Lost (43 page)

 

Jersey? Jervsey?

Gervasa?

 

For the first time in her life she doubted—well, what? Not her sanity, for she could not remember ever feeling more alert than walking back into the hotel in Bras¸ov, and seeing John there. So her grasp on reality was not in doubt. It was just that she had not, since childhood, ever felt like a child.

All the attention she paid to childish things! . . . the Pooh bear (Disney version) on her desk at home. The vague opinions spelled out by the arrangement of the stars in the sky. The scraps of verse, hoarded like prophecies--all these distractions had not made her carefree, just busy. Mentally cluttered.

 

I like this book, said the King of Hearts.

It makes me laugh, the way it starts.

I like it also, said his mother.

So they sat down and read it to each other.

 

Sure, she had managed a career, building a reputation out of limited talents. She had taken her father in until he died, despite the cost to her marriage. She'd done quarterly taxes, collected for the American Heart Fund, et cetera. She had honored and loved her husband, and she had rarely found it hard to obey him, either. Up until now, when he was unpardonably missing from this most significant campaign of their marriage, and she had become demented--drunk maybe--and fallen into bed with the one fellow she had ever really wanted, and never imagined she'd be able to get.

So what was she now, walking into the hotel, shaking the snow off her shoulders? No more than a teenager, trembling, more full of lust than she'd ever conceived possible. The old mocking truisms held. She was naked underneath her respectable wool coat and matching blue serge suit and bra and panties and hose. Her middle-aged body was reamed out with shock and desire. She had reverted to a being with breasts that felt things, didn't just provide a nice slope for the display of better necklaces. She could feel the blood flushing her buttocks. With a briefcase full of notarized files up in her room, extra money for bribery stitched into the padded
shoulders of her pinstriped suit coat, she was nothing if not a woman of today: competent to the point of being a maniac about it. And here she stood, on the hotel lobby's terrazzo floor strewn with sawdust, the room circling because she was dizzy with hunger for John, again. She could not be sure who she was, a married woman or a teenager in love for the
first time.

He should be here
, she thought of Emil. Damn him! And John looked up from his club chair and smiled. Not, she saw, a smile of complicity, or passion, or even embarrassment, but perhaps a smile of worry.

“What, what is it?” she said, wondering if Emil had called.

“Oh, the snow, that's all; we're stuck here for some time, I think,” he said.

“We needn't see each other, if it seems I've taken advantage of the situation.” She felt like an Audrey Hepburn character. It was standing here in this retro lobby, which had not been redone to evoke an older, more sober time, but was the genuine article, seedy and tired, gently decadent. “Perhaps I misunderstood--I am afraid that I moved too near.”

“It was not what I expected,” he said, “last night I mean. But that's not what I'm talking about.”

“What?”

“It's quite a serious storm, they say. Sighisoara is right in its path, and there have
been power outages. It might be several days more before we can get through.”

He meant--she thought--that they would be locked in this hotel together, as snow hemmed them in, imprisoned them, kept them from completing their mission. Not like Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, marooned in a fairy-tale dacha, but here in a hotel that smelled of diesel fuel, with little of interest to eat, nothing to read, the task ahead postponed indefinitely, and only their illicit and accidental romance to occupy them.

She said to him,

 

“Davy Dumpling,

Boil him in a pot,

Sugar him and butter him,

And eat him while he's hot.”

 

He answered, “Davy's hot.”

So they went upstairs to bed, though not out of passion this time, but out of regret and a certain variety of terror. And this time, because perversity is perverse, the sexual undertow was more unfathomable--in the meaning of the word that connotes not just the hidden distance of depths but their secret nature as well.

 

Halfway back to lower Bloomsbury, she decided it was time to go. Go for good. She got off the Northern Line at Camden and crossed to the other side of the platform to head back to Hampstead. She could never regain her sense of moral decorum, but at
least, with effort, she could act as if she had. That would have to do. And surely the first thing, or anyway the best thing, that she could think of to do was to evacuate herself out of John's digs. Get the last piece of luggage, get out, get out, and then worry about the next step later.

