By the way, you can probably order an entire replacement seat for your car. BMW seems like the kind of company that takes care of their customers; they probably have a warehouse of spare seats at the ready. If spot-cleaning the ceiling doesn’t work (it probably won’t) a new sky of ceiling fabric might be best. I’m not sure what can be done about the dashboard. I cleaned it off best I could, but I’m afraid I waited longer than I should have. There’s a corona of stain around the far edges, like salt.
Sorry. Digressions, digressions. You’ll notice that I’ve had to go out and buy more writing paper. No watermark this time. And I’ve traveled yet another day from your BMW.
Let’s get back to it: the palace. I began to suspect I was on one of the alternate tours, something like Temperamental Schwarzwald: Heating and Cooling in the Nineteenth Century, or Plumbing the Depths of Schwarzwald. Except in Chinese. I was in purgatory. I need to get upward and outward. I think I mentioned that I crept away from the tour and headed down a long corridor on my own—and if not, well, that’s what I did. There was a door at the top of a set of stairs at the corridor’s end. I pushed it open and was bleached for a long moment in light. But it was only the sun, punching through a bank of windows. The light glinted off curly-cues of gilding on nearly every possible surface. How did people stand such ridiculous ornamentation back then? A pun slipped into my head: If it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it. Unexpected, ready-made phrases like that have been dropping into my head lately when I’m alone. I don’t mind them; it’s reassuring to know there’s still a mind at work, even if it turns gears solely for its own amusement—though it gives me the disconcerting feeling of the true me being somewhere between the intricate mysteries of the body on one end, and the mind’s inscrutability on the other.
I closed the door behind me and found it to be but one panel of a Grecian tableau. Out of place in the room sat a 1960s-era metal desk, a rotary telephone, and an empty mug of coffee atop a men’s magazine, the mug bearing roughly the same circumference of the other exposed breast on the cover. I’d found a night watchman’s break room. I parted the gauzy curtains and saw the courtyard, and beyond it, the lake where a boathouse dipped into the water. Anyway, you know. I don’t need to describe it.
I was tired, so I climbed onto the bed. I noticed the ceiling painting then in the center of the oval baroque frosting: a scene of cunnilingus. I imagined this was where the King, or Duke—or whoever had the palace built—would come to his mistress, (ha, ha), then slink away through the concealed door should the wife or mother-in-law happen by. Maybe they did their mother-in-laws, too. Seems like infidelity was built into the architecture of this palace as much as men have it built in themselves. My late husband would have loved a room like this, back when we were living in Connecticut, those years ago. He pronounced it Connecti-cut. I can’t even remember the name of the woman in the apartment next door. That’s not true, but let’s pretend it is. I hold no grudges. Rest his soul.
When I was in high school I knew I’d marry a Frenchman. I never did, of course. I married Peter, only. I knew I’d have a son. I had daughters. I was going to write for a New York magazine. Nichts. Wishful thinking can be the worst kind of thinking. It’s beautiful wrapping paper over a weightless box, like in department stores at Christmas time. Maybe life’s dissatisfaction stems from the heart never receiving the promises of the head. But I’m here, in Europe, aren’t I? So that’s one promise kept.
I slept for a few minutes. When I opened my eyes again I noticed that the room held quite a few pieces of erotic art. Pieces too objectionable, perhaps, for hanging in toured rooms. Sex never seemed so unoriginal as when you clearly see that everything’s been done before. A clock rang, its pendulum a phallus, its twin weights—well, you know. And when I got over that I focused on the time and saw that I’d missed the last shuttle back to town. So I must have slept for more than just a few minutes. I felt a delightful spurt of mild panic which turned out to be me just needing to relieve myself. I retraced my steps back downstairs and found a restroom I’d passed earlier.
When I returned to the cunnilingus room, I noticed the jacket immediately, hanging over the chair. It was dark blue, clean, but like most jackets it hadn’t been washed in a long time and I could smell the man who’d worn it. Günter was stitched on a name tag. He’d made the bed I’d napped on. The magazine was in a trash can. An imposing German book with neither dialogue or paragraphs brooded on the desk beside a tall gray thermos with a stainless steel handle. There was also a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, the folds held together on the underside with an adhesive blue dot with a hand-drawn heart. I ate half of the sandwich and left a neat stack of Euros from my pocket. I loved this Günter something awful just then. He smelled good, to quote his jacket. It’d been a long time since I’d had love-like feelings toward men. (The chemistry teacher was nice, but really, the carbohydrates and the cheese did more for me than him.)
I heard you shouting just then, Mr. Photographer. I moved aside the curtain and I felt transported. I’d like to thank you for those long seconds the sensation lasted. One moment there’s a gauzy curtain in front of me, then I’m looking at your two wigged models in those elaborate dresses riding vintage bicycles around the courtyard fountain. Elisa in Prussian blue and the other whose name I never got, wearing a faded mustard-colored extravagance of a dress. A man could perform cunnilingus in such a dress and never be noticed. Not on a bicycle, of course.
