Three Short Novels (18 page)

You will recall I told you about my job in the Cook County Hospital. A steel splinter from a brush got into my finger and caused blood poisoning to set in and I didn't know it. Imagine that! I was visiting an elderly gentleman who has an apartment down on the first floor. He used to be a pastry cook at
the Palmer House and he has a stove in his room and bakes pastries. He saw the red streak up my arm and escorted me to a doctor who gave me a shot. My friend kept me in his room and applied hot, wet cloths to my arm, day and night.

Although he was happy to be tended by a friend out in the world, wasn't it true that his sister ought to be the one tending him, just as she had protected him from what the world might do to him, the years when she had walked beside him and sat beside him on trolleys and buses, her small presence never enough to keep his fear from breaking out as a cold sweat over his face, never enough to convince him he was not at the world's mercy.

Six, seven years ago he had sent her a snapshot of himself. It might be lost, it must be lost. She found it now where she knew it was, at the bottom of a shoebox of snapshots, and, sitting on the floor of the closet, she examined once more the man in the little picture. He was afraid of the camera—she could see that and she knew why. Who was it on any film but a ghost and who wants to see his own ghost? The one in this snapshot was a man at a picnic in a park in Chicago. You could tell by his stance he was tall and didn't know what to do with his tallness, you could see he was thin because of his fear over his body and how it might trick him and do him harm. The pantslegs of his suit were somewhat short and so were the sleeves. But a tie! White cuffs! His forehead had spread upward into the dark wavy hair to become a likeness of the noble brow, and whoever had taken the picture of this man trying to smile, this childlike eccentric, had no way of knowing who he had been in his youth and what tumult had gone on in that stucco bungalow in the weeds.

She, Ilona Lewis, who had vowed to herself to see that certain persons would not pass by unknown, even if all she could do was imagine with a few faltering words their inaccessible selves, had deliberately forsaken one and that one was her brother.

6

W
hen she opened the door to Martin she asked herself several questions and gave herself answers, all in the space of a moment. Was he taller than before? No, he was always tall and you can't grow several inches in three months if you've reached your full height already. He weighed more? No. Or maybe yes. His face, then? Was it any different? His face was larger, even broader than before. But that was not true either. Was he changed or was he not? The enigma came right along with his familiar presence and with the tears that rise at the appearance of someone who's been away for a long time and whose absence is like a hint of forever. He was the same and yet he was changed in her eyes by the thousands of strangers who saw his face in photographs many times over, a hypnotic repetition, and who, before, had no idea he existed.

In that same moment he appeared to be asking himself why he had come here and who she was. Then he stepped inside and embraced her. He went ahead of her down the little hallway, and in the kitchen he sat down at the table, lifting the lamp to the edge as considerately as he would have moved a sleeping cat. They had spoken only each other's name, nothing else.

“Would you like wine? Would you like tea?” Was her voice lost among the countless other voices from wherever he'd been and wherever he was to go? She had dreamed of him often while he was away, and in one dream he was leaning against a doorjamb, framed by the doorway, just stopping by to tell her he was on his way elsewhere, smiling over the thought of someone who was waiting for him, unseeing of her alarm, of the grief that woke her. The figure in the dream stood between her and the man in the familiar wrinkled raincoat with the twisted belt, the man at her table, the table where they had talked the night away, so many nights, back in that house on the mountainside, the man who had seen in her face, then, a spirit deserving of benevolent curiosity, even of love, the man watching her now.

“It's me,” he said. “There's nobody here but me.”

Then he stood up and she came to him, and he was not the stranger at the door and not the man in the dream. Their arms around each other, they roamed up and down the hallway and in and out of rooms. They roamed the neighborhood and back without knowing they'd gone out, both of them entertained by the comic adventures of Martin Vandersen out in the real world. Strangers, he told her, strangers on the street, in theater lobbies, in restaurants, on planes, recognized his face and failed to know his name, once giving his face the name of a novelist incomparably more famous and twice his age, and once the name of a young French film star, dead years ago, and she wondered if the famous ones, each undeniably different from the rest, bore a striking resemblance one to the others, even so.

