Dry Your Smile (55 page)

Celia found tears burning her own eyes. She didn't want that, didn't want to feel, didn't want it all opened up again. “We are the strong women,” she heard herself say in a small voice, “the political ones, the ones who have careers, the ones who are feminists, the ones who dare to love women. So. You say, I say, we all say … Yet the ghost of the mother rises and walks among us, through us, between us. Maybe that is the only love, Iliana; maybe all other loving is an imitation of that first passion—or of the lack of it. Maybe love is just another masterful invention of the poets.”

They fell silent again. The boulevard wind keened softly.

“I tried, Celia. I helped her look at apartments. I helped her shop for furnishings. I surprised her with gifts she would need to set up housekeeping—since she refused to fight the husband over property. At first my gifts were met with delight; later with that familiar tight-lipped expression of suffocation. I don't
understand.
”

Celia fought the understanding, but she understood. “Julian felt you were equipping her with articles she wanted to choose for herself. You were filling her longed-for space with too many artifacts of your presence—as if you
were
going to be living together.” Not to feel this empathy, not to see life raw and chaotic again. As devoutly as Iliana claimed she sought clarity, so Celia claimed she sought opacity. They circled each other and their overlapping truths, trading the wrong clues.

“But still she didn't
act
, Celia. I began to see she was waiting to
react
. And I began to feel descend on me a role I did not—still do not—comprehend. It was as if I had to fulfill some promise I had no recollection of having made, honor some unholy bargain, live up to some forgotten pledge with the devil. So I—who wanted nothing more in the world than to keep her close—drove her away. Not in anger. But in pressuring that she
must
decide.”

The two women approached the corner of St. Germain and the side door of the Musée de Cluny. Celia glanced at her watch. At least she had delivered de Costa on time.

“So
you
ended it,” she suggested, offering her friend the gift of dignity.

“I don't know,” Iliana mumbled in bewilderment. “I don't know what
happened
. I mean, in one way, it's not ended. We see each other frequently, we have dinner at my flat or at hers, go to concerts, laugh, gossip … I know she'll meet me at the airport next month. I know I'll write her all about the concert in detail. The mysterious thing is that I don't know how I lost her. Or even if I have.”

Obsession. Celia saw it, pitied it. Whether for a lost little nation or a mother's voice or a lover's glance or the character of a D-minor chord, it was obsession that carried and inflicted its own content. Any object of obsession was merely the excuse; it was the capacity for obsession that was the message entire. She saw it and pitied it. More. She feared it. She envied it. Iliana, ignorant of her pity and her envy, and impervious to her advice, was meanwhile putting the coda on her narrative.

“The day Julian moved from my flat, that last day at Grove Street, I'll never forget how her eyes pierced me through their tears. ‘Where are you going, then, truly, my Juliana, whom I am going to lose?' I asked her. ‘I don't know,' she answered, with a doleful shake of her head. ‘So many dyings, so much to mourn.' Then she looked at me. ‘Freedom—is it so impossible, 'Yana? Will it be the most painful dying of all? Or will it be real, a stepping off the stage at last?' I could have answered in many ways, but some peculiar power struck me dumb. ‘Then is anything
ever
real, at all?' she appealed, tears running down her face. So I picked up the set of Grove Street keys I had given her, which she had discreetly put on the hall table, to leave behind—and I tossed them at her. She caught them, in surprise. I remember lifting my head high and smiling at her, with a wink, singing out as lightly as I could, ‘Style, my love. Perhaps style is the only thing that ever is real.' And so she turned, still holding the keys. And so she was gone.”

They stood before the museum door.

“But we have arrived,” Celia announced, turning to her childhood friend. “Now. I want you to understand something, Iliana de Costa. Perhaps you did love this time in ways more profound than you ever loved before—and whatever this churlish old friend may rant, know that I respect it.” She fumbled in her pocket, produced a crumpled linen handkerchief, and blew her nose loudly. “And whatever mysteries you cannot comprehend, understand this: that you are now composing in ways more profound than you ever did before. In the long and short run, exile or not, lover or not, that is what counts. That is what
lasts.
”

Iliana nodded, sniffling. Celia proffered her handkerchief. “Go on, blow your frozen nose. We've shared everything else. Why stop now?” Iliana obliged and emitted a dutiful honk.

