Shakespeare's Kitchen (21 page)

The hills had turned black but not as black as the woods at their backs. The hibachi glowed as the earth’s center might glow.

“Look!” Ilka said. Out of the hills galloped danger or was it romance? The two horsemen increased in size, were suddenly here, reining in the mass of horse flesh that reared and beat the air
with hooves. The riders raised wide-brimmed hats to the picnickers on the blankets, turned their steeds and galloped off spurting clumps of grass, decreased in size, were gone, and Ilka said,“It’s when I’m happy that I want to cry for Jimmy. It’s the woods, hills, the horsemen, the food, stories, talk—being with you, here with you all. I’m not really crying.”

“You are crying.” Leslie passed her his handkerchief.

“Did Una ever give you back your handkerchief?” Ilka laughed and lay back on the blanket. Leslie lay down beside her. A cotton handkerchief is a poor conductor of heat so that Ilka might mistake the heat where Leslie’s palm met hers, the white heat of their intertwining fingers, for the passage of consolation, but Cassandra barked and barked and barked and barked and barked. Did Ilka think Leslie’s shoulder against her shoulder was the connection of a dear friendship? Ilka was not brave about believing that she could have what she wanted.

They were sitting up. They were leaving. Must Ilka wake Maggie or carry her sleeping? Weren’t they leaving? Teddy had brought his little scratchy phonograph. Joe danced with Bethy on the grass. Bethy was dancing with Teddy who was cutting up. “Stop it!” she kept telling him, “Stop kidding around!”

“Dance?” Joe Bernstine pulled Ilka to her feet; Ilka felt herself pressed against his chest where she had never been pressed before. “Not so shabby!” he said to her. Joe and Ilka danced and turned on the grass, turned past Eliza sitting between Leslie’s knees where Ilka had never seen her sitting before, past smiling Jenny who held Bethy between her knees, past Maggie asleep on the blanket. Joe turned and turned Ilka.

Ilka said, “You can, too, hear the sound from Concordance.”

Joe said, “Look at Leslie and Eliza dancing!” Leslie was dancing a jig on the grass, hopping from one foot to the other to avoid the toes of Eliza’s sneakers aiming at his ankles, his shins.

Were they leaving? Everybody was standing. Leslie said, “Everybody will come to our place.”

“No they won’t,” Eliza said, “because I’m going to go to bed.”

Unheard of! “Eliza,” they teased her, “you never go to bed! Leslie goes to bed. You don’t go to bed till dawn. Since when do you go to bed before Leslie?”

Joe said, “Leslie, no fair! You get everybody riled about the bible and Dickens and finding who we are. You never said what you think.”

Leslie said, “I think it’s a silly question. There is no such ‘who.’ ”

They drove Ilka to her door and Leslie came around to lift sleeping Maggie out of Ilka’s lap and carried her up the steps to the front door.

“I can take her,” Ilka said,

Leslie said, “I will come by presently.”

 

 

And now Ilka understood that what she hadn’t allowed herself to imagine and had not, consequently, told herself that she desired, was going to come to pass, come to pass tonight. Maggie woke up and cried and had to be jollied and put to bed. Happiness made Ilka deeply patient with so many steps, motions, and revolutions: the opening of drawers and cupboards looking for she couldn’t remember what; finding, mislaying and again finding the bottle for Maggie’s juice; taking Maggie’s shoes off and the socks, seeing the baby turn to stare in the direction of the window: a turn of the wind aggravated the volume and clarity of the human scream—and the child needed to be hugged and tickled to distract her. Ilka unbuttoned and peeled Maggie out of layers of clothing, filled the bath with water, got the temperature right, soaped and rinsed and cuddled her inside the towel, lay beside her incanting one book, another book, the same book another time, every moment distinct and swollen with anticipation.

When the doorbell rang, Ilka, wishing this were any other night and she quiet and decent in her bed, ran down the stairs,
opened the door. Leslie stepped inside, closed the door deliberately behind him. He reached for Ilka. “How did this ever happen?” chattered Ilka, ineffably moved by his gravity, his absorption in herself. This was Leslie’s hand that traced her arm to the elbow, moved down the length of her back as if over some rare and delicate thing; outlined her arm from the wrist upward; hovered, had an intention. Leslie’s hand lay lightly trembling along the side of Ilka’s breast. It was Ilka’s hand and it was his sex for which she reached.

