Foreign Bodies (30 page)

The musics would tell. Iris listened and listened: she shut her eyes, trawling. Lascivious couplings among the swirling flutes — she fished them out. She was sickened by the world’s couplings. Boyfriends, lovers, husbands, idle dallyings (hadn’t she come close to flirting with the man who might have been her uncle?) — while in the unseen regions of the earth snowy mountains and moon-wrinkled lakes are waiting, and, in the marble-white city of Rome, Michelangelo’s mighty Moses! (Phillip’s misbegotten promises, and what had become of Florence, and Como, and the Alps glimpsed from Milan?) Instead, all these breeding couplings, the fateful coupling of her father and mother, a pair of unlikes; it had turned her father greedy and her mother reckless. Her brother and his foreign wife, far away in another
other country for all she knew, clinging each to each beneath hanging gourds under a boiling Mediterranean sun — and when dark comes, the carrion noises, furious haunted dyings. And Phillip naked, plying his assurances of mountains and lakes, the ugly nighttime nakedness, the naked force of it: the coupling . . . the copulating. The fearsome penetrations. Coitus, a wolfish power to make fecund that tiny secret bean lurking in her belly . . . Her peaceful crystals in the cold room had risen into steepling growths without such fleshly imperatives! She went on listening for the couplings in the many musics, their polluting heat and beat, transitory and changeable. She listened; she saw. Bea’s answer lay coiled in those swellings and ebbings, those dartings and retreats, those pulsings and withdrawals, those girdlings and ungirdlings . . . and Bea was released from them, she had let the musics go. The man who had been her husband would never get her back, no matter what he believed he owed her, no matter how he meant to bribe her with his belated bargain tunes.

In the dim-lit movie house, garish coruscations of orange and vermilion and violet flashed down from the illuminated screen to flood the children’s intent little faces with rainbow flares. Iris towered over them like some grotesque ruddy ogress. Her thighs were long. Her calves were stone-hard. She wished she could be a child like the children all around her. She wished she could be a small girl, with her smaller brother beside her, secretly licking the red and green Christmas baubles. She wished she could wish away her woman’s thighs and the underground factory that was her woman’s groin. She would never again plummet into the folly of coupling, she would never have a husband. She would live with her father forever. She wished she could be free. She wished she could be Bea.

January 10, 1953

Bea: I’ve heard from my accountants — it turns out that the check in question hasn’t cleared, and I think you owe it to me if you know something — I can’t believe he’d spit on a thing of this magnitude, and for sure
she
wouldn’t. Is there any chance he never got it on time, or did it get lost in the mail? For God’s sake, you
did
send it registered air mail special delivery? Anything else would have been goddamned idiotic.

Marvin

January 12

Dear Marvin,

Your registered air mail special delivery arrived here early yesterday. I understand that you did this as an object lesson in how to handle long-distance communications. Fine, I take your point, but it has nothing to do with what can only be called a matter of the heart. It’s plain your son wants to make his own life as he sees it — can’t you grant him that? If he’s repudiated your money, that’s all there is to it. Which means that
she’s
repudiated it, despite your judgment of her, sight unseen. To tell the truth, Marvin, I’ve had, on and off, similar suspicions about Julian’s marriage. I was thinking just like you — to my surprise, you’ve had that effect on me. But it could be that those
two are after something else in this world — I don’t know how to describe it or assess it, but when I last saw Julian

Here Bea lifted her pen to concentrate: she was about to place, precariously, a pebble-sized falsehood atop the mountain of deceptions that had, stone by stone, been building. Julian in her own apartment, in Marvin’s chair; but she could not admit to this. She wrote instead,

when I last saw Julian — it was the night before I left Paris, at that dinner I told you about — he was reading Kierkegaard! So you see where his head is — he has these metaphysical inclinations, how else to say it? It’s made him a bit gruff — he doesn’t trouble about ordinary things. And she looks to be nearly the same — as if being wounded somehow purified her, I can’t exactly explain — it’s something in the way she talks and thinks, not that I got to spend much time with either of them. But it may be that she does him good, and why not let it go at that?

I hope the New Year brings you some consolation. It must be a comfort to have your daughter with you again.

