Oh What a Paradise It Seems (7 page)

In the car he joined his interpreter, a middle-aged woman whose language with him would be French. The minister had furnished the car with some ice and a bottle of whiskey. Sears was terribly tired. The car radio was on, very loud, and Sears knew enough not to have it turned off; it would be such a disappointment to the chauffeur. There is some sameness to car radio music all over the world and he would hear Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” and the second Razumovsky Quartet. In that part of the world there were
regular reports on the water level of the Danube River. It was a country where there were very few cars, and they traveled through the farmland at a hundred miles an hour. This splendid rich country was farmed still by hand. He was not that afternoon to see a single piece of farm machinery, and although it was late in the day men and women were still hoeing the rows. A few of these waved happily to the limousine. The beauty of fertile, well-irrigated and intelligently planted farmland moved him and he was able to trace and admire the fact that the variety of plantings reflected the changed nature of the soil as they approached the acid lava of the old volcanos he saw on the horizon.

He wondered what questions he might ask the oracle. His business prospered, he loved his wife and his children, his investments were insured and his health was splendid. He couldn’t think of anything to ask her. He had been told by his American friend that she was a terrifying presence, so frightening that it was sometimes difficult to ask her your prepared questions. He tried to imagine some traditional monster with a head covered with adders and a mouth filled with fire, but he was either too tired or too drunk or too solaced by the beauty of the farmland to feel anxious about his interview with Gallia. His interpreter was telling him about her beginnings. The story was nearly as familiar as the radio music. Her family had lost the houses and villas that most families have lost at one time or another.

They arrived at the foot of the volcano a little before dark. “Aren’t you frightened?” the interpreter asked. “Oh yes, yes,” said Sears politely. He did not feel that he was
giving the interview its importance. There was a little garden at the entrance to the prophetess’s cave and Sears noticed that the soil was so acid it supported almost nothing but parsley. “Please let me take your arm,” said the interpreter. “I’m so frightened I can hardly speak.”

There was a sort of room in the cave lighted by a single electric bulb. Sears wondered where the power came from. The prophetess sat at a plain table covered with clean oilcloth. She was a middle-aged woman whose hair had begun to gray and who held her head high with her blinded eyes closed. She wore a clean cotton dress. Sears’s feeling for her was one of absolute friendliness. This wonder, who had prophesied the fall of uranium prices, excited in him the broadest smile.

She asked to feel something of his and he gave her his wallet. She fingered the wallet and began to smile. Then she began to laugh. So did Sears. She returned the wallet to him and said something to his interpreter. “I have no idea what she means,” said the interpreter, “but what she said was ‘La grande poésie de la vie.’” The prophetess stood and so did Sears. They were both laughing. Then she held out her arms and he embraced her. They parted, laughing. Night had fallen and as soon as he started the car the chauffeur turned on the radio to very loud music and they returned to the capital.

This cheerful brush with a prophet was no help at all in Sears’s understanding of Estelle. She thought her prophetic attributes of the first importance. She seemed to think of them more as an achievement than a gift. She felt that the world we see—the world Sears adored—was superficial
and, in her case, transparent and that she could see a more real world where love and death were visibly ordained. It seemed to Sears that her foresight was largely pessimistic. She most often prophesied quarrels, poverty, divorce, madness and suicide. Sears could not remember her having prophesied any triumphs of the spirit. She dyed her hair red and wore lime-green dresses, and when you were introduced to her you would feel that you had met her at cocktail parties. I don’t mean five or ten cocktail parties—I mean hundreds and hundreds of cocktail parties before that social ceremony vanished from the calendar and when the cocktail party seemed as much a part of nightfall as the lengthening shadows. She seemed so allied to the cocktail party that one wondered what would become of her when that ritual had become obsolete.

