I walked home with a feeling that life was good. The au pair’s apartment, a cozy little knotty-pine appendage, was so comfortable and suited my needs so well that I knew I would remember it with regret wherever else I would live for the rest of my life.
It had a bookcase and a waterbed and a hot plate on a white marble slab that had been placed on a wrought iron sewing machine stand. A dramatically eaved bathroom was papered old-fashioned beige with tiny pink blossoms. There was an easy chair and a comfortable claw-foot tub with an oval window overlooking balconies and lines of clean clothes. At all hours the delectable aroma of bread wafted from the bakery below. It was from this idyllic covey that the children’s au pair had been coldheartedly ejected overnight and made to go live with the children, but at the time I’d imagined one didn’t have to pay at all for inconveniencing others.
I yanked open the heavy front door from the street. On the first landing, I would inevitably pass Frau Zwekl. I liked Frau Zwekl.
She was stunningly old, a mixture of forthright elbows, squinting eyes, and sagging belly. Her long thin hair was woven, then coiled, into a braided coronet and she wore daily the same ornate, queenly Bohemian garnets in her fleshy, quick-listening ears. Her face was as lined as crinkled yellowed paper but still she labored away, still taking laundry. She’d lived in the first-landing apartment all her life. Nothing failed to shock her. And she liked to be shocked. Her face—she had a handsome set of false teeth—would light up when she saw me coming. I suppose I was the highlight of her day. I’m sure few others found time to chat. Her big, arthritic hands would speed up over the work before her, snapping pillowcases and smoothing them into neat squares while her eyes would glisten like a monkey’s, hungry for scraps of information.
Isolde, my notorious landlady, was her favorite topic. Frau Zwekl’s English was even worse than my limping German and so I had no qualms about stopping and making a fool of myself while we chatted. When I’d first come to this house I’d dawdled away many an evening with her. I would bring her those little glass pots of jelly they give you in hotels and pensions. She loved them. Especially blackberry. It had all been fine at first. I learned to brave my first German sentence with Frau Zwekl. Yes, it was she who started me learning German because I hadn’t really cared what she thought of me. She’d complained once how the ‘Hund’ on the second floor had kept her up all night.
Uncomprehending, I’d looked at her blankly. “Hund?”
“Hund,” Frau Zwekl had said, turning into her apartment and picking up the small bronze Pekingese that sat with other tchotchkes on the pie-crust table. She displayed it in her wrinkled palm.
“Ah. Dog. The dog kept you up all night.”
“Ja!” she’d congratulated me with a joyous smile. Her English vocabulary was about a hundred words, and so I would dig out my little German phrase book and the two of us would trade
information. With a mixture of sign language and exaggerated rolling of the eyes in the appropriate places, it was amazing how much local gossip she and I managed to convey to each other. I used to save malicious little shockers for her and pass them over, like gems to a jeweler. One of these was Isolde’s upcoming divorce, which she received with delight, making me go over it again and again to make sure she’d understood.
The last time I’d seen Frau Zwekl, I’d scurried past, tapping my watch and turning my face to a grimace, so she’d understand I was stuck for time. I hadn’t been, but the initial glow of our relationship had worn off, and I had other things to think of now. The truth was, I didn’t need her anymore and—with all the heartless hurry of youth—I’d passed her by.
“Warte nur einen Moment,” she’d called out to me. Wait for just one moment!
I’d stopped on the landing and she’d clattered up after me, pressing a handkerchief into my hand. “Ich habe es selbst bestickt!” She’d smiled proudly. She’d embroidered it herself. It was some sort of bird.
“What is it?” I’d shifted my heavy bag from one shoulder to the other. It looked like one of those Johnny Ott hex signs they paint on the barns in Amish country.
She’d closed my hand over the fine, worn cotton. “Distelfink,” she’d murmured, her enigmatic eyes piercing mine. “Für Glück.”
I’d kissed her swiftly on the cheek and run the rest of the way up the stairs. For happiness. For luck. Understanding more than I gave her credit for, she’d smiled and waved me on.
She’d catch me on a better day, she’d called out in German, and I’d laughed gaily, because I’d understood her.
She wasn’t in her sentry spot today, though, and I felt both disappointment and relief.
A small boy with large gray eyes and a cat on his lap sat watching me mount the stairs. This was Rupert, Isolde’s younger boy.
Well into his fourth year on the planet, Rupert was hardly known to speak at all. Not in any language. I attributed this to the fact that no one language occupied the entire space of any conversation in the flat.
