Rough Strife

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Licking their cones, they walked together slowly toward cooler air. They were nearing the river.

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you,” began Caroline. “I hope you won’t be hurt, or think I haven’t enjoyed all the things we’ve done, because I have. It’s simply that…I really did just get here. I need some time to myself. To wander around a bit, on my own.”

  “I had a feeling you were working up to this.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, I can read your mind. Oh no, it’s nothing mystical. I can see it on your face. I knew you wanted ice cream. I bet you never played cards. You wouldn’t have a chance, even with all your math. Everything you think is written right there.”

  “I certainly hope that isn’t so. And anyway, I can play chess.”

  “Well, I can’t.” He bit aggressively into the cracker of the cone. “Okay, when did you want me to disappear?”

  “Come on, Ivan, I didn’t say it like that.”

  “It amounts to the same thing, however you say it. So, when did you intend this moratorium to begin?”

  Watching him attack the cone with feral motions, she was suffused with irritation. “Soon, maybe. Maybe right after we finish our cones. For a few days.”

  “It’s your script, baby. Whatever you say. What do you call a few days?”

  She stared. So he could talk that way too. A stripping away of civility to show the nakedness beneath, or the opposite, a cloak of brashness. Either way he tantalized. Were she an intimate of his she would hear such strange and jarring notes, atonal music. She would know him in his nakedness and in his masquerades.

  “Do you want to call me on Friday?” she asked, suddenly frightened. It was Tuesday.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  They reached the breezy promenade along the river and stood facing each other like adversaries, each with a hand resting on the balustrade high above the water. Caroline had thrown away the empty tip of her cone but Ivan was eating to the very bottom.

  “You could work on your outline,” she said with a faint laugh.

  “Don’t tell me how to spend my time.”

  “Sorry.”

  They moved a step farther apart. The breeze gathered force, blowing their hair in their faces. Caroline’s full skirt whipped about her legs. The sun was descending for a cool evening. Already, passing women spread dark knitted shawls about their shoulders. A red-haired boy speeded by on a bicycle, nearly grazing them. As they each drew back the boy bared his teeth and laughed devilishly.

  All at once, with a shake of the shoulders like casting out evil spirits, Ivan recovered his good humor. He moved toward her. “It’s too bad you’re doing this right now, because actually, I was planning to ask if you’d like to come over for a drink.”

  “Were you?”

  “Yes,” Ivan said. “Come on, I’ll show you my place.”

  Caroline’s cheeks smarted, red in the wind. What had rushed through her as desire was molten rage. So he took it as a challenge. Well, she would not have him that way. No, love was not love that crept out of hiding through threats or ultimatums. If they were to duel, let it be with the grace of swords, with swoops and lunges, not the fists and hatchets of gladiators.

  “I’m not in the mood any more. Your timing is off.”

  “Oh, do you require everything perfectly measured out and timed, everyone lined up like horses at the starting gate, mathematically precise? I don’t know, then, whether I can…run in your track.” It was not even sarcasm; he was soft-voiced as ever, and smiling straight at her. There was a proper lunge. And she might have negotiated a worthy response, might even have smiled back and conciliated, except Ivan had sliced so near the bone, his thrust slipping right into the groove of old wounds, of others who said the same thing—only not as succinctly and never on such short acquaintance. How did he know? Undeniably, he had contacts—he had warned her the minute they met.

  In pain and shock, with all the civility of stomping fists, she muttered, “You wanted the last word, you had it,” and walked off quickly, her head bent against the wind. Tears clamored behind her eyes but she wouldn’t let them out.

  She set out aimless and free the next day, Ivan’s absence from her side a palpable relief. His long legs kept an almost martial pace, while she liked to amble. She could look now, or ignore, with unaided eyes; childishly she prized her ignorance simply because it was her own. She walked along the river again. Surely she could appreciate what a river had to offer without his refinement of vision. Today the water was black with a salacious tinge of green toward its banks, and sluggish, as befitted a river that had witnessed so much human intransigence. Against the flat milky sky jutted the castellations of an old fort where Renaissance Popes had fled for their lives. She didn’t need Ivan to find that out: the stories were right in her guidebook. With Ivan she wasn’t permitted to display a guidebook.

