Foreign Bodies

by Cynthia Ozick

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he called after her.

  “To get me some supper.”

  “I need to talk to you! Considering I left everything in the middle, canceled a meeting, didn’t even stop to look in on m-Margaret . . .” She heard him falter; it was almost a stammer, but he was quick to recover. “Bring me some coffee while you’re at it, will you? And make sure it’s good and hot.”

  In her little kitchen — and how miniature it all at once seemed, a rabbit hutch of a kitchen — Bea put up the coffee, scrambled half a dozen eggs, toasted four slices of bread, and carried it all out on a tray.

  “What’s this?”

  “Thanksgiving dinner,” she said.

  “Listen, there’s a swanky restaurant over at my hotel, what do I want with this stuff?” But he ate hungrily.

  She did not know what to make of him. He was unshaven, and the stubble aged and roughened and hollowed his face. His nose was broader than she remembered. His mouth had thinned to a dry line. Flecks of white dotted his eyebrows; two or three hairs, blacker and longer than the rest, curled upward like insect antennae. She thought he was even balder than when she had seen him weeks ago, on his way to the pool behind the hedge — but that had been at a distance, and from across the road.

  “I don’t see why you’re objecting,” she said — she was careful to be direct, to avoid any shade now of vitriol. “It’s exactly what you wished for, isn’t it? What you wanted, what you wanted from me, what you asked me to do.”

  A crumb of toast hung scornfully on his lip. “What d’you know about what I want?”

  “You wanted Julian back. He’s coming back.”

  “Good God, not like this! I never wanted this!”

  “He’s very young,” she admitted.

  “Young’s got nothing to do with it, Margaret and I weren’t a whole lot older, and Margaret — Margaret was Margaret, that’s the point. Margaret couldn’t take a thing like this, she wasn’t made for it —”

  “She took you,” Bea said.

  “And I put an end to it, didn’t I? I finished it off, it wasn’t supposed to get into the next generation, and it never did, I stopped it right from the start. You saw Iris —”

  “I did. Right off the Mayflower.”

  “Cut it out, Bea, you’re not the one to talk. I’ve kept my name just the way it came from pop, which is more than you’ve done, and I’m not about to have some little old grandma with broken English creep into my family. I’m sick over it, I won’t allow it, the boy’s a goddamn fool, I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I’m only half alive — a fool, you had a look at him and you made a secret of the thing, and now you think you’re going to sneak him past me . . . well, you can’t, I’m here to stand in your way, and I know how to do it . . .”

  Marvin in full rant. Her throat heated up; she was embarrassed for him, and for herself, for her petty retaliations — that Thanksgiving dinner remark, the silly Mayflower jab, why so sardonic, wasn’t he suffering, even from his own awful contradictions? He made her more tired than angry.

  Tiredly, heavily, she said, “Why not just wait and meet her?” But she could hear how simple-minded this was.

  “You’ve met her, one’s enough. I don’t want to set eyes on the woman. I know what’s coming, I’ve seen the films like everybody else, and I can’t have one of those, not in my own family. All that’s blood under the bridge, it’s not my business, and I don’t intend to invite it in. And don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking —”

  “You wanted him back,” Bea said, “you wanted him back at least for Margaret —”

  “Callous, that’s what you’re thinking, I’m callous, I don’t have a drop of what d’you call it — compassion, wouldn’t that be the word you’d like? Not to mention that I’ve got my own little war medal and earned it at forty-four, if that counts for anything, and look, I’ll contribute all they want to those organizations, whatever they are, same as I give to the Red Cross and such, and more if they think I owe it to ’em for solidarity’s sake . . . solidarity! But I don’t want any of those people in my house, I was done with all that a long time ago, and look at you, you’re no different from me, in fact you’re worse, you haven’t got the means for the type of donations I can swing, so what good is all your fancy feeling without the money to back it up? I don’t want to see her — I don’t want to smell her — and I don’t want to see my son, the damn fool . . . Bucharest, where the hell is that, Romania, Bulgaria, who cares? He’s gone back three generations into the past, the boy’s digging up skeletons —”

  Bea said narrowly, “But you went to the oboe, nothing stopped you from that.”

  His eyes jumped: two quick beasts in a cage.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Leo Coopersmith.”

  “How do you know that? Who told you?”

  “He did.”

  “What, are you in touch with him?”

  “No. But I saw him. I saw his house. I saw his . . . instrument. It isn’t an oboe, it never was an oboe.”

