Chapter 45 Raining in Surface
Chapter 45 Raining in Surface
Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet
who survives (even if secretly and invisibly) in every human
being as the child survives in him (denied and disguised), to this
poet she threw an unexpected challenge, a ladder in the middle
of the city and ordained: “Climb!”
As she appeared, all orderly alignment of the city gave way
before this ladder one was invited to climb, standing straight in
space like the ladder of Baron Munchhausen which led to the
sky.
Only her ladders led to fire.
Jay laughed and shook his head from side to side at the persistence
of the image he had of Serena. After seven years she still had not
learned to sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with a
feverish breathlessness like one in fear of silence. She sat as if
she could not bear to sit for long and when she rose to buy
cigarettes she was equally eager to return to her seat.
Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked,
restless and keen. She drank hurriedly, she smiled so swiftly
that he was never certain it had been a smile, she listened only
partially to what was being said to her, and even when
someone in the bar leaned over and shouted out her name in
her direction she did not respond at first, as if it were not her
own.
Her way of looking at the door of the bar as if expecting the
proper moment to make her escape, her erratic and sudden
proper moment to make her escape, her erratic and sudden
gestures, her sudden sulky silences. She behaved like someone
who had all the symptoms of guilt.
Above the iridescence of the candles, above the mists of cigarette
smoke and the echoes of the cajoling blues, Serena was aware that
Jay was meditating on her. But it would be too dangerous to
question him; he was a satirist, and all she would obtain from him at
this moment was a caricature which she could not take lightly or
dismiss, and which would, in her present mood, add heavily to the
weights pulling her downward.
Whenever Jay shook his head kindly, with the slow heavy
playfulness of a bear, he was about to say something devastating,
which he called his brutal honesty. And Serena would not challenge
this. So she began a swift, spiraling, circuitous story about a party at
which indistinct incidents had taken place, hazy scenes from which
no one could distinguish the heroine or the victim. By the time Jay
felt he recognized the place (Montparnasse, seven years ago, a
party at which Serena had actually been jealous of the strong bond
between Jay and Lillian which she was seeking to break), Serena
was already gone from there, and talking as in a broken dream, with
spaces, reversals, retractions and galloping fantasies.
She was now in Morocco, visiting the Arabian baths with the
native women, sharing their pumice stone, and learning from
the prostitutes how to paint her eyes with kohl from the market
place.
“It’s coal dust,“explained Serena, “and you place it right inside
of the eyes. It smarts at first, and it makes you cry, but that
spreads it out on the edge of the eyelids and that is how they
get that shiny, coal black rim around the eyes.”
“Didn’t you get an infection?“asked Jay.
“Oh, no, the prostitutes are very careful to have the kohl
blessed at the mosque.”
Everyone laughed at this—Mambo who had been standing near,
Jay, and two indistinct personages who had been sitting at the next
table but who had been sliding their chairs to listen to Serena.
Serena did not laugh; she was invaded by another memory of
Morocco. Jay could see the images passing through her eyes like a
film being censored. He knew she was busy eliminating other stories
she was about to tell; she might even be regretting the story about
the bath, and now it was as if all she had said had been written on a
huge blackboard and she took a sponge and effaced it all by
adding: “Actually, this did not happen to me. It was told to me by
someone who went to Morocco,” and before anyone could ask:
“Do you mean that you never went to Morocco at all” she
continued to confuse the threads by adding that this was a story she
had read somewhere or heard at a bar, and as soon as she had
erased in the minds of her listeners any face which could be directly
attributed to her own responsibility, she began another story…
The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only halfdrawn,
and when Jay had barely begun to reconstruct the missing
fragment (when she told about the man who was polishing his own
telescope glass she did not want to say too much for fear Jay would
recognize Philip whom he had known in Vienna and whom they all
called playfully in Paris: “Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war”), when
Serena would interpose another face and figure as one does in
dreams, and when Jay had laboriously decided she was talking
about Philip (with whom he was sure now she had had an affair), it
turned out that she was no longer talking about a man polishing a
telescope glass with the umbrella hung up in the middle of the room
above his work, but about a woman who continued to play the harp
at a concert in Mexico City during the revolution when someone
had shot at the lights of the concert hall, and she had felt that if she
continued to play she would prevent a panic; and as Jay knew this
story had been told of Lillian, and that it was not as a harpist but as
a pianist that Lillian had continued to play, Serena became aware
that she did not want to remind Jay about Lillian as the memory
would be painful to him, for Serena’s seduction of Jay in Paris had
been in part responsible for Lillian’s desertion of him, and so she
quickly reversed her story, and it was Jay who wondered whether
he was not hearing right, whether perhaps he had been drinking too
much and had imagined she was talking about Lillian, because
actually at this very moment she was talking about a young man, an
aviator, who had been told not to look into the eyes of the dead.