Foreign Bodies

by Cynthia Ozick

  when I last saw Julian — it was the night before I left Paris, at that dinner I told you about — he was reading Kierkegaard! So you see where his head is — he has these metaphysical inclinations, how else to say it? It’s made him a bit gruff — he doesn’t trouble about ordinary things. And she looks to be nearly the same — as if being wounded somehow purified her, I can’t exactly explain — it’s something in the way she talks and thinks, not that I got to spend much time with either of them. But it may be that she does him good, and why not let it go at that?

  I hope the New Year brings you some consolation. It must be a comfort to have your daughter with you again.

  As ever,

  Bea

  Jan 17

  Bea: I haven’t got the goddamnedest idea of what the hell you’re talking about. Kierkeguard, what’s that? Sounds like a deodorant, which is to say that the whole thing smells as far as I’m concerned. I’ve stopped payment on the check, so that’s that. I was going to tell Iris what I’d done — I figured she’d be level enough to see the rightness of it. But since she’s come back I’ve had second thoughts. A bundle for her brother for doing nothing, for being nothing — how would she like that, this kid with a lifetime of steady elbow grease behind her? She’s taking Margaret’s death hard, she won’t say the word, at least not when I’m around — she calls it “the accident,” as if her mother could be patched up. And by the way, I’ve got my lawyers right this minute suing the shit out of that so-called Spa and the goddamn bus company, you bet your life they’ll be paying through the nose. And that crackpot letter you sent, it keeps on eating at me, what else could have set her off? I won’t say it’s your fault exactly, maybe I’ve got over that, but look what happened, so what am I supposed to think? — All right, I’ll tell you what I think! It’s taken me a while, I had to get my head cleared, and my God, my poor wife, that bloody scrap of shit in her pocket couldn’t be the only time you wrote her, there had to be other times before — you told her things, you knew things you never told me and you told them to Margaret behind my back, you told her Julian got married over there! You told her things and I didn’t believe her — how could I, nobody believed her, she was sick, it was the way it showed she was sick. The last time I went to see her, didn’t I write you this, they’d stopped the imbecile art therapy and had her doing that cockamamie weaving idiocy, placemats, can you imagine? Margaret always hated such low stuff, she called it Boston Irish table linen. She tried to hide it from me, but I got a good look at one she’d made — they made her make this shit! — all white, with stars in each corner, blue stars with six points, and in the middle a big yellow cross. No, she tells me, it’s not a cross, that just shows how you always think, it’s a plus sign and I put it in on purpose to stand for money. Spite, that’s what they had her spending hours on, that’s their therapy! And while all this was going on you were feeding her things to upset her, about Julian, and that Iris left school, you took advantage of a sick woman! Looking back, if you hadn’t been in Paris I could almost get myself to think you’d actually been out here barging in on my wife in some underhanded way, without letting me know — she said so! She said you’d come to her rooms and saw what she’d been painting, it wasn’t plausible as far as I knew, you were flying straight back to New York from over there, but she kept insisting on it, how could I believe such a story? Especially when you’ve never in your life gone off the beaten path, you’ve been stuck in your godforsaken rut forever. Still, you did make it out to Paris . . . I don’t know, I don’t know, and I’m telling you now, Bea, if I ever find out for sure exactly how much you’ve interfered with Margaret, if somehow or other you did manage to sneak out here and play games with my wife’s brain, you’ll pay for it, don’t ask me how. She was sick but she wasn’t a liar! I’m almost ready to think it’s you who’s the liar, and meanwhile I’ve gathered from Iris that you’ve made a friend of my daughter, she says she likes to be in touch with you sometimes — just don’t you forget I can stop that if I need to. My daughter’s my only shaft of light nowadays, that’s from a hymn or something Margaret used to sing in church when she was a kid, Lead me out of darkest night, Lord my only shaft of light — You’ve probably heard that Iris missed the funeral, it had to be for a reason — I cabled her plenty of notice, I guess she thought she couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t go to the cemetery with her when she fi-nally got home — to see my kid all broken up? Nothing doing. The worst of it is she’s got too much time on her hands, she’s cut out all her old friends, she won’t say why. And on top of everything else she’s had to drop back a year or so toward her degree — while she was out of the picture some competitive creep in the crystallography lab finished up that whiz of an experiment she got started. This guy grabbed the credit for it — dog eat dog, same as in the business world, no different. Iris tells me not to take it to heart, she’ll make up for it next semester. My daughter’s nothing like that boy! She’s always had me for a model, for one thing — though I can’t go on running the business away from the office — it’s how I’ve been doing it — I expect to pull myself together and get going again. What matters is I’ve still got a kid with a future, I’m not worried about her, don’t get me wrong — it’s no good for a girl like that to be holed up in this empty house — she’s got the right idea, she’s mostly out the door and off to the movies, sometimes two a day — it beats me that she can stand it. The Hollywood bug, at her age I imagine they’ve all got it. She says she goes for the music — movie music, who would believe it. If she gets something out of it I can’t complain.

