Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  I am hurting Edward, his complaisant wife, his child, myself. I do not want to break up a home. I have to practice what I now believe in, to take responsibility. I must observe the Ten Commandments. I have to stop. I cannot explain this to anyone. I cannot even explain the intensity of my feelings to myself. In my circle of friends, there is no one to whom I can talk about guilt and retribution. All I know is that I must do something very difficult, nearly impossible, and I must do it right away. I am a person who believes in absolutes. I feel I have no choice.

  In New York I pick up the phone, dial Edward’s number, and say, “I never want to see you again.”

  Today I wonder why I wasn’t gentler, kinder. But at the time, it has to be all or nothing. I have no strength for debate or argument. I cannot find the words to tell him that what he has been doing is wrong and what I am now doing is right. It sounds too self-righteous, especially on the phone. If I try to do it face to face, it will be worse and I won’t be able to resist his charm. So I break off without explanation and let him believe what he will—another man, a change of heart, whatever.

  My heart breaks. I cry openly in public places and fail to hide my tears. I adore this man more than anything in the world. I come close to killing myself over this lost love. Yes, I wish to die, for a part of me believes that I must perish as a final punishment. But another part recognizes that I must endure the expiation process to the end. I must submit myself to the burning of my love flame until it finally consumes and purifies me.

  Feverish and full of fear from my reading of the Bible, I am not sure whether it is hallucination or a true visitation when the prophet Isaiah appears and says to me, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

  I am totally possessed by this vision. I repeat Isaiah’s promise as a mantra for days on end. I check the words in the Bible, Chapter I, verse 18, and know they have been written for me.

  Then a recurring, surreal dream haunts my nights: I am standing near the edge of a cliff, where I pick a magnificent violet. I bottle the scent. With a pair of metal tweezers I tear apart the stamen. I examine the seed. One by one, I weigh the petals. I measure their length and width with a centimeter ruler. With a calculator I evaluate their density. I proceed to cut up the flower and fit the tiny pieces under a microscope. Violet color bleeds off on my fingers. The shreds of petals rot swiftly, but before they disintegrate I accumulate a long list of data. I copy the information into a notebook. Then I try to put the violet back together again.

  When I can’t, I am frustrated. I feel powerless. I grieve over the flower. I brood over my inability to make it whole again. The dream wrecks my sleep seven nights in a row. On the eighth night I awaken. I know I must be bleeding internally, for blood is running down my leg. I feel so desperately ill I know I must be dying.

  REFORM OR PERISH

  I call Joseph Koster, a man who has given up his successful Wall Street interests to write and read widely in Eastern philosophy. We have become good friends. Joseph is in love with me, but I am not in love with him; I am still and forever under the spell of Ruscha. I am grateful for Joe’s devotion but unable to return his ardor. I ask him to take me to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital. I am on the table in the emergency room, among accident victims and someone who’s just been shot. The doctor leans over me. I am frightfully ill, so ill I actually feel my spirit leave my body. I’m sure I’m dying. I prepare my soul for God. “Please receive me as I am,” I pray. “I know I’m not too clean. I regret the things I’ve done. Please forgive me. If I had to live my life again, I would live it differently.”

  The emergency room dismisses me, and Joe and I ride home in a taxi. I start to bleed again. Joe wants to take me back to the hospital. I say no; I know there will be no instant forgiveness by God. I must live through this trial on my own. “Please take me to your place,” I ask Joe.

  Joe lets me stay with him for a year. He treats me gently, sweetly. I spend most of my time in bed. It seems I bleed through the day, I bleed through the night, I refuse the treatment of a doctor; I don’t trust doctors. Joe, like a saint, cooks for me, brings me food, feeds me with a spoon. I am nailed to the bed. Only a short while ago, I was on the go twenty-four hours a day. Now each sunset impresses me as the last of my life. Each sunrise seems to bring my last day.