  “My God, Bea, a stale old quip, the way you can hold a grudge —”

  “Someone you’ve had contempt for your whole life, and then you go looking to him for influence —”

  “He didn’t come through anyhow. Julian’s got the idea he’s a bit of a scribbler, they could’ve made something of a boy like that in the movie business, why not?”

  “You thought you could use me to get to Leo.”

  “It didn’t harm you, did it, and damn it, I’d do anything for my son, can’t you see that? Even now, even now . . .”

  Bea watched him pull up from his chair, bisonlike, with his shoulders humped and his chin thickened, reconnoitering as if measuring the distance from one wall to another, or impatiently inspecting whatever his nostrils drew him to: an agitated ruminant sniffing for fodder. After another turn or two he came back to her and tossed a paper on the table, among the sticky plates.

  “That,” he said, “is a whole lot of money. A tremendous lot of it. You could say it’s enough to live on decently for fifteen, maybe twenty years, depending, and this is not the way it’s done, I’ve got lawyers, I’ve got bankers, it’s got to be done with trusts, the whole paraphernalia, I know damn well how it ought to go. But hell, I don’t want any goddamn lawyers, not yet, the complications I can take care of later, I want it the way I want it, and right now this is how I want it — plain and simple, never mind what’s behind it, the kid has no more idea than a two-year-old how anything works in the real world. I want it the way the boy can understand it.”

  His neck and forehead had dampened; his breath was coming fast.

  “Now listen to me, what you’re going to do is get this check to my son pronto, air mail special delivery, you follow? Before he has a chance to put a foot out the door, wherever he is. And tell him to stay put. Stay where he is. Keep away. He fell into some muck over there, let him stay there.”

  Bea went on staring: the big chest under its moistened shirt was bobbing dangerously. “You really want to do this?” she said. “When he’s finally ready to come home?”

  “He’ll see I’ve made it worth his while, I guarantee it.”

  “But what about Margaret,” Bea pursued, “you said it was for Margaret he had to come back, her health depends on it —”

  “It doesn’t matter, not anymore. She’s too far gone, in the last few weeks she’s stopped making sense. I told you, she hallucinates, she has visions, you’d think she knows things before they happen . . . My God, Bea, I’m a man without a wife, I live like a monk.”

  “Do you?” Bea said. The leafy path, the girl in the cape, the pool; but she let the lie pass. “And what if Julian won’t accept your money?”

  “He’s not that much of a fool, and if he is, she can’t be. People who’ve gone through all that over there have to be practical, they take what they can get.”

  “You think she’s a user —” She held up the word like a m
irror.

  “What else could she be? Why else would she hang on to a boy like Julian?”

  “And despite what you think you’re willing to provide for this woman?”

  He threw up his arms and wailed, “He married the creature, didn’t he?” — and sent out a broken rattle that Bea at first could not recognize for what it was: the start of a spurt of short high laughs, giggles almost: a paroxysm of grieving hilarity. She comprehended him then — her blunt brother was capable of a hideous irony. She was moved to embrace him, to hold his head against the safety of her body while he vomited out those cackling convulsions; yet she did nothing; and if he had wept, possibly she might have wept with him, for the pity of it (she pitied him unresistingly now), but he had no tears, not one, and what was she to do with his laughter?

  When he left her, she remembered that he had scarcely mentioned his daughter at all. Nor had she confessed her clandestine visit to his wife — a deceiver’s lie of omission yet again.

  45

  SHE COLLECTED the dishes and carried them away to be washed, and when she was done she looked fleetingly at Marvin’s check inert on the table where he had hurled it, and with the long evening still before her went to fetch the book Leo Coopersmith had declared to be his talisman — had declared it defiantly, or defensively, in that gaudy grand house reeking of old butts. But when she passed by a second time, with Doctor Faustus in hand, the check, as thin and light as a leaf, fluttered from one spot to another, seeking escape — so she plucked it up and stuck it into the body of the book to prevent it from flying off again. How thin it was, this check, and how light: but the sum on its face was weighty. An unfathomable fortune, a treasure, a king’s ransom: in this sum Bea could count a hundred times more than the two decades of her wages; of her life. Marvin, she saw, was willingly surrendering to his son — to his son and his son’s wife — a royal inheritance. But the conditions for it! An inheritance intended to punish with the lash and sting of exile, and an iron door inexorably shut. He could not imagine Julian’s refusing it. And surely Lili . . . people who’ve gone through all that over there have to be practical, they take what they can get. Whatever else Marvin was, he was worldly, he was sharp, he was a virtuoso of self-interest.

