Three Short Novels (16 page)

Restlessly he moved around the room, a host expecting one last guest before the festivities can begin, and she thought: He throws open all doors and begs loss to enter. Had he brought her into this almost bare room so that she might give him evidence in advance, just by her presence, of how his life was to be changed by the guest who would soon be lying in the narrow bed, sitting down with them to their meals, reclining on their couches, lying in their tub? The guest would even play the grand piano downstairs, the accomplished musician that he was, and a raconteur besides, whose every word would be given rapt attention. Once you leap out of obscurity so many talents come to light.

Awkwardly, as though embarrassed, he faced her from a corner. “You know I write myself? Claud must have told you. That's my study, the other door.”

Was he waiting for her to ask him what his novel was about? She never asked that question of anyone and sidestepped it when it was asked of her, and even if he were pleased to answer she chose not to see in his eyes, as he told her, all that pleading with reality to yield up its meanings.

“It's about them,” he said. “It's about this poet who runs off with somebody's wife and it's no bed of roses. Some of them die of joy after twenty years but some of them, like Neely, drop off fast even though she's doing all she can to make him the happiest man in the world.
It might have been too much for his heart, he might have wanted to be free of what he'd wanted so much.” He glanced at her sharply to see if he were truly heard. “She doesn't know what my novel's about, she thinks it's about my childhood in Iran. My father was an oil exec. I tell her Scheherazade tales and she thinks that's what it's all about. Something else she doesn't know and that's the guilt I feel, stuck in that room like I'm in solitary for committing some crime, and the crime is what I'm doing in there. I'm not supposed to touch them, I'm not supposed to get all wound up in it. It's like I've been warned to leave them alone. In other words, leave life alone. Die of it if you want to, but don't presume to know how it is with anybody else.”

He came toward her so fast, switching off the light so fast, that she was forced to step aside to allow him to leave the room first.

On the way down she glanced into their bedroom. A lamp was on and she saw a wide bed covered over with a pure white spread, she saw a deep red Oriental carpet and an antique chair draped with a black silk Spanish shawl. On the nights when their guest was to lie alone, up there on the top floor, would he know that the woman lying beside her husband longed to lie beside him, instead? Ilona, glancing in, was reminded of herself at twelve, when every night before sleep she imagined a different being for herself from head to foot, and that fervent concentration on every particular (from an actress up on the screen—her eyes; from a girl in school—her mouth; from a woman passed on the street—her hair) was to bring about a miracle. When she woke up in the morning she'd be the girl she'd created the night before. The woman who was embraced in that broad bed, the woman loved by many men—was she someone whom the girl, Ilona, would have chosen to become, back on those nights of dreaming herself up?

When they came down the last stairs and the room with its company was out before them, she was still in the past, the street urchin with the tangled hair and torn dress and the shame over herself, the child gazing at the scene through a window, not wanting in, only
wondering why so much light, why so many things reflecting light—silver and mirrors and glass and jewels and eyes—were always on the other side of the pane. The wife looked up at them and seemed to know all that her husband had told Ilona, and the face of the woman imprinted itself in her memory, an infliction, a trial, a dazzling fact of life.

The host brought Ilona a cognac and she stood with the other guests around him. He was lightly drunk, transported by his performance. “Old Fyodor, here's old Fyodor back in Russia. Here he is, knocking his shins on heavy Russian furniture again. He's just come back from the gambling spas, Baden-Baden, linden trees, fountains, roulette wheels, chandeliers like heavenly constellations over his little demented head, and here he is and he's under contract to that swine.”

“Paulina lay around naked,” Claud interrupted. “She lay around and wouldn't let him touch her. All across Europe. The girl he went gambling with, he couldn't touch her.” And someone laughed, a short derisive laugh.

“Anna, I'm talking about Anna, the girl he married. Anna comes after Paulina. I don't know what the hell happened to Paulina. Anna was his second wife. The first wife was insane and then she died. You ever think how many of the greats married insane women? Well, here he is, I'll start over again. Here he is back in Russia and he's under contract to that swine and he's got to hand over another novel or else he forfeits his rights to all his works so far. He's got one month and not one word.”

Ilona saw that his wife had wandered away to the stereo and, her back turned to the group, was selecting an album. The low voice of a French male singer was heard, and the woman bowed her head to listen.

“One lousy month and not one word. Then this friend says he knows about this class where the girls are learning some sort of hieroglyphics that's just been invented. Shorthand? What the hell's that?
So old Fyodor asks the instructor to send over a student, and he sends over this girl, twenty years old. . . .” One fast step to the side and he was the girl, gazing in awe at the space vacated by Fyodor. “Are you Mr. Dostoevski?” A girl's tremolo. Jumping back into Fyodor's space, he brought up from his chest a weary bass voice. “My dear Anna, I've got one month, my dear, one lousy month to get this novel together.” Then he was himself again, his voice his own. “You ever see pictures of her? Tolstoy told her they were look-alikes, Fyodor and her. They were. You can see for yourself. Same eyes, same stare. Or her eyes got to imitating his, she was looking into them all the time. Anyway, she took it all down in hieroglyphics every day, and every night she went home to Mama. They got it all together. So old Fyodor—everybody was old at forty in those days—asked her to marry him. My God, she loved him for the rest of his life, even when he pawned the baby's shoes for gambling money.”

Sweat shone on his face, he was a medium on the verge of collapse after conversing with that couple on the Other Side. His clownish act, his exertion stirred Ilona's sympathy. Was it his way of telling his wife that if only she would stay by him, they too would be remembered by the world? Now that his performance was over, the seductively aloof voice of the French singer was heard by all.

