Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (11 page)

“It depends.”

Henry thought,
She wants to punish me for abandoning her. My God.
He made a mental note to do some reading about disturbed children. He said, shielding his eyes with his hand, “You stay out of that closet!”

A startled, single peal of involuntary laughter popped out of Melinda. She stared at him with pink astonishment.

“What’s funny?” Henry asked.

“You are!” the child shouted. “What you’re thinking! You want to kiss me!” Strands of hair bounced on her forehead in the silvery light. She spread her fingers over her mouth and cheeks, hiding them from him.

The sunlit panorama was squeezed into a rich oval in the center of which his daughter’s face floated, partly veiled by her fingers. “You’re right,” Henry said, with amazement.

A flutter passed across the child’s shoulders; a sound halfway between a choked shout and a laugh came from behind her fingers.

Along the canals, at the edge of his vision, Venice trembled on its uncertain islands, assailed by the devouring and protective and odorous wash of the sea. He kissed Melinda’s hands, and as she moved them he kissed her cheek, her nose, her chin.

T
HE GONDOLA
floated toward the seaward rim of the Piazzetta. Melinda’s head lay on Henry’s chest in the exhaustion following laughter. Her arm was thrown across his stomach. “We’re at the Piazza,” Henry said.

Melinda sat up, touched a hand to her hair. Groggily, she surveyed the approaching landfall, the stone folds of the perspective opening past the winged lion, the lozenge-patterned palace, the benign litter of Byzantine oddments, bronze horses, golden domes, pinnacles, flagpoles, and pigeons. Amiably, the child said,
“Ciao, piazza. Ciao,
lunch.
Ciao,
pigeons.”

I
THINK
I am going mad, what you call loco.… I don’t want to bother you … but you live so near.…” Annetje’s voice over the telephone, fascinating, foreign, threaded on hard-breathing pauses, moved Avram Olensky unbearably. He was curly-haired, a handsome but unhappy- and nervous-looking Jew. He kept his back to his guests, Louise Kimball, now Louise von Kunnel, and her husband of eight months, the
Graf
Ulrich von Kunnel.

Avram, as usual wishing his feelings could be simple, felt embarrassed to be thinking it dreadful luck that Louise was the person he would have to abandon to help Annetje: Louise was so highly susceptible to slights. She had earlier, in her bland, quite admirable, Yankee forthrightness (she was from Ridgefield, Connecticut), warned Avram that she worried he would be anti-German with Ulrich.

Louise was a very old friend and had been briefly a mistress and had once lent Avram the money he had needed to found a small literary magazine.

Calculating the ethics of the situation rapidly, Avram said to himself, “Compassion outweighs Gratitude,” and said into the telephone, “Annetje, I am
glad
you called me.”

“You are a kind man!” Annetje exclaimed in her accented, exciting, telephone-flavored voice.

“No, no,” Avram said truthfully. “I only wish I were. I—”

Annetje said, “I took LSD. I am having a
reaction.
I cannot eat, I cannot sleep. I am paranoid as hell.”

Avram’s spirits lifted; they rose a certain percentage. LSD. Ah, he thought, a little help is all that is required. “Talmudist,” hissed a part of his mind.

But he had avoided Annetje for years. He had grown nervous in his middle thirties; Annetje frightened him, her prettiness was so extreme—white-blond hair, enormous seaside-gray eyes—her irrational, storm-tossed, passionate conversation so unnerving. She would say, “The story of my life is too much. I was born in a castle, a Dutch castle. My father was a banker. He was not afraid of the Nazis. Then he was. We got to Vichy, and one day my father went out to buy cigars and never came back. Never. The nuns told my mother they would save me. I was dressed as a nun and I went to Italy. I never saw my mother again. I was told after the war she died of pneumonia. But they were being kind to me, I think. I spent the war in Italy. We were often bombed. I could not go to the chapel or the cellar. I did not want to be buried alive. I used to run outside and scream at the airplanes.”

As soon as the war was over, she came to America. “I didn’t want to see frightened faces anymore.… My first husband was terribly rich—he came from Chicago. He had a tiny little airplane—he was very strange, that man—he wanted to fly everywhere. Even to horse races. He decided to fly to Rio de Janeiro. We flew from Chicago to Tennessee, from Tennessee to Florida, from Florida to the Bahamas. I wanted never to be frightened again, and here I was in this little tiny airplane with this man who wanted to be frightened all the time. It gave him
pleasure
! My God. When we flew over the jungle, I decided that was the end. In Rio, I left him. Also, he was dull.”

