The Drowning Girl
Page 26
Eva called near the end of April. She was crying.
I had never heard Eva cry, and it was as disconcerting a sound as it was unexpected.
We talked for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, at the most. It might have been a much longer conversation, if my cell phone had been getting better reception that afternoon, and if I’d been able to call back when we were finally disconnected (I tried, but the number was blocked). Eva was not explicit about what had upset her so badly. She said that she missed me. She said it several times, in fact, and I said that I missed her, too. She repeatedly mentioned insomnia and bad dreams, and how very much she hated Los Angeles and wanted to be back in Boston. I said that maybe she ought to come home, if this were the case, but she balked at the idea. “He needs me here,” she said. “This would be the worst time for me to leave. The absolute worst time. I couldn’t do that, Winter. Not after everything Albert’s done for me.” She said that, or something approximating those words. Her voice was so terribly thin, so faint and brittle in the static, stretched out across however many thousands of miles it had traveled before reaching me. I felt as though I were speaking to a ghost of Eva. That’s not the clarity of hindsight. I actually did feel that way, while we were speaking, which is one reason I wouldn’t permit my therapist (my ex-therapist, now that we’re estranged) to convince me to lay the blame elsewhere. I clearly heard it that day, the panic in her voice. Hers was such a slow suicide, a woman dying by degrees, and it would be reprehensible of me to pretend that I’m not cognizant of this fact, or that I did not yet have my suspicions that day in April. She said, “After dark, we drive up and down the Coast Highway, back and fucking forth, from Redondo Beach all the way to Santa Barbara or Isla Vista. He drives and talks about Gévaudan. Winter, I’m so sick of that goddamn stretch of road.” I didn’t ask her about Gévaudan, though I googled it when I got home. When we were cut off, Eva was still sobbing, and talking about her nightmares. Had it been a scene in a Hollywood melodrama, I would surely have dropped everything and gone after her. But my life is about as far from Hollywood as it gets. And she was there already.
A few days later, the mail brought an invitation to the opening of The Voyeur of Utter Destruction. One side was a facsimile of a postcard that the man purporting to have murdered Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, sent to journalists and the police in 1947. The original message had been assembled with pasted letters snipped from newspapers, and read “Here is the photo of the werewolf killer’s/I saw him kill her/a friend.” There was an indistinct photo in the lower left-hand corner of the card, which I later learned was of a boy named Armand Robles. He was seventeen years old in 1947, and was never considered a suspect in the Dahlia killing. More mind games. The other side of the postcard had the date and time of the opening, please RSVP, an address for Subliminal Thinkspace Collective, etcetera. And it also had two words printed in red ink, handwritten in Eva’s unmistakable, sloppy cursive: “Please come.” She knew I couldn’t. More than that, she knew I wouldn’t, even if I could have afforded the trip.
Like I said, I googled “Gévaudan.” It’s the name of a former province in the Margeride Mountains of central France. I read its history, going back to Gallic tribes and even Neolithic people, a Roman conquest, its role in medieval politics, and the arrival of the Protestants in the mid-sixteenth century. Dull stuff. But I’m a quick study, and it didn’t take me long to realize that none of these would have been the subject of Perrault’s obsession with the region. No, nothing so mundane as rebellions against the Bishop of Mende or the effects of WWII on the area. However, between the years 1764 and 1767, a “beast” attacked as many as 210 people. Over a hundred of them died. It might have been nothing more than an exceptionally large wolf, but has never been conclusively identified. Many victims were partially eaten. And I will note, the first attack occurred on June 1, 1764. From the start, I saw the significance of this date. After Eva’s call, I could hardly dismiss it as a coincidence. Perrault had knowingly chosen the anniversary of the beginning of the depredations of the infamous Bête du Gévaudan as the opening night of his installation. I spent a couple of hours reading websites and internet forums devoted to the attacks. There’s a lot of talk of witchcraft and shape-shifting, both in documents written during and shortly after the incident and in contemporary books, as well. Turns out, Gévaudan is one of those obscure subjects the crackpots at the fringe keep alive with their lavish conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific, wishful blather. Much the same way, I might add, that the true-crime buffs have kept the unsolved Dahlia case in the public eye for more than half a century. And here, Albert Perrault seemed intent upon forging a marriage of the two, along with his unrelenting fairy-tale preoccupations. I thought about the life casts, and wondered if he’d chosen Eva as his midwife.
I stuck the postcard on the fridge with a magnet, and for a few days I thought too much about Gévaudan, and was surprised by how much I worried about Eva, and how frequently I found myself wishing that she would call again. I sent a couple of emails, but they went unanswered. I even tried to find a contact for Perrault, to no avail. I spoke with a woman at Subliminal Thinkspace Collective, a brusque voice slathered with a heavy Russian accent, and I gave her a message for Eva, to please have her get in touch with me as soon as possible. And then, as April became May, the humdrum, day-to-day gravity of my life reasserted itself. I fretted less about Eva with every passing day, and began to believe that this time she was gone for good. Accepting that a relationship has exceeded its expiration date is much easier when you always knew the expiration date was there, waiting somewhere down the road, always just barely out of sight. I missed her. I won’t pretend that I didn’t. But it wasn’t the blow I’d spent so much of our four years together dreading. It was a sure thing that had finally come to fruition. Mostly, I wondered what I should do with all the junk she’d left behind. Clothing and books, CDs, and a vase from Italy. All the material ephemera she’d left me to watch over in her absence, the curator of the Museum of Her. I decided that I would wait until summer, and if I’d not heard from Eva by then, I would box it all up. I never thought far enough ahead to figure out what I’d do with the boxes afterwards, once they were packed and taped shut. Maybe that was a species of denial. I don’t know. I don’t care.
