The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (43 page)

God forbid that any part of this record become a temperance lecture! No man has ever been a victim of whiskey—only of his
own weakness. Determined as I was of the correctness of my course, much as I enjoyed to be with Mink, any excuse would suffice.
Letters from Katie, samples of her writing, as though for my critique.
Colette and Baba in Timbuctoo,
⁸³
indeed! News of her slutting around in Mexico, with another member of the Estranged Wives Club, would move me to crack open
the next bottle.
⁸⁴

Once Mink’s divorce was final, I even wrote the presumptuous letter of all time to Lyman, demanding why didn’t he make Katie
an honest woman? Eventually, he would. Justine, I continued to keep at arm’s length. Mink and I were living in Toulon. A demon,
which I couldn’t exorcise as easily as I had the “Abbe Penhoel,” was the one reminding me that France had held mortal danger
for Justine. Perhaps it was irrational, but I had the same sexual tastes, grouped with even wilder sets, and Justine would
always go to extremes, push things too far. So how could I know, I ask you?

It might have been fortunate that Justine chose to despise Marjorie as much as she loved Katie. For play beyond that which
Mink could accommodate, there were always others. Hell’s bells, sometimes I just ran ads! Popular misconception aside, it’s
never difficult to find girls, like my young friend Eleanor,
⁸⁵
who will volunteer to be chained and whipped. The dearth is of men able to distinguish this practice from mindless brutality.

————————

Returning to France, after the publication of my book on Africa, we visited my friend Walter Duranty at his wife Jeannot’s
St. Tropez home. Walter had just made the coup of his historic interview with Stalin, and was basking in the admiration and
brilliant accolades of the smart set. Some were bemused by our camaraderie, ignorant of Walter having been more deeply involved,
in his youth, with Aleister Crowley than ever was I. Comparing lives touched by the Great Beast, checking them on each other,
had led us to believe from early on that I was not alone in my conscious congress with otherworlds.

Walter had rounded up the journalist George Seldes in the company of a recently acquired, beautiful blonde leftist from Texas,
of all places. As my friend Max has always contended, Texan Communists are of a different cut—more anarchist than red, and
open to anything. To George’s amazement, I promptly persuaded her to spend some time, exquisitely suffering, in a cage in
my Toulon loft.

The real fly in George’s ointment was Walter, with whom I was sharing the girl’s attentions. A brouhaha started up at dinner,
Walter surprising everyone with a very serious proposal that she return with him to Moscow. Jeannot threw a large fish across
his face, and then ordered us all out of the house. Walter put the blonde up at a hotel and asked me to look after her, so
I moved her into the loft. George, by that point, sounded relieved.

Mink, on the other hand, got sore and drunk on rum. Out of humor with these “Lizzies-in-chains,” as she called all my substitute
Justines, she promptly ran the girl off—at the point of one of my Damascus blades. I’m sure she never understood why I was
so amused, taking her out for her favorite dinner and wine. A reserved and easily embarrassed person, Mink is generally mute
when she first meets people. Intimidated by waiters and clerks, switchboard operators, haughty saleswomen, guests at teas
and literary cocktail parties—even her own publisher, or so it seemed—but you’d never have made that blonde believe it.

Across the table, I contemplated her fine manners, the perfect antithesis of undeniably other-than-decorous Justine, and my
renewed fondness and appreciation were bittersweet. Why, it was simply that the holy terror I’d just witnessed, uncharacteristic
of sweet-natured and polite Marjorie, was so reminiscent of my red-haired angel herself!

Justine had last been in France the previous summer, in 1930, about the time I became acquainted with the artist Man Ray,
who shared my interests, if only aesthetically. One evening, when Justine was staying at my Paris flat, Mink and I had to
attend a banquet where I was the guest of honor. I telephoned Man Ray and asked if he and his date, Lee Miller, a good-looker
recently arrived from the States, would drop by and visit with Justine.

