“I could use an aspirin, if you have any.”
“If we have any . . .” Roland smirked in Lee’s direction. “You’re looking at the queen of contacts. Lee even had aspirins in her kit when she was at the eastern front, didn’t you? What can we get you? A duchy in Romania? An ancient papyrus? An audience with the queen, to go with the aspirin?”
She blew him a kiss, but made a face behind his back when he returned his attention to the stove and the eggs.
And then, they did what most married couples do, began talking about things I knew nothing about, part dismissive, part show-off, presenting their lives to this almost-stranger in the kitchen. I sipped my coffee, ate the eggs Roland put in front of me even though I wasn’t hungry, and pretended I wasn’t there.
From somewhere high upstairs, I heard a child’s scream, a shout, a thud. Anthony was throwing things. When she was two, Dahlia threw everything she could get her hands on, anything she was strong enough to lift. She broke cups and plates and powder compacts and perfume bottles, laughing joyfully all the while.
“Bet you look forward to the sun,” Roland was saying to Lee. “The warmth. Looks like it’s going to rain again this afternoon.”
“Mostly the fruit,” Lee said. “Sicilian oranges. Can’t wait. Did I tell you, Nora, I’m doing a photo shoot in Sicily next week? ‘Traveling at Ease,’ they’re calling it. I’ll have to learn how to say ‘Don’t look at the camera’ in Italian. I can already say it in French, German, Arabic, and Romanian.”
“There’ll be the usual pretty young models in two-piece bathing suits and shorts, soaking up the sun,” Roland added. There was an edge to his voice that made me put my cup down and look at Lee.
“He’s always on the lookout for a new mistress,” Lee said. “Be careful he doesn’t ask you to apply for the position, Nora. He’s greedier for women than Man was.” Roland, still at the stove frying more eggs for himself, having fed Lee and myself, said nothing.
I went back outdoors, slamming the screen door behind me. Lee’s comment about Roland’s infidelity had broken open old scars, had reminded me of all the broken promises between Jamie and myself. But it was too late to catch the ferry. I’d have to stay another day.
Farley Farm had a library, as did all good English country houses, and even a few books that hadn’t been burned as fuel, as well as some newer novels Lee had purchased in London and brought with her. I found a well-thumbed copy of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and walked out onto the flat Sussex landscape for a quiet day of reading, apart from the others. I took some rolls and butter and a half-empty bottle of cognac.
It was a fifteen-minute walk over the downs to get far enough from the house to achieve privacy, to find a place in the rolling green hills where I could neither see the farm nor be seen by the others. The vast openness of the landscape was another kind of loss and sorrow.
When you have lost someone, horizons change. You look, and force yourself to see her, top of the head, face, shoulders, torso, legs, appearing incrementally over the rise. But she never does.
Finally, I crested one hill and discovered a large boulder, too big to have been removed through those centuries of taming the very ground, and crouched against it, my sweater bundled up as a pillow, my face turned to the sun, now playing hide-and-seek in accumulating clouds.
Chirps sounded in the turf around me and protective mother birds, angered by my intrusion, hopped and stared me down with their round yellow eyes. A new season of the living yelled at me to go away. I sat perfectly still, and soon the morning returned to silence.
I opened Rebecca and read that glorious first sentence: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” But soon my thoughts wandered as aimlessly as the turf-grazing sheep. Lee and Roland. Little Anthony. Jamie. Pablo. Where was Man Ray? Lee hadn’t mentioned him yet. Wise not to mention a lover in front of a husband, of course, but every time I saw Lee, I expected to see Man behind her. That was how it had been in Paris, Lee and Man, inseparable. Until she met Aziz.
The last thought before sleep claimed me: Dahlia, sixteen years old, just beginning that breathtaking change from child to woman, beautiful beyond words, the perfect blend of her mother and father. I tried to breathe shallowly to avoid the pain of her loss, but there was no avoiding it. The grief twisted inside me like a caged beast.
