The Delphi Room (9 page)
Authors: Melia McClure
Again, I am sorry I lied.
While I am apologizing, I feel that I must also say that I am sorry about my appearance, in case it disappointed you. Perhaps this sounds strange, but I was initially terrified that you saw me, terrified and disappointed. Somehow it seemed easier to write to you knowing that you had no idea what I looked like. But now I want you to see me. Although I cannot stop myself from writing apologetic rambles like this one. So: sorry that my nose and chin are unevenly distributed. And it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, as you saw, that I will not develop shoulders before I die. I know that—unless things have altered in your room—you have no one else to correspond with. Nevertheless, I hope that my person did not disappoint. No one likes to be chosen by default.
Shut up, Brinkley. Is that what you are thinking? Once one embarks on a tangent rife with worries, it is difficult to reset the course. Next topic: I suppose the fact that I am not actually a banker has rearranged your ideas about what kind of place I lived in. It was a very nice, thoroughly disinfected basement suite, in an older but very nice house. Actually, my mother lived in the house; I rented the basement from her. She has been sick the last few years and I was trying to take care of her. It was a brown house with large hedges in front, and two prominent upstairs windows that looked like eyes. My suite was small, but it had hardwood floors, like yours, and bright warm yellow walls, just like Monet’s dining room at Giverny. I did not have any Monet poster prints, but I had a Matisse, the one with the wild dancers that caused a critic to label him a Fauve. (What do critics know, anyway?) I also had a Chagall, “Bouquet with Flying Lovers.” And three de Lempickas. I loved Degas, too. All that tulle is beautiful to me. And of course, I had lots of pictures of Clara Bow, my favourite actress. Do you have favourite artists?
I had a small closet that I kept very organized with a special system that I invented, which sorted things based on colour and the type of buttons on any given garment. I had fourteen suits that I wore to work, according to my work-wardrobe rotation schedule. I did not really have to wear a suit to work, there was no rule saying that the file clerk had to wear a tie, but I always felt more ready to face the world in a suit. I found that the right tie was a sort of armour. Somehow, I believe you understand my meaning.
I went around the corner to a tiny diner every day to eat my meals; the people were very nice and got to know me. Restaurants are a great breeding ground for bacteria, but this one was particularly clean and I felt comfortable there. The owner’s name was Mary and she was very good to me. She was a great fan of silent films and we would have long conversations about the nuances of old cinema. She loved Valentino. I never ate in any other restaurant. I always brought something home for my mother to eat, usually macaroni and cheese or chicken soup.
So, like you, I have left my mother behind. I miss her, of course, although in the last few years we had not spoken all that much—I mentioned to you that she had not been very well. I worry about who will take care of her. My aunt lives in Boston; maybe she will have to come and stay. My father left when I was a baby, and disappeared. I don’t mean literally, I am sure he is around somewhere, but I never saw him, so consequently I do not miss him now. You have not mentioned your father. Where is he? I did not have many friends, either—what do they call us, lone wolves?
No, Velvet, I do not think anyone hates you. Certainly not your mother, nor your friend Davie. They love you and they understand. I must say—and please do not take this the wrong way—I admire you. I admit there were moments, while I was filing or at night alone with Clara Bow, in which I thought of doing what you did, but I never had the courage. I think you are very brave. I do not know, Velvet, how we are going to carry on here. We have been awaiting the Judgment, but perhaps this is it. You are right that the weight of missing someone, of absence, crushes—so many moments I feel as if I cannot breathe in and out one more time. I do not suppose we can die all over again; if we did it would likely be just another step on the treadmill that would return us to this place. (Always hated repetitive cardio.) I will tell you a secret: I do not have too many people to long for. I am longing for the familiar, for the sounds my house made at night, for lying in bed listening to horns on the street, for macaroni and cheese and lattes with soymilk, for my bedroom and my clothes, and most of all for Clara Bow. I am longing to see you. But I guess, to keep breathing in and out, we write letters and wait. There must be more to this place, Velvet. And I am here, thinking of you, on the other side of the wall.
Yours very truly,
Brinkley
He saw my life, he saw my life, he saw my life. . . .
A clump of words repeated over and over lose all semantics, become instead a pulsing sensate clot. There was no mistaking what he had described, so great was the feeling of my skin being peeled away and the salty pour of memories attacking the rawness. Yet I was surprised by my lack of shame in light of Brinkley’s innocent voyeurism. There was more a rueful smile, a shrugging of the shoulders.
