Sleepless Nights (12 page)

After you had seen her a few times, you found that she was vain but not argumentative. Little appeared to her as new in life, little came as a surprise. It was appealing. She had the idea that a gross, uncomplicated self-interest was the old truth a new force or person were trying to disguise.

Dr. Z., who found the events of his own life flushed with the glow of the unique, the unexpected, the inexplicable, sometimes chewed his lip in annoyance when she expressed her belief in the principle of repetition. They lived in a special intimacy nevertheless.

From Holland I wrote many complaining letters. Dear M.: How cold the house is. How we fight after too much gin, etc., etc.

Complaining letters—and this one of the happiest periods of my life. With what gratitude I look back on Europe for the first time. So, that wraps up Verona. We take in the cracked windows and the brilliant dishevelment of Istanbul. And the long time in Holland, time to take trains, one to Haarlem to see the old almshouse governors painted in their unforgiving black-and-white misery by Frans Hals in his last days. The laughing cavaliers perhaps had eaten too many oysters, drunk too much beer and died a replete, unwilling death, leaving the poor, freed by a bitter life from killing pleasures, to shrivel on charity, live on with their strong, blackening faces.

Antwerp and Ghent: what wonderful names, he said, hard as the heavy cobbles in the square. Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long you seemed to hear the turning of pages, pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars.

What are you doing here?

Motley’s
Rise of the Dutch Republic
and Fromentin on the old Dutch painters in a neat Phaidon edition.

Dr. Z. had acquired the nurse in his office. A fresh-looking woman who had never married and who lived frugally outside the center—a long trip on her bicycle, She had her occasional afternoons with Dr. Z., afternoons now grown, according to gossip, as perfunctory and healthgiving as a checkup. Oh, the burdens.

Dr. Z. acquired Simone, the painter, after her husband left her. He nudged the other two to make room. Simone was often spoken of as the most independent woman in Amsterdam. She was also the only female painter anyone talked about and it was from her long, nervous struggle to establish herself that the independence had arrived. If indeed it had. She did not display any special happiness or confidence from “doing something well.”

Why should painting pictures make you happy? she said. It is not a diversion. Her nerves were frazzled and she had a strong leaning toward melancholy and exhaustion. Yet, worn down by life as she saw herself to be, she was always in movement, always running up and down the stairs to her studio on the fifth floor. In her agitated fatigue, Simone was a striking figure in tattered, mysterious clothes which she apparently bought in junk shops on her travels. Skirts and blouses and jackets of satin or flowered cloth, Balkan decorations, old beads, capes, shawls, earrings. The effect was sometimes that of a deranged frugality and other times she brought it off, like the church dignitaries in Florence when they went in their worn velvets and shredded furs to release the dove from the altar of the Duomo.

Perhaps if she had been a man she would have become a cardinal. She had been born a Catholic and although this had been set aside in the libertarian Amsterdam intellectual world, which was a sort of archive of Trotskyite, Socialist, Anarchist learning, Simone was sometimes seen slipping into church, wearing several large shawls in pitiful disguise. It was whispered that perhaps she was praying for the soul of her brother, who had collaborated with the Nazis.

Simone’s husband looked like an Alpine skier and was instead a professor of history. He actually went off on a long skiing holiday in Austria and in about six months a new woman arrived in Amsterdam, an American. I’ve always wanted an American, the husband said.

Dr. Z. was sympathetic to Simone and outraged by the husband’s complacency and more by his ridiculous happiness with the pretty American. The doctor would have managed differently somehow, in some way, man of binding memories that he was. He took to quoting the Russian proverb mentioned in Pushkin’s story “The Captain’s Daughter”:

Worse? How does he know now, and if it turns out that way it will be too late, Madame Z. insisted.

Slowly, or not so slowly, Dr. Z.’s duet became a trio. He and his wife had known Simone for years. Was that not favorable? Wasn’t the ex-husband living with his American in the apartment below Simone’s?

