Suite 312
Dear Margaret,
I believe you will be pleased to hear that there is good news from Paris. Julian is on his way home. He will be accompanied by Lili, his wife.
I hope you are continuing well.
Yours with good wishes,
Beatrice
November 25
Marvin:
Some time ago I very nearly risked phoning you, but dreaded the uproar and thought better of it. There is something pacific (if surely not pacifist!) in silence, especially a long silence — I acknowledge that the fault is mine. As you’ve no doubt suspected, I’ve been withholding information (I don’t call it knowledge, as you’ll soon see), and not without cost to my conscience. In all brevity, then: Julian is ready to come back. My short-lived visit — I always felt I was representing you as a kind of plenipotentiary! — was a diplomatic failure in the extreme. Your son repudiated me from the first instant. He was, in fact, painfully derisive, and I can finally report to you that he was keen enough, and resentful enough, to see me as nothing more substantial than your shadow. What moves him to return appears to be his attachment to the young woman you already know of — it won’t do anymore to say “girlfriend,” and I discovered belatedly that it was never the right word to begin with. I have had two or three rather scanty encounters with this person. My impression is one of uncommon gravity and endurance — nothing lighthearted or frivolous. I have learned very little of her background, beyond that she is the daughter of an educated Bucharest family, and apparently has some literary skills in several European languages, though her English is stilted and in certain aspects insufficient. She is older than Julian, I would think somewhere between eight and a dozen years. She is a widow and has lost a child — I gather she was interned with her family during the war and somehow ended in Paris with hundreds of other such uprooted people.
I hope I have said enough to make you understand in what mode Julian returns. He returns as a husband. My apartment is small, but because it has lately undergone some convenient changes, I will be able to accommodate the two of them for a reasonable time. They will arrive on December 3rd.
Yours,
Bea
43
IRIS WAS NOT the first of Dr. Montalbano’s assistants. He had enlisted (“employed” didn’t exactly fit the case) a lively roster of others, particularly in Milan, where he had had the advantage of a series of dark-eyed, dark-haired enthusiasts. He lost them one by one; the most vengeful had the habit of reporting certain aspects of his practice to the authorities. No matter: he kept what he called his Christmas kitty, local Pittsburgh lingo for a bank account set aside for a specific use — it forestalled anything more dire than a fine by paying off the relevant officials. Italy was lenient in this respect, unlike Paris and especially Lyon, where a stricter atmosphere reigned. But Iris was his first American, and as blond as Patsy and Mary Alice, the two sisters just above him, with this critical difference: she gave off an air of indulgence, of high expectation; even of just deserts, as if she had accomplished something worthy of reward. It surprised him that she was a virgin — she wasn’t a baby, she was past twenty and more. He judged it to be a purely American prudery, distinct from the European type, which was grounded more in duplicity than in principle. He had seen this restrained unrestraint in Patsy and Mary Alice before their marriages — so far and no further, maddening their boyfriends, who departed at three in the morning with bulging flies, while the girls went off to bed laughing, their teeth lipstick-smeared, their mouths swollen.
No laughter in Iris — she wasn’t a tease, at least not with him: gratitude made her tractable. She took him up, instead, with full seriousness, like a difficult course in school, wanting to do well. She was as stiff as a corpse (and hadn’t he mistaken her for a corpse at first sight?); he came too soon, it made him angry. It was as if she had no instincts, and had to be taught — or as if she was listening, in her head, to a different set of lessons. At such times she spoke of her brother and her brother’s wife; she asked whether everyone made love in the same way. — Jeez, he said, what d’you think human anatomy’s for? — No, she said, I mean if someone’s been injured, if someone’s body got mangled forever, a missing piece, a hole in the wrong place, wouldn’t that change how you’d feel? — Listen, kid, he told her, there’s only one hole that matters, and it’s in the usual spot . . . but even then she didn’t laugh. He could talk dirty to her and she didn’t laugh. He had gone with her to that horror of a rooming house, with that shrieking landlady and her curses; by then her brother had disappeared.
