They laughed and laughed and I, feeling both worse and better, realized I might actually have a good shot at this relationship because Blacky, good as he was, was no saint after all—and worse, because it seemed that I, bad as I was, would never be good enough.
chapter seventeen
It was very early the next morning, before, even, the sun. We were headed for Hula’s, looking forward to warming ourselves with cups of chi.
Refreshed, Tupelo was standing alone at the top of the tall narrow stairs. She was still wearing my dress. Blacky was thrilled to see her looking so well. I aimed the camera at her but it was still too dark. “How did you get my dress?” I called out.
She leaned across the wooden railing and stretched. “I took it because I thought you were going to die and I wanted something to remember you.”
“And for that you need a dress?”
She smiled and moved toward me, kissing me plunk on the lips. Right in front of Blacky. He came over and put his arms around both our shoulders. “That’s what I like to see,” he praised us happily, “camaraderie.”
We watched him march briskly on ahead into the tea shop.
“That’s funny,” she wiggled her nose in my ear, “what I feel doesn’t feel like camaraderie.”
I knew exactly what she meant but I didn’t like her to think she was running the show. And I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that this time it was I who thought she was going to die.
As though she’d read my thoughts, she said, “You just want to be the one who decides when and how. You think you have that power. You’re wrong, you know. We none of us have power.”
Of course she would realize that now that she was ill. I felt immediately sorry for her. At that moment I wanted to reach out to her. I wanted to comfort her in some way but I didn’t know how without revealing what I knew and betraying Blacky’s confidence. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching and then she yanked my hair, pulling me toward her, saying, “You think you are so clever, so good.”
Exasperated, I moaned, “Oh, Tupelo, what is it you want?”
“I’d like to beat you up. That’s what I’d really like to do.”
I tried to laugh. “You are ruthless,” I said.
She put her hand on the small of my back and her mouth against my ear and narrowed her eyes. In a croaky voice she answered, “Yes. I am. I am ruthless.”
You know how they say it’s not what you say but how you say it? Well, I swooned with the intimacy of her voice. She knew how to recognize my stream of sexual preparedness and dive into it. Yet how could it be? What lack of character persuaded me to be affected like this when I had all the love I needed with the man of my dreams? Was no betrayal beneath me? My head hung loose with vanished self-esteem and illicit desire.
She wrapped her body closer still. Her breath was on my cheek. “What’s the matter, Claire, you’re afraid to be alone with me?”
“Of course not.” But I was. I was fine as long as we weren’t in close contact. But I knew what would happen if she started up again. I might wind up sleeping with her just to prove I wasn’t turned off to her because she had cancer.
“Look,” I pulled away, intending to be firm, “all I want is to be here now.”
She gave me an alluring side profile. “Are you sure that’s all you want?”
“Oh, Tupelo,” I laughed, giving in, taking her hand and walking with her that way, girlfriends, “what’s to become of us?”
“Nothing, I hope. I just want to stay here forever.” She laughed. Then, decisively, turning away from me, “I am going to stay here forever.”
The air was filled with mist. The waterfall roared with melted snow and you could smell it, you could smell the snow. It was cold and would be until the sun peeked through. I looked at her carefully, her face lit green by the flickering kerosene lanterns. It was true, she seemed blissful. But Blacky would never allow her to stay behind without us. I knew that for certain.
“Tupelo, you can’t be serious.”
“Oh, I am. I’ve prayed about this over and over.”
“Maybe too much,” I suggested.
“No, Claire, because I knew one thing; prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening to Him.” She smiled to herself with that irritating holier-than-thou expression they’d all perfected since they’d come here. “I’ve been listening.”
“All this meditation stuff has got you hoodwinked!” I told her.
“And what do you know?” She resumed her true personality without missing a beat.
“Well,” I said, angry at last, “I know I’m not reaching for the unobtainable.”
She turned and looked at me, raising an eyebrow. “Ah! You say that in such an assertive, I-got-the-guy way.”