It would have been very unlike Sears to check on the accuracy of her prophecies. When they returned home in the evening after a party she would sit at her dressing table and say that it had been revealed to her that the A’s would divorce, B would lose all of his money, C would be arrested for fraud and Mrs. E would go mad. She considered prophecy to be her outstanding social gift, and the complex irony of claiming to know the future was revealed one night to Sears when they were entertaining. Estelle was a dreadful cook—indeed she was a dangerous cook and she had that night prepared a risotto that was particularly lethal. While she prophesied lengthily the misfortunes of a family in the neighborhood, Sears worried a little about what he knew of the immediate future. He knew that at three or four in the morning that was to come every one of their twelve guests,
poisoned by the risotto, would spend an hour or more on the toilet, racked by excruciating diarrhea. While Estelle, with her eyes half-closed, sketched the future, Sears wondered why her prescience should overlook that violence in the immediate future that he was able to predict.

Her ending was rather like this. She had been to a matinee in Philadelphia and had returned by train to the suburb where they then lived. She could reach the lot where her car was parked by an underpass beneath the tracks or by an unsafe wooden walk that predated the underpass. It was a winter dusk. She had started across the walk when a young man shouted: “Hey, lady, that ain’t safe. A train is coming.” “Who
do
you think you are speaking to?” she exclaimed, believing in introductions and other courtesies. “I happen to
know
the future.” She stepped straight into the path of the Trenton Express and nothing was found of her but a scrap of veiling and a high-heeled shoe.

“Your male lover is a traditional invention of the neurotic,” said Dr. Palmer. “You have invented some ghostly surrogate of a lost school friend or a male relation from your early youth.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by ghost,” said Sears. “It may be that for a man of my age love is rather elusive. I seem these days to know love only briefly, but I honestly can’t agree with you when you say that Eduardo is a surrogate. He seems to offer me an understanding of modes of loneliness that are quite new to me and new I expect to other men, since they mostly involve new places like airports.”

“Of course you’re afraid of flying,” said the alienist.

“I am not afraid of flying,” said Sears, “but I am afraid of airports.”

“Do you really think you understand Renée?”

“Oh, no,” exclaimed Sears, “but I never really cared about those parts of her life that she meant to keep private. I mean, I kept picking her up in these church basements where she was trying to stop smoking or drinking or eating too much. Sometimes I thought it was all three. Sometimes when we go out to a restaurant she eats most of my dinner, but she never gets fat. I think she wants to improve her ways, and I believe there are more people who feel like this than you might guess from looking at the faces in the street.”

“Do you have any friends?” asked Dr. Palmer.

“I have loads of friends,” said Sears.

“That is,” said the doctor, “the classical reply of the neurotic, who constructs a carapace of friendliness and popularity to conceal his clinical aloneness. If you have so many friends you might send a few my way as patients. The politics in this profession are absolutely indescribable. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask your help. I’d like to see you tomorrow at the same time.”

T
HE
telephone was ringing when Sears returned to his apartment. It was Renée asking him over for a drink. He was delighted. Considering their last quarrel he expected her to be wearing the old blue wrapper when she opened the door, or perhaps nothing at all. He was smiling at this possibility when he entered the lobby and saw Eduardo, who laughed at the breadth of his smile. Here seemed to be a union from which jealousy had been leached. She opened the door as soon as he rang. He was disappointed to see she was not wearing the old blue wrapper. She was wearing a dress and some shoes and some perfume, but when she kissed him her kisses were of such an inestimable softness and variety that he didn’t worry about her clothing. She gave him a drink and sat on his lap and unfastened both his shirt and his trousers. While she fingered his trunk he remembered that the gymnastics instructor at his school had lectured them on the fact that the male torso, disfigured as it was by vestigial nipples, was totally unresponsive sensually. He had, until very recently, never doubted this statement. This was really what one wanted, he thought. To have a lovely woman on one’s lap as darkness fell from the wings of night was truly journey’s end. She was kissing him when the telephone rang and she left his
lap to answer it. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she said. “The doorman will let you double-park.”

“What in hell was that?” said Sears.

“It was the man who’s going to drive me to the airport.”

She went into the hallway, where he heard her open a closet.

“Where are you going?” Sears demanded. “You haven’t told me you were going anywhere and you certainly haven’t behaved as if you were taking a plane.”

“You might have noticed that my suitcase is in the hallway. You always notice that sort of thing.”

“I’ve noticed that your hallway is always full of suitcases,” Sears shouted. “I’ve been stumbling over the damned things for months.”