In bed (she still considered it her bed) she rattled him from moment to moment. He had mistaken her for one of those well-off American girls who grow their hair to their waists and follow whichever import is currently popular, sometimes an African singer, sometimes a Greek filmmaker: Paris has its fads. Until now he had stayed away from American girls — a man with four sisters at home in Pittsburgh knows better. But this one had turned up drunk on the other side of his door; he couldn’t avoid her and he couldn’t throw her out. The smell disgusted him. All his life his mother had reeked of the stuff: when his father left, she got herself work in one of those bar-restaurants that are more bar than restaurant. Her cotton dresses came out of the wash smelling of beer. A steamy mist rose up from the ironing board smelling of beer. It astonished him that when he took the girl in, on the condition there’d be no more bottles, she stopped — stopped on the instant, just like that. It was beyond his understanding, and beyond his experience too. He had never been able to get Alfred to stop, or, as a matter of fact, anyone else: a drunk is a drunk.
He figured it out the day they went to look for her brother.
“It’s over,” she said.
He asked, “What’s over?”
“What I tried.”
“What was it you tried?”
“To love him. The way we used to be at home. I came to make him feel better — not just with money. He didn’t want me, he didn’t need me. He had Lili.”
She was a woman of projects. She gave herself assignments, she had a program. She thought like a scientist; she hinted that her father had something to do with chemistry, with plastics. The wine, he concluded, was deliberate: like Freud with cocaine, say. The brother was a failed project, and then came the wine, plumbed for its sensation, for its effects, but when she got to the bottom of it, after the flowery burst, after the descent, there was nothing. Stupor, blackout, sleep. Prone like a cadaver on the other side of his door. He had told her to give it up; she gave it up. This was her stubbornness. Her brother; the wine; and now she must open her legs to please him. He saw that she meant to satisfy him. She worked at it with diligence, as something to pass through, a test demanding success. She had the idea — but how would she have acquired such a notion? — that there ought to be noises, small moans, gasps. Even outcries.
In the clinic she was useful and enterprising. A pair of gendarmes had turned up, asking to examine his business cards, the usual first step: he knew what might follow. He suspected the concierge, though it could easily have been some disgruntled client. His concoctions were generally innocuous, yet it stood to reason that now and then someone would break out in a rash, or worse. He was prepared to treat the reaction, whatever it was, but there were times when he couldn’t subdue the resentment. The gendarmes came again, more threateningly. He was a despiser of laws; he concealed himself, while Iris, gesticulating in the doorway with her fragments of school French (he scarcely heard two words of it) charmed them away. They went off grinning, and the visit was never repeated.
He asked how she had managed it.
“Just as you would,” she said. “Mumbo jumbo.”
Her term of admiration, of trust. She admired and trusted his way with the clients. It wasn’t what he gave them to chew or swallow or rub on their skins or between their toes; it was how he got their imaginations to work. Mostly it was his own imagination at work. His mumbo jumbo (she’d begun to call
it that almost from the start) was no more spurious than nature itself. Nature was the true shaman; she saw this, she understood it, she had witnessed such transmutations in beakers and vials, liquids into solids, solids into gases, gases back into liquids, lifeless molds in petri dishes burgeoning overnight, crystals growing. Not one of the others was so clever — those chirping girls who had come aboard in this or that city, a whole row of them, all sexually pliant, not one of them given to listening for ghostly groanings. Mumbo jumbo, she said, and he caught what she meant and was flattered: nature, intuition, inventiveness. And sometimes scam — what harm in it, if it brought in francs and lire, and dispensed a bit of transient joy? He hadn’t expected that she would show so practiced an interest in those francs and lire — he still thought of her as California-rich — until he remembered that apart from him she was destitute. She kept her ticket home in a kitchen drawer, among his spatulas and sticky ladles; he supposed the thing was well past its expiration. She had this in common with him — those half-rusted keys to burned-out Pittsburgh pads that daily jangled on a ring in his pocket. She never wrote to her father, though she mentioned him often enough. He took it for granted that she was, like everything else, transient, passing through. She wouldn’t last.
