The old man spoke.
“He asks, if still you wish to view the silk rooms.”
Wearily, warily, Harlan tucked his head and smiled.
———
It was a huge room, cellar-dark. Each length of silk lay loosely wound between fat lacquer poles in horizontal racks so no crease formed. As Harlan and the old man passed, the girl put out one lamp, switched on the next, over colors and colors, like the exotic moth collection of some grand museum.
There’s nothing at all like what we want. They know it, I know it, Harlan knows it.
Harlan missed his calling; Harlan was cut out to be a Southern Senator. He’s on his second wind now, rapping on in that exquisite, intolerant little voice about the French silk industry’s decline since the war, about the annual fabric collections at IdeoComo, about sportsmen’s thermal underwear, and antique parachutes, and Papal vestments—
I wandered away.
Closed doors are a challenge. The first I opened was a janitor’s closet: concrete sink, mops, buckets. The second was a toilet.
The third was pay dirt.
Chinese carpets rose toward the dark center of the room in heaped-up, layered luxury like a dragon’s horde. Around the walls stood tall cabinets, wardrobes of the sort you climb through into Narnia. All the light came in the door, one dim shaft with my head in the middle of it, picking out a cabinet on the far wall. Gleams of colored lacquer and moon-pale carved stone.
I tiptoed up across the rugs; it wasn’t locked.
Fright of a lifetime. I didn’t quite run screaming. Somebody in there: a mannequin in gold brocade court robes and headdress, escapee from Chinese Narnia. Faint cold sweetness flooded out, like Harlan’s perfume only far older, more forbidding. I shut the door on it.
Most of the cabinets were dead dark. But the first on the right—was visible enough—to make out three fat poles of horizontal fabric. The top one, black as Harlan’s hair, melted into shadow. The bottom one was red as Tom’s, no shadow disguised that. I drew an end of the middle stuff out to the light; white raw silk, rough and plain.
Something fell back glittering underneath.
———
First, they said there was no other room. Then, that it was all antiquities, no silk. Then they said the antique silks were for museums, not for wearing; fourth (of course) there was no white; fifth, it wasn’t what we wanted. Sixth, she led us in, switching on the crystal chandeliers.
Two white fabrics housed in that cabinet, on a single pole with the raw silk outside, like a peasant handmaid set to guard a royal mistress with her body and her life.
“This is death silk for an Emperor’s concubine.”
Harlan’s face was a classic study.
“But surely—the last ruler of China was a woman?”
The old man spoke.
“He says, the gentleman is well read. Tzu Hsi, the great Empress Dowager died in 1909, but the last of the Emperors is Henry Pu Yi, who lived yet but few years in the People’s Republic. He lived yet, 1927, in the Forbidden City when treasure houses were burned by palace eunuch who wished to conceal crimes; many many treasures stolen and sold over the world, many sold here.”
“Ah.”
I elbowed him.
“Plausible,” he murmured. “I’ve worn older silks than that, and this piece appears never to have been cut, or even left in the light.”
A buzzer brought silent men, who unrolled it on a table in the silk room, one piece and perfect. And the pattern, what was that? Some places swirled, nebulous, thick textured; were they clouds? Places were almost sheer, twined with sinewy satin flows, what were those? A river course half hidden in mists? A huge scaly body too vast to comprehend? But in between it all, an emblem shone recurrent, like a great sign in the heavens. “What does that say?”
“The Dragon’s blessing, it means ‘Ten Thousand Years.’”
“How much?” said Harlan.
“Ten thousand.”
“No. What is the price?”
The old man spoke.
“He says, is not what you wish. Is for the dead.”
“But is for sale?” Harlan persisted.
“It is three hundred dollars for the yard; thirty yard; he does not cut.”
“That’s nine thousand dollars?”
The old man spoke.
“Plus tax,” said the girl, smiling.
“Will you accept my check?”
I saw it for sure this time, the glitter of satisfaction flash across behind the old black silk eyes. But the girl still translated. He replied. She said, “Cash.”
