Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (25 page)

She made scenes when he was late to dinner: “If you know you’re going to be late, call me. Don’t make me worry!”

She did not want him to be able to read her emotions. If he was certain of her feelings, he might become bored; he might wish her to be different; it was best to be elusive, hypocritical, to seem to have as many moods as possible, to practice sleight of hand.

It startled her, she thought it funny, that the emotional side of a love affair should so quickly come to outweigh the physical, to take precedence, to guide it, to make it, if not minor, then lesser.

She was often tired and took an hour’s rest in the afternoon. Sometimes when she was resting, she thought. It seemed to her that just as when a person talked to himself he let himself exaggerate and dream in a way that was a little insane, so what went on between a wife and husband was like that solitary lunacy: a wife and husband talked to themselves, alone together, the world outside.

She had come to an age where she did not value herself or her time so highly that she wanted anything better or other than what she had. She thought it wasn’t marriage so much as a love affair complicated by marriage that she was living.

Fennie wanted to go away with Ann, on a trip, to get away from everything and everyone, to be alone with Ann. He thought of her as a subtle and clever companion, and not at all a disappointment to him.

They went to England first. Standing in front of the stony grace of the Elgin Marbles, she said, “Oh, Fennie, you’re so good to me.” That night, she said, “Fennie, don’t take too long in the shower.”

“Don’t nag,” he said.

(The cleverer she was, the happier they were, the more he expected of her.)

In Brussels, it seemed to Ann that there were so many states to be passed through in the course of a day spent with Fennie—appetite and surprise, curiosity, peevishness (glossed over), middle-aged passion, and unexpected sorrow—that there was no place and no peace wide enough to hold her and Fennie.

Ann knew now—away from home, grateful to Fennie—that she loved him. In Paris, she memorized the shape of his hands. In Rome, she filed away the look of his eyes squinting in the sun on the Palatine. “A Man in Sunlight,” she labeled the sight of him waving to her from one of the upper tiers of the Colosseum. The adventures of traveling and the patterns of her and Fennie’s feelings involved Ann in a tension and watchfulness that seemed to her now the outward symptoms of love.

In the Greek Islands, she and Fennie rode on donkeys up a winding track to a hilltop temple, honey-colored and in ruins. Ann watched the sunlight move like melting porcelain across Fennie’s white shirt. Far away, on the Aegean, a large white ship with a single funnel shouldered
blue water aside, and Ann thought, You can feel the peace in the air; you think if it touches your skin that you feel it inside, but you don’t; you guess at it, like a tourist looking at ruins. That’s the closest you come to it, this side of death, as a tourist.

She wanted to go home, to Washington, to the house in Alexandria, at once and not wait out the last five days of the trip. There seemed to her to be, after all, only a very few emotions and many degrees of intensity.

She felt so tired of tension and watchfulness.

Fennie took her to the Parthenon. “Are you tired?” he asked her.

“Oh, no,” Ann said. She promised herself, Tomorrow I’ll tell him I’m tired. She could not find her own feelings. She did not know if she was happy or unhappy. She knew her actions were dictated by Fennie’s feelings.

She addressed him in her thoughts: I can’t bear it—you make me think I wish you were dead.… I’ve lost my sense of perspective, she thought. And in Greece, the land of the Golden Mean. She thought, The Greeks talked about it but they never lived it. She wanted to go home. She thought, This is too much for me. I can’t go on. She was tired of love. Why are you so surprised? she asked herself. She meant she had not been trained for this kind of life or trained herself for it. She was not a romantic woman.

Then she said to herself, It’s all right if I think this way. Then Fennie won’t have to.

The sunlight was very bright. From the porch of the Parthenon, Ann and Fennie could see the sea. Ann said as she and Fennie stood there that perhaps she’d take up embroidery. “Embroidery can be very creative,” she said. “People appreciate it as gifts. I’m going to give away the things I make,” she said. “I don’t intend to keep anything.”

Fennie said, “The Acropolis is just as wonderful as people say it is.”

Ann saw it through his eyes. She wondered how much Fennie knew. Perhaps he theorized to himself only about politics. Perhaps women were the ones who wound up with all the knowledge. She thought, Now I know what people mean about love and death.

Fennie said on the plane to New York, “It’s sort of womanlike the way the Parthenon crouches. It’s full of magic.” He shielded his eyes with his hand. “It’s sort of threatening. It’s not calm at all. It seems very mysterious. I wonder why people say it’s classical.” He said, “It’s one of the wonders of the world.”

T
HEY WERE HOME
. Ann was too tired and too disorganized to sleep. She tried to set her thoughts in order. She wasn’t so impressed by her daughters, she decided. Character skips a generation. She and Fennie had character.

On and on her thoughts meandered: Life and sex were to be regarded wryly—that’s why the young seemed so stupid. Character, she thought, character counted. Feelings were too unreliable.

Ann started up suddenly, as if she had been dozing. She cried out, “Oh God, we keep getting shot over and over—in the same place!”

Fennie said, “What! What!” and came awake. “Ann, what is it?”

“It was a dream,” she said. “I was a target at an amusement park, in a shooting range. You had blond hair, you were a workingman, and you said it was all right for me to cry.…” The rising moon appeared in the window, large and full and reddish, lunatic. “It hurt so. It was a silly dream.” She said, “I like good sense. I haven’t any respect for human nature. I like things to last.” She said, “Fennie, I’m turning middle-class.” She said, “Everyone who gets what they want turns middle-class.” She moved her head and looked at him then. “Why is that, Fennie?” she asked him. “Tell me why that is.”