  When I am awake, I review my life, screening it like a motion picture. I envision the homes I have broken up, my lies, my robberies, my abortions, my adulteries, my cruelties, my recklessnesses, my sins. I read the Bible. I realize with horror that I’ve broken just about every one of the Ten Commandments.

  I think of the psychological and sociological devastation that we who proudly labeled ourselves the avant-garde have caused. I am overcome with guilt, with remorse.

  I dwell time and time again on the youngsters I’ve seen OD. I am especially troubled by Edie. I am obsessed by her memory, a bright morning star, and I let her waste away. I saw her turn to dust. Could I have prevented her death? Am I my sister’s keeper? The Scripture teaches us so. Is redemption of self possible without redemption of others? A feeling of unworthiness, selfishness, callousness, ugliness weighs on me.

  Alone and in torment, I think of Edie. In my sane mind, I know I was powerless against the forces pulling her to destruction. Neither logic nor love can save a person possessed by drugs. But still the doomed Edie haunts my weird, flickering dreams, dreams of hellfire, racks, and torture devices that punish me day and night. In one of my dreams I see Edie hanging head down, feet up, tied to a rope. She has a bag of puke in her mouth; she is gasping. I learn much later that when Edie received shock treatment, a bag was placed at her mouth to receive regurgitated matter.

  In a recurring dream I see a headline: “Ultra Violet X-Rays Andy Warhol.” At Joe’s insistence, I have been x-rayed repeatedly in recent months as the doctors search my body, instead of my soul, for the malady that is consuming me. In my dream, I become the technician who orders Andy onto a table cold as a morgue slab, which tilts him head down, almost to the floor. Then I focus the probing eye of the machine on his vital organs, dart to safety outside the door, and return to say, “Now turn, please, just a little to your right.…”

  Later, when I hold the x-ray film up to the light of truth, what do I see?

  I find a human-inhuman hologram of a man with a yellow flickering light on his forehead, like a third eye. On close examination, it proves to be a Polaroid camera embedded in his brow. There is dense printed circuitry from his eyes to his ears to his hands. In his inner ear is a library of microcassettes. His tongue is missing, but there is a coin slot in his mouth.

  Surprisingly, a heart-shaped valentine is pinned to his right chest. Handwritten across it in blood-red letters: “I love you, Mother.”

  A fiery track—starting at his abdomen, continuing to his chest, on to the left lung, then the esophagus, liver, stomach, spleen, on to his right lung and out his side—puzzles me. Then I recognize the path of the bullet that nearly killed him.

  The gallbladder blinks off and on. I’m not sure, but I think I detect the word “Help.”

  The genitals don’t show.

  The limbs are normal except for the nuts and bolts that rivet them to his skeleton.

  An infinite inventory of numbers is imprinted on his skin. The digits go on and on: birth certificate number, telephone numbers, charge accounts, bank accounts, insurance policies, zip codes, social security and internal revenue numbers, real estate registry numbers, passports, license plates, club memberships, many more.

  In the morning, awake and feverish, I ponder the meaning of this dream. Is Andy a Lucifer, tempting us into a cybernetic nightmare from which there is no escape? Is he the apocalyptic beast of materialism, identified by 666? Or is he a prophet come to warn us, save us, from mechanized, computerized destruction?

  After a year of struggle with devils that wan
t to keep me on their side, I conclude that I must choose: Death or change. It is that simple: Reform or perish. The doctor tells me I have an ulcerated colon. He recommends its removal. That means carrying a sack for body wastes all the rest of my life. My bowels are burning with excruciating pain, but I refuse the surgery. The pain becomes more intense.

  A few nights later, in my delirium, I visualize myself in a store in California with a friend. We’re shopping—well, actually shoplifting. We look around to make sure we’re not observed, then blithely slide various items into our oversized purses or shopping bags.

  My friend and I are caught. We are arrested, handcuffed, hauled off to the station house, fingerprinted like common criminals, stripped, and subjected to a totally humiliating body search by a lady cop. Do they think we’ve stuffed pearls up our vaginas? I awaken in a cold sweat, remembering with horror that this is not a dream but something that happened to me a few years earlier, something I’ve tried to banish from my mind. I recall now that my friend’s attorney got us off without a jail sentence. I thought the ugly episode was finished. But now it explodes in my mind, spewing poison through my arteries and veins.

