by Lore Segal
“Aha?” said Martin Moses with interest.
“No, I mean to be her Viennese cousin and Vienna is so long ago. It’s sad, actually,” Ilka said, “because I’m in possession of a piece of information not available to Gerti Gruner: Gerti Gruner can’t have me. Is she still standing in the door?”
“Still staring daggers,” reported Martin Moses.
“There’s a Viennese expression: ‘Nicht mit der Hacken zu derschlagen .’ It means something like ‘With an axe you couldn’t do her in.’ I have several theories about Gerti Gruner,” Ilka said, all the time wishing she were not saying these things to Martin Moses, whom she hardly knew. Ilka kept hoping—she kept meaning—to stop, nevertheless she kept right on, and Martin Moses kept filling up her glass from his bottle. “One theory,” said Ilka, “is Gerti Gruner is missing the human component that tells one person that she is being a pest to another person, or, two, Gerti Gruner knows she is being a pest and doesn’t mind it. I actually think there’s something ever so slightly the matter with Gerti Gruner. She looks one right in the eyes which is not a thing normal people do to each other.”
“Sure they do,” said Martin Moses.
“Look into my eyes,” said Ilka. “Into, not at my eyes.” Martin looked into Ilka’s eyes, blinked and looked away. Ilka said, “We think we look into each other’s eyes because the language says we do, but the language is wrong.”
“People we love we look in the eyes,” Martin said.
“We do not. Particularly people we make love with, particularly when we are making love with them. That’s when we close our eyes. I think I better go home.”
But in the front door stood Gerti Gruner barring Ilka’s exit. “Oh! Hello! So! How are you?” squealed Ilka.
“You come tomorrow to supper in my house,” said Gerti Gruner, “isn’t it?”
“I think I can’t. Not tomorrow,” said Ilka looking in her handbag for her date book. Ilka’s date book confirmed that tomorrow Ilka was having dinner with the Stones.
“Sunday,” said Gerti.
Sunday Ilka was having dinner with the Zees. Ilka’s date book showed next week to be entirely filled up, which astonished Ilka, who continued to feel that her days were empty: These several events did not essentially count, because if the institute hadn’t happened to have hired a new director, the Bernstines would not have given him a reception, and Alpha Stone would not have seen Ilka at it and remembered that they had been meaning to have her over, nor could she have introduced Ilka to Alicia Aye. These invitations didn’t prove anything. If Ilka hadn’t happened to have got talking with Martin Moses, she wouldn’t have so much as known he was having a shindig. And, if she hadn’t tried the Friedmans a fourth time, they wouldn’t have so much as known of Ilka’s existence, and then there would have been nobody all week except Gerti Gruner on Thursday. Ilka looked up and Gerti Gruner was looking daggers not, as a matter of fact, into Ilka’s eyes: Gerti Gruner’s eyes met not Ilka’s eyes, but each other where their line of vision crossed at a point in front of the bridge of Ilka’s nose. “I make Sacher Torte with Schlagobers,” said Gerti Gruner, who knew, as everybody always knows, and minded, as everybody minds, that she was being a pest. It was something she had learned to live with. What Gerti Gruner could not learn was how to survive in an absence of cousins.
THE TALK IN ELIZA’S KITCHEN
Alpha Stone said, “Winterneet couldn’t make it. He’s in Copenhagen.”
“Never you mind Winterneet,” said Ilka and looked gladly around the room full of her new friends and colleagues at the Concordance Institute. Here were her hosts Alpha and Alfred Stone, here were the Ayes and the Zees and the Cohns and the Bernstines. How could Ilka’s back tell the difference between empty air and a body—male? Director Leslie Shakespeare was standing right behind Ilka listening to his wife Eliza making Yvette Gordot laugh. “Your wife is terrific,” Ilka said to him.
“Yes, she is,” said Director Shakespeare, and he and Ilka stood and listened together.
“That was before I stopped Leslie from doing the things he likes to do,” Eliza Shakespeare was saying. She was Canadian, a plain woman nobly built on the grand scale, wide in the shoulders, with a length of thigh. Her hair was so fine and electrically charged it attached itself to her cheeks and temples. She had to keep palming it away.
