Dry Your Smile (49 page)

Iliana sat straight up and yelped. “To the office? Today?”

“Uh huh,” Julian said, gathering up the breakfast tray and its former contents from the floor. “Oh, lucky, nothing broke.”

“Hope, I can understand. I'll go with you, in fact. But why go into Athena?”

“Because. Nobody else will be there. It'll be quiet. I can sit at my desk and pretend it's my own study and maybe do some writing.”

“But this is a holiday in your country. You're
always
working, going, doing. Can't you take one day and just
be?
”

“'Yana. You know me. You know my situation, what a swamp of work there is to do on every front. The notion of being able to sit uninterrupted for a few hours at a typewriter on my own real work—come on, you ought to know what that means to me.”

“Well, why can't you work here?”

“Because you don't have a typewriter. Because I've now switched my copious traveling files to a home, however temporary, in one of my desk file-drawers. Because I need to riffle through some business stuff—all of which is also there now—before I can even tackle my own work.”

“Then I come with you and help you.” Iliana swung her legs over the side of the bed.

“No, I—I'll ring you later so we can decide about dinner, whether here or at Georgi's, okay?”

“I came with you last Saturday and Sunday to the office. The weekend before that, too. Now I get in your way or what? I disturb you or something?”

Julian's smile tightened.

“Iliana. For heaven's sake. Of course you don't disturb me. But—you have nothing to
do
there. You just sit and read and pace and get restless. The office is stuffy. It's a lovely summery day. And I get to feel … pressured. Guilty because I've chosen to be there.”

“Then choose
not
to be there on a lovely summery day,” Iliana bantered, throwing open her arms to emphasize the logic of her solution.

“But I
do
choose to be there. Look, just for a few hours, okay? I'll dash up to the nursing home and then to the office.”

“Then I come with you at least to visit the mama.”

“
No
. Darling, look, I'm sorry. It's no rejection of you. Really. But you've been there with me every visit this week. Momma must think she gave birth to Siamese twins. It's too much to ask of you, and I never get … Well, anyway, it's way uptown. Listen, I'll call you when I get into Athena, okay? Then I'll just dash off some checks and stuff, do a few minutes of writing, and—”

“You still are paying all the expenses on the loft, aren't you?”

There was a moment's silence.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I am.”

“I thought you were going to stop that as of last month. You procrastinate making him live for himself.”

“I was. But now that I have this job … and Larry has no other means yet—Oh for god's sake, 'Yana, don't look at me as if I were a naughty child. He's a human being, you know. Besides, I think it'll resolve itself. He's seeking work again. I don't think I'll have to shoulder the bills for much longer, and—”

Iliana took the tray out of Julian's hands, then pulled her down to sit on the edge of the bed again.

“Juliana. You know I never saw myself as trying to come between you and your husband. That's why I went to Europe. But things have been breaking down between you for some time. Even when I began to think you and I might become lovers, I didn't regard that as something ‘against' Larry. Things seemed over between you. But now … I have to tell you that the way he has behaved these past months, knowing how you are homeless and how your mother is dying, that to me is
not
the behavior of someone who loves. Yet it seems to move you closer to him—or at least it doesn't drive you away.”

“That has nothing to do with it. We're talking about almost twenty-two years, a shared history.”

“Let me finish, please. You say I know how to love. Yet you try to 'scape me again and again. Any time I mention the obvious answer—that you come here to live with me, or that together we find a bigger place so you can have your own study—your face grows stormy and you … distance yourself from me. Yet you say—and I feel it to be true—that you love being with me. I want to be with you for the rest of my life. I've told you that. So this confuses me. It … activates my oldest fears. More exile, more not knowing where I stand. All I can think is that you like yourself so little you have contempt for anyone who truly does love you—and who risks showing that.”

Her eyes were brimming by the time she finished. Julian took her in her arms.

