Three Short Novels (20 page)

“Maybe I belong where I was before.”

Where was that? Was it where he had thought he was when he was with her? Was it among all those in the dark?

Though the room was between them, he was too near. A door was open to another room and she went in. A bed covered with a sea-blue spread. A bureau with two silver candlesticks, the white candles burned low. On a chair a woman's silk kimono, pale green and amber and garnet, mingling in exquisite harmony, the woman's own colors. Tonight he would recover from this day. She left the room the moment she entered it.

In the doorway she was caught by him and embraced, and in his body against hers she felt that same ebbing away of his strength, that same bafflement over a woman's coercive need of him just as on that night his wife had gone into the waves at his doorstep, and she longed to embrace him and protect him from herself, the enigma that was herself.

“Sit down with me,” he begged.

She went with him to the couch but she would not sit down with him. An unbending will had taken possession of her body. She stood above him, and he drew her between his knees and bowed his head against her. Someone years ago had seen in her some goodness of heart, even some beauty of spirit, and only now was she remembering.
Was it this man? And had he told her not in words so much as in his embrace of her?

“My heart wakes me all night long,” she told him.

“My heart wakes me too.”

She hadn't expected that.

“Nobody but you makes me cry,” he said.

What did that mean? If she had come to be told that, yes, she was a good person, yes, comprehending of the lovers despite the trouble she was giving them, if she had come to be told this, was he telling her that her striving to be wise was enough to make him weep, so futile was that striving?

She broke away. Flowering plants, ferns in humid air—a conservatory? No, it was only a small room next to the kitchen. A bare table, a mug of cold coffee, a few crumbs. The windowpanes were rattling in the warm wind and a fly was crawling along the sills and tapping against the hot glass. It was really a modest kind of house. But when the woman sat here at this table, the flow of morning sun, patterned with the shadows of leaves, must appear like a lovely scarf floating around her, and he would paint her as Bonnard would have painted her, her hair ablaze with sun, and summer fruit on the table. Back in his rooms by the ocean the walls had glowed with museum prints—portraits of women who had mesmerized the artists years ago, centuries ago, and when he had lain asleep beside her those women had seemed to be the women in his dreams or all icons of one woman.

A door led to the backyard, and Martin stepped out into the wind and the sun. She watched him through the window as he knelt to set a plant upright. One sundown, out on the cold stretch of beach, they had come upon a shorebird whose wings were covered with oil. A few days before, fuel oil spilled from a tanker and hundreds of birds were dying. He had knelt and clasped the bird in his strong, gentle hands though it pecked at his hands with its long sharp beak, and they had taken it to a bird refuge to be cleansed. Watching him kneeling now
to attend to a living thing, she saw how he could be mesmerized by a woman's desire for more of life, for him, and by his own desire for more life.

The boughs of a tree in the next yard hung over the high fence between the yards, and she sat down in their shadows that were swept back and forth across the grass. She was always surprised by gardens in the city. This one was a tangle of dry grass, tomato plants, and geraniums. From over the fence drifted the sweet, lulling music of glass windchimes hanging from a branch. Years back, in her neighborhood of bungalows on the edge of Los Angeles, glass windchimes hung on the front porch of a bungalow where something violent had gone on, the nature of it kept from her, a child. The bungalow was empty, no one lived there after that, but the windchimes went on tinkling, stirred by the slightest breeze.

Martin sat down beside her in the confusion of sun and shade, and stroked her hands. “Your hands are beautiful.” They were not, the knuckles and fanlike bones too visible. Some caresses of hers that had conveyed to him her sight of beauty in his own being—he might mean that.

“Who are the ones you say are blessed?”—his voice carried away by the wind and back again.

“I just suppose they are”—her voice her own again. “You have to see that my mind isn't altogether gone.”

“Who do you suppose they are?”

She lay down on the coarse, dry grass. “Nobody is.”

But something comic about his request for simple answers freed her to consider who they might be. Once again she let herself believe that simple answers were always hovering around and she had only to catch one on the wing.

“Explorers, I guess. Where nobody's been before, each one in his chosen territory. Even though they go so high or so deep they can't breathe anymore. They might be.”

She didn't know what she was talking about and she didn't want to look up and see his listening face. She could see only his shirt and how the shadows and sun moved across it in quick succession.

“Go on.”

“I guess great singers.” They would do as well as any.

“Could you speak a little louder?”

“I said great singers.”

“I heard that so far.”

“Say a great soprano, and the audience stands up and applauds for a long time, and you're standing up with the rest and as the applause goes on and on you notice you've got tears in your eyes. Say you're up in the balcony and you can see the rest of the audience below and you can see the little figure on the stage, and her head is bowed.”

No answer, no comment. He must be giving it serious thought.

“Or say a great composer. What if you'd heard Beethoven play the piano, his own music? A friend of his said that his bearing was masterfully quiet, noble, and beautiful. You'd feel you were in the presence of someone blessed, wouldn't you?”

“I hear,” he said.

“But if he was blessed he didn't know it. In one of his bad times he wrote to a friend ‘A man may not voluntarily part with his life so long as a good deed remains for him to perform.' Maybe he didn't know his good deed was his music. Or maybe he knew it but not all the time.”

She glanced up to see him nod because she knew he wasn't going to do more than nod.

After a while, “Who else?”

Who else? Who else? The number had to be small.

“I missed that one.”

