Sleepless Nights (13 page)

Love affairs with their energy and hope do not arrive again and again, forever. So, you no longer play tennis, no longer move from place to place in the summer, no longer understand what use you can make of the sight of the Andes or the columns of Luxor.

It gradually became clear that Simone would not be replaced. Poor Dr. Z. with his infidelities and agreeable lies, his new acquisitions and engaging disruptions: they vanished suddenly but so quietly and naturally he was the last to know.

Wasn’t it said about Queen Elizabeth that old age took her by surprise, like a frost?

In a few years the nurse went home to retire, to look after her old mother in the country. Simone died. It turned out that she had done more than a dozen portraits of Dr. Z. and one sold to an American museum for a fair price. In it, Dr. Z. is seen in a white jacket and there are instruments of his profession about him. On the wall, not one, but three stylized skeletons are dangling from hooks.

1973

The doctor and his wife are in New York for a conference. I go to meet them at a shabby, depressing hotel in the West 70’s where Europeans who are not rich often stay.

They were like two woolen dolls and I could not decide whether the Frenchwoman had grown to the size of the Dutchman or whether he had, with a courteous condescension, simply inclined downward to the size of his little French wife. She was still wearing her black beret, and her fingernails shone with a wine-colored polish. She spoke in tongues: Dutch, German, French, and English, as if choosing cakes from a tray.

Dr. Z. met a mild New York winter day clothed in Siberian layers. He was wearing a heavy black overcoat, a woolen vest, a dark-gray sweater, and when he sat down in the waiting room off the lobby gray winter underwear appeared above his socks.

He talked, he told the Amsterdam gossip, he spoke of his work, of the fearful cost of things, of hippies in Vondel Park.

Madame Z. smoked cigarettes and coughed. They were studying the map of the city, looking for subway and bus lines. The outstanding difficulties of thrift in New York bewildered them, and they sat there as if pulled down into the mud of a dismaying displacement, the confusion that afflicts unfashionable, elderly foreigners when they visit America. They who had been everywhere, from Jakarta to Tokyo to India and every country in Europe.

Dr. Z. smiled and bowed and dashed about looking for chairs and a quiet corner. In fact he seemed to be groping in the New York air for the supports of his life in Amsterdam, for his weathered little house on the Amstel, with his office on the first floor, and the rooms above with the old patterned carpets, the comfort of the hideous abstractions given by patients, abstractions which covered the walls next to the stairs like so many colored water spots left over from an old leak.

Where is my life? he seemed to be saying. My plates of pickled mussels, the slices of cheese, the tumblers of lemon gin?

Still, importance flickered in his eyes—his olive eyes still shining with the oil of remembered vanity and threatening to water with the tears of all he had learned and forgotten in his long life.

We in Holland were the first to do certain important blood studies, he said. I no longer have my laboratory at the hospital but I keep up with the developments in my field. How can one not? A life’s work.

We in Holland
kept appearing in his conversation. The vastness of the skies they had flown over and the large abyss into which they had fallen on the ground made him call forth his country like an ambassador, one who stands for the whole.

You remember that he was well known there, his wife said without any special inflection. Oh, I know, I know. I remember well the well-known Dr. Z.

Enough of that, he said. Edam cheese is better known than any Dutchman. That it is well to recall, also.

As it got to be near six o’clock I asked if they wanted to go to a nearby Irish saloon for a drink. The doctor drew back with a frightened look, but his wife took up the suggestion vehemently. Indeed yes she would like a drink she said with a peculiar insistence and defiance.

We sat in a dark booth and Madame Z. ordered a martini. An American martini, she said twice. The doctor crumpled and sagged over a beer, a Heineken. Supporting home industries, his wife said.

Suddenly in the gloom, Madame Z. began her lilting harangue, all of it pouring forth with a fearful energy. She did not use to talk very much, the doctor said, attempting a smile. See the unbeckoned, unpredicted changes of age, the sky full of falling stars!

It was clear that the recitation was not new and that in the midst of it she could pause only to order another drink.

I have always hated Holland. I am not Dutch. I am French, born in Paris.

There are many Frenchmen, the doctor interrupted. It is not what I would call a special distinction in itself.

