She drew him back, curled herself under his arm. “Don’t go away like that. It’s horrible. I’m not your mother, you know.”
“I’m sorry. It’s not that at all.” He held her closer, though it took effort. His muscles felt like stone. “But don’t you feel nice, Jess? Didn’t you like it?” He made himself smile at her.
“That’s hardly the issue, is it?”
“Look, it’s been almost six years. You don’t just drop someone after all that time, so long, ta-ta, cheerio, ho ho. She depends on me.”
Jess pulled away and sat up. “Then why do you come here?”
“I come because I love you.”
“No!”
“All right, no. Have it your way. I don’t love you.”
“No, no, you do love me.”
“All right, so I love you.”
“You know, Martin, I was a decent person before I got started with you. I was in good standing with myself. Go away, will you? I’ll manage fine. Let’s part friends.”
“Ah, don’t be cross, love. Come here. That’s right. Tell me a fantasy and we’ll do it.”
“God, you’re impossible! I don’t want a fantasy. I like reality—have you heard of it?”
“Come on.” He pulled her still closer, stroking in a teasing way. Despite his great weariness he had to be generous and selfless, yet again. Sacrifices were in order, to placate the gods. There was even a certain pleasure in renouncing the self, offering it as sacrifice. This is my body. Eat.
“Okay, baby, think of something—the most exciting, the most lewd, the most lascivious, the most erotic, the most outrageous, the most voluptuous, the most epicurean—”
“Oh, stop already, you nut!”
He had triumphed; she was laughing.
II
At twenty-five, Martin, in his romantic soul, viewed his continental trip as one of initiation, rather like the long, leisurely kind undertaken by sons of propertied British families in the nineteenth century, only Martin did not come from a great family and had to support himself with odd jobs. So much the better: he was nothing if not enterprising, and anyway, property was theft. In Paris, when he was not hauling crates of fruit or repairing the engines of Citroëns, he divided his time among museums, painting, and women. Older women, for the most part. Girls were not as readily accessible to a foreigner. Older women whose husbands were preoccupied and lukewarm with middle age, women to whom a young and boundlessly energetic American artist was a morsel of exotica.
That ended, though, when he found Alice. She was a shy girl from a strict, well-to-do family in Toronto, working for the overseas Herald Tribune and trying to perfect her French. She had little experience of men. As they sat in the Bois de Boulogne eating bread and cheese and olives and drinking wine, Martin wooed her with sweeping speeches. He disdained the surrealists, he thrilled to the Fauves and Matisse. Yes to Soutine and all feckless exiles. No to the sterilities of glass and steel, yes to the fecundities of Gaudí. His other passion was history, and his judgments ranged wide (he had read everything), though lingering as if nostalgic on the streak of revolutionary fervor of 1848. He called himself an anarchist. “A lawless man?” Alice laughed in delight. “Not at all! An Old Testament prophet, who bows to no authority but the ineffable! Squash the Philistines!” Eisenhower! Cecil B. de Mille! Coca-Cola inundating the antique splendors of Europe! Well-bred girls made the best audience. Martin pounded a fist on the grass, then sprang up to orate to the poplars. “We shall be drowned in another flood—Coke—for spiritual sloth. Where is the grandeur of mind that gave Samson back his strength? Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. So to speak. Life is beautiful, till we mar it by ugliness.” He paused to breathe and offered a shy grin. “I was the valedictorian in high school.”
When he returned to America he would paint enormous pictures, he told her, not flamboyant like himself, but pictures that showed the meditative, delicate soul within. He would transform the world by vision alone, he promised with a wink and a gleam: Martin was his own ironist. Modest too, in his way. He did not tell her about the scholarships at Yale or the special attentions from the exalted painters there.
To eat, he would dig ditches if necessary. He was huge and had the energy of ten men—that much Alice could see for herself in the way he whisked her in and out of galleries and cafés and, finally, in his lavish love. She followed his lead down erotic byways, querying, “Does everybody really do this?”
Martin too was entranced. He liked the slender toughness of her body, her chestnut hair drawn back in a ponytail, showing the bare, clean lines of her face; more than that he liked her acuity, her ear alive to the slightest nuances of phrase, her rigor in choosing the precise word for her meaning. Sometimes, talking, she would pause for five or six seconds, her face suspended in calm, one hand open and outstretched as if the perfect word were a tactile thing drifting invisibly towards her; intriguing to him, what fevered activity must be hidden within, what flashes scurrying along the circuits of her brain. And still more, he liked the fact of her being—however minimally—foreign, Canadian, nurtured far from the tattered streets of Newark, where Martin’s father had been a baker who died young. When Martin told her how relatives had taken him and his mother in, how his aunt had presided over the family candy store while his uncle took bets over the phone, Alice gaped like a schoolgirl. No room for a bulky boy in that apartment where his bed flipped out of a wall. No one had ever asked where he spent his time (the library, and when that closed, the streets), surely not his mother, staring at her blotchy ceiling. There was something crude and primitive and cobwebby and inarticulate about the life in those rooms; not the physical markings of poverty—he was no snob, he assured Alice—but the dismalness lodged in the woodwork. So he developed peripatetic habits; without a roof, he leaned up towards the light. For he earnestly believed life was beautiful. He had to. Could she see? Alice nodded urgently. The abundance he felt within, the very force of those longings bred from books and bleakness, were proof enough. And here was Alice, with her reserve and elegance and precision. Class qualities, bred to deny easy access. Well, he would brook no such barriers.
