Murder on the Cliff

by Stefanie Matteson

  “From the ‘Poem of the Pillow,’” commented Paul.

  The “Poem of the Pillow” was a famous album of erotic prints showing couples in various positions of love. The print on display was a cover sheet, an innocuous print suitable for public viewing.

  “Yes, I know. When I was filming Soiled Dove, I used to visit an art gallery in Tokyo where they sold ukiyo-e. The dealer kept the shunga in a drawer under the counter. He used to show them to me.”

  Shunga was the Japanese word for erotic prints, a subcategory of ukiyo-e. But unlike Western pornography, shunga were works of art: except for some of the later ones, there was nothing sordid or vulgar about them.

  “I imagine that you can buy them in the open now,” she continued. “But they were considered pornographic then.” It had always struck her as ridiculous that a great artist was suddenly scorned as a pornographer the minute he applied his genius to the subject of love.

  “Things haven’t changed all that much. I have the other eleven prints from the ‘Poem of the Pillow,’ but I wouldn’t display them here.”

  “You do!”

  “In the next gallery. Would you like to see them?”

  Charlotte replied that she would.

  “The court order says that I’m allowed to use her rooms and she’s allowed to use mine, but we each have one room reserved to ourselves,” Paul said as he reached into his pocket for a key. “This is mine—God only knows what’s in hers.” He opened the door to reveal yet another gallery, at least as extensive as the first. The walls were lined with shunga.

  Charlotte was amazed. Her Tokyo dealer had kept a few prints hidden away. Here was a whole roomful: print after print by the most famous of the woodblock artists. She wandered among them, marveling at the distortions of the limbs, the exaggerated sizes of the genitals, the lovely patterns of the bedclothes. They were a far cry from “Mount Fuji in Clear Weather.”

  Harris stood by, his arms crossed smugly over his chest. “What do you think?” he asked. “I want you to know that you are one of the few people to whom I’ve ever extended an invitation to view my collection. It’s a pleasure that I usually reserve for myself.” He bowed slightly. “However, how could I do otherwise for the former Okichi?”

  Charlotte smiled.

  In retrospect, she supposed that her discovery of shunga had had a lot to do with the passion of her affair with Line. For a woman brought up in New England in the twenties and thirties, the shunga had been a sexual revelation. To the Japanese, sex was a natural event, and a beautiful one. The shunga displayed this casual attitude in the beauty, sensuality, freshness, and even humor with which sex was depicted. But then again, maybe it had been the warm ocean breezes, the forests of camellias, and being young—or younger. Certainly she had never experienced those same feelings again, on screen or off.

  “I have thousands of shunga in my collection, but only the finest are on display here. There aren’t a lot of them, but”—he smiled—“what there is, is choice, to paraphrase one of your colleagues.”

  “You must have one of the world’s most extensive collections,” she said.

  “It’s hard to say. I suspect there, are still some sizable collections out there that haven’t surfaced yet. Like myself, a lot of collectors have amassed their collections in secret. It’s only been in the last twenty years that shunga have become even remotely respectable.”

  It was an odd feeling, being led by Paul through these interconnected rooms in the servants’ wing. Charlotte had the impression that each room represented a deeper layer of her host’s psyche: preservationist, descendant of Townsend Harris, art collector, and now—the hidden side of the public persona.

  He led her over to the left-hand wall. “They’re arranged chronologically,” he explained. “Starting with the earliest, which dates back to 1660 and ending with the Meiji Restoration.”

  The earliest prints were lyrical portraits of young couples, most of them done in black and white. By the mid-eighteenth century, the subject matter had become more sexually explicit and the prints were in full color. These were her favorites: they were bold and modern, but still pretty.

  “Do you like Shunchō?” asked Paul, as she stopped to admire an elegant series depicting a young couple making love, the bold patterns of their kimonos contrasting with their naked limbs and flesh.

  “Yes. He’s my favorite.”

  “I confess to liking the later ones myself,” Paul said. “It must be the perverse streak in me.”

