by Alan Isler
What he had as a child absorbed as unembroidered facts – the Kraven salon, for example, the pride of Vienna, where gathered painters and poets, musicians and journalists, bright eager young girls and their dashing escorts – were, after all, the reminiscences of exiles, refugees, lost and, but for one another, alone in an alien city. So they had clung together, deriving strength from shared memories of earlier happiness, memories from which anything less than the marvellous had been carefully filtered. In retrospect, the adult Kraven saw them, alas, as rather banal, mere sentimentalists, aspiring to what they were pleased to call Kultur rather than possessing it. (Cousin Marko, a natural Pavlovian, had once put on the turntable a record of Tauber singing ‘Wien, Wien, nur du allein’ simply to prove how quickly the tears would form in his mother’s eyes. ‘Told you so, Nicko, under thirty seconds!’) True, the Kravens had possessed a certain panache, a certain style, that distinguished them from the self-effacing English Jews among whom they found themselves. But as for the famous ‘salon’ of Viennese days, Kraven now rather doubted that it had achieved a level of intellectual attainment beyond that of the dreary cocktail parties he himself occasionally attended in New York.
The Kraven refugees had descended upon Felix’s London home in 1938 and transformed it, not merely in tone, but in furnishings, for they had brought their best pieces with them. The language of social intercourse became German. The cuisine was altered to accommodate Opa’s likes and dislikes. Felix was delighted, his wife less so. It was something to be a Kraven, a member of a moated enclave into which little Nicko had entrée by right of birth; poor Mummy, however, was, quite simply, not one of them. The Kravens stood against the world, a tight core of defence against hostile forces. And how could Nicko’s mother contend with that? She became after their arrival in England an alien intruder in her own home.
* * *
KRAVEN MUST HAVE FALLEN asleep. A rap at the office door brought him to his feet so suddenly that he knocked over a column of books on the floor. Groggily, he kicked his way through them. But, the door now open, what he saw before him shook him fully awake. For there, a frown of engaging perplexity upon her angelic face, stood a young woman of supernal beauty. Lissom she was and lithe. Her blonde hair – her tresses rather – tumbled to her shoulders. Her flawless skin was lightly tanned, her dark eyes huge, her lips a delightful moue. She was clad in well-bleached jeans that lovingly clung to her. A bumble-bee danced merrily on her upper thigh towards a rose, a brilliant red, emerging from her crotch. She wore a sleeveless white blouse that moulded itself to her small bosom, from which, after the happy fashion of the day, her nipples asserted themselves. In her hand she clutched a sheaf of papers. Kraven was enchanted.
‘You an English prof, and like that?’
‘Indeed I am.’
‘So I guess you know all about po-tree, right?’
‘Try me, my dear, just try me. Ask me anything from Homer and Virgil to Eliot and Molesworth. Test me on pastoral, Petrarch, ploce, or prosody. If it’s poetry you’re after, Kraven’s the name.’
‘O wow!’ she said. ‘Gee, you really talk funny, like weird, y’know?’
Strange, thought Kraven. The linguistic stigmata of her generation, against which he so frequently fulminated, tripped with endearing sweetness from her lips, less blemishes than beauty marks.
‘I guess you’ll do. See, what I need is help. Like advice and that.’
Kraven ushered her into his office and closed the door. Swiftly he gathered a pile of papers from his desk and dumped them on the conferee’s chair. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ he said. She sat on the chaise longue and on the instant transformed it into a throne of state. Kraven turned his own chair towards her and sat down too. The rose, he saw, was short stemmed. It was a briar rose, ferociously thorned.
‘Only speak,’ he said. ‘How may I help you?’
‘I’m in Phys. Ed.’ She blushed in her embarrassment. ‘But like I write po-tree, I mean like my own.’ She abased her eyes. ‘So how do I know, y’know, if it’s for real? Like, am I wasting my time?’ She held the sheaf of papers towards him. ‘I figured maybe you’d take a look, tell me what you think. Y’know, like that.’
Kraven had established a firm policy never to read student writing outside the requirements of his courses and his regrettable duties on the Prizes Panel. From this policy he had never wavered since that unfortunate occasion early in his career when he had condemned and derided the work of a student who, within two years of graduation, had won a National Book Award.
