They greeted the man with cries of joy. By this time he was an old man. The sea had wrinkled his face so intricately, it was a surprise when his smile scattered the lines to shine through, like a beautiful glossy fish darting out of a fishing net.
The old man fed the seals, he settled near them in a cave, cooked his dinner, and rolled over and fell asleep with a new feeling of companionship.
One night several men came. They wanted to catch the seals for a display in a pool in front of their restaurant. A publicity stunt which attracted the children. But the pool was small, it was surrounded by barbed wire and the old man did not want this to happen to his seals. So he warned them by an imitation of their cry and bark, and they dove quickly into the sea. By the time the men reached the end of the jetty the seals were gone. From then on the old man felt he was their guardian. No one could get through at night withalking through his bedroom.
In spite of the tap-dancing of the waves, and the siren calls of the wind, the old man would hear the dangerous visitors and always had time to warn the seals in their own language.
The old man discovered the seals’ names. They answered to Hilarious, Ebenezer, Ambrosius, Eulalee and Adolfo. But there was one seal whose name he did not know, who was too old when they first met. The old man did not have the courage to try out names on him, to see which one he answered to, for the seal could hardly move and it would have humiliated him.
One severe winter the old man’s children began to worry about him, as he was growing old and rheumatic. One rainy day they came and forced him into their car, and took him to their home and fixed him up a bedroom.
The first night he slept on a bed, he fell off and broke his arm.
As soon as his arm was well again he returned to the cave.
One night when he felt minor quakes were taking place in the area of his heart, he thought he was going to die, so he tried to crawl nearer to the seals, into the crevices where they slept. But they gently, compassionately, nosed him out of the place.
By then he resembled them so much, with his mustache, his rough oval eyebrows, his drooping eyelids, and his barking cough, that he thought they would help him to slide down the rocks and be buried at sea, like a true seal.
WHEN RENATE DID NOT SELL ENOUGH PAINTINGS she worked as a hostess at Paradise Inn. The nightclub, built of rocks and wood, stood high on a rock above the beach. Palm trees and cactus gave it a semblance of tropical softness which was belied by the sharpness of the wind. It was more pleasurable to sit inside near the big fire in the fireplace, and to contemplate the sea through the enormous windows.
Renate wore a purple dress she had made herself and so it did not have the shapelessness of fashion but followed the natural contours of her body like a second skin.
She was always in movement, throwing her long black hair back away from her face, moving forward to greet the visitors, and when she turned her face towards the bar it seemed as if she set the whole glittering mechanism in motion to satisfy hunger and thirst.
She was so gracious in her gestures of welcome that the diners often stopped talking and drinking to watch her, as if she were the spectacle they had come to see. The bar man looked at her while he shook his potions, the old chef looked at her over his charcoal pit, the musicians sang for her, looked at her over the black wings of the piano, and one thought of the French word for hostess, entraineuse,which meant to pull, to magnetize, to lure in her wake.
Eat, drink, talk, she seemed to whisper as she placed the menu into the visitor’s hand, as if she were giving them the secret to all delights, and often they moed aside to make room and said: “Renate, sit down, have a drink with us.”
Animator, bringing animation to silent tables, staying long enough to light the candles.
They arrived in disparate costumes, formal and informal, summer coats, furs, gloves, sport shirts, Hawaiian shirts, Harper’s Bazaar plumes, racing-car goggles, motorcycle helmets, dancing pumps, or leather boots. They arrived heavily made up, with false eyelashes, wigs, or unkempt, ungroomed. No one was surprised. It was the movie colony, at work on films. It looked as if they had snatched a few items from the costume department: beards, gangster’s raincoats, the star’s false jewels. It matched the jumbled styles of their homes, imitations of the styles of other countries which, bereft of their natural atmosphere, looked like stage sets.
Nothing seemed to belong to them organically, to be stamped with their own identity, but no one seemed to expect that. Even the painters and writers wore disguises which outdid Venetian masked balls. The beards of men shipwrecked for years on desert islands, the unmatched clothes from thrift shops, the girls with hair uncombed, and black cotton stockings, and eyes painted a tubercular violet. In this costume they meant to convey a break with conventions, with the stylish mannequins in Beverly Hills shop windows, but it created the impression of merely another uniform, which they bore self-consciously, and it did not portray freedom, nonchalance. They wore them stiffly, as if on display, like extras for a Bohemian scene, proclaiming: look at me.
All of them were impatient to drink the dissolvent remedy which would loosen the disguise, disintegrate the self-conscious shell, to drink until the lower depths of their nature would rise to the surface in sodden debris, brash words, acid angers, to shatter the mannequins they stifled in, to shatter the disguises.
“Renate,” they called, not because they were hungry or thirsty, but because she knew who she was, and as she knew who she was, she might also be able to identify them, with a smile and a word, just as with a smile and a word she had said to Bruce: “You are a poet.”
There was food on the table, and the glasses were full, but who was at the table? Would Renate know? They were at sea, and Renate was more than a woman, she was a compass. What confused them did not confuse her. If she did not answer their distress signals, if she left them stranded in the vacuum they lived in, then to assert their existence they would have to begin a quarrel with someone, anyone.
The features became muddied, the facades collapsed. When a glass broke, Renate appeared as if this were a signal of danger, the start of a drama, as if the restaurant had become a ship at sea, and they all floundered on waves of anger. Strangers were flung together and collided in tidal waves of alcohol, in incoherent quarrels.
I am a star, I am a director, I am a cameraman, I am married, I have two children, I have discovered oil, I have built a house, I have written a script, I won the Oscar, I bought a horse, I rented my ranch, I started the fashion of boar hunting, I am having an exhibition, I am sailing to Acapulco.
But none of these facts the full-bodied power Renate had when she said: “I am a painter.”
Her painting had been born from within just as her son had been, organic, part of her flesh, whereas for the desperate anonymous, they were adopted accidental children, not truly their own, and they were not certain of paternity or reality.
There was one more personage who was not foundering in anonymity like a pilot in weightless space, and that was Leontine who was singing by the piano.
Her hair was cut in a boyish style with bangs over her eyes. It had been dipped in a red glow. Her skin was of a creamy chocolate, her eyes black and highly polished. Her fingers were long and sensitive when she touched her long neck, to feel where the voice came from, as if to coax it pure, and out it came honeyed and heavy, warming, tender, at times like silk, at other times like zephyr wool on the skin.