The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  On this night, however, she saw more than the dark, and this surprised her. She saw the dull glare of the day’s sun shining through clouds over the empty beach. She saw the terrible gulls flying overhead like instruments of some holy vengeance. She saw the face of the young man, Jean, his blind eyes so gentle with her that she longed even now to be with him, not for the softness of his mouth on hers or for the strength of his hand grasping her weary fingers or for the handsome face over which his golden hair grew like a crown; she wanted only his blind eyes because she felt safe within their depths. His blindness was a world she had come to from much traveling the way someone steps off a train at the wrong station, looks at her ticket, and suddenly realizes that even if she had not known the proper destination, that destination had been waiting for her nonetheless.

  Miss Smith stood by the window for more than an hour. She looked, with dull moonlight casting its shadow across one side of her face, like a member of some holy order that is not recognized by any church. Her perfect immobility was of a kind fanatics of Eastern religions take great humble pride in finally attaining after a lifetime of the most rigid practice.

  But as she turned from the window, this stern quality vanished and she appeared to be no more than a woman who is caught up in a moment’s dreaming after the sewing basket has been misplaced and forgotten.

  She started for the bed, but paused by the dresser, seeing its dim outline. She gazed into the mirror which now was the dark color of the sea. With one hand she lightly touched her cheek, running the tips of her fingers down to the corner of her mouth, pausing there, beginning to smile, then taking her lower lip between her teeth and pressing both hands in against her cheeks in a suddenly desperate gesture, as if to prevent her face from falling apart.

  Slowly then, Miss Smith turned from the dark glass. Mirrors had, over the years, become a part of the darkness as if all life were a single day and with night, even mirrors and tables and chairs and the very sea itself had to become part of the dark.

  Miss Smith removed her dressing gown, placed it over the back of a wooden chair, and then got into bed, slipping in slowly, carefully, between the fresh sheets.

  She did not fall asleep for a long time, but she was used to this. She often lay awake for hours—but not because she couldn’t fall asleep. She did not suffer from insomnia. It was merely that she kept herself awake purposely because this was the only time of day when she permitted her mind to wander freely over the memories that had become part of her, like faded snapshots bought in an antique shop that someone takes home, pastes into a leather album and then proceeds to study those purchased snapshots as if they were the story of his own life.

  Miss Smith could remember glorious days, but even now the very glory of those days frightened, even bewildered her. She could hear her own name being spoken by a thousand different voices. Rooms were filled with cautious eyes and the clatter of glasses. Bright afternoons echoed like cries down a long valley and the dawn’s mist made the shape of her face against the blue hills and old cities and gray rocks worn smooth by the wind.

  There were so many snapshots. Mouths touched lightly, then passionately upon hers. Hands caressed her and she had withstood these caresses the way a statue of marble withstands a dozen centuries to tell us that beauty must be eternal even in worlds that will crumble through still air to become again the beginning of corrupt, insatiable dust.

  Miss Smith let the years pass again before her eyes, and when she was quite sure they were all there, she turned over on her side and let sleep carry her off into still another world that she had always feared.

  chapter 4

  one

  WHITE VEINS of wind whipped off the tops of waves. Close ridges of clouds lay piled against the blue sky like old snow. The sand had the clean look of something perfect. Morning rose up out of the gray waves as creatures did from ancient seas and settled on the bleak land, a cold light without mercy for mountains broken down to sand, for rock being worn away by each moment of the wind, even for wind itself that dies as death must die with each bit of life it steals out of the light.

  The sea came crashing down a gray color on the white land, its strength seeming useless only for all that of Time we never understand. Waves flowed in long dancing lines across distances that make a continent no more than the palm of any man’s hand. And come this long way, they fell out finally upon the sands to wash a crab back into the sea, to turn a pink shell over on its back to catch the sun, no more than this.

  Even rocks have no memory of this sea. And old men know fear is to be wise upon its shores. King Xerxes, raging once, as men do, at the insolence of waters that would not obey him, charged his men loudly to punish the sea. And yet where are the good king’s shining bones on this November morning?

  Gulls, wiser than kings, circle the morning sky, dive at their carrion, feast savagely, pick the dead flesh from bones or shells that are still warm.

  Flocks of curlews and a few pipits hide behind the tall dune piled with stones not far down the beach.

  More crabs, their feathered antennae out to find the world, back down into the wet sand until only mouths and bristled feather-eyes show. The tides wash in over these creatures who wait until all power is spent and the green waters capped white with foam wash listlessly seaward again. Antennae dart up, one first followed by dozens, a hundred, to catch food in this ancient net, mouths sucking the feathers clean. The beach deserted, as each wave falls from the land, thus comes suddenly to life with bead-eyes, long whiskered faces set in bodies that are the color of the sand. And in another instant disappear as if only magic made them. All morning this goes on. A gull dives and catches one in its sharp beak. A blue crab darts from the surf to catch another. But the tide washes in over them, dozens, a hundred, whiskered old patient crabs.

  Jean and Miss Smith walked slowly together along the beach. Both felt the wind blowing into their faces.

