In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  “Yes,” Louise lied. Regi always had some young man around whom she paid as little as she could get away with, so they changed frequently.

  “You do? How can you? I only met him last week . . . Oh, I suppose you’re mixing him up with Chuck. Well, Mr. Chuck had his good-bye and good riddance, we’ve seen quite enough of that one, thank you very much. . . . Oh, by the way, he said he knew your Mark.”

  “Why not? Mark knows a lot of people.”

  “I wouldn’t like him to know someone like Chuck; not if he were my grandson. . . . I have such a pain here, Louise, it shoots right up my thigh.”

  “Pain,” Louise said. “Who doesn’t have pain.”

  “I have my checkup regularly,” Regi said with a proud sway of her wig. But next moment she looked at Louise with eyes which were quite appealing and humble: “It couldn’t be anything bad because Dr. Hirschfeld gave me an absolutely clean bill. He said I was remarkable . . . But it keeps coming back.” She put out her hand to a waiter again, but he escaped her nimbly, swaying sideways with his tray. “You don’t know how lucky you are, Louise. All you have is toothache.”

  “And heartache,” Louise said—as a joke, trying to cheer her up.

  But Regi took her seriously: “Well, now listen, the time for that sort of thing is really finished. There’s a lot of it going on in Florida, but I keep myself absolutely away from it. And if you hear people talk about me with Jerry or anyone, you can take it from me, there’s nothing of that sort. He’s just a nice boy who helps me out sometimes. I might get him to take me to Dr. Hirschfeld again tomorrow, if this doesn’t get better. . . . Oh, God, you’re looking over there again. I can’t stand it.”

  Louise took her eyes away from Leo’s table and murmured, “There’s such a nice couple sitting there, do you think they’re husband and wife?”

  “Husband and wife. Whoever is husband and wife nowadays . . . I’ll tell you something, Louise: I’m tired. I’m tired of it all.”

  “So am I,” said Louise, but in such a different tone that Regi had to put her right at once: “I mean of all that sort of nonsense. The you and Leo sort of nonsense. And while we’re on the subject let me tell you something else: from now on, I don’t want to hear another word about the old monster. I just don’t want you to mention him in my hearing ever again. I don’t even want you to think about him when you’re with me. Is that absolutely clear? Ridiculous,” she finished off.

  But once upon a time, Regi had felt differently about Leo. Louise didn’t remind her—and Regi didn’t want to be reminded—of the night she had found them out. It was a night when, Leo having failed to come home for almost a week, Louise did what was forbidden to her: she tried to track him down. In an uproar at her own daring, she telephoned the escape hatch. But there was no answer. She let it ring and ring; then she tried several times more. The result was always the same. There was a rushing in her ears, or was it a storm in her brain. She lay down next to Bruno asleep. The storm did not abate. She got up, tried again; at the other end the phone rang and rang in an empty room.

  Then she became reckless. She telephoned Regi. It was three in the morning but Regi answered quite soon, and wide awake. “. . . Know where Leo is?” she echoed Louise’s question. She put surprise into her voice but did not take much trouble to make it sound genuine. “How should I know a thing like that?” she drawled and seemed to be smiling—possibly at someone else there in the room with her.

  Years and years later—two generations later—Regi told Mark about that night, and its aftermath, and how jealous his grandmother had been. Regi laughed at the recollection: “She always took everything so seriously. For me it was only an episode, short and not all that sweet, but for her . . . Well,” said Regi, patting down her wig, “each one to his taste, or whatever it is they say.”

  Mark listened to her with pleasure. He always liked listening to Regi and getting her view of the past. When she was in New York, he often visited her in her apartment—the same apartment where Leo had held his first classes. Although she only used it for a few weeks in the year, she kept it because by present-day prices it was what she called dirt cheap. She never allowed anyone else to stay there. When she left, she simply lowered the blinds, and when she returned, she opened them again. She still had the ultramodern furniture of the thirties, all glass and tubular metal legs; the same white wolf rugs yawned on the parquet floors. Over the marble mantel hung an expressionist portrait of Regi in the nude. “Do you really like it?” she asked Mark who always spent a long time looking at it. She felt it didn’t do her justice, although she knew by now that it was worth a great deal of money. It had been painted by a German artist who later became very famous. He had been madly in love with Regi—crazy about her, she told Mark—but she hadn’t had much time for him. “I don’t know why you think it’s good,” she pouted at the picture which showed her geometrically elongated, with green eyes spilling all over the place, and breasts like little icebergs.

  “This is what I really looked like,” she said. She drew his attention to a studio portrait which showed her contemplating in profile. When he admired it, she got into a good mood and brought out her albums. There was Regi in a swimsuit, and Regi in her leopard-skin coat; and motoring in an open sports car, and off to a masquerade as a chimney sweep in tight black silk. Louise was with her in many of these early photographs, and other girls in very short skirts. There was a New Year’s Eve party where everyone held a champagne glass and blinked at the light of the flash. Another time they were on the beach wearing colored swimming tubes. All the young men were dapper, with a tennis racket in one hand and the other around a girl’s waist. In some of the pictures they kissed the girls but no one was serious for their eyes were swiveled roguishly toward the camera and some of the young men winked.

