In Search of Love and Beauty (27 page)

When he did meet Kent, it was again in the Old Vienna and with the same elegant gray-haired man as before, at one of the tables for two down the center. Mark, entertaining an exceptionally dull out-of-town client, watched them. It was clear to him at once that their relationship had in the meantime considerably progressed. Although the older man was no
longer as nervously on display as the last time—fidgeting with his tie, his hair, talking in a high-pitched manner in order to amuse and hold the attention—he still appeared to be under strain: in fact, even more so, and in a deeper way. Now there were silences between them filled with covert glances from the older man and broken by him with a desperate spurt of talk that died away into another quivering silence. Kent, his broad back to Mark, was as always a rock against which others had to break themselves.

Besides being bored by his companion, who was telling him about different girls he had made it with in Hong Kong and Singapore, Mark was also aware that their projected business deal would come to nothing: so his attention was entirely on the other table. He silently considered what to do. Several possibilities were open to him. One of these was to do something he had never done himself but had on several occasions been a witness to. This was to get up, go over, and make a scene. The idea, especially under the influence of the potent little drinks in which the Old Vienna specialized, was enticing to him. He imagined all sorts of possibilities, a variety of three-way emotions. But, in fact, such a public scene was not within his character, and when he did go over, it was in the cool, friendly manner of an acquaintance. Kent did not see him till Mark came and laid his hand on his shoulder; then he looked up and Mark was gratified at the tremor that passed over his impassive features. The other man, so intent on him, saw it too. Mark felt at an advantage. He even drew up a chair for a moment and perched on it and asked to be introduced to Kent's companion. When Kent unwillingly muttered a name, Mark cupped his ear and made him repeat it; it was Anthony.

One leg tucked under him, his elbow on the table, his chin cupped in his hand, Mark continued to regard Kent with a teasing look: “I wish your hair'd grow back,” he said after a moment. “You shouldn't have it cut that way, it
doesn't suit you at all.” He turned his eyes, slowly and deliberately, toward Anthony: “Don't you agree?” he said lightly.

The other tried to answer him in the same tone. But his hand was shaking, so that he had to put down the glass he held in it. Mark saw that he was a good deal older than he appeared from a distance; also that his eyes, when they met Mark's, were pale and drained of color as though washed by nights of tears. They were also full of fear—not only present fear but fear of everything that had happened to him in the past. Mark's jauntiness left him. He got up and said good-bye and went away. He wound his way gracefully between tables and gilt chairs, not looking back but knowing Anthony's eyes to be following him. Nor did he again glance over at their table but listened to, and apparently greatly appreciated, his companion's racy humor.

Later, when questioned by Mark, Kent was dismissive: “Just a guy I met.”

“Where?”

“. . . He's an agent.”

“What sort of an agent?”

“He could be useful.” Kent stretched and yawned and appeared too tired to answer any more questions. When Mark persisted, Kent became absorbed in studying some contact sheets. Mark tore them out of his hand, and from there on their fight took its usual course, reaching its climax when Kent pulled out his fine leather bag (a present from Mark on his last birthday) and began to stuff some shirts and underclothes in it. He packed with great determination—waiting all the time for Mark's pleas and protests. These were not as fervent as they used to be. Mark lay on his bed, with his arms folded behind his head, saying nothing beyond, “Now don't be stupid, Kent,” so that Kent grimly shut his bag and dragged it to the outer door. Having got that far, he had no alternative but to go out and slam it. Mark raised himself on his elbow at the sound: he vibrated to it, and also to the silent
cry he felt coming to him from Kent waiting to be called back. But Mark lay down again and continued to look at the ceiling, taking his time.

After less than five minutes, he was surprised to hear a key unlock the outer door. Kent had returned. He was very quiet now. He put down his bag and sat on the side of Mark's bed. He clasped his hands and looked down at the space between his feet. Mark, watching him, thought that perhaps his haircut suited him after all; it made him look very young and defenseless, like a boy of twelve in reform school.

“He's down there.”

“Who?”

“Anthony.”

Kent's Adam's apple went up and down: “He often does it,” he said. “Stands out there half the night. Waiting. He says it's just so he might get a look at me coming in or going out . . . He doesn't leave me alone,” Kent said in mounting desperation. “Calling me. Writing me letters. And he
cries.
It's weird. Says he'll kill himself and all of that. Sometimes I think he'll kill
me,
he's that crazy. Or you. He might try that. I'm scared to look out the window in case he's there . . . I'm sorry for him—I mean, he's a nice guy. But he's gotten so intense. You'd think he'd have better sense, but he's worse than anyone, worse than any crazy kid. He's
old,
Mark—that's what's so weird—how can you get like that when you're
old?
”

“That's when,” Mark said. He remembered Anthony's eyes, and a sense of his own future passed through him in a shudder. But he shook it off and decided at once what to do.

Jeff was getting really restless. He had been about as long in this place as he ever stayed anywhere; and besides, he didn't like the setup in the house. By this he meant mainly, even solely, Kent: for, in order to get Kent away from Anthony, Mark had installed him in his house. Now that it had begun to take on the look of an elegant country residence,
Kent liked it. He stalked around with his camera and took pictures from all sorts of angles. Once, while he was perched in the cleft of a tree to frame a very interesting composition of the gatehouse, Jeff unexpectedly opened the door and came out holding a tooth mug. He was trying out a new mouthwash he had concocted out of various herbs boiled together. Kent shouted for him to get out of the way. It took Jeff some time to locate him, and when he did, he went on standing there and watched him gesturing more furiously; and then, when he got tired of that, and also cold—he was wearing only a pair of cut-off jeans and his chest was bare in the autumn air—he spurted out his mouthwash in Kent's direction with a horrid grimace, partly at the taste of the concoction, partly at Kent.

