“Oh, hi, Leo,” Stephanie said, skipping up the steps, shaking her long hair and her small hips, and evidently terribly pleased to see him.
Natasha was coming up behind, and it was she whom Leo asked: “Where did you go?” He spoke mildly, though at the same time fixing her with his uncomfortably flat porcelain eyes.
There was need for a lie, but Natasha had no experience in telling one. Stephanie, however, didn’t waste a second: “Jeff took us over to Great Barrington to do some shopping.”
“What did you buy?” asked Leo, still mild as milk.
“Oh, shit—we left it in the truck!” cried Stephanie, stamping her foot at herself and shaking back her hair again, in temper this time.
“Hm,” Leo said. He gave them both another of his looks, but when Stephanie met it with a pout at her own carelessness, he turned and shambled off, in his monk’s robe like an elephant’s loose skin.
Later, Leo called Natasha to his den. She was embarrassed, fearing she would have to tell lies to protect Stephanie. But Leo asked for nothing like that. He was gentle and reasonable. He told Natasha that Stephanie was there to work on herself and that it was his responsibility to see that she did. Left to herself, she would just go off again into every kind of wrong direction. All his students were like that.
“Why do you think these people come to me?” asked this gentle, reasonable Leo, looking straight at Natasha perched uncomfortably in one of his old-uncle armchairs. When she raised her eyes, she saw that he was looking at her not in any of the ways in which he looked at people—always in some superior capacity—but as at an equal; and he spoke to her as to an equal. “Because they’ve made a mess of themselves and can’t deal with it. Psychologically, they’re all waifs and strays. Not like you,” he said, smiling his small teeth at Natasha—she who, physically, was the epitome of all waifs and strays. “You’re strong,” he said. “You know what you want. You’ve found your Point.”
Natasha was amazed. She didn’t know what he meant. In fact, she never did know what he meant when he talked about The Point. She couldn’t understand about the division between the physical and the other part and had come to the conclusion that she was lacking in one or the other or maybe both. In a way, her life was simpler than other people’s: she had few attachments, and these were strong, unquestioned, and had never changed. When she was small, the most unhappy moments she knew were when Mark had no time for her. He had gone to school six years before she did, and every day she would run from window to window in her grandmother’s apartment to watch him walk away with his school bag on his back. Sometimes he was joined by other boys, and though the street was far below and they were tiny figures, she could easily make out how lively and interested he was with them. Of course, he never knew she was there watching so he didn’t look up to wave; but Louise came and knelt behind her and put her arms around her and said “Never mind, worm, soon you’ll go to school too.” But when Natasha did go, she wasn’t interested at all and only waited for it to be time to return home.
So then Louise and Marietta decided that the only way was for her to grow up and develop and form new attachments. They told her about the changes in a girl’s body, and she was informed about sex in detail by both of them in two differing versions. But her breasts hardly grew, and she was sixteen before she had her first period and after that it only came very haphazardly, as if she had been forgotten about in some evolutionary cycle. Regi asked more often “Are you sure she’s all right?” But Natasha never missed anything—having dates, or being whistled at down the street—she hardly noticed that it happened to other girls and not to her.
When Jeff came to the Academy at night, he threw handfuls of gravel up at the attic window. He had pretty good aim, but the window was too high and he missed frequently, so that his missiles fell in spurts to the ground. Natasha had learned to listen for them. She woke up Stephanie who cursed a bit at first, but then—tousled, warm, and fragrant from sleep—she stole down the stairs, rubbing her eyes.
On nights when Stephanie was with Leo, Natasha had to go down and tell Jeff. He was angry and disappointed and he cursed Leo. So one night when Jeff said, “You come along, then,” Natasha agreed, just to put him in a better humor. He took her back to Mark’s house, driving her in his truck through country lanes so narrow that the hedges lining them swept the car roof and tapped the glass as with ghostly fingers. But then the land cleared, and Mark’s house, standing on its hill, rose from out of the black trees. Jeff parked his truck inside the gate and invited Natasha into his one-room stone house. It was bare and masculine inside, with a wood stove in the middle and the old bedstead he had found somewhere and his clothes hanging from nails he had hammered into the wall. His shoes stood under the bed, including a pair of battered hiking boots, and also under the bed was his knapsack, which was all he traveled with. He didn’t have much else except his transistor and an oval stone that looked as if it held magical properties, for him at any rate. There was nothing there that couldn’t be packed up in a moment and stuffed back into the knapsack and carried away on his back.
Natasha stood around like an awkward guest, not knowing what was expected of her. But also like a guest she was eager to oblige her host, so that when Jeff asked her to take her clothes off, she did so at once. It was quickly done, anyway—she only had to step out of her Indian cotton skirt and slip her cheesecloth blouse over her head, and there she stood—inadequate, but bare and willing. Jeff looked her up and down; he was surprised both by what he saw—he was used to girls who were girls—and by her attitude. He couldn’t make out whether this was indifferent, experimental, or sacrificial. But there were the two of them alone in the night and he would have considered it unnatural not to get together.
Matching her politeness with some of his own, he inquired: “You sure you want to?”