‘I would be delighted, Miss … er, Miss?’
‘Berkowitz. Nimuë Berkowitz.’ She shook her head and scattered day. ‘Gee, thanks!’
‘Well, Nimuë, why don’t you select what you consider to be the very best of them and give me that to read.’
She went carefully through the papers on her lap, biting her superb lower lip as she bent to the task, selecting, rejecting, rejecting, selecting. Kraven watched her. As the poets of his own era of special competence might have said, he sat ‘astonied’. At last, apprehensively, she handed him a sheet of paper. And there in firm round hand appeared the following:
‘Relationships’
by
Nimuë Berkowitz
As you walk along life’s highway
You may often shed a tear,
But remember while you’re walking,
I’m walking with you, dear.
As the road unfolds before you
And your feet begin to ache,
I’ll be there to bathe them for you
In the waters of a lake.
Up the hills and down the valleys,
By the ocean’s burning tide,
Just give a glance to windward
And you’ll find me at your side
Whither thou goest, there I will go,
Hither and thither, yonder and fro.
‘Nimuë,’ said Kraven fervently, ‘you are a poetess!’
‘O wow!’
‘Of course, there is work to be done, some polishing, some slight modifications here and there. Milton called even Shakespeare “a wild, untutored talent”. But of your great gift there can be no doubt.’
‘O wow!’
‘Perhaps I should be rather more specific in my evaluation and criticism?’
‘O yes!’
Kraven moved from his chair and sat beside her on the couch, his leg inadvertently making firm contact with her own as he held the poem between them.
‘First, I would point to the splendid consistency of the central metaphor, life as a journey. Here you write in the grand European tradition, boldly elaborating an image that Dante himself, seven centuries before you, did not scorn to use.’
She squirmed with delight.
‘Then, too, I was particularly struck by the sly introduction of the four elements, the old Ptolemaic cosmology being particularly apt here: the hills and the valleys, the wind, the burning tide – a particularly fine conflation of two elements in one, fire and water, poetic economy of an oxymoronic kind – and finally the ocean and the tears. Now, what does all this mean to the sensitive reader? Well, first, you succeed brilliantly in suggesting at once the timelessness and the universality of the experience; second, you draw together all Creation into a single harmonious whole, a unified poetic vision. But I scarcely need tell you this.’
‘Wow!’
‘The metre is cunningly chosen. It is spritely and optimistic, confident and amiable. More particularly, the rhythms are strong and insistent, quite regular through three stanzas, but pointedly altered in the concluding couplet, where the unexpected change focuses attention on the Biblical allusion.’
‘Biblical illusion?’
‘Whither thou goest, there I will go.’
‘I got that off of a perfume bottle; it’s called Moon of Galilee, and then it says “Whither thou goest,” and that. Here, smell.’
The delightful creature thrust an exquisite wrist beneath Kraven’s nostrils. He caught her
hand in his and inhaled. All the perfumes of the fertile crescent mingled with a whiff of the gym. He retained her hand.
‘New Testament or Old?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The Biblical illusion.’ She frowned. ‘My dad, he’s liberal and like that. I mean, he don’t interfere much. Live and let live is what he says. But like he’s kinda funny about some things. He don’t know about Gabe, y’know, my guy. I mean, he’d like lock me in my room. So the Bible, well hey, I mean, he’d blow his stack.’
‘The Old Testament, Nimuë. It’s from Ruth.’
‘Great!’
Kraven absentmindedly caressed her hand. ‘Above all, I’m attracted to your poem’s sentiment. It is at once sincere and emotionally charged, frankly passionate and unobtrusively calm.’
‘No shit?’
‘It is clear to me that you yourself have suffered, that you know what it is to be alone, to be misunderstood.’
‘Right on.’
‘And of course, as your poem reveals, you know the value to the naked human spirit of companionship, of the presence of one, just one, sympathetic soul vibrating to the needs of another. Agape, Nimuë, agape and caritas, transformed in an instant of unselfish giving, apotheosized, so to speak, into eros.’
