Now, Now, Louison

by Jean Frémon

  Early the next morning, you went down to the studio. Jerry was still sleeping; you could smell his body on you, the scent completely surrounded you. You started to gather pieces of wood from various sculptures, scraps in different shapes, and you piled, glued, screwed, and wedged them together, making a curious scaffold, very solid, but with the feel of something about to collapse, full of tiny outcroppings, overhangs, and misalignments. Jerry came in silently. You said: You see, I put the apple back together again. You both laughed.

  The next day, you wrote to Jerry:

  1) I love you

  2) bad daughter bad wife bad mother

  3) it’s hopeless

  4) who ever said it wouldn’t be?

  5) I miss you

  6) bad woman

  7) bad life

  8) where is it all leading us?

  9) who cares?

  10) I love you

  You tore up the letter. You wrote: Not guilty. Using Scotch tape, you put the letter back together. You wrote: 11) Not guilty Not guilty Not guilty. You put the letter in a drawer. It’s no one’s business but your own.

  *

  And you sang:

  Je pense à vous quand je m’éveille

  Et de loin, je vous suis des yeux

  Je vous revois quand je sommeille

  Dans un songe mysté-ri-eux

  Le seul bonheur auquel mon cœur aspire

  C’est d’obtenir un aveu des plus doux

  Voilà voilà ce que je veux vous dire

  Mais hélas j’ai trop peur de vous

  You remember how it climbs and extends when it gets to the ce que je veu-eu-eux vous dire.

  And the same on the brûlant:

  Je veux je veux dans mon brû-û-ûlant délire

  Dire je t’aime en tombant à genoux

  Jerry hummed.

  The ingenue singing torch songs . . .

  To him, the Opera; to her, the operetta.

  *

  You hardly knew Jerry; you’d only seen him two or three times. And in fact, after Robert’s death, you hardly went out at all. With the children gone, you roamed around the enormous house. It’s actually not all that big — it’s rather narrow, but all the same, with the three floors, the mezzanine, the basement, and the attic — now it’s all in complete disarray, but when Robert died, it was simply a large house in which you wandered like you wander in yourself. You, too, were an empty house. Sounds like the words to a song, of the sentimental, tear-jerky sort — ♩♫ Ne me quitte pas, (or something like that) Je suis une maison viiide . . . ♫♩ It keeps running through my mind. It was in a Varda film, though I’ve forgotten the title. You were a bit like that, passive, in black and white, time going by, piling up on you. What happened? Nothing, time passes, that’s all. It was five o’clock, now it’s six o’clock, and in an hour, it will be seven. What’s that mean? Nothing. Does it bring you closer to your death? Not even. Does it enrich your experience? God forbid.

  Jerry telephoned to say that he had seen your figures from the 1940s, that he was organizing an exhibition for a gallery in Soho, that he wanted to include one or two of your things in wood, that he’d also use X, Y, or Z, and that he’d like to come to the studio to choose some things. The studio. To which you replied: I don’t have a studio. I have a big empty house that I fill up with little emanations, little harebrained schemes that come out of the woodwork to keep me company. You said: Sure, come over.

  The first meeting was glacial. You were terrified. He was, too. You were decked out outlandishly; you’d found an old black-and-white Poiret dress that reeked of mothballs, and you’d topped it off with your old blue hat, worn like a medieval helmet to protect you from the club wielded by the white knight on the way.

  The hat, nothing like it for hiding behind, creating a diversion, outwitting the enemy. Maurice Chevalier ♩♫ Z’avez vous vu le nouveau chapeau de Zozo? / C’est un chapeau, un chapeau rigolo. / Sur le devant la la la trois plumes de paon / et sul’ côté un amour d’perroquet. ♫♩

  He mumbled some sort of compliment. You said, Go for it; take anything you want, it’s got nothing to do with me. Then you pretended to be busy, and in fact, you completely destroyed a sculpture by sanding it vigorously in every direction the entire time he was there. You did not walk him to the door; you said, I’m sure you can find your way out.

