In my house there are love and violence and wonder — full orchestras, huge chandeliers, and champagne. In my house she is always there, next to me.
My mother is in a black cocktail dress and pearls. It must be about 1960. She twists the black phone cord in her hand. She is so beautiful standing there in the hallway, talking in French to the woman across the ocean before she leaves for the party.
He lives in another country but it doesn’t matter, we see each other often — he wants me so much. No matter what the weather, how difficult the trip, the number of stops, the price of the fare, somehow he always gets to me. I know this and so do not worry. For coming such a long way, he is reliable, hardly ever late; pure desire keeps him from harm as he races through the city streets to me, asking directions in broken English if he must.
He glides into the room as if he hears music, Jacques Brel perhaps or Piaf. His black beret, the baguette under his arm, these let me know that tonight the distance he has come from is named France.
He pours two glasses of wine — Beaujolais-Villages. He closes his eyes, breathes me in. I lower my mouth; this wine, this music, this man — it is all perfect. He tears the bread. “Le beurre,” he says, “la confiture.”
We gaze at each other and our hunger grows. Outside it has begun to rain. There is a swell of music. He takes out a package of Gauloises; I recognize the light blue color, the wings on the package. Before he opens them our clothes are off. Our bodies are lovely — all perfect, graceful arcs. We perform our slow sexual ballet flawlessly, mouth to mouth to mouth. Afterwards we smoke a cigarette and it is piano music we hear now, Chopin or Poulenc. In his face I detect some waywardness. The camera that records our every move pulls closer. It means he will die soon. It brings further romance, an urgency to our next embrace when it comes, a meaning to the silence. I close my eyes, naked, twisted in the perfumed sheets. In a few hours he will be returning to a country I cannot really picture at all — mythic, far away, filled with beautiful women, I suppose.
“It’s just like a film,” I whisper: the rain, the wine, the stranger from France. “Le cinéma,” he says. His voice is deep and tragic. “Au revoir, je t’aime,” I say, as he slowly puts on his clothes and I look on, smoking his last cigarette.
“Au revoir,” he sighs. A tear falls from the corner of my eye. Then the final credits.
Sometimes I will notice, while sitting in the kitchen eating lunch, that the trees outside the window are moving, slowly at first and then more and more quickly. By now I recognize this movement — it is a ride I love: the linen; the silver; this most elegant of dining cars; the scent of cologne, of fresh flowers; the clinking of fine china, of crystal; the pale rose in the pewter vase; chicken in wine with mushrooms; the French countryside.
“You must watch for small bones,” the handsome waiter whispers in my ear, and I can feel his whisper lingering somewhere near my throat as he pours me a glass of champagne.
“Champagne in the afternoon makes me dizzy,” I smile. A few tables over, two women in hats begin to blur. “Meet me in the back car in five minutes,” he says, his body covering mine in shadow.
“Vanessa,” my brother shouts, finishing his lunch next to me. “Vanessa.” The man in white in the back car lights a cigarette from the blue-winged package. “Vanessa, come back,” Fletcher says.
Yes, it is probably best — leave him there for a while, smiling, loosening his tie in the last car.
“Are you dreaming again?”
I watch the landscape slow down outside the window, then stop.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Are you dreaming again?” Fletcher says.
“Do you think Mom will ever take me to France with her?” I ask Fletcher, who smiles, happy to be able to answer anything for anyone.
“Yes, I do,” he says. “Sure. Why not?”
My father walks into the kitchen carrying an empty soup bowl.
“Do you think Mom will ever take me to France with her, Dad?” I ask.
He runs his hand along a copper pot that glints in the half-light.
“Oh, probably,” he says finally. “Someday,” he sighs.
My father is far away. His silence is so deep and seductive that it seems he has had to travel a great distance to the surface to form even these few words. He does not buoy up to the surface like a swimmer or some other temporary guest of water. His life is down there — in deep blue, in gray, in green, in tangled plants, in dim light.
Still, I would like to rescue him. I put on a black bathing suit. A silver whistle hangs around my neck. My eyes are clear and focused, my body is muscled, much stronger than my ordinary body, set for the task.
I would like to dredge him up from those depths, breathe my life into him, beach him on some even shore. I dive once, twice, hold his head in the air, push water from his lungs.
He turns on the faucet and submerges his soup bowl in warm water. “How about a movie?” he asks in his dreamy, underwater way. He is back in the air again. I have succeeded in some small way, I think.
“Sure,” my brother and I say in unison. “What movie?” My father shrugs. “Whatever you like,” he smiles.
Father’s love of the movies always reassured us; it made him seem like other fathers to us.
“Oh, any movie will do,” he says gently, helping us on with our coats. But I wondered a little, as we drove into the afternoon without any idea of where we were going or what time it was, whether even the movies meant something different to Father than they did to us.
Grace Kelly turns to say good night to Gary Grant at her hotel room. A faint smile drifts across her face and she slides her pale arms around his neck.
My father gasps in the front row and sinks into his plush, red seat in the tiny theater at the edge of campus in Princeton, New Jersey. He looks through his fingers as she presses her mouth to his.
I imagine my father spent many afternoons peering through his fingers, marveling at the great and not so great movies of the 1950s in that dingy theater with its lobby of fake ferns, its big old stage, its touches of gold and brocade. Bits of plaster and paint would fall into his dark hair from the ceiling, and, looking up, he would see on either side of the stage an artist’s version of royal boxes, made from plasterboard, red painted curtains pulled back to reveal an attentive king and queen.
“What a dive, Louie,” my father must have said affectionately to the apathetic owner, wiping what he imagined was the dust of centuries from Louie’s bald head, pulling candy wrappers and gum from the bottoms of his own shoes. “What a dive.”
Dive or not, my father never missed a movie and indeed saw most of them at least twice. I can imagine him sitting alone in the front row, devouring popcorn and waiting for the masks, one of tragedy and one of comedy, pinned to the musty velvet curtain, to part and the screen to light up. In that final second before the first reel began, he must have felt a small thrill in the pitch black, his whole body weightless with anticipation. There were newsreels then, and before To Catch a Thief or The Country Curl he could watch his lovely Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in real life, on the arm of Clark Gable or Oleg Cassini. “Oleg,” he thought, chuckling to himself, “what a great name.” He watched as she took the arm of Prince Rainier III of Monaco. My father witnessed it all. He saw Rainier visit Grace’s home. He saw the Kelly family, blond and athletic, smiling and waving for the camera, Grace off to one side, unlike them, distant and mysterious. He watched as tons of flowers rained down on her from Aristotle Onassis’s private plane as she stepped from an ocean liner onto Rainier’s yacht.