Heart of Darkness
(excerpted from the novel Blood & Mud by Suzanne Turner)
ACT 2; excerpt from Ch 2 — Georgetown, Washington, DC/EXILE
To call the girls of the Garden Terrace cocktail waitresses — because that is what we were — is to entirely miss the point of the establishment. Weary CEOs and heads of state gratefully relaxed in the hotel’s confidential and exclusive restaurant, and politely chatted with us over rounds of excellent wine and food. Of course the W had already laid the groundwork, because what is a belle if not a geisha? But the Four Seasons put on the final coats of polish and ease.
But a geisha is also a salesperson. Ever since I had learned that I was no longer a person, but a light that distracted and bedazzled people, I also knew there was a gravity that I could engage around me, drawing others to me. I would be talking to someone and suddenly the atmosphere around us would go into a lower gear, everything moving more slowly with greater intention and purpose, as the man talking to me was pulled into my psychic gravity, whether I wanted him to be or not.
The belles had loved this game. W girls shuffled scores of beaux as easily as if they were trading cards in gin rummy. Mindy used to call the boys in her life her “string of polo ponies”. But these were girls who had been lookers since babyhood. My beauty, if that’s what it was, appeared out of nowhere, to everyone’s surprise and was not to be trusted. It had caused me nothing but trouble and I found it hard to respect a man who was snared by its charms.
Slowly, I learned to sit back and listen, leave the energy on the table, allow others to perform, and watch everyone display their deepest desires.
This man needed to pick up the check to impress the others. He would be drawn into over-spending by investing in only the finest wines and foods, about which he knew nothing and needed guidance. These are full of cocktails and out for fun. Make their evening with performance after performance — two geisha in a sing songy presentation of every special! The darling back waiter Sebastiao serving from the platters with a flourish! Flaming drinks! Flaming desserts!
There should be a musical. Perhaps there is a musical. I can see it now, as we spin in our rose silk dresses, the back waiters jump in their liveries, the jazz trio thumps thumps thumps! My dearest most darling Sebastiao wheeling wheeling wheeling always a half step behind tempo, always extravagantly with great flourishes trying to perform, always saying to us “GATCHINA” — my little cat — and always smiling from the bottom of his feet.
And, rushing off stage, the geisha collapse in giggles in the dish room, no longer goddesses, now just girls. And Sebastiao abashed by yet another error, struggling to speak English, we cannot help ourselves we just kiss him and pet him because he is too delicious and dear. Then, high heels in hand, we run down the servants’ stairs, skirts bobbing to the right then left as though we are actual church bells in rose-clad human form and past the ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five industrial trash cans filled to the brim each with empty bottles of Dom Perignon.
ACT 2; excerpt from Ch 3 — Georgetown, Washington, DC/EXILE
The afternoon after La Cocarain, I was working lunch at the hotel, a little unsteady from my late night. I had cleaned up after the rush and was starting to set for happy hour. It was that moment between human needs — after lunch, before early cocktails — when there was no one in the lounge. I was grateful for the rest and grateful to be in our comfortable day costume of loose beige slacks and flowing silk tunic with comfortable ballet flats, when I heard a deep voice from the behind the palm fronds. He is speaking softly, thoughtfully to himself, that gravelly baritone already surprisingly familiar.
“At five in the afternoon, it was exactly five in the afternoon.” The words were in Spanish, but even as I instinctively checked my watch (it was 4:45 pm), I also began to quote, under my breath, Federico Lorca’s famous poem about the sudden death of the bullfighter; this was the famous poet Lorca who was later assassinated by Franco’s goons with two famous matadores.
I rounded the corner, knowing who I would see there, a smile playing at the corner of my mouth, softly singing to myself the great rhythm of the words in time with his reading.
A las cinco de la tarde. (At five in the afternoon.)
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde. (It was exactly five in the afternoon.)
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana (A boy brought the white sheet)
a las cinco de la tarde. (at five in the afternoon.)
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida (A frail of lime ready prepared)
a las cinco de la tarde. (at five in the afternoon.)
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte (The rest was death, and death alone)
a las cinco de la tarde. (at five o’clock in the afternoon.)
