The Whiteness of Bones

by Susanna Moore

  “I’m not like you, if that’s what you want to know. I don’t walk around in some flora-and-fauna hallucination with tears in my eyes.”

  Mamie looked down at the envelope in her hand.

  “I do have a few, very specific things I sometimes think about,” Claire said quickly. She paused. “Not too often, though. Sometimes.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the taste of a Duane’s Ono-Burger. Or the time we were caught on the Hanakapiai cliff trail during that storm and it took us four hours to crawl a half-mile in the mud on our hands and knees.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Mamie said, frowning.

  “Mamie!”

  “Just teasing. Just teasing.” Her voice was full of melancholy, and even sorrow, not for the constant island in her heart, but for her sister. It had nothing to do with islands. Claire, who was in the kitchen making two new drinks, did not see the regret in Mamie’s face, nor hear it in her voice, and even if she had, it would not have made any difference.

  The morning that Mamie was to go to Chicago to do the first show of Mr. Felix’s collection, she was awakened by the telephone. The telephone was in Claire’s bedroom. The ringing went on for so long that Mamie, even in her sleep, realized that it must be an important call.

  Claire’s room was such a tribute to the vernacular, filled with tequila bottles and empty tins of Almond Roca and packets of vitamins and filaments of dental floss and jars of pink Dippity-do and disposable douche containers, that Mamie could not make out at first if Claire was in her bed. She had not made the bed for the eight weeks they’d lived there.

  It was Alysse on the telephone.

  “Where were you?” Alysse asked irritably.

  “I’m going to Chicago,” Mamie said.

  “I want you to take that gown back to Felix. It’s too big. You’d think he’d remember how big around I am. That’s the only thing I remember my mother ever saying, ‘Big feet; small foundation.’ ”

  “I thought your feet were small.” Mamie yawned. Claire was not in the bed. She looked around the room in admiration and amazement. There was a small dead animal in the corner.

  “How’s Alder Stoddard?”

  “Limp, I can wrap him around my neck.”

  “What?”

  “He’s fine.” The animal in the corner trembled. Perhaps it’s not dead, Mamie thought. She waited for it to move again, but it was still. She wondered if Claire had had Jimmy exhumed and sent to her.

  “She left him, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Baby.”

  “Oh. Baby. Yes, I did know.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Yes,” Mamie lied. She yawned again loudly. “Excuse me, I was asleep when you called.”

  “She told him he could have all the girls he wanted, she didn’t care about that. He was just so boring. Always reading the newspaper.”

  “That is tiresome,” Mamie said.

  Alysse did not say anything. Mamie closed her eyes tightly and willed herself not to speak.

  Alysse said, “His mother, Laura Lee Shannon (she was older than me, of course, but she was crazy about me), had her face scraped and peeled the same time as me, and she invited me to The Grove, old Mrs. Lee’s house in Connecticut, to recover. On the way out of town, we saw an ice cream store on First Avenue and we made that good-looking black chauffeur stop the car. He didn’t want to. We were so hot under all the gauze. He wouldn’t get out, so we jumped out and bought ice cream sodas to sip through the bandages. Speaking of bandages, I’m just on my way to the hospital to see Dodo. She finally had her baby. Born without a stomach or a lung or something, but she still gets the money.”

  “I’ve been thinking about Dodo,” said Mamie. “She used to do these shows for Felix, didn’t she?”

  “He was crazy about her. Fucked her during the first fitting. ”

  “You said once that Dodo didn’t get where she was just on her looks.”

  “Did I?”

  “And I’ve been wondering what it was then, what it was that got Dodo where she is—?” Mamie really had been wondering about this. “And where is she exactly?”

  “Oh, didn’t you know?”

  “No, I don’t know anything.”

  “She was the last girl with that congressman, you know, Congressman Guardini, the night he was assassinated.”

  I really don’t know anything, Mamie thought; I wasn’t kidding.

  “Give ‘Feel’ my love,” Alysse said. “You can pick up the dress when you get back.”