If she was so afraid of danger—Avram had asked her—why had she married Allan? Allan was her second husband, and it was while she was married to him that Avram had met her. Allan was a professional deep-sea diver, a scuba expert, with very little money.

“He never asked me to go diving with him,” Annetje said, wide-eyed. “I did not realize I would be frightened for
him.
” She had left him when he gave her an ultimatum, to calm down and be reasonable or go away. He had not expected her to go away.

She had married a third time, while visiting friends in Switzerland. She told Avram what had happened, meeting him one day on Lexington Avenue, both of them shopping; they lived two blocks apart, they discovered. Avram was recently divorced—from his second wife.

“I did not want to get married again,” Annetje said, brushing at the
incredibly blond hair that fell across the left side of her forehead. “He
insisted.
He is very, very sophisticated. He said we would drive each other mad if we did not marry. He said, married, we would love each other less, we would have a little peace.”

Her third husband, a cadaverous six-feet-five-inch semiserious novelist from Montana, as handsome as Gary Cooper, as serious a drinker as Scott Fitzgerald, wrote for the movies between novels, squandering and gambling away his enormous salary. Annetje was his fourth wife. Avram knew the man slightly—John Herbert Thompson his name was. John Herbert had what seemed to Avram a peculiarly touching quality of emotional elegance; he loved and suffered with a singleness of purpose that reminded Avram of the curved, thin legs of French antiques.

One of Avram’s most intense experiences had involved John Herbert—Avram had fallen briefly, confusedly in love with an Italian poetess who was at that time loved by John Herbert. The Italian poetess had been pessimistic, very tall and bony for an Italian woman; her usual expression had been one of somber, dark-eyed, hopeless intuition. She had taken Avram as a lover and discarded John Herbert, because, she said, Avram’s deadness, his endless calculations, were more needful than John Herbert’s despair. “I want a man who cannot live without me,” she had said. “When I love, I am a capitalist. When I love, I own.” At other times, she was, of course, a Communist.

Avram had always admired John Herbert. “I am almost a C.P.A. really, in spirit, by comparison,” he had said to Annetje when she told him of her marriage. “There is a spiritual grandeur about great drinkers. Me, I am prudent. Always, involuntarily, at bottom,
prudent.”

But, he thought, Annetje had again married strangely. John Herbert was mentally and physically adventurous. He had had two nervous breakdowns, brought on by too much thinking, by exhaustion, and like many American writers afflicted with what Avram called “a virility syndrome”—he wanted to be a perfect man—he pursued farfetched sports, skydiving for one, and had once gone on a four-month expedition in the Andes and discovered a tribe that used hallucinogenic sweet potatoes as a staple of diet. Yet Avram thought there was style in the marriage of a man of such emotional elegance to a temperamental coward like Annetje. Annetje would make John Herbert want to live. She would interpose her beauty between John Herbert and his passionate carelessness.

“Where is John Herbert?” Avram asked now on the telephone.

“He has left me,” Annetje said. “I told him to get out. It was the drug. He did not want to give me any sympathy. I do not deserve sympathy, but he is my husband, the bastard. Besides, I think he has a girl. I do not care. My God, my God. This is awful. They should put me on TV. The world should see me like this. No one would ever take LSD again. Ha-ha. Ha. Listen, you live so close, I want to see someone. My friends hate me. I tell you, I am paranoid. Listen, can you come over. The walls here are behaving strangely. I should throw myself out the window.”

“Annetje!”

“No, I won’t throw myself out the window. The windows have a very evil look. I am being persuasive. John Herbert says this is what I do. I am unfair.”

Avram felt a surge of complicity with John Herbert. Annetje sounded to him like someone enjoying a minor collapse, not someone who needed immediate help. But could he take that chance?

In New York, to be without compassion was to become an outcast. Avram did not know of any circle except among lawyers, perhaps (and even then he wasn’t certain), where an unwillingness to sympathize was not cause for exile. Avram had often said that intelligence was less in demand in New York than a feeling heart.