How many men (straight ones) have even heard of Clara Bow, let alone love her? How many actually like silent movies? How many understand the protective force of a good tie? Far too few, in my book.
And what he said in answer to my question about whether I am hated made me feel a little better. Perhaps completely untrue, but kind of him to say.
I looked out the barred window at the visual equivalent of white noise. Not mist, fog, smoke or snow, but pure matterless white. There was an opaque quality to it, so despite its natural bright, it didn’t hurt my eyes. There was a tearing sensation, though, in my chest, a ripped-at-the-roots hollow. I pushed forward and leaned low over the desk, on my elbows, and pressed my face between the bars to the window, unloosing my squashed kiss against the chill glass. My breath bloomed a flower.
Did he really say he admired me?
Hot pink eyeshade was pushed up on my head, so when I looked in the mirror I had two sets of eyes. One, headlight-sized and blinkless, with braidable lashes; the other, large-lidded and shiny, and steadily turning colour. The blue outline had grown and was encroaching ever more on the blacky-brown, though not in any neatly defined way. There was no tidy border now, the sapphire ring a wavy ellipse, one colour spilling over the other. It gave my eye an odd marbled effect. I imagined Brinkley’s eyes looking the same way, except a spillage of blue and green. I wished I could see them for real.
So where was
my
movie? I peered at the glass hard, until my eyes felt as though they glowed with the effort. And like a snake willed by the desire of its charmer, my reflection was gradually obscured by an electronic blizzard.
INT. VELVET’S HELL—MIRROR—
BRINKLEY’S CHILDHOOD HOME—BATHROOM—NIGHT
Brinkley sits on the bathroom floor picking lint out of the valleys between his toes. He is a young boy.
His mother relaxes in the bathtub. She bears an uncanny resemblance to Rita Hayworth. Her feet are thrown over the edge of the tub, glistening with damp and their own incandescent pallor. She smokes with one hand while the other lithe arm uncoils from her chest and extends into the air holding aloft a glass of clear liquid, a sliding mirror ruled by the minute inflections of her wrist. She stares at it, eye to a crystal ball, on the hunt for her reflection, or the future.
RITA/MOTHER
Baby. BABY.
Brinkley stops arranging his lint balls into a star pattern on the tile, and looks up. Rita/Mother unlooses a giggle that touches off a chain of hiccups. The hiccups alternate with giggles until both are lost to a maelstrom of ragged coughs. Her small son sits in silence, Argus-eyed.
RITA/MOTHER
Fucking Mother of God.
Once the hacking subsides, the clear liquid in the glass obeys the motion of her hand, rushes to the rim and over, the necessary tonic down her throat. After she swallows, Rita/Mother gazes into the empty glass for what seems to her son a long time, her siren loveliness cataloguing a baffled gravity.
RITA/MOTHER
Oh-oh.
Laughter once again overtakes her, deeper and louder than before, its hollow bell tolling in every corner of the bathroom. Choking coughs displace the bell and Rita/Mother contorts as though she may retch a lung. A clot of jellied yellow emerges from her mouth and plops into the glass. She groans and sets her cup of biology on the edge of the tub, leans her head back and slides further into the water. A come-hither mask obscures her features and she starts to belt out “Put the Blame on Mame” from the Rita Hayworth film
Gilda
.
Brinkley/Argus is motionless, taking his place alongside ancient gods in his all-seeing sweep of vision. Rita/Mother stops singing mid-song, arches her back, shakes her mane and sighs. Her long-fingered hands cup her breasts, push them chinward. She appears to be testing them out, searching for something. A sudden racket of sloshing water, up and over its white cage—the flame-headed mermaid is face-to-face with her child. She blows smoke.
RITA/MOTHER
(low)
What happened to you?
(louder)
What happened to you?
Brinkley’s arms are wrapped around his legs, rendering him a tight ball of boy, and he looks up into the two lights for eyes that blaze down at him.
RITA/MOTHER
Are you deaf? Are you an idiot? Did I give birth to an idiot?
She falls back into the water with a cry.
RITA/MOTHER
(low)
Twit.
(then, to herself)
Where’s my daughter?
