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Iceburg lettuce faded as leaves of a schoolgirl's scrapbook bedded cherry tomatoes on a blue plate. The table spread between us, draped white and stiff; I pressed the hem that fell against my knees into the groove of my thumbnail. On paper thick as cloth he had written his invitation to me, to come to his house for dinner, without my father who had arranged for his exhibition in Texas, without my mother who has known his wife Teeney since before I was born. Just him and me. His fingers were long as boney as the silverware.Before the salad plates disappeared he asked me for a kiss. I am perhaps 70 years the artist's junior. Wrens landed at our feet to nibble crumbs. His lips were thin and cold.
Before I met him, I had only seen a postcard of Monsieur Duchamp. The photograph which became the postcard was taken in Juarez by a Mexican street photographer with a box camera on a tripod of broomsticks, the shutter a piece of black cardboard removed for one second from a quarter-sized hole at which you aimed your eyes. When the Frenchman returned minutes later, the photo was brought from the gray depths of a water-filled bucket, slightly overexposed, showing a thin balding man with long nose and cigarette before the ghostly scalloped edge of a mission-style storefront.
Duchamp could tell a story. While we sipped brown broth from bowlsized cups he recalled his first visit to an art museum, attended by a Parisian aunt. Sneaking away from the velvet chairs of the Chambre de le Renaissance, he viewed from behind a curlicued iron gate spotted with pigeon droppings the church across the street: large black cars like wet rocks, ladies' black veils caught wing-like in the breeze, black armbands and sashes which mde the gentlemen look like members of a secret society. The luxury of a widow's weeping was so loud it appeared that the pale lithe women sewing, pouring milk, by windows looking out on canal cities, were disturbed by it.
Then fishes baked with heads and tails were brought to us as the sun lowered, casting deep shadows on the brick floor and the white claws of the wrought-iron table legs.
He attempted to describe the rooms where he had stayed all his years in Paris, he, always the traveler, the renter, the collector of wires bent in perfect shapes found in the street. At Place du Plombèrie he watched from his bed Mme. Violette across the way, her dainty hand stirring coffee, writing a letter, releasing the small buttons of her sweater from their holes. Four flights of stairs led to his room on the Rue de la Fripérie, with rows of built-in glass shelves in the entryway window, on which he collected late-night leaf green wine bottles.
As we swirled the wine in our goblets, sounds drifted out to us from inside the house. I thought I should rise to leave, but the moment I turned to thank him his attention was stolen by the guests who burst through he French doors and onto the patio with all the chatter and rich perfumes of after-performance opera stars. Three women and four men pulled up chairs from the distant edges of the terrace, flung their wraps and sequined scarves around the ladder-backs, and seated themselves around the famous artist like wrens around the last buttered crumb.
They chirped in French, voices scaling the vine-tangled walls, the sad old oak trees. I played with my food. The fish's cavity became a boat with perfect ribbing, which I filled with long green bean parcels and surrounded with sea-foam parsley sprigs stolen from plate, as I had eaten mine to clear my breath. From a nearby bush I tore a handful of green berries, cannons for protection against pirates and gypsy thieves. Having arranged all this, I now grew bored, and spying some failing purple mums in a pot, I rose from my seat and gathered the fallen petals as fish for my fisherman-less sea. A man wearing a white shirt cleared the smaller plates and extra glasses from the table for the serving of the sherbet while the artist and his admirers gibbered French. As I speckled my sea with the last wilted violet minnows, the man's brown hand wrapped around the plate and it was gone.
Knowing no stories, or foreign languages, magic tricks, having no double joints, and a half-fear of almost everything, I tried to remember the sort of things my father would say to the artist, but the names, the correct phrases would not come. I failed to hear my host calling to me. Viens ici, Duchamp said, Come. I stood, he reached out his hand--the guests fell quiet--and through a maze of chair legs he swirled me to his side. Suddenly I was tall and elegant as the blue flame of a single candle. The woman in the rustling dress kissed me on either cheek and motioned for me to take her chair. He lit his first cigarette of the night, and tilted his head back. His throat was creased like a turtle's, but was the color of a swan's. Beneath heavy moss in crooked trees, I remembered suddenly lamplight falling onto all the things collected in my room at home. Then he said, before all of his famous French companions, Sweet, tell me, for what are you going to be famous?
