CHAPTER 2
Madame Métier Begins Again With Her Cremes
Between her outings at the beach, Madame Métier was now working very hard on her cremes. She had taken the green striped hatbox down from the closet, made an inventory of all her assorted dried items and set up shop in the sunroom.
She bought a huge library table and on it she set out in piles the myriad leaves and petals and fronds that she had already preserved as well as the new ones that she had started collecting. She bought two tin file boxes and several packets of different colored filing cards on which gradually, as she experimented, she wrote down her new recipes. She ordered fluids and oils to serve as suspensions and emulsions for her cremes, and these in their various bottles and jars she stacked in the corner of her room. She bought cases of little containers, of porcelain, silver, and copper; of blue glass and white glass and clear glass, in which to serve up her various cremes, aware that the cremes themselves would perform one final alchemical change when they came into contact with the substance of their packaging.
She got up early each morning and, after having her tea, went into the sunroom, checked all the plants that were drying, sampled the various emulsions, and then set to work, admixing various tinctures, extracts, liquids, herbs and flower essences.
As she combined and mixed, evaluating each texture and fragrance, she waited, poised, for the mysterious moment when something, an unpremeditated alchemical event, would finally occur and the creme would achieve its optimum consistency, give off its beautiful fragrance and assume its permanent color. Then she would hear, as if spoken by a voice in her ears, the words announcing the ailment for which it was the remedy. Then and only then, would she write down the new recipe.
Her method was somewhat haphazard. She was never quite sure which afflictions she was attempting to cure, that is to say, whether she should seek to attain a particular creme for a particular malady, or whether a creme in its seemingly unique combination of fragrance, texture, and packaging—total essence—would reveal the purpose for which it had been invented. So far it had been true that each time a creme had achieved its essence, The Voice, as she called it to herself, had whispered in her ear and told her what it was to be used for.
So it was that at times she felt quite confident that simply by her experiments, she would arrive at exactly where she was meant to be going. At other times she doubted this, felt she should state her intention for a creme, develop a rigid, no-nonsense, specific, concrete, and orderly plan—and then steadfastly adhere to it.
One week, after a siege of many failures, she was feeling particularly desperate. One recipe, for no reason, exploded in its cruet, spattering the sunroom with shards of broken glass. Another, overnight, grew a frightening purplish mold. A third had curdled mysteriously and turned rock hard by morning.
Her table was a nightmare, a veritable Vesuvius of seeds and fronds, of scraps of paper and recipe cards, to say nothing of all the pots and jars of failed and/or perfected cremes that cluttered every spare surface of the workroom. She had certainly tried to clean up, and once or twice she had actually succeeded. She had taken her workroom down to the bone, filed all the wandering recipe cards, stacked all the jars of finished cremes, and cleared off the surface of her table. Each time she did this, she believed—for a few days at least—that she had finally learned to live by her mother’s directive to always clean up as she went along. But then once again she would be inspired, and the process would start all over again. It seemed, in fact, as if only from chaos could she create. Tidiness had itself as an end, but chaos, it seemed, was the sine qua non of all her creations.
Perhaps she was mad. Perhaps this business with cremes was a folly—poppycock as her husband had said. What did the world need cremes for anyway? She wished she could have talked to her father, asked him for some advice. What would he have said, for example, about these particular recipes? Did he think she was wise or foolish, for carrying on with her cremes? It was true, that with all these disasters that she hadn’t heard the voice that ordinarily announced the purpose for each creme. She hadn’t been told the ailment for which each one had been invented. Had wished she could have talked to her father. From where he was now, in a world beyond worlds, he would certainly know if this was her calling.
She thought of the room, 5244, in which he had died, and she wondered if—as with the plants when they themselves were no longer alive—some whiff of their essence remained, some molecules of her father’s might still linger in his hospital room. In her wave of despair, she decided to go to the hospital, to the room where her father had died, to see if, by sitting where she had last felt his essence, some remnant of his being might offer up a message.
CHAPTER 3
Madam Métier Goes to the Hospital
When Madame Métier arrived at the hospital, she was distressed to see that her father’s room, 5244, was occupied. The door stood open, and in the room, on a bed tilted slightly upward, lay a young man, probably in his twenties, fast asleep. He was wired up to an octopus-like configuration of machines and corrugated tubes. These were attached to a metal box on the back wall of the room, which displayed a series of lit-up colored lines that moved endlessly across it, as if across a TV screen.
He had needles in his arms and a hole in his throat, which had a gurgling fluid-filled tube inserted into it. A huge metal hand, the extension of yet another machine, lay over his chest and was pressing air in and out of his lungs. In spite of how strangely scaffolded he was, Madame Métier felt strangely drawn to him.
She stepped back to read his name on the door but, oddly, there was none. Then she walked down the hall to the nurses’ station and, saying that she had been a close friend of his family’s, asked if she might visit awhile with the young man in the room.
“Since you’re sure you’re a friend,” said the nurse, suspiciously eyeing her, “I suppose you can go in. Stay as long as you like. They’re pulling out the plugs any day now anyway.”
