In Search of Love and Beauty (12 page)

She brooded about Natasha's absence. She didn't know why Mark had chosen to place her with Leo, nor why Natasha chose to stay there when Marietta wanted her at home. And now Mark kept going out there too and was even thinking about buying a house in the area. Marietta was very much opposed to this idea. She didn't know what he needed a house for, and when she fought with him about it, she said “And why
there,
of all places?” She had made this same objection when he was buying the house for the Academy. She thought they had finished with that part of the country—Tim's family's—and couldn't understand why Mark should want to start the whole thing again.

Thinking about all this, Marietta couldn't sleep and she paced up and down, smoking many cigarettes. Little pulses
beat inside her, all through her body and also inside her head, and she didn't know why: she had always felt intensely but not like this, with these physical symptoms which made her twitch as with electric currents running through her.

As usual when she couldn't bear to be on her own, she took a cab across town to be with her mother. It was past midnight, but she found Louise as awake as she was. Day and night were really the same in Louise's apartment. With the chandeliers blazing, Louise was walking around making tall pots of coffee for herself, as absorbed in her own thoughts as Marietta was in hers. In her youth Louise had resembled a Wagnerian singer, but now in her late seventies she was more like a French tragic actress: tall, stately, draped in dark silk, her white hair disheveled, she appeared always to have heard some terrible tidings. Yet at the same time there was also something cozy about the way she sat there drinking coffee as though it were the middle of the afternoon.

“Of course, no use arguing with him,” Marietta was complaining about Mark. “No use asking him anything. Impossible even to talk to him. I tried to call him; no answer, just that idiotic machine; one of these days I'll go over there and kick it to bits.”

“Child, child, darling,” Louise murmured.

“And who are all these people he hangs around with? I mean, if they were decent, nice people he'd
want
us to meet them . . .”

Louise stood over her and stroked her hair. Marietta laid her head against her mother and shut her eyes. “I don't know what's the matter with me,” she said. “Do you think it's the menopause? Blood pressure? I feel like I might split apart, blow up. What is it? I don't know.”

Louise laid her hand on the twitching pulse in Marietta's cheek. “It's nothing. It's nerves. You're so highly strung, darling, it's your temperament.” Louise was a strong, healthy woman herself, and she was confident that Marietta was the
same. All that milk Louise had drunk while she was carrying her! All those fried potatoes she had eaten! It was almost fifty years ago but the effect of it, she was sure, was built into her daughter's bones.

The Van Kuypen house had been on the market when Leo and Mark were looking for a place for the Academy. But Leo had rejected it: “I get bad vibes,” he had said (he liked using the slang of whatever generation was current). The late-Victorian house they eventually bought suited him much better. When Mark said that that gave
him
bad vibes—because it was so ugly—Leo said no, it was a healthy place. It had been built as a summer home by a wealthy New York wholesale grocer, and there were still photographs in the house of the whole family arriving for their annual vacation in carriages overloaded with children in sailor suits, nursemaids, pets, steamer trunks, and leather hatboxes. The pleasant aura of these summers had remained intact in the house because, according to Leo, nothing worse had happened to the family than that they had gone out of business and died of natural causes.

When Mark proposed to buy the Van Kuypen house for himself, Leo was another person who tried to discourage him. He shook his big head and pushed out his underlip: “Leave it alone, Mark,” he said. “Let it rest.” He didn't approve of people trying to buy back their own or someone else's ancestors. “That's not the way it's done,” he said. There were, however, a growing number of people in the area who were trying to do it. Rich and restless women from New York bought up dingy cabins and spent a fortune refurbishing them and restoring the fittings to the exact period detail, down to the locks and hinges, and hiding their stereos inside seamen's chests. But when their labor of love and ingenuity was finished, they still found themselves with plenty of money and energy left over; and it was then that, eager to work on
themselves instead of their houses, they turned up at the Academy to put themselves in Leo's hands. But he wasn't, as he put it, having any. “First get rid of all that shit,” he said—and they did, cheerfully sold the refurbished cabins to other rich New Yorkers and moved themselves up into Leo's attic.

But Mark was not to be dissuaded. He was raising part of the payment on the Van Kuypen house by taking out a mortgage on the Academy, and for this he needed Leo's signature. He didn't want to burden Leo with the details, for he knew how much Leo hated and feared all business matters. There was a scene every time Mark came to see him, with Leo complaining—about the house, the expense, the repairs to be made. Leo said he was an old man, he couldn't cope with any of it, it wasn't fair to saddle him with these problems. Mark calmed him. He asked to see the contractors' estimates and bank papers and bills and everything else that was disturbing Leo. As a matter of fact, Leo had laid it all out ready for him to see. Leo was very methodical about papers, especially those relating to money matters. He was also cautious but not shrewd—at least not shrewd enough. He had never quite understood the terms under which he had acquired this house, nor how much of it belonged to Mark's firm and how much to Leo's movement. He watched Mark run his expert eye over all the papers, and after a while he asked, “You're not cheating me, are you?”

