Foreign Bodies (25 page)

The tail of the check, a translucent wisp, hung out from the middle pages of
Doctor Faustus.
She had inserted it there unthinkingly, randomly. But now it flickered before her that she might, for the whim of the thing, attempt a divination, after the practice of those believers
who open a Bible and blindly point with a finger to any passage the finger may alight on. From this passage a fate will be determined; and so it would be with Leo’s talisman. It was Leo’s fate she was after — his present fate, not his future, not what was still to become of him; rather, his situation at precisely this instant, or, if this were not forthcoming, then the subterranean germ that had brought him to where he was now, alone with his sacred Blüthner, bereft of his little girls. It was a game and it was not a game; it was a willed superstition and it was the opposite, a disgorgement, an ultimate cleansing — the vatic link between divination and exorcism. To find Leo out, to parse him, finally to see him, to see
into
him . . . to cast him out. And then the maggot that crawled along her nerves would die. The emperor Titus had a gnat in his ear, maddening him with its incessant buzz. How Titus got free of his gnat Bea could not tell, and legends are not often guides for the perplexed; but it was a certainty that through Leo’s talisman she would drive Leo out. And what else was there to occupy the melting hours of this wild night, when Marvin had burst in on her without warning, in the fanatical storm of his scheming?

Hurriedly, as if what she was doing was shameful and likely to be discovered too soon, she leafed through the pages until she came to the crack in the spine where Marvin’s check clung, humbly hiding, half through the force of static electricity, half of its own volition. And over this same page (it was 379) she whirled her index finger once; she whirled it twice; she whirled it a third time, and, eyes shut, allowed it to descend to the noiseless syllables it dizzily fell upon.

She saw:

and the same fear, the same shrinking and misgiving awkwardness I feel at this gehennan gaudium, sweeping through fifty bars, beginning with the chuckle of a single voice and rapidly gaining ground, embracing choir and orchestra, frightfully swelling in rhythmic upheavals and contrary motions to a fortissimo tutti, an overwhelming, sardonically yelling, screeching, bawling, bleating, howling, piping, whinnying salvo, the mocking, exulting laughter of the Pit.

Gehennan gaudium, hell’s jubilation, the laughter of the Pit. Yes yes yes, Leo to the life, derided and undone. The man who longs to become, and is too fearful to become. To become what? The Mahler of the Sixth Symphony, where the hammer pounds down, the Beethoven of the Allegretto of the Seventh Symphony, as the trooping winds die into secret melancholia, Hindemith with his jagged staggerings . . . Never mind, she hears nothing, fifty bars, one hundred bars, all are lost to her, she is shut out from those yearning yammering notes — nevertheless she is seeing Leo plain, Leo’s terror, Leo’s not-becoming. She imagines a red, red pear ripe on its bough; but soon, in horror of crashing to the ground, it yields to the stupor of an internal rot, breeding its own devouring wormless worm.

It was not a game. It was not a superstition. What now was Leo Coopersmith to Bea?

She knew immediately what she must do. She went back into the kitchen and dropped Marvin’s check into the sink. Then she struck a match and watched the leaflike paper flare up until it shriveled into black ash. Then she let the water run it into the drain.

S
OUTHERN CALIFORNIA
, even in late November, keeps its summer smile: the sun is always in its accustomed place, shedding maroon shadows alongside a sometimes unbearably blinding sparkle shot from windows and windshields and watch faces. The brightness made Margaret squint as she looked out over the far-flung grounds, pocked by red-and-pink flowerbeds, of the Suite Eyre Spa. On this very day she was determined to go home. Many of her neighbors had already been fetched away for the holiday by dutifully vigilant families carrying the Spa’s distinctive orange drawstring sacks; these things bulged with odorous vials. Marvin on his last visit — when could it have been? here timelessness reigned — had himself proposed what he called a holiday furlough, an outing to such-and-such a fine restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner; but she had demurred. As long as Julian is gone . . . when Julian comes back . . . “Same old palaver,” Marvin grumbled, and went off as uneasily as he had arrived, leaving her money for treats. She understood he meant bribes for the lower echelons of the staff. The therapists could not be bribed.

