In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Kent never glanced toward Mark’s table. He sat there in lordly abstraction—one long leg stretched out along the carpet, a hand resting on his hip. Nevertheless, Mark knew that Kent was as aware of him as he was of Kent: each feeling the other’s presence more intensely than anything else that went on in that crowded place.

  “The one thing I don’t like in the Fifty-fourth Street lot is that crappy little house bang center,” Mr. Cross said.

  “He’ll sell, don’t worry,” Mark assured. “He’s already offered air rights.”

  “Oh, please, must you, you two?” Alice said. “Spoil my evening?” She pouted in the way wives are supposed to pout when their husbands talk business on social occasions.

  Mr. Cross humored her: “Someone has to pay the bills on all that shopping. Can you believe it?” he appealed to Mark. “The whole morning in Lord and Taylor’s.”

  “And you know very well what for,” she replied. Her leg still snug against Mark’s, she too appealed to him: “I had to get his mother one of those warm robes with fleecy lining—you know how old people feel the cold.”

  “Like we have no stores back home,” Mr. Cross pretended to grumble.

  “Yes, and Norleen? Girls want something different from what everyone is wearing. . . . I got her the cutest little outfit you ever saw—cerise, with a darling row of buttons here and its own little blue blouse to go. She’ll love it. She’ll have it on her in a minute and call everyone to see.”

  Mr. Cross turned red with pride: “I’ve never met a girl like that Norleen for going crazy over clothes. Except,” he twinkled across the table, “her mother here.”

  “There he goes,” said Alice.

  But Mr. Cross’s attention was back on the Fifty-fourth Street lot, and Mark, always entirely alert when it came to business, responded. In the ensuing discussion, both of them forgot ahout Alice. She was used to that, and was sensible about it; this trip to New York was business-cum-pleasure, and she knew the business came first. And it was a privilege for her to have been brought to this place where famous people came and to be sitting there in the company of a good-looking young man. Strange, the way his leg rested against hers; strange but nice, stirring up nice memories. As her eyes roved around the restaurant, she smiled a little to herself: she loved her life in Portland—her family, her lovely home, her reading group, her work with dyslectic children—but of course she did like glitter; she always had. Norleen was the same; her mother saw it every time she caught her looking at herself in the mirror—wondering, no doubt, if she could be a fashion model or something of that sort. It was silly, a dream, but one that never entirely faded, so that whenever Alice was anywhere really nice, like this place, glamorous, or even when she just heard a tune she liked from way back, suddenly it would be there again, filling her with strong, sweet feelings. And overcome by these, she pressed her thigh closer to Mark’s: but was shocked, bewildered by the way he withdrew it as though he had been stung.

  And for a moment that was just what it felt like to him. Engrossed in his business talk, he had as completely forgotten about her leg attached to his under the table as he had about her sitting beside him. Next moment he was sorry; he saw the look on her face and interpreted it exactly. He had lived close to women all his life and knew about their feelings. Not only that, but he had these feelings himself. He only needed to look across to where Kent sat with the other man to be aware of that.

  Kent appeared to be in a deep reverie. He had his head back as though he were lying in a field looking up at the blue sky instead of at the chandeliers of the Old Vienna. But the more abstracted he became, the more intensely determined was his companion to hold him. The older man was talking volubly now, his hand gestures had become both more stylized and more frenzied; he frequently patted his hair and his fine necktie. Their table was too far away for Mark to see the expression on his face, but he knew what this would be. He had often seen it on the faces of middle-aged men like Kent’s companion: and the more sensitive they were, the more intelligent, the finer their nature, the more marked this expression of—what was it? Desire was one word for it, but desire in so poignant, so refined a form that it reached to what Leo, in his later teaching, had characterized as The Point.

  Mr. Cross was weighing the pros and cons of various types of mortgage. Mark nodded intelligently; at the same time he placed his hand on Alice’s knee under the table and smiled at her over it. He wanted to make it up to her for his momentary forgetfulness. He felt a bond with her as he did with Kent and Kent’s companion. Only Mr. Cross—successful male, husband, father, Elk—was out of it.

