Testimony and Demeanor (15 page)

I thought: My little girl in show biz.

Honorée couldn’t sit still through the first short piece. She wriggled and whispered so that I barely saw it. When there was applause she grabbed my arm for joy.

The second was silly but amusing. A pastiche of spy films in which every third shot was a jet plane landing and then a postcard-like shot of the Eiffel Tower or palm trees or the Manhattan skyline. There would be one scene played in a room in which several people explained things in rapid-fire dialogue made up of comic book cliches. Then all the actors would rush to the window to watch a car blow up. It was always the same car. Then the jet plane taking off and landing and another establishing shot.

The last piece came closest to being real work. It was called “Pibroch.” There was no narrative. Image followed image; the only link I could think of was that in most cases whatever was being photographed was seen in such a way that it was unrecognizable at first. The screen would fill with what seemed a washed-out afterimage of the previous shot—for example, an apple falling into halves as it was cut, seen from only a few inches away—but the new picture developed into, or turned out to be, the top sheet of a bed being pulled down, viewed obliquely so that the slight shadow between the top and bottom sheets appeared at first to be the knife edge still severing two
whitenesses. Then this shot was shown in negative, and gradually darkened. When it lightened again one realized that the new picture was of a white churning line (the wake of a motor-boat?) dividing two masses of dark water, seen from directly above. And finally, in that sequence, lips parting.

Honorée giggled and I recognized the mouth as hers.

All the images came again at a faster pace and with an occasional hop backward—apple, sheets, negative sheets, apple, negative sheets, water—which gave the effect of an added grace note.

At its best, the film did have a compelling visual rhythm. And a number of the pictures were beautiful in themselves. But they were always being mastered by tricks. Of course, a great deal of Elizabethan poetry is neat tricks—quibbles and conceits—but I couldn’t overcome a slight rankling.

Honorée and I went outside during intermission. Some people were flying kites on the playing field in front of the student union. Honorée gazed up at the kites and then shut her eyes.

I asked her if she was all right.

“Oh, yes. I’m just a little dazed these days. I don’t think anything’s wrong.”

“What do you mean? You aren’t—you haven’t taken up drugs, have you?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I had an affair, but that didn’t do anything. I mean, it didn’t mean anything. It was really”—she shrugged her shoulders and looked airily away up the slope—“just an affair I got bored with.” She laughed and then once more stared at my face for a sign, her gaze sweeping back and forth from one of my eyes to the other.

I wasn’t really surprised. I did think of how far it was from “Our dog is named Kartoffel” to “It was really just an affair I got bored with,” just as a matter of diction.

“You don’t think that I shouldn’t—I mean, you don’t think it’s shocking that I got bored?”

“No,” I said. “Sooner or later, I guess. I mean, having an affair.”

“That’s just what I thought.”

I said, “Do you—I mean, I assume you use …” She nodded her head quickly. It made her hair bounce along her cheeks.

“Well, don’t take any drugs,” I said. “Marijuana may be all right, but …”

“All right,” she said. She took my hand. “I’m glad you’re here. Did you think his film was good? It really is good, don’t you think?”

“It really is very good,” I said. “It really is.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re here. Will you come tomorrow? We’re going to shoot the last scene.” Honorée laughed. “I get assumed into heaven.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s sort of silly in a way. It’s a kind of Marx Brothers version of the gospel, and some other Catholic dogma. Phil was a Catholic and—oh, it’s too complicated to tell you the plot except that the apostles are sort of Keystone Kops and the Virgin Mary is really smart. Sort of like Snow White with the seven dwarfs.”

“Are you the Virgin Mary?”

Honorée said, “No. I’m Mary Magdalene. But in this version I’m really good.”

I said, “In the original, Mary Magdalene is good.”

“Well, yes—but in this I’m innocent. I mean, it’s good to make love and so no one minds except—oh, it’s too complicated. You’ll have to see it. I shouldn’t have tried to explain it. A lot of my part is just being chased by the apostles. In this I like men O.K., but I can’t stand beards, so I run away. When they finally catch me I turn into an angel and fly away. I know it sounds silly, but anyway it’s all over except that last part tomorrow, so there’s no point in worrying about it. They’ve all been just wonderful.”

