“Claire,” Isolde said, “please write the place cards out. You do it so well with your fancy pen.” She moved into the kitchen and picked up the phone.
“Okay,” I said, eager to please in a way that wasn’t too exerting.
“Let me think who all will be here,” Daisy thought out loud, counting on her dainty fingers. “Vladimir will come. He’ll be at the head. She likes him at the head. Let me think. There’s you and me.” She meant herself and Isolde. “Then there’s you, Claire. And Dr. von Osterwald.”
Isolde came out licking her fingers. “And Wolfgang, the film director. Put him down the table on my left.”
So he can see your best side, I thought meanly, but didn’t say. I was always a little bit afraid of Isolde. Everybody was. You measured how much you could say by the mood she was in.
“And here I am, the goose.” Daisy passed us, laying down the place mats, miffed and getting used to it.
Harry padded back to the sofa in his rumpled cashmere socks, sat down, and began feeling around the floor for his shoes.
“So,” Isolde stood still for a blazing moment, “let’s start again. The three of us and Tupelo Honig. How many men have we? Blacky, Vladimir, Wolfgang the director …”
“This Wolfgang has no last name? Just ‘Wolfgang the film director’ on his card?”
“It’s Wolfgang Scherer,” Isolde replied acidly, “but no last names on the cards. It’s not a wedding.”
“What about Harry?” Daisy said in her persistent way. She rather liked Harry, no matter what she said. She fed him delicacies when no one was watching.
Isolde gave a dismissive swipe. “Just leave the bottle next to him,” she advised, not even lowering her voice. “He’ll be asleep before they get here. Claire, after this, why don’t you arrange those flowers in a vase? What I need,” she chewed her lip, “is another man.” The doorbell rang.
Daisy trotted away and returned with Chartreuse.
“Well, that was fast,” Isolde said.
“Chartreuse!” I cried.
Chartreuse held my chalk box up. “Your pastels,” he said. “You left them on the table.”
“I did?”
“She’s always forgetting things,” Daisy admonished.
Chartreuse touched his heart. “I intrude?” He bowed, his accent rich as Dijon.
“On the contrary,” Isolde looked him up and down, “we were just needing an extra man for dinner.”
“But I am honored.” Chartreuse sniffed the air like an alert bird dog, taking everything in at once. The Biedermeier furniture. The hand-carved frames. And, I gulped, the antique sterling.
“Asparagus?” Chartreuse eyed the ragged pile upon the table.
“That’s right.” Isolde smiled over one shoulder, kneeling down and pulling different cheeses from the fridge. And then, worriedly, “And a still partially frozen lamb.”
“Ah! You must allow me to join you in the kitchen.” Chartreuse rolled back his sleeves and held both arms up in the air. “I shall prepare for you my béchamel.”
Isolde, recognizing a connoisseur and ready to ooze charm equal to his, saw her chance to duck out for a shower. She led him into the tiny kitchen.
Chartreuse seemed right at home in the winsome pine kitchen. He scrubbed his dirty hands in the sink with the impressive care of a surgeon, then conspicuously scrutinized them under the light. This pleased Isolde, I could tell. Then, with a flourish of his crushed velvet magenta scarf, he rattled each pot testingly, provocatively, found what he liked, and went straight to work.
I was a little surprised. Isolde was attracted to only very rich or at least successful men. Chartreuse was so obviously neither of these. Although he was devilishly good-looking, with his long, wavy brown hair, his silky black lashes, and sparkling yellow eyes. He had a modest, close-mouthed smile. I knew he was sensitive about his teeth and often suffered with them. Still, he was dashing, in a theatrical, world-traveler way. He wore those fuzzy, loose-fitting pants from Nepal, a saffron langee from Ceylon, and a burgundy shirt from Rangoon. His eyes were exotically rimmed in kohl. It seemed he knew his way around a kitchen. I remembered him once telling me he’d traveled around the Mediterranean as a chef on a handsome, eighty-foot Brigsom yacht.
