Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  Her expression shifted so quickly that it took me a few moments to realize what was going on. Her face grew suddenly flushed, and her eyes filled. If I hadn’t known her well, I’d have thought she was having a sudden attack of hay fever. She wasn’t, though, and we both knew it. This was as close as she’d get to crying—for now, and in front of me.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose, sniffed sharply, and wiped her eyes dry. “It was always like that with her. She’d drop a few clues, and I’d sit around for days trying to figure them out . . . I used to think if I didn’t ask too many questions, she’d spend more time with me. Even though I knew it didn’t work that way.”

  She was right: it hadn’t worked that way.

  “Cam, when you lived with Mom on Ninth Street, did she ever do her vanishing act?”

  I squinted at Danny as if I hadn’t understood the question. Her tone had altered; it was urgent now. There was something she wanted—needed—to hear from me.

  “You know,” she said. “Like when she’d shut her bedroom door and that’d be the last you’d see of her for three days in a row?”

  I kept silent, waiting for her to elaborate.

  She twisted one of her rings around her finger. “I swear, Cam, she didn’t once exit that room.”

  Hissing in frustration, she wiped her face with the backs of her hands. Her tears were falling freely now, and noiselessly. “Mom wasn’t negligent—I mean, there was always food in the apartment and a phone I could use. But I was on my own. Nobody ever called to find out where she was. She must’ve told her assistant not to expect her, and I guess she banished all the fuck-mates . . .

  “The only sound I’d hear coming from her room—the only sound for three solid days!—was her crying. She had this way of sobbing very quietly, in the early morning. She’d drag the air up into her lungs, and it was like her sobs were a series of short steps, and at the top there’d be this incredibly long silence. I’d stand at her door, listening to it, to the silence. Then she’d exhale, and the sound would be like a wave—not the crashing kind, the rolling kind . . . Sometimes I’d pretend she was ill. Even though I knew she wasn’t.”

  She gazed at me, her eyes dry now. “Did you know Mom needed to cry for three days at a time?”

  I reached for her, pulling her to me. “Nobody understood Eve,” I said, wrapping my arms around her. Her fragrance rose off her, an iris-and-vanilla emanation, light yet penetrating.

  Her shoulders stiffened. “But you grew up together.”

  Taking hold of her upper arms, I gave her a little shake. “Danny, she left for college when I was eight, remember? She stayed upstate more than fifteen years, till you were born. You were what linked us, when she came back to New York.”

  She didn’t move, but I felt her body relax a little. I’d last held her at Eve’s memorial service; since then she’d restricted our physical contact to quick kisses on the cheek. It felt good, and strange, to be so near her. After a few more moments of silence, she extracted herself from my embrace and took a step backward.

  “Mom thought I was a great kid,” she said quietly, her voice holding bitterness and longing in a tense, fragile balance. “She just didn’t want to be with me.”

  “She didn’t know how.” My words were, I knew, patently inadequate.

  “Uh-uh.” She was refusing my refusal to engage. “Something happened to her—pertaining to me.” Moving to the entrance to my office, she leaned against the doorframe and banged the back of her head against it lightly, repeatedly. “Why’d Mom have me and then not have me, Cam? How’d she pull it off—being my mother yet not being my mother, year after year? Why didn’t she go nuts?”

  “Nobody can answer that.”

  The look she threw me communicated an unmistakable accusation: You’re not telling me what you know! Slipping an arm around her waist, I began steering her toward the front of my shop. “Let’s see what happens in Ithaca,” I said as we stepped out onto the sidewalk. “I’ll look for you Saturday morning, okay?”

  She nodded, but her skepticism hadn’t receded. It was there in the back-of-the-hand wave she gave me as she walked off.

  AFTER DANNY’S departure, I tidied up my office. Mulling over our talk, my insufficiencies replaying in my head, I found myself remembering my most recent dream—the one in which I’d been sparring with my father.

