As a matter of fact, it seemed to her that she didn’t know Henriette well enough to do this; she had met her only that same afternoon. Leaving her victim still bound hand and foot, pleading and writhing on the floor of the stockroom, she put her own clothes back on, checked to see if everything was still in her musette bag, and stole out into the darkened department store, leaving the stockroom unlocked. She was leery of the treacherous escalator, even though it was still running, and used the stairs to go down to the street floor.
Evening was coming on by this time and she went back to her cheap hotel. El Paso was not working out as well as she expected. Each of these two cities, Alburquerque and then El Paso, seemed a larger nightmare to her, a successively magnified Madrid. Even though she was born in the desert, something in her soul hated and feared hot, dry, glaring environments; she longed for greenness, mist, and cool plashing water. Her knowledge of geography was shaky but she decided to head west, toward the Pacific. There she might find a white beach with palms leaning over it, and a creek of pure water trickling down from the mountains through the sand.
She got on a train at the El Paso station and went where it went: Tucson, Phoenix, Blyth, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles. This was the end of the line, and she took a red streetcar the rest of the way to the sea. She was in San Pedro, a busy seaport that had little to do with white beaches and leaning palms, but it was cooler than El Paso and there was water nearby. Walking along a stinking and crowded dock in Fish Harbor near the cannery, she found a woman looking up at her from the deck of a small boat littered with nets. When they had their fill of staring, Joan climbed down the slimy wooden ladder with her musette bag and stood looking around. She had never seen a boat before in her life, and this one seemed to her like something in a children’s book.
“What kind of fish do you catch?” she asked the woman.
“Tuna. And now I caught you.”
She was large, stockily built, and smelly, and she wore gum-boots and a sou’wester hat. Her hair was a lanky bronze, her eyes were green, and her name was Bern Kavallala. She spoke with an accent but Joan never did find out what it was. She had two sons, both as blond as the moon, named Gus and Yrjo, and the three of them worked the fishing boat. It was no longer than an automobile, with a jutting bow and a flat stern piled with nets, and in the middle of it was a kind of telephone booth with glass windows for a cabin.
They set to sea the next morning, and Joan worked alongside the others, heaving and pulling on the nets, dumping out the slapping fish and shoveling them into the hold, and scrubbing the scales from the deck with a brush. The two brothers didn’t speak to her, but they glanced at her curiously from time to time. The routine of the boat was soon established. In the daytime Bern worked furiously in her gum-boots and sou’wester, sweating like a hussar. At night, while Gus steered in the phone booth, Joan and Bern grappled in love in the forepeak, a small wedge-shaped space in the bow of the boat, while Yrjo watched morosely from the opposite bunk. The smell of fish became highly erotic to Jean, and remained so for a long time, if not for the rest of her life. She felt that Bern was the sea, not this Pacific Ocean but a vast northern sea, the Mother of all seas, starting as ice and then warming to spread out and enclose the whole living bowl of the earth.
Neither Bern nor her sons nor Joan talked very much; it was work, love, and sleep. A storm came up and the boat danced an infernal sarabande on the sea; the fish fled to the depths. When Joan didn’t get seasick, even though the forepeak plunged like a porpoise, the brothers had to admit that she was a sailor like them. Then the sun broke through making a cathedral effect as its rays came through the clouds at an angle, the sea calmed, and it was time to head back to port.
In Fish Harbor they stayed at the cannery dock for three days, unloading their catch and patching their nets. When night came the four of them slept in the two narrow bunks in the forepeak. That first night all four of them were exhausted and they slept like corpses, or so Joan believed at first. During the night someone took something from her musette bag while she slept; she discovered the loss when she checked the contents of the bag in the morning. The next night she slept with one eye open and found out who it was. In the dimly lighted forepeak, with Bern sleeping next to her, she saw thick-necked Yrjo rise from his place next to Gus and grope in the bag hanging from a hook.
She said nothing. But the next day, when she and Gus were alone on the boat, she crooked her finger and, looking around to be sure no one was watching from the dock, whispered that she had a message for him; she loved him and desired him, she had concealed this previously because of her fear of Bern, but now she couldn’t contain herself any longer, so would he please do something about it?