Alpha called everyone into the dining room.
Ilka was seated between Professor Zee and Leslie Shakespeare and at the furthest remove from Mrs. Shakespeare who was entertaining her end of the table with a highly colored anecdote about a groom who had inadvertently locked Leslie into the stables, making him miss the equestrian tryouts for the Olympics. Ilka glanced at Leslie’s great head brooding over his soup. “Did he really lock you in?” she asked him.
“No,” said Leslie.
“Are you really an equestrian?”
“I was,” said Leslie.
“No, you weren’t,” said Ilka, “and I can prove it.”
Leslie looked at Ilka.
Ilka said, “People I sit next to at dinner are not equestrians, and I’m sitting next to you.”
Leslie smiled.
“I can prove you never tried out for the Olympics.”
Leslie laughed.
“People I know are as likely to try out for the Olympics as they are to climb Mount Everest.”
Leslie blushed.
“You climbed Mount Everest!” Ilka said so loudly that Eliza said,
“Before I stopped him.”
“Did Eliza stop you?” asked Ilka.
“As a matter of fact she did.”
At the far end of the table Eliza was embarked on a tale about the sherpa who carried Leslie’s tent out onto the blinding white expanse and disappeared. “Nothing as far as the eye could see except his abominable snow prints.”
It felt silly to keep asking Leslie what, in Eliza’s stories, was the truth. Ilka kept looking sideways at him. He said, “It was a preliminary expedition to test new equipment.”
“And Leslie tested a new type of nylon rope by falling off a mountain and hanging upside down with a simultaneously spinning and yo-yoing motion …”
Here Leslie said, “Dear, did you ask Alpha for Mrs. Beaton’s recipe for gooseberry fool? Our real estate man,” persevered Leslie, “showed us two gooseberry bushes in our back garden. Did you know that growing gooseberries is forbidden in several states of the Union?” And having got the left side of the table discussing Mrs. Beaton’s Cookery and the right side listing the obsolescent laws that continue on the books, Leslie returned to the soup in his plate. Ilka looked down the table at Eliza who had been stopped in the middle of her story. Eliza’s head was bent over her plate and her eyes were hidden.
This was before Ilka got a car, and the Shakespeares offered to drive her home. She walked down the dark path with Eliza behind Professor Stone walking the director to his car. Eliza said, “It wasn’t the gooseberries out back, it was the tiny tomatoes in the front that made Leslie buy the house.”
Ilka sat beside Leslie. Eliza, in the backseat, said, “Alfred Stone looks like something out of Steve Canyon. The iron jaw, the jutting forelock.”
“Tremendously good-looking,” said Ilka.
“I don’t think so!” said Leslie. “You think he is good-looking?”
“Yes,” said Ilka and Eliza.
Ilka said, “By the way, do we know there really is a Winterneet?”
“There used to be, before he got his Nobel Prize,” Eliza said.
“But you affirm, categorically, that Winterneet exists?” asked Ilka. “I cried when I had to leave New York and come to live in Concordance. All my friends said, ‘Winterneet lives in Concordance. ’ My friend Jules knows someone who knows someone who played golf with someone who knows Winterneet. At my interview, Zack Zee told me Winterneet had done the institute a lecture series, and Jenny drove me by his house. Alpha said Winterneet was in Copenhagen. Maria promised to have him to dinner but he had not got back from the Coast.
The Bernstines made you a reception, and he had a cold. Martin Moses invited me to a party given for the express purpose of not being stood up by Winterneet by the simple expedient of not inviting him.”
Leslie said, “The State Department sends him on tours.”
“We knew Winterneet before he was Winterneet,” said Eliza. “Winnie was our ‘lodger’ and the day the baby disappeared he skedaddled. Got out of town.”
Ilka would have very much liked to hear more but was obliged to say, “That’s my house at the corner. I rent it from the Rasmussens. They’re on sabbatical.”
“Leslie, aren’t you going to be a gentleman and walk Ilka up the path to her front door?”
“Ilka, do you need to be walked to your front door?”
“Absolutely not,” said Ilka stoutly, and Leslie invited her to come Sunday morning.
Eliza said, “To a late breakfast.”