“That’s rubbish,” Isolde would say. “Look at Dirk.” Dirk was her other son, already five, who, thanks to a colorful and varied exposure to boarders like photo models and sporadic nannies, carried on in German, Italian, Slovenian, and, lately, English. The rule was that only English was spoken at table. Isolde thought it would do them good. That Rupert never spoke a word of anything didn’t seem to faze her. He pounded the piano with a dramatic, almost Mediterranean flourish and this, she considered, was language enough.
“Hello, Rupert.” I dropped my sack now and gave the cat a tickle.
Rupert watched me steadily with wide, unblinking eyes while I fumbled for the keys. The sound of music filtered into the stairwell. “Who’s that now, Rupert? Mozart or Telemann? You know I always mix them up.”
Rupert rose, casually hanging the unresisting cat by the fur of her neck, and pushed the massive door right open. He paused once for imperious effect, then locomoted through.
I flumped my sack once more onto my back and followed.
Inside, black-and-white-tiled floors gleamed under tall chalk ceilings. Couch-sized sculptures of women in bronze reclined every which way here and there. There were unframed, enormous silk paintings from Bali on the walls and zebra and fur throws all about the comfortable velvet couches. Rupert disappeared into the children’s wing.
“Hallo,” came a pleasant British accent through the archway. “Is that you, Rupert?”
“No, it’s me,” I called, dropping my sack and going in. “Rupert’s in the nursery.”
Daisy Dahlhaus, Isolde’s English au pair whom I’d displaced, was sitting at the dining room table behind a huge pile of white asparagus.
“Well!” She sniffed. “And where have you been?”
Daisy had round, astonished blue eyes and ermine ringlets springing out all over in an unruly, Louis XIV disarray. At night, she’d take exorbitant amounts of time to manicure her well-trimmed nails and paint them up a ladylike mauve. She’d wave them at everyone on their individual way out, our sensible Daisy, while she sat before the telly learning German verb tenses in baby’s-breath terry cloth, a strand of pearls, and Christmas-present talcum.
“I stopped off at the Riding School café.”
“Did you now! Dressed like that? The poshest café in Munich with all the jet-setters driving their Porsches up onto the pavement … and you went looking like that?” Daisy regarded me with distaste.
Right. My messes of dark red hair were yanked convulsively into a knot and I could taste a smear of charcoal across my mouth. My hat was stuffed into my sack, my jeans rumpled from their long day in a heap under the makeup table. Daisy threw her beefy little arms up in exasperation. “Oblivious to all those lovely men?” she scolded. “Sitting there being Toulouse-Lautrec again, I’ll wager, sketching the lot!”
“The jet-setters aren’t there on weekdays, Daisy. It’s just students and chess addicts and gigolos.”
“Gigolos? Right. Just waiting about for the likes of you!”
“I wasn’t picked up, don’t worry. I was quite safe sitting with Chatreuse.”
“Chartreuse!” Daisy squawked, outraged. “That pissy Frenchman? How could you? Everyone will think you’re his mistress!”
“Oh, they won’t. We’re good friends.”
“They bloody will! Everyone will think you’re on drugs!”
“Well, I am, if smoking a little pot is being on drugs. Everyone smokes pot.”
“I don’t!”
“I know you don’t.”
“Claire! That hashish he peddles isn’t pot! It’s disgusting!”
“It is very strong,” I agreed. “It’s the seventies, Daisy. No one cares who sleeps with whom.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you.” Daisy picked up her peeler again as though her heart was no longer in it, and resumed whittling Isolde’s asparagus. They’re not like American asparagus, the white ones. You’ve really got to peel them, the way you would carrots. The end result, however, is heavenly and worth every effort. “You think you’re going to catch a man when you go gadding about disguised as a soccer player, do you?” she went on badgering me. “It’s no wonder no one rings you up. All the likely fellows have given up.”
“Likely playboys and gigolos, you mean. No point in going out with them.”
“Right. Better to hang about with a drug dealer.”
“He’s a musician,” I said, remembering Chartreuse’s guitar. “And he makes me laugh.”
“Oh, he’s not witty,” she said with sudden insight. “You just like that he flatters you.”
It’s true, I realized.
“Sorry I’m so cross.” She sighed. “It’s a very good thing you came home. I just devoured the Havarti cheese and apricot jam on sunflower bread and was about to go back for more. God, I’ll never get that bloody ironing finished. I polished the floor in there. I don’t suppose you bothered to notice.” Daisy’s chubby jaw shut with a martyred click.
