In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  “She’s in a bad way,” Mark said, reverting to Regi, the object of his visit.

  “Yes, but she’s got money.” Mark had heard others speak the word money the way Eric did: with longing and bitterness, as of a cruel lover. Mark guessed that this might be a good point at which to introduce his financial proposition with regard to Regi; but in his embarrassment and fear of offending his host, he did it badly: “My grandmother says she would love to see you again, that perhaps you would come and have tea with her. She says to tell you that she would really love and appreciate it, and so would I, Eric,” he ended, sincerely but somewhat breathlessly.

  He found himself misinterpreted: “I’d love it too, Mark,” Eric said. Still sitting on the floor, he looked up at Mark and put his hand on his knee.

  Mark returned Eric’s soft look with one he tried to make friendly and manly; and in a friendly, manly, but businesslike voice he said, “My grandmother was also asking if you’d be free anytime—convenient to yourself, of course—to come and help out with Regi.”

  Eric let his hand lie there a moment longer; then he withdrew it. “Sure,” he said with a little laugh. “Why not? It’ll pay the rent.” He shook the hair out of his eyes: “You can call me anytime you like,” as friendly and businesslike as Mark. “I’m busy Tuesdays and Thursdays in the afternoons but okay in the evenings and vice versa Wednesday and Friday.”

  “Fine,” Mark said. “We’ll work it out. Thank you. It’s really good of you.”

  Eric shrugged a little bit and smiled a little bit. Probably this was the gesture with which he met every little humiliation that life offered him. It touched Mark. Although he was already on his way out in the corridor, he turned back to where Eric stood in the door. He put his arm around Eric and hugged him and said, “I’ll be seeing you,” his voice full and warm with feeling.

  “Thanks, dear,” Eric said, returning both the hug and the feeling.

  Eric was very conscientious in carrying out his new duties. His first concern was to clean out Regi’s apartment, and soon he had the glass-and-chrome furniture shining as it used to, and the wolf rugs lying there white and shampooed. But his best efforts were expended on Regi herself. He took great pains to dress her up, and if he didn’t like one outfit on her, he would start over and try another. He also did such a beautiful job of makeup on her that Louise wanted him to go professional and had already decided to send him to a beautician’s course. Regi was very good when he made her up; she lifted her face to him and sat absolutely still for as long as he wanted. The end result was always splendid, and Regi sat enthroned like a mannequin, glittering with all her jewelry hung about her and her eyelids painted to match her dress. She had taken on an amazing resemblance to the expressionist portrait hanging on the wall above her, with its skeletal outlines and one eye glaring green and baleful from its center.

  Propped up on a piece of Art Deco furniture, she was usually happy in her thoughts while her two companions played cards. But sometimes she clamored for their attention—as on the day when she suddenly exclaimed: “But where is he?”

  “Who, darling?” Louise said, holding her cards tight against her chest so that Eric wouldn’t see them.

  “That one! Where is he? Why hasn’t he come to visit us?”

  “What’s she saying?” Eric asked, for all this was in German; at the same time, he said to Louise, “Now what’s that you’re hiding under your skirt? Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.”

  Louise slipped the hidden card farther under herself and said, “You’re imagining things.”

  “Where’s the fat one? The great big fat one?” Regi demanded.

  “What’s she want?” Eric asked again, and when Louise translated for him: “Who’s the fat one?”

  “An old friend of ours,” Louise said—but just then the card she was hiding slipped from under her, so she threw down the rest and said she was tired of playing. “I hear he’s got a new girl friend up there . . . Leo’s got a new girl friend!” she shouted to Regi.

  “Don’t shout,” Regi said. “I can hear you.” It was true that Louise usually shouted at Regi—not to get past bad hearing but to penetrate into her jangled, crowded mind. But sometimes, as now, Regi understood perfectly the first time. “It’s always some horrible little blonde with red cheeks,” she said, making her disdainful Regi face.

  “We should go there and see,” Louise said. She laughed at the idea but was also taken with it. She told Eric: “It’s her birthday on the fourth; we must do something. We could take her to the Academy—a day in the country, it’ll do us all good. You need a change too. What is it to be locked up with two old women. I wonder you can stand us.”

  “I wonder too,” Eric said, gathering up the cards she had scattered. “The way you cheat.”

  “We’ll have an outing!” she called to Regi. “In the country—like we used to. Wandering, and a picnic with a big hamper. You’ll like that, won’t you, darling? On your birthday.”

  “I’m not inviting him to my birthday,” Regi said, pointing at Eric. “Not Hofbrau.”

  “Who’s Hofbrau?” Eric said.

  “You’re Hofbrau!” Regi shouted. “Don’t think I don’t know. Hofbrau the swindler.”

  There was a pause. Then Louise said: “Oh, my goodness.” She got up and stood behind Regi’s chair and stroked her wig. “The things she remembers,” she said, smiling and stroking while Regi smirked like a child praised for its cleverness.

