The Magical World of Madame Métier

by Daphne Rose Kingma

  They were both still for a moment. In the aftermath of his great outpouring there was a pool of silence, into which, presently, Mademoiselle Objet dropped a small stone. “Nor do I,” she said, “but you yourself have said a clue—if it has to do with looking at me, then it has to do with looking, with seeing. Why don’t you get your camera out and see what you can see?”

  And with that, she got up from the table and put on the kettle for tea.

  CHAPTER 11

  Monsieur Sorbonne Takes His Camera Out for a Walk

  The next morning Monsieur Sorbonne retrieved the View Camera, which had been buried deep in his closet. How could he have left it there for long, when it was his search for meaning that had caused him to buy it in the first place?

  How—and why—had it ended up in the closet? He had fallen in love. They had moved into their little house. He had lost his Oblong Credit Card. He had gone to work, and the camera—that treasure, the key perhaps to his sense of meaning—had languished in the closet, gathering fleas, as it were. Fleas—he laughed to contemplate it. Fleas! Perhaps this was in fact, how the Flea Fair got its name. Considering this, he laughed once again. He was happy that a little flicker of humor should have so crossed his mind. And feeling thus minutely cheered, he loaded it with the single roll of film, which, remarkably, still remained at the bottom of the small maroon velvet pouch.

  Out on the boulevard the chestnut trees were in bloom, their towering blossoms a festival of pink. He photographed them and the clouds, the endlessly poetic sky, then a beautiful wrought iron gate. He snap-snapped a doorway of stately proportions, then another and another, its multiple layers of paint decomposing, and windows, light shadowing them, obscuring whatever mysteries the rooms behind them contained.

  He was amazed, arriving at his office, to discover that he had already exploited the whole roll of film. So distracted was he by the possibility of seeing, that the morning raced by and at noon he went out to drop off the film at the Films Development Store, after which he ate a small sandwich lunch in the park.

  The afternoon dragged. No more could he attend intently to his artifacts. It was fortunate, therefore, that starting out he had been so zealously committed, for even now, today, doing almost nothing, he was still far ahead with his work. When five o’clock came, eyes itching, he raced out like a schoolboy to the Films Store to pick up his photographs.

  CHAPTER 12

  Monsieur Sorbonne Receives a Disappointment

  “I’m so sorry,” said the man at the Films Development Store, who looked a little like a monkey, “but none of the pictures have come out.” He handed Monsieur Sorbonne a small gray envelope. “We’ve checked the film, Sir, and the film was fine. So there must be some problem with your camera.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Monsieur Sorbonne. “There can’t be a problem with the camera. Why, just six months ago I took some photographs of my sweetheart and they turned out perfectly. I haven’t touched the camera since. It has to be the film.”

  “It’s not, Sir, I’m sorry. We can always tell. We have a special test to test film viability. Films, Sir, that is our specialty. So I repeat, Sir; it must be your camera.”

  When Monsieur Sorbonne continued to look incredulous, the monkey man went on. “Should you desire, sir, we can recommend an agent who can check it. But I do definitely advise that you should have your camera repaired.”

  Hearing this, Monsieur Sorbonne was downhearted, and, speaking of his camera, he realized he had left it at the Artifacts Museum. He therefore returned to his cubicle to retrieve it. There was going to be more to this search for meaning than he had expected. Film failures. Camera breakdowns. And now God-only-knew-how-expensive repairs.

  CHAPTER 13

  Madamoiselle Objet Comforts Monsieur Sorbonne About His Camera

  Monsieur Sorbonne was late getting home and Mademoiselle Objet was irritated until she saw how dejected he was. He set the camera down like a dead goose on the kitchen counter. “It doesn’t work,” he moaned. “None of the pictures came out. The film was fine, but there’s something wrong with the camera! At least that’s what the man at the Films Store told me.”

  It was interesting, thought Mademoiselle Objet, how like her Monsieur Sorbonne had momentarily become, now that one of his objects was dysfunctional. And it was even sranger that this week everyone around her—Madame Métier and Monsieur Sorbonne—seemed to be having a crisis of faith, when to her, for once, life was fine.

  It was quite remarkable, too, she thought, how when people lost control over things they could start, a little, to lose their minds. It was interesting, seeing this now, with Monsieur Sorbonne and his camera, Madame Metier and her cremes. She herself had known all her life how problems with objects could warp out your mind and how setting them straight could give you, at once, a whole new sense of well-being.

  Mademoiselle Objet felt sad now for the poor distraught Monsieur Sorbonne, whose broken camera had all but reduced him to hysteria. “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s just a camera, an object, and it can be fixed. Here, give it to me. Tomorrow I’ll take it to the Camera Repairs.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Madame Métier Contemplates a New Creme

  As willing as she was to take Monsieur Sorbonne’s camera to be fixed, Mademoiselle Objet, the next day, found it quite impossible to do. When she got to work there were twenty phone calls waiting on the recording machine, cremes to be mailed out, the stack of fan letters still waiting to be answered. Most pressing was the request—made by now three times—from the TeleVisions station, regarding the series on medicinal flowers, and insisting it be the occasion for the launching of a new creme.