I didn’t feel too sorry for Daisy. She was in fact a diplomat’s daughter, born in Singapore, schooled in Dehli and Geneva, and would one day return to that life.
“I noticed everything looks exceptionally spic and span,” I said admiringly, taking it all in. “What’s up?”
“Oh, she’s having a bunch of swells over tonight. Some big director from Berlin. He’s looking the flat over to see if he’ll want to use it for his film.” Isolde was constantly renting out the flat to film people to make extra money.
“Oh, no,” I cried. “Not again! She just got rid of that TV commercial crew.”
“Film people are quite different from advertising people. Anyway, someone has to pay for all the fancy goings-on,” she said, imitating Isolde’s parsimonious voice.
“But all those cables!”
“I know. Everything underfoot. You can never shut a door properly. Still, I’m rather pleased. There’s such an undercover of excitement with that lot! They take their work so seriously. You almost begin to believe in the malarky yourself! Do those gladiola look as though they’ve had it?”
“No. What’s she cooking?”
“Lamb, I think. She’s got me thawing the mint jellies from the freezer.”
I was drawn to the kitchen. “Mint jellies?” I picked one up from the dish. “Looks intriguing. What is it?”
“She cuts up a bunch of fresh mint, really fine, like a paste. Then she puts them in ice cube trays with aspic. You know. That gel that forms from bone marrow.”
I dropped it quickly. “Oh.”
“That Tupelo Honig is coming. The film star. Isolde’s fixed her up with her plastic surgeon.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I think it’s sort of a trade-off. She’ll bring the surgeon all her friends in the film business and he’ll save her from growing old. Isolde tells her she’ll get better parts if she’s not desperate for them. You must admit Isolde is dead on the money nine times out of ten.”
I was silent, stopping a big lemon that had rolled to the edge of the table. Its blissful smell filled the room.
“Really,” Daisy continued, “Isolde’s shameless! Imagine introducing your doctor to famous women in exchange for eye lifts. Yuck.”
“He’s the one who sounds disgusting,” I called, returning from the kitchen. “And who’s this Tupelo Honig the film star? I’ve never heard of her.”
“Well, I mean, I’ve never heard of her, either, but the way Isolde makes astonished, disbelieving eyes at you when you say you never have, you’d think you were living on Mars if you haven’t. She makes all those films with five minutes of close-up and very little dialogue. You know.” She slammed the iron down hard. “Not that I ever get the chance to go to the cinema. All I ever get to go see is Pippi Langstrumpf and Paddington Bear and the like. Mind you, I’ll be relieved to have some adults about.”
“I don’t blame you. So who else is coming?”
“She’s gone and spent a bomb on these white asparagus,” Daisy continued to rant. “She yells like mad at me for not shopping at the Plus, just to save a few extra crummy Pfennig, and then she goes and buys everything madly expensive at the Viktualienmarkt.”
“Daisy! Who’s coming?”
“Oh. Well, let’s see. The hubby, Vladimir. He’ll come. I know he wants to pick up some more of his records. Hell. The best ones are his, you know. How much you want to bet she’ll get him drunk so he’ll forget the records? And of course the one they call Blacky. The Graf. Count. Vladimir and he are both counts, you know. I suppose that’s why they get on.” She stopped for a moment and wiggled her head in a satisfied way. She and I both savored living with the bluebloods. “You’ve met him. Haven’t
you? No, I suppose not. You were on that bathing suit trip to the Canary Islands last time he was here, weren’t you.”
“I guess so.”
“Now, he is sexy. Although,” she scowled, “I don’t much like him.”
I looked up, interested. “Why not?”
“I suppose I’m a bit frightened of him. Don’t even think of setting your cap for him, missy. Isolde’s got him fixed up with that film star.”
“What?”
“The one Isolde introduced him to.”
“I thought she was going with the doctor!”
“He is the doctor!”
“Oh,” I said, catching up.
“Anyway, he’s no one for you. He’s ten years older than you, you know,” Daisy went on. “He was in the Vietnam War. Well, he was a doctor over there for a while. Detests Americans. Thinks he knows it all. Although I guess he does. His English is really quite remarkable for a Kraut. But he’s a dirty sleep-around. He’s even bumpsed with Isolde, if you want to know the truth. She told me.”
“She did?”
