‘Oh, no, I think it stands to reason—quite elegantly. How terrible would it be if our lives were the sum expressions of our souls? What sort of soul reads like an autobiography? The one I found was awful—I should not have liked to have known that man, I am sure of it. We are all fantastic to some degree or other; that, at least, I am pleased to have learned.’
For a moment I thought he might actually believe me. Perhaps because some part of him did believe me, he again rejected my theories, waving his hands before him as he rose to go. He paused halfway out, turned and wondered, ‘But did you free them? Or destroy them?’ Then once more, he grumbled, ‘No, no. I won’t think about it. It is . . . it is . . .’
I confess I do not know the answer to his question. As I said, if I had been more in my right mind, I may have acted differently. If I had acted with more restraint, then maybe the belly of the beast would have remained full and would still be constrained in that hidden room, and maybe its distant mouths would have remained closed.
It is unremarkable here to claim there are creatures prowling the ventilation system. Inmates have been doing that for years. The doctors blame my influence for the recent agitation; they have even questioned me about the strange odour that now pervades this solitary wing. They sedate me heavily every night, and it is enough to keep my nocturnal screaming to what I suppose is an acceptable minimum.
There was another row in the corridor today. The doctors are angry because no one on staff will admit to smuggling books into my cell.
LES OMBRES CHINOISES
‘It’s a funny word, isn’t it? What does it mean to be “legendary”?’ Irene sprawled across the foot of the low, small stage, staring upward as though watching the rhetorical questions drift to the black ceiling. ‘Webster’s defines “legendary” . . .’ she began, and then giggled wetly, and then hooted as she spilled a drop of Riesling on her blouse while trying to sit up.
‘Mother,’ Milo chastised in a sigh, without looking. Intricately-cut zinc plates plinked dully against each other as he divided them into piles on three folding chairs from the front row turned to face him.
His mother ineffectually brushed at the wet spot with a finger. ‘To be “legendary” is to be famous because of some exemplary . . .’ she paused to recover from the effort of clear pronunciation, ‘condition or achievement. One might say: to be storied. Ah, there’s the rub.’ She giggled again, rubbing the cuff of her shirt clutched in her hand to dry the wine. ‘For if we are storied, then we are the stuff of legend—which is to say: fictional.’ She toasted her thesis triumphantly. Milo demonstrated no interest in the pronouncement. Irene touched her wrist to her brow as she tilted her head back. ‘Oh, but must I be fictional before anyone should care about me?’
‘You were never an actress, Mother,’ Milo admonished absentmindedly; ‘You were an artist.’ He winced at his use of the past tense. He did not wish to be cruel to her, but when he was incautious, it happened easily.
So as not to acknowledge the slight, she corrected him elliptically, ‘I am an artist—of life!’ She rose to her feet unsteadily before finishing with a flourish, ‘And therefore, I have always been—a performer!’
The statement required no response, so Milo sighed wordlessly this time. He turned to face his mother, though not to look at her. He held one of the plates up to view it against the white screen and tried to remember what it was about the ‘Polynesian’ background that had struck him as false during the last performance. Held just above her head, it appeared as though his mother wore a ridiculous hat of tiny coconut trees and bamboo. He suppressed a smile as possibilities on how to incorporate the illusion into a performance fired through his thoughts.
‘To have a legendary love affair is only possible in the fiction of memory,’ Irene declared. ‘And only artists can have them.’
‘Oh, really? Only artists?’ Milo did not mean to encourage her.
‘Yes! Do not confuse a love affair with a romance. Romances are aggrandised schematics. They are dreadfully extended beginnings—point A to point B and so on—and yet must be seen as their ends in and of themselves. “They lived happily ever after! Move along!” A romance is the achievement, but a love affair achieves something beyond itself; it inspires—and what more noble achievement is there? And if it crashes and burns then it inspires all over again! A romance might entertain, but an artist’s love affair is spoken of—because what is born from it belongs to everyone.’ Milo had to admit it was a surprisingly cogent argument; but then she ruined it with, ‘But the reality is always the same: all the grunting and awkward flopping about.’
