“Yes, what is it, Eleanor?”
Between them there was a thick current of emotion.
They lived and breathed in each other’s atmosphere, barely conscious of the words that passed between them. For Aaron the shape of a curve, the texture of flesh, of metal, of bark, the radiance of hair and eyes, the soft heaviness of clay spoke far more than words.
“I’ve been wondering what Antonio will do when he gets here. Do you think there might be a job for him with the Spanish Department? Could you speak with the head of the Department . . . We just met them a few weeks ago at a party, if you remember . . .” she wavered, feeling Aaron’s displeasure. He sensed, yes, he must sense a great deal, even if he were too prudent to voice what he felt. Her eyes lost focus. Around her the room whirled with its plaster busts, tools hung on nails, large torsos, and welded shapes that seemed to float, its large empty workspace and its skylights.
“Do you mean Mr. Torres?” Aaron scratched at his cheek where the goggles had chafed.
“Yes, I believe that was his name . . . you know, the little man with the mustache . . . he might be rather pleased to have someone who approaches literature as a writer. . . .” Her voice trailed off again, as she sensed Aaron’s displeasure once more.
“You are a snob, my dear.” He chuckled and patted her buttocks.
“Not at all,” she said.
He backed off, turned towards the piece he was welding. “What do you think of it?” he asked.
“I can’t tell yet,” she said, laughing in turn. She started to leave, then paused. “I’m rather frightened about Rosa,” she said. “About having her here . . . she’s so . . . unpredictable . . . especially with Antonio.”
He hammered at the large piece. “They can’t stay here more than a month,” he said. “It’s too much of an imposition on us—you especially. After I’ve finished this fountain, I have to prepare my entry for the International Competition. I have less than three weeks for that. Then there’s summer school. Also I want to complete more work for my fall show.”
Already he was jealous of Antonio, although he knew nothing about what had happened. He knew nothing about it at all. Nevertheless, within marriage, she reflected, everything was sensed, no matter how carefully one hid things.
Just as she was about to fix lunch, Heinrich called her long distance from Maine, where he now lived during the winter. Several years ago he had given up his work at the Metropolitan, after achieving a certain success as a painter.
“Eleanor, it’s been far too long! I’m coming down in six weeks with Helen, but is there any way you can get up here before that? I’ve missed you far, far too much.”
“Oh dear . . .” she said. “I only wish I could . . .” Her voice trailed off. She glanced at the grey plasterboard bulletin with its notices of exhibitions on the wall by the refrigerator, and then at one of Heinrich’s etchings on the other side of the kitchen, near the stove. Heinrich had given it to them long ago. The picture consisted of rocks, almost human in shape, being battered by waves. It had a finely wrought, tormented quality, as did much of his work. He used blacks, greys, shades of white. “There is so much I must do. Although I cannot remember what it is . . .” Her head throbbed with a dull pressure. Things to do. So many things that, indeed, escaped her.
“Heinrich, I’ve missed you too, my darling.”
She had not seen him since November, just before she left for France. “My darling Heinrich,” she murmured. But even as she spoke, the image of Antonio rose up to taunt her. “It’s me you want now,” mocked Antonio, and his voice reverberated clearly inside her throbbing head.
Heinrich, quick to sense things, more voluble than Aaron, nearly as acute as Antonio, said, “Something more than your everyday problems is bothering you. What is it? Is it Rosa’s husband?”
“Of course not. . . . Whatever do you mean?” she asked, shocked. They had not spoken on the telephone for ten days. How could he probe her so indelicately? In all the years she had known him, he had always been restrained by a certain gentleness. He did not burst into one’s interior world and set it aflame, as Antonio did.
“Write to me,” she said. “Please write. I must go now.” (Was the rye bread stale, she wondered as she hung up, in the midst of the pain that spread through her body, flooding her with conflicting emotions over Heinrich.)