All the while she was talking she held my hand. At first I thought I was embarrassed to be seen this way in the middle of the campus, but then I realized it was something else that bothered me—some sense of Honorée’s endless possibility of feeling and the small speck she actually now made on the surface of her life.

That evening I visited Elizabeth Mary in the hospital. She was under observation, since she’d had some dizzy spells.

She said, “Oliver, do you know what I think? I think I have actually got the vapors. The doctor is quite cross with me, as I won’t be a good little girl. I have just enough medical knowledge to know he’s completely at sea. I tell him not to be embarrassed that he doesn’t know, and that makes him even more cross with me.”

She gave me a list of little errands to do—I was to distribute various materials to her students and tell them to go to a lecture in another course if she wasn’t out of the hospital by Tuesday.

I felt very odd myself. I couldn’t tell if I felt more like Elizabeth Mary or more like her doctor. Some question was moving through my mind, troubling me by not taking form, by being at the wrong distance. The physical symptoms were exactly those of immediate embarrassment—a hot prickling stuffiness in my thought. But there wasn’t the cold internal condensing of shame that usually followed.

The next morning I thought it might just be the weather, which was both muggy and gusty. I had hoped for a sharp spring day, but the atmosphere was blurred. As I was about to leave my house, a bird flew under the porch roof and hit the front window. I was startled, then reassured that there
was
something wrong with the day if a bird could be so off kilter. The bird recovered and flew off, bobbing through the air in an unbroken line of Palmer penmanship
i
’s.

I wondered if there was a technical name for fear of spring.

Honorée had told me that her group would be in costume
for the parade—one of the events of the festival, a parody of the football-weekend “homecoming” that Miss Quist was looking forward to. After the parade they would drive off with their pickup and wagon full of gear to do their scene.

In town the sidewalks were lined with people. The same little boys who sold Hawkeye pennants and black-and-gold pompons were selling balloons with “Love” on them.

And at first it was the duplication I noticed more than the parody. There was an Indian—that is, someone dressed as an Indian—in full feathers riding in front of a small brass band that played “Hail to the Chief.” There was a cowgirl on a pony, followed by a group carrying placards saying “Linda Zeckendorff for Sheriff.” Her calves bulged prettily out of her boot tops as she pressed her pony from one side of the street to the other.

There were several floats and another brass band. One thing I noticed about the Midwest—brass bands are easy to come by. I think it may be the German tradition. Almost all the children learn to tootle along on some kind of horn.

There was a float mocking the student health service—a patient swathed in red tape. Various bandaged students carrying crutches struggled to climb aboard and were beaten away by a nurse and a doctor holding huge plastic thermometers. As far as I could see, it was the style and wit of the Beat Purdue floats of the fall.

Following that there was a man on a bicycle decked out with American flags. He was a figure about town—a harmless sparse-haired fellow who wandered about on his fat-wheel Schwinn with a large basket, picking through the trash baskets behind the stores. He was meant to represent the motorcycle escort for the homecoming queen, who followed in a convertible. She was in fact a store-window mannequin with a blond wig. She—or it—wore a large silver cape which had a phone number in orange Day-Glo numerals on the back.

Honorée’s group came next. The twelve apostles were in
harness, pulling a farm wagon. They all had grotesquely long false beards. In the wagon was a large globe, on top of which sat the Virgin Mary, in a blue robe over a white gown. She had a halo of stars. Honorée, who was behind her, helped her to stand up on the globe and arranged a large rubber serpent under her feet. There was some laughter at this; I was surprised at first that so many people recognized this emblem. Then I thought it was simply that everyone was having a good time. I was envious for a moment. Were their sources of unhappiness so easily dealt with?

Honorée saw me, and we waved to each other. She was wearing a metallic halo like a hat brim without a crown. It was tilted back so that it shone around her face. She pointed with her free hand behind the wagon to a pickup truck. Rising out the bed of the pickup was a partly inflated balloon. She pointed to herself and then pointed up. I suddenly caught her mood. It was a kind of glee that was almost too sweet, almost too large. It seemed to burst behind my senses, pressing them into a fever.

