by Lore Segal
Boots said, “What’s wrong with tossing your hips?”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong …”
“I didn’t say you did,” said Boots, “but yougotchawatchout for people putting America down.”
“I wasn’t putting it down,” lied Ilka. “I meant some cultures do things one way and some another, which is interesting.”
“That’s right!” Boots held out her glass and said, “Gimme one more whatchucallit. Like some women flash their ankles, and some women flash their smarts.”
Ilka reddened and said, “That’s true! That’s just what I do! That’s clever of you!” She looked at Boots with surprised admiration.
Boots said, “Gotchawatchout for people with their vocabulary walking off with other people’s husbands.”
Ilka blinked, looked and was staring down the two sheer abysses of Boots’s pale eyes that had no bottom, and no surface from which Ilka could have caught the rebound of something as distinct as hatred.
Ilka sat in the car, silent, her throat blocked while the well-bred Dotty Tottenham persevered in worrying about her lawn, which she had left in the care of a friend’s son home for the hols. Ilka was subliminally grateful for the warmth of Herbert’s thigh alongside her own. In her imagination Ilka was explaining herself to Boots: “You’re accusing me of something I accused myself of. You’re using ammunition that I gave you, against me. And what good does it do you to squeeze me into the narrowest idea of me?” Ilka longed for Leslie. Ilka tried to think that Boots had not meant what Boots had meant.
The Ithaca lay asleep in the cradling water. The little foyer, empty except for their drunken, yawning selves, looked seedy. Had the light in here always been so brown? The marbleized linoleum was all worn in front of the purser’s desk and in front of the triangular corner counter.
Boots said, “I’m dead. Aziz, that was a really great, great, great evening. You’re an ab-so-lute love! Listen, what do we owe you?”
The stout friend was gone. Aziz drew up his slender young person, threw his head back and laid his hand upon his heart. “You are my guests, the guests of my country.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Boots. “I don’t know what you make, but I can just about imagine it’s not enough to take eight people out to dinner, and god knows what those cars and hookahs and those roses set you back for. You’d make life a lot easier for everybody if you’d tell us and we’ll divvy it up between us and go to bed. Otherwise we’re going to stand here till we figure it out which is going to be a real pain.”
Aziz kept shaking his head. He covered his eyes with his hand.
Boots said, “I’ve got my pen. Anybody got a piece of paper?” She and Tom Tottenham leaned their heads over the purser’s desk and started counting the dishes in the restaurant on the water plus the ouzo. “Aziz, did we drink two or three bottles of that other thing—what’s it called?”
Aziz put his forehead on the counter with the postcards and the toothpaste and covered his ears.
Herbert had got up to say good-bye. Ilka was glad it was so early she would not be likely to see Boots again, but here was Boots with her morning face, in her robe. Boots embraced Ilka, Ilka embraced Boots. They exchanged addresses. Ilka looked back from the little launch chugging through the sheer white dawn and waved to Boots and Herbert waving from the ship’s railing.
Leslie had said, “Let’s not have confusion. I’ll come and meet you when you get through customs. Sit in the waiting area and I will find you.”
The area was under reconstruction. A temporary screen cut off Ilka’s view of all but the approaching feet. The variety of women’s shoes and ankles was an entertainment, but Ilka learned that she wasn’t sure she would know Leslie’s shoes in a crowd. Did Leslie wear cuffs on his trousers? Ilka could tell those gray ones weren’t Leslie: Leslie would not saunter to meet Ilka. And he was too heavy for the bounce of those flannels; that was a young man. The navy pants were running, and Leslie did not run. That pair of good brown shoes, not new, driving at a steady forward pace toward Ilka—Leslie was coming.
An End
YOM KIPPUR CARD
Und doch welch Glück geliebt zu werden!
Und lieben, Götter, welch ein Glück!
—from Göthe’s “Abschied”
Joe and Jenny Bernstine in Concordance e-mailed Ilka in New York the late-breaking news from the institute: Nat Cohn was reunited—once again—with Nancy. Matsue was back from Japan and sent Ilka his best, at least that’s what Joe had understood Matsue to be sending Ilka. Big government grant to study the practical applications of the Reverse Bug. Jenny wrote that Eliza was on the rampage. “She told Zack Zee he had a mouth like a keyhole with the key stuck on the inside. Joe thinks, with Leslie gone, Eliza is bent on shedding one after another of her friends. She’s starting on Winterneet.”
