Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  We need to talk and talk and talk. Please come.

  Love, Rhoda

  Dear Saint John,

  Don’t go back to Mexico and catch amoebic dysentery. Come up here instead. We don’t need to kill things in order to eat. All we need to do is stay alive and work and try to appreciate life and have a good time.

  Come on up. Dudley and I are going to revive card games. We are going to play poker and drink a lot of coffee and I’ll make biscuits for breakfast.

  We’ll have new times instead of old times.

  Love, Rhoda

  P.S. I’m sorry about that bullfighter. I really am.

  P.P.S. I had this vision of the three of us huddled together on the floor at Esperanza sucking on each other for sustenance and love. Trying to get from each other what we couldn’t get from the grown people. All those terrible years—our fathers at the war and our mothers scared to death and the Japs coming to stick bamboo splinters up our fingernails and you and me and Dudley trying to mother and father each other. Life is not easy for anyone. That’s for sure. I don’t think we really understand much yet and may be losing the little that we used to know. We don’t need Mexico, old partner. We need something to hold on to in the dark and someone to remind us of where we really are. We are spinning in space on this tenuous planet. I won’t let you forget that if you won’t let me.

  Love and love again, me.

  Rhoda sealed the letters into envelopes and addressed them. Then she got into the car and drove down the hill and deposited them in the box at the post office. She was in a good mood. She even remembered to think it was miraculous that man had learned to write, not to mention invented a system to get letters from one place to another. Not to mention taming horses and fighting bulls and living to grow up. Every now and then someone grows up, she decided. I’ve heard about it. Why not, or else, whatever.

  Paris

  A young man is dead and maybe we could have stopped it. That’s what I wake up with every morning. Until a month ago I was a completely happy person. Who knows, maybe I’ll be happy again.

  Reality expands exponentially. It meets itself coming and going. It is a net, a web; touch one strand and the whole thing quivers. Get caught and you cannot get away. Sticky stuff, reality. Spiders understand this metaphor. It had nothing to do with me. I say this over and over again, like a mantra.

  There was no reason why I shouldn’t go to Paris. My young friend, Tannin, was writing a book about me. He needed me to inspire him and give him material. I don’t think he knew he was writing about me. He thought he was writing a book about three girls in Paris living in an apartment and talking all the time about their lovers. Only all three sounded like me, my hysteria, how I make every utterance an oath or a promise. I can’t help it. I was poisoned in the womb. If you don’t buy first causes, don’t read on.

  I’m a journalist and a writer of novels. My name is Rhoda Manning and I’m fifty-eight years old and you’d never believe that either. People who believe in fairies don’t age.

  So on the fifth of May I climbed into the belly of the whale and crossed the Atlantic Ocean and arrived at Orly about seven in the morning. Tannin met me at the plane. His fifty-eight-year-old muse in a wrinkled white linen suit and two-inch spectator pumps getting bravely off a plane with her hair cut short for the mission. I used to have lovers his age. Now I only want the good part, the youthful energy, the sheer delight. Coming out to Orly at seven in the morning to squire me through customs. The ones I had for lovers might have done that. But none of them spoke flawless Parisian French.

  There are many love affairs in the world, more ways to love, Horatio, than you dream of. I had been practicing all my life for this. Having brothers, raising sons, loving young men. And now, in my Senior Citizenship, Tannin had been delivered to me. To love, to understand, to nourish, to adore. He had written me a letter to say he liked a book I wrote. It was a book about a friend who died an early death. I will write about you, I had told the friend. I will not let you die. Do it, he had answered. If you write it from the heart, it will be good. I had and it was and I was as proud of it as anything I had ever written.

  Also, it gave Tannin to me. The book had come to him from the Book-of-the-Month Club and he forgot to send it back. So he read it and then he wrote to me and told me he wanted to be a writer. I throw such letters away every day. This one was different. It had a lilt, a ring, it made me laugh. He asked my advice about writing schools and I told him to come up here. That Randolph was a genius and would not harm him. Randolph is the director of the writing program.

