The World Is the Home of Love and Death (3 page)

BOOK: The World Is the Home of Love and Death
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The degree of irony—knowledge of the world as an activity concerned with self-protection—in Ida’s face altered into friendliness; and she said, “Lila, you
are
adorable, you know I adore you, I hope you know it—you
do
know it—Lila—you know I’m someone you can count on—lifelong—Lila—”

Because it had a rehearsed quality—Ida’s speech—Momma thinks she sees the symptoms of the local thing of having-a-go-round with Lila. Ma is ruthless but subject to being
ashamed
(her term).

Momma sits in a subdued and pale and cautious way, denying the sexual. She wants romance and feeling—Ida on a string. Besides, the movements of feeling between her and Ida have only irony and subtlety and powers of mind in them, only those—Ida has this effect on people often, and so she thinks the world lacks sexuality altogether.

Lila says, “Oh, lifelong isn’t necessary: twenty-four hours is enough for me. Where people are concerned, I’m not demanding.”

Ida says, with a certain twisted loftiness and down-to-earth whine or complaint, “Friendship is usually taken by serious people, Lila, to be something one can rely on.”

Lila says, “I’m someone who takes chances, but I’m a big frog in a little pond. If I ask someone seriously, ‘What are you doing?,’ people don’t ever listen even to the question; I fall flat on my face. I bet that doesn’t ever happen to you. I didn’t finish college, I was too wild, but actually I know a thing or two, even if I don’t get much credit for it. Well, take the cash and let the credit go—isn’t that how you expect
a Jewish woman—a Jewess
—to talk?”

Ida—knowingly, lyrically—says, “If Ida Nicholson were Lila Silenowicz, she would say here, I have to catch my breath …’ ” She did an imitation of Lila’s voice—one of Lila’s voices—she captured Lila’s mocking politeness.

Lila smiled a soft, plumy smile—dovelike. Then she said, “Ida, I wouldn’t say that: I would say,
Ida, you may be too much for me
.”

“I’m still an amateur at being Lila Silenowicz,” Ida says with an air of modesty, of wit that isn’t modest: it’s suffocating in its confidence—its confident pleading.

Momma doesn’t want to be darling; she says darkly, restlessly, “I think I probably am a streetwalker at
heart
.”

“Lila!” Ida waits.

“Look at us—drinking and smoking. Wouldn’t your mother say we were like prostitutes?”

Ida is genuinely puzzled, but she is also genuinely combative—not easily put off. What she sees, though, is someone who passed from initial invitation to some depth or other of guilt. Lila doesn’t seem to Ida to have any moral sophistication (Lila feels that way about Ida). Ida doesn’t know whether to keep matters “social” or not. She says with contemptuous readiness of
wit
(a further mistake sensually), “Oh, Lila, you? The way you change, it’s like the life of a tadpole.”

Lila feels it’s tomboy seduction that Ida offers—Lila was never a tomboy. She doesn’t speak—she waits to see what will happen (to see what her
power
is here).

Ida lifts her head and sort of moves it in a nursery way, of pride and mental energy, a brightness of thought. She is convinced of her own sexuality as a matter of argument, no matter what others think.

Lila is self-willed and illiterate, cruel and unstable. She is full of rivalry and caprice now.

“Oh, Lila, you are impossible, you are so brilliant, you are adorable,” Ida says. “Isn’t she adorable?” she asks the rainy air. She is bringing Momma to heel. She is aware Momma is jealous of her.

“My momma has always admired
you,”
Momma says. “She thinks you probably have tastes in common; Momma thinks men are awful—all except S.L. My husband. You never can remember his name.”

“Initials,” Ida corrected her.

Ida wants Momma to admit Ida’s authority.

Momma wants to be the authority.

“Samuel Lewis—S.L.” Momma thinks she has the authority here.

Ida makes a face. The look on Lila’s face is teasing, and not pierced and corrected by Ida’s power. Ida is inclined to think that the supposed intelligence of Jews is a mistake.

Ida raises her eyebrows and slowly expels cigarette smoke. Her nose and cheekbones are chic. She’s pigeon-chested but handsome-bodied all the same, clean, unwhorish—ungainly.
She’s too proud to be pretty.

