After climbing six flights of stone stairs inside a dour building saturated with cat urine, that Persian cologne (and Roman, too), we arrived at Romaine’s studio—whoever Romaine might be; neither of my companions explained their friend, but I sensed she had joined the majority and that the studio was being maintained by Miss Barney as a sort of unkempt shrine-museum. A wet afternoon light, oozing through grime-grey skylights, mingled with an immense room’s objects: shrouded chairs, a piano with a Spanish shawl, Spanish candelabra with partially burnt candles. Nothing occurred when Miss Barney flicked a light switch.
“Dog take it,” she said, suddenly very prairie-American, and lighted up a candelabrum, carrying it with her as she led us around the room to view Romaine Brooks’ paintings. There were perhaps seventy of them, all portraits of a flat and ultra realism; the subjects were women, and all of them were dressed identically, each fully outfitted in white tie and tails. You know how you know when you’re not going to forget something? I wasn’t going to forget this moment, this room, this array of butch-babes, all of whom, to judge from their coifs and cosmetics, were painted between 1917 and 1930.
“Violet,” the widow stated as she examined the portrait of a lean bobbed blond with a monocle magnifying an ice-pick eye. “Gertrude liked her. But she seemed to me a cruel girl. I remember she had an owl. She kept it in a cage so small it couldn’t move. Simply sat there. With its feathers bursting through the wire. Is Violet still alive?”
Miss Barney nodded. “She has a house in Fiesole. Looks fit as a fiddle. I’m told she’s been having the Niehans treatment.”
At last we came to a figure I recognized as the widow’s lamented mate—depicted here with a Cognac snifter in her left hand and a cheroot in the other, not at all the brown mother-earth monolith Picasso palmed off, but more a Diamond Jim Brady personage, a big-bellied show-off, which one suspects is nearer the truth. “Romaine,” said the widow, smoothing her fragile mustache, “Romaine had a certain technique. But she is not an artist.”
Miss Barney begged to differ. “Romaine,” she announced in tones chilled as Alpine slopes, “is a bit limited. But. Romaine is a very great artist!”
It was Miss Barney who arranged for me to visit Colette, whom I wanted to meet, not for my usual opportunistic reasons, but because Boaty had introduced me to her work (kindly keep in mind that, intellectually, I am a hitchhiker who gathers his education along highways and under bridges), and I respected her: My Mother’s House is masterly, incomparable in the artistry of its play upon sensual specifics—taste, scent, touch, sight.
Also, I was curious about this woman; I felt anyone who had lived as broadly as she had, who was as intelligent as she was, must have a few answers. So I was grateful when Miss Barney made it possible for me to have tea with Colette at her apartment in the Palais Royal. “But,” warned Miss Barney, speaking on the telephone, “don’t tire her by overstaying; she’s been ill all winter.”
It’s true that Colette received me in her bedroom—seated in a golden bed à la Louis Quatorze at his morning levee; but otherwise she seemed as indisposed as a painted Watusi leading a tribal dance. Her maquillage was equal to that chore: slanted eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face powdered clown-pale; her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red; and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy blush, a kinky spray. The room smelled of her perfume (at some point I asked what it was, and Colette said: “Jicky.
The Empress Eugénie always wore it. I like it because it’s an old-fashioned scent with an elegant history, and because it’s witty without being coarse—like the better conversationalists. Proust wore it. Or so Cocteau tells me. But then he is not too reliable”), of perfume and bowls of fruit and a June breeze moving voile curtains.
Tea was brought by a maid, who settled the tray on a bed already burdened with drowsing cats and correspondence, books and magazines and various bibelots, especially a lot of antique French crystal paperweights—indeed, many of these precious objects were displayed on tables and on a fireplace mantel. I had never seen one before; noticing my interest, Colette selected a specimen and held its glitter against a lamp’s yellow light: “This one is called The White Rose. As you see, a single white rose centered in the purest crystal. It was made by the Clichy factory in 1850.
