One week before, sitting alone in a motel room late at night, I had imagined Iris on Johnny Carson. A twin to Lillian Gish. Gish, large-eyed, thin-faced, delicate, curved at the spine, wearing an ill-fitting black pants suit. Once a goddess of Hollywood, now wearing orthopedic shoes on late-night TV, her black-sequined skull cap letting little ringlets of gray spill out—-and I had fallen madly, insanely in love.
“Nobody gets any older than the day I met them,” she mused.
That’s when the amphetamine kicked in again, and I began to talk endlessly of plantations and cemeteries, egrets and alligators, and the moldering smell of the French Quarter and the melodious remnants of clarinets and saxophones, caught like stars, in the night sky. For each bite she took, I offered more.
At dawn, she pulled herself from the sofa depths to draw back the café curtains. Even as she dumped freeze-dried coffee crystals into mugs and poured in boiling water, light spilled into the room like cream into dark French roast. And I told her how wonderful the beignets. How the air in Jackson Square was admixed with sugar. How it wafted in clouds outside the Café du Monde. How I’d tried and failed to photograph the breeze that sucked the sugar off the plates of little powdered donuts. How the breeze had ruffled the powdered sugar into the hills and fur- rows of a patron’s long, glossy sable.
At this, she cricked her index finger, with its miniature disco ball, to warn me. “Don’t you even think about it. I haven’t had my picture made since...” The finger examined her face. “Here...The doctor did a good job, didn’t he?...Ha! Ha! ”
I sized her up, touched her shoulder. “If I was going to take your picture,” I said, “I would want you to turn your head just a little…Yes, just there.”
By the way, it’s not true what they say—a picture is not always worth a thousand words. Iris would be beautiful at any age. But what would my camera see? Her faded, long black cot- ton gown. Her skin, once translucent and ivory, turned to silvery, finely crackled porcelain. Her long hair falling in a thin braid, not silver or gray or yellow, or any color. Its corn gold left only for me to see.
She straightened herself. Uncertain, I turned, but saw every- thing was the same. Posters of B. J. Thomas and Three Dog Night, not far beyond, hiding cracks in the bedroom walls. School pictures—so many children of her long-ago acquaintance—papering the inside of the back door. A framed photo, Mick’s daughter, stationed on the TV.
Until the cancer had poked out of Glen’s ear like a finger,
and Mick had run off, and the dog Geoff died—and then the pet monkey—this had been a family home. Without Moj’s cage, the kitchen table was cluttered with bundles of unanswered Christmas cards and letters and unopened packages. A bottle of corked wine. A box of half-eaten fudge.
Around us, zebra pillows. No bong—only cigarettes allowed here. Bookshelves with curios floor to ceiling. Replicas of Greek and African masks. TV trays holding jewelry boxes, one box with a ballerina spinning on a pond of glass ice, and large chunks of costume jewelry, perfume, and a plastic elephant tusk with intricate “carvings.” Spilled shoe boxes and hat boxes. A termite-eaten Webster’s World Dictionary, and the Flaubert novels I had studied in high school and should have learned more from. The clerk in L’Education sentimentale was myself.
Margaret Osburn teaches creative nonfiction writing at The Johns Hopkins University. She is the recipient of regional press awards (IN) for news and feature writing and wrote a documentary film broadcast on PBS.