Kate contemplated him as he talked decoratively on. One had to acknowledge, even admire, such energy, so strong a will to enjoy, to entertain, even if, as was clearly the case, it was only to entertain himself.
“Giovanna tells me you’re a teacher,” he said unexpectedly, laying down his fork and knife as if her response required his full attention.
“Nothing very exalted, I’m afraid,” Kate said. “Just high school biology.”
“It sounds rather exalted to me,” he said. “I should think it would be rather a beautiful subject.”
Kate glanced at him. “It is, actually. Hmmm…” She noted the sudden haloed clarity of her thought, the detailed vibrancy of her awareness, and concluded she was drunk. Natural enough—she’d certainly been drinking. “I have to admit that I do find it beautiful. Of course, what I teach is very rudimentary—basic evolutionary theory, simple genetic principles, taxonomies, a lot of structural stuff. Pretty much what I learned myself in school. You know, an oak tree, a tadpole, the shape of its growth, the way the organism works…”
“I understand nothing about biology,” he said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing at all…”
“Oh, well. Neither do I, really.” Kate found she was laughing loudly. She composed herself. “I mean, not what’s going on now, all the fantastic molecular frontiers, the borders with chemistry, physics…the real mysteries…”
He rested his chin on the backs of his clasped hands and gazed at her. “What seems so simple to you—a tree, a tadpole—those things are completely mysterious to me!”
“Actually, I’m not being at all—” Was he, in fact, interested? Well, it wasn’t her place to judge. At least he was pretending to be. At least he was—Stop that, she told herself; a conversation was something that humans had. “I mean, I’m not being…Because actually it’s all hugely…It brings you to your knees, really, doesn’t it? You know, it’s really quite funny—there are my students, rows of little humans, staring at me. And there I am, a human, staring right back. And I’m holding up pictures! Charts! Of what’s inside us. And the students write things down in their notebooks. Our hearts are pumping, the blood is going round and round, our lungs are bringing air in and out…Class, look at the pictures. These are our lungs, our kidneys, our stomachs, our veins and arteries, our spleens, our brains, our hearts… There we are, looking at pictures of what’s going on every instant inside our very own bodies!”
“I don’t even yet have it straight. Where any of those things are,” Harry said ruefully. “My kidneys, my spleen, my heart…”
Kate shook her head. “It’s a wonder we can understand anything at all about ourselves…We can’t even see our own kidneys.”
“Ah!” Harry grunted. “So I have recovered, after all.” He summoned the waiter to order for Kate a little chalice of raspberries and scented froth, then sat back to observe as she took the first spoonful. “Extraordinary, no?” he said. “It’s up to you. I’m not allowed.” He smiled briefly and shallowly, then rubbed his forehead. “To tell you the truth, it’s a rather stressful trip for me, always—going back to this little farmhouse of mine. I spent summers there in my childhood…Really, I’m very glad to have had a pretext for stopping here overnight.”
Harsh tears shot up to Kate’s eyes. Fatigue, she thought. “Tell me…”
“Yes?”
“Tell me…Oh—well, tell me, then…Have you known Giovanna long?”
“For many centuries. Our families are vaguely intertwined, though I never met her until I was a young man. There was a party, very grand, and in all the enormous crowd, women in spectacular gowns, I caught a glimpse of a young girl. I remember every detail of that glimpse—the exact posture, the smile, every button on the dress. She was scarcely thirteen. There were eight years between us.”
His hand was resting on the table, three, maybe four inches from hers. “There were?” The cuff of his shirt was very white. She raised her eyes from it to smile at him. “Aren’t there still?”
He sat back and studied her, amusement and sorrow competing in his own smile. “Well, now it’s a different eight years.” He sighed, and signaled for the check.
“Oh, please, let me. You did lunch, and drinks. You’ve taken all this time—”
“Madam,” he said gently. “You will put your purse away for this one evening, please. But will you join me for a last drink in the bar? A digestif. And I will have, if you won’t find it too disgusting, a cigar.”
