Raw Silk (9781480463318) (34 page)

Sometimes when it lifted I was inspired with petty boldnesses, I suppose out of the contrast. Now I stopped when I got to them, and offered to the man, “I’m sorry if I looked startled or stared at you a while ago. I haven’t seen a Western face for two weeks, and it really was a shock.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” He laughed and stretched, to embarrassing armspan for so dignified a hotel as the Palace Side. “Will you join us? Sit down, sit down.”

“To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind. I haven’t heard any English for two weeks, either, and it’s been driving me nuts.” I could scarcely believe the sangfroid with which I said this. Having said it, I wondered if it were true.

“I’m Warren Montgolfier”—he said
Mont-golf-yer
—“and this is Herman Kurt. His friends call him Catman.” I wasn’t sure if he smiled or not.

“Virginia Marbalestier.”

“Nice to meet you. Catman has a problem.”

The boy had said nothing, was pulling his forehead skin into furrows between thumb and fingers, staring at the floor.

“My beads, man,” he said. “I can’t believe it I lost my beads.”

Montgolfier leaned over elbows on knees now too. The boy wiped his hands on his jeans, which were dangerously threadbare, whereas Montgolfier’s were excessively patched with squares of various cotton prints that made him look like a harlequin. Just what I needed, a couple of krishna mystics or Jesus freaks.

“Go over your steps, man,” Montgolfier commanded urgently.

“I can’t believe it, how’m I gonna chant without my beads?”

“Did you check your pack out?”

“Yeah, yeah. How’m I gonna chant?”

“You gotta concentrate. Don’t do a thing on me, man, you gotta fucking split for Hiroshima tomorrow. Get it together.”

Then he turned to me and said, without irony but in a voice more or less standard American middle class, “He lost his chanting beads somewhere between here and Nagoya, and he gets bad vibes without them. The trouble is, he might have dropped them on the train.”

“Shitfire,” Catman groaned at this suggestion.

“You could buy some more,” I reasoned.

“Shit, man, no, those beads were
given.
”

“Okay.” Montgolfier leaned farther forward still and put an energetic, stub-nailed hand on Herman’s knee. “Here’s what. You know me, man, the karma’s good, it’s brothers, right?”

The boy nodded miserably.

“So you can sleep tonight. I tell you so, I promise you can sleep one night. In the morning I’m going to find you a string you can
relate
to, you believe me? And those’ll be
given,
get me? From a brother.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay, man.” The boy looked up at Montgolfier, his focus slightly out of kilter, and nodded several times, then shook his head doubtfully.

“I tell you so. I give you sleeping permission. You don’t need to do a single number, you believe me?”

“Yeah, okay, I guess.” The boy got up and wandered toward the elevator. Montgolfier followed him at a distance, his hands held tense and forward as if he were lifting Catman up the shaft himself. When the elevator came he stood in front of it making the peace sign until the doors had closed. Then he came back and sat down again, forward over his knees again, and said, “Shit. Christ.” He stared at the floor. “He’ll do some stuff or other, though.”

He shifted and looked up in my general direction. “The trouble is, it works in seesaws. The minute you’re really
sure
that God is dead, you get all this mysticism erupting, and they can’t handle it.”

I didn’t think I could handle it myself, and was looking for the phrases to say I was tired, etc., etc., and go up to bed, when Montgolfier focused on me directly for the first time.

“Would you like a cognac?”

This seemed a particularly incongruous choice of drink. But I did in fact want another brandy, so I accepted and settled back again. He strode off, multicolor patches flapping, and came back with two Hennesseys in pint snifters. He handed one to me and threw a sip down his throat before he sat. A T-shirted, hay-haired harlequin looked so out of his element swirling a brandy snifter that I laughed. It sounded aberrant to me, a high hearty foreign sound I hadn’t heard out of my own throat for—how long?

“I’m sorry,” he said, pacing a time or two and then sitting. “But it gets to me. That kid is so spaced out he can hardly make it up to bed, let alone to Hiroshima. And he hasn’t any idea how deep he’s in.”

“I was confused,” I said. “I thought you were traveling companions.”