The therapists too had vanished for the day; and also (or so it seemed) more than half the rest of the staff. A somnolence deeper than the usual torpor. The lobby a marble shell, cold under her feet. A pair of china figurines on the receptionist’s desk: a Pilgrim couple, he in his broad hat with its buckle, she in her bonnet and apron, and propped between them a big square cardboard announcing
OUR SPECIAL THANKSGIVING MENU
, 3:30
P.M.
Out of a back corridor,
two or three laughing voices. The woman who ought to have been at the desk was nowhere in sight — who could blame her, with nothing to do and no one to oversee? Margaret passed unnoticed to the porch with its white columns and sleepy cushioned chairs; the oak benches that grew up out of the grass were unoccupied. The only evident path wound, mazelike, among the flowerbeds, and brought her back to the porch; so she set out again, this time directly across the long lawn, heading for the gate that abutted the freeway. The brief sizzle of a bee hurtling too close to her ear momentarily obscured the steadier hum of distant cars. She remembered a bus stop right there at the gate — she had heard the lower echelons speak of it. Plenty of change in the pocket of her smock — they had stolen away her easel, but never her painter’s smock. The thieves, whoever they were, had been too stupid to covet the smock. She wore it now for its capaciousness: it kept her hidden, invisible, no one could judge her, no one could grasp the joyfulness sequestered in its bottomless pocket — the
other
pocket, not where those dimes and quarters weighed and jangled . . . how often, from the minute it came to her, had she unfolded and folded the joyfulness, so that its creases opened all on their own! And to think that the joyfulness had been sent by her husband’s sister, of all dislikable people, the sister he had never had anything to do with for years and years . . . and yet it was her husband’s sister who had turned up out of nowhere with the first inkling of the joyfulness!
Displaced person,
how else could it be? The war and its upheavals, and kings and dukes and countesses and such deprived of their thrones, deposed and displaced, driven from their lands, still clinging in foreign cities to their rightful titles . . . was it possible that Julian had married one of
those,
though it wouldn’t surprise, there was her cousin Roseanna, a family legend, who had gone to Cracow in the twenties and converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry a Polish count, or someone everybody said was a count, he didn’t have a penny, but he did live with his mother the countess and five sisters on the remnant of a grandly decaying old estate that had once boasted a dozen stables for thoroughbreds . . . the joyfulness twice
joyful, Julian back at last, Julian
home,
Julian in the embrace of an aristocratic wife! And there they all were — and on Thanksgiving Day to boot — Iris — and well, Marvin, it had to be — and oh — Julian and his princess bride — and very soon, after the half-hour’s ride in the bus, she would see them all together, feasting, and how they would greet her, Julian with his shining childlike look when she strode in with coins bouncing in one pocket and Marvin’s sister’s letter in the other! Ever since the joyfulness had flown into her hands, that incessant unfolding and folding, until the creases knew on their own how to go . . .

By now she had come to the gate. The bus stop was not there. She put up her hand to shut out the sun’s glare (a passerby might have supposed that the woman in the unwieldy garment and the bare feet, costumed like some impoverished angel, was in the act of saluting) and realized she had been mistaken. The bus stop was on the other side of the freeway. Surely there must be some way to cross? A traffic light to halt the ruthless flow of cars — and there it logically was, a distance of one or two city blocks to her left, though in this secluded place no trace of city life, only this relentlessly rushing road connecting suburban cluster to suburban cluster . . . A burning and stinging in the soles of her feet. Somehow she had forgotten to put on her shoes . . . or no, not forgotten, it was on account of the joyfulness that she was at one with the air, skimming an inch above the ground, or hovering like a hummingbird! Then why this burning, why this stinging? She lifted her foot to see. A pebble embedded in the heel. She lifted the other foot. A cut under the toes, bleeding, and how painfully out of reach the traffic light now seemed! Car after car screeched past, louder as it loomed, one screech instantly dying, instantly reborn in the next screech, and the next, and the next. The crazed procession of screeches dizzied her a little, but look — again and again a gap appeared in the two parallel columns of cars charging in opposite directions, a gap in the near lane and a gap in the far lane; and every so often the two gaps miraculously coincided, opening a clean swath like the parting of the Red Sea, and how easy it would be to pass
through the double gap, straight across to the other side of the road! And fortuitously just now, among the maddening screeches, a grinding vibrating growl: the bus itself, at first no more distinct than a blue blur, flashing multi-windowed flanks as it approached, and scarcely slowing as it shuddered toward its appointed stop. Margaret saw her chance: burning and stinging, she fled through the near gap, and was halfway through the far gap, when her heel, the one with the pebble stuck in it, slipped on a flat smear of grease, or oil, or unidentifi-able spill, and she tumbled forward on her face while a new screech, louder than any other, howled in her head, and the gap closed over a crushing of bones and living flesh.