  Hofbrau really had been a swindler, but they hadn’t known it till he was arrested. Up till then he had been a very welcome addition to their circle in D—. He had joined all their excursions, had gone boating and bicycling with them, and of course to the opera and theater. He had been a fine amateur actor himself and such a wonderful mimic that he had made them laugh till they cried. Regi had been very taken with him, for in addition to everything else he was a stylish dresser, and Regi had always judged people by their clothes. (It was a joke among them that the man who had the best chance with her was the one with the sharpest crease down his trousers.) Anyway, they were all beginning to think there was something happening between her and Hofbrau—especially when at her seventeenth birthday party they disappeared during a game of hide-and-seek and couldn’t be found till they came out by themselves. Regi’s high pale cheekbones had two pretty red spots on them which were definitely not rouge. But on the very next day, he was arrested for embezzling funds from the insurance company where he held a responsible position, and it was later discovered that there was also a case against him in another town. Regi had never mentioned his name again, from that day to this.

  Louise began to pay more attention when Regi sat there talking to herself. Mostly she only caught odd German words, half sentences, fragments of meaning here and there. But sometimes, suddenly, Regi’s background babble became crystal-clear: “. . . the day I wore my white hat with the cherries for the first time,” Regi said, and Louise could see the day exactly: in summer, a table laid under the apple tree in her father’s garden, her mother in a long skirt sitting with her knees apart while she held the tall, blue-sprigged coffeepot; and Regi, coming to visit them, had stepped through the glass doors and walked toward them, knowing herself to be looking ultrachic in this new hat with one side of the brim turned down against her cheek and the other turned up with a cluster of glass cherries. But when Louise exclaimed, Regi pretended she didn’t know what at, and then she smiled and said, “Oh, you mean my hat?” lightly touching it with her fingertips as though she had forgotten she was wearing it.

  Marietta, whenever she came to visit them, couldn’t understand their cheerfulness. She had to force herself to come; it was an effort each time. One day she happened to drop in while Regi was being given her bath. The giggling in there and the splashing reached such a pitch that she had to go and see: she came in just as Louise and Eric were coaxing Regi to let herself be lifted out of the water and she was playfully resisting them. When they got her out, it was a trium
ph for all three of them: Louise laughed with relief as she enfolded Regi in the towel, and Regi laughed when Eric, also relieved, gave her a little pat on her pitiful shrunken behind. Marietta turned away.

  While Eric was putting Regi to bed, Louise joined Marietta in the living room. Louise kissed her daughter, at the same time looking at her with that secret glance of worry that everyone who loved Marietta had for her those days. “Why aren’t you taking your coat off?” she asked, for Marietta was stalking around the room in it as though in the street.

  “No, no, I have to go,” Marietta said.

  “To the showroom?”

  Marietta nodded—not liking to admit that she didn’t spend much time there now. She would get up in the morning, intending to go, but then decide to call her manageress and say she would be in later. And when she did go, she never stayed long but perched on her chair, often still with her coat on, smoking and thinking of something else, only to depart as suddenly and aimlessly as she had arrived.

  “What’s he doing in there?” she asked Louise, hearing sounds of wheedling and argument from Regi’s bedroom.

  Louise smiled: “He’s putting her to bed. She hates going to bed. She holds out for the last good-night kiss as long as she can.”

  Marietta took a deep breath. There was a silence. Then she said, “Why don’t you get a woman for her? It’s so . . . indecent with a man. A boy.”

  “You don’t know anything!” Louise exclaimed. “You don’t know what he’s done for her! How lucky we are.”

  “You’re right,” Marietta said. After a while she said, “It’s his black leather jacket. I always think of the Angel of Death in one of those—yes, yes, I’m crazy!” She pecked her mother’s cheek, and her coat flying open, she let herself out of the apartment, out of the building, into the street.

  At one time Marietta had loved these city streets, striding down them as if she owned them: her hair swung, and her skirt; she swung her handbag in the air. People looked at her and she expected them to; she felt exuberant. But now it was all different. She herself had changed—she was no longer open but as if closed up within herself. And it seemed to her that the streets had changed too: when she came out of Regi’s apartment building onto Park Avenue, she felt herself to be walking into an unending vista of towering buildings, repeating themselves over and over as in ice mirrors. What was left of the sky in this tall arctic landscape was also sparkling cold. Marietta got into a cab. It seemed to her that she had spent years and years, a lifetime, in one of these city cabs, cowering inside it with her fears while the driver—a Korean, a Pakistani, an Irishman, his name and number and convict photo nailed to the dashboard—presented his anonymous back to her on the other side of the safety screen inserted between them in case she should, in the course of their ride, go crazy and shoot him.

  When she reached home, she called Mark. She didn’t get the answering machine but Kent. This had happened before but, like other youths in the past who had answered Mark’s phone, he always said Mark wasn’t home and hung up without identifying himself. But today, after saying Mark wasn’t home, he added, “I’m Kent.”

  So then for the first time Marietta also had to identify herself, and how strangely her heart beat as she did so.

