Anaïs Nin - Collages

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.

Having situated her in Mexico permanently in her memory, Renate was all the more startled to run into her on Third Avenue, New York, before the elevated was removed. Lisa was carrying a brown shopping bag. Her hair so wild and abundant was hidden by a handkerchief. For a moment, in the striped light of soot-filtered sun, Renate wondered if all she remembered had belonged to Acapulco and not to Lisa, for she could not find in Lisa herself any gleams of gold, of sun, no tinkling of bracelets, no pearly laughter. Lisa wore a dark winter coat and seemed to have amalgamated with the city and the winter.

“Renate! What are you doing in New York?”

“I’m having an exhibition on 57th Street. And you, Lisa?”

“Do you remember the Acapulco sailing and fishing contests? Well, Bill was with one of the newspapers, a reporter for Field and Stream. He came in his trailer to cover the celebration. I had just finished building my house and I had a housewarming. We began to dance together Sunday night, the night of the prize distribution, and we continued to dance together for two or three nights. I don’t remember that we stopped for meals. I had just divorced my third husband, and I felt like beginning a completely new cycle. But I couldn’t persuade Bill to stay. Instead he gave me an hour to get ready and took me away in his trailer. We went from Acapulco to Fraser, Colorado, on another assignment. I arrived there with gold sandals, and it was snowing. While Bill covered his story, I waited for him in a cafeteria and played the slot machines. All my life I had dreamed of finally settling in Acapulco and living there and going native. And here I was in a snowstorm, sleeping and traveling in a trailer on my way to New York.”