  “It makes me feel so very alive,” Miss Smith said, smiling happily now, closing her eyes for a moment as if to let the wind reach even deeper into her this way. “The sea and this wind,” she said.

  They walked on and then Jean stopped, turned Miss Smith toward him, her body obedient to his hands the way dolls must endure all things. Her eyes grew puzzled; she thought to draw away from him, to sit down on the sand, to tell him there was a strange blue shell and then walk to the water’s edge to fetch it. She knew, as do all women at such moments, that he would touch her, and every inch of her sickened with a fear over which she had never had any control.

  Then, in the only way she knew to escape not from, but into, this fear, she raised her mouth to let him kiss her, but all he did was take gentle hold of her face with both hands and let the skilled tips of his fingers trace lightly, like the brush of an old Chinese painter, first over forehead to both temples, then in toward her eyes and over the closed lids to her nose, lingering finally on her mouth, her lips parting slightly, dried by the wind, but soft. And inside herself she said only, “Be still . . . be still . . .”

  Miss Smith thought first he was merely touching her. But then suddenly she realized he was looking at her. She was about to turn her face from him. She felt a rush of shame and deep regret and defeat grip at her heart. She heard herself say the word “no” silently, wanting to cast a spell with that single word to dissolve all this into something that would never happen.

  Then she heard Jean say, “You are beautiful.”

  She trembled against him, felt herself smile in a loose, quick, uncontrollable way. The phrase kisses and toys came to her. Someone had said it very long ago. It was a key she held to a black door. It always made her think of being a child. And she thought of being a child now, turning the key, trusting all mysteries that waited behind the door; it was this kind of joy she experienced when he said, “You are beautiful.”

  She took his face now in her hands, as if to show him that she could see him in this same way. It was part of an old ritual, something grown out of a child’s
dream of once having been cruelly tricked into life. She traced her fingers over his face just as he had done with her. “You are beautiful.” The words echoed in her brain, stirred new seasons in her heart, mended the past that trailed helplessly behind her like a torn veil, came toward her out of distances that could very well have been made out of the sea.

  She said, “We should go back to the house.”

  Jean said, “Not now.”

  “Please . . .”

  His words seemed to break out of incredulous laughter when he said, “What are you afraid of?”

  She said, “The sky’s turning dark.” The sun burned brightly over their heads. “It will rain . . .”

  “It won’t rain,” he said.

  She wanted to flee, as she always did, when the world came crashing into her loneliness, when she could not feel the warmth of her own life inside her. She always became so terrified simply because the passions of others had always told her that somehow her own dying was all that made her beautiful, the way terrible lives committed to myth grow to be gallant and lovely in the long void of time.

  But, as always, she accepted this ritual of passion, as one come to a ceremony of secrets, with no secret to tell, forced to invent one.

  She kissed him once on the mouth and held the trembling still in her heart that was as dead, as long abandoned, as any derelict hull washed up onto the beach.

  Then, finally knowing calmly what was to be done, she pressed her cheek tenderly against his and said, “Will you love me just a little . . . ?” Old, old words, a green corked bottle floating a century’s distance in the sea, bearing no message, seeking no port, a plaything for fishes and the moon’s light.

  two

  Mrs. Orlovski found the photographs quite by accident. She had come to Miss Smith’s room on her usual morning mission of making up the bed, folding the towels (since she changed them only twice a week, on Saturdays and Wednesdays) and going over the table, three chairs, and dresser with her feather duster, humming all the while to herself tunes she could remember from her phonograph.

  She had finished with the bed and towels and had started dusting when she saw the suitcase sticking out of the closet. She always liked closet doors closed; she was fond of telling her children that no matter what else any life might turn out to be, it could at least be neat. “We do have that much control over our destinies,” she would say. And so now she started to push the suitcase back inside the closet so she could close the door. But it toppled over and the single latch that had been fastened snapped open so the lid fell back and several photographs dropped out onto the floor.

  Mrs. Orlovski bent down to pick up the photographs and, when she looked at them, she smiled because they were pictures of the movie actress Nicole Yvar, who had always been one of her very special favorites. But as she was placing them back in the suitcase, she saw it was filled with magazines that Miss Smith had no doubt brought with her to read during the winter. What surprised Mrs. Orlovski was that they were confession and movie magazines and comic books. These were the only kind of magazines she saw. She thumbed briskly, even hopefully, through them to see if there were any others, but these were all she found. Mrs. Orlovski was surprised and disappointed because Miss Smith just did not look like the sort of woman who would read such magazines. She had such a cultured face, Mrs. Orlovski had thought the minute she had seen her. And it was remembering Miss Smith’s face this way that made her look absently again at the photographs of Nicole Yvar, and then Mrs. Orlovski actually gasped with surprise and nearly fell over backward.

  She struggled to her feet, rushed to the window. There she examined the photographs closely in the bright sunlight. And she could hardly believe her eyes.

  “Why it isn’t!” she exclaimed out loud, putting one hand to her bosom, as if to maintain her equilibrium with this gesture.

  “It isn’t!”

  But it very definitely was!

