Very Old Bones (19 page)

“She might not stay, but I want to bring her here.”

“Bring her, bring her,” Peter said. “I’d like to see the look of anybody who’d marry you.”

Peter smiled. I examined the smile to evaluate its meaning. Was it a real smile? It looked like a real smile. I decided to return it with a smile of my own.

Son?

Dad?

The bright light of the day had cheered me all the way to Idlewild Airport, spring only a day old but the brilliant white clouds racing ahead of my step, even so. I felt the
fire of the equinox in my chest, a sign of certainty: Orson Purcell, no longer an equivocator. I saw Giselle coming toward me from a distance, hatless in her beige suit, frilly white blouse, and
high heels designed in heaven, and I quick-stepped toward her, stopped her with an embrace, kissed her with my deprived mouth that was suddenly and ecstatically open and wet. Even when I broke from
her I said nothing, only studied all that I had missed for so long, reinventing for future memory her yellow hair, the throne of her eyes, the grand verve of her mouth and smile; and I felt the
fire broiling my heart with love and love and love. Love is the goddamnedest thing, isn’t it? The oil of all human machinery. And I owned an oil well, didn’t I? Separation would be
bearable if it always ended with rapture of this order.

I retrieved her one suitcase (the rest of her baggage would arrive later) while she went to the ladies’ room; then we quickly reunited and resumed our exotic obeisance to unspoken love. So
much to say, no need to say it. In the taxi I stopped staring at her only long enough to kiss her, and then I realized she was naked beneath her skirt, which buttoned down the front. I stared at
the gap between two buttons that offered me a fragmented vision of her not-very-secret hair, reached over and undid the button that allowed expanded vision, and I put my hand on her.

“Did you travel from Europe this way?”

“Only from the ladies’ room.” She kissed me and whispered into my ear: “I’ve been with you for twenty minutes. When are you going to fuck me?”

I immediately undid more of her buttons and parted her skirt to each side: curtain going up at the majestic theater of lust. I loosened my own clothing, shifted and slid her lengthwise on the
seat and maneuvered myself between her open and upraised legs. The cab driver screeched his brakes, pulled off into the breakdown lane of Grand Central Parkway.

“That’s enough of that,” the driver said. “You wanna behave like a couple of dogs, get out on the highway and do it, but not in my cab.”

I saw a crucified Jesus dangling from the driver’s rearview mirror, and a statue of the virgin glued to the top of the dashboard. The first time in my life I try to make love in a taxi,
and the driver turns out to be a secret agent for the pope.

“This is my wife,” I said. “I haven’t seen her in six months. It’s her first time in this country.”

“I don’t care if she’s your long-lost mother. Not in my cab.”

Giselle was sitting up, buttoning up, and I tucked in my shirt. The driver pulled back onto the parkway and turned on the radio. Bing Crosby came through singing “Bewitched, Bothered and
Bewildered.”

“I’m overcome by irony and chagrin,” I told the driver. “If I were you, I wouldn’t expect a big tip.”

“Just what’s on the meter, buddy. I don’t take tips from creeps like you.”

Condemned by taxi drivers. A new low in moral history. I took Giselle’s hand in mine and put them both between the opening in her skirt, then covered her lap with my topcoat.
Clandestinely, I found the passage to the Indies, stroked it as passionately as a digit would allow, and made my wife sigh with some pleasure. Life has never been easy for immigrants.

I directed the cab to my father’s apartment, and Giselle was barely inside when she told Peter Phelan, “I must photograph you.”

“What for?” asked Peter.

“Because you cry out to be photographed. Has anybody ever done a portrait of you in this studio?”

“Never.”

“I’m surprised.”

“You’re naïve. I’m not important enough to be photographed.”

“I disagree,” said Giselle. “I love the paintings of yours I’ve seen. I like them better than some of Matisse. I took photos of him a month ago in Paris. He was a
charmer.”

“Orson,” said Peter, “I know why you like this girl. Her lies are as beautiful as she is. How did you convince her to marry you?”

“He didn’t convince me,” Giselle said. “He
wooed
me, and carried me away to Never-Never Land.”

“You still hang out there?” Peter asked.

