Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (5 page)

Nervy and alert and quick-eyed, Marcus at fourteen, as later, loved frequently; he loved secretly and from afar a girl named Sukie Tredweil (the granddaughter of old Gamma Foster, the bishop’s widow). For companionship he relied on the gardener’s son, who came and went at Marcus’s (and Nanna’s) convenience. He had friends of a sort, boys from the Yacht Club or from school, but somehow friendship never grew. Something would occur in the course of an afternoon—loneliness in their company, or one or the other caring too much, or boredom—and nothing took. Nanna became irritated at his isolation. Nanna called Gamma Foster, who had staying with her a grandson two years older than Marcus; the boy had grown up in Paris (his father was in the Foreign Service and about to be sent to Tokyo), and was to start at Andover in the fall and be Americanized. “We think,” Nanna said, “you and Robin might have something in common. Robin is intelligent. Gamma says her grandson is artistic.”

Marcus drove with Nanna in her black Packard, Nils, the chauffeur, up front, down the shore road to Gamma Foster’s immense, beporched, and undistinguished house. He and Gamma Foster’s grandson Robin stole glances at each other across the luncheon table. Robin was as thin as string, and fair, with dark, opaque eyes and enormous, nervous, graceful hands. He was Europeanly precise in his movements, and Nanna smiled at him. Robin showed up the next afternoon at Nanna’s with a portfolio under his arm of several of his large, Bérard-like ink and watercolor sketches of theatrical
mises en scène.
He said to Marcus that he intended to go into the theater, that he was something of a genius. Marcus asked him, “Does your family harp on that, too?” Robin said, “No. You’re lucky you’re a Jew. Jews have a real appreciation of the arts.” He confided to Marcus that he was lonely. Gamma Foster was impressive, but not European—not like Nanna, who was clearly very cultivated. He gestured with his large hands while he talked. He came the following day, and the one after. The two boys lay on wicker couches on the south porch and talked. He told Marcus, “I am deeply French. I do not care what you say as long as you say it with distinction.”

“My friend, my friend,” Marcus said to himself, lying in bed at night. He was cautious and did not reveal the extent of his affection. He did not trust Robin, because he could not see that Robin had a moral nature, but he blamed himself for his lack of trust. He had not yet been told the tenets of that particular Jewish hagiology—Jews are saints (Noreen did not know of it, and Nanna never spoke of it) and Gentiles are a cross they bear. When Gentiles pursue the company of Jews, the hagiology states, they do so because they are rejected by their own kind and feel they will be welcomed by Jews, who are, of necessity, flattered by the attentions of a Gentile. These Gentiles are not to be trusted. A Jew who takes Gentile friends must expect to be exploited, lacks pride, and is a fool.

Robin talked of Jewish understanding and Jewish warmth and Jewish intellect. Robin was sweetly-smiled and a petty thief (loose change, bibelots, fountain pens). Robin was experienced with whores and well read. Robin told Marcus he had talent but that he was pedantic, heavy-handed, rather old-fashioned and ignorant in style. (When Marcus imitated Robin’s manners, the results pleased Nanna.) Robin introduced him to symbolism, to Mallarmé, to Rimbaud. He said he admired vitality and earthiness, and that no one should refine his mind and tastes too much and become effete; he should remain a little clumsy, because clumsiness was strength. Marcus began to make another movie, one never finished, with Robin as protagonist. Robin said all titles sounded better in French, and the movie was called
Les Yeux d’un Poète.

Marcus thought as a child that people were speeches, delivered with sincerity in incomprehensible languages, and one had to learn those languages. (Death was that people grew silent. The end of a conversation was death, and he was left alone. His terror of death at that age was terror at the breaking off of a dialogue.) Before he learned someone’s language and knew how to translate into it, he hid himself in eagerness to be agreeable: “What would you like to do? What kind of mood are you in?” He’d known Robin five months before he risked showing one of his images; it was after Thanksgiving, which Marcus spent in New York at his father’s. When he was back at school, he said, “Do you know what I think at family dinners? I’m at the Wars of the Roses. There are people in a living room and they throw white and red roses at each other, with thorns on them. There’s blood on the carpet. They squawk; it sounds like ‘York, York, York.’ But if everybody’s peaceful it sounds like a fire in the fireplace: ‘Lancaster … Lancaster … Lancaster.’ ”

“That’s rather farfetched,” Robin said. “Frankly, I think it’s over
done. Anyway, I don’t get it. Family life is much more psychological. Freud appears with the hors d’oeuvres and stays through the tapioca—that’s my opinion.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Marcus said. Robin’s difficulty in getting grades (except in English, where he wrote a superbly terse and grammatical prose, more French than English in spirit) proved he was intelligent and thought for himself. Marcus tried to think with Robin’s thoughts. He began to erupt in scenes without understanding why he was making them. “I have a terrible temper,” Marcus kept saying. Robin admitted that Marcus was violent and deep. He admitted it with pleasure and with proprietary conviction.