  So Tannin came to Fayetteville and became my friend and the next thing I knew I was flying to Paris to “hang out with him” while he wrote his book.

  He called me frantically two days before I left to say he had a visitor, a young man who had gone to Sewanee with him. “He’s driving me crazy,” he said. “He’s in a terrible mood. He hates everything in Paris. I took him to hear Ravel at the Sorbonne. He hated Ravel. I hope he’ll be gone by the time you get here, but he might not be. I’m really sorry. He just showed up. I invited him a year ago. I never dreamed he’d come.”

  “Maybe he’s disoriented. That happened to me once, in Heidelberg. I just got completely disoriented. I had to go home.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He quit his job a month ago. Maybe that’s it. He was working for his dad in Nashville.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Nothing will stop us from having fun in Paris. Did you get tickets to the ballet?”

  “Yes. They’re supposed to be good seats. They’d better be.”

  “My cousin plays in the orchestra. We’ll meet her after the performance. I haven’t seen her since she was in high school.”

  “Good. That’s fine. We’ll do anything you want to do. I’m so glad you’re coming.”

  As soon as we collected my bags we went to my hotel and sat in the café drinking coffee and talking. We hadn’t seen each other in four weeks but it seemed a year. Our sagas engage us. His are as real to me as mine. “So what’s the friend’s name?” I asked. “And is he better?”

  “His name is William and he’s worse. Now he has a cold. He’s asleep in my room. He’s going to the ballet with us tomorrow night.”

  “That’s fine. I want to meet him. Don’t worry, Tannin. Nothing is wrong. I’m elated to be here. Look at this weather. This is paradise. My plan is to stay awake all afternoon and take a sleeping pill and crash about six and sleep till dawn. How does that sound to you?”

  “Fantastic. Should you be drinking coffee?”

  “It won’t matter. I have a Xanax. It will knock me out.” We giggled. We laughed as if that were the funniest thing in the world, as if it were deeply, wildly, madly, hysterically funny.

  We left the hotel and walked up the rue de Montalembert to the boulevard St.-Germain and followed it to the Seine. We stood on the bridge and watched people and talked about the swimming pool that had sunk in the river the night before.

  “A floating swimming pool that’s been here since the forties. Think what would have happened if it had been in the daytime. If people had been there. I wish I could have seen it sink.”

  “So do I. What a phenomenon. A huge floating swimming pool sinking into the Seine. Mon dieu!” We laughed again. It was incredibly, divinely, hilariously funny. No one ever gets that tickled when they are alone. Only two people can know something is that funny.

  “In sight of Notre Dame Cathedral. This may be a sign. Listen, I told William I’d meet him for lunch. I never thought you’d want to stay awake. We don’t have to go. I could go by there and tell him I’m not coming.”

  “I want to. Come on. I want to go. I really do. Why are you so worried about my meeting William?”

  “Because it’s your vacation. You shouldn’t have to baby-sit my friends.”

  “I want to meet him.” I took his arm and we walked along the river to the Jardin des Tuileries and across the gardens to the Café du Palais Royale, a brig
ht café with pots of orange flowers and brilliant paintings on the walls. We found a table and sat down and began to read the menu. A young man came hurrying toward us through the tables. He had curly blond hair and blue eyes and looked enough like Tannin to be his twin. “William Watkins Weckter,” Tannin said. “The fourth or fifth. My old roommate at Sewanee. He’s dying to meet you.”

  “I read your books,” he said. “I used to talk about them all the time.”

  “Oh, my. Sit down. Are you feeling better? Tannin said you had been sick.”

  “It’s nothing. A summer cold. Well, I quit my job last month. I’m out on the street. That should give you a cold, don’t you think?” He laughed and took a handkerchief out of his pocket and stood up and went outside and blew his nose. When he came back in he picked up the conversation and went right on. He didn’t seem depressed to me. Just at loose ends, like half the young people I meet. No children, no responsibilities they can’t leave. They are free, in the deepest and most terrible sense of the word. Cut loose, dismounted, disengaged. Not Tannin though, he’s in love with the muse, the sight of his words upon the page. Artists are the same in any age, always lost and always found.

