Light Years (31 page)

“Hello, Peter,” she said.

He turned and looked at her blankly like some dissolute stranger propped in a chair. She could have wept. “How are you?”

“Nedra,” he finally said. “Well, considering everything, not bad.”

Beneath the sleeves of his coat lay the wasted arms of a paralytic. His body had hardened everywhere, it was like the lid of a chest, he could barely move.

“Feel it,” he told her. He made her touch his leg. Her heart grew faint. It was a statue’s leg, the limb of a tree. The flesh that enclosed him had become a box. Within it, like a prisoner, was the man.

“This is Sally and Brook Alexis,” he said.

A young, red-haired woman. Her husband was thin, folded like a mantis in nondescript clothes. Their children were playing with the Daros’ in the back of the apartment.

The conversation was innocuous. Other people came, a cousin of Peter’s and an old woman who had a glass eye. She was the Baroness Krinsky.

“The doctors,” she said, “my dear, the doctors know nothing. When I was a child I was sick and they took me to the doctor. I was terribly sick. I had a fever, my tongue was black. Well, he said, it’s one of two things: either you have been eating a lot of blackberry jam or it’s cholera. Of course it was neither.”

Nedra found the chance to talk to Catherine alone. “But what is it?” she asked.

“Scleroderma.”

“I’ve never heard of it. Is it only the arms and legs?”

“No, it can spread. It can go anywhere.”

“What can they do for it?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid,” Catherine said.

“Surely there are medicines.”

“Well, they’re trying cortisone, but look at his face. Really, there’s nothing. They all say the same thing: they can promise nothing.”

“Is he in pain?”

“Almost constantly.”

“You poor woman.”

“Oh, not me. Poor man. He wakes up three or four times a night. He never really sleeps.”

“Catherine!” he was calling. “Can you open some champagne?”

“Of course,” she replied. She went to get it. “What have you been doing?” the cousin was asking.

“Thinking,” Peter said.

“Things in general?”

“I’ve been thinking of what my last words will be,” he said. “Do you know the death of Voltaire?”

He was interrupted by Catherine returning with a tray and glasses. She opened the bottle and began to pour.

“No,” Peter said as soon as he had tasted it, “something’s wrong.”

“What?”

“This isn’t the good champagne.”

“Yes it is, darling.”

“It’s not.”

“Darling,” she protested, “it’s what we always drink.”

It was in a silver bucket. She withdrew it to show him the label.

“Why does it taste so strange?” He turned to the Baroness. “How does it seem to you?”

“Quite good.”

“I see. Don’t tell me my sense of taste is going. That would be serious.” He smiled at Nedra, a strange, imitation figure, florid and corrupt.

His voice was the only thing unchanged, his voice and his character, but the structure that held them was dissolving. All the old and interconnected knowledge—architecture joined to zoology and Persian myth, recipes for hare, the acquaintance with painters, museums, inland rivers dark with trout—all would vanish when the great inner chambers failed, when in one final hour the rooms of his life dropped away like a building being wrecked. His body had turned against him; the harmony that once reigned within it had disappeared.

“The great specialists for this are in England,” he said. “Dr. Bywaters. What’s the other man’s name, Catherine? In Westminster Hospital. I forget. I thought of going to England, but why undertake such a long trip when I know the answer? The time to go to England was when you and Viri went. We should have done that, I really regret that we didn’t. I love England.”

“We stayed at Brown’s,” Nedra said.

“Brown’s,” he said. “I was having tea there one day. You know how rigorous their afternoon tea is—the fires burning in the fireplaces, cakes. Well, at the next table there was an Englishwoman and her son. He was in his forties and she was one of those county women who ride until they’re eighty. They’d been to a matinée, and for an hour they sat there discussing the play they’d seen, it was
The Cherry Orchard
. Of course I was listening, and in that hour they exchanged about four sentences. It was a wonderful conversation. She started by saying, after a long silence, ‘Quite a good play.’ Nothing for about fifteen minutes. Finally he said, ‘Um, yes, it was.’ Long, long pause. Then she said, ‘Those marvelous silences …’ About ten minutes more passed. ‘Yes, quite effective,’ he said. ‘So typical of the Slave temperament,’ she said. You know, the English have an absolutely unbending attitude toward pronunciation. Slave, that’s exactly the way she said it.” He fell silent, as if having said something he regretted.

