Moon Over Minneapolis

by Fay Weldon

  Clifton’s teeth dug sharply into Greta’s earlobe and she uttered the husky little scream which so entranced and interested men.

  After she had replaced the receiver, it occurred to Greta that her daughter was still a virgin, and she almost picked up the phone for a longer talk, but then the time was past and Clifton’s red, red tongue was importuning her and she forgot all about Bente for at least a week. Out of sight, out of mind! Many mothers feel it: few acknowledge it!

  Bente wrote within the month to ask if she should tell Mrs Beaver that she and Mr Beaver were having an affair, since she didn’t like to be deceitful. Adrian himself was reluctant to do it, saying it might upset the children and it should be kept secret. What did Greta think?

  Greta wrote back to say, with feeling, that children should not begrudge their parents a sex life; you had to take sex calmly and openly, not get hysterical. Sex is like a wasp, wrote Greta. You must just sit still and let it take its course. It’s when you try and brush it away the trouble comes. Fanciful Greta!

  Bente wrote to say that Mrs Beaver had moved out of the house: simply abandoned the children and left! What sort of mother was that? She, Bente, would never do such a thing. Mrs Beaver was hopelessly neurotic. (Didn’t Greta think her, Bente’s, English had improved? She had been quite right about pillow talk!) Mr Beaver had told his wife she could continue living in the spare room and have her own lovers quite freely, but Mrs Beaver hadn’t been at all grateful and had made the most dreadful scenes before finally going and had even tried to knife her, Bente, and Mr Beaver had lost half a stone in weight. Could Greta send her the pickled-herring recipe? She enclosed a photograph of herself and Adrian and the boys. She and Adrian were to be married as soon as he was free. Wasn’t love wonderful? Wasn’t fate an extraordinary thing? Supposing she and Adrian had never met? Supposing this, supposing that!

  Greta studied the photograph with a magnifying glass. Adrian Beaver, she was surprised to see, was at least fifty and running to fat, and plain in a peculiarly English, intellectual, chinless way, and the Beaver sons were not little, as she had supposed, but in their early adolescence and ungainly too. Her daughter stood next to Mr Beaver, twice his size, big-busted, bovine, with the sweet inexorable smile of a flaxen doll. Greta did not want to have grandchildren, especially not these grandchildren. Greta, one way and another, was in a fix.

  Greta had fallen in love, in a peculiarly high, pure, almost sexless way—who’d have thought it! But life goes this way, now that!—with a doctor from Odense, who wanted to marry her, Greta, save her from herself and build her a house in glass and steel where she could live happily ever after. (Perhaps she was in love with the house, not him, but what could it matter? Love is love, even if it’s for glass and steel!) The doctor was thirty-five. Greta, alas, on first meeting him, had given her age as thirty-four. Unless she had given birth to Bente when she was ten, how now could Bente be her daughter?

  ‘You are no daughter of mine,’ she wrote back to Bente. ‘Sex is one thing, love quite another. Sex may be a wasp, but love is a swarm of bees! You have broken up a marriage, done a dreadful thing! I never wish to hear from you again.’

  And nor did she, and both lived happily ever after: the mother in the flat, clean, cheerful land: the daughter in the dirty, hilly, troubled one across the sea, where fate had taken her. How full the world is of bees and wasps! In the autumn the birch trees of Denmark turn russet red and glorious, and the lights which shine across from Sweden seem hard and resolute and the air chilly, and the wasps and bees move slowly and sleepily amongst the red, red leaves, and how lucky you are if you escape a sting!

  How I Am is How You Are

  ‘HELLO. HOW ARE YOU TODAY?’ came from the waiter’s mouth. And he didn’t quite speak, and he didn’t quite murmur, and he didn’t quite whine; what he did was greet, and he greeted with such a sweet smile, such a generous crumpling of mouth muscles, a squeezing of big brown eyes, you might almost have thought he meant it. But since the guest with the leather hat and the sandals, and the thick hands so battered by the over-use and accidents of decades as to be all but impossible to clean, and the woman in the blue-and-white spotted dress, cartwheel hat and blue-and-white striped shoes, just stared at him, as if taken aback by the question, the waiter flicked his napkin around their empty, perfectly clean table and went away.