  Over what, exactly? Roles, Meyerhold had said as he appraised Jordan’s and my performances. Did I know which roles my father had played, and for whom?

  No, I did not. The stories Jordan had recounted to me at the end of his life had been truthful, I believed, yet I wasn’t sure what they signified. And who could say what he or I might have altered in the telling, the listening? There’d been moments of pure puzzlement, too—as during one exchange, uncharacteristically philosophical, which took place days before his death.

  You know what experience is, Cam? he’d asked.

  No. Tell me.

  It’s a web spun by a spider.

  Oh? I said, trying not to sound either flippant or serious.

  The mind’s the spider. You know what the spider’s like?

  Tell me, I said.

  It’s ravenous but also cautious. It snares only what it thinks it can devour safely.

  His thin lips were pulled back from his teeth. In that moment, the pale gauntness of his face so disturbed me that I could hardly bring myself to look at him.

  Devour? What do you mean by that? I said.

  The spider feeds on prey, he answered. Things it wants to incorporate. Ideologies, theories, beliefs . . .

  He stopped, his breathing labored. After a few moments, he resumed, his voice muffled now by fatigue.

  But the spider avoids truly dangerous prey, he said.

  Dangerous?

  Things it feels menaced by. Certain ideas, fantasies . . .

  He shifted position, inhaling sharply. I knew I shouldn’t be pressing him, yet I felt compelled to ask another question.

  Tell me, I said, what the spider needs most.

  Once again Jordan inhaled, very softly now. He became so still I thought he’d stopped breathing altogether.

  Drama, he exhaled at last. Someone to applaud . . .

  He spoke another word, and I bent closer to hear him. Camilla, he murmured, Camilla, Camilla. He wasn’t calling for me: he was crooning my mother’s name.

  WHEN MY parents were a couple, they were apart a great deal, Jordan told me.

  Their love affair lasted twenty-one years; during that time, my mother did not once go to New York. She’d made a firm decision never to return to the United States, and no one was going to make her change her mind.

  So between 1928 and 1949, Jordan made regular trips to France—partly for his job, partly to see my mother. Proximity turned out to be double edged. For its momentum, their relationship depended on repeated separations.

  As the 1920s drew to a close, Jordan begged Camilla to marry him, but she declined. Then, during the mid-Thirties, she begged him to move to France, and he refused. At the start of the war, they both played the infidelity card—seeking to humiliate each other, I suppose, and hoping thus to recalibrate the delicate balance of power between them.

  When the war came to an end, their private battle lulled. During those summer weeks in 1980, as I folded my father’s laundry and listened to his recollections, I sensed he was narrating an inevitability, a story with only one possible outcome. Beneath all the repeated administrations of hurt, a deep mutual need had bided its time.

  THEY READIED themselves without realizing it.

  Camilla was by this time working for Coty as one of its marketers; my father had ascended to the post of senior chemist. Work was a safe haven, the one arena in which they’d always be able to interact contentedly.

  We had a ritual, Jordan said to me one afternoon.

  Ritual? I repeated, not sure I’d heard the word correctly.

  Involving perfume.

  Please describe it.

 
; Camilla and I weren’t company people, you see. The only thing that mattered to us was perfume. She was like me—she never got tired of it . . . She was good at marketing, but what she really loved was spending time in my lab.

  How was her nose?

  Very refined. She could identify false or weak notes in any fragrance. And she was an excellent judge of staying power. That’s harder to appreciate—it takes a certain intuition.

  What was that ritual of yours?

  Ah . . . a little perfume-testing thing we did together. Whenever I was developing a new fragrance, I’d apply it at the base of Camilla’s throat, behind her earlobes, and on the insides of her wrists. Then I’d wait a few minutes, close my eyes, lean in, and inhale. To check the harmonies.

  Harmonies?

  The way the notes unfold. A scent plays out, like music.

  And then what would happen?