She nodded and smiled, and he said, “Okay” with what was almost a sigh. He asked her to lie on the bed and she did so. They resembled doctor and patient. He stepped out of his clothes. She didn’t look at him—he had a perfect boy’s body, but she wouldn’t have been able to appreciate that. She lay flat on her back with her arms by her sides and looked up at the light bulb. It was so bare and bright that it was like looking into the sun, but she forced herself to; she was bracing herself to feel pain and not cry out. But nothing happened except that Jeff grew heavier on top of her and wet with perspiration like he was really working hard. “Relax, for Christ’s sake,” he panted. She thought she was relaxed. She was prepared to continue lying still for as long as required. But this was not very long. He tumbled off her and fell beside her on the bed and lay there, exhausted and amazed.
She turned her eyes to look at him; she wondered if she had done something wrong but didn’t like to ask. He looked back at her. It was strange, this meeting of their eyes—hers so dark and deep they seemed to reach down into caverns way beneath the earth and his blue and clear as a lake into which the sun could shine all the way to the bottom.
“You remind me of someone,” he said. “Someone I knew as a kid. Myrtle her name was—she was half Indian and living with her mom in this shack in the Great Smokies. Her old lady didn’t like it, her playing with me, on account I had a bad name around there. But we didn’t do anything bad—we had nice games, a bit sexual but clean.” He raised his hand to the switch he had fixed up so he could turn the light off without getting out of bed. He said: “It’s like that with you; like we’re both ten years old.”
It was peaceful and good to be in the dark. He was asleep before she was. Through the bare window she could look straight up to Mark’s house glimmering on its hill, a heavenly vision.
It wasn’t only physically that Natasha felt herself to be inadequate. She also failed to come up to other people’s emotional intensities—especially at the Academy where every word, gesture, and detail of daily life was invested with a deep charge. There was the question of bedrooms. These were situated on the second and third floors of the house, and
their occupation was a matter of finely graded prestige. The second-floor bedrooms were kept up the way they must have been by the original owners, with canopied beds, mahogany wardrobes, dressers, fine lawn curtains, quilts and counterpanes, Brussels carpets. The third-floor bedrooms were bare except for utilities; the wooden floors had no carpets, many of the rooms had two beds in them, and one of them three. Still, they were more prestigious than the attic where most of the students were housed.
Newcomers were always made comfortable on the second floor, but before long they were moved up to the third to make room for other newcomers or for guests. There was considerable shuffling to and fro between this third floor and the attic. Some students were allowed to stay in the third-floor bedrooms indefinitely—there was one elderly Englishwoman, a Miss Kettlebury, who had never been asked to vacate. Some, moved up to the attic, were allowed to move down again, changing places with others who, for no reason apparent to them, were told overnight to pack up and go to the attic. These arrangements and rearrangements generated considerable feeling.
One day Natasha was on kitchen duty with a woman called Janet, who had just been relegated to the attic from the third floor. The kitchen was as gloomy and cumbersome as the rest of the house, and since Leo did not believe in spending on laborsaving devices, it still had many of the inconveniences of a Victorian kitchen. It was below ground level, and the sunlight was filtered through burdocks before entering by way of the barred rectangular windows. Natasha was cutting onions, and Janet was washing spinach; a big cauldron of stew simmered on the stove, giving out pleasant smells of fresh vegetables, herbs, and cloves.
Janet had the tap on over the sink, so it took some time before Natasha realized that the sounds she heard were not only of water running but also of Janet sobbing. Sobbing was not unusual at the Academy, but Natasha never could get used to it. “Oh, gee, Janet,” she said. Tears were running down her own cheeks, from the onions she was cutting.
“Leo’s right!” Janet broke out at last. “I deserve to be in the attic.”
“But, Janet, it’s only that they needed your room.”
“Then why me? Why not Shirley? How is she. better than I am?” Irresistibly, she went off into Shirley’s bad qualities—emotional dependency, and inability to sustain a relationship—also, a particular incident where Shirley had made free with Janet’s organic night cream. Halfway, she pulled herself up: “There you are, you see, there you have a good example of me; what sort of a beast I am.”
“Janet, no,” Natasha said. “You’re upset, that’s all; you’re not a bad person.” It was what she usually said to people—the Academy constantly rang with self-accusation—and they always refuted her with a list of their character delinquencies.
Janet went right back to her childhood when she had often been mean to others and had been noted for her neurotic behavior. At school she had had crushes—searing attachments—on teachers and other girls, and she understood now that this was to make up for the terrible lack in her childhood when her mother failed to love her. Janet had adored her mother, and had longed to be like her when she grew up, but instead she took after her father’s family where the men and women tended to look alike, all retaining the heavy features of their family portraits. It seemed to Janet that her mother disliked her for her disappointing appearance, so was it any wonder that from loving her Janet grew to resent her and even worse. But all her life after that—it had long been made clear to her by a series of psychiatric and other healers—she had been in search of love and beauty and, in the course of this quest, had recklessly entangled herself in one harmful relationship after another.