“I’d love to go back to England,” Nedra said.

“Oh, yes. Well, you will.” His voice trailed off.

At the end his wife led him from the room. Small, shuffling steps, as if bearing what remained of his existence.

“He was so pleased to see you,” Catherine said at the door.

We cannot imagine these diseases, they are called idiopathic, spontaneous in origin, but we know instinctively there must be something more, some invisible weakness they are exploiting. It is impossible to think they fall at random, it is unbearable to think it.

Nedra reached the street. She was uneasy, as if the air she had been breathing, the glass from which she drank, had been contaminated. What do we really know of all this, she thought? She had touched his leg. Her throat seemed a bit sore. She must watch herself to see if there were any unusual signs. Foolish, she thought, unworthy. After all, his children lived in the same apartment, his wife slept in the same room. She passed cluttered drugstores in the rear of which pharmacists worked. Cosmetics, medicines, asthma inhalers—she saw her image reflected among them, the sacred objects which could heal, bring happiness. And somewhere above them all, perhaps sleeping now or lying in what passed for sleep, was the victim for whom all cures and benefices were in vain.

Is illness an accident, or is it a kind of choice, the way love is a choice—hidden, involuntary, but sure as a fingerprint? Do we die of some kind of volition, even if it cannot be understood?

“Come and see him again,” Catherine had said.

A month later he was worse, back in the hospital. His family had given up hope; they were waiting for the end. It was already hot. Death in the summer, in a haggard city from which everyone wanted to flee, death without meaning, without air.

He lingered six weeks. He was too strong to die.

The doctor came as part of his routine. “Well, how are you today?” he asked.

“They say I’m fine,” Peter managed.

“But what do you say?”

“I can’t be against the whole world, can I?”

The doctor felt his abdomen, his legs. “Are you very uncomfortable?”

“No.”

“But it hurts?”

“It hurts like hell.”

“You’re a tough fellow, Peter.”

“Yes.”

He wanted to leave the hospital and go to his ocean house. His life was now a series of small incidents; it had lost all scope. He had one ambition, he said, one goal. He could hardly move, he could not bend his arms or legs, the joints were swollen like Tutunkhamen’s. He had sworn to walk to the sea.

“Darling, you will,” his wife said.

“I mean it,” he told her.

“I know you do.”

He turned his face to the wall.

In September he was driven to Amagansett. There is no more beautiful time there. The days pour down their warmth, in the morning the smell of fall. The house was a summer house; in the winter it was always closed. The walls were thin. It was like going to sea in a fragile boat; the first cold, the first storms would end it.

He lay in bed upstairs. The room faced east to the broad Atlantic. Under his windows, on the lawn, in her white uniform a nurse was taking the sun.

There were many arguments now; every hour of the day brought its quarrel. Beneath these difficulties lay deeper grievances. He accused his wife of wanting to leave him, of giving him up for dead.

“She’s been magnificent,” he confessed to Nedra, “an angel, there are very few women who could have done it, but now she wants to go, she wants to go to the city for a few days and rest—now, when I need her. And a few days … I know what that means. How is Viri?”

He hardly listened to the answer. He was reading biographies, there were three or four on the table beside him—Tolstoy, Cocteau, George Sand.

“How is Franca?” he asked. “How is Danny?”

He told her stories of his family, things he had never mentioned before, the first wife to whom he still occasionally wrote, his sister, his plans for the winter.

They had dinner in his room. His friend John Veroet, with whom he often fished, had cooked it. They ate on rose-colored cloth. Gleaming glasses, stiff napkins, a wood fire burning, the chill of evening at the windows. Peter lay in bed with his hair combed, his shirt open at the neck. A beautiful dinner, festive, perverse, like a New Year’s dinner in St. Moritz where the host had, unhappily, broken a leg.

He ate nothing himself. For almost a week he had been unable to eat; it would not go down. Only a bit of yogurt, some tea. Propped up on pillows, he talked to them. “What are the good plays, John?” he asked.

