Dry Your Smile

by Morgan, Robin;

  “Right now, yes, right now if that’s humanly possible. Please. There’s stuff I’ve—I’ve got to tell somebody. Meet me in fifteen minutes at the Manhattan side of the bridge? Please?”

  And he said he would. And he wasn’t lying.

  He did.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Autumn, 1982

  Emerging from her darkroom, Iliana de Costa blinked at the afternoon light slanting through her windows. Large, she supposed, bemused at the notion that windows of such size could be clucked over reverently in Manhattan, while they’d be considered average to small in Venice. There, her flat had cost one-quarter of the rent this one did, and had been almost three times the size. There, the incomparable light had lavished itself through floor-to-ceiling French doors that opened onto her terrace-balconies on the Riva degli Schiavoni overlooking the laguna. There … But what was the use of comparing? Venice was past. Like the Paris years. Like those in Barcelona, in Rome, and the abominable month in London, which she disliked almost as much as New York.

  Yet here she was again, back in New York: this massive impersonal city where the light’s repertoire was usually limited to charcoal through slate, the textures on which it fell flattened to steel, concrete, granite. What New Yorkers called “the” park, she thought, would not be “central” but one of several in almost any major city in the world, nor did she find this lack ameliorated by the scrawny trees pathetically lining some (only the more affluent, she noticed) blocks. This time, however, Manhattan seemed more tolerable than it had in that first devastating encounter with the city almost thirty years earlier, when she had arrived from Buenos Aires with the equivalent of twenty-five U.S. dollars in her pocket and not a soul to contact. The cherished Hasselblad had to be pawned after three days. Later, when she returned to retrieve it with her first week’s salary from the factory job, the pawnbroker refused to honor her ticket. No use shouting at him in clear English; to him a Spanish accent meant a Puerto Rican and a drug addict. Nor would she assert that she was neither, feeling that would constitute a betrayal of the thirty-nine Puerto Rican women with whom she had shared that first week of hell, all of them hunched over sewing machines in one drafty room.

  This time she had returned to New York in what they said was triumph. The reviews of her one-woman show at the Focus Gallery were uniform in their praise. Her work sold well. This time, all the cameras and lenses remained with her; no pawnbrokers need apply. This time, she could afford a high-ceilinged sunny flat in Greenwich Village, assemble her prized record collection from storage in three different cities around the world, purchase a fine set of components, and hear music again. This time, she was back as Iliana de Costa, and nobody dared ask why.

  Nobody but Julian, of course—who had leaned across the table at their first lunch after her return last spring, inquiring earnestly just that: why had she returned, hating the city as she did? The answer had been easy enough, Iliana remembered, plumping down now onto her cocoa velvet couch, the still curling prints of her darkroom session in her lap for sorting: the Focus show, naturally. And then again, how weary she was of Venice.

  Weary of Venice! Where every object extolled the light, which in turn wooed everything it caressed! But where the light never lingered its glance on Julian Travis. That, to be sure, she had not said to Julian. And never would say.

  “Never.” Iliana commanded aloud, an order to her solitary self.

  But Julian lay now in her lap, new photographs, the first contact sheets from the session for the jacket picture of Julian’s next book. Roll upon roll—she, who never descended anymore to “portrait photography,” who had volunteered this, as a friend. And a flesh-and-blood Julian would be walking through the door in fifteen minutes.

  Iliana cast a practiced eye around the room, then screwed her mouth up in a pout of distaste. Too little a space, too bland an architecture. Here, what had been the artlessly graceful dishevelment of her Venetian rooms became mere clutter. The Murano blown-glass vase on her coffeetable loomed too large for its setting and sparkled dully as if sulking at the quality of light it was given to reflect. Books, recordings, and tapes spilled over from their shelves onto every tabletop, onto some of the bentwood chairs, onto the floor itself. She could never find anything in this ridiculous flat about which everyone oohed and aahed. No space in the bedroom for a proper dressing table; her colognes and lotions had to balance, living dangerously, in the bathroom medicine cabinet or on the back of the toilet commode. No room in either of the postage-stamp-size closets for her Cerutti suits to hang without creasing, for the silk shirts to emerge without their sleeves fixed in freakish gestures—refugees from the work of a Diane Arbus, perhaps, not from a de Costa.

