Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (6 page)

Oskar, determinedly holding his pose, remarks, “That one is the Keats House,
ja?
He is your great poet. ‘Truth is beauty and beauty truth’—
ja
?”

“Mein Schatz,
” Marcus says, “lower your chin perhaps one inch.” Marcus minutely and slowly inches the camera this way and that. Oskar’s mouth grows bedraggled but dutiful. Marcus says, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child and acted like a man, with bows and arrows and guns, but now I’m a man and spend my time doing childish things.” Oskar smiles vacantly. Marcus says, “Willi, imagine a naked woman in the shower, completely unselfconscious; she does not know you’re watching.” Oskar’s lips thin sensually. Marcus beckons and Alliat leans over him, observes the position of the camera, takes it from him while Marcus scrambles free. Marcus holds a small mirror in front of the camera and studies Oskar’s reflection in it, and says, “To the right. Up. A bit m—Yes.”

Nanna was alert and watchful, but not as alert and watchful as a moment to be placed on film. In the mirror, Oskar’s face flickers. The mirror is an eye; and the pupil, the tunnel to perception and the capture by memory, is Marcus. On the glassy lids of the large, silvered, metal-rimmed sunglasses Oskar wears float twin reflections of a swarm of roofs, sweetened by the rising in their midst of grayish, high-arched domes. Oskar’s hair moves. Marcus says, “Oskar,
mein Schatz,
what would it be like if they put up a statue to you in the Villa Borghese as the most talented German since Goethe?” Oskar takes a deep, simmering breath. An internal shift occurs within the oval of Oskar’s face—a queer light, an illumination. He looks Olympian. He waits, unattached and daydreaming, and Marcus touches Alliat’s knee and the camera starts up, stops, starts up again. The camera whirs a third time.

“That’s it for the moment,” Marcus says. He touches Oskar’s shoulder. The actor has grown into the railing, the sunlight, the daydream, and must be summoned back.

M
ARCUS SAT
in the classroom unprotected, his feet on the floor, his head and eyes lowered as if a wind blew. In the shower room, he exclaimed inwardly, “I love you, Sukie.” He wrote her, “I love you.” His roommate bumped into him and Marcus lashed out, “Don’t you touch me!” Marcus cried out in his sleep, “Sukie!” He wrote her, “I miss you crazily.”

Robin played the pander. He asked, “When are you two going to sleep together?”

Marcus shouted, “I don’t want to hurt her! I don’t want to do any harm!”

Robin said, “Don’t tell me you think sex is wicked, Pony. Haven’t you ever read a book? Haven’t you read D. H. Lawrence?” Robin said, “There’s a real beauty when a woman becomes a woman.” He said, “Jewish morality has crushed everything in Western culture that’s beautiful and natural. If our own sense that it is necessary to sin—and Freud, of course—hadn’t come along, we’d all be neurotic Calvinists. Tell me, Pony, do you believe in the Old Testament?”

Beneath the springs of the upper bunk distended with the weight of his roommate’s sleeping body (whose breaths made runners of sound in the darkness), Marcus lay in a tangle of imaginings. He yearned to tell Nanna, far away, in Florida, that he was about to become transfigured. He said to Sukie over the phone, “Sukie, I want—Listen, I don’t mean to be a bastard, but I—Sukie, please just tell me
when.”

“Oh, Pony,” Sukie said in a small voice. “Whenever you want. I’m helpless in your hands, Marco.”

Robin made a reservation at a hotel in Boston and drove Marcus up the afternoon the Thanksgiving holidays began. Sukie came by train from her school in Connecticut. Robin said, “You have two hours before I have to get Sukie home,” and he said he would wait in the coffee shop.

In the hotel room, the pleasure was brusque, simple, and heart-stopping. When it was over, Sukie said, “You control all our lives, mine and Robin’s and my parents’! You’re incredibly powerful.” She said, “You’re beautiful and very sexy and have a much nicer body than Robin’s.” She said she’d slept with Robin but it hadn’t meant anything, not like this; and once with a boy in Maine, but that hadn’t meant anything, either. “Pony, I’m embarrassed. Everyone will see the change in me. I know I’m going to blossom.” She said, “Are you one of those men who only want what they can’t have?” She said, “I wish you weren’t going to New York. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.” She said she hated her mother and her mother hated her. She said boys never liked her. She said the girls at her school avoided her. She said she wanted to kill herself. She said, “I know you’ll bring me happiness. Everybody knows that Jews make the best husbands and lovers.”

At Christmastime, Marcus told his father he had to return to Boston
Saturday morning to see Robin about the school play. In Boston, snow was coming on. He arrived bone-broken and askew with longing for the sensation—very like the assurance of being wanted—that had come when Sukie had undressed and let him hold her. He was dull with a sense of humiliation he couldn’t identify. He thought, She needs me. He was racked by astonishment as much as by desire. From the hotel, he called Sukie; she said she would come as soon as she could. He waited, and the moments seemed to him to lack walls, roofs, and floors. Never since had he experienced anticipation so violently.

