Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  “Whatever. The point is, you’re the only person Danny can really rely on now. Everyone else is secondary.”

  I turned to face him. “Actually I’m feeling a little secondary myself. Here I’ve agreed to run up to Ithaca on a wild-goose chase for some guy who’s been dead for years. Kind of silly, don’t you think? It’s not like I have all the time in the world for a road trip.”

  “Well, what else is biting into your schedule?”

  The delivery of the question was neutral, without a hint of sarcasm, yet it felt like a laceration. “This little jaunt isn’t something I feel like doing, Nick,” I answered. “But I’m going with her anyway. So let’s give me credit for that, okay?”

  He got up from my bed. “I just don’t think it’s that big a deal, baby,” he said quietly, as he began to dress. “Maybe if she learns something about her other parent—the one she never got to know—she’ll feel better.”

  “And if he turns out to have been a real loser?”

  Nick carefully folded the corset and rolled the stockings into a neat wad before handing the lot to me. “Knowing something’s better than knowing nothing,” he said.

  “We’ll see. And now you need to go, bud—I have things to do tonight,” I lied, wanting suddenly and fiercely to be alone.

  “Okay,” he replied gamely. “I’m off to the gym, then.”

  AT MY front door, he embraced and kissed me. I smelled his familiar scent, a mix of lovemaking and aftershave, and a little war erupted in me: stay—go! After ushering him out, I listened to the sound of his footsteps diminishing, then leaned against the door, exhausted.

  I hadn’t actually had a solid night’s rest, I realized, since Eve’s death. Rousing myself, I pushed off from the door and headed down the hall, lured by the thought of a bath. As I drew the hot water and added a handful of gardenia-scented bath salts—another gift from Nick—I pictured a recumbent figure, a woman swaddled in something like sheer muslin. Now it returned: the dream of the boat and the box.

  Settling into my tub, I inhaled the perfumed vapors, aware of the tension knotting my neck. Nick was right, I had to admit. Nobody else in Danny’s circle knew the cast of characters or the earlier acts as I did. We’d go to Ithaca, and Danny would find her father—intimations of him, anyway. Maybe some clues, a few hard facts. But Eve would elude us, and Danny would feel frustrated without knowing why.

  AT THE start of 1980, when Danny was six, Jordan was diagnosed with cancer. I began going out to his house in Frenchtown on weekends; Eve and Danny visited regularly as well. Danny entertained Jordan—they played checkers or read stories—while Eve gardened and I cooked for him, stockpiling his refrigerator with meals. Eve told Danny something about Jordan’s condition, and I stuck to the bare facts: Jordan was ill, he tired easily.

  His cancer spread aggressively. In April his doctors determined that surgery and further chemotherapy would be pointless. The endgame wouldn’t be protracted, we were told, and Jordan would be best off at home, with nursing help when necessary.

  He took the news squarely. I hired several attendants from a private agency; on weekdays they prepared his meals, helped him bathe, and administered his medications. I came out on weekends, which was enough for him, he said, and for me as well.

  By June he was sometimes in a dopey haze. His will, he’d told me, stipulated that half his money and all the proceeds from the sale of the Frenchtown house would go to me; some money would be left to Eve, the rest to Danny. He’d already surrendered his trusty Volvo to my cousin. But he wasn’t able to give me clear instructions about what to do with the rest of his possessions; he didn’t care how I disposed of them. He’d already set up a living trust to protect his estate from undue taxation. With practical matters, my father was fastidious.

  It was during that summer, as he steadily weakened, that Jordan and I began finally to converse in detail about the past. His, that is, not ours; he and I didn’t have much of one. Mostly he talked about his perfume-making and theatergoing experiences. Other people, I soon realized, didn’t figure strongly in his narrative. A few weeks before his death, on an overcast morning in early August, I heard at last the story of my mother.

  THAT STORY was initiated by another: the account of Jordan’s chance encounter with Vsevolod Meyerhold in a small Paris hotel at which both men happened to be staying.