  She sighed and poured herself a glass of sherry. The one worthwhile taste England had taught her—and that, she smiled, originated in Spain. Hot-dogs and pizza and garlic bagels learned from New York. Schnitzel and Café mit Schlag from Vienna. Fresh-baked baguettes and café with a grande crème, from Paris. Sensual pleasures. But no flavor like the asado from home.

  Home. What an insipid notion, she reminded herself. If a revolution occurred tomorrow, she still couldn’t return to Argentina. Even were there to be an end to the shifting military coups and corruption, her revolution would still be a long way off. As a woman, a Latin woman, a Latin woman artist.

  She picked up the magni-viewer and began squinting at the contact sheets. Yes. And yes. There. Oh yes. She had caught it again and again, the quality Julian always tried to project but no one except she, Iliana, had managed to see, much less catch. Here it was, captured, an ultimate possession in black-and-white, forever. Smiling, serious, brooding-author-fit-for-book-jacket-shot, impish, sullen, enticing—there: laughing so hard as to be almost unrecognizable, smile unplanned, hair tousled to a loveliness no comb could elicit, throat arched back and free. Possessed. Iliana savored the memory of that session: of taking Julian as she wished, telling her what to wear, how to sit—then surprising her between poses, from every angle, the challenge of mating unhinted passion with technique to focus on this particular subject! It had electrified the result, as Iliana guessed it might. This perspective of that belovèd face was now forever Iliana de Costa’s.

  She sat back and sipped her sherry. It would be interesting, now, to see which of the shots Julian would gravitate to, as opposed to which she might ultimately pick for the bookjacket, which involved other considerations. But there would be a message in which print would shock its subject, rivet her, make her uneasy—deliciously so. Most interesting.

  All the Julians, she concluded with satisfaction, were on these sheets, stripped bare by the perception of her lens, as if the subject of that lens herself, luminously naked, lay open, laughing, ready for love, on the bed in the small room beyond. At least all of the so-far Julians. The one she had first met almost ten years ago during her second New York sojourn—the period volcanic with Seventies politics and personal epiphanies—the Julian she had encountered in that early CR group, where the North American women were irritatingly astonished at how “feminist” a Latina could be. Patronizing gringas, she scowled. But there had been Julian. Who was not in the least surprised, who loved the writings of Sor Juana de la Cruz, whose eyes widened with recognition when Iliana mentioned that back home she had studied—the only woman student ever—under Enrico Martínez.

  “The ‘Latin Stieglitz’!” Julian had exclaimed. Then quickly added, blushing, “Oh, I’m sorry, Iliana. I didn’t mean to define him in such ethnocentric terms.” Amazing, for a Nordeamericana. Then, later, there had been all the other Julians.

  Images poised one by one before Iliana’s memory vivid as the contact sheets in her lap. She shut her eyes, the better to see them. She and Julian, the compulsive ones left at 3 A.M. after the rest of the group had begged off—husbands, kids, a hard day tomorrow—left alone to finish mimeographing leaflets for the next night’s demonstration. The two of them giggling uncontrollably in karate class, to the frowns of their feminist classmat
es and the fury of the Sensai. The two of them, sharing literary and artistic bonds beyond what either shared politically with the rest of the group. The two of them, sometimes just walking around the Lower East Side—Iliana furtively snapping her camera at certain street faces, objects in the gutter, doorways of boarded-up tenement buildings; Julian learning to see with Iliana’s eyes; Iliana refining her English by getting Julian to talk about poetry. The two of us, she remembered, comprehending each other across chasms of culture and language—finding in that an exhilarating victory, a promise for humanity. She opened her eyes and peered again at the spectrum of expressions in her photographs. The pity of it. Hidden somewhere behind those smiles there was a secret smile waiting all this time to fling itself across the face with an abandon no motive but desire could provoke.

