Winter of artifice; three novelettes (6 page)

In the taxi she lay low on the seat so that Bruno could not see her as they passed Madison Avenue.

Phihp was in a state of anxiety over her lateness.

She wanted to say: you are not the one who should be anxiousl It is you I came back tol I struggled to get to you. But I'm here. And Bruno it is who is standing outside, waiting in the cold.

One day Phihp asked her to wait for him in his apartment because his train had been delayed. (Before that he had always come to her.) For the first time he wanted to find her there, in his own home.

She had never entered his bedroom.

It was the first time she stepped out of the ambience he created

for her by his words, stories, actions. The missing dimensions of Philip she knew must exist but he had known how to keep them invisible.

And now late at night, out of idleness, out of restlessness, fumbling very much like a blind person left for the first time to himself, she began to caress the objects he hved with, at first with a tenderness, because they were his, because she still expected them to emit a melody for her, to open up with playful surprises, to yield to her finger an immediate proof of love. But none of them emitted any sound resembling him ... And slowly her fingers grew less caressing, grew awkward. Her fingers recognized objects made for or given by women. Her fingers recognized the hairpins of the wife, the powder box of the wife, the books with dedications by women, the photographs of women. The fingerprints on every object were women's fingerprints.

Then in the bedroom she stared at his dressing table. She stared at an immaculate and "familiar" set of silver toilet articles. It was not that Philip had a wife, and mistresses, and belonged to the public which awakened her. It was the silver toilet set on the dressing table, a replica of the aristocratic one which had charmed her childhood. Equally polished, equally symmetrically arranged. She was certain that if she hfted the hair brush it would be fragrant. Of course, it was fragrant.

The silver toilet set of her father had reappeared. And then of course, it made the analogy more possible. Everything else was there too — the wife, and the public, and the mistresses.

Her father receiving applause and the flowers of all women's tribute, the flowers of their femininity with the fern gamishings of multicolored hair given prodigally to the stage figures —the illusion

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needed for desire already artificially prepared for those too lazy to prepare their own. (In the love we have for those who are not on the stage the illusion has to be created by the love. The people who fall in love with the performers are like those who faU in love with magicians; they are the ones who cannot create the illusion or magic with the love — the mise-en-scene, the producer, the music, the role, which surrounds the personage with all that desire requires.)

In this love Phihp will receive bouquets from women, and Stella will find again the famifiar pain her father had given her, which she didn't want.

Because they had touched the ring around the planet of love, the outer ring of desire, had taken graceful leaps across visitless weeks, she had believed these to be marvelous demonstrations of their agility to escape the prisons of deep love's pains.

There were days when she felt: the core of this drama of mine is that at an early age I lost the element of joy. (In childhood we glimpse paradise, its possibihty, we exist in it.) At what moment was it lost and replaced by anguish? Could she remember?

Standing before the silver brushes, combs and boxes on Phihp's dressing table she remembered that just as other people watch the sun and rain for barometers to their moods, she had run every day to watch these silver objects. When her father was in stormy periods and ready to leave the house, they were disarranged and clouded. When he was in full bloom of success, harmony and pleasure they were symmetrically placed, and highly poUshed. The initials shone with exquisite iridescence. And on days of great discord and tragedy they disappeared altogether and were placed in their niches in his vahse. So she consulted them hke the barometers of her emotional cUmate.

When he left the house altogether it seemed as if none of the objects that remained possessed this power to gleam, to shed a brilliance. It was a transition from phosphorescence to continuous greyness.

It was when he left that her life changed color. Because he took

only the pleasure, he also shed this pleasure around him. When she was thrust out of this effulgence and away from the gleam of beautiful objects, she was thrust into sadness. How could joy have vanished with the father?

A person could walk away without carrying everything away with him. He might have left a little casket from which she could draw joy at will! He could have left the silver toilet set. But no, he took everything away with him because he took away the faith, her faith in love, and left her the prey of doubts and fears.

Human beings have a million little doorways of communication. When they feel threatened they close them, barricade themselves. Stella closed them all. Suffocation set in. Asphyxiation of the feelings.

She appeared in a new story on the screen. Her face was immobile like a mask. It was not Stella. It was the outer shell of Stella.

People sent her enormous bouquets of rare flowers. Continued to send them. She signed the receipts, she even signed notes of thanks. Flowers for the dead, she miu-mured. With only a httle wire, and a round frame, they would do as well.

Winler of Artifice

She is waiting for him. She was waiting for him for twenty years. Mc is coming today.

This glass bowl with the glass fish and the glass ship—it has been the sea for her and the ship which carried her away from him after he had abandoned her. Why has she loved ships so deeply, why has she always wanted to sail away from this world? Why has she always dreamed of flight, of departure?

Today this past from which she has struggled so long to escape strikes her like a whip. But today she can bear the lash of it because he is coming and she knows that the circle of empty waiting will close.

