Mount Terminus (28 page)

You weren't the obstacle.

I know, said Bloom. Nevertheless …

Yes, said Simon. Nevertheless, I should have spoken with you first. I should have thought more of you.

I would have done everything in my power to help. I would have done what I could to influence Mr. Stern to help you. The money, said Bloom, I don't care about the money. All you needed to do was ask for it, and it would have been yours.

Simon returned to nodding and tapping. He was unable to look at Bloom. I'm sorry, he said as he stood up and walked away. At the threshold of the parlor door, he stopped, and said, I truly am sorry.

Wait, said Bloom.

What is it?

Promise me something before you go?

Yes.

Promise me no harm will come to Mr. Stern.

No, no harm will come to Mr. Stern. He's done what I've asked of him. There's no reason for it. Simon now walked off in the direction of the front door. Bloom considered going after him. He stood up, and when he was about to start out, Gus stepped into the parlor and told Bloom to leave him be. Let him live with his shame for a while. It'll do him some good.

There's no need for him to suffer, said Bloom.

Yeah, said Gus, yeah, there is.

*   *   *

If living with his shame did Simon any good or harm, Bloom wouldn't know about it for quite a while. Simon ceased his visits to the estate for the time being, and from what he had heard from Gottlieb, he was keeping himself busy making frequent journeys to the offices of the water authority, to his various construction sites. Besides, from Gottlieb's perspective they had more serious concerns than Simon. Not long after Simon made his somber departure from the villa, Gottlieb barged into Bloom's studio carrying an enormous canvas sack on his back, proclaiming, I have paused! I have thought! I have reached my conclusion! He dropped the bag on the studio floor and announced, Love! An intimate knowledge of love!
Death, Forlorn
would be significantly longer than
Mephisto's Affinity
, he said, and Gottlieb insisted
love
was the key to bringing the story to life.

Love? said Bloom.

Love! cried Gottlieb. For this picture, you must begin to understand what it is to be in love. Truly in love. Deeply in love. Blinded by love. If the creator of this sort of picture hasn't been undone by the visceral upheaval only a tormented heart can provide, it will be nothing more than a hollow fantasy. And what do
you
know of such a love? Gottlieb scoffed.

To this, Bloom could only say he had witnessed the aftermath of this kind of love. Lived in its shadows. If he had his way, he told Gottlieb, he would rather not love if what he observed in his father was the result of abiding love and devotion.

Nonsense! Gottlieb shouted. You would feel blessed if you were ever lucky enough to be cursed by such love!… No. We must find you a woman you can sink your teeth into. Isn't there anyone on the lot who moves you?

No, said Bloom. The only women he had known well were Hannah Edelstein and Constance Grey, and Hannah, he was certain, had no romantic feelings for men whatsoever, and Constance was twenty years his senior. He had loved Roya for a long, long while, but when he considered the kind of love Gottlieb spoke of, their love wasn't that. Their love was unconditional and unspoken, secret, familial. It was a love he relied on to sustain his spirit and his art. It was the love of a muse, not a love through which his body would be overcome by passion or heartache, jealousy or rapture. It wasn't the type of love that had the potential to tear him asunder. He knew nothing about that kind of love. That category of infectious love he had distrusted and avoided for good reason.

Well, said Gottlieb, the hunt is on! He kicked the bag at his feet. Bloom asked what was inside. Letters, said Gottlieb. From
admirers
.
Your
admirers. Readers of that
yenta
column your pimp brother put you in.

I don't understand. What am I to do with them?

Find a goddamned woman, of course.

Like this?

Why not? Can you think of any better way? You go nowhere. You see no one.

I know. It's just … I wouldn't know how to begin.

For
chrissake
! Get up! Pick it up! Give it here! Bloom lifted himself up from his collection of stones, from Death's fortress, lifted the heavy bag from the floor, and handed it back to Gottlieb. Come along! Gottlieb marched down into the courtyard and made his way to the kitchen, where he dropped it between Meralda and Gus, who were sitting at the table, drinking tea and playing cards. Gottlieb said to them, Find this virgin Apollo a woman and turn him into a Dionysus.

Mr. Gottlieb? said Meralda.

It's time he knew the true purpose of his heart. And here, said Gottlieb as he turned to Bloom. He removed an envelope from his jacket pocket and pressed it into Bloom's hand. From your brother.