“No,” I protested, “I didn’t mean that.”
“You love him, don’t you think I can tell?”
“Is it that obvious?” I admitted sheepishly.
“Of course it is. You love him and you think that’s enough. You believe that will sustain you,” she rocked back and forth, “but there are other things. You and I both know there are other things … .” Her voice trailed off.
I looked, to see if anyone was coming. “Yes, it’s true. There are ‘other things,’ as you say. But in the end, it’s they that are always not enough.”
She laughed. “That’s not what you said in Iran!”
“No,” I admitted, laughing with her. For although there had been something unfulfilling in our dalliances, something that could never be combined and completed, for me the negative had always been in the betrayal afterward and not in the act itself. There’d been a closeness reached and shared like nothing else. And now she was seriously ill and I was going to lose her. “Tupelo,” I said, becoming frightened, “we’re going to have to have a talk.”
“Ah.” She stopped in her tracks and glared at me. “So he’s told you.”
I held my breath. “You had to know he would.”
“I was so afraid of it I probably made it happen,” she admitted, perching herself on the edge of a woodpile.
“Tupelo, you’ve lost touch. When we get back to Germany—”
“Germany! What? What then?”
“Well, there’s something to be said for Western science and conveniences.”
“You can believe what you want. I don’t fall for any of it, anymore.”
“You can’t think that staying here will change everything!”
“I don’t care anymore. It’s funny but I don’t.” She plucked at the lacy, ragged strands of wood. “Death isn’t so bad. It’s love that’s the killer.”
She held my eyes and I hers. I took her hand. Her fingers were like ice. I sat down beside her.
She said, “You’re going to laugh at me when you hear this … .”
“I won’t.”
“Cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me. It straightened me right out. Oh, it’s hard to explain. It’s not that I wouldn’t rather not have it. But I do, you see. I do have it.”
I didn’t laugh. I wanted to cry. Of course she felt that way now, when every moment was so intense. What about when the pain began? What then? I told her so.
“Oh, Claire,” she shook her head, sorry for me, “you think that going into hospital will somehow make everything all right. But nothing will. All because the rooms are white and the nurses are there—it doesn’t change what’s happening. It doesn’t stop the process. Because the truth is they know not a thing about how to stop it. Not a thing. And Blacky will see to it that I won’t suffer. He’s promised. He’ll take care of me.”
I was silent. I almost said, “Me, too.” But I was done with being the “me, too” girl.
She coughed a laugh. “I’m going no matter where I do it from.” She crossed her eyes in horrified jest. “And fast. Fast, Claire, that’s the beauty of it. I’m not going to linger like a bother.” She gnawed her thumbnail cuticle and spat it out. “I’ll just,” she snapped her fingers, �
�go! One day I won’t be here anymore. Nobody can change that. But at least I can choose the point from which I leave the earth.” She held her arms up toward the sky, great actress that she was, and she beamed. “What finer place than this mystical village of goodwill, eh?”
We looked together at the quaint and eerie loveliness. Chimneys smoldered and puffed. A tinker’s hammer pinged. One Tibetan woman in her striped apron and bent with an enormous pack of straw—as big as she was—padded politely by us up the little path. “All this before the sun is even up,” Tupelo pointed out. “They’ll write about me in the papers, Claire,” she went on, “they’ll say, ‘Tupelo Honig, Film Star, Dies in Himalayas!’”
“You don’t care about that!”
“Oh, but I do! I really do. And while we’re on the subject, I have a favor to ask you. But don’t think badly of me now, that I am egoist. You won’t?”
“No. What is it?”
“And you won’t laugh?”
“No. I said I won’t.”
“For my funeral I want Debussy.”
“Oh, please.” I held my head in a dramatic woe-is-me pose.
“No. Come on, humor me. That nice one. You know. You’re named for that song.”
“‘Claire de Lune,’” I whispered. “You remember that?”
“You told us the night we met.”