  She stared her fill in the windows of expensive shops. Ivan, with fingers that could circle her arm, had dragged her from shop windows. He scorned the consumer economy and had a dread of being taken for a tourist. During the year he had bought ready-made clothes in Roman department stores, and with his dark hair and coloring he could easily pass for a native. How he loved to examine the menu in a restaurant and cast a nonchalant, compatriotic glance at the waiter, a tableau inevitably ruined when he opened his mouth to order. Harmless vanity.

  She was an unabashed alien. She tried on dresses in an overpriced boutique on the via Frattina and ate in a place where waiters in red bolero jackets guarded the door with napkins over their arms. Ivan wouldn’t be caught dead here, she thought slyly as one of them pulled out her chair. All day she played tourist—a relief to assume so general and commonplace an identity—and hours later, coming home, she smiled at the children on her square, who ran about in summer darkness till the moon was high, then yawned, sallow-cheeked, in the morning. Into her dreams crept parochial images of ruins, pasta and anchovies and coins shimmering inanely at the bottom of fountains.

  When she woke she wondered, still in the thickness of sleep, what she and Ivan would do today. She raised herself to her elbows. Through the half-open shutters the blue trapezoid of sky was lit with dusty gold sunshine. There would be no Ivan today, she remembered, maybe never. She herself had dismissed him, in a fit of perversity or pique. No, pride. The p’s of those brittle words popped at her insolently like mockers. The day was a sightseer’s delight, but Caroline was her specific self once again, set afloat like a lone particle in space. Queasy, she drank tea in sidewalk cafés. She shivered in the sun, grew dizzy walking in the Borghese Gardens, and finally, in the square of St. Peter’s, tilting her head back to look at the dome, was hit straight in the exposed, tender throat by panic like a six-foot wave.

  She sat down on a bench, relieved that it had risen and crested. For she knew panic; once visible and labeled, it could take its finite course. When she was fifteen years old she came home from school to find her mother lying on the couch in the living room. Day after day. It was strange to see. She had always been energetic, buoyed up by a life devoted to propriety at home and good works abroad. But now she simply lay on the couch. At the beginning she would read, then she would listen to the radio, and then she did nothing. Caroline started cooking without being asked. She took over the laundry in the evening and the shopping on Saturdays. Her father was silently grateful, withdrawn, possibly embarrassed. He was a prim man who taught earth sciences at the Milton Academy; his mind was safely fixed on inanimate rocks of arcane stratified ages. Even then, Caroline understood that the fleshly present was almost more than he could bear, and she sometimes marveled that she had been conceived at all. So no one spoke the name of the illness; it was a house where unpleasant things were never spoken out loud. She was sorry for her mother, and kind, but as far as she knew, sickness was a passing thing; there were no ugly symptoms, and there were pills. Surely she would get up again soon, the swishing, clicking noises of her fine admi
nistration would return. Caroline’s attention was elsewhere.

  She had become enchanted by mathematics, a Minotaur’s cave of proliferating abstraction whose paths led to ever vaster but more intricately divided spaces, world without end. In excitement, she pursued the vanishing thread. The teachers gave her special projects because she had gone through the textbooks on her own, over the summer. They sent her to hermetic volumes on dusty back shelves, books about Fourier’s Series, books with lushly complicated repeating patterns and sine curves that set up corresponding undulations of excitement in her head. One special teacher took her aside and initiated her into the secrets of spherical geometry, where—wonder of wonders—parallel lines met, on the rounded surface of the earth. And then, late Friday and Saturday nights, on the very couch where her mother’s strength leaked out afternoons, the editor of the school paper, a slim talkative boy of astounding verbal agility, took off his plain silver-rimmed glasses to reveal liquidy blue eyes, slipped a hand under her sweater and under her skirt while her parents lay chaste and dreaming upstairs, and went home leaving her flushed and wakeful, tossing irritably in the dark. There was plenty to claim her imagination.