‘Mother!’
‘Ah! You see? No one wants to hear about the ugly truth.’
‘I don’t want to hear about . . . you.’
Irene laughed. ‘But that is my point—it is all just stories now, don’t you see? So why shouldn’t I share my “life’s work” with you?’
Milo lost track of his progress. Exasperated, he barked, ‘You do it because you have to’—meaning, because you have driven away anyone else who would have listened. Milo frowned, glum at his own darkness, disappointed he had failed again to censor himself.
To his surprise, his mother did not appear at all hurt, but seemed concerned for him instead. She pouted as though in sympathy, hopped down, and set her glass on the edge of the stage. She crossed to him and took her face in his hands. ‘You are the best thing I ever made,’ she said.
The exertion of climbing the two flights of stairs—from the subterranean theatre, through the café, up to the ‘offices’—agitated the alcohol in Irene’s blood. She felt flushed and mildly nauseous, and thought it wise to compose herself near porcelain before she lay down. She rinsed her mouth with water from the sink cupped in her hands, and then splashed a second helping on her face. She attempted to judge her appearance with equanimity. At forty-nine, never having bothered much about her health (it might be said, ‘having lived with a disinclination towards preserving her health’), she thought she held up remarkably well. She was pale, but routinely flaring capillaries lent colour to her cheeks, and by sleeping through many an afternoon, she had kept herself from the sun’s ravages. In a propitious Sunday matinee, Laurence Olivier had taught her to smoke only when the moment required the affectation, and to always discard the cigarette emphatically after no more than five puffs. She drank a lot, but only pure spirits and good wine, so no extraneous sugars gathered on her, and drink suppressed her appetite. She could almost say it had been good to her.
‘Pickled,’ she concluded buoyantly. She regarded the glass resting on the back of the sink, still half full. ‘Ah, but if only you could restore youth.’ She pouted, not because the idea was preposterous, but because it was a cliché wish to entertain, and she liked to think she could choose a more exceptional miracle if presented with the opportunity. In truth, Irene was not sure she would wish to be young again—a few years, yes, that might be fine—but she didn’t think she wanted to live her timeline again, and she couldn’t imagine being happy joining her son’s generation. The wish, if there was one, seemed more towards promoting her neglected health for its own sake, sans objective. The wish was for vitality, or, ‘Importance,’ she muttered, then thought, the vitality of the life, not the energy of living it.
Her stomach settled, Irene left the bathroom, passed by the cluttered office where the silver dial of a small safe peeked out from beneath a warped desk laden with loose stacks of paper, and entered the large front room. The walls were brick; the floor had been painted white a lifetime ago, and the abandoned, tortured lattice of a drop-tile ceiling hung overhead. Storage from the café dominated the space—chairs waiting fixing, a rusty three-tub sink, white plastic buckets stacked as high as Irene stood tall, paint cans on shelves that couldn’t hope to hold them if they were anything but empty. Competing was storage from the basement theatre, both for Milo’s shadow plays and from previous productions, including items that likely had nothing to do with any play presented in the tiny sp
ace that had somehow found their final resting place here—two racks of costumes, wooden boxes painted minimalist black, shepherds’ crooks, frayed parasols, a horse’s head, a fake tree, a fake rock, a faded sun. And in one corner near the long windows at the front of the building dusty canvasses leaned one on another on another.
Irene went to the centre of the room and indelicately kicked aside a coffee table; she flopped on the dilapidated but luxuriously giving orange tweed sofa it guarded. Her vision shimmered cosily with drink.