Chapter 6
The way out was not the way in. Godzilla had booted more boltholes than one. We waited quietly in a door with no number, until a black Mercedes spun into our alley, tires squealing. I saw the girl interpreter was driving.
The merchant was in back, swathed in a great coat, black cashmere to his shoes. Harlan got in beside him. I perched on the jump seat. The bundle of silk lay in my lap, warm and heavy as a sleeping child, tied with its raw silk companion in rice paper and scarlet cords. An end stayed open to show it was the same stuff; they had tied that last of all.
We parked at a yellow curb in front of Barclay’s Bank, while Harlan sprinted in. I sat facing How Sam Wah. Take my eye off that one for an instant, he and his silk might vanish in a thunderclap. Maybe it was faery treasure anyway, and fell to ashes in the morning.
No cops in sight. Glad of that, somehow. I get to watch Harlan count ten banded packs of ten one-hundred-dollar-bills, meticulously, from his big Italian shoulder bag into a nearly identical one belonging to the girl. Now we’re out on the curb.
“Could you recommend a local designer competent to work such silk?”
The old man drew a black address book from his breast, consulted it. The girl produced writing materials. His little book was all Chinese. But her note read (in English) “Seven Blows” and an address on Liberty Street. The black Mercedes and its occupants disappeared, not into thin air, into traffic.
The cabbie Harlan flagged knew Liberty Street, but it was map study time for me. By now he’d dodged and cornered onto Market, headed west. Our quest was turning into a cosmic scavenger hunt. Hustling south now on Valencia, I located Liberty. Its coordinates were—it was a cross between—Oh crud. No use trying to hoodwink Harlan; he had laser eyes.
“Is that too close to Castro for you?”
He said, “I’ll let you know.”
———
Imagine a narrow old Victorian, wooden second story on a stucco storefront; and between the two, reading right across in brass letters on a red lacquer panel, “Seven at a Blow.” Around the words perch big (about a foot long), brass, 3-D houseflies. Seven of ’em. The window, done up in P.T. Barnum lettering said, “Tim the Tailor.”
The coin dropped. “The Brave Little Tailor!”
“So it seems.”
A phalanx of striped sword plants stood guard inside the window, then there was a bench, a red tile floor, and a counter. The door jangled a bell in back.
Noises. Chair scraping.
Through an archway lay an airy workshop, sewing machine, cutting and pressing table, neatly cluttered tools of a tailor’s trade. But what rounded that archway looked less like a Castro Street tailor than Harlan did; he looked like Sinbad the Sailor. Barrel-chested, not tall but wide, he moved with the rolling swing of a storybook sailor, and wore old Sinbad’s big gold earrings. I guessed he was Hispanic or Mediterranean of some kind, and he wasn’t very young. Either one was hard to tell: he was the most exquisitely made-up person I have ever seen, so well done it was almost natural: shadowed, lined, and glossed into an icon of male vitality and Technicolor health. His hair (dark I imagined, but it might have been gray) was frosted gold.
Harlan’s recovery was flawless: “How brave are you?”
The man looked him over, intelligently, impudently, took in his last detail, finally leaning forward on the countertop to check his feet. When he straightened
up again he said, “What did you have in mind?”
“We need a first-rate designer to copy her frock, or extrapolate from it—but full length, and in silk.”
Tim the Tailor evaluated my five-dollar Esprit mini: the same unhurried once-over he’d given Harlan. “Why?”
“For a wedding.”
“Yours?”
“Hers.”
“But not to you?”
“To my partner.”
I rested my silk load on the counter. A blue and white bowl beside the cash register held a pile of glossy ovoids, mottled appetizing shades of brown. Now I knew what those were, they were Chinese —
“Tea eggs,” said the tailor. “Have one.”
Harlan had one. I wasn’t sure he’d meant me, but I had one. Tim the Tailor had one. “You remind me,” he said, waving his at Harlan, who had handkerchiefed his hands and started to work on the knots of the silk package, “of the rich Arabs in Paris.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Prince Ibn Hobnobbi views all the collections, see, and smiles ‘How excellent, how fine,’ and I buy forty of this fashion in different color; but: you must make the few small changes: the hem must be to here—’ (pointing at the floor), ‘and the sleeve to here—’ (just below his wrist watch).” It was an LCD calculator job, Grand Prix race car game and all, on a gladiator-width black leather band. With studs.)