M
ARCUS LEANS
forward as the Lancia enters the Piazza di Spagna. He thinks, Yes, yes, yes—he wants the two shoals of parked cars on either side of the open channel in which traffic moves. He wants for the movie the tourists in shorts and sunglasses, the Peugeot with bedding rolls strapped to the rear, and the four dust-coated taxi drivers smoking as they sit at the foot of the obelisk. The urban jumble will explain the lines in Jehane’s forehead above the bridge of her sunglasses when she crosses the piazza.

The car halts behind the costume-and-makeup trailer and an orange generator truck from which spill out black electric cables; up and down the travertine curl of the Spanish Steps, extras and passersby hurry or stand. The workmen turn with an air of expectancy as Marcus climbs out of the car—a wooden-faced episcopal figure in the stillness at the altar beneath the dome. A bystander, a woman, cries out,
“Je vous ai toujours adorée, Jehane!”
Jehane smiles at the ground, somber-faced. She and Oskar are hurried off to the costume trailer by the makeup man. Marcus waves to the electricians.
“Noi cominciamo, sì?”
They call
“Sì”
and smile. The lighting man, brought from Paris, points to the lights already in place on the second landing, where Jehane will meet Oskar going down. There is to be a close-up of their faces, and Marcus wants the faces to be without shadow.
“Bon,
” Marcus says, gripping the man’s shoulder.
“Nous commençons.
” Marcus greets the script girl and the Italian workmen and the Italian translators:
“Nous commençons … Noi cominciamo.
” And he smiles and pauses to shake hands.
“Un buon momento, non?”
He has charm; he finds it easy to be charming whenever he is certain people are listening.

He greets Whitehart, the assistant director, with overt affection, as if it has been months instead of hours since he saw him last. He puts his arm around Whitehart’s shoulder, and Whitehart returns the gesture. Whitehart tells him that Liselotte (the Munich stripteaser who is to play Oskar’s middle-class, self-conscious, sexual-looking wife; Oskar will describe her to Jehane as cold.
“Und du, du bist … Ich kann nicht sagen
.…” The audience will not know if he is lying) has had a broken filling, has been to the dentist, is a little shaken but otherwise all right. Marcus nods. We are all breakable, he thinks. Whitehart goes over the order of the takes to be shot that day. Marcus listens; details are commands of conscience. The sunlight touches him. He is seized by a nervous desire to begin to hunt down in the sunlight and in the faces of the actors the shadows of meaning in his movie. He wants to ask Whitehart if the camera boom is in place atop the Spanish Steps for the first scene, but he cannot think of the word “boom,” and he points and says, “The thing—the thing.” Whitehart says, “The boom? It’s there. Ready,” and Marcus smiles at him and says, “Thank you.”

R
OBIN TOOK
him to Boston and introduced him to Sukie Tred-well, his cousin. Sukie was getting over a crush on Robin. Sukie said she was in love with Marcus and acted as if she were. She was short, thin, and her face was porcelain white and sunrise pink, her hair ash blond; her hips were wide, her shoulders high. She chain-smoked, and spoke in a small, nasal, high-pitched flat-in-tone voice, very directly and simply. Sukie was a prism in which sunlight broke up into a rainbow. Marcus’s happiness was vertiginous, steep-sided like a cliff.

Summer came. At Scantuate, Robin sprawled in a wicker chair and picked at strips of skin peeling from the sunburn on his arms while he hummed and grimaced to a recording of
Don Giovanni
on the radio. Night made mirrors of the windows of the porch, the sea soughed, and the soughing curled the night outside into a shell. “Sukie,” Marcus said, “I want to tell you something, something very strange.”

“May I listen?” Robin asked.

“Well, you’re here,” Marcus said. “Sukie, I have a very strange mind. Listen, I’m just sitting here just now, and it was like—well, a man in armor walked in,” he said quickly, interpolating, improvising to soften what was really in his mind. “He walked in through that door. I could see the straw mat through his feet, and he struck me on the arm with
his sword. I have a big wound on my arm. I have a wound but not on my arm. My wound is your mouth. I look at you and it changes; then it’s your mouth is my wound. And I’m going to die. But I can close this wound if I kiss you.”

