Light Years (10 page)

2

“ARE YOU HAPPY, VIRI?” SHE
asked.

They were in traffic, driving across town at five in the afternoon. The great mechanical river of which they were part moved slowly at the intersections and then more freely on the long transverse blocks. Nedra was doing her nails. At each red light, without a word, she handed him the bottle and painted one nail.

Was he happy? The question was so ingenuous, so mild. There were things he dreamed of doing that he feared he never would. He often weighed his life. And yet, he was young still, the years stretched before him like endless plains.

Was he happy? He accepted the open bottle. She carefully dipped the brush, absorbed in her acts. Her instinct, he knew, was sharp. She had the even teeth of a sex that nips thread in two, teeth that cut as cleanly as a razor. All her power seemed concentrated in her ease, her questioning glance. He cleared his throat.

“Yes, I suppose I’m happy.”

Silence. The traffic ahead had begun to move. She took the bottle to allow him to drive.

“But isn’t it a stupid idea?” she asked. “If you really think about it?”

“Happiness?”

“Do you know what Krishnamurti says? Consciously or unconsciously, we are all completely selfish, and as long as we get what we want, we believe everything is all right.”

“Getting what we want … but is that happiness?”

“I don’t know. I know that not getting what you want is certainly unhappiness.”

“I’d have to think about that,” he said.
“Never
getting what you want, that could be unhappiness, but as long as there’s a chance of getting it …”

They had only to reach Tenth Avenue and the street would be empty, open, as on a weekend; they would be free, speeding onto the highway, rushing north. The gray, exhausted crowds were trudging past newsstands, key shops, banks. They were slumped at tables in the Automat, eating in silence. There were one-legged pigeons, battered cars, the darkened windows of endless apartments, and above it all an autumn sky, smooth as a dome.

“It’s difficult to think about,” she said. “Especially when he says that thought can never bring you to truth.”

“What can? That’s the real question.”

“Thought is always changing. It’s like a stream, it moves around things, it’s shifting. Thought is disorder, he says.”

“But what is the alternative?”

“That’s very complicated,” she agreed. “It’s a different way of seeing things. Do you ever feel you would like to find a new way of living?”

“It depends what you mean by a new way. Yes, sometimes I do.”

It was the day Monica died, the little girl with one leg. The surgeons had not removed enough, there was no way to do it. She had begun to have pain again, invisible, as if it had all been for nothing. That pain was the knell. After it came fever and headaches. She swelled everywhere. She went into a coma. It took weeks, of course. Finally—it was in the evening, Viri was bringing in wood, bits of bark stuck to his sleeves, his arms filled, he was making a bank of cut ends, a parapet that would last through the winter when she died. Her father was still at work. Her mother was sitting there in a folding chair, and her child ceased to breathe. In an instant she was gone. She was lighter suddenly, much lighter, she lay with a kind of terrifying insignificance. Everything had left her—the innocence, the crying, the dutiful outings with her father, the life she had never lived. All these weigh something. They pass, dissolve, are scattered like dust.

The days had lost their warmth. Sometimes at noon, as if in farewell, there was an hour or two like summer, swiftly gone. On the stands in nearby orchards were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments. In the distant fields, seas of dank earth far from towns, there were still tomatoes clinging to the vines. At first glance it seemed only a few, but they were hidden, sheltered; that was how they had survived.

Nedra had a basket full of them. Viri had two. The weight was astonishing. They were like wet clothes; they were heavy as oranges. A family of gleaners, their faces dirty, their hands dark with the stain of this last moist earth. It was a field near New City; the farmer was their friend.

“Pick the small ones,” Viri told his daughters.

Their baskets were filled as well. They were putting the little ones in their pockets, those that were partly green. They moved down the endless rows, straying back and forth, tiring, learning to stoop, to work, to feel the naked fruit in their hands. They cried out to each other, sometimes they sat on the ground.

At last they reached the end. “Papa, we have so many!”

“Let me see.”