O
RRA
P
ERKINS
was a senior. Her looks were like a force that struck you. Truly, people on first meeting her often involuntarily lifted their arms as if about to fend off the brightness of the apparition. She was a somewhat scrawny, tuliplike girl of middling height. To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. I’m not the only one who said that. It was because seeing someone in actuality who had such a high immediate worth meant you had to decide whether such personal distinction had a right to exist or if she belonged to the state and ought to be shadowed in, reduced in scale, made lesser, laughed at.

Also, it was the case that you had to be rich and famous to set your hands on her; she could not fail to be a trophy, and the question was whether the trophy had to be awarded on economic and political grounds or whether chance could enter in.

I was a senior, too, and ironic. I had no money. I was without lineage. It seemed to me Orra was proof that life was a terrifying phenomenon of surface immediacy. She made any idea I had of psychological normalcy or of justice absurd since normalcy was not as admirable or as desirable as Orra; or rather she was normalcy and everything else was a falling off, a falling below; and justice was inconceivable if she, or someone equivalent to her if there was an equivalent once you had seen
her, would not sleep with you. I used to create general hilarity in my room by shouting her name at my friends and then breaking up into laughter, gasping out, “God, we’re so small-time.” It was grim that she existed and I had not had her. One could still prefer a more ordinary girl but not for simple reasons.

A great many people avoided her, ran away from her. She was, in part, more knowing than the rest of us because the experiences offered her had been so extreme, and she had been so extreme in response—scenes in Harvard Square with an English marquess, slapping a son of a billionaire so hard he fell over backwards at a party in Lowell House, her saying then and subsequently, “I never sleep with anyone who has a fat ass.” Extreme in the humiliations endured and meted out, in the crassness of the publicity, of her life defined as those adventures, extreme in the dangers survived or not entirely survived, the cheapness undergone so that she was on a kind of frightening eminence, an eminence of her experiences and of her being different from everyone else. She’d dealt in intrigues, major and minor, in the dramas of political families, in passions, deceptions, folly on a large, expensive scale, promises, violence, the genuine pain of defeat when defeat is to some extent the result of your qualities and not of your defects, and she knew the rottenness of victories that hadn’t been final. She was crass and impaired by beauty. She was like a giant bird, she was as odd as an ostrich walking around the Yard, in her absurd gorgeousness, she was so different from us in kind, so capable of a different sort of progress through the yielding medium of the air, through the strange rooms of our minutes on this earth, through the gloomy circumstances of our lives in those years.

People said it was worth it to do this or that just in order to see her—seeing her offered some kind of encouragement, was some kind of testimony that life was interesting. But not many people cared as much about knowing her. Most people preferred to keep their distance. I don’t know what her having made herself into what she was had done for her. She could have been ordinary if she’d wished.

She had unnoticeable hair, a far from arresting forehead, and extraordinary eyes, deep-set, longing, hopeful, angrily bored behind smooth, heavy lids that fluttered when she was interested and when she was not interested at all. She had a great desire not to trouble or be troubled by supernumeraries and strangers. She has a proud, too large nose that gives her a noble, stubborn dog’s look. Her mouth has a disconcertingly lovely set to it—it is more immediately expressive than her eyes and it
shows her implacability: it is the implacability of her knowledge of life in her. People always stared at her. Some giggled nervously.
Do you like me, Orra? Do you like me at all?
They stared at the great hands of the Aztec priest opening them to feelings and to awe, exposing their hearts, the dread cautiousness of their lives. They stared at the incredible symmetries of her sometimes anguishedly passionate face, the erratic pain for her in being beautiful that showed on it, the occasional plunging gaiety she felt because she was beautiful. I like beautiful people. The symmetries of her face were often thwarted by her attempts at expressiveness—beauty was a stone she struggled free of. A ludicrous beauty. A cruel clown of a girl. Sometimes her face was absolutely impassive as if masked in dullness and she was trying to move among us incognito. I was aware that each of her downfalls made her more possible for me. I never doubted that she was privately a pedestrian shitting-peeing person. Whenever I had a chance to observe her for any length of time, in a classroom for instance, I would think,
I understand her.
Whenever I approached her, she responded up to a point and then even as I stood talking to her I would fade as a personage, as a sexual presence, as someone present and important to her, into greater and greater invisibility. That was when she was a freshman, a sophomore, and a junior. When we were seniors, by then I’d learned how to avoid being invisible even to Orra. Orra was, I realized, hardly more than a terrific college girl, much vaunted, no more than that yet. But my God, my God, in one’s eyes, in one’s thoughts, she strode like a
Nike,
she entered like a blast of light, the thought of her was as vast as a desert. Sometimes in an early winter twilight in the Yard, I would see her in her coat, unbuttoned even in cold weather as if she burned slightly always, see her move clumsily along a walk looking like a scrawny field-hockey player, a great athlete of a girl half-stumbling, uncoordinated off the playing field, yet with reserves of strength, do you know? and her face, as she walked along, might twitch like a dog’s when the dog is asleep, twitching with whatever dialogue or adventure or daydream she was having in her head. Or she might in the early darkness stride along, cold-faced, haughty, angry, all the worst refusals one would ever receive bound up in one ridiculously beautiful girl. One always said, “I wonder what will become of her.” Her ignoring me marked me as a sexual nonentity. She was proof of a level of sexual adventure I had not yet with my best efforts reached: that level existed because Orra existed.

What is it worth to be in love in this way?

I
DISTRUST
summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with where it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.

In the last spring of our being undergraduates, I finally got her. We had agreed to meet in my room, to get a little drunk cheaply before going out to dinner. I left the door unlatched; and I lay naked on my bed under a sheet. When she knocked on the door, I said, “Come in,” and she did. She began to chatter right away, to complain that I was still in bed; she seemed to think I’d been taking a nap and had forgotten to wake up in time to get ready for her arrival. I said, “I’m naked, Orra, under this sheet. I’ve been waiting for you. I haven’t been asleep.”