Collages (14 page)

John Wilkes applauded, laughed, shared in the
universe born of
yes.
He sponsored Renate’s gaiety and originality, her
belief that ideas must only be handled by the one who gave birth to them or
else they withered.

“Is it time for a celebration?” they asked.

Renate said: “Let’s wait until John Wilkes
comes. Let’s wait until the contracts are signed.”

But they bought champagne. It was such a
delight to buy champagne and fill in a slip which would be paid by the expense
account. No more concern over narrow personal budgets. What a delight to take a
taxi when carrying heavy portfolios and charge it. What a delight to eat in a
new restaurant every day and be treated like a millionaire so one would write
flatteringly about the dinner. What delight to visit the printer all of them
knew, and to be able to say to him they would pay him handsomely this time.
What delight to plan for Christmas in June, to reserve hotel rooms for the film
festivals at Venice, to plan for Spoleto, to accept invitations to the jazz
festivals.

John Wilkes arrived. He and Renate spent three
whole days with lawyers. Renate looked tired but elated. “He says yes to
everything.
”

In the climate of enthusiasm, new ideas
proliferated.

At last the contracts were done with. The young
millionaire had consented to everything. He had also agreed to meet the staff,
and to have champagne with them. They were to gather at Renate’s house.

The sun gold-leafed the sea, the tips of the
leaves, the window panes, the pottery and the paintings. Cars arrived. Everyone
seemed to feel lighter, to walk more confidently.

Bruce brought Renate an umbrella for her trip
to Paris. It was made of cellophane, and planted with bunches of plastic
violets. To walk in the rain and yet be able to see the sky, the buildings, the
people. And her face behind it when she opened it was like the face of a
mermaid in an aquarium. The violets seemed planted in her dark hair.

But John Wilkes did not arrive. The telephone
rang. He excused himself. He had been called to a conference in Denver. Anyway,
he had to take the contracts to his own committee and mail the checks to close
the deal.

There was a moment of suspense.

“Oh, we mustn’t be superstitious,” said Renate,
“that’s how millionaires behave. They are always in business conferences. They
have no time for celebrations.”

They drank the champagne, but for the first
time their gathering seemed more like the gathering of other magazine staffs,
solemn and cautious.

The next day there was silence and suspense, as
if the post office, the telegraph office, the bank, and the postman must not be
disturbed in the performance of their duties. They did not telephone each other
with new ideas.

On each desk there was a pile of unpaid bills.
On Renate’s desk a bill from the printer for the dummy, writing paper and
cards, and a bill for the rental of the office.

Each one had a personal, intimate problem he
did not want to share with the others: doctor’s bills, insurance bills, a
parent to support, all the obligations which were going to be met with money
earned while doing what they loved to do. An unknown writer had seen his name
on the cover. An unknown singer had believed herself discovered.

But no check came.

Renate broke her promise not to telephone John
Wilkes. But when she did he took a long time to come to the telephone. His
answers for the first time, sounded vague and evasive.

Renate asked her lawyer’s advice. The lawyer
spoke to his neighbor who worked for the F.B.I. Quiet investigations were made.
Two weeks had passed since John Wilkes had signed the contracts and promised a
check.

It was then Renate discovered that the young
millionaire was a gardener in a millionaire’s home in Phoenix. He liked to play
the role of millionaire. He had done it before. He had been in New York, had
been present at several conferences over new projects, studied them, signed
contracts, and vanished.

Renate could imagine him clipping rose bushes
and listening to the talk of rich oil men resting on chaise-longues around
their pools: “I am investing in Playboy. I am producing a play. I am backing a
film.”

And Renate could see the young, shy, handsome
gardener, studying the roles he was to play while watering the lawns and
planting bushes. He had learned a trade which gave him elation and a sense of
power. He had done it well.

When she telephoned him the telephone was
probably right in the kitchen, or in the tool house where people could hear
him. And the genuine millionaires were probably sitting a few yards away,
planning other investments.