“I can't stand having that creep up there,” Jeff said to Stephanie and Natasha when they came to visit him. He closed the green shutters of his cottage and stoked up his wood stove and they huddled around it, but it was impossible to forget the house looking down on them with Kent inside it, like a giant in his keep.

The reason Jeff was delaying his departure was that he was waiting for Stephanie to make up her mind to go with him. At night, in her bunk above Natasha, Stephanie tried to get at her own motives and to decide whether it would be more meaningful to stay with Leo or to go off with Jeff. Although she had not yet come to a conclusion, Natasha noticed that every day when they went off to see Jeff, she took some little bundle of her possessions along. “What is it?” Natasha asked, and Stephanie said “Oh, just some crummy old jeans . . . And those blue sneakers I don't wear anymore? They may be in there too. And my Book of the Dead.” Gradually, everything she had kept in her trunk in the attic found its way to Jeff's cottage.

In the past, when Marietta had come to visit her mother, she had always given two short rings and one long so that Louise would know who it was. Mark and Natasha had used the same signal, and when she heard it, Louise would call from inside “Which worm is that?” in a voice full of elation. But now, of course, she was mostly at Regi's so that Marietta had to use her own key to let herself in.

It had always been a dark apartment because the buildings outside tended to block the light and the German furniture inside to absorb it. The first thing Louise had done in the mornings was to go from window to window to pull aside the velvet curtains—in a grand gesture, flourish almost, at the same time taking a deep breath as though welcoming streams of sunlight into her house.

But now, when Marietta tried to pull the cord of the salon curtains, she wondered how Louise had managed to make them fly open that way: for they were so heavy that she herself could only get them to creak apart slowly and stiffly. In any case, she gave up after she had parted them only a little way, for the chink of light falling through them lit up a desolate scene. It wasn't that Louise, especially in these latter years, had always been meticulous in keeping the place dusted and tidy. But now the room had an air of utter neglect, with dust ingrained and settled into each crevice of the carved and convoluted furniture and on the clustered grapes of the chandelier. Inside Louise's bedroom, Marietta found the bed unmade and Louise's old-fashioned flannel nightgown abandoned on the floor. When she stooped to pick it up, she saw some more clothes lying on the carpet—old-woman underclothes that Louise must have stepped out of and left there. A pair of stockings had rolled under the bed too far for Louise to retrieve. Marietta had to stretch out to reach it, and when she did, she found it covered with fluff like something lost long ago and overgrown.

When she went into Mark's room, she found it not only neglected but superseded. It still had his baize bulletin board onto which he used to pin reminders to himself; some remained, drooping from rusty tacks. There was the brand-new tennis racket he had never used—a present from a friend he had cherished—and an exercise bicycle that was another present he valued for the sake of the giver but had not had any use for. (He had never been addicted to sport or exercise, though admiring those who were.) Marietta sat on his bed and decided that her parents' apartment must be given up and the furniture either sold or put in storage. As for Louise, she must come and live with Marietta—that was the way it had to be now.

She wasted no time. Mark was in his house in the country, so Marietta got her car out of the garage and drove herself up there. But on the way she surprised herself by taking a detour to Tim's. She hadn't been there since Mark was born—in fact, the last time was when she was pregnant with him, thirty-four years ago. The house had been sold long since and had changed ownership more than once in between. Mark had told her that the present owners used it only for weekends and vacations. She got out of the car. The place was completely deserted—she called a few times but no one came, so she went up to try to peer into a window. And then she couldn't tear herself away but went from window to window: now she got a glimpse of the hallway, now a corner of the front parlor; from the rear window she saw the breakfront bookcase and the Martha Washington chair. She was astonished: it was almost an exact reproduction of what the house had been in Tim's family's time. Even the bought pictures resembled the ancestors! Evidently the present owners—a corporation lawyer and his wife who was something in television—loved and revered the place to such a degree that they kept it up like a museum. Marietta felt that, if they could have bought Tim's mother and sisters, they would have
propped them up with loving care in appropriate positions inside the house; even Tim himself, quietly sozzled in his chair in the front parlor. Marietta knocked on the glass of a window, she rang the bell, but no one came. She was almost tempted to break in—it looked so easy except that she knew the burglar alarms would begin to shriek the moment she tried anything of the sort.

She didn't need to go in—she knew exactly what it would be like, down to the characteristic smell of furniture polish mixed with potpourri. It was strange the way there had never been any cooking smells in that house. Not even on Thanksgiving—which was the last time she had ever visited there. By that time she and Tim had separated and she was living with her parents in the city; but as a gesture of goodwill she had driven herself down to participate in the family's Thanksgiving dinner. She was pregnant with Mark at the time. She found herself alone with Tim's mother and his sisters. Tim failed to show up. At first Marietta was indignant, then she became anxious: she thought that he might have been drinking somewhere and have wrecked his car on the way home. If anyone else shared these not illegitimate fears, they didn't show it. They would have considered it bad form to brood about possible disasters—news of them reached soon enough if it had to, and until such time one carried on as if such possibilities did not exist. They were joined by Tim's mother's mother who had driven over from her house farther upstate to join them for this family meal. She looked very much like Tim's mother, as tall and raw-boned; they even appeared to be the same age—but then so did Mary, Tim's eldest sister. The tomboy of the family, Mary was always stamping around the house engaged in manual labor such as digging or fixing drainage pipes, or carrying heavy objects in and out of her pickup.