While I was gone, I worried about finding my way back, which produced paralyzing anxieties. Circumstantially, I found myself behind the avant-garde visual artist working at her easel in the unyielding dark.
“Getting what you want?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “and go away.”
“You didn’t happen to notice a woman perhaps wearing a plastic cap over her hair go by?”
“Someone went by about an hour ago,” she said, “but it was too dark to see who it was and besides I was working, which let me remind you I still am.”
I spent the rest of the night in the hallway of the Villa in the vicinity of my room, no longer sure which door was mine, trying to remember the first words of my sentence.
I must have entered the nearest door because when I woke up at first light I was in an unfamiliar bed in a room much like my own though conspicuously different.
I knew the room wasn’t mine because the pieces of under-clothing dangling over the odd pieces of furniture strewn about were female apparel.
I thought it might be fun to write in a room that had an erotic subtext though I worried that the prospect of real sex might become distracting.
Moments after I locked the door someone knocked and I left the bed to answer it, realizing on the way that I had nothing on but a t-shirt that extended six inches below the knee. The clothes I had been wearing — my writerly outfit of workshirt and jeans — were nowhere in evidence.
I thought whoever had been there had gone away while I was looking for my pants, but momentarily the knocks returned with renewed persistence.
“Come back in ten minutes,” I said to the intruder behind the door, hoping to be fully clothed when whoever it was claiming my sanctuary returned to displace me.
37th Night
Hours passed without further incident. After awhile my my circumstantial quarters achieved the status of long-term familiarity. Molly had a late afternoon cameo in my borrowed bathroom only to disappear again as a way of gaining my attention.
It couldn’t be said that she was always missing. It was that she tended to be absent when I longed most to have her around. I told her as much but she remained skeptical or indifferent. She kept redyeing her hair, never getting it quite the right shade of dirty blond and so almost always in the bathroom when I needed to use it. I tended to pee on the grounds in the dark, noted by the visual artist who kept her own counsel, while perhaps including me in her black-on-black nightscape.
As much as I liked being at the Villa, as much as it seemed the best home I’d ever known, I knew I couldn’t stay there forever.
I had lost my letter of instructions but memory reported that I had three or four more days allotted me. The unfamiliar case I found in a corner of the room already packed with odds and ends in anticipation of my eventual eviction.
When I asked Molly if she was staying on to be the muse of the resident coming in to replace me, she said, “Funny, I thought it was you who was supposed to be my muse. Does this look like a man’s room to you?”
I couldn’t say that it did without lying inexcusably.
That’s what happens, I suppose, when you find yourself occupying a room with women’s clothes strewn about — you lose your sense of place in the world.
So I went out into the hall to look for my old room, knocked on a few doors. Various residents I knew only from a distance answered my knocks, invited me in for a drink or not, seemed at home with themselves.
There were two more doors left to investigate and I approached the first one warily in the hope of discovering a more productive strategy, my fist in the air withheld from the door.
The door abruptly opened and I was confronted by a woman dressed in black, who I imagined I recognized as the painter of nightscapes. “Yes,” she said, “this is or was your room, but as you can see I’m here now.”
I wondered out loud why they hadn’t given her her own room when she arrived.
She stepped aside to let me go by. “They did sort of,” she said, “but then one day I discovered someone else had taken it when I was out doing my art so I commandeered the first unoccupied room I could find. We could share it if you have no other place. I tend to sleep during the day and work at night so we shouldn’t get in each other’s way.”
I looked at my watch. It was on the cusp of nighttime, and she would be leaving in an hour, she said, to do her work.
Everything else in the room, I noticed, was mine except for three black canvasses prominently displayed, two on the wall, one alongside the wall opposite the bed.
I accepted her offer and went back to my sentence as soon as she left the room. It was a little different from how I remembered it, but also less hopeless, more susceptible to ultimate resolution.
38th Night
The painter-in-residence didn’t return at first light as promised and I had my room to myself in a sense. The black paintings on the wall had a way of insisting on their presence in a disconcerting sometimes oppressive way. They were signed — at least the two on the wall were — with the initial Q. The one on the floor, which I assumed was unfinished, had the signature letter roughed in, near invisibly in pencil. Odd, I thought since the painter’s name, the name she introduced herself to me by, was Leonora.
If she ever returned, I would have to remember to ask Leonora what the Q stood for.
When I wasn’t writing — by this time I had moved on to the second sentencehad I wondered if it were a coincidence that the two women in my life had both disappeared. Then it struck me that going back in time all the women I had ever known, starting with my mother, had eventually deserted me.
Feeling abandoned, I left the room in search of company.
When I returned the paintings were gone, at least no longer on the wall and I assumed — what else could it mean? — that Q (or L) removed them so that she would no longer have a reason to return.
But that night, someone shook me from sleep, wanting to know what I had done with her paintings. It was Q (aka Leonora) and she had paint on her hands which transferred to the shoulder she had shaken.
I protested my innocence and then went off with her on a prolonged and seemingly hopeless search for the missing black paintings. A sense of responsibility will take you down odd paths.
We went from room to room on tiptoes, looking in closets and under beds, taking something from each of the rooms in compensation for the loss.
We had quite a haul of stuff in an orange garbage bag when we returned to our room to discover Q’s black paintings on the walls again — all three this time — returned by the thief in our absence.
Q was pleased, though not greatly pleased, hugged me, and then began to moan, complaining that whoever took the paintings decided they weren’t worth keeping, which was hurtful and cruel.
“Perhaps the slanting of the light had blinded us to their presence before,” I said.
I meant only to console her, but it led to something else, something more or less, and we were on the floor together irrevocably entangled when, after a staggering knock on the door, some official entered (the Assistant Director in charge of Transgressions — she wore a button to that effect) to banish us from the Villa. From my vantage on the floor, the angular young woman, who bore Molly a passing resemblance, seemed bigger than life.
39th Night
Q (or L) and I left the Villa together in disgrace and relative poverty, forced by circumstances to wander from one look-alike town to another, doing whatever came along to earn our keep.
With the last of our lira, we bought some realistic-looking imitation metal chains and I improvised a strong man act in the various town squares. Q (or L) would tie the chains around my chest and I would huff and puff and groan until it seemed I had given up and then I would break my bonds by seemingly expanding my chest. The unit had a trick link that came apart when yanked on in a certain way. Each time I gave the illusion of breaking my bonds, Q would scream with pleasure as if she had never seen anything like it before.