“Good God, Pony!” Marcus was called Polo (Marco Polo) and Pony (Polo pony) and sometimes Pony Boy. Robin, his large gray eyes fogged from listening to music, exclaimed, waving one large hand irritably in the air, “Kiss my cousin if you want, take her out in the garden if you want, but cut out the Hebrew poetry. Mozart is being played.”

“Shut up, Redbreast,” Marcus said, blushing. “Come on, Sukie.” He and Sukie stepped outside. The night widened around them. They walked through the squares of orange light that fell on the path from the porch windows (inside, Robin, his legs over the arm of his chair, jiggled one foot high in the air to “Il mio tesoro”) and then in the dark made their way to the rim of the bluff. There was no moon, only a vast dusting of stars, and the lights in houses across the bay sparkling fireworks trails on the water, and occasional headlights of cars driving along the shore road.

Marcus said he didn’t mean to be boring but he really wanted to know what Sukie thought of his mind. “Wait: you know what I was just thinking? We’re all death. We’re little envelopes around death, and everywhere we walk we arrive like the mail, and people approach us with hope, with letter openers in their hand to open their mail—that’s what I was just thinking.…”

Sukie said, “Everybody gets strange thoughts. I have very strange thoughts, too. Like I’m going to die any minute—things like that.”

Marcus thought abruptly it was true (it sounded true); everyone had strange thoughts, and he was callow and inexperienced to have thought it odd in himself. He laughed suddenly. “Letter openers—ha-ha.”

“I don’t mind the way you talk,” Sukie said. “I think you’re very, very sensitive. I help make you secure, don’t I?”

“Yes,” he said. “You do.”

Marcus told no one (except Nanna, later), discussed with no one (except Robin) that he loved Sukie. He wanted no one’s opinions, no one’s breath, to touch his love. A second Adam, he saw that all leaved plants were beautiful, and that on windowsills sunbeams slowly seesawed once each day. Sukie held a cigarette between the tips of her short, square fingers. She lay supine on a towel at the beach, and said, “It’s a perfectly beautiful day, isn’t it, Marco? Isn’t it the most beautiful
day?” He had been wrong ever to doubt himself. Such errors were conceived in the vagaries of manners (like light dancing on something bright and obscuring what lay beneath); people when upset invented faults, but there were no faults, only bad habits. People were achingly akin. He was sixteen.

He waited on Sukie’s pleasure with the care and attention with which he waited on Nanna’s, and he was grateful and flattered when she was pleased by his devotion. He was circumspect and watchful of the decencies. He was half in love with Sukie’s mother, whose breasts bobbled, and whose eyes were electric and dark, and who spoke in a baritone register when she wanted to be funny: “My God, here comes Sukie’s lov-err,” the “err” of “lov-err” dropping to C below middle C. Or she’d say, “Here comes Sukie’s swarthy, handsome lov-err,” and offer him a drink. She radiated an intense awareness of him, of what was happening; she had an air of caprice, of serious devotion to the idea and practice of love.

Sukie said, “No, don’t go photographing. Lie on the beach with me.” Sukie said, “Robin is more sensitive than you are, but you’re a more complete person.” Sukie said, “Everybody knows Jews make the best lovers and husbands.” Lying on the beach, she permitted him to kiss her arm, her leg, the small of her back. She never touched him. She would lie still, growing more and more rigid while he slowly kissed her, and then she would sit up, pushing her hair back, a heroine, and say, “Oh, Pony, I’m
mad
about you. It’s inevitable, isn’t it? We will—all that, I suppose. It’s inevitable, don’t you feel that, Pony?”

O
SKAR STANDS
at the top railing, looking out over Rome; the Spanish Steps fall away beneath him. A young workman guards an electric fan that stands on the railing and blows Oskar’s hair. Oskar looks unconscionably noble, even in his sunglasses. “Look up higher in the sky,” Marcus instructs him. “Oskar,
mein Lieber,
this is the City of the Popes.” Marcus leans precariously over the railing and sights through a portable camera at Oskar’s face. “It must be overexposed,” he says to Alliat; he wants Oskar’s face to be like a pencil drawing—a few lines, and the darkness of his sunglasses, and the reflection of the view in them, and Oskar’s mouth. Oskar’s mouth, if he can lead Oskar into the right mood, will be alive and dangerous: an artful shape, the instrument of the most human music.