“I am Arabic,” said Harlan, softly satisfied. He helped himself to another tea egg.
That stopped Tim the Tailor dead, in sassy open-mouthed appraisal. “Well I hope you’re not offended—”
“No. Oh, no.”
“—They also want the necklines up to here—” pointing to his throat. His shirt was open to show off four gold chains nestling in the chest hair, a high school class ring worn like a charm on each.
“I’m not that Arabic.”
“But they’re ruining Paris: like rich Texans in a way; the finest houses for leather in the world are in Paris: so what do they show this year? Elegant, exquisite jackets with a goddamn fist and falcon hand-painted on the backs.”
Harlan flicked the last memento of tea egg from his fingers and unrolled the contents of our package. Tim the Tailor blanched, gazing from the shimmer of silk to the shimmer of Harlan in honest, unconcealed awe.
“How Sam Wah.”
“Quite well,” nodded Harlan primly. “And you?”
“No. You got around How Sam Wah: do you mind if I—”
“Not at all. As—I believe it was Samuel Pepys—once remarked: ‘Pretty thing, what money will do.’”
“I once offered that old—well, everything I could think of: money, drugs, rare erotic manuscripts—for that length of silk—”
“Perhaps he didn’t understand your language.”
“His English is as good as yours. He runs Sam’s Video out on Taraval. That’s his legitimate business, at least. He did the whole show for you? With the interpreter and—”
“Exquisite interpreter. Exquisitely fractured diction.”
“Number one daughter. She’s a psych major at Cal.”
“Why did you want it?” asked Harlan suddenly.
“I imagined I had the proper use. The proper use since moved back to New Jersey. That’s neither here nor there.”
Harlan’s murmur was pure reverence: “White silk pajamas, white silk dressing gown, white silk—”
“Oh you are a live one, aren’t you?”
“You don’t know who I am?”
“The lost Dauphin?”
Harlan snickered.
“The Twelfth Imam?”
I’d been peering up at the wall above the front door. A small, dark object hung there under glass. Curiosity triumphed. I climbed Tim’s waiting bench. Then I could see what it was. I hopped down and went out onto the sidewalk, out in the gathering evening. The conversation didn’t seem to require me. I felt an embarrassing advent of tears.
All down Liberty street, as it dropped east toward the Mission, I could make out those AIDS posters wreathing lamp post and telephone poles: festive, red-white-and-black. Half the ones out here were English, the rest Spanish. Defiant jaunty mourning bands. People were strolling the warm twilight. Guys, mostly. Lights were coming on. I saw Saint Francis’s city, gearing up to glitter.
Oh, he doth hang upon the cheek of night,
like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—
Come on now, this won’t do. Breathe deep. Smell the salt air and the eucalyptus. Do some stretches. Slight pain in the gut still. Go inside past the jangling bell. Tim and Harlan have taken the silk in back; Harlan’s given Tim his card, and is digging VHS cassettes out of that bottomless shoulder bag.
Tim’s on the phone. “Richard. Me. Go downstairs—Well, tell him to stop. All right, so give the phone to Cody. (pause) Cody? Yeah. Okay. Go downstairs. (pause) Go into my room—my room. You there? Okay—”
“Long cord,” I whispered to Harlan.
He whispered back, “Cordless.”
“Look on my dresser. The blue glass—Yes. Run them over to the shop, would you, son? Well, tell Danny to hold dinner, or I don’t care how legendary he makes it, we won’t be there.” Then, apologetically to Harlan, “Just a block or two.”
Sure enough, in no time, a blond black-leather boy undulated past the front window with the stomping over-long stride peculiar to skinny young guys in motorcycle boots.
The blue glass was an old-time covered icebox dish. It was full to the top with pearls. And what pearls. Lumpy blue, bulgy silver, warty gold, long and narrow rose pink, not a one was white or round.