There was no need to dig ditches. They came home and taught at universities, Alice in Romance language departments and Martin in studio courses. Students loved him, especially when he marched at the head of their ranks protesting racism, and later, war. At rallies, after other speakers unreeled statistics of social injustice, it was Martin, scorning the microphone, who restored everyone’s spirits. However much they treasured their indignation, they must treasure their joy equally. He quoted Gramsci on the higher wisdom of optimism. Never cease believing that life was beautiful. After him came the singing.
He organized and exhorted in one university town after another. Alice wanted to settle in and take root; Martin was restless. Not your basic academic type, he told her. He bored easily.
“I see that. People and places both,” she said. “You seem to riffle through them and throw them away like newspapers.”
“Riffle. That’s good, very good,” said Martin. “Why don’t you write a book instead of doing all those translations?”
They moved partly because administrations found the perils of Martin almost as great as the wonders. Folding her skirts neatly into a suitcase, Alice said, “Even if you’re right, you don’t have to reveal everything that’s on your mind all of the time.” That might be all very well for her, but Martin felt natural as a troublemaker, tilting at the status quo, forever urging the needs of blacks, artists, students, and above all, women, for he was an early and ardent champion of their cause. Someone had to do it, he argued. The students needed an example, and could she suggest anyone else among all those stodgy professors? She couldn’t. There were days at a stretch so crowded with social agitation, he didn’t even see Alice. The day he cast his spell over a townful of Republicans, making them march and even sing “We Shall Overcome,” he was so overcome he didn’t notice she was not marching at his side
.
Alice, tired of seeking new jobs, stopped teaching and devoted herself to translations of novels, at which she was excellent, the best translators being unobtrusive. Martin was proud of her success. His superior Alice. And yet, translations ... Of course, he did not hint at this to her. They were talking less about everything. When one of the French novels she translated, based on the life of the Renaissance poet Louise Labé, became a campus cult book, it irked him that Alice won little glory. Who ever notices translators’ names? He had to tell people. “Please don’t make such a point of it,” she said, driving home from a party at which he had thrust her forward and announced her credentials. “Why not? One of us around here might as well reap some rewards.”
For his paintings wouldn’t come right. Not bad, only just below first-rate, the most accursed kind of failure. It was tempting to blame the narrowness of the academic life, but he refused any cheap excuses: better painters taught.
Nor were there children. The doctors found nothing discernibly wrong with either of them. Martin in any case had already fathered a child, or had reason to believe he had, a couple of months before he met Alice. Giovanna, the woman’s name was; till now he had all but forgotten. She had come with her three young children to visit parents in Florence and would return to a wealthy husband in Buenos Aires. On the eve of her departure she told him she might be pregnant.
“What do you mean, might? Don’t you know?”
“Sometimes I’m a little late.”
“How late now?”
“A few weeks.”
“But—” Martin stammered. “But what will you do?”
“Un piccolo ricordo.” A souvenir. She gave him a coquettish look. He could still remember her earrings, immense, pendulous, gold. He had suddenly found them revolting, but what could he do? She left no address—it was not something that could endure.
“Look, Alice, we could adopt a baby. Six months later you’ll be pregnant. That’s what happens.”
“Maybe later.” She lost weight and grew quiet. Martin had never liked silence—it reminded him too much of his mother lying in that close room, or the dinners served on that oilcloth-covered table where the only sounds were biting and chewing and slurping and his uncle’s pencil scratching at the racing form. So he filled their rented houses with students who buzzed around day and night. The more they buzzed, the quieter and more unobtrusive Alice grew, retreating to her study to work. But at some point the house would empty out.
“Talk to me.”
“It’s midnight. Aren’t you talked out yet?” She was in bed with a book in a language he couldn’t even recognize. Portuguese?
“But you haven’t said a word to me all day.”
“How could I? You’re always surrounded.”
Martin sat down at the edge of the bed and smiled, good-tempered as always. “I’m not surrounded now.”
“I don’t want the dregs.”
Every two or three years she set herself to learning a new language—Greek, Russian, Serbo-Croatian. She wore earphones and listened to Berlitz-type dialogues on tape while she cooked dinner, now and then murmuring an odd bunch of syllables. “What are they saying that’s so absorbing? You look spellbound,” said Martin, tapping at her shoulder.
She turned off the tape. “What? Oh. Stop or I’ll scream.”
“What did I do! I asked you a simple question. Is it too much effort to answer? I mean, you’re walking around here in another world, Alice.”
“Stop or I’ll scream. That’s what it’s saying. If you’re alone and accosted in Athens.”
The intervals at which she undertook these languages, Martin felt, were intervals at which she might have borne children. Or adopted children. But he could no longer mention such things. Now all her store of words was in foreign tongues. He felt faint with loneliness.
