He took care not to look at her but at Natasha, and he said to Natasha: “Come here, I’ll show you. Come on, don’t be shy. I won’t hurt you.”
Actually, Natasha was not shy with him. Trustingly, she did what he said: lay down next to him, facing him, their two bodies glued together. He put his mouth on hers. She was not uncomfortable. His lips had a fresh taste to them, and there was also a nice smell about him, as of apples and hay. He put one arm around her, to hold her closer. She felt protected by him and safe and was almost sorry when, in conclusion of the demonstration, he let her go.
He appeared to regard his point as proved and went back to tossing pebbles. But Stephanie plucked a blade of grass and applied it to the back of his neck; he continued to concentrate on his task with the intensity of a fisherman. “My turn,” she said.
“Split, will you. Beat it. Go on, you heard me.”
Stephanie smiled to herself; so did Natasha, at the two of them. They all three knew that there was every danger of the test not working between Jeff and Stephanie. Quite often, when they sat here either in the evenings or when they had time during the day, they made love to each other. It was a very natural need that arose between them. The first time she had been there with them, Natasha tried tactfully to absent herself. “It’s okay,” they had said, courteously inviting her to stay. And it was okay—it was just one more activity that went on in the summer grass at the edge of the brook, among the birds and insects. And it was okay too when sometimes he came up at night and they did it in the bunk above Natasha, under the window filled with moon; and indeed the noise they made was preferable to that of the other people sleeping in the attic, so that Natasha was glad when their tossing and heaving drowned out the sleepers suffering from guilty nightmares.
Leo called Stephanie several more times in the night, and the same thing happened each time: she laughed and he kicked her out. But he was never really angry with her, and she continued to be one of his favorite students. It was strange, how indulgent he was with these young students who came to him. He even waived their fees when they couldn’t pay him, and that was something really unheard of with him. In earlier days, if anyone pleaded inability to pay, he shrugged and said “Bad luck.” He wouldn’t even allow a postponement of payment—“The thin end of the wedge,” he called it; it was an expression he often used and in connection with other matters.
A word might here be said about Leo’s fees: actually, he didn’t charge fees—he accepted donations. These varied according to what he estimated a person ought to give, and in fact the amount was part of the therapy. It usually took him some time to assess this amount, just as it took him some time to assess each applicant’s need; and both were a secret process that went on while the newcomer was being made comfortable in one of the second-floor bedrooms of the Academy. Some people went away, deciding that Leo was not the answer for them, whereupon he would shake hands with them heartily, almost as if congratulating them on their escape: but if there was a committal and the person decided to stay, then Leo would say all right and he would narrow his eyes and get very businesslike: revealing his diagnosis and its suggested cure—that is, the psychospiritual exercises on the one hand, the size of the donation on the other.
But Leo had mellowed: Louise and Regi and their contemporaries would have been amazed to see the indulgence he showed to his young students. He moved among them with an air of benign blessing, in his brown habit with the silver ornament around his neck and the buckled cowboy belt hanging low over his stomach. He loved to watch them at their occupations and encouraged them by tweaking a firm young cheek here or buttock there. His presence among them, his approval, made them so happy that they redoubled their efforts, whether this was cleaning the house, cooking, gardening, or—a new project of his—bottling fruit for sale. Sometimes he called them all to sit around him in the sunken garden, and then he would say “Sing, children,” or “Tell me stories”; and these would always be their own stories, their lives up to the moment of regeneration—that is, up to the moment when they had joined the Academy.
It had been very different in Louise and Regi’s time. Of course he was different then—he was young, younger than most of his students, and stormy. Those terrible rehearsals they had, before one of their public performances! He had worked out a series of group dances, based on his psychological exercises but also of intrinsic aesthetic interest. He had choreographed them, worked with a composer on the music, designed the costumes and the scenery—he was not a Renaissance man for nothing—and he spent weeks rehearsing his students. That was as terrible a time for him as for them. He was literally in their hands—or rather, in their whole bodies which he was working to shape into living symbols to illustrate his ideas.