Isolde probably concluded he was artsy enough for the film people. If I knew her, she’d pass him off as her chef. I remembered my box of pastels on the table. Funny. I really did remember packing them away.
I left them laughing in the kitchen. Isolde was back, crouching on the floor with her head in the refrigerator. Out came vegetables and fruits from Africa. Chartreuse was hacking garlic expertly with a glinting knife, tzack tzack tzack, in lugubrious time with the rhythmic American music, which stopped again and again at the end of the stuck, long-playing album.
Harry staggered into a hassock in the living room.
“Bloody hell, Harry,” Daisy shouted. “You’re up! Put something new on the stereo, will you? Be useful.”
I remember thinking she was enormously disrespectful to a guest. But, compliant by nature, Harry made his careful way to the corner of the room and lowered himself gently to the floor. “Who shall we have, then?” he called out, immediately awake.
“Oh, make a decision,” Daisy practically screamed.
Coleman Hawkins’s banana rich tones set a new, more sultry atmosphere for us all. “Taste,” Isolde leaned sideways and confided to Chartreuse, “his only attribute.” Chartreuse chortled with a cruel French snort. His happy knife sped on.
Poor Harry. I did feel sorry for him now. Fondly I watched him, his pigeon toes, his roomy bottom, his plump lower lip out, sorting through the albums. Before the week was over, he’d be back to his auctions and country estates, hunting for treasure. He knew all about what was valuable and what wasn’t. I sighed with pleasure. How different all of this was from the ordinary. The mundane. From Queens. And then suddenly I remembered. I had placed my pastels on the top, inside my bag, before I’d stood to leave the Riding School café. Yes, I remembered it exactly. “Look,” Chartreuse had said from behind me, “how extraordinaire the light at this moment.” I’d felt his kindly hand on the strap of my sack. And then I’d turned around and he had grinned, his little teeth almost visibly aching with sugar and desire.
chapter five
I eased myself into a nice hot pool, oozy with capfuls of Isolde’s fine imported bath oil and snowy with bubbles.
The bath itself was very pretty: all mirrors and brass fixtures and Japanese seagulls swooping across a pale blue ceiling. Unfortunately, above the waterline it was freezing cold. I wondered why Germans found it utterly frivolous to heat an entire room, however small, for any longer than the short, industrious time one would and should be in it. Another thing I found: they refused, en masse, to support the phenomenon of the shower curtain. You were expected to manipulate your body between the spout and the rim of the tub so that you became a sort of bounceback for the stream of water.
I could hear Isolde and Daisy scuffling about and shouting outside the door.
“Run into the attic and get that white wine out of the Kühlschrank, Daisy!”
“Right. Schon erledigt. Already done it.”
“Then could you get the good scotch away from Harry? He’ll be asleep before anyone gets here.”
“That would save you a lot of scotch in the long run.”
Daisy walked in.
“At least you could shut the door,” I said.
“Oh, sorry,” Daisy said, paying no attention whatsoever and leaving the door ajar, then dabbing herself with a robust flounce of Isolde’s dusting powder. She sat down companionably on the rim of the tub and rumbaed in place. Peaches, cream, and flapping lashes. A corpulent Betty Boop. “She’s driving me mad.” Daisy sighed. “And she’s going to be home all week, too.”
“Hmm. That’s bad.” Isolde, as marvelous as she was to be with, was also quite a pleasure to be without. She did have the good grace to be off on location somewhere half of the time
, shooting a film or modeling fur coats on some runway or other, leaving Daisy long, lazy mornings and nights undisturbed by guests and great meals to clean up afterward. The boys, her real job, were never really that much trouble, having early on learned to fend for themselves. But Isolde was always up to something that required group participation: furiously cleaning out a winter closet at two in the morning, deciding suddenly to paint her bedroom red when the yellow wasn’t dry a month. There was Daisy, then, right behind, sulking, but doing it just the same. Lost in the trap, as everyone was, of not being able to say no to Isolde.
Daisy tugged at a piece of her mop of brown hair turning into determined ringlets from the steam. “I’m going off and get a normal job,” she said. “That will teach her. She’ll never find another slave like me.”
