The Transit of Venus (38 page)

At night in her soft strange bed, Mrs. Vail dreamed of flying over mountains and coming at last, not to this fertile valley but to a long flat land, an arid interior, boundless. Far below, occasional oblongs and squares of difficult cultivation tilted like paintings askew on a blank wall. Small depressions were neuritic with cracked mud.

From this she woke in relief that she had done nothing wrong, at least in the dream.

In the morning she wrote to Ted Tice:

Your letter came as we were leaving. How sad to miss you this time.

After some adventures, of the flesh rather than the spirit, we are among friends in a beautiful place where the earth is still supreme. There's a poet here who has been imprisoned and tortured for writing truth. Two years ago he was released. When this new government falls, it will be all over with him. He is old at fifty, his skin colourless, his bones awry.

He walks like an athlete who has had an accident—perhaps a tightrope walker who had a fall performing without the net. His voice is beautiful. His poems are very good. I am going to try to translate some of his work.

She might have closed the letter, but kept the pen in her hand and eventually wrote

Dear Ted, I am content. Yet even in this silent place there's the foreboding roar. As if a jet plane passed over paradise.

Adam Vail came to where his wife sat writing and put his hand to her neck, beneath her hair. When she leaned on him, he moved his hand forward over her throat, into her dress. He said, "You might tire of this life, and leave me."

"I can't believe my ears."

"I like this eclecticness. Most eclecticness is too dark."

"I'm glad." Ted was lying with his eyes closed and, when she asked, "What's that picture?" he answered without opening them.

"It's a mandatory group of sunflowers. No hotel can be licensed without hanging one in every room. Like listing the charges on the back of the door."

"You're putting me on. I like this hotel though, it's the best. On the lake too."

He would not spoil her prestige by saying the room was space rather than a room, it was geometry on a floor-plan. On one side, two windows exposed the lake, itself frozen grey like a dirty window. Melted splotches of lake were lathered by drifting ice. A wind ripped into the building day and night, walloping these encrusted windows as if beating rugs.

"Most of us work indoors at the center, the girls I mean. I mean, without windows. Getting assigned to the conference was like coming up for air or something."

It would be only polite to ask about herself, her life, her parents. Social obligation weighted Ted Tice as he lay with one arm about her naked shoulders, for he did not want her to come alive with longings and belongings of her own, or to add to his consciousness the details of one more life. Until she spoke of these things, she would remain typical, a random sample; once she mentioned them, she would, however typical, become singular. But he fatally began, "How does it happen that you . . . " opening his eyes and seeing, of a darkened room, only the ceiling on which an unlit fixture hovered, and the wall with the jagged picture, and the top of the pea-green chair on which she'd draped her clothes.

His misery in that place had all been typical, a random sample.

The city was cursed with sleazy inevitability—the most sombre thoughts acquired a picked-over character, and pleasure came ready-mixed for quick satiety. He had brought a girl to the hotel because the city expected it of him: loneliness had been industrial-ized. Yet fornication itself was very solitude. When he thought, here, of his wife and children and his own rooms, they seemed like health, and he could not feel that was banal. And when he invoked the presence of Caro it was to pit her strength against a city, or the world.

" . . . and after that happened I realized, uh, I was mixed up with negative things like needs. I mean"—her arm wheeled in darkness, palm outward—"I was too involved, right?" Her spread hair, raised knee, and the outline of brow and breast were lovely: they almost made the room come alive out of its floor-plan. How lucky she is, he thought, to have got away with it. With features like hers she might have been sensitive. A generation earlier and this episode would have had to mean something to her. She would even have had to pretend it meant something to me. That deception is the one thing we are being spared.

"We've all got our personal hang-ups. You married, right?"

"Yes." This question, which she was more than entitled to ask, called for more than a frigid affirmative, yet would not bear enlargement. "Englishmen don't wear wedding-rings."

"That's what I heard." She took his hand and felt the fingers, then unexpectedly put it to her lips. "You're nice. Know that?"

"I don't think you've had much evidence of it."

"No, you're nice." And mechanically, "Great." She laid his hand on her young and beautiful breast and after a while said, "Happily married, right?"

"Yes," he said, feeling the absurdity of the answer in the circumstances but once more wishing to be let off. "This is very nice, but I don't do a lot of it." Everything he said was stale, sententious. He spoke to her from the lofty height of his all but continuous virtue.

"Ever loved anyone besides your wife?"

"Long ago. Before I was married." Caro had become the long ago, the legend.

"Oh— That doesn't count."

"Yes. It does count."

"It counts?"

"It counts." Inanely. How one shows one's weakness, I am like those people—not like, I
am
one of them—who must talk about what obsesses them, their lover, child, cat, dog, enemy, employer, servant, office—even while aware they are boring others and exposing themselves. The craving is compulsive in that respect, virtually erotic. "Perhaps it is the only thing that counts."

"Wow."

Possibly she felt her role too plainly signalled, for she soon got up and carried off some of her clothes. Water gushed in an uproar of plumbing, a tin cupboard clanged, there were twin puffs of a deodorant. When she came out of the bathroom, hands to her golden hair, Ted was half-dressed and thinking there was nothing more melancholy than doing up a zipper at one
A.M.