She went on. There are many Dutchmen too and all alike. The men and the women. The provincialism. Can you imagine a country proud of skinny Indonesians, dark and slow and surly primitives, serving in red coats?
Rijsttafel
—a joke. Nuts and raisins and bananas. I would rather have herring, if the choice must be made... And it must be made or starve... But the worst thing is the ugliness of the people. Who can tell the men and the women apart in their rotten mackintoshes, their rubber-soled shoes... Look at the Queen—a joke. And old Wilhelmina in her tweeds like a buffalo... And the weather, steaming like hell in the summer and drizzling sleet the rest of the year.
Drizzling
, is that English?... What is going on in Amsterdam, tell me? Someone playing the organ in a church. They think they are masters of culture when they speak French, but if you want to write something you write it in Dutch, which no one reads. And why should they? Even the Poles are better off. Warsaw is a real city, not a puppet-show setting like Amsterdam.

Her black, black hair, her tiny little black feet, her wine-colored fingers heavy with red and green semi-precious stones set in gold. She was like an old glazed vessel, veined and cracked, but nevertheless in one piece.

The doctor trembled. This is not what you would call a discussion, he said.

And turning aside he made an effort to change the awful flow. I am not a patriot, he said, still couldn’t I claim that the Dutch are a civilized people? A bit tiresome about the loss of Indonesia and all that, perhaps, but...

Indonesia! she shrieked and the bartender shrugged. How all of you used to complain when you had to go out there to lecture, to advise as you called it. To visit the rich men on their plantations. Little cries all night about the bugs and the humidity. The suffering sweat of the lordly Dutchman. Imagine Holland with colonies. Have you ever seen the so-called city of Paramaribo? It’s a scandal, a joke.

Madame Z. tottered to her feet, exhausted. The doctor took her arm and gave a sigh as deep as death itself. Out on the street in the cold wind he supported his tiny little wife who could not stand alone. She dangled on his arm like a black shopping bag. For the moment she was quiet and he attempted a lighthearted manner, a whispered addition.

As you can see, she has taken to drink in a disastrous fashion. A sigh and then he bowed with something of his old sheikishness, drawing me into his memories.

It’s all those love affairs, especially the darling Simone. They don’t forgive you after all. They have their revenge.

It seemed to soothe the doctor to try to take the blame, as if even the revenge brought him back to his younger days. It was not clear whether he believed what he was saying. The ruefulness of his smile.

As we neared the hotel he said bitterly. It is only eight o’clock. But what can we do except go to bed without dinner? She will sleep it off and not remember a thing, the way they do. So mysterious. Yes, she must go to bed.

Bed! Madame Z. cried out, calling upon her last breath. They are all terrible lovers. Frauds, everyone of them. Fiascoes!

They passed into the brown and gray lobby, old companions sad but not quite miserable. They are waving goodbye. He is bowing and she is now winking and smiling.

She has hit the doctor like the Spanish Fury, but fortunately he is accustomed to the wind from the North Sea. Her hat askew and a strand of hair slanted down her cheek, Madame Z. of Paris had at last become Dutch, needing only a few strewn oyster shells and a ragged dog to bring to mind those tippling, pipe-smoking women in the paintings of the seventeenth century, creatures of the common life the Dutch bourgeoisie were pleased to commission and purchase.

S
OME HAVE
been here in this house in New York, have been here mopping, cleaning greasy stoves, putting in their hours, their weeks. One was in another city, in Boston; one up in Maine, living through winter after winter, a decade falling like snow on the top of another, soundless.

When I think of cleaning women with unfair diseases I think of you, Josette. When I must iron or use a heavy pot for cooking, I think of you, Ida. When I think of deafness, heart disease, and languages I cannot speak, I think of you, Angela. Great washtubs full of sheets remind me of more than one.

I came up here to Maine in service long ago, Ida said. I came as a girl, with the family, to the summer house. They kept saying how beautiful Maine was and one summer I just stayed... Words of a rough and peculiar laundress.

