18mm Blues

by Gerald A. Browne

  One reason for the late dinner was that Lesage had had a substantial cheese and charcuterie snack around six o’clock, and his appetite was only now approaching the outskirts of hunger. Also, he was getting more enjoyment than usual out of showing what he owned.

  The evening had started at nine in the salon with a decreed choice of cocktails. Scotches and sodas and vodkas on the rocks and such were disallowed. More divertissant to begin with sidecars, daiquiris, Lesage said, and recommended the martinis, which he personally concocted, calling attention to the dribble of cognac that went first into the glass and was swirled therein vigorously so it coated the inside before the pouring. He insisted Grady and Julia sip a taste, awaited their approval. Grady, out of spite, nearly scrunched his face and declared it tasted god-awful. But it didn’t and he didn’t and Lesage martinis (as Lesage called them) were what he and Julia chose to have.

  As for Lesage’s house, Julia’s blasé response earlier on when Grady had asked about it had been way off. The house was every square foot prime Mizner, exquisitely detailed with difficult graceful arches, groin-vaulted ceilings and other features. It was a good third again the size of Kumura’s house and more intensely decorated. Not with a mere introduction of elegance here and there, rather a crowding of it throughout, many things competing for admiration. Who, for instance, could decide that Regency console over there was less deserving than the pair of Meissen yellowground chinoiserie vases placed on its brèche d’alep marble top, or more to be appreciated than the Louis Quinze ormolu two-light bras de lumière that were flanking a George II giltwood mirror? Were not that pair of Gaillard tabourets worthy of four hundred dollar a yard silk? And in the same seating area, the two matching fauteuils à la reine miraculously rescued with petit point upholstery intact from the ravages of the revolution.

  “Those fauteuils are signed Jean Avisse, 1745,” Lesage mentioned, just mentioned as though it might, just might be of some interest. Years ago, before Paulette, he’d crowed those same words.

  Kumura lingered in the salon while Lesage nonchalantly guided Grady, Julia and William through the ground floor areas. Lesage was particularly dégagé when they were in the gallery. With the merest lift of his well-bred chin or with a single slight flourish of his peasantlike hands he presented the paintings he was most proud of, making remarks he’d practiced and had down pat by now. “That’s a fair enough Degas” and “Tissot always painted women seated, didn’t he?” and “I’m a bit taken by Boldini, as you can gather” and then a contemplative gaze at a Fantin-Latour still life of nasturtiums before remarking as though alone, “I’m not altogether sure of this one now that I’ve had it hanging for three months. I might replace it with a fine Bouguereau or a Draper. I’m becoming partial to fin de siècle. Are you familiar with Herbert Draper?”

  Grady deferred to Julia who deferred to William so no one replied. What shit, Grady thought and believed Julia was probably reading his mind and agreeing from the way she sneaked him a wink.

  Lesage proceeded down the long gallery, passing a couple of lovely Boldinis and a Matisse without so much as a glance. He didn’t pause or suggest that everyone go out and be seated at the dinner table, just continued at his meandering pace out the french doors that gave to the courtyard, assuming they’d all follow.

  Which they did and were made to stand around a long moment while Lesage decided on the seating arrangement. He chose to have Julia on his right next to William next to Kumura next to Paulette next to Grady, thus putting the latter on his left. As they were about to be seated Paulette asked William if he’d mind exchanging places with her. William did mind, preferred being next to Julia but he could hardly refuse. Paulette offered no reason for wanting the exchange and Lesage suddenly let it be known he couldn’t care less where anyone sat. “Commencez.” he impatiently ordered the overseeing majordomo.

  The table was round so it had no head, but there was no doubt, however, who was presiding. Throughout the hors d’oeuvre (a fois gras en terrine) it was Lesage who began and terminated the topics of conversation.

  At one point a contribution by Julia happened to contain the word cathedral.

  Paulette jumped right on that, submitted that she and Lesage had first met at a cathedral in Senlis. Everyone, of course, was familiar with the town of Senlis, in Oise, thirty miles north of Paris.

