Dry Your Smile

by Morgan, Robin;

  “No, no, you don’t understand.” Why do I invite her attacks on Julian and then defend Julian against them, Iliana wondered, slipping her arm through Celia’s this time and moving them onward. “Julian’s an artist, after all. She has to use her pain, the way I’ve done with the requiem. Besides, what she writes is all disguised to protect—”

  “Protect her. And she makes you a photographer. Taking pictures of her, I warrant. Still another audience.”

  “I’m beginning to regret I ever told you she was an actress,” Iliana snapped.

  “Don’t be. It’s central. She’s—used you in every way, the bitch—”

  Iliana raised her voice, oblivious to passers-by, “I won’t have you talk about her like that. You have no idea—”

  “An art photographer from Nicaragua. How preposterous.”

  “Not from Nicaragua,” the other muttered into her turnedup collar, striding along now at a pace that made Celia breathless, “from Argentina.”

  “Argentina! I can’t bear it. To turn you into one of those stuffy arrogant Argentinians who think that they own—”

  “No, dammit. Stop leaping to conclusions! I know why she’s doing that. She wants the reader to have instant sympathy for the character, so she made her a refugee from a right-wing dictatorship instead of—”

  Celia stopped again and faced Iliana. “Instead of the truth, you mean. Which is that poor fools like us happen to be refugees from a country plagued by both right- and left-wing dictatorships. Poor fools like us—who fled from Somoza’s hell, rushed back all dewy-eyed with hope for the so-called revolution of ’79, and then, sick at the soul, found the same corruption, the same censorship, with different uniforms and slogans. Poor fools like us, double exiles!” Celia’s eyes blazed with an old indignation. “You know how many hours I have had to spend explaining to French intellectuals why I do not return to Managua to live happily ever after in the revolution? Me, a lesbian avant-garde electronic musician? Ha!” She spat into the gutter.

  “Don’t you think I also have those conversations? Don’t you think—”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Celia yelled. A Parisian tripped past them without a glance, unruffled by two women standing on the street waving their arms and shouting in Spanish. “I think your wondrous Juliana lacks all capacity for political and aesthetic complexity. I think she has a simplistic North American mind capable only of cheap sympathy with victims of traditional despots. I think her attitude is as shallow in its own way as her country’s entire Latin American foreign policy—a policy created by some creature who was a cross between a sadist and an ass! One more well-meaning tyrant and I think I go mad!”

  Celia fell silent, glaring at Iliana. A gust of wind inspired them to move, and they began to walk again, not touching. Iliana was secretly basking in the warmth of her friend’s rage on her behalf, a solace which lasted until they reached the boulevard. But as they turned onto it, she caught a glimpse of the Luxembourg Gardens, lavish even in their winter-stripped state, across the street. A perilous glimpse, because any garden, any flower, conjured up Julian in a haunting more vivid than all the miles that lay between them. Desire in the eye, in the hearing, in the memory. Julian, during a weekend in the country, returning from a dawn walk in spring rain with her arms full of wildflowers; Julian, coming like a vision of splendor back into bed, skin cool and damp with the rain’s freshness, hair faintly ringleting, smelling of grass and dew, flinging blossoms all over the bed for the sheer elation of it. Julian, listening to Rachmaninoff’s “Trio Élégiaque No. Two” and Messiaen’s “Oiseaux Exotiques” for the first time. Julian eating an oyster, lips wrapping the fortunate creature in their fullness. Julian, diving and splashing like a berserk dolphin at the seashore. Julian, lifting from its box the gift of a white silk kimono. Julian, tipsy on champagne, lying on the sofa for three hours scowling at the ceiling and arguing aloud with God. Julian, sleeping in her arms—these arms now hugging only herself against the January wind—Julian asleep after love: small-boned body with skin finespun as gauze, limbs sprawled but never quite in abandon … always something maddeningly virgin about her, something withheld. Iliana reached up to her own throat, to touch the gold women’s symbol Julian had given her. Julian. Juliana.

  Celia glanced at Iliana surreptitiously and spotted the soundless tears. She moved closer and again linked her arm with her friend’s. The gesture brought forth a cataract of words again.

