In Search of Love and Beauty (3 page)

Natasha looked up at her in amazement: why should Louise be laughing at someone hungry and thirsty and in rap? “If it were Leo, you'd give him money,” Natasha reproached. “You'd take him home and cook for him and take him to bed.”

Louise's shoulders continued to shake. She opened her big purse, and Natasha was reassured. They crossed the street again. Louise thrust some coins on the man, but at the same time she showered him with homilies and reproaches which made Natasha anxiously pluck at her sleeve. But the man didn't seem to mind at all; on the contrary, he pursued them down the street with cries of gratitude and blessing, upsetting Natasha all over again because they were so undeserved.

If Natasha suffered in the streets, she suffered no less at home: and here again impotently, unable to do anything to help. She had always been used to hearing Louise fight with Leo. At one time—when Natasha was about six—Leo came to live with Louise. Terrible monster fights broke out continuously.
Natasha was the only other occupant of the apartment at the time—Marietta was in India, and it was one of those periods when Mark, who pretty much took charge of his own education, had checked himself into a boarding school. Natasha was often frightened by the violence of the scenes she overheard, even though the two protagonists took care to shush each other in her vicinity. They were less careful at night when they thought she was safely asleep. Then they gave full rein to their passions, and since both of them were large and had powerful voices, the effect was loud enough to raise the dead, let alone frail little Natasha sleeping across the hall from them. One night the row was so dreadful that she made herself overcome her fear and marched bravely to the door. She found it locked, so she rattled the handle and called for her grandmother inside. It took some time for her voice to penetrate and she had to reinforce it by drumming her fists on the door. Finally, a deadly hush fell inside. Then Louise called: “Sweetheart? Darling? Is that you?” in a quavering voice she tried to make normal.

She unlocked the door and looked out. Her hair was disheveled and wild. Behind her, Leo loomed in a white nightshirt, his hair on end like a bush in flames.

“Go to bed, little worm,” Louise coaxed in over-sweet tones. “Grandma is coming.” And from behind her, Leo also fluted: “Shall I come and tell you a story?”

Natasha said yes, so that they would stop fighting. Leo came and sat on the edge of her bed. Actually, he didn't like children, but he could, if he wanted to, tell wonderful stories. This one was about two princesses, a tiger, and a horse, in the course of which three generations grew up and several kingdoms were won and lost. It ended happily and with the following moral: “And just because they were angry with each other and fifty years passed during which they were not on speaking terms, do you think they could stop loving each other?” Natasha was too sleepy by this time to answer. She
also felt safe and snug in her bed, with Leo sitting on one side and Louise on the other. Louise held a bar of chocolate from which, during the course of Leo's story, she broke off pieces and popped them into Natasha's mouth, where they melted.

“How could it be?” Leo urged. “Even if one hundred years had passed, still they'd go on loving each other. Isn't that true?” he appealed to Natasha.

“Leave her alone, she's sleeping,” Louise said from the other side of the bed.

Leo said something to her that Natasha couldn't hear properly (maybe it was in German). It made Louise laugh—she laughed a lot during those days when Leo lived with them.

But afterward, when Leo moved out—packed up his things and left after one of their fights—then it was very difficult for Natasha to do anything for Louise except climb on her lap and put her arms around her neck and beg her not to cry. And Louise tried very hard not to; she unclasped Natasha's hands, she kissed them as though she wished to eat them—she pretended to eat them like a big bad wolf, and Natasha laughed and Louise laughed, even while tears continued to pour out of her eyes.

Once Natasha had had tall dreams for herself. She had wanted to be a doctor. But she couldn't do science subjects, so that had to be put aside. Then she wanted to be a nurse. Whoever knew Natasha couldn't help smiling at that dream, for she was the clumsiest person imaginable. “Oh, my Lord, those poor patients,” Mark said. He described what she would do to them, and it was true, she would. So that had to go too. Then her ambition became smaller. She wanted to do something humble but useful: useful to humanity, she thought at first, but afterward she reduced that to just wanting to be part of humanity, a tiny worker bee in its vast hive. So she took a succession of jobs—in a kindergarten, as a waitress
(this was especially disastrous), in an ice-cream parlor, a bookstore, a summer camp. She never lasted long anywhere; even those employers who liked her had, in the end, to let her go. Besides being clumsy, she was dreamy and absentminded; and though she tried hard, her physical stamina was not up to her mental resolution.