Their rehearsal space was a studio in the old converted theater building he had rented. At one end of the long room the composer sat at an upright piano while Leo was perched on a high ladder-chair from which he could overlook the students at the other end. Hopping up and down on the top of this chair, he uttered foul German curses translated into English. Sometimes he fell into such a rage at their ineptitude that he threw whatever was at hand; while they, holding on to the long white robes he had designed for them, had learned to skip smartly out of the way.
The day of performance approached. The theater, in the same building as the rehearsal space, was booked; the students went all around town to paste up the posters Leo had designed, and to hawk the books of tickets he had allotted to them. It was a small hall, but on the great day was never quite full. This was the fault of the students—they tried hard to sell tickets to genuine spectators but the price was steep for those days (five dollars) and interest not widespread, so that they usually ended up buying quite a few themselves. On the day itself, Leo was cool and very efficient—which was just as well, for no one else was. Practically single-handed, he put up the scenery; he tested and fixed the lights; he hovered over the piano tuner; he spotted and dealt with incipient cases of hysteria; he could even be seen kneeling with pins in his mouth to fix someone’s hem. So that at last it was always and only due to his efforts that the curtain parted almost on time, revealing the symbolic scenery. Sometimes this was just one pillar with a broken wall attached, sometimes a series of orbs stretching away into a similitude of infinity. Winding in and out of these props, and to the accompaniment of the pianist perspiring at his upright, Leo’s students performed the motions into which they had been trained. Leo himself stood to one side, dressed in the same robes as the performers except that his were black where theirs were pure, purest white. After each dance, and with the piano beginning to spell out the rhythm of the next, he explained the meaning of each item—the way each represented a separate passion of the microcosm worked up to a pitch where it was ready to take on universal significance and merge into the macrocosm: culminating in the final dance—an ensemble called The Spheres of Eternity—in which the separate groups of dancers formed themselves into one full circle, symbolizing the harmonious absorption of the individual into the universe.
The applause at the end was hearty. The audience was mostly comprised of friends and relatives of the performers, so that their enthusiastic clapping may have been partly in relief—not only that the performance itself was over but also the weeks of ordeal which had preceded it. At any rate, the spectators, descending with their kisses, congratulations, and flowers into the basement where the dressing rooms were fitted in around the boiler system, went home satisfied; but for the performers there was a celebration arranged by Leo at the Old Vienna—a celebration which usually turned into a last ordeal for at least one of them.
At first everything went very festively. Several tables had been joined on to Leo’s, so that they extended in a long row from his alcove into the center of the restaurant. The place was packed with other after-theater parties; the waiters ran around, shouting to each other in various European languages; the chandeliers blazed once from the ceiling and twice in the mirrors; huge trays were carr
ied from the kitchen to reload the trolleys of pastries and hors d’oeuvres; everyone was shouting at the top of their voices, both in excitement and in order to be heard.
Leo’s party was the most festive and the most excited. They gulped cold wine too fast so that their sensations were heightened and some of them were quite drunk. Leo himself drank enormous quantities of alcohol, and his face, with a cigar stuck in it, flamed. He was still a young man at that time and a great dandy in his tuxedo with a gardenia in his buttonhole. The students allowed to sit with him at his round table were handpicked. They were watched enviously by other, less favored ones who had to make do with seats at the joined-on tables: enviously but also apprehensively, for everyone knew that one of the chosen had been placed there in order to be made the scapegoat of whatever failure had marked that evening’s performance. The routine was always the same: when everyone’s good mood was at its height, Leo addressed a remark to one particular person at his table. At once everyone fell silent.
One year it was Louise’s turn to be the scapegoat. This was the year that Regi had become Leo’s favorite. After the first shock, and scenes, and despair, Louise had settled down into resignation. She was still part of the group, she still saw him almost daily, he still kept some of his clothes in her apartment. It had to be enough. Love made her humble, and she persuaded herself that it was. She thought he was pleased with her for her acceptance, and he appeared to be; and she was sure of it when she was chosen to sit with him at the round table for the after-theater supper.