The damp gives Lila’s skin and her lips and lipstick and her eyes a luster. She sits and judges the silence. Then she puckers her mouth, too—to get a grip on what Ida is feeling. Lila says, “Oh, I’m not adorable; you’re being nice; you’re being too nice; you’re being way, way, way too nice to me.” Momma has pleasure and power shoved inside a-wildness-at-the-moment: “I’ll be honest, I’m out to be fancy today, so if you feel like that, that’s my reward. I like a kind word or three; I’m easy to satisfy; but everybody has their conceit; I certainly have mine; now you know everything: I suppose it’s more than you want to know.”

Momma bends her head down defeatedly—
adorably.
Momma is as brave as a brave child. She is determined—energetic. With her head down, she pushes her skirt lower on her fine legs.
The world isn’t a hard place to have a good time in if you use your head. Play with fire and see what happens.

When she looks up, she has a freed, soft, hot-eyed face. She feels that she is throwing herself on a blade—she is wounded—inwardly startled. Seductive Momma. Momma’s
tempestuous
assault on the other woman: “I’m what you call reasonable if you decide to reevaluate; I’m a
reasonable
woman, but I won’t hold you to it, although I’m someone who likes loyalty.”

“Me, too,” Ida said in a giddy winning-an-argument way. Then, as if she’d thought,
She’s not good-looking enough to ask this much of me
(the defense of the sadistic mind): “I don’t think anyone thinks you’re reasonable, Lilly. Do you think so, that people do? Do you think people think that’s your type, the reasonable type?” She’s drolly shrewd—it’s what Lila calls
Ida’s dry way. “I’m
reasonable,” Ida says in humble summing up. A sad and modest Victory.
Her mind is very quick but she never did anything with it except be quick.

“I don’t know,” Momma says. Momma aims her head, a complicated gun, at Ida: “I’m popular. You know what they say—I have papers, I have the papers to show it; you know what the statistics are. I’m reasonable enough. I shouldn’t be the one to say so, but I’ll take that risk: don’t let on I was the one to tell you, don’t let anyone know I was a fool wanting to make a good impression on you.”

“Fearless! Fearless!” Ida maybe girlishly shrieks.

A sudden, swift look crosses Momma’s face:
You can never tell the truth to anyone to their face or ask it, either.
Momma would like to belong to Ida,
body and soul—up to a point: let’s wait and see.
“Yes? Well, who knows which way the cat will jump tomorrow?” My mother is in deep. She is where the lions and the tigers walk. Perhaps what she is saying is clearer than I understand it to be.

Ida’s fondness for women attracted women. Women saw her as an impressive friend humbled by caring for them. She knows this. Ida says, in a highly good-natured voice that is ironically
moral
, “Lila, I adore you.” She grins, openly foolish, as if declaring a truce on meaning. “And it’s lifelong.” She means it only in a way. She is suggesting laws of affection which she means to enforce.

Momma says, “I know everyone backbites.” She doesn’t mean
backbites:
she picked something Ida doesn’t do. She means backslides. She means people disappoint you. “I put a sweet face on it, but it hurts me. If you want to hate me, hate me for that, that I’m someone who puts being serious at the head of the list.” She wants to set up what the laws are and what the punishments are. “I’m silly, I know, but who knows how much time anyone has? I haven’t time to waste on getting hurt.”

Ida looks droll but firm: she knows Momma wants her to love her: Ida thinks,
Well, this is war, this is war
, and
I’m a guest.
She says in mostly a droll and clowning and smartly foolish way—richly superior, that is:
I’m the one who is the lawgiver here
—“Well, I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m
always
a loyal one.”

Momma feels Ida is lying
all the time.
Momma is drunk with consciousness. And purpose. “I’m a seeker, I don’t think I’m a finder. You know what they say? Still waters cut deep. But I’m telling you too much about myself. It’s a
free-for-all.
I’m going to ask you to be nicer to me. It won’t hurt you to be nice: you’re a first-family woman and I know I’m not, but there are still things for you to learn.”