“Yes. Such cheek!” And then: “He was quite good, apparently.” Daisy spotted the time. “She’d better get back soon, though. Lamb takes a year and a day. We won’t be eating till nine or ten. I hate that. And I hate those gladiola. They make me think of funerals. She thinks they’re Art Deco.” Daisy snorted. “Oh. And another thing. She wants everyone in Trachten.”
“Trachten?”
“You know. Bavarian traditional dress: loden green jackets, feathered hats, dirndls for the ladies—acceptable, even preferable, in place of formal attire in Bavaria.”
“I’m not going to wear one of her stupid dirndls,” I muttered.
“Of course you must. If you want dinner. If I’ve got to wear one then so must you. She said you can have one of hers. She’s got a closet full. She nicked them all from the Bogner fashion shows.”
“Oh, all right,” I said, imagining the splendid food.
“’Course it’s all right with you. Makes you think you’re Heidi. You wouldn’t much care for it if you looked like me.”
The record stopped and immediately Daisy went trotting off to start another up. Isolde had a superb record collection of classical, jazz, and semi-jazz. Daisy chose her favorite part of an early Keith Jarret.
I put one foot up on the dining table chair, a position I’d hardly dare were Isolde there herself, and admired, for the ten thousandth time, the window. Or windows, really, for there were many. Lead-lined panes one after the next and up and down, some of which opened with their own little latches. The whole was as large and light as a cinema screen. I hugged my sketchpad to my chest and took a quick snapshot of the scene for later reference, found a pencil, and sketched away. The well-scrubbed antique pine table shone like honey. Isolde, with her relentless dash, had arranged the window seat with raspberry- and sagecolored silk pillows and buckets and clay pots of flowers. Isolde cried poverty all the time, but there were always opulent bunches of flowers. Flowers and candles and wine. Luxuries I’d grown up knowing only when the priest came to dinner. Now here they were, necessities, purchased routinely along with the potatoes and the laundry detergent. And fruits. Bright-colored, luscioustasting apricots and strawberries. Where I came from, we were allotted poor-people plums, twenty-seven for a dollar, and that was it, now go do your homework. Here, blueberries cascaded casually every day from slim balsa-wood cartons on the sill.
Beside these extravagances, there were also two well-fed, muttering, surly gray parrots named Storm-Foot and Swift Wing for the Greek mythological monsters, Harpies on Phineus’ island.
Each dwelt in its own jealously guarded, two-storied cage. They were known to all and sundry, though, as Stormy and Swifty.
Daisy hummed busily to herself. I stood and headed to the birds’ messy cages, sticking one of my fingers in and nuzzling Stormy’s head.
“Please don’t go getting him all revved up stroking him, Claire. He’s been squawking all day long and he’s only just settled down. He so hates to be teased!”
“No, he doesn’t, he loves it. Don’t you, Stormy?” And it was true. Storm-Foot ruffled his feathers for me and barely put pressure at all while he nibbled away at my moonstone ring.
For me, Daisy was nothing less than gold. Who else would do my laundry, scour the bathtub, and empty out the ashtrays, quick, before Isolde saw? I smoked too much. But then, whatever I did, I did voraciously. It was gluttony. I know that now. But hedonism and excesses were the order of the day and none of us saw anything wrong with pleasing ourself. Not then. Not yet.
Daisy was invaluable to me in many ways and, best of all, was not yet fed up. Still dazed by Isolde’s chic and ribald lifestyle, she’d wake each morning full of curiosity as to what would happen next.
Here I was, busy every day, feeling happy and safe with supper to come home to. It was almost like being a child, with furious, tidy Daisy barring unworthy enthusiasts from the house, the respectable agency in charge of my cash, and world-class, churning Isolde in charge of my life.
People gossiped about Isolde constantly, assuring her a steep notoriety in Munich, as far as Klosters in Switzerland, really, but they always came if she invited them. She gave, as she said, a hoot about all that. Why, this was the age of Aquarius. It said so everywhere you looked. New York had gone through it with enthusiasm and now Munich, obediently carefree, would go through it, too.
On this front both I and young Daisy were united and excited; there was lots of action going on here, enough action to get caught
up in and catch tail ends of. Although we’d tell each other that we heartily disapproved, we knew, too, that it was not often in life one came in such scrutinizingly close contact with a diva. For that’s what Isolde was. A drive-men-mad-and-let-them-drop authentic diva.