“So now we go in there to the
salle
and you take the baton and get to work, eh? This is the last rehearsal holy saints and we have a Paris premiere tomorrow. I have no more patience with these lovelorn mewlings. I have to thaw these icy fingers for your hellish tangle of notes.
You
have no more time to be The Tragic Lesbian.
You
have to cope with the unruly mixture that's waiting in there: electronic
and
acoustic musicians,
plus
chorus,
plus
three female soloists each so temperamental that together they qualify to be the Nicaraguan revolutionary junta.”

Iliana broke into laughter. The two women hugged one another.

“If you are
very
good in there, I promise you a reward,” Celia said, stepping back, holding Iliana at arm's length, and peering sternly into her face. “I'll treat you to supper at La Coupôle, for old times' sake.”

“That would be heaven,” Iliana brightened, “but only if we can take a taxi. I will coagulate with all this arctic exercise.”

“Idiot. This is
Paris
, remember? You
walk
in Paris. It's not New York, where there's nothing to walk
along
. I will walk you back down St. Michel—and yes yes we can stop in the Café Luxembourg for a petit cognac if you wish—then, nicely warmed, we proceed through Montparnasse. Is it a bargain?”

“It is,” Iliana vowed. “And, Celia,” she added, returning the handkerchief with a straightforward look, “thank you.” They walked into the museum.

Ten minutes later, Celia stood at her synthesizer, flicking dials in between chafing her stiff hands. A din of tune-up and vocalizing filled the
salle
. Then the woman in black slacks and black turtleneck mounted the podium and faced the Groupe Vocal de France and the Ensemble Electroacoustique. She glanced at Celia, raked her eyes over choir, instrumentalists, soloists. She rapped her baton for attention. The noise began to subside.

“I am waiting, mesdames et messieurs,” Iliana called in a voice of authority. The room fell silent. “We begin at the top, with the Kyrie, please.
Forte, con brio
. It starts audaciously; reckless, in full passion, remember.”

There was a rustle of music sheets, then stillness again. Iliana waited. All eyes were fixed on the composer-conductor.
This is home
, she thought.
This is what lasts
.

Baton in hand, Iliana de Costa raised her arms, poised for the opening
attaque
.

Julian wandered around her apartment, touching things. After all these months, the tactile existence of this new home still gave her acute pleasure. Just to caress objects that felt, still not hers, but gradually familiar, as they lived in the same place as she: these spoons, that crystal candlestick, this pottery bowl. A newspaper clipping about Laurence Millman declaring his candidacy for local Democratic district leader was propped up on the fireplace mantel—a real fireplace this time, with a log flaming and crackling cozily inside. The de Costa photograph, “Old Woman in Nursing Home,” which had won the 1984 International Photography Prize, hung framed on the wall facing the fireplace. Bookcases lined the other walls and flanked the mantel. The piano smiled its perfect teeth from a corner, waiting for the one chord to be struck that would end all music. The cats—Virginia and Vita—lay curled in Yin-Yang fashion on their favorite cushion of the sofa.

She walked into her bedroom, where the afternoon light flung itself through open shutters across the bed, golden, odalisque. More bookshelves. Photographs of the major noncharacters on her bedtable. A battered Raggedy Ann doll sprawled, fearless now, on the chair.

In the study: her desk. Her own desk again, capriciously cluttered with “To Do” lists, mail, political tracts, seed catalogues for city gardeners, and galley proofs of the new book—on Thanatos as the heart of male politics and Eros as the heart of female politics—the book whose publishing advance had made possible apartment, spoons, fireplace, bed, desk, and everything else. Especially the garden she would grow upstairs on the roof in the spring. Another chance to “make the tar-paper bloom,” but this time looking out over a quiet street in Greenwich Village, not far from Iliana's.

