The Whiteness of Bones (16 page)

There was a large blood stain on the back of the slip.

Felix looked away.

Mamie dropped to the floor, sitting with stiff, bare legs straight before her, hands clenched tightly in her lap.

He stood over her, the black dress dragging on the floor. “My dear,” he said quietly.

She stared at his long, narrow feet in their thin brown leather shoes. There were bumps on the soles. He was wearing Italian driving slippers.

He reached down to take her hand. There was no place where she could stand that would protect her from view. The blood from the aborted birth of Claire and Orval Nalag’s child was visible no matter where she put herself.

“You are so sweet,” he said. “So
mignon
.”

She felt such a relief in being comforted that she didn’t mind when he put his arm around her to draw her to her feet. She was so embarrassed that she was not paying close attention to him. He was very excited by her. He stroked her arms with the back of his fingers.

“I am thinking to name this dress ‘Missionary’s Downfall’ in honor of you. But only if you promise to wear it in Chicago. Do you promise?”

He could see that as she grew more composed, she was more conscious of the intimacy with which he touched her arms and the small of her back. He touched instead each of the coconut shell buttons on her turquoise bowling shirt, and then he let her pull away from him.

“Do you promise?”

Without turning her back to him, although she knew that he could still see the bloody slip clearly in the mirror behind her, she reached out awkwardly for her skirt. “Does this mean no more Miss Magda?” She smiled. The idea of escaping from the lingerie department made her very happy.

“I saw you, months ago, on the elevator. Before we first met, before the fashion show. I have been thinking how you would look in my clothes.”

“You have?” Mamie was surprised. She quickly put on her skirt.

“You belong in the world. The world should see you.” He took her hand and kissed it. “The world
will
see you.”

Mamie laughed. He laughed, too, and allowed her to slip shyly out of the dressing room.

It was the night of Alysse’s big dinner, what the girls had come to call the Claire-and-Mamie dinner, and Mamie, still exhilarated by her change in fortune that morning, found herself standing for hours in front of the bathroom mirror. Claire’s slip soaked in cold brown water in the sink before her as Mamie tried to discover just what it was that Mr. Felix had seen in her. Despite studying herself from every possible angle, she couldn’t quite get it. The question is, she thought, not whether I agree with him, but whether I believe him.

It is safe to say that Mamie had never thought of herself as someone whom the world deserved to see. It was one thing to incite blue-collar compliments at construction sites (“Yo, skinny, want to go round the world?”), but it was quite another to be discovered by Felix Villanueve. It meant, too, that she no longer had to run to Eighth Avenue to pick up Miss Magda’s corn removers, or to hide among the ostrich-feather bed jackets the torn, soiled clothes stolen overnight by Selena. She was astonished at her good luck.

Claire spent the morning with Lydia, who had obligingly plaited Claire’s wet hair into fifty tiny braids. Claire, who had set aside an hour to unbraid her hair, was on the toilet seat, unweaving the thin, tight strands as Mamie held up yet another hand mirror to get a glimpse of herself from the side.

“Very Pre-Raphaelite,” Mamie said.

“Pre-what?”

“Very pretty,” Mamie said. “Your hair. Not me.”

“Lydia told me about a farmer in her village in Guatemala who had an old horse that he loved. He used to make love to the horse from behind, climbing up on the flatbed of an old pickup. Lydia used to watch them.”

“I’m sorry you told me this.” Mamie was looking at her profile.

“It gets better.”

“Not possible.”

“Lydia says the horse loved it.”

Mamie looked at her. The loose hair fanned out in an aureola around Claire’s sweet little face.

“How did she know?” Mamie asked.

“What?”

“That the horse loved it.”

Claire shrugged. “Women know these things.”

Mamie laughed. Claire looked up at her, pleased. “I believe it,” she said.

“You would.”

“I’m happy for the farmer,” Claire said.

“I’m happy for the horse,” Mamie said, putting on her dress. She was wearing a lavender flocked-velvet cheongsam she had found in an antique store in downtown Los Angeles. Alysse had wanted her to borrow something of hers, but Mamie had politely refused. Alysse thought that Mamie always looked as if she were going to a costume party. Like Selena, she thought that Mamie’s way of dressing was perverse. She had convinced Claire to wear one of her cocktail dresses and, in fact, it was Claire who looked like she was disguised as a middle-aged rich lady.

Alysse had gone to great trouble for the party. The apartment was filled with thousands of ruffled pink peonies and Mamie, who did not know about peonies, was delighted with the
millions of rounded petals, as soft as powdered skin, and the sweet fragrance that seeped from room to room.

Four round tables had been put up in the dark green dining room. Alysse was very proud of the place settings. She had stolen the idea from Vivi Crawford. The china and silver and glasses were set on top of three or four large art books arranged on the tables before each gilt chair. Mamie, who had on her right a plump interior decorator and, on her left, a man named Alder Stoddard, had been lucky enough to draw
Monet at Giverny, Avedon
and
English Country Houses
. This stack of books in front of each guest diminished by quite a bit the distance from plate to mouth and it wasn’t until the second course, a
Poitrine de Veau Farcie
, that they adjusted to this awkward foreshortening. The other difficulty was that there was nowhere on the table to place their arms, so in moments of stillness they looked like very good schoolchildren at their desks, hands folded obediently in their laps.

Mamie looked at the faces illuminated by candlelight. The women and their jewels, and the shining cloth of their dresses, shimmered with a glittering, pearly iridescence and the bare-shouldered women stood out whitely against the green walls, as if they were in a forest at night. As she looked curiously around the table, Mamie noticed for the first time that some women as they grew older, became increasingly hard, just as men became softer and more effeminate.

