Shakespeare's Kitchen (25 page)

After a moment, Jenny said, “Well, we know that.”

“You do? No, you don’t! Leslie and I were excruciatingly careful . . . How could you know?”

“The way one knows things. And Eliza told us.”

“She didn’t. She couldn’t, Jenny, she didn’t know until a moment ago. She found a letter that got into a file in Leslie’s office. I know she didn’t know—Jenny, it was her suggestion that Leslie and I travel in Greece together. What makes you think she knew?”

“Well, she didn’t know, and yet one night—this is a couple of years back, when she had a lot to drink and was beating up on Leslie, she said ‘You’re betraying me with an outlander.’”

“With an—oh, I see. I see. What did Leslie say?”

“Leslie said, ‘Dear, here is your coat. Say good-bye to Alpha. Say good-bye to Alfred.’ Speaking of Alfred, last week, before Eliza stopped talking to us, we had her to dinner with the Stones and Eliza told Alfred when she saw him coming up the street she put her hands out in front of her so as not to run into his glass wall.”

“The Stones! Do they . . . does everybody know!”

“Maybe,” said Jenny.

“Jenny, go and see if Eliza is O.K.”

“She’s not going to let me in. But I’ll go right away.”

“Please, Jenny!”

Ilka hung up the phone. The phone rang. Eliza said, “I don’t know how to do this by myself. I can’t do this. Help me.”

“I will help you,” said Ilka. “I know what to do, but I need a couple of days.”

“You need a couple of days.” Something curious always happened to Ilka’s words when Eliza repeated them back to her.

“Meanwhile, Eliza,” said Ilka, “please talk to Jenny! Jenny is on her way over to see you. Let Jenny in.”

Eliza hung up.

 

 

“Maggie,” Ilka said to her little girl, “Omama Flora wants you to come and spend the night because I’m going to be busy and grumpy.”

“How come?” Maggie asked.

“Because Eliza is really, really sad and I’m going to look for some things that will make her feel better.”

Maggie’s
How come
was an all-purpose question that didn’t mean
What is the cause
so much as
Tell me about things
.

Ilka said “There are some things in some letters that I’m going to look for.”

“How come?” Maggie asked.

“You and I are going to Concordance and stay with Jenny and Joe and you can play with Bethy and Teddy.”

 

 

Ilka had meant—had been wanting—to reread and chronologically order the seven years’ worth of letters—his and from a point in time, hers as well. The first plan had been for Ilka to write Leslie at the institute, for him to read her letters, to reply, and destroy them. This, he wrote, he found himself unable to do. Plan B was to read, reply, and return her letters to her. “Let us not destroy,” he had written.

The first was a single sheet he had put in her hand on the stair: “And to be friends already, to like each other and know each other well so that loving becomes only another conversation!” The postscript read: “Let’s not talk on the telephone except to make arrangements. I for one cannot feel electronically.” Then the early notes disguised as office memos.

The letters they had exchanged during the first winter holidays. “Would it be awkward for you if I leveled with my mother? My only hesitation would be her too great interest. Maggie, of course, must not ever be bothered.” From the office Leslie wrote: “Tell your mother. Your mother will be shocked and happy for us. I love your mother even if she is bossy and shouts commands from one end of the apartment to the other.” Ilka wrote, “You think my mother is bossy?” “Like you, darling.” Ilka wrote: “Bossy! Me? Really?” She had liked Leslie, who liked her so much, to tell her things about herself. “Poor Jimmy used to say being married to me was like wearing a perpetually new pair of shoes.”

Eliza had written her from home: “Nat has left Nancy and moved in with one of this year’s interns, which is not very original of him.” Leslie had added, “Nat is a moral lightweight.” Ilka replied, “Yes, well, that’s what human people do. And he’s a good poet.” They were embarked on one of their lively three-way quarrels with Leslie and Eliza, as so often, on the same side of the argument. Leslie: “As good a poet as a moral lightweight can be.” “Leslie means moral sleazeball,” amended Eliza. Leslie’s postscript said: “I’ve sent you, under separate cover, my latest chapter. I’ll be glad of your thoughts. Give your mother and Maggie our love.” “Love!” There was the word! They had been used to signing off with an easy “Love, Ilka,” “Love, Leslie,” which, now, at first, both withheld, shy of what it had come so tremendously to signify.