“Oh, Iliana. Dear love. Maybe what you say is true. About the contempt, I mean. But that's not the whole of it. I just—I don't know what will or won't happen yet with Larry. And I can't exile him, either. Or the me that's married to him. I also can't continue this nomadic existence indefinitely, I know that. I'm beginning to wear down all my friends, not to speak of being at my own wits' edge. But I can't … If I do definitely end things with Larry—and I admit that something in me
still
can't fully comprehend that—then I wouldn't want to live with anyone, not for quite a while at least. I've never had a space all my own, except for a few months back when I left Hope's. Even then I ricocheted into marrying Larry. I've
been
married, 'Yana. I'm too … flayed to plunge right in again. Besides, I'm always with people, relentlessly. I never have any solitude, any terrain to myself. Oh, can't you understand?”

“I have already become ‘people'?”

“No no
no
. But Jesus, let me
breathe
a little, can't you?”

Iliana's eyes flashed with pride. “And who do you think you have learned to breathe
from
, Juliana, please to remember?”

Julian stiffened and released her, rising from the bed with a set smile on her face.

“Of course. I remember. Then … could you let me practice what you've taught me? On my own terms? Don't … suffocate me with quite so many perfumed sprays of possession?”

“Juliana! How can you
say
that? I
love
you! I
never
pressure! I only want—”

“In god's name don't—don't
whine
like that!” Then seeing the insult shudder across her lover's features, she sat down and again took Iliana in her embrace. “Dear one,” she said, striving for a warmer tone, “it's another version of our old argument about Nin, remember? You claimed that
House of Incest
was the precious Anaïs' best work. I agreed only to the extent of saying it was the sole work of hers I could bear to finish without feeling I'd been force-fed five tons of honey; that her overglut of ambergris and molasses and peacock feathers so smothered me I longed to walk barefoot on a rocky winter beach? It's like—”

“I really cannot take a literary lecture on top of the political one, Juliana. Do what you want to do. I get out of your way. You don't want me with you,” she sniffed, “then I leave you alone. But I don't understand any of this.
I
have such a conviction about us … I wish
you
shared that conviction.”

“I do, oh I do. And you're not in the way. Oh, honey, this has all happened so fast. And I … I just can't stand one more pressure.”

“I'm
not
pressuring you when I say plain out I love you and want to live with you the rest of our days and die with you!”

“All right, all right. Let's talk about this later, can we? Tell you what. I'll go up to see Hope and then I'll skip the office. Or you can meet me up there, if you like, and we'll go to the park. It
is
a lovely day. You're right. We can watch the fireworks later. I suppose there's nothing at the office that won't wait …”

Iliana enveloped Julian in a hug. But had she at that moment been the keen-eyed photographer de Costa standing behind herself, her lens might have caught an expression on the face that appeared over her shoulder, through their embrace—and the expression would have been a study in chiaroscuro.

Waiting at the bus stop, Julian made an effort to shift her attention from Iliana to Hope. You have to refocus your mind to take on each new crisis, she reminded herself, learn to take your rests wherever you can, go numb in between, wipe out the scene just completed, try to get fresh for the scene about to be played. But what if Iliana is right, she wondered,
do
I feel contempt for those who love me? Do I view loving me as a sign of weakness or dependency—neither of which was permitted to The Baby? Is that why I'm still playing the Earth Mother role I got cast in when I was only Earth Toddler? Weakness. Dependence. Those would have been unlovable traits. The Baby wanted not, oh not, to be unlovable.

For this, David had assimilated. Not to be seen as weak. For this, Aryan demolished Jew; Dravidians, Etruscans, Albigensians, the more peaceable tribes of West Africa—seen as weak. For this the Tibetans, the Mayans, the Iroquois and Hopi nations, the female people—
the female people
—went under. Waiting and hoping, until it was too late, to be seen as lovable for daring to be other than strong.