The whole business horrified the virginal and naive Daisy while reassuring me. No one thought to bugger me with mindencompassing Isolde about. It was almost a replica of my life as I’d known it at home. My stunning older sister, Carmela, had always held the limelight, leaving me free from scrutiny, free to languor about, dream, and draw. I’d always felt comfortable in the background—or at least as though I belonged there, considered it my rightful place in the family. But where Carmela’s beautiful, benevolent eyes had suddenly turned angry and mistrustful when I had found myself in frightening adolescence, Isolde now offered me the grace of indulgence whenever she beheld me. For Isolde really liked me. I was an immediate draw for her table, for one thing. Any foreign model was. But besides that, Isolde admired my ever-ready and loud disdain for the “glamour” of modeling, my thirsty passion for art, and the fact that I truly enjoyed being alone, something she herself never could stand to be. On the evenings Daisy would have off, out the door Isolde would spring in a flounce of spangles and perfume, saying, “Thank heavens for Claire! She’s so good with the children!” And I would collapse with relief onto the sofa. I was simply lazy at heart and I didn’t mind at all being left alone with the children (these I simply ignored and, sure enough, eventually they’d go to sleep.) for I would also be left alone with the refrigerator, the likes of whose innards few world-weary models got to get a whiff of. Isolde’s refrigerator was small, but it was filled with cheeses, hefty, pungent cheeses. Cheeses from the countryside. From France and Switzerland and Denmark. There were bird carcasses in there, too, delicious dry things from the evening before, fragrant with herbes de Provence and rubbed tenderly with Dry Sack. Once I found
that I’d eaten the miniature partridges Isolde had planned for the weekend. There’d been so little meat on the things. How was I to know? I’d taken them for leftovers. Limp, bright green beans lay in a hardened yellow coddle of butter. On the windowpane were shiny, bursting tomatoes from Israel. In the cupboard were yawning hunks of sunflower bread just waiting to be sawed into. Or Swedish wheels of crumbly flat bread. Two or three half finished bottles of magnificent Bordeaux from the night before lined the wooden counter space. And then there was the endless assortment of heartbreaking records. Duke Ellington. Ella in Berlin.
Isolde admired my ability to occupy myself, drawing or listening to music. At home, activities having to do with philosophy and art had been seen by my mother as grievous faults, fraught with laziness and self-absorption. Here, these same ways were regarded as qualities of depth. Vladimir was like that, too. Quiet and still. Watchful. Isolde would always gravitate toward that quality in others as though it were a refreshing pool. My pool, I can admit it now, was a bit put on. I’d find the record that I thought would most impress Isolde. As it turned out, I learned to appreciate those artists she held in esteem, so I guess it did me no harm. But most of all, Isolde liked that I was a bonafide American. I was somebody here, not just the little one raising my hand, insisting, “Me, too!”
Thinking of all these things I found myself in the kitchen making tea.
Vladimir, Isolde’s husband, came in. “Hello, the pretty Claire,” he teased me.
The kitchen was so tiny and he so big. “Oh! Hi.” I ducked my head, trying to shrink but then I had the feeling that he didn’t mind me. I never let myself feel what I really felt about him while Isolde was around because I was so nervous she would think I liked him that way or he liked me. But while she wasn’t here I could be myself. He and I were actually very compatible in a friendly
way. Easygoing. He slipped a pan from under the stove. “May I use your water?” he asked, bumping into the braids of garlic and drying tufts of herbs.
“Sorry?”
“Your water. In the kettle. May I have some?”
“Oh! Sure. Here, help yourself.”
He poured some of it into a pan. It was already boiling and he slipped some spaghetti in after it. I thought of myself and how if I made pasta I’d fill a huge pot and have to wait forever for it to boil. He stood there stirring the spaghetti attentively. Vladimir, big and slow moving, had a particular way of looking at things—almost as though he were seeing something for the first time—and he made you feel it, too. When it was just done to the teeth he tipped the water into the sink, slipped the pasta onto a plate, poured olive oil into the pan, and cut up shards of garlic into it. He looked at me. I was dunking my teabag up and down into the teapot, watching him. “Now this is the most important moment to wait for,” he warned, catching my eye. “We can’t let this moment get away from us or we are lost.”
“Okay,” I said. Together we watched the garlic turn from alabaster to gold.