‘All right!’
‘There is, as I’ve already hinted, some work still to be done with “Relationships”. And no doubt your other efforts, however excellent, are in minor ways a trifle flawed. But if we were to work on them together…’
‘Y’mean you would?’
‘Not for the ordinary student, of course. I’ve other commitments, other obligations. But for a genuine poetess…’
‘Gee, hey.’
‘Alas, I cannot hold a poetry tutorial during my regular conference hours. But let’s see … Are you free at eleven on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays?’
‘No, o jeez, that’s when I gotta go to Indian Clubs, it’s in my major.’ She pouted. ‘O fuck!’
‘Never mind, we’ll work something out. You have a telephone? Leave me your number, scribble it on the poem. Fine. Rest assured I’ll be in touch.’
Kraven helped her to her feet and saw her to the door.
‘A bientôt.’
‘O wow!’
He watched her progress down the corridor. He noted the deliciously undulating buttocks. What was that? On the jeans’ right cheek a curving dayglo arrow pointed outwards, above it the legend ‘NO’; on the left another curving arrow, ‘YES’.
Wow!
* * *
KRAVEN STOOD AT HIS OPEN OFFICE DOOR vainly sniffing the last traces of Moon of Galilee when the phone on the desk began to ring. He stepped back into his cell and shut the door.
‘Kraven here.’
‘Hello, lover.’ The voice was seductive, throaty, entrancing.
‘I was just about to leave.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Of course.’
‘My place?’
‘I’d prefer mine, if you don’t mind.’
‘About nine?’
‘About nine. Er, Stella, there’s not too much in the refrigerator, actually. Of course, I could get in some…’
‘Sure, for a change. I’ll make some lasagna and bring it down.’
‘And a salad? I’ll pick up the wine you like, the Cetonese.’
‘Some Italian bread too. Oysters to start?’ She laughed lewdly.
Kraven shuddered. How he hated those slimy horrors she so frequently fed him.
‘What’s with you, Nicko? Not up to it? You’ve been taking your vitamins, eating your eggs, and so forth?’
‘For pity’s sake, Stella.’
‘Well then?’
‘It’s nothing, a run-in with a bastard student.’
‘Because you’ll need a bottleful of vitamins tonight. I picked up some perfectly smashing panties on East Sixtieth this morning, Knickers Unlimited, Ltd. Remember? I showed you, west of Second?’
She loved to model her panties for him. She would parade up and down before his astonished gaze, wearing nothing but the briefest briefs, undulating her hips, her full firm breasts moving to a dark inaudible music. Her body was splendid, and she was proud of it. Now in her mid-forties, winter’s ragged hand had not defaced in Stella her loveliness. Time’s trenches, tiny cross-hatchings on her face, scarcely visible at the slightest distance, merely augmented her beauty. Her dark hair, cut short, was shot through with grey, in Stella a visual pleasure, a sexual stimulant. Often, she no sooner entered his apartment than she lifted her skirt to show him her latest acquisition. He stirred at the memory.
‘You don’t sound any too keen.’
‘It will cost you a groaning to take off my edge. Let’s make it eight-thirty.’
‘No, nine.’ But clearly she was pleased. ‘You know what you British say, Nicholas. Keep your pecker up.’
Kraven’s affair with Stella was entering its second year. She lived with her husband, Robert, in a large elegantly appointed apartment two floors above him. Robert Poore-Moody, an American with an English-sounding name, was a man whose occupation, so far as Kraven could tell, was chairing boards. Kraven had encountered him a few times in the lobby or in the elevator. They now exchanged nods, New York custom happily not requiring verbal greeting. Kraven in fact, and Poore-Moody no doubt too, regretted the first of these exchanges, for it had immediately enforced a pattern from which it now seemed impossible to depart.
Poore-Moody was a stocky pouter-pigeon of a man in his mid-sixties, a dead ringer for the late Mussolini. Who would have suspected that those thick short fingers, heavily matted with hair, were capable of the most exquisite petit-point? And yet such was the case. Kraven had seen examples of his work in the Poore-Moody apartment. And Stella had told him, on one of the rare occasions when she spoke to him of her husband, that Poore-Moody had for years engaged in warm correspondence with an English duke living in Paris, himself an accomplished amateur.