“Is the baby asleep?” Leslie asked her.

“Yes.”

“Shall we go upstairs?”

Ilka walked ahead and turned to ask him, “Are you going to be all right?”

Leslie said, “Yes,” and Ilka understood with the tenderest interest that Leslie had had lovers before her.

Leslie asked, “And you?”

“Oh!” said Ilka. “I have nothing to lose.”

“Oh, not so!” he said

“This is happening?” said Ilka.

When they lay down with each other, Ilka prevented his motion by raising her head to the window. “Can we do this with that?”

“We can,” said Leslie. “The tree may not fall in the forest but whether we hear it or not, the screaming goes on at all times. You know that. What must we wait for?”

With the returned stillness after love, Ilka remembered to worry. “Hadn’t you better go?”

“God, no!” said Leslie and drew her against himself and lay so still Ilka thought he slept and got out of her side of the bed, palpated the blackness for her shirt, and reaching the door found it blocked by his body and his appalled voice saying, “Are you going? Where are you going?”

“To check the baby.”

“Of course. Go and check the baby. Are you coming back?”

“Yes!”

When he was putting his socks back on Ilka said, “I hope Eliza will not pay for our fun.”

Leslie said, “
Will
not. Will
not
.”

Ilka was relieved to be clear about this—about anything—and fervently agreed.

“We’re too old. There would not be time to recover. I have to be in New York next month. Come with me. Would your mother take care of Maggie?”

 

 

On Sunday, Ilka called and Eliza picked up. Ilka said, “There’s a razor blade in my throat. Maggie and I better stay home. We shouldn’t give you our colds?”

Eliza asked, “Are you in bed?”

“Yes. In bed, no. Yes.”

“Leslie and I will come and bring breakfast.”

“No!” shouted Ilka. “No, no, no, no. I can’t have you bothering. We can come.”

Ilka was surprised that Leslie, who opened the door, looked just like Leslie.

Ilka sat at Eliza’s kitchen table with her head stupid and stuffed full of cotton wool. The razor blade inside her throat had turned into a flap of skin she could not cough up, or swallow down.

“You look terrible,” Eliza told Ilka.

“I am terrible,” Ilka said.

Eliza made her hot tea and rum. Eliza said, “I saw the girl in the supermarket. Your mummy must be very, very sick,” she said to the little girl on her lap, “or she would be asking ‘Which girl?’ so she could be seeing the girl’s point of view and defending it.”

“I’m not defending anybody,” said Ilka, her lips thick as if the universal dentist had injected a local paralysis.

Maggie rolled herself up and went to sleep on Eliza’s lap. Eliza
said, “Why don’t Leslie and I keep her overnight, so you can go home and enjoy your cold?”

“No, no, no, no!” shouted Ilka.

On the way home Ilka passed the Bernstines’. Cassandra stood on her hind legs at the iron gate and barked at Ilka.

 

 

Institute business sent them on trips. Leslie and Ilka planned dates and times, flights and hotels, and Ilka’s mother came and took care of Maggie. “If I let her, she would take her away for good.” It shocked Ilka that joy should be so easy. Habit is the enabler.

T
hen it was a year since Ilka and Leslie had become lovers. Ilka asked Leslie if he knew how many nights they had got to spend with each other and Leslie folded his hands under his head, computed and named a number.

“That is correct,” said Ilka. “When I go to check on Maggie you no longer block the door with your body!”

“I’ve learned that you will ‘slip downstairs and bring us up some chilled white wine and some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine ruddy-skinned pears,’” quoted Leslie. “I don’t think of us as lovers,” he said.

“So what are we?”

“Fucking friends.”

Ilka, shocked and thrilled at the word in Leslie’s mouth, called
her friend Jacqueline in New York and told her that Leslie thought they were fucking friends.

“Does he?” said Jacqueline, who had got used to Ilka and her affair. Ilka missed the old greedy interest of Jacqueline’s disapproval.

 

 

It was Eliza who proposed a holiday together, in Norway maybe. She tended to the North. It fell to Ilka to make inquiries, write the letters: the house she had found was in Provence. “Do you mind?” she asked Eliza.

“You have closed the deal?”