  But never. Never said and never would be said. Even though Iliana had more than once felt invitation was being given, clues dropped. Deciphering those clues, imagining a hidden reciprocity of obsession, could lead to lunacy, she had warned herself, and as her private passion for Julian grew, she resolved that the only way to banish the unilateral love but preserve the bilateral friendship was to go abroad again.

  Not back to Latin America. She would return to Europe. It might heal her, as it had the first time. In Europe she had learned to see through an Old World sight, tearless with watching generations of revolutionaries, lovers, tyrannical idealists and their victims alike pass beneath windows leaded like half-lidded eyes—a gaze of jaded sanity, despair suspended daily more through acts of wit than will, a diffident altruism leavened by personal responsibility for one’s own existence.

  To this day she could remember the disappointment moaned by their group. Just now, to leave the States? When the movement was taking off, when press coverage of feminist issues had become serious, when Hispanic-American women were “getting involved” … Even more could she remember how forlorn Julian had been. But all Julian had said, wistfully, was,

  “It will be hard for me, losing you. We’ll miss you.”

  There it was again, the double-entendre code. “Hard for me,” but “We’ll miss you.” Was that the editorial “we,” the speaking-on-behalf-of-the-group “we,” the royal “we,” or some hint about all the Julians in tandem? It was the confirmation Iliana dreaded: she must get away from Julian in order to get over Julian in order to love Julian safely.

  So there had been Venice. “Pas mal, pas mal de tout,” Iliana murmured. Venice was decidedly a consolation for almost any loss. Her reputation had grown, and her financial means, and her capacity to enjoy herself. Venice had taught her that art was the only lasting revolutionary gesture, and that whatever helped her accomplish her art, made life more comfortable or more interesting, was not a luxury but a necessity.

  Oh, if the old CR group could see her now! Sold-out hussy, they would grumble, running dog of a capitalist-imperialist swine! Well, who cared; most of them by now were probably back in bland suburbia, the remainder still clutching bleached denim “workers’” shirts to their downwardly mobile selves. Let any of them manage to smuggle film out of Argentina under the eyes of the notorious torture police. Let them work in a sweatshop without the benefit of a union, live through a bone-chilling New York February with no winter boots. Let them scar their vision with one-tenth of what hers had seen and recorded. Then let them discover Venice: sensual delight, and the personal “self-indulgence” which was only a fraction of what she might now avail herself if she chose. Because it was true that she still was more at home in her coveralls, pockets bagging with lenses and light meters, than in designer clothes.

  There was only one problem in Venice. Even there she saw Julians: street-urchin small girls, militant feminists, intense women poets. Negatives. The original developed print remained in a far country but haunted her, the ghost of an exposure improperly set. There were the letters, too. Julian-on-the-page unconsciously knew how to give Iliana hope that the never-yet-manifest smile might one day dance, Salomé in a luxuriant éclat, across the real Julian face.

  There had been distractions, to be sure. Work, laughter, diversions. Lovers. Two years with Beth, the Canadian expatriate who tutored English for a living, whose accent and political radicalism made her a temporarily satisfying Julian-surrogate. Then the aimless year: long sidewalk-café conversations with Giorgio about the futility of love. Her agent and confidant, he was the one person with whom she ever discussed Julian. Then the last two years, with Christina, a Latin and an exile like herself, but from Brazil—and as different from Julian as a glossy finish from a matte. That affair had expired finally when there were no more tempestuous fights to be stormed through. Iliana had tried the imitation and the contrast; both had their compensations, neither quenched the thirst. Venice began to feel played out, a stopover. It was Julian who had now become “home.”

  But Iliana waited. Everything she knew and was helped her wait: the exile’s patience, the artist’s discipline, the apostate Catholic’s fatalism, the pride of the pampas caballero. She had waited without hope.

  Until Julian’s letters confided difficulties with Laurence, then mentioned him less and less. Until the loss of Giorgio, months of visiting the hospital as he wasted away, an early casualty of what they now called AIDS. When he died, carrying with him Iliana’s secret, she found herself for the first time in years thinking about a return to New York. Then it came—the coup for which Giorgio had worked so hard but never lived to see:

  “A one-woman show at the finest photography gallery in Manhattan,” she muttered aloud through clenched teeth.

