Searches & Seizures (22 page)

“Let me give you a little advice on that score. The arts. There are those who swear by diseases and the various social ills, but I’m not one of them. And of the arts I think the
performing
arts give you your best return. You get invited backstage.”

“I’ll have to look into it.”

“Look into it.”

And one of Mother’s friends wondered if marriage was in the offing. “Now you really
are
eligible, Brewster,” she said. “Oh, you were before, of course, but now you must certainly feel a bit of pressure to put your affairs in order and began to think about the next generation.”

It was a rude thing to say (though something like these had been almost Father’s last words to me), but the truth was I did feel it. Perhaps that was what my shameful lust had been about, nature’s way of pointing me to my duty. My search for myself seemed trivial child’s play now. Honor did subsist in doing right by the generations. I know what you’re thinking: Who’s this impostor, this namby with no will of his own? If he’s so rich, why ain’t he smart? Meaning glacial, indifferent, unconscious of the swath of world he cuts as the blade of what it leaves bleeding—the cosmos as rich man’s butter pat. Listen, disdain’s easy, a mug’s game, but look close at anything and you’ll break your heart.

I was inconsolable, grave at the graveside, beside myself like a fulfillment of Mother’s prophetic double vision.

“People lose parents,” a Securities and Exchange Commission cousin told me. (Yes, yes, it’s nothing, only nature bottoming out.) “Sons lose mothers,” he said, his gray hair trimmed that morning, wet looking. “Fathers die.”

“Don’t look,” I said wildly, “shut an eye. I am beside myself.”

I keened like a widow, a refugee from hardest times, a daughter with the Cossacks, a son chopped in the thresher. I would go about in black, I thought, and be superstitious. My features will thicken and no one will know how old I am.

“There, there,” he told me, “there, there.”

“There, there. There, there,” said this one and that.

My pals did not know what to make of me.

“My God, Ashenden,” one said, a roommate from boarding school, “have you seen the will? Is it awful?”

“I’ve been left everything,” I told him coolly.

He nudged me in the ribs. I would have called him out had I not been in mourning.

Only the sight of Mrs. Lucas saved me. The thought of that brave woman’s travail enabled me to control myself at last. I no longer wept openly and settled into a silent, stand-offish grimness, despair like an ingrown toenail on a man of fashion.

The weekends began.

All my adult life I have been a guest in other people’s houses, following the sun and seasons like a migratory bird, an instinct in me, the rich man’s cunning feel for ripeness, some oyster-in-an-r-month notion working there which knows without reference to anything outside itself when to pack the tennis racket, when to bring along the German field glasses to look at a friend’s birds, the telescope to stare at his stars, the wet suit to swim in beneath his waters when the exotic fish are running. It’s not in the
Times
when the black dinner jacket comes off and the white one goes on; it’s something surer, subtler, the delicate guidance system of the privileged, my playboy astronomy.

The weekends began, and the midweeks and week- and two-week stretches in the country. I was very grateful to my friends’ sense of what I needed then. Where I was welcome before, I was now actively pursued. My friends were marvelous, and not a mean motive between them. If I can’t say as much for myself.

In the luggage now with the bandboxes of equipment, the riding boots and golf clubs and hiker’s gear, was a lover’s wardrobe: shirts like the breasts of birds, custom ties that camouflaged themselves against their backgrounds or stood out like dye in the sea, ascots like bunting for the throat’s centennial, the handmade jackets and perfect trousers and tack room leathers. I dressed to kill, slay should I meet her, the mother of my children. (These were my mourning togs, mind.) And if I brought the best that could be had, it was not out of vanity but only respect for that phantom girl who would be so exquisite herself, so refined and blessed with taste that it would have been as dangerous for her to look at the undistinguished as for another to stare directly into the eclipse. So it was actually humility that made me dress as I did, simple self-effacement, the old knight’s old modesty, shyness so capitulative that prostration was only a kind of militant attention, a death-defying leap to the earth. And since I had never met her, nor knew her name, nor had a clue to where she might be, I traveled alone, for the first time taking along no guest of the guest. Which my friends put down to decency, the thirty- or sixty- or ninety-day celibacy of the orphaned. But it wasn’t that.