Leslie and Eliza had sent their Christmas card to New York. Ilka waited to respond with what she thought of as her Yom Kippur
card, using the Jewish year’s end to round up her friends and marvel at all the people she knew in America.

 

 

Now Ilka built a tower of books on the floor to clear a surface on which to spread the letters they had written to each other after the week Leslie, Eliza, Ilka, her mother and little Maggie had spent in the Verquières house, and the mistral had settled in for days on end, and Eliza‘s terrible collapse. Leslie had taken Eliza back to the States. “Because I wanted to spend as much time as possible as close to you as possible, I did not support Eliza,” he wrote. Ilka wrote, “Do we have a plan for de-escalation, withdrawal? Shall we pull out our troops? Stop now?” “What! De-escalate? Stop! Who us?” he had written. “So now we know our limits and will stay within them. We will do this right.”

Leslie had not discouraged Ilka when she was offered a fine job in New York. “And it will give you greater liberty to meet someone who can give you the life I can’t,” he wrote her. “When that happens tell me and I will know how to take myself out of your way.” “Preserve me!” Ilka had retorted.

 

 

Both Leslie and Ilka had jobs that required travel. They had made their arrangements. Ilka wrote: “The spirit moves me to write and tell you that I love you and that you can take the limousine to the Sheraton at A street and X Avenue. (USS is cheaper and they have shuttle service but not on Sunday mornings.) The room is reserved in your name. If you do the wine I’ll bring the fruit, the cheese and the bread.” “Now there is an actual date,” he wrote, “you begin to be solid again.” Ilka wrote: “Until we are in the same room, this undifferentiated longing fixes on some one memory like the last time, at my place, when you stood up from where you were sitting and came and sat in the chair close to me.” Concordance was
in the habit of renting Ilka’s spare room when institute people came to New York on institute business. When in town Leslie was known to be staying there.

 

 

These were the years Leslie and Ilka made love, talked love, and wrote to each other. The sequence of the letters was not easy to establish for it had never occurred to either to date this or that moment. Ilka might write, “Friday midnight after the morning you left.” Leslie wrote: “Monday. Weren’t we wonderful!” She was able to arrange the letters by the paper they were written on. Leslie had used Concordance letterhead except for one two-month period—he must have come across a batch of stationery brought over from Oxford. Ilka got through her linen birthday paper in two weeks. Was it a secondary sexual characteristic that he made himself beautifully clear on a single sheet while she required pages and pages to trace her own meaning to its source in some earlier exchange between them, or something read, heard, seen—narratives that led back to some mini-trauma or to the big old one in her childhood Vienna? “Your last good letter,” and “your lovely letter,” he wrote her. Ilka marveled at his passionate courtesy. “I imagine you hefting yet another fat envelope and I wonder if it’s a chore or a thrill.” She admired Leslie’s reticence, even as she sought to undermine it. “My urge to tell you is as strong as the urge to touch you!” she wrote. “I feel like writing you the minute you leave whereas you can wait till next Monday!”

“Things are churned up by our deepest loving,” he wrote. “Just the usual junk of the unconscious—the lost child revisiting. I’m used to it, but at the time I find it troubling. Hence my discourteous tardiness in writing after we have transcended ourselves. Oh love!” he had written.

