Very Old Bones Read online

  It was at this point, while pacing the room and considering how to value my chaos on paper, that I went downstairs to the mailbox and found Giselle’s letter. It was brief: “Dearest Orson, I’m arriving at Idlewild Tuesday at 3 p.m. on Air France. Please meet me with love. Life magazine wants me to work for them. Thrilling?”

  The letter was six days in arriving, and so I had only one day to make the apartment livable. My stomach was suddenly full of acid, my head ached, I was weary to the point of collapse, and relentlessly sleepy.

  I began moving things, carrying a three-foot standing file of Peter’s finished and unfinished canvases out of my bedroom and into his studio, which may once have been a living room. Tubes of paint, boxes of tubes, jars of old brushes, boxes of jars, table sculptures, easels, palettes, rolls of canvas, and half-made frames had also spilled into my room from the studio. Whatever the artist used or created eventually found its way into every corner and closet, onto every table and shelf in the four-room apartment. He threw away nothing.

  I swept the floor, washed dirty dishes, hid dirty laundry, stacked my scatter of books and manuscripts, made up the sofa bed on which I slept and which I would give to Giselle for sleeping. I would sleep on the floor, use the throw rug and two blankets as a mattress, it’ll be fine; and Giselle and I would reconsummate our marriage on the sofa bed, wide enough for one-on-one, wide enough for love. We’d often done it in more cramped accommodations.

  “What the hell happened here?” Peter asked when he entered the apartment, finding his studio devoid of disorder and dustballs, his own bed in the corner of the studio made with fresh pillowcase, clean sheet turned down with precision, blanket tucked army style.

  “My wife is coming home,” I said.

  “Home? You call this home?”

  “What else would I call it?”

  “Anything but home.”

  “It’s not your home?”

  “Colonie Street is my home. This is my studio.”

  “Your studio is my home. I have no other.”

  “But it’s not your wife’s home.”

  “Home is where I hang my hat and my wife,” I said.

  “That remains to be seen,” Peter said. “You know she can’t live here.”

  “Why not? There’s plenty of room.”

  “There isn’t even any room for mice.”

  “Are you saying she can’t come here?”

  “No, I’m telling you it won’t work. She wouldn’t stay here with me hanging around the place all day long. Don’t you know anything about women?”

  “I like to think I’m an expert on the subject.”

  “I once thought I knew all about the art world, but I didn’t know my ass from third base, as your Uncle Francis used to tell me as often as possible.”

  “My Uncle Francis?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  “Is he really my uncle?”

  “He said I was born innocent and would grow old that way. I believed him for years, but I’ve outgrown his prophecy. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve passed my old condition on to you.”

  I looked at Peter and saw myself as I might be in thirty-seven years, when I too would be sixty-six. It could be worse. I knew men of fifty-five who seemed decrepit, ready to roll obligingly down that beckoning slope. Peter was still a vigorous figure, grizzled of mien, with his voluminous gray mustache all but minimalizing the crop of gray hair that sat in wavy rumples behind his half-naked forehead; robust of torso, a man who professed no interest in clothing, but who in public wore the uniform of creaseless trousers, formless coats, always with leather elbows (where did he find them?), each coat a perfect fit; an open-collared shirt to which he added a neck scarf for dress occasions; the jaunty fedora which, no matter how many times it wore out from fingering and grease, was always replaceable by a twin from the new age; and two pairs of shoes, one for work, one for walking through the world, the latter less speckled with the artist’s paint. In short, the man presented himself as a visual work of art: casual self-portrait achieved without paint or brush.

  “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 don
e 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.