There was no law to jail a man who swindled one
of illusions and not of money. The gardener watered other people’s dreams. It
was not his fault that they grew so big and had to be pruned.

RENATE AND LISA HAD MET IN ACAPULCO when she
was there for a few days designing a mural for the new hotel.

She was sitting in the dining-room when she saw
a Toulouse-Lautrec figure walk down the stairs, a Toulouse-Lautrec with a
Rousseau jungle for a background. Renate’s eyes were also caught by the
brilliant native color of her dress. She used Mexican textiles. She wore
jewelry copied from the Aztec days of gold exuberance. The bouffant hair was
not in fashion then, but she wore it naturally, and it made her face small and
delicate. She had a small straight nose such as one only sees in paintings,
eyes always mocking, a slender neck and a fine head attached surprisingly to a
voluptuous body. Her body was heavy but in the way of primitive women, that is,
not inert but alive and rhythmic, graceful and vibrating. Her movements had a
vivacity and a flow and something more; she had provocative movements, as if
she were about to undress. She rolled her hips, her shoulders, like a
strip-teaser about to slide out of her clothes. She had the swinging roll of
sailors and prostitutes suggesting the rocking of ships or of beds. She thrust
her breasts out as if she would separate herself from them and fly off. Her
hands would rest on different parts of her body as if to indicate where the
eyes should alight. She shook her head, alert and animal, and laughed with a
ripple which ran through her whole body. It was as if she kept dancing just
enough to keep her jewelry tinkling and her earrings swinging.

Renate and Lisa talked on the terrace at night
after dinner while waiting to see what the evening would bring. In spite of her
two children, a girl of seven and a boy of nine, the men treated her as if she
were a young woman. Her laughter was inviting as she lay on the chaise-longue,
eclipsing the vivid tropical flowers, petal soft, perfumed among the dark heavy
tropical foliage. But her exotic plumage did not seem a permanent part of her.
One felt she was uncomfortable within it, and that her natural state was
nudity.

She could flirt and tease and laugh with people
she did not like, like a professional. She never conserved or economized her
charms, or refused anyone the fullness of her laughter, or the long glance into
her igniting eyes, or proximity to her tanned skin. Acapulco was a perfect
background for her. Her skin was naturally swarthy and she seemed like a
native, in harmony with the climate, never too warm, never estranged from it,
never intimidated by darkness, strange bird voices, monkey chatter, or the
sudden discovery of an iguana practicing camouflage and almost invisible,
frozen in the sun, the color of the rock it lay on.

When Diego Rivera painted her, with his Mexican
brush, he made her mouth twice as thick, her nose twice as wide, her eyes twice
as large, adding fierceness, and it was no longer Lisa, because Lisa was this
paradox between a jungle-luxuriant body and a delicate Toulouse-Lautrec head.

In Acapulco no one ever thought of profession,
titles, background, or past history. Everyone lived in the present and looked
at each other with an appreciation of appearance only as one looked at the sea,
the mountains, lagoons, birds, animals, flowers. Races, classes, fortunes, all
blended into an object for the pursuit of pleasure. Swimming, sunning, dancing,
idleness, made people part of the scenery, for the pleasure of the eyes only.
Quality was a matter of contribution to the beauty of the spectacle. This
unique qualification was determined by how one looked walking down the stairs
to the dining-room, because spotlights had been planted between the cactus and
the palms, and the descent, and pause, just before entering the dining room was
like a small stage, high above the diners, well lighted, and well designed so
that hundreds of eyes could determine if this figure was, or was not, an
aesthetic contribution to the isle of pleasure. Anyone at this moment could
achieve membership into the club of the
deshabilles.

Lisa’s origins were even more obscured by her
knowledge of many languages, of many countries, her exotic costumes, her home
in Acapulco, her rootlessness, her several husbands no one had known, her
mysterious income.