Dr. Z. was a passive man
by nature
; that is, he was often led to actions and moods quite the contrary. Certainly at the beginning of his affairs, this natural passivity took an extended leave. He began in a frenzy of passionate feeling. He fell in love; he drank too much; he rushed through his work as quickly as possible and got home very late for dinner and sometimes not until midnight. His nest was shaken by the new windstorm and the squawking of birds began. His wife said this was exactly what she had expected and that it did not interest her. Simone hesitated, but there was the infatuated Dr. Z. with theater tickets. There he was holding fast to her arm as they passed her husband and the American girl at the door of the house. Soon, she said, with a disheartened sigh, that she too was in love.

The nurse cried all day, even in front of the patients. When Simone sometimes called the office, the nurse abused and threatened her.

It is very poor medicine to have nurses in such a state, Simone said. Perhaps another position could be found for her.

Dr. Z. was taken aback but quickly resumed his ground. It’s all over with her, he insisted, but I cannot turn away someone I have known and worked with for seven years.

Dr. Z. was jealous of Simone, and her silences filled him with terrible alarm. He pushed his love back a few years. Yes, he remembered being overcome with feeling years ago just at the sight of her buying a book in the square, at a New Year’s party when she was wearing green velvet shoes.

I don’t remember anything of that sort. Right now is soon enough for me, she said.

At times the doctor did not want to go home at night and announced that he was prepared to give his house to his wife or to set her up in France. For weeks some new plan would seem to be working itself out. Yes, I am working it out, he said to everyone. But then the time came when his mood turned crestfallen and sad. He said Madame Z. hated change.

No one likes change, Simone said. Dr. Z. wept. But it has been more than twenty years. Think of that.

His parents—I knew them and all his living relations and seemed to know the dead ones. Marriage. We would often argue over
interpretation
, so fruitful of conjecture is the text of the family.

He said: You remember that my parents dressed for dinner every night. I thought of it as something military, like people on an army post. His closets were filled with regalia, his large collection of summer and winter dinner jackets, his cummerbunds and patent leather shoes with bows. Do you suppose that is why they imagined—

Or
pretended
to imagine, I said.

Imagined that I would one day give all their money to a wandering monk in brown woolens and sandals.

To me, the parents were a knotty pair. They were in marvelous shape, very careful and prudent. And yet very sensual about fine bed linens, silk underwear, soft cushions, and the proper purring of household motors. The father’s fine eyesight, healthy teeth, good tennis game did not keep him from an early death. He died just before we went to Holland and we brought his last days along with us. The mother died soon after we returned.

They would not have liked that, the son said later. Their hearts gave out. Alas, the heart is not a metaphor—or not only a metaphor.

So, the hills of home in the flatness of Holland. Think of it, he would say, our parents were born in the last century. The tsar was out chopping wood for exercise.

In Amsterdam there were no celebrated expatriates living in the hills or set up in flowery villas near the sea. One week, a lot of snow. Where are we? we wondered. In Iowa City? Many times it was as if the trams were all leading back to home. At night, feeling uprooted because so much was familiar, we would tell each other the story of our lives. The downy, musty embrace of the bed set us afloat, not as travelers, but as ones somehow borne backward to the bricks and stuffs of youth.

We had been to the flower market—a thousand still lifes. People, rushing about the Leidseplein, revealed ghostly similarities to those we had left behind. Old accusations: that is the memory left by mothers and fathers. Or is it we, in recall, who are accusing? So, in the chill, the litany of exiles, in the old language.

He remembered what a disappointment he had been to his grandfather, how the old man, dying of cancer, would call out to him, the only male around since a handsome son had died at thirty. Who are you? Grandfather would ask. One year thin and handsome and the next year bulky and brooding. Cannot shoot a gun, cannot ride a horse. What prizes have you won, except for collecting snakes and mismatched socks? On a sailboat, a menace. Where are you standing,
why
are you standing gazing at the water? You will drown us all.

