Light Years (14 page)

He picked up the telephone book. It was the county book, as thick as one’s thumb. He took it in his teeth and, the muscles jumping in his neck and arm, began to tear it, slowly, steadily, between teeth and one hand, in two.

“You see?” he said.

“Yes. I know you’re strong. I know,” she said.

She received a letter from her father written on small sheets of lined paper. It thanked her for the three days he had spent there. He had caught a cold on the way home. He had made good time, though, even better than on the trip up. She was a good poker player; she must have inherited it. There are no real friends, he warned.

9

SUMMER AT AMAGANSETT. SHE
was thirty-four. She lay in the dunes, in the dry grass. Her hand was marked in black, each finger divided in three parts, the thumb in two, the palm in quarters like a folded letter. At the base of her fingers she had circled the mounts, Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, and colored the palm lines in red. She was deep in study, the chart beside her, entranced. Beneath, on the beach, her children played.

She was silent, an outcast, invisible except from the sea. Her body was dark brown. Her hidden breasts were pale, there was a thin band of white around her hips, a band no wider than a tie. Her eyes were clear, her mouth colorless; she was at peace. She had lost her desire to be the most beautiful woman at parties, to know celebrated people, to shock. The sun warmed her legs, her shoulders, her hair. She was not afraid of solitude; she was not afraid of growing old.

She stayed for hours. The sun reached its zenith, the cries of children faded, the sea became tin. The beach was never empty. It was wide, endless, there were always figures on it, distant, like nomads’ camps. She saw wealth in her hand; she saw a prodigious final third of life. Three clear rings, of thirty years apiece, circled her wrist; she would live to be ninety. She had lost her interest in marriage. There was nothing else to say. It was a prison.

“No, I’ll tell you what it is,” she said, “I’m indifferent to it. I’m bored with happy couples. I don’t believe in them. They’re false. They’re deceiving themselves.

“Viri and I are friends, good friends. I think we’ll always be. But the rest, the rest is dead. We both know it. There’s no use pretending. It’s decorated like a corpse, but it’s already rotten.

“When Viri and I are divorced …” she said.

Arnaud came that summer. His arrival was worthy of Chaplin. He drove up with Eve in a white convertible, giving little waves when the front wheels went up on a stump and lifted the nose of the car three feet in the air. He took over two rooms in the back of the house, a bedroom and sun porch overlooking the fields. He wore a white cap and a ribbed shirt, pants the color of tobacco or certain perfumes, and a scarf for a belt. He was outrageous, serene, sleek as a cavy. The first thing he did was to buy a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of liquor.

“A wonderful gift,” Nedra recalled.

“Although,” Viri said, “as a matter of fact …”

“He didn’t drink it
all.”

“Well, not all.”

And cigars. It was the summer of lunches and marvelous cigars. Every day, having finished lunch in the sun, Nedra would ask, “Arnaud, what are we going to smoke?”

“Let me see,” he would say.

“A Coronita?”

“No, I don’t … perhaps. What do you think of a Don Diego?” he would ask. “A Don Diego or a Palma.”

“A Palma.”

“That’s it.”

She wrote to Jivan:
You know how much I hated to think of being apart, even for a few weeks, but somehow I find it’s not as difficult as I imagined. It isn’t that I don’t think of you. If anything, I think of you even more, but the summer seems like one long day after we’ve been together, I have time to reflect, to savor you again. It’s like sleep, like bathing. We often talked about going to the sea together, and though I am here without you, I see it through your eyes and am content. I couldn’t feel this if I didn’t love you and feel your love strongly. We are so fortunate. There is that terrific electricity that goes back and forth between us. I kiss you many times. I kiss your hands. Franca speaks often of you. Even Viri does …

There was a small drawing, done from memory, beside the signature.

She had mail from Robert Chaptelle, who was in Varengeville. His cards began without a salutation, his handwriting was illegible and dense.

My play is the first of its kind, running two hours and a half without intermission. It is called “Le Begaud.” I am giving it its finishing touches
.

“So he’s back in France,” Viri said.

“Yes.”

“What a loss.”

