The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  L’Oeil: So you felt the sequence was a failure?

  Perrault: Everything they shot was a failure. I was trying to speak to the dark forest of womanhood, and the liminal spaces between virginity and a girl’s first sexual experience. But what they wanted was a freak show. By the time we were filming those scenes, I only wanted it to be over. I’d stopped arguing. By then, see, some of us were hearing that the financiers back in the States were not happy with what they were seeing, the rushes, and I was beginning to suspect we wouldn’t get much farther. We’d done some footage for the mermaid scenes, on Stage A, and XXXXXXX’s plan had been to shoot “Riding Hood” and the mermaid scene at the same time, back-to-back, but it was a logistical nightmare, and the set for the latter was so much more complicated. It was the sea cave, where the mermaid goes to find the old hag, but XXXXXXX was convinced the cave should look more like the inside of a monster, a sea monster’s skeleton in which the hag had taken up residence. We did a lot of work on that, but it was simply impossible on his budget. I am still amazed that filming went on as long as it did, and that there was so little, in the end, to show for all that time.

  L’Oeil: It’s true you have not spoken to XXXXXXX since?

  Perrault: Absolutely true. It is true, also, that I will never speak with him again. I heard some talk about the studio trying to bring in another director to revive the project, but no one ever called me, and I was relieved.

  I was drunk, and only half recall granting that interview or speaking those words. I’ll open no more letters from Tannahill, but instead mark them “return to sender” or burn them. And it was Tannahill, that Scots fuck, crossed out, Xed out, the names, not me. I hardly give two shits who knows the particular facts of the matter.

  22/7/98

  Yesterday, I met a woman who said she knows a few of those cataphiles I mentioned. Said, too, that she’d gone down herself, into the belly of this rotten old cityscape. Nothing she did regularly, only a time or three to sate her curiosity. She told me of a chamber they’ve – the cataphiles, urban spelunkers – named the Beach. The earthen walls of the Beach are colorfully adorned after the style of Hokusai. Specifically, with a copycat mural of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. She talked of quarries down there where the intelligentsia hold secret court, and of abandoned subway tunnels. She offered to introduce me to a man who would take me down, and I declined. Is that my cowardice rearing it’s brutal countenance? Or am I simply not in the mood for stumbling about in the dark with only an oil lantern or carbide headlamp to shine the way? I’ve wandered plenty other catacombs and low-ceilinged ossuaries, have I not? My feet and hands have been soiled with that dust enough times that I’ll retract the question of bravery.

  24/7/98

  Made a meager but sufficient dinner of cold chicken, radishes, and baby carrots tonight for Dorothée and myself. Talked some about the cataphiles, and she thought anyone who’d prowl about the underbelly of Paris quite the fucking fool. I wanted to begin a conversation about dreams, but didn’t. She asked questions about the unfinished painting, and I toasted that murky folly and joked it might be named Last Drink Bird Head. She laughed, but I think only out of a sense she ought to be polite to her host. Dorothée is the sort of woman who has no taste for self-deprecation. Ah, well. She pressed, so I showed her the two paintings I finished in Ireland and have not yet sent back to NYC to the Agent: Leda and Clever Cinders. I took them out from beneath my sagging bed, unrolled the canvases on the floor so she might politely ooh and ah, though they felt more like obligatory oohs and ahs to me. She claimed to like the former better than the latter. I tried to give it to her, but she’d have nothing of it. Mark my word, it’s hard to give away your demons.

  (Admission to no one but myself: The subject of this painting occurred to me shortly after viewing an exhibit of photographs from the caves of Lascaux, near the village of Montignac. The cavern walls are famously adorn’d with Paleolithic graffiti, in the main large and extinct animals and the Cro-Magnon’s who hunted them. Discovered September 12, 1940, one of the images portrays a bird-headed hunter being struck down by a bison. Archaeologists have assumed the bird-headed man to be raven-headed [or at least crow-headed], “because of their [crows et ravens] mysterious yet conspicuous association with death.” It seems a spurious conclusion to me, a jumping to an unwarranted and ill-supported conclusion, shamanic and totemic assumptions – and I will not say the man painted on the cave wall more than seventeen thousand years ago has the head of a raven, nor that of any other corvid. Only the head of a bird.)