  ‘The word “greet” in Scotland means to weep, to grieve, to mourn,’ said Aileen.

  ‘I don’t follow your train of thought,’ he said. ‘Well no,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose you do. Rowena says she likes Mexicans, they’re such sweet guys, she personally has nothing against chicanos. Though of course nowadays few people use that term, she says. There are so many immigrants here you never know where any of them come from: seeping up over the border from anywhere in the South, and they all just get lumped together as “Latinos”. If you’re an illegal you get to be called a silent immigrant, which I suppose is quite polite. Rowena Gersh says there are now thirty million people in Los Angeles County and eighty per cent of them speak Spanish, so the twenty per cent are probably wise to be polite.’

  ‘Which one is Rowena Gersh?’

  ‘Rowena Gersh is my agent.’

  ‘The one with the tiny feet?’

  ‘Yes. I expect so. Though I have never noticed her feet. She was here earlier, wishing you good luck.’

  ‘The one who’s not coming to my show? She is a bitch. I don’t know why you have anything to do with these dreadful people.’

  ‘She’s coming later. She’s having drinks with Spielberg. Some deal or other.’

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  ‘What, that she’s coming later or meeting with Spielberg?’

  ‘That I can just sit here on my own for five minutes. The twittering round here is like a nightmare. Doesn’t anyone ever sit still, or silent, in this town?’

  ‘You are not actually on your own, you’re with me. Would you like me to go away too?’

  He studied her. Large chunks of ice clinked in thick glasses all around.

  ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that now you are older your nose seems to have grown in proportion to your face? Or perhaps it is that your cheeks have sunk. When I first met you, I’ll swear you had a little button nose like a doll. Now it’s almost beaky.’

  ‘I certainly feel less doll-like than I did twenty years ago,’ she said. ‘Do you like my dress?’

  ‘Well, no. It’s smart and silly. Isn’t it too short?’

  ‘No. Rowena Gersh helped me buy it. She said it was very LA. The style is casual, the fabric formal, everything matches and everyone is supposed to notice. Rowena Gersh, if you remember, is my agent, the one who’s seeing Spielberg about a script of mine.’

  ‘I hope she likes you. I see no evidence of it, from the dress. Or, God help us, the hat.’

  ‘Hello. How are you today?’ greeted another waiter, in passing. He had close-shaven white hair and a cavernous face, and brown, brown eyes. There seemed to be as many waiters as there were guests. All around arose the well-trained murmur; the formal acknowledgement that the rich deserve to be happy and content, not just in their bodies but in their minds as well, and that the poor must be considerate of the rich, not because the rich have money which the poor need so badly, but because the poor really like the rich. The rich are good guys and the poor are sweet guys. How are you? Have a nice day!

  ‘I have worked out, Rix,’ said Aileen, ‘that the only reason we can go on calling women and blacks and Latinos and the underclass “minorities”, although in actual numbers they overwhelm the majority ten times over, is that each minority soul is worth one-eleventh of each majority soul; only thus can the minority reasonably claim to be the majority. Powerful and strong the majority stands, spreading a little misery, a little kindness, complacently buffing its extra special soul.’

  ‘Keep it for your agent,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t you talk a little less? This is a very tense moment for me.’

  Through th
e wide-open glass doors at the far end of the lounge bar of the brand-new Van Gogh hotel, past the central twelve-foot-high flower display, and the palms, and the silk screens, was the Leonardo Gallery, and here, in some half an hour, her husband’s show would open.

  ‘Night of the Private View,’ she said. ‘Always tense.’ Disagreements had budded, blossomed, flourished and more or less faded. The paintings were finally unpacked and hung, the wall prices at last decided—$160,000 top price for a landscape fifteen feet by ten, $26,000 for a small flower piece and $15,000—a snip—for a pencilled nude of fifteen, pregnant, which Aileen would rather he didn’t sell, for fear of what the future might make of it, but hadn’t ventured to say so. Mira Kaplan, who ran the gallery for Van Gogh International, had retired to her suite temporarily, to calm herself, and put on her new Armani suit, bought across the road in Rodeo Drive that very morning. Van Gogh International would no doubt foot the bill—a chain, recently developed, of ‘Great Hotels of World Culture’, anxious to launch themselves as just that, and lavishly scattering PR largesse. Rix, his paintings, and Aileen, his wife, as nursemaid, had been flown over from London six days earlier. Aileen was a screenwriter, as it happened. She had her own contacts in Los Angeles. Rix and Aileen seldom left home together.