When I slept, I dreamed of damp cells and the double lightning-strike insignia of the SS flashing over the southern French hills—and the fields of lavender, the olive orchards.
• • •
Pablo found me several hours later, asleep on the turf with the sheep grazing around me, the emptied bottle still in my hand, the novel spread open to the first page. When I awoke, he was sitting next to me, a sketchbook on his lap, charcoal in hand.
“God, what boring animals sheep are. You don’t mind,” he said, a statement, not a question. “I drew you when you were sleeping.”
“I probably owed you that much for having said no, in Paris,” I said, sitting up. “I didn’t think you would remember that.” The afternoon had changed during my sleep; the air was heavy with the rain to come and the sun was completely hidden, no more hide-and-seek.
“You made such a contrast with Lee,” he said. “It would have been an interesting exercise, a newer version of Les deux amies.” In that painting, one of the figures had been of Madeleine, an early lover. Did that mean Lee had been one of his lovers?
Pablo gave me the notepad so I could see the sketch. He had drawn me as an odalisque, arms over my head in a circle, legs twisted to one side, eyes shut but with a suggestion of movement behind them. A dreaming odalisque.
“You have given me longer legs. Thank you.”
“I gave you the legs you should have been born with.” He smelled pleasantly of pipe smoke. “Or perhaps not. Not all women should be tall, like our Lee.”
Our Lee. Of course they, too, had been lovers.
Pablo looked out over the gentle green hills, green as far as the eye could see with stone fences and white sheep, recently shorn so they appeared vulnerable and oddly shaped, all that tight white wool cut close to the skin.
Pablo had aged. We all had. But perhaps he had aged best, no belly paunch, no shaking hands, no visible scars or loss of limb; only two long furrows making commas from his nose to his jaw suggested his age. He had gone bald on top, and to compensate had cut the rest of his white hair quite short, so that his head looked like a handsome, perfectly shaped egg. Gone was the famous forelock. I remembered how he had tugged it at, repeatedly, that evening I first met him and his wife, Olga.
He signed the drawing, tore it from his pad, and gave it to me. “Keep it,” he said. “Don’t sell it.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“No. I mean if you need money, don’t sell it to anyone but me. I will buy it back from you.” That was how Pablo made gifts. He would give a drawing and then buy it back for a very good price. He was generous, and clever. That tactic helped keep his prices high, under his control. Pablo was very, very rich by then. He bought houses with two or three paintings.
“Thanks.” I slipped it between the pages of the novel. A few years before, I would have jumped at my good fortune. But now that the war was over and Dahlia had disappeared, my only need, to find her, was not redeemable by mere wealth.
“So you survived,” he said.
“Yes. When it got too dangerous, I went to Switzerland.”
“I sent Olga and my son to Switzerland.”
“But you stayed.”
“Of course.”
Pablo and his Paris studio, I had learned after the war, had become symbols of the resistance. He tilted his head up to the sun, then squinted down at me. “During the war all I could think about was food. I painted it over and over, fish, bowls of fruit, pigeons. Have you ever tried to eat a pigeon? The meat is black as a crow’s.”
“Man told
me Hemingway used to eat crows, when he didn’t have money for a meal.”
“Man said a lot of things, not all of it true or important. Do you still live in Grasse?”
So he did remember.
“Yes. I went home, back to Poughkeepsie, once. But I went back to Grasse, and after the Germans invaded . . .” After 1940, no one traveled except to flee or escape.
“You stayed in the south. Safer there.” He nodded. “The Germans used to come to my studio in Paris, you know, looking for Jews, asking me if I was Jewish. They liked culture. That was how they described it. Kultur. And I would give them postcard reproductions of Guernica, and they would thank me. Idiots.”
I thought of his painting Guernica, full of screaming women’s heads, dying horses, body parts. In the upper left there was an oval like an eye, but the eye’s pupil has been replaced by a lightbulb, like those used to torture prisoners, to nearly blind them and sleep-deprive them. I had thought of that painting often while in jail in Lyon.
