Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  I didn’t think I could handle it myself, and was looking for the phrases to say I was tired, etc., etc., and go up to bed, when Montgolfier focused on me directly for the first time.

  “Would you like a cognac?”

  This seemed a particularly incongruous choice of drink. But I did in fact want another brandy, so I accepted and settled back again. He strode off, multicolor patches flapping, and came back with two Hennesseys in pint snifters. He handed one to me and threw a sip down his throat before he sat. A T-shirted, hay-haired harlequin looked so out of his element swirling a brandy snifter that I laughed. It sounded aberrant to me, a high hearty foreign sound I hadn’t heard out of my own throat for—how long?

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pacing a time or two and then sitting. “But it gets to me. That kid is so spaced out he can hardly make it up to bed, let alone to Hiroshima. And he hasn’t any idea how deep he’s in.”

  “I was confused,” I said. “I thought you were traveling companions.”

  “What? No—oh, I guess it’s a little cheap to slip into the hip jargon, but it’s easier for me than not, so fuck it, I function better that way. He just stumbled in this afternoon. And that’s part of the trouble, you see? He’s backpacking clear through Japan on five dollars a day and four million hare krishnas, but the minute something happens he can’t handle, he turns up in a three-star Pizza Hut hotel just like his Des Moines daddy would’ve picked for him.”

  “When it comes to that,” I hazarded, feeling the brandy slip down easily, and gratefully certain that it had lifted off me for the evening, “you look a little out of place yourself.”

  “Well now.” He gestured at me and I glanced down to see the tails of my striped scarf hanging off the side of the sofa. “You’re a little gypsified for a respectable place like this.”

  I’m pretty sure this sounded to both of us like flirting. I’m pretty sure of it, because he went back immediately into the earnest, energetic lean, and said, “I think it gets to me so much because I keep thinking about my own kid, and how long I’ve been away from him. He’s only four, I mean, he’s not into that phase, but I’ve been away six months and I know he doesn’t understand why Daddy went off and left him. It makes me nervous for him. But then,” he added, “I’m headed back home day after tomorrow.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Southern Cal,” he said vaguely, or pridefully maybe. Southern Californians sometimes appropriate the whole territory.

  “Is it really? So’s mine. That is, I grew up there, Seal Beach. I’m from England now.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a textile designer.”

  “Are you!”

  I had an exotic sense of the ease of everything. Who are you, where are you from, what do you do? Simple things. There are simple truths to answer with.

  “And you?”

  “I’m a minister.”

  “A what?”

  “A minister. Methodist. What’s so fucking amazing about that?”

  “Ordained?”

  “Sure. Well, the fact is that I haven’t had a parish for about three years, and I only had one, and I only held out for about eight months. Since then I’ve been doing theological research, mostly on grants. Not that they keep me at the Palace Side most of the time. I’m treating myself to ice water and hot showers because I’m on my way home day after tomorrow. Why are you so freaked out?”

  “I’m sorry, I guess I’ve been away from home for longer than I thought. You’re just not my idea of a minister, and I knew a lot of ministers.”

  “Yes, well, times change. And anyway, naturally I’m a radical. You see, if you want to be a radical but can’t quite hack it, religion is a very good racket to go into. If you’re an artist or politician and you want to make yourself out as really left, you have to go in for all sorts of difficult and dangerous things—slums, censorship, all that stuff. If you get yourself ordained all you have to do is patch your jeans and write about something wigged out like ‘Comedy in Christianity.’”

  “That’s an act,” I said. It was easy to say. The brandy went all the way to my fingertips.

  “Yes,” he said, grinning, easy.

  “But is that what you write about, comedy in Christianity?”

  “I’ve already done Christianity, now I’m doing Zen, but it takes a long time to research because Zen is nearly all comedy, great stuff, high comedy and diddlyshit slapstick. It is, as they say, a rich unmined field.”

  “For instance.”

  But he went for more brandy before he came back to tell me about Putai, a medieval Zen monk who left the monastery to travel about the villages, a pack on his back, throwing sweets at the children and chucking dogs under the chin. When people asked Putai why, if he was a monk, he didn’t stay in the monastery, he replied, “Give me a penny.”