  “I still don’t understand what happened, Celia. I try and try but … Julian always said she wished to live alone, at least for a while, to reassemble the fragments of her life. But I didn’t want to believe that. We were actually living together, you see, and I wanted that: a real life. Rising together and making coffee, chatting about nothing in particular over breakfast, going off in different directions to do different tasks during the hours of the day, reconnecting at evening to prepare dinner together, to sit by candlelight, share food and talk of the day, read perhaps or play some music, enter the nighttime smoothly, through an act of love or of simple curling together, body to body in sweet weariness, in our mutual bed. I craved that proximity, that continuity. After so many years of wandering, I wanted that. She once turned to me and lectured me that I kept saying ‘a real life.’ ‘Who doesn’t live a real life?’ she fumed. ‘The convict, the prostitute, the Carmelite, the Bedouin nomad, the paraplegic—their lives are just as real to them. Either none of us lives a real life or all of us do.’ But I meant something different, you know, Celia? Something rooted in its own sweet daily rhythms. Was it such a sin to want that, and with her?”

  For answer, Celia only pressed Iliana’s arm. Let her talk, she reminded herself; you’re a good friend, bear with all her retrospections; don’t argue, let the last of it cascade out.

  “Understand me, Celia. She never said it was a sin. But every time I spoke of it, she reiterated her own desires—space, time, solitude, freedom. How had I ever constricted her freedom? If I could only understand … Then, when she began it all again—the whirl of activity—I knew it was a reach toward that freedom. And yes, then I did fight it. There was the work in untangling what shreds were left of her mother’s estate. There were speeches, meetings, travels. There was her editing job, which she kept on top of everything else to put money away for her own apartment. There was her book. There was the anxiety about her husband, even though it was clear by then no reconciliation was possible. There were the world’s poor and dispossessed, there were letters to write and phone calls to make … Yes, I became jealous, of her colleagues, her friends, her time. I fought her over time for us. The more I fought for that, the more she withdrew. I don’t understand.”

  Celia sighed. “You tried to possess her, tonta. It sounds like she wanted that and also didn’t want it.”

  “But when all the rhetoric about loving in freedom is spent, isn’t it true that at heart every lover wishes to possess the belovèd? Possess and be possessed by, utterly, eternally—no matter how unrealistic and hopelessly romantic that seems to our modern, psychologically sophisticated intellects?”

  “That,” Celia smiled, “is part of an unfinished discussion you and I have had many times. But however that may be, I do think perhaps North Americans are fearful about … commitment.”

  “But she is committed to me. Like family. Friends until we die, I know that. Maybe even periodic lovers, though not in the way I would have wanted. Yet something in me still believes we will one day have that—that lively, ecstatic serenity together, that—coming home to one another.”

  Celia debated injecting a note of realism into the delicacy of the confessional moment. What was it her friend really needed to hear, in order to heal?

  “It sounds to me,” she said slowly, groping for the right approach, “as if your Julian must let herself experience what she has been denied for so many years—in the childhood, in the marriage. She must go into the … exile of herself, you know? Perhaps she will have other lovers; perhaps other women lovers, pe
rhaps men. It may be just as well. If she’d stayed with you she’d have coveted her freedom. Wouldn’t you rather she have her freedom and covet you? You say you don’t foresee her living with anyone again for some time. I wonder … But you, niña. You must cease the waiting.”

  “By ceasing the waiting one risks losing the hope.” There, she had admitted it. “And Julian would neither fully claim me nor fully let me go. Were she a composer, Celia, she would write music redolent with hemiolia. You know? The rhythmic ambiguity—?”

  “I know. That all time values are in the relationship. Are six notes of an equal time value three groups of two or two groups of three?” Celia recited, “Dunstable, Dufay, Schumann’s ‘Spanische Liebes-Lieder.’ I know, Iliana. I know.”

  “I didn’t want the waiting to erode my love for her. I didn’t want to abandon her—like her father had. That is the way of the exile. After suffering so total a severance, one goes through life protecting oneself against ever feeling too much again. You know that, Celia,” she said gently. “But I also did not want to be like the husband, waiting too long—until violent expulsion seems the only pure act. I didn’t want to be like the mother, clinging, demanding, smothering—though it was in this direction the greatest danger lay. Because Julian evoked precisely that form of loving.” Iliana lifted a blasted face to the winter sky, crying out, “What models are left us, we women?”