  “Hi,” said Kent. At once a strange intimacy flowed between them—the result not of what Mark had told each about the other but the very silence he had maintained with both of them. And perhaps because of this silence, Kent’s next remark had a guilty tinge: “I guess I’d like to meet you.”

  “Yes,” Marietta said, gulping like an adolescent, “I guess I’d like it too.”

  And indeed, the way each got ready for this rendezvous was like two adolescents getting ready for a first date. Mark saw Kent change his belt not once but twice and asked suspiciously, “Whom are you seeing?”

  Kent, after carefully straightening the belt within several loops at the back, answered with another question: “Who’s Eric? . . . He’s been calling. Said you’d be calling him.”

  “Yes, of course,” Mark said.

  “Of course,” said Kent sarcastically.

  Mark half smiled at his tone and said, in a tone of his own, “You still haven’t told me who you’re tarting yourself up for.”

  Kent was not good at repartee, but he didn’t have to be. There was an abrasiveness between them now that didn’t need words. They had been living together for almost two years, and although Kent often stormed out of the loft and stayed away for several days, he always turned up again; and though sometimes Mark wished he wouldn’t, if Kent stayed away longer than usual, Mark set out to find him.

  Marietta and Kent met in the Old Vienna. It was a very public place for so secret an assignation, and it was Kent who had suggested it. He didn’t have much—he didn’t have any—experience of going on a rendezvous with anyone’s mother, but the Old Vienna with its mixture of coziness and glamour seemed to him the right place for it. And Marietta was amused to find herself right there, in that family place where as a child she had eaten such quantities of Sacher Torte, with this youth who was Mark’s friend; his best friend, Kent told her straightaway.

  And because he was his best friend and she his mother, they had no difficulty in sustaining the tone of intimacy they had fallen into over the telephone. They talked, as a matter of course and without preliminaries, about Mark. They talked as if they were his parents—yes, even Kent who was at least twelve years younger than Mark. But he spoke with the grave responsibility of a father as he told Marietta that Mark was extending himself over too many projects and too may people. And Marietta agreed with the same gravity, and united in their care for him, they deplored him together. At the same time, they excited each other strangely. Talking about the loved person was of course exciting in itself, but so was the silent speculation each made about the role the other played in that person’s life. They put out tentacles toward one another’s personalities. Kent felt Marietta’s nervousness—he watched her hands fidgeting over the ashtray, the spoon in a saucer, the way she unnecessarily twirled the little stick around in her drink again and again. And she too was watching his hands, which were large and masculine, and from there her eyes traveled up to his chest, also broad and masculine, and from there, shyly and only for seconds at a time, to his face: manly in formation but feminine in expression.

  Besides speaking about Mark, they also spoke about themselves. Or rather, he spoke about himself (what could there be to say about her? he tacitly assumed). He told her how he was a photographer: not a very good one yet, he admitted, but he was working at it and Mark was helping him. It was one of the reasons he so much valued Mark’s friendship. Kent became, for him, remarkably voluble, even animated: Mark would have been surprised if he could have seen and heard him speaking to his mother. But that was just what Kent loved—not only speaking to Mark’s mother but also to a mother. As a child, he had loved his mother inordinately and had thrust himself on her for attention in every way he could. There had been no father, and she had had to work hard at various jobs—as a taxi dispatcher, in a cookie factory—to support them both. He had resented the fact that every moment of hers wasn’t his, that she was thinking about money when she should have been thinking about him. And then, as he grew older, and into the snobberies of adolescence, he resented other things about her. He began to feel that his love for her was ill-bestowed because she didn’t have the pretty clothes he craved for her nor the leisure to look after her appearance the way she, and he, deserved. All this was amply corrected in Mark’s mother; and not only in her but also in the place in which they sat together under chandeliers. That too was what he had dreamed of as a child—to go out to such a place with his mother for whom even the local diner had been out of reach.

  Around this time of her first acquaintance with Kent, Marietta had a letter from Ahmed. She was surprised, for it was almost ten years since she had heard from him. She didn’t expect to, for she knew that keeping up contact by correspondence was not something
that would occur to him. He was resigned to the fact that life swept people apart irresistibly and forever. However, this letter was for a specific purpose. Cast in traditional form, it began and ended with formal, flowery phrases directly translated from Urdu: “By the grace of God we are enjoying health and happiness,” it started off, and immediately launched into a recital of events that spoke of everything but health and happiness. Someone called Abida, whom Marietta could not remember, had left for the heavenly abode; another called Sayyida had been left paralyzed from an attack of polio (was she a daughter or a granddaughter?—so many years had passed since she had last seen them that Marietta had lost track of the generations). Ahmed himself was suffering from a swelling of the ankles that made it impossible for him to walk, so that he had to be carried like a child from place to place; one courtyard wall had collapsed in the last monsoon and no means had yet been found to repair it; and kindly to send one thousand rupees at earliest convenience. This request was made without circumlocution halfway through the letter, which continued with more news, mainly of the weather and the inflated price of all food and other commodities.