“Well, then, if you must come today,” said Madame Métier, conceding, “come at three.”
“At three,” said the suddenly overly effervescent Mademoiselle Objet. “I can’t wait!” she said, and happily hung up the phone.
CHAPTER 15
Madame Métier Contemplates Her New Situation
Knowing that help was on the way, Madame Métier felt immensely relieved. A spirit of lightness overcame her. It was happiness beyond happy that she should not, in the end, have to “pick up after herself.” For she had known all along that, in spite of her multitude of efforts, this was the one thing in life she would never be able to accomplish.
Once at the beach she felt very contemplative indeed as, sipping her soda, she sat with her back against the rock. The clouds, as usual, were magical, moving Isadora Duncan-ish against the high ciel of blue, and as she gazed at them again, she was gradually taken over by the sense that somehow things were changing, that from this day forward, everything in her life would be different. She didn’t know how exactly, but she could feel it. This Mademoiselle Objet would give her the kind of assistance that would allow her to thoroughly work on her cremes.
She realized, too, that in some ways she had never taken her cremes to heart, that is to say, had never taken her cremes work seriously. She had enjoyed concocting them and talking about them once or twice on the local TeleVisions station. She had liked, a few days ago, getting some from-the-public orders for her cremes. But when she thought about it really, she had liked even more sitting beside that silent young man in his hospital bed a few days ago—by the way, she must go back and see him again. Still, overall she had a great uncertainty about the value of her cremes, almost as if in some far small corner of her mind, like her husband the doctor, she, too, pooh-poohed them.
But getting help, having your life’s work become so big that somebody else was working for you, was, in one’s life, a serious step. Thus, as she sat there, munching the last of her rose-potato crisps, along with being excited, she was also feeling a pang of regret. Now she would have to make cremes. Now they would have to be good. Now she would have to succeed. Now she could no longer sit at the hospital bed of whomever she pleased for as long as she liked, daydreaming about her father and contemplating the mysteries of life and death.
She would have responsibilities now. And more work. And work was hard work, an undertaking to be sure, of very checkered attributes, some of which, as she thought of them now, seemed quite intimidating. Work, even a chosen work, was a structure. It shaped your days and told you who you were in certain ways. It gave you an identity. It was a freedom and a cage.
These all were weighty thoughts for Madame Métier. Thinking them, her eyelids became very heavy, and leaning back against her rock, she fell asleep.
CHAPTER 16
Madame Métier Is Observed
“You are very beautiful when you sleep,” said a voice melodic and deep, which, vaguely, Madame Métier recognized. She looked up and sitting beside her very still as, indeed, he had been for quite some time, was the young man with the round blue eyes who only a few days ago had given her the shell.
She saw him now more closely. He was young, much younger than she, although she could not guess his age. His hair, a slightly darker blonde than her own, was threaded minutely with white, but the whole of him, his strong limbs, his long hands, his smile so open and clear, and his spirit, the way it seemed not to have been too much dragged down by life, seemed young.
“You are very beautiful when you sleep,” he said once again. “I’ve been here quite a while, just watching you, the way your eyes beneath their lids move gracefully, back and forth, back and forth, as if watching the long graceful movements of an elegant ancient dance.”
How interesting, she thought. He was describing, precisely, the way she had perceived his movements the first time she saw him walking toward her on the beach.
“How interesting,” she said. “You move like that. I must have been watching you in my sleep.”
“I don’t notice my movements,” he said, “I notice you.”
He had changed his position, and now pulling himself up closer beside her, looked into her eyes. “I see things are changing,” he said. “The other day you were upset. Today you’re different—concerned. You made the ad and now big changes are coming. New things are beginning. In your work. You fear for yourself.” He looked off down the beach in the direction of the sun. Finally he said, “May I put my arm around you?”
Because she could feel that she trusted him—there was something about him so familiar—Madame Métier sat forward a little from her rock, and he very knowingly wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “You fear for yourself as a woman,” he said. “Don’t worry over this. There will be many miracles.”
For the teeniest moment she allowed herself to lean into him, to rest her shoulder against his strong governing arm. She felt safe there, protected and soft, and this, to her, was a very good feeling. In fact, she wanted it never to end, but just as she was having this thought, he withdrew his arm and looked into her eyes. “Thank you for letting me watch you sleep,” he said. ”You look so beautiful when you sleep.”
Then he stood up, and with long, elegant, dancer-like movements, he walked off slowly down the beach.
CHAPTER 17
Madame Métier Goes Once Again to the Hospital
Feeling strangely moved by her encounter with the young man at the beach—he is an angel, she thought, not a person; he carries such light in his eyes—Madame Métier, seeing that there was still time, felt suddenly inspired to stop on her way home to see the young man in the hospital.
She put on the crumpled blue dress she kept in the bottom of her picnic basket for just such unexpected occasions, and when she arrived at the hospital, made her way directly to his room.