  “He’s Santa Claus,” I said.

  “That’s it, that’s it.”

  So we talked about Christmas. Its commercialization didn’t trouble Montgolfier on his son’s account, because he thought that tinsel and toys were a better metaphor for birth in winter, to a child, than sermons and plaster crèches.

  “Greed doesn’t worry you?”

  “Only some forms of it. Of course, there’s a middle-aged settled sort of pisspoor sublimation greed that’s the root of all evil; but kids just mainly want the world. And that’s what it’s there for. Christianity is based on greed, as a matter of fact; it’s hardly altruistic to want to save your own immortal soul.”

  “I’ll feel better about Christmas then. I’m an ex-Baptist atheist myself, but I can’t get over loving Christmas.” So easy: what I am, theologically speaking, is an ex-Baptist atheist.

  “Don’t try.”

  I told him about the tradition of mechanical toys for Oliver, and how I’d wound up giving Jill an artwork and Oliver a trolley once, which he found delightful, probably charming, patting a knee. “That’s it. That’s it.” I’d forgotten how much I liked to talk to Americans. I’d never talked to one, that I could remember, so cheerfully foulmouthed as Warren Mont-golf-yer. I was sure he had as good a rationalization for it as he had for tinsel, but I wasn’t going to come up prudish by asking for it. On the other hand, I felt no particular compulsion to “slip into the hip jargon.” I like to use an occasional “shit,” “piss” or “fuck” myself, for particular emphasis, but on the whole I subscribe to the theory that such language constitutes a polluted and impoverished vocabulary. With Montgolfier, on the contrary, it seemed to operate as a metaphysical catalyst, and produced “a fairly fucking plausible Christmas pudding,” and “a bit of a celestial shitpile at the best of times.”

  We chatted till the second brandy was gone, discreetly coming round to chat about husbands and wives (his wife was called Zoe; I learned she was little and pretty and dark and a high school teacher), son and daughter, bungalows and manor houses and careers. Montgolfier described the difficulty of writing about fools and comics for theologians: if you write in the spirit of the subject you’re an academic reject, but if you write in the requisite cant you come up with comic disparity between tone and matter. He spoke of this stylistic problem with professorial solemnity which was funny; he knew it—“cosmic comic?”—and scratched his nose. I described the Oriental acquisition of Midwest five-and-dime design at Utagawa. Though I said little of Tokyo, and of Takayama only that I’d been there. Then we said how nice it was, how glad we were, how very pleasant an accident, and so forth, and good-bye.

  I slept wonderfully. The relief of a mattress above the level of the floor, and a silent squashy sort of pillow, and the moonlight slatted between ordinary ugly venetian blinds. I wished to God (or somebody), as I burrowed into the pillow, that I didn’t know it would be waiting for me in the morning.

  But in the morning it wasn’t. I was agitated and anxious about my airline ticket, and having to face a decision before the day was out, but agitated in a normal, explicable sort of human way. My face looked like a human face
with a toothbrush in it at the mirror, and I ate a normal breakfast of orange juice, toast and humanizing coffee. The only neurotic symptom, apart from reaching down to finger my ticket from time to time, was the interest with which I watched the elevator door until it parted on the rather ridiculous striding figure of the overtall harlequin-patched Very Reverend Warren Montgolfier. His hair was pretty well combed, though, and he had on a buttoned shirt this time.

  “Can I join you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll have to eat fast, I’ve got to go find a string of likely looking beads. Have you got plans? Do you want to come?”

  Neurotic after all. Insane, the lift of heart that met this invitation. Virginia Marbalestier, clown. Alone and crazy in the Orient, and looking for salvation, which comes, of course, from an American Methodist minister. Typical!

  “Are you sorry to be leaving?” I asked, while he wolfed down ham and eggs, black coffee, four rounds of English muffins and orange juice. I wished I had all those Wakimoto breakfasts to offer him.

  “Not really. I’ve had enough, I knew I’d had enough last week. I tried to do a stint in a Zen monastery, and I was lucky they’d let me in. But I couldn’t take kneeling at three in the morning. You’ve got to have tough knees to be a monk. Why? Are you sorry to go?”

