by David Plante
“And did you then have sex?”
“Often.”
“You weren’t deriding her, I think, but teasing her.”
“No, I was deriding her.”
Nancy thought: he is warning me.
Surprising Nancy, Tim said, “Miriam is dead, and I am alive, and that is everything.”
“Everything,” Nancy said.
“You understand.”
“I think I understand.”
“Well, then I can tell you I feel that though I couldn’t have saved her against death, I should have, somehow. But I didn’t save her.”
“And you blame yourself for that?”
“I do.”
Nancy leaned towards him. “And that’s grief.”
“You know grief?”
“In a way, I do, yes.” She paused. “Yes, I do.”
“For someone dead?”
“Someone I was once involved with. I never understood him. He frightened me.”
“He threatened you?”
“I suppose he did.”
“If I had been there—”
“Thanks, but I think, in the end, he was more threatened than I was.” She spread her fingers out on the edge of the table. “In a way, it’s as though he were dead. He’s the one I grieve for. What you feel about your wife, your feeling you could have saved her though you knew you couldn’t, that’s what I feel toward him—that I could have saved him, though I knew I couldn’t have.”
“You stopped seeing him.”
“Yes.”
“Is your will strong enough?”
“You mean, against my will, will I see him again? I mustn’t, but I do need a strong will.”
“How?”
He was attentive to her with a slight—a slightly seductive—smile. She smiled too. “You tell me how.”
“Learning Greek? Learning to play the violin? Learning symbolic logic? They all require willing oneself to learn.” Now he laughed, and she thought, with surprise: I am actually enjoying this. He said, “Learning all the forms of law?”
They sat back from the table for a waiter to serve them. She asked, “Will you tell me more about your wife?”
“Anything you want to know.”
“She was Jewish?”
“Of course.”
“Where from?’
“Texas.”
“How Jewish was she?”
“Only in that she, from a rich Texan Jewish family, would have married a Jew, no more than that.”
“And you?”
“I would only marry a Jew. And yet I don’t go to temple. I go more often to Anglican services for weddings, baptisms, funerals, memorials. One can’t grow up in England without participating, over and over and over, in Anglican services. I sing out the hymns with the best of them, sing them out with more conviction than an Anglican, none of whom I know actually believes any more than I do. The hymns are simple, so simple and so transparent, and in their simplicity and transparency very beautiful.”
“Very beautiful.”
“Well, if you were to come to London, I’d have you singing full voice in church.”
“I’d like that.”
Then he said, with simplicity and earnestness, “I have to admit I am not a deeply feeling person, but I am honest and open and have no secret desires.”
And for the simplicity and earnestness of his words, Nancy thought she could rely on this man for his honesty, his openness, his having no secret desires. And she knew that he was confessing to her for her understanding, what he would never confess to anyone else. And this occurred to her: he was proposing to her.
As they talked, the light on the ocean lengthened until it appeared to be, itself, an ocean of light.
Tim’s lovemaking was intentional, methodical, and this was all right with her. She had had lovemaking that was out of control, and she was reassured by his control. With careful deliberation, he made sure she was as satisfied as he was. And, after making love, he surprised her by saying, “Thank you.”
He flew back and forth from London to New York to see her and they always stayed in a modest but good hotel. Mr. and Mrs. Green liked Tim, or they told Nancy they did, but she knew they would never invite him to stay with them, as if they considered her relationship with Tim a relationship apart, Tim more than a boyfriend to their daughter, whose independence they had always respected. When she told Tim she was pregnant, he proposed marriage in a very straightforward way, starting with, “Well now—.” She accepted, but she soon realized that to be straightforward was what she too had to be.
This seemed to be his principle: whatever there was in his life that he did not explain needn’t be explained, because it was obvious, and the obvious explained itself. He explained the practicalities she had not quite considered, and he took care of the practicalities.
Nancy wondered if her entire relationship with Yvon had been based on pretension, on the pretentious attraction to, oh, the strange. Tim would have made her aware of that pretension. She wanted now, if not the familiar—for Tim’s world was not familiar to her—the simple, even though rigorously defined. She needed rigor.
Tim wanted the wedding, in New York, to be simple. His parents came from London, and an old friend from Oxford days to be best man. After the wedding Tim returned to London with his parents to prepare, he said, for Nancy, and she, now a married woman, continued to live with her parents as if she were single. She took notes on an article she thought of writing about Henry James.
As Nancy walked around the reservoir in Central Park, she thought about Henry James, and she wondered how she could expand on the so-often-repeated word “everything” in his novels: how so often the consequences of a dramatic conversation rose to a level where one of the characters said, “everything,” though the summation of “everything” was never explained, yet, as James so often wrote, “hung together.”
And, she wondered, what could the word “everything” mean, because, in fact, the word only existed in itself? There was no having “everything” unless you had every single thing in the world. Still, within the world of Henry James, “everything” did “hang together.”