They stood near the car, tomatoes piled around them, the dirt still clinging, the air turned chill. Nedra looked like a woman who had once been rich. She held her hands away from her. Her hair had come loose.

“What are we going to do with all these fucking tomatoes?” she laughed. Her marvelous laugh, in the fall, at the edge of the fields.

“Come on, Hadji,” she called, “you filthy beast.” His nose was caked with earth. “What a day you’ve had,” she said.

Their fingernails were black, their shoes encrusted. They put the tomatoes in the unheated entry to the kitchen as Jivan drove up in the dusk.

3

“THERE ARE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT
marriage. I love the familiarity of it,” Nedra said. “It’s like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it’s implanted in your skin, you can’t get rid of it. You’re hardly even aware of it any more. I suppose I’m very conventional,” she decided.

“In some ways …”

“If you asked people what they wanted, what would most of them say? I know what I’d say: money. I’d like a lot of money. That’s the one thing I never have enough of.”

Jivan said nothing.

“I’m not materialistic, you know that. Well, I am, I suppose; I like clothes and food, I don’t like the bus or depressing places, but money is very nice. I should have married someone with money. Viri will never have any. Never. You know, it’s terrible to be tied to someone who can’t possibly give you what you want. I mean, the simplest thing. We really aren’t meant to live together. And yet, you know, I look at him making puppets for them, they sit there with their heads close to his, absolutely absorbed by it.”

“I know.”

“He’s doing the entire
Elephant’s Child.”

“Yes.”

“The Kola-Kola bird, the crocodile, everything. You know, he is talented. He says, ‘Franca …’ and she says, ‘Yes, Papa.’ I can’t explain it.”

“Franca is very beautiful.”

“This terrible dependency on others, this need to love.”

“It isn’t terrible.”

“Oh, yes, because at the same time there is the
stupidity
of this kind of life, the boredom, the arguments.”

He was placing a pillow. She raised herself without a word.

“With the milk goes the cow,” he said. “With the cow goes the milk.”

“The cow.”

“You understand that.”

“If you want milk you must accept a cow, a barn, fields, all that.”

“That’s it,” he said.

He was moving unhurriedly, like a man setting a table plate by plate. There are times when one is important and others when one almost does not exist. She felt him kneel. She could not see him. Her eyes were closed, her face pressed to the sheet. “Karezza.”

He was solemn, unhearing. “All right,” he said.

He was slow, intent, like an illiterate trying to write. He was unaware of her; he was beginning the act as if it were a cure. The slowness, the deliberation struck her down like blows.

“Yes,” he murmured. His hands were on her shoulders, on the swell of her buttocks with a force that made her helpless. The weight, the presumption of it was overwhelming. Her moans began to rise.

“Yes,” he said, “cry out.”

There was no movement, none at all except for a slow distending to which she reacted as if to pain. She was rolling, sobbing. Her shouts were muffled. He did nothing, then more of it and more.

Afterwards it was as if they had run for miles. They lay near each other, they could not speak. An empty day, the gulls on the river, blue and reflecting blue like layers of mica.

“When you do it,” she said, “I sometimes have the feeling I’m going so far I won’t be able to come back. I feel as if I’m …” she suddenly rose partway. “What’s that?”

The door was rattling. He listened. “It’s the cats.”

Her head fell to the bed again.

“What do they want?”

“They want to come in,” he said. “It’s their one ambition.”

The noise at the door continued.

“Let them in.”

“Not now,” he said.

She lay like a woman sleeping. Her back was bare, her arms above her head, her hair loose. He touched this back as if it were something purchased, as if he had discovered it for the first time.

She could never be without him, she had told him that. There were times she hated him because he was free in a way she was not; he had no children, no wife.

“You’re not going to get married, are you?” she said.

“Well, of course I think about it.”

“It’s not necessary for you. You already have the fruit of marriage.”

“The fruit. The fruit is something else.”