Lee was so young then! She’d begun outraging taboos a couple of years earlier when, at age twenty-one, she’d been the first
photography model to appear, elegantly gowned in
McCall’s
magazine—in a Kotex advertisement. The supercilious mortification
of our countrymen had prompted her to sail for the more sophisticated climes of Europe, where she would become a brilliant
photographer in her own right. There must be poetic justice that a woman I had foolishly rejected the time before would not,
this time around, have any interest whatsoever in me.

I could scarcely believe that I had seen her as too old and worn, at thirty-three! Meeting her again, a decade earlier, my
foreknowledge of how she would begin to season made her youthful vibrancy only the more precious. Youth wasted on the young?
More honest, though a less colorful piece of reporting, is for me to concede; to that young Lee, I was but a degenerate old
soak.

On the other hand, the time before might have been only of a moment, which was as may never be; of the Blitz, or a spat with
her lover. Today, promoted by her skill, the Army, and
Vogue
magazine into the love-idol photojournalist of the Western Front,
she seems to have come into this more than I had intended. I do hope Roland Penrose appreciates what he’s getting.

In truth, I did have ulterior motives, beyond disliking Justine to be on the streets of Paris in a mood. While Man Ray and
Lee enjoyed our company, Lee had declined to participate in our photography sessions, though she liked watching them. To Man
Ray, Justine in her leather bonds would look good enough to eat. I hoped she would register with Lee sufficiently to get her
out of her clothes during our next session.

Justine, accustomed to going everywhere with me when I was with Katie, chose to see it in a different light. She threw one
of her ferocious tantrums, tearing off her clothes and screaming that, if she had to have baby-sitters, they would damned
well see the whole show. She insisted that she be found chained to the newel post and would accept only the compromise of
a loincloth. Mink, typically, was mortified, though I was amused.

Still, I sent her home again, ostensibly because of her friction with Mink—that convenient fiction being a mere fig leaf for
my fear. Three years later, my trepidation would be confirmed in New York. Marjorie had written a novel, entitled
Scarlet
Josephine
, that had overtones of D.H. Lawrence.
⁸⁶
Interestingly, it was about a bookish woman writer who became obsessed with a reciprocal life and inadvertently brought it
into being.

Mink appeared at a party celebrating its publication wearing her collar of two pieces of hinged silver with shiny knobs that
snapped into place about her neck as her one and only adornment. The wearer had to hold her head high and was unable to turn
it, producing a regal appearance. A slinky black gown matching her luxuriant mane, Mink created a sensation. When asked about
the collar’s unusual design, her replies were the customary dumb, polite banalities.

In Paris, I’d labored long in its production, sending Man Ray exact measurements of her neck and chin by way of
pneumatique
mail. His little silversmith, who lived way over by the Buttes Chaumont, had made repeated bus trips to my Montparnasse studio,
with his satchel of tiny anvils and hammers, before he got the
art moderne
collar and its companion bracelets to fit just
right.

It was my stupidity for having invited Justine, allowing the poor girl to be taken, when she made a row, for behaving like
a jealous child. It was my burden alone to understand the veracity of her impossible contention that the tailored collar somehow
belonged to her. I endeavored to handle her so gently, for only I could know of a design the time before, in a world where
it
had
been hers, where our play had helped cost her precious life.

Only after her altered destiny had been assured, did I fully confront its uncertainty. Her new fate would be as indeterminate
as that of any other man or woman. Of the one I loved most, I would no longer have foreknowledge, and I feared the effect
of my own continuing influence. I suppose it fortunate that she had given birth to a beautiful little girl and, consequently,
was otherwise occupied. Now,
there
was a mirror into which I could not begin to look. By then, my drinking had gotten to the
point that it was to be either a stretch in Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet, or the graveyard …

————————

“V
IVIDLY!
W
E WERE AT THE
P
LACE DE
L’O
DÉON
when you commissioned it!” she hissed when I asked her if she remembered those incidents. Her pale green eyes burned like
a magnesium flame, and she flushed with remembered rage. “I’d been sizzlin’ at you being wise at my expense, explaining me
to the press as your fuckin’
mascot,
of all things. After you left me alone with them, you can believe me when I say that I talked some shit!”