  “Yes, we were so romantic,” Regi said, “so romantic it isn’t true.” She looked at Mark sitting next to her, turning the pages with such pleasure. “And what about you?” she said, digging her forefinger into his ribs. “Don’t say you’re not romantic.”

  “No, I’m not saying that,” Mark smiled.

  “I should hope not. You can’t fool little Regi. I can always tell.”

  “Tell what?”

  “What, he asks. What do you think?” She massaged his thigh which he obligingly kept still beneath her old, old, speckled hand. “Yes, it sticks out a mile when a person is romantic; when that person lives for love.” She smiled into the distance but next moment she took her hand from his thigh after giving it a hard, rather spiteful little pinch; she sighed. “You should have known me at that time, what’s the use now,” she said and shut her album with a snap and was in a bad humor for the rest of his visit, as though somewhere she had been cheated, shortchanged.

  But she was right: Mark was of a very romantic disposition. Regi often teased him and tried to get him to confide in her about his affairs. “You can tell Regi,” she coaxed him, and afterward she boasted to Louise that he did tell her. But he didn’t; he was secret as the grave.

  In his younger days he had been promiscuous. He had started when he was in school, had really got into his stride in college, and then through his restless years of travel. But although in those days he had frequented bars and beaches, this was not his chosen way of life. Mark was serious in his approach: it was love he wanted, he craved, and he was ardent and tireless in his pursuit of it. He met with many disappointments, drained cups of bitterness to their dregs, but his ideal was never dimmed. This was always embodied for him in youth and beauty—it was only there that love for him was to be found. Yes, he believed in the beauty of the soul, but it was necessary for him actually to see it embodied in physical form. In earlier days, his chosen partners had been of his own age, but once he got into his early thirties, he preferred boys who were considerably younger. He looked very young himself: he was fair, compact, quick-moving, rather short in stature—his height was his grandfather Bruno’s rather than his tall willowy father’s. But although he
looked so boyish, the role he liked to assume was a paternal one. Perhaps because he had always had his women—Louise, Marietta, Natasha—to look after and play the father to, so that he was used to being depended on, educating, guiding.

  His latest lover was a youth called Kent who suited him better, he thought, than anyone he had yet met. It must be admitted that he had thought this more than once before, but had been disappointed. Kent fulfilled the first requisite to perfection—he was beautiful. Immensely tall, with broad chest and shoulders, he appeared very manly; but although his head was as perfectly modeled as his figure and sat on his shoulders like a Roman emperor’s, his lovely eyes and mouth were full of a soft, feminine expression. And as if all this were not enough, he was also intelligent and talented. It was his ambition to be a photographer, and Mark was eager to help and encourage him. Kent had already been helped and encouraged by a previous patron, a much older man who was a documentary film maker. Mark had met both of them at the opening of a new gallery, and at once the skirmish had begun. The older man was desperately in love with Kent, but Mark was desperate too. When the older man became too hysterically importunate, Kent began to hate him and begged Mark to rescue him. This Mark was glad to do; and he was also glad to replace the cameras the previous lover had bought with more advanced and expensive equipment. Although there were some ugly scenes when Kent moved out of the other man’s loft and into Mark’s—at one point it almost came to the police being called in—in the end the older lover had resigned himself, as perhaps he had already learned to do from previous occasions, and Mark and Kent began their life together.

  Mark’s loft was in a late-nineteenth-century building which had once been a warehouse. Each floor had been bought separately and converted into an apartment, and since two of the owners were interior decorators and one was an architect, they vied with each other as to the beauty and ingenuity of their conversions. Mark had the topmost story—an enormous space into which his architect had been able to fit as many rooms as into a complete town house, though at the same time leaving it open to a surge of cityscape. The warehouse windows, tall as a cathedral’s, gave out onto a different scene on every side. There were round water towers and a round Greek Orthodox church, a Romanesque tower, an unconverted warehouse and another converted one, a neon-lighted airline, a building with a silver spire, another like a black glass pencil with an adjacent Gothic old hotel mirrored in its side—all crowding and jostling together as they rolled away toward the horizon where the river flowed into the sea.

  Mark left early in the mornings, leaving Kent to spend the day as he pleased. When Mark came home again—quite late, for his business drew him into many activities—he often found Kent in the darkroom he had fitted up for him. They were both excited by the work Kent was doing, but sometimes, as they looked at the photographs together, Mark’s eyes strayed from the work of art to the artist, inspiring him with a different ardor. And often Mark wished he were an artist himself—for instance when he left in the mornings and gave a last look at Kent still sleeping in the bed they shared. Although this bed was high and gilt and luxurious, Kent, lying naked on the designer sheets, looked as innocent and pastoral as a boy lost in a wood and sleeping on moss.

  Over the years, Mark had worked out a compromise with his mother. She had had to accept the fact that he had his own place; that he was not to be pursued there; that he would be with her when he could—certainly whenever she truly needed him; but that in return not too many demands should be made on him nor questions asked. It had not been easy for Marietta to accept these terms—yet in the end she did, and was perhaps even glad to, for fear of having to accept others that she didn’t even want to let herself know about.

