In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Once, when he called for her and was told she wasn’t there, he sent for Natasha instead. As always, she entered the den with trepidation, and she positively jumped when he barked at her: “Where is she? . . . Gone to Mark’s house, I expect, to be with that boy Jeff. You needn’t lie to me.” He shot a glance at her from under his eyebrows which stuck out like promontories over his glassy eyes. “That’s what she’s left you behind for, isn’t it—to tell me lies; as if I’d believe them for a second. As if you could even tell them. But don’t go and pride yourself on your truthfulness: it’s a purely negative quality in you—nothing but an inability to lie.” But next moment he sank back on his couch, tired of analyzing Natasha, tired of the whole exercise—not only with Natasha but with everyone, it was all not worth it anymore. Something quite other engaged him now.

  “I don’t know why she goes there,” he said querulously. “When she knows I need her near me every moment of the day; need her,” he said, “need her, need her . . . What do you make of it all, Natasha?” He turned toward her, supporting himself on his elbow to look at her as if he were really interested in what she might have to say. “I suppose you tell Stephanie to leave that old fool to stew in his own juice.” He wouldn’t give Natasha time to defend herself but went on, “You think I’m old and disgusting and that no young girl—no young swallow, no young blossom, no young beauty like her—would want to stay with me. Only let me tell you, you don’t know a thing! Not a thing! Nothing!” he shouted and grew apoplectic in the face.

  “Let me go, Leo,” Natasha pleaded. “I’m just upsetting you.”

  “First I want to upset you a little bit. I’m going to do you a big favor, Natasha: I’m going to give you an analysis free of charge. Just think how lucky you are, getting something for nothing that other people would pay hundreds and thousands for. The idiots.” Tired of leaning on his elbow, and perhaps also tired of talking and thinking, and just generally old and tired, he sank onto his back. He groaned: “If only they’d all go away and take their problems with them, instead of dumping it all on me. I’m sick of them. I’m tired. I want to get out and enjoy myself.”

  He lay there, hugely panting, looking as if he would never get up again, let alone go out and enjoy himself. Natasha thought, Suppose he were to die now? She found herself taking this possibility quite calmly.

  “Come here,” he said and made an angry sound when she didn’t do so fast enough. She approached warily, and when she got close enough, he snatched at her hand so that with a cry she snatched it back again. That made him laugh and heave: “What did you think—I was making a pass at you? I haven’t come to that yet, not with you. I want you to feel my heart, that’s all.” When she gingerly gave him her hand, he guided it to his chest and held it there. At the same time, he looked into her face—triumphant at her astonishment: for though he appeared to be a disintegrating old man at the last gasp, the heart he made her feel was thumping and pumping inside him with a young bullock’s strength. “Not finished yet, you see; still some way to go,” he whispered. But he had to shut his eyes, too weary to speak or feel or be for a while, as though worn out by his own strong heart.

  Natasha was very anxious to get away. She was so afraid he was going to keep his promise and give her a free analysis. That was a privilege she was glad to do without—in fact, for her the privilege was to be allowed to stay at the Academy without having to submit to its principal function; to get off, as she secretly put it to herself, scot-free.

  He said, still with his eyes shut: “Sit down . . . There, at the table.”

  The den had one small table in its center, and on it was a red plush cloth with a fringe of little plush balls. Over the table hung an old china gas mantel converted into an electric lamp. But although Natasha sat there, at the table under the lamp, in the middle of Leo’s smoky, stifling den, she managed not to be there. It was a habit she had evolved—a safety device—so that whenever she didn’t care to be in a place, she simply absented herself from it. She did this by staring hard at whatever was ahead of her—in the present case, it was Leo lying on his leather couch. But though she had her eyes fixed on him, she seemed nevertheless to be seeing right through him: gazing into an inner landscape, wider, more magical, more full of light than the most glorious summer landscape she had ever beheld.

  But Leo, who knew all about this trick of hers, snapped his fingers in the air with a loud report. He had to do so several times before she unfocused her eyes from what she was seeing and rested them, mildly, on him.

  “Your grandmother called,” he said. “She wants to come here for a birthday party with Regi. My God, they’re still on birthday parties, those two.” But next moment his exasperation changed into something completely different. He smiled: “You know what? . . . Your grandmother used to have the sweetest dimples in the most unusual place. Two of them, two little hollows—never seen anything like it—” He began to wheeze and cough again, so that Natasha said, “Maybe you shouldn’t smoke so much, Leo, it’s bad for you.”

  That made him laugh as well as wheeze, and the resulting upheaval was frightful. Again she thought, with some detachment, Suppose he were to die now? But he recovered—as he did ten times a day—and when he could speak he said, still laughing: “Don’t worry, I’m still here; smoking or not, I’m still around for a while. Now, if I were the old phony you take me for, wouldn’t I be saying I have to stay, you all need me, I have work to do in the world and can’t leave for the better place I long for?” This he said in a saintly voice and also folded his hands over his chest to make him look like a saint; but next moment he unfolded them and said, “Balls! I’m staying because I like it here. It’s too good to leave.” And now he sounded wistful and sincere.

