The Ravishing of Lol Stein (3 page)

Their story soon became common knowledge—South Tahla was not large enough to remain silent about and absorb such an adventure—and of John Bedford it was said that he was capable of loving only women whose hearts had been broken and, what was more serious, that he had a strange penchant for young girls who had been jilted, and driven mad, by someone else.

Lol's mother informed her of the peculiar offer made by the chance stranger. Did she remember him? Yes, she did remember him. She accepted. John Bedford, her mother told her, would be obliged to move away from South Tahla for several years, because of his work. Would she agree to that too? She agreed to that too.

One day in October Lol Stein found herself married to John Bedford.

The wedding was not a strictly private affair, for Lol was much better, so it was said, and her parents wished, insofar as it was possible, to make her forget her earlier engagement. They took the precaution, however, of not inviting any of Lol's former friends, not even her best girlfriend Tatiana Karl. This precaution actually backfired. It only lent substance to the belief, held to by some, including Tatiana Karl, that Lol was a deeply disturbed girl.

Lol Stein was thus married, without wanting to be, in the way that she wished, without her having to resort to the grotesque incongruity of a choice, or to repeat, in what, in the eyes of some people, would have amounted to a kind of plagiarism, the crime of replacing the man from Town Beach who had just jilted her with some unique person of her own choice, and above all without having betrayed the exemplary abandon in which he had left her.

L
OL
MOVED
away from South Tahla, the town where she had been born, and went to live in the town of Uxbridge, where she remained for ten years.

During the years that followed her marriage she had three children.

For ten years, it was thought by everyone around her, she was faithful to John Bedford. Whether or not this term had any meaning whatsoever for her is doubtless something we will never know. The two of them never once discussed either Lol's past or that extraordinary night at Town Beach.

Even after she was better she was never interested in learning what had become of the people she had known prior to her marriage. The death of her mother —Lol had wished to see her as seldom as possible after her marriage—left her dry-eyed. But this indifference of Lol's was never a subject of serious concern to those around her. They discounted it by saying that she had grown that way from having suffered so terribly. She, once so tender—they said that as they talked about everything else relating to her past, which had now become dead coals—had naturally grown somewhat hard, and even a trifle unjust, since her unhappy love affair with Michael Richardson. They found excuses for her, especially when her mother died.

She seemed confident about her future, appeared to have little desire to modify it. When she was with her husband, it was said, she was relaxed, and even happy. Sometimes she accompanied him on his business trips. She went to his concerts, urged him to continue with his music, encouraged him in fact to do anything his heart desired, not excluding, it was also said, being unfaithful to her with some of the younger girls who worked in his factory.

John Bedford claimed that he loved his wife. He said that he loved her still, the way she was, the way she had always been, both before and since their marriage, that he did not believe he had changed her so much as chosen her wisely and well. He loved this woman, this Lola Valerie Stein, this calm presence by his side, this sleeping beauty who never offered a word of complaint, this upright sleeping beauty, this constant self-effacement which kept him moving back and forth between the forgetfulness and the rediscovery of her blondness, of this silken body which no awakening would ever change, of this constant, silent promise of something different which he called her gentleness, the gentleness of his wife.

Lol's home was a model of neatness. This obsessive orderliness, both in space and in time, was more or less of the kind she desired, not quite but almost. The schedule she set for their daily routine was rigorously adhered to. And likewise everything in the house had its proper place. It would have been impossible, everyone around Lol agreed, to come any closer to perfection.

Sometimes, especially when Lol was not at home, John Bedford must have been struck by this impeccable order. By this taste, too, this cold, ready-made taste. The decoration and furnishing of the bedrooms and living room were the faithful facsimile of model rooms displayed in store windows, and Lol's garden was the replica of all the other gardens in Uxbridge. Lol was imitating someone, but who? the others, all the others, as many people as possible. On afternoons when she was not there, didn't her house become the empty stage upon which was performed the soliloquy of some absolute passion whose meaning remained unrevealed? And wasn't it inevitable that John Bedford was sometimes afraid of it? That it was here that he had to be on the lookout for the first sign of thaw, of the winter ice breaking? Who knows? Who knows if he heard it one day?

But it takes very little to reassure John Bedford, and when his wife was present—which was most of the time —when she presided over her kingdom, it tended to lose its aggressive quality, was less prone to raise disturbing questions. Lol made her order seem almost natural; it suited her perfectly.

Ten years of marriage passed.

One day John Bedford was offered a choice of several better positions in various towns, one of which was South Tahla. He had always slightly regretted having moved away from South Tahla after his marriage, which he had done at the behest of Lol's mother.

Ten years had also gone by since Michael Richardson's departure. And not only had Lol never once alluded to it, as she grew older she seemed to become increasingly happy. Thus, if John Bedford had a moment's hesitation about accepting the offer, it was not difficult for Lol to persuade him otherwise. She merely said that she would be most happy to move back into her parents' house, which till then had been rented out.

John Bedford respected her wishes.

Lol Stein furnished and arranged her own house in South Tahla with the same impeccable care as she had the one in Uxbridge. She managed to instill in the new house the same icy order, to run it according to the same clocklike schedule. The furniture was the same. She worked very hard on the garden, which had been allowed to go to seed, she had already devoted considerable time to the earlier garden in Uxbridge, but this time, as she was laying out the pathways, she made a mistake. She wanted the garden paths to fan out evenly around the porch. But none of them intersected, and as a result they were unusable. John Bedford was much amused by the error. They laid out other, lateral paths which intersected the first ones and made walking a practical possibility.

Since her husband's position was a much better one than before, Lol, at South Tahla, hired a governess and was thus relieved for the first time of the full responsibility of the children.

