Kraven Images (12 page)

I imagine you’re very surprised to hear from me after so long a time. The truth is, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately, and
a very good friend of mine
said, go on, write to him, for heaven’s sake, get it off your chest, he won’t bite you, and hence this letter. I have discovered that I can
always
rely on the advice given me by this
particular friend
.

Do you think your affairs might bring you to England in the near future? Many’s the time I remember the jolly romps we had together, Nicko, years ago, when you were a little boy. Such fun! Wouldn’t it be nice to sit over a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit and chat about those days?

I have certain,
private
family matters that I want to discuss with you, matters that it would be
unwise
to
commit to paper
! Better have a chinwag with him, says
my friend
, whom
you do not know as yet
!

Do try and come soon, my dearest Nicko.

Your loving

Aunt Cicely

The letter took Kraven somewhat aback. He scarcely recognized his aunt in its sentimental tones. In her old age, she had rewritten their past. Jolly romps, indeed! And who was this mysterious friend? Some old hag, no doubt, who had latched on to Aunt Cicely as on to a good thing. As for the private family matters, Kraven knew well enough what they were. She had obviously decided to tell him at long last about the cloud hanging over his birth.

One dark day in childhood Marko had come to him with a postcard found by rummaging through drawers forbidden to him. It was written by Grandfather Blum and posted from Blankenberg on 18 August 1935, eleven months after Nicko’s birth. It was addressed not to Mrs Felix Kraven but to Miss Victoria Blum:

Dear Victoria,

Beg to inform you weather good. Prices somewhat higher than anticipated. Will make holiday bookings henceforth with ‘Seaview’ in Margate, as always hitherto. Please note address hereinunder indicated.

Trust ‘all goes well’ with you.

Greetings,

Dad

‘Seems you’re a bastard, Nicko.’

‘It’s not true at all! You rotter, Marko, you beastly rotter!’

‘
Bah
-stud!
Bah
-stud!’

‘It’s not true, I tell you!’ Nicko began to cry. ‘I’m telling Onkel Koko what you said.’

‘
Bah
-stud!
Look
at the stinking
bah
-stud!’

The question of his legitimacy had haunted Kraven’s childhood. Had he been born out of wedlock? Was the diabolic Marko right? He looked at his mother with different eyes. He felt a nauseating insecurity, as if he walked on ground shifting from a seismic shock. Perhaps his mother had eloped with Felix, had married his father secretly, unknown to Grandfather Blum. No, she could scarcely have concealed her pregnancy, to say nothing of his own arrival and his continuing existence for eleven months before the damning postcard had come. Besides, it had been addressed to the Kraven house in Hampstead. Nicko had agonized for years.

And now Aunt Cicely was prepared to tell him all about it. Her mysterious friend had perhaps warned her of the psychological damage she had unwittingly done him. Kraven crushed the letter in his hand and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. Well, she was a quarter-century too late. At the age of fifteen he had betaken himself to Somerset House, and there with relatively little trouble had found the evidence of his parents’ marriage.

Kraven, in need of cheering up, decided he would without delay phone his budding poetess, his Nimuë.

* * *

NIMUE’S POEM SAT UNDER THE TELEPHONE, her number exposed. Kraven dialled, heard the ringing in the Bronx, cleared his throat, and waited.

‘Yeah?’ Heavy breathing, slightly catarrhal.

‘Er, yes. May I speak with Nimuë, please?’

‘Who?’

‘Nimuë. Miss Berkowitz.’

‘I get it, sure, you mean Naomi, right? Hang on a second, fella.’ The voice was a gravelled monotone. It receded into the near distance, began to bellow.

There followed a grunt, a tiny shriek, a pause, then: ‘Yeah?’ It was her own darling voice.

‘Nicholas Kraven here.’

‘Gee.’ The darling voice became suddenly sharp: ‘Just a minute.’ A gentle hand now on the receiver: ‘What you grinning at? Like this is a
private
conversation.
If
you don’t mind. Yeah, that’s what I said,
private
. Why-n’t you get lost?’ The hand was removed. ‘Sorry about that.’ Here was his sweet Nimuë.

‘I’m phoning about your poetry tutorial. Bit of bad luck there, I’m afraid. Not a free hour anywhere on my appointments calendar, booked solid through the rest of the semester.’

‘O gee.’

‘Couldn’t agree more, but there it is. What’s to be done? I’ve taken another look at your poem, Nimuë. In fact, I’ve got it here in my hand. Yours is a talent to be carefully nurtured, a new and exciting voice in American letters.’

