Foreign Bodies (16 page)

3
   Founder, Society for the Prevention of Aging

4
   Professor of Functional Organics, University of Natural Healing (est. 1950, Pittsburgh, USA)

5
   Consultant, Mind-Body Foundation for the Elevation
of the Spirit

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   Chairman of the Board, Anti-Dairy Commission

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   Vice President, League of Oxidative Health

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   Executive Secretary, Alliance for Vedic Respiration, etc.

The list increased as his clientele grew, and his clinics in three cities swelled into suites of rooms at respectable addresses. And while his clients were restricted to bulghur wheat and carrot mash, Dr. Montalbano feasted on roast beef and heavy cream. Not every hedonist is a hypocrite, and Dr. Montalbano did not consider himself a charlatan. His work, as it spread south to Lyon and still farther south to
Milan, was notably charitable. His fees were reasonable, and he saw indigent clients for free. People swore by him, and some called him better than Lourdes, though no cripples threw away their crutches and the seriously ill went on dying — but with smiles of gratitude on their lips. And meanwhile the row of credentials was obliged to change shape and content from time to time, in order to satisfy the investigations of officials suspicious of unlicensed medical activity. Yet Dr. Montalbano never claimed to be a physician. He was, he said, a kind heart, a giver of commonsense advice, an ingenious cook above all. He was, in fact — what rings more Parisian than this? — a chef! His clinics were more kitchens than surgeries. On occasion, with a wink of make-believe complicity, he was even willing to name himself soothsayer. Not that he could see into the future — but certainly there is an inherent logic in things, you can tell in advance how an embattled marriage will turn out, you can predict a divorce, you can sniff out who will recover and who will not, and as for lovers: their fates are written in the stars, and Dr. Montalbano was at home with the proclivities of astral bodies. Venus was one of his specialties. He could stir up a potion for potency (this required a double boiler), though he never had a need of it himself: he was a magnet for girls. For this purpose he worked hard at his Italian, the northern dialect. His French too had become almost flawless, except for its Pittsburgh inflections, which he could never get rid of.

When Alfred brought Julian to him, Dr. Montalbano was preparing to leave for Milan, where a certain Adriana, a former client, was waiting for him. He had cured her of a wart on her breast by applying to it weekly an acidic salve of, as usual, his own concoction. The resulting scar was minor, and the breast, after this repair, was pinkly plump and appealing. Alfred listened sullenly; he wasn’t interested in some wop broad’s tit, he wanted to tell about his friend Julian, thinks he’s a poet, something like that, he’s got this strange old broad he’s stuck on and needs a place to stay in until she drags him away to who knows where, Jerusalem or Constantinople maybe, some Bible heap like that . . .

“I wouldn’t want my furniture broken up,” Dr. Montalbano said. “Does he drink?”

“He’s a kid from L.A., they drink sunshine and milk.”

“And the woman?”

“Not a kid. Something funny with an arm. One of those.”

Dr. Montalbano ruminated.

“I wouldn’t mind a couple looking out for the place while I’m gone — that cockney witch of a concierge, lets herself in behind my back and gets her fill of snooping around, thinks I’m running a brothel. But I’d need to see the kid first, I don’t want any of your hooligan pals throwing up on my rugs —”

Julian, who knew his soul was built on a last different from his father’s (but did his father have a soul at all?), was nevertheless not without his father’s judging eye. He saw at once that Dr. Montalbano was a bit of a fraud (all those letters after his name!), and Dr. Montalbano saw just as quickly that Julian was soft — he wasn’t one of Alfred’s hooligans, he was a marshmallow kid who believed he owned a soul. It seemed to Dr. Montalbano that his tables and chairs would be safe.

“But you didn’t bring your girlfriend,” he chided.

“She couldn’t come. She’s got a job.”

This was even more reassuring.

“There’s only one thing,” Dr. Montalbano said, “when I get back the two of you will have to clear out — I mean right away. What do you say to that? Do you have somewhere to go?”

