Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  “Excuse me, did you tell Mr. Peer that I’d checked back in?”

  “Certainly, madam.”

  “Well, if I get any calls from outside the hotel, I’m out.”

  “Excuse me, madam?”

  “I only wish to take internal calls. If anyone asks for me from outside the hotel, please say I’m out.”

  “Yes, madam, if you wish.”

  I soaked a long time in the bath, washed my hair and dried it at the air conditioner. I shaved my legs and filed my nails, with a strange disoriented memory of having done these things for the last time pleasurably on the night I fell down the stairs. I put a little makeup on without, if that is possible, looking at my whole face, but at one eyelid, one lip at a time. Then I stepped into my sandals, put on the kimono, bound it and tied the obi, and dared myself to face the mirror.

  You see, the thing is, that when you begin to hate yourself, you stop looking into mirrors. You distort yourself so badly that it’s better not to look. I had seemed so gross in Takayama, pasty and unkempt, and then had felt the flesh slough from me with such grim certainty that I was grotesque, that I hadn’t looked. I looked now, timorously, for the first time in maybe three weeks. And maybe in two years.

  And it was all right. Really, it was all right! I ought to have aged in all the awful time since Frances was sent to Dorset, but aging is not so much a matter of trouble as a matter of genes. Breeding, evolution, that sort of thing. My dad looked forty at sixty, and I’ve always taken after my dad. It was all right, my hair was shiny from the washing and beige to match the silk. Even with all the loss of weight my skin was taut and good, my skin was always good, my eyes and cheeks were a little hollowed but it was better for my bones; and bound from breast to hip like that, I was extremely slender, you might have said minute. A breath of astonished excitement slipped from me; I giggled at myself. I turned and tidied the room and folded down the counterpane.

  Montgolfier hadn’t called, so I went on down to the lobby, where I found him in front of the TV set, standing with half a dozen other guests, mostly male, mostly Japanese, watching the buddhalike bellies of the gigantic Sumo wrestlers strain and wobble against each other. He had taken some trouble too, I think, for him. He was wearing maroon cords and an ivory linen shirt, and his hair was washed like mine. He turned when I came up beside him and said, “Jesus, you look terrific.”

  I did. I thought I did. I looked terrific. Now, I’m an artist, and I set a certain store by the aesthetics of the human body. It’s a distortion of feminism that I never could accept, the pretense that human beauty does not count. But I had allied myself with the making of beauty, not the not being of it. Yet I always knew, when somebody praised my drawings, if they were right. And I knew now, too, about Montgolfier.

  “Thanks.”

  Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

  He looked at me a minute longer, grinning and frowning. “Well? What did you do?”

  “I didn’t. I got all the information, but I let myself off deciding till tomorrow.”

  He nodded and lifted an index finger to the television screen. “Did you know they breed them to that sport? They put the champions out to stud. And from the time they’re fourteen or so they train at Sumo farms, where they shovel food down them, masses of rice and hundreds, who knows, thousands of pounds of beef and pork. For the weight. They force-feed them, like hogs, and breed them up like bulls.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Sort of, but on the other hand, when they get in the ring it’s a real sport. It’s not a phony sideshow like wrestling is in the States.”

  “All the same.”

  “You have to see it from a certain perspective, though.”

  “You’re welcome to.”

  We went out and into the Gosho Park in the direction of the Akuho.

  “There was a little old lady here a few days ago, a Scot, who said to me, ‘What beautiful flesh they have!’ Isn’t that a kick? Seventy-year-old Scot or something, tidy little schoolmarm, she said, ‘What beautiful flesh!’ What’s wrong? You look disgusted.”

  “Do I? No, not exactly that. The idea of breeding puts me off. It frightens me.”

  “Frightens?”

  “Well, because it works, doesn’t it? You can actually do it.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “In the fifth grade we were taught about the eohippus—you know, the three-toed horse that gradually pawed away two toes over the generations, while the one that was left got coarse and callous and turned into a hoof? I learned that very well, because I was mad for horses, but now … I think, that a mother eohippus didn’t have any notion of losing toes. She just pawed for grass.”

