Friday, December 09, 2005

Poster Child

I’ll be out of the office all day today, on a site visit that could be very good or very bad.  Either way, I’ll miss y’all.  But let me leave you with this for the weekend - the legend of another dear friend who became more precious and important to me as our relationship matured:

Viola entered my life when I was six years old, and even though she was a cross-dresser I thought of her as an ally.  This was particularly so in comparison to some of her buddies – florid Falstaff, with the huge tankard-wielding fist and the slightly mad gleam in his eye; Rosalind, whipsmart with an icy smile; Mistress Quickly, her hair pulled up in two demonic horns that wrested a grin from her thin lips…. They were accompanied, as well, by a pedantic, goateed Charles Dickens, gesturing broadly to a menagerie of several dozen of his best-known (if not always best-loved) characters.  All were rendered in lifelike watercolor, expressive and piercing as they gazed out at me.  They all seemed, to my young eye, uncannily like real people, frozen in time (ancient) and place (my living room walls). 

For, in fact, all these were posters my parents pulled from the Times of London’s Sunday Supplement during our sojourn in England in 1970, and which they had gotten framed upon our return to LA and mounted around the house.  Many of these guys, frankly, sort of freaked me out, even though they each came with several columns of text explaining their individual intricacies.  Their eyes followed me around the room, and when I left the room, some of them (Fagin, Quickly) watched me through the walls.  These were imagined depictions of imaginary entities, staring at me with fantastic eyes.  But Viola, in her snappy silk cap and her girlyboy ruff, grinned with complicit good humor to me from her frame, as if to reassure me, “yes, I know we’re all freaks, but just made-up ones, and we mean you no harm.  In fact, we may even have a bit of fun together someday if you loosen up a little.”

I eventually got to know her play, 12th Night, better than any of the other works depicted in that set of graphics.  After I left her and home for college, I even got to appear in a production of that play, seeing her come to life charmingly with a new face and costume. 

By the time I graduated, my childhood home had broken up and when I moved back to the same house, which was now a very different home, Viola’s smile seemed a little more guarded, more worldweary.  Her jaunty headpiece no longer masked her frustrations with her misbegotten path.  It was good to come back to her and renew our acquaintance – me, happier and better-adjusted than I’d ever been, and her, changeless and consistent, yet somehow now deeper than the page on which she’d been printed.  Viola, the shipwrecked beauty, masquerading as a man, secretly longing for her lord, spurning his inamorata’s advances… Her limned eyes spoke again to me with more meaning than those of the other character posters.  Still, I couldn’t quite make out the message. 

Years passed.  Kel moved in with me, and then the two of us moved a few more times.  Viola came with us, first to a midtown LA flat, then to a bijoux pacific heights apartment, and finally to our place out in the avenues where we had two roommates, then one, then none…. Viola moved too, from wall to wall, always smiling, always agreeable, always a calming confection for the eye, so much a part of the interior landscape that I stopped noticing her, communing with her, perusing that mysterious smile.  She slid from the foyer to the dining room to the long dark hallway just outside our bedroom door, where she took up permanent residence as the Lady of the Corridor.  There, she seemed to fade a little into the background.  The hallway was not a place to linger, and she couldn’t be seen from inside the bedroom.  No other artwork hung nearby to keep her company; the closest were two mounted photos on the other side of the door – small monochrome prints of rough and desolate scenes.  Viola just hung tight to her wall and, for a couple of years or so, shone her smile into empty air.

Then came Zach, and the reconfiguration.  Our dyad became a triad and, consequently, the old yoga room gradually became a nursery, furnished a piece at a time till it was a warm and comfortable and entirely new room.  The crib and changing table and dresser formed a cozy set; the greenling-tinted walls were soothing to the eye and mind.  A blue star and a yellow crescent moon shone from one wall; Quan Yin and Korean tigers communed in the opposite corner.  The place was almost finished.  What remained were the finishing touches – a rug, whereon the boy could splay and scramble, and a chair, whereon we could fed him a bedtime bottle and read him Goodnight Moon again. 

One trip to Ikea filled both those gaps in the décor: we found a rug festooned with cavorting dragons that coordinated with the other furniture, and a comfortable easy chair for the corner near the window.  When I finally sat in that chair, the room finally really felt complete – the most complete place in the house.  Even so, I didn’t notice at the time the one detail that made it all work, that we’d inadvertently crafted years prior. 

That night, I heated up six ounces of formula and cradled Zach in my lap, fresh from his bath and clumsy with impending sleep.  I looked from his small, sweet head to the boardbook spread open on my knees, then around the intimate room full of friendly touches, and out the door into the hallway – and there I caught her smiling at me.  Viola was watching over us, looking right in from her once-isolated vantage, keeping a loving vigil over the final minutes of the baby’s day.  Her smile finally made sense to me as I reveled in the nurturing quiet of the warm nursery, my voice lulling Zach to sleep.  She wasn’t winking with sardonic derision; neither did she smirk sarcastically, nor did she grimace with ill-concealed sadness.  Her smile had opened, at long last, like a flower in a wild field.  After 400 years or so of being ill at ease and a stranger in her own house, she had find her place, her home, with us.  As she beamed at us, Zach fell asleep in my arms and I laid him in his crib.  I shut the lights and left him for the night.  When I closed the nursery door behind me on my way to my own bed and dreams, I’m sure I saw her wink at me.