Basic Black with Pearls Read online

  Moths begin their fatal flight

  Into the slender flame;

  bees, made blind by perfume

  wait in the closing bed.

  A longing for my lover made me survey the room again. If he were here, I would have had a sign by now — a look, a gesture, a word I could recognize as the memory or the promise of an embrace.

  There was nothing on the faces of the men in this room, I thought, that revealed how their night had been spent; nothing lingered in their eyes that hinted that the previous night had, possibly, been an ecstatic one; did any of them have more than one orgasm? had he been welcomed in his ardor? had his partner been indifferent, simply paying her dues? had he had a wild night with his mistress, coming home after midnight with a story that he had to stay in the stables to look after his mare in foal? All the men’s faces were intent on the day that was unfolding before them, last night having been scraped away by the morning shave.

  Before long the room bustled with the movement of men leaving; sounds of chairs scraping; it was a quarter to nine. The waitresses slowed their steps and cleared tables and pocketed tips before one of them came to my side. She was the same one as yesterday. She poured coffee into my cup and asked, And how are you today. I replied, Very well, thank you. And how is your little girl? The waitress found it necessary to rest the Silex on the table as if it had suddenly become too heavy to hold in midair. What’s she done now! Do you know Elsie, are you her teacher or something? I was struck by her pallor. Although I have never seen a dead person up close, not even my mother, I would think a gray skin like hers, with a slight yellow cast to it, would be called deathly. To my mind, it is cause for concern — whose? hers, mine, the Royal York’s? — that she looked so ghostly so early in the day. I fear for her. An irresistible vision appears. I see her floating in the space between houses, over the street, not in her blue uniform but in the printed housedress she wears on her days off. I watch her as she falls awkwardly, arms dangling, legs bent, her skirt lifted as if the wind had begun to undress her. In my vision, she never reaches the pavement. I ask the waitress, not in so many words:

  – Why don’t you want to live to see your little girl grow up?

  – What has she been telling you? She makes things up, you know.

  – It is against the law to kill yourself. You have no right to end a life that belongs to Elsie.

  And the waitress, waiting with pencil over pad, her eyes flat and empty, replies, silently:

  – I can’t go on any longer. It is too hard; to work, work, work; to live this way, in one room in an attic. And Elsie looks more and more like her father. What if she turns out to be like him? She even talks the way he does, her words run together and I can’t make out what she says. It reminds me of his rages. I left him to make a fresh start. My life now is worse than ever. And if a man moves in with me, so that I can have a room with a kitchen, or an apartment even, she tells him lies about me, and tells me lies about him. It doesn’t matter who it is; he never stays long, a year or so. What am I to do with her? I cannot go on this way.

  – Think, think of the future, think of what Elsie will have to live with the rest of her life if you do away with yourself. For a reason that she will never understand, you will wake her up early some Sunday morning, while the street lamps are still on, at this time of year probably, and you will say to her, Stand right here, and you will open the attic window and jump. You live in a crowded district, so that even at that hour, someone is awake and has seen you fall. The police find their way to the window where Elsie sits still, and snatch her back from the open space. She is safe. At any rate, Elsie is alive. Elsie asks herself then, and forever, what she did wrong that her mother would want to kill herself.

  – She will be better off without me. She cries a lot.

  – Let me tell you what will happen even though you will be dead and indifferent. As long as she lives, Elsie will recall every detail of that dawn: the pyjamas she wore, pink flannel with blue flowers, putting on her bedroom slippers like you always told her to, not to walk barefoot on the cold floor, although your own feet were bare, following you across the room, not questioning anything, not even your climb out the small window. From that morning on she will not want to look at a pink-streaked dawn again.

  – I have pills. I will look as if I’m asleep, that’s all.

  – And five minutes after your body has been found, your lover will arrive to declare his devotion, with flowers for you and presents for Elsie.

  Her lips tremble; she bites them.

  – You’re trying to make me change my mind. It’s too late. I will leave a nice note.

  – Oh those notes, red herrings all of them! The imagination knows no bounds before the final act. I love you. I can’t live without you. My life has no meaning. Therefore I will end it. Goodbye cruel world I go to a better one. And the instructions! At the graveside, as the coffin is being lowered, they are to play a recording of Walter Huston singing September Song. At the funeral parlor a continuous showing of the film Children of Paradise. She, he, is to be laid out in her, his, wedding garments. And so on. Besides, you can’t be certain your note will be found by your lover. I know a failed writer whose hobby is collecting suicide notes — he beats the ambulance to the scene. He intends to publish them as found novels. He will write the setting, description of the dead protagonist, give the text of the note, and the reader will create his own novel. Every reader a writer, he told me, a suicide note is a work of fiction. But Elsie will know the truth: you cannot outwit her with a note.

