Light Years (20 page)

“You’d better get her out of here,” Nedra whispered.

“Don’t worry.”

“He’s going to get her into bed, I can see it.”

“She’s had a little too much to drink,” Jivan said.

“Yes, but nothing that you gave her.”

“She told me she didn’t like the wine.”

“Why are you whispering, Nedra?” Viri called.

“It’s fun,” she said, smiling.

She poured more brandy. She was like a silver Christmas helix, a foil decoration turning slowly, the dazzle descending only to reappear time after time.

“You play beautifully,” she said.

She excused herself to say good night to the children. Viri went up afterwards. He kissed his daughters. Sitting on their beds, he felt the warmth of their rooms, the chambers in which they slept and dreamed, were secure. Their books, their possessions filled him with a sense of accomplishment and peace. On the stairs he heard voices, the sensual chords from below. Kate was sitting near Arnaud. Her teeth had a bluish cast to them, the blue that flourishes on pure white, in diamonds. He had a moment of concern for her—no, not concern, he realized, but covetousness. He was like a sick man as he thought of her, stricken and unhappy. The pain he felt was a phantom pain, like that in the toes of a missing leg. It was only desire, which he hoped would leave him, which he prayed would not.

Nedra was talking to her. “I wish I’d had your courage when I was your age,” she said.

Kate shrugged. “I don’t really like California.”

“At least you’ve lived there. You’re seeing what it is.”

“My mother doesn’t like the idea. She’d like us to be married.”

“Yours is a better way,” Nedra said.

She poured them each a little more brandy. Jivan and Viri were listening to the music; Arnaud sat sprawled near the fire, his head back, his eyes closed. The snow was still falling, even the roads had disappeared.

The elegance of the evening, the dishes remaining on the table, the ease with which Nedra and her husband treated each other, the understanding which seemed to stream from them, all of this filled Kate with a feverish happiness, that happiness which lies within the power of another to confer. She was drenched with love for these people who, though they had lived nearby all through her childhood, it seemed she was suddenly seeing for the first time, who were treating her as someone she longed at that moment to be: one of themselves.

“Can I come and see you while I’m here?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“I mean, I really like to talk to you.”

“I’d love to see you,” Nedra said.

One afternoon, then. They would walk together or have tea. She had never set foot beyond the borders, this woman Kate suddenly loved, this woman with a knowing face, not at all sentimental, who leaned on her elbows and smoked small cigars. She had never traveled, not even to Montreal, and yet she knew so well what life should be. It was true. In her heart she carried an instinct like that of a migrant species. She would find the tundra, the deeps, she would journey home.

Arnaud’s eyes were open. They were uninquisitive, calm, a signal that he was returning slowly. His face was soft, like a child’s. “For some reason, I am being urged to sleep,” he murmured. “Your house is so warm and good.”

“You may do anything you like,” Nedra said. “You should have anything you want.”

There was a silence. “You told me that once before,” he decided.

“And I’ve always practiced it.”

“Anything I want … you’ve practiced that?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m waking up,” he said.

He had not moved, but his eyes were alert. He was bearlike in his languor. One saw his innocence—that is to say, the innocence of great actors—as he came awake. “You’ve stopped playing, Kate,” he said.

She began again. She struck a few mournful chords, they fell slowly from her narrow fingers. In her thin girl’s voice, her head down, she began to sing. She sang on and on. She knew endless words, they were her true eloquence, the poems she believed in.
The sheets, they were old, and the blankets were thin …

“My first boyfriend used to sing that,” Nedra said. “He took me for a weekend to his family’s summer house. It was after the season, they were all gone.”

“Who was that?” Viri said.

“He was older than I was,” she said. “He was twenty-five.”

“Who?”

“I had my first avocado there. I ate it, pit and all,” she said.

Three

1

AT SIXTEEN, FRANCA CHANGED
. She began to fulfill her promise. As if in a day, the way leaves appear, she suddenly had the power of self-possession. She woke with it one morning, it was bestowed upon her. Her breasts were new, her feet a little large. Her face was calm and unfathomable.

They were close, mother and daughter. Nedra treated her like a woman. They talked a great deal.

The world was changing, Nedra told her. “I don’t mean changes in fashion,” she said. “Those aren’t really changes. I mean changes in the way one can live.”

“For instance.”

“I don’t think I know. You’ll feel it. You’ll understand far more than I do. The truth is, I’m rather ignorant, but I am able to feel what’s in the ground.”

There is warmth in families but not often companionship. She loved talking to Franca, and about her as well. She felt that this was the woman that she herself had become, in the sense that the present represents the past. She wanted to discover life through her, to savor it for the second time.

There was a party at Dana’s one evening during the holidays. Dana, whose face already had a curious dead expression, one almost of resentment, but after all, what can you expect, as Nedra said, the father a drunkard, the mother a fool. She was reading a book on Kandinsky that night, heavy, beautiful, the paper smooth. She had seen his exhibition at the Guggenheim, for the moment she was dazzled by him. In the silence of the evening, in that hour when all has been done, she opened it at last. He had come to painting late, she read; he was thirty-two at the time.

She called Eve. “I love this book,” she said.

“I thought it looked good.”

“I’ve just started reading it,” Nedra said. “At the beginning of the first war he was living in Munich, and he went back to Russia. He left behind the woman—she was a painter, too—that he’d been living with for ten years. He saw her again just once—imagine this—at an exhibition in 1927.”

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

She laid the book down open beside a few others. She wanted to think, to let it await her. She would go back to it, read again, read on, bathe in the richness of its plates.

Franca came home at eleven. From the instant the door closed, she sensed something wrong. “What is it?” she asked.