Eliza Shakespeare phoned Ilka: “Finished off Winnie. I called and told him, ‘I hoisted your boxes into the trunk of my car. I’m driving them to the dump.’ You,” Eliza reminded Ilka, “used to looooove going to the dump with Leslie.”
There was nothing, nothing, not any thing that Ilka had not loved doing with Leslie. She said, “It’s that weird expanse. It has a disgusting grandeur, don’t you think?”
“No,” said Eliza.
“With the gulls circling …”
“Scavengers,” said Eliza.
“I never understood,”—Ilka had found her side in a non-existent argument and pounced—“why we are so down on scavengers being ourselves a dead-meat-eating species. Anyway. So. What did Winnie say?”
“Asked me why I was being a bitch. I said, ‘Because you took yourself off to Berkeley on the day we lost the baby. And because I need to clear the decks before I can get started on Leslie’s manuscript. ’ How is your mother?” she asked Ilka.
Joe wrote: “Jenny thinks Eliza is waiting for me to offer to turn what Leslie was working on into a publishable manuscript. You saw most of it. Is there enough in any final form?” Ilka wrote back: “I shouldn’t think so. The chapters he sent me were the source of a bad argument between us. I hurt him by disagreeing with what he was saying.”
Jenny wrote: “Eliza has Leslie’s papers spread over the whole dining table.”
Ilka phoned Eliza. “How are you coming with Leslie’s manuscript?”
“I’m trying to organize the chapters he wrote back in Oxford but I don’t understand his code for first, second, and later drafts. Some of it looks more like notes he was writing to himself …”
“Would you like me to come down and help?”
“I don’t know what I would like.”
Joe wrote: “Eliza told us you offered to come and help her. We would hire you back on a temporary basis.” Jenny added, “You could stay with us. Bring Maggie. Bethy wishes she had a little sister like Maggie instead of a stupid, obnoxious, stinky, etc., etc., brother like Teddy.”
Joe wrote: “At dinner yesterday, Eliza told Alvin the very rude thing he could do with his perpetual revolution. He just laughed and kissed her hand, but when she asked if Alicia was working on an appropriate cliché, we drove her home.”
Ilka wrote them: “Leslie used to say on her bad days Eliza feels that nothing and nobody is any good.”
Eliza gave Ilka her version of these events: “Zack sits across the table withholding his disapproval while Alvin promises, come the revolution, rust and moth will cease to corrupt. Poor Alvin. He sees the Thinker’s naked concentration furrow Alicia’s forehead and goes into hibernation until she’s finished talking. Then he opens his eyes and rejoins the conversation.” Ilka thought she heard the mistral’s distant, dangerous roar in back of Eliza’s voice. Eliza said, “How is your mother?”
“Fine.”
“How is Maggie?”
“Maggie is fine. Eliza, are you O.K.?”
“Perfectly ‘O.K.,’ as you so eloquently put it. I’m raw as if my skin had been flayed. Bumping into things hurts—bumping into people one hates and there is nobody I
don’t hate.”
“Eliza! You don’t hate the Bernstines.”
“The Bernstines are golden,” said Eliza.
Jenny called. “We worry about her. She starts on her first glass of wine who knows when and sips till she goes to bed if she ever goes to bed. I have to wonder if she eats. Leslie’s papers have crept into the foyer, over the console and the chair. Joe wants to talk.”
Joe took the phone. “I think that she keeps spreading papers to put off the moment she has to start putting them in order which it’s never going to be possible to do. It’s really rather a nightmare. Yesterday, she told Nat and Nancy that they disprove Tolstoy’s idea about unhappy families all being different because they bickered like all the bickering couples one has ever had the misfortune to have to listen to. She’s going to run out of people to demolish.”
Eliza called Ilka to badmouth Joe Bernstine. “He pried us away from Oxford where Leslie could have finished his book. Joe made Leslie come to Concordance to run the institute so Joe could finish his book. He won’t lift a finger to help me put Leslie’s book in shape: ‘The hell with Shakespeare. Raise high the Bernstine.’”