Giselle looked at me. “I don’t know, do we? Don’t answer that.”

“Why not answer?” Peter asked.

“I want to talk about Matisse,” Giselle said. She opened her camera bag, took out her Rolleiflex, and looped its strap around her neck.

“I’m struck that you know Matisse,” Peter said.

“When I went to see him he was in his pajamas. I fell in love with his beard.”

“He says light is the future of all art,” Peter said. “I thought that was pretty obvious, but he must understand darkness in some new way or he wouldn’t think that was an
original idea.”

“The only thing I understand is photographic light. I once heard a lecturer say that without light there is no photography. How’s that for obvious?”

“I avoid lectures on art,” Peter said. “It’s like trying to ice-skate in warm mud.”

“Orson,” Giselle said, “I’m falling in love with your father.”

“Gee,” I said, “that’s swell.”

Peter leaned on the table and stared at Giselle. She focused her camera, snapped his picture.

“Orson,” she said, “stand alongside your father.”

“Father in a manner of speaking,” I said.

“However,” said Giselle. “Just move in closer.”

I so moved, and there then came into being the first photograph ever taken of Peter Phelan and Orson Purcell together. In the photo, it was later said by some who saw it, the two men bear a
family resemblance, though Peter’s mustache destroys any possibility of establishing a definitive visual link. My full head of dark brown hair has a torsion comparable to Peter’s, and
our eyes both shine with the dark brown pupils of the Phelan line. By our clothing we separate themselves: Peter, in his bohemian uniform, I a spruced dude in double-breasted, gold-buttoned black
blazer, gray slacks (retrieved that morning from the cleaners) with razor-edge creases, black wingtips burnished bright, black-and-white-striped shirt with winedark four-in-hand perfectly knotted,
and red-and-black silk handkerchief roiled to a perfect breast-pocket flourish as the finishing touch.

I had not groomed myself so well since I’d arrived in New York as a basket case. This was a gift to Giselle: a vision of myself in meticulous sartorial health: no longer the manic,
self-biting spiritual minister to the rabble; now Orson Purcell, a man in command of his moves, a surefooted, impeccable presence ready to enter, at a highly civilized level, the great American
future, with his beautiful wife beside him.

It had been my plan to use the one hundred dollars my mother gave me to pay for a weekend at the Biltmore with Giselle, maybe even ask for the room where Zelda and Scott
Fitzgerald had spent their honeymoon. This was a harebrained idea, but I thought the ambience of that outlandish marriage might serve as a psychic prod to our own marital adventure, which seemed as
blasted from the outset as the Fitzgeralds’ most vulnerable union.

I broached the matter in the taxi back from the airport, but Giselle had scant memory of Scott or Zelda (though I had lectured her on both).

“Anyway,” Giselle said, “we already have an apartment on the West Side. Twelfth floor, three bedrooms, view of the river. A
Life
editor I met in Paris offered it to us.
He was doing a story on Matisse the same week I was there to photograph him. You know I knew Matisse when I was little, did I ever tell you that?”

“No,” I said. “Lots of things you’ve never told me.”

“The editor’s in Japan for two months,” Giselle said. “We can have his place for the whole time, if we want it.”

Giselle’s steamer trunk had arrived ahead of us, and was already inside the apartment. I wanted only to make love to her, immediately and fiercely, but she flew into instant ecstasy at
seeing the place, which was a triumph of modern decor, full of paintings, photos, books, mirrors, bizarre masks, pipes, stuffed birds, shards and estrays from around the world, the collections of a
cultured traveler, Picasso on one wall, a sketch by Goya on another.

“It’s such a stroke of luck he and I were both in Paris at the same time,” Giselle said.

“You’re good friends, then,” I said.

“Well, we’re friends.”

“He’s most generous to you.”

“He’s like that.”

“Are you lovers?”

“Orson, please.”

She opened the steamer trunk and rummaged in it for a folder with several dozen photographs. She stood them on end, one by one, on the sofa and on chairs, laid them on the dining-room table for
viewing.

“This is why they want me to work for
Life
,” she said.