“What is what?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. It was terrible.”

“How?”

Her daughter was suddenly crying.

“Franca, what is it?”

“Look at me,” she wept. She was wearing a suit with a little fur trim at the collar and hem of the skirt. “I look like some kind of doll you buy in a souvenir shop.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I was the first one to leave,” she said in desperation. “Everyone said, ‘Where are you going?’ ”

“You didn’t have to come home this early.”

“Yes, I did.”

Nedra was frightened. “What happened, was it the wrong kind of party?” she said.

“It was absolutely the right kind. I was wrong.”

“What was everyone else wearing?”

“You always insist on my being different,” Franca burst out. “I always wear different clothes, I can’t go here or I can’t go there. I don’t want any more of that. I want to be like everyone else!” The tears were streaming down her face. “I don’t want to be like you.”

In one stroke she had established her own world.

Nedra said nothing. She was stunned. It was the beginning, she suddenly knew, of something she had thought would never happen. She went to bed troubled, torn by the urge to go to her daughter’s room, and afraid, at the same time, of what would be said.

The next day it was all forgotten. Franca worked in the greenhouse. She painted. There was music in her room. Hadji lay on her bed, she was truly happy. It had passed.

*      *      *

A letter arrived from Robert Chaptelle, whose life had drifted downstream. It was difficult to remember him, his nervousness, his expensive tastes and impulses so like her own. He said nothing about the theater; it was all about some man who could save Europe.

 … he is about five feet ten inches tall. He has the Kennedy appeal. His voice makes you tremble. It is an unforgettable voice. I have had the privilege of meeting him, hours in his company are minutes. His eyes! Finally I understand the nature of politics
.

Celatient du prodige
.

She read it only hurriedly. He would write again soon, he said in this final letter. He was traveling for his health, vanished into the remote towns of France from the insurance agency where for a time he had tried to work. Gone, passed into silence.

She thought more than once of the woman Kandinsky had left behind. There are stories that win by their brevity. She had written the name on her calendar, above where the pages are turned: Gabriele Munter.

2

HE EARNED MONEY, HE WAS LIKED
by his clients, he could draw beautifully. Ruskin said a true architect must first be a sculptor or painter. He was nearly that, and so absent-minded, so absorbed in work, that he once poured birdseed into his tea by mistake. He was talkative, witty; his handwriting was like print.

They went to dinner with Michael Warner and his friend. Nedra was their favorite, they adored her.

“Your daughter is so beautiful.”

“I like her,” Nedra admitted. “I find her a good friend.”

“She’s so inviolable. What will she do?” Michael asked.

“I want her to travel,” Nedra said.

“But she’ll go to school?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes, though, I think the only real education comes from a single person. It’s like being born—you receive everything from one perfect source.”

“Well, she has that in you, doesn’t she?” Michael said.

“Nedra, that’s a very dangerous notion, really,” Viri protested.

“A person whose life is so exceptional that it nourishes the life around it,” she went on.

“Theoretically that might be possible,” Viri said, “but a single relationship, basing everything on that, could be very dangerous. I mean, there is the chance of being imprinted with the ideas of a very strong individual, and even though they might be interesting ideas, they could be absolutely wrong for someone like Franca.”

“Marina traveled for three years with Darin Henze when he was touring all over the world. It was a fantastic experience.”

“Darin Henze?”

“The dancer.”

“What do you mean by ‘traveled’?”

“She was his mistress, of course. She was interested in his work. But it really doesn’t matter what he did, he could have been an anthropologist. Specific knowledge is not education. What I mean by education,” Nedra said, “is learning how to live and on what level. And you must learn that or everything else is useless.”

Night in the city. They were at the bar of El Faro, packed among people waiting for a table. The noise of a crowded restaurant beat around them. In the back they were dragging in crates of food while customers wreathed in tobacco smoke shouted over drinks.

“You never know what’s going to happen to people,” Michael was saying. “I have a friend,” he said, “she’s very funny, very generous. She could have been an actress.”

“Morgan,” Bill said.

“You must meet her sometime.”

Just then they were given a table. The waiter brought the menus.

“We’re having the paella, aren’t we?” Michael asked them. “Yes.” He ordered. “She lives on Fifth Avenue, just across from the Metropolitan. She got the apartment in their divorce. It’s a fabulous apartment …”

In the small room, in darkness to which one’s eyes must become accustomed, where even a face being searched for can be missed a few tables away, Viri suddenly saw someone. His heart staggered. It was Kaya Doutreau.

“One night she was coming home from the ballet …”

He was frightened; he was afraid she would see him. His wife was stunning, the company polished, and yet he was ashamed of his existence.

“… Swan Lake. Now say what you like, but there is my all-time favorite.”

“So beautiful,” Bill said.

“When she opened the door to the apartment she found her dog lying there …”

He did not hear, he was aware only of the clatter of utensils, of the sounds that underlay everything, as if listening to the mechanism which moved it all. It seemed terrible that he should be so stricken by her presence, by simple characteristics of which she was completely unaware—her ease, the way in which she sat, the weight of her breasts within the pale, ribbed shirt.

“Well, they don’t know. They think someone pushed poison under the door. It was just awful. She didn’t know what was wrong. She took him downstairs in her arms, he died in the taxi.”

“Viri, are you feeling well?” Nedra asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.” He smiled briefly. He had forgotten how to eat, it seemed, as if it were a ceremony he had only memorized. His attention was directed toward the plate. He tried not to see beyond the table.

“I mean, here is the most interesting, warm person imaginable. She would never hurt anyone. An apartment filled with books. People are insane.”

“It’s an awful story,” Nedra said.