The sentences stretched on and on, and he understood that sentences such as these had been written thousands of times in the history of the world, and in truth carried no redeemable coin, and would be blown like vapor into nothingness. The wilderness of Texas lay before him (bamidbar, the desert, he too had Hagar’s destiny), and for Lili, what, where? Their journeys diverged, he to the west, she to the east . . . she had spoken of an uncle, would she go now to that uncle? And in the meantime, how was it possible that these few francs could permit an establishment of this grandeur, the luxuriantly carpeted foyer, a gilded cage of an elevator, a sour-faced concierge whose accent was as uncongenial as his own?
From behind a marble barrier the woman held up a hand to halt him.
“What do you want here?”
“I’ve come to see a friend.” How else should he say it?
“You’re one of those, aren’t you?”
She had already appraised him; she knew instantly what he was. All over Paris they knew. They could tell it even from a corner of the eye. Would it be the same in Texas? Why not, it was the same everywhere.
“Not that he’s open for business yet, as far as I can see,” the concierge said. “He’s just back, there’s only the one girl up there now. And that squatter boy’s gone too, not that I could ever figure out was he a Jew or not, never mind he had the name.”
Kleinman blanched. Was he being taken for a visitor to a brothel?
“Sixième étage, it’s that chap Montalbano you want. As long as I get my tips it’s none of my affair —”
Ascending in the elevator, he thought: No, not Lili, it cannot be Lili . . . yet the world was filled with contradictions. He pressed the button and waited; a fit of shame seized him, shame for Lili, shame for what he was being taken for. The door opened and a young woman, only half dressed, appeared before him — he saw at once that she was an American: there is something different in the faces of Americans. A look of — how to name it? — exemption. He had glimpsed that same look in the boy who had come to meet Lili, the boy who did not resemble anyone in the queues. In America, a population of cowboys and gangsters.
He tried out his new English. (How diligently he had been studying!) “Excuse me,” he said. The phrase rang right, exactly as he had practiced it. But it fell from his tongue submissively, like a cringe. That she should be standing there so boldly, so unselfconsciously, in such dishabille!
The American young woman said in a businesslike American voice, “Sorry, these aren’t our regular hours, no clients until after the weekend.”
“I wish to see Lili,” he pleaded.
“Lili? She’s gone —”
“I must see her, I must. Please, tell me how to find where is Lili.”
“You should keep away, she’s sick, she doesn’t want anyone.”
“Sick, yes!” he cried. “I have money to give, so now I must see her —”
What misshapen words were these? As if he was in search not of the Lili he knew, but of some . . . whore.
“Please,” he said again. His head, his chest, flooded with the stain of it. “I beg you, tell me where is Lili.”
So Iris told him, and shut the door behind him, and called out to Phillip, who was already naked in her bed, “There! I hope I did that well. My first official act,” she said brightly, “for the clinic.” Then she bethought herself; she hadn’t spoken truthfully. “Not really for the clinic,” she amended. “Someone from Lili’s job, one of those — the way he carried on you’d think the world was coming to an end. But I knew right away he wasn’t a client.”
In the foyer below, under the concierge’s contemptuous eye, Kleinman took out his fountain pen — the important one he used for the Baron’s bookkeeping — and carefully added three words to the last of his heartfelt hurried sentences.
“Whatever your circumstances,” he wrote.
It was past seven o’clock when he arrived at the rooming house. A mean address in a shabby outpost. He had blundered into the wrong neighborhood after taking the wrong bus, and had retraced his route and started out again. The evening had deepened. There was only one streetlight — the others were shattered and dark. He nearly tripped on a crack in the threshold, and when he righted himself he found that the door had been left unlocked. The hallway smelled of something foul, an unpleasant sweetness covering a stench; but in a moment he recognized it as a woman’s unclean breath. She had stolen out of the dimness (an overhead bulb was missing) and was sidling close to him, her mouth almost level with his own. She was chewing on a twist of caramel.