Mr. Stoddard was a tall man in his early thirties. He was wearing a well-cut navy blue pin-striped suit. He had dark, short hair and dark, serious eyes that flicked restlessly over the surface of things. Mamie had the sense that he was a man who was easily bored. He was frowning, with his head cocked so that he could listen to Lady Studd, who was on his other side, without having to look at her. Lady Studd ate stealthily off his plate as she told him of the time Slim Pomerantz jumped
into a bonfire in Jamaica because her husband was flirting with the waitress.

“She said, ‘Look, look, I’m Jeanne d’Arc!’ ”

Mamie turned to the man on her right. He was very famous for having recently introduced Toile de Jouy to the new world. There were very few good apartments or country houses that did not have at least one room covered in toile. Alysse’s bedroom was done in a red and white toile hunting scene.

He said to Mamie, “Look at the Grand Duke. He is the exact image of the Dowager Empress, isn’t he?”

Mamie allowed as how he did resemble her greatly.

“Of course, they never got on,” the decorator said. “He hated his father.”

“That’s not so uncommon, do you think?” Mamie was trying to be a good dinner partner. “It is the classic Oedipal struggle. ”

“The what?” He looked at her for the first time.

“The Oedipal struggle.”

He was very perplexed. With some suspicion, Mamie took it upon herself to briefly explain to him the story of Oedipus. When she finished, there was a long pause.

“That is the single most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said loudly. He was shocked and outraged. Mamie looked around nervously, but no one was listening to them. “Want to
kill
your father and
marry
your mother? It’s ludicrous! Judas priest, girl, wherever did you hear such a thing?” he shouted.

Mamie was so taken aback that she pulled away from him and knocked Mr. Stoddard’s knife from one of his art books,
Balthus
, onto the floor. She leaned down to pick it up at the same time as Mr. Stoddard bent down to find it. Mamie looked at the top of his head, and she looked at his black shoes, and then, inches apart, heads pressed against the moiré tablecloth, they looked at each other.

“She’s explaining to me how she masturbates her corgis,” he said solemnly to Mamie. “She says that everyone does it.”

“I don’t,” said Mamie.

“I didn’t think so,” he said and they sat up.

Claire was standing behind Mamie’s chair. She grinned a little drunkenly at Mr. Stoddard and leaned down to whisper to Mamie. “I’m next to someone fat from Newport who keeps talking about his ‘Mummy.’ ” Mamie could smell whiskey and cigarette smoke in Claire’s hair.

“Alysse says it’s a good sign,” Mamie whispered back to her. “It means he had an English nanny, remember?”

A young, handsome waiter stood behind them, impatiently waiting to pour more wine. Mamie gently nudged Claire away. The waiter, with great sulkiness, leaned around her to pour the wine.

“Is that your sister?” Alder Stoddard asked abruptly. He had given up dinner parties, especially Alysse’s dinner parties, years ago.

“How did you know?”

“I met her before dinner. That gentleman over there, the man who is laughing, the Ambassador, is very sorry that the American military did not bomb Vietnam into submission. He believes it should be done now in Nicaragua and that we would regain the respect of our allies by ‘standing tall.’ He was describing just how Navy Seals kill village headmen when your sister interrupted him to ask a question. She wanted to know if his wife cupped his balls when he came.”

Mamie, under less inhibiting conditions, would have laughed. She saw that it wouldn’t do. I am now in terrible trouble on both sides, she thought. The homosexual on my right thinks I lied to him about a conspiracy to kill fathers and Claire has deliberately insulted the State Department.

Mr. Stoddard looked sternly at Mamie. She was angry
and embarrassed to be put in the position of having to defend her sister, but she knew, from the past, the futility of explanation.

“Well, does she?” Mamie asked. “Cup his balls, I mean.”

He leaned toward her. “Let’s get out of here.”

He pushed back his chair. He pulled back Mamie’s chair. She saw Alysse look up quickly. The decorator who had never heard of Oedipus did not bother to look at them.

Mamie, who was passive because she was still waiting to see what would happen in the world, and Alder, whose passivity came from having already seen what would happen and not much liking what he had seen, were unlikely conspirators. Or perhaps they only seemed unlikely. Alysse would never have insisted that he come to dinner had she known that her niece would attract his attention. Alysse would have thought Alder too jaded for Mamie—he was more her kind of man. She could never have guessed that Mamie, whom she secretly found a little too sincere, a quality she considered deadly, reminded Alder of himself before he was overwhelmed with disillusionment and the laziness that is so often the penalty for falling out of love with the world.

Mamie rose gravely from the table. Alder, with his impatience and intelligence, drew her toward him like a tidal pull. Mamie, who was never able to say exactly what she meant, or do exactly what she wanted, in fear that the whole tremendous weight of human fury would come down on her head, recognized immediately that Alder was not only unafraid of its crashing down on him, but not very interested in it. Of course she would follow him.

For a moment, she stood trapped between her chair and the precarious place setting of art books and china. She looked at him. He gently took her arm, nodded and smiled at Alysse, and led Mamie out of the still, startled room.

It was a warm night, like a night in the tropics. The light breeze hit Mamie full in her smiling face as she stepped with her big, graceful stride onto the street, and she felt the soft air like an emblem of her liberation. She walked south on Park Avenue and Alder Stoddard walked beside her.

“I hope that you are someone I can talk to,” she said. “I know now that this has been a problem. When Claire arrived, I thought I’d be all right. I sometimes think my reluctance to speak out is a form of acquiescence with the enemy.”

“The enemy?”

“Oh, with men, or my aunt, or the ambassador who wants to kill everyone in Nicaragua. I am upset and silent; Claire is upset and goes into her karate stance.”

“Most people have a punt or two in their repertoire,” he said. “They kick the ball away and hope for good field position. It’s just that your sister is punting all the time. That’s all.”