  When Dorothée had gone back to her rooms, I cleaned the dishes and found myself at a loss, not wanting to pick up the palette and brushes. Last of all wanting to do that. Instead, went out in search again for the boy, uncomplaining Gautier, but walking three times up and down la Rue Saint-Denis, Avenue of Whores, I caught no sight of him, was afforded not so much as a fleeting glimpse, as if he saw and then avoided me. I was discouraged, yes, but no less hungry. I paid a transvestite, in Gautier’s stead. They could not have been less alike, sheheit and my missing Gautier. Sheheit (travesti, or is that in the lingua italiana?) wore proper clothes for a French street whore, and all perverse and sick of myself and angry and wishing to humiliate my own hubris, and rewarded the whore with a generous handful of franc lourd for letting me blow herhimit, which, said the being of fluid gender, was not usually on the menu. On my knees, I was where I should have been, the cock in my mouth, then my mouth filled up with cum and swallowing every drop, licking the swollen, pulsing phallus clean. Then I took the ass, supposing my mortification of the spirit had earned me a more genuine concupiscence. I took the ass with my dick and my tongue and two fingers, and sheheit expelled all the sounds you’d expect from a transvestite bitch bastard who prowls the streets like a solitary jackal in wolf’s clothing seeking out a scrap of carrion not unlike myself.

  I am alone again now. If Dorothée notes the comings and goings of my whores at all hours of the night and in the early morning, she never comments on them. She’s too discrete for such prying or violations of privacy.

  Oh, almost forgot. The transvestite left something behind. I keep it as a souvenir. It must have slipped from a red-taloned hand. A narrow silver band graven on the outer side with tiny flowers, and inside with a single skull. I can assign it, no doubt, a hundred meanings. I ought send it to a writerly acquaintance, because surely there’s a story in that ring. But no, I think I’ll hoard it for my own. I’ll place it in the cedar box I bought in Shannon.

  25-26/7/98

  The moon tonight…no matter. No matter of the moon, as I finally pulled the tattered curtains shut and gave it no more thought than I give it now in this moment.

  I sat down to write one thing, but my pen was out of ink, and while I scrounged about for a fresh cartridge, another thing distracted me. That most recent envelope from Tannahill. Which set me thinking about the day we met not too far from Inverness. He was living in a flat on High Street above a florist. I was only in Scotland for two weeks, but couldn’t resist the lure of the Loch’s peaty waters. Cannot ever resist the siren song of legends, be they derived from kelpies or surviving plesiosaurs or trapped seals or hoaxes. I was parked at a lookout on the A82 above Urquhart Castle. He stopped, and struck up a conversation, forcing me to lower my binoculars. I do not, as a rule, talk with strangers, but there was about Tannahill an infectious (good choice of adjective) this or that, and we stood together an hour in the chilling wind. He talked to me about the crumbling medieval edifice of Urquhart, how no one knows for sure when it was built, but surely no later than the Thirteenth Century. And that diggings and radiocarbon dates from the grounds go back to the Fourth and Sixth centuries, so something here fortified since at least as far back as that. He’d not even mentioned the “monster,” which I found odd, not ribbing a tourist when a tourist deserves a ribbing. Me, I’d not have passed up the opportunity.

  He told me how the Nazi’s flew sorties over the lake, and also, in greater
detail, of how a Wellington bomber, R is for Robert, bound for Heligoland, ran into nasty weather on the New Year’s Eve of 1940. At eight thousand feet, the plane met with a snowstorm above the Monadhliath Hills, and somewhere over Foyers the starboard engine failed. Sputsputsputtersput. The pilot ordered six trainees to bail, and more I don’t recall. Deaths. Men fly, men die. The plane was ditched in Ness, and sank, and lay on a slimy bed of silt at sixty meters down for thirty-six years, I think, until one September it was hauled back up to the light of day. Also, Tannahill told me of a woman who swam the breadth of the Loch at the age of sixteen, and that’s more than eighteen hours in frigid waters. I have this memory and a head for numbers, though it never serves me profitably. I recall dates and figures that are at best, trivial. He talked of six-foot eels, but nothing more monstrous. We watched a peregrine falcon soar above the black expanse, and he asked me back to accompany him for a pint or two or three, and I went.