  But one day she experienced a flash of knowledge of the kind that seems to come from nowhere, from the empty cavities of the body, yet has come from everywhere. And immediately from being a flash it congeals into the most obvious truth, the essential truth, around which our lives will bind themselves thenceforth like scar tissue around a wound. She knelt beside the couch where her mother slept and saw that the color of her skin was cement, and her yellow hair was no longer springy but sagging; even her eyelids and her lips had tiny wrinkles, and her cold hands were colder than ever. She shook her; it was urgent that her mother wake and acknowledge her, Caroline. The eyes opened with reluctance. In them, before they fixed on place and time and Caroline kneeling, was the knowledge. Quite plainly, Caroline saw death, which was no more than a soft, pleading terror coating her mother’s eyes. It was not the terror that was so painful to see but the softness.

  “What’s the matter?” her mother asked. “You’re staring at me.”

  She broke her stare. “Nothing. How are you? Do you need anything?” But she wanted to burst out in shamed laughter, as if she had said a gross and stupid thing. What could she fetch her now that would make any difference? That stern shape was going away from her. Looking closely, she saw that her mother was much thinner, thinning out every day, discarding cells like cargo from a sinking ship, removing herself gradually to lessen the shock. Going, going, gone—evaporating like a movie ghost. Being a lady in the eyes of her neighbors and teaching a daughter to be the same had been a consuming vocation. And now she was consumed. By sixteen Caroline was gritty; she had thought her mother’s era of usefulness was over. She had even finished rebelling against her severity of outlook, and they had made a tenuous peace. Yet senselessly, as though she were an infant, it suddenly appeared that all rightness and balance came from the skeletal figure on the couch. Losing her, she would be adrift.

  So it was that she became acquainted with panic, living with it nine months. For as long as it takes to make a baby, she labored to free herself of her mother. At the end she had the illusion that her labors enabled her mother to die. And she herself was delivered as well, of her panic. So that years later when her father’s eyes softened over with terror, she could suffer the panic to abide in her for as long as it took. And the bearing of it and the ridding herself of it came easier, like a second baby.

  But Ivan! A stranger, no blood tie, what had he ever done for her or given her that the loss of him should be such an ordeal? Some accomplishment, she groaned. Some love, to be distinguished by the degree of pain it could cause. She despised people who doted on the sources of their misery.

  When night fell she bought a loaf of bread and a liter of wine to take upstairs, and she sat on the floor trying to drink herself to sleep. There was not even a radio, and the square below was inexplicably quiet. “They have all gone into the world of light,” she murmured, and slipped naked into bed. Now, what had he found repellent about her? In the dim light from out the window she touched her face with her hands as if something grotesque might have sprouted there without her knowledge, as if she might resemble the small gargoyle thrusting from the solitary lamppost below. She did not imagine love, or Ivan’s body against hers. What she needed seemed, monstrously, to have gone beyond the consummations of touch. She wanted to be enveloped even more thoroughly, obliterated. She wanted to subside to something he could carry hidden in his flesh like a mother kangaroo. These images filled her with self-disgust. In a fury she bolted upright and threw a pillow across the room. She had a powerful arm. It hit the half-filled wineglass, which fell over and shattered. As in a Jewish wedding, she thought bitterly. He had shattered the glass by proxy. Her innocence gone, the temple destroyed. She had been pierced by the cruel, mocking shafts of love.

  He called the next morning. She leaped from sleep to the phone, to bask in the voice coming at her like pure warmth. His voice had a low, narrow range and a huskiness at the edges that might break into a laugh at any moment.

  “Well, can you?”

  “I’m sorry. Could you—I didn’t hear what you said.” Her cheeks flushed.

  But Ivan said sharply, “Are you alone?”

  Aha! She could see his dark head pulled back warily, his pupils crouching behind the lenses. Was she alone! She had barely a living relative.

  “What do you think? At this hour, God! What time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty. I’m sorry I woke you. Cory and Joan are having a party tonight. A sort of farewell. Joan tried to get you all day yesterday. Where’ve you been?”