  “Well, I’ve only been here six weeks, and I, um, it isn’t clear just what, I mean, I have to decide my schedule. But yes. Yes, I’ll be sorry to go. I like Japan.”

  “Do you?” He flapped jam onto a muffin. “Why do you like Japan? What do you like about it?”

  I considered. He seemed to want to know. It was a reasonable challenge, since all I’d really told him about was the Osaka factories and the Kyoto Center.

  I considered. “Pattern. Pattern is what matters most to me. That’s why I’d rather paint than design, but since I’m in design, I try to make patterns that’ll make a whole no matter how many times they’re repeated. And the Japanese know more about composition than anyone on earth. I like the shapes of their gardens, and the way they weave. Sumi and Kabuki, ukiyo-e, Noh, Bunraku—things that come to closure. I’d rather see a tragedy come to closure than a drifting comedy.”

  “Would you? That’s where we differ. I like both comedy and drifting. But then, I come by that honestly. You know my name, Montgolfier? It’s really pronounced Mont-goal-feeay; it’s French.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  “Okay, you’re laughing, but you gotta know I don’t run into so many cosmopolitan English ladies.”

  “I don’t suppose you do, in Southern Cal.”

  “Well, anyway, I’m descended from the famous Montgolfier, the balloonist. How about that? You can’t come from a more drifting sort of stock.”

  “I guess not; I’m impressed. But on the other hand, look at Montgolfier’s balloons. You could hardly find a closure more symmetrical, either in the functioning, or in the paintings round the rim.”

  “You know what they look like?”

  “C’mon, they sell cheap prints of them for college rooms. There’s nothing esoteric in knowing about balloon design.”

  “Well.” He chewed the last of the fourth muffin round and said through it, “It’s a paradox then. I’m a paradox. I can handle that. Why do you care so much for pattern?”

  “I come by it honestly too, I guess. My dad was the careful old kind of carpenter that wouldn’t put two boards together out of true, and wouldn’t work for anyone who wanted it sloppier than his principles. It kept us poor, his principles. But when he drove the last nail in a cabinet or a hamburger stand—I watched him do it—and stood back, you knew that something had been accomplished. Brought to closure.”

  “You liked him? Your dad?”

  “Yes. You remind me of a soap opera.”

  “That’s a pretty shitty thing to say.”

  “No, it’s only an idea I had once, that the reason soap operas work is that the men in them listen to the women.”

  “Don’t men listen to women?”

  “See? You give a distinct impression of wanting an answer to that.”

  “I do. Don’t they?”

  “Not in my experience. Well, some do. Queers listen.”

  “I think that’s a pretty shitty thing to say.”

  We laughed, he paid his bill and I paid mine; he ushered me out the door and south along the streetcar line toward the Demachi Yanagi. He walked with a loping lurch; his head leaped forward annoyed that his legs wouldn’t follow it fast enough. I skipped to keep up, then he’d notice I was falling behind and miss his stride to wait for me. So we proceeded, creaky-pullied, into the low-rent shopping section at the bottom of Gosho Park. He didn’t talk while he walked, he put all his concentration into getting there, but when we hit the street of shops he pulled up under a streetlamp and brought out, “It’s probably that they’re afraid of finding out how mad you are.”

  “What?”

  He stuck his fingers under the spiky hair to scratch his nape. “If men don’t listen. They’re probably afraid of finding out how angry women are. Because otherwise they wouldn’t would they?”

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  “Find out. I mean, it’s socially acceptable for a woman to show fear but no anger, isn’t it? Just as it’s socially acceptable for a man to show anger but not fear.”

  All my life I have been running up against stuff from dubious sources that seemed to me important and profound. Once my mother gave me a book called Helen Welshimer’s Talks to Girls, which contained the opinion that the three necessities of happiness were: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. It also contained a number of parables proving that you should brush your teeth and carry Jesus along with you in your sex life, so I have known that this formula was to be distrusted. Still, I have not found a better. Once a dorm counselor at art college, comforting me over a souring romance with a mulatto graphics student named Chips Bayena, assured me that there was no issue of politics, race, religion or class that could not be overcome in a love affair, “as long as you like the way his hair grows down the back of his neck.” This lady read McCall’s and The Upper Room, in the former of which I found a variation of this insight also printed. Still, it keeps coming back to me with more force than, say, “Remember the Lord thy God, to keep his commandments,” or “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart.” I think I have a female mind, but I don’t know what to do about it.

