Foreign Bodies (7 page)

She was an enigma to herself. She had come away calmly enough, a curious calm, a sleepwalker’s calm: the bus to the bank, the hypnotic mechanical packing, the interview with her rough-hewn principal.

— You ask this
now?
At the last minute, just at the start of the new term?

— Mrs. Bienenfeld says she’ll cover for me, won’t that take care of it?

— It’s too much, she has her own classes. And she isn’t credentialed to teach English, you can’t mix puddings!

— She’ll be fine. She’s glad to do it, she’s a friend.

— You mean she’s your patsy. Well, if she’s that willing, she can take two of yours, but for the other two it’ll mean an extra teacher from outside and extra pay, and we’ve got guidelines and a budget. All right, you’re worth something around here, you give us some
class, so I’ll go for it, but Mrs. Bienenfeld better keep your guys in line, you’ve been good about that. Hell, what’s this really about, Bea, another run to Paree, you got a French kisser hidden away over there? Miss Nightingale, lady of the night, oo-lala!

And then Laura:

— Bea, I can’t do your syllabus the way you have it, all this Whitman and Hawthorne and God help me,
A Tale of Two Cities
, they’ll spit it out! Can’t you change it to stuff I can handle?

— Wing it, Laura, wing it.

Her rough-hewn principal, rough-hewn Laura. Her own life ragged and low, scorned by Marvin, scorned by Leo — by Leo, who had put her there! Then why hadn’t she climbed out of it?

On the rue Mouffetard (she saw this on the side of a building) she stopped and looked all around. She had been walking in the wrong direction — she was nowhere near the numbers on the back of Iris’s envelope. The morning cool had begun to retreat. Despite the growing mob, a frenetic swirl of tourists with their cameras and bags, she was sickeningly alone. She had smuggled herself into this unnatural scene, displaced, desolate, and to what end? Marvin, hollow Marvin — she hadn’t answered his letter, she had told him nothing. She was all contradiction — resentment and indifference — and then this . . . this harebrained plummeting into Paris. To do what? To rescue whom? Marvin from his torment, the brother who abused her? Bea from a low and ragged life? That note, that broken blow, as of glass splitting, a wallop to the brain — she had thought herself content, reconciled, resilient, orderly days, an orderly life: until Iris’s finger hurled her into turmoil. The stab at that single uncanny key, a short-lived overturning looking-glass sound — it had a pitch, an accent, she could not recall whether bass or treble, boom or screech, a splinter of glass that wormed through her veins and flowed with the flow of her blood . . . Leo’s untouchable instrument. The girl’s touch, a golden girl, and what was Bea, if not aging, ragged, and low?

She turned down a street of cavelike stalls hung with souvenirs, key chains, rings, ashtrays, bracelets, each engraved with a minuscule
Eiffel Tower, painted ties and scarves and banners, row upon row of porcelain trivia. And squeezed among these importuning shops in this unidentifiable neighborhood, yet another outdoor café. She ordered scrambled eggs and cold juice, more out of politeness than hunger, and showed the elderly waiter her map, pointing to the street she wanted. Madame — laughter in an old creased Levantine face — it is far from where you are now, very far! Madame should not think of walking, under this hot sun she will drop in the road, the police will come and place her in hospital, hospital for foolish Americans who drop! Never mind, he was one who liked Americans very much, he especially liked American cinema, back there in America did she know
Weesperin Weens?
A very good film, the woman so beautiful, only in the American cinema do women have such red lips and whole teeth, in fact she is right now in a cinema just here, not ten meters away . . .