“Hard years. But I got some good work done. I, too, survived.” Pablo leaned back and studied the sky, tilting his head so that his Adam’s apple jutted out, sharp and dangerous looking.
“Where is Man?” I asked. “I didn’t think I should mention him in front of Roland.”
“If money is the root of all evil, then jealousy is the root of all emotion. Where would art be without it? But in this marriage, the shoe is on the other foot. Lee is jealous of Roland. He insists on certain rights, including the right to roam and keep a mistress.” Pablo puffed on his pipe and made a face at the sheep grazing steadily closer, oblivious to us.
Pablo would know something about that, the keeping of mistresses.
“Man,” he said, speaking without mirth, “is in California, with rich people and moviemakers. The women are very pretty, but I think he doesn’t like it there. He is famous here, in England and France, not in California. But he had the sense to leave Paris before the deportations began, the trains to the camps.”
“Good thing,” I said. Man, with his Semitic features, his outspokenness, would have been spotted instantly, and we knew what had happened to those Jews who had stayed. They had been rounded up into a sports stadium, the Vel d’Hiver, and from there taken to the camps.
“Madame Hughes?” he asked.
This was a ritual we all went through after the war, checking lists, finding out who had survived, what had happened to whom.
“Quietly, in her sleep. A year after she lost her son, Nicky.” That pain again, always coming when I thought I was dead to emotion. Nicky in the sunny Nice morning, pulling my toes to wake me up.
“She must have been quite old. Is it good to see Lee again?” Pablo asked. “You were close friends, weren’t you?”
“When you are twenty and in Paris for the first time, I think there is no such thing as a close friend. I was all eyes and ears, all sensation, so busy taking everything in, there was little to give out.”
There had been so much to experience, so much that gave enchantment to a life transformed, the steep narrow cobbled streets that Jamie and I slid down on icy winter days, the ornate Bishops’ Fountain of St. Sulpice where we held hands and talked about the future, the bookstalls near Notre-Dame where we bought French schoolbooks to improve our grammar.
Pablo laughed. “That was how I was, my first years in Paris, that young boy from Andalusia. Paris was where everything happened, everything was new. Home was boring. Nothing changed. Paris was the magnet, the center. Was it like that for you?”
“At my home, things did change, but for the worse.”
“A death,” he guessed. “Children are more moved by death than adults, even when they don’t show it. A sibling? Mother or father? Maybe the first love.”
“My father.”
He took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and a packet of papers, and rolled a cigarette.
“I think it will rain,” he said, striking a match. I inhaled, noting the smell of ozone in the air, the sulfur of his match.
He leaned back on his elbow and stared up again at the glooming sky where the blue-tinged clouds bumped into one another. We seemed to have run out of conversation.
“How are Olga, Paulo, and Marie-Thérèse?” I asked.
He exhaled smoke through his nostrils and didn’t reply for a long enough time that I knew I had made an error. He finally answered in a neutral voice. “They are well, I assume. I haven’t seen Olga and Paulo in a while. I have a daughter now, Maya, with Marie-Thérèse. But tell me, how does Lee seem to you?” Pablo turned those piercing black eyes on me.
“Happy,” I said. “Because of the child. Because of Roland.” That was the polite answer, of course. One day with Lee and Roland and I could see the chinks in the wall of their marriage.
“Roland thinks she is fragile. Emotional. She saw terrible things in the war and afterwards.” Pablo puffed a perfect smoke ring.
“The camps.”
“And the battles. She went where women hadn’t gone before, and I think she will pay the price for a long time.”
I thought of her hand in the tearoom, tapping, incessantly tapping on the table. She was drinking even more than I remembered.
“She took too many chances, went too far,” Pablo said. “Her nerves are ruined. She destroyed herself, not for her art, but to prove something. I don’t know what.”