As she entered the living room of her parents’ apartment, she saw them standing by the fireplace, he with a sheet of paper in his hands, a letter, Nancy supposed, because an envelope lay on a rug on the floor. Usually when she came into a room her parents were in, they immediately turned to her and smiled, and often enough her father held out his arms to her for a quick hug, but now they were both concentrating on the paper her father held, and as she approached she saw her mother’s eyes magnified with tears. Alarmed, Nancy asked, “What’s the matter?” but her mother simply looked at her. Her father, with a deep frown, folded the piece of paper and Nancy reached down to the rug for the envelope to hand it to him. He slipped the paper into the envelope, closed the flap, and said, as a fact, “After all, the search has been abandoned,” and he put the envelope into the side pocket of his jacket. In a low voice he said, “We’ll go have dinner now.” Nancy’s mother, her hands to her cheeks, followed him into the dining room. Her father, at the doorway, called Nancy to come, in a low voice.
At the table, Nancy noted that her mother’s eyes were red. Hilda came in with a tureen of soup and placed it on the table, and Nancy’s mother served the soup.
She asked Nancy, “Do you ever hear from that Yvon?”
“I don’t, no.”
“I suppose he was strange.”
“Yes, he was strange.”
“But I liked him,” Nancy’s mother said.
“I did too, I liked him, but he was not for me.”
Her father asked, “And you’re sure Tim is for you?”
“I’m not really sure of anything, Dad, but I think I have a better chance of getting along with a Jewish man.”
&
nbsp; “That’s for you to see.”
Nancy repeated, “That’s for me to see.”
She thought how everything that was said seemed to sound within a vast empty hall.
Hilda cleared away the soup plates and served the main course.
Nancy asked, “What search was abandoned?”
Her mother answered, “For my mother.”
Her father said, “It was no surprise, because we waited so many years to learn what we already knew.”
Nancy tried to keep her voice in accord with the silence of the vast, empty hall. “And you don’t know in what way she died?”
“We tried, we tried,” Nancy’s father said. “And maybe, after all, it’s better that we don’t know. The search is abandoned.”
“How can you bear not knowing how she died?” Nancy asked them.
Nancy’s mother answered, “We bear it because we have no choice.”
After the silent dinner, Nancy, sitting up in bed, tried to read, but she couldn’t, and often dropped the book to her lap and stared out.
“Everything,” she said, just the word, “everything.”
When she knew her parents were in their bedroom for the night, she went to them. Her father was in the bathroom, her mother lying in bed; Nancy lay down next to her and her mother drew her close and Nancy rested her forehead against her shoulder. In his pajamas, her father came from the bathroom and sat on his side of the bed. Nancy moved to get up, but he said, “Stay with us,” and she lay with her head on his pillow, and he lay by her, and by his breathing she knew when he had fallen asleep.
“You should go back to your bed,” Nancy’s mother said.
“Let me lie here a little longer,” she asked.
“A little.”
But her mother reached out to the lamp by her side and switched it off, and Nancy fell asleep with her parents.
In the taxi into London from the airport, Tim looked out of the window at his side and Nancy had the sense that whatever he was thinking about, it was not her.
Finally she asked, “Are you thinking deep thoughts?”
He turned to her slowly. “Deep thoughts? What rubbish,” he said playfully.
And yet she found herself apologizing.
“I was thinking about the champagne, ready for us in the fridge to celebrate.”
She laughed and put a hand under his elbow and leaned closer to him. “That’s thinking deep enough for me.”
He placed an arm across her shoulders and kissed her temple.
Maybe, she thought, he was teasing her.
She expected Tim’s house to have a wide white façade, front steps leading up to a wide black door, with, of course, a brass knocker, and on either side of the door, maybe, pilasters holding up a pediment. The front garden would have grass and, in tubs, shrubs on either side of the steps. There would be an iron gate in a white wall along the pavement and a gravel path to the steps. And the inside shutters of the wide, many-paned windows would be closed, or half closed; she would open them. She expected simplicity and spaciousness, bare, shining parquet floors, and a large mirror above the marble fireplace. She saw what she imagined to be such houses from the taxi.
On a side street in Hampstead the taxi stopped in front of a narrow brick house with narrow windows and a high, stepped gable. An iron scroll-work gate in a low brick wall opened onto a brick pathway and a red front door. Gravel covered what couldn’t be called a front garden. Tim carried his briefcase, followed by the taxi driver, Nancy behind the driver. The driver deposited their two suitcases on the brown-tiled stoop, was paid, and left. Around the red front door were little multicolored glass panes.
Nancy realized that she had known, without having to be told, that Tim could not have afforded the house she had imagined, and that he, who would never apologize, had not described the house because describing it might have sounded like an apology. He would not apologize for himself.
He held the door open for her and she walked down a narrow hall, a stairway at the end, and as she went along paintings on both sides of the hall appeared and disappeared, small paintings in heavy gilt frames: camels and an oasis of palm trees, a veiled woman sitting on a cushion, a pyramid against a sunset.
