Voice of Our Shadow (6 page)

For instance, there were her drawings. Besides the German course, she had decided that during her “free” year she would do something she had had in mind to do for years — she was going to illustrate her childhood. When they were living in London she had taught art at one of the international schools there. During her free periods she’d made over a hundred preliminary sketches, but getting her to show them to me was impossible at first. When she finally did, I was so impressed I didn’t know what to say.

The Shadow
was one of those humpbacked Art Deco radios with cozy round black dials and the names of a million exotic places on them that were supposedly at your beck and call. This radio was on a table set far back in the room toward the top of the drawing. Jutting out stiff and doll-like from the bottom were three pairs of legs set right next to one another — a man’s, a child’s (black patent-leather shoes and short white socks), and a woman’s (bare with pointed, high-heel shoes). Nothing more of these people could be seen, but the most wonderful, eerie part of the work was that all three sets of legs were pointing toward the radio, giving you the impression the bottoms of their feet were watching the radio like a television set. I told that to India and she laughed. She said she had never thought of it that way before, but it made sense. In all her work, that one-quarter naive, one-quarter eerie quality came through again and again.

In another one, an empty gray room was totally bare except for a pillow in flight across the middle of the picture. The hand that had thrown it was there in the corner, but in its frozen openness it had lost all human qualities and was suddenly, disturbingly something else. She said she planned on calling the final version
Pillow Fight
.

Only one of her pictures was on actual display in their apartment. It was entitled
Little Boy
. It was a still life, painted in fragile, washed-out watercolors. On an oak table were a shiny black top hat (the type the Germans call a
Zylinder
) and a pair of spotless white gloves. That was all: tan wooden table, black hat, white gloves.
Little Boy
.

The first time I went to their home I stared at it for a while and then politely asked what the title meant. They looked at each other and then, as if on cue, laughed at the same time.

“That one’s not from my childhood, Joe. Paul has this crazy thing he does sometimes —”

“Shh, India, don’t say a word! Maybe we’ll introduce the two of them sometime, huh?”

Her face lit up like a candle. She loved the idea. She laughed and laughed, but neither of them made any attempt to clue me in. Later she said she had painted the picture for Paul as an anniversary present. I had noticed there was an inscription in the lower-left-hand corner: To
Mister from Missus — Promises to Keep
.

They had lucked into a great big apartment in the Ninth District not far from the Danube Canal. But they spent little time there. Both of them said they felt compelled to be out and on the move as much as possible. Consequently, they were almost never home when I called.

“I don’t understand why the two of you are always out. Your apartment is so nice and warm.”

India shot Paul an intimate, secret smile that fled as soon as she looked back at me. “I guess we’re afraid there will be something out there we’ll miss if we stay home.”

We met the first week in July, when they had been in town for over a month. They had seen the usual sights, but now I eagerly appointed myself their special guide and gave them every bit of Vienna I had accumulated (and hoarded) in the years I had lived there.

Those dreamy, warm days passed in a delightful blur. I would finish my writing as early as I could and then two or three times a week would meet them somewhere for lunch. Paul was on vacation until the end of July, so we moved slowly and sensually through those days as if they were a great meal we never wanted to finish. At least that’s how I felt, and I could sometimes sense their happiness was growing too.

I began to feel as if I had been fueled with some fabulous high-octane gasoline. I wrote and did research like a mad machine in the morning, played with the Tates in the afternoon, and went home to bed at night feeling that my life couldn’t possibly be much fuller than it was right at that moment. I had found the friends I’d been looking for all along.

On my twenty-fifth birthday, they put the cherry on top of the cake.

I was sitting at my desk on August 19, working on an interview I was doing on spec for a Swiss magazine. It was my birthday, and because birthdays almost always depressed the hell out of me, I was trying hard to work my way through this one with as few distractions as possible. I had had an early dinner at a neighborhood
gasthaus
, and instead of going to a café and reading for an hour, as I usually did, I raced home and restlessly pushed the sheets of typescript around my desk in a vain attempt to forget that no one in the world had tipped me a nod on my Day of Days.