“We’re full up,” she said, “if it’s a room you’re after.”
“No, no, it’s only that I’ve come to see a friend” — and Kleinman, chanting this refrain, felt like some traveler in an Oriental tale.
“And who might that be?”
“Her name is Lili.”
“I don’t know them by how they call themselves, I know them by their looks. And if they pay on time.”
“Small. Black hair. And very thin.”
“The one he wanted water for, that’s the one. Like if I’ve got the Holy Grail to give away to any tramp that asks. Washed out a vinegar jar and charged him for it too —”
“Him?” Kleinman said.
“Plenty of caterwauling in there, I figure it’s been a fight. Not that you’re the only one come looking today — the other ran right off. You’d best do the same, I lock up at seven-fifteen.”
He climbed the stairs and listened. Lili; and then a man; and then again Lili. Deformed sounds, lifting and dying, lifting and dying, as if their throats were pooling blood. The sounds left him faint-hearted. He did not dare to knock. Instead, he pushed the packet under the sill and went away.
One of those, the landlady said to herself, turning the key in the lock.
51
NOT UNEXPECTEDLY, Bea’s principal was a dead end.
— Foreign language tutor? Are you out of your mind, when you of all people know better’n anyone we can’t get our guys up to par in their own so-called mother tongue?
— No, Bea said, I was thinking if you still have some connections in that other school where they do French and Latin — where you used to . . .
— Used to, well now I’m here. Better suited as they say. And Bea, from a Commie country, who’s gonna stick his neck out these days?
But it was Harold Bienenfeld who came through.
Laura said, “Harold’s got this old classmate, not a classmate really, a year ahead, but it’s a big accounting firm, does business all over South America and Europe. I’ll see if I can get Harold to ask, all right?”
And four days later: “Turns out they could actually use someone, I’m not exactly sure, from Spanish to French to German . . . something like that. The timing’s right, they’ve just lost one of their translators, moved to London —”
So Lili was in luck. Bea took the business card Laura had given her and placed it on her bedroom dresser. Possibly it portended an interview, and how would Lili present herself, how would she be dressed, how would she speak? The card signified hope.
She emptied two of the dresser drawers and crammed the contents into a third. She removed two rows of clothing still on their hangers and transferred them from the bedroom closet to a narrower one in the vestibule. The kitchen cupboards were newly stocked with more than the usual provisions. Where there had been only Bea, now there would be three. Three in a rabbit hutch? The apartment looked oddly small again. She had presentiments of disorder . . . that stocking dangling from a lampshade, from a picture frame — it couldn’t have been Lili’s stocking. Lili was wrapped too tightly in her sallow skin. Iris’s, then; but Iris was closing down her life. Alone with her father in his house, would she ever again throw a stocking over a lamp?
Bea spent the night on the davenport. Her big bed, with its pristinely fresh sheets and big deep pillows, awaited the visitors. Her back hurt a little from the unaccustomed surface — something hard and relentlessly upholstered. Th
e day ahead was uninviting. She was afraid of Julian — perhaps more than she was afraid of Lili. She was afraid of both of them, and of what she was letting herself in for, of what she must say to Julian. And of what she had done! That small covert conflagration. It was covert, it was private; but was it shameful too, was it only to thwart Marvin, or had she more grievously thwarted Julian? Thwarting wasn’t the same as vengeance, was it, when it was merely her dignity she was avenging? All her life Marvin had treated her badly. And his son had treated her badly, his barbarian son who was a stranger to her, whom she had looked at no more than twice! Looked at, and barely been looked back at. She had never so much as touched his hand.
She woke into an abnormal early light — a filtered glare, as if her window had been transfigured by some dark galactic radiance. The panes were obscured by starry patterns of crystals. Snow! In the street, humps of whiteness at the curbs, the few cars inching cautiously against a beating slant of white wind. Airports shut down, departures delayed, arrival times unknown. Announcement after announcement; much radio static. The queer light gave off a queer odor — the scent of apprehension.