“Well, would you like to help me to the elevator with my suitcase,” she asked, “or shall I ring for Eduardo?”

She stood in the doorway wearing a hat and a coat and pulling on her gloves. He felt himself approaching those bewildering spiritual mountains where he doubted the reality of his person and his world. He went into the hallway and picked up her bag. “Where in hell are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going back to Des Moines to see my daughter,” she said. “I must have told you but you’ve forgotten.” Eduardo, rather more like a custodial relative than a lover, regarded the suitcase, Sears’s face white with rage and Renée’s airs of a traveler with great composure. Sears’s only commitment was to wait for her on the sidewalk until the car had its door opened and to accept her goodbye kiss. “You don’t know the first thing about women,” she said. He did not look back in the lobby at Eduardo and went to a movie. To
scorn one’s world is despicable, he thought, and he would merely observe that the theatre he chose was nearly empty, that the film was about werewolves and that a man in the row ahead of him had brought his dinner to the theatre and ate it during the film. When the movie ended Sears returned to Renée’s house and found Eduardo in the lobby. He was pleased to see him as he would have been pleased to see a dear friend. “We’ve got to find something else we can do together,” he said. “Do you like to fish? Would you like to go fishing?”

“Sure I’d like to go fishing,” said Eduardo. “I’ve got some time coming, but I’ll have to check with the union about a replacement.”

“I know of a good bass pond upstate,” said Sears. “There used to be a decent inn there. Do you have any tackle?”

“I think I have a couple of bait-casting rods,” said Eduardo. “I’ll have to look. My sons may have taken them.”

“What do your sons do?” asked Sears.

“The youngest is a senior at Rutgers,” said Eduardo. “The oldest plays jazz piano in a place in Aspen. That’s in Colorado.”

“Well, goodnight,” said Sears. “We’ll work out something.”

“Goodnight.”

Ten days later in a rented car Sears and Eduardo headed north for a pond near the Canadian wilderness that Sears recalled having fished ten years ago, although his memory
was often mistaken and it might have been twenty years in the past or even longer. They left for the north on a rainy morning and this corresponded exactly to Sears’s sense of the fitness of things. Eduardo drove until they stopped somewhere for lunch and Sears then said, “I’ll drive.” Eduardo tossed him the keys, and as soon as he started north in the rain Eduardo fell asleep. Sears was terribly happy.

He drove north on route 774, which had, like any main thoroughfare, changed greatly in the last ten years. Sears was not disenchanted but he did observe what there was to be seen. They traveled through what had been a neighborhood of small dairy farms, where the acre and half-acre fields had been divided by stone walls and light stands of timber. There were a few churches and farmhouses from the nineteenth century and even earlier that were completely unpretentious but that, in their charm and inventiveness, seemed outstandingly patrician. Seven seventy-four was now a length in that highway of merchandising that reaches across the continent. It would be absurd to regret the obsolescence of the small dairy farm, but the ruined villages were for Sears a melancholy spectacle, as if a truly adventurous people had made a wrong turning and stumbled into a gypsy culture. Here were the most fleeting commitments and the most massive household gods. Beside a porn drive-in movie were two furniture stores whose items needed the strength of two or three men to be moved. He thought it a landscape, a people—and he counted himself among them—who had lost the sense of a harvest.

While he drove he thought self-righteously of what he had done to improve the scene; what he had done for
Beasley’s Pond. He had employed the environmentalist—Chisholm—and paid a laboratory at Cornell to specify the toxicity in the water. The reports were not completed, but there was to be a hearing in the town of Janice in the coming week. Chisholm spoke of the people who were destroying the pond as a huge and powerful criminal organization, who were bribing small municipalities and polluting water supplies to profit from the high cost of fill sites. Sears was not completely persuaded. Chisholm was one of those men whose worthwhileness, it seemed to Sears, was more of a genetic trait than a persuasion. One found them all over the world. The size of Chisholm’s teeth, the thickness of his glasses, his stoop and the spring with which he walked all marked him, Sears thought, as a single-minded reformer. His marriage, Sears guessed, would have been unsuccessful and his children would have difficulty finding themselves. Sears was not far from wrong. Seven seventy-four seemed an extension of the destruction of Beasley’s Pond.