I went back to my car and down out of town to the field where the “guerrilla theater” had been and where Honorée’s group would now shoot their scene.

The pickup truck arrived with the balloon, compression tanks, and valves, and the wagon full of apostles, Virgin Mary, and Honorée. Another station wagon followed, with the director, two cameramen, cameras, and tripods. Then another car, with several more people and mechanical devices. The entire caravan lumbered up a grassy slope to a barn.

It took a half hour before they stopped milling about. Honorée was being fussed over in the barn. She finally emerged. Her dress was now a Roman gown of soft muslin held up by ribbons tied across her bare shoulders and loosely belted below the bust. She eyed the balloon, which was now fully inflated. Suspended from the shrouds there was, instead of a basket, a device that looked like the seat of an infant’s swing, called, I later learned, a bosun’s chair.

There was a burst of activity. The crowd of assistants cleared away, and Honorée and the apostles came running up the hill. The director began to instruct them through a bullhorn. The apostles surrounded Honorée. The director said, “Fog! Now the fog!”

A machine spewed out a pinkish fog around the swarm of actors. The camera seemed to stop every ten or fifteen seconds. At last all of them regrouped under the balloon. The Virgin Mary came out and fitted a pair of huge wings over Honorée’s arms. They were fully feathered on both sides—Honorée’s arm went inside the envelope of feathered material through several rubber rings.

Then the fog again, as the apostles began to swarm around and then on top of Honorée. But then she was suddenly lifted up in the balloon seat as the apostles clasped her about the knees and ankles. Her dress slithered down in several pieces. Honorée rose another yard, her wings crossed in front of her. The director said, “Blinding light!” and several spotlights mounted on the truck began to dart their beams into the fog. “Higher!” Honorée rose again above the lifted arms of the apostles. “Fly!” Honorée leaned forward against the seat belt and, lifting her face, uncrossed her arms and spread her wings.

“Apostles, consternation!” The apostles began to fall to the ground.

“O.K., move her toward the barn camera.”

The man holding the line attached to the balloon seat began to walk toward the barn.

“Flap your wings!”

Honorée’s bare bosom had somehow not been surprising until then. She’d looked like the figurehead of a sailing ship—her face blank and thrust forward, her shoulders flexed back so that her collarbone, bust, and rib cage were a compound curve carved out of a single block. But as she began to flap her wings she became flesh. Honorée’s legs, emerging in a straight line
below the bosun’s chair, were firmly held together, her toes pointed, as though she were diving forward.

She passed directly over my head on her way to the barn. At every flap I could see the movement of the muscles in her shoulders and stomach. Her joined legs moved in a sort of dolphin kick. Each slow downward beat of her wings seemed to lift her upper body slightly.

The director shouted encouragement. The two boys holding the cameraman on the barn roof cheered.

The balloon hovered over the barn, twenty feet above Honorée on its long shrouds. There was some confusion as the man holding the line reached the barn. Honorée’s feet touched the barn roof. One of the boys holding the cameraman moved to grab her, but the balloon sailed past. Honorée seemed to leap into the air off the other side. She sailed free, the line to the ground sliding past the cameraman, who grabbed for it with one hand, holding one leg of the camera tripod with the other.

She swung from side to side very slowly as the balloon moved away. The director shouted through the bullhorn, “Pull up the line! Don’t let the line hit a wire! Pull it up!” Then he got in the back of the pickup and thumped on the roof of the cab. The driver started off, but then the director stopped him to pick up a camera and tripod.

They got to the fence at the bottom of the field just as Honorée passed over it, but the balloon had stayed at the same height and the fence line was in a hollow.

The wind was not steady, but the gusts moved the balloon at a smooth pace, as though it was a paper boat gliding down a bubbling stream.

I got in my car and drove out the gate. The balloon didn’t seem to be very high, but it wasn’t coming down. One problem of getting under it in a car was that almost all the roads ran either north-south or east-west, and the wind now was out of the northwest, so that Honorée was crossing the fields diagonally while we had to drive at right angles, like rooks on a
chessboard. The other problem was that we had to detour at first, as the roads crossing Interstate 80 were far apart.