All the great weights were produced between 1840 and 1900 by just three firms—Clichy, Baccarat, and St. Louis. When I first started buying them, at the flea market and other such casual places, they were not overly costly, but in the last decades, collecting them has become fashionable, a mania really, and prices are colossal. To me”—she flashed a globe containing a green lizard and another with a basket of red cherries inside it—“they are more satisfying than jewelry. Or sculpture. A silent music, these crystal universes. Now,” she said, startlingly down to business, “tell me what you expect from life. Fame and fortune aside—those we take for granted.” I said, “I don’t know what I expect. I know what I’d like. And that is to be a grown-up person.”
Colette’s painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. “But that,” she said, “is the one thing none of us can ever be: a grown-up person. If you mean a spirit clothed in the sack and ash of wisdom alone? Free of all mischief—envy and malice and greed and guilt? Impossible. Voltaire, even Voltaire, lived with a child inside him, jealous and angry, a smutty little boy always smelling his fingers. Voltaire carried that child to his grave, as we all will to our own. The pope on his balcony … dreaming of a pretty face among the Swiss Guard. And the exquisitely wigged British judge, what is he thinking as he sends a man to the gallows?
Of justice and eternity and mature matters? Or is he possibly wondering how he can manage election to the Jockey Club? Of course, men have grown-up moments, a noble few scattered here and there, and of these, obviously death is the most important. Death certainly sends that smutty little boy scuttling and leaves what’s left of us simply an object, lifeless but pure, like The White Rose. Here”—she nudged the flowered crystal toward me—“drop that in your pocket. Keep it as a reminder that to be durable and perfect, to be in fact grown-up, is to be an object, an altar, the figure in a stained-glass window: cherishable stuff. But really, it is so much better to sneeze and feel human.”
Once I showed this gift to Kate McCloud, and Kate, who could have worked as an appraiser at Sotheby’s, said: “She must have been barking. I mean, whyever did she give it to you? A Clichy weight of that quality is worth … oh, quite easily five thousand dollars.”
I would as soon not have known its value, not wanting to regard it as a rainy-day reserve. Though I would never sell it, especially now, when I am ass-over-backward down-and-out—because, well, I treasure it as a talisman blessed by a saint of sorts, and the occasions when one does not sacrifice a talisman are at least two: when you have nothing and when you have everything—each is an abyss.
Throughout my travels, through hungers and suicidal despairs, a year of hepatitis in a heat-warped, fly-buzzed Calcutta hospital, I have held on to The White Rose. Here at the Y.M.C.A., I have it hidden under my cot; it is tucked inside one of Kate McCloud’s old yellow woolen ski socks, which in turn is concealed inside my only luggage, an Air France travel bag (when escaping Southampton, I left pronto, and I doubt that I’ll ever again see those Vuitton cases, Battistoni shirts, Lanvin suits, Peal shoes; not that I care to, for the sight would make me strangle on my own vomit).
Just now I fetched it out, The White Rose, and in its winking facets I saw the blue-skied snowfields above St. Moritz and saw Kate McCloud, a russet wraith astride her blond Kneissl skis, streak by in speeding profile, her backward-slanting angle an attitude as elegant and precise as the cool Clichy crystal itself.
IT RAINED NIGHT BEFORE LAST; by morning an autumnal flight of dry Canadian air had stopped the next wave, so I went for a walk, and whom should I run into but Woodrow Hamilton!—the man responsible, indirectly anyway, for this last disastrous adventure of mine. Here I am at the Central Park Zoo, empathizing with a zebra, when a disbelieving voice says: “P. B.?” and it was he, the descendant of our twenty-eighth President. “My God, P. B. You look …”
I knew how I looked inside my grey skin, my greasy seersucker suit. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Oh. I see. I wondered if you were involved in that. All I know is what I read in the paper. It must be quite a story. Look,” he said when I didn’t reply, “let’s step over to the Pierre and have a drink.”
They wouldn’t serve me at the Pierre because I wasn’t wearing a tie; we wandered over to a Third Avenue saloon, and on the