“Flawed pearls. My friend collected them. Now of course, they’re styled ‘Baroque’ and they’re not to be had, but then nobody wanted them. He’d been all over the Orient.
“He sold everything else, but not these. He spent the last months, while he still had use of his hands, drilling them. There’s another safety deposit full. I was left to find them a good home.”
I scrambled past Cody in a hurry, on my way back to the street. Cody was small and smooth and pretty, a little older Calvin minus Hobbes, trying so hard to look scary in his leathers, one ear bristling with silver death’s heads, axes, crucifixes. I fought off a dreadful urge to hug him, and stopped short of the front door, embarrassed to make another big bell racket going out. Harlan was saying, “Can you recommend a shop for vintage clothing?”
“How vintage?”
“’Thirties. ’Forties.”
“God, the vintage people do their buying in the thrift shops and flea markets. I had a friend in the trade, he’d take me buying sometimes. He had a list—Cody, dear, in the file cabinet, would you, under ‘Charlie’s Trap Lines.’ See? Pages of it. All ye need know. Addresses and what’s hot at each. A vintage buyer’s itinerary for the Bay Area—days of the weekly half-offs and the monthly flea markets—Charlie was organized. Little out of date, I’m afraid. We do seem to have an embarrassment of dead men’s riches—” That put me out the door, bell or no bell.
I was born in 1968. I suppose I must have bought the ’70s moonage daydream, and in some way, I still do.
If all the “holy” I know about comes from desert saints and Latin chant, all the “City” I know is San Francisco: not Rome, not Constantinople, not even Jerusalem. I am a citizen, a high-visibility member of that Babylonian merchants’ and sailors’ guild who stood afar, heaping ashes on their heads and weeping, when none were left alive to traffic in their wonderful stuff.
Alas, alas, that great city!
And the merchandise of gold and silver and precious stones and of pearls and fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet—
And cinnamon and odors and ointments and frankincense and wine and oil and fine flour and wheat and beasts and sheep and horses and chariots and slaves, and the souls of men—
And the voice of harpers and musicians and of pipers and trumpeters shall be heard no more at all in thee, and no craftsman of whatsoever craft he be shall be found anymore in thee—
>
And the light of the candle shall shine no more in thee and the voice of the bridegroom and the bride shall be heard no more in thee—
Alas, alas, that great city.
I didn’t have that one by heart. Like Rocky Raccoon, I got back to my room and found it in Gideon’s Bible. I just knew where to look, one page before the Holy City New Jerusalem.
Oh God, I’ve got no sense of proportion! I never could keep scripture and nursery rhymes and dumb rock lyrics separate! And the tears are coming, too fast to hold off now. This is the kind of thing I have by heart:
Granfa’ Grigg
Had a pig
In a field of clover.
Piggy died,
And Granfa’ cried,
And all the fun was over.
If I could only wipe away the tears from the eyes and see the working out of that great promise: No more sorrow, no more death, I am making all things new. Not just some things new, the safe respectable things, but all things new.
———
A taxi cruised up Liberty street, to Harlan’s summons, doubtless. I went back through the bell.
“There she is. What’s your size in 501s, dear?”
“Guys’ 28s.” Shock. My own voice.
“Sooper. We’ll need to part you from your dress.” Tim had this shelf full of new black Levis, tags still on, like at the store. He produced a guy’s size small white dress shirt too, and when I exited his changing curtain, traded my dress for a black velvet jacket (Harlan’s, from the scent,) and a silk tie draped around my collar. “Love it.”
There was Harlan, in the velvet pants and weskit, white shirt, open collar, pouting voluptuously at me like the King of the Cats. “So take me out,” he said. “Entertain me.”
He glanced above the door as we went through it, at the small round item under glass. “Something of interest?”
“Don’t be too entertaining,” Tim called after us. “We do expect your bodies in the morning—”
I whispered, “Purple Heart.”
“?”
“War medal. Wounded in battle.”
“His?”
“No name.” Crossing the sidewalk, I said, “You really think that stuff was woven for an Emperor’s concubine?”
White Leather and Flawed Pearls Page 15