Light Years (21 page)

“I hope I didn’t upset you.”

“It must be the season,” Bill said. “February is like that. The only time in my life I’ve really been sick was in February. I was in the hospital for six weeks. On the death list for two. This is marvelous paella.”

“What was wrong?”

“Oh, I had a bad infection. My family even bought a coffin for me. It wasn’t even big enough. They didn’t want to spend the money. They were going to bend my knees.” He laughed.

“Viri, are you sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

Throughout dinner he had glimpses of her. He could not evade them. She was alive; she was well. Suddenly she stood up. He felt a moment of utter panic, of physical fear. It was only that they were leaving. When she passed, making her way through the tables, he put his hand to his brow to conceal his face.

They drove home in a night that was cold and immensely clear. The blocks of apartments, great darkened hives, floated above them. In the distance the bridge was a line of light.

Across the river the road became empty. The moon was above it, the entire sky white. The car was filled with the faint aroma of tobacco, of perfume, like the compartment of a train. If one were standing in the darkness watching, they passed in an instant, the brilliant headlights pouring before them, a moment’s glimpse of them, no more. In the cold the sound vanishes, then even the distant red of tail lights is gone. Silence. Overhead perhaps the faint noise, brushing the stars, of a plane.

That same night Arnaud was near the Chelsea in the studio of a friend. When he left it was after midnight. He walked east. They had talked for hours, the kind of evening he liked best, intimate, rich talk that flows unending and of which one is never exhausted. He was a Dickensian man; he ate, he drank, he held up the tip of his little finger to show how big someone’s talent was, he swam in the teeming city. His overcoat collar was up. The sidewalks were empty, the stores dark behind their shutters of steel.

The traffic came up the avenue in isolated waves. The headlights of the cars rose and fell in ominous silence over the worn macadam. He looked for a taxi, but they drove with their signs reading
OFF DUTY
at this hour. The corner with its four bleak prospects was cold. He walked up the block. A cafeteria, the last lighted window, was closing. A wave of cars went by, most of them battered, driven by lone men, cars of the working class, every window up.

Around the corner, moving slowly, a motorcycle came. The rider was in black, plexiglass covered his face. A cab went by, Arnaud waved, it would not stop.

The cyclist had pulled to the curb a little way ahead, the engine was idling, he was looking down at his wheels. He had no face, only the curved, gleaming surface. Arnaud moved a few steps out in the street. He could see the lights of midtown, the great buildings. The cyclist had dismounted and was trying the doors of walk-ups, wrenching at the knobs. As he went from one to another he looked into empty stores, his hands pressed flat against the glass. Arnaud began to walk.

In the west Forties there were effeminate young men on street corners, still waiting. There were men slumped in doorways with filthy hands, their drunken faces scalded by the cold. The taxis that fled along the great avenues were falling apart, their fenders rattling, trash on the floor.

He began to hold his ears. He couldn’t walk from here; he lived on Sixty-eighth. He looked back toward the distant traffic, it seemed there were even fewer approaching cars. The tone of everything had changed, as when one listens too long to silence. His thoughts, which had been bundled about him like his coat, suddenly moved off, encompassed more: the dark, stained buildings, the cold legends of commerce written everywhere. He thought of going to the Chelsea; it was only three blocks away. Two men had turned the corner and were coming slowly toward him, one of them dancing a little from side to side, half-entering doorways.

“Hey, what time is it?” one of them asked. They were black.

“Twelve-thirty,” Arnaud said.

“Where’s your watch?”

Arnaud did not answer. They had stopped, the rhythm of their walking changed, they stood in his path.

“How you know the time with no watch? You unfriendly, man?”

Arnaud’s heart was beating faster. “Never unfriendly,” he said.

“You been to your girl friend? What’s wrong, you too big to talk?” Their faces were identical, gleaming. “Yeah, pretty big. Got a hundred-fifty-dollar overcoat, so you’re all right.”

Arnaud felt the strength, the ability to move draining from him, as if he were stepping onstage without an idea, without a line. A group of cars was coming, they were five or six blocks away. He began to talk; he was like an informer.

