Three Short Novels (17 page)

One foot was turned in, pigeon-toed. It was that way when he walked, too, as if part of him, if only a foot, was at odds with the sardonic rest. “If it happens tonight, if the earth somersaults tonight, you alone in your bed, me alone in mine, that'll take care of any trouble Martin might have caused us. Something bigger than Martin Vandersen will consume us.”

3

O
ut alone in a neighborhood that was now her own but still unfamiliar, out alone in the night, she tried to free herself from the person she was with others, the trespasser who imagined more than she saw and saw more than she ought to see, the person who could not look into their eyes because, if she did, they would look into hers. She tried to rescue herself from this night, from the party, from the couple who lived in that house, from Claud, and from the premonition of loss, and the way to try was to remember two nights ago when she had embraced her daughter at the airport and watched the plane rise into the night sky.

Among a crowd of passengers checking their luggage, their unwieldy backpacks, she stood with her daughter, sixteen, Antonia, going off to Nepal, to the Himalaya, into antiquity. Not yet dawn, deep night still, and she had put her hands to her child's face and kissed her on the mouth, on the brow, on each cheek, and over again.

“Mother?”

“Yes?”

“All you need to do is bless me.”

“I bless you.”

“Now if you wake up in the night afraid about me, all you need to do is remember that you blessed me.”

Only a few pinpoints of light—the plane was only that, and then the lights had disappeared fast, though she had tried to mistake a star for the plane. It had come as a surprise to her that her child, or anyone, believed that she could bless and that the blessing might work.

Ilona, climbing the hill, became someone other than the woman she had been at the party. Alone in the night she became the one she was in solitude, solaced by the delusion that simply because she was given life then some deep mystery was promised her, not any answers, only the experience of mystery, a beneficence unlike that granted to those beings who belonged on earth with ease.

A green globe hung above the narrow passageway that led from the street into the concrete courtyard formed by old frame apartment buildings, where the wind rustled newspapers all night long into corners, and a large but dim globe burned above the flight of concrete stairs that led up from the courtyard, and only the night sky lit the higher flight of shaky, wooden stairs and the landing and her door.

4

I
lona, remembering how the wife had looked at her that last moment, remembered another moment four years ago when Martin's wife had come out into the night to see who Ilona was, to see who Ilona was in his eyes, divining her own future in Ilona's face.

It was in the time when he lived by the ocean and Ilona would drive across the bridge and through the city, out to the Great Highway where the houses facing the sea appeared shriveled by years of salt and wind, and the dim glow in their windows resembled small lights at sea, ready to disappear. At low tide she caught glimpses of the wide beach beyond the high sand dunes, and when the waves were heavy and close their sound against the rows of houses was like the ocean itself towering over them. He liked it there. Any hour, even in the middle of the night, he would leap up from his work and run along the strip of wet, hard sand, and sometimes she ran with him, over the mirrored sky, over the night clouds gliding along under her feet.

Always, when she was expected, his window lit the passage between the houses. His basement rooms were ground level, once a
garage. That night the passage was almost dark. Had she come when he wasn't expecting her, drawn only by her own desire? Once in a while, even when he seemed most grateful for her, another voice of his spoke up, cautioning her to expect a time when he was to be elsewhere, but she hadn't expected to be turned away so soon, after only a summer. She raised her hand and he was there before she knocked, springing up from a chair near the door.

Without a word he closed the door behind him and walked her back to the curb, and there he told her that his wife had tried to drown herself. They had parted a year ago, they had not seen each other in that time, but she had driven up the coast to go into the waves at his doorstep. She had waited on the sand for darkness, and then she had gone beyond the farthest breakers. Out there, overcome by terror, she had struggled back to shore and knocked at his door. She was sleeping now. Early on he had told Ilona about their many partings, that each parting was his wife's decision and that it was expected of him to be always waiting for her to return. Someone, he told Ilona now, must have written to her, a friend must have told her about Ilona, he must have told her himself.

They stood at arm's length from each other, not touching, the distance between them decreed by the woman in his bed. Yet even at that distance Ilona felt the ebbing of strength from his body, as much a loss as there would have been had he gone out into the deep water and brought her back.

“Martin!”

A voice thinned by fear was calling him from the passage, and Ilona thought—You have always to be prepared for a voice like that out of the past, calling the name of the lover.

His wife found her way out from the dark passage and, leaning against the porch, looked at Ilona, the woman who had come to spend the night with him. And how did she appear to his wife? There she stood on the curb—Ilona—quite thin, wearing an old raincoat,
her hair in disarray even before the wind off the ocean had got to it, and were all her attempts at beauty futile? The mascara, the necklace of blue glass beads, the high heels? There she stood, her hand over the place just above her breasts, a gesture to protect herself from the pain of not being the one, the incomparable one whom his wife must have imagined.

Without wanting to, Ilona glimpsed them as she drove away. They were going back through the passageway, his arm around her shoulders, her arm across his waist. They must have walked together in just that way to rooms where they lay down to love, and now together again they went back into his rooms that his wife must have wondered about from hundreds of miles away, rooms known to other women, unknown to her. Only the address had been known to her.

Ilona had counted the days, imagining how it was in those rooms by the ocean. His wife must have knocked at his door when he was sweeping the faded rugs that kept off some of the cold of the concrete floor, or when he was spreading clean sheets on the bed, or clearing away from the table his manuscript pages and newspapers and magazines and apple cores and walnut shells, when he was shaping up his rooms for Ilona, the woman who was coming to him that night. Someone knocked at his door. On his doorstep—his wife, streaming ocean water, and all expectation of pleasure for that night, and all desire for pleasure, was swept away. He brought her into the room, he peeled off her wet clothes, he turned on the heater and bundled her in under all his blankets. Then he sat in a chair by the bed, wiping her face lovingly, stroking her wet hair, the cold salt clinging to his fingers. She must have said I got scared out there and he must have imagined her out in the darkening ocean, her body lifted by the swells and swept under all night long while, unknowing, he lay with Ilona.