It was a strange period of my life. My friends, innocent of my intentions and honoring what they supposed to be my bereavement, omitted to invite any girls for me at all, and I found myself on this odd bachelor circuit, several times meeting the same male guest I had met at someone else’s house a few weeks before. We crossed each other’s paths like traveling salesmen with identical territories. And I rode and hunted and fished and stayed up all hours playing whist or backgammon or chess with my hosts or the other male guest, settled before fires with sherry and cognac, oddly domestic, as if what I owed the generations was a debt already paid, a trip in the time machine, keeping late hours in libraries until the odor of leather actually became offensive to me. On the few occasions I retired early it was at my host’s instructions. (I am an obedient guest.) The next morning there was to be an excursion in the four-wheel drive to investigate property he had acquired in backwoods forty miles off—a lodge, an abandoned watchtower, twice an old lighthouse. And always, nodding my approval if the purchase had been made or giving my judicious advice if it hadn’t, I had this sense that I’d had the night before in the library: that the property in question was
my
property, that I was already what I was dressed to become.

I was not bored; I was distraught.

A strange thing happened. It occurred to me that perhaps my old fastidiousness regarding the inviolability of a friend’s wife was wrong, morally wrong. Had not these women made overtures, dropped hints, left doors ajar so that returning to my room with a book I could see them in nightgowns beside bedlamps; hadn’t they smiled sweetly and raised arms? Perhaps I had been a prig, had placed too high a value on myself by insisting on the virginity of my intended. Perhaps it was my fate to figure in a divorce. I decided that henceforth I must not be so stand-offish with my friends’ wives.

So I stroked their knees beneath the whist table and put down their alarm to surprise. I begged off going on the excursions and stayed home with them when my friend and the other guest climbed into the jeep. I followed the wife all about the house and cornered her in stairwells and gardens.

“I’m no prig,” I told Nan Bridge, and clasped her breast and bit her ear.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, buster?” she shouted.

“Four months ago I would have called you out for that,” I told her lamely and left her house that afternoon and went to the next three days early, determined to be more careful.

I was staying with Courtney and Buffy Surface in Connecticut. Claiming a tennis elbow, I excused myself from the doubles early in the first set. Courtney and I were partners against Buffy and Oscar Bobrinage, the other houseguest. My plan was for Buffy to drop out and join me. I sat under a wide umbrella in the garden, and in a few minutes someone came up behind me. “Where does it hurt? I’ll rub it for you.”

“No thank you, Oscar.”

“No trouble, Brewster.”

“I’ve a heating pad from Chase Manhattan in my suitcase, Osc,” I told him dejectedly.

That night I was more obvious. I left the library and mentioned as casually as I could that I was going out for a bit of air. It has been my observation that the predisposition for encounter precedes encounter, that one must set oneself as one would a table. I never stroll the strand in moonlight except when I’m about the heart’s business, or cross bridges toward dawn unless I mean to save the suicides. There are natural laws, magnetism. A wish pulls fate.

I passed the gazebo and wondered about the colors of the flowers in the dark, the queer consolidation of noon’s bright pigment, yellow sunk in on yellow a thousand times as if struck ’ by gravity. I thought of popular songs, their tunes and words. I meant for once to do away with polite conversation should Buffy appear, to stun her with my need and force. (Of all my friends Buffy was the most royally aloof. She had maddening ways of turning aside any question or statement that was the least bit threatening.)

I heard the soft crunch of gravel. “Oscar?”

“No, it’s Buffy. Were you looking for Oscar?”

“I thought he might be looking for me.”