  I was naturally quite surprised when Jordan mentioned the Russian theater director’s name. I knew well who he was, having read about him over the years. Emboldened by my enthusiastic response, my father began reminiscing about the brief time he’d spent in Meyerhold’s company.

  He’d had drinks, he said, with the director and his wife at the hotel’s bar, then invited the couple to join him for supper the next evening. They’d had a few more meals together, including a final dinner at which Jordan spent a small fortune on a bottle of Chablis. It had rained lightly that night; Jordan lent Meyerhold his umbrella so the director and his wife could take a post-dinner walk through the damp streets.

  I pressed Jordan to describe the Russians’ appearance. Meyerhold was tall and rumpled, his gaze intense; the wife was sharp-tongued, full-figured, and lively—an actress through and through, but likeably so. They were both witty observers of Parisian society and culture. The wife loved to eat. She’d expressed a greater infatuation with France than did her husband, who struck Jordan as being homesick.

  At one point during his narration (I was standing near his bed, folding his laundry), my father paused to sip ginger tea—to settle his stomach, routinely distressed by his pain medications. Then, without any preface, he brought up Camilla.

  I FIRST saw your mother, he said, on the same street where I met the Meyerholds.

  Hearing this, I pushed the laundry basket aside and sat in the chair by Jordan’s bed. My entire body felt warm, as though my temperature had just risen a notch. I wondered if my face looked flushed, and if my father would notice.

  When was this? I asked quietly.

  In 1928. She was gazing at the window display of a little shop a few doors down from my hotel. It was an exclusive parfumerie—I’d already cased it, so I knew it sold only the best fragrances. The owner was a really haughty homosexual. He must’ve been at least seventy, beautifully dressed. This man knew his perfume, and he had an attitude to match. Eventually I wore him down, though. He showed me a nice collection of Lalique bottles and one unusual flacon of a Poiret perfume called Le Fruit Defendu.

  What did it look like?

  Quite a vessel, that one! It was shaped like an apple. It lay in a silk-upholstered silver box with jungle foliage embossing—fronds and vines and so forth. Sort of opulent and humorous at the same time. Nothing like an appeal to original sin to get a female buyer’s juices flowing! Or so the thinking went, I guess.

  And Camilla? What did she look like?

  Your mother wore a skirt that was long and nicely tailored but not altogether clean. She’d dragged part of its hem on the ground. Actually, her entire outfit looked like it needed a good shaking out and pressing.

  He yawned, not out of boredom, I could tell, but because he was short of oxygen.

  She had very little money, he continued. She was living on what she’d borrowed from Dan to get herself to France, and there wasn’t much left over for clothing. At that point she’d been in Paris for maybe six months. She’d found two little rooms in an apartment near Montparnasse that belonged to a retired civil servant and his wife. They weren’t fond of Americans, but they put up with Camilla because she minded her own business.

  He adjusted his position in bed; I saw him wince softly as he did so.

  Anyway, there she was, staring at bottles of perfume in a storefront window. Not quite what I’d call the picture of elegance. But her skin, her hair—everything shone . . .

  Shone? I repeated, not sure I’d heard him right.

  I don’t know how else to describe it. She was one of those women who give off a kind of gleam, regardless of how they’re dressed
or coiffed.

  Was she wearing perfume?

  Oh yes. She was wearing Coty’s Narcisse Noir, a scent I’d always liked. In the trade it was considered a real keeper, a fragrance that would last. A man named Daltroff developed it. He was a Russian who’d made perfumes for the czar’s family before emigrating to France, and he was talented. I’ll tell you what, though: that fragrance wasn’t something just any woman could wear! Especially not a nineteen-year-old. It tended to come off as heavy, even a bit oppressive. But on Camilla it was something else . . .

  So how did you actually meet her?

  I just went up to her on the street, and we stared at the window display together. She didn’t seem at all perturbed that some strange man was standing beside her. I spoke to her in French. Quite a bottle, isn’t it, I asked, pointing at it—at Le Fruit Defendu.