“Listen, I can’t stay, but I want to tell you something …”

“He can’t stay,” one of them said to the other.

“There was this deaf man …”

“What deaf man?”

The cars were coming closer. “He met a friend on the street …”

“Les see your watch. We played around enough.”

“I want to ask you one question,” Arnaud said quickly.

“Come on.”

“A question only you can answer …”

He suddenly turned toward the approaching cars and ran a few steps in their direction, calling and waving his arms. There were no taxis among them. They were dark, sealed vessels swerving to avoid him. He was struck by something that stung in the cold. He fell to one knee as if pushed.

He tried to stand. Whatever they were hitting him with sounded like a wet rag. It was the beginning of one thing, the end of another. He was staggering forth, like a flagellant, from the ease of uninjured life. He held his arms about his head, crying out, “For God’s sake!”

He stumbled, trying to grapple with the rain of grunting blows that was making him wet. He was trying to run. He was blinded, he could not see, lurching along the plank of legend, ridiculous to the end, calling out, his performance faltering in the icy cold, his legs crumbling.

On his knees in the street he offered them his money. They scattered the contents of his wallet as they left. His watch they did not even take. It was broken. It bore, like the instruments of a wrecked plane, the exact moment of disaster. He lay for more than an hour, the cars swerving past, never slowing.

Eve called in the morning. “Oh, God,” she moaned.

“What’s wrong?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” Nedra said. Outside the window in sunlight her dog was walking on the frozen ground.

“Arnaud …” She began to weep. “They beat him. He’s lost an eye.”

“Beat him?”

“Yes. Somewhere downtown,” she cried.

3

LIFE DIVIDES ITSELF WITH SCARS
like the rings contained within a tree. How close together the early ones seem, time compacts them, twenty years become indistinguishable, one from another.

She had entered a new era. All that belonged to the old had to be buried, put away. The image of Arnaud with his thickly bandaged eye, the deep bruises, the slow speech like a record player losing speed—these injuries seemed like omens to her. They marked her first fears of life, of the malevolence which was part of its fluid, which had no explanation, no cure. She wanted to sell the house. Something was happening on every side of her existence, she began to see it in the streets, it was like the darkness, she was suddenly aware of it, when it comes, it comes everywhere.

In Jivan she noticed for the first time things which were small but clear, like the faint creases in his face which she knew would be furrows one day; they were the tracings of his character, his fate. The somewhat servile deference he paid to Viri, for example, she saw was not the result of a unique situation, it was his nature; there was something obsequious in him, he respected successful men too much. His assurance was physical, it did not go beyond that, like a young man practicing with weights in his room; he was strong, but his strength was childish. Things had somehow changed between them. She would always have affection for him, but the summer had passed.

“What is it?” he wanted to know.

She did not feel like explaining. “Love is movement,” she answered. “It is changing.”

“Yes, of course it’s movement, but between two people. Nedra, something is bothering you, I know you too well.”

“I just feel we need to breathe some new air.”

“New air. You don’t mean air.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Maybe I do. You know, you look wonderful. You look better than when I first met you. It’s natural, but I’ll tell you something you don’t realize. You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It’s not true. It’s very hard to find.”

“I haven’t been looking for it.”

“It’s like a tree,” he told her, “it takes a long time to grow. It has roots very deep, and these roots stretch out a long way, farther than you know. You can’t cut it, just like that. Besides, it’s not your nature. You’re not a child, you’re not interested simply in sensation. I don’t have another woman, I’m not married, I have no children.”

“You can marry.”

“You know I can’t.”

“Things will change.”

“Nedra, you know I love Franca. I love Danny.”

“I know you do.”

“It isn’t fair, what you’re saying.”

“I’m tired of looking on both sides of things,” she said simply.

She was above bickering. She had decided.

Her children became for her all there was, so much so that the remark of Jivan’s, about loving them, disturbed her. Somehow she found it dangerous.

