In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Smiling through his tears, he wanted to say more—but not wanting her to hear more, he went into the bathroom to wash his face. After a while he called her in there: “How do I look?” he asked, lifting his face to the light so she could see it better and make sure he had wiped away all trace of tears.

  “How do I look?” Marietta was at the same moment asking her young doctor. He had followed her into her room and was surprised not to find her prostrate on her bed and in need of his comfort but vigorously repairing her makeup. She said, “I hope you didn’t hear anything.”

  “Not one thing, sweetheart,” he assured her with a wise, grave face.

  “It was my fault, entirely. All he asked was to be left alone for five minutes—” She caught sight of the doctor’s knowing expression in the mirror and said: “You don’t understand a thing. You don’t know what he’s like. You can’t judge us—”

  “Who’s judging? Who’s judging?”

  “Mark’s very responsible. He always has been. Sometimes I feel like it’s the other way around with us—that he’s the parent. What’s the use? I can’t explain and you’ll never understand.”

  “Don’t forget I’m a doctor.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “We have to know about people.”

  “About sick people. Mark’s not sick. He’s the sanest, strongest, manliest man I know. You only think people are sane and strong if they have football muscles like you do.”

  “Want to see?” he said, proudly flexing them inside his jacket and holding them out for her to feel. As she did so, he bent down to kiss her, but though his lips were young and hygienic, they didn’t make her feel any better.

  After her last visit to India, Marietta did not see or hear from Ahmed for over five years. Then one day he telephoned her from New York, where he had come again as part of a troupe of Indian musicians. She was astonished and delighted and insisted that he move in immediately. So within an hour he was at her door, with his sarod and his modest, battered little suitcase, looking up at her—grizzled, wry, and amused. Automatically, he went to put his luggage in her bedroom where it had always been; smiling apologetically, she diverted him to one of the other bedrooms. So then he too smiled and was perfectly happy to carry his suitcase into the guest room. She began to explain at once, in a rush, that there was this young doctor who sometimes came to stay with her, but although he kept his pajamas under her pillow and a razor in her bathroom, it wasn’t anything much. “He’s just a boy,” she said—she was in her early forties and didn’t like older men anymore.

  But she still liked Ahmed. He sat in her raw-silk armchair with his shoes placed on her rug and his feet tucked under him. He drank Scotch and chain-smoked. He appeared pleased to be there again. He had narrow, shrewd eyes—there was a touch of Tartar in him—and she was aware that with these he gave her a few quick glances. It made her self-conscious and she put her hand to her face: “What do you think? How do I look?” Instead of answering, he asked more questions about the children, and she brought out photographs of Mark and Natasha.

  As on his first visit, when the other musicians returned to India, Ahmed stayed behind with Marietta. She called the young doctor and told him it wouldn’t be convenient for him to visit her at this time; and she packed up his few belongings and met him for a drink one evening to give them to him. She was irritated by the way he made out that the break which this meeting signified was his idea: he was kind, even patronizing, and patted her sleeve to show how much he still liked her. But she forgot about him the moment she left him. That night, when she went into her bedroom, she called to Ahmed from the door: “You can sleep in here now, if you like”; and he assented as cheerfully as he had before taken up his quarters in another room.

  There was something of Bruno, her father, about Ahmed. Perhaps because they were both spare and small and patient; both were a head shorter than Marietta, both had had a soothing effect on her. But if in the past she had tended to see Ahmed as a father figure, he had never got things mixed up that way. He had made love to her quite lustily, whenever he felt like it, which was surprisingly often for a man his age. He also had a surprisingly large male organ—when she pointed out the disproportion of it to the rest of him, he looked down and raised his eyebrows at it with amusement and pride.