At four o’clock, Robin and Sukie arrived—together. Marcus told Robin, “Please go away,” and when Robin left, without a word, Marcus began to undress Sukie. In the silence, it was as if certain sounds that had been curtained by a rush of noise became audible. Sukie grew nervous. Marcus told her to hold still. She said, “You don’t know what you’re doing; this is creepy,” and began to cry.

Marcus said, “Sukie, what did I do wrong?”

“You don’t act as if you like me.”

Red-faced and taut, Marcus assured her that he liked her, swore that he did; he swore it on his soul.

Sukie blinked, then said submissively, “All right.”

After that they made love.

When Robin came back, Marcus went to the door, wrapped in a blanket, and said, “Give us five minutes and we’ll get dressed.”

Robin said, “No, let me in. I won’t peek,” and he came in and sat on the foot of the bed. He leaned across Sukie’s ankles and talked rapidly—chattered about what an ugly town Boston was, how dreary winter was. Sukie and Marcus lay as quietly as corpses. Robin turned his head away while Sukie got dressed. (He’d said like a gym instructor, “It’s time we got going.”) Marcus remained in bed, propped against the headboard, the blanket up to his shoulders. Robin’s weight hurt his ankles. Stiff-necked with excitement, Robin said, “I’ll bring her back whenever I can.”

Marcus returned to school and told himself that people were all alike. Sukie would soon change for him, as he had changed for Nanna’s sake. She would become a warm, responsive, trustworthy girl. He would help her and be strong. At the same time, he longed to escape from her. But he wanted her, too. He wrote Sukie twice a day. He was tired and could not sleep. He toppled into periods of nervous exhaustion and lay staring at the wall, drenched with sweat. He’d lock
the door of his room at such times; he wanted no one to see him. Feelings that he could not put a name to, incomprehensible but powerful feelings, like abstract paintings—a blue one, a blue-and-black one, a gray one shot through with viridian—filled his head and chest. The recollection of the texture of the skin on Sukie’s back drove him from the lunch table to walk slack-jawed, both exalted and wretched, in the snow. He began to avoid his mind. (When he grew older, he found he could avoid his mind easily whenever he wanted except when trying to fall asleep; to quiet his mind then, he would drink two shots of brandy and take a Seconal, and wander around his bedroom until he entered a state of near idiocy; only then, when he fell on his bed, would he find unconsciousness within reach.)

Sukie’s letters burned like dry ice; in them she complained of her classmates, described her feelings—“Everybody looks at me; I think I’m blossoming”—begged him to arrange with Robin to drive down to her school: “I’m going out of my mind. I’m suicidal. I’m so bored, Marco. I must see you. I love you.”

He’d make arrangements to go with Robin to Boston to stay in Gamma Foster’s house on Saturday night, and then, Robin telling Gamma Foster he and Marcus were going to the movies, they’d drive to Connecticut, both boys sitting hunched forward as if to hurry the car on. Sometimes he felt Sukie’s presence was unpleasant and he would tell himself passionately that she was stubborn, insisted on being unlovable, did not care if she alienated him or not; she was spoiled. He watched her face always. He knew its lineaments. He saw apparitions in it, landscapes, the hues of flowers. When his will faltered, he saw it as something associated with pain, a bandage. Sometimes a mood would warm that porcelain-white face and him, and he would begin again the fall of falling in love. On his way to see her, not knowing what he would find, his heart and nerves went rackatty-clack like a half-empty train rushing through a countryside at night. He’d arrive and his eyes would fly to that face. (“Don’t, Pony. It makes me so nervous when you stare at me.”) If her face was trampled or muddied, he would grow distant and emotionless, like a doctor; he was anxious to help her, not to be bad for her. He tried to be a proper lover, like one in books, and he told her—remembering another moment when he had been unable to speak—that she was the sun and wind and clouds and a rosebush. Sukie brightened and said, “Oh, that’s lovely.” He continued with increasing sincerity, and compared her to the craziness of dreams, to a beach, to
warm sand and the sun making you dizzy, and sand fleas making your legs twitch. She said, “I don’t think I like that. No, it’s nasty.” She looked uneasy. He said he hadn’t meant anything, a beach was a force of nature—he’d only meant to compare her to a force of nature.

