The Goddess in the Black Vintage Dress – Conversations on Writing

During a lengthy illness, I had a complete meltdown regarding interior design. The first week I decided I wanted to change the room order in my house entirely, then, at some point during the next, that I hated the whole apartment with fiery passion, and finally, in the final moments with the sweats and a hankie, that new house plants were to be the answer to the age-old question one presents herself when sick: just why the hell did I arrange my house in this manner, and why do I have to lie around all day and look at my terrible walls and boring furniture?

So basically, having circled all the way to the Dark Side and back with a severe case of cabin fever, I decided to get right on it and go buy some of those pesky new house plants. Naturally, this venturing outside the sickbed and apartment would not have been the true adventure of a woman just regained her good senses, if it hadn’t included a little clothes shopping on the side.

I hadn’t been to my vintage shop in ages, and since I knew the kind proprietor also loved flowers, I rushed right over to try on some spring jackets and bracelets. We have been having some awful karma lately, the kind proprietor and I, wardrobe-wise, and as evidence of that karma she has been caught in the act of having to close early due to dentist’s appointment or some other sickness every time I have tried to go shop there in the past few months. This time, though, my attempt was successful, and I got in before some emergency required her closing the store.

We congratulated each other heartily for this happy incident, but I did feel the need to share the fact that I had just been bedridden with fever and the sniffles for two whole weeks, and she confessed that she had been to the doctor’s earlier that day, and thank god I came when I did and not two hours ago because she had had to put the “Be back in an hour” note on the door. What is it with us and being sick? we both mused, but could not find an answer.

I don’t know exactly how long I had been inside the shop, but it couldn’t have been very long, since I was hardly perspiring in my winter tweed coat, when a vision appeared before me from inside the pamplemousse-colored curtained fitting room.

She was a strange mixture of a faun and punk rock goddess and the Green Woman, and I knew who she was. Her name was Roxanne, like in the movie where Daryl Hannah plays the elusive object of the affection of both Steve Martin and his dimwitted co-worker, and there were violets growing on her shoulders, and her hair was half buzz cut, half flowing, exotic jungle of green ivy. She was the apparition of the Narrative Present, with lips painted Marilyn Monroe red, and she looked so untamed and wild in her orange boots, the shop keeper herself asked to take her picture.

“I saw you in my dream”, I said to her.

“I know. It was over a month ago, and I was sitting in your car and telling you I had never been in a car that shade of green before.”

“Yes that’s exactly it. Then I said I needed to return that book I borrowed from you, and you told me I could never walk into the same book twice.”

“I did? Well, how very Heraclitus of me. Being in the car reminded me of driving inside this incredibly narrow tunnel once while on book tour, where if another car was coming towards you, there was no room to pass, but you had to park into these tiny pockets carved on both sides of the tunnel, in order to let the other car go its way. It could have very well been the most claustrophobic experience of my life. But it is true, though, the book is never the same, because you yourself aren’t.”

“Yes, no matter how hard and meticulously you read it, and how carefully you try to channel the experience and explain it to someone, even yourself. Where was this narrow tunnel?”

“How would I know? It was your dream.”

Had I conjured her in my desperate need for some fresh water splashed on my face after being cooped up inside for so long? Her bespectacled face reminded me of someone, a character in a Japanese novel I had once read, yet when she said she was hungry for some lemon-meringue pie, I sobered quickly from my botanical fantasy and said I would love to go get some pie.

“It is always different, because it echoes differently in different people. Everyone creates their own signature echo that reverberates through the text. That is why you see me now, in this beautiful black dress with the flowers, and why we are headed to get some pie together. No need to get confessional, I don’t care how we came to be here. By the way, you need to get that midnight blue linen jacket.”

“I know, right? It looks really good, doesn’t it?”

“Sometimes I think I have just discovered the metaphor to end all metaphors, and as I am patting myself on the back for a job well done, I find I have used that exact image already, in a book I wrote eighteen years ago.”

“Yes, don’t you just hate it when that happens? Like all of a sudden, there are no more discoveries, other than the fact that you yourself have already written every line at least once somewhere else.”

“That is exactly why I don’t keep a diary. I always just end up using the beautiful notebook for writing down shopping lists, or I write down things like ‘Remember the tax return’.”

“Well that’s just not right! You can’t write a word like ‘tax’ in a beautiful notebook.”

“Well that’s what I write in it. I just leave it lying around and end up never using it at all. I think about things, then I type them down, as a thought-out sentence, or chapter, even, in one fell swoop.”

“In other words, you leave out the middle man. ’Tax return’, oh my god.”

“Will you get over it? And buy the damn jacket already, you know you look lovely in it. You look like you are about to have a clandestine meeting in a dark street corner with Humphrey Bogart, regarding the Maltese Falcon.”

“Okay, but if I get this, then you need to get that gorgeous black dress. You look absolutely stunning in it. You look like you are about to meet up with Humphrey Bogart, too, only not in a dark alley, but in the heated winter garden of your father’s estate, and you are about to have a legendary verbal sparring match with him and then marry him.”

“I said corner, but alley works out well, too. Okay let’s go.”

“Jeez, look at us, with our bags. We should not go clothes shopping together.”

“Yes, we were like a couple of bulls, egging each other on in there.”

“Well, if I end up hating the jacket when I get home, I’ll call you and demand an explanation.”

