The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  Sygen did not answer. She finished the wine in her glass.

  Mrs. Orlovski proceeded to relate the tale about the time a seventy-five-year-old man named Holleran conducted quite an affair for himself with a seventy-seven-year-old woman named Goldbeck.

  “Why,” Mrs. Orlovski said, “when they came in here—he came several days before she did—I thought they had made a mistake and should have been going to the old folks’ home.” She laughed briefly at this, but was quick to add, “Of course, I don’t mean that I don’t like to have older guests, because I definitely do. They’re much less trouble really. They just sit about on the porch and read their magazines and take their naps, you know. But not these two. Oh, it was something! Why, you’d never see one without the other. Not for a minute. . . . Not that I’m sure they could do anything, you know.” She placed her fork down and laughed for a moment at this, not noticing the silence that surrounded her. “Although,” she continued, “I must say they did try several times. I know that, you see, because once, quite by accident, of course——”

  “Mother, please!” Sygen said.

  “It’s perfectly all right,” said Mrs. Orlovski. “There are no little children about. No one here will be shocked by what I have to say. It’s just a story.”

  “Oh God!” sighed Sygen.

  Jean looked across a bit uneasily at Miss Smith.

  And Mrs. Orlovski continued with her story of how one afternoon, when she had been going about making up some of the rooms she had missed in the morning, she had happened to open the door to Mr. Holleran’s room and there were the two of them, so bony and so very white, naked as babes in the bed, and Miss Goldbeck was saying, “Like that. Yes. I like it like that. . . .”

  Miss Smith continued to eat while Mrs. Orlovski related this story and several others. Mrs. Orlovski paused only to point out to Miss Smith in each instance that, of course, she herself did not approve of such goings on, but she never did like to cause any trouble and so she never said anything to any of her guests.

  As she listened, Miss Smith glanced over several times at Sygen, who, so it seemed, never once lifted her eyes while she ate. Miss Smith had never really noticed before just how beautiful the girl was. She had the loveliest golden hair, which she combed down in bangs over her forehead and then straight back, tied behind with a rubber band so that the bulk of it hung down freely in a ponytail over her back. She wore no lipstick, but her lips had a fresh red color like pale roses. And her complexion, Miss Smith thought, was truly miraculous, especially so since she spent so much time out in the sun and wind.

  Miss Smith began to feel a familiar melancholy take hold of her now as the image of this young girl etched itself with such painful accuracy on her brain. She tried to think back, as she often did, upon the beauty she herself had been. Millions of people had acclaimed her. She had been called the most beautiful woman in the world. Even today, she was worshiped as a love goddess by young men and old alike. Her face was perhaps the most famous face of the century, the most famous and the most beautiful. And now, sitting at this kitchen table, she could not even be sure that she had ever been as beautiful as this young girl who was sitting across from her and this doubt, while seeming monstrous and absurd, still ached in her heart, not like a pain suddenly come to, but rather as one that has had years to grow and plant its roots down so deeply into all she was that there could never be a true escape from it any more.

  Mrs. Orlovski went on with her stories about summer guests, and at one point Miss Smith turned to her and, staring for only an instant at the red round face, the horrible realization struck her that she was as old as this woman who had long ago resigned herself to not being young any more. She could be that woman sitting there, gossiping like a hen; but she could never again be that young girl across the table.

  Miss Smith felt the tears rise suddenly to her eyes and, coughing several times, she placed her napkin to her lips and then said, “Please forgive me. I feel dizzy.” Jean rose to help her, but she said, “I’ve had this before. It’s really nothing. I just have to lie down.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Orlovski with a look of grave concern. “I’m so sorry. . . .”

  “Please,” said Miss Smith as she stood up. “I’ll be all right. I just have to lie down. That’s all.” And she turned and quickly left the kitchen and went upstairs to her room, where she fell down on her bed and thought she would cry for a very long time. But she did not cry.

  three

  “I’m terribly sorry about last night,” Miss Smith said in the plaintive deep voice that moved slowly over the words as if it had the power to caress them before they were spoken, to make them true in that way, if in no other. “I am so very sorry,” she said. “Will you forgive me, my darling?”

  Jean said, “I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  “No. . . .”

  “Mother with her stories,” he said.

  “But I like your mother,” Miss Smith said. “I like her very much. I get these dizzy spells. They’re so very silly and the doctors have all told me I’m very silly to have them.” She laughed, a flat joyless sound that had only the look of laughter to it. She turned to him. She said, “Please kiss me.”

  Jean found her lips, felt her mouth wet, opening to him as her hands reached quickly to touch his face.

  “Sometimes,” she said, as she pressed her cheek against his, letting her lips speak the words on his flesh, “sometimes,” she said, “1 become so terrified of things. Of course, it’s quite silly. I know that. But I can’t help it. Suddenly the world is a dark place I’ve never been to before, that strange house children always fear. It’s silly, so very silly. And I do try not to be afraid, I try so hard. But it never does any good. Without any warning at all I become terrified, and then I have one of my dizzy spells.”