  “That sounds pretty … fucking accurate to me,” I said.

  We tried four little shops in quick succession, where Montgolfier pawed through trays of wooden, glass, bamboo and metal beads, and finally settled on a string composed of carved cedar balls punctuated at intervals by cylinders of ivory.

  “You think?”

  “You’ve got taste. I just wonder if Catman does.”

  “I think I’ll risk it.” He pressed the bottom on his digital watch. “I’ll have to get him out of the hotel by ten. Shall we taxi back?”

  Montgolfier hadn’t Japanese enough either to make the bead transaction—he held up fingers and grunted, used pidgin English and spread his money on his palm—or to direct the taxi driver, which I therefore did. I thought it pretty poor to be in Japan six months and not be able to buy a string of beads. But even as I was making this judgment he pointed out the window at a tea shop with a marquee in English.

  “Look at that: DRINK FOR LADY, WITH NUTS. I saw one called SNACK OF LADIES once. And the monorail in Tokyo—have you been on the monorail? That accordion sort of section between the cars, they call it the diaphragm and you’re not supposed to leave your luggage there. So there’s a sign, DEPOSITING ON THE DIAPHRAGM IS NOT ALLOWED. They show up our language, don’t they? Don’t they show our language up?”

  So I told him about my proposition on the Takayama train, and when he guffawed at it I laughed as well, with a nervous sense of being untrue to myself, betraying a perspective that was only temporarily in abeyance.

  I sat in the restaurant section w
ith a cup of coffee again while Montgolfier went up to get Catman, and after a while they came down, Catman hunchbacked under his pack and the minister drawing him along with both hands, one on his elbow and the other on the string of beads, as if he were leading an animal. He urged him out the double doors, and I turned to watch through the window as Montgolfier hailed a taxi, hugged the boy, said something intensely close to his face, and put him in. He made the peace sign again and stuck his head in to talk to the driver—I guess after all he could make a destination clear if he wanted to—then stood in the middle of the traffic lane gesturing peace till the cab was out of sight. He came back in and ordered coffee, preoccupied and moody once again.

  “You did all you could.”

  “No. No, I didn’t. I should’ve gone with him to the train. But it’s my last day in Kyoto and I haven’t seen the Koko Dera. Don’t you think it would be some kind of crime against aesthetics not to see the Koko Dera?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it.”

  “You haven’t? And you were here two weeks?”

  “I told you, everything was closed when I got out of the Center. And it was too far away for the weekend, when there was so much else to see.”

  “That’s got to be a crime against aesthetics. Have you got plans?”

  “Well”—my handbag was in my lap and I clutched the top of it over my passport case—“I’ve got one errand to run, to … confirm my ticket, but I could do it this afternoon, I guess.”

  “We’ll take a taxi. It’s not that far.” He sloshed his coffee cup and frowned. “I should have gone with him to the train.”

  “It probably wouldn’t have made much difference.”

  “No, I guess you’re right. But … it’s Christian greed again. Haven’t you ever felt that you failed at something, not because you could’ve done any good, but because you didn’t do all you could’ve done that wouldn’t have done any good?”

  And then—it doesn’t seem to me that I had any choice in the matter; the frame, the context had been provided and it was reflex, necessity, to fill it—I began to tell him about Frances and I ended telling him all about Frances. Her coming to East Anglian, her circular reasoning, her suicide attempt, her paintings, the Rubigo, the windowpane, Holloway, the Carnaby Award, the Dorset home. It tumbled out headlong. I’d never spoken of her to anyone since Malcolm left, and I thought I was talking too long, that we should be getting to the Koko Dera; but when I said so Montgolfier restrained me, ordered more coffee, told me to go on. Sometimes I stumbled, contriving slightly to leave out Oliver’s part, out of loyalty to Oliver maybe but also out of more immediate loyalty to Montgolfier. We’d set up the self-protective rules of our conversation, and they included only warm and positive references to home.