  Her expression changed from despair to one of puzzlement. She wrote something on her pad and left abruptly. When she came back she brought orange juice and hot porridge, which, apparently, I must have ordered. She inquired whether I wanted the eggs the same as yesterday, scrambled. The dark young man at the corner table looked up from his paper. Our eyes met. I reflected, even if he could not care about me, he might, being a poet, like to hear my thoughts on suicide. This wayward notion derived from Coenraad’s insistence I forget the past: he wants to know nothing about it: he tells me the moment is all. Coenraad, who, possibly, helps decide the fate of nations; who, possibly, holds untold lives in his hands; who, possibly, is on the side of terror — this man speaks to me of the destiny that arranged for us to meet and fall in love. “I believe in fate,” he tells me. Perhaps the young man’s stare has nothing to do with me: he may be inviting a felicitous phrase or le mot juste and I am in line of his unseeing gaze. Whatever his reason, I recognized my examination of him to be a means of trying to live in the moment: I became again the complete observer, noting how he furrowed his brow and that he tapped a silver ballpoint pen against his teeth. Steadily I ate my Number Four, leaving all the plates clean, and using all the cream provided. I had only to lift a wrist and my bill was brought. Then the waitress joined her young man at his table. I noticed she sat on a corner of the chair, ready to get up and leave quickly if it became necessary. Their heads were bent over the paper from which he appeared to be reading.

  Subways, tubes, metros — I am always uneasy in a steel car under the ground, afraid the automatic doors will not open, or afraid that the automatic doors will open in a dark passage too narrow for escape. We sit with fists clenched. I concluded that in a subway, because flight is impossible, we prepare to fight. I was happy to surface and get out at Dundas Street. From the corner I watched a streetcar six blocks away come waddling towards us. It stopped with all its doors open. We embarked in a leisurely manner. The conductor was calm, straightening out transfers against the palm of his hand while answering questions. We pushed gently against one another until seats were found. On a streetcar I feel safe. Every two blocks I have a choice of staying on or leaving. I pull on a cord overhead and the conductor is alerted to my intention. I have but to step down one step at the exit and the doors fly open.

  At Parliament Street I got off as if I, too, were in a hurry to
get home. Crossing these streets I began to question my choice of Elm Grove. I was in a zone reserved for the poor. The narrow houses were joined in twos or fours and looked as if they were holding each other up at drunken angles. When the sunlight broke through, it was as bleak as the scene it shone upon. I consulted the map. This was a false gesture, as false as the blue plastic hyacinths stuck in the grass beside me — I knew every street in the area, including the one I was seeking; I knew also that “grove” is a misnomer for a mean street with barely a shrub on it.

  Occasionally I passed a huge old mansion sprawling back from the street at the end of a large lawn of weeds. I looked up at its windows and found myself playing again a childhood game. By noting whether the glass had been cleaned, the styles and material of curtains, how far down a blind had been drawn, I guessed whether there was inside an old man (lace curtains), the last of a respected hierarchy, who would be found a week after his death; whether there was a pair of elderly sisters (chintz drapes) and their fat, middle-aged nephew, whom all the little girls have been warned against; whether the house had two kitchens (flowered plastic) one upstairs and one down, the upstairs tenancy always short-lived; or, whether its many rooms provided sanctuary for pensioners, deserted women and children, single men of all ages in various stages of sobriety (green blinds only, pulled to the sill) all of whom share the original bathroom on the second floor, which was, after all this time, in remarkably good condition, except for a door which one always had trouble in locking. I felt I should have sought out one of the other Elm streets, in Rosedale perhaps. Even before I got to Elm Grove I knew there was little chance of finding Coenraad in Lower Cabbagetown.

  Still, the habit of hoping was strong and I kept turning corners. Number Four was a large house but it had none of the Victorian embellishments of curled wood and moulded plaster. It was plain red brick with plain windows. It looked like a converted warehouse. Three cars were parked on the gravel that had replaced a lawn. At the eastern edge of the property, close to the sidewalk, was the raw stump of a felled tree, its growth rings clear and dark at the outer edge, and dark spots in the pattern toward the center. I checked the journal: “Look for vascular discoloration in outer sapwood of elm infected with Dutch elm disease.” My hopes rose: if I have deciphered the message correctly, everything points to my having arrived at our rendezvous: the street name with an elm, the house number the same as the number of journal pages, and the large tree trunk clearly has the marks of a diseased elm. As for the one anomaly, the signs of poverty, I recall Coenraad once cautioning me, Take nothing for granted; nothing is predictable.

  The house before which I stood was set well back from the street. I looked up at a black door with a brass knob. Facing the black door I got a sudden image of a coffin with brass handles. Inevitably, my mind darted to another conclusion: the journal was sent to me by the Agency as a message that Coenraad is dead. Or worse, that Coenraad has himself sent the journal as a sign that our love is dead. Maybe the very elements of uncertainty and danger that fired our love have proved too much for him. If he found it necessary to reduce risk, I would probably be the first to go. All this while I have been staring at a sign that finally impinges on my mind: Domino Costume Company. Ring and Enter.

  The hall inside was bright enough but the effect remained funereal, with black carpeting that continued up the stairs and black slabs of doors all about me. How long I stood there, tense and listening, I do not know. Always in situations involving fear and uncertainty I lose my connection with time, not in the sense of “I lost track of time,” but in the absence of the feeling of time itself passing, somewhat like being under an anesthetic. In order to put myself back on the track (of time), I knocked hard and loud on the door to my right; and then on the one to my left; and once more on the door down the hall. All the doors were locked. I continued in the same manner on the second floor. Here were five (black) doors off a dim corridor. These doors, too, were locked; and no one here, either, to respond to the beating of my fists.

