Three Short Novels (14 page)

The china began to rattle in Vivian's hands, and, leaning forward, she set the cup and saucer on the rug by her feet. “David ran away,” she said, her head down, her fingers unable to release the rattling china.

“Vivian, lie down,” her mother begged.

She lay down again and her mother drew the coat over her again.

“Where did he go?”

“At this point I don't care where he went. At this point he's on his own. At this point I don't care if he never shows up again. I never told you, did I, how jealous he was?” She threw off the coat and sat up. “What time is it?”

“Do you want me to phone and tell them you're not coming?” her mother asked.

“No, because I'm going,” she said. She got into her coat with her mother's help. “You can't imagine how jealous he was of Max. Can you imagine—of Max? Not just him,” she cried. “Of everybody. Of Russell. Because I don't come and tell you my troubles, you think I've got none.”

“I know about them,” her mother said.

“He's gone to the Pastori family at Clearlake. That's where he wanted to go. They've got a boy his age. He'll be all right. I drove him to the bus depot,” she said, wanting to dispel the alarm from her mother's face, wanting no face near her that showed alarm.

She went upstairs with her mother because no one was waiting for her to sit down with the rest of the party. Her old room was immaculate, satin shining on the bed and walnut glowing. The silver-framed photograph of herself at the age of twelve in a ballet pose was obscured by the reflected light on the glass that covered it. She undressed while her mother was out of the room finding a nightgown
for her, and, waiting, she covered herself with her slip, afraid that her mother would sense, at the sight of her nakedness, what use the daughter had made of her body. She let the slip fall to her lap as her mother helped her draw on the gown, a pink gown fragrant with sachets, yielding to the gown like a small girl who needs help with undressing.

“I told him to go,” she said. “ ‘Goddamn it, go,' I said. ‘What do you think, that you're going to stay with me forever, looking at me with those baleful eyes?' Isn't that what kind of eyes he has? Like somebody in a storybook? Animals and awful creatures? Mama, you remember?”

Sitting up in bed, she held up the palm of her hand submissively for the capsule her mother put there, swallowing it down with port wine from the decanter that was kept in her mother's room.

23

S
he waited for him with dread, and the few times she went out she expected to find him somewhere in the house when she returned. Waking in the morning or at noon or in the night, she was at once alert to the possibility of his presence by her bed. Wanting to be far away, she was unable to leave because he had no other person to return to; there was no other person from whom he had got sustenance, got love.

In the second week of his absence, a letter came from Las Vegas, from Paul, his father. Through the years, he had sent the boy a few letters and a snapshot of himself and his wife, smiling into the glaring sun of that desert city. David was with them, he wrote, and although the boy had asked them not to tell her, they were sure she was troubled by his disappearance and they thought it best to inform her of his whereabouts. And for another reason it was best: the boy was miserable, and they were trying to persuade him to return to her so that she and David could talk over their bad feelings and forgive each other for whatever the quarrel was about. A few days after the first letter a second came: David had been put aboard a bus to San Francisco.
She waited with the curtains closed. On the sixth day, when she went out to the sidewalk box to pick up the accumulation of mail, she found a letter from David, mailed from Galveston, Texas. The sight of his handwriting was like a confrontation. She could not stand, and sat down on the steps to read.

Vivian
. In large letters, with pencil, her name was scrawled across the top of the scrap of paper.
I want you to die. If you die I won't have to. I hope when you read this it will be like a curse that works. Maybe you won't even get to this line
. He had not signed his name.

She left the city that day, driving her mother, and her mother's two poodles, to her parents' summer home on the shore of Lake Tahoe. She lay out in the sun on the wide deck of the house, drowsing and pretending to drowse, wakened often by the fear that he was gazing down at her from upstairs, sometimes shaken awake by her mother, who said that she had been crying in her sleep. In her mother's face she saw how her own face must appear down on the cushions. Her mother's face, bending over hers, was her own face in the years to come, the face of herself as a past woman, alone and alarmed; and she drew her mother down upon her.

At her mother's urgings she had her hair cut and bleached again, and she had a manicure and a pedicure. She bought flamboyantly flowered, very slim dresses from the resort shops, and delicate sandals with high heels and no backs, and, urged by her mother to a display of this artful care of her person, she strolled out with the two poodles into the crowds. Although she despised them for their yapping and the tension of their bodies, she reluctantly enjoyed the spectacle of herself and the dogs, whose fur was the white of her hair, all three of them exquisitely groomed.

After her mother's return to the city with the dogs, Vivian stayed on, spending her afternoons in the cool bars and in the casinos, bringing home her small winnings and sometimes a man she had chosen to sit down by. A long time ago, her first love after the birth of her
son had separated her body from the infant's, but now the men she brought to her bed to obliterate her son failed to convince her that the body she lay against was not her son's, and waking with someone beside her was always a time of panic.

On her return to the city, late in October, she sold the house with its furnishings and antiques, taking with her only enough for her small apartment on Green Street in a building of four apartments signed over to her by her father shortly after the war. With her mother she sailed to Hawaii. On the boat, her mother, excited by the voyage, imagined that everyone mistook them for sisters, that her twenty-five years beyond her daughter's age were swept away by the sea winds. They stayed at one of the more seclusive hotels where they could settle down for a time without the constant bustling change of other guests and, in March, returned home by air.

She took a separate taxi, declining to go home to her mother's house. In the apartment, she sat down on the sofa, clasping herself, shivering with the change of climate as if the transition from sun to fog had taken no more than a minute. When the sound of the cab driver's footsteps, running down the stairs, was gone, the silence in the apartment, whose location and existence her son was ignorant of, became the silence that had swallowed both herself and her son.

