Foreign Bodies (20 page)

You notice I keep calling him Phillip. After the first day or so it seemed silly to go on saying Dr. Montalbano! I was a little bit sick when we met, but he had me rest and then he fixed me up right away, some sort of powder in milk, with cinnamon in it. It peps you up pretty quick, and he showed me how to mix it myself. He says I have good lab hands, which almost sounds like something dad would say. He’s taken me on as his official assistant (that “official” is a sort of joke), but I’m not getting an actual salary because — well,
because
. I don’t need or want anything when I’m with Phillip, I’m completely happy for the first time in my whole life! I’ve honestly never felt so filled with a sense of the future, of the world as
open
, instead of that stale old trap waiting to snap me up back home. Phillip is a marvel, you couldn’t ever predict or dream him up, the sweetest combination of businessman (dad would like that part!) and gypsy — the part I like best. He’s going to show me all of Europe, not just where he has his other clinics, but places thick with history and legend and myth. If that makes him sound like a kind of poet, that’s exactly what he is. But a poet who can make a living! (Dad’s definition, I remember, of an empirical impossibility.) We’re going to see the Colosseum, where the lions ate the Christians, and Phillip thinks he knows the precise spot where the Delphic Oracle used to be — I know he makes things up, but what fun! Lili was always suspicious of Phillip, but Lili is suspicious of everyone and everything, and I’m afraid she’s twisted Julian to be the same, she’s crawling with preconceptions — Julian once told me she hates Europe, even Paris! — so who knows where they’ve gone to?

Which brings me to the point of this long letter — I do believe it’s too long, in view of what a thug I’ve been! Two points, really. So the first has to be regret and apology — we
chased you away. Or you felt you needed to run away from us, and there’s hardly a difference, is there? And the second is to ask a favor, the last I’ll ever again trouble you with, I promise. I recognize that dad’s silence must mean something terrible. He’s already had the big blow — you’ve been the postman who delivered it, and I for one am grateful for that. Julian would never on his own have given dad the awful news about Lili. And now there’s me. I can’t write dad myself — to tell the truth, Aunt Bea, I
won’t
, I’m free of him! There’s no way I can comfort him or get him reconciled, so will you let him know that I’m staying on, and that I’m in wonderfully good hands, and will you tell him that I’m wildly happy?

It’s very early in the morning now, and I’m out on the balcony, with a notepad on my knees. There’s a pinkish-bluish dawn in one half of the sky, and a wintry sun peeping out from the other half. I can just see well enough to write, though it’s brightening pretty fast. And cold! I’ve got my new coat on, the nicest present I’ve had from Phillip — he’s inside in the kitchen, getting our coffee ready and working on his special poultices, and I’m about to go in and start stirring. It doesn’t bother me in the least that some of the people who come are under the impression that Phillip’s a medical doctor — in an important way he’s so much more, and does so much good. I’ve watched him hold their hands, and he speaks to them so sympathetically and seriously, but always with a kind of lightness too, and he gets to the heart of things. I’ve felt it too — how he knew right away that I
had
to stay on, that it would be the mistake of my life to go back now — he says I’m not supposed to be responsible for my brother’s troubles
or
my mother’s
or
my father’s. This should tell you that he’s practical (this coat!) and not at all syrupy, he’s built up my spine, he’s made me brave. I’ve never been brave, I’ve always been afraid, and it was cowardice that had me acting so nastily, I see that now.

My new coat, by the way, has a gray fur collar, something no one’s ever had much use for in L.A.! When I got here the weather was warm and I didn’t ever imagine I’d be sitting on this same narrow balcony in the middle of November, with its two old chairs left out in every season, where Julian and I first talked — all that seems so long ago. I think I realized almost from the start that he’d never go back home. And now I won’t either, even if I’m not sure about the “never.” Phillip says he hasn’t ever wanted to go back, but I noticed once that he still keeps his old Pittsburgh key in his pocket. He laughs at it, though — he says it’s to remind him of why he left. — So for now I belong here, and in the next hour and a half the waiting room will fill up with Phillip’s clients, and the day will begin. In Paris it always begins so beautifully!