She had some free time, a great deal of free time all of a sudden, and she got into the habit of taking walks through this town where she had grown up, and through the surrounding areas.

While at Uxbridge Lol had rarely gone out, so seldom in fact that her husband had sometimes forced her to go out for the sake of her health, here in South Tahla she took up the habit on her own.

At first she went out only when she needed to do some shopping. Then she went out without any pretext whatever, regularly, every day.

Within a very short time these walks became indispensable to her, as everything else she had done had previously been: punctuality, order, sleep.

T
O
LEVEL
the terrain, to dig down into it, to open the tombs wherein Lol is feigning death, seems to me fairer—given the necessity to fill in the missing links of Lol Stein's story—than to fabricate mountains, create obstacles, rely on chance. And, knowing this woman, I believe she would prefer that I compensate in this way for the lack of cold, hard facts about her life.

Moreover, in doing so I am always relying on hypotheses which are in no way gratuitous but which, in my opinion, have at least some slight foundation in fact.

Thus, even though Lol never said a word to anyone about what follows, the governess does remember it vaguely: the calm of the street on certain days, the occasional passage of lovers strolling by arm-in-arm, the way Lol shied away—the woman had been working at the Bedfords only for a short time and had never before seen her act this way. And since I, for my part, seem also to remember something, let me go on:

After she was settled in her house—there remained only one more bedroom on the second floor to furnish— one afternoon on a gray day a woman had passed Lol's house, and Lol had noticed her. The woman was not alone. The man with her had turned and looked at the freshly painted house and the neat grounds in which the gardeners were working. As soon as Lol had seen the couple turn into the street she had hidden behind a hedge, and they had not seen her. The woman had also looked up at the house, but less pointedly than the man, as though she were already familiar with it. They had exchanged a few words which, in spite of the quiet street, Lol had not been able to catch, except for the isolated phrase, spoken by the woman:

"Dead maybe."

After they had passed the Bedfords' grounds they had stopped. He had taken the woman in his arms and, furtively, had kissed her long and passionately. The sound of a car had caused him to let her go. They had parted. The man went back up the street the way he had come, walking quickly now, and had passed the house without so much as glancing at it this time.

In her garden, Lol is not certain that she has recognized the woman. There was something vaguely familiar about her face. About her way of walking, about her look too. But does the guilty, the delightful kiss they have exchanged in parting, the kiss Lol had chanced to see, does that kiss not also awaken something in her memory?

She does not dwell any further on who it was she had seen or not seen. She waits.

It is not long after this that she finds some excuse—she who never needed any excuse for anything—for going out walking through the streets.

As for the connection between these excursions and the passage of the couple, I see it less in the glimmer of recognition Lol had for the woman she had happened to see than in the words that the woman had let slip in an offhand way and that, in all probability, Lol had heard.

Lol stirred, she turned over in her sleep. Lol went out for walks through the streets, she learned to walk without having any special goal in mind.

Once out of the house, the moment she reached the street, the moment she began to walk, her walk absorbed her completely, delivered her from the desire to be or to do anything, even more than the immobility of dreams had up to that point. The streets bore Lol Stein along during her walks, that I know.

On several occasions I followed her without her ever realizing I was there, without her ever looking back, caught up as she was by something directly ahead of her.

Some insignificant accident, which she probably would not even have been able to remember, determined the circuitous route she took: the emptiness of a street, the way another curved, some dress shop displaying the latest fashions, the rectilinear bleakness of some boulevard, love, couples locked in close embrace in the remote corners of some public park or under the archways of streetside doors. At such times she passed by in a religious silence. Sometimes she took the lovers by surprise—they never noticed her coming—and startled them. She no doubt excused herself, but in a voice so low that in all likelihood no one ever heard her apologies.

The center of South Tahla is sprawling and modern, with broad perpendicular streets. The residential section is located to the west of this center, covers a considerable area, and is full of meandering streets and unexpected dead ends. Beyond this section lie a forest and fields, and a network of highways. Lol has never ventured as far as the forest on that side of South Tahla. She has explored the other side of town in great detail, the side where her house is located, hemmed in by the large industrial suburb.

South Tahla is a fairly large town, large enough so that Lol was reasonably certain that she could pass unperceived when she went on her walks. All the more so because there was no one section she preferred, she walked through all of them and seldom returned to the same places.

Nothing, moreover, about Lol's clothing or conduct was such as to attract any special attention. The only thing that might have was her personage itself, Lola Stein, the girl jilted at the Town Beach casino years ago, who had been born and raised in South Tahla. But assuming there were some people who might have recognized her as this girl, the victim of Michael Richardson's monstrous, despicable behavior, who would ever have been tactless or spiteful enough to remind her of it? Who would have said:

"Pardon me, Miss, but if I'm not mistaken, aren't you Lola Stein?"

No one.

Though it had been rumored in town that the Bedfords had moved back to South Tahla, and though some people had been able to confirm the rumor, having seen the young woman pass by, no one had tried to talk to her. They no doubt decided that she had taken a big step in coming back, and that she deserved to be left alone.

I do not think it ever occurred to Lol that people went out of their way to avoid greeting her in order not to put her in the embarrassing situation of reminding her of a painful experience out of the past, of some difficult moment from her former life, since she herself did not take the initiative of greeting anyone and thus seemed to indicate her wish to forget.

No, Lol must have given herself the credit for passing unperceived in South Tahla, she must have considered it a test she had to pass every day and from which she daily emerged victorious. Each day, following her walk, she must have felt all the more reassured: if she willed it, people scarcely saw her, she was almost invisible. She thought that she had been cast into a mold, the identity of which was extremely vague and to which a variety of names might be given, an identity whose visibility she could control.