“It’s fine,” Julian said. “We’ll figure it out.”

So it was arranged.

A
WAKENED BY CRIES
, Iris thought at first of animal squeals. Then, as unsound sleepers ripped into sudden full consciousness are wont to do, she remembered where she was, and took in the unlikelihood of wild birds and street cats indoors in the middle of the night. The half-bottle of wine she had swallowed the evening before — it was intended to help her sleep — instead drew her to an insistent clarity. The wine was a discovery: it made her
see.
In this foreign city she had begun to comprehend everything that had gone before — those long strivings, the dogged classroom years and the noxious discipline of the laboratory, the solitary drive for perfection, for goodness, for her father’s praise. She was perfect and she was good. She had earned prizes and fellowships. Whatever she did, she did diligently and well. But here — here she threw her stockings in the air and let them dangle for days from picture frames! Here it was normal to drink wine — people drank it daily with their meals, it was as ordinary as water on the table at home. And the wine found its own reasons: it was for pleasure, it was for digestion, it was for sleep, it was for . . . other things. For getting free of being good. For not caring what you said, or to whom. Like a cave, like a labyrinth, the wine had its secrets. You could step into its mouth and then, little by little, wind gingerly on; the deeper you went, the more wine-drenched the walls, painting themselves brighter and brighter — as when eyes shut against the sun are left gazing at their own red blood.

The noises were coming from two rooms away. It was not their
lovemaking. She was familiar with their lovemaking, the murmurs and echoes that gained and slowed and gained again, and then broke with the crystal crack of an eggshell, and the orange yolk spilling blindingly out. Their lovemaking seemed incessant, and tragic, like some terrible thirst, more Lili’s than her brother’s — the wine told her so. The wine was a teacher. She was listening for the pangs and blows of their bodies. These high strained cries weren’t the bleats of their lovemaking, no: they belonged to the dreams. Bad dreams: even in childhood Julian had cried out in his sleep: he was falling, falling out of some great vulnerable vessel into a fire. The falling and the fire and the smell and the burning frightened and woke him. But it wasn’t the falling into the fire, it wasn’t the lovemaking. It was Lili. Lili’s bad dreams made a strange piping, and sometimes a harsh grim grunt, or even a metallic click, like the cocking of a trigger. Lili’s dreams were deadly. Only Julian knew why. And while Lili would laugh in the morning at Julian’s bad dream — “Poor Julian, papa Freud pulls him through the womb again” — there could be no mention of Lili’s pipings and grunts and clicks. The wine begged Iris to inquire, but Julian forbade it. Lili’s dreams were wounds. Sometimes they were terrifying resurrections: of her mother, her father. Her father had been a linguist, a professor at the university; he had begun teaching her German and Russian and French when she was very little, as a pedagogical experiment. In Lili’s dreams her father was speaking in no known language — savage syllables and crazed chatterings. Her mother in the dreams was always on the point of disappearing, like a drawing faintly inked. Or the animal sounds were whimperings, and the whimperings were Mihail’s last flailings after the last shot, or they would twist themselves up into words — Eugen’s clear words called out across a gray field, from a distance; yet they could not be retrieved or remembered. And Iris was not to ask.

More and more, Iris was feeling the difference in Julian. The brotherly barbs and teasings were waning, and the mocking angers flew out only now and then. How he had scalded Aunt Bea! Iris too had stung her, mercilessly and meanly; but it was because of
Lili — because Aunt Bea had seen Lili huddled into Julian, and Aunt Bea would inform her father, and her father . . . what
would
her father do? It was weeks since Iris had come. She had come to succor and protect her brother, and had found Lili doing both. Lili was a nurse, a mother — but what was she really? Was she the protector or the protected? Julian was building a fence around Lili — there were silences Iris must never penetrate. She was not to ask about the dead husband and the dead child. Julian had given her all she was to know — that the husband was called Eugen, that the child, three years old, was called Mihail, and that was enough, that was all. As for Lili’s arm inside her sleeve, it was always there, Iris had glimpsed it many times, its bulging depth and pucker, like a toothless mouth that has swallowed a bone. It meant what it meant. It told too much; there was nothing to say.

