I felt a lot like a girl in a tower or one who slept in a briar-covered castle or a glass box. My skin was always clammy and my hair was tangled. I slept and slept on soft pillows, seeing almost no one. But if I was the spellbound princess I was also the witch who had put myself in that place of icy isolation. One thing I was not, though: the faithful prince with the sword and the kiss, the rescuer.
I thought of Jeni's room with the roses and books everywhere, the mix of flower fairies and rock stars. We gave each other pedicures and listened to music and giggled late into the night. We were girls but becoming something else.
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Bear brought him into the kitchen where Fox, Tiger, and Buck were eating their lunch of vegetable stew and rice, baked apples and blueberry gingerbread.
Bear and Ram built her a room among the trees overlooking the sea. Tiger built her a music-box cradle that rocked and played melodies. Buck sewed tiny lace dresses and made her tiny boots like the ones he and his brothers wore. They cooked for her- the finest, the healthiest foods, most of which they grew themselves, and she was always surrounded by the flowers Lynx picked from their garden, the candles Fox dipped in the cellar, and the melon-scented soaps that Otter made in his workroom.
When the gardener came they let him go to her alone. They sat downstairs in the dim- just a single candle- working on the gifts they would give to her only if she woke. These gifts she would take into the world- dresses of silk, necklaces of glass beads and shells, glass candlesticks and champagne glasses and tiny glass animals, candles and incense and bath salts and soaps and quilts and coverlets and a miniature house with a real garden and tiny fountains that she could keep at her bedside.
She was no longer a slow dreamer watching the flowers grow. She was a warrior now. Warriors need something to fight for, though, besides their lives, because otherwise their lives will not be worth it.
She woke the next night. The woman was sitting at her bedside with a silver tray. She had made a meal of jasmine rice, coconut milk, fresh mint, and chiles. There were tall glasses of mineral water with slices of lime like green moons rising above clear bubbling pools. There was a glass bowl full of gardenias.
Rev found, strangely, that she was hungry. She ate the sweet and spicy, creamy minty rice and drank the fizzing lime-stung mineral water. She breathed the gardenias. She watched the woman's eyes. They were like the eyes of old-time movie stars, always lambent, making the celluloid look slicked with water, lit with candles.
I thought he had taken my soul, said Rev.
I thought he took mine, too. But no one can. It's just been sleeping.
Rose Red's voice evokes volcanoes, salt spray, cool tunnels of air, hot plains, redolence, blossoms. Rose White listens and smiles. Yes- worlds, waters, rocks, stars, color so much color. She can see it all when Rose Red speaks.
The air had that grilled smell, meat and gasoline, that it gets in Los Angeles when the temperature soars.
I was always hungry for food- blueberry pancakes and root beer floats and pizza gluey with cheese- I thought about it all the time. And other things. I'd sig around dreaming that the boys I saw at shows or at work- the boys with silver earrings and big boots- would tell me I was beautiful, take me home and feed me Thai food or omelets and undress me and make love to me all night with the palm trees whispering windsongs about a tortured, gleaming city and the moonlight like flame melting our candle bodies.
She sat on a cushion in front of a low table that was spread with foods she had never seen or even heard of before. There were translucent sweet red and green fruits shaped like hearts, bright gold roasted-tasting grains shaped like stars, huge ruffley purple vegetables and small satiny blue ones.
All that winter I painted him with his eyes like moons or his head crowned in stars or a frozen city melting in his hands. I had some ideas of how I was going to paint him riding on the back of a reindeer, eating snowflakes, holding a swan. He wrote songs about a girl who was a storm, a fire, a mirror. My hair grew out and I started wearing sparkling light-colored soft soft things I'd found in thrift shops. I had a fake fur coat and a pastel sequin shirt and rhinestones. We got the flu and ate rice balls and miso soup in the bathtub. I gave him vitamin C and echinacea. He felt better. We went to the mirror and he always made sure to find me right after he sang and hold me so no one would try to touch him.
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She is his unprecedented blossom, his chocolate-cherry-swirl birthday cake, ultimately his angel.