They were expected before noon. It was after midnight when they came. Their plane had been diverted to another city, Lili could not say which, they had been kept on board for hours, then flown to a different city, where they circled and circled, unable to land. It was all extremely confusing, they were extremely tired, they really didn’t want any hot soup, and thank you but please where were they to sleep?
Julian’s feet in his scruffy California sandals were soaked to the ankles. Under her coat (it had a sensible hood) Lili wore a blouse suitable for a country house lawn party fifty years before, flounced at the collar, puffed at the shoulder, and ornamented by a double row of ruffles at the wrist. Long sleeves in rough weather, but what a preposterous pair of sleeves! Could Lili herself have chosen such a costume, this daughter of Bucharest who could speak so many of the languages of Europe? The two of them looked impoverished; they were impoverished. Lili’s pair of worn suitcases, the locks useless, bound with hairy rope. Julian dragging in a stuffed and ponderous duffle bag. Urban nomads, one as outlandish as the other.
Bea led the way to her bedroom. Immediately they shut the door; she heard hushed sibilants; and later, later . . . stifled gasps, broken outcries. Bea had never once shut her bedroom door. What should she have shut it against? Empty air? But these two were, pointedly, man and wife.
The morning was nearly as dark as the night it had left behind. A soundless snowfall had changed, in a few hours, into a haranguing blizzard, pelting the windows with chattering monotony, warning that today too the world outside was going to be closed down — the stores, the offices, the roads, the schools. Viewed from where Bea lay, removed from the amicable mounds of her customary pillows, everything all around had turned unfamiliar, cavelike and dim: a thin crack in the ceiling she had never noticed, the Kollwitz prints freakishly smeary. Her spine felt drilled through; her brain still swarmed with fearsome dream-shreds retreating into oblivion. She had slept hard and wickedly. Her dreams were rife with treacheries.
From a short distance away a rustling and clinking, water running, the kettle’s low breathing, the toaster’s bruising smell: Lili creeping about in Bea’s tiny kitchen. She sat up, unnerved. The table was set, breakfast plates and cutlery; and Julian, huddled over a curl of steam ascending from his teacup, in what had been his father’s place, just where Marvin had infamously presided over the expulsion of his son. The storm went on clamoring, hailstones mixed with sleet. Now and then the drumming of wintry thunder. They were walled in together, Bea and her nephew and his wife.
At three o’clock in the afternoon a false dusk was already deepening into the colors of midnight. The lamps were lit. The day had been given over to a desultory decorum — Lili’s grateful avowals, Julian’s mostly sheepish silence. He yawned; he appeared to brood; he hoarded his thoughts. At times, without provocation, he reddened on either side of his skimpy straw mustache. Was it acknowledgment that the nastiness of Paris was being repaid with Bea’s warm New York bed? But it was Lili who admitted to embarrassment.
“You will forgive my husband,” she said. Again my husband, that supremacy of possession. Or else a restless nervous clinging. “He is so very fatigué, the journey it was so difficult, soon he will be better —”
They had almost exhausted the subject of the storm. There was little more to say, and anyhow the icy violence was starting to recede, making way for flying shrouds of rain. A chorus of scraping shovels rose up from the street. The city trucks were out, salting the roads.
“I suppose,” Bea intervened, deflecting the apology, “I’ll be able to get to work tomorrow. Though maybe not, the way it looks so far. And Lili,” she added dutifully, “when this awful weather’s over, if you’d like to go for an interview, there may be a job for you. A friend tipped me off, it sounds just right.”
The parallel tracks in Lili’s forehead tightened.
“But Julian,” she began, and let it die.
“I hadn’t thought about Julian — I haven’t found anything — actually I haven’t tried, either —” A callous admission. She hadn’t thought about Julian, what he could do . . . what he was good for.
“He wishes to study. To learn.”