In the meantime she trusted him; he trusted himself. He trusted that his urgings would soon melt her. She trusted that before long they would stand together on the frozen peak of some mighty Alp, or at the lip of Como. She did not refuse the invasion of her mouth. She wound her hair, a slippery manacle, around his wrist. But the rest of her was enigma: naked under his nakedness, she lay like an inert Pompeiian cast in the bed that had been hers alone while those yawps and mewls and solemn lowings came drifting to her ears from her brother’s lovemaking, or from his wife’s horrific dreams. And when at night the blind blows of the soothsayer’s member struck and struck at the root of her flesh, she could not tell one cry from the other.
44
LATE ON THE WEDNESDAY afternoon before Thanksgiving, Bea sat at her desk in her deserted classroom, red pencil biting down. A rainy dusk blurred the big windows, and the rows of empty seats exhaled the mingled malodors of young males. Under her hand were her class’s Shakespeare reports: misperceptions, misspellings, verbs and commas running wild, wrong turnings everywhere. A starvation of words. Still, she detected in this thicket of blots and brambles a subterranean mindfulness: at home they knew Iago and Goneril and Edmund and Lear, they knew their simulacra, they knew fear, they knew rage. They had seen into the tragic, and she was not ashamed of their errors. Their errors were short-lived paper phantoms; but they were skilled and manly boys, and they would not live paper lives. Her red pencil could not demean them.
Four days free, the longest weekend of the year. Laura had asked Bea to Thanksgiving dinner: they were going to do the works, from the stuffing right down to the candied yams and cranberry sauce. And apple cake! Harold had loved Bea’s apple cake. Jeremy, believe it or not, had volunteered to make the fruit salad. Besides, Laura said, there’d be a special lure for Bea — live drama on their television.
Live drama? The new machine was giving birth to new expressions.
“Real plays,” Laura explained. “Like going to the movies without leaving the house. It’s not just Sid Caesar and wrestling anymore. And anyhow you don’t want to be alone on Thanksgiving —”
“I don’t mind,” Bea said. “I picked up something from the library to keep me company.”
“Oh you,” Laura said. “Missing out on all the fixings for a book —”
It was Doctor Faustus. In that stale and enervated room stinking of the ghosts of snuffed cigarettes, Leo’s venerated old Modern Library copy at her elbow . . . and she hadn’t touched it. She had been bold enough, but not so brazen as to lay a finger on that impalpable part of him haunting a book. Instead, the pitiable photo of those little girls. The grand was banished, its shadow erased — but still there remained this galling bedeviling invisible specter: Leo’s brain. Unexpectedly, it continued to take up space in her own. How to be quit of it? The days of quiet to come, undistracted: then let there be one last solitary exorcism.
Someone had placed a foil-wrapped chocolate turkey on the corner of her desk. Around its neck, confined by a rubber band, a labored note: A BERD FOR MISS BERDY. It made Bea smile; she hadn’t noticed it before. She thought she could identify the giver, a boy who never wore socks and had the habit of solemnly staring. She shoved the heap of papers into a drawer and dropped her red pencil in after it. Done, a relief, she was her own woman until Monday. She picked up her raincoat and shut the lights and went out into the silent hall.
A man was walking toward her, hesitatingly, looking into the open doors of the darkened classrooms. She clutched her purse and stood nervously. This was no ordinary weekday afternoon, when the corridors would have been alive with scufflings, hoarse muddles of reluctant tutoring floating along the walls, thuds and yells pounding upward from the gym. She was aware of an emptiness, an abandonment — everyone, boys and teachers, had rushed away to begin the holiday. But plainly not everyone: in the dimness, a single bulb over the stairwell, she saw that the man was large and hatless and balding. Mr. Elkins then, delayed like herself, searching for who knew what he’d left untended. Bea had heard him boast in the teachers’ lounge how he never departed the premises without properly tidying up, a lesson for the slovenly.