  “They only want you if you have a new creme,” she said to Madame Métier. “They want to promote you—and you them. They’ve had hundreds of calls because of your last appearance and they want to make you a featured guest. They think you could improve their watchings ratings, put their channel on top; but we’ll have to move fast. You’ll have to have a new creme proposal by next week.”

  “I’m not interested,” said Madame Métier, “in promoting a TeleVisions station’s ratings, nor am I interested, haphazardly, in originating some new creme.” She sat down on her blue embroidered hassock, and as if there were no hurry whatsoever, handed Mademoiselle Objet a cup of warm fig bark tea. “I just can’t be pressured,” she said. “The process is organic. I can’t just willy-nilly—just because somebody wants it—whip up a new creme. Besides, the creme I am currently contemplating—a calla lily creme—I want it to be the cure for great loss, for the heartbreak caused by death—and I can already tell that its concoction will be most complex and difficult.” She looked out the window as if searching for the mysterious components of its recipe, then mindlessly ran her hands back and forth across the smooth varnished surface of the View Camera’s box, which, in anticipation of her taking it to be repaired, was now languishing on a corner of Mademoiselle Objet’s desk.

  “Why is that?” asked Mademoiselle Objet.

  “Because calla lilies are white and when their cornucopias are broken down, reduced to the proper components for a creme, they will be inclined to turn brown. No one would want a brown creme. Brown is the color of earth, of heaviness, of solidity, and I would want the calla lily creme”—and here she stroked the camera again as if it were a magic box from which, eventually, a genie might emerge—“to be white, a symbol of resurrection, of the triumph of light over death.”

  Madame Métier stood up then, and excusing herself for a moment, retrieved the two calla lilies from the crystal vase on the dresser in her bedroom.“Here, I have an idea,” she said excitedly, lurching forward and spilling some water from the calla lily vase onto the table (which Mademoiselle Objet immediately mopped up). She filled up the level of water in the calla lily vase with the rest of her brown fig bark tea. “Perhaps brown is the antidote for brown,” she said, “and this tea will neutralize the oncoming brown and re-energize their whiteness.” She watched anxi
ously while beside her Mademoiselle Objet observed, as gradually the slightly bronzed margins of the calla lilies began to whiten once again.

  “There, I think I’ve got it,” said Madame Métier. “I need to do some more thinking, but you can call the TeleVisions station.” With that, she got up and with uncharacteristic tidiness, returned the vase of lilies to her bedroom.

  To Mademoiselle Objet’s surprise, however, when she returned to the workroom a few minutes later, Madame Métier was dressed to go out. “I’m going to the library,” she said. “I’m sorry to leave you with all these letters, all this … everything, but I need to do some research.

  “And by the way,” she added, drawing a red silk scarf beneath the collar of her long black coat, “that camera does not need to be repaired. Tell its owner he will find that the camera will work when, once again, he photographs human beings.”

  “And why is that?” asked Mademoiselle Objet.

  “Because human beings, in spite of their imperfections, of all creatures have the highest spirits. They can think, they can move, they can suffer, and they can feel; and they have—like no other living beings—the capacity for conscious love.

  “Tell him that in photographing people, he will find the meaning that he seeks.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Madame Métier Goes to the Library

  Madame Métier felt somewhat uncomfortable as she proceeded to the library. She hated the library. She hated how ordered it was, how everything had a number, a card, and a place it belonged. She hated it because never, in all her impressionistic life, had she learned how to use the card file or the numbers system for locating books, nor really, aside from pure instinct (when roaming the stacks and her fingers had stumbled on something), had she ever learned how to locate what she needed in it.

  She hated it further because of her father. Her father had loved it, and in an ongoing attempt to escape himself from the orderliness of his wife, had often walked the three miles from his house to its doors and planted himself in the outside courtyard where hour after hour, he would lose himself, reading esoteric plant magazines.

  Having finished with the plant magazines, he would often go back inside and, in one of those wooden closet-like listening cubicles, listen in solitude to piano classical masterpieces. And if all that hadn’t escaped him enough from his orderly house, he would go to the Reading Room and investigate all the new books or read, rolled up on one of those long bamboo poles, an odd newspaper or two.

  It had been in one of these three locations that the young Madame Métier, having been dispatched as a posse of one by her mother, would eventually discover him. She had been sent to the library in search of him so often, in fact, and her father had always been so reluctant to go home—“I’ll come in an hour,” he’d always say, or “I need another two hours”—that in time, she had come to detest the library itself. For it represented, in concrete, the cross-purposes between her parents and her cross-purposes with them.

  She realized, approaching it now, that she hadn’t so much as walked past it since her father had died. Once inside, there was still that dingy sepulchral feeling, that thick mental silence she so abhorred. Old men were still sitting on chairs, still reading those newspapers rolled up on broomsticks. For a minute, from a distance one of them looked like her father. A few tears crossed her eyes, and as she walked through the huge reading room, she half expected that at any moment, passing from the courtyard to the Reading Room or one of the listening cubicles—but of course this was impossible—she would stumble across her father.