“Turn around, Alice. You’re not really sleeping.” She would let him make love to her, with never a sound, eyes closed. Mortifying. “Say something, goddammit,” he once shouted. “Say you hate it, even!” His raised voice shocked him, but didn’t seem to bother Alice in the least.
“What should I say? You just want company on your travels. It doesn’t have to be me or anyone in particular. You could do it yourself and I could watch—it would be the same thing.”
The injustice of it! To him, who sought only the perfect communion of spirits! She was deliberately withholding herself, refusing him what he needed. Just as his mother had done, but he had not succumbed then and wouldn’t now. It all came clear: his work was failing because she was failing him. Women were the rich source, the spring, the indispensable path. Throughout history, Dante to Picasso ... Poets were not mad when they wrote of their Muses.
Still, he was never unfaithful to Alice except in the abstract, though opportunities were near at hand. Students hovered close, hoping for a sign of his interest; a few were not content passively to hope and had to be gently deflected. Martin was surprised, since even in the abstract they were hardly the rich source he was after. Could it be that his exuberant hugs and kisses, the long conferences where he allowed them to expatiate on their private lives, the cups of coffee he offered not only at home but all over town, his letting his wild hair down at parties and dancing with the girls, even his occasional ribald remarks, were misinterpreted? Was he provocative, all unwittingly? The very notion disturbed his pride. Certainly no girl could ever claim his warmth had been anything but paternal, professorial. If he seemed more frankly human than the other teachers—well, it was his nature. Not for him that dry aloofness. He had never been an academic type.
It was no more than common courtesy to offer the girl a lift home after their weekly conference: she wasn’t feeling well. As they pulled up in front of her house he saw she was weeping.
He put his arm around her shoulder. “What’s troubling you?”
It was too awful to speak of. Too embarrassing. Well, all right: she was pregnant.
Martin removed his arm, edged off a bit. “Uh, that’s not unheard of. Is it someone you ...”
“I went out with him a few times, but I don’t really want to see him anymore.”
“Well, in a college town like this I’m sure there are plenty of ...”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. I’m Catholic.”
“Catholic ... I see. Look, don’t despair. It’ll work out somehow. Do your parents ...”
“You don’t understand! It’s that ... I mean ...” She was hiding her face in her hands. “I’m still a virgin.”
“Tracy, really. Catholic, all right, but there are limits. ... Aren’t you getting a little carried away?”
“No, no,” she managed to get out between sobs. Her doctor had confirmed it. “It was very fast, do you know what I mean?”
“I think I can figure it out.”
“The stuff travels, you know? It doesn’t have to be really that near. Just sort of nearby ... Oh, go ahead and laugh if you want. I know it must seem funny.”
“No, I’m not laughing.” He patted her hand, lying helpless in her lap. “It’s just that it’s ... an unusual case.”
“I need someone to help me.” She looked at him beseechingly.
“Oh, my dear girl,” said Martin after a considerable pause. “You don’t really mean that.”
“Why not? You always seemed to like me.”
“Of course I like you, but ...”
“Don’t you see, I can’t go through a whole pregnancy like this!” she cried.
He looked at her and stroked her arm. Paternally, he hoped. At this moment he could hardly distinguish. She put her hand on his knee.
“I’ve always liked you a lot, Martin.”
He thought, while the hand inched up his leg, of the deprivation that had seeped into his life and that he had accepted docilely, so far. Help her. Wouldn’t any man?
“Look, uh, Tracy, we’ll have to talk this over. This is not just some casual thing.” He put his own hand firmly over hers, to halt its progress. “Is anyo
ne home now?”
Have your baby, Martin thought as he returned to his car an hour and a half later. I’ve cleared the way. First gently but efficiently to get the job done, and then more elaborately, so she might see what it was all about. He felt a trifle exploited, but bore that with patience. Women did, why shouldn’t he? At least she was appreciative. So much so, that Martin had felt compelled to leave somewhat abruptly, declining her offer of a hamburger dinner. He drove a few blocks to the edge of town, stopped near a stand of maples ripe with the reds and golds of fall, and rested his head on the steering wheel to weep.
Absurd as it was, the singular event renewed him. He had not fathered a child this time, yet he had had some role in the mysterious process. He felt obscurely chosen, as if he were a larger-than-life character in an ambiguous myth. That winter he worked swiftly, with fresh energy and purpose. He was in his studio one afternoon when Alice interrupted to speak to him, which she rarely did. She had taken to wearing his old sweaters around the house, and her hair was very short now. He couldn’t remember when she had cut it, before his encounter with Tracy or after.
“You don’t look right. What’s the matter?”
She said she had to have a hysterectomy.
Martin laid aside his brushes to listen. Finally he said, “Well, if it’s necessary ... Look, afterwards you’ll be better than ever.”
“How good is that?”
“Alice.” He took her hand. They were sitting on tall stools side by side. “You know how good I think that is.”
“We never had any children.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You would have enjoyed them. Showing them off. You would have been a good father, too.”
“I doubt it.”
“Why? Look at you with the students.”
The Melting Pot Page 21