Jesse was playing Hanon scales on the piano in the dining room. Then he switched to Prokofiev. It was very beautiful, Eleanor thought. Jesse was dark-haired like Aaron, but even taller than his father, with enormous hands and feet. “Musician’s hands,” Jesse liked to say. His muscles had developed. You could barely tell from looking at him, even when he was barechested, that he’d had polio. But it hindered his ability to play bass chords.
From Prokofiev he went into an exercise for jazz chords, despite the muscles that he lacked in his left shoulder. He managed to lift his arm with a different set of muscles, although he moved awkwardly. He played in a syncopated rhythm with fast right-hand finger runs.
She climbed the stairs, listening to the music, with a pile of laundry in her arms.
In his bedroom she found a card with a large red heart on it.
He came into the room.
“What a lovely card,” she said with a trace of amusement, for she found it kitsch, so vulgar that it obtained a kind of beauty.
“I bought the card for a friend, Mom. I don’t want you in here looking through my stuff.”
“Jesse,” she said, her face saddening so that he could not bear it. She seemed to impale him with guilt, but damn, it was his room after all.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
As she stood there, slightly stooped, in her old grey skirt and sweater, a careworn look about her, with his ironed and faded clothes in her arms, an irresistible urge came over him to tell her the truth.
“If you want to know, Mom, the card is to a boy named Nick. He lives on the Lower East Side, and we fuck. We’re lovers.”
She was quiet and soft. She did not seem shocked. Her lack of violent reaction enraged him. He would have liked her to show anger, distress. Instead he believed she was secretly pleased. He thought of Nick, who had the smile of an angel, glistening black hair, alabaster skin.
“I thought you were going with Sylvia,” she said.
“That was over months ago, Mom. Months ago.” Sylvia had smooth breasts and arms. Sylvia was clear-eyed, innocent of all the storms that churned inside him. In a sense she was stupid, despite or because of her affluent goyim North Shore background. She did not fill up the need in him that was there.
“How did this come about, Jesse?”
“I met him in a gay bar. They don’t check ID’s in some of these places. He’s been a hustler since he was fourteen.”
He stopped, feeling that he had revealed far too much, and yet he wanted to shock her.
“Why are you telling me all this?” She shifted the laundry in her arms.
“I want you to know who I am, Mom. I want you to tell Dad. I want you both to know.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said, implying by her tone of voice, however, that she did. A faint tremor ran through her.
She told Aaron about Nick. Aaron did not say a word about it to Jesse, but avoided looking him in the eyes the next day, which was Saturday, and closed himself off in his studio. The piece for the fountain he’d welded yesterday cracked because he handled it clumsily. He had to rush into Brooklyn in the Ford van to buy more metal before the supplier closed at three o’clock. It was unnerving. He was so close to the deadline for installing the fountain. He tried to shut out what Eleanor had told him; he did not want to believe it.
Howard was so far away, off in Ohio at college. All day Eleanor thought of him more than usual. Howard was engaged to a girl named Louisa. Howard lived a normal life. She missed him. She and Howard understood each other in a way that neither Rosa nor Jesse understood her. Howard was fairer-haired, more stolid, more reliable,
more gentle. Then Rosa’s friendship with Tanya drifted through her thoughts. She had never mentioned Tanya to Aaron, because these things disturbed him so, and Rosa never asked her to tell him, as Jesse did. Furthermore, in some sense, it seemed a secret between women—Rosa, herself, with Antonio as intermediary.
She felt suspended waiting for Antonio to come from Paris. He would appreciate her roses, her Medieval French chansons. His consciousness would create sanity within her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Antonio and Rosa arrived with the baby at New York Kennedy Airport on a cold, windy evening in May.
It was dark when they landed. After getting through customs, Antonio saw Eleanor and Aaron waving frantically to attract their attention. Aaron looked younger than his years. He had dark hair, greying at the temples, a restless energy, an expression that was at once emotional, impetuous, and guarded. His face lit up with exaltation when he looked at the baby, whom he was seeing for the first time.
The people around them talked in sharp voices. There was restlessness, a sense of hurrying, a sense of things left unfinished between people because there was no time.
They drove back to Plainville on the Parkway. It was completely dark now, with illumination from other cars and from orange overhead lights that cast an eerie greenish glow over everyone.