  Celia found tears burning her own eyes. She didn’t want that, didn’t want to feel, didn’t want it all opened up again. “We are the strong women,” she heard herself say in a small voice, “the political ones, the ones who have careers, the ones who are feminists, the ones who dare to love women. So. You say, I say, we all say … Yet the ghost of the mother rises and walks among us, through us, between us. Maybe that is the only love, Iliana; maybe all other loving is an imitation of that first passion—or of the lack of it. Maybe love is just another masterful invention of the poets.”

  They fell silent again. The boulevard wind keened softly.

  “I tried, Celia. I helped her look at apartments. I helped her shop for furnishings. I surprised her with gifts she would need to set up housekeeping—since she refused to fight the husband over property. At first my gifts were met with delight; later with that familiar tight-lipped expression of suffocation. I don’t understand.”

  Celia fought the understanding, but she understood. “Julian felt you were equipping her with articles she wanted to choose for herself. You were filling her longed-for space with too many artifacts of your presence—as if you were going to be living together.” Not to feel this empathy, not to see life raw and chaotic again. As devoutly as Iliana claimed she sought clarity, so Celia claimed she sought opacity. They circled each other and their overlapping truths, trading the wrong clues.

  “But still she didn’t act, Celia. I began to see she was waiting to react. And I began to feel descend on me a role I did not—still do not—comprehend. It was as if I had to fulfill some promise I had no recollection of having made, honor some unholy bargain, live up to some forgotten pledge with the devil. So I—who wanted nothing more in the world than to keep her close—drove her away. Not in anger. But in pressuring that she must decide.”

  The two women approached the corner of St. Germain and the side door of the Musée de Cluny. Celia glanced at her watch. At least she had delivered de Costa on time.

  “So you ended it,” she suggested, offering her friend the gift of dignity.

  “I don’t know,” Iliana mumbled in bewilderment. “I don’t know what happened. I mean, in one way, it’s not ended. We see each other frequently, we have dinner at my flat or at hers, go to concerts, laugh, gossip … I know she’ll meet me at the airport next month. I know I’ll write her all about the concert in detail. The mysterious thing is that I don’t know how I lost her. Or even if I have.”

  Obsession. Celia saw it, pitied it. Whether for a lost little nation or a mother’s voice or a lover’s glance or the character of a D-minor chord, it was obsession that carried and inflicted its own content. Any object of obsession was merely the excuse; it was the capacity for obsession that was the message entire. She saw it and pitied it. More. She feared it. She envied it. Iliana, ignorant of her pity and her envy, and impervious to her advice, was meanwhile putting the coda on her narrative.

  “The day Julian moved from my flat, that last day at Grove Street, I’ll never forget how her eyes pierced me through their tears. ‘Where are you going, then, truly, my Juliana, whom I am going to lose?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered, with a doleful shake of her head. ‘So many dyings, so much to mourn.’ Then she looked at me. ‘Freedom—is it so impossible, ’Yana? Will it be the most painful dying of all? Or will it be real, a stepping off the stage at last?’ I could have answered in many ways, but some peculiar power struck me dumb. ‘Then is anything ever real, at all?’ she appealed, tears running down her face. So I picked up the set of Grove Street keys I had given her, which she had discreetly put on the hall table, to leave behind—and I tossed them at her. She caught them, in surprise. I remember lifting my head high and smiling at her, with a wink, singing out as lightly as I could, ‘Style, my love. Perhaps style is the only thing that ever is real.’ And so she turned, still holding the keys. And so she was gone.”

  They stood before the museum door.

  “But we have arrived,” Celia announced, turning to her childhood friend. “Now. I want you to understand something, Iliana de Costa. Perhaps you did love this time in ways more profound than you ever loved before—and whatever this churlish old friend may rant, know that I respect it.” She fumbled in her pocket, produced a crumpled linen handkerchief, and blew her nose loudly. “And whatever mysteries you cannot comprehend, understand this: that you are now composing in ways more profound than you ever did before. In the long and short run, exile or not, lover or not, that is what counts. That is what lasts.”