  The tail of the check, a translucent wisp, hung out from the middle pages of Doctor Faustus. She had inserted it there unthinkingly, randomly. But now it flickered before her that she might, for the whim of the thing, attempt a divination, after the practice of those believers who open a Bible and blindly point with a finger to any passage the finger may alight on. From this passage a fate will be determined; and so it would be with Leo’s talisman. It was Leo’s fate she was after — his present fate, not his future, not what was still to become of him; rather, his situation at precisely this instant, or, if this were not forthcoming, then the subterranean germ that had brought him to where he was now, alone with his sacred Blüthner, bereft of his little girls. It was a game and it was not a game; it was a willed superstition and it was the opposite, a disgorgement, an ultimate cleansing — the vatic link between divination and exorcism. To find Leo out, to parse him, finally to see him, to see into him . . . to cast him out. And then the maggot that crawled along her nerves would die. The emperor Titus had a gnat in his ear, maddening him with its incessant buzz. How Titus got free of his gnat Bea could not tell, and legends are not often guides for the perplexed; but it was a certainty that through Leo’s talisman she would drive Leo out. And what else was there to occupy the melting hours of this wild night, when Marvin had burst in on her without warning, in the fanatical storm of his scheming?

  Hurriedly, as if what she was doing was shameful and likely to be discovered too soon, she leafed through the pages until she came to the crack in the spine where Marvin’s check clung, humbly hiding, half through the force of static electricity, half of its own volition. And over this same page (it was 379) she whirled her index finger once; she whirled it twice; she whirled it a third time, and, eyes shut, allowed it to descend to the noiseless syllables it dizzily fell upon.

  She saw:

  and the same fear, the same shrinking and misgiving awkwardness I feel at this gehennan gaudium, sweeping through fifty bars, beginning with the chuckle of a single voice and rapidly gaining ground, embracing choir and orchestra, frightfully swelling in rhythmic upheavals and contrary motions to a fortissimo tutti, an overwhelming, sardonically yelling, screeching, bawling, bleating, howling, piping, whinnying salvo, the mocking, exulting laughter of the Pit.

  Gehennan gaudium, hell’s jubilation, the laughter of the Pit. Yes yes yes, Leo to the life, derided and undone. The man who longs to become, and is too fearful to become. To become what? The Mahler of the Sixth Symphony, where the hammer pounds down, the Beethoven of the Allegretto of the Seventh Symphony, as the trooping winds die into secret melancholia, Hindemith with his jagged staggerings . . . Never mind, she hears nothing, fifty bars, one hundred bars, all are lost to her, she is shut out from those yearning yammering notes — nevertheless she is seeing Leo plain, Leo’s terror, Leo’s not-becoming. She imagines a red, red pear ripe on its bough; but soon, in horror of crashing to the ground, it yields to the stupor of an internal rot, breeding its own devouring wormless worm.

  It was not a game. It was not a superstition. What now was Leo Coopersmith to Bea?

  She knew immediately what she must do. She went back into the kitchen and dropped Marvin’s check into the sink. Then she struck a match and watched the leaflike paper flare up until it shriveled into black ash. Then she let the water run it into the drain.

  46

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, even in late November, keeps its summer smile: the sun is always in its accustomed place, shedding maroon shadows alongside a sometimes unbearably blinding sparkle shot from windows and windshields and watch faces. The brightness made Margaret squint as she looked out over the far-flung grounds, pocked by red-and-pink flowerbeds, of the Suite Eyre Spa. On this very day she was determined to go home. Many of her neighbors had already been fetched away for the holiday by dutifully vigilant families carrying the Spa’s distinctive orange drawstring sacks; these things bulged with odorous vials. Marvin on his last visit — when could it have been? here timelessness reigned — had himself proposed what he called a holiday furlough, an outing to such-and-such a fine restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner; but she had demurred. As long as Julian is gone . . . when Julian comes back . . . “Same old palaver,” Marvin grumbled, and went off as uneasily as he had arrived, leaving her money for treats. She understood he meant bribes for the lower echelons of the staff. The therapists could not be bribed.