Anyone seeking to include her in a realistic
novel would have had to resort, even against the grain, to impressionism. Her
Mexican servants treated her as one of their own because she ate their food. A
Mexican god was cemented on a column in her garden. There were no books in her
house, but many canvasses and supplies of paints.

Having situated her in Mexico permanently in
her memory, Renate was all the more startled to run into her on Third Avenue,
New York, before the elevated was removed. Lisa was carrying a brown shopping
bag. Her hair so wild and abundant was hidden by a handkerchief. For a moment,
in the striped light of soot-filtered sun, Renate wondered if all she
remembered had belonged to Acapulco and not to Lisa, for she could not find in
Lisa herself any gleams of gold, of sun, no tinkling of bracelets, no pearly
laughter. Lisa wore a dark winter coat and seemed to have amalgamated with the
city and the winter.

“Renate! What are you doing in New York?”

“I’m having an exhibition on 57th Street. And
you, Lisa?”

“Do you remember the Acapulco sailing and
fishing contests? Well, Bill was with one of the newspapers, a reporter for
Field
and Stream.
He came in his trailer to cover the celebration. I had just
finished building my house and I had a housewarming. We began to dance together
Sunday night, the night of the prize distribution, and we continued to dance
together for two or three nights. I don’t remember that we stopped for meals. I
had just divorced my third husband, and I felt like beginning a completely new
cycle. But I couldn’t persuade Bill to stay. Instead he gave me an hour to get
ready and took me away in his trailer. We went from Acapulco to Fraser,
Colorado, on another assignment. I arrived there with gold sandals, and it was
snowing. While Bill covered his story, I waited for him in a cafeteria and
played the slot machines. All my life I had dreamed of finally settling in
Acapulco and living there and going native. And here I was in a snowstorm,
sleeping and traveling in a trailer on my way to New York.”

As they talked, Lisa led Renate to a small and
shabby apartment house. They walked to the top floor.

“Bill is poor because most of his salary goes
in alimony.”

When the elevated passed they had to stop
talking. This gave Renate time to wonder why Lisa had not clung to her
beautiful life.

When they reached the top floor, instead of a
dark, anonymous door, Renate found a canary yellow garden gate. Lisa had
covered the walls of the hallway with lattice of vine-covered trellis; the
ceilings hung with potted plants and cages filled with singing birds. When she
touched the gate Mexican bells chimed. Lisa shed her dark coat and appeared in
a flaming orange dress. The small apartment was no longer in New York. Rugs,
panels, murals, paintings, statues, serapes, white fur on the bed. It was
Acapulco. She had placed her stone gods in niches, her jewelry overflowed from
a coffer, and a record player spun tender Mexican songs.

There were Mexican paper flowers in a jar,
silks on the windows, and the shutters were painted yellow so that even on this
dark day the sun seemed to be shining. There were more birds singing in the
small kitchen.

This gallant effort at transplantation touched
Renate. Would Lisa survive in this illusory set? Bill had torn her away but had
not won her to his own life. What quality did he possess that she should be
willing to risk withering her essentially primitive and tropical nature?

“Bill has gone for liquor,” said Lisa. “He will
bring back my sister who lives nearby.”

At this moment they both arrived. Bill was
small, not handsome, and he was cursing the chiming bells over the door and the
wicker gate which clung to his coat. His tie was askew, his coat rumpled, and
the end of an unlit cigar hung from his lips. He was in harmony with Third
Avenue, and so was his harsh accent, and his way of exaggerating his homeliness
and bad manners as if he were proud of them. Lisa’s sister had the accent of a
street boy and the impersonal mechanized politeness of a telephone operator.
Both of them talked to Lisa as if she were a pretender, as if everything she
wore, or said, or hung on the walls were artificial, not hers by birth.

Bill put his short, stocky hand on Lisa’s knee
and said smiling at Renate: “Well, isn’t it good to be home again? One of these
days you’ll throw out all this fancy foreign stuff and be yourself again.”