The stove died, the snow clung to the panes, the outline of fringed lamps caught the light of the street. In the shadows, listening to the bells ringing the hours, we would lie smoking and talking.

History assaults you and if you live you are restored to the world of gossip. That is what it had been for Dr. Z. He was half-Jewish and had spent time in a labor camp in Germany. This well-established Nederland lover, with his nervous alliances and peculiar fidelities, had looked death in the eye, had lived through the extermination of his younger brother. This life, his aura, remained in his proud, olive-tinted eyes, in his researches on the devastations flowing in the bloodstream, in his death-defying lovemaking. He was a small, shrewd European country, moving about carefully in peacetime, driven on by the force of ghastly memories.

So, life after death is to fall in love once more, to set up a little business, to learn to drive a car, take airplane trips, go to the sun for vacations.

It began to appear that Simone was not suited to the role of mistress. She said: This thing has brought a great coarsening of my nature. I hate Madame Z. What is she, a general? She seems to be giving a good many orders to those of us behind the lines.

Hate? Dr. Z. said. That’s quite extreme. She has her qualities.

When Simone saw the wife on the street she rushed off in the opposite direction. So fearful was she of a meeting she would not go to her friends’ houses without making careful inquiries.

The whole of their circle in Amsterdam was involved in the affair. This wish to oust Madame Z. and the nurse is Simone’s cardinal side, people decided. Yes, the little girl who held the hand of so many nuns cannot accept the purgatory of Dr. Z.’s confusing nature and intentions.

One time Madame Z. went to Paris for several weeks. With a round-trip ticket of course, Simone observed bitterly. But in freedom, she and the doctor went for a weekend to London to look at pictures. It was not a happy time. Dr. Z. was always calling Paris to speak to his wife or calling his office to speak to the nurse. Telling them tremendous lies about a “conference.” Simone spent most of her time in London saying: It will soon be over and we will be back where we started.

Dearest darling, do not rush to future pain, the doctor said. But all went as she had predicted. Back once more, Simone could be seen several evenings a week at the window of her top floor, looking down on the street, waiting for the hurried approach of her lover. And late in the night when he was returning to his wife, Simone would open the shutters and wave a long goodbye to the swarthy, badly dressed, vivacious man, now turning a corner and fading from sight.

Dr. Z. was happy in his love pains. He adored to spend the evening in Simone’s studio, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, eating little chocolate cakes and sipping gin. He was honestly more and more in love and the genuineness of his feelings often caused Simone to burst into tears of anger.

Dr. Z. had studied the body and its workings and liked to say: We human beings are,
au fond
, put together quite simply. Yes, quite simply. The part that is complicated, even we as scientists are ignorant of that.

In matters of love he seemed to feel the same. His distressing trio caused him to be often fretful, sleepless, anxious, jealous, even drunken. But he also knew well the dejection of resignation and the torture of absence. So, tormented, accused, even guilty, there was still happiness to be found in reassuring the weeping nurse at the end of the day, in bringing home a
pâté
and cheese to his wife, in going down a dark canal on the arm of Simone and singing “In questa tomba oscura.” Somehow he could lend to the noble composition a heartfelt flirtatiousness.

During our year in Holland there was at last a movement of reclamation on the part of Simone. She broke off with the doctor and stayed in the house for weeks for fear of meeting him and once more surrendering to his passion for her. He whistled below the window, potted tulips arrived. Look at the colors! A late Mondrian, no? his note would say.

He called upon the help of European poetry:

Simone was assisted by an attack of depression and did not turn back. She hurt the doctor’s feelings by saying: I do not seem to care for anyone just now. Least of all myself.

The doctor’s wife and the nurse were affronted by Simone’s revolt. They accused her of triviality and shallowness, of heartlessness. The doctor’s suffering fell alike upon them, as if it were a contagion. His alarm, his loss, his humiliation were an insult to themselves. And perhaps the two women, so accustomed to his ways, sensed that the singularity of endings may slowly gather into a plural.