  Natasha moved more freely in and out of the different areas of Mark’s life; probably because he felt safer with her. In earlier days too, when he had gone off on his various trips, although he never told Natasha where he was going or with whom—she didn’t ask—he always took care that she had a number where he could be reached if absolutely necessary. Natasha never told Marietta that she had this number, for she knew that if she did, Marietta would very soon have found it absolutely necessary to use it.

  Now, in these later years, Natasha did not tell Marietta about her visits to Mark’s loft, nor about his friends whom she met there. Some of these friends she did not like, though she never told Mark so—not even later when he broke with them. And she was wary of those whom she did like because she knew from experience that sooner or later something would happen and Mark would suffer. It was strange, his suffering—she had seen it since he was a boy at school and had quarreled with his friends there. Even then it had struck her as so at variance with the rest of him, or with that aspect of him that they knew at home: where, always, from childhood on, he was strong and resolute and manly. But when his friends were cruel to him, he wept—yes, Mark wept like a girl! And at such times there was nothing she could do for him, though she would have undergone any torment suggested to her to save him from those unbecoming tears.

  She met Kent shortly after he had moved in with Mark. Afterward Mark asked her, trying to sound casual the way he always did when he introduced her to a new friend: “How do you like him?”

  “Yes, he’s nice.”

  “ ‘Nice.’ What a word.”

  He turned from her as though she were not worthy to be talked to any further. But she couldn’t bring herself to say more, for fear of what might happen later and what she then might have to retract. Besides, she knew he would return to the subject—and of course he did, just five minutes later.

  “Do you think he’s handsome?”

  “Very.”

  “Yes.” And Mark smiled into the distance as though he saw Kent there in all his glory. After a while he said, “But it’s not only looks, you know. He’s very talented too. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he turned into a really good photographer. I mean, really great. Famous.” Natasha tried to make the right noises but obviously did not succeed. Mark began to sound testy: “Well, you saw his pictures. What did you think? You must have some opinion,” he said when she thought nothing.

  “You know I don’t understand these things,” she excused herself; and it was true, she didn’t, she had no appreciation of visual art at all.

  “No, and you won’t learn. You won’t make an effort.”

  She knew he was cross with her because he wanted her to say more, to be more enthusiastic, to sing Kent’s praises; nothing less at this stage would have served. But she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, though she minded him less than some other friends whom Mark had taken to live with him in the past.

  Mark didn’t remember much about Tim, his father, who had died when Mark was seven. It was a characteristic of Tim’s family that in the last few generations the male members of it had died young and either violently or under mysterious circumstances. Tim’s father had driven his car over a cliff; his grandfather had died by drowning in the ocean at Southampton; and Tim himself had combined both these violent deaths by falling with his car, one perfectly still summer night, into Lake Kennebago after a party in a cabin there.

  Another characteristic of that family was that none of them had ever really gone in for a career, either in business or in the professions or any occupation whatsoever. This may have been in reaction against their ancestors who had very strenuously made money in farming, property, and whatever trade had been currently profitable. They had built themselves handsome classical houses, but since their descendants applied themselves to spending rather than making money, these were gone now—either torn down, or fallen into decay, or taken over as institutions. And besides the houses and the fortunes, the family itself had disappeared. The only relatives Mark ever knew were his father’s mother and two sisters, Mary and Evie. These three led spare but active lives in a converted farmhouse standing on the few acres of land which were all that was left of the original family holdings.

  As a boy, Mark sometimes went to stay with them, but he
always got restless and left earlier than intended. He missed the city and his two homes there—Louise’s and Marietta’s—and his life with both these women and with Natasha. It was only when he was grown up that he began to think more about the other side of his family. Then it was too late. The mother had died of a carefully concealed cancer when Mark was twelve; Mary had gone to live on Martha’s Vineyard where she set up in the antiques business with a friend; and Evie had to be checked into a mental home for a while, from which she emerged only to take an overdose of her tranquilizers in an apartment hotel on West Twenty-sixth Street. Their house was sold and its contents scattered among family members who turned out to be more numerous and to have stronger claims than anyone had suspected. Mary even had to fight a lawsuit with one very clamorous cousin over a Federal chest of drawers. By the time everyone was through, only a few pieces were left for Mark; but these he cherished, and when he grew up, carried them to the various lofts in which he established himself.

  He also developed an attachment to his father’s part of the country that became in due course proprietary. It was here that he found the house for Leo’s Academy; and when he came to visit there, he drove around the countryside and got out of his car to look not only at houses with a view to acquiring them but also at the landscape, as though he wanted to buy that as well. It pleased him to think that a part of him belonged here; and often on a summer day he parked his car on some overlook and got out and filled his gaze with the view of grassland shimmering green and yellow in the sun and cows grazing as peacefully as the clouds that floated in the sky above them. When he got back into his car he drove slowly and lingered especially through villages where the white clapboard houses—some of them converted into antiques shops—clustered around an only slightly larger church, also white and clapboard with a modest spire attached to it vertically and a modest green graveyard horizontally.