When the guests were putting on their coats, the host, waving his arms, called for silence. “My friends, I'd like to sing a little song for you. It's a song composed especially for the remarkable man who was unable to be with us tonight because he's in demand everywhere else.” With a rapturous voice he sang his variation of a song heard everywhere, “Mar-tin in the sky-eye with diamonds,” while everyone listened dutifully like children taught a song to sing together. Except his wife, who listened incuriously as if not listening.

It was then, at last, that her eyes met Ilona's—while her husband gazed up through the ceiling at the starry heavens and sang his one line—and Ilona saw the woman's awareness of her, she saw the other
woman's curiosity about what she, Ilona, meant or had meant or would mean in the future to the man who was to appear any day now, any moment, out of the sky.

2

C
laud caught at Ilona to keep himself from falling down the front steps. The collar of his coat was turned under, his hair, combed so carefully before he pressed the bell, was hanging in limp spirals, and his sight was hiding far inside like that of a nocturnal animal, a predator waiting for deeper night.

On the sidewalk—the lurch, the stagger, while she held his arm to keep him up. If she were to let go he might pitch forward onto his face. But out of sight of their host in the doorway and of the other guests, he was not so drunk for her as for them.

“My mother,” he explained, “taught me manners. She said someday you're going to mingle with people who count. So tell them how much you enjoyed their company and they'll invite you back again. That's how I do it. I get stinko drunk.”

Except for the seething sound he made by whistling through his teeth and for the rattle under the floor of his car, the drive to their neighborhood was a silent one and careful. They lived a few blocks apart on the north side of a hill above the piers fanning out into the bay.

She had been in Claud's one-room place only with Martin, and when the three of them sat around in there, this man seemed not to see her. Something had changed at the party. He had come to stand by her or sit by her, and he had told her who the others were—that man, an attorney, that woman, a psychologist, that man, a reporter—and he had told her what he knew about them, especially their frailties, and from across the room he had saluted her, and the salute was a puzzling tribute. At last, this night, he was acknowledging her presence.

“Come on in,” he said, “and I'll drink yours for the road.”

She wanted to stay only a minute and to sit in the straight chair, but he swung that chair aside to give her access to the lumpy, upholstered armchair. He sat down on the bed, leaned over to set an ashtray on the floor between his feet, and stayed in that position to hide the troubling in his eyes.

He was an anonymous man again after the brief recognition for his own novel. She hadn't known him then—ten, twelve years ago—and if she were to have met him she would have lost her voice and run away, wanting not to be counted among all those asking something of someone in the light—Oh, please see me—asking the visible one to make them visible too. Usually now he was out in his old fishing boat, wherever the fish or his restlessness led him, and she remembered dawns when she had stood at the window of the rickety house at the water's edge, over across the bay, the newborn girl in her arms, watching the fishing boats moving out toward the channel and the open sea, a line of dark imprints on the pearly, luminous waters. She remembered thinking It's not just a matter of a livelihood. They're testing to see if they're looked after, out there in deep water.

It was cold in the room. The oven door hung open and some heat was coming out, but not far enough.

“It's a blow upside the head,” he said, smacking his temple. “Fame hits you like that. That's how it hit me. Even my dinky fame compared
to a very large fame. It's like a comic strip. Whack! The guy's out cold, he sees stars, he's got this silly smile on his face. What it did, it was like I was forgiven for everything in my life which I shouldn't have done and for all those things I didn't do which I ought to have done, just because my past, my life, was exactly as it ought to have been, because if I hadn't lived such a life I wouldn't have got what I got, my dinky fame. It was proved to me that it's an all right world and God is an all right fellow. When I woke up I wiped that smile off my face. It made me look like those used car salesmen up on billboards, like those hearing-aid salesmen and realtors smiling away in the yellow pages of your phone book, like Orville Rednecker on his cartons of ice cream. I thought—Hey! We all got ourselves some homemade immortality.”

No matter what their host had said about envy, accusing all his guests, envy wasn't this man's problem and it wasn't her own and it might not be the host's. What was it then? Was it a storm warning when the horizon was clearer than it had ever been, the way they thought Martin Vandersen saw it now? Was it your own longing to be seen on earth while you were still here, and remembered for a while after? Was it only that longing, simple enough? Whatever it was, their host had called them together so that no one would be alone with it. Until now, after the party.

“Let's talk,” he said, “about something cheerful. Do you ever think about the end of the world? You think I don't know why I like to think about it, but I know, I know. You've heard about that ecstatic feeling epileptics get before a fit? Well, say you're ecstatic over a friend's good fortune and then you throw a fit.”

“Some other time,” she said.

“By cataclysm,” he began, “and the kind I'm talking about isn't what everybody else is talking about, like what we're doing to the planet. I've got an Old Testament God hanging around in my head and it will be His doing. You've got Him, too. I can see it in your eyes, you always
look like you're waiting for an angel to banish you from wherever you are. I was never raised in any religion and I never chose one for my very own, and a certain convert, my ex-wife, used to ask me How are you going to write about a tormented Catholic? And I told her I'll just consult the encyclopedia and find out all about a cathedral, where the hell the nave is or the apse, and then I'll throw him in and torment him. Well, this cataclysm is going to be our hothead God's when He's pissed-off enough. Say He gives a little push with His finger, say it's the same finger He touched Adam with, and the world somersaults. Over we go. The ocean goes bed-hopping. We'll all be swept over to the other side of the world and around again. It's not true you only go round once. Waves of unprecedented fury. If we could see it on television that's what they'd say. ‘A wave of unprecedented fury is sweeping over the earth.' Then your set's off and you and yours are swept away the same moment as your anchor man. Fffft.”