The house had to be assessed. My mother went around throwing out all the chemicals that might have toxic properties and putting crystals everywhere- in teacups and cereal bowls, in the bathtub, all over the windowsills and altars. First, she soaked the crystals in salt water in the sun to purify them. The house was a mess of rainbows. The crystals reminded me of tiny cities with cathedrals and towels. Sometimes I took the smaller ones and sucked on them like rock candy but they had a slightly bitter flavor. Then, guilty, I put them in a glass of salt water on the windowsill to make them pure again.
The water was so cold. And the waves were stronger than they seemed. Right away I knew it was too much. Part of me reached up like a hand trying to grasp for air but part of me sank in so easily like a fist, plunging deep deep in, flooded with sea until it was inside of me- a lover, in my lungs and in my heart and I was no longer the daughter of a dying man and an angel who could not save him but the daughter of the water.
The jade-green hotel where they lived looked like a fairy-tale palace. Eva sat by the pool talking to the palm trees. She told them stories of eastern trees that changed colors and lost leaves, and heard palm tales of kissing movie stars and drowning children. Eva believed the place was enchanted, not realizing she was the enchantment. She picked oranges and avocados when she was hungry and she floated in the water all day until her ivory skin turned to gold and her hair grew even longer, down to her knees, and people staying at the hotel would stop speaking or choke on their drinks when they saw her floating or perched in a fruit tree with hibiscus flowers in her hair and powder-blue or pale-yellow parakeets on her shoulders. A famous movie director spotted her weaving a nest out of twigs, branches, feathers and dried flowers; she planned to put it up in a tree so she could sleep closer to the moon on the warm nights when the pool glowed like a blue ghost. He was sure she was some kind of supernatural creature and that if he could capture her on film, he would change the history of cinema. However, she wasn't interested in becoming a film star, afraid that it would take her away from her parents and corrupt her healing powers, so she pretended to be deaf and mute when he was around. Eventually he gave up and she was left alone to swim, build her nest and care for her parents. She learned to cook at that time, experimenting first with mud-and-jacaranda blossom stew for her bisque dolls who ate it voraciously and began to develop and uncanny human glow in their blue glass eyes, and eventually gathering tips and recipes from the people at the hotel. An Indian businessman taught her about curries, the aphrodisiac properties of certain spices and how to make a mango-yogurt concoction that was refreshing on the most burning days when the palm trees seemed about ready to ignite from the Santa Ana winds sizzling through their fronds. A couple who had come from China to open a restaurant, familiarized her with dishes employing healing roots. And a handsome Italian with fistfuls of black curls, dangerous cheekbones and hopes of becoming a matinee idol gave her his mother's secret recipe for risotto that shone in the dark. At the hotel Eva also learned secrets of a southern Californian garden from a three-foot-tall gardener who had played a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz and who knew how to breed impossibly green and silver hydrangeas, about the poisonous and thoroughly Los Angelean beauty of belladonna and oleander, and the arias that roses enjoyed hearing. The plants immediately took to Eva and the garden at the hotel began to grow so profusely that the head gardener had to hire three more men to keep it from overgrowing the building.
One day, sitting at the soda fountain in the hotel cafeteria, Eva saw a man with shining shrunken eyes and beautiful hands watching her over his cup of coffee and sketching strange sad-eyed creatures on his napkin. He was much older than she and never spoke to her, but she knew that he was in love with her and that one day they would meet again and become as inseparable as identical twins who looked nothing alike and had been born many years apart.