Madame Métier was shocked, and this must have showed on her face because then the nurse added, “He’s been unconscious for five weeks. His brain is gone. His parents just haven’t decided when to pull out the plugs. Excuse me,” she said, and disappeared down the hall.
Madame Métier walked back to the room where the young man lay still, very still on the bed. She pulled the door half closed behind her, and pulling up a chrome and orange plastic chair, sat down next to him. She watched as mindless, he breathed in and out, his chest rising and falling like the tides of the ocean, beneath the great metal hand, while his hands, like two beached fish except for occasional twitches, lay motionless beside him.
She sat there transfixed by him. His dark hair lay around him in shining bright ringlets on the pillow, and his eyelids, great lidded arcs with dark lashes, were closed. There was a mysterious peacefulness about him, and she wondered who he was and how he had come to be this way, suspended here as he was between life and its aftermath.
As Madame Métier sat there beside him, she felt her own breathing ever so slightly begin to change, until she realized that the two of them were breathing—in and out, in and out, in and out—in unison. As she sat with him there in the silence, she suddenly wished very much that whether he could feel it or not, she could apply a creme to his head, that just as she had for her father as he lay dying in this room, she could now do something for him.
But unfortunately in all her distress about her profession, she had left her house without any cremes, and so she had nothing with which to soothe him. Just the same, as she sat there, a curious thing began to happen. Her hands started ever so slightly to tingle, to seem to want to move in the direction of his head. And so she allowed them to move until finally, softly, she laid her hands on his forehead, which was cool and damp like a rain-washed stone. She could feel somehow through her hands—or rather she could see, almost, through the tips of her fingers—that his skull was cool and dark inside, like an empty cave.
Then, as sh
e sat there, quietly resting her hands on his head, she began to “see” that the faintest thin threads and flickerings of white lights—like strings of carnival lights reflected at nighttime on water—had begun to inhabit the cave of his head, and as she continued to rest her hands on his forehead, these threads of light began, one by one, ever so slightly to brighten.
Beside her, the young man lay motionless in the bed. The room was still, no sound in it except the minuscule buzz of the octopus-like machine that monitored his every breath. Madame Métier continued to sit at his side, with her hands on his head a little while longer.
It had grown dark outside. The first stars had just pricked their way through the velvet blue umbrella of the high night sky. Madame Métier stirred, came back to herself, and realized that she had been sitting there in a sort of half-sleeping state for quite a long time.
The young man lay still as a stone, but he was breathing more easily now and through her fingertips she could see—or was this just her imagination?—that the faint, thin flickerings of light in his head were now noticeable strands, veins almost, of white light that moved through the hemispheres of his brain in a distinctive undulating pattern. She removed her hands from his head and brushed back his beautiful hair. Then she stood up, and before she could think, she leaned over and planted a kiss on his forehead.
When she came out into the street, a dark night had fallen. There was almost no moon, and as she walked outside, receiving the crackling crunch of the fallen chestnut leaves through the bottoms of her shoes, she felt strange. She had learned not a thing about her cremes. Her father had sent her no message. She had spent the whole afternoon with her hands on the head of a young man whose life-sustaining machines would soon be turned off because, according to medical science, he was already dead.
CHAPTER 4
Madam Métier Is Discouraged
Having thus discovered nothing, Madame Métier decided the following day that the least she could do was clean up her workroom.
Because of the previous day’s explosion, the sunroom was now a full-blown disaster. Leaves and seeds were everywhere. In fact, it was in such a shambles that when she returned, she actually thought for a minute that vandals had come in while she was gone, and, in a mad search for money, had topsy-turvied everything.
She stared at her table, trying to sort out the recipe cards, of which she had six colors, but she couldn’t find the box for them, and, besides, should she sort them by color, by the primary content of the recipe, or by the ailment for which it was a remedy? She couldn’t tell. And so, without deciding or arranging anything, she moved on to the piles of petals and leaves she had stripped from the plants she was drying. Should she put them all in white medicine boxes, or small round tins?—she couldn’t tell. And what about her fluids and oils—now that they had been opened? Where, and how, and in what should she store them? She couldn’t decide that either.
She was surrounded by chaos, and the more she tried to correct it, the more impossible it seemed. She realized, in fact, that she had no idea at all of how to even begin to get it organized. Discouraged almost to the point of crying, she got up from her table, closed the door to her workroom, put on her new red bathing suit, and headed for the beach.
CHAPTER 5
Madame Métier Returns to the Beach
The air was shiny and blue with high fluffy white clouds as Madame Métier propped herself up on a rock. In her hurry to get away from her mess, she had taken no time to pack herself a lunch, so on the way she had stopped at the corner Waters Store to buy herself a cranberry soda.
She was idly sipping her soda as, once again, she watched the clouds go rolling by. She wanted to think of nothing, certainly not of her room and her inability to clean, and certainly not of the silent young man in the hospital room.