Mark looked up. Their eyes met. Leo's were sunk in flesh, wise and ancient as an elephant's, whereas Mark's were green and beautiful, a lover's eyes. Mark looked away first; he smiled. “What if I were?” he said and turned over another paper.

Leo sighed with a great shudder. “I know,” he said. “It shouldn't make any difference to me. But it's the way I grew up. Everyone forgets that I grew up too—yes, pardon me, I'm human too, I have my conditioning. Why shouldn't I be my father's son, just like everyone else? My papa was a clerk in
the mayor's office and naturally he thought a great deal about his pension and his savings. He had to have them, like lung and liver, and so do I. I'm a petit bourgeois, Mark, I worry about these things. And something else that's worrying me is that I may have to live forever—don't laugh! Sometimes it looks like I may have to go on and on, and how can I, without pension and savings.” He appeared entirely serious; but next moment he became playfully rueful:
“And
I'm in love again. Isn't it terrible? Really shocking, not to say ludicrous. No wonder she laughs at me.” He smiled, thinking of Stephanie's laughter. “Yes, yes, ludicrous,” he went on, “but also, Mark, a little bit beautiful I think. Isn't it beautiful to see a very old tree with a big fat gray trunk and out of it sprouting the greenest, the tenderest little shoots; shy little harbingers of spring,” he said, and lay there on his leather couch, smiling like a German uncle.

Mark took out the mortgage papers. At once Leo collapsed and became a mass of weary old flesh: “Must you, now? Must you spoil my mood? . . . What is it, anyway?”

Mark tried to explain, and for a while Leo tried to follow, but Mark went into more and more detail and quoted higher and higher figures, with complicated calculations which Mark loved to do, which were easy and joyful to him, but which addled Leo completely, so that he gave up and cried out for Mark to stop. “Well, just sign here, then,” Mark said.

“I don't have a pen, Mark.”

“I have.” He thoughtfully pressed it into Leo's hand which was, however, shaking so much that Mark had to guide it.

II

U
sually when Mark arrived at the Academy, it was after a fight with Kent. His heart was breaking, but he was used to that; ever since he could remember, he had suffered in this way from the boys he loved, and he had developed a stoical front with which to cover up. His lips were set, his eyes rather cold as he drove himself the two hundred miles from the city to the Academy.

His manner when he got there showed no trace of inner turmoil. He was, as always, jaunty, courteous, and alert. But there was no fooling Leo. It was dark inside his den and he lay inert and sagging like some superannuated circus animal on his leather couch. But with only one look at Mark—“Ah,” Leo said, “love trouble again.”

It might be said about Leo that he cared far too much about himself to bother about anyone else; and it was true. But it was also true that he could look deeply into others and see what was going on there. It was an instinct he had, a skill, a gift, something almost extraneous to his own personality
which he himself acknowledged to be that of a monster egotist.

Another paradox about Leo: one could say—many did say—that he was vain, greedy, and worldly, but all the same he seemed positively to run away from his own success. Popularity, adulation bored him. He had always been very attractive to a certain type of high-strung, high-bred girls; with these he relished behaving in a very crude way, and then enjoying the pale, pained smile with which they pretended not to mind. When they were at their most soulful, he was at his most down-to-earth; he became a peasant and a simpleton; he was loud and vulgar and embarrassed them in public places; and when none of this worked—and it never did, on the contrary—he finally sent them packing by telling them they were the wrong type for him and were harmful to his work.

It was not only people of whom Leo grew tired—or, he himself would have said, outgrew—but also his own ideas. In the past, just when his theater movement was beginning to attract wider attention, he was ready to abandon it. This was what really broke up his affair with Regi. For a while they had got on very well together. It was a relief for him to be with her, for unlike his other followers, she did not press him too closely, either physically or in any other way. On the contrary, she didn't like him to come too close to her, and when he what she called “bothered” her, it was always either too hot, or time for her to have her nails done or her legs depilated. This amused him, he called her iceberg and shivered—“Brrr”—when he came near her. She was frank about it, she said she never cared much for that stuff; it was intellectually, she explained, that he attracted her. This amused him even more; he really enjoyed Regi for a time. And she adored the success his movement was beginning to generate. She constituted herself his general business manager and put up the students' fees and cut down the theater owner's. When both
these affected parties complained to Leo, he shrugged them off—it was the time when he was losing interest anyway and was content to leave everything to Regi. What she enjoyed most was the publicity angle and really worked hard at it and was in seventh heaven when she managed to arrange an interview and photographs with the
Herald Tribune.
But although on the appointed day the students were all keyed up and stood tense and ready in toga and sandals to demonstrate their exercises, Leo refused to appear. When Regi knocked on the door of the escape hatch and fluted sweetly through it, “Leo, we're ready!” all she got in reply were some loud, caricatured snoring noises.

