What would he tell Mademoiselle Objet? And what, eventually, or tomorrow, would he do about a job?
With these somewhat unsettling thoughts infesting his mind, he stepped down the stairs. At the bottom, like a jackal in the jungle, the Curator-in-Chief of the museum, wearing a charcoal gray, boiled woolen suit with a brass falcon badge in its right lapel, and looking uncomfortably like a policeman (or so it seemed to Monsieur Sorbonne) was sitting behind a long table, lying in wait for him.
“Are you the same man who entered the museum at 9:32 a.m.?” asked the Curator-in-Chief.
“I am,” said Monsieur Sorbonne, feeling the small little hairs rise up on the back of his neck.
“I have been watching and following you,” said the Curator-Chief, “as you have conducted your sojourn through the museum, and I have made note of the considerable passion and curiosity with which you perceived every object. It was truly remarkable,” said the curator, “unusual, the high degree of your interest, a pity that you are a visitor merely, since the qualities you possess would be so perfect in a Museum Sub-Curator … one of which,” he continued, “we are desperately in need of.”
Monsieur Sorbonne was so beset with thoughts of how he would discuss his failure to get a job with Mademoiselle Objet that he only one-third heard the words that the Curator-Chief had uttered. He had, in fact, been about to excuse himself to get back to the hotel, to tell Mademoiselle Objet God-only-knows-what, when the Curator-Chief continued. “Is there any possibility,” he asked, “any miniscule chance whatsoever that a person of your perceptual ilk, your aesthetics-appreciating character might possibly be available—for a salary, of course—for such a Sub-Curator position?”
He paused for a moment, as if waiting for his hopes to crumble like an ancient artifact, but then he went on, “One is needed immediately in the Gallery of Etruscan Artifacts; and you, I can tell, would be perfect. Could you, or would you, consider … such a position? Or is my enthusiasm—excuse me, and I beg your pardon—tragically misplaced?”
Monsieur Sorbonne was by now at least beginning to hear the words that the Curator-in-Chief was saying, and he was overjoyed and amazed by them. Composing himself in the midst of his shock, he replied that he would be pleased indeed to become the Sub-Curator of Etruscan Artifacts. Should it please the Curator-in-Chief, he said, he would appear at 9 o’clock—salary to be discussed—the following Monday morning.
The Curator-Chief shook his hand, and, opening the high bronze door in the vaulted basement corridor, directed Monsieur Sorbonne up a flight of white marble steps that led out into the velvety night, where, already, the sky was alive with stars.
CHAPTER 35
Monsieur Sorbonne and Mademoiselle Objet Convene Again at the Hotel
It was late and dark when Monsieur Sorbonne returned to the hotel. Mademoiselle Objet had ordered his favorite repast from Service-for-the-Rooms (tea, fumed salmon, toast points, horseradish and capers, lemons, mayonnaise, and grated egg yolks) to celebrate the finding of the house; but she was now becoming nervous because of Monsieur Sorbonne’s extensive tardiness.
Sitting on one of the velvet red chairs, feeling a mixture of excitement (about the new house) and distress (about Monsieur Sorbonne’s elongated absence), Mademoiselle Objet had once again started to scratch at her hands, and was now hovering at the brink of starting to cry.
Why was it, she wondered, that everything so utterly affected her? One minute she was happy, on top of the world—Monsieur Sorbonne loved her, they were going to move in together, she had found them a wonderful house—but now his lateness had left her feeling homeless, hopeless, and abandoned, as if all the good things she’d felt just a minute ago were a figment or a phantom.
She hated her temperament. It was so temperamental, so endlessly exhausting, and the rash it caused would, sooner or later she knew, be the ruin of her hands.
The rash had started years ago, in the early days with Mr. TV. He had given her a Teflon frying pan one Christmas. She hadn’t known what to say—she was so upset—she’d wanted a bottle of lily perfume, and after he said, “It’ll be great, don’t you think, for grilled cheese sandwiches?” and she had said, “Yes, yes, I think it will,” the rash had suddenly appeared. She had scratched it all winter until finally one day in spring, when Mr. TV had gone out of town for a croquet tournament, she put some old white gloves on her hands, taped them both shut at the wrists, and, instead of scratching her hands for five nights, she had cried herself to sleep.