  Camilla rolled her eyes at me. You aren’t kidding, she answered in English. I must have looked surprised at her switching languages on me like that, because then she said, Takes one to know one—your accent gives you away! I had to laugh at that, since she was right. She laughed, too. She had a nice strong chuckle.

  What’s it smell like, do you know? she asked me. I told her the scent was dominated by Bulgarian rose, which would make it expensive, apart from the packaging. Of course, that would also raise the price considerably, I said.

  She wanted to know why Bulgarian rose would make it costly. So I launched into a lecture. Getting the oils from the roses, I told her, is a very labor-intensive process. First you’ve got to separate the petals from the green sepals at the base of the flower. That’s a major job right there. Then it takes multiple distillations to separate out the oil. Peasants do that by hand.

  Where—in Bulgaria? she interrupted. I explained that most of Bulgaria’s roses are grown in a place called the Kazanluk Valley, but a similar variety of rose has also been cultivated in Russia, on the Black Sea. It takes a whole lot of them to make even a small amount of perfume, I told her. Four thousand flowers yield only about a kilogram of oil.

  She whistled at that—a loud whistle, like a man’s. And then she turned from the window and stared directly at me. Her eyes were dark blue, like yours only bigger, with dense black lashes. I couldn’t place her; she was clearly an American, but physically she could’ve been French or Italian or Greek. And she was so young!

  You work in perfume, don’t you, she said. I could hear the interest in her voice; it was genuine, not just a way of keeping the conversation going.

  Yes, I said, I make it.

  She nodded, and that gleam of hers seemed to intensify. Hard to describe—but when it happened, you couldn’t miss it.

  Good, she said. Then maybe you can tell me where I might look for a job. Because I want to work with perfumes. Not in a shop like this—I don’t want to sell them, I’d make a lousy salesgirl! I have ideas about packaging. There’s a line between gorgeous and silly, and I know when it gets crossed.

  She paused. I love perfume, you see, she added, very slowly and emphatically. That was it—she had me . . .

  Had you?

  This was somebody I needed to get to know. Very few women at that time were trying to get into the perfume business. They wanted to wear it, not make it or market it.

  So then what did you do?

  I gave her my business card and pointed at the hotel’s awning, a few hundred yards away. That’s my current address, I told her. Then I asked her to join me for a drink the next night at the hotel bar. She nodded at me again—seriously and unseriously at the same time, if that’s possible. Like she meant it but found the whole thing amusing anyway. She held my card at eye level and read aloud Coty’s addresses in New York and in Paris. Then she extended her hand to me. Its grip was surprisingly warm, I remember. She said her name, and then she turned and walked away.

  Did it occur to you that you might never see her again?

  Jordan paused before replying. For as long as I knew your mother, that thought was always occurring to me, he said.

  HE TURNED on his side, exhausted. In a minute, he was asleep.

  I picked up the laundry basket, carried it to his bureau, and distributed its contents in various drawers. The sheets I carried to a linen closet in the hall. Folding them, I noticed they were suedelike to the touch. Because Jordan had purchased them, the sheets were of the highest quality, and they’d softened beautifully over the decade he’d lived in Frenchtown.

  Stacking them on a shelf, I realized I was feeling glad. How could I not be? Against all expectations, my father’s and my silence was buckling at last. I sensed that there would be more: he’d fill in the blanks, paint a verbal picture of my invisible mother.

  Yet in its strange quiet, its sobriety, this gladness I was experiencing was unlike any I’d known before. Why, I wondered, had my father and I waited until now to talk about Camilla? Having had all along so little connection to risk, why hadn’t I taken a chance and forced the issue with him a long time ago?

  Better silence than separation: that had been my strategy. And although in a sense it had been successful, my fear of losing Jordan had remained unexpunged. Did it occur to you that you might never see him again? Yes, that thought was always occurring to me.

  DRYING OFF after what had turned out to be a very long bath, I saw that the water’s heat had mottled the skin on my belly. Slathering myself with lotion, I visualized Eve’s skin as her blood toxified and the purple blush spread across her.