  I’d ask Camilla for her reaction. She wouldn’t say it right away. First she’d tussle with me for a few moments on the sofa, or run down the hall, to elevate her body temperature. That’s how you bring out the full range of a fragrance, by warming the skin. And then she’d sit next to me, inhaling and exhaling, smelling the fragrance on herself . . .

  Did she always tell you what she really thought?

  He gave a nod. Always, he said.

  IN THE autumn of 1948, entirely by chance, they conceived a child. Camilla had never before been pregnant. She was about to turn forty.

  With the pregnancy, something opened between them—perhaps because neither could pretend to be young any longer, perhaps because their mutual dependence could finally be acknowledged. Jordan offered no explanation. They were simply relieved, he said, that all the battling was finally behind them. Years of friction had yielded a burnished tenderness—or so I pictured it, needing to envision their feeling for one another. It had a sheen, I imagined, like that of old brass.

  In the sixth month of the pregnancy, they decided to marry. Jordan negotiated with Coty to be posted permanently in France. After relinquishing his New York apartment and packing up his few possessions, he flew to Paris. Camilla met him at the airport, and they took a cab to the bureau des mariages; at the threshold, Jordan hoisted Camilla and carried her over.

  The wedding took all of three minutes, and the resulting certificat listed the wife as Camilla Archer, née Pell. Her pregnancy was not officially noted, though it was plain for all to see—and warmly toasted by the enthusiastic patrons of Le Trianon, a little café near the Place des Vosges, where the newlyweds repaired after their civil ceremony for a celebratory glass of champagne.

  As they sipped their brut and received their toasts, Jordan and Camilla were holding hands. They held each other’s hands a couple of months later, too, when Camilla’s labor began. And they were still holding hands, my father said, when it ended.

  YOUR MOTHER was a loner.

  Jordan spoke to me from his bed, where he lay resting after one of his slow, difficult walks to the bathroom. I stood near the bed, a basket of clean clothing and towels before me. This had become our pattern: Jordan talking, me folding and stacking laundry.

  He had two more weeks to go. The date had been chosen, though we hadn’t refined the details. In the time remaining, I’d told him, I wanted him to recount as much of his and my mother’s stories as he could. He’d agreed to talk, but reminded me that we’d need to set aside some time for planning—rehearsing, he called it. As if this were a one-act play and I his stagehand.

  How long had Camilla been in France when you met her? I asked him.

  About a year. She was only nineteen. But she always struck me as being older than she really was. She had some gray hair even in her twenties. And lines at the corners of her eyes. But she was one of those women who age beautifully.

  Her parents? What were they like?

  I never met either of them. Your Uncle Dan said their father was a heavy drinker, always antagonizing people. The mother was a silent type, rarely showed her hand. Didn’t like outspokenness—it scared her off.

  So Camilla scared her off?

  He gave me a thin smile. Camilla scared off most people, he said.

  And why France?

  I told you, she was a loner. And she was tired of America. You know, the Roaring Twenties—too many people getting fat too fast . . . Dan had loaned her some money for a trip abroad; their parents weren’t about to sponsor any travels. Camilla had read about France and thought it sounded like a nice place.

  He paused to sip water. He’d been dehydrated for several weeks, unable to stomach most liquids. I was glad to see him drink.

  So off she went, he continued. And then she refused to come back. Dropped out of sight completely for several months, then called home and announced she was going to make a career for herself. She’d already learned to speak pretty good French, and she’d landed a job at a small Parisian perfume company with production facilities in Grasse. Near Cabris—that’s the town where Edmond Roudnitska had his house. Everyone in the business used to drop by his place. It’s beautiful there . . .

  I could feel him migrating backward in time. His face softened a little.

  How did her parents react?

  Well, they’d never heard of Grasse. And Camilla’s move to France was like a fire alarm—it scattered the whole family. After a couple of years, the parents left the city and moved back upstate, where they were originally from.

  Near Ithaca?

  No, near Albany. But far enough away that Dan hardly ever saw them. He stayed in the city, of course. You would’ve had to crowbar that guy out of Manhattan.

