Tupelo, silent with annoyance, pulled Blacky down onto the faded loveseat. She held one of his clean hands in hers. Yes, the emerald on her finger twinkled. While she had him in her grasp she was almost complacent, her normally vigilant eyes in a glaze. There was that old song on the radio, “Deep Purple.”
His eyes met mine. He took his hand away from her and put it into his own, unwrinkled lap. Out the window, past the blossoming pear trees, the raindrops falling so heavily lightened like parachutes opening, and they turned into whispery snowflakes—my snowflakes now—amast in the wind.
chapter nine
We left at the height of summer. Out of Bavaria, over the picturesque hills, our caravan wound its way.
Watching Munich disappear before my eyes, I loved it so much. Art galleries. Farms in the middle of town. Flowers, so abundant they traipsed across each path. Cozy bakeries and streamlined autobahns. Window boxes. Railroad stations linking everywhere with history. The soft pastel colors of stone houses. Clock towers with clocks that actually worked. For a minute I couldn’t for the life of me think why I was leaving.
But leave we did.
“Harry,” I said, for Harry and I rode those first days together, “here I am with my dream, off to the Orient, and I’ve got to tell you, I’m sad.”
“What about?” He fiddled with the radio and found us a waltz.
“I’m not exactly sure. I just feel my life so profoundly, I could cry.”
“You’re not sad, my dear, you’re happy.” He lifted himself and adjusted so the seams of his white duck pants would align, the change he always kept in there jingling. “You just don’t recognize it as you’ve never felt it before.”
“Really?” I looked into the rearview mirror to see who I was. Yes. There I was. Young. Happy. Although Tupelo, to my great disappointment and confusion, had managed to come. It wasn’t I who’d held everything up in the end, but she, whose busy schedule had had to be reshuffled. She’d moved heaven and earth to get out of a contract.
Grudgingly, I’d conceded defeat. Blacky, busy tying up loose ends at his practice, was nowhere to be found. So I’d worked through the summer. The money I would have coming from the will would take time and red tape, and the apartment and its contents would have to be disposed of. As an American it was simply less complicated for me to let the estate lawyer handle everything from Zurich. But the money would be mine to come home to. Unrequited love leaves actually quite less of a broken heart when there’s a consoling chunk of money in the picture, take it from me.
I wore Frau Zwekl’s Bohemian garnets in my ears. They glittered and swung with my every movement and each time I saw their reflection I thanked my lucky stars. Unfortunately, they’d come to me in a what-nots cardboard luxury soap box along with Frau Zwekl’s blue crystal rosary beads and her complete set of grinning false teeth. That was a shock. Still, I couldn’t throw the teeth away and kept them just as they were in the black box with roses on it she must have always kept near her on her nightstand. I felt I owed her that. I put my I Ching coins in there and the Distelfink handkerchief. I tried to give the rosary beads to the children but at the last minute, I couldn’t. I wrapped them back up in the handkerchief and returned them to their box.
I’d known already in July that my hopes for Blacky had been dashed. I knew it the moment I’d heard that his mother, the Countess von Osterwald—in my mind a sort of queen of the Black Forest—had invited Tupelo home for an early summer weekend. I could fight but I had no power against a purse-strings-toting countess mother who was in fact a besotted fan. I imagined she cared more about Tupelo than Blacky did. I told myself he was accommodating the countess.
At first I refused to look at Tupelo’s ring. Then, heartbroken, I forced myself to, as if that would get me over it. It did not. Though unrequited, I was still in love with him—so much so that I considered her affections for him nothing more than greedy self-preservation. I thought I could see right through her. After all, she’d been the instigator in our liaison. If she loved him, how could she have? Then again, I loved him and I’d participated, too. So I was just as bad as she.
I consoled myself with wondering if Blacky didn’t occasionally feel as though he’d moved too quickly. Would I have been a satisfactory lure to him with my newfound money? Or was I fantasizing, deluding myself? And what the hell was I thinking, wishing for a man whose prerequisite for love might be money!