Ilka could interface one letter with another to which it must have been the answer: Her, “You talk love to me in words that of all the ways to put it most precisely suit me. I am dazzled by my
luck,” had preceded his: “Luck is another word for grace,” followed by hers: “I’m dazzled by your word: Grace.” Ilka had found herself adopting his vocabulary: “What blessed fun,” she wrote, “to be allowed to borrow you to love for a while. I feel impregnable for minutes on end. How did I get to be happy! Amazing.” “Why are you amazed?” he wrote. “Isn’t it normal to love, to be loved, to be and make happy?” “No. Nature and nurture may have formed you for graced love, but I feel every love and each friendship to be a gorgeous accident, an error in my favor and in danger of correction.”

(What in hell had Ilka written in the letter that got into Eliza’s hands? What had Eliza been forced to know?)

The letters Eliza had written to Ilka from Elm Street were typed and dated and fixed the year: “Maggie going on to high school! And you wouldn’t know Teddy Bernstine. He is a new and different shape of boy. Bethy is a new shape also, grown grossly overweight.” Leslie had added, “And insufferable. One has seen this curiosity before: the parents at all times scrupulously courteous to the child who never addresses them under a shout.” Ilka returned: “Poor Bethy! She shouts because she knows her parents are sorry for her which frightens her.” They were off. Leslie wrote: “Why ‘poor’ Bethy! Is there no bad behavior that you are willing to fault?” (“Yes!
Mine
!” she wrote to him to the institute, meaning him to add “and mine!”) Eliza wrote: “You would make excuses for ‘poor’ Iago. Who could blame him for causing the deaths of Cassio, Desdemona, Othello, not to speak of his own wife. He was passed over for a promotion!” “I’ve always thought,” replied Ilka, “that Iago was trying to account to himself for being so terrible.” Eliza wrote, “Remind your mother that she owes me her recipe for cheese straws.” Reading this good-natured argument so many years later, Ilka experienced the void in the belly that comes when we recognize the movie we are watching: we have watched it before and know the characters inside the car are on the road to the accident.

Not yet; they had not yet turned the corner. “Even our all-night argument was happiness,” Leslie had written Ilka—they had come to be with each other in a LaGuardia motel—“how endlessly we misunderstand each other so that we must go on talking forever, thank god.”

Ilka took a piece of paper, took a pen and copied out: “How endlessly we misunderstand each other,” suppressing “we must go on talking forever” and “thank god.”

“Do you believe in god?” she had asked him. “That’s not a good question,” he replied, “like the question ‘Do you love me?’ the answer to which is, ‘No, though I did a minute before you asked me and will again the minute after.’ I believe there is something eternal outside ourselves, and that I don’t know much about it.”

Ilka, ensorcelled, had fallen in love with Leslie all over again and again and again.

 

 

Ilka had written him from a summer in Portugal: “Maggie smells of saltwater and is a dear, civilized little travel companion. She looks and takes everything in, at least I think she does. She makes it her business that I leave tips. My mother is driving us crazy. What you see as her bossiness, I see as anxiety—for us to be on time, for us to be clean and safe, even the anxiety to be agreeable.”

“Your Concordance friends,” wrote Leslie, “keep wondering why you have not married again, and I worry.” Ilka wrote: “Should I be touched by your care for me or irritated at your taking my mother’s tack. Chrissake, Leslie! This is hardly polite of you!” “I beg your pardon,” he wrote, “but I thought you understood why this troubles me.” Ilka answered: “I’m always surprised that things trouble you. You never let on.” “But you know my big, big trouble about Eliza. I’m not going to dump that on you.” “Oh
dump, darling! Dump! Don’t I tell you every thought you don’t ask me anything about?” “Wonderful, and wonderful,” wrote Leslie, “that I’ll know everything you want me to know, whether I want to know it or not, and you won’t know anything I don’t want you to know, whether you want to know it or not.”

This also, leaving out the two wonderfuls, Ilka copied out onto her paper.

 

 

Ilka had heard trouble when Leslie made one of his rare phone calls. He was canceling a planned visit to New York.

“What happened to your voice? You don’t sound like yourself,” said Ilka.

“My voice closes up when I am angry. Eliza had a bad night. She is better now but has asked me to stay with her and that’s what I will do. She hasn’t often done this to me.”