She thought her son had been uncharitable in his assessment that she had no one else to talk to. It certainly could never be true in her business—she worked in customer service, after all, though she had less to do each passing day with the operation of the café (a competent manager, Laurie, had become indispensable). The clientele turned over gradually, though it had never been about the clientele for Irene. It had been about those dazzling few that refused to belong to so gauche a nomenclature as that. And if there had ever been any danger of them being subsumed by the popularity of the establishment they popularised, they christened themselves with some new exclusive and weighty moniker (‘The Populist Avant Garage’), and then immediately rebelled against it with self-imposed sacrilege (‘Les Idiots Rouges’). Those irrepressible few, she admitted, those whom she knew and loved, were absent. She sometimes watched their pale imitations huddle together, faces blue from backlit monitors.
‘Where are they now?’ Irene murmured.
A few had died. She was aware of two suicides, one drug overdose that was almost certainly unintentional, one car vs. bicycle, a drowning. Many came too close to the brink and backed away. Some battled too hard against their demons to invite temptation by frequenting the old haunt. A few had been her lovers, though probably less than what was believed of her. There were triangles enough and more in their collective past that every reunion had to be measured and considered—and possibly required pre-emptive forgiveness. There had been falling outs that no one wanted to reverse, and drifts away no one could quite account for. Even without definite offence, Irene felt certain that jealousies lingered in some who knew her past and in others who could only suspect it.
‘Harridans,’ she growled. ‘They tamed my men. Do they think it would be any harder now for me to not sleep with them than it was then?’ She clucked and sighed. Yes, it would be, she thought, longing for intimacy.
She turned her head to the side, longing for some thought away from the skeleton ceiling. She looked at the costume racks. She hugged herself, feeling chill, even in the stuffy sun of the loft. She refused to be despondent, opting instead to lazily embrace her melancholy. She decided on a nap, and rose to pull a dress from the rack to use as a blanket. She picked out a ruffled dress of soft pink with thick, red stitching along the seams that gathered the fabric in layers below the waist. A petticoat was sewn into the dress (to facilitate a costume change). Irene smiled coyly with secret delight. Imagine if Milo should come looking for me and find me asleep on the couch . . . wearing this darling number. She laughed and stripped to her undergarments. She pulled through the white taffeta layers at the bottom, digging for the centre. She dove upwards and wiggled, struggling to get the dress to fall over her arms and down her body. She began to feel nearly trapped in the ruffling fabric, and strained for breath. Then, suddenly, the dress dropped perfectly over her form as though she’d been wearing it all evening, revealing a changed light, a different room; the sounds, the smells—everything was new.
Irene sat—she did not remember sitting—on a bench, leaning against diamond-patterned wood panelling, behind a thick, mahogany table polished to a shine. She was in a cosy café that reminded her much of her own. Photographs and lithographs and original art covered the walls; someone had taken great care to fit the varying-sized frames into a tight puzzle that left no space wasted. Irene was stunned to see burning candles peeking from behind the enigmatic faces of cats in a wrought-iron chandelier. The clinging cherry scent of tobacco wafting through the air surprised her even more, as smoking indoors was prohibited by state law. Something tugged at her hair, and she reached up to discover her hair piled loosely and pinned beneath a narrow-brimmed hat topped with feathers and a great puff of tulle. Though a glass of wine waited on the table before her, the rush of confusion left Irene feeling distinctly sober. Motion across the centre aisle drew her attention: Several men sitting at a matching table opposite her seemed anxiously excited, fidgeting in their seats and leaning forward repeatedly as though colluding; they smiled eagerly, then seemed to remember something, and smoothed their lips beneath their fingers.
‘It is bittersweet, of course,’ announced a voice to her left. ‘But for now, I choose to be disgusted.’
A petite woman sat on the bench beside Irene. She had a broad face with a softly angled jaw; a dismissive sneer built into her features presented her beauty as a challenge.
‘Do you know why they are so excited?’ She cocked her chin at them. ‘Satie is dead.’
The name seemed familiar to Irene, but she found it difficult to gather her thoughts.
‘They are his admirers, of course—that is Debussy in the middle—and they will help to make him immortal. But see how they bend together in excitement, like vultures over a carcass! Twenty-seven years ago, Satie moved to Arcuiel, and from then until yesterday, no one went to visit him there. Finally, they go, after he is dead, to see to his things. Imagine! Sheet music thought lost, pieces never suspected—found under his mattress, behind the piano, stuffed in the pockets of his old jackets.’ She looked at her drink. ‘Erik was always more of a genius than a thinker.’