“When the perfume reaches your nose it will tell you the moment,” he whispered. We waited together, watching. Just the edges of the garlic crusted brown. “Now,” he shouted. I jumped and he pulled the pan from the heat. He slipped the spaghetti back into the pan, dashed white salt and black pepper over the top. There was an old crust of hard cheese on the counter I’d thought meant to be thrown away, but no. He broke off a small bit and held it before my nose. He opened his great nostrils wide and sucked in with a spectacular performance of appreciation. It smelled, I thought, stepping back, very ripe. But not bad, no, not bad, I agreed. He crumbled this small piece between his huge fingers and onto his dish, handed me a fork, poured spots of last
night’s wine into two jelly glasses, and there in that little kitchen, sitting on the washing machine and he standing with his great hulking self leaning across the cutting board, I enjoyed one of the simplest yet finest meals I think I’ve ever had. All these years gone by, so many restaurants and meals, and yet, I can still taste that nutlike and delicious afternoon.
“Upfh!” Vladimir suddenly realized the time, dumped his dish into the sink, and disappeared. When he left, the kitchen became just a kitchen again. I was rinsing the dishes when Dirk, Isolde’s older son, marched in and held me up with a water pistol.
“Very funny, Dirk,” I said. “Please don’t get me wet, sweetie.”
“Bah,” Dirk maintained and squirted me in the face. The truth was that I found myself a little terrified of Dirk. I didn’t know then that children love whomever loves them and he only wanted attention. I thought there was some special way to be. I thought there was a catch.
“Come in here with me now,” came Daisy’s arbitrary voice from the next room. “Come along, Dirk. Let Claire get on with the tea.” Daisy maintained equal amounts of fair play and bullying in her tone, which is just what little boys need. The doorbell rang and Daisy went to get it. But I’d forgotten all about the tea. I went back to it, carried the tea tray to the dining table, and sat down.
Daisy came back in with a basket of clean laundry. “That was Frau Zwekl,” she said, “with the children’s whites. Good thing, too, because I can’t keep up.”
Isolde and Frau Zwekl had had words of the harshest kind some time ago. I had always supposed the confrontation had had something to do with late hours and respectable people and strangers tromping up and down the stairs.
“That wasn’t it,” Daisy had confided in me later. “Dirk pinkled all over her clean washing.”
Frau Zwekl held no grudge against Dirk. It was Isolde she couldn’t abide. I didn’t understand this at first. I thought it was stern
moral disapproval. I know my mother would have been appalled at the goings-on. Frau Zwekl didn’t like men in and out at all hours. Empty French wine bottles twice a week in the overflowing recycler. Twice a week! she would sputter, horrified. Later, I imagined it was jealousy. I saw it glitter like hard stones in the old woman’s eyes when I helped Isolde carry fourteen potted mums up to the flat. Up and down the stairs we went, our boots tromping the tight snow loose on her clean floor, our arms laden with vibrant color. I’d gone down for the last load and sat for a moment on the step with Frau Zwekl. Snow-lit sunshine filled the stairwell from the skylight. I felt guilty for the sloppy steps. I knew I shouldn’t. We had every right to go up and down. And it was her own problem if she chose to scrub the darn steps. Nobody made her. But I couldn’t help sympathizing with her. We were chums, sort of, by now.
She didn’t like that Isolde had access to mums in the middle of winter when everyone knew they were only to be had in the fall. “Imports!” Frau Zwekl would shake her head emphatically. It was unnatural! I explained they were from Israel. “Ach,” she’d snorted. “And red tomatoes she buys in the middle of winter!” She didn’t much care for that extravagance, either.
Frau Zwekl had told me other things, things I’d rather not have known. Her husband had been much older than she. He was a kind man, but she hadn’t loved him. He used to make her kiss his thing. She’d shuddered. You see, there were no other men around. They’d all gone off to war. “Schwierigkeiten.” She would shake her head, fold the linen sharply. Hardships.
Isolde had told me that whenever she smelled oranges it made her think of Christmas. She’d never smelled them before that. I was beginning to realize that this affluence was new.
“Isolde will be home any minute,” Daisy reminded me, bringing me back to the present.
“Who’s that in there on the sofa?” I gave a hitchhike nudge across my shoulder.
“What? Oh, him. He’s been here so long I’d almost forgotten him. That’s Harry Honeycutt. Is he still asleep?”
“I guess so. I can only see his head. Harry?” I called. We looked toward the living room. There he was, just coming to. He didn’t answer.
“He’s always hanging about,” Daisy grumbled.
