will perhaps speak of that another time—no, not now.” She raised her voice against Julian's reply. “
No
. Believe me. But my point is that I didn't see you on the television when you were a baby star or whatever; I hadn't even read your books when I first met you in our old group. I had no preconceived notions of Julian Travis. It was
you
I saw. You I still see,” gesturing toward the contact sheets, “and you I will always see, no matter how you try to hide from me. It's no special virtue on my part; perhaps it will be my doom, who knows? I can't help it.”

“I wish I could—”

“
I
wish you could love Julian as I love Julian. That simple. I'm only afraid that,
not
loving her as you do, you nurse a secret contempt for anyone who does. I should not like to be the target of that contempt.”

Julian stared at her.

“So that is why I tell you it would be a mercy to everyone all round, I think, if Julian were to love Julian just a little, not with her ego but with her heart; a mercy to her poor mother, to Larry, to me. But most of all to Julian. This ‘self-lessness' is an evil word, if you think about it. Ayee,
mi amor,
” Iliana urged, “don't you see! After Eva Perón there was Isabel Perón trying to become Evita! We
all
invent ourselves, every minute of every day! That's all there is!”

The room was blue now with dusk. Iliana heaved herself up from her place beside her stunned visitor and snapped on a lamp.

“So,” she cleared her throat. “A little wine, food, coffee. A little visual art. Some basic consciousness-raising. And a Latin sermon. Are we feeling better?”

“Much better, thank you, 'Yana.” But Julian still stared, unmoving, at the space Iliana had vacated beside her.

“Then I think it's time you better go and plunge into the whatever article—in which, no doubt, you will tell other women what they should do to love and liberate themselves.”

Julian looked up at her sharply, then one corner of her mouth twisted into a grin. “Yeah. Charlotte Kirsch—she's a friend, works at Athena—told me once that I ought to drop my preachiness and instead write out all this chronic crisis as a TV play. That was almost a year ago; by now it would be a miserere miniseries.” She rose and stretched. “But you're right. The article awaits. Come back, Hypocrisy, all is forgiven!”

Slender fragile strength in that body. Subtle, resilient strength in that mind. Flemish body and Renaissance mind, my own private primavera, pure and impure,
mi mujer
whom I love enough to refuse myself to, you whose proximity intoxicates unknowingly, intentionally. Careless seductive cat who mourns yourself as declawed when your talons sank themselves long ago into my vitals. My Juliana.

They walked to the door and Julian shrugged into her coat.

“Holá! I forgot. I have a present for you. Hold there for one minute.” Iliana returned with a bottle of cologne and tucked it into Julian's satchel. “It's Amazone. You always comment that you like it when I wear it. So this time when I got myself some, I got some for you.”

“Oh '
Yana—
”

“Ta ta ta. It gives me pleasure. And maybe it will remind you that even if life isn't, how do you call it, a bowl of rosebuds, still, a pleasing fragrance now and then, a mellow wine, a little laughter …”

Julian turned in a blur of hall light and flung her arms around Iliana, the whole body this time, no part held back in fear.

“Dearest friend, I love you and respect you and am more grateful to you than I know words for. I've never in my life been so … taken
care
of. All your generosities—the photographs, the thoughtful little gifts, the offer to help with Hope. Even just listening to me, letting there be one place where I can pour
all
of it out. The wisdom you give me.
And
the pâté, too.” Iliana could feel Julian's breath warm with laughter against her ear. Then Julian drew back and peered at her.

“De Costa,” she said, “you know how to love. You're a cornucopia, spilling energy. Thank God for you in my life, de Costa.”

Hail, heartbloom, full of grace, tower of ivory mystical rose, be still, be still. She took Julian's hands in hers and said simply,

“It matters. And it's possible.”

One look. Then Julian whirled and was gone.

Iliana stood gazing out into the apartment corridor, past the doors to the other flats, and heard Julian's footsteps pad down the carpeted brownstone stairs. She shut her own door and leaned against it, feeling her heart pound through her body—throat, wrists, genitals, knees. Then she went to the bookshelf, sought and found what she wanted, and carried
The Revelations of Divine Love
by Juliana of Norwich over to the lamp. The book opened naturally to the heavily underlined passage she so loved: “I saw no difference between God and our substance, but saw it as if it were all God … virtues come into our soul at the time it is knitted to our body. In this knitting we are made sensual … Thus I understand that God is in our sensuality, and shall never move away from it … We cannot be entirely holy until we know our own soul—and that will be when our sensuality … has been brought up into the substance.”

Yes, she decided, moving to the window and watching the figure diminish in the fading evening light, bent into the wind, that is my belovèd. It mattered not to her, the real story of Julian's name which she had been told years ago, even before genderless names became fashionable in the women's movement: how Hope had expected a son and chosen the name for its assimilative elegance, and because of the Huxleys, whom Hope had read in her brief sojourn at university. How the mother had kept the name for the son born a daughter, as if to feminize it would signify defeat. None of that heritage mattered to Iliana. This heavily marked passage of devotions, she believed, was the true heritage of Juliana, the name that chimed with her own, and one that she, Iliana, had been sent to reveal—the annunciatory angel.

Julian's figure had become barely more than a speck in the Goya-blue street, then it turned a corner and disappeared. But if, with that vanishing, the last of the light seemed to drain from the sky, Iliana could now believe in the return of dawn. Even in such a city—the renewal of radiance.

“
Mi Juliana
,” she prayed aloud to the descending darkness, and pressed the book close to her breast, where that head had lain, in a momentary peace.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Winter, 1982–1983

“Family”

A Television Drama

Cast

(Fade in on close-shot of woman's hand pressing a doorbell, then pick up sound of a buzz-back. Widen out to medium-shot of Julian, carrying suitcase, letting herself in on the buzz-back and starting to mount a flight of loft stairs. Cut to: Laurence, at upstairs loft door, looking down anxiously. Pick up perspective from behind him, angle over his shoulder, as Julian enters the loft, moves past him without embrace, then drops her suitcase. Widen to two-shot:)

Laurence:

What happened? Why'd you ring instead of using your key?

Julian:

I seem to have lost my key. Maybe it just slid to the bottom of my bag, but I couldn't stand on the street all night trying to feel for it in the dark.

(Rapid flash-cut to close-shot of a wedding ring, then flash-cut to The Mother yelling “Use your key!” Cut back to two-shot of Laurence and Julian:)

Laurence:

Oh. You're real late.

Julian:

I know. Sorry, Lare. The plane circled for half an hour—

Laurence:

You hungry? I got take-out Chinese, but I don't think there's much left.

(Pan Julian as she moves toward sofa, then seems to change her mind and sits in overstuffed chair, lowering herself heavily:)

Julian:

No. Thanks. Just want to sit and never move again. A coma would be nice. Fed intravenously, other people responsible for my vital signs and bodily functions. Deliberate consciousness-lowering.

(Widen angle to show Laurence come over, hesitate, then sit on sofa opposite her. Medium two-shot:)