But on Thursday nights, with a regularity broken only by a necessary business trip, an occasional illness, and of course holidays, Poore-Moody drove his Bentley out to Brewster for a poker game with ‘the boys’. Kraven could much more easily imagine him playing poker than plying a needle. His low brow fairly cried out for the extension a green eyeshade would grant. At any rate, from about eight on a Thursday evening until four or five on a Friday morning, Poore-Moody was gone. The vacuum his absence caused, abhorrent to nature, was filled by Kraven.
And this vulgar little man had been happily married to the marvellous Stella for more than twenty years. What could she possibly have seen (still see) in him? Not money, for Stella herself was moneyed, a daughter of the Boston Devereux. If not money. Then what? Sex? Of that possibility Kraven preferred not to think. Besides, it was clear to him that she also felt a warm affection for her husband – and a ferocious loyalty that forbade Kraven to talk to her of him and forbade her (except infrequently and then only appreciatively) to speak to Kraven of her husband.
Nor was this abiding love for her husband, especially in view of her passionate adultery, the most puzzling of Stella’s oddities. Her breeding, education, and social ambience, after all, were quintessentially WASPian. She was a product of the best eastern schools, with a BA from Bryn Mawr and an MA from Harvard. Her Harvard thesis, in fact, had won a University Prize and was subsequently published as The Perils of Parzifal: Proto-Cinematic Aspects of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Serial Romance. Moreover, she engaged in Good Works, sought the Elevation of the Downtrodden, attended Charitable Evenings; in short, she expressed the Cultured Liberalism and Social Conscience of those who dieted from choice. Sometimes, when Kraven lay palpitating on the Poore-Moody couch, he heard Stella speak on the telephone to her social peers. There was no mistaking the cultured tones, the assurance of place, the sense of belonging, the familiar allusions to people with such absurd names as Muffin and Bunny, Lolly and Wills.
And yet with Kraven this American blue-blood, this offspring of the nation’s
historical élite, became a drab, a scullion, a daughter of the game. Sex became her raison d’être, food an important preliminary to fornication, vulgarity her mode. Proud of her cuisine, she refused to employ a cook. Kraven had seen on the weekly menu-charts pinned to her kitchen bulletin board the gustatory promise of boeuf Wellington, truite amandine, pigeonneau à la crapaudine. For him, however, she prepared liver and onions, corned beef and cabbage, or (as, for example, tonight) lasagna.
Why she should have elected to play this role with him he was unable to say. She had drawn him into a kind of Lawrentian triad, a grotesque parody, in which Lady Chatterley was actually married to the brutish Mellors and sought her sexual-spiritual salvation in an adulterous liaison with … whom? Well, no, the role of sexual impotent was demonstrably not for a Kraven. The hypothesis would not hold. Once he had asked Stella outright why with him alone she opted for vulgarity. Did she not see that there was something psychosexually sick about it, something kinky? What drove her to transform the glory of their lovemaking into base coupling, the beast with the two backs, something squalid and lewd? But he had succeeded only in precipitating inexplicable laughter in her, wave upon wave, until at last, reaching for him, she had managed to blurt out, ‘Come again?’ More laughter, and then, coaxingly: ‘Come again, why don’t you?’ He had, of course, dropped the matter. Still, he sometimes caught her looking at him oddly, as if he were the curiosity, not she. And once she had pinched him cruelly beneath the heart and slashed his ribs with her nails until she drew blood, merely to discover, she had explained, if he could feel with anything other than his prick. Perhaps she was mad.
Kraven poked about among the papers and books on his desk. Was there anything he needed to take home with him? Ah yes, here was the poem he had himself composed en route to the college that morning and jotted down immediately upon arrival, the newest item for Tickety-Boo, his bulging private file of light verse. Tickety-Boo had grown apace of late, had grown, in fact, in direct proportion as the number of his academic writings had declined. Now he wrote only poetry, or at any rate light verse, and in any case for his own eyes only. He glanced through this morning’s effort.