Look at the Harlequins! (16 page)

She was now studying the History of the Theater at Columbia University. Parents and grandparents were tucked away in London. I had a child, right? Those shoes I wore were lovely. Students called my lectures fabulous. Was I happy?

I shook my head. When and where could I see her?

She had always had a crush on me, oh yes, ever since I used to mesmerize her in my lap, playing sweet Uncle Gasper, muffing every other line, and now all had come back and she certainly wished to do something about it.

She had a remarkable vocabulary. Summarize her. Mirages of motels in the eye of the penholder. Did she have a car?

Well, that was rather sudden (laughing). She could
borrow, perhaps, his old sedan though he might not like the notion (pointing to a nondescript youth who was waiting for her on the sidewalk). He had just bought a heavenly Hummer to go places with her.

Would she mind telling me
when
we could meet, please.

She had read all my novels, at least all the English ones. Her Russian was rusty!

The hell with my novels! When?

I had to let her think. She might visit me at the end of the term. Terry Todd (now measuring the stairs with his eyes, preparing to mount) had briefly been a student of mine; he got a D minus for his first paper and quit Quirn.

I said I consigned all the D people to everlasting oblivion. Her “end of the term” might bend away into Minus Eternity. I required more precision.

She would let me know. She would call me next week. No, she would not part with her own telephone number. She told me to look at that clown (he was now coming up the steps). Paradise was a Persian word. It was simply Persian to meet again like that. She might drop in at my office for a few moments, just to chat about old times. She knew how busy—

“Oh, Terry: this is
the
writer, the man who wrote
Emerald and the Pander.
”

I do not recall what I had planned to look up in the library. Whatever it was, it was not that unknown book. Aimlessly I walked up and down several halls; abjectly visited the W.C.; but simply could not, short of castrating myself, get rid of her new image in its own portable sunlight—the straight pale hair, the freckles, the banal pout, the Lilithan long eyes—though I knew she was only what one used to call a “little tramp” and, perhaps,
because
she was just that.

I gave my penultimate “Masterpieces” lecture of the spring term. I gave my ultimate one. An assistant distributed
the blue books for the final examination in that course (which I had curtailed for reasons of health) and collected them while three or four hopeless hopefuls still kept scribbling madly in separate spots of the hall. I held my last Joyce seminar of the year. Little Baroness Borg had forgotten the end of the dream.

In the last days of the spring term a particularly stupid baby-sitter told me that some girl whose name she had not quite caught—Tallbird or Dalberg—had phoned that she was on her way to Quirn. It so happened that a Lily Talbot in my Masterpieces class had missed the examination. On the following day I walked over to my office for the ordeal of reading the damned heap on my desk. Quirn University Official Examination Book. All academic work is conducted on the assumption of general horror. Write on the consecutive right- and left-hand pages. What does “consecutive” really mean, Sir? Do you want us to describe
all
the birds in the story or only one? As a rule, one-tenth of the three hundred minds preferred the spelling “Stern” to “Sterne” and “Austin” to “Austen.”

The telephone on my spacious desk (it “slept two” as my ribald neighbor Professor King, an authority on Dante, used to say) rang, and this Lily Talbot started to explain, volubly, unconvincingly, in a kind of lovely, veiled, and confidential voice, why she had not taken the examination. I could not remember her face or her figure, but the subdued melody tickling my ear contained such intimations of young charm and surrender that I could not help chiding myself for overlooking her in my class. She was about to come to the point when an eager childish rap at the door diverted my attention. Dolly walked in, smiling. Smiling, she indicated with a tilt of her chin that the receiver should be cradled. Smiling, she swept the examination books off the desk and perched upon it with her bare shins in my face. What might have promised the most refined ardors turned out to be the tritest scene in this memoir. I hastened
to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier. The ultimate convulsion rocked the desk lamp, and from the class just across the corridor came a burst of applause at the end of Professor King’s last lecture of the season.

When I came home, I found my wife alone on the porch swinging gently if not quite straight in her favorite glider and reading the
Krasnaya Niva
(“Red Corn”), a Bolshevist magazine. Her purveyor of
literatura
was away giving some future mistranslators a final examination. Isabel had been out of doors and was now taking a nap in her room just above the porch.