“What? No—oh, I guess it’s a little cheap to slip into the hip jargon, but it’s easier for me than not, so fuck it, I function better that way. He just stumbled in this afternoon. And that’s part of the trouble, you see? He’s backpacking clear through Japan on five dollars a day and four million hare krishnas, but the minute something happens he can’t handle, he turns up in a three-star Pizza Hut hotel just like his Des Moines daddy would’ve picked for him.”

“When it comes to that,” I hazarded, feeling the brandy slip down easily, and gratefully certain that it had lifted off me for the evening, “you look a little out of place yourself.”

“Well
now.
” He gestured at me and I glanced down to see the tails of my striped scarf hanging off the side of the sofa. “
You’re
a little gypsified for a respectable place like this.”

I’m pretty sure this sounded to both of us like flirting. I’m pretty sure of it, because he went back immediately into the earnest, energetic lean, and said, “I think it gets to me so much because I keep thinking about my own kid, and how long I’ve been away from him. He’s only four, I mean, he’s not into that phase, but I’ve been away six months and I know he doesn’t understand why Daddy went off and left him. It makes me nervous for him. But then,” he added, “I’m headed back home day after tomorrow.”

“Where’s home?”

“Southern Cal,” he said vaguely, or pridefully maybe. Southern Californians sometimes appropriate the whole territory.

“Is it really? So’s mine. That is, I grew up there, Seal Beach. I’m from England now.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a textile designer.”

“
Are
you!”

I had an exotic sense of the ease of everything. Who are you, where are you from, what do you do? Simple things. There are simple truths to answer with.

“And you?”

“I’m a minister.”

“A
what
?”

“A minister. Methodist. What’s so fucking amazing about that?”

“Ordained?”

“Sure. Well, the fact is that I haven’t had a parish for about three years, and I only had one, and I only held out for about eight months. Since then I’ve been doing theological research, mostly on grants. Not that they keep me at the Palace Side most of the time. I’m treating myself to ice water and hot showers because I’m on my way home day after tomorrow. Why are you so freaked out?”

“I’m sorry, I guess I’ve been away from home for longer than I thought. You’re just not my idea of a minister, and I knew a lot of ministers.”

“Yes, well, times change. And anyway, naturally I’m a radical. You see, if you want to be a radical but can’t quite hack it, religion is a very good racket to go into. If you’re an artist or politician and you want to make yourself out as really
left,
you have to go in for all sorts of difficult and dangerous things—slums, censorship, all that stuff. If you get yourself ordained all you have to do is patch your jeans and write about something wigged out like ‘Comedy in Christianity.’”

“That’s an act,” I said. It was easy to say. The brandy went all the way to my fingertips.

“Yes,” he said, grinning, easy.

“But is that what you write about, comedy in Christianity?”

“I’ve already done Christianity, now I’m doing Zen, but it takes a long time to research because Zen is nearly all comedy, great stuff, high comedy and diddlyshit slapstick. It is, as they say, a rich unmined field.”

“For instance.”

But he went for more brandy before he came back to tell me about Putai, a medieval Zen monk who left the monastery to travel about the villages, a pack on his back, throwing sweets at the children and chucking dogs under the chin. When people asked Putai why, if he was a monk, he didn’t stay in the monastery, he replied, “Give me a penny.”

“He’s Santa Claus,” I said.

“That’s it, that’s it.”

So we talked about Christmas. Its commercialization didn’t trouble Montgolfier on his son’s account, because he thought that tinsel and toys were a better metaphor for birth in winter, to a child, than sermons and plaster crèches.

“Greed doesn’t worry you?”

“Only some forms of it. Of course, there’s a middle-aged settled sort of pisspoor sublimation greed that’s the root of all evil; but kids just mainly want the world. And that’s what it’s there for. Christianity is based on greed, as a matter of fact; it’s hardly altruistic to want to save your own immortal soul.”

“I’ll feel better about Christmas then. I’m an ex-Baptist atheist myself, but I can’t get over loving Christmas.” So easy: what I am, theologically speaking, is an ex-Baptist atheist.

“Don’t try.”