  “Oh, that Senlis,” Grady remarked wryly.

  Paulette went right on like a Guide Michelin informing that at one time besides the cathedral there were three other churches in Senlis, so many because of the abundance of good hard stone available nearby. But now the three other churches, despite their religious structure, were a market, a cinema and a garage. Their crypts had become furniture shops. Come to think of it, Paulette said, it hadn’t been in the cathedral that she’d first met Daniel, rather in the church now a market. He, so outstanding, too distinguished-looking for the place, buying four bunches of white breakfast radishes because, as he told her later when they were seated in his Rolls chomping and chatting, he’d suddenly had a craving for fresh radishes on his drive back to Paris from Deauville. She’d suggested then that the craving had been divinely instigated. She still thought so, she said.

  Where, Julia thought, would be the next place they supposedly met? This Senlis version was the fourth she’d heard from Paulette. Initially there’d been the one at 165 miles per hour. Then, divulged in spectacular detail, it had been in the warm conducive mud of Montecatini. Followed by the hot, chance encounter during the Royal Club Gold Tournament at Evian-les-Bains. And now radishes. Was the marquise a diagnosable dingbat? Julia wondered. Or was it only that she found it amusing to create contradictions and quandary? Considering it through the lace of three martinis on an empty stomach, Julia gave Paulette the benefit of the doubt, decided the obvious fibs were intentionally obvious, indicative of Paulette’s vagarious spirit, one of her ways of combating ennui. Choose what you prefer to believe, not everything I tell you, was Paulette’s caution. Not bad.

  Julia stole a glance at her. Got caught, but exonerated herself with a neutral smile. Paulette retaliated with a conspiratorial one. Julia took notice again of Paulette’s left hand. A ring on each finger and, as well, the thumb. “Poor is not being able to afford an affectation,” Paulette had said that afternoon. The stones of the rings were all precious and large. Adjuncts to the claws, Julia thought, like the spurs of a rooster.

  Throughout the first course (a cold, creamy potage crécy stylishly served to each place in an individual Limoges tureen) the conversation lagged and raced, hopped and limped along. The factions had no mutual acquaintances to discuss, so for ammunition they resorted to famous persons, motion picture stars, politicians and the like. Those were good for a quarter hour. Then it was on with a stumble to the greenhouse effect, life on other planets, the population explosion, fur coats versus live animals, Lesage’s account of a perilous Viet Nam war experience (embellished greatly since it was first told, and by now, for Paulette and more so for Kumura, a stale story they both tried to interrupt and sidetrack).

  William’s participation in the table talk was sparse. He didn’t initiate any subject, limited himself to concurring phrases.

  Kumura provided fuel every so often but didn’t pour it on.

  Grady, who’d also had three martinis and was two goblets into the wine, thought of a lot of comments he wanted to slip in, but kept most of them, especially those that were too sharp or acidic, to himself. He couldn’t hold back, however, when Lesage boasted how one of his gardeners had clipped a yew into the likeness of a dog.

  “What kind of dog?” Grady asked.

  “Just a dog.”

  “A regular dog is easy. Have him do a breed.”

  “Yeah, a Shar Pei,” Julia put in.

  Lesage thought he should laugh, so he did. He cut the laugh abruptly, as though a portcullis in his throat had just dropped, and went back to sliding small bits of his portion of the gigot farci. He ate overproperly, held his knife as if it were
a delicate tool, cut with just the tip of it and never stabbed with his fork, used the back of its tines for transport.

  “I understand you’re an artist,” he said to Julia, not bringing his eyes to her until the statement was out.

  “I paint,” she said plainly.

  “Like whom do you paint?” Lesage asked, and inasmuch as he’d planned the point didn’t wait for her reply. “American painters are blatant derivers, not an original brushstroke ever. Except, of course there’s Andrew Warhol and his piss paintings.”

  Lesage allowed the invisible question mark to form.