Iris

B
EA GRIPPED THE
half dozen sheets in a surge of anger — clearly there was a crime in progress, but whose? She had read the girl’s letter over and over, seven times, eight. It sickened her. How like Iris to evade confrontation with her father, and to thrust it all — again! — on Bea’s shoulders. Aunt Bea the postman: but the postman hadn’t yet emptied his pack, and its burden was undelivered. The crime was Bea’s own: all these weeks she had told Marvin nothing. She was letting him dangle unslaked and ignorant in his suffering. To put off the blow was only to increase its force; and still she deferred. Marvin’s outcry, the edges of its envelope damp and curled up, languished on her bedside table in the drying puddle of a spill from a glass of water in the night. The hard blow, the bitter poison: Marvin’s disappointment, his pain. His ego, his bristling amour-propre. His proud expectations denied — as if he were a god who, having sent forth his seed, could mold his creatures as he pleased. The wayward immature son, and now the daughter, still half a child, who imagined herself in love with a charlatan, a seducer, even a kind of kidnapper —
there
was the real criminal! Taking the girl on as a servant without wages, an adoring little slavey, a sex slave in fact, dragging her all over Europe until she bored him and he dropped her, alone in some faraway city, unprotected. And wasn’t it protection she was searching for? The letter was speckled with
dad, dad, dad.
She was invoking Marvin even as she reviled and repudiated him. Only see how it is a blessing to have no children! Or an affliction to have them. Leo and his daughters:
They live away.
Marvin’s children too lived away. They could not live with their father — he had driven them off. The girl was inflamed. She had inserted herself into the unstable lives of her brother and his wife, a couple entangled nightly in sex.
He is a man
— so had Lili, old in the ways of bodily congress, spoken of the boy she had aroused; and there lay the girl in a nearby room, listening, inflamed, alert to hints of hidden erotic longings, ripened and open to the charlatan, the false doctor who fed her potions and enlisted her in the stirring of cauldrons, turning her cold to the brother she had come to solace. Julian had disappeared into the nowhere, exactly as Margaret envisioned it. Margaret, who emptied her body of its malodorous fruits to daub smudged fecal fields . . .

It was senseless to be scandalized — sickened — by this childish letter; childish; cynical; importuning. And Marvin: she’d been keeping him too long in the dark. She could hardly influence him, and even if she could — influence him how, influence him to do what?

This burning in the throat, this grinding under the heart. It wasn’t the letter, Iris wasn’t to blame! She had been sick and irritable for days — in her classroom with the biggest boys and their antics, and with Laura in the teachers’ lounge, where they had gone one afternoon to protest the imposition of loyalty oaths, but in the end had signed them anyway, hectored by the principal’s threats. On the question of loyalty oaths he was not so easygoing. They are designed to shield our soldiers from internal espionage, he announced, we must be vigilant, in Korea it already looks as if the Communists are winning . . .

All that morning, in a fit of futile aspiration, she had been force-feeding Shakespeare to her seniors. It was
Macbeth:
since they’d liked the guillotine so much, perhaps they’d like the gore.

— The little rise of nausea, just below the breastbone, inching upward. The stale canapés in the teachers’ lounge, some sort of fish paste left over from a party for a shop supervisor soon to retire, a Mr. Elkins, who would have preferred beer and pretzels. Was it the fish turned bad, or was it the guilty roil of her own dereliction? The dereliction
had long preceded the fish. She owed Marvin what she knew, and what she knew was an unholiness — how vile a butchery it is, to be the one who wields the knife fated to eviscerate a brother’s bowel. Cain and Abel, tossed out to Iris in the Broadway dawn. But Marvin was no peaceable Abel, and Bea was no butchering Cain. What she was obliged to convey was a commonplace, children gone wrong, life gone wrong, love traduced, hope rotted, how ordinary, how banal, how easy to get it said.
They live away. It is their intention to live away.
It could be recited in a telephone call, in a neutral word or two, without the Sturm und Drang of primal sin. And why not the telephone, after all? Writing was safer — a hiatus mercifully intervenes before the answering explosion. But phoning was quicker, and the cost of a long-distance call all the way to California would keep it short. Marvin would insist that she reverse the charges, he would insinuate some nastiness about her pathetic schoolteacher’s salary, he would offer to call right back at his own expense — anything to press and press, to have it out, to finger the suppurating wound. She would resist, she would be adamant: let it be short and quick, get it over with!
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.
The tomfoolery of her boys groaning over
Macbeth,
undone by all of it, cackling at the bloody hand and hooting at the creeping greenery.
Hey, Birdie, that’s like camouflage uniforms, ain’t it?
Soon many of them would be in Korea as mechanics and drivers, and what was she to say when they argued that Lady Macbeth was useless to men under fire?

