Three Short Novels (15 page)

The oval glass in the oak door of the Victorian house was etched so profusely with grapes and leaves and tendrils it served as an impenetrable silver mist that with utmost graciousness denied you a view of what went on inside. A lamp or a chandelier in some far room glinted off the entwined grapes and turned them gold, now one and now another, a matter of how you shifted your feet or your eyes.

Claud had ridiculed the host on the way over, but now at the last moment the desire to be presentable forced him to comb down his hair, tossed by the wind. He wore a sportcoat with only one button missing and each pocket held a pack of cigarettes to protect him from his perverse need to smoke the couple's. Ilona had refused at first to come along. She had come only because the couple's curiosity about the man who was her lover stirred her own curiosity about something she wanted not to think about at all—a premonition of loss.

Grasping Claud's arm, shaking Ilona's right hand with his left, the host drew them inside, the three awkwardly linked. The host's jeans were faded, his hiking boots were grayed by rough use, and the most humble garment of all was his gauzy shirt from India. In those years, the early seventies, some affluent young were imitating the poor of the world. The shirt, however, failed to lessen his chest's prosperity. It was as obdurate as all other wealthy chests, narrow or broad, that she'd slipped by or asked something of, a job or simple directions, or brought something to, a tray of whatever was ordered.

Beyond the wide doorway to the dining room, the several persons lounging around the long table were like actors on a stage, made small by their surroundings and each striving to be seen and heard. Except one, who had no need to strive—the one among the women who was beautiful, and Ilona knew at once that the woman was the wife of the man who was guiding Claud and herself toward the table and knew that she was the eventual one, the one who takes away the
lover, the one who is a reward in a time of rewards, and she wished for herself a time when presentiment of loss would never bother her because she would be wise enough to know that loss was as natural as breathing.

Ilona, seated across from the woman, looked instead at the couple's son, close to three years old, who sat elevated by cushions next to his mother, turning his gaze from one face to another, bending over his plate to see who was speaking at the end of the table, to see who was laughing. The little boy bore his resemblance to his mother like a gift whose value he knew about. His eyes, like his mother's, seemed balanced by serenity, by the trust that all he was to desire of life would be granted, and Ilona called upon reason to rescue her from her archaic view of the world that saw it divided between those who appeared to be blessed and those who appeared to be forsaken, and reason failed. She tried then to imagine at this table a great writer of the past, say a century ago, someone who had observed compassionately women who went unnoticed, but if that figure, whoever he was, were really to be at this table, absorbed again in life, his gaze would be on the beautiful wife, amazingly like a woman who had enthralled him a hundred years ago.

The host at the head of the table was accusing his guests of envy, envy of the man somewhere up in the air. “Severe envy. It's worse than hepatitis. More people die of it. Nausea, insomnia. But the worst symptom is impotence.”

“You know that for a fact?” someone asked, and someone else laughed.

“Impotence,” the host repeated. “Of the mind. Of the hand that holds your very own little pen. Look at Claud. Claud hasn't written one word in ten years and he'd like you to think he couldn't care less, he's through. But look. Overnight his hair's turned white and the whites of his eyes have turned green. Claud, let everybody see your eyes.”

Claud was smiling, smoking a cigarette of his own. His hair was as dark as ever and his eyes as clear as they ever were. “If I'm dying it's not from envy. It's from what that Frenchman, Péguy, said—You die of your whole life. Not just one shock.”

The host brought up a Time from under his chair, already open to the photograph of the absent guest of honor, and held up the magazine for all to see. Ilona had read the review weeks ago and the other guests must also have read it then, but everybody complyingly raised their eyes. Except the wife, who was placing tidbits from her own plate onto her son's plate, while the child gazed up anxiously at the picture, afraid of missing something so important to his father.

“One of those faces that haven't been lived in yet,” the host said. “He's thirty-four and he looks nineteen and he'll look nineteen when he's ninety, God help him.”

“I think . . .” A girl, afraid to contest with the host, appeared to be talking to her plate. “I think he deserves all the praise he's been getting.”

Down came the magazine, down beside his plate, and his hand came down flat on the small picture. “I agree, I agree. That's why I've called you all together. To sing his praises. We'll practice every night, we'll gather here every night, and the night he walks in the door a heavenly choir shall greet him.”

Like falsely obedient children who've bested a parent they took up their forks and wineglasses again, complacently silent. When the array of delicatessen delights on each plate was one or two bites less, the chatter began again—nothing about the novel itself but everything about those persons who were welcoming Martin Vandersen into the world: critics, and the movie producer who had bought the screen rights to the novel, and the director at whose villa on the Costa del Sol Martin had been a guest, and the actor who was sought for the lead. “Sought,” cried the host, staring wildly upward. “One lousy actor sought like in ‘they sought God,' like in ‘they sought justice.'” But
though they pleasurably interrupted one another with details about the lives of those legendary persons who were surrounding Martin at this birth, they appeared to be baffled over why they were so affected by somebody else's recognition, somebody else's entry into the light. She saw the bafflement in their eyes and heard it in their voices.

Out in the living room the host sat down at Ilona's feet, took off his boots, and attempted the lotus position. Apart from them, the others were talking loudly and his wife was upstairs, putting the child to bed.

“She had a lover in Italy last year,” he said, low. “A good man. A fine sculptor. American, living in Florence. We would have been great friends if he hadn't been her lover. Your Martin reminds me of him. I met Martin a couple of days before he left, ran into him and Claud, and his resemblance to her last year's lover was remarkable. The looks, the wit.” His glance slipped sideways on its way up to her face. “What's he like? I mean when you get to know him.”

Bearing a tray of decanters and goblets, his wife came into the room, and the question seemed asked for her. They would have to answer the question themselves, each with a secret answer.