Along the windowsills were the postcards he'd sent, among them the hotel postcard from Los Angeles. On the back he'd written That's me in the lower left corner. See what's become of me? The little figure in the photo of guests around the swimming pool was a bald man whose belly ballooned out over his yellow swim trunks. In that vast pink stucco hotel, he told her now, he'd had a suite of his own, his
own postage-stamp-size patio with palm tree, steak and lobster in the restaurants, and the use of a long white convertible, everything paid for by the producer who had bought the screen rights to his novel and for whom he was writing the script. Some rewards, he had written on the postcard, are for something other than what you think you've done. It's a case of mistaken identity.

Spain, after that, and the villa on the Costa del Sol, one of the hideouts of the American director and that was no hideout at all but a mecca for notables from all over the world. A general from Israel, a Zen priest from Kyoto, an Italian novelist, a soprano from Austria, a British historian—all had been guests in the time he was there, some singly, some together. And where did he go when he was alone again?

“That will take years,” he said. “I'll keep you awake all night long for a year.” But he began, at random. “From Malaga to Seville the road winds up among steep, dry hills, and on the slopes are chalk-white villas, far apart, and when you approach Seville you see great piles of golden wheat and a gold haze over the fields. I went to Avila, too. The town is enclosed in ancient stone walls, immensely high, and outside I saw an old woman in black sitting on the grass, sewing, and she was so small at the foot of those walls and she was so used to them. I came back to Madrid on the evening train, and the moon, the full moon, looked like it must have looked centuries ago when people were in awe of it. So close, alive, just about to say something in a voice that would fill the sky, a marvel of a moon. The train stopped along the way at village stations, and young girls were hanging around, flirting with the civil guards, and the light inside the stations was gold because of the white moonlight outside.”

Spain was like the moon to her, Europe was like the moon. She hadn't been there, and when anyone assumed she had, she underwent some confusion, some embarrassment, as if caught in a lie. Because she had sent characters of hers there, they figured she had gone there too, before the imaginary ones could even buy their tickets.

“In Madrid I spent four, five days in the Prado Museum, hours in that room where they've got Goya's paintings from that time toward the end of his life they call his Black Period. When he painted those ghoulish, goatlike creatures. Maybe he was in a black period most of his life. Look at his Disasters of War, the terrible things we do to one another, the atrocities, where else was he but in a black period? I looked at those paintings wishing I could be abysmally true, like him, only with words. No fooling around anymore. What I did with my novel, I think I had to make the tragic palatable, like tell a few jokes, because if you take a long look at what's tragic, it's indescribable. Maybe I'll become like Claud and never write another word.”

She had imagined him wandering the museums ecstatic, the praise for his own work persuading him to give up his disparagement of himself and accept a kinship with the great ones, and now, aware of her mistake, she kissed him, and her kiss was a way to impart some of that ecstasy she had imagined for him.

It was ten o'clock at night and they were at the kitchen table again. His raincoat hung on the back of his chair and he reached around into a deep pocket and unfolded on the table a large manila envelope. Several smaller envelopes of various colors slid out—blue, lavender, coral, one decorated with sprigs of flowers. Along with the letters came clippings from newspapers and magazines, some with his picture, and the face that the host had held up high for all to see appeared once again. All this had been given him by his editor in New York, yesterday, and he had read the letters on the plane. They were from strangers, some reminding him that they had met or that they had been fast friends in grammar school or in high school or in college, in cities where he had never been. One man recalled the day they climbed the mountain together, the mountain in Montana that rose above the acres of wheat and the farmhouse where the two brothers were born, the mountain that existed only in the novel. Another man claimed to have been present at the death of the younger brother, a
medic in the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam, but Martin's brother, who had served him as the character, was alive if not well in a veterans' hospital. From out of the envelope decorated with flower drawings—a snapshot of a girl. A lovely face, dark curls, and her letter confessed her hope that someday they would meet because she had recognized him as the man she was to love above all others. Whatever, whomever they wrote about, whether about themselves or about him, all their letters were saying the same thing between the lines. You are someone who sees, so please see me. You are someone who is seen, so please see me and make me visible. His voice unmarred by vanity, he read them aloud, puzzled, like someone learning to read a foreign language, and she saw that he was cured of his talent for witty ridicule; his writing outstripped that lesser talent. Some of the reviews likened his vision to that of the great novelists who wrote about peasants and farmers—Hamsun and Giono and Turgenev. She gazed at his face in the lamplight as he read, and, though his voice was disbelieving, his face was soothed by that resemblance.