  ‘Hello,’ greeted the white-haired waiter, returning. ‘How are you today?’ and he took out his notepad and held his pen between his thin, delicate brown fingers, because if these guys did not start focusing soon he would go off duty without bringing them their drink, or their coffee, or the cream cake of their fancy. He had sweet brown eyes. Aileen’s eyes were blue; Rix’s were grey. The waiter went away.

  ‘Now you’ve missed your drink,’ said Rix. ‘It comes from talking too much.’ He did not like the bland red wine of California, or the secret sweetness of its dry white Chardonnay. He seldom drank spirits. He liked to arrive at his Private Views sober, so as not to stumble or fall flat on his face in public, though he knew art buyers were not averse to a drunken, dissolute and ill-mannered artist. It made their connection with the churning heart of the universe the more poignant. He suspected the Van Gogh chain was part of an enormous world-wide conspiracy: its hotels mere clearing houses for Company Art, that is to say the big-scale, big-name, big-budget contemporary paintings which these days hung over board tables; from which the dealers profited so much, and the painters so little. It was gratifying to become one of the big names. It was also humiliating. To be successful, as a painter, was to have failed, to have been corrupted; the thin priest turning into the fat abbot. The trip to California was a mistake. He was not interested in establishing a reputation on the West Coast: he felt vulgar, and exposed. He didn’t need the money. Aileen made enough money for them both anyway, writing rubbishy TV scripts.

  He noticed that tears were rolling down Aileen’s cheek. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘don’t make an exhibition of yourself. Not here. I should have brought Frances, not you.’ Frances was his sister. She too was a painter. She seldom spoke and never cried.

  Aileen turned to look at him, and the cartwheel hat caught in her collar. She tugged it free.

  ‘Somebody has asked me how I am today,’ she said, ‘and it has made me feel sorry for myself. Since there’s no one else to tell and I finally have fifteen minutes to spare in which there is nothing I have to do, I shall tell you how I am. Why do I have fifteen minutes to spare? Because the Latinos are doing all the work for me. I am grateful to them. They are doing the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the taking of messages, the looking up of maps to tell us where to go, the calling of cabs; a steady flow of reminder notes creeps under the door of our room upstairs, so I can empty my head of memory, and there is no justice in it, but in the three days I have been here I have had a little rest and I have seen how other women live, and how they live is good. Even the lonely ones who come and sit here at the Van Gogh in the afternoon on their own, with their expensive horrid clothes, and listen to the piano-player, who is young and romantic-looking, playing melancholy tunes which remind them of love past, and look so sad, so sad, are better off than I am.’

  ‘You’re wearing such expensive horrid clothes today,’ he said. ‘You know I hate spots and stripes.’

  ‘That is why I went out this morning and bought this spotted dress,’ she said. ‘I went with Rowena.’

  ‘You ought to go back to your therapist,’ he said, ‘in that case.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me,’ she said. ‘I am telling you how I am. Hello, the waiter said. How are you today? And I know he is paid to say it, and trained to say it, but it got to my heart. Hello. How are you today?’

  ‘You are drawing attention to yourself,’ he said. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something about yourself,’ she said, ‘that you don’t know. You don’t know nothing from nix. You are a painter. You don’t understand words. If you use them at all you use them as weapons. That to you is their only use. You and your sister are the same. You have a hereditary defect. You inherited it from your father because he was a painter too.’

  ‘He was a bad painter.’

