Inventing Memory (10 page)

As I squat over the stinking bowl, flanked by two giant ridged footprints (you should see these toilets!), I conjure "The Land of Fuck"—a
wild place, a steaming jungle of smells and tastes, everything forbidden
even for flaming youth forbidden nothing.

I return to my table. The asiatic Brooklyn eyes leer at me.

"And just where is The Land of Fuck?" I ask.

"Where the Seine mingles with Alph the sacred river of Kubla Khan,
wafting you to the stately Pleasure Dome beyond the sunless sea. It is
bisected by the River of Dreams, guarded by Morpheus and Kali. It runs
with menstrual blood and sperm, the primal ooze of creation. I am drunk
on its fumes as on poppy fumes."

I move over to his table.

"Tell me more," I say.

"Literature," he says, "is over. What is wanted now is a prolonged
insult, a gob of spit in the Face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man,
Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…."

I am riveted. That's what I want too.

"There is no more hope for civilization," says the bald man with the
slitty eyes, "nor for literature. What we need is what is in the open street,
not derived—life, not literature."

He also needs a place to stay, he says, so I take him in. He tells me
he has survived up to now by making lists of his acquaintances and rotating among them for dinner, singing for his supper—a thing he does
well.

He also does another thing well, with a kind of abandon and—shall
we say—moxie that makes you think your womb has been visited by a
shower of golden rain—but it is also the most purely innocent act you
have ever known. And that is another thing about The Land of Fuck—its
innocence. Who would have thunk it? Oh you kid. (More later.)

It is now later. I am back at my place with Val, who is sleeping like
a dead man. Don't get me wrong. He is no rapist—everything is courteous, by invitation only. Nor is he tight all the time like Scott and Zelda
always were (dipsomania seems a prerequisite for the literary life). But
suddenly he tells me that his
wife
has arrived. She's called June and
she's quite mad—but then mad girls
always
bewitch writers. (I learned
this
from Scott if nothing else.) Then it turns out he is also involved
with someone called Anaïs, who is married to a banker! They must be
discreet. The long and the short of it is they want to use my place! They
even want me to stand guard on the floor below and rap on the pipes as
a kind of human alarm when
her
husband or
his
wife comes to surprise
them.

And why do this? Henry says it will help my novel. For art…the
last refuge of a scoundrel. I already have the title of my novel:
A Bad Girl
in Paris. I know it will be too shocking to ever be published in
America. So much the better! I will have it printed in Paris and smuggle
it into New York! That way, everyone will want it more!

Love, Love, Love,

Salome

Dear Theda,

What do you mean, Artie—or, as he pronounces it, Ahtie—found
the letter and has forbidden you to write me? What do you mean, he
burned my letter? Good thing I keep carbons!

What use is the vote for women if Artie can burn your/my letters?
Please send back all my earlier screeds. It is one thing to give a man your
body—but your mind? S.

[To place the undated entries, I have had to use my own knowledge of Salome's
life from other sources. Ed.]

NOTEBOOK—UNDATED

The most incredible thing has happened. I have met Mrs. Edith Wharton at her elegant manor house, Pavillon Colombe, at St.-BricesousForêt north of Paris. I wanted to bring Val, my guttersnipe and vagabond, but Scott Fitzgerald—who gave me the letter of introduction before he left Paris—warned me that Mrs. Wharton was a bit stiff, so I did not.

A few years ago, Scott was invited for tea, since he and Mrs. Wharton shared an American publisher. Apparently Scott disgraced himself with the reigning dowager of American Literature by telling her a long, unfunny story about an American couple who stayed in a brothel in Paris, thinking it a hotel. "I did not object to the coarseness, but only to the lack of humor," said Mrs. Wharton. "Coarseness unleavened by wit can never be forgiven." Not the sort of comment you'd expect from her, but then she is not the sort of
woman
you'd expect.

I came expecting to find nineteenth-century reserve and icy propriety—but what I found instead behind the pearls, the silver tea set, the leather-bound books, the old-fashioned French, the beeswaxed furniture, was a shy but clever and most amusing elderly lady. She told me that she wanted to meet me because she wanted to meet "a real flapper." If only I were! I felt she was studying me, sucking me up with her eyes as a stone-still lizard sucks up flies with her tongue.

Here's the amazing part: wandering around Pavillon Colombe, I found a portrait of a young man with sandy hair and blue-gray eyes, against a background of purple hills, copper beeches, and red maples, that had my mother's signature—her real signature before she mysteriously abandoned it: "S. S. Solomon."

Somehow, I dared not ask the venerable Mrs. Wharton about the portrait. She was pouring tea and telling me quite amusingly how Scott made a fool of himself—but she did not hold it against me.

"Authors," she said sagely, "do not exhibit the best part of themselves except in their books." I certainly had learned
that
in Paris—if nothing else!

Later, Teddy Chanler, who was showing the house and grounds to me, burst out:

"That man in the portrait
looks
like you!"

"Not only that, but it has my mother's signature," I said.

"Who in blazes is it?" Chanler asked.

"I've no idea," I said.

"I'll find out," said Teddy.

And he trots off to Mrs. Wharton, a great friend of his mother's, and whispers in her ear.

Now,
this
is a moment. Like the moment that an automobile flips down into a ravine after you have miraculously escaped. My whole being hangs on this moment, and I know it.

Teddy Chanler strolls across the polished parquet floors.