  Caroline leaned back in bed, crossed her legs and began to smile. She would have him yet; she could almost feel him on the tips of her fingers. “Out.”

  “Well, anyway, do you want to come?” he went on. “About nine. We could have dinner first.”

  “Sure. I don’t have any pressing engagements. But listen, Ivan—” She paused, shocked at herself, and plunged on. “Before I see you again I have to tell you something.”

  “Well?”

  “Okay. I had a really bad day yesterday, and I’d like to know…is this a—a love affair or what? I’m not the subtle type. I need to know what’s going on.” Again she colored, but he couldn’t see her.

  There was a wait. “What do you want it to be?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “Well, I should think it was obvious, what I want.”

  “Obvious! It’s not obvious at all,” she cried. “If that’s your idea of obvious I’d like to see what you think is confusing. If anything is obvious, it’s that you don’t know what you want.”

  “This is something we should discuss in person.” She could hear his relief, and even a tinge of jubilation. The laugh was poised and ready to break out. Conniving lazy bastard. She would have him, all right, but she had had all the labor of it.

  “Caroline.” It was a voice that could tease like a probing finger. A shiver rose through her. “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Do you have your haughty look on, you know, your Greta Garbo look?”

  “You’re vile.”

  “Ah. I’ve wondered,” he said cheerfully, “what sort of sweet nothings you’d murmur.”

  “I’m not at that point yet.”

  “Believe me, I’m not taking anything for granted.”

  “Oh, please,” she cried, “let’s not start all over again. This could go on forever, till we’re too old.”

  “You’re right. I submit.”

  “I don’t want you to submit,” she cried even louder. “I want you to…want.”

  “I want, goddammit. Is that what you want to hear? I want. I want.” It was the first time she had heard him so angry. His anger was hard, like varnished wood.

  “But what are you mad about? Is it so awful to say that?”

  “I guess it
is. For me.”

  “Well, I’m glad you called, anyhow.”

  “I could come over right now, and bring you breakfast.”

  “No,” she said quickly, looking at the broken glass, the stained rug. “I have to straighten up the apartment and take a bath.”

  “Oh, I’m not fussy,” said Ivan.

  “No.” She laughed. “I want you to suffer.” She might as well laugh, if that was how he was going to be. He was funny, after all.

  The party was supposed to be held on the roof where they had met, but a heavy gray sky foreboded rain, so it was held in the apartment below, Joan’s until Cory moved in. Caroline and Ivan walked there, singing, from the restaurant. They had drunk a good deal at dinner. As he pressed the door buzzer, Ivan slipped his fingers inside the waistband of her skirt; she retorted that he was fresh, and they were laughing like fools as Cory opened the door.

  “Come on in,” he said. “I see you two are already in the party spirit.”

  “Saluti,” said Caroline, stepping in and pulling Ivan after her. Raising an imaginary glass, she looked around. “Do you still keep your vegetable genitals hanging up? They were hung so well.”

  Cory paled. He was a blond, cherubic young man, younger than Ivan; as in poetry, the roses fled from his cheeks. Ivan soothed him, then moving on, he placed Caroline against a wall, leaned up close and kissed her. “You frighten people,” he whispered, grinning with a kind of pride.

  “But do I frighten you? That is the question.”

  “Not in that way, no.”

  “How, then?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  He released her and walked into the crowd. As she followed, she marveled that they were here at all, in this fragile ambience of transients having a last fling. Why were they not back in her place, since that was all they could think of anyway? Ivan brought a piece of pungent cheese to her mouth. She opened her lips, he slipped it between her teeth and she understood why. Weeks of tantalizing. It was all part of the act, an extended prologue, and Ivan a lavish, leisurely producer, a Cecil B. De Mille of the boudoir. “My vegetable love should grow vaster than empires, and more slow.” Never had she encountered a virtuoso in the prolonging of desire: mostly they were eager to prove themselves at consummation. An uncommon lover, possibly, but also uncommonly reluctant. She touched his leg surreptitiously and he brushed her shoulder with his in response.