  Marietta insisted that Natasha be brought back to the city because it was time for her checkup with the dentist. Natasha had terrible teeth, but it was always a struggle to get her to keep her dentist’s appointments. In earlier years, she would argue for days: “Supposing I was poor. Supposing we couldn’t afford a dentist.” “You’re not. We can,” they had answered her. But nowadays they didn’t go into any of that with her. Mark just told her to get in the car, so she apologetically took leave from Leo and told him she would be back in a day or two. “Hm,” Leo said; he was listening to Wagner on his stereo and may not have heard what she said.

  But if Leo didn’t care whether she came or went, Marietta did. She wanted Natasha to stay with her, and when Mark came to take her back, she was reluctant to let her go.

  “She has to go,” Mark argued. “She’s got a job.”

  “She doesn’t need a job. And specially not with Leo.”

  “Well,” Mark said, “so far he’s been the only person willing to keep her. And he actually pays her.”

  “It’s you,” Marietta, who was a lot shrewder than Natasha, said. “You made him. Probably you’re paying her salary too. Isn’t that something?” she said when he couldn’t contradict. “I need her, and you pay her to go away.”

  She was sitting on her sofa; she put back her head and shut her eyes. Mark gazed into her face and saw that the skin, stretched taut over her fine small features, was beginning to crack into many lines; he saw the pulse twitching in her cheek like a live thing.

  Natasha came in, ready to leave. When she saw Marietta sitting there like that, she exchanged a look with Mark. There was a silence during which Marietta remained with her eyes shut.

  “Why don’t you come with us?” Natasha said at last. “You’ll like it. I mean, the country and everything.”

  “I don’t like the country. I never have liked the country. And I can’t stand Leo.” She opened her eyes, she got up, she took out a cigarette and forgot to light it. “I know I’ve got to the age where I’m supposed to be susceptible to Leo; where I’m supposed to need him. Well, I don’t. I never will. He’s never going to be the answer to my problem.”

  Natasha said, “I wouldn’t want him to be.” They were surprised, for she spoke more vehemently than they were used to from her. But she was thinking of Marietta up in the attic of the Academy, or in a workshop working on herself like the others; and that was what she didn’t want. Not for Marietta, not for herself, not for Mark, though she was willing to grant that it might do other people good.

  Not only did Natasha fail to take part in the Academy workshops, she didn’t even attend Leo’s famous Saturday night lectures or the party that followed them. She preferred to be by herself up in the attic with her own thoughts and feelings, which were not lonely but on the contrary deeply and strangely fulfilling. However, she was never alone for as long as she would have liked to be, for sooner or later one of the others would turn up there, in some sort of psychological trouble. Leo’s Saturday night lectures might be compared to the Sunday morning sermons the original owners of the house had gone to hear in the white clapboard church that was still extant, half a mile down the main road. But whereas these original late-nineteenth-century owners may have yawned and fidgeted through their pastor’s exposition, Leo’s students listened to Leo with the same high seriousness, the same intense concentration as the earliest
settlers to their preacher’s message. For just as that preacher’s message was directly connected with the lives of his congregation at the deepest level, so Leo had what he called a “hot line” right into his students’ souls (or psyches). And in the same way as the preacher had the means to bring the sinner to repentance, so Leo brought his listeners to an awareness of their maladjustments: and it happened every time that some of them were so deeply affected by what he said that they had to withdraw to think about themselves.

  One Saturday night it was a woman called Shirley who, overcome by his lecture, had to come and be in the attic with Natasha. She sat on her little narrow bunk under a light bulb dangling from the rafters. When she lifted her face, Natasha could see it was puffed with tears. She looked like someone’s grandmother. As a matter of fact, Natasha knew she was someone’s grandmother: she had a son who was married and lived with his wife and two children in a Hare Krishna community. Shirley was not on good terms with them; whenever she visited the community, the atmosphere there depressed her so much that she began to quarrel with the son and the daughter-in-law and almost succeeded in stirring them back into the anger that they had cast out of their hearts. She also got sick from the vegetarian messes they ate, and their carrot juice.