Harry Honeycutt, with his plump form and excellent shoes, was becoming rather an embarrassment—respectable Englishman though he was—who would mope about the house waiting for everyone to leave, consuming great quantities of scotch in the meantime, hoping to have a quiet word with Isolde. If Isolde fancied someone, she’d simply boot Harry out. If she didn’t, he’d be allowed to park his inebriated body on one sofa or another for the night. Isolde didn’t bother to sleep with him. He was so useful in restoring her antiques, having redone all the picture frames and most of the better furniture. He had been very kind to me, admiring my moon-phase wristwatch when everyone else had laughingly deemed it junk. It would be years before such things would become fashionable, but Harry had the eye. He also wrote the occasional critical column in fashionable artsy magazines and had a standing vanity column in the Times Sunday supplements.
“Isolde says he’s a big shot in his field,” I reminded Daisy.
“It’s very hard to think of him that way when he acts like a sheep. Don’t defend him. You shouldn’t defend him. He’s a man. He ought to get on with his life.”
“You’re right. It isn’t that I like Harry, because it’s difficult to like someone who so obviously despises himself, but he gives me the opportunity to administer pity, an uncommon luxury at our age, don’t you think? He reminds me of the hesitant ant you let live. Poor thing, you think, imagining it on its way home from an enterprising exploration. So you keep your god feet to yourself, admiring its perseverance. And you forget it. Then, before you
know it, there are seven hundred of them marching obliviously across your ledge. And now there is no stopping them.”
“Do you hear yourself? The way you talk? It puts people off. Please do watch your cigarette ash, Claire.”
“Hello, darlings.” Isolde, strong as Hercules, swept into the room with a box of groceries and two woven Spanish shoulder baskets filled with stuff. She clomped the carton of Nutella and bottles of wine and produce in the midst of our tea, rattling and almost upsetting the saucers. A paper of bright black cherries spilled across the table and we all filled our mouths as we reached to refill the horn of greengrocer’s paper.
Dirk flew in and squirted the parrot with his water pistol and Rupert attached himself to Isolde’s leg. Harry woke up from his nap on the couch and followed Isolde into the kitchen.
“Haven’t you got any pots of water going on the stove yet?” Isolde returned almost immediately and attacked plump Daisy.
“No,” Daisy said, “I thought we were having lamb and I was just waiting for you to come back and—”
“Well, then, the oven should be hot! And who,” continued Isolde, “used up all my Jil Sander perfume … You?”
Daisy and I exchanged panic-stricken looks. Both guilty in all things concerning Isolde’s sumptuous properties, we shared some unbreakable bond. It wasn’t as though Isolde really cared, we told ourselves. She’d push things on us when she was in a good mood.
“Dirk!” Isolde ordered. “Dirk, come over here and give your starving mother a sloppy wet kiss. There we are. What’s that on your forehead?”
“He’s been tattooing himself once again with the fruit gum tattoos,” Daisy calmly explained as she proceeded to unload the stuff from the carton and carry it into the kitchen. She had to do it around Isolde, whining Dirk, who was having his head wiped, and the yawning and belching Harry, whom Isolde had not yet chosen to recognize.
“Claire,” Isolde said, “please write the place cards out. You do it so well with your fancy pen.” She moved into the kitchen and picked up the phone.
“Okay,” I said, eager to please in a way that wasn’t too exerting.
“Let me think who all will be here,” Daisy thought out loud, counting on her dainty fingers. “Vladimir will come. He’ll be at the head. She likes him at the head. Let me think. There’s you and me.” She meant herself and Isolde. “Then there’s you, Claire. And Dr. von Osterwald.”
Isolde came out licking her fingers. “And Wolfgang, the film director. Put him down the table on my left.”
So he can see your best side, I thought meanly, but didn’t say. I was always a little bit afraid of Isolde. Everybody was. You measured how much you could say by the mood she was in.
“And here I am, the goose.” Daisy passed us, laying down the place mats, miffed and getting used to it.
Harry padded back to the sofa in his rumpled cashmere socks, sat down, and began feeling around the floor for his shoes.
“So,” Isolde stood still for a blazing moment, “let’s start again. The three of us and Tupelo Honig. How many men have we? Blacky, Vladimir, Wolfgang the director …”
“This Wolfgang has no last name? Just ‘Wolfgang the film director’ on his card?”
“It’s Wolfgang Scherer,” Isolde replied acidly, “but no last names on the cards. It’s not a wedding.”
“What about Harry?” Daisy said in her persistent way. She rather liked Harry, no matter what she said. She fed him delicacies when no one was watching.