‘O wow, when you say things like that, it makes me, you know, I kinda get all, I dunno, like gooey all over.’

Kraven’s heart felt a tremor. ‘Perhaps if I referred you to a colleague? I’d hate to do it, but the week, alas, has only five days.’

‘Well, maybe … Hey, I wouldn’t wanna use up your free time, but y’know the weekend, well, maybe sometimes… the week, y’know, it’s got seven days, not five, and hey.’

‘Good heavens! The weekend, of course! I should have thought of it myself.’

‘O wow!’

‘Now next weekend’s no good, I’ve been asked to give a paper in LA, “Whither American Poetry?’ Hmm, that involves a delay, at least a fortnight. Of course, there’s always tomorrow, Sunday. But perhaps you have other plans?’

‘Tomorrow’s great! What time?’

Such eagerness in the pursuit of learning was all too rare in today’s young. ‘Two o’clock? We can have a late lunch and get right to work.’

‘All
right
!’

He gave her his address. ‘You think you’ll be able to find it?’

‘I got friends.’

‘Two o’clock, then. Remember to bring your other poems.’

‘Far out!’ She hung up.

Kraven picked up Nimuë’s poem and read it through. The purple words danced on the page. His voice, it seemed, made her gooey all over. Far out! But what could she have meant that she had friends? People familiar with the bus and subway system, probably. When he got up tomorrow, he would change the sheets on the bed.

* * *

OVER THE YEARS KRAVEN HAD PRODUCED the requisite scholarly articles. ‘The Brothel and the Paradise
Garden
: Shakespeare’s
Pericles
Revisited’; ‘Below the Salt: Plebeian Resentment in
Coriolanus
’; ‘Desdemona’s Wedding Sheets: A New Interpretation.’ These were but to scrape the surface. He had, moreover, published a book, well received, as such things go:
The Womb, the Tomb and the Loom in Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies
. One might even say that early in his career he had written with enthusiasm, certainly with enjoyment.

But the world around him, alas, had changed. For whom, Kraven wondered, was he keeping alive the lamp of learning? For a Princip? True, a Dillinger might alter the world’s view of the Middle Ages. Perhaps that mattered. But a Kraven? Yet another arcane article to be read only by other drudges like himself? No, that was finished, done. Kraven’s ‘light verse’ parodies, usually of poems, sometimes of songs, provided him now with a luxury, a private entertainment divorced from any practical goal. His stuff was unpublishable, he knew, but that fact bothered him not at all. What mattered was that writing it gave him pleasure.

He removed
Tickety-Boo
from its hiding place and leafed through its pages. Here, for example, was a lyric he had written one morning shortly after Stella had left him to return to Poore-Moody:

To Stella,

On a Friday Morning

In nought but panties thou art clearly fairer

Than Botticelli’s pallid Primavera,

And Trojan Helen, reft of all her clothes,

Cannot assume a more enticing pose.

Salt Cleopatra, nude, is second best

To thee, beloved, who art scarcely dressed.

Why then delay, why cause me so much anguish,

Why leave me on our mutual couch to languish?

Come, Stella, come, for Venus’ laws condone

The revelation of thy fragrant zone.

To see, to touch, to sniff, to taste – egad!

The thought alone doth drive me raving mad!

Thou knowst that pecker in the morning’s light

Far stronger is than pecker in the night.

Why poinst thou at the clock, thou timid mouse?

A fig I give thee for thy wretched spouse!

Remove thy panties, leap into the bed,

Forget this once that thou art elsewhere wed.

Thou art my love! There can be nought amiss

If thou and I once more achieve our bliss.

Alas, alas, our pleasures thou wouldst mar:

Why put’st thou on thy breast-concealing bra?

What’s this? Thy pantyhose? O, evil chance

That I should be tormented with thy dance!

Thy blouse, thy skirt, and now thy jacket too –

What use my plaints, what though my lot I rue?

To think my dame her duties thus should shirk:

Her duties owed to me, not to that jerk!

Kraven refiled the poem. No, publication clearly was impossible.
Tickety-Boo
amused him, and that was enough.