This is my schedule, and my aim is to follow it very closely. I will be at “Hôtel de la Tenasse” until the 15th of August. At “L’Abbaye” in Viry-Chatillon until the 30th of August. At the Wilbraham Hotel, Sloane Street, London, the whole month of September
.

A certain Ned Portman may call you. He is an American, quite intelligent, I have come to know here. He has seen me at work, and what he has to say about me may interest you
.

She had nothing to say, but she managed to write a brief reply. She was strangely elated by his addresses, their underlined words and stamps of Le Touquet and sculptured heads of the thirties.

The children loved Arnaud. His curly hair was bleaching, it was much too long. He had a big belly; it made their father seem slender in comparison. Arnaud was a patriarch, an Alpha man. He wore a straw hat, his toes moved contentedly as he lay on the sand, a beachcomber with white teeth, white as seashells, and pockets filled with crumpled money. He was a book dealer. He had money because his business was well-run, secure, and because he had no hesitation about asking the best price. He could joke about money, he could waste it, it flowed to him like water to a drain.

He ran with them on the beach. He was powerful in the burning sunshine, his face shaded, his skin brown. Eve came for the weekend. They moved to a motel.

“It’s too quiet there,” he complained the next day. He was mixing drinks, rum with fresh fruit; it was the last of the fine rum. Viri was gathering wood. The beach was almost deserted. In the distance, half a mile away, one other group was bathing in the sea.

While the ears of corn soaked in sea water were broiling, they drank the icy rum.

“You’ve heard what happened?” Nedra said. “Our house was robbed.”

“Oh, God,” Eve said. “When?”

“We just got a call this morning. They took the record player, the television, they broke into everything.”

“You must be just sick.”

“I want to live in Europe,” Nedra said.

“Europe?” Arnaud cried. “They’re worse.”

“Are they really?”

“They invented stealing,” he said.

“What about England?”

“England? The worst of all. You know, I do some business there, I have friends in England. Their flats are broken into constantly. The police come, they look around, they dust for fingerprints. Well, we know who it is, they say. Wonderful, who? The same ones who did it last time, they say.”

“Oh, but I love those pictures of England.”

“The grass is quite good,” he admitted.

Eve was drunk. “What grass?” she said.

“The English grass.”

She was stroking his hair. “You really are beautiful,” she said. “How can a woman hope to …”

“Hope to what?”

“Interest you,” she murmured vaguely.

“There’s surely some way.”

She walked off a few feet, paused, and then in one motion turned and removed her dress. Underneath she was wearing nothing but a pair of white underpants.

“Are you hot, darling?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re so impulsive about clothes.”

“Let’s swim,” she said. Her arms were covering her breasts. The sea hissed behind her.

“The corn is almost ready,” Arnaud complained.

“Darling.” She reached out. “Don’t make me swim alone.”

“Never.”

He carried her down to the water, soothing her as if she were a child. They could see her long legs dangling over his arm. The waves were silky. Hadji stood barking at the footsteps vanished into the sea.

Eve was no longer young, Nedra noticed. Her stomach was flat, but the skin had stretched. Her waist was thickening. Still one loved her for this, one loved her even more. Even the faint lines beginning to appear in her forehead seemed beautiful. When they came back, the ends of her hair were soaked, her body glistened, the womanly mons showed through her wet pants. She leaned against Arnaud in deep affection. She had put on his sweater; it came to her hips, she seemed naked beneath it. His arm was around her waist. “The trouble is,” she said, “what can I do about it, I love Jews.”

Summer. The foliage is thick. The leaves shimmer everywhere, like scales. In the morning, aroma of coffee, the whiteness of sunlight across the floor. The sound of Franca upstairs, of a young girl’s steps as she made her bed, combed her hair, descended with the warm smile of youth. Her hair hung in a smooth column between her shoulder blades. When one touched it, she grew still, certain already, sure of her beauty.

Drives to the beach. The sand was hot. The sea thundered faintly, as if in a glass. Their limbs were tanned. Franca had the faint outlines of a woman, hips just beginning, long fine legs. Her father held them so that she could practice standing on her hands. She was in her black swimsuit. Her buttocks showed as she arched her body, her calfs, the small of her back.