Leo made jokes. He was in capital humor and teased a girl who had almost tripped during one of the dances when the laces of her ballet shoes had come undone. “How do you expect me to raise you to a higher level of being,” he deplored, “when you haven’t even learned to tie your shoelaces?” “Oh, Leo,” protested this girl, blushing, shy and happy; she was a very young girl and a great favorite with the others. They joined in teasing her, enjoying her confusion, her blushes, her bliss (of course she was in love with Leo). And Louise too enjoyed it, knowing so well how the girl felt. She put out her hand to ruffle her hair: “Leave her alone,” she said, “she’s just a baby. Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” she joked to Leo.
But he did not joke back. Instead his good-humored smile faded, he took the cigar from between his lips, and fixed Louise with a steady stare: “All right, I will,” he said.
It was strange the way the rest of the people in the restaurant carried on as though nothing were happening. The waiters still shouted and the conversations and laughter and greetings continued; but it was only a tide lapping at the edge of their row of tables. Here they sat frozen in an island of silence: some still held the stems of their glasses where they had been twirling them; half-drunk bottles were placed in a row along the middle of the tables but no one dared refill an empty glass; they were all turned in their chairs toward the round table where Leo had begun his inquisition. They held their breaths. Leo did not raise his voice by as much as a decibel, but he could be heard distinctly down to the very end of their tables, completely drowning out the surrounding noise.
“You’re no baby,” he said to Louise—and she wasn’t: she was a blooming matron in a plum-colored evening gown. “What happened to you? During the Interior Storm?” He pointed out some faulty footwork she had committed in the course of that number—maybe she had, maybe she hadn’t, she couldn’t remember; she could only gaze back into Leo’s cold, compelling eyes, and feel the silence of the others surrounding her.
“You ruined it,” Leo said in a voice as flat as his stare. “You ruined everyone’s work, including mine.” He shrugged his shoulders, plump as a woman’s, broad as a man’s; he wasn’t angry, not at all; he was resigned; he had expected nothing better.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I blame myself. Will I never learn?” he ruefully asked. “People are what they are, I can’t change the leopard’s spots—no, not even I,” he joked at himself, but no one laughed.
“Let’s look at your spots, Louise,” he said, with a sigh that this should be necessary. But it was; it was his responsibility to spot psychological failings, both for the sake of the individual and for that of the group. His hands were folded on the table; he spoke in a conversational tone, into the air, without emphasis. He brought out all Louise’s faults—her jealousy, her possessiveness; he dwelt on her limitations, such as her bourgeois housewife mentality. Louise sat at the table—the way she had been taught as a girl, with a good straight German back—and made no attempt to defend herself. How could she? She knew it was all true, and that she was all ego.
Louise now entered what was known in Leo’s group as the D phase—Depression, Discouragement, and Disgust (with self). Also Disappearance from Sight: she was expected neither to see Leo nor to join in group activities until she had sufficiently worked on her imperfections (or, as a later generation would put it, straightened herself out). During this time, she drew closer to Bruno than they had ever been before; even closer than during the first years of their marriage, for at that time she hadn’t needed to lean on him as she did now. She threw the weight of her misery on him—and how glad and willing he was to receive it. He didn’t know what had happened, only that she had come home to him and they were a family of three again—he, she, and Marietta (or Marianne, as she still was at that time)—and not just a part of Leo’s movement.
Marietta used to like coming home from school at this time because she knew Louise would always be there. She adored her mother. Louise was a tall woman, but for Marietta she had absolutely mythological proportions: in fact, when she learned about Juno, Minerva, Ceres, all those goddesses, it was always Louise she saw in her mind. Louise had a firm tread and a ringing voice, so when she was home, she filled that apartment, big as it was. And she always had plans, she always knew what to do, and Bruno and Marietta followed. When she felt like hugging them, they stood still and smiled while she squeezed them with all her might. They tiptoed around her when she wept; and when she raised her head and wiped her eyes and said “Let’s go and see the tapestries at the Metropolitan,” they fetched her hat and coat and put them on her and then got ready themselves as fast as they could. Even at her most miserable—and this she was during these weeks—she might at any moment sit down at the grand piano which she couldn’t play and bang out enormous chords and sing arias, out of tune but as if she were the greatest diva in the world.
