The Destiny of Nathalie X

The Persistence of Vision

Persistence of vision is a trick of the eye, an ability the eye possesses to fill in the gaps between discrete images and make them appear perfectly contiguous. This is what makes animation work.

Murray and Ginsberg’s Dictionary of Cinema (1949)

4:05 A.M. The island. Seated on the terrace in front of my house. This is what I tried to retain. This is what I wanted to come to me unbidden from those three years. The soft explosion of a pile of leaves. A bare-breasted Gypsy girl dancing for some native soldiers. Orange snakes uncoiling in the glossy panels of an antique automobile. Big papery blue blossoms of hydrangea. A red printed smile on a square of tissue. A honeyed triangle of toast on a faience plate. Tennis in Sausalito. The huge pewtery light of the salt pans. The bleached teak decks of a motor yacht. A rare cloud trapped in a cloud-reflecting pool.

It was in the gusty autumnal pathways of the park that I first saw her. Her small dog had nosed its way into a crackling and shifting drift of plane leaves and she was tugging crossly at the lead, shouting, “Mimi, no, come on, really, you impossible beast!” in her surprisingly deep voice. But it was her wrists that held my attention first and provoked that curious breathlessness that I always associate with moments of intense irritation or intense desire. They were very thin, with the bony nodule of the wristbone, the ulna, particularly prominent as she tugged and heaved on recalcitrant Mimi’s crocodile-skin leash. She was bundled up against the astringent frostiness of the day in an old ankle-length apple-green tweed coat, a black cashmere shawl and a soft felt hat that concealed her figure totally, but the length and slimness of her pale wrists and swift computations and assessments thereafter — a slightly hooked nose, sunglasses of an opaque ultramarine hue, a corkscrew of auburn hair — were enough for me to lose concentration and allow Gilbert, my adored but ineffably stupid Labrador pup, to gallop by me, unchecked, from whatever shrubbery or tree bole he was dousing, and hurl himself into Mimi’s leaf-drift.

The soft explosion of dry leaves, the terrified yips and idiot barkings, the cuffs administered to Gilbert’s golden rump, the apologies, the pacifying of Mimi, the crouchings-down, the straightenings-up, the removal of sunglasses, the removal of a calfskin glove from my right hand, the briefest gripping of those thin cold ringless (ringless!) fingers were achieved in a kind of roaring silence as if one half of my brain were registering the full tapestry of sounds available (the dogs, our voices and above the traffic the querulous where-the-hell-are-you? toot of an impatient motorist, blocked in by a delivery van or waiting for someone), while the other half, as if in some dust-free, shadowless laboratory, were pedantically analyzing and observing. Noting: the ability to raise one eyebrow (the left) without any change in expression; the depth of the blue hollows in the undulations of bone and skin where the clavicle joined the manubrium below her throat; the wide mouth and the perfect unevenness of her teeth. Assessing: the exact moment when to effect the introduction; the exchange of doggy arcana (“A Norfolk terrier? Quite rare, I think.” “Norwich, actually.” “Really?”); the casual invitation absentmindedly offered just as one was saying goodbye, about to set off: “Look, I don’t suppose you’d fancy—?” The observable pause, the flick of the eye toward the east gate of the park, the decisive, independent jut of the chin and the tautening of the lips to suppress a smile as she accepted.

We sat at a small table and she rubbed a small circle, tugging her coat sleeve down over the heel of her hand, in the bleary condensation of the window to peer out at the motorcars speeding past. She chose hot chocolate and smoked a French cigarette. I had an apple juice and tried not to sneeze. Her name was — is — Golo.

Even at the wedding her father did not trouble to disguise his candid dislike for me. That he had a handsome, young, parentless, independently wealthy son-in-law whose devotion to his daughter was both profound and unequivocal seemed to make no difference at all. I asked Golo why he hated me. “Oh, Daddy’s like that,” she said. “He hates everybody. It’s nothing to do with the fact that I’m marrying you.” I asked my best friend, and best man, Max. Doctor Max thought for a while and then said: “It’s obvious. He’s jealous.”