The last of these, just before she had come to Leo, had been with an Iranian—or was she an Iraqi?—girl who claimed to be a princess and certainly looked like one. They had met at a benefit performance that Janet had helped organize. Janet had often involved herself in good causes but never for long, because she couldn’t stand the internal politics or the people who sat on the committees with her. The Princess, who was a singer, a chanteuse, had donated her services for one such performance—actually, it was a good opportunity for her because the committee members and the people who bought the tickets were the sort to help further her career. The Princess was very single-minded about her career. Janet admired her for it, how she made it her business to get information about every single person she met, who they were, what sort of family, what sort of contacts they had.
“She was amazing,” Janet said, “the way she’d find out everything, and often about people who couldn’t possibly ever be any use to her at all. But if I said that, she’d get mad at me. She said I didn’t know what it was like to be on your own and have to make your own way—and I’d say ‘But you’re a princess,’ and then she’d get really mad at me.”
The fact was she was often so irritated with Janet that she couldn’t stand to have her around. Janet was sad but understanding; she knew she did have an irritating effect on people. During the days that the Princess banished her, Janet would just stay in the room she had taken in a women’s hotel in Manhattan and wait to be called. She knew that sooner or later—usually it wasn’t more than a day or two—her friend would telephone and be very sweet and forgiving. On these occasions, she always had some task for Janet—one that was mainly symbolical, signifying reconciliation, but also practical, such as buying provisions and cooking for a party the Princess was giving in the evening. Janet ran around happily, tirelessly, and arrived on the Princess’s doorstep dragging a little shopping cart piled high behind her, and after hastily collecting her kiss of forgiveness, she rushed into the kitchen to start cooking.
The Princess had installed herself in someone’s penthouse apartment—Janet never knew whose it was—a brand-new place in a flashy glass block that wasn’t quite finished yet. There was practically no furniture, so it was very good for giving big parties and all sorts of people came. Janet did not know any of them, and anyway most of them were younger than she was. She went helplessly from group to group, not finding anyone to talk to or who wanted to talk to her. She knew herself entirely unfit to be there—and worse, understood that the Princess knew it too, that she saw her wandering around, large, dowdy, and awkward, and felt ashamed to have her there. Nevertheless, in her kindness, she tried to draw Janet out, introduced her to people and urged her to talk about herself—or rather, about her family connections —she gave her such a good start on that, so that the other guests would know who Janet was, in spite of her unpromising appearance. But Janet could never carry it any further; she was left tongue-tied, wringing her hands—a cook’s hands, a gardener’s—and shifting from one large foot to the other, so that the Princess could not bear the sight and turned away.
All this was painful, but a thousand times worse was the jealousy Janet felt toward the Princess’s lovers. She had absolutely no right to feel like that, for there was nothing of that sort between her and the Princess. And, moreover, her friend made no secret of her lovers before Janet; she was completely open and aboveboard. She would even call Janet in while she was in bed with someone—in the big onyx and brass bed, which was the only piece of furniture in the room—and she would ask Janet would she be very sweet and make some coffee? She always explained to her companion that there was no one in the world who could make coffee like Janet, so fresh and fragrant. And Janet would make this coffee and bring it—but not with good grace, not with a quiet heart, not with satisfaction in being able to serve the person she loved—no, but burning with torment and fury. And once—the last time—it had been so bad she could not control herself. She had gone into the bathroom and, taking the razor with which the Princess shaved her legs, she had begun to slash at her wrists—so wildly and clumsily that the blood had spurted up on the mirror and over the Princess’s towels. Then she had swept a shelf of glass vials to smash on the floor so that they would hear the noise and come running. Well, of course, the Princess had been furious; but also calm and cool, and she had phoned for an ambulanc
e and then she had called Janet’s brother in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to tell him what hospital Janet was going to be taken to, and that he had better get himself down there and take care of her.
“That’s the sort of person I am,” Janet told Natasha with a shudder at herself. “I still wake up at night thinking I’m in that bathroom again, smashing the glass and cutting at my wrists—and all the time, what I really wanted to do was run in that bedroom and murder and kill them. So don’t you ever say to me again that I’m not a terrible person, because I’m worse than anyone you’ll ever know.” She dropped the spinach she was washing and sobbed into her wet, raw hands.
Natasha regarded her with wonder and some admiration: so much strength of love! Her own feelings—for instance, for Mark—seemed in comparison a very small, still pool.
While everyone else at the Academy was busy looking into themselves, Natasha spent long hours looking out the attic window. Up till now she had lived only in the city and her awareness of the changing seasons had been confined to the spindly trees that lined the streets and put out frail tufts of green in the spring. But from the attic she looked out over summer trees and ripened fields and hills; and watched it all changing—first blazing, then fading, and falling and sleeping under snow. Then the trees and the hills were black, the river and lakes frozen, and everything just lay there waiting for the whole process to start again.
All this time Mark’s house was progressing. Much of it was still obscured by scaffolding and building materials; the windows gaped, the interior was ripped open: but by the time one cycle of the seasons had gone round and it was the second summer of Mark’s occupancy, the house, rearing above the shimmering trees, was no longer a corpse sinking into the earth but new growth pushing out of it.
In Search of Love and Beauty Page 18