It was not clear whether muscular Gus could really understand a sentence this long and complicated, but he grasped enough of it to know what to do. They removed their clothing in the forepeak, although Gus left on his hat. Before he could make a move himself, Joan coiled around him like a starfish, astonishing him by her superior knowledge of the human body, her dexterity, and her total lack of modesty. She took off his hat and flung it out the hatchway, she tickled his groin and stuck her tongue in his ear; she drew forth the honey of his desire in copious spurts, and then in short and simple whispered phrases she told him her complaint.
He rose from the bunk without a word, put on his clothes, and went off to the waterfront saloon where Yrjo was drinking beer and telling tall tales to his companions. When he came back in half an hour his knuckles were bloodied and he had a greenish patch in his eye-socket, but he had the two trinkets that Yrjo had stolen from the musette bag. He knelt and held them out to her in his large and gnarled hand, imagining that through this gesture of fable he had won a long-term lover if not a permanent one.
But that night Joan pleaded an incurable if temporary complaint and accepted the attentions of no one. In the darkest part of the night after the moon had gone down, she got up, felt in the darkness, and stole off the boat onto the dock. She moved lightly and as if enchanted, her feet hardly touching the pavement, past the rows of boats creaking in their sleep and the putrid-smelling black nets looking like heaps of elephant dung. In San Pedro the streets were deserted; a milk truck rumbled by in the distance; a disheveled man lurched past her reeking of beer.
The red streetcar too was asleep at the terminal, and she had to wait till morning for it. But at last it started, with an electric thrum from its entrails and a shower of sparks from the trolley. It sped her into a Los Angeles where people were just stirring and awakening, spitting out of windows, washing its streets, and pitching rotten vegetables into the gutters.
She had a doughnut and a cup of coffee on Spring Street, then she went to the station and took the train to San Francisco, where it was late at night again when she arrived. Trudging along with her musette bag in the lively district south of Market, she caught sight of a hotel where other young women were staying; some of them were leaning out of windows and others were waiting for their friends on the doorstep. The manager, Nora Houlihan was a statuesque Irishwoman with green eyes, a crown of golden hair, and the kind of monobust that was popular around the turn of the century. Joan felt a welling of hope in her soul; perhaps she had finally come to the end of her search.
Mrs. Houlihan gazed at her with puzzled tenderness. A curious toy, a small exotic gilded object, a collector’s item, for Madam who was a lifelong connoisseur of curious and bizarre human beings. Her first question was “Where are your breasts?” She questioned her about her origins and previous experience, gave her a plate of hash, and then showed her where to sleep, in a triangular space under the stairs which reminded Joan of the forepeak on the fishing boat. She spent six months in this luckily found haven. Although she was not comely enough to entertain the customers, she made herself useful in other ways, dusting the floors with a cedar-mop, helping in the kitchen, coming with a mop and pail to clean up when a guest, was sick, going on errands, and running to the corner when a policeman was ne
eded to eject a violent or too vociferous guest.
Mrs. Houlihan was her idol; she soon fell in love with her in a way that combined all the elements of mother-and-daughter love, boy-and-girl love, and girl-and-girl love. Madam was the largest and most physically imposing of the Green Goddess avatars she had encountered in her wanderings over the earth, although Joan was never quite sure of her size. Her stately manner, her deliberate motion of a battleship, and the radiated waves of her authority gave her a stature that couldn’t be measured by ordinary means. The hotel as she ran it was a jolly place. The girls were always strumming ukuleles and dancing fox-trots, and there was a pianola in the salon, which was pedaled by one or the others of the girls who kept it going most of the night. Mrs. Houlihan enjoyed singing along with this instrument, even though she might be at the other end of the house from it. Her voice was a deep baritone, floating just at the edge of the bass, and it penetrated well into the street along with the sound of the pianola, so that people passing by were in no doubt that the hotel was a cheerful and musical place.
