Basic Black with Pearls Read online

  J. — Give me the keys to all the doors. I must enter every doorway.

  B. — Tell me why you want to, Judith.

  J. — Because I love you. I am here and I am yours. Show me all your hidden secrets; let me enter every doorway.

  B. — Thou shalt see, but ask nothing. Look your fill but ask no questions. Judith, love me and ask no questions.

  J. — Tell me, tell me, dearest Bluebeard, tell me whom you loved before me?

  B. — Kiss me, kiss me, ask me nothing.

  J. — Tell me in what way you loved her, was she very fair, did you love her more than you love me, my Bluebeard?

  B. — Kiss me, kiss me, ask me nothing.

  J. — Let all the doors be opened.

  B. — Judith, Judith, I must kiss thee. Come, I’m waiting.

  J. — Let all the doors be opened.

  Tender kisses and sensual delight were acted out before me less than five feet away.

  Ordinarily, opera librettos do not appeal to me: they are for the most part absurd tales of obsessions with love, terror and death; but the poignancy of Bluebeard’s dilemma, together with their beautiful voices, moved me to stand up and shout “Bravo!” Bluebeard and Issa bowed to me in a manner so professional that I realized they took me to be a person of artistic sensibilities, perhaps even a music critic. I continued to write in my notebook. The movement of pen on paper seemed to please them, for Bluebeard smiled down at Issa and she smiled up at him. What I wrote was, I am a person of artistic sensibilities; in order to wear the mantle of the artist one has only to put one’s arms through the sleeves.

  As a novice in the art of deception, I was not certain what to do next. If I stayed and explained I was not who they thought I was, they would have felt they had wasted a magnificent effort on me and perhaps would become angry. I said I had to get back in time for my paper’s deadline and needed to know their names and so on, at which point Bluebeard went into the room and came back with some glossy fliers colored pink and green. His picture in costume and beard was on one side, looking menacing against the background, which I recognized to be Casa Loma. In the lower right-hand corner was a small photograph of Issa wringing her hands. Bluebeard then impressed upon me the names, dates and prices printed on the other side. I read that the opera Bluebeard was by Béla Bartók. I put the writing pad back into my purse, said thank you, and descended the stairs with an air of purpose.

  As soon as I was around the corner and out of sight I sat down on the steps of a bungalow. I assumed the house was empty; its windows had been replaced by plywood. I had to consider my situation which had been brought to a crucial point today, Friday. There were twenty-three streets named Elm yet to be checked out. I began to doubt my interpretation of the message. On the other hand, by four o’clock Coenraad might send another message for next week’s rendezvous. The best way of spending the next few hours, charged as they would be with anxiety, I decided, was to distract myself with a movie.

  The splendour that was Loew’s of memory has given way to an efficient system of five small theatres. I chose The French Connection. All about me, scattered one or two to a row, waiting for the film to start, were solitary men and solitary women. Am I one of the loners? I wondered, somewhat surprised at the association, yet having to admit that I was in the same position as they, sitting in a dark movie house in the middle of the afternoon because I had no reason to be elsewhere. Or, perhaps, we were all taking a breather, having a respite, declaring a moratorium, from whatever it was we were supposed to get on with. We sat upright, facing straight ahead, purse on her lap, overcoat neatly folded on the empty seat beside him, waiting for the lights to go off. Cheery march music came from two speakers in the corners beside the (curtained) screen; blue, green and red strobe lights chased each other along the two walls. The music ended, the overhead spotlights were turned off, the curtain parted, the screen was white for an instant then images of a film “Coming Soon” covered it.

  Fernando Rey is killed in Marseilles, after a long chase along the Old Port by Gene Hackman. He is killed in the Pare du Pharo, in sight of the green slopes where Coenraad and I stretched out in the sun. Connais-tu le pays? We knew the country, didn’t we, you going back and forth to Marseilles and I riding the tour buses every day, and then you returned to Aries at midnight and in the dark with your arms about me I would describe what I had seen but you were silent about where you had been. You laughed, then remarked how difficult it is for the young when I told you about the graffiti in English on a wall near the University, “Masturbation is the only solution.”