The first of June came and went without incident, and I heard nothing more from her. I don’t think of myself as a summer person, but, for once, I was glad to have the winter behind me. I welcomed the greening of Boston Common, the flowers and the ducks and the picnicking couples. I even welcomed the heat, though my apartment has no AC. I welcomed the long days and the short nights. I’d begun to settle into a new routine, and it seemed I might be discovering an equilibrium, even peace, when I got the letter from Eva’s sister in Connecticut. I sat on the bed, and I read the single page several times over, waiting for the words to seem like more than ink on paper. She apologized for not having written sooner, but my address had only turned up the week after Eva’s funeral. She’d OD’d on a nortriptyline prescription, though it was unclear whether or not the overdose had been intentional. The coroner, who I suspect was either kindly or mistaken, had ruled the death accidental. I would have argued otherwise, only there was no one for me to have the argument with. “I know you were close,” her sister wrote. “I know that the two of you were very good friends.” I put the letter in a drawer somewhere, and I took the postcard off the refrigerator and threw it away. Before I sat down to write this out, I promised myself I’d not dwell on this part of the story. On her death, or on my reaction to it. That’s a promise I mean to keep. I will only say that my mourning in no way diminished the anger and bitterness that Eva’s inconstancies had planted and then nourished. I didn’t write back to her sister. It seemed neither necessary nor appropriate.
And now it is a cold day in late January, and soon it will have been a year since the last time I made love to Eva. The snow’s returned, and the radiator is in no better shape than it was this time last year. A
ll things considered, I think I was doing a pretty good job of moving on, until a shipment of Perrault’s book arrived at the shop where I (still) work. It came in on one of my days off, and was already shelved and fronted, right up front, the first time I set eyes on it. The dust jacket was a garish shade of red. Later, I would realize it was almost the same shade of crimson as the girl’s cap in Fecunda ratis. I didn’t open it in the store, but bought a copy with my employee discount (which made the purchase only slightly less extravagant). I didn’t open it until I was home and had checked twice to be sure the door was locked. And then I poured myself a glass of scotch, and sat down on the floor between the coffee table and the sofa, and scrounged up the courage to look inside. The book is titled simply Werewolf Smile, and opens with an epigraph and several pages of introduction by a Berkeley professor of modern art (there is also an afterword by a professor of Jungian and Imaginal Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute). I saw almost immediately that Perrault had dedicated the book to “Eva, my lost little red cap.” Reading that, I felt a cold, hard knot forming deep in my belly, the knot that would soon become nausea as I turned the pages, one after one, staring at those slick full-color photographs, this permanent record of the depravity that Albert Perrault was peddling as inspiration and genius. I will not shy away from calling it pornography, but a pornography not necessarily, or exclusively, of sex, but one effusively devoted to the violation of anatomy, both human and animal. And the freeze-frame violence depicted there was not content with the canvas offered by only three dimensions, no, but also warped time, bending the ambiguities of history to Perrault’s purposes. History and legend, myth and the Grand Guignol of les contes de fées.
I should—though I can’t say why—include that epigraph, which sets the book in motion. It was written by a Boston poet I’d never heard of, but since there are many Boston poets I’ve never heard of, that means next to nothing, doesn’t it? I live here, and work in a bookstore, but that hardly seems to matter. It’s no protection against ignorance. The text of the epigraph appears first in Latin, and is then translated into English. It is titled “The Magdalene of Gévaudan”:
Mater luporum, mater moeniorum, stella montana, ora pro nobis. Virgo arborum, virgo vastitatis, umbra corniculans, ora pro nobis. Regina mutatum, regina siderum, ficus aeterna, ora pro nobis. Domina omnium nocte dieque errantium, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, ora pro nobis.
Mother of wolves, mother of walls, star of the mountains, pray for us. Virgin of trees, virgin of desert, horned moon’s shadow, pray for us. Queen of changes, queen of constellations, eternal fig-tree, pray for us. Mistress of all who by night and day wander, now and at the hour of our death, pray for us.
It doesn’t actually feel like a poem. It feels like an invocation. Like something from Aleister Crowley.
I am becoming lost in these sentences, in my attempt to convey in mere words what Perrault wrought in paint and plaster, with wire and fur and bone. The weight and impotence of my own narrative becomes painfully acute. Somehow, I’ve already said too much, and yet know that I will never be able to accurately, or even adequately, convey my reaction to the images enshrined and celebrated in Perrault’s filthy book.
I am a fool to even try.
I am a fool.
I am.
He festooned the gallery’s walls with black-and-white photos of Elizabeth Short’s corpse, those taken where she was found in the weedy, vacant lot at Thirty-ninth and Norton in Leimert Park and a few more from the morgue. These photographs were so enlarged that a great deal of their resolution was lost. Many details of the corpse’s mutilation vanished in the grain. There was also a movie poster from George Marshall’s 1946 film noir, The Blue Dahlia, written by Raymond Chandler, which may (or may not) have served as the inspiration for Short’s sobriquet. Hung at irregular intervals throughout the gallery, from invisible wires affixed to the ceiling, were blowups that Perrault had made of newspaper accounts of the murder, and there were the various postcards and letters taunting the LAPD, like the one that had been used for my invitation to the installation’s opening.