“This is my nicest, Lilly. I am never nicer than this—”

“That’s all there is? There isn’t any more? Then you’re boring—if you have limits like that.” Momma says it with unfocused eyes. She thinks,
I don’t care.

Ida says, “The jig’s up.” She sits straight, a narrow-backed, nervously elegant woman, cigaretted, alert—plain. “Well, this is—regrettable,” she says. Her eyes are shy and weird, then abruptly bold and fixed.

Momma flinches because she envies Ida her being able to use a word like
regrettable
without self-consciousness. Nerves pull at Momma’s face, at her eyebrows, at her eyes—her eyes have a startled focus.
There’s no inertia in me, there’s nothing inert, and there’s no peace: I always take the High Road.
She says, “Well, maybe it’s time I said I had a headache.”

Ida’s face is a shallow egg—with features scattered on it. A potent ugliness. Now she formally sees how proud Lila is, just how
fiery
(Ida’s word), and Ida’s heart breaks. She is suffused with sudden pain—sympathy—a feeling of grace—emptiness is dissolved—but she substitutes sympathy for herself instead of for
women
or for Momma, since she is more alone than Momma is; so the emptiness returns but it’s not entirely empty: it has a burning drama in it. Momma is in agony from the work of her performance and of creating feelings in Ida, but Ida is in
pain
, which is worse, but they are
both enjoying it in an awful way
, as Ida might describe it in a semi-grownup way.

“It’s raining too hard for me to go home just now, Lilly,” Ida says with a kind of gentle grandeur. Then, for the first time sharing her wit with Lila, taking Lila in as a partner in certain enterprises, Ida repeats from earlier, “What do you think of the rain, Lila?” And she gives a hasty smile and casts her eyes down to the porch floor, awake inwardly with the nervous unexpectedness of her own generosity and feeling it as love of a kind.

Momma wets her lips and says in a haphazard voice, “You know, some religious people take rain as a hint, but you try to have a good time anyway—and give a good time—did it wash away Sodom and Gomorrah, do you remember? Of course you remember, you like
The Bible.
I have no memory for those things. You know what they say, people and their sins ought to get a little time off for good behavior. I don’t think I know what good behavior is. Well, that’s enough: I’m not good at being silly: I don’t want to be silly in front of
you
.”

“Silly is as silly does,” Ida says—perched.

Momma says, “It’s not raining violets today—it’s more cats and dogs. The rain—well, the rain—you know these old houses is like arks. Are. All the animals two by two—I have a houseload of people coming in an hour.”

The central active meaning of Mom’s life is that in her, when everything is taut on an occasion that matters to her, self-approval
when the evidence is in
becomes pervasive in her, lunatic, a moonlight, a flattery of the world, as summer moonlight is. Her pleasure in herself becomes a conscious sexual power—the reflexive self-knowledge of a woman who attracts. For the moment, Momma has a rich willingness to be somewhat agreeable in her sexuality.

For Ida, Momma is
the real thing
—as if famous and European, of that order but in its own category: self-exhibiting, in some ways discreet; but talkative. Momma can give an impression—breasts and clothes and face—of supple strength and a crouching will and endless laughter and mind and martyrdom: a 1920s thing, from the movies. The drugged catlike weave of shadows on Momma’s belly, her being the extremely fragile and supple huntress—Ida sees this as extreme prettiness and a will to dissipate the megrims, boredom, and ennui, the kind that kill you.

Ida is here for a lot of reasons. Ida is a nervous collector and judge, but she is in Momma’s shoes when she is in Paris: there
she
has to perform for the women she admires. She feels she attracts as many people there as Lila does—Ida will compete with anyone.

That’s a high value to set on yourself
, Ma thinks. Ida seems to Momma to be beautiful in her holding back—women’s beauties and abilities seem fearsome and of prior interest to Momma.

The sight and presence of Ida’s
“beauty”
(will and courage and freedom) excite Momma, who makes a mad offering of a devoted glance—Ma, who is painfully, flyingly awake with hope, and cynicism.

BOOK: The World Is the Home of Love and Death
7.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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