Ilka walked up her path in a state of happiness she had not experienced since New York: she liked the Shakespeares so much, and they had invited her to a late breakfast.
Leslie called Sunday morning. “I have chores in town. Eliza thought you might like me to pick you up on the way home.”
Ilka was pleased. She kept inventing more hardships from which being picked up by Leslie was going to save her well past the point at which she perfectly understood his desire to get off the telephone.
“Is eleven a good time?”
Eleven was the perfect time by which Ilka would have finished grading her class papers. “This really is good of you …”
“Oh you bet,” said Leslie.
Ilka experienced the intense pleasantness of sitting beside Leslie Shakespeare, but it made her nervous. She obligated herself to entertain Leslie’s silence with speech, which, she hoped, was interesting without being tiresomely interesting. “Do you know that delicious moment when you have finished grading your last student and you have a whole week before you have to grade your next class?”
Leslie appeared to be thinking this over.
Ilka said, “It’s like the second before a holiday has had the first minute bitten out of it?”
Now Leslie had two things to think over.
Ilka said, “Like the moment in the theater when the curtain has just started going up?”
Leslie said, “I know that moment.”
Let him think up the next thing to say, but Leslie was turning in to his driveway. He walked Ilka into the kitchen to say hello to Eliza. “Can I help?” Ilka asked her.
“Christ, no!” said Eliza. “Leslie will make us Bloody Marys.”
Leslie and Ilka took their drinks into the living room. Ilka said, “I don’t know how you do it, but you and Eliza make me talk. You never ask me any questions, and I tell you everything I know.”
“That is odd,” said Leslie. When Ilka’s glass was empty he carried it out into the kitchen, and she heard him say, “Ilka says we never ask her questions and she tells us everything. She says, how do we do that?” Ilka imagined Eliza standing with her back to Leslie because she could not hear the answer. Ilka got up and stood in the doorway and listened, and hearing Leslie’s returning footsteps, sat quickly down.
Leslie said, “Eliza says we ask questions in the form of suppositions.”
Ilka said, “The truth of the matter is that you and Eliza are accomplished listeners. I’m always interjecting my autobiography into the other person’s story. I mean to be expressing my sympathetic understanding, but all it does is take the conversation away from the other speaker. What you do is make little sounds like mm or mf, so that one feels you listening. Do you know what you do when somebody says something you don’t like?”
“What?” asked Leslie.
“You uncross your right leg from over your left knee and recross your left leg over your right knee.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Leslie.
“If I see you make some abrupt movement like suddenly picking up or putting down your glass, I know I’ve got some common fact dead wrong.”
Leslie said again that he would be damned, excused himself and walked out into the kitchen to tell Eliza what Ilka had said. He came back and said, “Eliza says we should bring our drinks and talk in the kitchen.”
Eliza once more refused Ilka’s offer of help. Ilka and Leslie sat at the table while Eliza sliced and chopped and grated. It was a large and pleasant kitchen. Two snapshots, one of a little baby with a large bib, and one of an apple tree in full fruit, were stuck into the frame of the window.
Ilka said, “The Rasmussens’ kitchen is full of doodads. When I moved in, I hid things away in back of the cupboard and went shopping. I bought this beautiful Danish chopping board made of blocks of different kinds of wood.”
“Did you? I fished this one,” Eliza pointed to a little square of wood with a cracked corner, “out of Lake Michigan in 1959.”
Leslie said, “Tell Eliza what you said about the way I listen.” Ilka repeated to Eliza what she had said, and Eliza asked, “How do I listen?”
“You look pleased when you hear some half-truth or nonsense; you get a satisfied look, as if the world were bearing out the opinion you privately held of it.” Ilka was excited to feel them listening to what she was saying; she hoped she would be able to stop talking. She said, “In the weeks I’ve known you I’ve told you all my stories, but I know very little about you,” and she asked what Eliza meant about asking questions in the form of suppositions.
