In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Louise and Regi had their first quarrel about Leo in the Old Vienna. It was their habit to meet there at least once a week for afternoon coffee and “to talk things over.” What they talked over on that occasion was Leo’s classes which were about to begin. They were his first experiments in a lifelong series of training programs and workshops—his trials and errors, as he called them, toward the evolution of a life-philosophy (though he hated that word) which in the end culminated in The Point.

  The point at issue between Louise and Regi on that afternoon was where these classes were to be held. At first he had agreed to hold them at Regi’s and she was annoyed that the venue had been changed to Louise and Bruno’s apartment where he was then living.

  “But Regi, darling,” Louise tried to soothe her, “it wouldn’t be convenient for you. . . . You know you like to sleep late. And what when you have to sort your laundry?” she said, smiling on this last, for it was one of their private jokes, Regi sorting her laundry meaning Regi having a lover in.

  But Regi continued to pout. Pouting rather suited her, she had that sort of mouth; also, ever since the age of thirty she had been a redhead, and redheads were expected to be sulky. “He isn’t going to hold classes all day, is he? We could arrange about the times.”

  “Can you honestly see Leo arranging with anyone about his times? You know what he’s like, what sort of a tornado,” Louise said, and laughed out loud.

  “Well, of course, with you spoiling him. He doesn’t have it so easy with me, I can tell you.” Regi tossed her head and looked more sulky. She and Louise were always somewhat on display at the Old Vienna. They were perched on little chairs at one of the round marble-topped tables for two set up in a row along the center of the restaurant. Their legs were too long to fit under the table, so they kept them crossed outside, long and smooth in silk. Both were elegantly dressed—Louise in one of her sober, well-cut suits of very expensive material with a fox-fur piece around her neck; and Regi much more flamboyantly in a long-skirted, clinging crepe de Chine dress with masses of jewelry hung like booty all over her.

  A waiter approached their table with a note. It happened regularly, and the only question was for which one of them the note was intended. This time it was for Louise; she read it and tossed it in the ashtray. “I told you, Heinz,” she spoke severely to the waiter, “not to bring me these things.”

  “What can I do,” the waiter said. He leaned over the table, not only to brush it with his napkin but also to whisper to Louise: “He says you are the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.”

  “Ridiculous,” Regi said, stubbing out her cigarette on the note in the ashtray. “Which one is it? One of those decrepit pieces of furniture against the wall, I expect.”

  “The gentleman on the right over there,” Heinz whispered.

  Only Regi turned around to look. She saw a smart, bold Viennese gallant—there were still plenty of them around in those days, sitting in their favorite cafés all day on the lookout for women with whom to have a liaison or just a rendezvous. Regi turned back contemptuously.

  “I don’t know why you have this fatal attraction for all the dear old gentlemen,” she told Louise. “You should see this one: why don’t you have a peep? He’s smiling all his gold teeth at you.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “No. I think nowadays you are only interested in Leo.”

  This upset both of them: Regi because she thought it was true, Louise because Regi was going too far.

  Assembling her dignity around her like a shawl, Louise said: “Of course I’m interested in Leo. Aren’t you? I thought we were both interested in his work.”

  “Well! Good heavens! Who introduced you to him in the first place? Who discovered him: you or me? I must say! Ridiculous!”

  “Keep your hair on please, Regi.”

  “Sometimes you’re so irritating, I’d really like to scream. I would scream too, if we weren’t in public.”

  “Go on. Do. I think you ought to.”

  “Do you think so?” Regi asked. “Are we supposed to act out in public too?”

  They huddled closer around their little marble table and fell into a deep discussion. To the Viennese gentlemen watching them from all around the restaurant it was clear that they were talking about affairs of the heart. But actually they were discussing Leo’s theories which were changing their lives. They were both in their thirties and several years older than he was; they were married women—in Regi’s case already twice, and twice divorced: they had a lot more money than he and were at that time among those who had the privilege of supporting him. But none of this detracted from his authority over them, and they had absolutely no hesitation in putting themselves—their personalities, or inner beings, or souls (except that he disliked that word)—into his hands.

  A compromise was reached about his classes. Since Regi’s apartment was starkly modernistic with a lot of empty space, it was more suitable for the physical expression classes; while the theoretical lectures remained at Louise’s. Both represented important, indeed, inseparable aspects of his work. At that time his teaching was still loosely attached to the theater—though the theater only in so far as it was a symbol of Life; and in his theoretical classes at Louise’s he taught that the actor—mutatis mutandis, the human being—could only express those passions which he had absorbed into himself through his own experiences. Leo would call on someone, anyone, at random—and how their hearts beat, for who would it be today?—to relate some personal experience in illustration of the Passion which was the topic of the day. One day it might be Jealousy, or Wrath, or merely Irritability, another Love. It was discussed, expounded on, at Louise’s, and then at Regi’s it was acted out. With all her tubular furniture pushed out of the way, and only her white wolf rugs scattered over the parquet floor, the students gave strenuous physical expression to the chosen Passion; not only in their own characters but assuming those of others as different from themselves as might be—shoe clerk, masseuse, streetcar conductor; and further, not only as human beings but as animals too, so that, for instance, on the Day of Wrath there would be such roaring as of lions, such bellowings of bulls, chatterings of monkeys, shrieks of hyenas that nervous old ladies in the rest of the building would call through the intercom to complain to the doorman who came up to ring Regi’s bell.