She turned to Tim, who, having brought the cases inside, was closing the door. She had never before heard herself sound so affected. “What are these lovely paintings?”
“Nothing more, really, than picture postcards.”
“Where do they come from?”
“They’re a collection I’ve been putting together.”
He was being elusive, and so, too, would she be. “Oh.”
He opened double doors, dark and paneled, into the living room, and stood aside for her to enter, and she saw, in a blur, not simplicity and spaciousness, but unexpected complexity and clutter. This couldn’t be Tim’s living room, not the Tim she was married to, the Tim she thought she knew for his personal sense of order. There emerged from the blur a leather Chesterfield sofa and leather armchairs, the kind she imagined were in men’s clubs, and paintings—camels striding across a desert, a moon shining on an oasis, three pyramids of diminishing sizes in a sunset. How odd his taste in art was. Nancy walked slowly around the room and noticed tiered shelves on which were displayed brass water jugs, rows of ancient terracotta oil lamps, small clay or faïence statuettes, dull glass vials, fragments of marble. On the floor was a large Oriental rug, the pile silky, and on a large round embossed copper tray supported by a stand were ceramic bowls patterned in blue and green; hanging over the edge of one was a strand of Muslim prayer beads in red amber with a red tassel. A Scottish plaid throw rug, folded neatly, lay on the seat of one armchair and before the armchair a pouf upholstered with an old embroidery on canvas, a long fringe hanging round the bottom edge.
Tim stood in the middle of the room.
“You collected all of this?” Nancy asked.
“I suppose it’s my way of trying to reproduce the world of my parents in Alexandria before they left.”
“Why did they leave?”
He frowned. “You don’t know?”
She tried to dispel his frown by saying lightly, “I’m afraid I don’t.”
He frowned more. “All Jews were expelled from Egypt.”
“Why?”
Tim was, she saw, disappointed, and she felt that she had revealed something about herself she shouldn’t have, revealed that she was a stupid American who didn’t know history, or so he would think. “Don’t bother your head about that.”
“But I want to know.”
“Leave it.”
“I won’t leave it. I want to know.”
His face tensed. “We arrived in London, refugees, and that’s enough to say. You needn’t know more.”
And she did know him well enough to leave it. For a flash, she wondered if he was putting her in the place where he wanted her to be, and where she would accept being. She didn’t have to know. She pointed to a room beyond the living room, to which double doors were wide open. “What’s in there?”
“My study.”
Still dazed, she went in. Books lined the walls, even on either side of the chimney breast, where there was an elaborate fireplace and, over the mantel, a framed page of Arabic script, black on gold.
She thought she wouldn’t ask what the script meant, but, singling it out by gazing at it, let him assume she had her own appreciation. She said, “Really lovely.”
“Thank you.”
She pointed to a table in the center of the room piled with books, and among the books, standing upright, a gleaming silver case embossed with swirls surrounding small tablets with Hebrew letters in gold and topped with what looked like a delicate crown, within it tiny gold bells. To either side of the crown slender silver posts supported elaborate globes from which hung, all round, more tiny gold bells. Wanting him to
know she was not entirely stupid about Jewish matters, she said, “I’ve never seen a Torah cover like this one.”
“Sephardi. You would be used to Ashkenazi covers.”
She would be as stupid as he wanted her to be about everything, but at the same time she would try to make him think she wanted to know everything he had to teach her, if he wanted to.
“Where is it from?”
“It belonged to my great-grandfather, who was chief rabbi in Aleppo, Syria.”
“It’s too much for me to take in right away, but I will—I shall—take it in, all of it. It’s all so great.”
Nancy thought to herself: make the world as real as real as can be. Then she felt like a fake for thinking this. Holding Tim close to her, she pressed her pelvis against his, but as she did she thought: I’m acting.
She drew away and jerked her shoulders as if dismissing everything, real or unreal, and said, “What about that champagne?”
“Go upstairs and look around and make yourself at home. Our room is the one overlooking the back garden. I’ll bring the champagne up to our room and find you already bathed and in bed.”
“Resting?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “not resting, but wide awake.” And to Nancy this sounded vulgar.
She said, “I’ll be waiting.”
And she lay waiting, as he had asked, in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar bedroom that was not to her liking.
She heard him in the bathroom splash in the bathtub, and heard him sing as he dried himself, and heard a cork pop; and she sat up when, naked, he came into the bedroom, two flutes crisscrossed at their stems in one hand and the open bottle of champagne in the other.
He climaxed, shouting, “Fuck!”
Why did this shock her? It shouldn’t have. He was frank about sex, as he was frank about everything. She wanted to like this frankness. He rolled off her and said, as he always did, “Thank you, darling, for that.”
She sat up and, looking about at the room, said, “I’m going to redecorate this room.”
“You can have this room,” he said, “but not the sitting room or my study. You won’t touch those rooms. Promise?”