  ‘You only remember the last sentence of any paragraph I speak because you are a painter, a visual person. Language flows through your brain; you don’t pay it any attention, it is so unimportant: if there’s any hanging about in your head when I’ve finished speaking you might just pay attention to it and respond. It does not matter whether your father was a bad painter or a good painter; indeed, it is because you are a painter, a visual artist, that you throw these concepts about so crudely. Good, bad. I see a whole world in between: of goodish and baddish and sometimes a little bit of both; you describe the painter, I describe the painting. I think you are childish.’

  ‘You are doing your best’, he said, ‘to destroy this show for me. You are so envious and jealous of my gift you want to attack me. You wait until now to do it.’

  ‘You can always get up and walk away,’ she said. ‘But you won’t because you’d rather people were talking about you than not talking about you and at this moment I am talking about you.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘You know nothing about me and you know nothing about painting and you make a fool of yourself pretending you do.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘How are you today? Today I am speaking to my husband, that’s how I am. I have been married to him for twenty-two years and I have never spoken to him properly, in case I spoke all this. I have had rows with him, and been unfaithful to him, and felt guilty, and he has left me and returned and had models for mistresses and mistresses for models and felt not at all guilty, and all these things have been overcome but I don’t think this can be overcome now it has raised its head. You are a painter and a painter is a monster, no woman should marry an artist, because all artists are monsters, and very few men, you notice, marry women artists, being sensible, and if they do they do not survive. Or only as shells. They too serve art, whether they want to or not. All those who have sexual relations with artists serve art. The artist is the high priest, the spouse the acolyte, and acolytes, like the waiters who serve the priest which is money, who serves the god which is success, are sweet guys but have had the stuffing knocked out of them. A low self-image and a feeble sex drive. The wives of male artists pad round with ladders in their stockings; the husbands of female artists left long ago, or if they haven’t, should have. It is a terrible thing for a man to have to revere art through his wife the artist: to thus funnel his soul through a woman is a humiliation. I am talking about your sister Frances and her husband Rex. She chose him for a husband because his name is Rex and yours is Rix, and it was the nearest she could get.’

  ‘That old incest stuff again,’ he said. ‘Please keep your voice down.’

  ‘And now Rex drinks and his face falls in folds, and he stumbles and trips and his eyes are bloodshot: and she, she is firm and determined and melancholy, and cold. She loves her art, she loves her painting: she could not ever
love her children. She despises them. They disappoint her. They are not like a canvas she can work upon and work upon; they burst from her loins fully formed; no touch of cobalt blue, or stroke of titanium white, is going to make a difference. That’s it, that’s them: children are a puny creation compared to a painting. No woman artist truly loves her child. The child of the painter is the orphan of art. “Where is Mummy, Daddy?” “Mummy is in the studio, communing with her muse. Mummy has had a vision, darling. Mummy must communicate that vision to a world which doesn’t know or care, and believes real is real, and knows that if you don’t change a nappy the baby gets a nappy rash, but Mummy doesn’t know that, or care, and the baby cries but all Mummy knows about is a vase of flowers which seem to her to have been sent as a message, to illuminate the world. As Jesus is to some, so is a landscape to a landscape artist; and God help the lambs who stumble round the real world because the artist sure as hell won’t help them.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about these things,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you stick to writing? Why don’t you leave my unfortunate sister alone? Bad enough her losing the child without you capitalizing on it.’

  ‘I am not capitalizing. I am observing. She was too busy painting to take the baby to the doctor. It was dreadful. I am not blaming her. I am trying to explain your own nature to you, using your sister, because you can see your sister just a little more clearly than you see yourself.’

  ‘If I wanted to see myself clearly I would do a self-portrait.’

  ‘You see, you see!’ she cried in triumph, and finally took off her cartwheel hat, and her hair fell skewwhiff and she looked much more herself, he thought.

  ‘It is a great blessing to be a painter and a great misfortune too. It is a blessing because you have a glimpse of a world behind this one, and a curse because you must try to seize it with tweezers, which are your brushes, like a splinter beneath flesh, and drag it into the day; if you do, it bruises and if you don’t, it pains you if you press there by mistake, and if the pain doesn’t stop, you know it’s because the splinter is working its way, working its way inwards towards the heart and it will pierce the heart and you will die.’