  He was silent awhile. She watched him, waited. When he said, “You’re never terrified with me,” the words seemed to be part of the silence. And she thought how the words really were always the same and that was why she could fill silences with them this way. They were always the same and foolish, without purpose, helpless soft words cast, as if by the sea out there, against high rocks, destroyed every time, but spoken again out of memory, never out of any true need in her or in any other.

  Slowly, with a tenderness she knew by heart, she said, “Never with you. No, when we’re here like this, just the two of us, the entire ocean could come washing up over us and I wouldn’t be afraid. Anything at all could happen when I’m with you this way and I wouldn’t be afraid.”

  And Jean said, “You won’t go away.”

  She said, “Foolish, sweet . . .” But she paused, knowing she was about to say “boy” and not only didn’t she want him to hear her say this, she did not want herself to hear the word, and so she said, “I won’t go away.”

  “In the summer, of course, it gets crowded here,” Jean admitted. The lightness was back in his voice, the fear gone. “It is so easy to soothe them,” she thought. “All the fools,” he said, “out on the beach trying to burn themselves up alive under the sun. They must live underground like moles the way they take to the sun as soon as they come here. The first thing they do is rush to their rooms, get out of girdles and suits and hats, put on bathing suits, and then stretch themselves out in the sun.”

  “I like the winter sun,” she said. “There’s something pure about it. It has no warmth. It’s like a man loving a woman who isn’t beautiful.”

  Jean laughed softly. He picked up a handful of sand, let it run slowly through his fingers. “I’d never do that,” he said. She thought, “He is only a boy.” “I’m a practical man,” he said. “Only the most beautiful women.”

  “Oh?”

  “Of course.”

  “And if I were not beautiful?” she asked him.

  “I’d have nothing to do with you.”

  “I see.”

  “Absolutely nothing. Why my reputation would be at stake.”

  “It must be not
orious.”

  “Known the world over,” said Jean. “Don’t you ever read the papers?”

  “And do I disturb your world-wide reputation now?” Miss Smith asked him.

  Jean said, “You’re beautiful and just stay that way.”

  “A command,” she said.

  “Very definitely a command.”

  “Then I’ll obey.”

  He took her arm, drew her down on top of him with a suddenness that startled her into nervous laughter even before the old, unshakable fear came alive in her the way desire might have sprung to life in another body. And she thought how strange it was to be afraid of children.

  Jean kissed her cheek, missing the mouth, sliding his lips across quickly to find it. He moved his body slowly back and forth against hers, the breasts pressing to him as if they existed apart from this body that was so completely without either instinct or desire.

  “You really think I’m beautiful?” she asked.

  “I told you I wouldn’t have anything to do with you if you weren’t beautiful, didn’t I?” he said.

  “Please . . .” She paused, felt his mouth, let her body fall away from her so he could make whatever use he wished of it without intruding upon the solitude that had, all her life long, been her only possession. She said, “Please say it,” when his lips freed her mouth for an instant. “Please.”

  “That you’re beautiful?”

  “Yes. . . .”

  “Of course you are,” he said.

  “Beautiful . . .”

  “Beautiful.”

  “My darling. . . .” And she covered his face with quick kisses, lingering finally on his mouth in that tentative way a hummingbird sips at the heart of a flower.

  At the sea’s edge, not far from where they lay, five gulls hovered with eager, mewing cries, waiting for their prey, small fish, to be driven by tides to the surface of the sea.

  He started to unbutton the white blouse she wore, buttons so smooth and small, they seemed designed only to be easily undone. As his fingers, skilled by his blind eyes, worked thus, his mouth went to her neck, her head leaning over against his face to hold him there, her hands confused as they embraced him, always certain as she was that there was something to be done which she did not do; but her confusion settled to a calm that was not to stir him until later, when recalling it, she seemed to have burned all passion in herself down to some hard pure core that had no need of flame for the terrible burning of itself that was beyond what flame could ever be.

  His mouth played on her neck, on breasts, with tender hunger that frightened her because at any moment she expected the tenderness to turn savage, a feeling that always held her back away from love or even the mere dead signs of it, old hieroglyphics of the heart, which screaming, crying out in this act, tried to wake out of that defiled tomb that was her only true defense against life. Something in her thus always waited to be destroyed by love and when all would be done, in that dread silence that followed, she would be grateful only for not having been destroyed, only for that.

  She felt his soft mouth on her breasts, the tongue gently caressing one nipple, then the other, hands cupping the breasts together; she shuddered and his mouth reacted as if her move had been one of passion. She pressed his head in against her, said, “I always want your mouth on me. Always . . .”

  “And yours on me.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Now,” he said, “here . . .”

  He held her head with both hands. She moved through old slumber, her body, her mouth belonging not to her but to his empty dream of her. She fought against all he could feel, to forget everything now. She imagined an emerald sea, listened for the hushed, frayed, lying tale it had to tell and, hearing it, thought for a moment there was nothing else left, this sea reaching up slowly on white sands to touch her with a kind of cold that would be like death. But everything was warm as he held her head in both hands, as she let him draw her on into the mad ruins of desire, as they became naked then slowly between kisses and their bodies touched everywhere, huddled close as they were in the sandy blanket beneath that white sky.