Seven nights after the night he had turned Ilona away from his door, he phoned her after midnight. He had driven his wife back to
San Diego, where she lived with a lover, where she was enrolled in the university. He had driven his wife's car, taking the route through the valley because she had driven up the coast route, along that precariously high and narrow road above the ocean. Then he had caught a plane back to San Francisco, unlocked his door, and called Ilona. After the last parting a year ago, he told Ilona, his wife had written that all the capitals of the world were open to her now. She had written to him like a girl writing to a brother, and in the year apart she had confided in him just as she had done when they were together, she had told him about her lovers, she had told him about her hopes for herself. But when she heard that another woman might take her place, and be loved above all others, then the world with all its capitals had dwindled down to nothing.

“This time,” he said, “this time we convinced each other the world is still out there. It's still out there for both of us”—his voice dimmed by the sound of the heavy waves shaking the air.

When Ilona came to him again and lay down with him where his wife had lain, she felt the other woman's fear of abandonment. While he slept the night seemed a night already in the past. She heard the calls and wails of the little children in the house above and the mother's bare feet across the floor, she heard the man who lived on the other side of the passageway, in rooms like Martin's, wander out and come back again, over and over, and she wondered foolishly if everyone's restlessness was brought on by the man beside her, if it seemed to them that in his basement rooms he was devising a miraculous future for himself, leaving them all behind. They probably weren't thinking about him, they weren't troubled at all about whether or not they were to figure in his memory. Only herself, the woman beside him, was already adrift in his past.

5

T
here were so many mailboxes fixed to the wall of the passageway between the sidewalk and the courtyard that her own sometimes seemed missing. It couldn't be found, first attempt. While she waited for Martin to return in his own time and from wherever he was in the world, freed at last by the work that had kept him captive, freed by the praise for that work as if those who praised wore rings of keys that opened the doors of cells, a profusion of letters and postcards arrived from Venice, from Madrid, from Amsterdam, from London, and she would climb the first flight of stairs and turn and climb the next flight, reading.

The foreign airmail stationery was of a fine, soft texture and subtle colors, and his handwriting over this weightless paper—careful but not precise, quick but still contemplative—and over all the postcards of paintings in museums enabled her to imagine him among the places he described. She imagined him possessed by all there was to see, euphoric one moment and dazed the next by the realization that he was never to see it all.

One among the many postcards was Rembrandt's portrait of himself when he was a young man, and she gazed at that one for a long time. The face was partly in shadow, the small, black eyes so alive in
that shadow, and the rest of the face and each hair of his head radiant, lit by the ruddy gold light of a day four centuries ago or by lamplight on a winter night. The postcard came the same day as the letter from her brother, and her tactic to postpone opening her brother's letter was to gaze for a long time at the portrait. If she gave herself over to the beauty of that face it might reflect itself on all human faces, among them her brother's face. It was a superstitious act, an attempt to redeem her brother, and she had done the same thing with a portrait of Copernicus she'd found in a book on astronomers, and that man's narrow, bony face above the ecclesiastic's collar, his sideways gaze sliding away from the painter's concentration upon him, resembled even more closely her brother's face, and she imagined Copernicus living incognito as a poor, demented soul in a rented room in Chicago just to see how different the universe could look from there.

On coarse tablet paper, her brother's letter was composed in the formal style taught him by his father, who had taught him to read and to write, and the pencil was pressed down hard, key words emphasized in red pencil.

My dear sister,

In order not to beat around the bush I must confess I am afraid. There is a pain in the region of my heart and I intend to find out what it means. In the meantime, please give serious thought to my plea. I assure you I will not be a burden if you allow me to live with you. I will find a job and we can share expenses. You might also consider Chicago. You can rent a room for yourself and your child in the Nestor apartments. It is clean and comfortable here. The landlady will prepare a room for you as I have already told her about this possibility. Since you have never informed me about how you make a living I guess you are a jack of all trades. If that is the case you can rest assured you can always find a job in Chicago.

A child only half his age when he was twenty, she had been his mentor and his guide out in the streets of the city, out in the world of terrors and threats, a child keeping step with his long, erratic steps, her eyes down to hide her shame over him and her shame over that shame, an entanglement of shame, and to hide herself from the wary, fascinated, mocking faces that watched them approach and pass by—the poor young madman in dead men's clothes from salvage stores, clothes too big or too small, and his sister with the snarled hair and the soiled dress that was twisted in places because she had stitched a tear wrong. She had not seen him for almost twenty years, not since the day they parted in the empty bungalow on the edge of Los Angeles, the yellow stucco bungalow that was probably not there anymore. An apartment house was probably there, layer on layer of other families living above a memory they knew nothing about. She had kept from him the way she made a living, by ephemeral stories, a way that often, very often, seemed a cowardly evasion, a dense dreaming, a delusion of omnipotence that enabled others, who were wide awake, who knew what they were doing, to slip the floor out from under her feet. He would be unable to grasp it, she knew, because it was less substantial, less meaningful, with less of a future than the way he made his living, scrubbing pots and pans in hospital kitchens, mopping the floors of restaurants and museums, pushing an ice cream cart through the heat of summer, and if he did grasp it, then his very understanding would convince her that both of them were awry, sister and brother closely resembling each other, both so uncomprehending of the world and so willful about how it was to be imagined.