Light Years (26 page)

“You’re married,” he announced.

“No.”

“You’ve been married.” He handed her a glass. “I can see it. Women become dry if they live alone. I don’t think it needs explaining. It’s demonstrable. Even if it’s not a good marriage, it keeps them from dehydrating. They’re like the fruit flies in Franklin’s wine. You know that story? Incredible. One of the great stories of all time—I mean, even if you know it, it’s still amazing, it never disappoints you, it’s like a trick. And I believe Franklin; he was our last, great, honest man. Well, Walt Whitman, maybe. No, forget about Whitman.”

He took a large swallow of champagne.

“This is like youth,” he said. “Nothing is sweeter, even though I hardly remember it. Well, I remember some things. Certain houses people lived in. Latin class. I don’t think they even have Latin classes any more. It’s all like a suit that’s been pressed too much, nothing left but the spots.

“The flies—listen to this—the flies had been drowned in the wine, they were at the bottom of the bottle with a little sediment, the dirt that tells you things are real. That’s what’s missing in American life, the sediment. Anyway, Franklin saw these little drowned flies, they were fruit flies, they’re always hovering over peaches and pears, and he put them on a plate in the sunlight to let them dry. You know what happened?”

“No.”

“They came back to life.”

“How could they?”

“I told you it was incredible. This was wine that had come all the way from France. It was at least a year old. You can say that’s the power of French wine, but the story is true. So that’s my plan. If it works for flies, why not for primates?”

“Well …”

“Well what?”

“That’s been tried many times,” she said.

At dinner they had a good table, he was clearly at home, there were flowers, the wineglasses were large. The young headwaiter in his high collar and striped pants came over to talk.

“How are you, Mr. Pall?” he said.

“Bring us a bottle of Dole,” Pall told him.

A fire crackling. Dry Swiss wine. It disappeared rapidly into the glasses.

“So what are your plans?” he asked. “You’re not staying in Davos? You should come here. It’s very comfortable. I’ll talk to the owner; I’ll see if I can get you a room.”

“I love the restaurant.”

“Consider it done. This is the place for you. Do you like the wine?”

“It’s delicious.”

“You don’t drink very much,” he said. “You have a great economy of act. I admire that. Tell me about your life.”

“Which one?”

“You have many, eh?”

“Only two,” she said.

“Are you going to spend the winter here?”

“I don’t know. That depends.”

“Naturally,” Pall said. He drank some wine. He had ordered dinner for them without looking at the menu. “Naturally. Well, I have friends here you should meet. I used to have a lot of them, but during the divorce you split everything, and my wife took half of them when she left—some of the best ones, unfortunately. They were really hers, anyway. I always liked her friends. That was one of the problems.” He laughed. “One or two of them I liked a little too much.”

He ordered more wine.

“The best friend I ever had—you never heard of him—was a writer named Gordon Eddy. You know him?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Wonderful guy.”

There were beads of saliva in the corners of his mouth. His movements were loose, his hands waved freely. Solid, generous, practical, he was all hull; he had no keel. The rudder was small, the compass drifting.

“He was the friend of my life. You know, you only have one friend like that, there can’t be two. He had no money—I’m talking about a certain period after the war. He was living with us. I’d give him some money and he’d go right down and lose it at the casino. He’d bring back girls who’d stay for a day or two. Naturally, my wife didn’t like him: the girls, and he’d leave cigarette ashes around and come downstairs with his fly open. What she remembers most about France, she says, is Gordon’s fly being open. So finally she said either he went or she did. I should have said, All right, you. I knew nothing then.”

The dinner was served on large, warm plates: sliced steak and
rosti
, raspberries in cream for dessert. He was emptying the second bottle of wine. Outside it was cold, the small streets dark, the snow creaking underfoot. His eyes were glazed. He was like a beaten boxer waiting in his corner. He could still smile and speak, his embrace of life was not loosened, but he was spent. When people stopped to talk to him, he did not rise, he could not, but he remembered Nedra’s name.