When the doorbell rang, I was frowning at the minuscule pile of pages I had done. I was wearing an old sweatshirt and a pair of blue jeans.

An old man in a seedy but still-elegant chauffeur’s outfit was standing there with his cap in his hand. He wore black leather gloves that looked very expensive. He looked me over as if I were last week’s lettuce and said in a nice
hoch-deutsch
accent that “the car” was downstairs and the lady and gentleman were waiting. Was I ready?

I smiled and asked what he was talking about.

“You
are
Mr. Lennox?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have been told to come for you, sir.”

“Who, uh, who sent you?”

“The lady and gentleman in the car, sir. I assume they hired the limousine.”

“Limousine?” I squinted suspiciously and pushed him a little to one side so I could peek out the door into the hall. Paul liked to play tricks, and I was dubious of anything he had his finger in. No one was out there. “They’re down in the car?”

“Yes, sir.” He sighed and pulled one of the gloves farther up onto his hand.

I asked him to describe them, and he described Paul and India Tate in evening clothes.

“Evening? You mean formal? A tuxedo?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, God! Look, uh, look, you tell them I’ll be down in ten minutes. Ten minutes, okay?”

“Yes, sir, ten minutes.” He gave me one last tired look and marched off.

No shower. Rip the tuxedo off the hanger way in the back of the closet. I hadn’t worn it in months, and it was full of creases. So what? Seconds of trouble buttoning the silk buttons with shaky, happy hands. What were those two up to? How great! Fabulous! They had
known
it was my birthday. They had even double-checked the date a few days before. Why had they hired a limousine? I took a fat glug of mouthwash and spat it loudly in the sink as I was turning out the light and heading for the door. At the last second I remembered to take my keys.

A silver Mercedes-Benz 450 was purring majestically in front of my apartment house. Inside I could see the chauffeur (with his cap on now — all business) lit by the calm yellow of the dashboard lights. I stepped over to look in the back seat and there they were, champagne glasses in hand, the bottle sticking out of a silver bucket on the darkly carpeted floor.

The window on my side zizzed down, and India’s wonderful face peeped out of that rich inner gloom.

“What’s up, Birthday Boy? Wanna go for a ride?”

“Hi! What are you doing here? What’s with this silver chariot?”

“Joe Lennox, for once in your measly little life, don’t ask any questions and get in the damned car!” Paul’s voice rumbled out.

When I got in, India slid over so I could sit between them. Paul handed me a chilled glass of champagne and gave my knee a short, friendly squeeze.

“Happy birthday, Joey! Have we got some big plans for
you
tonight!”

“And how!” India clinked her glass to mine and kissed my cheek.

“Like what?”

“Like sit back and you’ll see. You wanna spoil the surprise?”

India told the driver to go to the first place on their list.

The champagne lasted until the end of the ride, which turned out to be Schloss Greifenstein, a huge and wonderfully forbidding castle about half an hour out of Vienna. It is perched high on a hill overlooking a bend in the Danube. There’s a splendid restaurant up there, and that’s where we had my birthday dinner. When it was over, I really had to work hard to keep from crying. What special people. I had never had a surprise like that in my whole life.

“This … this is some night for me.”

“Joey, you’re our
boy
. Do you know how much you helped us when we first got here? There’s no way in the world we’d let you get away without a party tonight!”

India took my hand and held it. “Now, don’t get all worked up about it. We’ve been planning to do it forever. Paul thought up the idea of coming here for dinner, but that’s nothing. Wait till you see what I —”

“Pipe down, India, don’t
tell
him! We’ll just go.”

They were already standing, and I hadn’t even seen anyone pay the bill.

“What’s going on? You mean there’s more?”

“Damned right, buddy. This here’s just the first course. Let’s go — our big silver bullet’s waiting.”

More turned out to be three chocolate sundaes at McDonald’s on Mariahilferstrasse, with the Mercedes waiting for us outside. India bought the driver a sundae, too. That was followed by a long coffee at the Café Museum across from the Opera, and then adjoining rooms for the night at the Imperial Hotel on the Ringstrasse. If you haven’t been to Vienna, the Imperial is the place where the likes of Henry Kissinger stay when they’re in town for a conference. The price of rooms begins at a hundred and forty dollars.