“
Voilà du joli,
” Buffy said. She knew the idioms of eleven modern languages.

I gazed into her eyes. “How are you and Courtney, Buffy?”

“
Mon dieu! ¿Qué pasa? Il est onze heures et demi,
” she said.

“Buffy, how are you and
Courtney?
”

“Courtney’s been off erythromycin five days now and General Parker says there’s no sign of redness. God bless wonder drugs.
Darauf kannst du Gift nehmen.
”

“Do you ever think of Madrid, Buffy?” Once, in a night club in Madrid on New Year’s Eve she had kissed me. It was before she and Courtney met, but my memory of such things is long lasting and profound. I never forget the blandest intimacy. “Do you?”

“Oh, Brewster, I have every hope that when Juan Carlos is restored the people will accept him.”

“Buffy, we kissed each other on New Year’s Eve in Madrid in 1966 before you ever heard of Courtney Surface.”

“
Autres temps, autres moeurs.
”

“I can’t accept that, Buff. Forgive me, dear, but when I left the game this morning you stayed behind to finish out the set
against
Courtney. Yes, and before that you were Oscar’s partner. Doesn’t this indicate to you a certain aberrant competitiveness between you and your husband?”

“Oh, but darling, we play for
money. Pisịca blândă pgarịe raŭ.
Didn’t you know that? We earn each other’s birthday presents. We’ve an agreement: we don’t buy a gift unless we win the money for it from the other fellow. I’ll tell you something,
entre nous.
I get ripped off because I throw games. I do. I take dives. I go into the tank.
Damit kannst du keinen Blumentopf verlieren.
Isn’t that
awful?
Aren’t I
terrible?
But that’s how Courtney got the money together to buy me Nancy’s Treehouse. Have you seen her? She’s the
most
marvelous beast. I was just going out to the stables to check on her when I ran into you. If you’d like to accompany me come along
lo más pronto posible.
”

“No.”

“
De gustibus.
”

“That’s
not
a modern language, Buffy.”

“People
grow,
darling.”

“Buffy, as your houseguest I
demand
that you listen to me. I am almost forty years old and I am one of the three or four dozen truly civilized men in the world and I have been left a fortune. A fortune! And though I have always had the use of the money, I have never till now had the control of it. Up to now I have been an adventurer. The adventures, God save me, were meant to teach me life. Danger builds strong bodies twelve ways, I thought. Action and respite have been the pattern of my existence, Buffy. Through shot and shell on hands and knees one day, and breakfast in bed at the Claridge the next. I have lived my life a fighter pilot, beefed up like a gladiator, like a stuffed goose, like a Thanksgiving turkey. I am this civilized…
thing.
Trained and skilled and good. I mean
good,
Buffy, a strict observer till night before last of every commandment there is. Plus an eleventh—honor thy world, I mean. I’ve done that. I’m versed in it, up to my ears in it as you are in idioms. I was an environmentalist a decade before it was an issue. When I first noticed the deer were scrawnier than they’d been when I was a boy and the water in the rivers where I swam no longer tasted like peaches.

“I’ve been a scholar of the world—oh, an amateur, I grant you, but a scholar just the same. I understand things. I know literature and math and science and art. I know
everything.
How paper is made, glass blown, marble carved, things about furniture, stuff about cheese. This isn’t a boast. With forty years to do it in and nothing to distract you like earning a living or raising a family, you can learn almost all there is
to
learn if you leave out the mystery and the ambiguity. If you omit the riddles and finesse the existential.

“No,
wait
! I’m perfectly aware that I’m barking up the wrong tree—do you have that idiom, my dear?—but looky, looky, I’m speaking my heart. I’m in mourning, Buff. Here’s how I do it. By changing my life. By taking this precious, solipsistic civilization of mine—Buffy, listen to me, dear;
it’s not enough that there are only three or four dozen truly civilized men in the world
—this precious civilization of mine and passing it on to sons, daughters, all I can get.”