Of course that made it worse. We married in a small rural church stacked with the tombs and effigies of Golo’s ancestors, a short canter from the family home. I had a flaming sword of indigestion rammed down my esophagus for three days preceding the ceremony which miraculously disappeared the moment I said “I do” and I knew that the old man had lost his power to frighten me anymore. I could look at his seamed, haughty face, the thinning, oiled hair and the debonair hidalgo’s sideburns that he affected and feel no fear. I was not at ease, true, but I was no longer scared. “You may call me Avery now,” he said, as we shook hands after the ceremony, but I never did.

At the reception the relief made me drink too much and, feeling myself unsteady, I sought a distant lavatory in which to vomit. I tickled my throat with the thin end of my tie and emptied my stomach. Patting my lips with a hand towel and feeling markedly better, I realized I had wandered into Golo’s father’s apartments. The bathroom was paneled in a knotty and brooding oxblood cherrywood. Many stern, blazered, cross-armed young men sitting in rows gazed proudly out from sepia photographs. Here and there among the cased memorabilia were samples of discreet erotica: breast-baring Gypsy maidens playing the tambourine for languid Zouaves; loose peignoirs slipping off shoulders at midday levées. And a picture of Golo, a thin and pubescent fourteen-year-old.

The room was redolent of expensive hair oils and sandalwood soaps. It was a private shrine to the sort of clubby yet perverse masculinity that I loathed — the beery sexuality of a rugby team’s locker room or the officers’ mess after the port has gone round. Max’s observation now seemed alarmingly apt. I crumpled my face towel and threw it in the wastepaper basket. I had to get out. I opened the door.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” her father — Avery — said. He held a long cigar, ash down, in his five fingers.

“Came to say goodbye, sir.” I offered my hand. “I was told you were in your sitting room.”

Avery was not convinced, but, transferring his cigar, he shook my hand all the same. “They’ve only just started the ball, for Christ’s sake.”

“Ferry to catch.”

I stood in the misted blue dusk with Max, waiting for Golo, standing beside the old burnished Malvern some uncle had given us as a present, our cases strapped into the boot. Fitful orange snakes danced in the glossy bodywork from the flares burning down the drive.

“I’ve got to get her out of here,” I said, a little hysterically. “That man is a monster. No wonder her sisters went to live with the mother.”

“Stepsisters,” Max said. “Golo’s from the first wife.”

“Oh? I didn’t see her here.”

“She committed suicide when Golo was five.”

“Jesus. How do you know?”

“I was talking to a cousin, inside.”

Max offered me a small silver box. I lifted its lid: it was full of small round unmarked pills. “My wedding present,” Max said. “I rarely prescribe them. One has to have an exceptionally healthy heart, but they’re guaranteed to make your honeymoon go with a zing.”

We embraced and I caught a scent of the menthol jujubes Max used to suck to sweeten his breath.

“Where is that girl?” I said, my voice thick with emotion.

Max reached into the Malvern and tooted a brisk cadenza on the horn, redundantly, as Golo, dressed as far as my blurry eyes could tell in a matador’s spangled suit of light, emerged through the front door and seemed to flow luminously down the stairs into my arms.

We honeymooned at my little house on the island. I had had its clapboard exterior repainted a lemony cream the better to offset the regulation bottle green demanded by the mayor’s office. Big cloudy blue blossoms of hydrangea lined the sandy path down to the beach. Across the silver bay I could see the dark stripe of the mainland. A lone yacht slowly edged its way east. In a minute the composition would be perfect. I ached for my sketch pad.

Image. Golo sitting on the lavatory, her skirt hitched up to her thighs, her ankles footcuffed by her impossibly sheer panties. Her long pale thighs angled upward, knees meeting, her satin evening shoes just clinging to her heels as she sits on tiptoes, like a jockey straddling a thoroughbred. Except this jockey is simultaneously painting her lips vermilion without the aid of a mirror. She purses her lips, pouts and turns to offer me her best false smile.

“Mmm?”

