Body & Soul (54 page)

Claude wanted to speak, but stopped himself with great effort.

"Somewhere," Weisfeld said, "Wittgenstein is talking about some people he disagrees with, some ... philosophers he disagrees with. I can't remember where. He uses the phrase 'abject optimism.' " Weisfeld separated the words for emphasis. "It's an interesting idea." He paused and gave a very slow nod. "This is an idea Bergman and I are familiar with. Am I right, Ira? Bergman, and me, and people we knew."

"Shh," Bergman said softly. "Shh, now."

"Yes, you're right. My mind is wandering."

"Think of the boy."

"Absolutely." He looked at Claude and smiled. "Much better."

It took Claude a moment to realize they were talking about the Jews of Warsaw. The Jews of Europe, living and dead. He had an almost tangible sense of the unseen in Weisfeld, of the weight of the unspeakable past behind his dark eyes. No matter that Weisfeld had done his best to hide it all these years, Claude should have known, and now he felt shame for his self-absorption. There was a sense of everything collapsing down to the size of the room, as if they were drifting through space in a cube from one of Einstein's thought experiments, with no reference points except one another. For a moment those dark eyes seemed more than Claude could bear, but he held on and the moment passed.

When Bergman announced he was leaving, Claude followed him out to the front and down the stairs.

"I'm going to spend the night here," Claude said. "Upstairs."

Bergman thought about it, even glancing up at the ceiling as if he could see into Weisfeld's sickroom. "That's a good idea. It's getting ... Someone should be with him. We can alternate nights, so I'll take
tomorrow. What do you think? Vogel comes again tomorrow morning."

"Good. I want to talk to him."

"So we'll switch off, okay?"

"Yes," Claude said. "And maybe a nurse too. I'll talk to Dr. Vogel."

"Aaron can be very stubborn, you know. Very proud. So be careful with him. Something you think is no big deal can be important."

"Like a nurse, you mean?"

"Maybe. Who knows? It's important to him to get dressed in the morning even though he knows he isn't going anywhere, for instance. Little things."

"I'll be careful," Claude said.

"I was going to call you." Bergman patted Claude's arm. "He didn't want you to see him sick, but he wanted to see you, if you know what I mean. It's been like a little war."

Claude bowed his head and nodded.

Back upstairs, Weisfeld had drifted off. Claude sat in the chair beside the bed. Instinctively he picked up a book and opened it so as to appear to be reading. For a while he found his mind empty—thought and emotion temporarily suspended, even his body drained of tension. Eventually the words seemed to appear on the page as if out of invisible ink and he began to read. A biography of the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. Glaciers. White bears. White skies. White ice, white snow.

"Claude," Weisfeld said, "do me a favor before you go. My feet hurt and I'm too lazy to take off my shoes."

Claude got up. It was dark outside. He went to the end of the bed and unlaced Weisfeld's black shoes. "I'm going to sleep here tonight, in the other room, if that's all right with you."

"That's not necessary."

"I know it isn't. But I wouldn't be able to sleep at home. I'd be up all night worrying, so do me a favor." Gently, Claude eased one shoe off. The ankle was swollen. He removed the other shoe. There was a hole in the toe of Weisfeld's sock, and this ankle too was swollen, the skin blotchy.

"Such melodrama," Weisfeld said.

"It's just easier."

"Well, don't forget to call your wife."

Claude put the shoes on the floor by the side of the bed and sat down.

"How goes it in that department, by the way?"

Claude hesitated. It seemed wrong to talk about his own troubles, but then, perhaps because of what had happened inside himself when he had been pulled into those dark eyes, it seemed more wrong not to. "Not so good, I think." He told Weisfeld about his sterility, the bungled adoption effort, the sense of something hanging over them. When he'd finished Weisfeld didn't say anything for some time.

"This sadness," he finally suggested, "this sadness should go in your music. You understand? So it shouldn't get the upper hand."

"Oh, it's not so bad."

"You say that."

" I mean—"

"You don't take yourself seriously," Weisfeld said. "When there's trouble, you should take it seriously. What is it with you?"