  “So what? What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, my mother tricked me. No, she was only eating grass. But I only thought I was rebelling, wanting to go east and to England. I didn’t know it would turn out that was just the way to make a lady of my daughter, and that then my daughter would pass on, the, grace, the ladyship, the ladyshit, to her daughter and her daughter …” I had started shaking. I could not explain that it was clean shaking, externalizing, getting-it-out-shaking.

  “Hey.”

  “I made a mistake. I didn’t know it and if I had I wouldn’t even have known what kind of mistake it was. But it’s going to be passed on, it’s going to matter right down to the genes.”

  “You take it too hard.”

  “I know, that’s another way I mess things up, by taking them too hard.”

  We mounted the steps of the Akuho and followed the tuxedo with the towel over its arm to a window table. Montgolfier pushed salt cellars and sauces around on the tablecloth.

  “You sound pretty vicious. I guess you must be the lowest of the damned.”

  “Oh, no. I’m just an ordinary sinner.”

  “What’s your sin?”

  “My sin?”

  He shook his napkin over his knees and gestured, palm-upward, the way he’d lifted Catman up the elevator shaft, as if he could lift my mood on the palms of his hands.

  “What circle of hell do you belong to, what’s the particular temptation you can’t resist? Avarice? Overweening pride? Your sin.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s it.”

  “I have committed …”

  “Yes?”

  “The sin of submission.”

  “I believe you.”

  “You may believe me.”

  24

  WE NEVER GOT TO the fourth of September Fourth of July picnic at the Shiramine Jingu shrine. A pity, that, because if we could have foreseen that we’d sit in the Akuho from seven to two we might have chosen some other place to sit. Something else than the gilded Orient-plasti-rococo and the string band backing up a scarf-trailing yellow gamin who sang Chinese laments to a kind of Shanghai Down Home Rock. Affluent black-suited Orientals, a few of them, pushed their brocade ladies around the hardwood semicircle in what looked suspiciously like a foxtrot. For a blessing, Montgolfier didn’t want to dance. We sat against the window over a candle in a gaslamp globe, and talked.

  We talked. Talk, for me, bottled and dammed for so long and to so many fathoms that to have spent two weeks in a remote place where I did not know the language was but to have demonstrated the prohibition of my talk; was after all a metaphor. Talk like uncorking, then, smashed bottles, floodgates and dynamited dams; but I also want to say, talk like a lock, the measured gating of a conduit to its level, the equilibrium of water. Montgolfier did not perceive that I talked too much, he did not say so. He said: why? and: explain, and: I see, and: go on, and: that’s it, that’s it.

  I told him about the blind mare in the Seal Beach trailer park, the anger of the weavers at Migglesly town hall, the peonies breaking ground in January. I told him about Leonardo da Vinci’s use of bay, palm and juniper motifs in the Portrait of Ginevra de Benci; and about the roller coaster in the old Long Beach Pike, which I never dared to ride though it broke my heart when they pulled it down. About the bea
ting of Frankie Billingham, the pregnancy of Dillis Grebe, the stealing of my money, the decline and fall of Oliver. I told him about San Isidro’s smuggling through the Dover customs, about Nicholson’s watch fob, Goya’s village masks, Mom Pollard’s generationally confusing family, the evolution of the photographic silk-screen process, Malcolm’s graffiti and his unmarital dilemma. I told him about the way my father taught me to draw a cube, and how I’d studied botany, and how I’d loved Jill’s birth. I told him about my first two weeks in Japan with fledgling Jill; the missing visas, the seed sifter, and the White Thread Waterfall. I told him the history of raw silk, how its texture is a religious matter, since the Chinese steam the worms dead and unwind the slick cocoon, whereas the Indians to whom all life is sacred must wait until the moth bursts free and then weave of the coarse broken fibers. I told him how my mother used to take me to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, where I fell in love with the portraits of Blue Boy and Pinkie at the age of eight, and conceived a passion to see Reynolds’s and Gainsborough’s country. I told him about Jay Mellon too, and how I had been given a chance to see Japan at eighteen, but had been too bourgeois, too middle-aged to see it as an option, and so had had to come around the world the other way; and how I had been filled with dread at the juice in everything. But of course I didn’t tell him in so very organized a way as this summary suggests, because it was that kind of talk that is always breaking off just short of point and punch line, the listener having parallels, interjections, questions and stories of his own to tell.