She didn't want to run into him, so she waited until dusk, when his presence would be marked by the switching on of lamps. When she noted no such illumination, she let herself in and went upstairs.

In just a day or two he had managed to get another contractor, though they had not shown up that day or she'd have seen them leave. The pantry wall was now down entirely, and the brick fire wall beyond had been scrubbed with an iron brush. The bricks looked perky, very period, as if baked to order by Martha Stewart. A few sawn bits of timber, the beginning structure of a staircase that would wrap about the bricks and head illegally to the roof. She wished it all well. A house gives up its ghosts every time some window is punched out, some molding is removed, some faded wallpaper is stripped or painted over.

She gave thought to placing a well-aimed kick at the sorrowing face of Scrooge/Rudge. Deal with it, she told him. Either stay in your house or get out of it. Just move over the threshold. How long can you stand there threatened by the bed-curtains?

Only, of course, maybe they weren't bed-curtains threatening him, but the shroud of the Jervsey creature.

Either way, get out, old man. Remove yourself to Brazil or the Punjab or the Antipodes. There isn't enough room in this place for the both of us to be haunted.

She threw open her suitcase and pulled things from the closet. Things she had left there in between visits. Her state of mind was becoming grim. As long as she was going to be here alone, she might as well steep herself in it. Looking for some music to wallow
by, she found a CD of
Die Winterreise
and immediately began to hanker after its harrowing sonorities.

She folded her clothes with unusual slowness, unwilling, she guessed, to leave very quickly—why? To listen to the music? She even pressed the straps of her bra together and inverted one cup inside the other, for maximum efficiency. The fourth song came up in its sequence: “Erstarrung.” She checked the libretto to make sure she was remembering the translation correctly. “Numbness.” How strange that numbness should be given such an aggressive setting, the piano thrumming percussively rather than with languorous legatos. As if Schubert's idea of the nature of numbness were best characterized not by paralysis but by obsessive motion and iteration, ceaseless noise and distraction.

She heard:

 

“Ich such im Schnee vergebens

Nach ihrer Tritte Spur,

Wo sie an meinem Arme

Durchstrich dei grüne Flur.

Ich will den Boden küssen,

Durchdringen Eis und Schnee

Mit meinen heißen Tränen,

Bis ich die Erde seh.”

 

And then she found the text of, whose was it, Wilhelm Müller's poem, and sat on the edge of the bed, one leg over a knee and kicking in a bored way, and read:

 

Vainly I search in the snow

for the footprint she left

when arm in arm with me she

passed along the green meadow.

I want to kiss the ground,

pierce ice and snow

with my hot tears

until I see the soil beneath.

 

But the wanting, she thought, the wanting was an active thing, not a numbness. It was the world that was numb with cold and snow, not the singer. The singer was fiercely alive in a dead environment.

She heard the key in the lock and the door open, and sat up straight, determined to be neither frightened nor hostile. “John?” said a voice.

“He's not here,” said Winnie.

“Oh.” Allegra paused at the door of the small room, holding something to her breast. A book? “But you are. I thought you'd gone.”

“Nearly. As you can see.”

“Well.” Allegra seemed to be trying to decide what to do. Winnie did not get up. “I suppose,” said Allegra, “I can put to you what I was about to put to John, with some irritation.”

“Put what to me?”

Allegra lowered her arm. Not books, but two tiles. She held them out. “I am clearing up the old work, ready to begin building the frames, and there are two extra plates on my drying rack in the kitchen.”

Winnie squinted at one. “So?” she said, and then looked at the other. “Oh,” she said in a different voice.

“Winnie. Have you been in my flat without my permission? Have you found a key that John had tucked away somewhere? Have you been letting yourself in?”