Even I was wise—or greedy—enough to see that any feeling of love was preferable to me to no feeling at all. And I’d been hiding for so long inside a state of numbness. This feeling of “inlove-ness” enhanced my very essence of life; went along with it, like a river beside it, refreshing and, sometimes, flooding. In a way, it had nothing to do with Blacky. It was all about me. I could feel the passion, as anyone who has been in love will remember. It sentimentalized the going to bed, delighted the closing of eyes, the looking up, even—on fair blue midnights—to the canticle of stars.
That evening, just before the border, I sat checking and rechecking my purse, thick with passport, visas, and camera equipment. At that time in my life I always seemed to be grappling with the contents of one bag or another. At least that’s what Isolde said. She was quick to point out one’s faults in her charm-school-mistress way. I think I was afraid to lose what I hadn’t already received. Holding on to everything, sort of.
Everyone was a little nervous and anxious before we’d got under way. We’d gathered in a huddle like before a big game, Isolde restlessly moving from van to van, checking our inventory, hoping to remember in the nick of time some vital forgotten item. It was the early days of Clinique and we thought that without that particular soap and moisturizer, we’d be lost. We had stacks.
Isolde’s van looked very chic, all red and paisley, with voluptuous pillows and huge mirrors in frames along the walls so it actually looked really roomy. She was very proud of that van. The Abendzeitung had run a story on us and shot the interior. They had, however, shot Tupelo inside it—looking like a harem goddess in a cacophony of scarves—and run that picture on the Sunday supplement cover.
Isolde’s nose was out of joint. But Tupelo hadn’t actually said Isolde’s van had been hers. She’d simply happened to be there when the photographer arrived and, as Isolde was off somewhere, planted herself inside and let them assume what they would.
I knew it was bad-spirited of me, but I was delighted to see a crack in the veneer of Isolde’s adoration for Tupelo. Childishly, I wished for Isolde’s fondness again. I was always second now.
In Blacky’s and Tupelo’s van, sparse by comparison, sleeping bags were rolled up neatly, a refrigerator was stocked with antibiotics and Chardonna for diarrhea and so forth. Tupelo rode, head held high, beside him. I know she thought she looked like a “real” person. She’d even put orange madras plaid curtains on the windows. She probably saw herself as Nurse Nancy to his Dr. Dan. My upper lip curled into a sneer the moment I thought of her. Still, it pleased me to see there would soon be roots growing out of her “real” blond hair. And as if that all wasn’t enough, Chartreuse had found Tupelo’s green pearls in a hock shop—at least that was his story—and then presented them to her, like she was the queen.
Wolfgang, our filmmaker, had the most official-looking van. His was new and stocked with film canisters and camera equipment. He was used to taking off on trips to far-off places. He carried a clipboard and checked things off. There was, I thought, an excess of extra batteries and spare tires in every vehicle but there would come a time when I would delight in the existence of these things, too.
Harry’s van was the best. He’d hired Chartreuse to outfit it much like a yacht, and along the walls were cabinets and shelves chock-full of books and leather straps with snaps to keep them in line in case of jolting roads. He’d done it in pine and then polyurethaned it. We were all enthralled with Chartreuse’s masterpieces of deception: false-bottom drawers and cubbies. Sort of a drug dealer’s delight, I thought. But really, it was wond
erful. I loved sitting in it. Harry kept a bowl of bananas on the shelf at all times, believing that this was the only food you could eat and not get sick from while traveling. He’d fastened a brass bell up in front outside the driver’s seat. The open cabinets displayed all sorts of things to stave off boredom: game boards, a chess set, even two plastic suitcases of badminton, the only sport he allowed himself. The closed cabinets were housed with items Harry assumed Far Eastern people would be interested in and would want to barter for with their small treasures. On Chartreuse’s advice, he had one section filled with nothing but short-legged jeans. Believe it or not, there was a time when jeans only came from the West.
Reiner, once again outfitted in dry-cleaned Hemingway African safari gear, his vehicle heavy with good German Überkinger bottled water and Spaten Bier, had papered and shellacked his walls artistically with a collage of German photographers’ black and white art.