The final disaster had been a job in a camp for retarded children. The campers were not really children but adults, at least in age and size. Many of them were incontinent, some were violent, others epileptic: they needed care day and night and craved affection. This latter Natasha was eager to give, but she was incapable of giving much else. She was clumsy with them. When she had to change their soiled clothes, she tugged and pulled and had such difficulty that they became exasperated and she desperate. Sometimes they hit her, and she had to hide this from the camp managers. One young woman had such love for her that she wanted to sit constantly in her lap and, though grossly fat through ill-functioning glands, insisted on being carried by her. Once, when Natasha tried to pick her up and totter a few steps with her, they both fell, the girl on top, Natasha underneath. Screaming with shock and rage, the girl seized Natasha's head and banged it violently on the floor. Someone blew a whistle; the counselors and manager of the camp came running. Natasha was rescued, and the girl had to be tied to a bed. A day later another camper threw a pan of boiling water at Natasha, and though she jumped aside more smartly than was usual with her, it became evident that she had an irritating effect on the patients, so she lost that job and Mark had to come take her away.

It was then that Mark arranged with Leo to create a job for her at the Academy. Leo didn't like it, but he rarely said no to Mark. Natasha didn't like it either. “I don't believe in his work,” she said. But Mark guessed that this might act for rather than against his plan: if living at the Academy was the
most unattractive prospect she had, then very likely it would be the one that, after serious thought, she would choose for herself.

She didn't know that Leo had only agreed to take her on because Mark was secretly paying her salary. Leo never paid anyone unless he absolutely had to; and mostly he didn't have to, getting all the services he needed from the people who came to train with him. It was, in fact, considered part of the training; Leo didn't believe in spiritual without physical work, and participation in lectures, classes, and workshops automatically involved participation in the household and other chores connected with the running of the Academy.

Natasha's job, thought up by Mark, was to take charge of students' files. Perhaps she was the one person in the house who could be trusted not to divulge them, so Leo agreed to let her do this. She had to keep the old files in order and type up the new ones, and she didn't mind it because she found she could do it and didn't often get into a tangle. She also didn't mind living in the attic with the other female students. Usually new members of the Academy were installed in one of the comfortably furnished bedrooms on the second floor, until the arrival of other new members, when they had to move up into the attic or down into the laundry room with the rest of the working force. But Natasha was put into the attic right from the start.

The house, large, heavy, and dark, was physically oppressive to her, and she spent as much time as she could out on the grounds. These had been left tangled and wild, and Natasha wandered along the paths winding among trees and bushes with withered berries on them; or she sat in a little broken pavilion by a body of water that had dead lilies floating on it. She liked being here best of all when the sun set and sky and water brightened and everything else darkened.

No one took much notice of her. Even Stephanie, the girl
with whom she shared one of the cubicles into which the attic was divided, was hardly aware of her. It wasn't that Stephanie was a particularly selfish girl, but she was self-absorbed: well, they all were, that's what they had come to the Academy for. Self-centered here wasn't a bad word, it was an aim, an ideal. It meant self-development, progress, even creation, and it had to be worked at. And Stephanie did work at it, terribly hard. “I've got this big block in me to overcome,” she told Natasha. “A big huge block of wrong thinking and wrong living.” However, it wasn't so much her own fault as her mother's who, in addition to giving her insufficient love, had instilled in her her own wrong attitudes. At one time Stephanie had hated her mother—also her father (a very successful lawyer), though less so because he was just
weak;
but now she felt sorry for them for being all screwed up. When her mother phoned, from New Mexico where she was living with a younger man, a potter, Stephanie tried to be patient with her. “Why don't you grow up, Mother,” was now her only reproach. But she didn't spend much time thinking about her—not like in the past, when she had thought about her
all
the time—she couldn't, because of working so hard at thinking about herself.

