Foreign Bodies (17 page)

Julian looked up over the notebook’s red margins. “All right. Where to?”

“I guess home. Where else? Back to the lab.”

“Will you like it?”

“I don’t know. It’s not too bad. I left all those crystals growing, and sometimes it’s exciting. If I could be really interested, it’d be exciting.”

“Duty calls, you’re doing it for dad —”

“I’m good at what I do.”

“Chip off the old block. So’s dad.”

“He runs around.”

“He’s always been on the move, he goes where the money is —”

“No, I mean with . . . you know. Distractions.”

“What, women? While mom’s in storage?”

“Girls, sort of.”

“It’s nothing to me what he does. Only mom —” The swelling in the neck. “How come you’ve never said this before?”

“I haven’t been thinking about it. It’s just that going home, if I go home . . . I’ve got my own place anyhow, dad let me have it.”

“So he could bring in girls after kicking mom out?”

“It’s only once in a while, it’s not a lot of the time. And maybe it’s because she’s been so mad at him.”

“Marvin the philanderer, why not?”

“Don’t say that, Julian, it’s not right. Poor dad, it’s just not like that. You don’t know . . . before she got sick, or maybe it was part of being sick, a sign of it, how it started to show . . . mom would say things.”

“What things?”

“Things.” Iris struggled with it. “That . . . she’d married a Jew. And that on account of him you and I —”

“All that’s old news, isn’t it?”

“But the way she said it. It was the way she said it —”

“She took dad’s name, didn’t she? A long time ago. And gave up her own family.”

“They gave
her
up. Maybe she feels it even now.”

“Well, I don’t. Especially since they’re mostly all dead or got themselves killed and we never knew any of them anyhow.”

“Or any of dad’s. Except for Aunt Bea, and only because . . . I wonder how he’s taking it. If she told him —”

“About Lili and me? Why should I care?”

Iris said cautiously, “Because you haven’t any money. Because you haven’t got a place to live. Or any way to make a living. You can’t live on
that
—” Her eye was on the notebook.

“Go ahead, finish it,” he said. “Say the rest of it, that I can’t keep on living on Lili. But Lili can’t keep it up either, she’s just about worn out. All those miserable people day after day, it eats into her. She’s thinking of trying for translating work —” His look wandered off a little. “Or something else. She talks of getting out of Nineveh.”

“Out of what?”

“Out of Europe altogether. At least mom would know, they sent her to Sunday school. A rotten city in the Bible.”

“Paris is beautiful,” Iris said. “Europe is beautiful. And old. I love it that everything’s old over here. I wish I could see every bit of it, places like Italy and Greece.”

“It’s all Nineveh to Lili. And anyhow we’ve got no choice, we’ve got to get out — I’ve had a letter. Phillip’ll be back in two weeks.”

“Julian! What will you do?”

“I suppose find a room somewhere and tread water for a while. I can always go back to waiting tables.”

“Mr. Flotsam and Mrs. Jetsam, what a plan! What does Lili say to that?”

“My wife wants to get on a ship and sail to Jaffa and sit under some sort of gourd. I looked it up. Interesting book, that Bible.”

It was the first time Iris had heard her brother utter “my wife.” It jarred her, it baffled: how incongruous it was, Lily the stranger, no different from the people who were wearing her out.

“But what will you
do?
” she pressed.

“No idea. Sitting under gourds in the Middle East heat isn’t for me, and Lili knows it. Even if I
am
half a Jew.”

They ended it there. It was turning into a quarrel of cross purposes, the kind of quarrel Iris believed, from long habit, it was better to avoid — it was her practice to fend off such spats with her father. And then why leave now? Why not delay a little? Dr. Montalbano was returning, he was coming from Milan, from Italy! From Milan you could see the Alps! And meanwhile, in the notebook with the red margins, Julian was feverishly copying psalms. It made him feel close to his mother — he had lately discovered he was missing her terribly. By now he had got as far as number seventeen, and if Iris had looked into her brother’s notebook, she would surely have judged him cracked.

“T
HANK GOODNESS
you’re back,” Laura said. “How was the trip?”

