Three Short Novels (23 page)

They searched a long way, up and down the beach, for enough dry sticks and driftwood. From far Ilona saw Jerome moving about, a figure in an excellent suit a shade darker than the sand. He stumbled over a mound, and she expected to see him drop to his knees and stay there. A dog, running along the beach in zigzags and loops, stopped to nose the package and dig furiously with its hind legs, throwing sand over it. They came back with their arms full.

With a show of expertise, Claud arranged wood and newspapers and set the pile ablaze with Jerome's cigarette lighter. “The rest is up to you. Don't throw it all in at once, you'll smother the fire. A few pages at a time and don't try to read them.”

Kneeling, Jerome untied the string, unfolded the wrapping. The wind lifted the top page and began to slip it away, left it to riffle through the pages just underneath. Then, leaping up, waving his arms, he was shouting at the three figures above them. “Look what's going on here, fellas!”

He took off running, he ran in circles, searching for something he must have seen earlier, and swooped down on it at last—a yellow plastic pail, or part of a pail. Waving it above his head, he ran down to the water, waded in, filled the pail, ran back and past the fire, and
stopped before the girl.

“Fellas, look!” he shouted, holding the pail over his head. “I'm going to burn myself up. I'm like your Buddhist monk over in Saigon. See! I'm pouring this gasoline over myself. See, fellas?”

Ilona saw no change in the faces of the three, no smiles, not even annoyance. The one with his eyes closed did not open them, and the other two continued to gaze out to sea.

Jerome tipped the pail and the water splashed over the crown of his head and streamed down his face. He threw the pail away, leaped down the slope, ripped off his shoes and socks, and thrust his bare foot into the fire. He kept his foot in the fire beyond the limits of even Claud's endurance.

Claud shoved him off, and he went hopping away. Hopping back, he picked up the entire manuscript and dropped it into the fire. The fire was almost extinguished. Sparks, burning bits of wood shot out all around. Claud handed him a long stick, and he stirred the fire to life again. The flames flared up, the corners of the pages turned brown, curled up, the words in black ink turned brown and lost their meanings. The top pages rippled, rose up and fell back and vanished, and the pages below, facing suddenly the vast white sky, shriveled into evanescent shards. The bulk of the manuscript remained almost untouched, too heavy and dense for the air to enter and lead the way for the flames.

Jerome limped away fast and Ilona followed him. For a long way he waded through shallow water, cooling his burned foot. His trousers were wet to the knees. She could tell by his back, by his lifted shoulders and bent head, that he was crying. In the white glare of sky and ocean she lost sight of him. When she found him again he was sitting on the sand, up away from the water, gripping his ankle.

She sat beside him. The skin on the sole of his foot was burned away. “That monk,” he said. “I wasn't ridiculing him. God no. I wish I were him. The man had something to burn himself up for. The
world's over there, that's where it's at, and I thought it was waiting to hear what's going on inside my head. The rot up here, up here. What I did in that novel to her and old Neely, Willy Nilly Neely, poor old cocksman! You look at your pages, you look at the type, it's like barbed wire. You've got your victims, your prisoners inside there. Years ago I read about what those syndicates down in Mexico do to the prostitutes who try to escape. They roll them up in barbed wire. I was doing that to her. Elisa.”

The wind was colder, it seemed colder. It stung her face, hung back, slipped by, came around and struck her face again. She could say that the ones he thought he'd imprisoned behind barbed wire were not there, that he had imprisoned only himself and not forever, and someday he would forgive himself for the attempt on their lives and his own, but the roar of the ocean filled the sky and her voice would be unheard.

“Well, I guess I set them free,” he said. “I guess I'm free myself, free of her, free of her boy. He always reminded me of his father. I think I loved that boy, I think he loved me, but I'm glad he's gone. I loved his father, too, but he shook me up, the son of a bitch. But I can't say I'm free of Martin Vandersen. Maybe I'll never get rid of him, maybe I'll become one of those nighttime teeth-gnashers, and if I ever get married again my wife will sleep in a separate bed. The only way I can ease myself of him is to imagine him when he's old, you know what I mean? When he's old and his fame gone, and all those seraphic curls gone, all those red curls shining under all my goddamn lamps, maybe we'll embrace in Paradise. ‘Goddamn, Martin, glad to see you again!' Maybe that's where we were in a dream I had a couple of nights ago, but I didn't know that's where until Claud reminded me there's a Paradise. Joe Neely was there, too, and we were standing on a sort of balcony, the three of us, me and Neely and Martin. We had on white robes like angels or maybe they were hospital nightgowns, but we weren't old yet, we were like we are, or Neely was, and all the pain
and envy and anger were gone, and there were all these women down below, women and children looking up at us, and I said to Martin or he said to me or Neely said to him or to me, one of us said it anyway, ‘Which one did you say was Elisa?' We didn't know and it didn't matter. Maybe that dream made me decide to burn the stuff.”

It was a long way back to the fire. He walked all the way in the shallow water, limping. The three meditators were gone, the fishermen gone. The only ones left were a lone figure far down the beach and Claud, poking the fire.

“It's got to be ashes,” Claud said. “You don't want somebody to come along and read a fragment and take it home. It could trouble him the rest of his life—What came before and what came after?” At the end of his stick the last page burst into flame.

They climbed the sand dunes, Claud in the lead, and at the top he paused. The green motel was flashing a million promises of glamour and ecstasy to the overcast day. No blazing sunset was necessary.

“Claud, don't say it,” she begged.

Jerome came up the dune last, shoes in hand. His hair was wet, his trousers wet, his face pinched closed by the cold wind and the loss of his captives. A white line, like salt, sealed his lips.

They went down the sand dune together, no one leading, no one straggling, and all the way back into the city they spoke not one word.