“I don't know about these. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“This is your symbol.” Allegra pointed to the slashed cross that
had been scraped and dug into the medium with a sharp implement. The motions had been swift and imprecise, and the hard edges were rucked back from the furrow.

“It's not my symbol, I don't have a ‘symbol.' Leave me alone.”

“And then these aren't your big hands?” said Allegra, pointing to the other tablet.

“I don't know whose hands they are and I don't care.”

“They're yours. You are trying to intimidate me with tactics borrowed from some campy American movie.”

“I don't go around making impressions of my hands in wet cement like some starlet outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Give me a break, Allegra.”

“Put your hands in there and let me see that the prints aren't yours, then.”

“I'll do no such thing. Look, I didn't ask you in.”

“This is the last straw,” said Allegra. Her voice went up, to compete with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who'd moved on to another meditation on loss. “I did fourteen impressions over the past week, what with the holidays coming, and when I go to finish them with glaze and framing I find sixteen tiles. I won't have it. These are not child's hands! Put your hands in here, Winnie, and show me they're not yours.”

Ruminatively Winnie took the tile and then shattered it against the wall, which left a chalky scrape and flung plaster crumbs on the bedspread. “Rather friable, your work. Must be a lot of repeat business from clumsy kids running to show their grandparents your handiwork.”

“John is right.”

“John is right about what?”

“You really are mad.”

“I am not mad. I'm not even annoyed. Maybe you did these in your sleep. Ever think of that?”

“Right. I'm leaving now. Shall I let John know you've moved out? Since I take it you're being incommunicado again?”

Winnie stood up and went to her suitcase, and laboriously heaved it up. “I could use some help getting this down the stairs, if you're that eager to see me go.”

Allegra set down the remaining tile on the edge of the bookcase. “Now hang fire, Winnie. I'm saying things I oughtn't because I'm upset about this. Let me take it back. I know things are hard. I shouldn't have accused you.”

“Let me just go,” said Winnie, with some degree of exhaustion.

“I'll help you,” said Allegra. “Allow me that much, as apology.” Winnie tried not to suppose that Allegra offered so she could report to John that with her own eyes she had seen Winnie actually pack up and leave.

“All right,” she said.

By the time they were on the ground floor, huffing with the effort of hauling the luggage, some of Winnie's irritation had dissipated. “I'm sorry about breaking your tile,” said Winnie. “I just really, really resent being accused of madness if I have nothing productive to show for it, okay?”

Allegra looked poised for flight, but ventured, “You could have had the tile if you hadn't broken it.”

Winnie laughed. “If I go mad, I'm going to keep very careful notes so I can write a self-help book from the other side and make a million bucks. You know, if you weren't so edgy, I'd tell you even more to make you mistrust me. There's another twist, this time involving weird Mrs. Maddingly.”

“Well, finding those tiles was upsetting,” said Allegra. “What
would you have thought? Having your home broken into is not delightful.”

“I'm sure you're right.”

They were at the corner where Allegra would turn to head up Rowancroft Gardens, and Winnie set course for the Tube station. “Well, you might as well tell me,” said Allegra.

“So that you have more dirt on me to laugh about with John? Not in this lifetime.”

“Oh, come on,” said Allegra. “I don't laugh about you with John. John and I aren't even seeing each other anymore, actually.”

Winnie looked at Allegra over the top of her glasses. A ploy of some sort? But to what end? “That's not what I get from John.”

“John would say what he wanted to get what he needed, wouldn't he?” said Allegra. “I mean, I love the bloke, but he
is
a bloke.”

“What does he need, though? From me?”

“He needs you—oh, why should I say? What business is it of mine?”

“It has to be someone's business,” said Winnie, starting to tear up. “Something has to be someone's business, or where are we all?”

“All right,” said Allegra crossly. “But I'm not standing here gossiping in the cold. Nor am I inviting you back to my house. Too awkward.”