The passion for the seamless collar under the iron, for the grating of the vacuum cleaner, the shine of wax on the floor, water forced out of dirty mops, beds tight as a bandage. The energy of the lustful movements, whiteness of towels, scoured garbage pails. Ferocious battles with repetition, with the sloth of others, the crumbs and dust, the gathering of ashes, the adhesion of eggs, burnt pans and blackened ovens. At some point in the day, finally things in place, for a moment.

Intolerable beatitude in the rhythm of slaves and behind the passions: necessity, disguise, habit, will.

I am thinking of Josette and Ida, remembering them here in my study in New York where the moths will soon arrive, the lipstick stain on the white door will never be washed away, the lost garnet pin will not turn up, nor will the windows ever be free of exhaust streaks from old trucks, and the faucet will never cease to drip its grassy-green trail.

Heroines, turning their key in the lock of the door in the morning, arriving like a wanted medicine or even some entrance of perfect happiness. Josette, in Boston, long ago. The blessing of her white nylon uniform, her heavy rubber-soled shoes, the benign flash of gray false teeth, the crown of stiff gray hair cut in a plain bob, the grayish-brown skin cool as steel. Beauty formed out of negatives. She raced up and down the steep stairs of Marlborough Street, and the stairs of other old town houses, malignant ascensions and descensions of space and privilege, punishing the legs, the heart, and the disposition for the glory of dining rooms with twelve chairs spaced around the wall, for the large rectangles of parlors, one at the front, one at the back.

Rilke imagined that a tin lid had no other desire than to rest evenly and firmly upon its proper can. The old lights of Rand Avenue in summer, the playground, the band concerts, lids and cans trying to fit. And if they fit, or seem to do so, early in life, most of those older shudder a bit.

Josette, childless, had a husband she had met in high school—Michael. Their toil began, no doubt from the moment they met and saw their lives streaming out from the meeting. First love—all is given for eternity, and these two, loyal and fearful, had about them a mystery, the mystery of orphans. Michael was painfully uncertain and yet trusting. Together they shared a humbleness and courtesy made up of poverty and thrift, of neatness and diffidence. Both grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts; both were from French-Canadian families who had come down to work in the factories.

Boston: an intermission. Many things happen between the acts. Everything has come to me and been taken from me because of moving from place to place. Anyway, it was some time there in the beautiful city, the city filled with names.

Connais-tu le pays?
Yes, everyone knows Boston, even I. How is the Mister this morning? Josette would say. The Mister? Shall I turn his devastated brown hair to red, which few have? Appalling disarray of trouser and jacket and feet stuffed into stretched socks. Kindly smile, showing short teeth like his mother’s.

Dearest M.: You asked me about his life in Boston. It is odd that, since this is his city, we do not seem quite to belong here. Of course I am like an Eskimo sent to a circus, dressed in whale grease. But he? Thirty-six is neither young enough nor old enough for certain places, but perhaps in the end this city will interest him as it did when he was young. Now, a lot of people seem to think he’s an anarchist (they strive to be a little out-of-date) and he does often have the preoccupied look of a secret agent. Just as always he reads and writes all day, here in this house on the top floor, drinks quarts of milk, smokes cigarettes. He hates for me to play my jazz records, but sometimes I do late at night and then he dances around, off the beat, like a bear.

His health? All right. There is an absurd little midget of a doctor here, a psychiatrist, sweet as a chaplain, very conventional and timid, accustomed to treating and advising wellborn Boston women who have stayed too long at home and young men not doing very well at the State Street Trust. He does not in this case seem to know the difference.

What distresses the doctor, makes him look at his watch, are long “free associations” about Goethe. Is he a family connection? the little doctor asked. Well, that’s not a scandal, I guess, since the man got out of school almost a century after the Brahmin Germanism.

How long ago was it, Josette? Twenty years. I will remember a type, not unexpected. An old lady, tall and thin, looking exactly as she should, being an old Boston lady who is a
character
.

Age and her very long legs had given her the horse aspect. She, true to image, gave tiresome tea parties on a Sunday afternoon and invited to them dull students from client states, from Taiwan and Korea. The students’ yellow faces and stiff hair slipped into the gloom of her dusty mansion near the Athenaeum. The old lady knew a little, but not much, as it would be because she had always had money and no profession and so her mind swoops and darts and flies away.