CHAPTER 2

Madame Métier Begins Again With Her Cremes

Between her outings at the beach, Madame Métier was now working very hard on her cremes. She had taken the green striped hatbox down from the closet, made an inventory of all her assorted dried items and set up shop in the sunroom.

She bought a huge library table and on it she set out in piles the myriad leaves and petals and fronds that she had already preserved as well as the new ones that she had started collecting. She bought two tin file boxes and several packets of different colored filing cards on which gradually, as she experimented, she wrote down her new recipes. She ordered fluids and oils to serve as suspensions and emulsions for her cremes, and these in their various bottles and jars she stacked in the corner of her room. She bought cases of little containers, of porcelain, silver, and copper; of blue glass and white glass and clear glass, in which to serve up her various cremes, aware that the cremes themselves would perform one final alchemical change when they came into contact with the substance of their packaging.

She got up early each morning and, after having her tea, went into the sunroom, checked all the plants that were drying, sampled the various emulsions, and then set to work, admixing various tinctures, extracts, liquids, herbs and flower essences.

As she combined and mixed, evaluating each texture and fragrance, she waited, poised, for the mysterious moment when something, an unpremeditated alchemical event, would finally occur and the creme would achieve its optimum consistency, give off its beautiful fragrance and assume its permanent color. Then she would hear, as if spoken by a voice in her ears, the words announcing the ailment for which it was the remedy. Then and only then, would she write down the new recipe.

Her method was somewhat haphazard. She was never quite sure which afflictions she was attempting to cure, that is to say, whether she should seek to attain a particular creme for a particular malady, or whether a creme in its seemingly unique combination of fragrance, texture, and packaging—total essence—would reveal the purpose for which it had been invented. So far it had been true that each time a creme had achieved its essence, The Voice, as she called it to herself, had whispered in her ear and told her what it was to be used for.

So it was that at times she felt quite confident that simply by her experiments, she would arrive at exactly where she was meant to be going. At other times she doubted this, felt she should state her intention for a creme, develop a rigid, no-nonsense, specific, concrete, and orderly plan—and then steadfastly adhere to it.

One week, after a siege of many failures, she was feeling particularly desperate. One recipe, for no reason, exploded in its cruet, spattering the sunroom with shards of broken glass. Another, overnight, grew a frightening purplish mold. A third had curdled mysteriously and turned rock hard by morning.

Her table was a nightmare, a veritable Vesuvius of seeds and fronds, of scraps of paper and recipe cards, to say nothing of all the pots and jars of failed and/or perfected cremes that cluttered every spare surface of the workroom. She had certainly tried to clean up, and once or twice she had actually succeeded. She had taken her workroom down to the bone, filed all the wandering recipe cards, stacked all the jars of finished cremes, and cleared off the surface of her table. Each time she did this, she believed—for a few days at least—that she had finally learned to live by her mother’s directive to always clean up as she went along. But then once again she would be inspired, and the process would start all over again. It seemed, in fact, as if only from chaos could she create. Tidiness had itself as an end, but chaos, it seemed, was the sine qua non of all her creations.

Perhaps she was mad. Perhaps this business with cremes was a folly—poppycock as her husband had said. What did the world need cremes for anyway? She wished she could have talked to her father, asked him for some advice. What would he have said, for example, about these particular recipes? Did he think she was wise or foolish, for carrying on with her cremes? It was true, that with all these disasters that she hadn’t heard the voice that ordinarily announced the purpose for each creme. She hadn’t been told the ailment for which each one had been invented. Had wished she could have talked to her father. From where he was now, in a world beyond worlds, he would certainly know if this was her calling.

She thought of the room, 5244, in which he had died, and she wondered if—as with the plants when they themselves were no longer alive—some whiff of their essence remained, some molecules of her father’s might still linger in his hospital room. In her wave of despair, she decided to go to the hospital, to the room where her father had died, to see if, by sitting where she had last felt his essence, some remnant of his being might offer up a message.