  When I quieted down, I became aware of some sort of activity going on overhead. The sounds were those of footsteps, of more than one person, and of heavy objects being moved. At the thought of going up to the attic, there took hold of me a paralysis that I recognized as a struggle against past misery. If I can bring myself to go up there, I know I will find sanctuary of a kind. An attic is distant in every way from the terrors below. If I can make myself go up there, no one will question my presence. Occupants of these aeries can be likened more to sparrows than to hawks. Their loneliness is the result of a nature that has no claws. Whoever is up there (I cannot imagine him to be Coenraad) will know by the careful sounds I make that I am a sister in timidity.

  On the third floor landing I sat on bare wood, with my back against a door. I was not surprised that the steep stairs, the walls and the ceiling, through which rain had obviously leaked, had been considered unworthy of redecoration. Coenraad’s advice to savor the moment could not apply in an attic. I was about to take stock of my situation — today being Friday, Coenraad would have to fly to his family; there is only this afternoon left; if I go looking for him on another Elm location I might miss him should he come to the hotel — when the door in front of me burst open. Before me stood a huge figure, resplendent in a medieval costume of many-colored velvets and purple silken hose. He was encrusted in gold and jewels, from the glittering crown on his head to the gold chains and ribboned medals across his chest, to the rings on fingers that were poking and prodding a false beard against his cheeks. His beard secured, the formidable figure advanced. By moving my head a little to the left I could avoid the glare of spotlights in the room behind him, and in this way make out his heavy-browed dark face, set in a fierce expression. He frightened me: he could not possibly be my lover: no matter how Coenraad disguised himself, no matter who he pretended to be, I was not afraid. There is always ease — ”that inexpressible comfort” someone called it — between us.

  – Glad you could make it. We’re ready.

  I followed him into a room that was very large despite slanting walls. It was bare except for two straight chairs and three spotlights shining down from a track in the ceiling. Coming towards us was a slender young woman in a courtly gown, the bodice drawn so tight that her breasts were raised high under her chin. Clearly visible under the bright lights was a tattoo on her right breast just under the clavicle. It was a half-blown rose in pink with dark blue stem and leaf. He spoke to her in a deep rich voice, She’s here now, let’s start. It seemed to me that something was expected of me because they did not “start” right away. I took a chance and extracted my pen and pad, turned some pages (the first page had been written on with My dear children) and poised my pen. They appeared to be satisfied. Still they did not “start.” He addressed me:

  – You’ve been on the second floor?

  – The doors were locked.

  – We’ve stored our sets there. The prop men are very good; you will be pleased with the authenticity of the torture chamber, the armory, a treasury, a garden, and even parts of a castle. A decapitated female is in each room except, of course, in the one containing parts to the parapet, from which she (pointing to the tattoo) threatens to throw herself to escape her fate. He turned towards her and said, Stand here, Issa; you have to watch the conductor. To me he said, At the beginning of the second act, we are in my bedchamber, at the window, overlooking my kingdom, which I have just offered her if she does not disobey me. Issa flung back her long blond hair, humming “mi . . . mi . . . mi . . . ” in various pitches, while he continued to address me.

  – Actually, her sisters should be here to rescue her. I’m extremely sorry the budget doesn’t permit two or more women to join in the lamentations and outcries, the screams and squeals of fear and trepidation. I love a chorus of women’s high voices, don’t you? Now, then, where are we? Yes. Judith is very curious about my past. Not being satisfied with the shocking truths she has uncovered,
she is determined to pry deeper. She has to know everything, at any price. The scene we will do for you is the one wherein Bluebeard and Judith express their love for one another. There is a feeling of hope because of that love. If only Judith will leave well enough alone, if only she will be satisfied with Bluebeard’s love for her and all the riches pertaining thereto. (Turning to Issa) You’ve got the picture: you’ve just seen the headless body of one of my former wives. You are shaken, but fascinated. More than ever you are resolved to get at the core of my soul; you will not rest until you know everything there is to know about me. The oboe repeats the love theme, then I come in at 46. I plead with you. (Turning to me) This place is too small for full voice, we will have to sing sotto voce.

  Bluebeard began, singing in a slightly nasal pitch.

  B. — You have seen my former loves; they have bled to feed my flowers.

  Judith replied in a sweet pure tone:

  J. — No more, Bluebeard, no more, no more, no more. I am still here.

  B. — Morning, noon and night, they were mine. All my days and nights are thine hereafter.

  J. — Bluebeard, Bluebeard, spare me, spare me!

  B. — Thou art lovely, surpassing lovely, thou art queen of all my women. (Passionate embrace) Art thou afraid?

  J. — Let me have the keys, Bluebeard, give me them, because I love you.

  There was a long pause, while they turned pages. I presumed the invisible orchestra was making portentous sounds. Judith continued: