In Search of Love and Beauty (31 page)

Seated at the table where Mark planned to give his dinner parties—he was getting an appropriate set of dishes together—were Kent and Anthony. They were side by side, and Anthony had laid his hand on Kent's. He left it there when Mark came in—perhaps in challenge: at any rate, the way he looked up at Mark was defiant.

Kent said in his growling, deep voice, “I didn't ask him to come here.”

“But he
is
here,” Mark said.

“I didn't ask him,” Kent said again. He looked down at Anthony's hand on his and seemed surprised to see it there; and only then did he withdraw his from underneath.

“I've come to take him away with me,” Anthony said.

“Oh, yes? And what does he say about that?”

Kent didn't have anything to say. He stared ahead of him into horizons of his own, frowning, absenting himself from the scene.

Mark saw that he and Anthony were expected to fight it out between them. He was prepared to do that. He stood by the sideboard (inlaid with matching veneers) and Anthony came to join him there. They faced each other. Trim and fair, with careful haircuts and elegant casual suits, they looked so much alike that they might have been brothers. But there was this difference—that under his boyish haircut and over his
young man's suit, Anthony's face was strained and old. Looking at him, Mark might have been looking at his own face twenty years later; but not yet, not now.

Anthony said, “He wants to come and live with me. We've been talking about it. You can ask him.”

Kent had his back to them and gave no one any help. He sat there stolidly and now he even supported his elbows on the table and held his hands over his ears.

“I don't think he wants to at all,” Mark said. “If he did, I wouldn't try to stop him.”

“You can't stop him.”

They kept on glaring at each other. Mark felt at an advantage—in years, strength, everything. He wasn't even sure that he urgently wanted or needed Kent, but he was certainly determined that no one was going to take him away.

“Do you want to go, Kent?” he asked.

They both knew there wasn't going to be any answer, so instead Anthony spoke. He said, “Leave him out of this. I'm telling you: he wants to go with me.” His voice rose to a falsetto: “Do you think you own him? Do you think you bought him, with this house, as part of the furniture?” Anthony's mouth twitched, so did his hands; Mark could have felt sorry for him—perhaps he even did, especially as he knew so exactly how he was feeling.

“Listen,” Mark said. “You'd better drive yourself home now. They said on the radio there's going to be a very bad snowstorm. I wouldn't like anything bad to happen to you driving back by yourself.”

Anthony replied with bravado: “I'm not driving back by myself.”

This was followed by too long a silence. When Anthony spoke next, the bravado had gone out of him. “Kent?” he said in a trembly voice, turning in that direction.

Kent let Mark speak for him—and Mark was glad to do
so. He felt triumphant and superior, and couldn't help showing it on his face; and he said, calmly: “You must realize yourself that it was not a good idea to come here.”

Anthony did something entirely unexpected: he snatched one of the silver-handled carving knives out of the stand—the same Mark's aunt Mary had used on the Thanksgiving turkey—and he directed it toward Mark's heart. Now, Anthony knew how to wield a carving knife—he could cut up roast chickens expertly—but not how to plunge it into other people's hearts. Or perhaps at the last moment caution overcame his rage. He got as far as Mark's pale blue cashmere sweater and slit into that, crying, “I'll kill you!” And with that cry the knife clattered to the floor, and both Mark and Anthony stared down at it.

Mark stooped to retrieve it and, in his tidy way, to replace it on the stand. He touched the tear in his sweater, and Anthony, watching him do that, said, “Good God.”

“Yes,” Mark agreed.

Anthony straightened the necktie under his fiercely working Adam's apple. He said, “I guess I'm sorry,” in a strangled voice.

“So you ought to be,” Mark said. “It was quite a favorite sweater.”

He managed to smile, and so, with more effort, did Anthony. But Kent was devastated—he had buried his head in his arms laid on the table. The other two had to comfort him, each placing a hand on one of his huge shoulders, now shaking with sobs. He was still very young, only at the beginning of his career, and knew nothing of what could sometimes happen among people with very strong feelings.

About these feelings: Leo had once likened them to the voices of the great castrati, in which a man's vigor was made to give body to a woman's nervous delicacy. Unhuman voices, Leo called them; unnatural hybrids. “All the same,” Mark had replied, “no one ever said they weren't beautiful.”

When they arrived at the Academy, Louise was so excited that she embraced everyone, even people she didn't know. “Where's Natasha?” she asked. Leo looked around: “Yes, where is she?” No one knew. Louise wouldn't allow Eric to take off Regi's hat and coat because she wanted to take her out again at once to show her the Academy grounds. “You don't come,” she told Leo. “I don't want you with a cold.” He didn't hear her. He said: “Where's Stephanie?”

Louise had taken Regi's arm and she carefully descended the steps out into the garden with her. When Eric tried to help, she wouldn't let him; she said they could manage perfectly well, this wasn't the first time she and Regi had been out in the snow together. “Is it, darling?” she said, squeezing Regi's fur sleeve. But Regi said, “When are we going to open my presents?”

Louise took her to the sunken garden. Marietta and Eric and a few students came up behind them, in case they needed help. But the two old ladies seemed to be managing quite well on their own, clinging to each other as they tripped over the hardened snow. Both of them tall and completely encased in fur coats and fur hats, they looked like two prehistoric animals—cumbersome yet graceful because so perfectly adapted to their environment. Their high-heeled suede boots made the first tracks in the virginal snow of the sunken garden. Louise led Regi to the edge of the fountain basin. She showed her the stone nymph, whose curves were now packed with snow; icicles had formed at the stone nipple from which in the summer she pressed a fountain. “Brrrr,” Louise playfully shuddered at Regi. “Aren't you glad you've got your mink?”