In the days when the
bermudki
(as Ninella indecently called them) used to minister to my humble needs, I experienced no guilt after the operation and confronted my wife with my usual, fondly ironical smile; but on
this
occasion I felt my flesh coated with stinging slime, and my heart missed a thump, when she said, glancing up and stopping the line with her finger: “Did that girl get in touch with you at your office?”

I answered as a fictional character might “in the affirmative”: “Her people,” I added, “wrote you, it appears, about her coming to study in New York, but you never showed me that letter.
Tant mieux
, she’s a frightful bore.”

Annette looked utterly confused: “I’m speaking,” she said, “or trying to speak, about a student called Lily Talbot who telephoned an hour ago to explain why she missed the exam. Who is
your
girl?”

We proceeded to disentangle the two. After some moral hesitation (“You know, we both owe a lot to her grandparents”) Annette conceded we really need not entertain little strays. She seemed to recall the letter because it contained a reference to her widowed mother (now moved to a comfortable home for the old into which I had recently turned my villa at Carnavaux—despite my lawyer’s
well-meaning objections). Yes, yes, she had mislaid it—and would find it some day in some library book that had never been returned to an unattainable library. A strange appeasement was now flowing through my poor veins. The romance of her absentmindedness always made me laugh heartily. I laughed heartily. I kissed her on her infinitely tender-skinned temple.

“How does Dolly Borg look now?” asked Annette. “She used to be a very homely and very brash little brat. Quite repulsive, in fact.”

“That’s what she still is,” I practically shouted, and we heard little Isabel crow: “
Ya prosnulas’
,” through the yawn of the window: “I am awake.” How lightly the spring cloudlets scudded! How glibly that red-breasted thrush on the lawn pulled out its unbroken worm! Ah—and there was Ninella, home at last, getting out of her car, with the string-bound corpses of
cahiers
under her sturdy arm. “Gosh,” said I to myself, in my ignoble euphoria, “there’s something quite nice and cozy about old Ninel after all!” Yet only a few hours later the light of Hell had gone out, and I writhed, I wrung my four limbs, yes, in an agony of insomnia, trying to find some combination between pillow and back, sheet and shoulder, linen and leg, to help me, help me, oh, help me to reach the Eden of a rainy dawn.

The increasing disarray of my nerves was such that the bother of getting a driver’s license could not be contemplated: hence I had to rely on Dolly’s use of Todd’s dirty old sedan in order to seek the conventional darkness of country lanes that were difficult to find and disappointing when found. We had three such rendezvous, near New Swivington or thereabouts, in the complicated vicinity of Casanovia of all places, and despite my muddled condition I could not help noticing that Dolly welcomed the restless wanderings, the wrong turns, the torrents of rain which attended our sordid little affair. “Just think,” she said one especially boggy June night in unknown surroundings, “how much simpler things would be if somebody explained the situation to your wife, just think!”

On realizing she had gone too far with that proposed thought, Dolly changed tactics and rang me up at my office to tell me with a great show of jubilant excitement that Bridget Dolan, a medical student and a cousin of Todd’s, was offering us for a small remuneration her flat in New York on Monday and Thursday afternoons when she worked as a nurse at the Holy Something Hospital. Inertia rather than Eros caused me to give it a try; I kept up the pretext of having to complete the literary research
I was supposed to be conducting in the Public Library, and traveled in a crowded Pullman from one nightmare to another.

She met me in front of the house, strutting in triumph, brandishing a little key that caught a glint of sun in the hothouse mizzle. I was so very weak from the journey that I had trouble getting out of the taxi, and she helped me to the front door, chattering the while like a bright child. Fortunately the mysterious flat was on the ground floor—I could not have faced a lift’s closure and spasm. A surly janitrix (reminding me in mnemonic reverse of the Cerberean bitches in the hotels of Soviet Siberia which I was to stop at a couple of decades later) insisted on my writing down my name and address in a ledger (“That’s the rule,” sang out Dolly, who had already picked up some intones of local delivery). I had the presence of mind to put down the dumbest address I could produce at the moment, Dumbert Dumbert, Dumberton. Dolly, humming, added unhurriedly my raincoat to those hanging in a communal hallway. If she had ever experienced the pangs of neuralgic delirium, she would not have fumbled with that key when she knew quite well that the door of what should have been an exquisitely private apartment was not even properly closed. We entered a preposterous, evidently ultra-modern living room with painted hard furniture and one lone little white rocker supporting a plush biped rat instead of a sulky child. Doors were still with me, were always with me. The one on the left, being slightly ajar, let in voices from an adjacent suite or asylum. “There’s a party going on there!” I expostulated, and Dolly deftly and softly drew that door almost shut. “They’re a nice friendly group,” she said, “and it’s really too warm in these rooms to choke every chink. Second on the right. Here we are.”