Rosa had trouble balancing herself with the baby on her lap in the back seat of the van, which bounced quite a bit. Her knees knocked against Antonio. Their luggage rattled.
Once off the Parkway, Aaron drove them through deserted suburban streets, past houses trimmed with shrubbery, past parked cars and tall trees.
“The land around here is all so flat,” Eleanor said, turning towards Antonio from the front. “Only five miles away on the North Shore are hills, which I miss.”
“And ten miles to the south,” said Rosa, “is the ocean. I always wanted to live by the ocean.”
Aaron talked in a mixture of English and French, trying to accommodate himself to Antonio’s limited knowledge of English. “This is an older suburb,” he remarked. “Une ville plus vieille que beaucoup des autres.” He told him of how the Island was once inhabited by Indians. He talked about the fountain he installed a few weeks ago at a corporate headquarters in Connecticut.
Aaron’s voice filled Rosa’s mind, clouded her thoughts. She had forgotten how much her father talked. It always seemed as if the words—no matter how intelligent they sounded—were elaborate constructions to hide a painful, raw reality. He sounded warm, and yet part of him always remained aloof. She remembered long drives through the suburbs when they talked about art, history, politics. The talks after dinner, before they bought the dishwasher, while she and her father washed and dried dishes. Yet he never shared himself. She was always reaching out for something she could not grasp. He had power over her, and she had forgotten how much he affected her, how much his wishes ate into her own will, robbed her of choice.
She recalled how awkwardly he had embraced her at the airport. He kissed her cheeks as if she were composed of flames, as if he could not trust himself to control his sexual urges if he gave way to any tenderness.
Their house was the largest on the street. It had been built fifty years before the neighboring houses, and it towered over the others on the street with its three full stories and its immense oak, maple, and beech trees. The attic lights stood out, beckoning them.
As they climbed the front steps, her father was asking, “What do you think you’ll do here, Rosa? Where will you work? Where will you live? You and Antonio can stay with us for awhile, of course, but . . .”
“Aaron, they’ve just arrived!” interrupted Eleanor. “Would you take up the large suitcases? Antonio, you take the brown ones. All these things of Isabel’s in paper bags . . . the bags are coming apart.” Her voice was shrill. It bit into Rosa’s nerves. “Aaron, take the suitcases now.” All the rage her mother dared not admit existed inside her came out in that awful voice now over the suitcases and the paper bags.
Yet Eleanor herself was so sensitive to tones of voice, to emotions, almost unbearably so.
Impassive, Antonio picked up the brown suitcase. Rosa held Isabel, who was stirring.
“The bed and bureau belonged to my grandmother,” said Eleanor. Dressed in a pale blue bathrobe, she stood in the guest room where Antonio and Rosa were to stay.
Isabel had been put to sleep in Rosa’s old bedroom.
Antonio felt the mahogany frame against his back. A solid bed, over a hundred years old.
“The bed was made by a master cabinet maker,” said Eleanor. “I hope you’ll be happy here. You say that most of your belongings are being shipped?”
“Yes, they should be here in a few weeks,” said Rosa, who was unpacking. Strands of hair fell over her face. She looked distraught. She always hated to come back to this house.
Later as Antonio lay in bed next to Rosa, he could hear water filling the tub in the bathroom on the other side of the thin wall. He could even smell the fragrance Eleanor put into the bathwater—something like lily-of-the-valley. Apparently Aaron was sleeping. It seemed as if Eleanor were crying out to him through the walls. He could hear her move about in the tub, languidly soaking herself. She seemed to be sending out electric impulses, cries for help, for communication. Whenever she spoke earlier that evening, her voice had sent tremors through him because he could feel how much she wanted him, not merely as a lover—(“That was merely an accident, mon ami.”)—but she wanted some substance of himself. Eleanor and Rosa both wanted this. Vampires. Bloodsuckers.