  “For those of you who aren’t familiar with the achievement, what Warhol did was coat canvases with metallic copper paint and have just about anyone who happened into his studio relieve her or his bladder on them. The copper oxidized where it was splattered, creating a green, black and orange pattern. Quite a few American critics, including some quite notable, had praise for these canvases, said they had significant meaning and merit. Others went so far as to propose they expressed an affinity to the staking out of territory by animals.”

  “In my opinion they were remarkably alchemical,” Julia said for spite.

  Grady read her eyes and thought Lesage should fear for his life.

  The conversation again sputtered.

  Which gave Lesage the opening to soliloquize on his knowledge of oysters. Not the pearl-producing kind (species ostreidae) but those for eating (aviculidae). He expounded on the Belons and the Portuguese varieties, the young claires compared to the fines de claires compared to the plumper, more preferred older spéciales. He explained, as though he were tutoring, how the French dealers classified from triple zeros and double zeros (rarest and best) to the less desirable single zeros and ones and twos and finally the small, cheapest threes. Lesage claimed a three had never passed his lips, never would.

  From oysters the topic had only to shift slightly to be pearls and all at once a rich, conversational vein had been tapped with everyone taking a share.

  “Cultured pearls weren’t allowed to be sold as pearls.”

  “They had to be called beads, didn’t they?”

  “According to international law.”

  “Until the crash in 1930.”

  “Before then the only pearls considered to be pearls were naturals.”

  “Think of all the naturals there were back in those days.”

  “Tons.”

  “And now it’s said there might not be more than four or five truly gem-quality natural pearl necklaces in existence.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Doesn’t seem possible.”

  “What about all those long strands of pearls women wore in the twenties? I believe Chanel made them fashionable. Women used to twirl them and tie them different ways.”

  “They weren’t naturals.”

  “So officially they weren’t pearls, is that it?”

  “Fuck the distinction.” From Lesage.

  “Dear, the distinction has been fucked.” From Paulette.

  “Fortunately.” From Kumura.

  “What happened to all the naturals, I wonder? The regular rich and the royal rich had so many.”

  “They got stashed away.”

  “Or mistreated.”

  “Both. Reminds me of something that’s said to have happened in the seventeen hundreds. A maharaja of somewhere, his name escapes me at the moment, possessed a huge fortune in pearls, kept them hidden away in a large cask. When he died his son claimed the hoard, opened the cask and found only peels of nacre and pearl dust.”

  “The pearls had also died.”

  “They do, you know, dry up and die unless they get attention.”

  “Pearls and people.” From Paulette.

  Grady was now in a more comfortable element, sure that he could hold his own when it came to pearl trivia. For him the evening had now turned enjoyable. “Roman women wore pearls to bed to sweeten their dreams,” he said.

  “Caligula had his boots encrusted with them.”

  “And the trappings of his horse, as well.”

  “Mary, Queen of Scots, owned a great many remarkable pearls, loose and in strands.”

  “They went when her head did, I suppose.”

  “Queen Elizabeth got the most and best of them. According to Walpole, Elizabeth wore a mass of pearls in her hair, on her ruff and on a huge fardingale.”

  “What the hell’s a ruff?”

  “I know what it sounds like it might be.” From Paulette with a wicked smirk.

  “A huge fardingale, you say?”

  Laughs, a league of laughs.

  “In ancient times…”

  “How ancient?”

  “Ancient ancient. It was believed that pearls grew in the brains of dragons.”

  “The Japanese tell of a pearl with so much luster that its glow was visible three miles away.” That from Julia.

  Grady assumed that tidbit was something she’d read and just now was prompted to recall. Or else she’d made it up. What amused him was the wide-eyed, serious-faced way she’d said it.

  “I’ve seen some remarkable pearls in my day.” That from William. No one asked him to elaborate and his statement was lost as the verbal sallying continued.

  “Cleopatra…” Lesage began.

  “Oh Christ, don’t pull out that old stale story. Everyone’s heard it.”

  “I haven’t,” Julia said.