  “Yes,” said Mamie and she put the phone down between a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips and an open jar of petroleum jelly. Under the jar was a linen dinner napkin with the name of the former Secretary of State and his office telephone number (he was married) written on it in lipstick.

  Mamie went to the corner where the animal lay huddled. She touched it timidly with her bare toe. When it did not stir, frightened and curled in its tense, defensive coil, she bent down and cautiously picked it up. It was a brown fur brassiere. It looked like something a buxom cave-woman might wear in a movie. It was clumsily made, possibly of mouse or shrew fur. It made Mamie laugh. She threw it on the flea market that had once been Vivi and Whit Crawford’s prized eighteenth-century marriage bed, and went to Chicago.

  Thanks to Bones Washburn, Mamie was not altogether unprepared for the splendor of the hotel suite that Felix Villanueve had reserved for her in Chicago. Perhaps she thought all good hotel rooms looked that way. It was not done in the very special style of Mrs. Washburn, who was given to elephant tusks and antelope-hoofed chairs, but it was padded and swathed, from floor to ceiling, in pale yellow silk. The white furniture, in the style of Louis XV, was covered in yellow-and-white striped silk and the big, raised bed was draped in swags of yellow silk. There were silver baskets of grapes and a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket in the sitting room. Next to the bed was a bowl of gardenias. There was also a note from Mr. Felix. He hoped that Mamie would be able to dine with him that evening.

  He was early. She had just stepped out of the bath and put on her old blue-and-white cotton yukata to open the door and he smiled when he saw her, barefoot, in the elegant room, in the girlhood kimono that was too small for her.

  She said that she would dress quickly, but he told her not to—he had just ordered dinner for her. She must be in bed early in order to look beautiful the next day. Did she mind if he sat with her and nibbled a little something? When she wondered where Jacline, the other model, might be, Felix explained that he had changed his mind at the last minute. He only needed Mamie.

  He looked around the room. “You haven’t opened your champagne.” He peeked into the lovely bedroom. In the closed room, the smell of the gardenias was very strong. He opened the champagne and brought her a glass. He sat down on the striped silk sofa and patted the seat next to him.

  “Are you sure I shouldn’t change? I’d really rather change.”

  “My dear,” he said. “It is so unnecessary.”

  The room service waiter arrived to prepare the table. Felix had ordered with care: a vegetable consommé, a small, neat piece of grilled fish and a timbale of carrot and turnip—all for Mamie’s good nutrition. He asked for another bottle of champagne. The waiter treated them with knowing deference. He never spoke and never looked at them and it was clear from the satisfied precision with which he set the table that he was delighted by his own tact.

  “There is a wonderful exhibit at the museum here. Late Picasso. I should like very much to take you. Perhaps after the morning show. I must lunch with Mrs. Green mañana, I do it every year, it is particularly, particularly dull, but she buys the entire collection and they tell me I must give her lunch.”

  He chatted on amiably, alertly filling the champagne glasses, making Mamie smile with his deliberately awkward American slang, taking his time with her, attentive and polite.

  “I should like, I should like very much,” he said, holding up his glas
s to her, “if I could think of this as the beginning of our special friendship.”

  Mamie lifted her glass and blushed.

  “In all my years of admiring beautiful women, you are the first I have spoken to like this. I will train you. I will groom you, guide your every step, dress you.”

  Mamie did not say anything. She did not want him to dress her. Or guide her every step. She was uncomfortable sitting there in the splendid room, with Mr. Felix watching her every gesture with shrewd, exultant eyes. He daintily wiped the wet corners of his mouth with his fingers.

  “You must put yourself in my care. You must do everything I say. For example, my dear, you must finish your vegetables.”

  She picked up her fork. She was not very hungry. She did not know if he was teasing her. His talk about Marbella and backgammon and the pretender to the throne of Spain and the firmness of Mamie’s skin was both fatherly and effeminate, and it confused her. She had no experience of a father, so she was not to be blamed for mistaking his interest in her as kindness. Alder, who would never have spoken to Mamie in this falsely intimate way, was, to Mamie, a mature man, while Felix was a bewildering combination of girlfriend and uncle.