  He found it. So well that he came back. To take the sculptures he’d chosen and to tell you about the exhibition, to bring you a press clipping, and to see if you needed anything, to say hello, and to offer his services — he’d be happy to go find you materials, have blocks of marble delivered, and on Saturday, he’d take you bargain-hunting at the flea market on Seventeenth Street. He came every day until the day of the apple. When life took a new turn. Your sons were lukewarm about it. And simply waited for an excuse to distance themselves. Not great-grandmother material. Though they’d been expecting something like this. And then they must have told themselves that at least they didn’t have to worry about you anymore. You were taken care of. Vita Nova. Reprieve.

  *

  Je suis la bonne

  La bonne à tout

  La bonne à tous

  La bonne à tout faire

  La bonne à rien

  First comes love

  Then comes marriage

  Then comes etc. in the baby carriage

  Fille de

  Femme de

  Mère de

  Merde

  Merde

  Merde

  I’d had enough. And then life extended me credit. Now it’s my turn. I’m the dog of Jean Nivelle who runs away quand on l’appelle. I know where I’m going. As the young Sagan said of her father’s mistress, she kept me from loving myself. Over. Done. You take yourself in hand. Out of frustration, you make sculpture. Destroying, repairing, mending, patching together, there’s love in all of it. You have to take control of the situation. It’s a kind of equation — on one side, pain, anxiety, and frustration; on the other, wood, marble, bronze. The trick is to get them to infuse each other. With sculptures, you weave connections. Everything’s a matter of weaving. White thread, red thread, one for lies, one for truths . . .

  ♩♫ N’vous mariez pas, les filles, n’vous mariez pas

  Changez d’amant quat’fois par mois

  Restez pucelle chez votre papa

  Mais ne vous mariez pas ♫♩

  *

  And then you found the old, dilapidated sweatshop in Brooklyn for rent . . . Finally, real space. For peanuts. You took it as is, what chaos! Sewing machines, mannequins, bolts of cloth, tables, shelves. Finally, you could breathe surrounded by your things. Chaos can be controlled. You had all the sculptures that had been hanging around in crates moved out there. You made a gorgeous mess of marbles, bronzes, wood, resins, composites, lairs, houses, Januses, so many things that you hadn’t seen in such a long time.

  Every morning, Jerry brought the car, and you went over to Brooklyn, singing along the way ♩♫ Allons à Brooklyn pêcher la sardine, Allons à Manhattan manger la banane ♫♩

  The Brooklyn years, a whole chapter. Brooklyn was a wasteland. You ate lunch at an awful pizzeria two blocks away. But finally, you could think big, make spiders under which you could feel so small, so protected. And cells, like rooms, with their carefully kept secrets. The parents’ bedroom, red. Jerry found a salvage shop that supplied you with doors, windows, wainscoting from old buildings being renovated.

  *

  Spiders, spiders, you never tired of remaking them, bigger and bigger. More immoderately maternal.

  A note from the book:

  Some web-building spiders keep to the edges of their works; they’re better hidden there, even though they may at times be rather far from their prey. Other species, on the other hand, camp out right in the middle. They may be in more danger of being preyed upon themselves, but at least they’re close to
the groceries when they arrive.

  Some species of Theridion and Tetragnatha perch in the center of their webs, but shrewdly hidden beneath a leaf or blade of grass, which they anchor to the web by a thread, so that their clever camouflage isn’t carried off by the wind.

  *

  Then one day I thought, you can always carve wood, mold clay, or polish marble better than anyone, but what good is it if you don’t tell your own story? Lovely sculptures, gratuitous, idiotic, vain, and useless if they don’t say what you have to say. Just ridiculous pretensions in marble and bronze with their angles and curves sparkling in the light. Your story. Big story, small story, whether it captures everyone or only a few, how can you hope to interest anyone in your obsessive carving and polishing and molding if it doesn’t tell a story that’s your own?