I hadn’t even known she’d been listening. I’d only thought of Blacky at that time. She went on to tell me hurriedly—as though there was little time left and she’d been saving all this up—“And I want to be cremated.” She looked down and shuddered. “I don’t want to be put in a box in the ground where there’s no air, no sunshine.”
I tried not to pay attention but she pressed me, locking her pinkie with mine. “Promise.”
“All right, all right.”
“I mean, I really do have regrets, though, you know?” She turned and looked into her lap. “Now that I know I’m leaving the planet. Not things you would think, like not ‘making it’ in America, you know? I really don’t care at all about that. Funny.” We watched our legs dangle over the side of the woodpile, the brilliant jewel colors of our Afghani slippers sharp in the subtle halflight. “One thing is, I would have liked to speak to you in my own tongue. What? What are you thinking?”
I heard myself begin to cry. “Only that I’m honored that you find me that important in your life.” I sniffled.
“Ach! Don’t be so stupid. You make me sick!” She shoved me and sputtered at me with loathing, spitting the words. “Stop crying immediately or they will all see from the window. I mean it, Claire. Just stop crying and listen. That you know is one thing. But I won’t have Harry coming at me with get-well flowers he picked in some sentimental field. Or Isolde checking me out, trying to figure how long it’s going to take, kneeling at my shrine with, with sacrificial lamb shanks.” We both laughed and she went on. “You have this thing about your lack of importance. I think it’s very Catholic.”
I remembered her crossing herself at Isolde’s. “You’re Catholic, too.”
“Not so very much as you.”
“Tupelo. You never talk about your family. You must want them to—”
She put up her hand, stopping me. “You think everyone has family because you have family. But I have no one. They’re both dead, my parents, can you believe it? All gone.” She shuddered. “My mother from the breast and my father from the colon. It was terrible when they were dying. I had to go to the hospital and sit there and look at them and look at them, each one in turn, and you know, they took their time. It was awful. It went on and on and on. There was something so disgusting about them wanting me to always be there and witness their pain. I hated it. It was like their pain gave them some privilege, some license to all my time. And I was young. All I wanted was to be out of there. Oh, it was horrible.” She lit a cigarette but the coughing stopped her and she couldn’t smoke it. “That was how I met Wolfgang. He found me in hospital where he was filming a scene. I was sitting in the cafeteria, passing time so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at my father suffering. He took some film of me and came back looking for me two days later after he saw the rushes. I was still there. He told me my skin was cream. He said he would make me an actress. ‘Good,’ I told him. ‘Anything is better than this.’”
“You should have told me all this sooner.”
“Why, so you would sleep with me because you felt sorry for me? Pfhh. Who wants that?”
“Tupelo. I never realized—”
Her eyes were shining. They were deeper than they’d ever looked. “Why, I remember the very moment I met you. When I saw you for the first time at Isolde’s. You were wearing that ridiculous dirndl.”
“You were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” I blurted.
“I fell in love with you right then,” she smiled ruefully, “right that moment,” and she stood abruptly, as if to close the discussion, as if she’d said more than she’d intended.
“But then why—” I began but gave it up. What was the difference? I walked her to the tea shop. The sun had sprung up over the mountain. It blazed and I couldn’t see her. It was like when you’re driving a car at sundown on the Belt and you’re scalded by the light but you don’t pull over. We walked along, blind, lit up, following the path with only our slippered footsteps.
That afternoon while Tupelo slept I wandered around the town taking pictures of all the lovely gentle Tibetan faces. They were so healthy-looking. Finally, I came back to Hula’s and sat at the top of the steps. I was tired. I guess I wasn’t as recovered as I’d thought. I put my head on the railing and watched Isolde and Vladimir walk past the prayer wheel and the Tibetan Moon toward Hula’s. He was animated, discussing something relevant with her, his hands moving in dramatic expression. Isolde walked elegantly beside him, her one ear cocked and listening, her arms folded behind herself in an easy, contented pose. This trip had brought them back together, returned them to each other. I sighed, surprised at how well everything had turned out for them.