And Lili was always carefully kind. Her talk was careful and bookish and stilted and slow. She was often nervous. It was her work with those luckless people, Julian said, or living in a stranger’s place: she distrusted Dr. Montalbano. But Iris thought,
Suppose it’s me.
Was Lili wishing her away — was that why Lili was nervous? She went every day on the bus to sit in that old
boucherie
with the hooks for carcasses still on one wall, and those wretched importuners with their pleading eyes.
The doves of the Marais have pleading eyes
— Iris had read this in that Paris magazine Julian had sent home, the thing that had inflamed her father to boiling contempt. And what was her father thinking now? She hadn’t so much as written him a note. It was too cruel, but she couldn’t, she wouldn’t! She was relying on her aunt (and how cruel she’d been to Bea!) to tell him his daughter was well, she was safe, she was with Julian. With Julian and Lili! What would her father say to
that?

Meanwhile her money was running out. It wasn’t an emergency, her ticket home was secure, and Lili’s small earnings filled the larder uncomplainingly. But the money she had brought for Julian was gone. It horrified her: he had spent it nearly all at once, he was profligate, one day a dozen blouses for Lili (all of them, she saw, longsleeved
and frilly and awful, had he found them in a flea market?), then night after night flowers and fruit and puddings and cheeses and cakes and bottles of wine. First it was the wedding party they’d never had, and next it was a birthday marked but annulled — if the boy had been allowed to live, he would have been . . . Lili put a hand over his mouth. The number was a fortress, it was not to be broken into. The three of them lifted their glasses while Lili wept. Her tears fell into the wine; she left it untouched, and Iris drank it instead, the wine and the salt. It was the first true craving of her life: a danger was in it, things never before imagined. She had never before known anyone whose child was dead. Something of Lili was creeping into Julian. While Lili was away he brooded over a notebook. He declined to tell what was in it, but he was willing to say what wasn’t. He had given up the immorals. It was plain to Iris that her brother was changed; little by little he was becoming another Julian. The old babyish drama was still there — look how he’d wasted all those dollars! But he had married a woman who was teaching him the knowledge of death.

The Suite Eyre Spa
October (I do not know the date)

Dear Beatrice,

Though I am repeatedly frustrated these days, your visit has left me angrier than ever. I am certainly not to blame if you arrived and departed unannounced, thanks to carelessness on the part of the staff here! These people are too frequently careless. For example, my easel has been missing for more than a week and they claim it cannot be found. (Do I suspect theft? Indeed. The chief therapist here is a devious creature.) Your visit was far from pleasant, and I have no wish to communicate with you further, yet circumstances demand it. It was difficult enough to persuade my husband to let me have your address. He insists it is futile, perhaps you will not reply. And also he believes it to be an impulse that I will soon forget. He is often right, even when he is not perceptive. My husband is not a perceptive man. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he considers me untruthful. A better way to say it is that he is convinced I am the dupe of my imagination.

This is why, despite my distaste for it, I must approach you. I write now with a request. Kindly inform my husband that you did in fact come into my rooms here, and that you did in fact give me news, impossible news, of my children. It may be that you lied. How can what you told me not be a lie, if my
husband knows nothing of the sort about my son? I thought at the time that you were lying out of malice over my marriage to your brother, or out of some other motive. But lately it occurs to me it is likely my husband has all along known what Julian has done, and wishes to shield me because he believes I am ill. For some little while I have been aware that there is something deceptive in my husband’s nature. This deception is not a kindness. When my son returns, I will greet him with joy no matter what he has done. As for my daughter, I have faith in her self-sufficiency. In this she is like her father. I take it to be one of the better Jewish traits.

I ask you now to be my witness that I am entirely in my right mind.

Sincerely,

Margaret B. Nachtigall

I
RIS SAID FINALLY
, “I’m thinking of leaving.”