On the other hand, he was afraid of Louise. She was a rather rigid person. Within bounds, she could be flexible, but the bounds were very narrow. She was a Republican, a heavy drinker, and once slighted, she never forgot. If he left to go to Annetje, she would feel slighted; she was unyielding in points of honor. No matter how carefully he argued that he had an ethical obligation to go to Annetje, Louise would simply feel he preferred Annetje to her. If he lied and said Annetje was a very close friend, Louise would wonder, out loud—Louise never held anything back—why he had never introduced Louise to her. Louise would say, “You think I’m too dull for your interesting friends.”

Avram leaped toward a compromise. “I have company,” he said to Annetje, and turned his head to give Louise a warm smile. She returned a suspicious look; she sensed a slight in the air.

“Oh,” Annetje said quickly, “I am terrible, I have interrupted you, I am very sorry, go, go at once, I will be all right, I am fine, I am very strong, I—”

“No, no. Listen to me. Why don’t you join us? Please. Let me take you to dinner. Please?”

“I couldn’t. I am going mad. I—”

“Please. I want you to join us.” Avram saw that Louise was looking very angry.

Annetje said, “I can’t. I am afraid. I cannot leave my apartment. I have not left for five days. I do not know what is outside my door.”

“I will come and fetch you,” Avram said. He put his hand over the receiver and said to Louise and Ulrich, “It’s only two blocks. It will only take a moment.”

Louise closed her eyes and said, with eyes closed, “Don’t worry about us. Don’t let us interfere.”

God, Avram thought, why am I such a coward?

“I look so terrible,” Annetje said.

“So do we. I’ll be there in three minutes,” Avram said, and hung up.

He leaned against the wall near the telephone table and smiled still more warmly at Louise. Louise’s pan-shaped face was rigid. Her hair had been done by some famous man of the scissors but remained undistinguished. She was wearing pearls and a dress Avram assumed was expensive. Dear, rich Louise, Avram thought. He wondered for the fifty thousandth time since he’d met her how her mind worked—she was very family-conscious; she believed in the human personality as produced and trained by certain families. But Avram had never known her to lie, she was rarely or never devious, and she often amused him.

Avram began to talk quickly. “Look, I know this is terrible. Here we are, our first get-together since God knows when, and I want to bring in a stranger. But she’s in trouble. She’s married to quite a good friend of mine”—Avram hoped he would not have to explain that or name the friend; Louise would be furious he had never introduced her to someone as famous as John Herbert—“and he happens to be in California. Stupidly this girl took some LSD and she’s having a bad reaction. I really don’t think she should be alone. Her husband would never forgive me. And you will like her. She’s a fascinating person. She was married to Langwell Eggles—you know, Chicago?” Avram tried to force a social smile from Louise by tilting his head toward her, catching her glance, and raising his eyebrows to suggest what she do with her mouth.

“Of course, of course,” Ulrich said. Louise has picked a large, handsome German, Avram thought; Avram often thought in sentences. He will turn pasty later in life. He is very gracious. He doesn’t like me.

Louise said, “I think we’d better go.” Her mouth had the twist that Avram knew so well: she felt slighted.

“No, no,” Avram said. “You must stay. I’ve looked forward so to seeing you.” He sighed; he always did, like a stage Jew, when he felt himself forced into duplicity.
Listen to me, sounding like a Gentile,
said his sigh. He rolled his eyes slightly upward. He said, “I can’t help the girl’s calling. I wish she hadn’t called me. But I can’t leave her in the lurch. Please don’t punish me by leaving. And she’s quite fascinating.”

Louise sat back deeper into her chair; Avram took that for an answer. He darted into the kitchen and fetched a tray, loaded it quickly with bottles of liquor and the ice bucket, talking loudly all the time. “You know how it is in New York? We’re very strongly neighbors in our set. It’s an emotional thing, not geographical; I mean, I don’t know who lives next door to me. But Annetje is a neighbor, I feel. I—” He reentered the living room. “Please don’t blame me. You mustn’t let me down. We owe ourselves this evening together.” He set the tray on the oiled walnut coffee table. “I’ll be gone ten minutes at most, and I’ll bring back this fascinating girl I do really want you to meet. Really.” Avram felt a twinge of conscience; surely charity and affection were equally insulted when one tried to kill two birds with one egocentric stone: not only would Annetje be the equivalent of a floor show and make the evening special and ease this getting acquainted with Ulrich but Louise and Ulrich would protect him from Annetje.