  Out again on Yonge Street, I made my way against crowds hurrying home. Apparently many have left work early to extend the weekend. Faces advance and then recede. Traffic is heavy; cars have their lights on, making the afternoon seem like nightfall.

  Inside the hotel lobby I took in at a glance that the botanists were leaving. Their luggage was strewn about. There were bits of flora and fauna sticking out of paper bags and out of rolled-up newspaper and out of small flowerpots. There was a lineup, but it was at the cashier’s desk, a matter I regarded with relief, since my concern was with the receptionist. The clock behind him marked 4:12. He was ready for me: no mail, no message. In my haste, I had forgotten to limp. I didn’t care: sympathy would change nothing: Coenraad was not coming.

  The weekend had begun and I would be alone again. Alone and with no meeting to look forward to, the anticipation of which would have filled my mind and made the loneliness bearable, what was there for me to do but go up to my room and look at postcards? . . . Sounds rose in my throat that threatened to force themselves out into a cry. In order to gain control I pretended to examine the booklets arranged in three neat piles on the counter. I picked up Key to Toronto and What’s Happening. The third pile was reprints of the article on Dutch elm disease, the four-page copies folded in a manner to reveal on top the (now familiar) picture of a bare elm tree and the word Victim! beneath.

  – Where did these come from? I asked the clerk.

  – They — nodding in the direction of the lineup of botanists — asked to leave them here. Take one, it’s free.

  – I have one. It was left in my box.

  – Yes, now I remember, I put one in every box.

  The habit of motion took me away from the desk, as if I had a clear direction, but actually to hide the shock of knowledge that must have been apparent in my face. All my clever guesses had been wrong; there was no message on the plane; the pages of the botany journal had to do with doomed trees — nothing else. I had been entirely mistaken.

  In a circle under the brilliant chandelier sat a half-dozen shabby grizzled men as if guardians of the botanists’ luggage at their feet. Here they would sit all weekend, having wandered in out of the cold. Throughout the day, they would, one by one, without a word or the flicker of an eye, leave their seat and slip around the marble columns to the cafeteria downstairs and fill up on mashed potatoes. They would sit in their overcoats ready to leave if necessary. They will sit so still they will give the appearance of statues. The house detective will be glad of their company on Saturday and Sunday when this hotel becomes deserted. Crossing the lobby I found myself swerving to the right instead of heading for the elevators. The turn I made led me to the bar, whose entrance was stygian and not at all in accord with the promise held out by the sign overhead, Bacchus Lounge, in jiggly letters suggesting dance. To the left of the sign was a painted figure meant, I supposed, to represent the god of wine. It looked as if it had been painted by an amateur, perhaps by one who remembered the paintings in the National Museum of Rome of bacchanalian gods. The satyr’s limbs were short, out of proportion to his massive hands and large feet. He had a snub nose, baleful eyes and a mouth turned up in a good-natured leer. On his curly red hair was a crown of vine leaves. He wore a loose garment made of purple grapes. On the other side of the sign was the figure of a young woman, an upraised arm hold
ing a jug of wine, her diaphanous dress revealing curves of breast and hip and thighs. She too was garlanded with vine leaves. I took her to be a Maenad who sang and danced for Bacchus. The figures were crudley painted but evoked, nonetheless, images of Dionysian revels. For some reason it had not been my custom to go to bars; perhaps, vaguely, I would have considered the time spent drinking with other men a form of unfaithfulness to Coenraad. While I hesitated in order to become accustomed to the dark interior, four elderly women filed briskly past me, shaking off drops of water from the plastic hoods they lifted carefully from stiff gray hair. Guilt, or a similar feeling, caused me to turn around. As I did so, the detective quickly lowered his head and pretended to be tying his shoelaces, but I knew that, subliminally, he was observing me go into the bar.