She was thinking of all this when Monsieur Sorbonne turned the key in the door. He handed her a little pink box, which was tied with a braided gold ribbon. He kissed her, and sat down beside her in front of the table brought in by the Service-for-the-Rooms.
“I’m so very sorry I’m late,” he said. “I’ve had a most interesting day. I got a new job.” He paused. “Well, to be more truthful and specific, I got my first job, and, to celebrate, on my way home I stopped to buy you a gift, a bottle—I do hope you’ll like it—of lily perfume.”
CHAPTER 36
Madame Métier Returns to Her Cremes
Madame Métier was starting again to work with her cremes. In the fresh air and freedom of her now-extinct husband’s absence, she was exploring again the medicinal possibilities of plants.
To that end, she often frequented the local flower stands, particularly on the days when she knew the flowers were wilting and she could feel, as her father had always called it, the “cell-magnetic power” in them. There was a certain spring of energy, he had often told her, which, if captured before it exhausted itself in a plant’s final breath, could be condensed and suspended in various medicinal emulsions.
Buying the plants, drying them upside down in her sunroom, dividing the dried leaves and petals in the proper proportions for the recipes (some remembered, some newly invented), storing them in various boxes and bottles and jars, submerging them in a variety of solutions, reminded her of her father, whom she realized now, belatedly, she had adored.
It had taken her quite some time to realize how deeply she had loved him. He had died when she was in her young twenties. She had been occupied at the time with her husband and with the loss of her daughter. It was only as time went on and she met and talked with a great many people with whom, for one reason or another, she seemed to be unable to converse (they seemed to like to talk only about the things they wanted to buy or to get) that she realized that her father had been a most remarkable man, and that, in a very deep way, he had shaped her
He had spoken to her about many things: the rotation of the planets, the perfectly symmetrical pattern of the molting of feathers on birds’ wings, the elevation of Mount Popocatépetl, the folly of politics (and, in particular, the words of politicians), the importance of doing in life what you love—whether or not there seem to be positions open in the field—(or fat remunerations for doing it), the fragile balance between every leaf and tree and bird and animal on earth.
Once, briefly, she had entertained the disturbing notion that it was perhaps only because he had died that now she so admired him. Perhaps like her husband, whom now, in his absence, she could quietly appreciate, her father, too, simply by virtue of being no longer alive might have become, belatedly, an object of her adoration. But entertaining this thought on a day when she was shredding blue thistles, she suddenly sneezed, and deeply inhaling their vapors (which gave her clarity of mind), she realized that, of course, this couldn’t be the case.
Her father had had an irregular life (and thereby had made her an heir to one). Unable to please his wife, who wanted only to keep things in order, unhappy with the various professions which as a youth his parents had insisted upon him (he had become a lawyer for his father, a banker for his mother), he found himself repeatedly bored and insulted by the straight-line thinking which these esteemed professions seemed always to require. As a result, he found himself surreptitiously studying plants, which endlessly fascinated him; and in his fifty-fourth year, after both of h
is parents had died, he became a certified botanist.
Unlike the law or banking, botanical riddles charmed him. What—or who—had made all the plants the way they were, with their frivolous, gorgeous (possibly pointless), but endlessly colorful variations? What, for example, was the botanical lineage of the plant called Lamb’s Ears, and how could you account for the fact that when you touched its leaves, their silvery furs, like the nap of a velvet, insisted on going in only a single direction? For what purpose did roses have thorns, or holly have pricks, or persimmon no leaves while showering their fruit? Or, as he noticed much later, why was it that tea infused with the leaves of blue thistle should have the effect of creating mental clarity? (This he had discovered quite by accident one night while making himself a cup of tea. A bouquet of blue thistles he was drying collapsed from its thread on the kitchen ceiling and crumbled into his open pan of boiling water, and he had noticed, after he drank it, that he was able to think more clearly.)