So the boy began a desperate search for a woman with flowers growing out of her head, birds on her shoulders and the ability to mend broken hearts with her creations. There was no sign of her for years. Then he realized that he wouldn't find her in Manhattan, a city of dark stone and soot and noise and burning cold winters where nature had to be imported and relegated to certain areas like a caged animal. He imagined she was living in a sun-blossomed paradise, a city of magicians, movie queens, love-struck clowns. So he took the empty box of paints his mother had given him and the wedding dress wrapped in pale blue tissue paper and left the brownstone apartment, where he lived in a perpetual silence with his aunt and uncle, and went to Los Angeles to find her. Sitting at a soda fountain in a hotel restaurant, he was shocked to see beside him a little girl with satined skin and a white dove perched on her garlands of rose-colored hair. She was sipping a root beer float in a state of bliss. He heard the fizz of soda and cream, smelled the caramel dark; her hair was waves of petals, her hands were carved ivory amulets, tiny enough that he could have worn them around his neck. He said a prayer to a God he had ceased to believe in. He vowed to wait for her, to never let himself love anyone else. But one day she was not at the counter sipping her float. She and the enchantment had gone from the hotel.
She was standing amongst the monsters and casting an eerie light onto the bleak canvases. In that light the monsters appeared to be transforming. They seemed to be getting smaller and weaker. Their mouths closed and their hands dropped sheepishly to their sides. No one wanted to purchase these watered-down versions of Caliban's earlier work. They left the gallery in droves until the only person left was a woman who resembled Nefertiti with blushing hair. Caliban approached her and said, "What have you done to the monsters?" The woman smiled and it was like a temple full of candles, like a garden full of white flowers, like the spread of wings. At that moment Caliban knew that she was the little girl at the soda fountain in the jade-green hotel and that from them on he would never paint or love anyone else.
If Death is your lover, you don't have to be afraid that he will ever leave you.
"He abandoned his religion for you. You became his religion."
I sat at a tiny desk cataloguing and filing papers for the owner, Iris herself, a petit eighty-year-old actress who liked to waltz down her staircase dressed in her finery from half a century ago. She entertained me with monologues from Shakespeare and stories about the gallery's glory days. The gentle horror movie actors, ballet gods with feet like hooves, and bohemian queens in long velvet scarves who were her favorite clients.
We went out on the third of July. I wore a cream-colored silk 1920s dress that I had gotten for a few bucks at a flea market. I didn't care if it was haunted.
Then sometimes he would speak of how she would get better, how they would swim with dolphins, dance under stars and how she would wear glass slippers and be worshiped on a stage made of moonlight.
Valentine drank martinis like her father. She told me he had been an animator. He had created a character named Teenie Martini, a miniature girl who appeared on the rim of this guy's glass whenever he drank too much.
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I go into the kitchen and put some plums and a slice of buttered, home-baked bread onto a blue-and-white plate from Holland. I fill a glass with water and squeeze some lemon in. I put everything on the tray with the real butterflies pressed under glass.
The clown is a tiny man in whiteface who sits on the boardwalk painting people. He asks me, "What do you dream about?" and I tell him about the parrots and the poison flowers and the gold. So he paints delicately while I speak, tracing the brush like a tongue over my forehead and cheeks and eyelids. He paints me my dreams but I can't see them. I feel my dreams being licked onto my face with paint. Then he holds up the mirror. I see feathers and blossoms- scarlet highlighted with gold.
The clown paints Claudia's dreams on her face. He paints crescent moons and pomegranates and crosses. He paints her pale blue and silver.
My mother has two silk roses in her cabinet. Nijinsky wore them when he danced in The Specter of the Rose. My mother used to take one out and let me hold it. It looked and felt like a real rose but it smelled like old closets, old silk. We have a photograph of Nijinsky as the Specter. His eyes are closed and his eyelids and lips look like petals. Sometimes, I would find my mother holding the rose or the photograph and crying.
We decide to have a Midsummer Night's Dream full-moon party. My mother brings out all her white tulle and we hang it in the trees. We cut out paper stars and glue blue and pink glitter onto them and scatter them in the tulle canopies among white Christmas lights. We buy watermelons, pineapples, cantaloupes, honeydew, strawberries and cut them up and put them on platters and my mother makes her punch. It is a citrus-greenish-yellow color and it smokes. We call it the witch brew and everyone is drinking and dancing around in their white shirts and dresses and lace and masks and glittery scarves.
