“Come in, please. I’ve been expecting you for some time now.”
Oh, I bet she had.
Chapter 44
ABOVE HER WRITING desk, framed and written out in fine calligraphy, was a peculiar quotation that I remember for its apt strangeness. There was much to see in the huge studio loft of Alura Straczynski, fine paintings on the walls, photographs, colorful scarves tacked to the plaster as if billowing in the wind. There was a couch and a chair and a huge four-poster bed that sat in the center as if an altar to some great pagan entity. The ceiling was open and rough, with a web of pipes and wires over the beams and large gas heaters yawning down. The floor was apparently the same wide and scarred old wood that had been there when the building had been raised a century before. A scent of musk and flowers and exotic incense permeated the space, a scent that was both warm and intensely feminine. And there were the books, journals in all shapes and sizes, arranged neatly in a great mahogany bookcase standing up by the desk. They sat on their shelves like the collected ledgers of a venerable corporation, so many of them that it almost seemed the purpose of that space was to create and to house and to protect them. But it was the quotation that struck me most forcibly, a quotation from a man with whom I often could identify, another urban Jew suffering an intense bout of dislocation, Franz Kafka:
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
And now, here I was.
Alura Straczynski, lover of Tommy Greeley and subject of his most ardent photographs, stood pensively by the door as I examined her loft. She wore a lose peasant shirt unbuttoned at the top, a long gauzy skirt, her hands were clasped one in the other, her arms held before her like a V. There was something of a dancer’s grace in the way she held herself back, tensed with anticipation. I couldn’t help but examine her closely, more closely than I ever had before, trying to see in her something of the woman in the photographs. Her thin arms, the long legs I could glimpse beneath her diaphanous skirt.
She caught me staring and smiled and there was something about the smile I didn’t like.
I turned away and examined again the large open space. There was a small kitchenette in one corner, a door leading to a bathroom in another, and by the window stood the tall writing desk with the framed quotation above it. No chair or stool squatted before it, just the desk, its upper surface about chest high and tilted slightly back, a heavy journal open atop it, a fountain pen and a pair of glasses resting atop the journal.
I noticed a framed photograph on the wall near the desk that looked familiar. I stepped toward it. A young Alura Straczynski, taken from the neck up, her shoulders bare, her head held at a dramatic angle. Where had I seen this photograph before? Yes, in the Mayan slate frame in Jackson Straczynski’s office. But there was something else that tolled familiar in the shot. The texture of her skin, the blank backdrop, the angle of the capture, the way the camera seemed to caress her features. I hadn’t noticed it when I had spotted it before but now it seemed obvious.
“Tommy Greeley took this,” I said.
“Why do you think so?”
“I’ve seen other examples of his work.”
“Have you indeed?” That damn smile again, as if she knew exactly what I had pinned to my bedroom wall.
“What is this?” I said, looking around.
“This is my studio.”
“And what do you do here?”
“Whatever I choose,” she said. “This is my sacred place. Sometimes I dance naked. Sometimes I paint.”
“Naked?” I said, staring once again at her. Her smile seemed strangely knowing.
“If I choose,” she said. “But most importantly, I write. My journals. Recording my life with complete honesty is what I consider my most important work.”
“Life into art.”
“Yes, like we talked about. But it is more than just the glistening surface, Victor, though I want the surface to glisten. No, I have to admit to a grander ambition. I want to travel deeper, into the murky realms that have always seemed to defy exploration, into the very heart of what it means to be a woman. Some spend years in analysis to peer there. I have spent a lifetime with my journals, recording and rerecording, sifting, analyzing, distilling. Searching for that one unmentionable truth at the very bottom.”
“The last thing,” I said.
“If that’s how you want to put it. And my studio is the tool I use to get there, so to speak. The ax for the frozen sea within. I sit here and the world comes to me, just as you have, dear Victor, and whatever happens in this loft is my raw material.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Come over here and I’ll show you,” she said.
She moved toward the tall writing desk, almost glided there, and I followed, as if impelled by some unknown spell. She put on her glasses, took up the pen, a fine fountain pen with a golden nib.
“Stand closer,” she said, and I did, until I could feel the heat off her shoulders, smell the fresh scent of her dark hair. Standing beside her as I was, I could lean forward and peer over her shoulder onto the pages of the journal. She dashed the pen in the air twice, put the date and time into the journal, and began to write in a careful and lovely script.
Victor Carl has come to visit. He is wearing his suit, his hideous red tie,
“Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong with my tie.”
“Shhhh,” she said. “Just read.”
his thick black shoes. They are the shoes of a schoolmaster, or a parish priest, that is why I like them. They fit him so welclass="underline" sturdy, earnest, plain, a little grubby. His shoes, in fact, are a main component of his charm. He seems angry that I have been holding back secrets. But of course I have been holding back secrets. What is a secret if not something wonderfully dreadful that is held back? But he has secrets too, this Victor Carl. He looks at me as if he is unable to force himself to look away. He looks at me, as if he were looking through me, or at least through the surface of me. Is he trying to see my soul, or something less metaphysical? The way he stares at me has created an electric tension that I find delicious. Is that what this is all about, our need for others in our lives, not for comfort but for the tension in the real that mirrors our own inner conflicts?
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I am writing as truthfully as I can,” she said. “I seem always to be more honest on the page than I ever can be with the spoken word. The barriers are lowered when I write. You want the honest truth, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then read,” she said.
He asks what am I doing. I am transferring the moment into something concrete. Like a photograph captures light, I am capturing all the flitting moths that normally pass through our brains and disappear into the smoke of the past, all the sensations, emotions, ideas. Here, in my words, they are caught, mounted on the pages as if with pins through their wings. Later I will elucidate what I have written, revise, analyze, relive again what is happening here and now, the familiar and yet unique frisson when two separate individuals first start rubbing up against each other.
“This is too weird,” I said.
“This is too weird,” he says. It makes him uncomfortable to look into the mind of another so closely. I don’t blame him. It is uncomfortable for me to see my own thoughts and emotions, my own pallid yet unquenched desires, my own mortal failings lying naked on the page. For him it must be some exquisite torture. But it is having another effect too. I feel him over my shoulder. First he looks at the page, then at the nape of my neck.