How well she remembers their home near the sea, the villa which was in ruins. She was nine years old. She arrived there with her mother and two brothers. Her father was standing behind a window, watching. His face was pale, he did not seem glad to see them. She felt that he did not want them, that he did not want her. His anger seemed to be directed against all of them, but it touched her more acutely, as if it were directed entirely against her. They were not wanted, why she did not understand. Her mother said to him: It will be good for your daughter here. There was no smile on his face. He did not seem to notice that she was wasted by fever, that she was hungry for a smile.

There was never a smile on his face ex'cept when there were visitors, except when there was music and talk. When they were alone in the house there was always war: great explosions of anger, hatred, revolt. War. War at meals, war

over their heads when her brothers and she were left in bed at night, war in the room under their feet when they were playing. War. War. . . .

In the closed study, or in the parlor, there was always a mysterious activity. Music, rehearsals, visitors, laughter. She saw her father in movement, always alert, tense, either passionately gay or passionately angry. When the door opened her father appeared, luminous, incandescent. A vital passage, even when he passed from one room to another. A gust of wind. A mystery. Not a reality like her mother with her healthy red checks, her appetite, her frank natural laughter.

Never any serenity, never any time for caresses, for softness. Tension always. A life ripped by dissension. Even while they were playing the dark fury of their perpetual warring hung over them like threats and curses and recriminations. Never a moment of complete joy. Aware always of the battles that were about to explode.

One day there was a scene of such violence that she was terrified. An immense, irrational terror overwhelmed her. Her mother was goading her father to such anger that she thought he would kill her. Her father's face was blue-white. She began to scream. She screamed until they became alarmed. For a few days there was an interval of quiet. A truce. A pretense of peace.

The walls of her father's library were covered with books. Often she stole into the library and she read the books which she found there, books which she did not understand. Within her there was a well of secret thoughts which she could not express, which perhaps she might have formulated if someone had leaned over them with tenderness. The one person who might have aided her terrified her. Her father's eyes were always cold, critical, unbelieving. He would not believe the

drawings she showed him were hers. He thought she had traced them. He did not beheve that she had written the poems that were handed to him. He thought she had copied them. He flew into a rage because he could not find the books from which he had imagined she had copied her poems and drawings.

He doubted everything about her, even her illnesses. In the train once, going to Berlin where he was to give a concert, she had such an earache that she began to weep. If you don't stop crying and go to sleep, he said, I'll beat you. She stuffed her head under the pillow so that he would not hear her sobs. She sobbed all the way to Berlin. When they got there they discovered that she had an abscess in her ear.

Another time he was taken down with an attack of appendicitis. Her mother was tending him, fussing over him, running about anxiously. He lay there very pale in the big bed. She came from the street where she had been playing and told her mother that she was in pain. Immediately her father said: Don't pay any attention to her, she is just acting. She is just imitating me. But she did have an attack of appendicitis. She had to be taken to the hospital and operated on. Her father, on the other hand, had recovered. He was in bed only three days.

Such cruelty! She asked herself,—was he really cruel, or was it mere selfishness? Was he just a big child who could not bear to have a rival, even in the person of his own daughter? She did not know. She was waiting for him now. She wanted to tell him everything. She wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted to hear him say that he loved her. She did not know why she loved him so much. She could not believe that he meant to be so cruel. She loved him.

Because he was so critical, so severe, so suspicious of her, she became secretive and lying. She would never say what she 58

really thought. She was afraid of him. She lied like an Arab. She lied to elude his stern glances, his cold, menacing blue eyes. She invented another world, a world of make-believe, of illusion, of games, of comedies. She tyrannized over her two brothers, she taught them games, she amused them, acted for them, enchanted them. She was a spitfire and they loved her. They never deserted her, even for a moment. They were simple, honest, frank. She complicated everything, even the games they played.

In Berlin, when she was five years old, she ran away. There was a seven-year-old boy waiting for her around the corner. His name was Heinrich.

She was a pale and sickly child. The doctor in Berlin had said: She must live in her native climate. Take her back. But there was no money for that. Her youngest brother had just been born. There was no money in the house, except for books and music, for a fur-lined coat, for the cologne water which her father had to sprinkle over his handkerchiefs, for the silk shirts which he demanded when he went on his concert tours.

At the villa near the sea she lay in bed and wept all night without knowing why. But there was a garden attached to the villa. A beautiful garden in which one could get lost. She sat by the big Gothic window studded with colored stones and looked out through a prismatic-colored stone in the center of the window; she sat there for hours at a stretch gazing upon this mysterious other world. Colors. Deformations. Trees that are rubv-colored. Orange skies. She felt that there were other worlds, that one might escape from this one which was so full of misery. She thought a great deal about this other world.

About her father there was an aureole of fragrance, of immaculatcncss, of elegance. His clothes were never wrinkled, he wore clean linen every day and the fur collar on his coat 59