“She’d find someone right away. Don’t be such a teenager.” I blew a glob of bubbles at her.
“You should talk! You’re not that much older than I!”
“It isn’t that bad. What else would you do? Wait tables? You wouldn’t like that too much after a while. Why don’t you just go back to school?”
The truth was that Daisy was already better educated than most. She patted her hair. “Because it’s more fun here. I know. I’m just sick of all her stupid men hanging about. And it’s no better when she’s gone. They call her nonstop, you know. I’m like a bloody secretary.”
“At least your German’s getting decent. I can’t say half the things you can.”
“Yes, I’ve become a regular little Bavarian, I have.” She sighed. It wasn’t easy cavorting with models who ran off to exotic ports while you were left holding the laundry bag.
“Has Harry gone?” I asked, to change the subject.
“Certainly not. He’ll stay for supper. And long after that if she lets him. Funny about men,” Daisy marveled. “They can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to Isolde. Even respectable businessmen like Harry. Poor sods. They just sort of melt beneath her bossiness and get lost there, don’t they? Poor, poor Vladimir.”
“Oh, come on, little Miss Priss. Vladimir’s been with everyone. Why do you think Isolde started fooling around in the first place? He left her long before she left him. She told me.”
“Phhhhh. She tells you everything she thinks will amplify your sympathy.”
“She doesn’t need my sympathy.”
“Yes. For some reason, she does.” Daisy admired me with envy.
“I’m sorry I took your lovely apartment away from you,” I said. I wasn’t really sorry, though.
“It was you or someone else.”
“By the way, I saw Vladimir at the Riding School café with an exotic girl.”
“Yeah? Was she a looker?”
“A stunner. And she was our age. Younger.”
“Oh, don’t let Isolde hear you say that! She’s jealous.”
I put an arm across my bent knees. “I’m absolutely sure Isolde has no intention of giving up Vladimir. She just figures let him have his little fling.”
“Nothing she can do about it, is there? I mean, he just up and left.”
“Oh, Isolde will think of something.”
“She’d better get cracking, then. She’s got to be thirty.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, that’s true.”
We sat there silently for a while, thinking about all these things, when in barged Isolde herself, noticeably filling up the bathroom. “What’s this?” she said. “The clubhouse?”
“Mm-mmm,” we murmured noncommittally, preoccupied.
“Where are my black mules?” she demanded. That was the thing. The flat was cool and huge until Isolde came home. She filled it with heat and business and things and perfume the moment she walked in. It was always the same.
“Oh.” Daisy turned bright red. “They’ll be under my bed.” Then, “I was trying them on.”
“By the way,” Isolde said to me, “don’t invite that Afghani anymore.”
“Chartreuse? He’s French.”
“Tch. Of course he isn’t. He might have been in prison there once.”
“I’m sure he would have told me if he was Afghani,” I said, almost to myself.
“He looks like a Moroccan,” Daisy said.
“You’re the one who invited him,” I reminded Isolde.
“It’s no good to be seen with someone of that caliber.”
I looked away. I wouldn’t invite him back here to Isolde’s house, but no one told me with whom to be friends. No one.
“He’s dangerous,” she added, pointedly scrubbing behind the faucet with a thrown-away toothbrush. She did this as a reprimand to Daisy.
He’s harmless, I started to say, but then I remembered that of course he wasn’t. His velvet pouch of opium-veined hashish was in his pocket, ever at the ready. His secretive, conspiratorial eyes promised crime with a nudge from the top of the head and fun and who knew what all.
“Company’s coming in thirty minutes, you two,” Isolde fumed, as though this were our fault. “Well, you might have come home a little earlier, then, to get things started,” Daisy dared.
“I was at a cattle call. Twen magazine is doing a bathing suit layout in the Canary Islands, Claire. You might want to try out.”
“Not me. I never want to see the Canary Islands again. I was just there. Don’t you remember? That was some horrible trip. The photographer was awful. Mean.”
“Who was it?” Isolde said.
“Reiner Decke.” I loathed even to say his name.