The clouds, which had started out mushroomy, cottony, and fluffy when she first sat down, seemed to be becoming, as she watched them, gradually more vaporous, diaphanous, and gauzy, until they dissolved altogether into a fine white mist which totally obscured the sun.
Having now finished her soda, she watched in delighted mindlessness as the veil of clouds descended, became a fog, then moved ever so slightly, like a thin white curtain teased into motion by a summer breeze, until it had bathed the entire landscape in a silvery soft film. Trees melted in it. The line of the shore appeared and disappeared like a landscape in a dream, and although she was getting chilly because of the absence of the sun, she sat there mesmerized. Her mind was suspended in some gauzy in-between place, and the thoughts that had troubled her only minutes before, all seemed now to have been quite magically erased.
As she sat there thus, her mind unleashed from its gears, she noticed a man walking toward her. First a dot, then a form, then the form of a man emerging through the haze. She was surprised to see him. She had been there so often alone and the beach had always been so deserted that she had begun to think of it as a place inhabited by no one but herself. She was therefore all the more surprised when, with long loping elegant strides like the graceful movements of some ancient dance, the man emerged from the haze and seemed to be very intentionally approaching her.
He was tall and strong and had white-blonde hair, long arms, and large, beautifully formed hands in which he seemed to be holding something. He folded his legs and sat down beside her. He had round blue eyes, with which, intently, he studied her. For a time he said nothing, just sat there quietly in her presence. Then finally he said, “You’re sad today. You’re upset. Nothing is working. I’m sorry. Here,” he said, “I’ve brought you a present.”
He handed her a large white shell, which had a deep pink bowl inside and rolling white scallops along its edges. They curved upward and downward and upward again like the movement of the waves in the ocean. She took the shell in her hands and smiled, and, as she did, he stood up. Then, lowering his eyes to hers, he looked at her for a moment and added, “You might want to put an ad in the paper—to get yourself some help. You need it.” Then he turned, and walking away through the veil of mist, he disappeared down the beach.
When Madame Métier got home, she opened the door to her workroom, which for some reason now no longer appeared so chaotic. The pale gray light of the late afternoon slanted in through the windows, falling in shimmering lattices across all her medicine boxes and tins.
She had brought the shell in with her and she cleared a space for it now on the middle of her table. Then, thinking reverently of the rather unusual manner in which she had acquired it, she lit a small candle, which, with a smile, she placed in front of it. There. Somehow everything felt better. She sat down at her table and started composing an ad for the paper:
Organizer of objects, chaoses, and mélanges.
Office magician needed. Desperately. And at once.
She sealed it in an envelope, put on a coat, and walked it out to the Post Box on the corner.
CHAPTER 6
Monsieur Sorbonne Is Happy With His Work
Having organized everything in the house—the herbs and teas and beans and peas in jars on the shelf in the kitchen, the sheets and towels and wrapping papers and quilts (down-filled for winter, pale-colored cottons for summer) in their closet in the hall, the papers in her desk, her make-up box, her hairpins and clips and ribbon bows, her poems books on the library shelf, Monsieur Sorbonne’s socks in his drawer, his shirts (in order of design), on a high rod in the bedroom closet, his myriad pairs of cufflinks, his telescope and binoculars, his skiing and parachute gear, his cutting and sawing tools (these all she put away in the shed), his camera and its several lenses, the tattered Belgian linen bag with the rolled-up tubes of paint, and the maroon velvet pouch which, when she encountered it once again, reminded her that Monsieur Sorbonne had never developed the pictures of her that he had taken that first night. She found the disengaged film in a small metal canister and this she set aside to bring to Monsieur Sorbonne’s attention. Having done all this, the lovely Mademoiselle now found, much deeply
to her distress, that the hideous horrible rash had once again appeared on her hands.
She had had such a wonderful time here, sorting things out, putting them up and then relishing their put-upness, that she had scarcely noticed that Monsieur Sorbonne, the delight of her life, had been so constantly gone.
He had taken to the work of being a Sub-Curator at the Artifacts Museum like a drake to a pond. His first assignment was sorting out pot shards from an ancient Etruscan excavation site. There were 6,043 of them. Once having determined which set of shards formed which pot, Monsieur Sorbonne was to supervise their gluing together, and, subsequently (when the shattered pots were all re-formed), to oversee the construction of the cabinets and backgrounds for their eventual exhibition.
The sorting had not, in particular, been Monsieur Sorbonne’s cup of tea. After hours, on twelve occasions at least, he had whisked Mademoiselle Objet into his curator’s cell to assist him. This, of course, had given her pleasure, for in even the organization of objects so esoteric as pot shards, she was a master. She felt a great satisfaction. But now Phase I of the EPP (Etruscan Pots Project) had been completed. The various bowls and vessels and urns had all been perfectly reconstructed from the pot shards, and Mademoiselle Objet had completed her brief after-hours tour of duty at the Artifacts Museum.
Monsieur Sorbonne, however, had not. He was now hard at work imagining and designing the backgrounds and foregrounds for their exhibition and this also kept him out late many nights at the museum.
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