“When are we going to cut the cake?”

The water in the basin had frozen solid—“Just nice for skating,” Louise said; and still in her playful mood, she stuck out one toe toward the ice and the tip of her tongue emerged between her lips in pleasant anticipation.

But Regi didn't want to go skating, she wanted to go in where her cake and presents were. She said crossly, in German, “Let me go, you stupid goose”: and she jerked her arm free—so that Louise, one foot extended toward the ice, the other on the slippery surface of the snow, lost her balance and fell, striking the rim of the basin.

The others rushed forward to help her up. She was hurt but no one suspected how badly—except Eric who had seen old ladies slip and fall more than once before, on the ball-room floors round which he had led them in the fox-trot, the peabody, and the old-fashioned waltz. They usually broke a hip and had to be taken away in an ambulance; once, one of them had died before they could even call the ambulance. Some of them died in the hospital, but others came out again and hobbled around a while longer. However, none of them ever came back to dance again.

After Mark had gone to join the others in the dining room, Natasha didn't want to stay in the house with them. She walked down the hill to wait for him in Jeff's cottage. She hoped he wouldn't be long because, with the wood stove gone out, it was cold in there. She huddled in the garbage-dump armchair, with her hands in the pockets of her coat; her breath came in vapors. The cold outside seemed to be taking over the deserted cottage as if it were a dead tree with a hollow trunk.

She was relieved when she heard a car and got up to lift the latch from the door. But it was Leo who rushed in—like a wild man, wearing nothing over his monk's robe, his silver ornament swinging. He didn't say anything but his eyes rolled around the room, and when all he saw was Natasha, he said, “Where have they gone?”

She couldn't tell him; she really didn't know. She said, “Has Grandma come?”

He seized her arm as if she were unwilling to go with
him; though at the same moment she was saying, “Take me back to the Academy.” He hustled her into his car. She was surprised to see that it was his own car—a very small red sports model that he had had for thirty years. His followers wouldn't let him drive it anymore because it was so old and also because he was such a mad, erratic driver. And he drove madly now, with Natasha beside him: the tiny car lurched and groaned as he wildly, doggedly drove it over the slippery road; it heaved and thumped and boiled. Natasha, who had never learned to drive, didn't realize how dangerous it all was. Instead, she was glad to be speeding back to the Academy where Louise and Marietta were waiting with Regi and the birthday cake.

But after a time she realized that he was driving in the wrong direction, not toward but away from the Academy. It took some time longer before she plucked up courage to point this out to him. It was doubtful whether he heard her: he was hunched over the wheel, wheezing as loudly as the old car, his heavy, sack-like body lurching every time the car lurched from one side of the road to the other. Natasha said it again: “Leo, we're going the wrong way.”

He was muttering; he was saying, “I'm going to find her. We'll find her.” It was crazy. He looked and sounded crazy. His face was inflamed, his nose swollen, tears were coming out of his eyes and falling down his cheeks onto the steering wheel. He was making sobbing sounds like a baby or a very old man. Natasha was awestruck: “He really loves her,” she thought. At the same time, this thought depressed her, for it seemed to her that there just wasn't enough love to go round and never would be—not here, not now—with everyone needing such an awful lot of it.

Although it was still afternoon, dusk was falling—imperceptibly, for all day the clouds had not cleared and there was no sun to set, only sky and white earth to fade together into a colorless twilight. This was relieved by one single star that
had appeared and glowed dimly in midair. It didn't occur to Leo to turn on the lights—he was too sunk in other thoughts that made him mutter as he lurched and drove and wept. It seemed to Natasha that the pale twilight, the fading earth were swallowing them up, sucking them in, as into water or clouds. Nevertheless, she was glad to be there with him: not that she could do anything as, blinded with tears, he drove them farther into snow and mist, but at least so he wasn't alone.

They carried Louise into the den and laid her on the leather couch. She sighed when they did that—probably with pain, but perhaps also because she felt satisfied to be there in that hot, close room full of Leo's cigar smell. Regi's cake had been taken out of the box and placed on the round table in the center where it shone pink and festive.

Regi wanted the candles lit. There were four of those—for herself, Louise always had the full amount (on her last birthday, her cake had blazed resplendently with eighty-four candles); but for Regi she left out the first digit. When everyone ignored her, Regi became more plaintive and loud—until she penetrated whatever it was that made Louise keep her eyes shut. Anyway, Louise opened them and said, “Let her”; so then Eric lit the four candles. They made a very pretty sight, and Regi laughed and clapped her hands, and Louise too seemed to smile as she shut her eyes again.

But the very next second something happened within her—it was as if a stone broke through a vein and lodged itself inside her lungs: filling her with a sensation surpassing all others, a pain so sharp that it became transporting. She cried out, though just once and not very loudly, and only Marietta heard her. “I'm coming!” was what Marietta heard—as she had heard her mother exclaim once before, years and years ago when she had watched her and Leo from behind the
screen. And Marietta wondered now as she had wondered then—
What's she mean? Where's she coming? Where's she going?

Regi gathered herself together to blow her four candles out, but although she tried very hard, she only managed three and one remained. Nevertheless, Eric praised her for her effort, and then he said, “Now let's try again—one more time, okay?” So Regi took another deep breath and blew the last one out, terribly pleased with herself.