  By contrast with the early prints, the later ones that Paul favored were more abandoned, more primitive, and often more brutal. Even Utamaro had included a rape in his “Poem of the Pillow” album. Charlotte wasn’t a prude: the pan from the bed to the window wasn’t her style, but neither did she go in for brutality. But she could also see why Paul liked the later prints. They had a sense of force, vigor, and majesty that the earlier prints lacked.

  Passing the “Poem of the Pillow” series, Paul paused at the last print. “My masterpiece,” he announced. “Hokusai, 1814. A book illustration.”

  Charlotte knew the print; it was very famous. Famous, and disturbing: a nightmarish sexual fantasy. If the gallery represented the hidden side of Paul’s public persona, this print was the dark core of that inner self.

  The print depicted a young geisha lying naked on her back on a rocky shore, green with algae. Between her open legs an octopus sucked greedily, its bulging eyes staring over her pale belly, its slimy tentacles enveloping her body. A smaller octopus was attached to her mouth. One of its tentacles was wrapped around her nipple; another, her neck. At her sides, her small, delicate hands gripped the tentacles of the big octopus.

  What disturbed Charlotte about the print was the ambivalence of the expression on the geisha’s face. Her head was tilted back against the slimy rocks. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was slightly open, revealing a row of tiny white teeth that gently bit the octopus’s tentacle. Was she racked with pain? Was she swooning in ecstasy? Or was she already a corpse, half-drowned and beyond all feeling?

  Her expression summed up the ambivalence of the floating world. For all its freedom and beauty, it was also a harsh and depraved world, a world in which one person fed upon another, a world in which pleasure was fleeting, in which there was little room for tenderness or romance.

  What would be left of the geisha when the octopus had had its pleasure with her? Charlotte wondered, Would she be an empty shell, washed up on a rocky shore? It was how she thought of Okichi.

  4

  Charlotte sat with Connie in the living room at Briarcote, Connie and Spalding’s house on the Cliff Walk. Briarcote had been built in the twenties on land owned for generations by Spalding’s family, and was probably one of the most comfortable houses on the Cliff Walk. Unlike the mansions at the northern end, it was relatively small. But it was elegant: a white-columned Georgian densely furnished with well-worn antiques inherited from Spalding’s forebears and a mishmash of objets d’art collected from his diplomatic postings around the world. At the rear, a wall of French doors led onto a terrace overlooking the ocean. At this time of day, the setting sun reflecting off the water cast a golden glow over the room, warming the faded Oriental carpets and polished wood surfaces of the furniture.

  They were having a drink while they awaited Marianne and Lester, who were staying at a neighbor’s guest house. They would all be leaving shortly for the geisha party. Spalding was talking on the telephone in the adjoining library, making last-minute arrangements for the Mikado Ball the next evening.

  “I really don’t understand it,” Connie was saying. “He hasn’t spoken to us in five years, and now he’s inviting us to his geisha party. Maybe I do understand why he would invite us. After all, Spalding is president of the Black Ships Festival. Keeping up appearances and all. But why on earth would he invite Marianne?” Her brow creased in perplexity. “Would you like another, dear?” she asked, noticing that Charlotte had finished her drink.

 
“Thank you, I would. But don’t call Mimi. I’ll get it myself,” Charlotte replied as she got up to fix herself another Manhattan at the bar tray. As she mixed her drink, she offered her explanation: “Maybe he’s trying to get on the good side of the surrogate judge in order to enhance his chances of winning his case,” she said. “He said today that the judge had ordered him and Marianne to cease hostilities, or something to that effect.”

  Her drink mixed, she resumed her seat on a chintz sofa facing the fireplace. Over the mantel hung a nineteenth-century seascape of a view almost identical to the one from the Smiths’ terrace. It was called “Twilight on the Seashore.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Connie said. “But that was last March, and he’s never made any friendly overtures before this. And to invite Dede too! The thought that Shimoda might ever go to her is enough to … I don’t know, to make him hysterical or something. He can’t have changed that much. Only six weeks ago, he was accusing Lester and Marianne of trying to kill him.”