With all this, she ran the place with an iron hand. People could be as cheerful and musical as they liked, but while she was in charge there was no fooling around, by which she meant robbing people, giving away favors for nothing, or taking off your clothes on the ground floor. Any such behavior and out you went.
Of course, she was a little more indulgent with Joan, her favorite. Joan soon found out that the golden hair was not real, that the green eyes were, and that the bust was just like everybody else’s. Every night, after the last of the guests had his hat and coat put on him and was pushed out the door, Joan got out of bed and crept to Madam’s room at the back of the house, where she crawled into her large teak bed with its Chinese canopy for an hour before stealing back to her own lair under the stairs. The girls, who slept upstairs, knew nothing of this. Joan thrummed with desire until it was time for the next visit to the Chinese bed; even in her wildest reveries as a child in New Mexico she hadn’t imagined having her clitoris licked by the Green Goddess.
She also got up several other times during the night; her bladder was small along with the rest of her, and she often had to visit the antiquated water-closet just around the corner from her nook. She did this in her ordinary night-dress, that is her underpants, thus breaking Madam’s rule about decorum on the ground floor, but she put on her sandals, because of the cold floor, and her gold spectacle-frames, because they were part of herself. One night at four in the morning, coming back from the John, she encountered at the foot of the stairs a quartet of men all dressed alike, in gray fedoras, blue double-breasted suits, and rubber-soled shoes. They gazed at her curiously; she went back to her nook, got into bed, and fell asleep again. Some time later there was a great bumping, shrieking, slamming of doors, and trilling of female laughter. Her door sprang open and a male voice barked, “Everybody out.” She took time only to put on her spectacles, but was told, “Go back and get dressed, little girl.” This time she put on her clothes and took her musette bag with her. Everybody was assembled in the entrance hall, then they were all marched out and put in the paddy wagon, except for Madam, who got into a taxi fully dressed in her overcoat and hat, smiling at the fedoras and even patting one of them on the cheek. “That’s just the girl who works in the kitchen,” she told them, indicating Joan with a negligent wave that displayed a large ruby in the air. The paddy wagon and the taxi went off, leaving Joan on the curb. She felt at first a sick dismay and then an indignation at this betrayal: that her idol, her lover, the incarnation of her dreams, had connived with the hated enemies the fedoras and gone over to their side, seeing first of all to her own comfort and arranging that the fedoras came at an hour when all the guests were gone and only the girls were there. No more ukuleles and fox-trots for them.
Dawn was just breaking as Joan came to the bottom of Market Street and the ferry that would take her to Oakland. In her soul was the taste of bitter ashes and disillusion. These four goddesses of her desire now seemed to her only simulacra, representations by actresses, visions that had been placed before her eyes to delude her, false Grails into which everyone had spat.
In Oakland she bought a ticket for the north. She was uncertain of the geography but knew that great rain-forests lay in that direction; she longed for greenness, cool ferns, and plashing water. The train bore her away, choking her with dust and the taste of cinders. All day long she was carried along in the claws of the iron monster, and after dark the train slid with a groan into the station in Portland. She wandered off numbly in search of a place to stay, and in only a short time found herself before the open door of the Odd Fellows Hall. She was late; the meeting had already started. All the seats were taken and the lights were dimmed. At the front, under the incandescent green letters of a word she was too tired to make out, stood a figure nine feet tall, it seemed to her, with golden hair and a gown touched with fire, holding out her wide arms to her in a gesture of forgiveness and love.
FOUR
The League of Nations is preparing to depart from Frankfurt. Eliza is standing at one of the large slanted windows in the lounge, looking down at the mysterious movements of the ground crew. At one side behind a barrier a crowd of people is watching with upturned faces. Romer is at her side; when his elbow touches hers it makes a little electric motor buzz inside her, as though some current passes that would be shut off if he moved away even an inch. If he does move away an inch, she moves toward him to restore the connection and start the motor going again. Some of the people in the crowd, she sees now, are reporters and photographers. A pan of flash powder goes off, producing the brightest light that Eliza has ever seen; it leaves a white planet surrounded by several Saturn rings until her normal sight is restored.