  She squinted, held the photographs away from her, then drew them in close, tilted them one way and another, closed her eyes, opened them. But nothing would change, absolutely nothing!

  Miss Smith was Nicole Yvar!

  Why, it was perfectly astounding! Mrs. Orlovski had to sit down in the chair by the window and catch her breath. She let the photographs fall into her lap, and she sighed several very deep sighs. She suffered the sudden and incredible exhaustion of someone who is, by devious proxy, experiencing the sensations that should have been felt by some stranger who has just journeyed across a continent that has no geography.

  When she was sufficiently herself again, Mrs. Orlovski picked up the photographs and examined each one very carefully. As she started over them for the third time, she tried to tell herself that, of course, she must be mistaken. But as each new image of Nicole Yvar was revealed, she knew that her guest was definitely not Miss Smith at all.

  “Well now, imagine . . .” Mrs. Orlovski said out loud. This time she smiled to herself and felt very pleased, almost as if she herself had achieved something remarkable. “Nicole Yvar . . .” The very words sounded like the most carefully kept of secrets as she spoke the name.

  She glanced out of the window, thinking perhaps she would see Miss Smith on the beach, but she saw no one.

  When she returned to the photographs for a fourth time, she started by telling herself that if she had known it was Nicole Yvar, she could have asked at least five dollars more a week for the room. A movie star as famous as Nicole Yvar had undoubtedly paid thousands and thousands of dollars for hotel rooms.

  But why ever on earth would she come to a hotel like this? Mrs. Orlovski asked herself, glancing briefly around the clean, not unattractive, but certainly far from luxurious room.

  Then she recalled all she had heard and read over the years of Nicole Yvar, so many stories, a life lived in a waking dream, something impossible brought down to earth by no more than beauty. It seemed that way. Other lives, her own, were lived only to provide a suitable and necessary background for those others who lived more like old gods and goddesses than like human beings, for surely God could not take that much time with so many.

  But still in all the stories she could remember, the one unifying thread was that Nicole Yvar remained somehow unknown. The other movie stars—she knew where they were born, what they ate, where they lived, the color drapes they had in their living rooms, the sort of dishes they pretended to cook in their kitchens. But with Nicole Yvar, with all the thousands, millions of words that had been written, that she herself had read, nothing was really known. The stories told not of where she lived, but of where she had gone and could not be reached. They told not of what color drapes she had in her living room, but merely that she had no living room. She would be here or there by herself and people who wrote the stories always seemed to be speaking to people who had known her, never to the woman herself.

  Now Mrs. Orlovski recalled having seen many of her movies and wondering at the time just why any woman who was so beautiful would want to go off always by herself that way. Mrs. Orlovski had never thought of herself as being beautiful, which she was not; but at the same time she had never thought of herself as being unattractive either. She had long ago acclimated herself to the reality of knowing she was a plain but pleasant woman with a face that was always a little too red, no matter how much powder she used. But in the days before she had taken over the hotel, when she had gone to the movies at least twice a week, she would sometimes wonder, as she sat in the darkened theater watching all the beautiful men and women on the screen, just how it would be if she were to wake up in the morning and suddenly find herself to be as beautiful as a movie star. It had been a girl’s game, to be sure. But now she remembered it as being more than a game, confronted as she was not with any face upon a screen, but with a movie star living right in her house with her. And not just any movie star either, because Nicole Yvar was perhaps the most beautiful woman in the entire world.

  Mrs. Orlovski was thoroughly overwhelmed by her discovery. She tho
ught of running downstairs to the kitchen and telling the news to Sygen. But then she thought that if the children knew, perhaps they would start bothering Miss Smith for autographs and that sort of thing and then she would surely leave.

  Mrs. Orlovski straightened the photographs out on the table the way one lightly taps a deck of cards to even the edges. She then placed them back in the suitcase, closing the single latch that had been fastened to begin with, and she dragged the suitcase out of the closet just a bit so that Miss Smith would not think anyone had touched her luggage.

  Mrs. Orlovski took up her feather duster and left Miss Smith’s room, forgetting completely about the day’s dusting that was to be done. She walked slowly down the stairs, smiling to herself, thinking that she would prepare her special chicken for dinner and perhaps a salad. Yes. That’s what she would do. She would have Sygen make a Caesar salad since she herself was only good at fruit and cottage-cheese salads. But her chicken was a very special dish. Everyone complimented her on it. And she was sure that Miss Smith would enjoy it too.

  three

  They lay in each other’s arms behind the high dune, where they were sheltered from the wind.

  Miss Smith said, “The wind was so cold.”

  Waves broke down in their incessant whispering upon the shore.

  “When we walked along the beach,” she said, “I could feel it cold inside me. And now I’m not cold at all.” She laughed in a comfortable way for the first time since she had been with him, pressing her mouth against his face as if in that way he could see her laughter and understand how grateful she was to him, even though the joy she could feel was completely anonymous, as words scrawled in colored chalk upon a brick wall, caught briefly in passing, but remembered much later in great detail, as if they were words spoken by one’s own heart.