The telephone stood on a small square table across the room, under a window — where, in different weather, a carafe of iced tea had awaited an unknown niece. It was an indulgence to walk barefoot over the carpet, one of the comforts of living alone and unseen. A clovery softness under her toes — crooked embarrassing things they were, a hammertoe among them. Leo, attempting once to pluck the discordant digit into conformity, had gleefully named it a
diabolus in musica.
In the Middle Ages, he told her, the offending foot with its dissonant tritone would have been excommunicated as the work of the devil. Well, so much for that. A fresh lurch of the stomach, and
the return of the crinkle of acid. The grand was gone, and wasn’t the last of Leo and his hurtful dazzlements out of her life?

The carpet had originally been an autumnal beige, now grown many shades paler from years of afternoon bleachings by a lazily lingering western sun. It had been installed wall-to-wall, a postwar fashion, and Bea’s one concession to what in her hemmed-in rooms could pass for luxury; it traveled consolingly through the tiny vestibule and on toward the windows. She pushed into its warm grassiness and went to fetch the little book of reminders she kept in her purse, where she’d left it on the bedroom dresser. Of course she had never learned Marvin’s number by heart; in that long silence between them, what need of it? Marvin’s voice on the telephone, could she endure it? The fury and the sneers.

Halfway to the bedroom, she stopped and looked down. Here,
here
was the sickness! She had been treading on it day after day, a darkness before her eyes. Not Iris, not Marvin, not the fish paste, not those prancing howling boys — the sickness, the lurch and the acid, was here. Her naked toes were swamped by it. The blemish, the shape, the muddy dark. A brown estuary flooding the threads of beige. Where Leo’s piano had planted its legs, under its broad black belly where the sun hadn’t reached to drain out the color, the grand’s bleeding silhouette persisted. It persisted, it bled, its edges were as undefined as a cloud of brown dust. In the dictionary of clouds, it was the sickest.

She lifted the telephone, and early the next morning — out, damned spot! — three burly men, wearing jackets with the company logo stitched into the pockets, arrived to rip up the carpet and scrape and varnish the wood floor beneath.

But she hadn’t phoned Marvin, and on second thought what would be the good of it? To hear him rail? Or was it because, for the pity of it, she could not bear to hear him rail?

B
ARON GUILLAUME
de Saghan, a distant cousin of Marcel Proust (unfortunately on the Weil, or maternal, side), had founded the Centre des Émigrés out of conscience, and on the understanding that it was to be a temporary service: when its task was completed, it was destined to dissolve. He had set the place up out of conscience certainly, though out of something else as well. It was perhaps true that he had had some unsavory connection with Vichy — or perhaps not. Such a rumor was difficult to verify, and what difference did it make in the present circumstance, since he was clearly doing good? Besides, if even so much as an atom of fact adhered to the charge, then it could be said that the establishment of this charitable office was a felicitous act of atonement. At the same time, it was true (or was not) that he was overly conscious of his relation, however remote, to Mme. Proust, the daughter of a Jewish stockbroker, and was thereby, as his critics put it, “taking care of his own.” Taking care of their own was what all those other agencies and relief organizations, pouring in from New York after the war, had done, harrying the displaced willy-nilly onto ships headed for Haifa and whatever other dingy ports lay along the newly Hebraized Levantine littoral. He didn’t know, or wish to know, the geography of La Terre Sacrée: he had been made to learn it as a boy, and remembered only Golgotha, a hill in Jerusalem, and the river Jordan, which roared in his imagination as a rushing cataract — never mind that nowadays it was described as only a shallow narrow stream. Yet might it not have dried up in the
long centuries between the appearance of the Saviour on earth and our own time?