  After a long silence, which he spent in wheezing contemplation and she in wondering how much longer he was going to keep her there, he swiveled his eyes in her direction and gave a deep sigh which he did his best to make a mock one: “I really feel sorry for you, Natasha. You’re deprived. There’s one whole side missing for you—and what a side, God, Christ in heaven, what shall I tell you, what a side!” And he gave another sigh, and this one pushed up from the depths of his being with such force that his whole frame shook with the impact.

  Although Natasha would have liked to tell him that she wasn’t missing a thing, she was afraid of exciting him, with terrible results. Anyway, he was off on his own again: “You don’t know anything,” he told her. “You can’t know: it’s not even your fault. I’ll prove it to you. Now, you think you love Mark—hey, wait! I haven’t finished—you think you love him so much that you don’t care what he does, whom he loves and what he does with them and all the rest of it. And you think because you don’t care that’s the height of love. I’ll tell you different: it’s not the height, it’s the opposite. And I can’t even teach you anything—if I could, believe me, I’d do my best to bring you up to standard.”

  “Up to whose standard?”

  “Nature’s.” Although she said nothing, he gave out warning noises and shook his finger in the air: “Careful now—don’t underestimate Nature. You can’t reach anything higher without going through it—right through it—from top to bottom—through Louise’s little dimples—”

  “—You be careful now,” she warned as he cackled and cracked up—

  “Ah, those two poor old women—when I think of what they were. But I don’t have to: just see how prodigal Nature is—one Louise after another—one Regi after another—and then in the end, at the top of the tree, there is the sweetest little, hard little, juiciest little apple—where is she? why don’t you tell me?” But meeting Natasha’s blank stare, he waved her away: “You’re really getting on my nerves now—clear out of here, before I lose my temper. One,” he began to count”—if you’re not out by three—two—”

  She shut the door behind her just on his count of three.

  When Marietta asked Louise what she thought about giving up her apartment, she was surprised at how readily h
er mother agreed. Louise said, “Yes, yes, of course, what a good idea”; and went on at once to talk about Regi’s birthday celebration, which had been her principal interest for the past few weeks.

  Regi’s birthday had never been celebrated among them as regularly as Louise’s. There were years when Regi was out of sight and often out of reach, so that Louise was not even sure where to send her birthday gift; and other years when, though in the city, Regi chose to spend the day with new friends, or even chose not to be on speaking terms. However, nothing like that this year. It was Louise who ordered the birthday cake that they were to take with them to the Academy. She had been going to the same place—Blauberg’s—for over fifty years, and one of the assistants, a Mrs. Weintraub, had been there for the last thirty of these, though complaining more and more about her feet and not knowing how much longer she would be able to carry on. When Mrs. Weintraub took the order for Regi’s cake, she automatically wrote down mocha, which was the invariable flavor of Louise’s birthday cake. But Louise changed it to strawberry—strawberry-pink—for Regi loved bright colors.

  And when she went to collect it, she was glad she had done that. The cake was as beautiful as a palace—tall, shining, and pink, outlined with balconies and battlements of white frosting. While Louise was waiting for it to be packed, trays of pastries were carried in fresh from the ovens, so she bought some more—there were so many to buy for: coffee éclairs for Leo, chocolate ones for Natasha, napoleons for Mark, meringues for Eric, cheese straws for Marietta who did not like sweets, and then another steaming fragrant tray of cookies came out which Louise could not resist. Mrs. Weintraub took and packed these purchases in her usual phlegmatic, low-spirited manner; all this was nothing new for her—every day of her life an unending stream of fresh baked goods came out from the back premises to be bought and eaten by an unending stream of customers. But her packing was very efficient so that her hands seemed to be working independently of the rest of her; and all the time she told Louise about her latest complaint—this year, besides her feet, there was something wrong with her kidneys—as well as about the misfortunes that had befallen her family in the course of the year. Every time she came here, Louise was kept up on the latest in Mrs. Weintraub’s family—one year her brother-in-law was in a car accident, another year her sister had to have a mastectomy, and then there was the year of her own hysterectomy. For Louise, all these events had become part of the ambience of Blauberg’s, and a preliminary to every celebration. And when Mrs. Weintraub—having packed all the boxes and dispatched a younger assistant to help Louise put them in her cab—wished her joy of the occasion and to eat in happiness and good health, concluding with her usual, “Who knows where we’ll all be next year”: then Louise wasn’t in the least worried abut Mrs. Weintraub, because in spite of all that happened, all the disasters, the next year she never was not there.

  One day—this was the day Louise was expected with Regi—Stephanie took the last few possessions out of her trunk; and when they arrived at Jeff’s cottage, Natasha found that he had packed up too and that they were leaving. She didn’t know whether they had decided on this verbally, or whether their agreement was as instinctive as that of birds when they make off for the winter. All Stephanie said was, “Where’s my stuff?” He pointed out a bulging trunk tied with rope which was already in his pickup; she made him open it again to add her last little bundle.