"I'm sorry."

"And don't be sorry."

"The thing about sterility," Claude said, "it's important, of course it's important, but it doesn't seem pressing. It seems like something I'll be dealing with. With Lady, I don't know. It's almost like I'm her son or something. I know that sounds strange."

"No, it doesn't."

"It scares me. There's some kind of hollowness and I can't seem to do anything about it."

"Does she still want to adopt a child?"

"Oh, no," Claude said quickly. "All the stuff went to the Salvation Army the next day. She couldn't get it out fast enough."

"I see." He seemed to be tiring now, and Claude felt a pang of guilt.

"Things will work out," Claude said.

"Sure," Weisfeld said, and then added, "but take yourself seriously, and at all times be ready for anything." He took a breath. "This is ancient Jewish wisdom you're getting here, believe me."

"I understand. You've told me something like it before."

"I have?"

"Many times."

"Good. So listen." He closed his eyes. "Maybe this time you'll listen better. After all, a dying old man."

Claude watched the motionless face. "Are you dying, Aaron?"

"I think so." He went to sleep, eyelids flickering.

***

Claude slept little that night—episodes of dozing on the chaise longue punctuated by silent visits to the back room. Weisfeld was occasionally half awake, mumbling a few words, once giving a little wave with his right hand.

Just at dawn Claude went in to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at his shoes.

"What is it?" Claude asked. "What do you want?"

"I was thinking of that old suitcase. The one on the back of my bicycle. It's here somewhere. All beat up. Coming apart."

Claude moved forward and knelt before him. "You want me to find it? Should I get it?"

Weisfeld lifted his arm, wincing until his hand came to rest against the side of Claude's neck. He smiled, and then his eyes seemed to shift focus and he grabbed his lower lip in his teeth.

"Aaron—" Claude whispered.

"Something," he began, "something is..." And then his eyes went flat and he fell over onto his side.

Claude picked up Weisfeld's hand and held it between his own. That was how Dr. Vogel found them two hours later.

B
IT BY BIT
Claude began to close down. He wrote Otto Levits a card explaining that under the circumstances he felt it necessary to cancel all upcoming engagements, that as far as performing was concerned he should be considered on a leave of absence. Levits wrote back to say that he understood, but reminded Claude that in two months he was to record in the RCA sound studios. The time had been reserved and other people were counting on him. Levits had worked hard to put the deal together, and it was a significant engagement in terms of Claude's career. Claude did not respond.

Lady seemed to spend more and more time outside the house on unspecified pursuits. At dinner she was more than ordinarily quiet, and in general seemed to acknowledge Claude's loss by tactfully backing off, leaving him space, making no demands. Sometimes he was aware of her looking at him with concern, but as the weeks went by he sank gradually into a dull lassitude, a kind of torpor that blocked off his perception of much of his surroundings. The simplest actions became difficult. He might sit before the empty fireplace in the living room for half an hour thinking about whether to make himself a cup of tea. He could not read anything more demanding than newspapers or magazines. An entire morning might be spun around something as simple as taking a bath. He slept fourteen hours a day.

He was only minimally aware of what was on the television screen he watched much of the time. He did not answer the phone when it
rang, nor did he open any of the growing pile of letters Lady had set aside for him on the hall table. When the letters began to spill off the table she got a basket.

He did not touch the piano or even enter the music room. He lost track of time. He drifted. Without music there was no time.

One night he awoke from a bad dream—a confused, surrealistic narrative of nameless dread—and was surprised to find his body in a state of sexual excitement. He saw that Lady was awake, lying, as she so often did, flat on her back with her arms crossed over her chest, staring at the window.

"You were talking in your sleep," she said.

"What did I say?"

"It didn't make any sense. I couldn't make it out."

"Bad dream."

"My shrink says maybe you should see somebody." For a year or so Lady had been seeing a psychotherapist once a week, apparently to discuss why, given her ambition and intelligence, she was having so much trouble committing herself to meaningful, challenging, long-term work. "She thinks you're having trouble adjusting," she said softly.