Sobs fill up the bathroom, plangent with phlegm. Up pops the mermaid’s head, her arms reaching over the edge of the tub, fingers stretched and taut with desperation.
RITA/MOTHER
ComehereI’msorryI’msorryI’msorrybeautifulbeautifulmylittleboy!
The long fingers make a grab for Brinkley, pull him into soaking breasts, bury his face. She rocks him, strokes his hair.
RITA/MOTHER
Mommy loves you. Mommy loves you so much. You’re my boy.
Draws back suddenly, jerked by a string. Eyes orbed with strange light, fantastical fairy flame like her hair.
RITA/MOTHER
Don’t you leave me. Promise me you won’t leave me. Okay? Promise? Promise me?
Brinkley nods, face bearing the grave frown of a grave covenant. The mermaid takes his face in her hands, runs her prune-y fingers down his cheeks.
RITA/MOTHER
You are such a good boy. You’re the best boy in the whole world.
(to herself)
But I want my little girl.
The good little boy watches as Aphrodite of the nether regions rises, sans seashell, from her murky, shallow sea. Water streams from her pubic hair, limp locks spill pell-mell over her shoulders, stick to her breasts like seaweed.
RITA/MOTHER
Darling, hand me a towel.
Brinkley obliges, and Rita/Mother lights up like a Christmas tree, drops her cigarette in the bath.
RITA/MOTHER
Oh my God, Brinkley!
(lets towel fall in water)
Oh my God! I have the best idea!
INT. VELVET’S HELL—MIRROR—BRINKLEY’S CHILDHOOD HOME—LIVING ROOM—A SHORT TIME LATER
Rita/Mother wears a red silk robe that bears a sinister dragon on the back. It keeps falling open. Together, she and Brinkley have pulled all the cushions off the living room couch and chairs, and are stacking them to make a fort. A bounty of blankets is at the ready to make a roof. Brinkley stacks the cushions, paying special attention to the matching up of edges, sure and sober of face, and doesn’t look up when his mother flies from the room.
RITA/MOTHER
I want potato chips! Brinkley, do you want to make pancakes? Let’s have pancakes in our fort!
He hears the pour of popcorn kernels and a few minutes later they pop to life, a blitz of tiny gunshots.
RITA/MOTHER
Did you eat all the pickles?
BRINKLEY
(to himself)
I don’t like pickles.
Rita/Mother begins to sing “My Funny Valentine” at the top of her lungs. She gets to “Your looks are laughable” and then stops, charges into the living room and stands stock-still, staring at Brinkley.
RITA/MOTHER
I’m bored. Let’s play dress-up. And I have to finish my goddamn painting! I can’t work like this!
She rushes from the room. Brinkley shakes out a blanket, prepares to lay the roof on his fort. He is methodical, seemingly insensible to his mother’s manic behaviour.
Minutes later, Rita/Mother appears in the doorway that hinges kitchen to living room, poses with one arm high above her head, a cigarette in hand. A full, white breast slips free, gleams in the lamplight. In her other hand, she clutches a bag full of clothes.
RITA/MOTHER
Oh my darling. You are so beautiful.
Strides across the room, red hair and red silk flying.
RITA/MOTHER
(drops the bag, cigarette hanging from her lips)
Dance with me.
Brinkley is smothered by giggles and hair, dropping the roof of the fort as he is dragged ’round the room in a quasi-tango, ’til his mother trips and they both take headers into the pile of cushions that he had so carefully arranged. Laughter from the dancers hits the four walls of the room; the woman’s is loud and infectious, and her small son rides on it like a raft. It takes him in, as her arms open and she draws the bony boy to her skin, and he lies in a heady cloud of gin and lavender perfume. After a moment she pushes him away, leaps up and moves to a corner of the room. Pulls a sheet off an easel upon which sits a large canvas, a vivid unfinished abstract of a small boy with multiple sets of eyes.
RITA/MOTHER
Do you like this? I’m getting mixed signals.
BRINKLEY
What is it?
RITA/MOTHER
How should I know? I just paint what I’m told.
BRINKLEY
Who tells you?
RITA/MOTHER
The Committee. You know, they tell everyone what to do. Especially artists. Because we know the secret code.
(indicating painting)
Yes, this one is going to be special.
BRINKLEY
(nods solemnly)
Special.
Rita/Mother flings her arms around him, biting his ear.
RITA/MOTHER
Mommy loves you, Mommy loves you, Mommy loves you!