From Simon?

Who else? Remember this well.
This
, Rosenbloom,
this
is why for men like us we enjoy the work when we make it, and abandon it to the dustbin of history after the fact. The
work
! The
work
is essential! Whatever comes of it is ephemeral, momentary, a flicker on a screen,
no more
! he said as he made his exit.

As Bloom made
his
exit and walked back to the studio, he opened the envelope, thinking perhaps his brother had written some further explanation or apology, but the letter Gottlieb had pressed into Bloom's hand was from Georges Méliès, the magician whose inimitable pictures Bloom so admired that afternoon his brother took him up in the balloon. Méliès had addressed the letter to Simon, thanking his old protégé for having sent the print of
Mephisto's Affinity
to him. He was pleased to see his efforts had not been entirely wasted on Simon, that here, finally, was a picture he had produced worthy of his admiration. Mr. Méliès was pained to report that his production company had failed and that he had been insolvent for some time. Bankrupted beyond bankrupt. To feed and clothe himself, to pay his creditors, he had been forced to cede all the film in his archives to the courts. He believed one day it would be returned to him, but now, with his country preparing for war, someone in some ministry, some pecuniary functionary, had decided the film stock should be scrapped and melted, shaped into heels to be cobbled onto the boots of soldiers.
All has been lost
, he wrote.
Nearly every trace of me, of our work together, will soon be marching into oblivion.
Only children appreciated magic these days, he contended. And so he had taken to making toys for them. Stuffed into the corner of the envelope, Bloom discovered a tiny metallic moon whose face spun about on a spool when its string was pulled.

*   *   *

Bloom was informed by Meralda that he had received many letters from many young women expressing in refined penmanship a keen interest in making his acquaintance. She was in agreement with Gottlieb, as was Gus. It
was
time Bloom began a proper courtship. It is what your father would have wanted, she said to him when serving him one evening. And so she took it upon herself to respond to his letters and make invitations. For a period of a month—while Bloom continued cementing his rocks into the shape of the fortress—the young Rosenbloom dressed for dinner and sat in the dining room across from young women whose appearance and manners were as fine as the lines of their handwriting, and with each passing meal Bloom felt himself growing fat and bored. He thought the dozen women to whom Meralda and Gus had extended invitations priggish and prudish and self-possessed to such an extent they might as well have been dead. Not one appreciated the beauty of his birds or his view of the sea; they didn't enjoy a senseless meandering through the maze of the front gardens; they complained about the steep grade of the trail leading to Mount Terminus's peak; they thought it morbid that he would introduce them to his father's burial site; and they all insisted he walk them down to the lot so they might catch a glimpse of their favorite idols, actors, so many of whom Bloom found dull and uninteresting. And Bloom, who, to one degree or another, had discovered the beauty and life within every life model Gus had delivered to his studio some years earlier, Miss Merriweather included, found it deeply troubling that there existed women into whose eyes he could look and see nothing at all. How, he asked one afternoon while standing at the foot of his father's grave, before the eternal lovers, can I love if I'm not moved to love?

Don't worry, said Gus when Bloom asked him the same question, the quivers hit you when they hit you, and when they do you'll wish you never got struck by the little cherubic bastards.

*   *   *

The outer walls of Death's fortress had been completed, and Bloom had moved on to building the exterior of the cathedral in which Death captured the souls of the dead, when he heard Gottlieb call out from the courtyard, He has come! Rosenbloom! He is here!

Bloom stuck his head out the studio's doorway. Who's come, Mr. Gottlieb?

Dr. Straight. He's come to document your father's collection. Stop what you're doing and come meet him. Bloom put down his tools and met his miniature master and collaborator in the courtyard, followed him into the house and out onto the drive, where Gottlieb, who was in his usual animated state, made the introductions. Upon shaking Dr. Straight's hand, Bloom couldn't help but notice in what ways the man carried himself with a military bearing. He stood well over six feet tall, considerably taller than the taller-than-average Bloom. He possessed a bold nose and a sturdy jaw, wore an imposing mustache. He even had a brawny head, bald and gleaming, as if he applied a polish to it. His eyes looked at everything they beheld with such youthful intensity, they appeared as if they possessed a supernatural ability to see through solid objects. Bloom would have normally felt intimidated by a man of such overt, masculine stature—as he had felt around Gus when meeting him for the first time—but when Dr. Straight reached into the trunk of his automobile and presented to him a large box adorned with diamond inlay, Bloom saw the doctor's robust countenance transform—as if built into the musculature of his face was a childish wonder and topsy-turvy logic—and he understood Dr. Straight wasn't entirely defined by the body that contained him.