  After her death, neither Danny nor I had referred to that eerie final hour. Nor had we spoken of Eve’s symptoms prior to her hospitalization. Yet although these things were unavailable for discussion, they definitely weren’t gone from memory—mine, anyway.

  As I dressed and poured myself a vodka, I pictured the last time I’d seen my cousin in her apartment. She’d been in bed all day, the curtains drawn, her temperature elevated. Eve’s assistant at The Mad Gardener had called Danny to report that Eve hadn’t come to work that day or the day before. Danny had then called Eve at home, and after hearing her mother’s abnormally groggy voice, she’d phoned me, asking if I’d mind running over to Eve’s with her that evening. Something was up, she said. Reluctantly, I’d agreed to go with her—mostly because I knew how rare it was for Danny to display concern about her mother’s well-being. Normally she maintained a wary distance.

  I’d then called Stuart to bow out of a film date we’d made for that evening. After inquiring about Eve’s symptoms, which apparently included a stiff neck, Stuart announced she might have meningitis. No way, I responded—that was far too exotic. It was predictably hypochondriacal of Stuart to imagine something so extreme.

  AT EVE’S that night, Danny made a pot of tea, but Eve wasn’t interested. Danny and I tidied up her room while she lay in bed, listless.

  She hadn’t wanted us to hang around. Several times we tried persuading her to eat something, but she wouldn’t take more than a few sips of water. She said she felt achy, as with the flu.

  After about an hour, we said good night to her. As I was pulling the bedroom door closed behind us, Eve called my name.

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” she said, her voice so low it was barely audible.

  I stepped back into the bedroom while Danny headed toward the kitchen with the teapot and mugs. Eve spoke without turning her head toward me. I remember thinking it was odd she didn’t turn to face me, not realizing it was too physically painful for her to do so.

  “Danny’s worrying,” she said. “I don’t want that, Cam. Remind her I’ve talked with my doctor, okay?”

  “We’re not used to seeing you like this,” I said.

  Eve nodded a little; the action seemed to cause her discomfort.

  “Eve,” I asked, “does your neck still hurt?”

  “Some,” she replied. I could hear her inhaling and exhaling slowly.

  “You know,” I said, “Stuart told me a stiff neck and a severe headache could be a sign of meningitis.”

  Eve s
aid nothing.

  “Does your head hurt now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell your doctor about your neck?”

  “No,” she answered without heat.

  “Well, why don’t you?” I said. “I mean, there’s no reason not to mention it to him—”

  “Cam,” she broke in, “leave it alone, okay?”

  It was my turn to say nothing. The silence between us felt charged. “All right,” I answered at last.

  “I mean it,” she said, her voice low but willful. “Don’t talk about my symptoms with Danny or anyone else. It’s nobody else’s concern.” She paused. “Promise me.”

  “All right,” I repeated. “But let your doctor know if your neck keeps hurting, won’t you?”

  Eve stayed silent for a little while. “I’m tired,” she said finally. “You’d better go now. I need to sleep.”

  “Cam?” Danny called from the hallway. “You ready?”

  “Go,” Eve murmured.

  Her stubbornness was frustrating but unsurprising. “Be right there,” I called to Danny. Then I gave Eve’s forearm a squeeze. Her eyes were closed; I figured she’d fallen asleep. On tiptoes, I crossed the floor and shut the door behind me.

  Danny and I headed down Seventh Avenue and across Bleeker Street. I said nothing to her about my conversation with Eve; she didn’t ask. At the West Fourth Street station, I saw her off to Brooklyn. Before descending the subway stairs, she told me she was sure her mother was having a migraine headache, and I agreed. There was no need, I decided, to contravene Eve’s request by telling Danny or anyone else about her neck. That was her business.

  The ambulance came the next morning, after Danny, getting no answer when she phoned Eve at nine, obeyed her intuition yet again and went to her mother’s apartment. She found Eve unable to move. By that time (though no one knew it), the conclusion was foregone.