Yes, she said,
Whispering Winds
, I know it. And paid for her uneaten meal (but thirstily drained the juice) and stepped out toward where the waiter gestured, and there they were: the big crimson garish posters, the two familiar stars entwined in a kiss, the heroine’s blouse unbuttoned just enough to display the upper cushions of her ample breasts, the man’s arms bare and almost cartoonishly muscular. To her surprise the box office was open for business, though it was still early in the afternoon. In the startling sudden night of the auditorium, she felt a seedy stickiness: fresh gum underfoot, spills on the patched carpet. The movie was already under way; she shut her eyes. She had nearly every movement by heart, and much of the dialogue. She had no desire to look at the screen. At home, uptown and downtown, in the Village, in the Eighties, on Times Square, she had pursued this spoor from movie house to movie house, secretly, alone, listening to Leo’s mind. Leo’s mind! “I intend,” he told her once, “to throw out the usual components of the conventional orchestra, you see what I mean?” She did not see. He knew she did not see, but it gratified him that she listened. In the evenings, after five or six hours with those deafening boys in that deafening classroom, she listened.
Leo in bed since morning, dreaming symphonies, dreaming operas. “What I’m just getting hold of is what nobody’s ever done before, two electric pianos, two bass guitars, two alto saxophones, a percussion ensemble, a boy soprano, a female chorus . . .” And another time: “The idea is to have a choir of fifty, a mezzo-soprano for Anna Karenina, or I haven’t decided, maybe it ought to be Bovary” — Leo exalted, carried away (and rested, Bea couldn’t help thinking), pouncing on the keys to show her a string of noisy passages, but then it was enough, it was only to give her the gist of it, the dramatic theme, steering her by the nape, his blazing look, the blazing engine of what he liked to call their harmony and counterpoint . . . The lovers were embracing, the movie was over, the credits were rolling past, almost too quickly to be read, but her eyes were busy now, she was ready for the name, it slid by in a second,
Music composed by Leo Cooper-smith
, and then the lights came on, and she took in the unswept dirt all around, and the four other moviegoers scattered in the seats, one of them a derelict stinking of something foul.

Leo’s mind!

The street was as brilliant as before: it was a Parisian sun renowned for setting as late as ten o’clock. Finding Julian could wait another day. She scouted a taxi and went back to her hotel to sleep off the deadly exhaustion of a foreign time zone.

A
PALACE
, Iris had written. To Bea’s American eyes that Sunday morning, it was venerably European — Romanesque windows, the lower ones swelled by rounded wrought-iron barriers, dark thick oblong stones rising like a vast wall, heavy wooden double doors carved into bunches of bursting grapes and a fat-stomached glowering Bacchus, all of it giving out some nearly olfactory opulence. Or else it was a latter-day mimicry, war-stained Paris refurbished, an architect’s willful deception or obsequious homage, stale modern Europe pretending to be ancient Europe. One of the doors stood open: a lamplit dimness, a marble desk and a concierge behind it — so this ducal manse was, after all, only another middle-class apartment building, though not of a kind you would ever see in New York.

Julian lived here.

She said his name to the concierge, who, it turned out, spoke English with a cockney sound, and was eager to explain why: it was lonely to sit all day in the half-dark without a living soul to talk to, only the comings and goings of the people upstairs, and nothing in her ears but the lift’s funny whistle. And of course she was English, anyone could hear it straightaway, she couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, she had married her second husband, a Frenchman from La Rochelle on the coast, they had met when she crossed over to Normandy to visit her first husband’s grave, a British soldier, you know, and here she was, stuck now in Paris, because her second husband was dead from the disease you can only whisper about . . . Please say again?

“Nachtigall,” Bea said. “Julian Nachtigall.”

“I’ve got nobody like that on my roster, and believe me” — she tapped her forehead — “I’ve got them all up here.”

“A young man. In his twenties. An American.”

“There’s an American doctor on the top floor, he speaks French pretty well. But almost never here, you don’t mean Dr. Montalbano?”

“No, no, Nachtigall.”

“All these foreign names, you’d think we were with the Jews.” The concierge pleated the sides of her mouth into a smirk. “I know the one you want. He’s a Jew, the one you want, but I don’t like to spread it around. A squatter boy, with another squatter, and now there’s a third one, don’t ask me why. It’s a wonder he keeps them up there, he’s an odd bird, Dr. Montalbano, who knows what they’re up to —”

Garrulousness without plausibility. But what
was
plausible? Was it plausible that Julian had ascended from that other place to this place, the pauper to the palace? The woman was ready to jabber on, widening brownish lips in a know-it-all smile, while Bea escaped across the carpeted foyer toward the glint of a tiny elevator cage. It staggered shrilly upward, one, two, three, four, five, and at the sixth landing halted before a single door.

An ordinary button-bell.