During this period of compulsory Disappearance from Sight, Louise realized that it wasn’t her work with the group that she missed but only Leo himself; and that it was her attachment to him which was the cause of the imperfections she had to struggle against. Helped by Bruno and Marietta, she did struggle, and felt herself becoming calmer and happier. When members of the group began to phone her to ask whether she felt ready to rejoin them, she was short with them; and when they tried to argue, she slammed down the phone.
However, when one afternoon Leo rang the bell of her apartment in his unmistakable way—in a series of short buzzes like electric shocks—she realized she had been waiting for him. Also, that she had long ago decided what to do. She went to the door and called to him: “Go away—I’m through,” He went on buzzing.
Afraid that he would disturb Bruno’s afternoon nap, she opened the door a few inches; only to have Leo push from the other side till he got in. He walked straight into the salon while she followed him, protesting. He said, “These are for you”—presenting her, for the first and last time in their life together, with a bouquet of flowers.
“Leo, it’s no use talking: I’m not coming back to your group.”
“I don’t want you for the group. I want you for myself. You’d better put those in water, I paid good money for them.”
She was glad of something to do and when she returned with the vase, she kept her back to him while she arranged the flowers. She was in a storm of emotion—but at the same time she felt like laughing because his bouquet, which was very thin and straggly, looked s
o incongruous in the tall cloisonné vase in which she was arranging it. He came up behind her and pressed her closer against the table where she stood. He murmured down the back of her neck: “I’ve missed you.”
“No, Leo, leave me alone. Let it end now.”
“You’re warm like a bed with a woman in it. What a relief after Regi.”
“Go away, Leo. Please.”
Stepping back to release her, he said, “On one condition.”
“What?” She turned around to look at him.
“Here,” he said, indicating his lips for her to kiss; so she turned back again to the flowers. After a moment’s silence, she said, “Wherever did you get them? They’re half dead.”
“Oh, really? Cheated again. Turn around.”
“No.”
So he came close again and began to tickle her. She screamed, as he knew she would; she was terribly ticklish. She gasped, “Bruno’s asleep—no, Leo, stop. You—must—stop.”
He retreated, but when she turned to look, there he stood with his finger pointing to his lips again.
“No,” she said.
He crooked the fingers of both hands and wiggled them at her in a tickling motion so that she screamed before he even touched her.
“You’ll wake Bruno,” he warned; and again pointed to his mouth.
She felt she had no choice—she had to go to him and press her lips where he indicated; and as soon as she did so, he grasped her tight, and she groaned; though before going under, she murmured, as if to save herself by deprecation, “It’s only physical, that’s all it is.” “Oh, yes, only,” he murmured back.
So it was that, when Marietta returned from school a few hours later, she found Leo there again. He was on the sofa with one arm laid along the back of it and his legs stretched out before him. His thighs bulged in English pinstripe; he wore silk socks with clocks on them, and white and tan shoes. He was holding forth about something or other, and Bruno was nodding in his polite way and also throwing in little affirmative comments to show he was listening attentively; and Louise was standing near the sofa with her hands clasped before her and her eyes fixed on Leo sprawled there. She didn’t even see Marietta come in—not till Leo turned his head; and Leo looked at Marietta in the way he had that always made her wish her skirt were longer or her legs less long and bare. And he greeted her—again in his usual way, as though they were the same age. Marietta didn’t answer, she went straight across the carpet and stood by her father’s armchair. Bruno put his arm around her and told her to curtsy—he always told her to curtsy when there were visitors, automatically using the exact same German phrase and intonation he had heard his mother use with his sisters. He kept his arm around her and continued to make polite listening sounds to Leo, apparently unaware of how stiffly Marietta held herself within his embrace, or how she glared across at Leo. Louise didn’t seem to notice either—only Leo did, and he smiled at it. He went on talking to Bruno and Louise, but the smile on his full red moist lips was for Marietta.
In Search of Love and Beauty Page 8