He was lanky and spread out over the love seat and had that dissipated air one nocturnal animal instantly recognizes in the daylight vision of another: white, drawn, hand slightly shaking as he reached for his first cup of coffee taken late in the day, even as the sun is already on its way back down. He put down the book he is reading and smiles up at me, shyly, from behind a lock of black curly hair.
“You certainly look deathly at five o’clock in the afternoon,” I say, smiling back. There is something immensely familiar about him, as though he is my shy little brother who has great things of intense interest to say if you can be patient and wait for him to open up.
He folds himself up and then unfolds himself again to make room for me on the loveseat in movements as spare and elegant as a professional gambler cutting a deck of cards. He leans over to hand me a small blue-cloth covered book. There is no wasted motion.
“This is for you,” he says.
I remain standing, examining the the book I hold in my hand, “what is this?”
“Only the poem you wildly declaimed in the back of the taxi last night.”
I pause, the memory surfacing from the drunken mists. He had shared he had grown up in the embassy in Madrid, his father a diplomat. The information — and his perfect lisping Castillian — had brought Spanish poetry flooding back to me, driven by an intense longing for my father.
Daddy and I had stomped all over the study singing, yelling, posing, acting the great Spanish and South American poets when he had been polishing the remnants of his country Creole Spanish into something professionally passable. It had happened to be a turbulent time in my adolescent and early teenage years when all the world was one giant dramatic Spanish verb, no feeling was too small not to hold in anguish and thrall.
“Oh, no,” I say, coloring a bit red with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry.” I remember last night, remember him — what’s his name? Eddie Munster? — quoting the poem with me, both of us at the tops of our voices in the back of the cab, waving our arms around, Sebastiao peering over the front seat great glee and not a little bit of jealousy.
Embarrassed, I start to turn the pages of the book, stop myself — “uh, wait, is that…?”
“Ernest Hemingway,” he answers, with quiet pride. “Lorca inscribed this copy to him.”
“They knew each other? Wait, what, this was Hemingway’s copy?”
He peered at me. “Yes, they both fought against Franco.”
I pause, thinking for a moment, and also thinking of the very many expensive gifts I had been offered in this lounge. This was the only one I had ever wanted to keep, wanted it with all my heart.
“Why do you want me to have it?” I asked stalling for the time to be willing to hand it back, smoothing one page down after the other.
“Because you get it,” he said fiercely. “You understand it.”
I looked at him a good long time before I solemnly return the book, shaking my head gently no. Before I can turn away, claim a false busy-ness to avoid the temptation of the sacred object that had been touched by men who were both artists and freedom fighters, I turn to escape the pull of speaking to him, he says “if you won’t take it, then come over any time to read it. And the others.”
“Others?”
“Yes, many others. Come any time. The back door is always open. Come read them all. I’m almost never there anyway. You won’t be bothered by anyone.”
He folds himself back, leaning in his indolent way against the green satin sofa. While holding my eyes, he gently leafs through the pages of the book, removes a yellowed card and hands it to me.
Alice Sewall Channing
3002 O Street Northwest
“I am Charles. Come read my aunt’s books,” he says.
— -
It is a great rattle-around old townhouse in Georgetown. There are holes worn in the Persian carpets, the wallpaper hangs in strips from the walls. Every floor is ringed with books from floor to ceiling. The house is my mother’s wet dream on acid — motheaten Victorian opulence, the contents of a great Uncle’s clipper ship haul from distant ports scattered about, silver services and sets of china stacked everywhere and books, books, books.
“My late great-aunt’s house,” he indicates with a shrug.
“Miss Havisham?” I asked, noting the inch of dust on everything, the unpolished silver on the dining room table, the mouse droppings by the stairway.
“She was a librarian,” he answers, by way of excuse. “Of sorts.”
There are paintings of the great royal family trees of the Spanish families in dark frames on one wall, on the other wall inky oils in the style of Velasquez and El Greco. On the family trees, toward the bottom I see both his last names in different places: Sewall, Channing. The text is heavy, italicized, hard to read; too much to process.
He is always occluded; graceful but internal. Not shy but not open. He does not lack confidence, but he has neither Billy’s physical ease of being in the world nor Basty’s great joy. It is as though Charles is folding himself around or over or through things, but never being present with them. We are both experts at hiding in plain sight.