“Do not call me, I mean it! I hate people calling me at all hours and asking why they had to buy the jacket.”

“Fine, I won’t call you. I need to go buy the house plants anyway, and now I’ve blown all my money on this wonderful piece of clothing. Story of my life.”

As we entered Café Poetic Malady to have some pie, I wondered how long I could keep the apparition intact. The high-ceilinged room was buzzing with the supernatural occurrence, and paint started peeling off it in long uneven peels. It reminded me of how in Amélie there is a short sequence, just a couple of frames, of her father, peeling off wallpaper in long strips with a blissful look of utter heroism and happiness on his face.

Roxanne ate her pie with a mixture of pleasurable deliberateness and thoughtfulness of a true pie appreciator, and wonderful gusto of a meringue-loving girl. The scent of lemon lingered above our table, and I thought of how when you rub and peel a little the stem of Honeywort, an intoxicating and surprising aroma of lemons fills the air and sticks on your fingers. She drank her espresso, before she picked up from where we left off outside.

“There can be a moment in there, somewhere in the work, where one reveals one’s most painful and truest emotions, a hidden confession, an outcry, but so cleverly camouflaged it is practically impossible for the reader to unravel the intricately woven texture, or even for the writer herself to acknowledge the words as her own locked-away mysteries uncovered, until perhaps years later, when one stumbles on the text, and there it suddenly is, some big secret, all exposed, showing clearly, and one wonders how it was possible to not know she was writing it in.”

“Do you like your name, Roxanne?”

“I’m not a Police fan.”

“No! Roxanne, from that Steve Martin movie? Where he has the long nose, the Cyrano de Bergerac adaptation? You know? ‘Finally, a man who can satisfy two women at once!’”

“Okay I like it a little more now.”

“You will appear as different ghosts of Narratives Past, Present, and Future, in all our conversations, and maybe you will bear a different name in each.”

“Okay. Will I always wear this black vintage dress with the violets? Because I like it, I am a dress person.”

“I don’t know yet. You know, earlier you were wearing pants.”

“I was? But you – changed your mind?”

“Yes. But your hair will be green and remind me of ivy, and you will sport those glasses. Ivy is my favorite house plant, but I have never managed to keep one alive. Bugs. And desiccation.”

“Sounds like something from Revelation. Ivy is definitely not for beginners. What else?”

“Sometimes I feel like I am about to deliver a bomb, in writing, and I put it out there and wait for it to explode, but then a few days pass, and the explosion never comes. I go out into the world, and turns out people are exactly the same. No one has found out, no one has been transformed at all by what I had to say, and while it is a relief, I wouldn’t be honest if I claimed I wasn’t the tiniest bit disappointed, or unnerved. All that unraveling, and nothing.”

“Will I always be this feisty?”

“I think each time I will enhance one aspect of you more than others. Which, of course, is also an aspect of me. And, of course, an aspect of the reader.”

“Like when Tolstoy said he was Anna Karenina?”

“That’s right. Also, the Beatles. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”

“Yes, I am the egg man, goo goo g’joob. Speaking of music, I went to hear a lecture a short while ago. It was about whether a play can actually exist independent from it being produced, whether a play always demands to be played out in order for it to achieve true coherent existence. If no one has performed the play, is it an existing work of art? Listening to the discussion, I kept thinking that the words, be it in a play or in a novel, are like the musical notes, and the reader or the actors and viewers are the players who create the music out of those notes, and every time it is played or read it’s a slightly different piece.”

“Yes, theater is of the moment, it is more urgent than a novel, and always different, but I think you are right. In the end, it all boils down to that Greek fellow droning on about the ever-changing river.”

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

“Does that mean that there truly is nothing new under the sun since the early philosophers were drawing circles in the sand in ancient Greece?”

“Well I wouldn’t go that far. You know I am not really a goddess, right? Greek, or otherwise.”

“I think I do. You know, I’m really not one either! Never tell anyone.”

“So, the conclusion today is that neither one of us is a goddess per se.”

“Unfortunately, no. But we do share many, many goddess-like features. See, there’s the abundance of beauty, of course, the strength of bones, the rosy of cheeks, the sly of wit. You like owls, I believe, the owl is like your familiar?”

“You know, you are right. Our unfortunate humanness will remain between us. And your familiar, what is that?”

“I’ve always pictured myself as an enormous black dog. I love dogs. Also, our outfits are totally goddess-like, with your divine reds and oranges, and my lime greens and blues. We are like a pair in the Complementary Color Memory Game. Man, this pie is delicious!”

“Yes, red and green. My green hair, your green boots. But what about your house plants?”

“Plants schmants, I’ll stop by a flower store in my district on my way home. Blue in green. Green eyes, blue eyes. The color green has been our friend, today, hasn’t it?”

Roxanne handed me my gray felt hat and the extra sweater I had bundled inside it instead of the usual rabbit. It was time to leave. The customers at the Café Poetic Malady seemed totally oblivious to having witnessed some practical magic.

Music from and inspired by conversations with S.S. Part one

Roxanne, directed by Fred Schepisi in 1987.

The Gilmore Girls reference from s 2, ep 7, Like Mother Like Daughter.

The Humphrey Bogart references: The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston in 1941; The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks in 1946.

Special thanks to Alice Hoffman once again, for inspiration and kinship, and for a couple of very specific words that are hers, not mine.