“Let’s have a brandy,” he said. He called to the waitress. “Rémy Martin.
Zwei
. Rémy Martin is good,” he advised Nedra. “Martell is good, but I know Martell. I mean personally. He’s rich enough as it is.”

“You seem to know a lot of people. What do you do?”

“I’m an owner. I used to be in banking, but I retired. Now I’m having a little fun. I don’t have any responsibilities. I can do everything by telephone. I’ve gotten rid of my problems.”

“Such as?”

“Such as everything,” he said. “I’m thinking of going to India.”

“I’d love to go to India. I’ve studied with Indians.”

“I’d be willing to bet you don’t know anything about it.”

“About India?”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s the trouble,” he said. “You study, but India is something else.”

“There’s probably more than one India.”

“More than one India … no, there’s only one. There’s only one Chesa, one Nedra, and one Harry Pall. I wish there was another one, with two livers.”

“Have you been to Tunisia?”

“Don’t ever have anything to do with Arabs.”

“Why?”

“Just believe me. Believe me,” he murmured. “You don’t have to worry, you’re not that young, they don’t even care how young you are. They’re a sick people.”

“Desperately poor.”

“They’re not so poor. I was poor. Look, I don’t care what you do, they’ve always been like that, they’re not going to change. You can give them schools, teachers, books, but how do you keep them from eating the pages?”

He had the bill brought to him and signed it in a scrawled, illegible hand. “Carlo,” he called.

“Yes, Mr. Pall.”

“Carlo,” he rose to his feet, “will you arrange for Mrs.… Berland,” he finally remembered, “to be taken to Davos.” He turned to her. “We’ll meet tomorrow on top,” he said, “for lunch. I’m too drunk at the moment to entertain you further.”

His eye fell on the glass of brandy. He drank it down as if it were medicine. It seemed to revive him, a sudden, false wave of composure came over him.

“Nedra, good night,” he said very clearly and left the room in a firm, deeply preoccupied walk, as if rehearsing. He fell on the entrance steps.

“Shall I call you a taxi?” the headwaiter asked her.

“In a few minutes,” she said.

She felt confident, a kind of pagan happiness. She was an elegant being again, alone, admired. She had a drink at the bar with friends of his. She was to meet many others. It was the opening of the triumph to which her bare room in the Bellevue entitled her, as a schoolroom entitles one to dazzling encounters, to nights of love.

3

FRANCA WORKED AT A PUBLISHER’S
, it was a summer job. She answered the telephone and said, “Miss Habeeb’s office.”

She typed and took messages. People came to see her—that is to say, employees, boys in the mail room, young editors passing by. She was the girl for whom, in a sense, the whole house suddenly existed. She was twenty. She had long, dark hair which she parted in the middle and, as is sometimes the case with breath-taking women, certain faintly male characteristics. How often one is stunned by a girl who runs swiftly, a back slim as a farmboy’s or a boyish arm. In her case it was straight, dark brows and hands like her mother’s—long, useful, pale. Her face was clear, one could almost say radiant. She was not like the others. She smiled, she made friends, in the evening she disappeared. The sacred is always remote.

Outside the streets were burning, the air heavy as planks. A city without a tree, without a green fountain, even the rivers were invisible from within it, even the sky. She found it thrilling, its crowds, its voices, the heads that turned as she passed. She talked to the writers who came to the office and brought them tea. Nile was one of these.

He was wearing the clothes of a man released from prison—of two men, in fact, since nothing matched. His shirt was from a surplus store, his tie was loose. He had the confidence, the cracked lips of someone determined to live without money. He was a man who would fail any interview.

“How did you get this job?” he asked. He had picked up a book and was turning the pages.

“How? Well, I just applied.”

“You applied,” he said. “Funny, when I apply …” His voice trailed off. “They usually ask you a lot of questions. Did you have to go through that?”

“No.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m sure you can answer all the questions.”

“It isn’t that easy,” he said. “I mean, you never know what they’re driving at. They ask you, Do you like music? What kind of music? Well, I like Beethoven, Mozart. Beethoven, uh huh. Mozart. And what about reading, do you like to read? What books do you read? Shakespeare. Ah, he says, Shakespeare. So he writes down—you can’t see it, the cover of the folder is up: Talks only about dead people.” He turned the pages as if looking for something. “You’ve heard about the cannibal?”