  Charlotte raised an winged eyebrow in an expression of skepticism that was her screen trademark, along with her long, leggy stride and her clipped Yankee accent. “Kill him?”

  “It was a ridiculous incident. It happened on a Wednesday, the day they switch occupancy. Marianne and Lester had just arrived and Paul was just leaving. They’d been fighting about something: where to hang a painting, I think. Paul wanted it in the foyer, Marianne somewhere else. Instead of driving around back to the carriage house, Lester drove around the driveway and came up behind Paul’s car and nudged it from the rear. Paul accused him of attempted murder.”

  “In court?”

  Connie nodded. “Surrogate’s Court. The judge didn’t pay any attention, of course. The last I heard, Paul had reduced the charge to vehicular assault, though I don’t think he ever filed any official charge. It was more like name-calling. Of course, Lester shouldn’t have done it, but …”

  “Lester shouldn’t have done what, mother?” said Marianne. She had entered the room with a teenaged girl. Her daughter Dede, Charlotte assumed.

  “Tried to kill cousin Paul,” Connie replied.

  Marianne laughed. “Oh that.” She was dressed in a traditional kimono of flowered navy blue silk. On her head she wore a wig in the formal geisha hairstyle, complete with hair ornaments. With her white skin and brown eyes she might have passed for a geisha were it not for her height and for her nose, which was good-sized even by Western standards.

  “You look lovely, my dear,” said Connie. “You can always depend on Marianne to dress up for the occasion,” she continued, addressing Charlotte. “I like to think it comes from having an actress for a mother.” She neglected to pay a similar compliment to the teenager, who looked like an Eighth Avenue hooker. She was dressed in skintight black shorts, a skimpy halter top, and high heels.

  The girl went over and kissed her grandmother on the cheek.

  “Where’s Spalding?” asked Marianne. “Lester’s out in the car. You know Lester. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “He’s on the phone. He’ll be off in a minute,” replied Connie. “Hello, darling,” she said, giving the girl a big hug. “I want you to meet an old friend of mine, Charlotte Graham. You’ve probably seen her in the movies. My granddaughter, Dede Montgomery.”

  As Dede crossed the room to shake hands with Charlotte, Connie stared disapprovingly at her outfit, and then addressed Marianne: “I hope you’re not letting her go to the party dressed like that.”

  “Yes, Mother, I am letting her go to the party dressed like that. One, she’s old enough to make her own decisions; two, I don’t want to discourage her fledgling sense of fashion experimentation; and three, I don’t give a damn what she wears to a party given by cousin Paul.”

  Connie shrugged.

  Dede shook hands politely with Charlotte. She was a petite blonde with blue eyes and a sweet smile. Although her father, whom Marianne had never married, had been a Greek, she had inherited none of his dark good looks. Nor did she resemble her mother, but rather her beautiful grandmother.

  “Come sit here next to Nana,” said Connie, patting the sofa. Then she turned to Marianne: “We were just speculating about why cousin Paul’s invited us to his geisha party,” she said as Dede sat down beside her. “Charlotte’s been fraternizing with the enemy. Paul gave her the grand tour this afternoon.”

  “Did you see the shunga?” asked Marianne with a concupiscent leer as she helped herself to a cracker and cheese from the tray on the coffee table.

  Charlotte replied that she had.

  “Aren’t you the lucky one! Naughty cousin Paul keeps them hidden away from the rest of us. His own private obsession. I think it’s rather strange to keep a gallery full of pornographic pictures locked up for your own private amusement. I don’t think he’s even showed them to Nadine. But then, we all know that cousin Paul is a very strange person.”

  The shunga weren’t pornography, but Charlotte didn’t want to bother explaining that to Marianne. Furthermore, when it came to sexual obsessions, Marianne was hardly one to cast stones.

  “Charlotte thinks he might be trying to earn points with the surrogate judge,” said Connie.

  “Could be. But I have my own theory.” She smiled mischievously. “It’s based on an accident I heard about when I lived in Africa. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Marianne lived in Rhodesia for five years,” Connie explained.