Madame Métier had often walked with her father (who walked to escape the orderliness of his wife) on Sunday afternoons. It was then that, passing through meadows or alongside moss-covered creek banks, or walking up and down the rows of the experimental garden plot he rented from the city, he had taught her the names and properties of many plants. It was then that, in passing, he had told her how to take note of even the subtlest differences in the tenor of their fragrance, the various oils that they contained, and when and how to harvest them for optimum results.
As she started now with plants of her own, his spirit at times seemed to haunt her, to speak to her from the midst of the slowly dehydrating petals and fronds, such a deep sense of peace did she feel each day as she gathered and dried them. When she felt his presence thus, at times a great sadness would overtake her, for she wished that while he had still been alive, she had talked with him more about life itself and the meaning of things.
One day, a few years after she had married the doctor, the city, by the right of eminent domain, bought up her father’s experimental garden plot for the purpose of building an outskirts-of-the-city public parking lot. He was too old then, to begin another garden, or to transplant his esoteric specimens, and it was because of this (along with his wife’s “now maybe you can settle down, stop fussing with all those fern fiddleheads and just read books or play canasta like everyone else”), that finally he invited death in.
So he had told Madame Métier on his death bed, anyway. “I knew he was coming eventually. I was tired, and so instead of resisting, I just opened the door and invited him in.”
It was the young Madame Métier who sat with him at his deathbed, while, day after day, through the hospital windows, he watched the clouds mysteriously circling. One evening, together, they watched the rain and the sky, which was ribboned with rainbows. “You know,” he said to her then, “when you think of it, life is just a little postage stamp, a colored bit of paper that gets canceled when the letter finally gets sent to its permanent destination.”
Between waves of pain he spoke to her of many things—of life, of death (“it’s just a new beginning,” he told her)—and also, because at times she wept to see him in such anguish, of suffering. “Don’t worry, Darling,” he said, “this is just my cup of the suffering. Suffering always asks you to change, to build your soul large. And because in one way or another we all have to suffer, it’s how we share in the human condition. Don’t be afraid of it, Darling. Suffering opens the doors to compassion.”
One night, toward the end, when his feet had turned blue, Madame Métier returned to her house. And while the doctor was at a Diseases of the Heart Convention, she ground up some petals and leaves she had saved in the green striped hatbox up in her closet. Then, working away in the sunroom all night, she prepared her first edition of a creme.
The next morning at the hospital, after the nurses had bathed her father and wrapped him again in white sheets, she sat down at the foot of his bed and, humming softly, applied the creme to his feet.
From the top of the bed, with his eyes looking down to his toes and his voice like a dry white wind, he said, “Thank you, Darling. That’s wonderful. My feet are ready to fly now. I’m going home.”
Then, as she sat there, still holding his feet in her hands, she felt a great rush of energy as if a million silver electric molecules had poured into her palms. And when she looked up to the top of the bed, his eyes had gone blank and his soul had flown away with the wind.
CHAPTER 37
Monsieur Sorbonne and Mademoiselle Objet Move into Their New House
Having finished their salmon and toast points, Monsieur Sorbonne and Mademoiselle Objet talked for what seemed like hours before they went to sleep. Monsieur Sorbonne told Mademoiselle Objet about his past life, and Mademoiselle Objet told him all about her parents—about her mother, who had worked sixty-plus hours a week at a clothes-cleaning shop as an ironing clerk, and her father, who was descended from princes but had been forced from his country by a sudden revolution, and who, in changing countries, had become a nothing. In becoming a nothing he had drunk without end while her mother worked all day and night at the laundering store. Mademoiselle Objet had tried to make her father happy (by throwing away all his bottles) and her mother happy (by arranging all the objects—the spoons and forks, the piles of mail, the clothes, the magazines), while her mother was away at work. None of this had brought peace to the household, however; and so, having met Mr. TV at an after-hours café where she had gone late one night to pick up a sandwich for her exhausted, over-worked mother, she had married him and gotten away from her parents.