  However, on this last visit it was different. Now he fell asleep as soon as he got into her big double bed. He even snored a bit, lying very still and straight on his back with his mouth open, catching air. Sometimes she couldn’t stand it and woke him up again. “Ahmed! Ahmed!” she called him. Then he would wake up at once with a cry of shock as for a fire or some other disaster. One night when he did that she went around the bedroom turning on all the lights so that the crystal bottles and their silver stoppers and the orange silk cushions and the shaded lamps glowed and shimmered, once in the room and twice in the mirrors; and it was a very bright scene except that its centerpiece, in the center of the bed, was this little old man in a white kurta, sitting up with the shock of his sudden awakening.

  But once fully awake, he seemed to know what it was all about and waited patiently for her to be sufficiently calm; then he said, “What can I do, Marietta, I’m an old man.”

  “How can you just say that!”

  “But it’s true.” He laughed and laughing made him cough as it always did—as it did Leo too, both of them because of smoking too much. There was no doubt about it, he was an old man. She sat down on the bed by him. “Even my grandson has a son,” he said. She laughed and hid her face in her hands, as though he had said something shaming. “Six months old,” he said.

  “But, Ahmed, you’re hardly sixty!”

  He drew his finger along her face until, to hide it from him, she buried it against his chest. Then he patted her back: “You’re too thin,” he noticed while he did this. “You’re not eating. You must eat. Women must eat. They have to be strong.” He pushed out his elbows to show how strong. “You should see in my house how they eat, the food they put in themselves each day. And they’re big, big women. When they walk—everything shakes, they shake, the house shakes, it’s like an elephant walking. And when they laugh or, God forbid, when they get angry—oh, oh, oh, thunder from heaven. And all because they eat good food.” He patted her back again. “Tomorrow I’ll cook for you. Will you eat it? Proper food like pilao, dhal, meat.”

  She got up and turned off all the lights again and then she lay side by side with him, both of them on their backs, and she held his hand. “Don’t go to sleep yet,” she begged. “Talk to me. You’re yawning. Say something. How’s Sujata?”

  After a tiny pause in the dark, he said, “Oh, you don’t know. Sujata’s gone. It was an accident with a motorcycle rickshaw. The driver had taken something and drove like a crazy man and they went straight into some metal pipes on a bullock cart. Sujata’s mother was with her and nothing happened to her, though she is very old, eighty years old: not even one bruise. They took Sujata to the hospital but she was finished that same day. Everyone came to the funeral, and the weeping and crying was not to be believed. And her mother, eighty-ninety years old, showed everyone how she didn’t have one bruise and she kept crying, ‘Why her and not me?’ This was in everyone’s mind, especially the people who lived in the house. Now everything is sold and they have gone to live in different places, whoever would take them. I met one of her old men, Sohan Lal, he played the tabla—he was crying, not even money for betel, can you imagine, an old man like that in need of little comforts. And after so much luxury she provided. All gone, just like that.”

  When anyone accused Leo of having a bad effect on people, he stretched his pale eyes wide open in surprise: “But I only want to do them good!” It was true, from his point of view. He thought he knew what was good for people better than they did themselves; and he did have a kind of insight that enabled him to see through a person’s complexities and diagnose whatever might be wrong there. He was, in that respect, like a really gifted
physician—though whether he had such a physician’s healing powers was something else again.

  His followers believed he had and wanted to put themselves entirely in his charge. But he resisted them: “no hang-ups, please,” he said. He wanted to do them good, lead them along the right way—but not in the one-to-one relationship they craved from him. The only person with whom he was willing to stand in such a relationship was himself. As he explained it, he needed himself as a laboratory in which to experiment on human nature. He was prepared to share the results of these experiments with others, but he had to be left free, unhampered, unentangled. “Don’t fence me in,” he would say—he would even sing it. He had made up this song for himself:

  Don’t fence me in. Don’t pin me down.

  I’ll flutter my wings, you flutter yours. Let’s see

  who’ll make it first, up to the sky.

  That’s where I’m heading for: look out, brother,

  I’m flying high!