Not long after her return, Joe Duggan, the attorney who had often visited in the time of her marriage to Russell, asked her out to dinner. He had separated from his wife; she had learned this some time ago. She disliked the man; he had always insinuated a knowledge of her and it had seemed to her that the basis for any insinuation was ignorance. She felt that he conversed not with her but with the woman he thought she was, while she sat listening to the dialogue like a third person. But, as in other times when she had been in need of someone, her criticism of her companion began to seem flimsy, and she wanted to believe he was capable of that knowledge of her most personal self. Then everything became attractive—his indisputable voice, his obviously
elegant clothes, and his little blond mustache that was like a stamp of approval on his face.

In his apartment, with its leased view of the bay and the bridges, he inquired after David, and she told him what she had told her parents, that the boy was attending a private school in the East. He recalled the night at Clearlake when David had danced with all the women, also recalling that she had gone upstairs before the others. Insinuative, self-amused, he lay beside her, recalling.

“You've got everything, Viv,” he said, “but one thing.”

“What?” she asked, afraid.

“Something you had with Russell.”

“What? What?”

“Something I couldn't have then. Now that you're with me, you don't have it anymore. All it is is what I couldn't have then.” He held in his laughter; she felt the sputter against her throat. “Otherwise, you've got everything.”

She could not bring herself to push him away. He knew so very little that his ignorance of her was like an unbearable vulgarity. And yet, with his lewd curiosity, he seemed to know everything, if only because he suspected everything. Lying beside him, she found that the memory of her son, the night with her son, was being reduced to what it would be in Duggan's mind if he knew about it, even as her life was being reduced to what it was in his mind. His curiosity forgave everything because everything fed his curiosity. Unresisting, she lay under him, kissing him in return, accepting his ignorance of her as if it were a forgiving wisdom.

In July, a few days before David's birthday, a letter came from him, postmarked El Centro, California, and forwarded from the house she had left. The handwriting was a barrier between him and herself, a fence beyond which all his experiences in the past year had gone on. It was written in ink, the letters neater and smaller than in the first letter. He was working, he wrote, on a date farm near the Mexican
border. On his seventeenth birthday he wanted to enlist in the army, and that was why he was writing to her—because he required her consent.

She was unable, for a few days, to answer the letter or to go a notary to make out her consent. The request from her son surrounded her with the terrors of the world, as if only now she had been born into the midst of them. One night she dreamed that he was dying. He lay on her bed, in an army uniform, his head shaven. He begged her to lift him and carry him away in her arms to some place safe from death, but she was unable to approach him. She had entered the room with a group of strangers behind her, who appeared to be waiting for her to save him, but she could do nothing. The sensation of dying was in herself as it was in him.

She sought out a notary and found one in a hotel, in a cubicle off the lobby, a gray-haired woman whose eyes seemed a part of her bejeweled spectacles. In the legalistic words suggested by the notary, she gave her consent for her son to enter the army, and, after the consent was typed and she had signed it, she asked for an envelope. Then, pushing pennies across the corner of the desk with the tip of a gloved finger, she asked apologetically to buy a stamp.

Early in September, Duggan flew to Washington in the interests of a case, and from there to New York. The first few nights he telephoned her. On the fifth night he failed to call and she lay awake, reading, knowing it was too late for him to phone, but expecting him to wake up in the middle of the night on the other side of the country and remember that he had not phoned her, and in his imagination see her waiting. She fell asleep, waking at one o'clock to the light of the lamp she had left on, and, in that moment of surprising light, she was reminded of Max and of his plea to her to leave a light burning for him. She could not recall the date that he had died because she had never known the date. It was a short time after he was taken away; she had been told the day, but she had not known the date of
that day and she had not attended his funeral. One night was as good as another as long as a year had gone by. He would, she felt, forgive her if she were in error by a few days.

With the light full on her face, she lay against the several pillows she had propped herself with to read, glad that there was no one around to ridicule her about the ritual or to disapprove of it, no one around to feel like an outsider in what might appear to be a most personal engagement of hers with someone not there. The light in the room seemed remote from its purpose. It was simply a light in an apartment among hundreds of lights in apartments all over the city, and how was one light to be separated from all others as the one that remembered him and lit his way? The purpose of the light was remote from the light, even as the ritual was remote from her, even as the man himself had been remote, even as all of them were remote. There was no illumination of anybody other than herself, lying alone, waiting for one of the remote ones to return and lie down beside her.

The Lights of Earth

“A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory may be rescued from the oblivion which overtakes others.”

M
IGUEL DE
U
NAMUNO

1

Y
ears after the night of that strange little party her memory played a trick on her. Her memory set him among the others, the guest of honor who heard every word, who saw every gesture and every expression on every face. But he wasn't there. He wasn't even expected that night. He must have been still in Spain or New York or down in Los Angeles or over the continent on his way back to San Francisco. He must have been up in the sky, somewhere over all, as the suddenly famous ones seem to be.

The name of the couple whose house it was, the house where she had not been before and was never to enter again, seemed of no consequence and she didn't quite hear it. Later, when she knew the name of the wife, she was unable to say that name aloud. An ordinary name to anyone else, for her it was the shattering presence of the woman herself. The couple had asked Claud, a friend of Martin—the guest of honor who wasn't there—to bring Ilona along. Just by her presence and even without a word she might tell them something about the man who was her lover. Even though he was to appear soon, any day, their impatience threw open the door to her as wide as it would have been had he accompanied her. They must have been hoping for
someone like him to come into their lives, each one's hope so ardently secret from the other that he must have seemed inevitable.