  Jean felt himself drifting away into her, falling through a dozen, a hundred depths that were deeper than any sea. He felt the inside of himself grow to the size of a giant who could reach the horizon with a single step. There was all of a lifetime to be lived in the moments it took him to kiss her body a hundred ways, caress all her secret places, lift her legs to him, and enter her in a way that opened darkness to show flesh colored like the sun and sea behind his blind eyes.

  Jean felt her soft warmth drawing him deeper and deeper into her and, as he loved her, she reached up slowly to place her hands on his shoulders and she remembered, above all else, how he had told her she was beautiful.

  But then suddenly, twisting, she stiffened with fright, caught a cry fast as squashing a fly on a table with the palm of your hand. She pulled away from him. She fumbled, fought quickly with tangled clothes to cover herself.

  “What . . . ?”

  “Shhhhh!”

  “What is it?”

  She covered his nakedness too in the blanket.

  “Your sister!”

  “She won’t come . . .”

  “Shhhhhhh. . . .” Pleading. A finger to his lips. “Shhhhhh . . .”

  And in a softer voice he said, “But why?”

  “She’ll hear us.”

  Jean thought how he had never hidden away before, not from anything, and especially not from Sygen. And her very name now confused him, as if some truth of it had suddenly, now for the first time, been revealed to him and the revelation, only for the fact of its not being understood by him, became something terrible.

  “Be still,” Miss Smith said, lying in close to him again, but with her clothes on now, and thoughts of Sygen escaped him as he became aware of her body trembling against his legs, his chest. “Be still,” she said. “Be still . . . be still. . . . ”

  And that premonition of something terrible fled forever from him, lasting only that instant of recognition, like a cloud torn apart by the wind, molded quickly into another shape by that same wind.

  four

  Fear was the only clue she had to herself. The day was done; night came always like an accomplishment. Days were the price one had to pay for sleep.

  Miss Smith sat in bed, propped up by three pillows behind her. Light from the table lamp fell more like shadow than light across her face, illuminating, it seemed, only that part of the room that was past her, ending where two windows stood firmly shut behind white curtains against the night.

  Magazines lay about on top of the blue quilt, confession and movie magazines, several comics. But she had finished with most of these. Now she was looking through the old pictures of herself that Mrs. Orlovski had found once quite by accident.

  The pictures had been taken twenty and thirty years ago. They had been taken by the best and most famous photographers in the world. Some of them, even now, perhaps at this very moment, were hanging in museum halls and if those halls were empty at this time of night, surely these perfect images of what she had once been gave some life to the dismal loneliness of stark corridors in the same way the scent of roses gives life to a deserted garden.

  Miss Smith came to one photograph she seemed to remember now better than any of the others. (This was a familiar process with her: one night she would remember this one; the next night, some other one.) But the one she chose this night had been taken on an August afternoon beneath artificial palm trees on the back lot at Culver City. The trees had smelled of rubber, one of the urine of a dog who had been viciously chased about the lot by at least a half-dozen stagehands. But the trees were not in the picture; they had been carefully masked with a high white tent that was meant to signify the home of a desert sheik. It had been a glorious day as she remembered it. The sun had filled a cloudless sky like a great monarch come to rule absolutely all his eye can behold. She had been frightened then, as always, when crowds of cameramen,
stagehands, press agents, extras, studio executives, and the bony small Viennese director named Schloss would gather around watching her like those carrion-lovers who will circle for days over a dying man, waiting patiently for the man to die. (All through the making of that picture, Schloss, from behind his pencil-thin mustache, would wheeze, cough, tell her constantly, “Always remember, sweetheart, you have been carried off, kidnaped by a savage. Remember, sweetheart, he is handsome only because we are making a motion picture. He is really a savage, terrible, you understand? Ha? He can tear you to pieces. You will love him, sweetheart, ja? But remember—every time he takes you in his arms, he is a savage. Ja. We go now.”)

  Acting had always seemed a little like being naked to her, even though she had never thought of herself as having any real talent as an actress. She had always been confused by critics who were constantly, even now, writing that she was a truly great actress and that she had never been given a role worthy of her talents. All her pictures, they wrote, were absurd stories with very poor scripts, but given a real stature only by her beauty and her gifts as an actress.

  “She is the costume every man drapes over the woman he loves.” One of them had written this in a French magazine. And in Paris he had come to her hotel to visit her. He had a certain reputation as a novelist; he spent more than an hour in her suite, pacing back and forth on his very fat legs, drinking glass after glass of cognac, talking only about love. “Love,” he had told her, “shapes whatever we can know of truth; like the hands of a thousand sculptors working a single piece of clay into a single face.” He had gone on and on, and she had tried as hard as she could to understand all he said to her. But at the end of an hour he was so drunk, he forgot all about love and began to tell her, grinning weakly, of obscene adventures he had had during the war, stories that disgusted her. But when he left, as she said good-by to him at the door, he said, “And you are that face.” Then he went swaying down the thickly carpeted hall toward the elevator and right on past it, turning into a passageway that led only to more rooms and then the closets where the maids kept their brooms and mops and the linen that would be placed upon beds in all the rooms the following day.