  Once inside I was pleased with my decision: the dim faces and the low hum of speech gave off an atmosphere of sanctuary. I kept going, dodging waitresses in long black stockings, until I reached the bar. However, the simple effort of getting on to a bar stool became an awkward rear-end maneuver, as I tried to avoid spreading my legs in an unseemly manner. Our heads were mirrored behind three tiers of bottles, which made us look like the fourth tier, but the mirror was darkened so that our faces were indistinct. The pearls at my throat and the men’s white collars and cuffs were reflected best of all. We were not unlike Rembrandt’s figures with their stark white ruffs at neck and wrist. Without turning my head, I could hear the woman on my left tell her companion, whose gray hair gleamed in the mirror.

  – I will be sixty-five next March. I have given my life to that place and now I’m to be thrown aside like a torn shoe. The young ones are breathing down my neck. It’ll take three of them to do my job.

  – You should have hung on to one of your four husbands.

  – Those guys! Total losses. The only man I ever loved died while I was still a bride. For two years we were honeymooning. I should have died in that car with him. Wasted my life anyway.

  My imagination fired by her plight, I looked at her reflection in the mirror. A small-brimmed hat over one eye made her appear tipsy. She disappeared from the mirror as she swirled on her stool and faced me.

  – What are you doing here!

  – Just having a drink.

  – Why here, this isn’t the only bar on the street.

  – I have some time to spend. I’m waiting for a message.

  – So you say. But I know — she sent you to spy on us.

  – You’re confusing me with someone else. My name is Lola Montez and I’m here on a visit.

  – You’re lying, I don’t trust you. Nothing personal, you understand. She’s out to get me, I took her precious Percy, and she’ll never let up until she gets him back. Beat it, honey, or you’ll be sorry.

  The bartender was busy with bottles and glasses but he kept an eye on her. She puffed furiously at a cigarette that never left her mouth; the smoke caused the eye under the hat to close. This gave her words a comic turn and I smiled. She stubbed her cigarette. When she took a light from her purse, I assumed it was to start another cigarette. Instead, she thrust the fire in my face. Beat it I said, she said. I slid off the stool and made my way across the room, bumping into people. I took an empty table in the corner, not having the courage to seek the company of others, who, like myself, were alone, even though many looked up from their drinks in a friendly way.

  There was laughter and animation all about me. Within an hour the waitress and the bartender and I remained the only ones in the Bacchus Lounge without a drinking companion. I reflected that in a place like this my ability to sit by myself brings me only a request to give the order for another (the third) drink. All the same I looked about me with interest. I would not have objected if someone had sat down beside me. At that precise instant, I saw, framed in the doorway, allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the semi-darkness, the botanist I thought of as “the Mennonite,” because of the cut of his beard. I waved to him. He walked towards me without hesitation.

  – There you are! You promised to let me read your paper on Ceratocystis ulmi.

  He was still wearing a name tag pinned to his lapel. Andrew O’Hara, and underneath, Senior Environmentalist. Somehow O’Hara is not a name I can associate with Mennonites. He ordered a double martini.

  – There isn’t any paper. I am not a botanist. I am not who you think I am, I said.

  – I’m not who I think I am. Let me explain. When I was fourteen years old, a woman came up to me one day after school. She called me by name, the name, that is, given me by my adopted parents. She said, would you like a hamburger and coffee at Fran’s? Sure, I said. At the restaurant I followed her to the very back. She chose a table for two. She faced the wall. There was nothing else for her to look at but me, and that she did steadily. She ordered a double martini for herself. She watched me eat. Now and again she asked how I was getting on in school, hoped I was studying hard, what would I like to be, an engineer, a doctor? In between she just stared. I had a hot-fudge sundae and she had anothe double martini. Before we left she asked if I needed anything and insisted I take a five-dollar bill. I was in my second year of high school. For the rest of that year, she was at the foot of the steps waiting for me every Monday. I figured that must be her day off. Each week it was the same: the same table, the same stare and the same questions: well, young man, and how are you getting along?; well, Andy, did you work hard at school this week? And the double martinis and the hamburger and sundae and the fiver. I did not speak of this to my mother, who did not like my staying every week “at a friend’s for dinner,” since the chores were late getting done that night. Besides, she wouldn’t approve of my taking up with a stranger, something I had been warned against, she hinting at unspeakable dangers.