Isolde gave a dismissive swipe. “Just leave the bottle next to him,” she advised, not even lowering her voice. “He’ll be asleep before they get here. Claire, after this, why don’t you arrange those flowers in a vase? What I need,” she chewed her lip, “is another man.” The doorbell rang.
Daisy trotted away and returned with Chartreuse.
“Well, that was fast,” Isolde said.
“Chartreuse!” I cried.
Chartreuse held my chalk box up. “Your pastels,” he said. “You left them on the table.”
“I did?”
“She’s always forgetting things,” Daisy admonished.
Chartreuse touched his heart. “I intrude?” He bowed, his accent rich as Dijon.
“On the contrary,” Isolde looked him up and down, “we were just needing an extra man for dinner.”
“But I am honored.” Chartreuse sniffed the air like an alert bird dog, taking everything in at once. The Biedermeier furniture. The hand-carved frames. And, I gulped, the antique sterling.
“Asparagus?” Chartreuse eyed the ragged pile upon the table.
“That’s right.” Isolde smiled over one shoulder, kneeling down and pulling different cheeses from the fridge. And then, worriedly, “And a still partially frozen lamb.”
“Ah! You must allow me to join you in the kitchen.” Chartreuse rolled back his sleeves and held both arms up in the air. “I shall prepare for you my béchamel.”
Isolde, recognizing a connoisseur and ready to ooze charm equal to his, saw her chance to duck out for a shower. She led him into the tiny kitchen.
Chartreuse seemed right at home in the winsome pine kitchen. He scrubbed his dirty hands in the sink with the impressive care of a surgeon, then conspicuously scrutinized them under the light. This pleased Isolde, I could tell. Then, with a flourish of his crushed velvet magenta scarf, he rattled each pot testingly, provocatively, found what he liked, and went straight to work.
I was a little surprised. Isolde was attracted to only very rich or at least successful men. Chartreuse was so obviously neither of these. Although he was devilishly good-looking, with his long,
wavy brown hair, his silky black lashes, and sparkling yellow eyes. He had a modest, close-mouthed smile. I knew he was sensitive about his teeth and often suffered with them. Still, he was dashing, in a theatrical, world-traveler way. He wore those fuzzy, loose-fitting pants from Nepal, a saffron langee from Ceylon, and a burgundy shirt from Rangoon. His eyes were exotically rimmed in kohl. It seemed he knew his way around a kitchen. I remembered him once telling me he’d traveled around the Mediterranean as a chef on a handsome, eighty-foot Brigsom yacht.
Isolde probably concluded he was artsy enough for the film people. If I knew her, she’d pass him off as her chef. I remembered my box of pastels on the table. Funny. I really did remember packing them away.
I left them laughing in the kitchen. Isolde was back, crouching on the floor with her head in the refrigerator. Out came vegetables and fruits from Africa. Chartreuse was hacking garlic expertly with a glinting knife, tzack tzack tzack, in lugubrious time with the rhythmic American music, which stopped again and again at the end of the stuck, long-playing album.
Harry staggered into a hassock in the living room.
“Bloody hell, Harry,” Daisy shouted. “You’re up! Put something new on the stereo, will you? Be useful.”
I remember thinking she was enormously disrespectful to a guest. But, compliant by nature, Harry made his careful way to the corner of the room and lowered himself gently to the floor. “Who shall we have, then?” he called out, immediately awake.
“Oh, make a decision,” Daisy practically screamed.
Coleman Hawkins’s banana rich tones set a new, more sultry atmosphere for us all. “Taste,” Isolde leaned sideways and confided to Chartreuse, “his only attribute.” Chartreuse chortled with a cruel French snort. His happy knife sped on.
Poor Harry. I did feel sorry for him now. Fondly I watched him, his pigeon toes, his roomy bottom, his plump lower lip out,
sorting through the albums. Before the week was over, he’d be back to his auctions and country estates, hunting for treasure. He knew all about what was valuable and what wasn’t. I sighed with pleasure. How different all of this was from the ordinary. The mundane. From Queens. And then suddenly I remembered. I had placed my pastels on the top, inside my bag, before I’d stood to leave the Riding School café. Yes, I remembered it exactly. “Look,” Chartreuse had said from behind me, “how extraordinaire the light at this moment.” I’d felt his kindly hand on the strap of my sack. And then I’d turned around and he had grinned, his little teeth almost visibly aching with sugar and desire.