“You have plenty of time,” she insisted. “I’m stupid. I’ve told you the thing I’m most afraid of.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“I can’t help it. It’s something I can’t do anything about. I depend on you.”

“Our lives are always in someone else’s hands.”

Her car was parked outside. It was afternoon, winter, the trees were bare. Her children were in class, writing in large letters, making silver and green maps of the states.

Viri came home in the darkness, headlights blazing his approach, illuminating the trees, the house, and ending like dying stars.

The door closed behind him. He came in from the evening air, cool and whitened, as if from the sea. His hair was even washed out of place. He had come from drawings, discussions with clients. He was tired, a little awry.

“Hello, Viri,” she said.

A fire was burning. His children were laying out forks.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked.

“Yes.” He kissed his daughters as each went by. He ate a small, green olive bitter as tea.

She prepared it. She liked her life this evening, he could tell. She was filled with contentment. It was on her mouth, in the shading of the corners.

“Franca,” she said, “here, open the wine.”

The radio was playing. The candles on the table were lit. The first nights of winter with their tidelike cold. From afar the house seems a ship, dark, unmoving, every window filled with light.

4

ROBERT CHAPTELLE WAS THIRTY
. His hair was thinning, his lips an unnatural red. Beneath his eyes lay the faint blue of illness, asthma among other things, the asthma of Proust. An intellectual face, the bone gleaming in it. He was a friend of Eve’s. He had met her at a dinner during which he mainly sat alone. She tried to talk to him; he had an accent.

“You’re French.”

“How could you guess?” he said.

“How long have you been here?”

He shrugged. “Yes, it’s time to go,” he agreed.

“I mean how long have you been in America?”

“The same,” he said.

He was self-indulgent, a failure. He had not abandoned failure; it was his address, his street, his one comfort. His life was one of intimacy and betrayal. Of himself he wrote: extravagant, false. He was impractical, moody, a deviate. He suffered and loved like a woman; he remembered the weather and the menu in restaurants, hours that were like a broken necklace in a drawer. He kept everything, he announced, he kept it here, tapping his chest.

Chaptelle was a name that had originally been Russian. His mother had come to Paris in the twenties, during the civil war. He had met Beckett, Barrault, he had met everyone. There is a kind of self-esteem which forces walls of ice. This is not to say he wasn’t remembered; his intensity, his dark eyes ringed with shadows, the confidence he carried within him like a tumor—these were not easily forgotten.

They talked about writers: Dinesen, Borges, Simone de Beauvoir.

“She is a dreary woman,” he said. “Sartre, now Sartre has
esprit.”

“Do you know Sartre?”

“We have coffee in the same café,” Chaptelle said. “My wife, my ex-wife, knows him better. She works in a bookshop.”

“You’ve been married.”

“We are very good friends,” he said.

“What’s her name?” Eve asked.

“Her name? Paule.”

They had spent their marriage trip in all the little towns Colette had gone to in the years she was dancing in revues. They traveled like brother and sister. It was an
hommage
.

“Do you know what it is to be really intimate, to feel safe with someone who will never betray you, will never force you to act unlike yourself? That was what we had.”

“But it didn’t last,” Eve said.

“There were other problems.”

When Nedra met him, he was calm; he seemed bored. She noticed that his cuffs were dirty, his hands clean; she recognized him immediately. He was a Jew; she knew it the moment she saw him. They shared a secret. He was like her husband; in fact he seemed to be the man Viri was hiding, the negative image that had somehow escaped.

He drank a demitasse of coffee into which he stirred two spoons of sugar. He was an unmarried son come home in the morning, the son who has lost everything. He sniffed. He had nothing to say. He was as empty as one who has committed a crime of passion. He was his own corpse. One could see in him both the murderer and the half-nude woman crumpled on the floor.

“Your husband’s an architect,” he said finally.

“Yes.”

He sniffed again. He touched his face with the napkin. He had forgotten Eve, that was obvious; one had only to look at them to see that.

“Is he talented?”

“Very,” Nedra said. “You’re a writer.”