“Actually, yes.”

“I mind.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ilka, and meant it.

 

 

They arrived tired and frazzled in the late afternoon and Ilka crossed into a dream of creeping ivy-covered ground and a dovecote and a six-foot topiary egg. The house was stone, severely symmetrical except that the finial urn on the left corner of the rooftop drooped its rim “like melting chocolate,” said Eliza.

“Our own Marienbad!” said Ilka.

“Always hated Marienbad,” said Eliza.

“It’s beautiful, don’t you think!” Ilka urged her glum companions. The façade was dappled gold, speckled, striated by age and weather. “Our own Diebenkorn,” said Ilka.

They unlocked the door. Ilka’s mother said, “For a hundred years has nobody dusted.”

Eliza brushed against a wall and came away with a white, with a golden shoulder. “It is returning into its original matter.”

Ilka said, “‘The ache of antiquity,’ Henry James called it.”

“The refrigerator is like working hammers,” said Ilka’s mother.

They had shopped on the way and picnicked at the long deal table. Ilka caressed its gouges and scars. The four grown-ups watched Maggie’s head descend and come to rest in the butter. Leslie carried the sleeping child up the stairs. Ilka came behind him. He said, “A summer of not making any love, heaven help us!”

“Oh but the happiness of knowing you are in the house, to expect—to see you—walking into the room . . .”

“Ah,” said Leslie.

“Leslie, don’t
you
think it’s beautiful here?”

“There’s only one bathroom,” said Leslie.

 

 

“Eliza and Leslie, why don’t you take the front room,” proposed Ilka. “Maggie and I can sleep in here. Mum, how’s this for you? Apple trees standing in rows outside your window.”

Ilka’s mother said, “The bathroom shower goes down by a hole in the tiles.”

“Which are all the earth colors with sky blue lozenges! This wallpaper is original I bet you.”

“It’s curling off the walls,” said Eliza. “The mattresses are kapok, knots and craters. I cannot sleep here.”

Now Ilka’s stomach knotted.

 

 

During that first restless night, the ancient Verquières refrigerator sighed before hammering into its active cycles. In the morning the Verquières shower refused hot water to any American who rose after 7 A.M.

Ilka took Maggie into the garden. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, Maggie! The ivy was sere. It was the color, and made the sound, of packing paper. Ilka and Maggie shuffled around the topiary egg and round and round the dovecote. Only Ilka loved the liquid monotony of the cooing white birds. They lifted, at intervals, all together, raising a rusty cloud and beating it with wings.

Eliza sent Ilka and Leslie to the village to look for milk. “Flora and I will make the lunch.”

“She doesn’t let me do anything,” complained Ilka’s mother. “Don’t worry about it,” said Ilka and saw her mother was going to chafe and to worry. Ilka and Leslie, with Maggie riding his shoulders, had returned bringing milk, a four-foot baguette, and local information. They had counted the thirty-four houses remaining after the Albergencian massacre of 1345 from which the village had never recovered. “Madame Chelan, the baker, says our topiary egg is the monument to the present owner’s mother, who is buried underneath.”

“That’s nice,” said Eliza.

The five of them drove around the country. “Maggie watch the water!” The amenable little girl turned her head toward the narrow, sparkling canal along the left side of the lane. Not once did they meet another car. “Wave, Maggie.” Maggie waved to the pair of sad-eyed, brown men who effaced themselves into the hedge.

“Cezanne country, the colors of our tiles!” To the west a wall of rock reared out of the flat, ochre landscape. Here and over there a row of candle-straight trees, planted shoulder to shoulder, formed fences against the prevailing wind, and the rows of perfectly spaced apple trees stood under the sun on single legs upraising patient, fruit-laden arms.

 

 

Eliza went up to bed early. Leslie wanted Ilka to come out into the garden but she said, “I promised Maggie I’d read her a story. ” “I will read her,” said Ilka’s mother, but Ilka said, “I promised her.” Making love in the garden frightened Ilka. The next day she suggested the little Verquières hotel, but Leslie said, “I would be so embarrassed, I couldn’t do anything.” Ilka and Leslie sat at the long wooden table together. She liked to talk about their bad behavior. Leslie did not. “You don’t think we are dreadful?”

“One must live, to live,” Leslie said.