I looked through the photos Giselle had not put on exhibit and found more quality work; also two portraits of one Daniel Quinn, in uniform sitting on a pile of rubble, somewhere in Germany, and
in mufti at a sidewalk café, somewhere in Paris? I then looked carefully at each of the photos Giselle had put on display, a photo of my sugar whore fellating the handless man; a photo of me
biting myself; a group portrait of the rabble in the Garden of Eden; a photo of a smiling Henri Matisse in pajamas on his sofa, and on the wall above the sofa a painting of a cross-legged nude
woman; industrial images—great gears and machines of unfathomable size and function in a German factory; a barge on a German river with a deckhand waving his hat and pissing toward the sky; a
woman sitting in a
Bierstube
perhaps exposing herself to two American soldiers; two seated women in their seventies, elegantly garbed, aged beauties both, in tears.

“I can’t imagine
Life
running most of these pictures,” I said.

“What they like is that I seem to be present when strange things happen. Keep looking.” She stood beside me as I looked.

A farmer was plowing his field behind an ox that had been branded with a swastika.

“When
Stars and Stripes
printed this one,” Giselle said, “somebody went out to the farmer’s place and killed the ox.”

To my eye the photos all had quality. The woman had talent for capturing essential instants, for finding the precise moment when the light and the angle of vision allow an act or an object most
fully to reveal its meaning or its essence. These pictures set themselves apart from routine photojournalism. Giselle, six months ago an amateur, was suddenly light-years ahead of so many of her
peers. Obviously she had a future in photography. Her beauty would open every door of all those male bastions, and this artistic eye, perhaps developed in childhood in her mother’s art
gallery, would carry her forward from there.

“This looks familiar,” I said, and I picked up a photo whose locale I recognized: the stage of the Folies Bergère. A dozen near-naked chorus girls and the beautiful Folies
star, Yvonne Menard, were in seeming full-throated song, all watching, at center stage, an American-army corporal kneeling in front of a statuesque beauty in pasties and G-string, the corporal
wearing a handlebar mustache for the occasion, his face only inches from the dancer’s crotch.

“It looks sillier than I imagined,” I said.

“It is quite humiliating,” Giselle said.

“How did you arrange it? They never allow photos during the show.”

“I told them I was on assignment for
Life
, and they let me do anything I wanted. I did get others but this is all I really was after.”

On our first trip to Paris, before we married, I took Giselle to the Folies and, because I was in uniform, an easy object of derision, I was dragooned from the audience onto the stage by the
beautiful Yvonne, put in the same situation as this kneeling corporal, then pulled to my feet, drawn to the abundant bosom of the dancer who had stuck the mustache on my lip, twirled about to a few
bars of music, and then abandoned as the stage went black and the dancers ran into the wings. Like a blind man, I felt with my foot for the edge of the stage (a six- or eight-foot drop if I missed
my footing), found the edge, sat on it with legs dangling, and slid sideways toward the stairs that led to the audience level. I was still sliding when the lights went up and I was discovered in
yet another ridiculous position. I scrambled down the stairs and back to Giselle, who was so amused by it all that she kissed me.

“You were very funny,” she had said then. “It was just as funny when I took this picture,” she said now. “The poor boy didn’t even know he was being
humiliated. Neither did you, did you, my love?”

“If you have a mustache to put on me, I’ll be delighted to be
your
fool and give a repeat performance,” I said. “I’ll even do it without the mustache.
I’ll even do it in public.”

I embraced her and undid her blouse and knew that she and I would separate, that something fundamental had gone awry and very probably could not be fixed. With her every breath she revealed not
only her restlessness but her faithlessness. I saw in her that surge of youth and beauty that was so in love with itself and its imagined possibilities (they must surely be infinite in her
imagination now) that even the fetters of marriage were not only ineffectual, they were invisible to the logic of her private mystique.

Standing before me in her uniform of love, she was voluptuosity itself: books could be written about the significance of Giselle in her garments, and how, together, she and they communicated
their meaning. The word “noble” came to mind. What could that possibly mean? I backed away and studied her.

“Do you think we married too soon?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” she said.

“You seem so certain.”

“I never make a wrong decision on things like that.”

“Are there any other things like that?”