The man came nearer. It was not Mr. Elkins. An intruder: he had no business here. He seemed perturbed, waving and calling out, his shouts flying apart into echoes and shards. She caught fragments of it: “— told me in the offi ce this was your floor — were all leaving — said you’d left — weren’t home, tried there first —”
With each step his shoes were printing wet ovals behind him, until he halted just in front of her, so close she could hear his breathing. “Raining cats and dogs,” he said, and Bea felt her mood strain toward these old schoolyard words, as if for this one instant he and she were children again. But he had no other greeting.
“Helluva job tracking you down. How d’you live with it, place smells like puke —”
“It’s only the disinfectant they use on the floors,” Bea said.
“Stinks anyhow, let’s get out of here pronto. Goddamn stairs, is there an elevator somewhere?”
There was no elevator. She led him down five flights. His body, the hurtling panting bulk of it, sent out a heaving strenuousness: he was well past middle age.
In the street, under a nearby awning funneling a watery spew at either end, she asked, “Where are you staying?” A courtesy one would put to a visiting foreigner.
“The Waldorf. Good business location.”
“So it’s work that’s brought you —”
“No,” he said. “It’s you.”
Bea considered. “Come back with me then.”
“Back where?”
“My apartment. There’s a bus, it’s not far.”
“Nothing doing. I’ve been there, got myself soaked. No doorman, one pile of bricks same as any other, helluva way to live —”
“It’s not your way, no,” she said. “Will you come?”
“Listen, I didn’t fly out here ten hours three thousand miles and changing planes twice to have a goddamn cup of tea —”
“Then why did you?”
“The point is there’s something you need to understand, and right away, that’s the point, you follow what I’m saying? Fine, your place, when it comes down to it what do I care —”
He had turned indifference into a command. He lifted an autocratic finger. A cab slid to the curb, splashing their shins.
Bea’s place — here he was then, improbably, inconceivably: a monarch at the dining table that had usurped the space where the grand once reigned. Where she had never imagined him. He was loosening his tie; he had already undone the top button of his shirt. A fat neck — she saw in the father at least this much of the son. She had hung his dripping coat on the shower rail.
�
�It’s not so bad,” he said, looking around. “Two and a half rooms, you’d think it’d be a lot more crowded.”
“It used to be.”
“Is this where you . . . your husband and you . . .”
Bea said drily, “Where we cohabited? No, that was long ago and far away.”
“Well, how would I know? For years you didn’t keep in touch.”
“Nor you,” Bea said.
“I’ve had a business going, there’s the difference. And a family, what do you know about having a family? And then when you finally get around to writing, you don’t answer, it’s start and stop, it’s nothing and then it’s bits and pieces, and hints and hidings, and then it’s nothing again. That last letter, it was goddamn cold. Cold as ice, and believe me, it won’t stand, over my dead body it’s going to stand, you follow me?”
“Marvin,” Bea said, “what’s this about, why didn’t you let me know —”
“Let you know! And have you throw some sort of cockeyed excuse at me, when it’s got to be stopped, I mean stopped right now, corked, why can’t you understand this, are you so dense . . .” But he broke off, and again Bea saw his look travel from corner to corner, from the window to the door, and across the newly naked floorboards. “Don’t tell me you were actually planning to put my boy up in this rabbit hutch —”
“I intend to give the two of them my bedroom, same as when Iris was here, that was only the one night, but Julian’s coming with his wife, so —”
“His wife! His wife! Are you out of your mind? To send me a crazy letter like that, and to think I’d let it happen? It won’t happen, Bea, it is not going to happen, can’t you get this into your head?”
“They’ll be here in six days,” Bea said, and stood up and walked away.
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