“His father mentioned once that Julian was doing science, some sort of science —”
“His temperament goes elsewhere, I think,” Lili said.
They were speaking of him as if he had gone away. Or had turned into a statue, deaf and sightless. All day he had been crouched over a book, remote from the talk. Bea’s quiet sociability — willed, forced; Lili’s anxious pleasantries. There was no intimacy here.
“Then what does he want to do?” Bea asked.
“Not to do. To be.”
But Lili was moving across the room to where Julian sat hunched (Marvin’s chair still, no one else had occupied it since), and wound her thin arms around his neck. Docilely, he pulled her fingers down to his lips, and went on reading. The boy and the woman, Bea saw, were densely entangled. They made an old-fashioned domestic picture: all that was required to complete it was a fireside; or a child. The boy (the man, she corrected herself) had a long strong masculine back. One leg splayed outward, the other was twisted around a rung — a boyish posture; but his nape, arched over the page, was aged. Startled, she caught in Julian an evanescent image of her father in his indolent niche at the rear of the shop; her mild, diffident, accommodating father and his perpetual novel; her unworldly father with his rabbinically bookish stoop. She looked at the boy: a bodily gaze, every pore an eye. A longing struck her — a pang. His head had an unexpected beauty, even in the tender curve of the full chin. His flesh held the weight of his feeling; his appetite for meat, she suddenly knew, was a hunger for feeling. She recognized him as someone she had missed; misjudged; passed over. And she had inflicted on him a pitiless blight. Her hand was as gory as Lady Macbeth’s. Her hand was a guillotine.
“What have you got there?” she called out — in the gray rainlight that chased vertical rivulets down the streaming panes, he seemed unaccountably far. “You’ve had your nose in that same book since morning.” The friendly auntly tone, meant to ingratiate. In Paris he had hated it.
It was a thick volume, like a school text. The spine was black with yellow lettering — or was it gold? She thought it might be her old college anthology, Beowulf to Wordsworth. He had taken it, she conjectured, from the small stand of shelves in the bedroom, where she kept such things: youth’s heirlooms, Leo’s abandoned fountain pen, with its rusted nib, still among them; forgotten.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
It was true: whatever drew him belonged to him and was nothing to her. That sting of compunction, that rise in the ribs — was it regret, was it envy? Envy that there was no one to urge her fingertips into a young man’s mouth? Julian’s long back, his legs. An old woman coveting a boy. The air was swollen with her nephew and his wife. T
heir farness and their nearness filled every corner.
In a resolute instant Lili tore away from Julian’s grip. She held up her palms to Bea: a mendicant’s empty cups. “He carries always many, many books! — heavy! And you see,” she appealed, “how he is like a student always, he must study now in a proper way, in a proper school” — here she wavered, it fled her, she could not bring it out; until at last she came on the thing itself — “théologie.”
“You can’t mean divinity school!”
Impossible for Marvin to suffer such a son. A mistaken shoot grown out of the father’s stony seed.
Julian lifted his head. For the first time — for the first time ever — he turned his narrow eyes on Bea. “Not anything like that, you’ve got me all wrong. I don’t believe any of that stuff, why should I? And it’s all foreign to Lili. All those denominations, maybe it once meant something to my mother, but I’m nothing, and that’s the truth of it.”
“But Lili says theology —”
The Tatar lids blinked. “It’s only a word. Lili knows what I think. It isn’t God I want to think about. It’s why there isn’t any God.”
“There’s no school for that.” But she meant to oblige him; to cosset. Not to oppose.
“Somewhere there is. Or a teacher. Or maybe,” he threw out, “I could found one.”
The last was surely ironical, but good grief, the boy’s head was skewed, he was in search of no-God! And if there was no God, then he was in search of nothing, and how would he live? Marvin in his wisdom had permitted his son the means — yes, yes, own up to it, Marvin’s wisdom, incontrovertible! — and Bea, in all her deviousness, in her wickedness, had immolated it.
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