He knew she was going to say more about Caro. It was the only interesting thing that had passed between them.

"Listen," she said. "We relate. We communicate. Wouldn't you say we communicate?"

We also, then, are part of the floor-plan: two rooms with a connecting door, of lust or loneliness. Ted sat on the edge of the bed.

"Come here."

She stood with her palms on his shoulders, meeting his eyes in the half-dark. A good-natured dog that comes and puts its paws on you and looks with God knows what, if anything, in mind. But she said, "Do you ever see her?" with a rational, crucial lowering of tone, as if the jargon—which she had employed even in the act—

was, for her too, an affectation to be set aside for the authentic.

"About twice a year."

"Still sleep with her?"

"I have never slept with her." Proclaiming this with grotesque pride, for it gave the scale of his devotion. And the girl said,

"Fantastic," and seemed properly awed—though perhaps thinking also, Some kind of a nut.

"She'd be about your age, right?"

"A few years younger."

The girl signified that, by that stage, three or four years could scarcely matter. She said, "You should—"

"Should what?"

"Well— You only live once, for Christ's sake."

This girl was assuming that Caro loved him. Ted put her away from him and stood up, saying "We'd better get you a taxi," before the truth could strike her.

A d a m and Caro returned to New York from South America during a heat wave. There was a demonstration against war. At the end of their street a row of grey trestles was guarded by two policemen on reddish horses, and by other police on foot. There was the smell of blistering tar and the sweat of horse and man. The street was cracked, the gutters unkempt. Trees had been hacked at, or were diseased. The Vails' door, which now had a complex lock, could be relocked from the inside, then chained and bolted. All of this took time. When they put their bags down in the hallway, Vail turned on the radio, which said, "Nonferrous metals declined and cotton futures closed higher." They could hear the mounted police speaking by machine and, beyond the barrier, the neutral wail of an ambulance. In the locked house man and woman embraced, because a measure of safety can be attained under almost any circumstances.

Letters were stacked on a table. A folded newspaper half-disclosed a presidential scandal: "It's an outrage," said a Harvard professor who asked not to be identified. Dora wrote from Palmerston North that she would never forgive Trish Bootle as long as she lived; and was seriously considering Ireland.

"At her age," said Caro. "To go where nothing is familiar."

Adam told her, "Seneca said of Hannibal—who in old age offered his services to any king at war with Rome — that he could live without a country but not without an enemy."

Caro could see the epitaph tilting in Irish grass.

In the mornings Caro sat at a table to translate the work of Ramon Tregear. These poems had been invented in a prison.

When the poet wrote her, "But then I held it only in the head,'* she thought of Rex Ivory digging graves in Malaya thirty years before. As Rex Ivory in the death camp had celebrated Derbyshire, so Tregear in his prison hell had recalled the love of women.

Tregear said he would soon send the remaining pages if things went well. And she wondered if she would ever see them. The volume would be called "Luz a Medianoche."

After some months a publisher returned her sample pages, explaining about the market. He noted the Miltonian title; and made a literary joke on the translator's name: "C. Bell." Another publisher, who had issued an academic study of dissident literature, returned the manuscript with a comment on the Koestlerian title; adding, "We rather feel we've done our pro bono publico stint for this year."

Adam Vail spoke in Spanish on the telephone. He went across town to be interviewed on television, and was introduced to the network's news chief, who said, "We think we're pretty gutsy, Adam, to be running this interview."

Caro, who went with Adam to the studio, was shown to a darkened room where, it was said, the picture would be clear on a large screen. She sat waiting in a velvet seat, and three men came in and sat in front of her. She had seen them in the corridor, carefully dressed men with dyed dark hair and tinted contact lenses. Not knowing she was there, they remarked that altruists rarely gave good value.

"You need only look at Stevenson."

"Stevenson. He went into orbit the last years. Committed one day, uncommitted the next. Maybe he really believed there was this peace proposal, so he clung on."

"I think he fell for it, that there was this peace proposal. I believe he died convinced. That if you could get Bundy and Rusk to a dacha outside Rangoon, Hanoi would deliver the goods."

"He couldn't get through to the White House though. Rusk stopped him."

"What was to stop him picking up the phone, Chrissake, dialling the White House? How long did he think this?"

"Autumn of sixty-four."

"No, I say June of sixty-five. And he was dead in July. One month then."

"Sixty-four. Who knew from nothing in sixty-four? Least of all our news service."

"I'll never forget, we did a programme on Stevenson. When he died. Embarrassing thing to replay now—not that it's gonna get replayed, like hell replayed. Jesus it was like nothing—some shots, the first convention, the second campaign. Speeches, puns, Stevenson conceding. Conceding, Jesus, conceding all right. A nothing programme. Not a word about Kennedy, about Vietnam."

"What about the Bay of Pigs?"

"I'm telling you, nothing. All right, I ran it, all right so I'm wearing a hair shirt. But we showed nothing. When the programme was over someone came in with the word, Washington on the line, the White House is very pleased. You bet they were pleased—God when I think of it now, the sigh of relief that must've gone up. Not a word about Kennedy, the war, nothing."