  Being thus distracted and allowing more tears to fall—how appropriate, she thought, that she should have come here to work on a creme for mourning—she turned a corner to the reference room and ran smack forward into the from-the-beach angel young man.

  “You look so beautiful in the library, here among the books,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?!” she asked. Indeed it seemed odd, totally inappropriate really, to come upon him here, he who seemed to be so much of nature, who appeared and disappeared in a haze.

  “I was sitting out in the courtyard,” he said, holding up a big book, “learning about the brain. About how the mind affects physical healing. But I got bored, outside, with reading; so I decided to come back in and listen to some music, in one of those listening booths.

  “And you?” he asked. Then, noticing the shimmering pathways the tears had etched along her cheeks, he raised one of his great, smooth hands and wiped her cheek with his fingertips.

  “I’m doing, or I’m about to do … ” she said softly—but the touch of his fingers, a gesture so intricate and kind, had momentarily disarmed her, distracted her from her scholarly intention—”some botanical research.”

  “Come sit with me when you’re finished,” he said. “I’ll be out in the courtyard waiting for some sun.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Madame Métier Is Encouraged

  Madame Métier was encouraged by the unexpected presence of Monsieur L’Ange, as she had now started to call this angelic young man to herself. Was he actually an angel, she wondered? He had a face of such innocence and purity and yet he always expressed such sayings of deep knowing that she couldn’t tell. But she was relieved today—she was almost ashamed to admit—to have noticed that his hair was laced somewhat with white. He was older, it seemed, than she had first imagined. He was both old and young. But why was she even thinking about that? She was here to study plants, after all, to, in particular, unlock the chemical composition of the calla lily, whose chemistry she imagined would be most difficult.

  Distracted, but also encouraged by even his distant presence, she studied intently; and after several hours, when she believed she had attained the necessary information, she came back to her senses only to realize that soon the library would be closing. She was distressed, in a panic almost, thinking that Monsieur L’Ange had probably already gone.

  Gathering her notes and returning the reference books so far as she could remember back to their proper places on the shelves, she walked sadly through the library rooms. Through the tall French doors she could see that twilight had fallen, but—and she was astonished to see this—sitting on a chair in the center of the courtyard, his bare feet curled with prehensile dexterity over the lowermost rim of the fountain, sat Monsieur L’Ange. His eyes were closed, and on his lap, in great peace, were folded his two large, beautiful hands.

  “So you’re finished,” he said, rising in a single elegant movement and speaking with a calm in his voice as if he had waited only ten minutes.

  “I’m amazed you’re still here,” said Madame Métier.

  “Of course,” he said. “I would never have left without you. I could feel your work was difficult—that it would take you a long time to finish.

  “And now,” he said, picking up his big book and walking back toward the reading room, “would you like to join me for dinner?”

  CHAPTER 17

  Mademoiselle Objet, Begrudgingly, Holds the Fort

  In Madame Métier’s absence Mademoiselle Objet was somewhat disconcerted. These long afternoons alone in the workroom when Madame Métier was gone for one reason or another, were not, to say the least, her cup of tea. Arranging things was one thing, but making decisions, talking to the TeleVisions station, and composing thank you letters on her own was quite a gigantic other. Furthermore, she realized that during the time of her employ, something strange had occurred. She had changed. It was no longer simply the joy of arranging objects and straightening things out, but being in Madame Métier’s strange but effulgent presence that made her so like her job. When Madame Métier was gone, the whole experience flattened.

  Twisting her pencils wretchedly at her desk, she rang up Monsieur Sorbonne at the Artifacts Museum.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, hearing the distress in her voice.

  “I’m upset,” said Mademoiselle Objet. “I’m here all alone and I hate it.”

  “Where’s Madame
Métier?” asked Monsieur Sorbonne.

  “Gone again. She’s always gone. She’s always running off somewhere. To the beach. To some stranger’s hospital bed. To God-knows-where for God-knows-what reason. Today she’s gone to the library—supposedly to do research.”

  “Well, she probably does need to do some research,” said Monsieur Sorbonne.

  “Research! Bah humbug! Why need to does she need to do research? She already knows everything about plants. You’d think that by now she’d have figured it out. There isn’t a thing that, instinctively, she doesn’t know. She just doesn’t feel like working. Well, neither do I. I hate it, working alone.”

  “Why don’t you go home then?” said Monsieur Sorbonne, finally getting a word in edgewise. “And don’t be so hard on Madame Métier. She probably does need to do some research. I know it’s hard, but right now working alone is your job.”

  “Well, I can’t do it,” said Mademoiselle Objet. “I give up. I can’t get anything done. I’m going to get your camera fixed.” She hung up the phone, but then remembering Madame Métier’s advice, instead of heading for the Camera Repairs Store, she picked up the View Camera box and tucking it under her arm, she headed for home.

  CHAPTER 18

  Monsieur Sorbonne Is Reunited with His Camera

  By the time he got home, Monsieur Sorbonne was also disconcerted. He had had a terrible day, he said, at the Artifacts Museum, dealing again with dead artifacts. He desperately needed, he realized, his camera to be fixed, for having used it even the miniscule number of minutes he’d used it a few days ago, he saw how much he longed to capture the things in his vision.