  So here was William with a degree in history and a minor in biology and nothing to do. He had worked for his father in an office supply store in Nashville for a while, now he was wandering around the world. “I better see it while I can,” he said. “When I go back to work I won’t have a vacation for a year.”

  “The age of commerce may be over,” I said. “I’ve been thinking of this. It’s time for live theater, beautiful buildings, parks. There must be things for young people to do that will engage them in their brightest minds. It’s this transition that is painful. Find out what you want to do and do it. What do you want to do, William? Do you have any idea?”

  “Something worth keeping. Something I could talk about. When I was young I liked to keep records. I wrote down what I did each day.” He looked off into the gardens outside the café. We finished our coffee. William insisted on paying for our lunch. Nothing would dissuade him. Then he left us, and Tannin and I walked back to my hotel. There were young people dressed in costumes from the seventeenth century wandering around the Tuileries looking beautiful and mysterious. They weren’t selling anything. We couldn’t figure out why they were there.

  “Gratuitous beauty,” Tannin declared. “France. I am happiest when I am here. It’s my mother’s fault. She did this to me.”

  “I’m fading,” I answered. “Take me to my bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Tannin delivered me to my hotel and I went upstairs and unpacked and ordered some Evian and drank half a bottle of it with a Xanax and went to sleep with the windows open. I was on the seventh floor of the Hôtel Montalembert, where Buckminster Fuller used to stay with his entourage. Outside my window I could see the Eiffel Tower and the streets leading to the river and les Champs Elysées. I slept. Like a lamb in a meadow I slept away the hours until dawn.

  I woke in Paris. I stretched out my muscles in the bed. Pulled the beautiful pillows into my arms. Goose down, from some lovely flock of geese somewhere in the land of France. This elegant old culture. I lay in bed and looked around the room. It was black and white. White walls, black painted furniture, a soft design on the chairs. Another bolder print on the bedcover. White linen drapes pulled back from dormer windows. I won’t do a thing I don’t want to do, I decided. I will not hurry. I curled back into a ball and daydreamed for a while, imagining the ballet we would see that evening. The Paris Opéra House with its ceiling painted by Chagall. Ballets by Balanchine and Robbins. I had not seen ballet in fourteen months. I was badly overdue for a ballet.

  I rose from the bed and walked over to the window and stood leaning out the casement in my white silk nightgown. When I’m at home I sleep in flannel. See what this city does for me. I drank the rest of the Evian and dressed in a black pantsuit and went down to the café for petit déjeuner. A waiter brought me the Herald Tribune and I read Russell Baker’s column and drank the best coffee in the world and ate a brioche and raspberries from the Dordogne. I was getting more civilized every minute. I was almost urbane. The city and the day stretched out before me. I thought of Tannin, not ten blocks away in his room overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. I thought of William, with his upper-respiratory infection and his pretty face. I thought of my young cousin playing her violin at the Paris Opéra. I thought of Chagall and the light coming in the glass windows onto my table and the perfect weather and how lucky I was to live in such a world.

  I went upstairs and changed into street shoes and left the hotel and walked for an hour, exploring side streets, stopping at a salon to make an appointment for my hair, windowshopping.

  When I got back to the hotel there were messages. Tannin was coming to take me to lunch. My cousin was home and would I call her. It made me giddy, to be in a city this beautiful, in cool weather, with young people to talk to, and nothing, not a single thing going wrong, and no longer in boyfriend jail. I was not in love with anyone and I did not want to be. BOND NO MORE, it said on notes I had scattered around my house. I had written it and I meant it. I was free to let the whole world be my lover.

  Free at last from the obsessive weight of love affairs. Free from waiting around a hotel room for a husband or a lover to decide what I could or could not do. Free from men turning on television sets.