  I try not to think about the boy. The boy’s gone — that’s that.

  Marvin

  57

  WHAT WAS IT? Stratum on stratum, swaddled, a mummy’s windings, sealed as if for a voyage to eternity — what could it be?

  She came to the inmost wrapping and peeled it away. Black blots and spots, some with fragile fishtails, dancing on insect legs along parallel tracks; a marker curved like a scimitar, or rounded like an ampersand’s belly; another resembling a hunchback, or else a swollen comma. Treble and bass. Allegro, legato, sostenuto, sforzando. Leo speaking in tongues.

  On a single unblemished sheet she read:

  The Nightingale’s Thorn

  SYMPHONY IN B MINOR

  by

  Leo Coopersmith

  Thick block of paper. Heavy. Big! What must one call such a stack? A ream? A bale? A quire? (A choir? “Chorus of little people.”) And among all these thousands of notes, no note, no reason, no why, no key to its coming. Minor — a brooding? a belittlement? How minor she had been in his life. A mote, a fleck of dust. Bea minor, is that what he meant? What was she to do with it? What did he intend her to take from it? He had composed it hastily, oh hastily — it was plain, when she’d surprised him in his gaudy lair, that he had nothing in hand. An empty pot. But how could she know this? It might be the quiet work of years; of decades. A language that kept her out, if it was a language at all. Music the universal language, vibrations that speak — what a lie. Words, the sovereignty of words, their excluding particularity, this was language. What was she to make of these scatterings of blotches moving up and down the staff lines like bugs on an escalator? This mutating voiceless Tower of Babel? Foreign matter. She understood nothing. What did he want from her?

  She fanned out the loosened sheets, like giant playing cards, on her broad dining table: they were too many not to overlap. Black blisters bursting out of naked stems. Black balloons on thin sticks. Bottomless black wells. Five stripes: a five-lane highway, small black cars speeding. But silent; silent.

  What did he want from her, when he was certain she had nothing to give? Symphony in Bea minor: one of his acrid little witticisms, like the diabolus in musica that was her crooked toe.

  She had sold off the grand and uprooted its shadow. She was rid of him! And here was the grand restored (what might have come out of it anyhow), its stain on her thrown-out carpet returned in these inky tattoos, her devil’s
exorcism reversed. And yet it was a gift — a kind of gift. Leo’s mind! It was the thing she had hoped for, long ago. She went on picking up one sheet after another, gazing, gazing — she was no better than a dog with its muzzle sniffing at an open book.

  But there was excitement in it, a glorious wilderness under the breastbone, a metronome charging in her temples — those droplets from the ice-mermaid’s tail. Leo burning. Her heart in its cage a foreign body — it had no business stirring up this frenzy, this delirium of knowing and unknowing.

  She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life.

  And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.

  As flies to wanton boys.

  The next morning, against all the odds — her antic young men would soon be sobered into soldiers — she took up King Lear. And instantly the buzzing began all around, punctuated by a single high-pitched yell: Flies, boys! Flies in the wonton soup!

  In the teachers’ lounge afterward, she told Laura, “Would you believe it, I’ve heard from your cousin, and he’s actually written a whole symphony —”

  “What, for the movies?” Laura squealed. “How does that make sense?”

  “For the ages,” Bea did not say. It would have been a comment too like a thorn; and Laura would only laugh.

  Even so, in the long, long war with Leo, wasn’t it Bea who’d won?