Three Short Novels (19 page)

Once more she came by Claud's window on her way up from the piers. Fine as broomstraw, the bamboo screen was made almost transparent by the light in the room. Claud was sitting on the floor, reading. She saw the many books in their orange-crate bookcases and remembered something he'd told Martin—that every time he found a book by one of his own beloved writers in somebody else's house he felt a pang of betrayal, as if that writer had been his alone, his closest friend.

A flicker of embarrassment in his eyes when he saw who it was at his door—a woman who had come to hear something she didn't want to hear. With one arm he gestured toward the lumpy armchair, with the other he offered the bed, and the entire small room was made available to whatever her response was to be when he told her what he knew. Anyone who leads you further into the way things are appears to be an enemy, but, watching him close the curtains, she felt an impulse of gratitude, a crucial last-minute impulse to make a comrade of him before he became an enemy.

“She left her husband,” he said.

Then, “Sit down.”

She was afraid to move. If she moved she'd fall away from her lodging in Martin's life.

Sparing her his sight of her, he turned his back. “She bought a house over on the mountain, up beyond where you used to live. All you've got to remember is. . . .” He must be groping for some truism that would take care of everything. “She hasn't invited me over so I've never been there myself, but he's pointed it out to me from this side of the bay, more or less where it is. A little closer to heaven.”

In the past, when this man had seemed not to see her, he must have known about this moment and avoided the sight of her, even then.

“Sit down, Ilona.”

Some closeted figure within her was warning her that if she sat down it would reveal itself, its fragile, cloistered self that was unprepared for assaults common to all. Out in the world there was a terrible prevalence of assaults that put to shame this one.

“All you need to remember,” he said, “is that your imagination finds more bliss for them than they find for themselves.”

A trembling took her over, and she turned toward the door, wanting to run out. Instead, she stayed where she was, to hear more. He was wrong, this man. He had figured it out in reverse. The bliss of lovers was the reality and your imagination came nowhere near. When she turned back toward him he was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her, and she saw at once, with surprisingly sharp sympathy, how his face contrasted with that of his friend Martin, whose face always expected great tidings, as if a promise had been made to him at birth. The promise was missing from this man's face, or it had passed before his eyes on its way somewhere else.

“Women with that gaze, you never forget them,” he said. “Those melancholy beauties. They look at a man that way and he thinks he's
the one she's been waiting for. I used to think it was me she had her eyes on. I imagine Anna Karenina looked that way, and Emma Bovary. Maybe Frieda looked at D. H. that way when he came to visit her husband. Women like that are always waiting for the lover to show up and they don't have to wait long, they just wait over and over. Oh yes, and Helen. Sailed away with Paris, the guest who came to stay just a few days. You've read Seferis? For me the greatest poet alive. So many of his lines—it's like we used to say in school—I know them by heart. She wasn't really there at Troy, but nobody knew that, ‘and Paris, Paris lay with a shadow as though it were a solid form, and we slaughtered ourselves for Helen ten long years, and the rivers swelled, the blood bedded in muck, all for a linen undulation, a bit of cloud, a butterfly's flicker, a swan's down, an empty tunic, all for a Helen.' I like the idea she wasn't there, it helps me when a woman looks right through me as if I'm air. I think—You're not there either, baby, you cause trouble but you're not who everybody thinks you are, you're a figment of our dumb imagination. Martin told me it got so strong between them he had to leave. I don't know how long he intended to stay. Maybe he set his suitcase down on that blue rug of theirs and thought he was on the Aegean Sea forever. He moved into a hotel until he could move into that place he's in now. She used to come to the hotel.”

Lovers obliterate you. She imagined them in the husband's presence, unable even to glance at each other because a glance would reveal to him how far from them he was, swept way back into the past. And when Martin came to be with her, those nights when he was living with the couple, she too was swept back into the past. A necessary cruelty the lovers mistook for kindness. Oh let's not hurt him, oh let's not hurt her. Let's simply make them disappear.

She began to button her coat and realized she hadn't unbuttoned it. Claude was wrong again. It wasn't melancholy in the eyes of those women, it was serenity, it was like that sweet stun in the eyes of children
who've been given a gift they never asked for, a gift too much to ask for.

Lamed by grief she climbed the hill and when she reached her street she turned, and there it was across the bay, across the black waters—the glittering mountain—and facing that spectacle of lights was like facing the lovers, their unseeing eyes.

8

A
t four in the morning she was kneeling on the floor of the dark kitchen, dialing his number. She had taken the phone down from the table because this trespass had to be done in a crouch, so she could not be seen, so she could protect her breast from his voice, from his presence on the other side of the city or from his absence, over there. She expected him not to be home. He was with the woman in the woman's house. They were lying together in that depthless sleep after loving, that falling away from the wondrous balancing of one by the other. Or they were in his bed, and the ring of the phone was waking them both. If he answered, what would she ask of him? Something beyond the possible? That he become himself again, change back into himself?

“I'm afraid.”

“Of what?” He must be standing nude, he always slept nude. Or on his way to the phone he might have wrapped himself in a robe, he might own one now. Neither of them had a robe when they were together. Robes belonged to the infirm or to those who preferred sleeping to waking. But the woman might have given him an elegant robe that made him even more precious to the giver.

“Ilona? What are you afraid of?”

Every night she slept for an hour or less and was waked by the pounding of her heart, by her heart leaping up in fear of itself.