  Leo’s classes became popular, so that soon Louise’s apartment was too small for his lectures, and Regi’s for his physical workshops. He took a large open rehearsal space in a building converted into an experimental theater. Around this time, he began to prepare his students for public demonstrations. These were not to be regarded as a contribution to theater—he was moving farther and farther away from that—but as a demonstration of his work in the field of existential experiment. He discouraged students with an interest in or talent for acting in favor of those whom he called “blank pages”: that is, those who were willing to give themselves over to his exercises for their own sake—to lend themselves, body and soul, to his experiments.

  This Louise and Regi were fervently willing to do. On the other hand, they were by no means blank pages but had very highly developed temperaments of their own. The same could be said of all Leo’s students—both at that time and, indeed, at all times. Maybe that was why they were attracted to him in the first place, because they had proliferated into such complicated personalities that they could no longer manage themselves and felt the need to hand themselves over to someone else, someone stronger. It was part of the challenge of his work; but it was also part of its difficulties, and from this time on he began to have what he called his “escape hatch” to which he could retreat from the demands of his emotionally charged students.

  His first escape hatch was a small room at the top of the experimental theater building. He allowed his students to furnish it with the sort of things he liked and needed—a leather couch, framed etchings of Gothic edifices, a comfortable armchair, many reading lamps, and a phonograph on which to play his
favorite Wagner and Beethoven records. It was a cozy, masculine den, and his students took an eager pride in getting it ready: but when it was, they found themselves excluded with a big LEAVE ME ALONE sign which he had scrawled on a piece of brown paper and tacked to the door. They could do nothing but stare at it.

  Although Leo moved some of his personal possessions to the escape hatch, he still kept most of them in his room in Louise and Bruno’s apartment. This suited him—especially as they did not charge him any rent—and it also suited Louise, for that way she could still think of him as living with her. She lay awake at night, waiting for him to come in. For the rest of her life she remembered those nights of waiting, with Bruno asleep next to her. Often she couldn’t stand it anymore but got up and moved from room to room and looked out the windows into the deserted lamplit street below. She always ended up in Leo’s room, moving around it, touching his things, experiencing its emptiness suffused for her with the feel of him. Overcome sometimes with emotion, she stood leaning her face against the cold window glass. The building opposite was the same heavy, scrolled, turn-of-the-century apartment house as her own; here and there in its dark granite mass a window was lighted up like a watchful eye. The silence in her own apartment was as deep as its darkness, and Bruno slept and slept—or she thought he did. Once, though, when exhausted with watching and waiting, she came and sank next to him again, she saw that his eyes were open and as wakeful as the windows opposite. It was a shock: “Bruno?” she said, but at once his lids extinguished his gaze, and she saw that he was breathing regularly in peaceful sleep, so she must have been mistaken.

  Louise and Leo had become lovers within a week of his moving in with her and Bruno. For her it was a secret that she carried within her like the gardens of paradise—green, blooming, watered by eternal springs; birds sang perpetually. One day she couldn’t stand it anymore—she had to unburden herself: of course to Regi, and in the Old Vienna.

  But Regi, as soon as Louise had made her tremendous, her tremulous, confession, just laughed: “You don’t by any chance think no one knows?” When she saw the expression on Louise’s face, she laughed more. She made a production of it, throwing back her head and opening her mouth wide with all her healthy teeth and palate flourishing within. Of course the men all around looked at her, hungry as wolves.

  “You’re wonderful,” Regi said.

  “You mean you guessed?”

  “Guessed!” Again Regi laughed, but only for a moment. Then she turned serious and cynical: “Well, what do you expect—what would anyone expect—when someone like Leo moves in with someone like you?”

  Pained and bewildered, Louise protested: “But he’s my teacher. Mine and yours.”

  “Yes, some teacher. Listen,” Regi went on, “I know Leo. And I know you.”

  “No, Regi, that’s not fair.”

  And it wasn’t: Louise was by no means promiscuous. In giving her hand in marriage to Bruno, she had given herself totally: first as chaste bride, then—after the birth of their daughter (it took eleven years till Marietta was conceived)—as housewife and mother, the Ceres of his household. She adored Bruno, no other man but her husband had ever counted for her.

  “Oh, I’m not blaming you,” Regi said, blowing cigarette smoke into the air, worldly-wise and tolerant. “It was inevitable. I was just waiting for it—ever since you told me what you told me.”

  For in one of their tête-à-tête sessions at the Old Vienna, Louise had confessed to Regi that now she and Bruno were as father and daughter, or brother and sister, or was it mother and child?—anyway, all possible combinations except husband and wife with each other. Louise had not complained: it made no difference at all to her feelings for Bruno whom she loved as before.

  “If it hadn’t been Leo,” Regi said, “it would have been someone else. Well, naturally, what are you, a nun or something?” She was quite indignant on Louise’s behalf.