BY ONE O’CLOCK
on Sunday afternoon Kraven had readied his apartment to receive Nimuë. The light layer of dust, accumulated since Early’s Friday whisking, had vanished. In the bedroom the window blinds were drawn together and the resulting gloom dissipated in the area of the great bed itself by the soft warm light of a bedside lamp. In the kitchen the coffee pot, primed, had only to be plugged in; while on the dining table in the living room was spread a tempting selection of Zabar’s delicacies: cream cheese and chives, smoked salmon, chopped herring, Greek salad, various cheeses, Danish crackers, pumpernickel, bagels – not the food of poetry perhaps, but food conducive, in Kraven’s experience, to feelings of well-being. Casually placed on the coffee table was
The Enthusiast’s Guide to Sexual Fulfillment
, a volume boasting ‘more than 100 full-color photographs and many easy-to-follow diagrams’.

By two o’clock Kraven had brushed his teeth for the third time since arising. He had also emboldened the after-shave splash of Dunhill, whose strength was by then disappearing, with a liberal douche of Zizanie. By two-fifteen he had determined, this time with assurance, to favour an open-necked sports shirt without benefit of silk scarf, whose dash, he now saw, was rather too affected. By 2:35 he was wondering whether some of the more easily perishable of
Zabar
’s offerings should be returned to the refrigerator. His anxiety was mixed with a scruple of irritation.

But at 2:55 the house phone rang. The voice of Clarence, rendered sepulchral in its journey along the wire, announced the imminent ascension of a visitor. It could only be she, his Nimuë. A knock at the door, and there she stood, enchanting, clutching a sheaf of papers to her bosom.

‘Gee, I guess I’m late, huh?’

‘Not to worry.’

‘First it was my old man, wouldn’t let me out. Where my going? Who lie be with? And like that.’

‘But here you are. That’s what counts.’

‘Like I’m over eighteen, hey.’

‘Ah.’

‘Then we have this accident, in the Heights, y’know?’

‘Your
father
brought you?’

‘No, Gabe. He was going to this Anti-Nuke Puke-in in Washington Square, see.’

‘You mean Gabriel Princip? You came with him?’

‘Yeah, Gabe. He’s got this great new Mongo Demon, y’know, the motorbike, the Mark III? So he’s giving me this ride in, and like in the Heights we go over this pothole, and his rear tyre blows, I mean it’s like Gonzo City, and we’re stuck in the boonies. You think he worries about me? No, he’s worried about his Mongo. I coulda been killed, and he starts screaming and yelling like maybe it was
my
fault, for Chrisakes. I mean, Jesus! So I told him what he could do with his fucking Mongo, and I took a bus. That’s why I’m like late.’

‘And you left Princip in the Heights?’

She smiled. ‘Yeah, hey.’

‘Well, never mind. Do come in.’

Kraven followed her down the hall and into the living room. She had exchanged her adorable jeans for a denim mini-skirt. The blouse appeared to be the one of their first
encounter
. On her stockingless feet she wore sneakers, dingy grey and frayed. Kraven’s heart thumped in its cage.

‘Hey, what a great apartment! Gee, all them pictures!’ She ran over to the wall and examined the photograph of the Divine Sarah in
Le Passant
(1869). ‘A relative?’

‘My mother. She was a great actress.’

‘That’s definitely cool, I mean that’s beautiful.’ She scanned the wall, whirled around to take in the rest of the room, spotted the dining table and leapt gloriously towards it. “Look at all that stuff, will ya? Cream cheese and chives, wow! Howja know?” A forefinger by Praxiteles plunged into the bowl and conveyed a generous dollop to her exquisite mouth. Her eyes closed in ecstasy. “M-m-m-m-m.” The tip of a delicate pink tongue emerged and licked her lips, trembled for a moment and disappeared. Kraven supposed the thumping of his heart audible and raised a hand to still it.

Nimuë’s demeanour underwent a change, a curtain closed across the source of light. She walked shyly towards him, her head bowed, and thrust into his hands her sheaf of papers. ‘Here’s all my stuff, my pomes, and that.’ She took a step backwards, blushed, and the world grew roseate.

‘Good, good. I’m eager to read them.’

He sat down on the couch, but Nimuë stayed where she was, her head still bowed, refusing to look at him.

‘Why don’t you sit next to me?’

‘Okay if I like move around a bit? Just while you’re reading, I mean?’ She spoke in a small voice and addressed her sneakers.

‘If that’s what you’d rather.’

He watched her wander, pause now before this photograph, now before that. She held her hands behind her, resting them on firm love-apples, luscious fruit of the new Hesperides. She stepped back before the
Lorenzacchio
print (‘Your mother! O wow!’), then resumed her wanderings. She
left
him and made for the bedroom. His heart leaped up. He heard the screech of curtains pulled back on unoiled rollers. His heart sank.