“Of what? Of what?”

“I'm a good person.” It made no sense.

“I know you're a good person.”

“I'm dear to some. I'm dear to my child.”

“Yes you are.”

There was no way to ask him to be her comrade again if only for a few minutes, only long enough to assure her that she was not someone who deserved to be left, not untouchable, not like the millions of untouchables, way over on the other side of the world.

“Ilona?”

“Can I come over? When it's daylight, I mean?” Never had she begged for anything from anybody. Unless, without knowing it, she had begged the very air, all her life.

“So early?”

“I mean in the morning. I need to tell you something.” She didn't know yet, herself, what it was she had to tell him.

He was waiting.

“I mean when I come. I need to tell you something when I come.”

He said nothing, reluctantly waiting for that something to be laid upon him.

“Please tell me how to get there.”

When it was over she bent her head to the floor, covering her eyes to hide herself away from the woman's sight of her, from her sight of the woman lying in his bed, her body covered with that shimmer of bliss that had covered her own in the past.

9

T
he long view of Market Street on a Sunday morning, the trolleys few and far between and only two and three people in sight, moving slowly through the heat of yesterday and of the day to come and through pale sunlight not yet reflected on glass and metal, an odd light like that of the first minutes of an eclipse. Waiting on the corner for a trolley that would take her into his neighborhood, she was again a trespasser into other people's lives, someone who insists upon saying something about the self regardless of the hour.

The clanging trolley carrying her along was like her own ridiculous will. Unassuming people should always be suspect. Sooner or later, when the time comes, their will takes over, their unanswerable desires take over. She kept her head bent with the shame of this tumult over the end of love. It happened to almost everybody, it was as widespread as other misfortunes, but it was the one to keep quiet about.

When she stepped down from the trolley it was just as he had described it to her—she was facing west, facing a steep hill, and just as expected her heart was a tyrant terrified of itself. The climb up the
hill was as tiring as it would be if the day were already over. At the top of the hill, on a corner, there it was—a gray frame house, small among the houses and apartments that covered the hill.

Where was the front door? There, at the end of an archway of dusty, flowering shrubbery, and she imagined the woman passing along under this arbor, coming and going.

“I won't stay long.” Not long, only long enough to plunge them into everything unanswerable from where it took forever to rise.

He kissed her on the lips, perhaps to placate her, perhaps to pretend he was glad to see her, unseeing of how his kiss deprived her of him.

Off in a kitchen he fixed tea while she stayed in the living room by a window, afraid to turn toward the room, immobilized by the presence of the woman for whom the house and all its objects were familiar. The woman was the atmosphere of the house. She wondered if she had forgotten to comb her hair or wash her face. Was there some gray in her hair she'd discover when she got home? If you bow your head for so many years over your endless unknowing, over your imagination that substitutes for knowing, then how surprised you are, when you lift your head, to find yourself older than when you began.

The interior of this house was to puzzle her memory for years. It was a small house but like a maze where experiments are carried on with animals—a reward somewhere, you had only to find it. She was never to get the scheme of it straight, where one room belonged in relation to another.

Each waited for the other's first words, one mind in fear of the other, and the moment she sat down to accept a cup the unspeakable self spoke up. “I can't be like her.”

“Why do you say that?”

Then she was up and roving, leaving untouched the teacup that the woman drank from. “I can't be like her, I can't be serene like her. You told me I was troubled in my soul, you made me feel like I had
something you didn't want to catch, but most of the time I was calm, most of the time we were comrades, most of the time we felt love. If there's trouble in me, and there is trouble, it's the nameless kind that's all right to feel because I'm human and I feel, and it's not just over me, it's over so much more than me.”

Her voice was loud and harsh, a voice not her own and yet her own but never heard before. So many times, people had to bend their heads to hear her, afraid they'd been stricken deaf. Then she heard that voice say something she herself would never say. “Oh I wish I were her!”

It was shameful, it should never be said and never even thought—the wish to be somebody else. The wish to be that other woman was a betrayal of everyone in her life whose life seemed entrusted to her for safekeeping, even if only in memory, a betrayal of everyone whose life was more precious to her than her own. The wish to be that other, any other, was to abandon them.

In a corner now, cornered by her own self, she was saying something she couldn't believe she was saying, so archaic, so demented, so lost was its meaning. “You're among the blessed ones now, you know.”

Nobody thought that way anymore, and she waited for his denial that would relieve her of the idea, relieve him and herself of the burden of it. She waited for a small, scoffing, uncomfortable laugh, at least.

A wind, stirred up by the heat of the days and nights, swept the curtains out over the sills, and a door in another house slammed shut, a distant sound warning of listeners. That voice of hers saying crazy things might be heard by whoever was in the apartment house across the street, by whoever was passing along the sidewalk. He shut the windows and pulled down the white blinds, and went into other rooms to do the same.

A white glare filled the room now, and she was to remember herself roving through that glare in the heat of the day, trapped by her
own self within that house she was never to enter again, within rooms that would puzzle her memory like a maze.

When he came back into the room where she waited in her corner, he had an answer for her. “Maybe I am among the blessed.”

At the front door she had seen at a glance that his face was mute, a mask concealing his life from her, and she had avoided glancing at him again. But now she looked to see if he were agreeing with her only because he hadn't heard it right. She had wanted him not to agree with her. Nobody was blessed and nobody abandoned. The world wasn't like that.