  While he sang, a student accompanied him on the guitar, and at the end they were all invited to join in the refrain: “Look out, I’m flying high!” It could be quite stirring when they were all together and expressing their longing for freedom and expansion in this united cry.

  During the summer months there was a big get-together every Saturday night on the grounds of the Academy. It was open house and all sorts of people came—friends of the students, followers of Leo’s from the city, neighbors, anyone interested—and they were all welcome to help themselves from the long trestle tables set up on the circular lawn in front of the house. There were various health-food dishes prepared in the Academy kitchen and also a very strong punch made of California white wine, orange juice, and Christian Brothers brandy into which they all dipped their plastic cups freely. It put everyone in a good mood and made them more expansive—took them out of themselves, or, in the idiom of the Academy, out of the prison of their own selves. They drifted around the grounds, sat by the stream, the grotto, in the overgrown orchards, had various experiences, formed or unformed some relationships; but sooner or later everyone ended up in the sunken garden.

  The sunken garden was the only part of the grounds to have been cultivated. Surrounded by a high hedge with four arched entrances, a radial of paved paths converged, between grass and flower beds, toward a stone pool in which stood a stone nymph squeezing water out of her nipple. But although this fountain was geometrically the center of the sunken garden, the real focus lay elsewhere. Between two of the arched entrances, an arbor had been formed out of white wooden lattices: and here Leo sat with a few favorites on a Victorian wrought-iron bench. This lovers’ seat became the magnet to draw everyone from the rest of the grounds. Not that anything intense was going on—on the contrary, the atmosphere was easy, unforced, just a nice time being had by all. Music played from a hi-fi. It was the latest dance music played very loudly, and although for his own pleasure Leo listened to Wagner and Mahler, he enjoyed this too: so much that he snapped his fingers and made dancing motions and said “Terrific.” But there was always someone waiting with a guitar, and when the order was given to take the needle off the record, it was time for live music. This was always original music composed to words based on what they were learning and experiencing: a summary of the week’s work expressed musically and always ending up with Leo’s own song followed by the chorus of “I’m flying high!”

  It was the prelude to Leo’s weekly address—which he never wanted to give, disclaimed the right to make. “Come on,” he said, “a bit more music, let’s swing, okay? I’m in the mood.” “Leo, Leo, talk to us!” “Ach, talk. Who wants to talk when they can sing?” And he sang again—by himself this time, with a lot of swing and uplift, snapping his fingers, swaying his body in the monk’s robe so that his silver pendant swung to and fro. Everyone was silent—all crowded along the paths and around the flower beds and the rim of the pool into which water continued to drip from the goddess’s nipple; and then, when there was absolutely no sound except for this dripping—and the unseen secret night life of insects in the tangled gardens all around—then at last Leo said “Okay.” And he talked.

  He talked about The Point. This was the summit of his philosophy—at least the summit he had so far reached: though, as he always said, “While there’s life there’s hope,” and he still had life in him—plenty!—and might yet ascend higher, as human beings are supposed to do. He had never drawn back from that, from striking off into new directions in order to reach a new summit. But so far, here and now, at the Academy, this summit was The Point. It was where he had got to over all these years and had taken anyone who cared to follow him. Here was the climax of all his various experiences and experiments: his theater group, his psychological encounter group, his quasi-psychiatric practice, his study of Eastern philosophies, his absorption in Ahmed’s music, his travels up and down America, his years of residence in California, the drugs he tried, the religions, and the love affairs with women, with girls, sometimes (“just for fun”) with boys, his mental and physical exercises, everything he was and thought and felt—it was all summed up, for now, in The Point. This was, for him, and by extension for everyone, what it was all about.