  Charlotte remembered that particular point of light on Marianne’s path to artistic enlightenment—the African nationalist who inspired her “Uhuru” collection. For a while, every socialite in New York was wearing a dashiki.

  “Zimbabwe, Mother.”

  “Sorry, dear. Zimbabwe. Anyway, what’s your theory?”

  “It goes like this: after Zimbabwe achieved independence, the government had all these armed rebels hanging around with nothing to do but get into trouble. Anyway, on the anniversary of independence, the government decided to have a reunion of revolutionaries. All the biggest troublemakers were invited. The reunion was held in a building next to a railroad siding.”

  “I don’t see how a reunion of African guerrillas relates to cousin Paul’s party,” complained Connie, who over the years had developed a limited tolerance for Marianne’s sympathetic accounts of various Third World struggles.

  “Wait,” said Marianne, raising a hand. “Unbeknownst to the revolutionaries, the government had brought in a railroad car that was loaded to the brim with dynamite.”

  “They blew them all up?” asked Charlotte.

  “To kingdom come, amen. How to achieve governmental stability in one easy step—African politics at its most creative.”

  “What are you saying, dear?” asked Connie. “That cousin Paul is going to blow us all up?”

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that he’s assembling all the most troublesome members of the family in one place?”

  “Then why are you going?”

  “To see what happens,” she replied. “Besides, I want to see the inside of the famed Temple of Great Repose. I’ve never been in it, or at least not since cousin Paul fished it out of the ocean.”

  The ride over to Shimoda took only a few minutes. They rode in Lester’s big Lincoln. Though Lester had never said anything to that effect, Charlotte suspected that he was offended by Spalding’s twelve-year-old Chevy. Spalding belonged to the breed of old rich who considered driving a new car an unseemly display of wealth. He also believed in turning off every light in the house except the one that was in use at the moment. Connie always said his obsession with the lights was the mark of a family that could trace its money back to the days before the invention of electricity. She also accused him of being as tight as a tick. But if Lester didn’t think much of Spalding’s Chevy, Spalding thought even less of the country-and-western music that blared from Lester’s tape deck, serenading the ivied walls and graceful trees of Bellevue Avenue.

  Lester dropped them off in front of the house, an
d then parked the car behind the carriage house. Once he had rejoined them, they were escorted by a young man in a kimono across the expanse of green lawn to the temple. Against the dark gray water and misty sky—it looked as if it was going to rain—the temple looked beautiful and mysterious. The pines had been strung with round red paper lanterns, the symbol of the floating world. As they walked, the boy babbled on about the Black Ships Festival.

  “What’s your name, young man?” asked Connie, who could always be counted on to be friendly to young people.

  “Charlie,” the boy replied with a smile.

  “Are your parents on the Black Ships Festival Committee?”

  “My mother is,” he said. “My brother’s going to the geisha party tonight. But my mother says I’m too young.”

  “And who is your mother?”

  “Nadine Ogilvie.”

  Although the boy didn’t seem to notice it, Charlotte caught the frown of disapproval that crossed Connie’s face. Marianne was less subtle: she nearly fell off her geta. Grabbing Dede’s wrist, she rushed on ahead.

  As they drew near the temple, Charlotte could see how closely it resembled the rustic original in Shimoda. Next to the flagpole there was even a replica of the monument that had been erected after Harris’s death, bearing an inscription of an entry from his diary describing the raising of the first American flag: “… at two and a half P.M. of this day, I hoist the ‘First Consular Flag’ ever seen in this Empire. Grim reflections—ominous of change—undoubted beginning of the end. Query—if for the real good of Japan?”

  “The change is ominous all right, but not for Japan,” Spalding grumbled as they stopped to read the inscription. “Maybe he should have said ‘if for the real good of the United States.’” Still smarting from Tanaka’s address, he looked as if he might smash a Toshiba radio at any moment, had there been one at hand.

  “Better get it out of your system, dear,” said Connie. “I think Mr. Tanaka’s going to be here tonight.”