Did Ilka hear an anti-Semitic note? Ilka swallowed. She said, “But, Eliza …”
“I knew you were going to defend the Bernstine. If you are not on my side, don’t talk at all.”
“Of course I am on your side, only Leslie agreed to come back. And Joe had been running the institute for over a decade …”
Eliza had hung up.
Both Bernstines were on the line. “Eliza is not talking to us. I call her,” Jenny said, “she picks up and says she’s asleep and left a notice not to be disturbed. I call later and she says she is out of town. Think of her alone in that house with those papers.”
Joe said, “She called Celie. She’s coming to the institute to get the files from Leslie’s office. She’s going to add the chapters he did in Concordance to aggravate the confusion.”
Eliza rang Ilka. “How long were you and Leslie having this hot and heavy affair?”
There are moments when the world stops turning. Such a moment is empty: nothing exists in it. It has a duration and when the world resumes its revolution the direction and everything afterward has been altered. Since the day of the picnic when Leslie and Ilka had made love, she had tried, once in a while, to prepare for this moment. She had attempted various scenarios but the imagination always balked and turned aside before she could think of the words she would speak to Eliza.
Now Ilka said, “It wasn’t really, you know.”
“Don’t deny it.”
Ilka said, “I don’t.” What Ilka had meant by it wasn’t really was hot and heavy but she understood Eliza to have heard I don’t and it wasn’t as denials of the fact.
“I hold in my hand the letter you wrote to him. It was in a file in his office at the institute. How many letters did you write him?”
“Filed in error. You were never supposed to see it.” Was that strangled sound on the wire a laugh? “You were never supposed to be hurt. That sounds stupid.”
“It does,” Eliza said. “How long did this affair go on?”
This was not the time to complain how utterly and totally the word affair failed to denote Leslie and Ilka’s love. Ilka was operating on the principle which experts tell us to remember when answering a child’s question about a fact we wish it had not chosen this moment, or any other moment to ask us: don’t lie, but don’t elaborate, they advise. What we do is work around the enormous central truth. Ilka said, “Stupid or not, his first care was always for you. It really always was.”
“This letter in my hand is written in a language I did not imagine to exist until a moment ago,” Eliza said and hung up.
Ilka hung up, picked the phone up again, called Jenny and said, “Jenny, please go and look in on Eliza. Please. It may be real real trouble. You don’t know but Leslie and I had a—had an affair.”
After a moment, Jenny said, “Well, we know that.”
“You do? No, you don’t! Leslie and I were excruciatingly careful … How could you know?”
“The way one knows things. And Eliza told us.”
“She didn’t. She couldn’t, Jenny, she didn’t know until a moment ago. She found a letter that got into a file in Leslie’s office. I know she didn’t know—Jenny, it was her suggestion that Leslie and I travel in Greece together. What makes you think she knew?”
“Well, she didn’t know, and yet one night—this is a couple of years back, when she had a lot to drink and was beating up on Leslie, she said ‘You’re betraying me with an outlander.’”
“With an—oh, I see. I see. What did Leslie say?”
“Leslie said, ‘Dear, here is your coat. Say good-bye to Alpha. Say good-bye to Alfred.’ Speaking of Alfred, last week, before Eliza stopped talking to us, we had her to dinner with the Stones and Eliza told Alfred when she saw him coming up the street she put her hands out in front of her so as not to run into his glass wall.”
“The Stones! Do they … does everybody know!”
“Maybe,” said Jenny.
“Jenny, go and see if Eliza is O.K.”
“She’s not going to let me in. But I’ll go right away.”
“Please, Jenny!”
Ilka hung up the phone. The phone rang. Eliza said, “I don’t know how to do this by myself. I can’t do this. Help me.”
“I will help you,” said Ilka. “I know what to do, but I need a couple of days.”
“You need a couple of days.” Something curious always happened to Ilka’s words when Eliza repeated them back to her.
“Meanwhile, Eliza,” said Ilka, “please talk to Jenny! Jenny is on her way over to see you. Let Jenny in.”
Eliza hung up.
“Maggie,” Ilka said to her little girl, “Omama Flora wants you to come and spend the night because I’m going to be busy and grumpy.”
“How come?” Maggie asked.