When everything was back in the large envelope and back again in his raincoat pocket, he looked around the kitchen and down the hallway, so narrow they had bumped their elbows against the walls the many times they'd gone back and forth, arms around each other. “It's small, isn't it?”—asking and answering. He was not to live there with her.

Above them a quarrel was going on, the voices even more distinct than those upstairs in the house by the ocean. Then he told her that the couple—“What's their name? Jerome? Is that their name?”—had invited him, via a letter from Claud, to stay with them until some friends of theirs left for France, and then he could sublet their friends' house indefinitely. Solitude for each was a sound reason for their living apart for a while longer, a reason Ilona supplied but only in thought, a reason to protect herself against the pain of not hearing him say Come live with me. She was not afraid of solitude, she had
weathered it often, she desired it often, but now she wondered what there was to fear in solitude that had not been there before.

“Give me your hand.”

She laid her hand on the table, palm down. From a pocket of his jacket he took a small white box, turned her hand up, and placed the box in her palm.

“Open it.”

She had never felt a need for gifts from a lover, from anyone, and so she failed to know, at first, what the box meant, and only gazed down at it, waiting for him to tell her.

“Ilona. Open it.”

Gold earrings in the shape of a rose, a seed pearl in each one. But when she looked up, something in his large clear eyes said to her, without his knowing, I'll forget I gave you this. If there was a roomful of observers, not one would see the gift as a sign of his departure. They would see it as a token of love, and it was that, too. It was both, and maybe that was why she had never wanted gifts, because they were mementos of love.

A continent and an ocean separated them when they lay down together, and every caress was a failed attempt to bridge the distance, and though he held her as he fell asleep, wanting not to lose her while he slept, he took a sudden fall into sleep and was gone.

7

N
o light was on behind the bamboo screen at Claud's window, the nights she walked by. She had not seen him since that paroxysm of a party in honor of the man who wasn't there. When, at last, the light was on in his room she could not bring herself to knock. She went on down the hill toward the piers, wishing that his window was dark, and contradicting that wish with another—that he would open the door just as she was passing by again and invite her in and tell her, without her asking, about Martin.

While Martin was still a guest in the couple's house he had come by often to be with her through the night, and in her few small rooms he had seemed to be wandering in a vast space. At night the red and white quilt that had belonged to his grandfather lay over them. He had loved his grandfather dearly, and his leaving the quilt with her seemed a promise that someday they would live together again. The nights she lay alone the quilt over her was like intimate knowledge of him as a child, like proof of kinship, but when he lay beside her, whatever she had imagined about his childhood became an intrusion on his life in the present. One night, while he sat on the bed taking
off his shoes, he looked down at the quilt wonderingly, as if he had never seen it before. She was already under the quilt, and from the corner of his eye he saw her watching him and gazed back at her, and recognition of her dearness darkened his eyes. But when he lay down beside her, his caresses were as unseeing of her as they had been since his return. The last time she had heard from him was after he had moved into the house of the couple who had gone to France. He had phoned to tell her where he was, and that was all. After three weeks of silence, a silence she kept because she was afraid to hear again the stranger's voice, she had phoned because of fear over him. If, before his recognition, he had seemed destined to become a venerable old man, in the silent weeks she became deeply mindful of how visible he was now and how vulnerable. It was a reversal of her illusion that if you were recognized for your wisdom, for your art, for whatever was admirable, you became invulnerable, you might even live forever. She had phoned him at last and got no answer, and that was yesterday.