  But be careful. Your story is not the one they’ve told you, the one they wanted to make you believe. We’re all stories, layers of stories, the interwoven stories of others, of parents, of elders. They see themselves in what they tell you, thanks to the enormously devastating good faith of those who pride themselves on having been there. We are what others say we are. Our name accumulates little by little from shards of being.

  For it turns out that it’s children, or children who’ve become adults while nonetheless remaining obstinately exactly who they were, who make all the trouble. They contradict; they deny. Who allowed you to speak in my name? And to make it all up? Because it certainly didn’t happen the way you say it did. So they get down to the task of telling it their way. They conflate imagination and memory to come up with their version of the facts. We didn’t live the same thing. The story you’re telling, I know it, but only because I’ve heard it before, way too often, and I know it too well, but it’s not mine, it’s not my story. You have to be absolutely precise — or say nothing at all. You can never be too precise. And yet we let ourselves be satisfied with vague generalities and peremptory assertions. Replay the major scene; get on top of it. Take your life into your own hands. Your past belongs to you. Explode the ambient discourse; spit in their soup, which was already pretty murky. Weave your monologue, my dear — that’s what I told myself.

  *

  Humanity is divided between obsessives and hysterics, or so Father said, drawing on his cigar with a penetrating air. As you will have noticed, he was strongly inclined toward definitive opinions on everything and nothing, and, of course, exempting himself from the rules that he applied to everyone else. A bon vivant, a self-confident, phlegmatic boaster, little given to melancholy. The epitome of the normal male. Perhaps what he meant to say was that pathological humanity is divided between the obsessional and the hysterical, while he was the very picture of sanity.

  You, you fell on the obsessional side. You obsessively collected the myriad facets of hysteria; hysteria fascinated you. You couldn’t get enough of the literature on the subject; you loved observing its effects, uncovering its tracks. In yourself as well as in others.

  The ancients believed that a uterus that doesn’t get what it wants heats up and begins pacing the woman’s body like a caged animal, oppressing the other organs one by one, giving rise to hot flashes, sudden sweats, heart palpitations, a knotted throat, dry mouth, and spasms whose sole origin is the internal uproar of a starved organ. They tried to coax the disturbed thing back into its proper place with various tempting scents. They laid the sick woman on sheets dampened with myrrh. They tried to get the aromatic emanations to penetrate between her legs. A phallic object was placed on perfumed charcoal, whose vapors were supposed to work their way into the vulva of the patient. The impatient patient . . .

  In a seizure, the body becomes a sculpture, the eyes popping out, the wrists twisted outward, the ankles angling in, a statue of excruciating pain.

  I went to the museum of molds at the Salpêtrière, all sculptures from life, a wrist, a leg, a torso without a head, the exemplary cramp, or the entire arc, a body caught in complete seizure, a frozen moment of utter contortion.

  I wonder if she’s happy. Do you know what I mean? I wonder if she’s coming. In the seizure. If the ghost lover makes her come. If she’s ecstatic. Ecstasy.

  In cases of mystical ecstasy, it’s quite clear, and throughout the centuries, painters and sculptors have given themselves over entirely to the task of depicting it: Mary Magdalene with her head thrown back; Agatha, her breasts held out on a plate; Theresa, twisted into an arc of tortured marble; Caravaggio, Bernini, Lequeu. “We too, we will be mothers,” she said, unveiling the enormously rounded breasts beneath her veil. They pass in a cortège, the exalted, the hallucinatory, the languishing, the stigmatized, the beatified, the swooning, the sobbing, the agonized, the possessed, the dead for the love of God the Father, the brides of Christ-touch-me-not, they’re all coming, there’s no doubt about it — but from what? God only knows. Divine wisdom, wearing their hearts on their sleeves, life in the folds, and surplices with tears of milk.