Perdita is wearing antique lace, and feathers in her hair. She is wearing strands of beads, a plastic necklace filled with green glow-in-the-dark liquid and a glass bird ring. She is dancing by herself and when she sees me, she comes and takes my hand.
We dance together, seining our hands and our skirts like wings. Perdita looks like she is floating because her dress is so long and white and her legs are so delicate and seem almost boneless the way she drifts back and forth to the music. She holds up her arms and I swing her around.
I feel like when I was little before I was afraid all the time. Dancing and swirling the silk of my skirt. Perdita has stars pasted on her face. They catch the light. I am six and a half with her, loving my body because it can dance, because it is my body, for a moment not knowing what it is like not to love my body. I am also her mother. I am aware of a weightlessness beneath my belly but I don't hate it. I imagine Perdita is my child, that I dress her in lacs and scarves and flower wreaths and we go out and dance in the park, play Goddess and Egypt, that I show her paintings and we draw with colored chalk on the sidewalk, that I read her fairy tales and feed her fruit and bread and milk.
I lift her up; she has a tiny paper parasol in her hair and lipstick smeared on her mouth but it looks like smudges of watermelon candy.
My mother comes up to my room with a tray of strawberries and plain yogurt, a piece of fresh-baked bread spread with honey. She puts the tray with real butterflies pressed under glass onto my bed.
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My tree, the one that I had strung with gold fairy lights, the one that shaded parties made for teddy bears and dolls, the tree in whose pink-blossomed branches Dad had built a wooden platform house with a rope ladder. That was where I went to read art history books and mythology, and to escape the world that I only now wanted to save.
I forget that I am alone here in this house, with the sea roiling squid-ink purple-black, dark like a witch's brew, just outside my window, where once there existed the rest of my city, now lost as far as I can see.
My room has a large bed on a platform of polished quartz. The floor is inlaid with an image of a rose. Inside the rose is an eye.
On a quartz table is a bowl of water, a pile of linens, a vase of the purple-black roses, and a platter of fruit. Dresses hand from protruding crystals of green, black, and punk tourmaline that grow from the quartz wall. The dresses are all of a similar style-long, narrow, cut in the bias, and made of silk or satin charmeuse like the finest slips. Some have tulle at the hem or lace inserts. They are in a variety of colors- ivory, gold, silver, dusky rose, peach, apricot, saffron, sunlit-leaf-green, a celestialous blue. Some, like the blue one, are covered in crystal beading resembling a starry sky.
But no, he was going to be strong. He was going to change things for himself and for his beloved when he finally found her. He was going to learn to use magic and change the world.
He sighs. "When I was very young my sister, Xandra, drew an image of us. I meditated on that image and I began to see you in my mind. I saw you alone in a room, reading, always reading, looking at paintings, studying the world around you. Your vision was so precious to you; I saw that. Someone who perceives, understands, and values beauty the way you do should never be robbed of even a shadow of her sight."
These words awaken a small sob in my chest. He goes on. "I felt your loneliness as a girl, the unrequited love for your best friend. You were so beautiful to me, so vulnerable, and, even though you didn't know it yet, so strong and I knew you must be mine. I have looked for you ever since."
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If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicon-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teeny-bopper sister. The teenybopper sister snaps big stretchy pink bubbles over her tongue and checks her lip gloss in the mirror, causing Sis to scream. Teeny plays the radio too loud and bites her nails, wondering if the glitter polish will poison her. She puts her bare feet up on the dash to admire her tan legs and the blond hair that is so pale and soft she doesn't have to shave. She wears a Val Surf T-shirt and boys' boxer shorts and she has a boy's phone number scrawled on her hand. Part of her wants to spit on it and rub it off, and part of her wishes it was written in huge numbers across her belly, his name in gang letters, like a tattoo. The citrus fruits bouncing off the sidewalk remind her of boys; the burning oil and chlorine, the gold light smoldering on the windy leaves. Boys are shooting baskets on the tarry playground and she thinks she can smell them on the air.
If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. her skin is as pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding tact (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward of bums and psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has bought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.