Irene finally made the connection and nearly shouted, ‘Erik Satie! The composer!’ One of the men glanced over at her and she could feel a blush rise.
The woman laughed. ‘But of course! Who did you think that I meant?’
‘But . . . how can you have known him?’
The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘I think it likely I knew him as no other ever did. Have you ever had a man propose marriage after your first night together? There you are.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Irene said, ‘I didn’t know you were married.’
The woman laughed again. ‘We were not. I was too kind for that. We had six months; it was enough. Relationships are not meant to be endured.’
‘Are you also a composer?’
‘A painter.’
Irene brightened. ‘Really? Me, too!’
The woman wet her smirk with wine. ‘Where have you shown?’
‘Not . . . not . . . here . . .’ Some instinct held Irene back from acknowledging where on earth she found herself, as though she knew the additional questions that admission would raise would overwhelm her. She found it easier to ‘play along’ if she maintained her naïveté. ‘I had pieces in a few group exhibitions, but it has been a long time.’
‘Ah! A shame. But I understand: I refuse to compromise quality in my own work. Why, I think sometimes there have been as many pictures painted of me as I have painted!’
Irene dipped her head. Here, too, the women shared experience, but Irene was not proud. Pictures—photos—of her had been exhibited, but beyond the mild scandal they created in her own circle, they were of little artistic value. She had been embarrassed—terrified—when they sold to an anonymous buyer two days after the opening of the show. Fortunately, they were never seen again in public. Irene had felt relieved to think some pervert kept them locked away for his own satisfaction, though thinking on them now she considered it might be nice to admire her younger form once more.
In the triumphant silence of the unreturned volley, the woman held out a hand. ‘Suzanne.’
Irene took Suzanne’s hand but forgot to introduce herself in return. Instead, she blurted, ‘We are in Paris!’
Suzanne feigned surprise at the outburst. ‘With your accent, I should hope so!’
‘Am I speaking French?’ Irene asked herself, to try to hear the language in her words.
Suzanne
’s finger brushed her arm. ‘I like your dress.’
Irene looked at the cloth. It seemed to her new and vibrant, not musty or cheap, not a costume. It felt right on her body; it fit perfectly. ‘Was it yours?’ She ignored the troubling thought, Am I you? ‘Is that how I am here? But it’s not possible!’
‘None of us can be here. This all happened later. Ah! Look, you see? We’re catching up.’
Irene slouched unexpectedly with relief, and she took in a great breath. She hadn’t noticed the corset until it was absent. The fabric of her dress softened and settled on her skin. She touched a felt cloche hat in place of the ornamental one.
The scene around her had changed as well: the men sat at their table, but all in chairs, just as she now was; the bench was gone. Irene had no chance now of hearing what they said, as the tumult of raucous conversation swelled with the multiplication of chairs and tables and people. The room was larger in every direction and the ceiling arced high. Art still adorned the walls, but larger pieces dominated, and they were no longer arranged with meticulous order. Fake Roman busts and statues seemed incongruously displayed in deliberate dissonance with the burlesque spirit of the establishment, as did pairs of crossed flags celebrating the pomp of nations or fraternal organisations unknown to Irene; a large fish hung from the ceiling, its wide mouth gaping. Centred on one wall was a white screen bordered by a gilded, baroque frame presided over by a curious cherub. Irene understood intuitively that the setting was wrong for a movie screen, and she recognised its purpose.
‘Is that for the shadow play?’
‘Yes. You have seen the Chinese Shadows?’
A pleasant wave of devotional attachment swept through Irene. She wished Milo was with her; she could imagine the look on his face as he sat at their table, even without a performance to watch, longing to peek backstage. She smiled with pride. ‘My son creates shadow plays.’
The Hidden Back Room Page 29