by Lorraine Ray
Chapter Three
What I meant when I said it was funny about the doors was this. When I think back on us, and how you kept me seeing you when I first began to sense that I was making a mistake, I seem to have been led through a whole series of them. Doors, I mean. You were leading me through a crazy collection of doors which were swinging open, and swinging closed, banging me in the face, and brushing me aside. Heavy old traditional doors from important places in some part of Back East, and okay, I’ll be truthful with you and admit they were the type of doors which were unlike ones I had ever known. Doors from mansions, I guess, like the ones in substantial novels, those old Edith Wartony things that I'll admit I haven’t yet read but have heard contain, oh contain very carefully and permanently, heroines who are wasting away because society says they can’t be in love with someone grand or they get excluded from being part of a set of really important rich people who are blundering around mindlessly, and who work at marrying one another, or failing to marry one another, unhappily, always unhappily. Novels about someone who had to compromise.
All your doors seemed to be straight out of places like that and your job was to make sure the doors you purchased would be used out here in the dusty West and that you would be paid gobs more money than what they were worth.
Yeah, your doors were stolid and substantial and they excluded someone as insignificant as me. But I did discover something in the process of the exclusion. You could say it’s sour grapes now on my part, but truly rich people often are the only people who don’t know how to properly appreciate the world. They are living behind some heavy doors, all right. But the people who write novels mostly don’t get that or they’re fobbing off the fabulous tales of the rich to the desperately bored poor. I got some insight into what the rich are missing out on, though it took me a long while to realize what I had actually picked up. As you pointed out once, I’m a little slow.
And at the same time there were other doors in my mind which also opened and closed and seemed to show me things that you pretended were not there. Deceptive doors, beautifully hand-carved, but nevertheless, deceptive. It took me a long time to trust my own instincts about the lies. I have to excuse myself for thinking someone older would necessarily be an expert in understanding the world, understanding themselves, and always operating in a realm of truthfulness. For all your knowledge, there were quite a few life insights lacking. Of course, on my part, I can fault myself for a youthful self-deception, for I actually thought you were walking with me through some of those thresholds when what you really did was shove me forward and slam the door behind.
But doors were what you did for a living. You were a dealer in old doors, in odds and ends, columns, expensive antique ones, called architectural details, mantles, chandeliers, fireplaces, stairways and all that heap of household crap found in really significant old-wealth mansions. You had all your smallish valuable crap in what had once been a grocery store and the big valuable crap in a warehouse near the railyards. The grocery store was in the center of the city’s first shopping center, an imitation Mexican square with niches, statues of saints, arches, fountains and clinging vines. Not so convenient to your ultimate customers, who lived in the foothills, but the store had a loading bay so some of the heavier items could come off a truck into the shop.
Smack in the center of a replica Mexican village. That was where your shop was. I wonder if you realized the irony of trying to sell authentic pieces from a store in a shopping center meant to imitate a village in Mexico? I doubt you ever thought of that. Subtle humor wasn’t ever your forte. I tried to point out subtle things, the way the scorching desert sun hit the top of a deep crease in a workman’s shirt so that it gave the illusion of limitless black below in the crease and you would never see it. I think your comment at the time, when I noticed the strength of that shadow, was that "you know, of course, you'll never be taken seriously by any really important people if I continued with this obsessive delight in odd moments of chiaroscuro."
All that stuff in your shop went from your old grocery into the homes of the extravagantly wealthy who were living out their winters only in the desert foothills. And you were successful at what you did. Very suave and impressive with your knowledge of antiques, archeological items, and historical links. You successfully filled the homes crammed up there at the base of the mountain, Frog Mountain, that’s what the natives, the O’odham call it, with some of the finest junk from the East Coast of the United States, China, South America and Europe. But the sad thing is that the O’odham who used to spend their summers there on the top of the mountain are now unable to hike their way to the top of the mountain. They're unable even to walk on the rich people’s property. That never occurred to you or your friends, I suppose.
But you were very knowledgeable of the artifacts of the O’odham, especially rare old black baskets which your clients valued. They never realized those were meant to be wash basins, that they were used to wash dishes and babies. And your clients loved old metates. They liked to place those corn grinding stones around the edge of their negative edge pools. This common implement of southwestern women’s work looked beautiful near water, you said.
A lot of your time, during the time I was with you, you were enjoying life by laughing at those people who were unlucky enough to be your clients. You ridiculed the way they had made their fortunes, the peanuts they sold for airline snacks, the smelly dog food that made them a fortune, and the masses of ugly cotton sweaters. Funny, you never realized what a sell-out you were, that you were even worse than them. How could someone feel superior who sold their services and therefore sold themselves to the heirs of a dog food fortune or to peanut vendors? Even I could eventually see that. Even someone as gullible as I was then could suddenly have enough insight to see that.
But it’s funny that it took me a long time to realize it myself. And to realize that you never really loved the world the same way I did. I guess some people are constitutional unfit to appreciate their time on earth. I suppose there’s some religious thing that explains it. A hell region you’re destined to land in, according to Dante. Probably one for every religion about which you are so well informed, and yet so poorly inspired. You were too busy being sophisticated to appreciate the things around you–the little insignificant things that signify everything good about living on earth. You never saw the tiniest detail of what was around you. That’s the one thing I got out of knowing you. Life has a lot to show a person who looks. But truthfully it’s pearls before swine for the others.
Chapter Four