  “You could come too,” she said to Natasha.

  “Sure you could,” Jeff said—he meant it: there was plenty of room in his pickup.

  “I can’t,” Natasha said. “My grandmother’s coming.”

  All three of them went back into the cottage to make sure nothing had been forgotten. But Jeff had done a good job of clearing up: only the old armchair was left and his bed stripped down to a stained mattress. He had let the wood stove go out and the cold wind blew in through the open door, making a shutter swing and creak on its hinges. They went out and quickly shut the door behind them, so the snow wouldn’t get in. Stephanie and Natasha tried to embrace, but they couldn’t get near each other because of the wadded coats they both wore. That made them laugh, though they had tears in their eyes. At the same time, Stephanie’s eyes were sparkling and her cheeks were flushed with cold and excitement, while Jeff was already calling impatiently from the driver’s seat; so that Natasha could not feel too sad at this parting from the only friends she had ever had.

  Jeff had given her the key of the cottage to give back to Mark. She locked the door without returning inside; but as she did so, she remembered she had no way of getting back to the Academy and would have to go up to the house and ask Kent to drive her. She walked the ascending path toward Mark’s house. She thrust her hands deep into her pockets—tearing these a bit farther—and stamped through the first layer of snow. The trunks of the trees reared black out of the ground, but their branches were already white with the fragile, crumbly, newly falling snow. The wind drove the flakes along the frozen lake and blew them up from the ground and into Natasha’s face. The sky hung down gray and swollen. And the house, shining with new paint whiter than the new snow, stood like an ice palace aloof on its hill.

  Natasha let herself in. As always, and especially since Kent had taken up his quarters there, she felt like an intruder—unnecessarily, for it was too cold and impersonal to be anyone’s house yet. She could hear Kent moving around in the upstairs front bedroom. This was the room in which Mark slept when he stayed overnight. Kent too had installed himself there and had laid out some of his developed prints over one of the twin beds. He was studying them and hardly looked up when Natasha came in.

  It seemed polite to her to study them with him. She stood beside him, but it was strange and difficult for her to be there with him. Although the clothes flung about and the shoes half pushed under the bed were Kent’s, basically the room was Mark’s: Natasha recognized the bedcovers he had bought in Italy, and the rug with baskets of flowers and fruits woven into it; also the three-sided leather frame which stood on one of the bedside tables. It held the three photographs that Mark carried with him and put up everywhere like household idols—Louise’s, Marietta’s (taken in India), and her own.

  She glanced nervously up-way up-at Kent. He was frowning with concentration as he studied his work and appeared totally unaware of her. If only she could have been so of him. Over the years, she had met several of Mark’s lovers, and they had all evoked the same sensation in her. She recognized it now as she stood beside Kent: that strange, strange visceral distaste, like the tugging of her infrequent but always painful menstrual periods. It was more strongly negative than anything she had ever felt for anyone else; and might have grown, if she had let it, into full-blown hate and fear.

  She heard a car drive up down below and was glad of the excuse to go to the window and see. It was a sleek, long, black sedan; and the man who got out—she saw him foreshortened from above, could look down on his modeled gray hair—was also sleek and city-bred, in a pale and perfect suit. Kent had come up behind her, and at the sight of the stranger, he turned from the window without a word and went out of the room. Natasha could hear him say from midway down the stairs: “What are you doing here? Who asked you to come?” And the man said: “I had to.” The unlived-in, impersonal house had become charged, electric.

  They went into the room on the left (the dining room), and Kent shut the door. Natasha followed them downstairs. She could hear their voices—principally the other man’s—but they were low and intense, and she would not have been able to make out the words even if she had wanted to, which she did not. By the time she had reached the bottom of the stairs, the man’s voice had risen. She still could not distinguish the words, but now there was something in the tone that she recognized only too well. For it was the same she had heard, or rather overheard, in some of Mark’s telephone conversations: high-pitched, even shrill, and one would have said feminine if at the same time it hadn’t been fraught with more force, more physical strength than
could have come out of a woman’s body. She sat down on the lowest step, stubbornly; and stubbornly, she did not cover her ears but made herself be present to hear and know. More than anything, she was indignant. She felt that Mark’s house was being desecrated by these strangers before he had even had a chance to live in it.

  But as she sat there and listened, her feelings began to change. She still didn’t know what was going on—in the same way as she had not known the details when she had overheard Mark on the telephone: but as on those occasions, here too a point was reached when she felt she had to intervene. Mark had always been furious when she came in and stood by him while he shrieked down the phone. But it had made him put down the receiver, and after a while he did not seem to mind her presence while he sat holding his head in his hands, trying to hide his tears. He never said so, but maybe he even felt good to have another person there, though a silent one. Moved by the same instinct as had moved her then, the same inability to stand another person’s pain, she got up from the step and went toward the front room. She didn’t have to overcome her acute shyness, it just disappeared. Kent stood towering, fierce and gigantic, by the fireplace; the other man was kneeling on the floor, with his arms clasped around Kent’s knees and his face laid against them.