“Now you’ll be in the rotogravure,” Romer tells her.
“So will you.”
“We’ll both be.”
A dozen or so men run out from under the dirigible pushing away the aluminum stairs on wheels. It is impossible to see anything directly below; it is as though you were a fat man who can’t see past his belly. They are aware of the low throaty rumble of the engines, which Eliza for a time mistook for the sound of her own amorous motor running. And now, without any sign or signal, the ground beneath them falls slowly away. The upturned faces shrink together and become smaller; the hangar becomes visible at the side with a row of elm trees beyond it. The thrum of the engines becomes deeper and the passenger lounge tilts up slightly. On the piano in the lounge is a Murano glass bowl filled with marbles. If the lounge tilts too much the marbles will slide off, but Captain von Plautus has promised Moira that the dirigible will never tip more than ten degrees.
At five hundred feet something happens at the tail; the passengers rush to the windows and look aft to see it. An immense silken banner the size of a tennis court falls from the tail, as light as gossamer, trembling to every current of the air. It is emerald green, with a world on it in the shape of a heart, shading from violet at the North Pole to tangerine at the south. There are cries of admiration, and applause.
Although there have been rumors about the banner, no one has seen it until this moment. It is the official flag of the Guild of Love, and Moira saw it in one of her private Visions and had it made secretly by a couturier in Paris. To Romer, it seems an odd invasion from the world of women (silk, made by a couturier) into the thoroughly masculine world of the dirigible, a world of aluminum, gasoline, and iron engines. In any case, the world is not a heart and has no dimple at its upper pole. He and Eliza watch the town of Wiesbaden go by below, with its large Kurhaus set in a park. Mainz, and the hills of the Hessian countryside where he and Eliza performed their Botticellian rite, are invisible on the other side. In Wiesbaden everyone has stopped dead in the streets and is gazing upward as if transfixed; they have seen dirigibles before but never one this large, and with this kind of banner floating from it. Church bells begin ringing, perhaps in honor of the passing airship, perhaps merely because it is time for el
even o’clock mass. Their sound, brazen and subdued, mingles with the hum of the engines and the low murmuring of the passengers in the lounge. The voices are mainly English, with a smattering of German and a French phrase now and then. (“Oh ça, par example!” by a French speaker who has caught sight of an entire wedding party stopped in its tracks on the church steps to stare up at the passing dirigible). Eliza counts the heads, noticing a few new converts picked up, evidently, during the stay in Frankfurt-Mainz. There is Aunt Madge Foxthorn, sitting in an armchair leafing through a magazine, with her reticule by her side. Joan Esterel, who shows scant interest in the landscape passing below under the dirigible, stares at Eliza to see if her love-bites still show. Evidently the word has got around that Eliza and Romer are lovers; they receive numerous other stares.
“I feel like a goldfish copulating in a glass bowl,” says Eliza. “What business is it of theirs?”
“They’re just jealous, for the most part.”
“Moira was watching us when we were there in the woods. I know she was. It was when I felt that dark cloud, and that hum.”
“Don’t be a superstitious little twit,” says Romer with an odd smile.
“Well, don’t you be such a big fat know-it-all.”
To escape the prying eyes they go to take an inspection tour of the dirigible. When they came on board they only left their bags in their cabins and went immediately to the lounge. The passenger cabins are on the same deck as the lounge. Each cabin has two berths, a dressing table with a mirror, and a folding washbowl. The toilets are down the corridor. They are for both sexes, making the dirigible seem more like an English country house than an ocean liner. It’s possible to imagine an English country house of the future made entirely out of aluminum, and this is how it seems to Eliza. All that is lacking is the woods to take walks in; this thought makes her feel amorous and she squeezes Romer’s hand as they prowl the corridors, peer into the pantry, and inspect the dining salon. They open the door of Eliza’s cabin and look into it speculatively, but she shares it with Joan Esterel who may come back at any moment. Where is Moira’s cabin? There is no sign of a door that is special in any way.
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