Dearest Moonflake,
I write you from the dregs of my father’s teapot. We live together in an armed camp, tea leaves and silence being our weapons of choice. Neither of us drink anymore, he out of fear that the rivers of hooch he has already drunk have given his muse cirrhosis, I because the jigsaw puzzle that is my life becomes increasingly difficult to solve when several pieces of the puzzle are invisible. You, for instance. It is coming onto six months, your contract is up, and when are you coming back?
I cheer your early photographic success from this remote bleacher seat, slowly gnawing away my own pericardium. I miss you with every inch of that bloody sack and all it contains. I live in a world without love, without affection, without joy. I have taken to sleeping for twenty-four-hour stretches whenever I can manage it, so as to lose a day and bring the time of your arrival closer. The job affords me small pleasure, but it does fill the hours with reading that does not remind me of my own inability to write. The author I’m editing is a micturator of language, a thirsty, leaky puppy whose saving quality is his cautionary, unstated message to me never to write out of the ego; in exalting himself he wets the bed, the floor, the ceiling below.
I finally visited with Mother Belinda this week. We met for a drink and I examined her being and found her in full, late-blooming flower, not that she hadn’t bloomed in earlier seasons, but now she has the advantage of looking as young as she was in the previous blossom, quite an achievement for the old girl. She is utterly without guilt concerning her abandoned child and husband. She thinks him mad, and though I would also like to judge him so, I cannot; and she thinks me “scattered,” which I suppose is how I appear to those unable to perceive any purpose in my chaos. There is purpose, of course. .
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?”