  “I’ll make it short,” Lesage promised and began. “Cleopatra, during the height of her passionate days with Mark Anthony, wagered with him that she could serve him a dinner so expensive it would never be equaled. Indeed, the meal she served was sumptuous, however Mark Anthony found nothing so expensive about it. He thought he’d won the wager, until Cleopatra removed one of her pearl earrings and dropped it into her goblet of wine, where it quickly dissolved, and she had Mark Anthony drink it down. That pearl—”

  “Was worth a lot of drachmas.”

  “Ten millions dollars today.” From William.

  “You fucked me out of the punch line!” Lesage complained loudly. He was really irked at William, looked at Julia, his lone audience, for support.

  She wasn’t about to be that generous.

  “That never happened, that Cleopatra pearl-in-the-wine business,” Grady contended. “It’s just a romantic myth.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because pearls don’t dissolve in wine,” Grady replied. “Except in the movies. In the movies they drop a pearl into the wine and right away the wine starts bubbling to dramatize that the pearl’s dissolving.”

  Kumura agreed.

  Lesage challenged. He resented having his story debunked.

  “I’ll prove it,” Grady said. He brought out the sixteen-millimeter pearl Kumura had given him that afternoon. With a little showmanship he dropped the pearl into his goblet of wine, and waited. “See, no bubbles,” he said. He brought the goblet to his lips and drained it, peered into the goblet and did a perplexed take. “No pearl!” he exclaimed convincingly, and when Julia laughed rather unsurely he pursed his lips and allowed the pearl to appear.

  “Such talent,” Paulette remarked cynically.

  “However,” Grady admitted, “I do believe the old, true accounts are best. The shark charmers, for instance.”

  “Shark charmers?”

  Kumura knew of the shark charmers, but didn’t let on, allowed Grady a total audience.

  “The pearl divers who took part in the great pearl fishing seasons in the Gulf of Manaar in 1905 and 1906 were—”

  “When did you say?” From Julia with keen interest.

  Grady repeated the years and went on. “The divers were a superstitious bunch. Easy pickings for certain individuals who exaggerated a mystical demeanor and claimed to be able to provide protection against attacks by sharks. Naturally, some ritual was involved. The so-called shark charmer was locked in a windowless room and would remain there throughout the day while the divers were out i
n the gulf working the bottom. The only things in the room with the shark charmer were a brass basin of sea water in which there were two miniature replicas of fish made of silver, supposedly a male and a female. The charmer’s job was to prevent the silver fish from attacking each other. If during the day none of the divers suffered a shark bite the mystical power of the charmer was the reason. If, on the other hand, a shark bite had occurred, the charmer had any number of excuses to fall back on, that someone had doubted his power, for example, or he was dissatisfied with the pearls with which he was being compensated. For his services the charmer received a twentieth of each day’s catch.”

  “Interesting if true,” Lesage commented.

  “It’s true,” Julia asserted firmly.

  “Oui,” Paulette put in, “I’ve known quite a few such charmers.”

  Lesage took silent exception to her remark.

  Kumura was about to contribute the old belief that pearls represented the tears of unhappiness that would be shed in married life—when Julia beat him to it. “I’ll tell one,” Julia said and went right on to relate how at one time in Borneo it was believed by the pearl divers that if every ninth pearl found was placed in a bottle along with an equal number of grains of rice the pearls would breed, multiply. The bottle had to be corked with the finger of a dead person. “Practically every house had such a bottle,” Julia said.

  “How macabre,” Paulette thought aloud.

  What was it with Julia? Grady wondered. Was she making things up for the hell of it? He’d heard various Borneo anecdotes but never that finger stopper one. It was farfetched. The thing of it was how earnestly Julia had put it across, as though she knew of it firsthand.

  “Pearl divers are ignorant, always have been. Otherwise they wouldn’t do what they do.” That from Lesage.

  Julia glowered at him.

  “Their exploits have been greatly exaggerated,” Kumura said. “For example, I’ve read sworn, recorded accounts of divers in the Society Islands who’ve gone down thirty fathoms and stayed under—ten minutes.”