"A cousin," he said. "Mrs. Wharton will explain." Mrs. Wharton—whose books I unfortunately read only
after
meeting her—now settled herself in memoir mode and mused:

"Sim Coppley is a cousin by blood and by marriage. He lives near my former home, The Mount, in the Berkshires—in the town of Lenox. His life has been tragic. Went to jail for love of a foreign woman, mixed up with anarchists and Bolsheviks, lost everything, married now to my cousin Lucretia, that gorgon. Why do you ask?"

"How did the picture come to you?"

"Arrived in a shipment of furniture sent by my family in Lenox, and I thought it a handsome portrait—decorative. I have
always
been interested in the decoration of houses. It was rolled up, lacked a frame, needed varnish. Nor was it the
only
one."

Mrs. Wharton went to a cupboard, opened it, and produced a rolledup canvas, unvarnished, somewhat scratched. Slowly she unrolled it.

It was a self-portrait of my mother as a young woman, her hair loose to her waist, a palette smeared with colors in her left hand, a brush in her right. And in a mirror behind her, a reflection of that same young man, his eyes full of adoration. It was not signed, but my mother's style is unmistakable.

I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. Later I drove back to the City of Light with Chanler, who pointed out the beauties of the countryside and gossiped about Scott.

"Who can blame poor Scott?" he asked. "Mrs. Wharton can be hard to amuse, and one sometimes gets so nervous one says
anything!"

"I liked her," I said. "Under the stuffy-old-lady act is a flapper longing

to get out. Probably Scott got drunk and insulted her considerable intelligence. He gets drunk with the hope of drowning his shyness," I said, "but his judgment drowns
with
it."

"A rummy," said Teddy.

"I wish there were another word," I said.

"Lush, dipsomaniac, drunk," said Chanler.

Me: "Scott is obsessed with Zelda and his cock, though not always in that order. He makes a play for me and everyone else, but then he's always too drunk to follow through."

"I thought so," said his supposed friend.

[Salome was always alert to betrayal and hypocrisy. She was far more vulnerable than she seemed underneath her brisk flapper act. Seeing the self-portrait
of her mother as a young woman must have triggered her homesickness and
yearning, for folded into the notebook, one finds the following letter. Ed.]

LETTER FROM SALOME LEVITSKY

TO SOPHIA SOLOMON LEVITSKY

Dear Mama,

I always felt somehow inadequate because I was not a boy and I could
never replace the baby you lost in Russia. He will always seem more
important than me—as if his death annihilated my life, as if Russia annihilated America.

Your productivity dazzled me—your skill, your discipline
,
your capacity for work. What was there left for me but to be a wastrel and make
a mockery of all your hard work?

Anything I did seemed small compared to your immense skill. So for
a long time I did nothing. When, as a little girl, I wanted to paint, you
made me draw in charcoal first, saying that painting was a privilege
that had to be earned, not a right that was automatically granted. This
ruined painting for me. I wanted it to be play, not work.

Once you introduced yourself as critic between myself and myself, I
could not enjoy art—or anything my clumsy baby hand could draw. It
had become a test, a competition with you, a tournament to win. So I
turned to writing—because there I could play. And I wrote the most
shocking things I could think of—like this book,
A Bad Girl in Paris,
which you have never seen before. It was written expressly to outrage
you, and I fear I have done my job so well that I will never be able to
send it to you….

[Here the letter breaks off, unfinished. It was written in 1932, it seems, on
stationery from the Closerie des Lilas—and apparently was never sent. Bundled
up inside is an extremely rare copy of
A Bad Girl in Paris,
inscribed "To
Mama from her good-bad girl…" Ed.]

Dearest Salome,

When you were born, I felt that all the holes in my life were healed.
Not like patchwork quilt, but like miraculous new skin. I never compared
you to Dovie, my dead angel. You were whole, complete in yourself, and
I spent hours leaning over you, cooing, singing, sketching. I loved you
so much that for the first time in my life, something was more important
than my work. I felt I would give my arms, my legs, my eyes, my liver,
to protect you.

But daughters grow up and beat their fists against the breast that
suckled them. The more they cling, the more they beat. I understand this.
I left my mama when I was seventeen and broke with tradition, Sabbath,
synagogue, to make a living in America. America liberated me but also
exhausted me. Exhaustion breeds defeat. It is a country that distrusts
and in fact hates the artist, the questioner, the woman, the mother, so I
found that to survive, I had to hide behind men.

You are angry that I sign my paintings with men's names. I will tell
you that this gives me the peace to do my work. Who cares about the
name signed to a work? All paintings are God's paintings, all poems are
God's poems. Praxiteles, Michelangelo, Leonardo, El Greco, Rembrandt,
are only fleeting names for the Spirit that is great within.

When a daughter grows breasts herself and begins to beat against
her mother's breasts, it is easy for the mother to feel demolished. This is
an enemy against whom one has no defenses!

It is a part of you that turns on you—a tumult in your cells, like
cancer. For years, as a mother, you lead your own life quietly but your
little girl's life out loud. You push your own needs into the background.
Your little girl's life is more important. All your hopes take root in her.
You want her to become everything the world squeezed out of you. But
your little girl cannot fight your wars. She first must fight her own. The
first of her own wars to fight is her dependency on you. She is cruel to
you to be kind to herself. She hates you in order to love herself. She
idealizes everyone unlike you—Aunt Sylvia, who plays mah-jongg and
charges dresses at Bergdorf's and Bendel's; Uncle Lee, who pays off
gangsters to beat up rivals in the linen supply racket who won't pricefix with his cartel; Papa, who disappeared for seven years of your life
and left everything to me….