  Did he visit Camilla in France?

  Dan? You kidding? He never went further east than Long Island! No, he and Camilla settled into an arm’s-length sort of thing. They had nothing in common. She rarely mentioned her brother to me.

  He rubbed his eyes with one hand. I had to look up Dan’s address in the phone book when I called him after . . . when you were born.

  AT MY BIRTH—once the doctor had arrived and my mother’s body had been removed—one of the two midwives asked Jordan what my name was. Camilla wasn’t a name he and my mother had chosen; it was simply the only name he could summon.

  With no close friends in France, he was effectively alone. A few of his dead wife’s colleagues tried reaching out to him, but he rebuffed them. His loss numbed him; he could scarcely feel it. It frog-marched him through his days.

  I wasn’t yet real to him. He’d hired a wet nurse; she and I occupied the apartment’s bedroom. Jordan spent his nights in a living room chair or on blankets piled on the floor. At seven each morning he went to work, staying there till eight or nine in the evening. He began really to notice me, to pay attention, only when my nightly crying changed from a helpless mewling to something fiercer, more assertive. All that shrieking and squalling became suddenly articulate. My cries, he said, were telling him Paris wasn’t where we should be living.

  And the trip home, to New York—what was it like?

  He didn’t answer me; he’d fallen asleep, cut off by exhaustion. I was left to imagine that return. A six-day trip by ocean liner; disembarking at a Midtown pier; a cab ride to an unfamiliar address in the Village; a buzzer at the door. Someone (Dan, Sarah?) had listened incredulously to my father’s self-introduction. Staring at the small bundle in the traveling bassinet.

  Eve would have stared, too. At these strangers, two would-be members of her would-be family. She was ten, precociously attractive. No longer a child, if she ever had been. Seeing Jordan and his baggage—four suitcases and a baby—what had she said to herself?

  ON THE corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, I bumped into Stuart.

  A bit jumpy after Danny’s visit, I’d closed The Fourth Wall earlier than usual and had just crossed Sixth Avenue, intending to drop off a deposit at my bank, when Stuart materialized out of nowhere. He was en route, he explained, to a nearby pharmacy, to get some medicine for Carl.

  “Anything actually wrong with h
im?” I asked.

  Stuart fake-smacked me with the flat of his hand. “Care to rephrase that? Like, ‘Oh, is Carl all right?’”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I do hope he’s all right.” We’d had versions of this exchange before; Stuart’s touchiness wasn’t merely a reaction to my seeming lack of concern. It did no good to remind him that he’d always been a committed fabricator of worst-case scenarios; he couldn’t shake his anxiety.

  Now he rolled his neck and shoulders: de-kinking, he called it. He’d spent his day going up and down a ladder, restocking the highest shelves of Backstage Books. I mimicked his movements and he mimicked mine, exaggeratedly. We drew amused stares from several people walking past our mirror-image improvisation.

  Then we traded a few shop tales. Admiring the amount of the check I was about to deposit, Stuart commented that I was getting harder-nosed about pricing.

  “This,” I said, waving the check, “is for that photo-framing thing I told you about. It’ll cover the motel room this weekend.”

  “Well, Danny will be grateful—her salary’s a disgrace! How’s she doing, anyway? And are you ready for this jaunt to Ithaca?”

  “As ready as I’ll get,” I said. “I’m worried about Danny’s expectations, though. She thinks she’ll find out all sorts of things about her father, but I have my doubts.”

  “Her father? Billy?”

  I nodded. “She’s hoping to speak with his sister, and maybe some other people who knew him. We’re going to Cornell, too. First time I’ve ever been there. Jordan never took me.”

  “Well of course not! If your father couldn’t get his head around the idea of taking you to Paris, why on earth would he drag you upstate?”

  I was about to respond to his remark when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Stuart’s eyes widened.

  “Ho, ho!” he exclaimed, pointing at Sam, who stood by my side. “Twice in a matter of days!”