The house was filled with sculptures and sketches by Aaron—bold, blatantly sexual, yet elegant. The man was an artist of the first rank, thought Antonio, if a bastard underneath his shifting glance and his polite manner. Au fond, Antonio sensed profound indifference, tinged with jealousy.
Jesse, their youngest, who buried himself in his piano music, had a blunt, unformed face. Artists. Egoists. Eleanor bore everyone’s emotional burdens, while Rosa expressed their craziness.
The house for Antonio had a curious mood of dreaminess. There seemed to be something in the air, stuffy, distracting to one’s mind.
There were strange gaps in Eleanor’s perceptions. Often in her own house—when she was with the others—her body seemed separated from her mind. She floated in a sort of a trance, unaware of what was happening. “Rosa, did you change dresses? I thought you were wearing a pink one just a few minutes ago.”
“No, Mother, I’ve been wearing this dress all morning.” Rosa was dressed in a loose red mumu.
Rosa asked, “Where is the vacuum cleaner?”
“Oh . . . up in the attic,” said Eleanor. “But the cleaning woman will be here on Thursday. Don’t get it out now.”
“I want to use it. I’ve never vacuumed . . . the cleaning woman always did . . . you never wanted me to . . . you were always afraid I would break something . . . I’ve got to learn.”
“Be careful,” said Eleanor. The tone of her voice created an irritating sensation down Rosa’s spine. She wanted to cry out, protest, scream.
“Is extraordinary. You never vacuum?” Antonio asked Rosa in English.
“It’s a very old vacuum cleaner,” said Eleanor. “One must be very careful with it. It’s so much simpler to let the cleaning woman, who knows how.”
“I’ve got to learn! You never let me!”
“That’s absurd! I never prevented you . . . you never wanted to learn before today . . . You were always busy with other things.”
“You were always afraid I’d break it. Now you don’t want me to use it!”
“You stop the fighting,” said Antonio. He burst into an unnaturally hearty laugh. “Is not necessary the fighting! A vacuum cleaner! Is important Rosa she learn the cooking and the cleaning and to sew the clothes, yes?”
Eleanor said, “Yes.”
In a fury, Rosa carried down the heavy machine from the attic, plugged it in, and began cleaning the dust from their bedroom floor. So simp
le a child of six could do it. Why had this been made such a mysterious activity? Why had she allowed her parents to keep her from learning this and a thousand other trivial, yet necessary things?
As Rosa vacuumed out into the hallway, drowning out the murmur of Antonio and Eleanor’s voices, she thought of how Eleanor would break down—apparently out of a need to confess, to be close. Once years ago when Rosa had just graduated from high school, Eleanor rushed into Rosa’s bedroom where Rosa was brushing her hair, sank down on the bed, and cried, “Your father does not want you to be a dancer, but I want you to know I’ll back you in that—if that’s what you want to be!”
Why then did Rosa abandon this dream when every night for years she had prayed to become a dancer? To decide upon a vocation did not seem to lie within her conscious control. Aaron had more power over her than Eleanor because he revealed less of himself.
Mysterious.
On the surface he seemed so affable. He let Eleanor determine how they lived, where the children went to school, all the details of their lives.
“Your father is not the best lover I’ve known.” Another confession, made years ago when Eleanor lay in bed with some mysterious ailment. Disturbing fragments that hinted at much more underneath. Tips of icebergs.
“When you children were all little and we first moved to the suburbs, sometimes in Penn Station I was so tempted not to come home. I wanted to buy a one-way ticket to someplace far away.
“When I married your father I was so romantic. I knew so little of life. I lived in a kind of dream. I imagined myself lying naked on a grey velvet couch while he sculpted me or made love to me. I never thought about what the rest of it all would be like . . . the shabby neighborhoods, old cars that broke down, not enough money, life in the suburbs. . . .” Eleanor broke off.
Who was her mother?
Rosa had hints.
Who was her father?
He talked and talked, but always to create structures. Everything could be explained. Everything followed in terms of cause and effect. His was a rational universe with no mention of God or the soul, although he was, she thought, engaged in a spiritual activity—he refused to dedicate his life to making money as his father and grandfather had.
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