  “No pudding, of course,” Felix said, smiling and pushing his chair back from the table. “We must get you into bed early-early.”

  Mamie wanted dessert. She wanted an espresso, but she was paralyzed by her discomfort and embarrassment. She wanted to ask him to leave, but she did not know how to do it. She stayed at the table. She finished her glass of champagne. She had drunk a little too much, out of nervousness and a wish to seem sophisticated.

  “Put on your nightdress and get into your pretty bed and I will tuck you in with my blessing.”

  He sat in one of the small chairs and picked up the book she had brought with her, The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, a present from Alder, and calmly looked at the illustrations. “I warned you, after all, that if you want to become the great beauty I promise you can, and will, become, you must do as I say, my dear.”

  She had the uneasy feeling that he was presuming on her inexperience and taking advantage of both her helplessness as a woman and her dependence as his model. She had always suspected that the mistake of feminism was its refusal to admit the superior, undeniably superior, strength of men—not economic or political strength, that was another thing altogether—but the simple fact that at any moment, Felix, for all of his idle, silly talk about princes and princesses, could lay Alder’s Delacroix book on the little French table, reach over and snap her narrow wrist in two.

  She went into the bathroom and locked the door. She brushed her teeth and washed her face and hands and changed into her modest cotton nightdress that buttoned to the neck. She came out of the bathroom and waited by the side of the bed as Felix deftly stood the French bolsters on end in the corner, and folded the heavy quilted silk bedspread at the foot of the bed, and pulled down the blanket and top sheet.

  She climbed into bed. He sat on the edge of the bed. She was unable to pull the blanket up over herself because he was sitting on it. She held her hands on her chest, as if she were saying her prayers.

  “Goodnight,” she said. “Thank you for the gardenias.” Their night smell was dizzyingly sweet.

  “May I give you a goodnight kiss?”

  Before she could answer, he took her by the shoulders and held her back against the pillows. Without her ever knowing how he did it, it was done so smoothly and quickly, he lay on top of her, stretched toe to toe, hip to hip and mouth to mouth, fitting her perfectly. He had no time to remove his Italian driving shoes and they rubbed against Mamie’s bare feet.

  She pulled her hands out from under him and grabbed him by the shoulders to push him away. He rubbed against her, eyes closed, moaning softly. He had unzipped his trousers. His movement, up and down, caused her nightdress to raise up around her hips. He pushed the small, wet tip of his penis up and down, through her pubic hair, as if he were fruitlessly plowing a furrow, over and over. It had happened so easily, his pressing himself on top of her, his assumption and his arousal, that it was as if Mamie were not there. He did not even look at her.

  He came on her stomach. She looked down at him. He was panting. His eyes were still closed. He rolled over onto the bed, one leg still across her, and she saw his semen on her stomach. She had never seen it on her own body before. It ran into her navel and slid down her side. She lifted her arms high in the air as if she disdained even touching him with her hands, disdained touching herself.

  He reached over and grunted as he stretched to turn out the lamp on the bedside table. She listened in the dark as he lifted his leg from her and, tucking in his tight silk shirt, went into the sitting room to find his suit jacket.

  He let himself out.

  She left her beautiful rooms without ever unpacking her bag. She left the cotton nightdress on the marble floor of the bathroom and she left a note for Mr. Felix.

  She was at the airport too early. She sat in an orange molded-plastic chair that was bolted to the floor. Too distracted to read, she waited quietly as the airport filled up around her. She went over each meeting with Felix, from the happy day when he had saved her from Miss Magda and Selena to the last view she had of him from the bed, silhouetted in the yellow light of the sitting room as he wiggled his polka-dot tie up under his chin to make a knot. There was no knowing whom he might meet in the hall.

  All that she could see, as she went over it again and again, were warnings and hints. She especially questioned her presumption, given Felix’s reputation, that she would be the exception; that because she was an island girl, Felix would treat her differently.