  But now Louise got really angry: “You don’t think, you’re not thinking, that it’s nothing more than—with Leo and me—” She couldn’t even bring out what she had to say and ended up with “How horrible of you.”

  Regi shrugged her slender, crepe de Chine shoulders; she lighted another cigarette; she recrossed her long legs by the side of the little marble-topped table. “Sometimes you talk like a child.”

  But just now Louise could hardly talk at all; she continued to stammer, partly in anger, partly in frustration at being unable to express the height and depth of her feelings. At that moment the waiter came up with a note. It was for Louise—tears of rage rose in her eyes, she tore the note across and across and threw the pieces on the deep-pile rose carpet. How handsome she looked as she did this, how brilliant her eyes were, and her bosom heaved like an opera singer’s: her gold-toothed, bald-headed inamorato across the restaurant thrilled at the sight of his own rejection.

  She jerked her head in his direction: “I hope you’re not mixing Leo up with one of those. And I hope you don’t think there’s anything vulgar going on.”

  “I told you: I’m not blaming you. I never thought it was vulgar when you made your pass at Leo—well, yes, of course you did, my goodness, what else was it?” Now it was Regi who was angry, whose eyes blazed; but unlike Louise’s eyes, full of fire, Regi’s were of ice, glinting green: “From the very first time you saw him at my place, from that first afternoon, I could see it: what was going to happen; what you were after.”

  “Lies, lies,” said Louise, shutting her eyes.

  “But I’m saying: it’s not your fault. How could you help it? You were ready for it. And I was happy for you; I was glad. I’m still glad,” she said, crushing her cigarette in the ashtray in a rather vicious way.

  Louise gathered up her handbag. She buttoned the coat of her two-piece. She rose with a resolute air.

  “But what’s the matter?” Regi inquired, looking up at her. “Can’t we even talk frankly with each other—I thought that’s what friends are for? Oh, all right, go then, if you want to, but don’t forget it’s your turn for the check this week.”

  Louise opened her purse; she placed money on the table regally. And regally—tall, full-figured, crowned with a wide-brimmed hat—she walked out of the restaurant. She did not hear Regi call after her, “You can take the change from me later!” Nor was she in the least aware of the tide of interest and admiration that followed in her wake. As soon as she disappeared through the revolving door, this tide turned and swept back toward the marble table where Regi now sat alone. Regi had picked up and counted the money and put it away in her alligator bag; she called for more coffee with cream; she recrossed her legs. Men straigthened their neckties. With a click of her gold lighter, Regi lighted another cigarette and rounded her mouth to blow the first smoke ring into the air.

  Forty years later, Louise and Regi still met at the Old Vienna, though not very regularly. Regi lived mostly in Florida now, and when she visited New York, she didn’t always bother to call Louise. But when she did, they usually arranged to meet at the Old Vienna, and as before they occupied one of the little tables for two ranged down the center. And as before, they drew many glances—only now not because they were handsome but because, perched among the crowded tables, tall and old and odd, they were impossible to overlook. And Regi, though still retaining the bored manner she had developed for social occasions, was at the same time avidly alert to everything going on around her.

  “Why do you still come here?” she asked Louise, though she herself had never suggested another meeting place. Her eyes roved around, rested on Leo’s old table in the alcove: “Because of him, I suppose.”

  “He’s hardly here now. He’s at the Academy.”

  “Academy,” Regi said. “Ridiculous. Who’s ever heard of such pretentiousness. . . . And I hear the girls are getting younger and younger.”

  “You’re looking well, Regi,” Louise said.

  “Because I look after myself well.” Her eyes rested on Louise; she smoked disdainfully. Louise still wor
e one of those same dark suits Regi remembered from years ago, and the same big hat to go with it; only now her hair, too thin to keep pins in, straggled from underneath. Regi herself had given up on her hair and wore a tall red wig; her brand-new dress was silk and of electric blue, and her jewelry was bigger and more fantastic than ever.

  “And now you’ve sent your granddaughter to him too. Even if she isn’t your granddaughter.” Regi had never given her approval to Natasha’s adoption.

  “She’s working in the office,” Louise said. “There’s a lot of secretarial work.”

  “In the first place,” Regi said, counting off on a skeletal forefinger, “she can’t do secretarial work.”

  “Natasha is very hardworking.” But Louise sounded neither convinced nor happy. She didn’t know why Natasha had gone to stay at the Academy; she wished she hadn’t. It was true, Natasha couldn’t do secretarial work; Leo would get angry and yell at her whenever she bungled something, which would be often.

  “In the second place—” Regi said; she was ready with another finger to count off, but then she couldn’t remember what there was in second place. Her eyes began to rove around the restaurant again; when she caught a curious glance at herself, she put on the contemptuous expression with which she had always warded off a pass. “Such awful types come here now,” she said. “I wouldn’t be seen out dead with any of them. And the waiters are just useless, no good.” She clawed at a passing one, pointed at her empty cup: “If you’re not too busy, thank you, and can spare a little time for me. I’m going to the theater tonight,” she told Louise. “A musical, you know how I love them. Jerry is taking me—you remember Jerry?”