“Complicated,” Bea said. “How did you make out with my guys?”

“Well, they kept calling me Beanie, I suppose that was the worst of it. Not to mention the noise. Your crew is even tougher than mine, Bea, but you won’t believe it — they actually
went
for
A Tale of Two Cities,
they liked it! And one day I found a pair of knitting needles on my desk. Look —”

She pulled out an elongated woolen mass from a canvas bag and displayed it. “A scarf, ready for winter. I started knitting it, five inches for every chapter, a race to the end, and they beat me, they won!”

Laura triumphant: comically, ingeniously.

And still it was the return to the quotidian; to the life before. Before what? Bea contemplated it. She had journeyed out as a kind of ambassador, she had turned into a spy against every ingrained expectation, and it was true: sometimes an ambassador serves as a spy, sometimes a spy is appointed ambassador. She had gone roving for Marvin, to begin with — for Marvin, yes, but was it only for Marvin? Something had altered. She had a stake in it, she was embroiled. It was no longer Marvin’s need. The world was filled with need — wherever she looked, need!

She thought:
I will change my life.
Other lives were changing (“I do
him good,” said Lili), why not hers? Paris was the hinge. However uncongenial the visit had been — however spiteful the brother and sister — she had witnessed shiftings, mutiny, young rebels in flight. The crisis of the untried, the past defied. Turnings!

It was time to get rid of the grand.

D
R. MONTALBANO
’
S TRAIN
would arrive at two that afternoon. Lili refused to see him: he was not honest.

“But you never even got to meet him,” Iris protested, “it was only Julian —”

“He is not honest,” Lili said.

It was their final hours in Dr. Montalbano’s flat.

The white cards they had found strewn on surfaces everywhere, with all those degrees, or whatever they were, marching across like rows of ants — that wasn’t what she meant. Gibberish and nonsense can’t hurt, and neither can water and ale, as long as you’re thirsty enough. But once, searching in a kitchen drawer for a whisk for Julian’s eggnog (he liked to lick off the froth, and he liked the funny name she gave to it too,
guggle-muggle
), Lili discovered a paper. It seemed to be a kind of formula, with three ingredients: water, ale, and an indecipherable third — in one instance it looked like “cascara,” though she couldn’t be certain. At the top of the paper was written, in clear capital letters,
FOR DISEASES OF THE BLOOD
, and under that,
FOR CLEANSING OF THE LUNGS
, and under that,
FOR A HEADACHE
, and under that,
FOR FUNGUS BETWEEN THE TOES
. The third ingredient was different under each heading.

She immediately showed the paper to Julian, who was wheezing on the divan.

“Your friend Dr. Montalbano is a magician,” she said. “And this is a magician’s place we stay in.”

“He isn’t my friend, not really. He was Alfred’s friend, and Alfred swore Phillip would never harm a fly. He just shores people up when they need it.”

“This Alfred is dead.”

“Not from any of Phillip’s recipes! Phillip’s all right, Lili — look how he’s helped us out all this while. Besides, it won’t be much longer, we’ll soon have to give up the key.”

But the time to give up the key had come; and still Lili would not see Dr. Montalbano.

“Then why don’t you both leave now,” Iris offered. “I’ll wait for him here and hand it over. I’ll take care of it, I don’t mind.”

But Julian said, “You don’t have to do this, Iris. He has another key for sure, he doesn’t need this one. Put it under the little lamp. Or the concierge can let him in —”

“To find nothing and no one? After we’ve taken over his place and he’s allowed it without a fuss? My flight isn’t till six, I still haven’t finished packing, and I’ve got nothing else to do. Someone should be here, someone should thank him, don’t you think?”

“Fine,” Julian said. “You’re telling me nicely what a boor I am.” Unexpectedly he patted her on the back. “Well, don’t moon, will you?”

Was this the last time she would have her arms around him? Iris kissed him and kissed him, on his forehead, all over both cheeks, under his chin, exploding finally into his ears, until he laughed: she was excessive in everything. She made him feel he had a conscience. Her face was wet.