Elisa rode with that kind of uncertainty that the rest of us (bicyclists) only get when we’re riding at nearly a stop. I’d stepped into a costume drama, and I was only slightly disappointed when I spotted you and your assistants coming around the other side of the fountain, cameras and strobes in hand. You were leaping around on the fountain’s rim like it was hot to your shoes. You’re a shouter, aren’t you? I liked you at first, though, especially when you slipped and one shoe went into the water. A man (you) whose employees can laugh at his (your) misfortune is a good man, at heart, I can tell. Kind, forgiving, slow to anger. Yes?
Those models, though. They were on such a different level of beauty it makes one terribly sad at the injustice in which attractiveness is doled out. My daughters have only a tenth of this beauty—though I thought them beautiful when they were very young. The sun lit the models’ faces the color of ripe peaches. Just gorgeous. So much for the meteorologist’s Niederschlagwahrscheinlichkeit. That’s when you first saw me, and shouted for me to close the curtains. To vanish. And so I did, have, will.
I was cold so I put on good, kind Günter’s jacket. The inside of the jacket was fleece and still warm. I liked him even more. It’s sad, but there’s less difference between a warm jacket and a good man than you might suppose. The room’s proper door let out into an even larger bedroom. I found myself behind an enormous bed surrounded on three sides by velvet ropes and four gleaming stanchions. I could hear your models laughing, then the squeak of their tires as you brought the photo shoot indoors.
“We go ahead, then you come on my call,” you shouted. “We do this, okay?”
This was in that long hallway that looked like the one where they signed the treaty ending WWI—all gold and mirrors. I was about to write all smoke and mirrors. When your girls passed me in the corridor they were laughing but not making a sound. Only brilliant actors can make glee silent—and sad that way.
You and your assistants ran down the hallway to the end, where descending stairs took away your feet, legs, waists, arms, and heads until I was alone with the two models waiting for your call. The one in the mustard-colored dress was balancing herself perfectly on the bicycle. The faces of the girls were ashen with make-up.
“Okay,” you shouted from somewhere down that staircase. “We go!”
The girls pedaled off, Elisa swerving as she headed toward the staircase. I heard the slap of their chains on the chain guard as they descended. I was alone again, mistress of the castle. But my thoughts were cut short by a scream and then a metal clatter I couldn’
t place. A wincing cry followed, then a curse. I ran toward the staircase. Ninety-nine percent of me was coming to help. The other one percent was glad there was this unknown thing for me to rush to: a plan for the evening. Not that being alone has been a great fear of mine. I like being alone. But there are nights when I don’t like being left somewhere between the mind and the body. Nights like that night, or this one.
The swooping staircase was a dozen persons’ wide and descended into an enormous entry room lined in portraits. Which reminds me—a short digression, I promise—of when my late husband Peter got it into his head to have an artist paint a portrait of the president of his firm as a retirement gift for the outgoing president. Somehow the nose ended up looking like a penis and Peter had to go out and buy an ostentatious Mont Blanc fountain pen at the last minute instead, as there wasn’t time to fix the painting because the painter had checked into an ashram somewhere for the summer. Penis-nose hangs in the garage, next to my hot water heater.
Short, see?
I could see you, your assistants, and the girl in the mustard-colored dress at the bottom of the stairs, but I couldn’t see Elisa. Descending the curved staircase, I saw that the red carpet had come undone, with several of the staircase’s long brass stair rods lying untucked. A plume of red carpet pointed downstairs, like a giant tongue, and Elisa lay at the tip, contorted under her bicycle. Her white wig lay several steps below, like a lapdog waiting to be picked up.
“Verdammte Scheisse!” you shouted, and—honestly?—your curse made me wonder if I’d perhaps stumbled, not on an accident, but on a rehearsed shot. Magazines and ads always have strange tastes: that heroin period, always the unhappy trapped-soul faces. Never anyone who looked like they could ever be a parent’s pride and joy. But Elisa’s wincing was real. You know the rest: I helped her untangle herself, thought her arm was broken, and you threw your little temper tantrum about a few rips in the dress and the fading light and something about paperwork and insurance that used that breed of German words they don’t teach you in language classes.
I do want to say, though, that some part of me appreciates the fact that you use film. My daughters gave me a digital camera to take with me, but I gave it away. Life isn’t digital, but unforgivingly analogue. Digital has an endlessness to it—you can store 4,000 photos on it Mom! Erase the ones you don’t want to keep—which is a kind of selective immorality. Real life is twenty-four shots. Thirty-six if you’re lucky. It’s about care and carefulness. On this I believe you and I would agree. I just wanted to say that, now that my mind is on it.
Five minutes after all this, I have the keys to your BMW and I’m taking Elisa to the hospital while you and the other model continue shooting, the one with that beautiful face, but beautiful in that strange, slightly inbred way—though I guess there’s no such thing as slightly inbred, is there? Maybe it was Günter’s jacket on my shoulders that let you trust me, or my mentioning I was once a nurse, or simply your panic at the fading light.