  One day, alone in the apartment, in agony and in tears, I know I can’t go on any longer. I’ve seen the four seasons go by outside the window. Maybe it’s time to leave. I welcome death. Death will end my persistent memories of Edward. I try to get out of bed. My knees give way. I fall to the floor. I get hold of one of the bedposts and try to pull myself up, but I remain on my knees. I don’t have the strength to rise.

  With a loud cry, I growl up to God. I beg for his mercy. I scream out loud, “I pray to you, God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob. I pray that your son Jesus Christ save me. I accept Him as my savior.”

  Those are the magic words. I cry for a long time. Then a calm comes upon me. I sigh and sigh and sigh and sigh. Peace envelops me. I am released of all the demons bottled up in me. Finally I crawl into bed and sleep quietly. That night my cheeks have some color, and I’m able to sit in my nightgown at the dinner table with Joe and his son Chris.

  I suppose some would say I experienced a nervous breakdown. Certainly I suffered a psychic collapse, brought on by my agonizing break with Ruscha. Maybe my body rebelled against the life I was leading; maybe I was punishing myself for my sins. Once I broke through to acceptance of God, my immune system rallied and healing began.

  I undertake to heal myself. I conciously choose to investigate alternative medicine. I dive deeply into the literature of healing, nutrition, positive thinking, acupuncture, color therapy. I study books on rebuilding physical and emotional health. I discover Chinese medicine and its principle of regeneration. I change my whole style of living, thinking, eating.

  I am warmed and comforted immeasurably by Joe’s concern for me. We finally become lovers, in a gentle, wistful way: I out of gratitude, he out of hope I will someday return his passion. But that is not to be.

  At first when I go out of the apartment, I feel like one of those fragile ninety-year-old ladies who live in dread of being knocked down by some young punk, for they know they will not be able to pick themselves up. I have to hold on to railings and building facades as I walk. But our bodies are more resourceful than we know. Eventually energy returns. Life prevails.

  While I am still struggling, Edward, my greatest love, calls me and says, “I have my walking papers.” I’ve never heard that expression before, but I know instantly what it means. Even though I still love him, my condition does not permit a warm reaction to his news. I can’t tell him I’m dying, dying partly because of him. He tells me he’s coming to New York.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t see you,” I say. How can I let him see me like this? I’ve lost fifty pounds. He used to love my curves; now I resemble a Buchenwald skeleton. I don’t have the strength for a rendezvous. And even though he is free, I don’t believe he has repented. But most of all, I can’t let him see me like this.

  When he gets to New York, he is still so much on my mind that I gather enough courage to call him at the Stanhope Hotel to offer some kind of explanation and to hear his voice one more time. A woman answers the phone. I leave a message. He calls me back. “You didn’t want to be with me, so I brought someone else,” he says. “I can’t get rid of her now.”

  A few years later, I run into Edward in New York. My heart skips several beats. I feel myself swooning with my old passion. But he is with someone new. It is too late for me. In 1982 the Whitney Museum gives Edward a retrospective show of 140 of his works. Now fully recovered, healthier than ever, I make myself as beautiful as possible and attend the opening. When I see Edward, again my heart misses beats and the old flame seems to rekindle. I greet Edward, I tell him the show is a beauty. He tells me that he has built a house in the California desert. That must be a beauty too. Alone late that night, I weep that the home is not for me.

  HOME, SWEETEST HOME

  As a teenager, I left my home in France, a black sheep. In 1975 I return, a sick sheep. I half expect to die and need to mend a huge hole in my life before it is too late. My sister Edwige is waiting for me at the Nice airport. She has the intense blue eyes, fair skin, and blond hair of my father and grandfather. She is ten years my junior. She has a very rich husband, three lovely children, and an apartment decorated with signed antiques. She has not lived through tidal waves and tempests, as I have. I wonder why she smokes one cigarette after another.