  On the plane, in the first class seat that Felix had bought for her, grateful to have a round-trip ticket, she was calmer and more logical. Her habitual fair-mindedness was bound to lead her eventually to Felix himself and, somewhere over Ohio, she finally caught up with him. Felix, who had not behaved in any way untrue to himself, would be rather surprised, and certainly inconvenienced, by Mamie’s note (in which she simply wrote that she was returning to New York). She knew that he would be disgusted by her inability to understand that the world worked in a certain practical, self-serving way and that, as far as these things went, she was fortunate to have caught his attention. Many girls considered themselves very lucky to have been discovered by Felix Villanueve, girls who went on to become famous, including a girl from Wisconsin who was eventually beaten to death by her pimp and a girl from Finland who married the Duke of Savoy’s cousin. Mamie knew all of this. She knew that she might have had a far more dangerous mentor than Mr. Felix, and because she was not without ambition, she knew, too, that she might have had a more vulgar Mr. Felix. She did not want to sell underpants at Deardorf’s. She understood that her Mr. Felix was at least marked with a little glamour and prestige. She might have been rescued by the Mr. Felix of frozen fish. It happened all the time. Mamie knew that there were girls in Des Moines, at that very moment, on business trips with their employers, being rubbed up against at machine-parts conventions. She did not see herself as a special victim.

  She was ashamed of her naïveté, and she was ashamed of her physical helplessness. It was not that she couldn’t have tumbled him onto the floor, or poked his eyes with her fingers or bitten him—it was that she had not. It is true that there would have been the risk of being hurt had she injured him, or even embarrassed him, but she had not even tried to defend herself. Worse, she had not even asked him to leave her room.

  She did not understand that her silence had come from a falsely guilty sense of her own complicity, and from a confused wish to be liked by him, to hold onto his admiration and, most compromising of all, to hold onto her job. What worried her was that she had allowed herself to be caught beneath the writhing, heaving man because it had been easier than asking him to leave.

  That a woman might be wise enough to say just what it was that she wanted, and at the same time protect her own body from harm; that she might spare the
feelings of the man, so that if he were denied or rejected, the humiliation would not cause him to hate her or do violence to her, was an idea that only came to Mamie later. She was too young.

  It must be said, too, that, for the first time, Mamie had come up against the powerful force of sexual impulse. Felix had been in a masturbatory trance, his mind and body unified and drawn forward by one thing only, sexual gratification, and it would have been very difficult to stop him from having what he not only wanted, but what he assumed was his right. Mamie, in her humility and shame, suspected that once she had allowed him to get to that stage of willful delirium, she had relinquished her ability, if not her right, to insist that he turn back.

  It would have been impossible for Mamie to have behaved otherwise, but all through her journey, and in the taxi into Manhattan, as she worried if she’d have enough money to pay the talkative driver, and up in the slow elevator, and into the quiet safety of her own dusty bedroom, she was unable to forgive herself.

  After taking another shower, she put on a record of Marlene Sai singing “Nanakuli.” It was very like Mamie to find solace in the Hawaiian music.

  She telephoned Alder in the country. He was very surprised that she had returned so soon and she said that Felix had decided to use only one model, after all. She did not tell him what had happened in the hotel room.

  He hoped that she was not too disappointed. Oh, not at all, she said. She was drying her hair with a towel, as if doing many things at once—rubbing, talking, keeping time with her foot to the fast hula—would scramble her thoughts, like jamming an enemy’s radio waves. He invited her to the farm. She was pleased to be asked. He’d be there in three hours.

  “I’ll take you to the Barnes,” he said.

  “I like cows.”

  “No, baby, not cows. Pictures. Pictures of cows.”

  “I like those, too,” she said.

  She made herself one of Claire’s Morning Mai Tais, which had more rum in it than juice. She played the Marlene Sai record again and sat back on the wine-stained sofa and listened to the lovely voice sing, “Oh, the Boston girls will love you for your money, singing Honolulu hula hula heigh, but the Honolulu girls will be your honey, Honolulu hula hula heigh.”