  The therapists too had vanished for the day; and also (or so it seemed) more than half the rest of the staff. A somnolence deeper than the usual torpor. The lobby a marble shell, cold under her feet. A pair of china figurines on the receptionist’s desk: a Pilgrim couple, he in his broad hat with its buckle, she in her bonnet and apron, and propped between them a big square cardboard announcing OUR SPECIAL THANKSGIVING MENU, 3:30 P.M. Out of a back corridor, two or three laughing voices. The woman who ought to have been at the desk was nowhere in sight — who could blame her, with nothing to do and no one to oversee? Margaret passed unnoticed to the porch with its white columns and sleepy cushioned chairs; the oak benches that grew up out of the grass were unoccupied. The only evident path wound, mazelike, among the flowerbeds, and brought her back to the porch; so she set out again, this time directly across the long lawn, heading for the gate that abutted the freeway. The brief sizzle of a bee hurtling too close to her ear momentarily obscured the steadier hum of distant cars. She remembered a bus stop right there at the gate — she had heard the lower echelons speak of it. Plenty of change in the pocket of her smock — they had stolen away her easel, but never her painter’s smock. The thieves, whoever they were, had been too stupid to covet the smock. She wore it now for its capaciousness: it kept her hidden, invisible, no one could judge her, no one could grasp the joyfulness sequestered in its bo
ttomless pocket — the other pocket, not where those dimes and quarters weighed and jangled . . . how often, from the minute it came to her, had she unfolded and folded the joyfulness, so that its creases opened all on their own! And to think that the joyfulness had been sent by her husband’s sister, of all dislikable people, the sister he had never had anything to do with for years and years . . . and yet it was her husband’s sister who had turned up out of nowhere with the first inkling of the joyfulness! Displaced person, how else could it be? The war and its upheavals, and kings and dukes and countesses and such deprived of their thrones, deposed and displaced, driven from their lands, still clinging in foreign cities to their rightful titles . . . was it possible that Julian had married one of those, though it wouldn’t surprise, there was her cousin Roseanna, a family legend, who had gone to Cracow in the twenties and converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry a Polish count, or someone everybody said was a count, he didn’t have a penny, but he did live with his mother the countess and five sisters on the remnant of a grandly decaying old estate that had once boasted a dozen stables for thoroughbreds . . . the joyfulness twice joyful, Julian back at last, Julian home, Julian in the embrace of an aristocratic wife! And there they all were — and on Thanksgiving Day to boot — Iris — and well, Marvin, it had to be — and oh — Julian and his princess bride — and very soon, after the half-hour’s ride in the bus, she would see them all together, feasting, and how they would greet her, Julian with his shining childlike look when she strode in with coins bouncing in one pocket and Marvin’s sister’s letter in the other! Ever since the joyfulness had flown into her hands, that incessant unfolding and folding, until the creases knew on their own how to go . . .

  By now she had come to the gate. The bus stop was not there. She put up her hand to shut out the sun’s glare (a passerby might have supposed that the woman in the unwieldy garment and the bare feet, costumed like some impoverished angel, was in the act of saluting) and realized she had been mistaken. The bus stop was on the other side of the freeway. Surely there must be some way to cross? A traffic light to halt the ruthless flow of cars — and there it logically was, a distance of one or two city blocks to her left, though in this secluded place no trace of city life, only this relentlessly rushing road connecting suburban cluster to suburban cluster . . . A burning and stinging in the soles of her feet. Somehow she had forgotten to put on her shoes . . . or no, not forgotten, it was on account of the joyfulness that she was at one with the air, skimming an inch above the ground, or hovering like a hummingbird! Then why this burning, why this stinging? She lifted her foot to see. A pebble embedded in the heel. She lifted the other foot. A cut under the toes, bleeding, and how painfully out of reach the traffic light now seemed! Car after car screeched past, louder as it loomed, one screech instantly dying, instantly reborn in the next screech, and the next, and the next. The crazed procession of screeches dizzied her a little, but look — again and again a gap appeared in the two parallel columns of cars charging in opposite directions, a gap in the near lane and a gap in the far lane; and every so often the two gaps miraculously coincided, opening a clean swath like the parting of the Red Sea, and how easy it would be to pass through the double gap, straight across to the other side of the road! And fortuitously just now, among the maddening screeches, a grinding vibrating growl: the bus itself, at first no more distinct than a blue blur, flashing multi-windowed flanks as it approached, and scarcely slowing as it shuddered toward its appointed stop. Margaret saw her chance: burning and stinging, she fled through the near gap, and was halfway through the far gap, when her heel, the one with the pebble stuck in it, slipped on a flat smear of grease, or oil, or unidentifi-able spill, and she tumbled forward on her face while a new screech, louder than any other, howled in her head, and the gap closed over a crushing of bones and living flesh.