But the Reitzes were already ensconced again in the bar, and waved them over. Kate glanced at Harry, but he had gone completely unreadable; he had simply disappeared.
Mrs. Reitz slid to one side of her settee and patted the space next to her. Again, there was a scuffle. Harry won, and Kate found herself sitting with Mrs. Reitz, suffocating under a dome of her perfume like a dying bug, while he went off to commandeer a chair.
Well. All right. Fine. And a very good thing it was, actually, that Norman was an electrician! He’d completely rewired her little house. And that at a time when she was barely getting by, even with the money Baker managed to scrape up for the kids.
The waiter was already prepared with a cigar for Harry, undoubtedly in accord with ancient custom. “Here, please,” Mr. Reitz said. “One of those for me, too.”
“Oh, dear—” Mrs. Reitz fluttered toward Kate. “I know men have to have them, but I never get used to them, do you?”
“I never get used to anything—” Kate was startled by her own slightly swaggering tone. “I mean, except for the things that aren’t happening any longer.”
“That’s an interesting way of putting it…” Mrs. Reitz said cautiously.
Good. Kate had frightened her. But heavens! What was her—Why was she so—After all, Harry had stated quite clearly that he was repentant about having snubbed these people before dinner. The girl was slung out sullenly upon a curvy white and gold chair, far above the juvenile sniping of her elders.
“Ooch,” Mr. Reitz said, patting the prairielike region of his stomach. “It’s impossible to speak after such a meal. But, really, have you no good advice for us? Saturday, or Sunday, to Rome.”
“Whichever you choose—” Harry exhaled with pleasure “—you will wish you had chosen the other.”
“Let us be prudent,” Mr. Reitz said. “We will play the early bird. Let us be ready to make our final decision at breakfast. If—” he turned to the girl “—we think we can get up in good time, for a change.”
The girl lifted a long, shining hair from her dress and considered it. “We’ll do our best,” she said.
“I surely do envy you,” Mrs. Reitz said. “This little girl of mine has a talent for sleep. But I can never sleep near the sea at all. It makes me so restless…”
“The sea?” Mr. Reitz said. “Restless? How very original. One is always learning the most surprising new things about one’s spouse! But it’s a good thing then about our room. I must say, I was quite annoyed earlier with the staff. I had my secretary specifically request the view. They swore she never did, but a people which is known for its charm is not often known also for its honesty.”
“I have a terrible time sleeping in hotels, myself,” Harry said. “Unfortunately, I’m always in hotels these days…How did it happen, how did it happen? Oh, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that it’s the same person who has lived each bit of one’s life. Yes, an hour or two of sleep, and then I’m up again, wandering around all night. In fact, I’d best go up now and try to get some sleep before I lose my chance.”
Kate attempted to smile pleasantly. “I think I’ll go up now, too.”
“And how is your room, my dear?” Harry asked.
Kate looked at him. Why hadn’t she just gone directly up after dinner?
“Good heavens, yes, where is my brain!” he said. “Glorious. Of course, you said—glorious.”
He did in fact lie in his room for an hour or so, letting images of the girl play over his nerves. Her exquisite throat, the curve of her che
ek…the clear, poreless skin, so close in color to the brows, the lashes, the light, long hair…her startling greenish blue eyes. She was clever about clothes, obviously—that mother surely hadn’t chosen the dress, simple, and stylishly long, stopping just at narrow shins. On her feet she wore elegant straw sandals.
When the buzzing of the girl in his head grew unbearable, he would convert it into thoughts of the astonishing Russian sleigh bed he had come across in an antique store that he would pass by again on his way to the farmhouse tomorrow. Things, things—at his age! But it seemed that age only increased his appetite to acquire.
The shop was one of several in the area he returned to often, ostensibly to pick up an item for one client or another. These places sometimes came into possession of surprisingly good pieces—occasionally an object that perhaps would have been consigned to a museum had it not, fortunately, fallen into ignorant hands, to be rescued then by him.