  The justification.

  The doorbell shrilled, announcing Julian. Iliana started with excitement—like an absurd schoolgirl, she thought. She forced herself to move calmly, sliding out from under the contact prints and carefully placing her sherry glass in its crystal coaster on the coffeetable. She could feel herself rapidly trying on a wardrobe of different smiles, despite the ripple of rage this realization sent through her. She glanced in the hall mirror, to see who Julian would see. Then she went to the door.

  This would be the woman she had wanted more than she thought such wanting possible. For eight years. This would be the woman she loved now as tenderly as she might once have loved Enrico Martínez’s aborted child. This would be her old comrade and friend. This would be Julian.

  “Querida!” she cried gaily as she swung open the door and enveloped Julian in a hug, feeling the upper half of Julian’s torso respond with warmth. The physical message of terror from a heterosexual woman to a lesbian friend: a peculiar spastic bend at the waist, a posture in the shape of a number 7, the lower torso kept arched away at a safe distance. She released Julian and stepped back, holding her at arms’ length to have a look at her. “But you’re fatigued!” she proclaimed immediately. “Come, right away, take off your things. Put down all the cases, little shopping-bag lady. Is it cold out? What would be good? Coffee? Tea? A drink? Have you eaten?”

  The worn face smiled at her.

  “Actually, I’d love a drink. No, wait a minute, better not. I have to finish an article tonight, no matter how long it takes. Better make that coffee, okay? Sorry I’m late—”

  “Not okay. A little drink, just a mild one. Then coffee. And you eat something.”

  “Honest, not hungry.”

  “Ta ta ta.” Iliana enunciated her nonsense words of dismissal with firmness. “I know what I say. A glass of burgundy gets the blood flowing. I promise that you will write your ‘whatever’ better, even if you have to stay up all night to do it, you workaholic.”

  “All right, I surrender, I give up,” Julian grinned. She loves being gently bullied, Iliana thought, loves being taken care of. Mi preciosa.

  “Oh!” Julian cried, spying the contact sheets on the sofa. “Is that them? I can’t wait!”

  “Oh no you do not, Juliana my friend,” she yelled, rushing to sweep the sheets up onto her corner desk. “You just wait. Sit down on the couch and relax. I bring you a glass of friend
ly St. Emilion. You clear your fevering brain of whatever has made you tired, so you approach de Costa pictures with the clear mind and eye.”

  “Dear dear. I did not mean to offend the great de Costa,” Julian answered, but the mischievous note in her voice already showed signs of recovery from exhaustion. “I’ll be good and wait. But I’m dying to see them, you wretch!”

  “Soon, soon. Patience is good for the soul,” Iliana called from the kitchen. Swiftly she assembled a tray: the wine, a stem balloon glass, an oven-warmed baguette, a slice of truffled pâté, a crystal bowl of cornichons. She didn’t like Julian’s brittle-boned look. It brought back her own days in Paris, when to eke out a meagre survival as a model, she had sucked in her cheeks affecting high-fashion gaunt, all the while living on bread and coffee. “Sustenance first, comprehension after,” she announced, bearing the tray into the livingroom.

  “But I told you, I’m not hung—Oooo it looks delicious,” Julian admitted, throwing Iliana the look of a child caught denying it wants to steal from the cookie jar.

  “So, hunger artist, you can perhaps stoop to nibble something?”

  Julian produced an exaggerated sigh. “For you, my dearest friend, only for your sake, shall I force myself to taste, chew, and even yea swallow, a morsel of this lowly fare.” Then, changing voices to that of a gangster, “Outta my way, lady, unless you wanna get run over in my lunge toward that pâté.”

  Iliana’s laughter rang out like a bell at matins. Every time she estimated what Julian needed and discovered herself accurate (despite any of the stated or unstated demurrals) was another sign, a nuanced promise that the Salomé smile was slowly, tantalizingly, dancing its way up to the surface of that face. She watched with satisfaction while the food was attacked. But between bites, Julian accused,

  “You’re not eating. I notice you’re not having any wine, either. You don’t practice what you preach.”