Vladimir wasn’t traveling with us. He had a show of his bronze women in Zurich on the sixteenth, which might prove too lucrative to forego, and would fly out later to meet us in Istanbul along with Daisy, who would stay on with the children until they were assimilated at their grandparents’ home in the country. Daisy was enormously put out by this. She hadn’t wanted to miss anything. But it was settled. Her translating capabilities wouldn’t be needed until farther down the road.
Evidently, Isolde and Vladimir had postponed their divorce. I think neither really wanted to go on the trip at first but neither could they figure a way to afford the trip separately, nor could they bear the thought of one having so much fun without the other. Their van, secondhand, commandeered by Isolde, beautifully lit and inviting, was, in a way, a second chance. I know Isolde practically glistened with hope.
When we’d pulled away from Isolde’s earlier that evening the cobbled street was yellow with light. The plan was to race through Austria and Yugoslavia and Greece. I was disappointed not to linger awhile longer in what was then Yugoslavia. So many houses were straw-thatched, with quaint little bridges and donkeys on low green rolling hills everywhere. But I was outnumbered by my friends, who’d grown up avoiding Middle European quaintness as hopelessly behind the times.
Six colorful vans fashioned the chain of our eastbound caravan. Isolde’s van started off first. Well, you know Isolde, she always had to be first. Vladimir would ride with her, of course, after Istanbul. Reiner’s van ran second. He too, drove alone. Later, Daisy—poor thing—would be stuck riding with him. At that point we weren’t all that flexible. We had our chartered spots and for some reason felt we had to stick to them. Later, Wolfgang would insist his van take the lead because coming onto any scene would be preferable photographically as a surprise.
Harry and I drove along next. Then came Blacky and Tupelo behind; I was happy not to have to watch them before me. As it was, I often lay in the back of the van with the curtains split just a crack, watching them sitting there driving along. I waited for them to do something lewd—something that would hurt me so much I would get over my terrible affliction—but they never did.
Chartreuse’s van took up the rear.
Just before we pulled away, Reiner came over grumbling about American politics. Without waiting for a reply, he walked away shaking his head, outraged. I would never be anything but American for Reiner.
The weather, however, was perfect. Westerners with knapsacks were churned into dust for Wolfgang and his film camera perched out the window. Still, they’d wave us pleasantly on. We motored through northern Greece without a hitch—everyone in our group had been to the Greek islands on vacation many times. We wouldn’t venture south. I didn’t mind. We were all excited to get to Asia. Istanbul, intoxicating and intense, was our gateway to the East.
It takes such a while to get used to driving great distances. You don’t realize how far it is when you look at a map. You can’t understand. But days and days go by and nothing at all happens. If it is not your turn to drive, you read. And then you can’t read anymore. You spend a lot of time with Chopin. Then Pink Floyd. Elton’s “Bennie and the Jets.” The landscape rides away and comes toward you and then away again. You can almost feel them at first, the arduous miles; long and dusty and weary—so long you think you won’t be able to bear it much longer. Only after a while they raise you up like a plateau of movement and they become life itself.
Harry kept me entertained with stories of his youth. One story was about his mother keeping his hair very long, like a girl’s. “I was a regular Shirley Temple,” he confessed.
“Kind of hard to believe when all the curls you’ve got to show for it is your little cowlick there.”
“Oh, that’s a story in itself. One day I took it upon myself to cut my own hair. I remember it as though it were yesterday.” He pulled his cowlick up. “I must have been six or seven. I took this piece of hair right here and cut it off. My mother came in before I got any farther. Oh, she screamed! I was so frozen with fear by her scream and by what I had done that this piece of hair never grew after that. Never.”
“That can’t be true!”
“It is. It might look like a cowlick but it’s really a child caught in rebellion. Oh, I was punished. I thought she’d kill me! Ah, yes.”
We looked at each other and laughed. That was the good part about riding with Harry. He revealed so much.