Well, she wasn't the type to put up with this sort of behavior and it wasn't long before she was declaring herself completely disgusted with him and all his ideas—and, moreover, with the intellectual life in general. She said it was all a lot of nonsense and rubbish and maybe all right for women who didn't have any social life, but Regi herself had plenty of that, thank God, and other things too; and indeed, shortly afterward she married a rich fur dealer—it was her third marriage—and went on an African safari for her honeymoon. As for Leo, he disappeared for many months, and when he re-emerged it was with a new form of expression for his philosophy.

During the many years of its formation, Leo's philosophy passed through a variety of stages before reaching its culmination in The Point. One of these stages came out of his contact with Marietta's Indian lover. Leo was in his fifties when he met Ahmed. No longer the large blond florid youth who had been introduced to Louise as an Adonis, he was already potbellied and short-breathed. He had not yet evolved his final costume—the monk's robe—but he had by this time laid aside his sharp, pinstriped English suits in favor of bib overalls over a striped sweater. This somewhat childish mode of dress, combined with his huge head from which tufts
of gray hair stuck out like a prophet's halo, gave him a very odd appearance. And the followers by whom he was surrounded—or patients, depending on whether one regarded him as a guru or psychiatrist—were also very odd: they were the usual people he attracted, a motley crew with motley problems of sex, drugs, nerves, religion.

All this was astonishing to Ahmed, but he reacted to it as he did to the many other astonishing features of American life (including Marietta): simply by laughing and shaking his head. And when he got to know him, he really liked Leo whom he found to be a jolly companion. Sometimes Leo sent all his retinue packing, and then he and Ahmed would just be two men together, drinking and talking about women. They both enjoyed that in their different ways. But most of all Leo loved Ahmed's music. Ahmed practiced for many hours during the day, alone in Marietta's apartment while she was in her showroom; and Leo would come and join him there to listen to him. They sat in her penthouse apartment—so lightly furnished that it seemed to have more flowers in it than objects—facing each other sitting on a rug on the floor. Leo listened with great attention; he had learned to sway his head like an Indian and also to exclaim at certain moments of high art. He loved the expression on Ahmed's face while he played: Ahmed seemed to be listening to something beyond himself and trying to reproduce the celestial notes he heard there. He was a shriveled, aging, insignificant little man but when he played like that he was as tender and exquisite as a youth in love. And what to say of those moments when the music reached some point beyond human capacity or comprehension? Then Ahmed's smile was a mixture of joy and pain as if it were a form of suffering to endure so much bliss.

Leo tried afterward to recall, to analyze, to isolate and fix those moments. He asked questions which Ahmed couldn't understand, let alone answer. They reminded Ahmed of Marietta in bed with him, asking “Do you like it? What do
you feel? You must tell me, Ahmed, you have to.” He never did—he couldn't—but it didn't matter since she was so busy telling him what
she
felt (actually, she was rather frigid). He tried to say that it was wrong to talk so much, but she didn't know what he meant, and he had no ability to explain anything in words. With Leo, he didn't need to, Leo understood him through his silence. “You're right,” Leo would say when Ahmed failed to answer him. “A hundred percent right. One shouldn't think but be. Not talk but feel, feel, feel.” Ahmed thought that Leo himself was much better at feeling than other Westerners: in the way he enjoyed the music, or the way he ate—loudly, and grabbing right and left—and the hoard of dirty stories from several continents he knew and relished.

When Leo asked Ahmed about his music: “Is it of the senses or of the spirit?” then Ahmed understood him less than ever. He had no conception of any division between the two, and if he had thought about it, he would have said, surely the one is there to express the other? That was what his music was for—he knew this so deeply that he had absolutely no thought or words for it. But Leo was fascinated by this question, and probing into it, he evolved a new theory which he tried out in practice, the way he did with all his theories, on his students. For his students were his test tubes. What he needed to carry out his experiments was the person; the personality. And by this he meant the whole of a person, all of him (or, more frequently, her). He tolerated no half measures.