  I combed my hair, put on my two-inch heels, went down to the lobby and Tannin was there, smiling and embracing me, as excited as I was. We left the hotel and walked until we found a sidewalk café that we liked and sat in the shade of a plane tree giggling and talking and telling stories and watching everything. There is nothing on earth like friendship. It is God’s love, God’s ambrosia, the one thing we never have to pay for or regret.

  “That man is looking at you.” Tannin laughed. “Men have been checking you out all morning.”

  “It’s the damnedest thing. I mean, mon dieu, the minute you stop being available, men start wanting you. They can smell it a mile away. It has nothing to do with age or beauty.”

  “It’s true. If we think we can’t have it, it becomes interesting to us.”

  “You can’t manufacture it. You have to really be out of the game. I am. You can’t imagine how much I do not want to have another affair of any kind.”

  “Look at that, Rhoda. Over in the corner.” I glanced at the couple kissing in the corner. A middle-aged man and a woman in a low-cut blouse. They looked like some inferior breed of human, the expression on their faces was completely infantile.

  “Do you think they just did it or are they just about to go somewhere and do it?”

  “Probably both.” A waiter approached the couple and set a huge glass of ice cream with whipped cream and cherries and chocolate sauce down in front of the woman. The man picked up a spoon and began to feed her. Tannin touched my arm. We shook with laughter. We almost fell off our chairs. We could not contain ourselves. We paid the bill and walked off down the street and found a building to lean against and laughed until we cried.

  I slept in the late afternoon and dressed and met Tannin and William in the lobby and we set out for the opera house. “I’ve never seen a ballet,” William said. “Is it okay to admit that?”

  “I was older than you before I saw one that was good,” I answered. “This is the World Series you’re going to see. Except for Maurice Béjart and the Ballet of the Twentieth Century. That’s the best to me, the nonpareil.”

  Later, after the first ballet, which was the Balanchine, he said, “Don’t the ones in the chorus mind? They never get to be the star?”

  “Prima ballerinas,” I told him. “Listen, these are great athletes. They don’t mind someone being the prima ballerina any more than a football team minds having a great running back. They have a wonderful life. They live to dance, to be up there on that stage, with that music, doing this for us. Dancers never grow old. I wish I could have been one.”

  “Well,
” I grudgingly admitted, later, in the lobby, at intermission, with a glass of wine. “They ruin their feet. They tear up their toes. What they’re doing is unnatural, but that’s why it’s so hard and why the excitement of it never dies.”

  We went back to our seats, which were in a box to the left of the stage. Above our heads, the divine ceiling by Chagall. The curtains opened. Two dancers came on stage. Behind them were the flats which had also been painted by Chagall. Entrée et pas-de-deux. Magic. Danse des garçons with tables covered by umbrellas. More magic. Then the danse des filles, with small umbrellas everywhere. It was the dance of the day we had just spent in Paris, with the burden of weight dissolved in color. The human spirit turned loose to fly, transcend itself. This ballet alone would have been worth the trip across the ocean.

  I had arranged for us to meet my cousin after the performance. May Chatevin Debardeleben. Her name was almost whispered in my family. She’s in Paris, they would say. She plays the violin for the Paris ballet.

  She was just as I remembered her, a blithe young girl with long dusty blond hair and violet eyes. Even as a child she had carried herself with dignity and grace. It had not surprised me when I heard she had flown the coop, escaped the massive tentacles of our family.

  We found her in the orchestra pit, holding her violin against her black taffeta dress. I introduced everyone, embraced her, and begged her to come to dinner with us. “All right,” she said. “Let me put this violin away. I won’t bother to change to street clothes, if you don’t mind.” She was so absolutely Southern, the same young girl from Abbeville, Louisiana, where her mother played the organ at the Episcopal Church.

  While she put the violin in the case I squeezed Tannin’s hand. I was so proud of my lovely young cousin. All this time William had not spoken. Now, when May Chatevin snapped the clasps on the case, he reached out a hand and took it from her. “I played a violin when I was a kid,” he said. “But I had to stop.”