He was still there, and asleep. She pulled up a chair and sat down beside him, and taking his hands into hers, she looked very deeply at him. There was an unearthly tranquility about him. Cut off as he was from the troubles of the mind, he lay there placid and unmoving. How different he was from the young man she had just seen on the beach, the Angel One, who wore his life so easily. How strange it all was. How truly odd and utterly mysterious—life and death and the place beyond life, and how thin the line between them. That line seemed to melt, to have been dissolved in the being of this young man, whose soul still hovered in his body, which, according to medical definitions, was really no longer alive. How strange. She didn’t know what to make of it, but it pleased her, nevertheless, to be sitting here beside him again, quietly holding his hands.
Without thinking, she started humming a wordless song. It climbed up softly out of her, and as she hummed, she felt what seemed to be a tremor in his hands, a quickening pulse of energy that vibrated into her own. It was strange to have movement come from where no movement was expected, unnerving to have things not be the way she imagined they should have been. He was, for all intents, dead. That’s what the nurse had told her; but now he showed signs of life. It was unsettling, but just as she completed this thought his hands relaxed and once again lay limp on her own.
She looked at her watch. It was already 2:30. Mademoiselle Objet was coming at 3:00, was probably already on her way. Despite the actual time—in this room it seemed that there was no time—Madame Métier felt a sudden strange urge to sing him a song. Who knows how long he’ll be here, she thought. Maybe they’ll pull the plugs out tomorrow, and I’ll never see him again. And so she started singing a song her father had taught her when she was young.
Her father had often sung the song as they walked together among the roses, but she had never noticed the words. She had just walked along beside him, holding his hand and being so happy to be there with him. But now as she sang, the words came back to her one by one, and she herself also heard them.
Oh, rose divine, whose fragrance sweet
Our hearts embrace, our souls secure
Surround us with y
our breath so pure
And when we die our spirits greet;
She sang the verse and as she came to the end of it, she felt once again—and she could scarcely believe this—a certain movement in the young man’s hands. This time it was more than a tremor. She could feel him distinctly, almost with pleading, squeezing her hand.
This quite unnerved her. This young man who was supposed to be dead had made distinctly a gesture of living. Had he heard her or felt her, she wondered, or were these simply the last involuntary twitches of dying? She finished the rest of the verses:
And when the rose
Envelopes us, our selves
Dissolve, our souls arise
We move into that essence
Bright that lies within
Our living eyes.
And so we drop the
Clothes of life, this body
So miraculous, to
Find a body made of
Light—the jewel escapes
What turns to dust.
Oh sacred rose, whose fragrance
Sweet, our hearts embrace
Our souls secure,
Give us the grace to die
In peace, so we may
Wake to live in joy.
When she had finished, she laid his hands out beside him on either side of the bed, and quietly tiptoed out of the room.
CHAPTER 18
Mademoiselle Objet Is Distraught
When Madame Métier arrived home, Mademoiselle Objet, standing at her front door and twirling in anxious circles, was distraught.
“Where have you been?” she asked, almost reprimandingly. “I was beginning to think—although I know it isn’t possible—that I had come to the wrong house. It’s twenty-two minutes after three,” she went on, again reprimandingly. “You said we would meet here at three.”
“I’m early then,” said Madame Métier. “And I’m sorry. I forgot to tell you that as a rule I’m always seven minutes late. Unless, of course, it’s a special occasion—in which case I’m even later.” She smiled and unlocked the door, and Mademoiselle Objet, still slightly disgruntled, followed her in.
“So now that we understand about the timing,” said Madame Métier, “let’s go upstairs.”
Mademoiselle Objet, who was thoroughly prepared—she had come with an attaché case filled with cards, notebooks, notebook dividers, pencils, and pens with which to diagnose the situation—was also (to say the least) a little put out by her new employer’s appearance. Through the open neck of the indigo dress that Madame Métier was wearing, Mademoiselle Objet could detect, she was sure, the criss-crossing straps of a red bathing suit. How careless and odd, she thought to herself, to be out beach-bathing on a day committed to office organization.
When they got to the workroom, Mademoiselle Objet could further see that Madame Métier had done exactly nothing to prepare. The room was in the same obstreperous ghastly array that it had been in yesterday. This also unnerved the fragile Mademoiselle. She could feel her already precarious balance slightly beginning to fray.
“I know you wish I’d done more,” said Madam Métier, “by way of preparing, but you see, organizational efforts of whatever kind, preparatory or terminal, are precisely what I cannot do. So here,” she said, taking Mademoiselle Objet’s attaché case decisively from her hands and setting it down in the middle of the workroom floor, “let’s have a few quiet minutes together before we begin, and then I can give you my undivided attention.”
Taking her by the hand, she sat the fractured Mademoiselle once again on the couch where she had sat just yesterday. When she was settled, Madame Métier took both of her hands, like two shivering birds into her own hands, and quietly, for the longest time, held them. When at last they had stopped shaking, she passed her own hands very softly across them, then laid them on Mademoiselle Objet’s lap.
“There,” she said. “Now we can begin.”
Mademoiselle Objet, who, unbeknownst to herself, had closed her eyes, now opened them and looked about the room. She felt remarkably serene and composed, and the workroom, which before had seemed totally out of control, an absolute ruin, now seemed like a wonderful playground. Even the straps of the red bathing suit peeking out from the neck of Madame Métier’s indigo dress seemed delightful and amusing.