“Claire!” he cried. “Look! We’re going to stop up ahead. You see? It’s Istanbul!”
We peered out the window. He looked at his watch. Istanbul had arrived in a sudden flurry of activity. Neither of us was prepared for such noise after four days on the road.
Already we looked very different. Appropriately bedraggled, we fell into our roles as film people with gusto. But really we knew nothing yet. We still considered it a hardship to have to wash up in public bathrooms. We didn’t realize that on the path we had chosen there would be no such things as sanitary bathrooms.
We parked at the Hippodrome across from the Pudding Shop on Divan Yolu. The Pudding Shop was an indoor/outdoor café filled with Western travelers, hippies, drug dealers, and trilingual Turks. Chartreuse had informed us that this was the only place to go. Everyone traveling to and from India met up there and we would find out all the news of the road. The Pudding Shop was a pretty place in those days, the smells of hashish and peppermint tea reaching the tables and chairs out along the curb.
Things caught you off guard. There was the peculiar smell of coal dust and the calls to prayer that flew across the minarets and Byzantine rooftops. There were entire lanes of cobblers, pairs of grown men walking together hand in hand—so many of them fair and blue-eyed. (“Ah, the Crusades,” Harry reminded me.) It was all so new, so different, we followed Chartreuse’s instructions with docile, wide-eyed cooperation. After all, he seemed to know what he was doing and we were all suddenly like children, eager to be shown what we should do. We were none of us sure of ourselves but we imagined we carried with us a certain glamour. We thought people would vie to get close to us and our theatrical aura but we were wrong. The stars here were those travelers returning from India. Their eyes were rimmed in kohl and, yes, it must be said, there was an aura about them. A few wore earrings in their noses. They looked glamorous in their soft clothing and outstretched, unwashed hair. There was something detached about them. They weren’t like the few tourists who never left the grand hotels or even like us, our crew, excited and disheveled. These weary, slender creatures gave you the feeling they’d seen it all and were at last blasé. Little did we know that most of them were holding it in for fear of some quick-conquering venomous parasite. Well, I thought, if it’s all going to be like this, it won’t be bad at all!
I was still too shy to hold my camera in front of me and I would place it on the table and take pictures without anyone aware that he or she was being shot.
On Thursday afternoon, Chartreuse and Isolde went to pick up Vladimir and Daisy at the airport. Isolde drove. She always drove. “I drive like a man,” she would boast. More like a
teenage boy, I would think.
The first thing I noticed as they wheeled Daisy’s sensible Samsonite through the thick haze of cigarette smoke into the Pudding Shop was that Daisy had circles under her eyes and had lost some weight. I knew she must have had a very hard time with the children, because we would be gone for months. I didn’t dare ask about them for fear of upsetting Isolde. I needn’t have worried, though. It wouldn’t have bothered her. Isolde was free for the first time in years. She looked like a great big thundering hippie goddess, all hooked up in her chains and belts and stomping around in her Wizard of Baghdad curled-toe men’s wedding shoes (there were no women’s to fit her), ready to do anything: anything at all! She ordered lunch for us all as though she were about to pay—which certainly she would not do.
“Well,” we all wanted to know, “how was the show?” Vladimir rubbed his palms together. “Excellent,” he beamed, looking around the ceiling, not meeting our eyes. We all knew then it had been a catastrophic failure. I thought of his latest presentation. I remembered his one upside-down woman and another unfortunate sort of stuck-in-a-can woman. I supposed it wasn’t a popular time to be berating women, placing them in demeaning positions. It had occurred to me, why then not to the critics? I noticed Harry said nothing. I wondered what Vladimir would do. It was a shame, too, because the figures he’d left behind as too mundane for the show were beautiful ones, graceful and noble. I was sure they would have impressed and delighted everyone but he’d pooh-poohed this as naive. Beauty, it seemed, was not enough in this art world of his. He thought he needed shock to get the American and Japanese buyers’ attention. I couldn’t imagine why. But he’d been so knowledgeable and convincing in his scorn for the conventional.
Pack Up the Moon Page 13