“Perfect. I don’t know how you do it.”

She tears off a square of lavatory paper and prints her lips on it. Neatly folded once, it does the work it was intended for down below, before the panties are hoicked to the knee, and then Golo rises in a swoop and rustle of crêpe. There is a millisecond of buttock-cleft on view before the dressing is complete and the chrome knob is pressed and the cistern voids itself.

“Why did you quit medical school?” she asks, apropos of nothing, checking her impassive face in the mirror. Her little finger lightly touches each corner of her mouth.

“What? Because I wanted to be a painter.”

“Can’t you be a doctor and a painter at the same time?”

“I can’t.”

“What about your friend? He’s a doctor and other things.”

“Max? But Max is Renaissance Man. I can’t compete with Max, for heaven’s sake.”

“Can we get a yacht?”

“Of course. But why on earth?”

“I think I want to learn to sail. Where are we going tonight?”

“The maharani’s.”

“How dreary.”

I watched Max dicing the garlic cloves. Each clove was peeled, halved lengthways and then laid flat and held with a fingertip on the chopping board, where, with a small fine knife, the clove was sliced vertically into a fan, turned 90 degrees and sliced across again, tiny neat cubes resulting. The residue left under the finger was discarded.

“Why don’t you use a press?”

“It doesn’t taste the same.”

We were in his garden flat in Kensington, not far from one of the hospitals where he had consulting rooms. He was cooking me supper — scallops. In oil and tomatoes. His kitchen was both efficient and picturesque. Big cleared areas for working, many pan-crowded shelves and racks and, hung here and there, hams and sausage, pimentos, chiles and garlic. Needless to say, Max was a highly accomplished cook and he liked his cuisine flavorsome.

“Thank you for my picture,” he said.

“It’s the view from the sitting room.”

“I know.” He wandered over to peer at the picture, which he had placed on a pine dresser. “You’ve changed the hydrangeas, or is that artistic license?”

“Well remembered. When were we there?”

“Thanks. Two summers ago. Is that the Heliotrope?”

“What’s that?”

“The yacht I used to sail at university. You remember, you met us once at Juan-les-Pins. Something about the spinnaker. That’s a nice thought. Thank you.”

“It’s just a yacht, I’m afraid. Isn’t that enough garlic?”

He slid the garlic off the board into a pan where it spat and sizzled in the hot oil.

“How’s Golo?” he said.

“Wonderful.”

Later, over the cheese, he said: “Don’t mind me saying this, old friend, but don’t leave a woman on her own for long.”

“God, I’m only away for one night. I had to see the trustees.”

“I’m not talking about now. Women get bored much faster than men.”

“Says who?”

“It’s a well-known medical fact. Try some of this quince jelly with the cheese. Just something an old lothario told me once.”

Golo is lying on her side, on the bed, naked. I stand in the doorway of the bathroom, showered, spent, happy. Propped on one elbow, she is reading a trashy Sunday paper and laughing to herself at its idiocies. At her elbow, on a faience plate I bought at Saint-Martin, is a triangle of honeyed toast. Through the window I see the sun on the bay and that obliging yacht attended by two or three seagulls. Without looking up Golo searches the bed with her right foot for the square of sunshine that was warming her flank a moment ago. She finds it and allows her foot a sunbath while she reads, reaches for her toast and bites.

“Why do you buy this rubbish? The stuff they say.”

“I only get it for the funnies.” I think I must be the happiest fellow in the world.

“A likely story.”

We traveled that first year. I let the house in Carlyle Square to a Brazilian diplomat and we went east to India, Ceylon, Thailand. We saw out the winter with Golo’s school chum Charlotte and her husband Didier Van Breuer in Sydney, Australia. Spring found us in a little house in Sausalito on another, larger bay. The exhibition of my Indian gouaches in a Broome Street gallery was a modest success. Golo developed a surprisingly effective, kicking second serve. We were never a night apart.

I felt a physical presence in my gut, like a stone lodged between my liver and my pancreas. I looked out over the dark trees of Carlyle Square and made all sorts of bargains with any number of deities.