Your car was in the staff lot. To get there we had to pass through the cavernous, half-finished ballroom with the mirrors behind the statues. Why work stopped on this room I’ll never know, though I might have discovered what flavor of bankruptcy had I taken the English tour. So strange to see that behind all that richness and solidity stood uneven brick and sloppy mortar and nothing fancier than a mud hut’s walls. Even some of the structural details are, close-up, nothing but tromp l’oeil.
Outside, it was twilight. The fountains had all been turned off, their white noise replaced by the rasping of insects. I pushed the fob on your keychain and heard a chirp. I transferred Günter—which is what I’d begun calling the jacket by then—onto Elisa’s shoulders and we climbed into your BMW and sped off into the enclosing darkness, the in-dash GPS showing us in a world of blues and greens when everything, to my eyes, was fading to black. The nearest hospital was somewhere off the map. In the beginning we followed a blue line that snaked before us, but I didn’t know where it led, other than back to wherever you’d driven from. A home? A wife? Children?
I asked Elisa to check the glove compartment for a proper map. She could barely get to it; her dress filled half the car. When she opened the glove compartment she found your pistol. Elisa laughed, making me first think it was a joke of some kind, a cigarette lighter, perhaps. But I quickly saw it was too angular and dark for a joke. It changed my picture of you immensely, Mr. Photographer. Your wife, your children? They evaporated. I didn’t know you, suddenly—as though I ever had.
Elisa winced when she lifted the pistol and switched it to the hand of her right, uninjured, arm.
“Put that back,” I said.
“I will,” she said, but didn’t.
It’s hard to find a corollary to the particular adrenaline cocktail you get when driving down unfamiliar roads at night, in a new car, in a rush to get to a hospital whose location you don’t know—all while wearing glasses at least a prescription too weak. Elisa put the gun into her lap where it was consumed by fabric. She pulled down her dress and unwound the tape that squeezed her breasts together for cleavage. I used to have breasts twice as nice.
“Better?” I asked.
“Yes,” she sighed.
I once read that men like cleavage because it reminds them of, well, ass. I told that to a girlfriend once and she said it made sense, since men like to fuck with your heart. But really, is that true (cleavage=ass)? I suppose if it’s that deep in the DNA, then it must mean we’ve been taking it from behind for a million years. Which, I suppose, we have been.
I gave Elisa some Vicodin, being careful to avoid the smaller pills, the ones with a more sinister chemistry. They’re octagonal for a reason.
“I broke my leg once, when I was eleven,” Elisa said, “Surgeons put a metal pin in.”
“How’d you break it?”
“Bicycling,” she said.
I told her not to worry. That she was young and young bones heal quickly. Funny, though, isn’t it, how avoiding what we fear can have a tendency to come back to harm us?
“You’ll have a cast off in less than six weeks,” I said.
“Six weeks?!" Elisa sounded desperate. "I have three shoots this month.”
I thought she was going to hyperventilate. But somewhere on that drive the pills kicked in and she went into a pharmaceutical reverie. When she discovered I spoke (some) German, she went on and on about her boyfriend and, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really listening and don’t remember what she said other than that he, her boyfriend, was gay-handsome, but straight. Like winning the lottery, she said. He either composed a song for her, or had a song composed for her—one idea worse than the other (to me.) She loved the song and tried to sing it for me in the car, but forgot the lyrics after a stanza. Meanwhile, I was enjoying your car: the heated seats, the headlamps that turned to follow the curves in the road—I had no idea cars did that. I own a ’98 Honda that’s sitting in a cold garage right now, the driver’s door dinged from hitting the hot water heater. Penis-nose is looking out over the oxidized hood of my car. Now that I think about it, it was the portrait’s stare that stopped Peter from giving the painting to his boss, not the nose. I remember now. It was eerie, the way the eyes followed you. The penis nose was something we came to appreciate afterwards. He’s dead now, Peter’s boss—Peter, too, of course—but the stare continued until, at some point in the last decade, I took a marker to the painting and drew on sunglasses and a goatee.
Back to your car. We’re driving along, the highway appearing at the top edge of the GPS’ screen, when Elisa rolled down her window. My first thought was that she was going to be sick, so I slowed down, looking for a turnout. Instead, Elisa had the pistol in her hand and aimed at the road sign for the upcoming highway. She fired, then shrieked and flung the pistol out the window and into the dark. The noise scared me so I nearly drove the car off the road.
“Now I’ve done that,” Elisa said, excitedly, and I was afraid to ask what else was on her list.
I sat with Elisa in the waiting room of a Uniklinik until I felt my blood sugar getting low. I headed to the hospital canteen, which, though the kitchen was long closed, still served pretzels and soup, both cheap. I checked the waiting room, but Elisa had already been admitted. I ate in the car (two pretzel, no soup—though my desire not to spill anything in your car, is, in hindsight, rather humorous). And then I drove, alone.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 32