  But then suddenly, in the nineteenth century, everything changed. No more lascivious saints. The great figure of religious sightings was no longer Jesus, the mystical spouse. He was supplanted by his mother, so good and so firm, a figure of remonstration, inspiring an ambient catechism, appearing to no one but uneducated children in caves and grottoes far from the incredulous crowds. In her queenly blue robe, the Good Mother takes over; the middle class becomes obsessed with family; faith enters a second childhood, and Lisieux and Sacré-Cœur are left to expiate the crimes of the Commune. Thiers, MacMahon, Pétain, Laval — it’s a line of direct descent. Basilicas of lard in the shop windows of Normandy butchers while they lock up the innumerable ecstatics in the Salpêtrière like Charles X’s giraffe in the Jardin des Plantes across the street. At times, they got rid of them en masse like one might condemn an entire city block. Soon Science banded together with Photography, and moral pain was recorded in anthropometric files. Bertillon, Lombroso, et al. But all that means nothing as long as she’s in ecstasy.

  Questions. These are the questions you sculpt in wood, in iron, in marble. That’s what counts.

  Is she ecstatic with her body arched over backwards? You’d love to know. It’s a healthy question. The orgasm as an arc . . . eyes popping out, pupils dilated, they speak of the wild eyes, the buttocks tensed, the pubis raised, offered, a drooling mouth. Mimicking the lack of love. There is no more love, she says. There was never enough love. But is she ecstatic in her spasm? That’s what you’d like to know. Is her joy flowing? Precious liquid. There is no love, only the proof of it, says the other. OK, so prove it! Show your cards!

  Long ago, you stopped waiting for a response. Lack, too, can be sublimated. And as long as we’re at it . . .

  *

  What makes you sick:

  The music from The Skaters on the radio

  The scent of lilies

  Anatole France

  Switzerland

  Winter sports.

  What makes you rejoice:

  Fire. You could burn up even your own sculptures for the pleasure of watching the flames devouring them. Leaving nothing but ash, space, and silence. Happiness.

  *

  And whose hand is that coming out of the marble? Rising to make a sign. Of what person drowning in the ocean? Happy? In indifference, an ocean of stone. The indifference of marble. He’s made of marble; that’s what we say in French, while here it’s “poker face.” Dumb as a fish, deaf as a post. You like canned expressions. For ages, the world showed you a poker face. And then, little by little, you warmed up its marble by asking inconvenient questions. Do you hear the bells? It’s Easter. You hunted Easter eggs that your grandmother had hidden in the garden. Not chocolate eggs, but real chicken eggs that she’d boiled and decorated with a paintbrush. We didn’t dare eat them because we didn’t want to break their beautiful, colorful shells. The bells ring in your head, the bells of childhood. No, it’s Tchaikovsky, the 1812 Overture, on the radio, the bells of Moscow celebrating the French disaster against
the background of an out-of-tune Marseillaise. Poker-faced in regard to me. Very little, if not to say, nothing. No regard. Without the least regard — that would be closer to the truth. Only the regard of those that you had yourself conquered, obligated. No regard. Unguarded. Don’t drop the ball, my dear!

  *

  So, ecstatic? Allow us to doubt. But doubt profits the accused. Jerry, who had given you everything of himself, also lent you his body for a mold. Life-size, arching over, his long, androgynous body. You cut off the head and patched up a few details. You don’t have to tell all. It only incites gossip. An aluminum cast was made from the plaster. You spent hours sanding the plaster with finer and finer sandpaper. It had to be exquisitely smooth. Perfection masks feelings. The confusion of feelings. The aluminum would be so highly polished that you could see yourself in it. A mirror. It’s there that the conversation begins. The sculpture is larger and therefore enlarges the reflections. The viewer is a part of it. It’s theater. It all gets mixed together. The mirror of illusions. But wait — this again? Yeah, I cut his head off — so what? Can’t I do what I want? It’s my sculpture. They’re just amazing! They pay no attention — none — you who pass and don’t even see me — and yet they stop to say: You can’t do that! You can’t cut people’s heads off — heads are not made to be cut off. Why not!? If I want my arching hysteric to be universal, I simply have to chop off Jerry’s head. And besides, it’s the law: All Holoferneses will have their heads cut off. It’s the law, and the law cannot be transgressed.