  The Point had a double meaning: it was both the point of human life—its goal—and also the point of intersection where its highest attainment, by which he meant its highest experiences, met. And what were these highest experiences? They were twofold, he explained: one on the physical plane, the other on the—what do you want to call it?—the psychic, the spiritual? Whatever. “Now, what would you call the highest human experience on the physical plane?” he asked his audience on these Saturday nights in the sunken garden. No answer, a hushed stillness except for the incessant plash from the fountain, and the insects shrieking (sometimes a bird woke up and sang by mistake from the depths of some dark tree). “What, no one knows? You don’t even know that? What have I done to deserve this bunch of dummies?” And then he supplied the answer himself: “The orgasm, of course—isn’t that it? Isn’t that the Point of our highest physical experience?” It was, there was no question of it. Yes, Socrates. “Okay. Now: and what, may I ask, is the highest human experience on the spiritual—the psychic—the you-name-it plane? . . . Give up? Well, I must say, you’re for the birds. It’s a wonder I don’t pack up and get out right this minute. The answer is—of course—again the orgasm! My God, any child knows that. What’s your problem? Don’t you know that there’s an orgasm of the soul just as of the body? Haven’t you heard of the frisson that takes place there and is every bit as delicious as that of the body? And some say, if you can believe it, even more delicious—a thousand times more delicious—but we won’t get into that. We haven’t got there yet. We can’t say. But what we can say—what we do say—what I say—is that there is a Point to be reached. A Point of intersection for both our highest points, and that’s what it’s all about! That’s The Point. To be reached. By all of us. Play, brother, play and sing.” And the follower with the guitar strummed up again and he sang and everyone joined in while Leo refreshed his throat with another plastic cup of his Saturday night punch.

  Whenever Leo sent for Stephanie, the same thing happened as the first time: only now they both expected it, and she wasn’t the only one who laughed, he did too—a bit ruefully but still, amused. And after that he put himself out to entertain her in other ways. He played her his Wagner records and sang all the parts himself—Isolde and everything, rising on tiptoe and with his hands laid on his heart: or he declaimed and translated German love poems to her that he hadn’t thought of in years. If it got too hot for her in his den—it was stifling in there, he had to have the heat on high all the time—he allowed her to open the window a fraction on condition that she keep him warm. So then she lay very close to him while he held her and breathed and snuffled in her hair. When, overcome with heat and fatigue, she fell asleep, he tried to rouse her, begging her not to leave him alone, thinking up some joke he hadn’t yet told her. To oblige him, sh
e laughed but in the wrong place and before he finished and then she went to sleep again. He shook her chin between his fingers, he called her—“Hey! Hey!”—but when he couldn’t wake her, he smiled with a tenderness and indulgence he had never before shown to anyone.

  Jeff still stole up to the attic sometimes, or Stephanie and Natasha went to visit him in his gatekeeper’s cottage at Mark’s house. Stephanie and Jeff were completely free with Natasha, not only in making love when she was there, but also in talking about their deepest, most private concerns. Of course that was nothing new—everyone at the Academy was talking about those, it was what they were there for. But it wasn’t always or even often interesting. The students got really deep into themselves: they analyzed their own motives, and interpreted their own actions or, rather, reactions—there didn’t seem to be much action—or, most boring of all, their dreams. Natasha always had difficulty pretending she was listening. But when Stephanie said “Shall I wash my hair?” or “Should I wear my pink T-shirt?”—that was a degree of intimacy that Natasha really cherished.

  Leo didn’t like their excursions to Mark’s house, but he was powerless to prevent them. Yes, for the first time in his life, Leo was powerless: and this when he was at the height of his career, was absolute master of his house and all its inmates! But when he told Stephanie not to go to Mark’s house, she promised she wouldn’t—and went nevertheless as often as she pleased.

  Natasha was surprised by the casual way in which Stephanie deceived Leo. She didn’t seem to think anything of it. One day Leo, who suspected these visits, was standing in wait for them when Jeff brought them back in the old pickup Mark had given him to drive around in. As soon as Jeff saw Leo standing on the front steps, he dropped off the two girls and backed his truck out through the gates, just waving his arm out the window in farewell.