“Because Eliza is really, really sad and I’m going to look for some things that will make her feel better.”
Maggie’s How come was an all-purpose question that didn’t mean What is the cause so much as Tell me about things.
Ilka said “There are some things in some letters that I’m going to look for.”
“How come?” Maggie asked.
“You and I are going to Concordance and stay with Jenny and Joe and you can play with Bethy and Teddy.”
Ilka had meant—had been wanting—to reread and chronologically order the seven years’ worth of letters—his and from a point in time, hers as well. The first plan had been for Ilka to write Leslie at the institute, for him to read her letters, to reply, and destroy them. This, he wrote, he found himself unable to do. Plan B was to read, reply, and return her letters to her. “Let us not destroy,” he had written.
The first was a single sheet he had put in her hand on the stair: “And to be friends already, to like each other and know each other well so that loving becomes only another conversation!” The postscript read: “Let’s not talk on the telephone except to make arrangements. I for one cannot feel electronically.” Then the early notes disguised as office memos.
The letters they had exchanged during the first winter holidays. “Would it be awkward for you if I leveled with my mother? My only hesitation would be her too great interest. Maggie, of course, must not ever be bothered.” From the office Leslie wrote: “Tell your mother. Your mother will be shocked and happy for us. I love your mother even if she is bossy and shouts commands from one end of the apartment to the other.” Ilka wrote, “You think my mother is bossy?” “Like you, darling.” Ilka wrote: “Bossy! Me? Really?” She had liked Leslie, who liked her so much, to tell her things about herself. “Poor Jimmy used to say being married to me was like wearing a perpetually new pair of shoes.”
Eliza had written her from home: “Nat has left Nancy and moved in with one of this year’s interns, which is not very original of him.” Leslie had added, “Nat is a mor
al lightweight.” Ilka replied, “Yes, well, that’s what human people do. And he’s a good poet.” They were embarked on one of their lively three-way quarrels with Leslie and Eliza, as so often, on the same side of the argument. Leslie: “As good a poet as a moral lightweight can be.” “Leslie means moral sleazeball,” amended Eliza. Leslie’s postscript said: “I’ve sent you, under separate cover, my latest chapter. I’ll be glad of your thoughts. Give your mother and Maggie our love.” “Love!” There was the word! They had been used to signing off with an easy “Love, Ilka,” “Love, Leslie,” which, now, at first, both withheld, shy of what it had come so tremendously to signify.
Leslie and Eliza had sent their Christmas card to New York. Ilka waited to respond with what she thought of as her Yom Kippur card, using the Jewish year’s end to round up her friends and marvel at all the people she knew in America.
Now Ilka built a tower of books on the floor to clear a surface on which to spread the letters they had written to each other after the week Leslie, Eliza, Ilka, her mother and little Maggie had spent in the Verquières house, and the mistral had settled in for days on end, and Eliza‘s terrible collapse. Leslie had taken Eliza back to the States. “Because I wanted to spend as much time as possible as close to you as possible, I did not support Eliza,” he wrote. Ilka wrote, “Do we have a plan for de-escalation, withdrawal? Shall we pull out our troops? Stop now?” “What! De-escalate? Stop! Who us?” he had written. “So now we know our limits and will stay within them. We will do this right.”
Leslie had not discouraged Ilka when she was offered a fine job in New York. “And it will give you greater liberty to meet someone who can give you the life I can’t,” he wrote her. “When that happens tell me and I will know how to take myself out of your way.” “Preserve me!” Ilka had retorted.
Both Leslie and Ilka had jobs that required travel. They had made their arrangements. Ilka wrote: “The spirit moves me to write and tell you that I love you and that you can take the limousine to the Sheraton at A street and X Avenue. (USS is cheaper and they have shuttle service but not on Sunday mornings.) The room is reserved in your name. If you do the wine I’ll bring the fruit, the cheese and the bread.” “Now there is an actual date,” he wrote, “you begin to be solid again.” Ilka wrote: “Until we are in the same room, this undifferentiated longing fixes on some one memory like the last time, at my place, when you stood up from where you were sitting and came and sat in the chair close to me.” Concordance was in the habit of renting Ilka’s spare room when institute people came to New York on institute business. When in town Leslie was known to be staying there.