He had bought the most fetching little Madonna at one of them on his last trip. He noted the bed at the time, but the Madonna had simply absorbed all his attention, until he got her settled into the right spot. Only then did he begin to remember the bed—its fluent maple curves, its allusion to careless pleasure…This time he would buy it for certain. Assuming it was still there! Oh, why hadn’t he called weeks ago, when he realized how badly he wanted it?
But the problem remained: Where to put it—Rome? Paris? Both places were small, and he already had remarkable beds in each…
He could move one of them out here, to the farmhouse. But that was the point. He always meant to be emptying the place out so he could sell it. And yet, each time he saw it…Those summers, when he was ten, eleven, twelve…Those were happy years, insofar as years could be said to be happy. Years filled with sensations so potent they seemed like clues to a riddle.
The place wouldn’t bring much of anything, once the money was divided between himself and his surviving brother. It was a nuisance; it would simply eat cash if it were to be kept from falling to bits. His brother, and his own sons, one in Istanbul, one in London, showed no particular interest in it. Only he, only he was enslaved by the memory of the sun on the leaves around the door, the way the fruit tasted in the morning…
It was dark when you entered. As you opened the shutters, grand, churchly prisms turned everything in their path to phantoms. The cool aroma of the waxed stone floors blended with the smell of sun-warmed herbs. First the big room, then the room they’d used informally as a library, then the huge kitchen…At the long wooden table, almost transparent in the light falling from the high window, sat the girl. Water dripped slowly somewhere, onto crockery or stone. He turned, readjusting his pillow. Perhaps he had slept for some minutes.
The bar was now empty except for a sprawling group of five or six men and a woman, which was scaling peaks of drunken happiness—a TV crew, the waiter told him; they had filmed a commercial nearby that day. One of them was pounding away on a small piano in a corner, and the others sang along, loudly and terribly, arms around shoulders. Harry sipped a cognac and regarded them with melancholy affection. They were still young, almost young. For an instant he could see, as if it were incandescently mapped, the path of years that lay ahead of each of them, its particular sorrows, joys, terrors…He’d have one drink, and return to his room.
When the girl appeared in the doorway, he restrained himself from jumping to his feet. For a moment he hadn’t understood that she was real.
She approached; he stood and bent over her hand.
“I thought I might find Mother down here,” she said vaguely.
Wordlessly, he pulled out a chair for her.
“Huh. Well, I guess Franz has learned to sleep with his eyes open,” she said. “May I have a drink, please?”
He was glad for the excuse to walk over to the bar and stand there for some moments while glasses were warmed and cognacs were poured; his brains were in such a clamor that he’d hardly been able to hear what she had said, let alone make sense of it. The TV crew was now singing an American popular song, stumbling over the words and filling in with la-la-las. Harry had read somewhere recently about the woman who’d written the song and recorded it. She’d grown up in a ghetto, he recalled, impoverished; the song was the story of her life.
The girl stared down at the little candle on the table, in an aureole of her own silence, impervious to the racket of the TV crew. After a few minutes he dared to speak. “Do you go to school in Zurich?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Fortunately not. I’m at a boarding school in the States. One more year, and I’m free.”
Tears kept coming to his eyes, as if he had been broken open; impressions, almost visible, were floating up around him, released from the hidden world by an enchanted touch: damp leaves and earth, a dappled meadow—treasure no doubt collected by his yielding and ravenous childhood senses, and stored. Every once in a while, some magic girl could unlock it. Then how to keep aloft in the radiant ether?
“Actually, I’ve hardly lived in Zurich at all,” she said. “Mother married Franz when I was eleven, and they shipped me off to school when I was thirteen. I spent summers with my father, anyhow.”
“And where does he live, my dear?”
“Oh, he’s still near Dallas. Bossing a bunch of cows around. He’s got some new kids…” She propped herself up at the table on her elbows, her long, delicate forearms together, her chin in her palms. “Mother and Franz! What a joke.”