  We fucked the first time that night, and when I returned to the States, I thought I’d never see the man again, which was fine enough by me. I was busy arranging a show, not that show, but that other show, and had no time for any persistant love affair. But he came on his own, unbidden, six months later, and tracked me to Los Angeles. I managed not to start hating him for several months, which is almost a record. I told him to leave, but he remained persistently peripheral, and still does so.

  Fuck all. Now I need a new nib. I’m not even sure I have one.

  26/7/98

  Another letter (with clippings, etc.) from Tannahill, and I should not even have opened it. But I did, because what I don’t know is worse than what I do. More of the same, and I think this is becoming seriously fucking sadistic on his part (and masochistic on mine, not tossing them unopened into the wastepaper basket right off):

  From Film Threat’s “Top Ten 50 Lost Films of All Time” (posted to filmthreat.com, 7 January, 1997): #41 Albert Perrault’s Court of the Sidhe (1987):

  “Believed to have never progressed beyond the early stages of production, the film would have presented various pornographic re-imaginings of classic fairy tales, including ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ ‘The Little Mermaid,’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ Despite occasional, unsubstantiated rumors of one or more test reels circulating among collectors, there is little evidence that any part of this film has survived.”

  EXCEPT:

  1. THE THREE REELS IN MY SAFE

  2. WHATEVER IT WAS, IT WASN’T PORNOGRAPHY

  3. La Belle et la Bête was never PART OF THE PROJECT

  4. I PERSONALLY HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF REELS IN POSSESSION OF “COLLECTORS”

  ~ and, something I wrote four years ago ~

  “It rained the whole first two weeks we were out at Shepperton. It rained, the cold rain of an English summer, and there were all manner of electrical problems, and insurance troubles, and we had two of the actors walk out on us. I kept wondering, to myself, ‘Where is all the goddamn money for this coming from?’ Mostly, I was working closely with our makeup effects man, Rob Bottin, who had impressed me, first with The Howling, then The Thing, for John Carpenter, then Legend, the Ridley Scott film. I cannot recall who directed The Howling, but it wasn’t a very good film, so I do not suppose that matters. The makeup was grueling, I know, and by the end of that second week, almost all the actors were ready to walk out on us, I think, though only two actually did quit.

  “We got in one more week before the backers pulled the plug on the project and the money dried up. But by then, I was sick of the whole mess, anyway, and glad for it to end. I could see, already, from the dailies, that it wasn’t what I’d hoped for or intended, not the movie that XXXXXXX promised me we were making. It was too graphic, and there was too much shown, too much shown that should only have been suggested. The emphasis on atmosphere and mood that I had been promised was being sacrificed for more blatantly prurient imagery. No one has ever yet called me a prudish man, I think, so it’s not like that. I was not offended by the explicitness, but disappointed by it. Almost all of the pre-production artwork I did for the film, it belonged to the studio or the director, whichever, and was taken away to the rotten bowels of Hollywood, and I nevermore saw it again.”

  That was written for Cinefex, but the article was never published; the threat of lawsuits intervened. Which made no difference to me. I’m calling T. tonight and asking him to stop this shit, the clippings. I have work to do and no need of goddamn ghosts of stillborn undertakings. No time for the head games he mistakes for flirtation.

  27/7/98

  I’ve never been in a wood as dark as this wood. Black Forest, maybe, Schwarzwald, but that part is likely not of any relevance beyond…beyond, beyond. I ought be out on the rue, searching for Gautier or make-do she-males and not writing down nightmares. I ought to be fucking painting. Fucking. Painting. I’m going to finish that ogre, whether it concludes in a mess or otherwise. I have all these things to be doing that trump any need to write down bad dreams. So, hah, I write down bad dreams. Hah. Ring around the rosies, pop goes the weasel, and make the impatient waiters wait impatiently a little longer.

  I’ve never been in a wood as dark as this wood.

