He sighed and his face turned pinkish. “Please, Salome, no scenes. No funny business.”
“I just want her to see Alchemy. I assume she knows about him.”
“If she’d wanted to meet him she would have told me.”
“Since before I was born she’s tried to manipulate me like I’m a cloying extra in one of her movies. I’m her daughter. I’m an adult. We’re equals.”
He looked into my eyes and understood that no lawyer’s chicanery could dissuade me.
We arrived at the front of the restaurant. He halted under a rust-red awning. His cheeks puckered. “Bicks, if she turns you into such a coward, you can leave.”
“Let’s go,” he said firmly. He took my left hand, led me down three brick steps and, ever the gentleman, opened the door to the restaurant. Immediately, we were hit by chalky air. Cigarette smoke hung below the dimmed lights of the low wooden ceiling with exposed pipes. Odors of garlic and pâté breathed from the walls. I thought about my dad and how he would’ve joked, “The food here sure must be lousy, otherwise they’d turn up the darn lights.”
I spotted Greta sitting by herself. Her posture erect, cigarette in hand. She wore a tan double-breasted jacket, dark glasses, and a red scarf draped around her neck. Only years later have I come to appreciate the uses of neck scarves. The glasses were a bit of overkill for someone who wanted to be inconspicuous.
Raul, the restaurant owner, a squat middle-aged Frenchman, cut me off before I got within five feet of her table.
“Pardon me, do you have a reservation?” He pressed his hand against my shoulder. I figure the only way to deal with obnoxious people was to be obnoxious back. I blew at his hand as if were a fleck of dust and flicked it with my finger.
“Ne touche pas, mon petit steak frites, can’t you see the baby is asleep?” I pressed Alchemy against my chest as his head rested on my shoulder. “We are here to see Lady Garbo.”
Bicks tried to interrupt. I’d never seen the old bat so ruffled, sweating and phumpfering. “This, this is, Salome and her son who and she—”
“William, stop. We do not need you.” Greta stood beside us sans sunglasses. “I think we can do whatever it is she has in mind by ourselves.” She glanced at me, but her gaze ran no lower than my head and did not move toward Alchemy. I looked intently at her. Even she couldn’t defy time or gravity. But despite the mudslide of flesh covered by too much powder and rouge, the face that millions had worshipped remained. Her voice, almost unchanged in pitch and timbre, carrying the freight of an aged soul with only the slightest vibration of the wounded, the perfect emanation of her silent screen presence. Only now, that distinct vibrato’s ache had been replaced by a dull throatiness.
“Raul, we will be moving to a back table.” The owner nodded and set out to move her handbag and prepare the table. She turned to Bicks. “William, you can go.”
“Are you sure?”
“I will call you. Do not worry. Now, please.” He bowed to her like an English butler. She turned to me. “I assume you prefer if it is just the two of us.”
“Three.” I dipped my head and my eyes focused on Alchemy. “He’s not a year yet, but he is here and I will make sure he remembers this.”
“Three, then. Please.” She pointed to the table for four. She followed behind me. I offered, “Do you want to hold your grandson while I take off my poncho?” She shook her head. Raul held him. I sat with my back to a brick wall underneath posters of the French countryside. She sat to my left, facing the front of the restaurant. She asked if I wanted a glass of wine. “Yes,” I said, “red.” I caressed the still sleeping Alchemy’s back while we talked.
“Do you want to eat?”
“Not yet.”
She ordered the wine. The candle at our table lessened the graininess of the restaurant’s light. I could see the broadness of her shoulders under her jacket hiding delicate bones. I shifted my spine and I felt my bones as hers.
The waiter brought my wine. Greta raised her glass but did not touch it to mine. “Chin.” She sipped her wine but did not speak. I could not read her thoughts. Not for one second. I closed my eyes and inhaled her soulsmell. She had none! Nothing repugnant like a man’s sweaty socks. Or remorseful like a European railway station. Nothing entrancing like an old jazz club. Nothing. Either my smell sense was experiencing some Electra complex block or she had no smell. I couldn’t believe it.
I’d tragically miscalculated. She was right to have given me away, to stay away from me, and now, from Alchemy. Hilda and Dad had wanted me, raised me, and yes, we infuriated each other, but we always loved each other. And Hilda adored Alchemy. I don’t think Greta loved anyone, not even herself.
Sitting there, I understood that Greta was not a narcissist. It wasn’t that she was too big for real life, but much too small. And it scared me that my mother’s machinelike detachment could become me, was the her in me. I hate that about myself, but it’s never changed. I still can’t control the on/off switch to my emotions. Even now, I prefer pain to numbness, to be too emotional than to be inert.
As Greta took an interminably long sip, swoosh, and gulp of her wine, my On switch snapped.
“Fuck this. If you won’t, talk I will. This sleeping little child is your grandson. Do you care to meet him? To know him?”
At last her lips parted into that exquisitely doomed smile that hid, well, nothing. “Yes, but I cannot.”
“Okay, I’m going. You’re not human. You’re not …” Instead of answering, she bent down, and out of her bag she pulled a hat. A red beret. She reached over and tugged it onto my head. “Perfect.” Her face brightened; the gesture pleased her.
Suddenly, I pitied her. “You don’t have to worry. You’ll never see the headline, ‘Garbo’s Daughter Speaks’ in the tabloids.”
“I never thought that I would.”
“I need to ask you one question and then I’m leaving. Who was my father?”
She lowered her eyes, sipped her wine again, and then stared directly at me. I’d hoped to see tears of reflection, the regret of a lost love, or even the flippancy of a one-night stand that ended with me. She sat there, unmoved.
“A man, a woman, a child … He once said I was like a glass rose and he was like a fossilized rose. You think you know the lovers in your life, but truly not.” A slight sense of whimsy had slipped into her voice, but it quickly disappeared. “He’s dead now. So it is impossible for a meeting, you see? There is no reason you need to be preoccupied with him or who he was.”
I could think of a few reasons, more than reasons — my right. But I knew — never was she going to violate her personal philosophy of ultimate restraint.
I stood up and took off the beret and tried to hand it to her. She rebuffed me. “No, no, it is a gift.”
I didn’t want it. Yet I felt impelled by some outside force to take it. I struggled to put on my poncho as Raul rushed over to help. Alchemy, at last, opened his eyes and I kissed him on his head. I bent down so she could see him. Her eyes veered away. I moved closer. I tried to feel an odor beyond the faux essences of her makeup and perfume, to find her soulsmell. Again, nothing.
I placed my lips on hers. She neither kissed me nor pulled back. I whispered in her ear, “We could’ve loved you and made you less alone.” I stood up, strode toward the door, and didn’t look back. I regret now that I didn’t turn around to see her face.
She was about seventy. She lived another twenty years. I could’ve gone to see her, but I never did. To me, she was already dead.