He smiled gently. “It’s quite mysterious, what attracts one human being to another…”
“Not in this case,” she said. “I mean, did you notice the size of his bank account?” She frowned, studying the small flame in front of her. “So…Mother said you have places all over.”
“Really,” he said. “All over?”
“But—I mean, where do you live?”
“Here and there. Like you.”
Her green-blue gaze lingered on him, then withdrew. “She said you’ve got a title, too.”
“Oh, lying around in a drawer somewhere.”
She poked at the soft wax of the candle for a few moments, allowing him to watch her. “So, why don’t you use it?” she asked.
“Evidently it’s not necessary!”
She glanced at him quizzically, then smiled to herself and poked again at the candle. “Okay…Well, your turn…”
“My turn…All right…Well, why off to school at such a tender age?”
“Want to guess? Or want me to tell you.”
He was sorry he’d raised the question. Any number of scenarios, all of them sordid, sprang to mind.
“I bet you can guess.”
“No,” he said. “You needn’t—”
“Because Mother thought I was having an affair. With my piano teacher.”
How many more years was his heart going to stand the sort of strain to which he was subjecting it now? “And were you?” he asked, against his will.
“Not exactly. You know. I’d go over to his apartment after school with my schoolbooks and my sheet music and my little uniform. Mother loved it that I had to wear a uniform, obviously. She’d still have me in anklets and hair ribbons if she could. And one day Mr. Schulte sort of wrestled me off the piano bench onto the floor. I mean, he left my uniform on. I guess he liked it, too. And then we’d work on Brahms. So that’s sort of how it went every Tuesday. He hardly ever spoke to me, except for, you know, you should practice more, watch the tempo here, don’t hold your wrists like that, this is legato…” She glanced at Harry speculatively, then sat back demurely with her drink.
How pitiable she was. Her bravado, her coarseness, her self-involvement—completely innocent. Perhaps never again would she be so dazzled by the primacy of her own life. “Was he—”
“The first, uh-huh. Not Franz, if that’s what you were thinking. No slummy boys in an alley…”
It was not what he’d intended to ask. No matter. He closed his eyes and listened to her clear voice; behind the shining veil, she con
tinued to talk.
“…The sad fact is that Mother had this humongous crush on Schulte, it was totally obvious. He was always sort of kissing her hand and, you know, gazing at her with big, soulful eyes…” The girl sighed languorously. “Actually, I have to admit he was kind of attractive, in a creepy kind of way…”
One of the singers had toppled off her heights of drunken joy and was now crying; a few of the others were embracing her, mussing her hair, singing into her ear, and attempting to rock her to the music, such as it was. The girl directed an abstracted stare of distaste in their direction, then looked away, obliterating them. The word “kidney,” throbbing on a flat, stylized shape, hung for an instant in Harry’s mind. Then the girl dangled her empty glass by the stem and Harry caught his breath, seeing her in her flouncy bedroom, dangling a pen, with which she was about to record her most intimate feelings. A gilt-edged diary, a heart-shaped lock…
“Are you happy enough, my dear?” The question leapt urgently from him.
“Enough for what? Oh, well. It lies ahead, right?”
“It does,” he said passionately, tears coming again to his eyes. “It does…”
An expression of pure derision passed quickly across her face.
“Ahead or behind,” he amended, and the candle between them received a tiny smile. “Ahead or behind. That you can count on…”
Just beyond the cordial room, the world was whispering. Harry—it had been a long time since he had thought of himself as anything other than Harry, though what off hand joke or misunderstanding had landed him with the name he no longer quite remembered—closed his eyes to let the shimmering air, the faint ruffling of the sea from outside the open windows reach him, embrace him. “It’s a remarkable night,” he said. “Shall we walk for just a bit?”
She sighed and sat herself up in her chair, throwing her hair back over her shoulders again.
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 79