She watched them go, her tall brother with his unaccountably thickened neck, and small thin odd Lili. A childhood singsong jogged in her brain:

She would never see Julian again, it wasn’t possible, Lili meant to take him far away: she claimed him, he belonged to her, he would do whatever she wished. Obstinate Lili! Why should she snub Dr. Montalbano? Those nightmare imaginings, a prescription for poison on a piece of paper in an ordinary kitchen drawer! Or else, if she didn’t take him away, the two of them might stick to where they were, and when, after all, would his sister come again to this incandescent parcel of earth and its beckoning cities, unknown, sealed, glowing, never to be ventured? Great public statues pitted by age, spires, ancient bridges over ancient rivers, while ahead lay newborn Los Angeles boiling in its tropical glare, rawness cut greedily out of a wilderness of valleys periodically ravished by primitive fires. Her rightful destination, her chosen future — finish her courses, get her degree, and then . . . Imperative to finish her courses and flaunt that sheepskin! It was her life, and always had been. It was what she had always wanted. It was what her father wanted. Her father . . . she must somehow brave what was to be.

Her sweated hand was dutifully clenching the key. She set it down on one of the little tables — just in the middle of it, where Lili had placed the vial of cough syrup weeks ago (every gesture now had its ghost) — and wandered through the familiar spaces, here and there attempting to make order, straightening the picture frames, puffing up cushions. On the rug at the foot of the divan, a dark circumference in the shape of a spreading lake: wasn’t this where Julian had carelessly spilled Lili’s eggnog? Iris put a chair over it, to hide the guilty spot. The only presence was an absence. An empty clinic, awaiting clients.

On the other side of Paris, Julian was not surprised to learn that his old room was rented out. But Mme. Duval recommended her friend Mme. Bernard, who luckily had an opening — her most faithful tenant, a neat old man of ninety-five, had recently died quietly in bed. Not to worry: the mattress was turned over and the room was clean and well aired. Though Mme. Bernard’s offerings were no more commodious than Mme. Duval’s, there was the convenience of
a toilet on the same floor. (At Mme. Duval’s, you had to go down to the landing below, and then to the end of a long corridor.) Mme. Bernard had one stricture only: no cats. She was allergic to cat fur.

“O.K.,” Julian replied — this much American Mme. Bernard understood, though nothing beyond it — and hauled in his overloaded duffle bag; a nuisance, it held more books than shirts and socks. He would not let Lili lift its bulky tail. That other time, when they were still a little new to each other and he was leaving Mme. Duval’s, she had begged to help carry the thing, and he yielded: it weighed like a ton of coal. But now she was his wife.

D
R. MONTALBANO DIDN
’
T
turn up until early the next morning. He had missed his train: a last-minute skirmish, a genuine fight, fists and teeth, her nails in his flesh, tearing the skin. Adriana when provoked (but how had he provoked her?) pounded and drew blood. He slapped her hard, and his Italian operetta came to its noisy coda. He couldn’t say he regretted it. She was a woman without imagination; she liked to see matters to their destined conclusion. He preferred improvisation. He spent the night prone on a bench in the train station in Milan, with his shoes off and his feet sticking out.

The concierge was dozing at her desk; he passed her by. The elevator sang familiarly. The keys in his pocket, when he pulled them out, were a confusion — Lyon, Milan, Paris, even the old Pittsburgh set on a rusty ring — as if he’d ever go back! It was difficult to remember which was which, they all looked alike, but after one or two resisted the lock, the door finally gave way and struck a bottle behind it. It rolled off with a hollow clink and tipped over two others standing like ninepins. All three were empty. He noticed the suitcase lying flat on the floor before he took in the rest: a head propped against it. The head of a girl. An airline tag attached to a strap dangled above it. His rooms smelled sourly of stale dregs, but inside the sourness a different smell, darker, looser. Was she dead? Stupid, asinine, to have trusted Alfred! Alfred had vouched for that marshmallow boy, and Alfred could not even vouch for his own life. He had promised to
live; he broke his promise. And the boy was gone, leaving this corpse. Such things happened. There was violence all around — Adriana would have killed him if she could.