In my mind’s eye I saw Lee, the little girl, climbing to the top of the tree. After the rape, she had climbed even higher. The rape. I thought of Dahlia and Bonner, and had to put my head into my hands so that Pablo would not see my face. The whispering wind quickened and the whole field became alive with an invisible destroying hand.
“The world has changed, you see it,” Pablo said. “We change with it. When we move from a state in which we believe, know, we could die at any minute, to a new state where we see long, sometimes boring years ahead of us, that changes us dramatically. Matadors don’t live long after they retire from the ring. The ennui kills them. I wonder if Lee will become bored with motherhood.”
Pablo did not ask about my child. Had he forgotten I left Paris pregnant?
The first drops of rain began to fall. Pablo rose to his feet with a stiff, pained movement. Sciatica, I thought. Omar had a touch of it as well. Pablo tucked his sketchbook into his shirt, offered me his hand, and we ran over the fields, back to Farley Farm.
When I went into my room to dry my hair, Lee was there, sitting on the bed and holding the new green dress in her hands.
“It’s gorgeous,” she said. “Will you wear it tonight? We’ll have a dress-up affair.”
I took it from her and put it back on its hanger. “It was silly of me to bring it.”
“Not at all. I still love a chance to dress up. Combat boots and a fatigue jacket do get old. I’ll do your hair for you. Just like old times.”
Had she done my hair in the old times? Not that I could remember. The notion had a sisterly ring to it and such familiar intimacy had never existed between us. Memories were often faulty. Did Lee remember events that had never happened, or was I disremembering something that had?
God, I was so tired, so full of questions for which there were no answers. “I have a—,” I started to say. I was going to tell her about Dahlia.
Before I could finish the sentence, lightning streaked the sky. Thunder boomed and rattled the windowpanes.
Lee turned pale. We were an entire generation that would jump at loud noises for many years after the war.
“I’d better go check the windows,” Lee said, jumping up. “I used to love thunderstorms, back in Poughkeepsie. Dad and I would watch them on the back porch, huddled under an old blanket. One year a gardener planted a vine on the porch, and Dad had to tear it down so we could see the sky. I’ll tell Roland dinner will be formal, and see if I can scare up a tablecloth.”
• • •
The rest of the day passed slowly with a constant murmuring of low voices, the occasional burst of music when someone thought to put a disc on the phonograph. We moved from room to room, window to window, glowering back at the glowering sky, carrying candles with us because the day turned dark long before sunset came.
Farley Farm felt haunted to me. So many presences of people who weren’t really there: Jamie, Man, my father, whom I hadn’t thought about so much for years. Being with Lee again, remembering her father, put me in mind of my own, how he smelled of peat moss and soap, the grime under his nails, his puzzled smile, as if life was something incomprehensible to him.
He would take discarded houseplants—geraniums, Christmas poinsettia, African violets—from the Miller trash and bring them back to life in our house, so that my mother complained of living in a jungle. He had been so pleased with the trumpet vine he planted in front of Mr. Miller’s back porch that when he found it torn up, he brought a piece of root back home for our own small porch. Every summer after that, we had to duck through a fountain of orange flowers to get in the house.
Chicken again for dinner, but that night Lee cooked and instead of Roland’s simple roast she served a casserole of chicken and potatoes in a red wine sauce, with a side dish of pureed spinach and pickled onions.
“I’ve taken up cooking,” Lee announced, putting the platter on the table with a grand flourish. “This is the new me, the domestic little housewife.” She gloated a bit as she served us, giving that satisfied smile, that slight tilt of the head to the side.
Roland blew her a kiss from his end of the table and pulled out my chair for me, formal as if we were at the Ritz, though water dripped into a pan in a corner of the room from a ceiling leak. Rain beat against the windows.
We all sat around the rickety table, dressed to the nines. I wasn’t the only one who had tucked evening clothes into her valise. Lee wore a colorful silk caftan, very exotic looking and lovely. She had been photographed in it when she was pregnant with baby Anthony, she announced, and had gotten used to the comfort of a loose dress.
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