“And I still feel unlovable,” she murmured, anticipating the visit to Peacehaven, where she would sit at her mother's bedside and feel her largesse dwindle under Hope's inability or refusal to communicate. She hailed a cab in defiance, and deposited herself in the back seat. Do this in memory of yourself, kid: a gesture of indulging Julian, beholden to no one. Sweet battered interior of a Manhattan taxi, the only true room of her own.

Compassion for the strong and contempt for the weak? For how many years had she motivated the emotion of compassion for Hope by seeing her as a larger-than-life Mother Courage character—the shrewd brutal peasant forced to survive by cunning, no matter who she used or in what manner? For how many years had she felt self-contempt for feeling that compassion—
and
for not feeling it? For how many years had she picketed the threshold of Hope's love, trying every password for admittance?

Even now. Was this new splendid celebration of her own body merely the latest gesture toward that dessicating maternal flesh, toward that same trembling woman whose hallucinations were more beset each day by paranoia? Always to be in flight toward
her?
Always this tearing and being torn, this peeling the surface away to find another layer enmasked beneath it? Always this repetition?

Torn now between Laurence and Iliana as well. Just now, when Laurence was being both spirited and gentle again, showing optimism and an understanding that could refer to years of shared verbal shorthand.
His
daring to be other than strong, what about
that?
His saying he wanted to “fight for us, for what we had been and dreamed of becoming.” Just now, when Julian had broken through to some untamed creature in herself—only to find, layer on layer enmasked and tearing, that there was in Iliana, too, the exquisitely tender tyrant of loving: the possessor.

And am
I
not the ultimate possessor? she debated. Or the greedy child who never dared be greedy when I
was
a child? She fumbled for her wallet as the taxi paused at a red light one corner from the nursing home.

What in hell have you done, Julian, she reflected, complicating things to further thicken your life's plot? What
is
this? Emotional dilettantism? Cowardice? A failure of nerve? Happy Independence Day, my foot. Aren't you ashamed to be playing a middle-aged woman as if she were an ingenue? Enough navel-gazing. Pay attention. Practicalities. Taxi pulling up to Peacehaven. Conference today with Dr. Grimes. Poor Grimes, he must think the daughter is as loony as the mother; he's been given so many different telephone numbers to try in case of emergency he's now set aside a whole page of his address book for Julian Travis. Come to think of it, where are you going to
go
after July 15, when Georgi returns from Europe? The heat is on to move in with Iliana. But you'll get no writing done today. The heat is on to return to the loft, too, both emotionally and financially. Would that be the easy way out, the Hollywood ending? Or the brave one, the refusal of defeat? Going home. To a desk of one's own, a study of one's own, one phone number, cats, dishes, kitchen, plants of one's own. Laurence.

Dr. Grimes was waiting in Peacehaven's medical conference room—neat, perky, efficient. Although this was to be the standard bi-weekly conference now that Hope was stabilized, he looked grave.

“It's nothing in particular, Miss Travis. That is, well … we won the last round with pneumonia, though I sometimes wonder … they always call pneumonia the friend of the dying, the gentle end. The hip is healing satisfactorily. The bed sores—they're inevitable to some degree in a bedridden patient, no matter how often the patient is turned and shifted. Debriding them gives her discomfort, of course, but it's necessary to avoid infection and the danger of gangrene. Her mental state, well, I understand you're here every day so you know …”

“I know. Lately the hallucinations have been intense.”

“Yes. As I've told you before, there's not much we can do about that. She's terminal-stage Parkinson's. I don't think she has more than a month or so left. But as you know, no one dies of the disease itself. The medical profession is still, as I'm sure you've noticed through these months, very ignorant.”

“Your humility about that is unusual—and touching, Dr. Grimes. I know you're doing everything you can to make her comfortable. Then what is—”

“She's getting weaker all the time. Her heart is still astoundingly strong. But she's barely eating enough. Please try to convince her to eat. Otherwise …”

“Otherwise?”

“The IV doesn't give her sufficient nourishment. We'll have to tube-feed her through the nose.”