In her anger, her speech was vacillating wildly between personas, so I avoided inflaming her by making any comment on the
total identification of me with Willie. I couldn’t distinguish whether there was fragmentation, or its reverse, an emotional
involvement of the whole combined entity.

“I told them I was a ho’ and that you played this game so that you could like,
may-be
get it up. If you couldn’t get into her pants, you have
me
to thank. You can be so goddamned sure I fucked you! And, you can sit on your heartfelt little alibis and rotate. If I had
known that it was indeed true, that you had Man Ray make
my
slave collar
for Marjorie,
I’d of slapped your ears off!”

I was blown away, not by the barrage, but its implications. Saying nothing, I went inside and retrieved my copied pages of
Man Ray’s memoirs. When I returned, she seemed to have calmed a bit. She looked at them and shrugged, “Yea, I remember how
he got all journalistic on your ass. Aw-hunh, good enough for you.
Hein!
” She stopped short. “If this isn’t some kinda shit.”

The pages I’d handed her were from the later, 1988 republication, with additional illustrations. She was staring at the black-and-white
photos, taken in Seabrook’s Paris apartment circa 1930, which could easily have been modern bondage and discipline shots.
They were the ones that featured a naked woman trussed up on the carpet with leather straps. Her legs appeared shaven, though
her armpits were not. She could be seen as quite pretty, even through the stylized twenties’ makeup. A masked woman, costumed
in a leather apron, was kneeling above her.

“You know them?” My own astonishment was rising. While the bound girl’s curls looked oily and disheveled, they could easily
have been red, compared to the black mane of the woman who knelt over her. The emotion in Justine’s timbre had morphed into
an unspeakable pathos, coming from somewhere apart from the normal spectrum.

“Go on with you, now,” she whispered. “I only looked at that face in the mirror every day.” I marveled at the longing in her
eyes, knowing I could not comprehend what she must be feeling. Reviewing pictures of our younger selves often can be bad enough.
Reflection upon the image of flesh that had ceased to be one’s own might be akin to a sort of “postpartum” grief, as at loss
of self—or of a child. That paradox, from which she had sought release at
The Château,
she must confront as established fact. Observing oneself from outside;
who is observing?

I studied the image of the original Justine, then looked again at Justine
^2,
then back to the picture of her great-grandmother nearly as young as she. Emotionally, I felt the “hall of mirrors” effect
again, with the old woman I’d met in ’69 lurking behind, and ahead, and in-between the worlds.

“My God, this is you? You were thirty-something when this was taken! Are there more like this?”

“Oh yes, thirty ‘something,’
indeed. Damn!
” Her voice cut like a steel razor. “Could you be any more annoying? Yes, a lot more, if you can find them. You can be sure
that
I’m
a babe anytime.
Lee
thought so,” speaking of Man Ray’s free-spirited young
protégée,
“and
believe
that I had a rave on for
her.

“But, he’d be first saying ‘go, girl,’ then, ‘stop.’ Like when she did Cocteau’s film? Think I didn’t know that sniffing after
her was the real reason for that silly idea of going to war again—and pushing sixty, of all things! As if you
even
had a chance with the future Lady Penrose, you old fool!

“Say, what if I told you that she played with me, pulled stuff on me that he wouldn’t write about and didn’t tell you? How
would that make you feel? Like, her reaching beneath my loincloth, and using her fingernails to …” Momentarily, I would snap
that this thoroughly weird tease had been calculated, but she succeeded in getting past me again. I felt a hot surge around
my neck and a tingling in my loins.

“Jealousy wedded to voyeuristic arousal,” I conceded. “Point taken, but how much of the rest of this …” I revisited the implications,
about Marjorie having sensed a repetition of their other-life meeting, and Justine glimpsing an alternate reality while driving
by the
Château d’Evenos.
“Are we supposed to be accepting the proposition of a group of souls traveling together through times and worlds? Stuck with
each other, as it were?”

“Not like a totally new idea, I’m sure. Jews,
hasidim,
go with it—and what about the ‘closed corporation’ of the
Druse?
Besides, isn’t this all, y’know, compatible with your research, like with Marjorie’s weird time sequences?” I assented that,
short of checking notes, I was reasonably sure that was so.