Eliza said, “If you ask me point-blank how I lost my baby”—here Leslie got out of his chair and walked to the sink and stood beside Eliza, “—I’d say what my rotten little American cousins used to say to me—like ‘Mind your own beeswax,’ or, ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’ But suppose you said, ‘It must have been a warm day when you left the baby in her stroller in front of the door?’ I might say, ‘Actually, it was one of those lovely-looking April days’”—Eliza walked to the refrigerator and Leslie kept beside her—“ ‘that looked warm, or maybe I was longing for the Chicago winter to be over. When we got outside it was chilly.’” Leslie walked to the stove with Eliza. “I put the brakes on the stroller, ran in, got her blanket that I had already washed and put away, and out fell a box of mothballs, so I ran and got the broom and dustpan and I’ll drive Leslie crazy telling you the whole story.”
“Just what my mother does,” said Ilka. “She tells the whole story of how she left my father sitting on the side of the road before Obernpest a week before the end of the war, and she never saw him again.”
Drivers in American movies made poor Ilka nervous, the way they took their eyes off the road to make love to the person in the seat beside them. Leslie kept his blue eye fully forward, leaving Ilka at liberty to study his fine head, the stern upper lip, the cheek with its high, healthy male fairness. “I did it again!” she said. “I told my father-story and stopped Eliza talking about the baby!”
“She will tell it to you again,” Leslie said.
“How long ago was this?”
“It will be fifteen years next April 15.”
“Doesn’t the pain pale?”
Leslie thought about this and said, “It seemed intolerable when it happened, and it seems intolerable today.”
Ilka resented the Shakespeares’ intolerable loss. She imagined it like a wound in their lives, a flaw in their pleasures that flawed the pleasure she wanted to be at liberty to feel when she was with them. Ilka wished the baby unlost.
Before he left her off at her gate, Leslie invited Ilka to breakfast the following Sunday. Again he called and offered to pick her up. Again Ilka worried about not helping, but what Eliza wanted was for Ilka and Leslie to sit and drink their Bloody Marys in the kitchen and talk where she could hear them. She said, “Winnie’s back. He wanted to come for breakfast, but I said we had other plans.”
“I’ll phone him later,” said Leslie.
“I told him to come get his boxes.”
“What’s Winterneet like?” asked Ilka.
“A Peanuts cartoon,” replied Eliza. “A swelled head walking on his little shoes.”
“You don’t like him?” Ilka asked doubtfully.
Leslie said, “Winterneet and the Bernstines are our oldest American friends.”
“How did you meet him?” asked Ilka.
Leslie said, “When we were graduate students in Chicago, Winnie was an adjunct professor. Everybody was short of money. Winnie’s marriage with Dorothy was breaking up and he moved in with us—”
“—and having spread his papers over every surface of every room in the apartment,” Eliza said, “he moved out …”
Leslie uncrossed and recrossed his legs.
“… and moved in with Susanna,” Eliza said. “Leslie collected the papers into a cardboard box that I fell over in our foyer all summer and autumn. Come the first snow I put it out in the driveway.”
“You didn’t!” said Ilka.
“Yes, I did,” said Eliza.
Ilka looked at Leslie, who said, “She did.”
“Leslie brought it in and carried it to his study. When Winnie left Susanna he moved back with his second box of papers.”
“You know what I love?” Ilka said when Leslie presently stood up, handling his car keys inside his jacket pocket. “I like it that you let a person know when you’ve had enough of them.”
“Always the gentleman,” said Eliza.
“No, but it means I can sit and enjoy myself without worrying whether the time has come for me to offer to go home. Eliza and Leslie, I make you a proposition: Will you be my elective cousins? I’m low on the kind one has by blood.”
Leslie and Eliza agreed to be Ilka’s elective cousins, and Eliza invited her to come over after dinner, Saturday. The Bernstines were dropping by for drinks. Leslie said he would pick her up.
Saturday, and Ilka walked into the Shakespeares’ living room. On a chair, with a drink in his hand, sat a man whose graying orange hair was the color, exactly, of the expanse of his cranium. He had a flat face with shallow features—the nose was blunt and short, the eye-sockets lacked shadow. His shoes were child-sized. It was the actual Winterneet regarding Ilka with a smile that revealed a small, charming gap between the two upper front teeth. Ilka lowered her eyes, raised them, and the actual Winterneet was still smiling at her. Here came the Bernstines. Leslie brought drinks and Eliza a platter of what Winterneet, with his delightful smile, called the “eats.”