  I stumble among the pines and hoary oaks, fat toads and sleek hares and overhead is owl and crow song. I pick my way over and between the weave of this living Arthur Rackham tableau vivant. The air has a cinnamon tang of fiddleheads and the heady musk of decaying forest-floor detritus; leafy strata underfoot, tunneled by moles and earthworms, inhuman and untamed cataphiles. There is no path, so I cannot have strayed from any path. There is a labyrinth I think, and it does not begin and it does not end. I look up, but limbs hide away the writhing, star-scabbed sky. I push aside briers and hawthorn, and I see the wolf and I see the girl who sat beside me at the Seine, girl who’s come to me down all my life. Here is only a fiction I’m going to hammer together from fading dreamstuff, and it’s gonna make do or damn me, fuck, I don’t vex myself with accuracy. I’m only tracing, rubbing charcoal at best, and will settle for indefinite, happily or not happily. Makes no difference.

  I have never been in a wood this dark. I push aside the underbrush:

  The wolf thing stands in a thicket of ferns and mushrooms, beneath the mossy boughs of unthinkably ancient trees, and it licks at its short muzzle. The actress kneeling before it is one of the two who walked off the set. Her makeup is almost as elaborate as the wolf’s. The red cape has been made an integral part of her, something like folds of crimson skin hanging from her head and shoulders and spine, drooping from her arms like the membranes of a bat’s wings. Latex or silicone prosthetics, I know that, sure, but the makeup is unnerving, and I feel faintly nauseous. The wolf thing looks down, running clawed fingers along the girl’s fleshy crimson cowl, which seems to have been coated with some substance so as to resemble the slimy, glistening skin of a salamander. Hydroxypropyl cellulose, perhaps, or, more likely, methyl cellulose. The symbolism is obvious, I think, ham-fistedly fucking too obvious, this “red riding hood” grown into a sort of hypertrophied virginal hymen, as yet unbroken and all but smothering the girl.

  “I’m bringing her bread and cream,” she whispers. I lean forward, all the better to hear her. All the better to hear words I wrote, but never meant for me.

  The “wolf,” its scruffy, short pelt matted with leaves and burrs, it asks her, “Do you follow the Road of Needles, or the Road of Pins?”

  “The Road of Pins,” the girl replies. “Most assuredly, I’ll take the Road of Pins.”

  “Well, then. I suppose I’ll take the Road of Needles, and we’ll see who gets there first,” the wolf says.

  The forest becomes…maybe a city street…something that isn’t a forest. Did I ever write, anywhere, about the night I held a loaded pistol to his head while I fucked him? That bastard Tannahill, I mean. Did I ever tell me that. I hold so much back from myself, buried deep in mnemonic graves here in my own mental Le Cimetière du Montparnasse, but devoid of headstones. They rise though, someti
mes.

  28/7/98 THREE MARGUERITES

  Walking in the cemetery yesterday, a Tuesday, I met a woman who recognized me (which is a thing that almost never happens) and who claimed to be a werewolf. I was out searching for the grave of Marie Dorval (1798-1849), an actress rumored to have been a lesbian lover of George Sands. I didn’t find the grave, but, as I said, found this woman who claimed to be a werewolf. Or to have been a werewolf. Or that she was and wasn’t, in some inconstant lunar cycle beyond my comprehension. To be sure, mad. Or I assume madness. Presumptuous cunt that I am, I assume. But she had an air of madness about her; wouldn’t any woman, though, who was also, on occasion, a wolfish creature? More audacious still, she claimed a role in the slaughters at Gévaudan, to have been one among the several who came to infamy and to be known as La Bête Anthropophage du Gévaudan. Didn’t point out this would have meant her to be quite advanced in years, a minimum of, say, let us say 248 years old, if she were, let us say maybe 14 when the depredations commenced. So, tatterdemalion and unwashed though she certainly was, my skepticism is not, I think, unwarranted. She looked, to my eyes, no older than thirty, but who knows the magick of lycanthropes?

  Her name, she told me, was Marguerite. She gave me (like young Gautier) no surname. I asked for none. The French name daisies Marguerite. Chrysanthemum frutescens, start of summer into middle of autumn, long blooming and susceptible to infestation by thrips. Surely they grow in the Margeride Mountains, but that hardly even counts as circumstantial, unless she was playing a very allusive game. Who knows the sporting whims of lycanthropes?