Ahmed's music opened up Leo's Tantric period. He taught in his lectures that there were ascending levels of being, and that each level had to be thoroughly explored and exploited before one was ready to rise to the next. In practice, what it came down to—later he modified this considerably—was that while one was on the level of the senses, one had to fulfill them to the brim: so that at this time, his students were encouraged to try out some very physical experiments on
themselves. Although he had left the art of the theater behind him, Leo had retained the rehearsal space in the theater building: only now, instead of their dramatic exercises, his students could be seen to go through some more direct experiences with each other. Not all of them could rise to the rigors of these experiments; although willing to transcend themselves, for some of them—like those pale, high-strung girls of good family—their limitations, or inhibitions, were too rigid to be overcome without severe psychological strain. These weaker students fell by the wayside, but Leo had expected that: it was one of the risks involved in his game of higher evolution.

He himself took no part in these experiments. He didn't have to, since he had never had any difficulty in living up to the full potential of his senses. As it happened, this was a relatively calm period in his personal life. Perhaps he was settling down. He still had his escape hatch in the theater building, but he also lived in several other places—rather grand places belonging to rich women students for whom it was a privilege to entertain him: there was a town house on Fifth and Eighty-first, another house in Vermont, a third in New Hampshire. He kept clean clothes and possessions in all of them, and went from one to the other as the spirit moved him. He turned up at Louise's at intervals too, though by no means regular intervals.

Except on her birthday—he was always to be counted on for that. She had her sixtieth birthday around the time of his Tantric period. By now she was no longer one of his disciples—although he had returned to her after the scene at the Old Vienna, he had never invited her back to his workshops. She was his private, domestic life to be kept apart from his professional activities; and it was as a family member—an uncle to Marietta, a great-uncle to Mark and Natasha—that he turned up for the sixtieth birthday party. He was the only
male left in this family group of women and children. Bruno and Tim were dead; Ahmed had recently gone back to India. Regi was one of the celebrants that year; she and Louise were on speaking terms.

By this time, on account of Mark and Natasha, it had turned into a children's party. Louise had extended the dining table to its full length to hold the array of gateaux and pastries she had ordered from Blauberg's. Mark and Natasha sat there with napkins tucked under their chins, stuffing themselves on everything within reach in between bouncing balloons up to the chandelier. It was the same long dining table, the same dark, over-furnished dining room where those exciting evening talks had taken place at the beginning of Leo's career. Now the only grown-up sitting at the table was Leo himself, for he was the only one who loved cakes as much as the children did.

The sliding doors between the dining room and the salon were open. Regi, who was unfortunately suffering from a migraine, lay on the high crimson velvet sofa in the salon, piled around with cushions made in fine needlepoint by various generations of Bruno's female relatives. Louise tried to massage her temples with eau de cologne, but Regi said she didn't do it right and pushed her hand away. Actually, Regi's migraine was psychological as much as it was physical. She felt the weight of too many birthday parties, and altogether too much that had been and gone. Two years earlier, her third husband—the fur dealer—had died, leaving her rich but restless. For the first time she was finding it difficult to make new relationships and was beginning to have to pay for them.

“My God, how fat he's become—and no wonder,” she said, squinting toward Leo at the dining table. His cheeks were bulging with cake and he was reaching out for more. To Louise she said ill-naturedly: “I suppose you're still gaga about him . . . I don't know how you can, Louise, a fat ugly old man like that. One has to be a little bit aesthetic.” She
looked up at Louise standing over her sofa: “I don't like the way you do your hair.”

“But Regi! Darling! It's been this way for thirty years!” Louise pushed at the knot into which her hair was wound. It was completely gray and straggled in every direction.

“Why don't you take care of yourself like a decent person?” Regi admonished her. She herself was still a redhead though a very lacquered one, her hair sitting on her like a metal cap. She would be keeping it another five years, then it would be superseded by a wig more splendid and flaming than anything that had crowned her in her youth. “Ridiculous,” she said, watching Leo bounce balloons across the table with Mark and Natasha. “He doesn't even like children.”

“But he's so wonderful with them,” Louise said. But it was true that he was only wonderful with them when he felt like it; on the whole children bored him, though he didn't go as far as Regi who actively disliked them. She had not had any of her own and had never felt the lack.

And what she simply couldn't understand was why Marietta should have gone out of her way to adopt one. Moreover, if one had to adopt a baby, at least it should be a pretty one and not Natasha.

“Are you sure that child's all right?” she asked Louise not for the first time, looking across at Natasha in the dining room. At that time of her life—she was four—Natasha's head was too big for her body, and—unlike Mark who hadn't been able to get started soon enough—she had learned to walk and talk very late.