“No, I said nothing.” Lost as it was out there in the wind, her voice wanted to retreat still farther to its usual refuge that was silence.

“Maybe those desert fathers. They stayed in their caves, they starved themselves. When one of them was given a gift of sweet
grapes, he passed it on. It went all around and came back to the giver, not one grape missing. They wanted nothing, they wanted nobody around but God. Maybe they were blessed. Or maybe they just wanted to be. I don't know. I never tried to name any before.”

“Go on anyway.”

Go on anyway. “Would you say those persons who give their lives for others? The ones who spend their whole lives that way because it is their life. Even though they die for others, even though they're executed or assassinated. Would you say they are?”

No answer. Only a waiting silence.

“A while ago I was looking at a book about the Spanish architect, Antonio Gaudí. Could he be one?”

Almost impatiently, “How do I know?”

“Everybody loved him. The whole country. He was like a saintly child, he was so deeply religious. One evening he was on his way home from the cathedral he'd designed and he was struck down by a trolley car and he lay there in the street, an old man in old clothes, and nobody knew who he was, and no taxi driver would take him to the hospital. They thought he was just a derelict. Somebody got him to a hospital and he was put in the paupers' ward, where he died. By then friends had gone in search of him and then everybody knew who he was, this poor old man with snow-white hair, and cries of sorrow went up all over Spain.”

“Anybody else?”

“Astronomers?”

“You're the one who's picking.”

“Astronomers, I guess. Like Galileo, like Copernicus. Can you imagine how they felt? Their heads filled with those great aerial charts? The planets spinning around the sun in there? When you see their portraits all you see is their faces, but when you think about what was going on inside their heads, they must have felt blessed, don't you think so?”

The rough grass against her face was suddenly unbearable. “I remember something Michelangelo said about human beauty, how it seemed to him that God revealed his beauty that way and so it's an outward sign of spiritual beauty. No matter that I know for sure it's not so, it seems so. It seems true because it's so simple and because Michelangelo said it. But isn't it a terrible blindness to everyone else in the world?” She sat up. “No, I can't anymore. I don't know who is blessed or who isn't. It's a waste.”

“No great writers? The long dead ones?”

“They could be.”

“They wouldn't agree they were blessed.”

“No, I guess they wouldn't agree. I remember an old German book of pictures of the death masks of great artists and composers and writers from all over Europe, and the faces of the composers and the sculptors seemed serene, as if they were on their way to Paradise, but the faces of the writers were tormented.”

She brought her knees up and bent her head to them, closing her eyes, wanting not to see him. It was absurd, this pursuit of something always elusive—an answer to why there was so much light around the few, even centuries after they were last seen on earth, and why the rest went down in the dark.

“Ilona?”

“I hear you.”

“Do you think they were blessed?”

“Maybe everybody thought they were just because they tried to rescue people—us, everybody—from oblivion. Maybe the rescue was an ordeal for them because they knew in their hearts it wouldn't work after all. I remember about Chekhov, his long, long journey across Russia and Siberia to that island, Sakhalin, where the czars sent convicts. He was tubercular, he was already coughing blood, but he made that journey—floods, awful rains, cold—to record what went on there, who they were. He wrote that the street noise there
was the clanking of leg irons.”

Silence. Then, “No more?”

At last, and against the most resistance. “Lovers. In the beginning.”

“Ilona, where do you come from?”

He began to stroke her hair consolingly as if she were a lunatic quieted down, and she wished she had kept her cumbrous delusion from this man who no longer cared to hear even the lighter ones.

10

T
he blinds changed from sunstruck white to mauve to gray. A streetlamp on the corner came on and the blinds changed to silver. In those hours the woman he loved now, the woman who resembled those portraits on the walls of night, back in his basement rooms by the ocean, seemed to be wandering the street, away and near again, and some moments so far away she might be lost out there forever. The kimono had been put away, he had slipped it away without her seeing how. Instead of a lessening of desire for him because she had become less, she felt desire as intense as in the beginning of their time together, a desire that was like the desire for life that flares up and takes possession in moments of danger.

They slept, and when she woke she was certain it was late, almost midnight. It was only evening. Seven, by the clock on the bureau. Martin was awake, lying on his back, very still.

“Does it seem she's always known you?” It was a question she ought to have left behind in sleep, where she must have heard it clearly spoken.

“I don't know what you mean.”

Neither did she. Unless she meant that the woman he loved now
must seem to him to have known him back in the years of his obscurity, when no one else had known he was already the man he was to become, when only he had known.

“She loves me, that's all I know,” he said, and the longing in his voice confirmed his love for the other. “She would have loved me when I was a nobody, if that's what you want me to doubt.”

She got up and with her back to him began to dress, wanting to destroy the tormentor in herself, wanting to give in to the way things were in the world, wanting to regain an innocence from years ago, that receptive innocence to which all things offered themselves.

She heard him get up and begin to dress. Somewhere in the house a phone rang. Over in her aerie the woman must be wondering why he hadn't appeared, suspecting he was caught in the maelstrom stirred up by the woman he'd left. He closed the door to the small room where Ilona had seen a desk and books, and she heard no words, only the resonance of his voice against the door. She imagined the compulsion of love that brought the woman to phone him. More than compulsion—the conviction that she was loved and her voice always welcomed and waited for, and Ilona imagined his pleasure, his relief, hearing the voice that rescued him from his tormentor, if only for a brief moment.