Once settled, Mademoiselle Objet went right away to work. Retrieving her attaché case from the middle of the floor, she pulled out various organizational devices. The first was a series of file cards on which she had written some questions. With these in hand, in an uncharacteristically authoritative manner, she took over. “What are you trying to do here?” she asked. “What are your most important projects? And what do you do in the morning?”
“In answer to the first question,” Madame Métier responded, “I am trying to develop various medicinal cremes by harnessing the healing properties of living or once-living things. I don’t know how healing occurs, but I don’t believe it happens through chemical medicines. I am exploring the process of healing.”
Listening, Mademoiselle Objet, was, in her very fine hand, taking notes on each card on which she had written a question.
“What are your most important projects?” she asked next.
“The development of my cremes,” said Madame Métier. “And perhaps some research. To discover if, after all, they do have benefit.”
“What do you do in the morning?”
To this question, Madame Métier, slightly, took umbrage. What business was it of hers what she did in the morning, and what did her morning routine have to do with the disastrous condition of her room? Thinking about it, she felt a nasty little clamp-like pinch in her brain, which was a clue, she surmised, that something of note would be revealed if, truthfully, she answered the question.
“I wake up when I wake up,” she said. “I never make myself wake up. With an alarm device or anything else. I lie in my bed and look out the window at the leaves of the apricot tree—they’re very beautiful, you know, heart-shaped,” she said dreamily. “I look at the leaves until I see some things. Then, when I have seen enough, I get up. I do my morning oblations. I make some cucumber juice. I eat my cereals. I sit in my white wicker chair and have tea. I think strong blessing thoughts in my heart for my friends—and for all the suffering ones. And then, when it is given to me, I turn to my work.”
“When it is given to you … ?” said Mademoiselle Objet.
“The sense, the message about which recipe to make, or some new recipe to try. When it is given to me, then I start working here, in the workroom.”
“For what hours have you scheduled your clean-up?
“I haven’t. There are none. Cleaning up holds no interest for me. It progresses nothing. It moves nothing forward. It simply returns you again and again to the self same place you have come from. This, of course, can explain …” she laughed her melodic tinkling laugh once again, “how my room has attained its present condition.”
“I understand,” said Mademoiselle Objet, trying, and succeeding very well indeed for her, to suppress the considerable degree to which she was appalled. “No clean-up time,” she said. “You can’t run a business—or a life, for that matter—without any clean-up time.”
“I suppose that’s true,” said Madame Métier, “but I think it a pity that the essence of most lives is clean-up time—cleaning up the house and the desk, cleaning the car, cleaning the cupboards, the yard, the clothes, one’s hair. It’s endless, the permutations of cleaning-upness required by a single life.
“Making cremes is what holds interest for me. Change. Possibilities. Creation. The mysteries of healing. Unfortunately, or fortunately”—she laughed at her own somewhat bizarre predicament—“I have never been able to locate in myself any talent whatsoever for cleaning up.”
“Then analyzing the problem won’t help us, will it?” said Mademoiselle Objet.
“That’s correct.”
“So how can I possibly help you?”
“I don’t know exact
ly. But not by analysis and not by scheduling.”
Having thus been relieved of her two prime assistance techniques, something crumpled inside Mademoiselle Objet. Her plan, it was clear, could not be applied in this circumstance. It was upsetting, losing her bearings like this, but there was also, she noticed, a strange kind of happy freedom to it. “Well then,” she said, “let’s just clean up your table.”
“What a wonderful idea,” said Madame Métier. “I’d love to. How do we do it?”
Once again, Mademoiselle Objet was agog. This very unusual woman was really quite remarkable. She didn’t know how to clean up her own table.
“It’s simple,” said Mademoiselle Objet. “You just look at each thing on your table and then put it where it belongs.”
“That’s actually very complicated,” said Madame Métier. “It is that, precisely, which I cannot do. I wouldn’t know how to begin.”
Thus it was that, very patiently, really—for her three-pronged interview had revealed that here, in Madame Métier, Mademoiselle Objet had encountered a specimen of stellar-grade incompetence, domestic-wise, and that she herself would have to take the situation in hand—Mademoiselle Objet assisted Madame Métier to look at, sort, decide about, toss out, or catalog and organize the entire contents of her table.
As the day wore on, she picked up every leaf, twig, petal, and frond, ascertained what purpose it served, devised a container for it and a place to stow the container, and if neither existed, added it, with a description of its peculiar properties to the Requirements List of storage items and/or preservative solutions to be eventually obtained.
All in all, it was a pleasant undertaking. Madame Métier was encouraged as, gradually, the ancient wooden surface of her work table top emerged, and Mademoiselle Objet once again felt useful. In fact, she felt useful in a way she never quite had before. For, straightening her parents’ house, endlessly throwing her father’s wine bottles away, even organizing her own little house with Monsieur Sorbonne had never quite connected her to anything.
The Magical World of Madame Métier Page 9