  Iliana nodded, sniffling. Celia proffered her handkerchief. “Go on, blow your frozen nose. We’ve shared everything else. Why stop now?” Iliana obliged and emitted a dutiful honk.

  “So now we go in there to the salle and you take the baton and get to work, eh? This is the last rehearsal holy saints and we have a Paris premiere tomorrow. I have no more patience with these lovelorn mewlings. I have to thaw these icy fingers for your hellish tangle of notes. You have no more time to be The Tragic Lesbian. You have to cope with the unruly mixture that’s waiting in there: electronic and acoustic musicians, plus chorus, plus three female soloists each so temperamental that together they qualify to be the Nicaraguan revolutionary junta.”

  Iliana broke into laughter. The two women hugged one another.

  “If you are very good in there, I promise you a reward,” Celia said, stepping back, holding Iliana at arm’s length, and peering sternly into her face. “I’ll treat you to supper at La Coupôle, for old times’ sake.”

  “That would be heaven,” Iliana brightened, “but only if we can take a taxi. I will coagulate with all this arctic exercise.”

  “Idiot. This is Paris, remember? You walk in Paris. It’s not New York, where there’s nothing to walk along. I will walk you back down St. Michel—and yes yes we can stop in the Café Luxembourg for a petit cognac if you wish—then, nicely warmed, we proceed through Montparnasse. Is it a bargain?”

  “It is,” Iliana vowed. “And, Celia,” she added, returning the handkerchief with a straightforward look, “thank you.” They walked into the museum.

  Ten minutes later, Celia stood at her synthesizer, flicking dials in between chafing her stiff hands. A din of tune-up and vocalizing filled the salle. Then the woman in black slacks and black turtleneck mounted the podium and faced the Groupe Vocal de France and the Ensemble Electroacoustique. She glanced at Celia, raked her eyes over choir, instrumentalists, soloists. She rapped her baton for attention. The noise began to subside.

  “I am waiting, mesdames et messieurs,” Iliana called in a voice of authority. The room fel
l silent. “We begin at the top, with the Kyrie, please. Forte, con brio. It starts audaciously; reckless, in full passion, remember.”

  There was a rustle of music sheets, then stillness again. Iliana waited. All eyes were fixed on the composer-conductor. This is home, she thought. This is what lasts.

  Baton in hand, Iliana de Costa raised her arms, poised for the opening attaque.

  Julian wandered around her apartment, touching things. After all these months, the tactile existence of this new home still gave her acute pleasure. Just to caress objects that felt, still not hers, but gradually familiar, as they lived in the same place as she: these spoons, that crystal candlestick, this pottery bowl. A newspaper clipping about Laurence Millman declaring his candidacy for local Democratic district leader was propped up on the fireplace mantel—a real fireplace this time, with a log flaming and crackling cozily inside. The de Costa photograph, “Old Woman in Nursing Home,” which had won the 1984 International Photography Prize, hung framed on the wall facing the fireplace. Bookcases lined the other walls and flanked the mantel. The piano smiled its perfect teeth from a corner, waiting for the one chord to be struck that would end all music. The cats—Virginia and Vita—lay curled in Yin-Yang fashion on their favorite cushion of the sofa.

  She walked into her bedroom, where the afternoon light flung itself through open shutters across the bed, golden, odalisque. More bookshelves. Photographs of the major noncharacters on her bedtable. A battered Raggedy Ann doll sprawled, fearless now, on the chair.

  In the study: her desk. Her own desk again, capriciously cluttered with “To Do” lists, mail, political tracts, seed catalogues for city gardeners, and galley proofs of the new book—on Thanatos as the heart of male politics and Eros as the heart of female politics—the book whose publishing advance had made possible apartment, spoons, fireplace, bed, desk, and everything else. Especially the garden she would grow upstairs on the roof in the spring. Another chance to “make the tar-paper bloom,” but this time looking out over a quiet street in Greenwich Village, not far from Iliana’s.