  I imagined all sorts of reasons for this lady’s concern. Whoever she was, she was the first person who seemed to care about me. Always I came back to the thought that she was my real mother, although there was nothing in our appearance, hers and mine, to connect us. She was short and plump and very dark, with tiny hands and feet. In Victorian fiction she would have been called Eurasian. She had the most amazing smile, perfect white teeth. Many times I wanted to ask her directly, Are you my mother, was I illegitimate, did you give me up for adoption, do you want me back as your son now? I was afraid to ask: either way, yes or no, my distress would have been more than I could handle. The last Monday in May she did not show up. I waited all that day, and the next week, and the next. I never saw her again. I never found out who she was. My mother had no interest in me. At sixteen, she handed me my adoption papers, told me to get out, I was old enough now to look after myself, she said.

  – People can be so cruel, I said.

  – Please don’t cry, he said.

  – And your name, whose is it?

  – I have always had it; it is mine now. Your name . . . ?

  – I use the name Lola Montez. She was a beautiful, clever and brave woman.

  – Why not your own name, the one your parents gave you?

  – When I look in the mirror, I see my mother’s tragic face.

  – There are no mirrors where I live. With me you can be whoever you are.

  – Do you mean I’m to go with you?

  – No etchings. A roomful of orchids. They are my hobby.

  – How can you play around with delicate flowers when the elms are in danger of extinction?

  – That pains me too. I’ve seen men in overalls come and mark the snags with a large X in white paint. I’ve watched as other men in overalls come and cut the elm down and feed it into a whining insatiable machine, branch by branch. Only the stump is left.

  – When I was a child, impoverished mothers and children in summer were given a week in the country in Bolton. It was open farmland; sometimes it became impossibly hot. I remember an afternoon when we sneaked out of our tent at rest hour. We walked along a side road lined with t
all, stately elms. We lay in the broad shade of a tree.

  – In a few instances, trees have been known to recover completely from an attack because of their ability to seal off the infection under layers of more resistant tissue.

  – Have you seen how their leaves in summer yellow and curl and droop?

  – Take heart. The Parks Department has planted a more hardy variety called Quebec elms on Elm Avenue.

  – Which Elm Avenue?

  – In Rosedale. Redundant, perhaps, but it’s a start. Do you like music, Viennese waltzes, Hungarian dances? I’ll play music for you; you will be at ease.

  – Preparation is necessary: I cannot change my hopes all at once.

  – Tomorrow is always a proper time. This is where you’ll find me (writing on the back of the cardboard coaster), I have no phone.

  Solemnly we shook hands. I left.

  Once beyond the arch of the lounge, taking leave of Bacchus and his grapes, I had to go back through the lobby, aware of the sharp eyes of the detective, who, it seemed to me, had not moved from his place. I had to go into an empty elevator again, and then along the dimly lit, empty corridors to my room; the key was inserted into the lock; there was the soft plop of a lightbulb that failed when I flipped the hall switch. Awaiting me was the packet of postcards on the night table under the lamp. And when I lay back against the pillows later, ready for a night of reverie and dreams, I couldn’t find a single card to suit me. Tonight they all looked like what they were: colored pictures of faraway places. Tonight my imagination stubbornly clung to the image of Andrew O’Hara framed in the doorway and the feel of his soft hand.

  I gave up the random choice. Instead, I went over my memorabilia, card by card, until I found the one that was certain to elicit such joy that, sometimes when it turned up accidentally, I had to put it at the bottom of the pack lest it keep me awake. It was a photograph of the Drake Hotel in Chicago. That picture pulled me back through a maze of halls, into one of its one thousand and eighteen rooms, to the fourteenth floor, number 1432, the second one to the right of the elevators. This card, recalling the night Coenraad first made his appearance, filled my mind with a clarity of detail that one sees in shock, as after a blinding explosion or during a night of labor. And even when the shock is the result of violent pleasure, then the ordinary properties of wood or plastic or paint or cloth take on strange and mysterious shapes and colors. The senses sharpen as if one’s very life were in danger, even in paradise.