East Into Upper East (38 page)

“Oh great,” said Claire; and then: “You haven't been to your apartment yet, have you?”

“No, I came to see you first.”

They moved around each other like pugilists, Claire trying to hide her face and Madeleine to get a better look at it. At last Claire said, “Why don't you sit down, you're making me nervous.”

Madeleine sat down in the center of a graceful little sofa; she occupied almost all of it, for she was big and sat with her thighs apart. Claire stood by the window as though there were something interesting happening in the building opposite. She said, “What do you feel like—spaghetti? Chinese? Or we could just go to Rami's. It's up to you.”

Madeleine said, “Why don't you turn around and let me see your face?”

Claire kept on looking out the window. After a while, she said: “I fell.” And after another while: “Leave it; forget it.”

Madeleine went over to her. She made her turn so that she could study her face. There was a cut over the cheekbone, a large dark bruise around one eye. The way Claire looked at her through this bruise brought a sob welling up in Madeleine's chest. To stifle it, she pressed Claire against herself, and they stood close together, trembling as with one body.

When she let Claire go, Madeleine spoke sensibly: “We can't go on this way. It's not as if it's just you and he now—I'm here too. And I'm not going to sit by and watch all this. I can't bear it.”

Claire's disfigured face jeered at her: “You can't? Then what will you do? What do people do when they can't
bear
something?” She gave a dry laugh: “They bear it.” But next moment she changed to a much lighter tone; she said, “I really did fall—all right, don't believe me, but that's what happened. All he did was throw a statue at me and it got me—here—and then he was coming after me and I ran and slipped and hit my face against the table.”

“What statue did he throw at you?”

“Oh, just that soapstone Buddha you have—” After a pause she said, “Yes, it was in your apartment because he's staying there. Only for a while, Mad, as long as you don't need it. Because it's nicer for a boy, isn't it, to be on his own sometimes and not have his mother fussing at him all the time . . . Of course I'll have it cleaned up, you know how messy boys can be—and in fact, that's what the fight was about yesterday.” She laughed, as at a not unamusing incident: “I was trying to get him to let Teresa in to clean, and he wouldn't. He's getting to be really possessive about your place, Mad. He really likes it,” she assured her in a bright voice, as at something to be pleased about.

Madeleine persuaded Claire to return to the country with her the same night, which was a Thursday, a day earlier than usual. They had several flawless days together. They stayed mostly outdoors where everything was in full summer bloom. Madeleine watered, weeded, and tried to take the scum off the pond, while Claire sat near her in a garden chair, reading and ruminating. Katze chased birds and squirrels. For hours Madeleine and Claire hardly spoke, but then there were moments when they had so much to say that Claire flung aside her book and Madeleine sat on the grass, leaning against Claire's chair. They remembered their schooldays and beautiful summers like this one, and how they had gone to some romantic spot for a picnic and had looked up at the sky and felt the earth pressing against them through their light frocks. They had spoken of their ambitions and plans, which had been wide open, infinite. Claire was going to be an actress, she was the most talented of their group and also one of the prettiest, so that many girls had wanted to be her friend. Often Madeleine had had to sit dumbly on the outskirts of their circle, with no one taking notice of her; so that when Claire spoke of those years with joy, Madeleine thought secretly how much better it was now that there were only the two of them in her fragrant garden with birds chirping around them, sparrows and swallows, and not excited, jealous girls.

When Claire talked about the past and the people in it they had known, she made it all so amusing and alive that Madeleine exclaimed: “You
should
have been an actress!”

Claire shrugged, smiled—a little melancholy but proud, too, of the talent she had had. Then she said, “Maybe, if I hadn't been a fool and got married to a fool.” Her face hardened as always at the
mention of her ex-husband: “He couldn't stand it that I did anything better than he.
He
had to be the one always, no one else. I tell you, Mad, he had a huge personality problem—still has. This is his latest.” Clouds had floated over the sun, she frowned at the sudden shadow and chill and said, “Let's go in.”

But Madeleine pressed her back closer against Claire's legs. Absently, still frowning at her own thoughts, Claire let her fingers play over Madeleine's crop of hair. “Bobby must have written to him,” she said. “I don't know what he wrote—he didn't even tell me about it, but good Lord, a boy has the right to write a letter to his own father, I sincerely hope.” She stopped, and took her hand from Madeleine's hair. Madeleine waited breathlessly for her to put it back, but Claire was by now engrossed in her own indignation: “So I have this letter from him saying on no account can Bobby come to stay with them in Geneva, going into this long thing about his boys' school exams—his boys! As if Bobby isn't! But he's never understood Bobby; never. He's just not fit to understand any personality more complex than those vapid kids he has with his little Swiss housewife—oh, they're okay, I suppose, quite nice if you happen to care for white mice, but nothing, I tell you, nothing compared to my Bobby.”

Madeleine looked up at the sky clouding over. “Maybe we should go in.”

“It'll be an eternal mystery to me where Bobby gets his looks from. Don't you think he has
star
looks? Really stunning? Those eyes—and his physique, Madeleine, his shoulders—you can't deny that he's incredibly handsome, you can't deny it, can you? . . . You don't like him, that's why you're not saying anything.”

“I said
yes
!”

“No you did not; you said nothing. Because you're against him, like everyone. Is it any wonder that he is the way he is, with the whole world against him, including his own father?” She pushed Madeleine aside so that she could get up. She went into the house and didn't look back when Madeleine called after her. Madeleine stayed sitting on the ground, tearing up clumps of grass with dandelions in them and crushing them inside her fist.

By the time she followed, Claire was busy pottering around the kitchen. Claire said at once: “I'm fixing dinner tonight—I'm making my pesto sauce, and you just go inside and put your big feet up. Go on now.”