BRINKLEY
Ow!
He tries to protect his ear. She draws back as though shot through with electricity.
RITA/MOTHER
Promise me. Promise me you’ll never leave.
BRINKLEY
I promise. But no biting.
RITA/MOTHER
Pinky swear.
Brinkley holds up his little pinky and his mother entwines it in her own.
RITA/MOTHER
That means we’ll be together forever.
A blizzard of sloppy kisses; a belch escapes her throat. Brinkley wipes his face. The belcher laughs.
RITA/MOTHER
What’s that smell? Oh my God, the popcorn!
Shuttles at star-speed from the room, while Brinkley scrubs his cheek with a wool blanket. Appears in the doorway, glistening lips in a mock-pout and a drink in her hand.
RITA/MOTHER
I burned it.
(exiting back into kitchen)
Wine gums, wine gums, salt water taffy, where’s my record player?
She returns, picks up the bag of clothes, rummages.
RITA/MOTHER
Dress-up time my angel! Where’s my goddamn red lipstick?
BRINKLEY
I don’t want to. I’m tired.
RITA/MOTHER
Nonsense! I want my little girl! I want my goddamn . . . Am I wearing any lipstick? Did I forget?
She blots her mouth with her fingers, checking for colour. Pulls a gold tube of red lipstick out of the dress-up bag.
RITA/MOTHER
Ah, my magic wand!
(smears her lips, smacks them together)
Much better, my darling, much better. I need my red armour. And so do you! Come, come.
Brinkley shakes his head and turns away. Rita/Mother grabs him, points the tube of lipstick like a gun.
RITA/MOTHER
Assume the position.
He shakes his head, mouth set in a steely line. She grabs his face, squishes his mouth into a pout and smudges it red like a child playing with crayons, colouring outside the lines. Brinkley struggles and whimpers.
RITA/MOTHER
Stay still! You’re ruining my work.
(inspecting his face)
There. Very pretty. What a pretty little thing you are. Now—your outfit. You simply can’t go to Sing Sing with a green face! Ha! Remember that movie, darling? Weren’t the clothes divine? Oh, I could be happy if I lived in a movie like that, couldn’t I? Let’s live together in a movie, my angel, shall we? We’d be happy then, I know we would.
She rifles through the bag, pulling out clothing and tossing it about. Out comes a frilly peach-coloured little girl’s dress and a white satin evening gown. Rita/Mother drops her robe and stands naked before her son, touching the white satin to her cheek. Brinkley looks away.
RITA/MOTHER
Oh darling, it’s so beautiful. I live for beauty! Do you think I should paint in this dress? Inspiring, no? You can’t feel sad in a dress like this, angel. It’s not possible!
She slips it on, struts about the room, strikes a pose.
RITA/MOTHER
Okay darling, now it’s your turn! Everyone gets a turn to be beautiful! That’s what The Committee always says!
Brinkley backs away, but she grabs him and pulls off his clothes. He shivers, shoulders hunched. She pulls the little dress over his head, does up the sash.
RITA/MOTHER
Oh, spin ’round for me! Let me look at you!
Brinkley is motionless, staring at the floor. Rita/Mother gently lifts his chin.
RITA/MOTHER
Mommy loves you. You are so pretty.
She smiles softly, her mania seeming to dissipate. He smiles back, reaches out and touches her hair.
RITA/MOTHER
You’re beautiful, just like my little girl that died.
BRINKLEY
What little girl?
RITA/MOTHER
My little girl. She died. And then I got you.
BRINKLEY
Are you sad?
RITA/MOTHER
Yes, sometimes I’m sad. But I love to see you in her dress. It makes me happy.
(pause)
Oh! I know what would make me happy—a snack! Let’s have a little tea party, darling!
She bolts into the kitchen. Surveying the ruination of the would-be fort, Brinkley appears to consider—for an instant—taking up the cause again, stacking the cushions, matching up the edges, choosing a blanket to keep out the rain. But exhaustion knocks him into a little ball on the floor, half-covered by a pilled green throw. A train of spittle has chugged its way down Brinkley’s chin by the time the lady in white shakes him awake, a new drink in hand.
RITA/MOTHER
BrinkleyBrinkleyBrinkley! I found my record player. Oh my God—the moon, have you seen the moon? It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, come look, come look, come look!