  We drive along the Mediterranean, where bathers are bouncing in the waves. The fragrance of the mimosa and the cactus-like agave trees awakens sensory memories of my childhood that seem buried as deeply as Akkadian ruins. The car stops in the paved driveway, bordered by laurels in bloom. Dogs bark my first welcome. Then comes a Portuguese maid dressed in white. The monumental glass-and-cast-iron front door opens slowly, and my father is framed by the sea, visible behind him through the marble hallway and the glassed wall of the dining room.

  Of course, I recognize him. He is my father, my long-lost father. Now his hair is white. When I last saw him, twenty years ago, it was black. His eyes peer at me through glasses with transparent frames. His nose seems a little longer, his forehead wider. The scar is still on his left cheek from his long-ago childhood. His dignity is striking. He extends his arm to shake hands. I am not to get a kiss, not to be enfolded in his arms and pressed warmly against his chest. That is not his way, and I must accept it. If I am not ready to accept him as he is, then all my years of struggle, all the recent agony, have been for nothing.

  I extend my hand to him. We shake hands. He says, “Sois la bienvenue.” You are welcome. I take a deep breath. It is good to be welcome, good to be home. An array of Dalmatians and Irish setters, my brother’s dogs, and miniature pinschers, my older sister’s and mother’s dogs, swarm around my feet.

  My mother is in the hallway. She offers her cheek to me. I am struck by the ravages of time on her face, but her features are still beautiful. It will take me a while to get used to the ruin of her classical loveliness; I have lived too long with the youth culture.

  I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the house, by the security I breathe in the air. I walk through the gallery of portraits of my ancestors. They look down at me, reminding me of where I have come from, of the proud descent. They speak to me of well-ordered hearths, cries of children, laughter of adolescents, conversations of grownups, the fullness of life. The onrush of life fills the huge emptiness within me. Why, in my youth, did I view these people as jailers? Now I see them as my lifeblood. It took all of them, through centuries of history, to beget me. I shiver, with a deep but healing contraction of my whole being.

  Dinner is served by another young woman from Portugal. The food, very fresh, but richer than I am used to, soothes my ailing soul. I can see my family looking sorrowfully at my pale, thin face, my lifeless hair, my emaciated body. But they say nothing. We speak casually of the children, of plans for the next day. Would I like to go fishing with the fishermen? “No, I think I’d rather rest, take it eas
y.”

  As we climb the monumental white stone stairs of the large, three-story house, I want to kiss my mother again. Since there is no one else in sight, I say, “Mother.”

  “Yes, daughter.”

  Then, daringly, “I’d just like to kiss you good night.”

  She presents her cheek. I kiss it. I wish I could bury my whole body in her lap. I wish I could crawl back into her womb, remain there another nine months, and start all over again. I wish that, at the very least, I could hug her, lean my shoulder against her. But in our family, feelings are shown in other ways—in wills, in inheritances. Flesh to flesh is alien, untried. I wish desperately it were otherwise.

  I walk along another corridor of ancestor portraits. I scrutinize each serene or frowning face—there are no smiles for serious exposure to posterity—searching for clues, for meaning of the mystery, the alchemy of family. In my bedroom, a photograph of my paternal grandfather awaits me. Even in black and white, I can see his limpid blue eyes, the white of his hair and mustache, the pink of his large, aquiline nose. I remember now how fond he was of me.

  I close my eyes and see again my grandmother, his wife, thin, kind, devoted, a perfect lady. Where are they now? I wonder. Are they hovering over this house that once was theirs? Are they looking over the headboard of my bed, my childhood bed, unused for twenty years, made of Louis XVI mahogany, made when Louis XVI sat on the throne of France? Almost reverently, I finger the gilded garland on the headboard, the yellow Naples silk bedspread encrusted with the symbols of a later monarch, the bees of Napoleon.