When the police and the ambulance arrived, the bus was long gone (there were no passengers to pick up, it had never stopped), and Margaret, her sister-in-law’s letter bloodied but still legible in her pocket, was dead.

December 2

Dear Aunt Bea,

When your cablegram came I wrote to dad right away to tell him I’ll be coming home to be with him. You know better than anyone how bad I’ve been — this was the first he’d had a peep out of me since I got here, but he answered in an airmail and said he’s glad to hear finally where exactly I’ve been staying all this time. He didn’t even sound angry — more like all broken up, it’s so grim and horrible, and nobody seems to have figured out why it happened or where mom was going. Dad said the only way they could tell it was mom was from an envelope they found on her, with a note in it from you. I never knew you and mom were corresponding, I don’t think I ever heard her mention your name. And poor dad, he’s really all alone now, so I’ve got to leave here as soon as I can. My old return ticket’s no good anymore — I learned this just today — which means I have to wait till Phillip gets back to pay for a new one. Dad would send the money for sure, but I’d rather not let on that I’ve been depending on Phillip for everything. Actually I’m here by myself now, and I guess that’s a good thing, otherwise I might have been in Greece seeing the Parthenon or at the Uffizi in Florence, and I would’ve missed getting your cable. So it’s all worked out — well, I can’t say for the best, can I, when everything’s so awfully sad and shocking. Greece
didn’t pan out anyhow, and neither did Florence, Phillip was called back to Milan practically overnight, some sort of emergency, an old client of his — he’d done some minor surgery on her a while ago (he really does do surgery!), and he asked me to hold the fort here, the way Julian used to, just in case it took him a week or so to fix up whatever the problem is. So you see we still haven’t had a chance to go on any of the trips we’ve talked about, the clinic’s been so busy here, though Phillip did promise that when it was time to move over to the Milan clinic I’d be going with him, and then we’d run down on the weekend to the Uffizi, where they’ve got a Madonna by Michelangelo and other amazing things, but when this emergency came up with this Adriana person, it’s some cranky old lady who gives him a lot of trouble, he thought it would be better for me to stay put. So here I am! I keep thinking of mom every minute, I just can’t stop crying. Julian’s always been closer to mom than I ever was — she sort of played favorites, maybe because even when we were small Julian kept waking up from scary dreams. It’s hard to know whether mom liked being married to dad as much as dad liked being married to her. It’s funny about marriage, isn’t it, and please forgive me if I’m being too personal, but you were married once, and I imagine you didn’t like it very much either, since you ended up getting divorced. I’m pretty certain I’ll never want to be married, there are parts of it I’m sure I wouldn’t like, and I might even have it in my blood not to like it, I mean I’ve heard about those three old maid aunts in dad’s family. If I can work up the nerve to say this outright, Aunt Bea, I can’t help thinking how you’ve lived most of your life on your own, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. And if there’s one thing I hope won’t ever happen to me it’s that be fruitful and multiply business, which is some sarcastic Bible quote mom used to throw at me whenever I got her really annoyed. Mostly she said it when I had to spend a lot of time in the lab, sometimes pretty late at
night. I guess she decided long ago I was too much like dad, who’s always been consumed by whatever’s going on with his company, but she wouldn’t think it anymore if she knew what I’ve been up to in Paris! Only now she won’t ever know. And Julian, wherever he is, it’ll kill him when he finds out about mom. Or maybe not, that weird secret way he is with Lili and with everything else. I never told him, I never told Phillip either, but the night before Julian and Lili moved out, and I was supposed to leave too — they were asleep and all packed except for Julian’s notebook — I sneaked a look, and he’s got religion on the brain, can you believe it? I figure by now he’s over there in the desert sitting under a crazy gourd or whatever. Which is something he said he wasn’t absolutely keen on, but who can tell, when he’s so bound up with Lili?