“Reiner? He’s brilliant. I love Reiner.” Isolde stretched herself in isometric detachment.
“Uch.” I grimaced and went rigid. “How could you like that creepy man?”
“How much money did you make on that trip, Claire?”
“A ton,” I admitted.
“And every catalog house in Germany started to book you right after he used you. I think I’ll give him a call. I wonder if it’s too late to invite him for tonight … .”
“Oh, no,” I moaned. But I could see she’d already made up her mind.
“Don’t put him next to me,” I warned, “because I won’t come.”
“I’ll bet I could catch him before he leaves his studio.” Isolde was halfway out the door. “We’ll put Harry next to him. And I need you, Claire.”
“You don’t need me,” I phiffed.
She actually looked hurt. She came back in. “Yes, I do. You’re pretty. So no one can say I’m the only good-looking woman I allow at my table. You’re quiet, so you don’t get in my way—”
“I’m not that quiet. Oh, please don’t! Isolde, I beg you … .”
“Why not?” Her eyes already danced at the thought of him admiring her across her wonderful dinner table. And if his presence made me suffer, all the more fun! “Maybe he’ll book me for his fall catalog. I was just thinking I could use new pictures.”
It occurred to me that Isolde really did want me for something besides money. She thought my newness would rub off on her. This vulnerability in her touched me.
“I wish someone would choose me to go to the Canary Islands,” Daisy said thoughtfully, her eyes still round, pretending not to notice Isolde’s last barb about the only other good-looking woman. Isolde was so thoughtless.
Isolde leaned up against the mirror, peering suspiciously at all her nooks and crannies. “You know,” she said, “anyone might arrive any minute. You’d better not leave me alone with them out there.” What she meant, of course, was that she didn’t like the two of us conspiring in here without her and we’d better get the show on the road.
“Don’t be long,” Isolde called back to me. I knew where she was going. Off to telephone that Reiner Decke.
“And gussy yourself up a bit, will you?” she added. “Sunday’s Pfingsten!”
“What the hell is Pfingsten?” I called after her.
“Why, it’s Pentecost,” Daisy said and skedaddled off.
Pentecost! The feast of the Ascencion. My impulse was to immediately sa
y a Hail Mary. Pentecost was big. At home we would be gathering the family together. But I didn’t believe in God anymore, did I? I remembered. So how, I reasoned, could I pray through His mother? I thought guiltily of my Queen of the Rosary beads left dejectedly in the back of a drawer in my old life back home. I could never have thrown them away. But neither could I have brought them along. For no God would have allowed my brother to have died back there in that filthy hallway. Not like that. And no mother of God. I shivered. Michael would never be there for me now when we were older. I’d always thought we’d be out in the yard raking leaves in some faraway October. I’d seen it. And now it would never be. We would never laugh together again. Never. Nor would I have my faith to console me. Still. There were times I missed my saints. I’d had one for each occasion. It had been a handy and fulfilling system. But I was grown up now, a friend of sophisticated Isolde’s. No one was going to put one over on me.
The air was cold. The idea, though, of once again sitting at table with the horrible Reiner Decke was such a shock that I plunged obliteratingly under the stolen, perfumed water and—as it always does when you try purposefully to forget about something—the entire memory played before my closed eyes like a film.
I’d hardly been in Munich a week when my agency had sent me out to Grunwald to see this “big” photographer.
I’d gone on the tram. His studio was a huge beams-and-stucco affair in a pretty courtyard behind a pocketbook factory.
Reiner Decke sat on his palomino-skin sofa, flipping through my portfolio. This was right after I’d left Milan. I hadn’t done well there, but I had some great tear sheets. Reiner just raced through these but stopped at my horrible commercial stuff from New York—really ugly shots of me for Ingénue and Seventeen. I’d only kept them to fill up my empty pages and to prove I’d worked in New York. I wasn’t yet aware of just how impressed with anything American the German was.
“Na?” He’d leaned back and gleamed at me. “How would you like to go on safari? To Africa! Groovy, or?”
Pack Up the Moon Page 6