  “Can you imagine,” Shirley said to Natasha, “my great-grandfather was a famous rabbi in Zlotchov, and so was his father. Can you imagine: rabbis? I wake up at night and think, my God, what would they have said if they saw Trevor now with his little shaved head? He isn’t even called Trevor any more. He’s called Prem Dass. It means ‘servant of love’ or some such screwy thing in their Hare Krishna language. The great-great-grandson of a line of famous rabbis and he’s called Prem Dass.”

  “Maybe that’s why,” Natasha suggested.

  “My parents would have had a fit too. They were so proud of being liberal agnostics. Well, of course, my parents—that’s another chapter.”

  Natasha had heard part of it. Parents featured large in the workshops and were always being recalled, like spirits at séances. Sometimes these spirits were invited to speak through the living person—“Be your mother”—and that way Natasha had actually heard Shirley’s mother talk through Shirley.

  Of course, like all mothers she had damaged Shirley and had been the first person she had to cut loose from. The second person had been her husband, Norman, a dentist—“A damn good one,” Shirley said, “a real provider and ready to spend on his family. That’s all he cared about, his family, Trevor and me. I guess he thought he loved me—but he didn’t know me, Natasha, and I didn’t know he didn’t till I started going to Dr. Koenig for my depression and nervous indigestion. Can you imagine? Nervous indigestion—me! That just shows how desperate things were; I mean, if I couldn’t even eat.”

  Everyone knew Shirley to be a great eater; and always with such relish, it was a pleasure to watch her. Leo said about her “You don’t have an appetite; you are one.” She gave the impression of a very healthy woman, short and compact with a tight bust (she said she hadn’t seen her feet since she was fourteen) and a shock of healthy curly gray hair and a florid face: the sort of woman whose senses are not diminished but vitalized by menopause.

  She stood by the dormer window of Leo’s attic and peered down into the garden hazy in the summer dusk. She saw the girls with their long hair in the ankle-length flounced skirts they had stitched for themselves. Leo didn’t like girls who cut their hair and he couldn’t abide them in pants; he said women who weren’t women didn’t turn him on, and what were they there for, he joked, except to turn him on?

  “I got married when I was nineteen,” Shirley said. “I didn’t even finish college, just got married like an animal. So it took me till I was thirty-five to wake up and know what I’d missed. And then, will you believe it, Trevor goes and does the same damn thing. I warned him, I told him, but no, on his nineteenth birthday his guru said he had to. It was a mass ceremony, eight couples all married under Hindu rites walking around in a circle throwing puffed rice. I wanted him to be a marine biologist, but he was more interested in selling packets of joss sticks in the subway. Nothing turns out the way you plan it, nothing, nothing, nothing . . . Are you sure you want to be sitting up here with me, Natasha? I mean, when everyone’s having such a good time down there.”

  But Natasha preferred to be with Shirley in the attic. She knew she wasn’t very helpful and she couldn’t ever really think of anything to say to make people feel better when they were low. But she was prepared just to sit there with them, and if they wanted to touch her, hold her hand, that was all right too.

  Shirley took her hand now and brought it up to her cheek. How warm Shirley’s cheek was, how cold Natasha’s hand. Shirley was surprised. She dropped it and said, “If this is how you are in the summer, what are you like in the winter?”

  “The same,” Natasha smiled. She was always cold. For years she had thought everyone felt that way, and she couldn’t understand it when Louise would fling off her dress and stand there in her petticoat with naked shoulders fanning herself.

  “Norman’s got married again,” Shirley said. “To a much younger girl. They live in the identical same home in Tarry-town we used to have in Briarcliff Manor. They’ve got two great kids, Edgar and Mary Beth. He’s crazy about them. He’s got what he wants, I guess, at sixty, poor guy. I’m glad for him, I really am. He’s been through hell. . . . Norman used to come to the apartment I’d taken for me and Trevor in the Village. He’d just sit there and cry. He’s a big guy with a long face and the tears would just roll down this long face, very slowly like they were taking forever to get from his eyes down into his collar. It was terrible. I had to tell him not to come anymore in the end. And Dr. Koenig said it was bad for me to see him. Dr. Koenig!” she said in outrage, for her psychiatrist was another person she had had to cut herself loose from. For five years she had gone to his office which wasn’t really an office but just a room in the apartment he shared with a big Swedish blonde. “He didn’t even have a couch,” Shirley said, “just this chair you had to sit on telling him all these things. When I said I was leaving, he was worse than my mother. First he made his profound face and said we’d have to live this decision through again; then he said I was destroying myself; in the end he got really aggressive because I was ruining five years’ work he’d put in on me. Have you ever been in analysis?”