Claire's cooking was much better, more subtle, than Madeleine's, so that night they had a delicious meal for which Madeleine opened one of the special bottles of wine still left from her father's cellar. Afterward they stayed in the living room, dark and crowded with old family furniture and family photographs and an oil painting of a very early ancestress in a mob-cap; there was a rosewood piano that Madeleine's mother had played, with her music still lying on top. Madeleine sat on a hard leather settee where her father used to take cat-naps behind his newspaper. Now it was Claire who squatted on the floor, with her back resting against Madeleine's legs; and the moon shone in through the open windows between the lined velour curtains they had left undrawn.

“You're not like me,” Claire was saying. “You've always been self-sufficient. You haven't needed people.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” said Madeleine.

“Not in that way,” Claire insisted.

“What other way is there?” Madeleine said. She knew Claire was hinting at her relationship with the philosopher, so she said: “For all his talk, in the end it came to the same thing. It was all personal. He manipulated us, just like a lover with a lot of mistresses.” Claire reached up her hand and Madeleine grasped and held on to it. She swallowed as though there were a painful obstruction to what she went on to say: “He made us believe it was all for a higher cause, for his philosophy, for a better world . . . Yes, a better world for
him
,” she sneered, making herself more bitter than she really felt. “He's the only one who got anything out of it.”

“But you cared for him; you did care for him.” Claire gave Madeleine's hand a little shake, to admonish her that it had not been all for nothing.

“Of course I did; we all did; that's what he relied on. Making us his slaves—I don't only mean working for nothing
and
giving our own money: he never had any poor disciples, he couldn't afford them—but chaining us to him by our feelings, that's what's so horrible, that he made us his slaves by what was best in us.”

Madeleine was shaken through and through—physically through her strong body, and through all the fortifications she had built up around her memories of the past. But consolation was immediate, for there was Claire and their hands were intertwined.

“Come sit beside me,” Madeleine said. “Don't sit on the floor—
he was always doing that, making us get down on the floor at his feet. And of course we liked to do it, we
loved
it. I know what you want to ask me.”

Claire had come to be with Madeleine on the leather settee; they were side by side, chastely holding hands while the moonlight streamed in on them.

“No, I never slept with him,” Madeleine said. “It was all on a much higher plane—laugh if you want; I feel like laughing myself, now . . . But then of course I took it dead seriously. It made me proud; exalted, if you know what I mean, that I was
overcoming
myself. That was part of the philosophy, overcoming yourself. It wasn't always easy, I tell you. I spent a lot of time with him, in intimate proximity, and he was a very attractive man, sexually attractive . . . Sometimes it was physical torture. But the worse the torture the better I felt—that I was doing this for him. I thought everyone else was doing it too, and it was only afterward that I found out he was sleeping with people right and left. Of course only the better looking ones.” She was silent; her face sagged.

After a longish pause, “I think you're nice looking,” Claire said. “I'm not just saying it, it's true . . . Not in a conventional way, not just silly-pretty, but you have real character in your face. That's because you
are
a real character; a really kind good person.” And moved by her own words, Claire leaned toward her friend and kissed her cheek.

Madeleine burst out, “Thank God I have you now; oh thank God.” And then she threw everything to the wind—all calm, restraint, the good-girl way they were sitting side by side—she put her arms around Claire and began to kiss her hair, and her face all over, impetuously raining down kisses that sometimes missed their mark. And Claire laughed and cried out: “Stop it, Mad, have you gone crazy!” but it wasn't till she cried, “You're choking me!” that Madeleine let go.

Claire smoothed her hair and clothes, which Madeleine had mussed. She gave an embarrassed little laugh: “I told you, you don't know your own strength.”

“You're absolutely right,” Madeleine admitted. She waited a moment: “Take off your clothes.”

“You
are
crazy.”

“Please. I want it. I want it so much. Only to see you, that's all.”

“Oh for heaven's sakes, Madeleine: do you know how old I am?”

“Yes; four months younger than I am, and I'm fifty-two. Go on, take off your clothes. I'll help you, shall I?” She undid a button here, a zip there, Claire protesting all the way—but amused too, for it wasn't much more than a game that two girls might play together.

Then Claire was stripped naked. She was slender, small-breasted, and illumined only by moonlight she might have been young. Madeleine ran her hands down Claire's hips, touching her reverently.

“Now you,” said Claire.

“Me!” Madeleine guffawed. “You don't want to see me, I'm like a buffalo.”

“Go on.”

“Promise not to turn on the light.”

“Of course I won't. Go on. You have to. Otherwise it's not fair.”

It didn't take Madeleine a moment—all she had to do was throw off her peasant gown; she wore nothing underneath. “Oh God,” she said, stark naked, covering her eyes so as not to have to see herself. “I
told
you.” But she too was transfigured by moonlight. The two of them stood looking at each other; they had clasped hands as though about to circle in a game of ring-a-roses. Katze humped his back and rubbed himself against their legs, so that they laughed out loud and gave little skips into the air to escape his tickling fur.

On Monday Madeleine didn't drop Claire at the station but drove her into the city. She found it impossible to part from her. But Claire was not pleased by this decision and sat tight-lipped and silent beside her. Madeleine tried to keep up her own high spirits by talking cheerfully and playing a lively tape as she drove her car over the winding wooded parkway. It was only when the beautiful landscape began to degenerate into New York City that Madeleine's mood began to match Claire's; and by the time they reached the Bronx, waiting by the crosslights where a brand-new McDonald's had sprung up on what had been a basket-ball court for unemployed adolescents, Madeleine said gloomily: “I wish I hadn't come.”