Often at night, when they were alone together in their cubicle, she shared these thoughts with Natasha. Their bunk was against the wall, just under one of the round windows that lit up the attic at either end. On moonlit nights, Stephanie could be seen lying in the upper bunk, in her flimsy nightie, her hair spread over the pillow, one arm behind her head, and her eyes shining with tears of longing for self-improvement. And while Stephanie sighed and whispered her psychological secrets, there were similar sounds from all the other cubicles; and one could hear soft sounds of weeping too, for everyone was having a hard time with herself, that was why they were all there in the first place.

All, that is, except Natasha. She felt quite guilty at not
feeling guilty enough about herself: she who was worse than any of them! For they were all good at something, all were useful, and with what dexterity they cooked and cleaned and gardened and whatever other tasks Leo allotted to them. Whereas Natasha sometimes got even her files mixed up and had to call in Stephanie to help her out. And yet Natasha was the only one there who didn't sigh and confess at night but, on the contrary, lay down with a light and happy heart as if she had done a great day's work.

Marietta could never be persuaded to visit the Academy. It had been in existence now for seven years and the movement within it had grown and prospered, but Marietta hadn't been there even once. Yet she was very interested in all Mark's other ventures, knew all about his other properties, and dropped in at his office more often than he liked. But she didn't even want to hear about the Academy of Potential Development.

Leo himself issued many invitations to her—which she ignored as she did her best to ignore everything to do with him. But Leo had never given up. He loved it when people resisted him, nothing pleased him more. “It's like fishing,” he said—actually, he never fished at all, it would have bored him to death, as did every sport. “It's no fun unless the fish resists; unless it struggles—flaps and fights and wriggles for its life until—yupp! you've got it: up in the air where you want it, dangling there, with all your hook, line, and sinker inside it.” He tended to use this image for both his sexual and his spiritual conquests.

He and Marietta didn't meet very often, she saw to that. At most once a year—which was when, without fail, Leo came to Louise's birthday party. At one time these parties had been very elaborate, for Louise had had many friends in her youth and middle age; but as the years went by, fewer and fewer people remained, so nowadays the celebration was confined to the family: that is, Marietta, Mark, Natasha—and Leo. If
she happened to be around and was on speaking terms, Louise's friend Regi also sometimes joined them. But Leo, even in these latter days of his grandeur, never failed to show up, and without being reminded. Sometimes he and Natasha were the only guests—that was during the years when Marietta was going through her Indian phase, and Mark was off somewhere on some trip of his own. Then Leo felt very bored and soon fell asleep, leaving Louise and Natasha to entertain each other.

But when Marietta was there, Leo stayed awake. It was as though her antipathy to him acted as both goad and amusement. In earlier years, he tried to get her to attend his lectures and workshops; later, to visit the Academy. She always said “I'm not your type.” And he would say “Try me out,” and smirk knowingly around his cigar.

But, in fact, she
was
his type. He attracted many followers who were like Marietta; that is, successful, high-strung women with problems. And perhaps, if it hadn't been for their earlier relationship, she too might have turned to Leo in her (frequent) moments of crisis. Instead, she turned in various other directions. When her marriage failed, she started a fashion business, a line in sportswear, which became very successful; for, in spite of her erratic, high-flown nature, she turned out to be a first-class businesswoman—a talent perhaps inbred in her through her father's line of German-Jewish entrepreneurs, and in turn transmitted by her to Mark. But besides outward activity, she also needed intense inner fulfillment. Leo knew it, and was ready to supply it, as he did to so many others. Marietta looked elsewhere. Above all—in reaction to her mother, for she had seen where that led—she didn't want a lover. She had her son, and that was enough for her, she said:
her
fulfillment lay in Mark. She added Natasha to him. But still something was missing, and Leo pointed it out to her year after year at Louise's birthday party. And every time he did that, she turned from him in greater revulsion,
but every time also she became more restless. So it was perhaps no accident that it was only a few days after one of these birthday parties that she discovered Ahmed and with him India and the particular brand of fulfillment to be discovered there.