“All right, let go!” she cried.

Wavering, unsteady, she took two or three brief steps with her hands and then fell. “How long was it?” she asked.

“Eight seconds.”

“Again,” she begged.

The wind was from the shore. The waves seemed to break in silence.

Days on the beach. They went home in the late afternoons, the great reaches glistening with sunlight no longer hot. Lunches that sheltered them like a tent. Beneath a wide umbrella Nedra spread chicken, eggs, endive, tomatoes, pâté, cheese, bread, cucumbers, butter and wine. Or they ate at a table in the garden, the sea distant, the trees green, the voices drifting from the house next-door. White sky, silence, the fragrant cigars.

She spoke of Europe often. “I need the kind of life you can live there,” she said, “free of inhibitions.”

“Inhibitions?” Arnaud asked. His eyes were half-closed in sleep. Viri had gone to the city. They were alone.

“I need a large house.”

“I don’t think you have many inhibitions.”

“And a car.”

“You’re very uninhibited.”

“Yes, well, it’s other people’s inhibitions I’m talking about.”

“Ah, other people’s. But you don’t care about other people. You care less about other people than anyone I know.”

She was silent. She was looking at her feet in which she noticed, as if for the first time, blue veins. The sun was at its apogee. She was conscious, as if it were a moment of weightlessness, that her life, too, was at its apex; it was sacred, floating, ready to change direction for the final time.

“You know, I think about divorce,” she said, “and Viri is such a good father. He loves his children so, but that isn’t what stops me. It isn’t all the legal business and argument, the arrangements that have to be made. The really depressing thing is the absolute optimism of it all.”

Arnaud smiled.

“I want to travel,” she said. She was not thinking; the words came from somewhere within her and rose to her mouth. “I want to go to a pleasant room at the end of the day, unpack, bathe. I want to go downstairs for dinner. Sleep. Then, in the morning … the London
Times.”

“With the room number on it in pencil.”

“I want to be able to pay with a check and not even think about it.”

“No matter what they say, that’s the one great feeling, isn’t it?”

“I’d like to buy all new clothes.”

They sat beneath a dome of heat, of midday silence, in attitudes of languor, as if exhausted, as if somewhere in Sicily, exchanging secrets which encircled them like slow currents and were as sweet to confess as to hear.

“Arnaud, I’m very fond of you. You’re really my favorite man, do you know that?”

“I’d hoped so.”

“I mean it. You have a marvelous quality of understanding, of understanding and accepting.”

“I seem to.”

“You have a wonderful sense of humor.”

“Unfortunately,” he said. “Humor comes largely from not caring.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Detachment is what brings forth humor. It’s a paradox. We’re the only creatures that laugh, they say, and the more we laugh, the less we care.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Um,” he reflected. “Perhaps. A lot of very clear insights that come in these hours of reflection, especially following lunch, later prove not quite so sound. This has been a lovely summer.”

“I think that every day,” she said.

Toward the end, in the last days of August, they lay on the lawn in the evening, Arnaud in shirt sleeves leaning on one elbow, posed like a Manet, Viri and Nedra sitting. The dinner cloth was spread before them on the grass. The great trees, rich in leaves, sighed in the wind. Viri’s arms embraced his knees, his socks showed.

“A lovely summer,” he said, “hasn’t it been?”

They did not know what they were praising; the days, the sense of contentment, of pagan joy. They were acclaiming the summer of their lives in which, far from danger, they rested. Their flesh was speaking, their well-being.

“I’m going to get the soup,” Nedra said.

“What kind is it?” Viri asked.

She rose to her feet. “It’s one of your favorites,” she said. “Can’t you smell it?”

The air was filled with the odor of grass, dry earth, the faint scent of flowers.

“No,” he confessed.

“Your nose is your weakest part,” she said. “It’s
cresson.”

“Did you really make that?”

She brushed her knees. “Just for you.”

She went inside. Franca sat on the sofa, reading. The spoons were in the drawer. The pure light of evening filled the house.