13

O
ne night she heard Martin's footsteps on the stairs. She knew they were his footsteps, always light, rather slow, those of someone led by a reason not yet known to him. The room where she slept and where she wrote faced the landing. The lamp was on, the curtains closed. He tapped at the window.

“Ilona? It's me.”

It began, the trembling of desire and resistance to it. Her hand was trembling so much she had trouble with the simple lock.

Avoiding the room where the lamp was lit, he went on into the kitchen.

“You're working late.”

She was wrong about his footsteps. He knew why he had come. He was troubled over what she was doing in her own way about the end of love. Or, as usual, she was only imagining what went on in someone else's eyes.

“It's not about us,” she said.

Relief in his eyes, and then a doubt, and then, perhaps because he chose not to doubt her, his eyes accepted her words. “Some say it's best to wait ten years before you say anything about any experience.
If you did that you'd give me time to escape and yourself, too, if you want to escape.”

Was he cautioning her to wait until balance was restored by time, to wait until the memory of love would suffice to soothe her and redeem her? She had only to wait and wait.

“What's it about, then?”

“It's about my brother.”

“I forgot,” he said. “I forgot you had a brother.”

Strange that this man by leaving her was leading her more deeply into herself than he had when he was with her in those few years of love. Like a guide who has no idea where he leads.

“That's what I tried to do,” she said. “I tried to forget him, but I couldn't. I was always afraid he would appear, knock at my door just as it was getting dark, when we were sitting down to supper or when it was just getting light and the air was cold, and I would be left alone with him because everyone would leave me, even you, not my child but maybe even her, and my friends, my few friends. He'd knock and I'd open the door and I'd see his face again, his face that never knew how it looked to the world. It's about him, even if it's just for myself to see, because now he breaks my heart.”

“Ilona.” He came no closer. She wanted him to come closer but he stayed where he was, across the room. “Ilona, can you see me that way? Not like everybody else sees me. Not like you see me now. You think I'm blessed, you think Somebody out there loves me, and sometimes I go along with that because it feels good. But I'll tell you something. Someday I'm going to be back with everybody else again, you won't be able to tell me apart. Me, just a lowly human being again, maybe even lowlier than the rest, and what if I knock at your door, the real Martin Vandersen, Old Mortal Martin? Would I break your heart?”

When he came to her she put her hands over her face to hide her desire for him. He kissed her hands hiding her face and led her back
down the hall that was not wide enough for two abreast, and drew her down onto her bed. She had imagined herself far in his past, faded from his memory, and she was engaged, day and night, in a desperate rescue of herself, a rescue by thought, by words, but all the time she had known the rescue required something more—his body over hers, his hands over her, his mouth over her, his desire moving over those secret places where proof of love seems to lie.

Apart, each facing upward in that rapt position memory places you in years later: “Ilona, did I tell you I dreamed about you? The other night? You knew where underground rivers ran and where trees could be planted and thrive.”

Nights to come, when she was to be wakened by her fear of belonging nowhere, by despair over who she was, so lacking in the virtues that make your presence, your time on earth so precious to some others, it was to calm her like a deep persuasion of his love.

At dawn when the phone rang she was lying against his back, curved to him as she had been curved to him countless times before, and in the first moments of waking the loss of him had not yet come about. Wrapping his shirt around her—it was closest to hand—she ran down the hall, praying that all was well with everyone.

The sound of distance like little waves, and within the waves a voice asking to speak to Ilona Lewis.

“That's me,” she said. “I'm here.”

Washed over by distance, the voice—a man's voice or the grainy voice of an elderly woman clerk—told her that her brother, Albert Lewis, had died at six that morning. A voice in a vast hospital told her that her brother had been brought there in the night, suffering a heart attack.

“I'll come on the earliest plane,” she said, and when she put down the phone her cries were the ones her brother kept down in his throat that last morning when he came to the bedroom door to beg her to allow him to protect her from the world.

Martin sat on the rim of the tub and bathed away the sheen over her body. He drove her to the airport and, waiting in line to board the plane, she rested her head against his chest and he kissed her on the brow, and to everyone else he must have appeared to be someone who would be waiting for her when she returned.

14

A
glass door to a dim vestibule, and the landlady peering out at the woman on the porch who had pressed the bell so early in the morning.

“I'm Albert's sister.” At last. And when she was let in she said it again, repeating it to exonerate herself from the years of her denial of it.

A second, inner vestibule, dim also, a black pay phone on the wall and a black leather discard chair before it. So this was where he sat waiting for her to call at the time they had agreed upon by letter, and always he had waited half an hour in advance, afraid he would miss her call or another tenant would have claimed the phone. So this was the small space wherein he waited for her voice.

“Come in. You like cuppa tea?” I have a Greek landlady who knows how to make repairs like a man.

Ilona followed her into the flat and down the long hallway and into the kitchen. The presence of the night still lay heavily in the rooms off the hallway, they were so solidly crowded with massive furniture and the drapes were closed, but the light of day came through the kitchen window.

“Your brother a nice guy. Nice guy. He always like cuppa tea. Sit down.”

Ilona sat at the table, in the chair where her brother had sat. A large dog dropped a red ball at Ilona'a feet and backed away, head cocked, a bright anticipation in the corners of its eyes. Its black and white fur lay in tidy, tended layers.

“Your brother, he like Hector. He always throw the ball. Nice guy.”

The sister, too, threw the ball. She threw it the length of the hall and the dog was back in no time, dropping the ball at her feet again. She threw the ball again, keeping her eyes on the dog to avoid the landlady's eyes. This woman's two sons, both in their teens when her brother moved in, became doctors while her brother went on living in the same room, observing their transformation with a tenant's pride.