Go ahead, he said. The bristles of his mustache spread like the crest of a porcupine over the bridge of his smile. Open it.

Bloom unhooked a gilded latch and lifted the lid to find reflecting back at him his face turned upside down. He was so delighted by this, he shut the box and opened it again to repeat the experience, and upon opening it a second time he could now see there were two mirrors joined at a right angle. From somewhere behind him, he heard the voice of a woman say, Try turning it sideways. Bloom rotated the box and moved it about until he caught within the mirrors' frame a young woman about his age. She had hair as black as the darkness leading to Salazar's chamber and a complexion the color of cinnamon, a rich reddish brown that reminded him of the earth in Woodhaven after the rain had soaked the ground. As she neared, he could discern she stood almost as tall as he. Her shoulders were slim, neither too fragile nor delicate. She wore her hair with a flip at the nape of her neck, and short bangs that framed a face round and full in the cheeks, long and narrow in the chin. The lower half of her face provided an unusual balance to a most prominent nose that was thick along its ridges. In the shadow of this most sturdy feature, her mouth, whose lips spread tenderly when she smiled, appeared affectionate. But countering this warmth were near-translucent eyes, which, in the brightness of the afternoon, picked up the blue hue of the sky. Combined, the rich color of her skin, the pitch of her hair, the pastels of her eyes, made such an arresting image, Bloom felt something of an electric charge surge through him, and without meaning to, he clapped the box shut.

It takes some getting used to. She laughed. It's your true image. Nonreversed.

Bloom reopened the box for a third time, and there within the mirror's frame, he now saw himself looking at an image of himself he hardly recognized. She explained to him that the two mirrors joined at a right angle created the illusion of a single frame. The light hitting you refracts onto the right mirror, which then refracts again onto the left mirror. If you were looking at the right mirror alone, you would see yourself as you would ordinarily, in reverse, but once the light moves from the right mirror to the left mirror, you become reversed once again. There you have your true self.

It's what you and I will see when we turn to face each other, said Bloom.

Precisely, said the woman.

Bloom thought he looked very strange as his true self. To see his hair fall off to the left instead of the right, to find his symmetry reversed in the eyes and the cheeks, the mouth, to see reversed the slight imperfections in his teeth, was all so very disorientating, he averted his eyes to the woman, who he thought much more pleasant in comparison.

I've grown accustomed to it, she said, but I still prefer to see myself in reverse.

Bloom couldn't imagine in what way her beauty would be diminished from any perspective. He now shut the box again and turned to her, and there she was, exactly as she had appeared in the mirror.

I'm Isabella, she said.

I'm Joseph, said Bloom.

They held each other's gaze without speaking, and although he thought he was most certainly deceiving himself, he believed he saw in her expression the same fascination for him as he felt for her. And the mere possibility unnerved him.

 

PART IV

LOVE

 

 

 

Over lunch in the courtyard that afternoon, Bloom learned Dr. Straight was an experimental psychologist whose sense of self-importance was equal to that of Gottlieb's and Simon's, as his humble aim as a practitioner was to find a means to curtail the collective impulse to wage war. He held the belief that civilization's instinct toward violence wasn't teleological in nature. If it were by design, he posited, why then would God provide man a conscience? Why would his creator provide him a moral imperative to nurture and sustain life, then ask him to ignore it? A soldier is trained to kill not by appealing to the best of his humanity, but by systematically stripping his humanity away from him, through a methodical act of reshaping his perception of men outside his tribe as something other than men. He had long ago concluded that if men were given the tools to see from an early age beyond the limits of who and what they were at any given time—if they were given the opportunity to foster within themselves a heightened consciousness, one that raised them closer to the aspirations their creator conceived for them—this broader perception of themselves would prevent such methods from being effective. They would more easily see with what narrow concerns authority was wielded and wars were waged. It is a matter of inhibiting the aggression inherent in men, he said, and replacing it with cold, dispassionate reason. It was his opinion that the most effective means to broaden consciousness and inspire enlightened, rational thought was through the means of visual perception.