When we were properly installed (and the bellboy had given us all an angry, insulted look because we had no baggage), and we’d bounced on each of the beds, Paul opened the door and paraded into my room with a Monopoly game he said he’d bought fresh for the occasion. We finished the night playing Monopoly on the floor and eating a terrific sacher torte ordered from room service. At four in the morning Paul said he had to go to work that day and had to get at least a little sleep.

We were all ruffled, frazzled, and giddy as hell from no sleep, being silly, and laughter. I hugged the two of them when they went off to bed with a force I hoped told them how much the night and their friendship meant to me.

“What was your brother like? Like you?”

India and I were sitting on a bench in the Stadtpark, waiting for Paul to join us. The leaves had just begun to turn color, and the sharp, smoky smell of real autumn was in the air.

“No, we were incredibly different.”

“In what way?” She had a brown paper cone of warm chestnuts in her lap, and she peeled the shell off each with the utmost care. I liked watching her do it. The chestnut surgeon.

“He was clever and cagey and sneaky. He would have made the world’s greatest diplomat if he hadn’t had such a bad temper.” A pigeon walked over and snatched up a cigarette butt at our feet.

“How did you feel about him after he died?”

I wondered if I would ever be close enough to her to tell the real story. I wondered if I wanted to tell anyone the real story. What would it accomplish? Would it truly make things better? Would I feel less guilty after I’d given someone else the truth to hold with me? I looked hard at India and decided to test some of that truth on her.

“Do you want to know something? I felt worse when my mother was committed to the insane asylum. My brother, Ross, was
bad
, India. By the time he died he’d done so many mean things to me I felt like a punching bag. Sometimes I don’t think he cared if he was my brother or not. He was that cruel, or sadistic, or whatever you want to call it. So in my heart of hearts I was glad I wasn’t going to get hit anymore.”

“What’s so bad about that? It sounds right.” She offered me a fat chestnut.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean just what I said — it sounds right. Joe, kids are little shits, I don’t care what anyone says about how cute and sweet they are. They’re greedy and egotistical and don’t understand anything outside their own needs. You didn’t feel bad when your brother died because he wasn’t going to hit you anymore. It makes total sense. What’s the problem? Were you a masochist?”

“No, but it also makes me sound terrible.” I was half indignant.

“Hey, don’t get me wrong — you
were
terrible. We were all terrible when we were little. Did you ever see how vicious and monstrous kids are to one another? And I’m not just talking about in the sandbox either, where they bang each other over the head with their trucks! Teenagers … God, teach them for a while if you want to learn about mean. There is nothing in the world as small and malicious and self-centered as a fifteen-year-old. No, Joey, don’t crucify yourself over it. People don’t become human until they’re around twenty-two years old, and then they’re just beginning. Don’t laugh, I’m completely serious.”

“Okay, but I’m only twenty-five!”

“Who said you were human?” She ate the last chestnut and threw the shell at me.

An editor who was interested in my idea for the war book was coming over to the Frankfurt Book Fair and asked if I’d come up so we could talk about it. I readily agreed because it gave me a good excuse to take a train ride (which I love) and to meet some New York book people. I mentioned the trip to Paul only because the subject of train travel came up in conversation one day when we were having lunch together. We went on to reminisce about the great train trips we’d taken on the
Super Chief
, the
Transalpin
, the
Blue Train
from Paris to the Riviera …

This was at the beginning of October, when the Tates were busy going to a month-long adventure-film festival at the Albertina museum in town. The night I left, I knew they were due to see a double feature they’d been talking about for weeks —
North by Northwest
and
The Thirty-nine Steps
. We had coffee together at the Landtmann in the late afternoon and said we would rendezvous somewhere as soon as I got back to town. Fine, see you then. When we separated, I stopped, turned, and watched them walk away. India was talking excitedly to Paul, as if she’d just met him after a long separation and had many new things to tell him. I smiled and thought of how quickly our relationship had blossomed. I smiled even more when I thought how great it was to have both Vienna and them to return to.