“What are you doing?” Harry was suddenly behind me. He reached for my arm and pulled me up. “I’m the cat. Let me drag you in.”
“Oh, Harry,” I said, slumping into his arms, “I’ve missed having you around to talk to!”
“That’s right,” he smoothed his tie, “you’ll never find another me.” Of all of them Harry was the only one to have maintained his identity. Even Blacky wore an uncharacteristic leather bracelet and his blue jean ensemble carried traces of dilapidation. Harry still wore his same old university-don clothes, his tweed jacket and balderdash trousers. He was the only one who appeared out of place.
It was dark when we walked inside against the bright wall of outside. Hula’s was like an old-fashioned schoolhouse complete with wooden benches. Hula herself, a fine broth of a Tibetan, a survivor, gold teeth still in place, sat on the floor near the potbelly stove and strained tea into a bucket of milk. The sign on the wall said, MUST BRING OWN PEANUT BUTTER. The others were already there, all but Tupelo. They were bathed in steamy sunlight at a table rocking with one leg shorter than its other three.
I took everyone’s portrait. They sat patiently, each one of them wearing the same benevolent expression. However, once they were photographed—as though for proof they’d been here—they did become a little more relaxed. I perched myself on a stool off to the side. Hula’s father, a wizened old fellow without a tooth in his mouth, sat down comfortably beside me. I wondered if I was in his spot. He took out his worry beads and hummed his prayers. I picked up a jar from the table and rudely licked some honey with my finger.
“Here, Isolde, take my biscuit,” Vladimir said with his new show of generosity.
Hula’s husband, a roll to his step, was just coming up the plank over the mud road. He was returning from a short drive to Delhi. She dropped her spoon and ran to him. He was covered in coal dust and sweaty but she took him in her arms as though she hadn’t seen him in years. They were both plump and middle-aged b
ut there was a glamour and a privacy to their love, you could just tell.
“Claire,” Chartreuse came in, brushing the fir trees from his jacket, “try this peanut butter. You won’t believe it.”
Daisy pushed him gently away. “Chartreuse, your breath!”
Chartreuse opened a packet of sen-sen he had in his pocket and popped a few in his mouth. He picked up his guitar and began to play, but it was a different sort of music. He played each note as though it were a mantra, low and resounding. It was interesting enough, sort of Oriental, but after a while I thought, Jiminy, they’re all in such a hurry to get devout. They reminded me of the gossipy rosary society in my hometown during Lent when everyone became charitable.
Isolde was on her hands and knees jimmying an Indian matchbox under the one short leg of the table.
Daisy pulled an extra shawl around herself. “It’s awfully cold.”
“I told you it would be cold here,” Chartreuse said acidly. “No one took my advice. I told you we should have gone to Goa. It’s not my fault.”
Harry said, “No one’s blaming you for the weather, Chartreuse. Calm down.”
“I say,” came a voice from the next table, “wouldn’t you rather fancy some pineapple jam with your chapedah?”
“Why not?” Wolfgang accepted.
The man who offered the mighty-sized jar of jam was a tall, shaven-headed Englishman wearing a burgundy lama robe. More brisk than brawny, he was still very tall. “I see you have a valuable camera,” the Englishman said to Wolfgang. “Unusual sight hereabouts.” A sardonic demeanor ruled his fleshy, firmly held lips. There was an air of triumph about him and a nervy solicitousness. He seemed quite taken with Wolfgang, who nervously clung to his expensive camera, even moving it possessively to his other side. Beside the man sat his very pregnant wife, a rather attractive girl with hennaed permanent waves. Also at their table sat two fellows robed like the first, their heads shaved as well. Their names, the first announced, in order, were Charles, Betty, Mr. Auto, and Park. Charles, the spiritual leader of the group, was a self-proclaimed unorthodox Buddhist monk. All Londoners—but only in this incarnation, Charles specified—they’d met Park and Mr. Auto while traveling through Goa.
Pack Up the Moon Page 25