As ever,
Bea       

Jan 17

Bea: I haven’t got the goddamnedest idea of what the hell you’re talking about. Kierkeguard, what’s that? Sounds like a deodorant, which is to say that the whole thing smells as far as I’m concerned. I’ve stopped payment on the check, so that’s that. I was going to tell Iris what I’d done — I figured she’d be level enough to see the rightness of it. But since she’s come back I’ve had second thoughts. A bundle for her brother for doing nothing, for being nothing — how would she like that, this kid with a lifetime of steady elbow grease behind her? She’s taking Margaret’s death hard, she won’t say the word, at
least not when I’m around — she calls it “the accident,” as if her mother could be patched up. And by the way, I’ve got my lawyers right this minute suing the shit out of that so-called Spa and the goddamn bus company, you bet your life they’ll be paying through the nose. And that crackpot letter you sent, it keeps on eating at me, what else could have set her off? I won’t say it’s your fault exactly, maybe I’ve got over that, but look what happened, so what am I supposed to think? — All right, I’ll
tell
you what I think! It’s taken me a while, I had to get my head cleared, and my God, my poor wife, that bloody scrap of shit in her pocket couldn’t be the only time you wrote her, there had to be other times before — you told her things, you
knew
things you never told me and you told them to Margaret behind my back, you told her Julian got married over there! You told her things and I didn’t believe her — how could I, nobody believed her, she was sick, it was the way it showed she was sick. The last time I went to see her, didn’t I write you this, they’d stopped the imbecile art therapy and had her doing that cockamamie weaving idiocy,
placemats
, can you imagine? Margaret always hated such low stuff, she called it Boston Irish table linen. She tried to hide it from me, but I got a good look at one she’d made — they made her make this shit! — all white, with stars in each corner, blue stars with six points, and in the middle a big yellow cross. No, she tells me, it’s not a cross, that just shows how you always think, it’s a plus sign and I put it in on purpose to stand for money. Spite, that’s what they had her spending hours on, that’s their therapy! And while all this was going on you were feeding her things to upset her, about Julian, and that Iris left school, you took advantage of a sick woman! Looking back, if you hadn’t been in Paris I could almost get myself to think you’d actually been out here barging in on my wife in some underhanded way, without letting me know — she said so! She said you’d come to her rooms and saw what she’d been painting, it wasn’t
plausible as far as I knew, you were flying straight back to New York from over there, but she kept insisting on it, how could I believe such a story? Especially when you’ve never in your life gone off the beaten path, you’ve been stuck in your godforsaken rut forever. Still, you did make it out to Paris . . . I don’t know, I don’t know, and I’m telling you now, Bea, if I ever find out for sure exactly how much you’ve interfered with Margaret, if somehow or other you did manage to sneak out here and play games with my wife’s brain, you’ll pay for it, don’t ask me how. She was sick but she wasn’t a liar! I’m almost ready to think it’s you who’s the liar, and meanwhile I’ve gathered from Iris that you’ve made a friend of my daughter, she says she likes to be in touch with you sometimes — just don’t you forget I can stop that if I need to. My daughter’s my only shaft of light nowadays, that’s from a hymn or something Margaret used to sing in church when she was a kid, Lead me out of darkest night, Lord my only shaft of light — You’ve probably heard that Iris missed the funeral, it had to be for a reason — I cabled her plenty of notice, I guess she thought she couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t go to the cemetery with her when she fi-nally got home — to see my kid all broken up? Nothing doing. The worst of it is she’s got too much time on her hands, she’s cut out all her old friends, she won’t say why. And on top of everything else she’s had to drop back a year or so toward her degree — while she was out of the picture some competitive creep in the crystallography lab finished up that whiz of an experiment she got started. This guy grabbed the credit for it — dog eat dog, same as in the business world, no different. Iris tells me not to take it to heart, she’ll make up for it next semester. My daughter’s nothing like that boy! She’s always had me for a model, for one thing — though I can’t go on running the business away from the office — it’s how I’ve been doing it — I expect to pull myself together and get going again. What matters is I’ve still got a kid with a future, I’m
not
worried about her, don’t get me wrong — it’s no good for a girl like that to be holed up in this empty house — she’s got the right idea, she’s mostly out the door and off to the movies, sometimes two a day — it beats me that she can stand it. The Hollywood bug, at her age I imagine they’ve all got it. She says she goes for the music — movie music, who would believe it. If she gets something out of it I can’t complain.

I try not to think about the boy. The boy’s gone — that’s that.

Marvin

W
HAT WAS IT
? Stratum on stratum, swaddled, a mummy’s windings, sealed as if for a voyage to eternity — what could it be?

She came to the inmost wrapping and peeled it away. Black blots and spots, some with fragile fishtails, dancing on insect legs along parallel tracks; a marker curved like a scimitar, or rounded like an ampersand’s belly; another resembling a hunchback, or else a swollen comma. Treble and bass.
Allegro, legato, sostenuto, sforzando.
Leo speaking in tongues.

On a single unblemished sheet she read:

The Nightingale’s Thorn
SYMPHONY IN B MINOR
by
Leo Coopersmith

Thick block of paper. Heavy. Big! What must one call such a stack? A ream? A bale? A quire? (A choir?
“Chorus of little people.”
) And among all these thousands of notes, no note, no reason, no why, no key to its coming. Minor — a brooding? a belittlement? How minor she had been in his life. A mote, a fleck of dust. Bea minor, is that what he meant? What was she to do with it? What did he intend her to take from it? He had composed it hastily, oh hastily — it was plain, when she’d surprised him in his gaudy lair, that he had nothing in hand. An empty pot. But how could she know this? It might be the quiet work of years; of decades. A language that kept her out, if
it was a language at all. Music the universal language, vibrations that speak — what a lie. Words, the sovereignty of words, their excluding particularity,
this
was language. What was she to make of these scatterings of blotches moving up and down the staff lines like bugs on an escalator? This mutating voiceless Tower of Babel? Foreign matter. She understood nothing. What did he want from her?

She fanned out the loosened sheets, like giant playing cards, on her broad dining table: they were too many not to overlap. Black blisters bursting out of naked stems. Black balloons on thin sticks. Bottomless black wells. Five stripes: a five-lane highway, small black cars speeding. But silent; silent.