The man at her feet rocked back and forth, gripping his ankles. “How long have you known him?”

“Oh, four years.” The number of years for lovers was supposed to mean something, a measurement of depth or truth, but numbers were revelations only for scientists. The things she knew about the lovers she'd never tell this man, and one was that love was never certain—who but herself thought it could be?—but that under the uncertainty of love lay the certainty of comradeness. What else wouldn't she tell? That when Martin had reminded her a time was to come when he would be elsewhere, she had listened reasonably and amenably, but they had pained her, those reminders, and once, afraid that if their time together was without love it was a wasted time, she had gone so far as to quote Camus. “You enrich the future by giving all to the
present.” Because she disparaged her own words, because her own words lacked persuasion, she relied on time-honored words. After that heavy-laden quote he did give up his warnings and reminders, perhaps believing that she already knew about endings and about elsewhere. But he was not persuaded to give all to the present.

Massaging his calves as though easing a cramp, the host asked, “Ah, you live together?”

“Yes, we live together.” Her answer appeared to soothe him, he seemed to accept it as assurance that they would continue to live together and his wife and himself also continue to live together, with no outside interference. “Though sometimes we lived apart.”

The man at her feet knew very little, probably, about makeshift dwellings that weren't your own and that convinced you of a destiny to be always without possessions and never even to desire them. So he might be unable to see that the way they lived together was another bond that made them kindred even apart. Six weeks ago, when Martin was in Spain or somewhere in Europe, the house across the bay, in the little town at the foot of the mountain, the house where they had lived together with her child, was sold, and she had found a small apartment in the city, hoping that when Martin returned they would find a larger one together.

“Claud tells me Martin used to live in a basement out by the ocean. Claud says the house was riddled with termites and their eggs or turds rained down on your friend's manuscripts. He said that in the flat upstairs the fleas were like a living carpet and when Martin went up there once to use the phone the fleas were all over him as soon as he stepped inside. He turned and ran.”

Any creature, she thought, a flea, a fly, no matter how microscopically small, that's on or near a person who's become famous, joins in the celebration.

“Claud says Martin had only two plates and he put the cooking pot on the table. Claud says he kept his manuscripts in a grocery
box and a mouse made herself a nest in there and gave birth, and he didn't know it and kept piling up the pages.” A pause. “Was it deliberate? I mean, was it a show of poverty, like ‘See, I was poor and now I deserve the rewards'?”

“It's what's called necessary poverty,” she said. If it was an attempt at saintly asceticism so that when recognition came along nobody would want to deny him its rewards, she didn't want to know about it. She didn't want to know his superstitions, just as she didn't want to know her own. Superstitions, like clues to dark confusions, were too much to know about anyone and yourself.

“Claud says they've torn down the house and put up a motel. Too bad. What they should have done—the city, I mean, or the state, or even the federal government—was buy the house, restore it, and put up a bronze plaque that says Martin Vandersen lived here, and the dates. If they'd only known. And turn the basement into a museum. The pot and the two plates on the table, a stuffed mouse in the manuscripts, the bed made, the covers turned back like he's away on a journey but he's coming home any day now. You've seen pictures of Tolstoy's study? Everything just where it was when the great man died.”

If Martin were present, and if she were to take him aside and point out to him this man's fear of him, this ridicule in the guise of praise, then Martin, who wanted never to suspect anybody, would say What's there to fear about me?

Over across the blue Persian carpet the wife was pouring brandy, and Ilona saw again how each particular of beauty, the beauty of any person, of any object, of anything on earth or in the heavens, leads you on, mesmerized, to all particulars, and she saw again how a woman's beauty seems to pardon that woman in advance for any betrayal, any transgression, for grief brought to others.

“If he's got no place to go,” the man at her feet was saying, “he can stay with us until he finds a place. Plenty of room here,” pointing
heavenward. “Come on, I'll show you,” leaping up, leaving his boots behind.

Climbing the stairs at his side, she saw how eager his feet in socks appeared, eager to run and prepare the way for an invasion of his privacy by the man up in the night sky.

On the middle floor they passed the half-open door of the master bedroom and she kept herself from glancing in. She might glance in on her way down. When you were on your way down you were already on your way out, like a trespasser discovered in the upper regions.

Gently he pushed the door to the boy's room a bit more open, motioning for her to step just inside and no farther. The child in the large bed, the lamp with its rosy shade, the shadows—it was like a very large oil painting with somebody in it preciously small.

“Does he resemble me?”

She had seen no resemblance at the table. It was as if the mother and the child had requested the artist to leave the father out of the picture.

“He isn't mine, you know.” A pause. “You know about it? His father was Joseph Neely, the poet. They'd run away. He died of a heart attack in Greece, on one of those idyllic islands. She was in a terrible state. Grief, you know, and pregnant, and I went there. We cried together. My God, we held each other and cried for a whole day and a night.” His hoarse whisper, his feet in socks—he was like a trespasser himself.

Up another flight, the last staircase uncarpeted, and the room they entered at the back of this floor contained only a narrow bed, a straight-back chair, a small table. No rug, no shade over the ceiling globe.

“If he lived that way in his basement he'll like this room the way it is. We haven't got to it yet. We'll find him some termites if they'll make him feel at home.”

Was he expecting the guest to stay forever? Years later, when one evening she was passing through this neighborhood, the house that she did not want to identify for certain in the row of stolid and stately houses caught her eye and roused again the emotions of that time of loss. The host's fear of this guest who would stay on and on had been realized. The house had become the guest's, though the guest wasn't there anymore and hadn't stayed long at all, and the couple and the child weren't there anymore, and the house belonged to somebody else.