Max came through the bedroom, running his hands through his hair, which was graying remarkably fast, I noticed, for some odd reason. He looks more tired than me, I thought.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m not a gynecologist, but I would say your wife is pregnant.”

I have a son. His name is Dominic. He bellows with rage, he screams, he howls. Odette, his nurse, takes him to his room. I touch Golo’s face with my knuckles.

“Welcome home,” I say, and from my pocket remove the ring I have had made from an emerald I bought in Bangkok. Golo slips it on her finger.

“She manages to say ‘I love you,’ before she dissolves in tears,” I gently mock her.

She hugs me to her. “You’re so sweet,” she says. “And I do love you.”

Didier Van Breuer to dinner at Carlyle Square. He tells us he is divorcing Charlotte. I leave the room when a messenger comes to the front door, and when I return Van Breuer is sitting hunched over his food, sobbing. It is all too terribly sad.

Summer came around again and we open up the house on the island. The new annex for Odette and Dominic blended perfectly with the rest of the house. Odette — a strong raw-boned girl, with many moles — proved to be a capable cook as well as a capable nurse. In one week we were served bouillabaisse, oursins à la provençale, marinated veal chops with ratatouille, poulet stuffed with roast garlic, pied de porc lyonnais, liver and onions. It was delicious, but too rich for me. I found myself feeling overstuffed and bilious, my throat salty and my sinal passages pungent and herby even the next morning. I fasted for twenty-four hours, drinking only distilled water, and endured a night sweat that drove Golo from the bed.

“We must smell like a tinker’s camp,” I said to her the day I began to feel better. “Tell Odette it’s salads for the rest of the summer.” By and large she complied, though from time to time a reeking stew or casserole would arrive at the table and the place would smell like a Neapolitan trattoria once again.

I found it hard to paint in the house now that its routines revolved around Dominic’s noisy needs rather than my own. I was trying to complete enough work for an exhibition that a friend, who owned a little gallery in the rue Jacob, was kindly arranging for me, and so, most days I would load the panniers on my bicycle with my paints and brushes and set off for various parts of the island that were not pestered with tourists or summer residents, returning home as evening began to approach. I found a place overlooking the salt pans which promised great refulgent expanses of sky and water. I loved the salt pans with their strange poetry of dessication, though the series of watercolors I produced there, well enough done, had a lonely simplicity that seemed a little repetitive.

So it was in search of some contrasting bustle and busyness that I reluctantly ventured into one of the little ports and set up my easel by the marina. But after the serenity of the salt pans I found the presence of curious sightseers peering over my shoulder off-putting and, to be frank, my technique was found wanting when I came to render the bobbing mass of yachts and powerboats, dinghies and cruisers, that were crowded in among the piers and the jetties.

I was sitting there one midmorning, having torn up my first attempt, wondering vaguely if it would be worth looking at some Dufys that I knew hung in a provincial gallery not more than half a day’s drive away, when my peripheral attention was caught by a half-glimpsed figure, male, slim in white khakis and a navy sweater, that I was convinced was familiar. You know the way your instinctive apprehension is often more sure and certain than something studied and sought for: the glance is often more accurate than the stare. I was oddly positive that I had seen someone I knew and, having nothing on the easel to detain me, I sauntered off to find out who it was.

Didier Van Breuer sat in the sunshine of the restaurant terrace with a small glass of brandy and a caffè latte on the table in front of him, shirtless with a navy blue cotton sweater. He had a small red bandanna at his throat. He looked changed since we had last seen him, older and more gaunt. He did not seem too surprised to see me (he knew I summered on the island, he said) but I was glad to discover that my instincts and my eyesight were as sharp and shrewd as they had always been. He was cordial, with none of that reserve I had always associated with him.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