She was most peaceful when he was tired, half asleep (although in his pride he did not like admitting to her that he was tired). Then, sometimes, she’d touch him or smile in a warm way. It excited and exhilarated her when the three of them—Sukie, Robin, and Marcus—went out together in Robin’s car. Bars wouldn’t serve Sukie; in the car, Robin, Marcus, and Sukie passed a pint of bourbon back and forth. They drove on back roads, safe from observation in their world inside the car. They often went at ninety, the automobile swaying, with only the loosest connection to the road, the earth, to fixed locations. The air inside the car was dry and warmed by the heater and chilled by cold leaking in at the windows, and faintly visible with their breaths, and sweetish with the smell of whiskey. Sukie’s excitement affected Marcus as if she were a flag.

She cried, “A ciggy-boo, I must have a ciggy-boo. Did you remember my Sen-Sen?” She said, “That school’s a tomb!”

Robin said, “ ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace.’ ”

Sukie said, “I love you, Marco.”

Outside the car, moonlight lay tremulously on the thin fields. Marcus said, “The world is coming to an end tonight.”

Sukie said, “Don’t be gloomy. Let yourself go on the Happiness Swings.” Happiness Swings were the opposite of Bad Weeks. “It’s a Bad Week,” Sukie sometimes said.

Marcus said, “I am on it.”

But Sukie said, “No, you’re not.” She turned to Robin. “Isn’t Marcus difficult? He scares me.”

Robin agreed. Marcus was awesome.

Marcus didn’t see it. Robin’s tongue was more cutting than his—Robin said Gamma Foster had a face like the Bible. Sukie and Robin were less sentimental, less eager to please, too, than he was. “Do I seem to you abnormal? Maybe what bothers you is that I’m Jewish.”

“But you’re not all Jewish,” Robin said.

Sukie said, “It isn’t being Jewish that makes you so difficult.”

Marcus was accustomed to women approving of him most when he was happy. “Oh, God, I’m happy!” he exclaimed. “You just don’t know. I used to think when I was a kid nothing would ever happen.”

“All kids think that,” Robin said, one arm on Sukie’s shoulder.

Sukie said, “I did. Do you want to hear a joke? Knock, knock. Who’s there? Abie. Abie who? A.B.C.” She giggled and leaned her head on Marcus’s shoulder, then on Robin’s.

They stopped and walked barefoot in the snowy field, shouting and laughing. Marcus threw himself down on the snow and stretched his arms out and said, “I am ready for Easter.” Sukie circled, turned round and around in the field, her shadow hopping behind her, then in front of her. Marcus said, “She’s dancing with crows.”

Robin went for a walk while Marcus and Sukie lay in the car, their breaths feathery, their eyes shining in the dark. Robin returned, and then they drove to the door of Sukie’s school. The girl Marcus held was muffled in a coat, was warm, and smelled faintly of gardenia soap. “Oh, Pony, I have to go back to the tomb. I love you.”

Robin said, “Wait, Suke! Better have some Sen-Sen.”

Sukie said, “Oops, stupid me!” Smiling secretively, she put her arms around Robin’s neck and Robin kissed her ear.

On the way back to Boston, Marcus said, “I don’t like the way you kiss Sukie. I’d like to smash your teeth in.”

“Look, Pony. She happens to be my cousin. I—”

“Shut up! Shut the hell up!” After a minute or so, Marcus said, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Redbreast. You know I’m crazy. I’m so much in love, you know.” He sat slouched in his seat, tired, nervous, in an agony of fatigue. The dark, now stale air in the car seemed to him a fit setting for himself.

I
N THE MOVIE
, Jehane, after coming to understand that Oskar does not intend to divorce his wife, returns to her
pensione,
opens the door of the room, and steps inside without turning on the light. At first, she simply sits in the darkness; then she begins to sob, reaching into her purse on the bureau for a handkerchief to stuff between her lips to prevent herself from making a noise and disturbing the other tenants in the
pensione.
She falls on the floor and cries without a sound, accepting almost with relief the humiliation. She does not move, but continues to cry silently on the floor.

Earlier in the movie, before she meets Oskar, she walks along the Via Condotti, past the store windows, the reflections, the things for sale. (The camera will be low, at waist height, because Marcus thinks one of the secrets of the beauty and credibility of Italian Renaissance frescoes
is that the figures seem to be taller or on higher ground than we are and we have to look up at them; this helps persuade us of their reality, because we remain children and continue all our lives to crane our necks to see the expressions on the grownups’ faces.) And she will walk past a young man in sunglasses similar to hers; she will slightly hesitate, as if amused that he is wearing similar sunglasses, but then, because the young man does not smile at her, she hurries on in an access of memory of what she expects for herself, ending what Marcus calls a masked moment, like the one when Robin told him, “I don’t see why it matters in what way I take my pleasure. I don’t see that it matters in what way anyone takes his pleasure.” She prefers flight to self-knowledge. She careers on, grandiose and virginal. Between the Jehane of the Via Condotti and the Jehane of the
pensione
lies the death of the hardness of her self-regard.