I told him about the tradition of mechanical toys for Oliver, and how I’d wound up giving Jill an artwork and Oliver a trolley once, which he found delightful, probably charming, patting a knee. “That’s it. That’s it.” I’d forgotten how much I liked to talk to Americans. I’d never talked to one, that I could remember, so cheerfully foulmouthed as Warren Mont-golf-yer. I was sure he had as good a rationalization for it as he had for tinsel, but I wasn’t going to come up prudish by asking for it. On the other hand, I felt no particular compulsion to “slip into the hip jargon.” I like to use an occasional “shit,” “piss” or “fuck” myself, for particular emphasis, but on the whole I subscribe to the theory that such language constitutes a polluted and impoverished vocabulary. With Montgolfier, on the contrary, it seemed to operate as a metaphysical catalyst, and produced “a fairly fucking
plausible
Christmas pudding,” and “a bit of a celestial shitpile at the best of times.”

We chatted till the second brandy was gone, discreetly coming round to chat about husbands and wives (his wife was called Zoe; I learned she was little and pretty and dark and a high school teacher), son and daughter, bungalows and manor houses and careers. Montgolfier described the difficulty of writing about fools and comics for theologians: if you write in the spirit of the subject you’re an academic reject, but if you write in the requisite cant you come up with comic disparity between tone and matter. He spoke of this stylistic problem with professorial solemnity which was funny; he knew it—“cosmic comic?”—and scratched his nose. I described the Oriental acquisition of Midwest five-and-dime design at Utagawa. Though I said little of Tokyo, and of Takayama only that I’d been there. Then we said how nice it was, how glad we were, how very pleasant an accident, and so forth, and good-bye.

I slept wonderfully. The relief of a mattress above the level of the floor, and a silent squashy sort of pillow, and the moonlight slatted between ordinary ugly venetian blinds. I wished to God (or somebody), as I burrowed into the pillow, that I didn’t know it would be waiting for me in the morning.

But in the morning it wasn’t. I was agitated and anxious about my airline ticket, and having to face a decision before the day was out, but agitated in a normal, explicable sort of human way. My face looked like a human face with a toothbrush in it at the mirror, and I ate a normal breakfast of orange juice, toast and humanizing coffee. The only neurotic symptom, apart from reaching down to finger my ticket from time to time, was the interest with which I watched the elevator door until it parted on the rather ridiculous striding figure of the overtall harlequin-patched Very Reverend Warren Montgolfier. His hair was pretty well combed, though, and he had on a buttoned shirt this time.

“Can I join you?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll have to eat fast, I’ve got to go find a string of likely looking beads. Have you got plans? Do you want to come?”

Neurotic after all. Insane, the lift of heart that met this invitation. Virginia Marbalestier, clown. Alone and crazy in the Orient, and looking for salvation, which comes, of course, from an American Methodist minister. Typical!

“Are you sorry to be leaving?” I asked, while he wolfed down ham and eggs, black coffee, four rounds of English muffins and orange juice. I wished I had all those Wakimoto breakfasts to offer him.

“Not really. I’ve had enough, I knew I’d had enough last week. I tried to do a stint in a Zen monastery, and I was lucky they’d let me in. But I couldn’t take kneeling at three in the morning. You’ve got to have tough knees to be a monk. Why? Are you sorry to go?”

“Well, I’ve only been here six weeks, and I, um, it isn’t clear just what, I mean, I have to decide my schedule. But yes. Yes, I’ll be sorry to go. I like Japan.”

“Do you?” He flapped jam onto a muffin. “Why do you like Japan? What do you like about it?”

I considered. He seemed to want to know. It was a reasonable challenge, since all I’d really told him about was the Osaka factories and the Kyoto Center.

I considered. “Pattern. Pattern is what matters most to me. That’s why I’d rather paint than design, but since I’m in design, I try to make patterns that’ll make a whole no matter how many times they’re repeated. And the Japanese know more about composition than anyone on earth. I like the shapes of their gardens, and the way they weave. Sumi and Kabuki,
ukiyo-e,
Noh, Bunraku—things that come to closure. I’d rather see a tragedy come to closure than a drifting comedy.”

“Would you? That’s where we differ. I like both comedy and drifting. But then, I come by that honestly. You know my name, Montgolfier? It’s really pronounced
Mont-goal-feeay;
it’s French.”

“I suspected as much.”

“Okay, you’re laughing, but you gotta know I don’t run into so many cosmopolitan English ladies.”

“I don’t suppose you do, in Southern Cal.”

“Well, anyway, I’m descended from the famous Montgolfier, the balloonist. How about that? You can’t
come
from a more drifting sort of stock.”