“No.”

“He said to his mother: I don’t like missionaries. She said: Darling, then just eat your vegetables.” He turned more pages. “Is this one of your books? I mean, did you publish it?”

She looked to see.

“It’s meaningless,” he continued. “Listen, this is a conversation I had with a friend; this is not a joke. We were talking about a couple who’d had a baby. He said: What are they naming it? I said: Carson. Carson, he said, is it a boy or a girl? A boy, I told him. So, he said, that’s interesting, so they named the kid Carson … Well, I told you it’s not a joke. It’s just a … What do you suppose is going on?” he interrupted himself. “I’m filled with this great urge to talk to you.”

He was clever, he was helpless. At that time they were publishing his stories in the
Transatlantic Review
. He was the son of a woman who worked as a psychologist and who had been divorced since he was three. She had no illusions about her son: the thing he was most afraid of was succeeding, but one would have to know him very well to understand that. The impression he gave was of weakness, a voluntary weakness like certain vague illnesses. But after a time these illnesses cry out to be legitimatized, they insist on being treated as a natural condition, they become one with their host.

He knew everything; his knowledge was vast. He was like the irreverent student who passes any examination. His eyes were dark, the muddy brown of a Negro. His cuffs were soiled. Many of his sentences began with a proper noun.

“Gödel was at Princeton,” he said. “He was walking down the hall one day, apparently deep in thought, when a student passed and said: ‘Good morning, Dr. Gödel.’ Gödel looked up suddenly and said: ‘Gödel! That’s it!’ ”

During their first meal together as he questioned her leisurely, he learned of her house in the country. “Ah,” he said. “I knew it. I knew you had a house like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I imagined it. It’s a large house, yes? Where is it? Is it near the river?”

“Yes.”

“Quite near,” he guessed.

“Quite.”

“As near, in fact, as one would expect such a house to be.”

“Yes,” she said. “Just that near.”

He was elated. “There are trees.”

“Bird-thronged,” she said.

“This is meaningless,” he exclaimed.

“Why?”

“Your life,” he said. “Because there is no pain in it. After all, what is life without a little sorrow now and then? Will you show it to me?” he asked. “Will you take me there?”

She thought of her house. Suddenly, though she had grown up living inside it and knew it in every weather, she longed to go back as one longs to hold a certain book again though knowing every phrase, as one longs for music or friends. In her life, which had become more fortuitous, brushed by other lives like kelp in the ocean, in the city which was the great, inexplicable star toward which her suburb with its roofs and quiet days had always faced—suddenly this well-loved house reentered her thoughts through the words of a stranger. Like ancient churchyards in the heart of commerce, it was suddenly inextirpable.

There had been many changes. Her mother had gone. The house existed without her as clothes exist, photographs, misplaced rings. It was part of these memories, it contained them, gave them breath.

“Yes, I’ll take you,” she said.

Nile drove. The sun whitened his face. She was able to examine him in profile as he looked ahead.

“Are we on the right road?” he asked.

“Yes.”

His skin was pale. His uncombed hair was splitting at the ends. It was also thinning, which pleased her somehow, as if he had been ill and she would see him regain his strength.

A half-mile from the house she was suddenly shocked to see the land dug out. They were erecting apartments, the shape of a huge foundation was clear, the yellow construction machines lay abandoned in late afternoon.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

“What?”

“Look what they’re doing.”

The trees, the few old houses had been swept away, there was only bare, ruined earth. She almost wept. Somehow it could never have happened when Nedra was there—not that she would have prevented it, but her departure, in a sense, was the knell. Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.

The shadow of change lay across everything. Her first view of the house from a place on the road she knew well—the chimneys above the trees, the line of the roof—brought a feeling of sadness as if it were doomed. It seemed empty, it seemed still. The rabbits that fled before Hadji—had they really been fleeing, they veered so rapidly, they leapt, they vanished into air—all gone.