He pointed to the harbor, at a vast gin-palace of a motor yacht with a single tall funnel (yellow with a magenta stripe). Crew members swabbed down bleached teak decks; brown water was being pumped from bilges. He was alone, he told me, on an endless meandering summer cruise trying to forget Charlotte and her grotesque betrayal (she was living with Didier’s estranged son). I asked him to dinner that night (I had seen Odette empty almost an entire tin of cumin into a lobster stew) but he declined, saying they were setting sail for the Azores later. He finished his drink and we wandered around the quay to his boat (his trousers were pale blue, I noticed with a private smile; however vigilant, the corner of your eye cannot achieve 20/20 vision). He had changed the name from Charlotte III to Clymene, who, he told me, with harsh irony, was the mistress of the sun. He invited me on board and we strolled through the empty staterooms smoking cigars, the warm buttock of a brandy goblet cupped in my tight palm. I felt sad for him, with his pointless wealth and the cheerless luxury of his life, and felt sad myself as the boat reminded me of Pappi’s old schooner, the Vergissmeinnicht, and my lost childhood. He had a rather fine Dufy in the dining room and I took the opportunity to make a few quick notes and sketches while he went upstairs to make a telephone call.

Nota bene. To be remembered: the serene roseate beauty of the summer dusk as I cycled homeward, a little drunk, a rare cloud trapped in a cloud-reflecting puddle at the side of the road. To be remembered: my almost insupportable feeling of happiness.

4 a.m. I am alone on the terrace of my small house, looking east beyond my blue hydrangeas toward the mainland, waiting for the sun to rise. I wonder how many people there are on that mainland as miserable as I am.

Golo’s note was terse. She had left me and our child. She was no longer in love with me. There was another man in her life whose identity she would not reveal at this moment. I must not look for her. She would be in touch with me in due course. This was the only way. She needed none of my money. She asked my forgiveness and understanding and hoped, for the sake of Dominic, that we could remain friends.

Odette said simply that during the day Madame had received and made numerous phone calls, had packed one suitcase and then, at about four o’clock, she heard the taxi claxoning for her in the lane. She was going to visit her family, she had told Odette, she had left a note for me and was gone.

I wasted no time. I drove at once back to the port, where of course there was no sign of the Clymene. En route for the Azores or God knew where. I returned to my house (not our house anymore) and cried a few hot tears of rage and frustration over my son’s cot (my son, not our son anymore) until I woke him and he began to bawl as well. I drank half a bottle of Pernod, then drove the car to the ferry and was transported to the mainland. I spent a fruitless hour searching for a “Venus of the Crossroads,” as Pappi used to refer to them, feeling the urge for revenge slowly ebb from me. At around midnight, in an overlit dockside bar I halfheartedly bought a large woman with bobbed hair and a tight jersey a few drinks but then lost my nerve. On the last ferry back to the island a bearded youngster played some form of Hawaiian music on a guitar.

The sky is lightening, a pale cornflower blue shading into lemon; my dead eyes watch the beautiful transformation, unmarveling. I must think, I must clarify my thoughts. The betrayed husband is always the last to know, they say. Didier Van Breuer. Were our friends in Sydney, Australia, all laughing behind my back that winter? What had made Didier come to our house to announce his separation? What had made him break down that way over the meal? What had been said while I was out of the room? To end this stream of answerless questions I force myself to think of Encarnación, a Mexican girl I had briefly loved and to whom I had once thought of proposing. Dear, lissome Encarna, some kind of ex-athlete, a hurdler or swimmer. So different from Golo. I think of a meal we shared in New York, that little restaurant in New York, south of Greenwich Village, where she cajoled me into eating a pungent, shouting salsa from her native province that made my eyes water, obliging me to suck peppermints for days …

This is what I must retain. These are the fragments I must hoard from these last three years. The soft explosion of a pile of leaves. The querulous where-the-hell-are-you? tooting of a waiting motorist. The scent of menthol jujubes. A lone yacht on a silver bay. The immaculate dicing of a garlic clove. The dark trees of Carlyle Square. Oursins à la provençale. A slim male figure in white khakis and a navy sweater. A tin of cumin. A taxi claxoning in the lane. A pungent, shouting salsa that obliged me to suck peppermints for days.