  He told me about his father, a rebel in his way, who, out of a long line of balloonists and engineers, had settled himself in a cut-rate shoe factory in Riverside and determined never to go farther away from home than the local Knights of Pythias. How he, Warren Montgolfier, had lived, middle child of five, in a gray sense of being middle at everything, the middle of a universal expanding mediocrity composed of church socials, gritty road dust, pot roasts, misshapen shoes, a series of identical four-door secondhand Dodge sedans and a plethora of identical adenoidal cousins; until he had discovered in his mother’s trunk the letters, daguerreotypes and other effects of his maternal great-grandfather, who had been a zealot missionary in the aftermath of the gold rush. How this great-grandfather, who had affected photographs of himself with one leg cocked on mountain summits as if he had just shot the mountain, frowned craggy-browed out of the browning snaps from under a broad-brimmed hat, and wrote exhortations to the lawless and godless keepers of small-town saloons. And how he, Warren Montgolfier, had conceived a hero and a mission, though when it came to that he would have made a rotten missionary, because he could never remember to convert anybody; he would have gone round the world aggregating tribal customs and beliefs to himself, being, at heart, a motherfucking magpie ecumenicalist.

  He told me how his siblings had gone, the elder brother into shoes and the younger into the army—in the service of which he was now guarding our gold reserves at Fort Knox—and his sisters into dishwater, diaper pins and Tuesday bridge; while he had embarrassed the family, down to the last adenoidal cousin, by seven years of divinity school, which had got to make him a fanatic. He told me how he had found Zoe in a family very like his own—her father was a tool and die worker in a small-arms factory—chafing and restless in an atmosphere of twenty-four hours a day San Jose Chamber of Commerce, had thought to make his one convert of her, but failed at that, because when it came to it she needed such a life to chafe against, and had started to gather her family round them, and hold socials at the parish house, and make marshmallow-and-pineapple concoctions called angel-something-or-other to feed his flock. And had chafed, finally, against him, until, one pot roast, he moved out. And now was allowed to see his son, by permission of the Sovereign State of California, every other Sunday and for two weeks in the sun-and-smoggy summer.

  He told me his theory of the function of comedy in theology, which is to relieve and contain the tension between the sacred and the mundane, so that, all comedy involving a collapse, religious comedy is a collapse from the sublime. And told me, by way of illustration, of the Zen monk who chopped up the sacred idols of the monastery to build a fire, because he was cold and there wasn’t any other wood around.

  “When standing, just stand. When sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble,” he quoted from Confucius.

  We ate egg rolls, sweet-and-sour pork, and a lot of rice, and drank a lot of tea. When the fourth or fifth pot was empty we had a brandy. And then coffee, and another brandy, and another coffee, and so on. By eleven o’clock the affluent clientele was all gone or going, and the waiters began to treat our orders with a certain irony. By midnight the irony had become a little strained, and they began dimming lights and stacking chairs on tables at the far end of the room. Luckily Montgolfier was oblivious to all this, and I didn’t care. Because if we had gone, where would we have gone? To the hotel. But if to the hotel, then up, and I was in no hurry. I sat deliciously damp, I let my hand stray on the cloth. It was barely the new day, and his train didn’t go until 10 A.M. There was time to anticipate, and talk, and have another brandy.

