John Wilkes arrived. He and Renate spent three whole days with lawyers. Renate looked tired but elated. “He says yes to everything.”
In the climate of enthusiasm, new ideas proliferated.
At last the contracts were done with. The young millionaire had consented to everything. He had also agreed to meet the staff, and to have champagne with them. They were to gather at Renate’s house.
The sun gold-leafed the sea, the tips of the leaves, the window panes, the pottery and the paintings. Cars arrived. Everyone seemed to feel lighter, to walk more confidently.
Bruce brought Renate an umbrella for her trip to Paris. It was made of cellophane, and planted with bunches of plastic violets. To walk in the rain and yet be able to see the sky, the buildings, the people. And her face behind it when she opened it was like the face of a mermaid in an aquarium. The violets seemed planted in her dark hair.
But John Wilkes did not arrive. The telephone rang. He excused himself. He had been called to a conference in Denver. Anyway, he had to take the contracts to his own committee and mail the checks to close the deal.
There was a moment of suspense.
“Oh, we mustn’t be superstitious,” said Renate, “that’s how millionaires behave. They are always in business conferences. They have no time for celebrations.”
They drank the champagne, but for the first time their gathering seemed more like the gathering of other magazine staffs, solemn and cautious.
The next day there was silence and suspense, as if the post office, the telegraph office, the bank, and the postman must not be disturbed in the performance of their duties. They did not telephone each other with new ideas.
On each desk there was a pile of unpaid bills. On Renate’s desk a bill from the printer for the dummy, writing paper and cards, and a bill for the rental of the office.
Each one had a personal, intimate problem he did not want to share with the others: doctor’s bills, insurance bills, a parent to support, all the obligations which were going to be met with money earned while doing what they loved to do. An unknown writer had seen his name on the cover. An unknown singer had believed herself discovered.
But no check came.
Renate broke her promise not to telephone John Wilkes. But when she did he took a long time to come to the telephone. His answers for the first time, sounded vague and evasive.
Renate asked her lawyer’s advice. The lawyer spoke to his neighbor who worked for the F.B.I. Quiet investigations were made. Two weeks had passed since John Wilkes had signed the contracts and promised a check.
It was then Renate discovered that the young millionaire was a gardener in a millionaire’s home in Phoenix. He liked to play the role of millionaire. He had done it before. He had been in New York, had been present at several conferences over new projects, studied them, signed contracts, and vanished.
Renate could imagine him clipping rose bushes and listening to the talk of rich oil men resting on chaise-longues around their pools: “I am investing in Playboy. I am producing a play. I am backing a film.”
And Renate could see the young, shy, handsome gardener, studying the roles he was to play while watering the lawns and planting bushes. He had learned a trade which gave him elation and a sense of power. He had done it well.
When she telephoned him the telephone was probably right in the kitchen, or in the tool house where people could hear him. And the genuine millionaires were probably sitting a few yards away, planning other investments.
There was no law to jail a man who swindled one of illusions and not of money. The gardener watered other people’s dreams. It was not his fault that they grew so big and had to be pruned.
RENATE AND LISA HAD MET IN ACAPULCO when she was there for a few days designing a mural for the new hotel.
She was sitting in the dining-room when she saw a Toulouse-Lautrec figure walk down the stairs, a Toulouse-Lautrec with a Rousseau jungle for a background. Renate’s eyes were also caught by the brilliant native color of her dress. She used Mexican textiles. She wore jewelry copied from the Aztec days of gold exuberance. The bouffant hair was not in fashion then, but she wore it naturally, and it made her face small and delicate. She had a small straight nose such as one only sees in paintings, eyes always mocking, a slender neck and a fine head attached surprisingly to a voluptuous body. Her body was heavy but in the way of primitive women, that is, not inert but alive and rhythmic, graceful and vibrating. Her movements had a vivacity and a flow and something more; she had provocative movements, as if she were about to undress. She rolled her hips, her shoulders, like a strip-teaser about to slide out of her clothes. She had the swinging roll of sailors and prostitutes suggesting the rocking of ships or of beds. She thrust her breasts out as if she would separate herself from them and fly off. Her hands would rest on different parts of her body as if to indicate where the eyes should alight. She shook her head, alert and animal, and laughed with a ripple which ran through her whole body. It was as if she kept dancing just enough to keep her jewelry tinkling and her earrings swinging.
Renate and Lisa talked on the terrace at night after dinner while waiting to see what the evening would bring. In spite of her two children, a girl of seven and a boy of nine, the men treated her as if she were a young woman. Her laughter was inviting as she lay on the chaise-longue, eclipsing the vivid tropical flowers, petal soft, perfumed among the dark heavy tropical foliage. But her exotic plumage did not seem a permanent part of her. One felt she was uncomfortable within it, and that her natural state was nudity.
She could flirt and tease and laugh with people she did not like, like a professional. She never conserved or economized her charms, or refused anyone the fullness of her laughter, or the long glance into her igniting eyes, or proximity to her tanned skin. Acapulco was a perfect background for her. Her skin was naturally swarthy and she seemed like a native, in harmony with the climate, never too warm, never estranged from it, never intimidated by darkness, strange bird voices, monkey chatter, or the sudden discovery of an iguana practicing camouflage and almost invisible, frozen in the sun, the color of the rock it lay on.
When Diego Rivera painted her, with his Mexican brush, he made her mouth twice as thick, her nose twice as wide, her eyes twice as large, adding fierceness, and it was no longer Lisa, because Lisa was this paradox between a jungle-luxuriant body and a delicate Toulouse-Lautrec head.
In Acapulco no one ever thought of profession, titles, background, or past history. Everyone lived in the present and looked at each other with an appreciation of appearance only as one looked at the sea, the mountains, lagoons, birds, animals, flowers. Races, classes, fortunes, all blended into an object for the pursuit of pleasure. Swimming, sunning, dancing, idleness, made people part of the scenery, for the pleasure of the eyes only. Quality was a matter of contribution to the beauty of the spectacle. This unique qualification was determined by how one looked walking down the stairs to the dining-room, because spotlights had been planted between the cactus and the palms, and the descent, and pause, just before entering the dining room was like a small stage, high above the diners, well lighted, and well designed so that hundreds of eyes could determine if this figure was, or was not, an aesthetic contribution to the isle of pleasure. Anyone at this moment could achieve membership into the club of the deshabilles.
Lisa’s origins were even more obscured by her knowledge of many languages, of many countries, her exotic costumes, her home in Acapulco, her rootlessness, her several husbands no one had known, her mysterious income.
Anyone seeking to include her in a realistic novel would have had to resort, even against the grain, to impressionism. Her Mexican servants treated her as one of their own because she ate their food. A Mexican god was cemented on a column in her garden. There were no books in her house, but many canvasses and supplies of paints.