It was cool here, and quiet. She stood and listened. Noiselessness behind the door, a ferocity of expectation — herself caught in a fixity, a movie-still excised from a scene of crisis, the frozen moment of her finger lifted, approaching the button, the button that was about to violate the silence behind the door (Iris’s lifted finger seconds before it fell blindly on a violated key) . . . A muffled ring; then nothing; then still more nothing; and finally the sound of a staccato bark — but a bark with a human timbre. The heavy scrape of shoes, scrabbling with a kind of hobble, as if the laces were untied, and from a diminishing distance a growling American voice: “Fine, not again, just when I’m dropping off you people have to go and forget to take the goddamn key —”

A young man, flabby at the neck, a thin horizontal blond mustache,
streaming eyes, a handkerchief over his mouth. Volcanic coughing followed by a river of French.

“English, please,” Bea said.

“Oh, sorry, this stupid cold, so I thought it was . . . and when I saw it wasn’t . . .” A smothered row of gasps. “He’s away now, he’s in Milan for the month —”

Bea said, “No, no,” and then, as if catapulted: “I was here in July, I tried to look you up. Julian? Julian Nachtigall? I have your sister’s letter —” She stopped and took him in; he was really no more than a boy. Even the mustache was undeveloped.

He stared back with — it struck her instantly — her own father’s eyes: Tatar lids drawn low at the corners.

“My sister.” Two spiteful grunts. He gave her his back — a rip at the collar — and shambled off into a large central room, out of which other rooms opened: impossible to tell how many. A palace, and too much furniture, a scattering of sofas and armchairs. Assorted articles of female clothing draped here and there, a stocking dangling from a lampshade, another thrown over a picture frame. A blanket on the floor. She shut the door after her — he didn’t care, open or closed, stay or go, he was indifferent. She saw his shoelaces, straggling, undone. A wilderness, it was all provisional. It was incoherent. He picked up the blanket and tugged it around his shoulders and foundered into the cushions of a divan.

“You’ve got to be Iris’s aunt,” he said.

“Yours too.”

His recognition — of who she was, of what she appeared to threaten — was almost too rapid to assimilate; he had unhesitatingly understood what he took to be the whole meaning of it. An instinctiveness arrogantly sure of itself. It hinted at intuitive stirrings. It hinted at an inner life. But oh, the outer one!

He said, “She told me she spent the night at your place. She came so you wouldn’t. She told you to stay away.” A rattling volley shook him; he wiped his eyes with an angry swipe. “My father sent you, didn’t he? He made you come.”

“I came because I wanted to.”

“But
he
wanted you to, you can’t deny it. Even if you think some-thing’s your own idea, he’s behind it. That’s how it goes with him, and don’t say it doesn’t. He always gets his way.”

“Not with you. He’s asked you to come back, and you won’t.”

“My mother thinks I’ve been abducted, I suppose you’ve heard. Little green Martians maybe.” He let out a resentful groan and flung the blanket over his head. “My God, you walk in here, what are you, the company representative, the family spokesman? When in my life did I ever know you? Whatever you think I’m up to is none of your business. It’s not my father’s either.” He reared up, shivering, from under the blanket. “Damn it, why aren’t they back?”

She saw the dry swollen lips, the too pink nostril-wings, the fevered wretchedness of a sick and self-indulgent child. Sullen and stubborn. But she had surprised him, she was an eruption, an apparition — unfair and brutish. Standing there, tentative and stung, facing her nephew — Julian, the hard case — she had never so much as looked around, among all these little low tables and worn rugs and a bureau or two and a plethora of chairs, for a place to sit. The big room resembled a meeting hall, overused, abused, public, frayed. She had fallen into it no more than three minutes ago, and already a truculence was brewing. Had she crossed an ocean to be so quickly despised?

Deliberately, she made a space for herself at the far end of the divan, at his feet.

“Your father doesn’t know I’m here. I never told him I was coming.”

“Then what do you want?”

The question, even if soaked in phlegm, was pellucid. What did she want? It wasn’t that she had taken pity on Marvin, inconceivable as this was — when had Marvin ever needed her pity? The boy was right: in the end, for one reason or another, inescapably, she was doing Marvin’s bidding. Admittedly there was sanity in his bidding. The boy had somehow to be extricated. He reeked of chaos — it was
an enveloping fume all around him. Chaos in his anger, chaos in this slovenly precarious abandoned flat. How did he keep himself alive? He was homeless, jobless, futureless. He was careless — he hadn’t bothered to tie his shoelaces. And worse: he hadn’t bothered to put on his socks: she discovered she was sitting on a dirty pair, with holes at the heels.