  And then at some point around one it began to be too long. The waiters were huddling near the empty bandstand in a discreet show of wanting to go home. Montgolfier was talking theology in an obsessive way, and I began to feel not that we chose to stay there, but that we couldn’t go. I laid my hand, more obviously, flat on the table so that my little finger touched his spoon, and when he failed to take it I began to feel a familiar contraction in the space where I had, maybe, after all, put more food and drink than I could handle. I withdrew my hand and excused myself to the ladies’ room, and when I came back I stayed standing by my chair for a minute, to suggest that we should go. But he didn’t rise; he pulled the chair out for me and ordered brandy.

  “Not for me, I think. I may have had a little much. I’ve had scarcely anything to eat for the last two weeks.”

  “Why is that?”

  “In Takayama … I don’t know, I couldn’t eat.” I gave up and sat.

  “Was the food bad?”

  “No, no, it was wonderful, so far as I can tell. But I … couldn’t do anything there. It’s nothing against Takayama, it’s a paradigm of a place. But I was paralyzed or something. I guess with trying to decide.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  So of course I did. In the telling I began to shake again, and shook space free to put another brandy, which he asked for from the zinc-faced waiter. Telling, I put my hand on the table again, and my hand shook and he saw it shake. I couldn’t explain that it was clean shaking, although I could explain nearly everything.

  “What I don’t quite understand,” I said, shaking, “or maybe I’m beginning to understand, is the nature of punishment. You realize it was a very big subject where I grew up. I mean, it seems to me as if guilt is the punishment itself. I’ve got away with big things, and yet it’s as I was taught as a child, the sinner only seems to go unpunished. I was guilty of assault and battery against my husband but the police weren’t called. I abandoned my daughter just to make life easier, and nobody blamed me. I was party to child abuse with Frankie, I stole, I plagiarized—and for that I was sentenced to a thousand pounds and this trip to Japan. But I was punished for something in Takayama. I was punished by the carp in that pond. The carp are supposed to be sacred, but they seemed grotesque and full of horror somehow. I couldn’t get rid of the sense that they were artificial.”

  “Oh, but that doesn’t matter. No, that’s the thing about sacred objects. It doesn’t matter a damn if a sacred object is natural or made. It’s sacred, see? That’s the point. An objective correlative, so it can be as mundane or silly as you like, that doesn’t divest it of its mystery. I’ll make a confession, shall I?”

  “I think at this point you might as well.”

  He laughed. “Okay. You have to take this in a … um, friendly spirit, because I don’t like to expose my romantic side. I feel exposed.”

&n
bsp; “Expose,” I said, friendly, and catching my breath for hope, finally, and letting my little finger spread to the bowl of his spoon again.

  “I think that—there isn’t much mysticism in me, you understand—but from the time I was a boy I’ve had a very strong intuitive sense of sacred objects. I remember that once I came across a letter in my great-grandfather’s trunk. A love letter, I don’t know to whom, probably not my grandmother, and since it was in there he probably didn’t send it. But it was comic, comically intense, embarrassing. He called her chickadee and cherry and then he talked about the wonders of the Lord. Like, she was mountain rills at sunrise, and she planted a wilderness in his soul. Awful stuff, you could hardly touch it, you’d get Karo syrup on your hands. But, you know, it moved me too, I could see through it and under it, and I could see that old son of a bitch in his hat and his holey hiking shoes, preaching brimstone to the cowhands and carrying this letter in his pocket. I knew it was a sacred object. And also comic. So. You see. Maybe all this Zen research comes in a straight line out of that.”

  He put his hands over the globe where the candle was guttering.

  “I’m fascinated by the image of the moth and flame. It perfectly describes the nature of a sacred object, because the sacred is that which it is most desirable to touch, and yet that which is most dangerous to touch, and can be most defiled by touch. Just like the moth attracted the light, and seared by it. Daring and not daring …”

  He trailed off. His thumb touched the handle of the spoon, and silver being a good conductor of electricity, I felt the shock. He started up again, about the moth and flame, and sacred objects. And I was very interested in his theology. And also melting at the crotch. And also in danger of getting the sacred giggles at any moment. Our hands made minute shifts on the cloth, you couldn’t miss it, moth and flame, and he went on and on.