"I'm sure she's right," Claude said.

"What does it feel like?"

The question surprised him. He fumbled around in his head for a few moments. "It's hard to describe. Sort of like being wrapped in a cloud of nothing, drifting in nothing. I don't seem to care about anything. It's too much trouble even to think most of the time."

"Will it go away? Does it feel like it'll go away?"

"I haven't the faintest idea."

"Don't you think you should do
something?
"

"I feel like I didn't really know him. I knew part of him, part of him. I was just beginning to..." He didn't finish.

"He was a complicated man. You told me that once."

"Bergman told me he was the best young composer in Poland. Everyone said so. But all his stuff was left there. It was all lost. And after his family died he couldn't start again. I wasted so much time. I mean, I just went along with the way he was. I didn't ... I never ..." He found himself literally gnashing his teeth.

Gradually he calmed down. He turned onto his side and reached out for her hip, the warm softness of her skin just above the bone. They
had not made love in a long time, but now he moved to her with some dim sense of the possibility of solace. As he kissed her shoulder, her hand found him and began to stroke, gently. He shifted his body up to prepare to enter her, but now he saw she was crying and felt her thigh roll in evasion.

"I can't," she cried, sounding almost like a child. "I can't, I can't. I'm sorry" Her hand was still on him.

"What's wrong?"

"Not inside me." She was pleading. "It's just something about they're all dead going in down there, it feels funny, it feels..." With tears in her eyes she continued stroking, started to slide down his body, and whimpered as he pulled away.

He began sleeping in the guest room, not emerging until late in the morning when he knew Lady would have left. He drank warm beer for breakfast and avoided the lower floors until Esmeralda had gone home. Then he would make himself a sandwich in the silent kitchen and wander through the house. Sometimes, without touching anything, he would look in the mail basket. Letters from Levits, a couple from the lawyer Larkin, something from Fredericks, even a note in his mother's hand, doubtless a letter of condolence. He knew that some of the letters might be important, as well as some of the phone calls he didn't answer, but it all seemed quite distant. Upstairs, with the door closed, he would drink beer, watch television, and go to sleep.

There was something recognizable about his isolation, about keeping caches of beer and peanuts near his bed, about staring out the window for hours on end, about the long, slow, aimless fantasies flowing through his head—plotless, surreal, and sometimes extraordinarily vivid. He became bemused by the textures and scents of his own body, or by very small details like the intricate weave of the pattern of the oriental rug, or shapes in the plaster above his bed. And then one day, as he sat on the floor idly building a house of playing cards, he remembered being locked in the basement apartment as a very young child, and how then, too, there had been no sense of the flowing of time but only an infinite present, a pervading, silent emptiness.

He wasn't keeping track, but it had in fact been twelve days since he'd laid eyes on her when she knocked on the door and came in. She entered hesitantly, but to him she arrived in a rush, a sudden, vivid
presence bursting in upon him, alive to an almost painful degree. It was hard to look at her. She was perfectly familiar, and yet her exotic quickness added an element of strangeness, as if she'd come from outer space. Some part of his brain registered that she was normal and that it was he who had changed, but it didn't feel that way. She spoke softly, but it sounded loud.

"Claude, I'm taking a trip." She sat on the edge of the bed upon which he lay, and put her hand on his knee. "Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning."

"Where are you going?"

"Palm Beach."

"This time of year?"

"It's business."

"Oh."

"Well, just exploratory, really," she said. "Mimsi Dunne and I have been talking about opening a gallery, and there's a location we're going to look at."

"Mimsi ..." He searched his mind.

"You know. From Locust Valley. The one whose husband died in the car accident."

"Oh, yes. Sure."

"We've done a lot of work on this." She paused. He could tell she was nervous. "Quite a lot."

"That's good."

"The thing is, if the location is right, we're going to move ahead. I might have to stay down there for a while."

"I see," he said, and pulled himself up to a sitting position. "I understand." He tried to gather his thoughts, aware now of danger, but it was like trying to swim in molasses.