Which had been, more or less, a good thing.
They had told each other their stories and then they had slept, and, in the morning, after a breakfast of coffee and tea cakes, they went off together to see the new house.
Monsieur Sorbonne, no longer wearing his blue Italian suit with the red silk handkerchief, was now wearing blue jeans and a well-pressed shirt. Mademoiselle Objet, using her arms grown strong from endlessly arranging things, gathered up all their objects—hers from Mr. TV’s ex-house, and Monsieur Sorbonne’s from the splendid hotel, and box after box, they installed themselves into their little new home.
“This is just the beginning, isn’t it?” said Mademoiselle Objet, when finally having arranged all the things in the order from which tomorrow and thereafter she would re- and rearrange them, she lay down in the freshly made bed beside Monsieur Sorbonne.
“Yes it is,” said Monsieur Sorbonne. “This is the beginning of everything,” and with that he kissed her and turned out the light.
PART II
CHAPTER 1
Madame Métier Goes Cloud-Watching
Madame Métier had been somewhat pensive since her husband’s death—not that she missed him in particular, but that in the void created by his absence, there was room for so much. She often wondered quietly to herself just what she was meant to do, now that she had been granted the unmentionable good fortune of being delivered from her husband and into a life of her own.
She was glad indeed to have sold off all the doctor’s things, and in particular the white powder for $5,000, with which she had bought the large supply of flowers she was now drying in the sunroom, to say nothing of her new red bathing suit.
The doctor hadn’t liked the beach—it got sand in your crackers, he always said—and since he himself hadn’t liked it, he insisted that Madame Métier also avoid it like the plague. Now, though, with the whiff of fresh air provided by his demise, whatever spare time she had left after work, she would carefreely spend at the beach.
At noon especially, she would put on her red bathing suit and a broad-brimmed straw hat and pack herself a lunch: a T-fish sandwich (sans sand), a pouch of rose-potato crisps, a pickle, and a bottle of sparkling spring water with half a teaspoon of cassis syrup stirred in, and head out for the beach.There she would sit with her snow-fluffy towel propped up against any rock that would serve as a chair, eat her lunch, and look down
and down the long stretch of beach, past the curve of the cove that cradled the city, and on and on to the wild beach beyond. She wanted to see how the air was, how the birds were, how the grass bent in the wind. Each day when she had finished her lunch and packed up the crumbs, she would lie flat-out on her towel, looking up at the blue ciel, and doze and dream and watch the clouds.
Mesmerized, she would watch their sylphlike shifting shapes, their tantalizing dance. At times they appeared to be animals, playing after each other, at other times spirits conversing, their attitudes endlessly changing, at other times jewel-like, catching this or that aspect of light. Enchanted, she watched them for hours, until the clouds themselves became invisible, swam into the sea of blue sky and were softly consumed.
Cloud-watching thus, Madame Métier spent many a peaceful afternoon. The more she observed the clouds, the more she was transfixed by them, until cloud-watching in itself became for her a kind of sub-vocation. For, in time, it was not just the clouds that she saw, but in their endless mysterious movement—the way they would begin and end and then begin again, the way they appeared and disappeared and reappeared, the way they were always different and always the same—a reference to the endlessly changing sameness of things.
Indeed, at times, staring up at the clouds, she felt as if she had become them, as if she herself had been carried up and been somehow melted into them, so that now as a cloud she looked down at herself—a woman on a towel on a beach, wearing a red bathing suit.
Sometimes she would feel like the clouds, at other times like the woman, but whenever she looked up at the clouds, if she stared long enough, the boundaries would slowly dissolve between herself and them. It was then that she knew she had come from the clouds, from the light which so infused them. She knew the clouds were a part of her and that she was part of them. And she knew that in time it would be the clouds to which she would return.
The Magical World of Madame Métier Page 6