Her love for them was the love to which she had devoted her life, the only one which would not be consumed or vanish. Their lives would be ascendent when hers was fading, they would carry her devotion within them like a kind of knowledge which swam in the blood. They would always be young to her; they would linger, walk in the sunshine, talk to her to the end.

She was reading Alma Mahler. “Viri, listen to this,” she said.

It was the death of Mahler’s daughter who had diphtheria. They had gone to the country and suddenly she became sick. It grew quickly worse. On the last night a tracheotomy was performed; she was choking, she could not breathe. Alma Mahler ran along the edge of the lake, alone, sobbing. Mahler himself, unable to bear the grief, went to the door of his dying child’s room again and again, but could not bring himself to go in. He could not even bear to go to the funeral.

“Why are you reading that?” Viri asked.

“It’s so terrible,” she confessed. She reached over and touched his head. “You’re losing your hair.”

“I know.”

“You’re losing it at the office.”

“Everywhere,” he said.

She was sitting in the armchair covered in white, her favorite chair—his, too; one or the other was always sitting in it, the light was good for reading, the table was piled with new books.

“Oh, God,” she sighed, “we’re in the grocery store of life. We sit here at night, we eat, we pay bills. I want to go to Europe. I want to go on a tour. I want to see Wren’s cathedrals, the great buildings, the squares. I want to see France.”

“Italy.”

“Yes, Italy. When we’re there, we’ll see everything.”

“We couldn’t go until spring,” Viri said.

“I want to go this spring.”

The thoughts of travel thrilled him too. To wake in London, the sunlight falling, black cabs queued outside the hotels, four seasons in the air.

“I want to read about it first. A good book on architecture,” she said.

“Pevsner.”

“Who is that?”

“He’s a German. He’s one of those Europeans who become strangely at home in England—after all, it is
the
civilized country—and live their entire lives there. He’s one of the great authorities.”

“I’d like to go by boat.”

The winter night embraced the house. Hadji, who was growing old, lay against a sofa, his legs stretched out. Nedra was borne by a dream, by the excitement of discovery. “I’m going to have some ouzo,” she said.

She poured two glasses from a bottle Jivan had brought at Christmas. She looked like a woman for whom travel to Europe was an ordinary act: her ease, her long neck from which there hung strings of Azuma beads, putty, blue and tan, the bottle in her hand.

“I didn’t know we had any ouzo,” he said.

“This little bit.”

“Do you know how Mahler died?” Viri said. “It was in a thunderstorm. He’d been very sick, he was in a coma. And then at midnight there came a tremendous storm, and he vanished into it, almost literally—his breath, his soul, everything.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“The bells were tolling. Alma lay in bed with his photograph, talking to it.”

“That’s exactly like her. How did you know all that?”

“I was reading ahead in your book.”

As they stood on the corner near Bloomingdale’s, the crowd passing, brushing against them, the buses roaring by, she said to Eve, “It’s finished,” by which she meant everything which had nourished her, most of all the city beyond the far margins of which she had found refuge, still subject to its pull, still beneath a sky one end of which glowed from its light.

Passing through the doors of the store she looked at those going in with her, those leaving, women buying at the handbag counters ahead. The real question, she thought, is, Am I one of these people? Am I going to become one, grotesque, embittered, intent upon their problems, women in strange sunglasses, old men without ties? Would she have stained fingers like her father? Would her teeth turn dark?

They were looking at wineglasses. Everything fine or graceful came from Belgium or France. She read the prices, turning them upside down. Thirty-eight dollars a dozen. Forty-four.

“These are beautiful,” Eve said.

“I think these are better.”

“Sixty dollars a dozen. What will you use them for?”

“You always need wineglasses.”

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll break?”

“The only thing I’m afraid of are the words ‘ordinary life,’ ” Nedra said.

They were sitting at Eve’s when Neil arrived. He had come to visit his son. The room was too small for three people. It had a low ceiling, a little fireplace covered by glass. The whole house was small. It was a house for a writer and a cat, off the street at the end of a private alley, a disciplined writer, probably homosexual, who occasionally had a friend sleep over.