He is rarely in the house. I am always there. With a place to burrow into and stacks of books to burrow with there is no reason to be out all night.
This is how I leave my nest of covers next to the washing machine in the basement of my parents’ abandoned house. As the sun climbs higher and longer in the sky, and the flowers of spring start to turn toward the humidity of summer, I find myself staying at the house on O Street every night. My post-work, pre-dawn hours are spent with my body nestled into ancient quilts and duvets piled at the bottom of the stairs, safely hidden into the concave enclosure of the house’s front turret, reading my way through colonial Spanish literature.
I love the walk from the hotel in hours before the sun rises after a long night. Charles comes in even later than I do, having spent most nights wandering, out at the clubs or just out, I don’t know where, he comes home tie hanging from his neck, reeking of cigarette smoke, eyes deep and lifeless as saucers.
It is nearly the same every night, the sun just starting to warm the March mornings. I am asleep in the feather comforters in the nest I have made in the turret, sleeping with as many books as can fit on the little pallet by the foot of the stairs with me. He comes in, looking haunted. When he sees me his face lights up, crawls into the covers clothes and all, and we spoon, whispering Spanish poetry back and forth to one another until one of us nods off, by which time it is full on morning the birds mad with the joy of living just as we are desperately and finally ready for sleep.
He does not touch me. I am grateful beyond all imagining to be safe, to not be alone, to be with someone who understands me, and to not have to give any more than a night-time whisper of poetry for his companionship. Sometimes I am afraid, as he crawls into the pallet, that I have seen something else in his eyes and tonight will be the night, but it never is.
One night when we have fallen asleep in darkness, I am awakened from a dream of pursuit. I have been screaming for help.
Charles’ hand on my shoulder awakens me, his soft baritone “what is it? What is it?” The moon is streaming in the window, outside the moonlight is so bright it is casting shadows in the front yard, the shadows dark and deep as ditches. He looks into my eyes as I come up from the murk of the horror, he holds me and I am calm.
I feel him trace the light scars on my arms, shining silver in the moonlight, a question in his eyes. I do not have to say anything, I can see he knows. I have told no one about my shame here in D.C. It lives in me, it follows me everywhere — how I could not stop it, how I did not speak up for Billy. It is the rotten core of who I am, but it is still a secret.
He holds my shame in his eyes and absolves me without even being told.
There is something he wants to tell me. I feel it throbbing in him. I know what he wants to say; I am sure I know. But I cannot say it for him. I hold him also with my eyes, until I feel his anxiety soothed. Then I tell him about Billy — all of it, everything, the thing no one can know. We fall asleep, relieved and silent.
He has grown up everywhere but here, father in the foreign service, but higher up than mine. A functionary whose family travels with him, the sort of family whose belongings are sent in shipping containers to each new posting — usually containing family antiques and libraries and oil paintings not so different from the decaying grandeur that surrounds us.
He speaks Spanish, French, Greek, Farsi, is both unbearably worldly and completely innocent, having missed drugs sex rock and roll in favor of music and art, literature — and now making up for lost time in his late-night DC ramblings. He is not European nor yet American. A recent graduate of Georgetown, law school inevitable, mildly dreaded with weary disdain like a threat of being sent to war.
He loves to entertain me on his aunt’s slightly out-of-tune grand piano. The afternoon after the moon shadows I awoke to Charles laying out the long, rhythmic mournful melodies of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, repeating and building, repeating and building, with a periodic mis-step, then a curse and a crash of the keys. He’d pick up and start again after each curse and crash.
I crept up behind him, sitting d on the edge of the scratchy horsehair couch until he noticed me. When he saw me quietly perched behind him he smiled shyly, as if he had handed me a present and wasn’t sure if I’d like it. “I haven’t played in months. I’d hoped to go to the conservatory in Vienna where my brother works at the embassy, but it’s off to law school with me.”
“You’re amazing — don’t stop — please keep playing.”
This became our rhthym — night owls who reconvene in the early grey pre-dawn, Charles from his nocturnal prowling, me from geisha cocktail service. Some poetry, some history, some music, and some sleep in the deep comfort of one another’s company — two misfits who do not need to explain ourselves to each other.
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