Julian had just resolved to make a cup of tea when the phone rang. Saturday, so it wouldn't be an offer of a free-lance job or a lecture—the means by which she still largely survived but which, in her newfound serenity, she had begun to resent as intrusions from the outside world.

It wasn't the outside world. It was Laurence.

“Larry! Good to hear from you! How's the Rocky Mountain Michelangelo?”

“Fine, Jule. Damn, but it's great to be back here. How're you?”

“Fine too. So how're things going these days? Is the new one finished yet?”

“Oh yeah, over a month ago. In fact, I just came back from the Midwest day before yesterday. Went out to see it installed in all formality, squack in the plaza of the Chicago Children's Museum.”

“You sound happy with it.”

“Very. Though I still can't get over the shock of all this happening after so long.”

“Are you kidding? It's
good
news for a change. Enjoy it! Everybody's talking about Millman's marble children. That article in the New York
Times:
‘Neoclassic Vision—The Children.' Wow.” Larry chuckled with pleasure. How satisfying it felt to hear him laugh again! She wanted an encore. “Laurence Millman. I can say ‘I Knew Him When.' Why, if I had thousands of dollars stashed away, plus the space in which to properly house it, I'd up and commission me a Millman Child, too.”

“You don't need one, Jule. They're part you, you know. From that first breakthrough one, over two years ago, straight on, they have some of your features. I mean, it's just become my own subject matter. Boy or girl, sleeping or running, leaping or breaking out through the stone, they're all part Julians.”

“Well, thank god nobody's noticed but thee and me.
I
still haven't recovered from
my
shock at seeing that first one. That incredible little …
creature
, clawing its rough-hewn way up out of the marble, part still-born, part alive, such suffering and joy hammered together in that child-face …”

“It's a good piece, that one, yeah. I thought to myself as I was working on it, ‘Larry, now you've gone and done it for good.
Children
. How sentimental can you get. This'll be the coup de grâce to whatever's left of your career as a sculptor.' But now look.”

“Well, I think they're successful
because
they have nothing to do with sentimentality. Some of them may be gaunt and starving, others sensual, others enigmatic—but not one of them is sentimental. That's what's so riveting about them—these complex states of emotion portrayed for the first time on the faces of
children
. It happens in life; it's just that nobody before you had the guts to show it in art.”

“Well, thanks, Jule. So, anyway, all goes well. I've got enough bread to buy a place out here for keeps now. Been looking at land. After so many years of renting, it feels weird—but super.”

“That's terrific, Lare. I'm really glad for you.”

“Well. I guess that first visit back here, after—I mean, it made me lust for my roots or some such baloney. And with the pieces getting larger, and actually selling for a change … I need a good big work space. So I'll get me an old barn or something, right here in the Colorado mountains. A failed New Yorker, I suppose.”

Julian was looking at the head he had done of her so long ago, the one she'd never let him throw away, even though he'd felt it a failed piece. The failed Julian head.

“Larry, you're not a failed anything. On the contrary.”

“Well, thanks. Anyway. I just thought I'd call and say hello. Tell you your ex was about to become landed gentry and—Oh, Jule, I almost forgot. I'm sorry I didn't get that manuscript back to you yet. What with the commissions and all—”

“That's okay, Larry. Whenever you have the chance. Uh, did you ever get to read it?”

“Oh, yes, right away. You know me, I meant to write you about it, or call, but—Anyway, I think it's … good.”

“Really? Gee, that's—”

“I, uh, I do have to say that, well, I think you're
awfully
positive on the woman lover character. And—damned unfair to the, uh, husband character. Kind of a cheap shot for feminism's sake. I mean, Christ, there's so much that's distorted, or left out entirely!”

“Yes. Well, you know, it's a
novel
. Fiction, after all.”

“Oh sure, I told myself that. But even so … you make the woman lover a plaster saint, instead of—a home-wrecker. You make the husband—”

“I'm sorry you feel that way, Lare. Let's not dredge up … Look, I'll probably revise it a few thousand times more, as I always do. So—”