Veroet was eating the new peas mixed with mushrooms that he had made himself. He was a heavy man with a bitter tongue. He wrote on the theater. He owned a small house. His wife and his mistress were friends.

“There aren’t any,” he said finally.

“Oh, come now. Surely there’s something good.”

“Good? Well, what do you mean by good? There are all sorts of terrible plays people think are good. My God, it’s an absolute disgrace. Every year they publish the plays of people like John Whiting, Bullins, Leonard Melfi—plays that absolutely nobody went to see, that the critics unanimously condemned, it’s criminal to put them between hard covers, but they do it and people begin to call them masterpieces, modern classics. The next thing you know, they’re being performed in repertory at the University of Montana or someplace, or adapted for television.” He spoke to the plate. He seldom looked at anyone directly.

“John, you’re always saying the same thing,” his wife said.

“Keep out of it,” he told her.

“The plays you like, nobody goes to see either,” she said. “People went to see
Marat-Sade
, didn’t they?”

“You didn’t like that.”

“I didn’t like it, but I didn’t dislike it.” He drank some wine. His upper lip was damp.

Had he heard of Richard Brom, Nedra asked.

“Brom?”

“What do you think of him?” she said.

“Well, I have nothing much against him. I’ve never seen him.”

“I think he’s the most astonishing actor of our time.”

“You’re lucky. Most of the time you go to see his plays and end up on some street of used furniture stores and dry cleaners, all closed. We’re all interested in the invisible, but in his case it’s carried a little far.”

“He believes in a committed audience.”

“By all means, by all means,” Veroet cried. “He’s tired of the old audience, and I’m tired of being part of it. But there’s really no such thing as unseen theater, that’s contrary to the whole idea. Eventually it must come out into the light. If it doesn’t, it’s not theater, it’s something else, it’s just recited lives.”

“Who is this man?” Peter asked.

Nedra began to describe him. She told about his performances, the strength in his body, the inexhaustible energy. Veroet had toppled over sideways and was asleep on the window seat. “He always does that,” his wife explained.

“John, wake up, listen to this,” Peter was calling. “No wonder you never find anything interesting in the theater. Wake up, John! Nedra, don’t mind him, he’s hopeless, go on …”

The Veroets drove her home. It was past eleven. What did they think, she asked.

“About Peter?”

“Yes.”

“He could live a month,” Veroet said. “Or he could live five years. There’s a woman in Sag Harbor who’s had it as long as I can remember—not as bad, of course. It depends if it attacks a vital organ. He was feeling very well tonight.”

“He was marvelous.”

“It was like old times,” Veroet said.

Peter Daro never walked to the sea. He died in November. At his funeral, in the coffin, was a face colored with cosmetics, like an invincible old woman or some kind of clown.

Five

1

WHERE DOES IT GO, SHE
thought, where has it gone?

She was struck by the distances of life, by all that was lost in them. She could not even remember—she kept no journal—what she had said to Jivan the day of their first lunch together. She remembered only the sunlight that made her amorous, the certainty she felt, the emptiness of the restaurant as they talked. All the rest had eroded, it existed no more.

Things she had known imperishably—images, smells, the way in which he put on his clothes, the profane acts which had staggered her—all of them were fading now, becoming false. She seldom wrote letters, she kept almost none.

“You think it’s there, but it isn’t. You can’t even remember feelings,” she said to Eve. “Try to remember Neil and how you felt about him.”

“It’s hard to believe, but I was crazy about him.”

“Yes, you can say that, but you can’t feel it. Can you even remember what he looked like?”

“Only from photographs.”

“The strange thing is, after a while you don’t even believe them.”

“Everything has changed so.”

“I always just assumed the important things would stay somehow,” Nedra said. “But they don’t.”

“I remember my wedding,” Eve said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, yes. My mother was there.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She just kept saying, ‘My poor baby.’ ”

“I was seventeen the first time I came to New York.” She had never told this to Eve. “It was with a forty-year-old man. He was a concert pianist, he’d passed through Altoona. When he wrote to invite me, there was a rose in the letter. We stayed at his house in Long Island. He lived with his mother, and he came to my room late at night. You know, I don’t even remember his face.”