Here we were. Nurse Dolan for the sake of atmosphere and professional empathy had rigged up her bedroom in hospital style: a snow-pure cot with a system of levers
that would have rendered even Big Peter (in the
Red Topper
) impotent; whitewashed commodes and glazed cabinets; a bedhead chart dear to humorists; and a set of rules tacked to the bathroom door.

“Now off with that jacket,” cried Dolly gaily, “while I unlace those lovely shoes” (crouching nimbly, and nimbly recrouching, at my retreating feet).

I said: “You have lost your mind, my dear, if you think I could contemplate making love in this appalling place.”

“What do you want then?” she asked, angrily brushing away a strand of hair from her flushed face and uncoiling back to her natural length: “Where would you find another such dandy, hygienic, utterly—”

A visitor interrupted her: a brown, gray-cheeked old dackel carrying horizontally a rubber bone in its mouth. It entered from the parlor, placed the obscene red thing on the linoleum, and stood looking at me, at Dolly, at me again, with melancholy expectation on its raised dogface. A pretty bare-armed girl in black slipped in, grabbed the animal, kicked its toy back into the parlor, and said: “Hullo, Dolly! If you and your friend want some drinks afterwards, please join us. Bridget phoned she’d be home early. It’s J.B.’s birthday.”

“Righto, Carmen,” replied Dolly, and turning to me continued in Russian: “I think you need that drink right away. Oh, come along! And for God’s sake leave that jacket and waistcoat here. You are drenched with sweat.”

She forced me out of the room; I went rumbling and groaning; she gave a perfunctory pat to the creaseless cot and followed the man of snow, the man of tallow, the dying lopsided man.

Most of the party had now invaded the parlor from the next room. I cringed and tried to hide my face as I recognized Terry Todd. He raised his glass in delicate congratulation. What that slut had done to ensure a thwarted beau’s complicity, I shall never know; but I should never have put
her in my
Krasnyy Tsilindr;
that’s the way you breed live monsters—from little ballerinas in books. Another person I had once seen already—in a car that kept passing us somewhere in the country—a young actor with handsome Irish features, pressed upon me what he called a Honolulu Cooler, but at the eoan stage of an attack I am beyond alcohol, so could only taste the pineapple part of the mixture. Amidst a circle of sycophants a bull-size old fellow in a short-sleeved shirt monogrammed “J.B.” posed, one hairy arm around Dolly, for a naughty shot that his wife snapped. Carmen removed my sticky glass on her neat little tray with a pillbox and a thermometer in the corner. Not finding a seat, I had to lean against the wall, and the back of my head caused a cheap abstract in a plastic frame to start swinging above me: it was stopped by Todd who had sidled up to me and now said, lowering his voice: “Everything is settled, Prof, to everybody’s satisfaction. I’ve kept in touch with Mrs. Langley, sure I have, she and the missus are writing you. I believe they’ve already left, the kid thinks you’re in Heaven—now, now, what’s the matter?”

I am not a fighter. I only hurt my hand against a tall lamp and lost both shoes in the scuffle. Terry Todd vanished—forever. The telephone was being used in one room and ringing in the other. Dolly, retransformed by the alchemy of her blazing anger—and now untellable from the little girl who had hurled a three-letter French word at me when I told her I found it wiser to stop taking advantage of her grandfather’s hospitality—virtually tore my necktie in two, yelling she could easily get me jailed for rape but preferred to see me crawling back to my consort and harem of baby-sitters (her new vocabulary, though, remained richly theatrical, even when she shrieked).