  “They wanted to send me to someone from school, but my grandmother wouldn’t allow it. She said if there was anything wrong with my psyche, Leo would see to it.”

  “And did he?”

  “He said I didn’t have one. Leo’s never been interested in me,” Natasha admitted.

  “There he is—just look at him.” Shirley clapped her hand before her mouth, laughing at the sight she saw from the attic window. Leo was chasing Stephanie through the grass while other students got out of their way fast or set off running behind them. It was Leo in his playful mood, acting out an impulse the way he said one had to. Maybe it was in illustration of something he had been telling them in his lecture. He often used such actual illustrations, and it could be embarrassing. For instance, when he said, “Now here is Robin. I would like to take Robin’s nose and twist it.” And he would do this, explaining, “Why do I want to do it? I don’t know. What does it satisfy in me? I don’t know. Only I know it satisfies me.” He would continue to twist Robin’s nose, and even though tears would come into the unfortunate student’s eyes, he had to keep still because he was being used as an illustration. When he had finished, Leo would say, “Sorry about that.” And Robin, sitting there with a flaming nose, would have to smile and say, “That’s okay, Leo. My pleasure.”

  Now Leo was acting out his drive toward satisfaction by chasing Stephanie. He had hitched his monk’s robe above his ankles in order to run better, but of course she was much too quick for him. Her slim, bare feet hardly touched the ground as she ran, her hair flew behind her; she was so confident of her superior agility that every time she reached a tree,
she swung round it—once, twice—and laughed at him lumbering behind her.

  “At least he has fun,” Shirley said, watching them from above. “Look at him—an old man like that having a good time. He must be right somewhere.”

  But Natasha had turned away from the window. She lay down on her bunk. Now she could only see a fragment of sky, which was dark and calm; she folded her arms behind her head and kept on looking at it, and when she shut her eyes it was as if she were enfolded by it.

  “Oh, you’re asleep?” Shirley said. She herself didn’t feel like sleeping—not at all, she was wide awake and hungry to join in the fun that was going on outside. She went down the attic stairs and then down the main staircase through the completely deserted house and out into the garden. Leo had caught up with Stephanie now, or she had let him catch her, and he was dancing with her. Although the record was of a very modern jazz group, Leo was hopping around in an old-fashioned polka. Others also joined in, doing whatever dance they felt like, regardless of the music. Shirley walked through the grass, looking for a partner, and bumped against Janet, another middle-aged woman, on the same mission. They danced with each other but it didn’t matter, for each had her eyes shut and was doing a dance of her own. The overgrown lawn in front of the house was turned into a ballroom, and no one looked back at the somber old mansion looming behind them with only Natasha inside it high up in the attic.

  On Marietta’s last visit to India, she had taken Mark with her. He was sixteen at the time and very responsive to everything he saw. They traveled around together and she took him to all the places she knew. He enjoyed them with her but also wandered off frequently by himself and made contacts of his own. Like herself, he was entirely open to the place and made friends everywhere—with a railway booking clerk, with the son of a textile millionaire, with a young monk at the Ramakrishna Mission. But his greatest friendship was with Sujata’s son and with her lover, Ravi.

  These two were college boys and spoke English and were eager to learn more English and anything else that Mark could teach them. Even though he was several years younger than they were, they looked on him as a guide to more sophisticated areas of living. Mark accepted this role without misgiving—he was used to guiding and took it for granted that he always knew best. He also at this time made it a point of honor not to be impressed by anything and to remain cool and impassive about everything they showed him. One night they took him to a brothel where the singing girls paddled their fingers in the back of his white boy’s neck; but even when one of them perched herself in his lap and, fumbling at his fly, breathed garlic and betel and essence of roses all over him, he managed to keep absolutely still and not give in to his overwhelming desire to rush out of there and throw up.