Look at the Harlequins! (21 page)

The grand was the first to go—it was carried out by a gang of staggering iceberg movers and donated by me to Bel’s school, which I had reasons to pamper: I am not an easily frightened man but when I am frightened I am very much frightened, and at a second interview that I had had with the schoolmistress, my impersonation of an indignant Charles Dodgson was only saved from failure by the sensational news of my being about to marry an irreproachable socialite, the widow of our most pious philosopher. Louise, per contra, regarded the throwing out of a symbol of luxury as a personal affront and a crime: a concert piano of that kind costs, she said, as least as much as her old Hecate convertible, and she was not quite as wealthy as, no doubt, I thought she was, a statement representing that knot in Logic: the double-hitch lie which does not make one truth. I appeased her by gradually over-crowding the Music Room (if a time series be transformed into sudden space) with the modish gadgets she loved, singing furniture, miniature TV sets, stereorphics, portable orchestras, better and better video sets, remote-control instruments for turning those things on or off, and an automatic telephone dialer. For Bel’s birthday she gave her a Rain Sound machine to promote sleep; and to celebrate
my
birthday she murdered a neurotic’s night by getting me a thousand-dollar bedside Pantomime clock with twelve yellow radii on its black face instead of figures, which made it look blind to me or feigning blindness like some repulsive beggar in a hideous tropical town; in compensation that terrible object possessed a secret beam that projected Arabic numerals (2:00, 2:05, 2:10, 2:15, and so forth) on the ceiling of my new sleeping quarters, thus demolishing the sacred, complete, agonizingly achieved occlusion of its oval window. I said I’d buy a gun and shoot it in the mug, if she did not send it back to the fiend who sold it to her. She replaced it by “something especially made for people who like originality,” namely a silver-plated umbrella stand in the shape of a giant jackboot—there was “something about rain strangely attractive to her” as her “analyst” wrote me in one of the silliest letters that man ever wrote to man. She was also fond of small expensive animals, but here I stood firm, and she never got the long-coated Chihuahua she coldly craved.

I did not expect much of Louise the Intellectual. The only time I saw her shed big tears, with interesting little howls of real grief, was when on the first Sunday of our marriage all the newspapers carried photographs of the two Albanian authors (a bald-domed old epicist and a long-haired woman compiler of children’s books) who shared out between them the Prestigious Prize that she had told everybody I was sure to win that year. On the other hand she had only flipped through my novels (she was to read more attentively, though,
A Kingdom by the Sea
, which I began slowly to pull out of myself in 1957 like a long brain worm, hoping it would not break), while consuming all the “serious” bestsellers discussed by sister consumers belonging to the Literary Group in which she liked to assert herself as a writer’s wife.

I also discovered that she considered herself a connoisseur of Modern Art. She blazed with anger at me when
I said I doubted that the appreciation of a green stripe across a blue background had
any
connection with its definition in a glossy catalogue as “producing a virtually Oriental atmosphere of spaceless time and timeless space.” She accused me of trying to wreck her entire view of the world by maintaining—in a facetious vein, she hoped—that only a Philistine misled by the solemn imbeciles paid to write about exhibitions could tolerate rags, rinds, and fouled paper rescued from a garbage can and discussed in terms “of warm splashes of color” and “good-natured irony.” But perhaps most touching and terrible of all was her honestly believing that painters painted “what they felt”; that a rather rough and rumpled landscape dashed off in the Provence might be gratefully and proudly interpreted by art students if a psychiatrist explained to them that the advancing thundercloud represented the artist’s clash with his father, and the rolling grainfield the early death of his mother in a shipwreck.

I could not prevent her from purchasing specimens of the pictorial art in vogue but I judiciously steered some of the more repulsive objects (such as a collection of daubs produced by “naïve” convicts) into the round dining room where they swam blurrily in the candlelight when we had guests for supper. Our routine meals generally took place in the snackbar niche between the kitchen and the housemaid’s quarters. Into that niche Louise introduced her new Cappuccino Espresso Maker, while at the opposite end of the house, in the Opal Room, a heavily built, hedonically appareled bed with a padded headboard was installed for me. The adjacent bathroom had a less comfortable tub than my former one, and certain inconveniences attended my excursions, two or three nights per week, to the connubial chamber—via drawing room, creaky stairs, upper landing, second-floor corridor, and past the inscrutable chink-gleam of Bel’s door; but I treasured my privacy more than I resented its drawbacks. I had the “Turkish
toupet
,” as Louise
called it, to forbid her to communicate with me by thumping on her floor. Eventually I had an interior telephone put in my room, to be used only in certain emergencies: I was thinking of such nervous states as the feeling of imminent collapse that I experienced sometimes in my nocturnal bouts with eschatological obsessions; and there was always the half-full box of sleeping pills that only she could have filched.

The decision to let Bel stay in her apartment, with Louise as her only neighbor, instead of refurnishing a spiral of space by allotting those two east-end rooms to Louise—“perhaps I too need a studio?”—while transferring Bel with bed and books to the Opal Room downstairs and leaving me upstairs in my former bedchamber, was taken by me firmly despite Louise’s rather bitchy countersuggestions, such as removing the tools of my trade from the library in the basement and banishing Bel with all her belongings to that warm, dry, nice and quiet lair. Though I knew I would never give in, the very process of shuffling rooms and accessories in my mind made me literally ill. On top of that, I felt, perhaps wrongly, that Louise was enjoying the hideous banality of a stepmother-versus-step-daughter situation. I did not exactly regret marrying her, I recognized her charm and functional qualities, but my adoration for Bel was the sole splendor, the sole breathtaking mountain in the drab plain of my emotional life. Being in many ways an extraordinarily stupid person, I had simply not reckoned with the tangles and tensions of what was meant to look like a model household. The moment I woke up—or at least the moment I saw that getting up was the only way to fool early-morning insomnia—I started wondering what new project Louise would invent that day with which to harass my girl. When two years later this gray old dolt and his volatile wife, after treating Bel to a tedious Swiss tour, left her in Larive, between Hex and Trex, at a “finishing” school (finishing childhood,
finishing the innocence of young imagination), it was our 1955–1957 period of life
à trois
in the Quirn house, and not my earlier mistakes, that I recalled with curses and sobs.

She and her stepmother stopped speaking to each other altogether; they communicated, if need be, by signs: Louise, for instance, pointing dramatically at the ruthless clock and Bel tapping in the negative on the crystal of her loyal little wristwatch. She lost all affection for me, twisting away gently when I attempted a perfunctory caress. She adopted again the wan absent expression that had dimmed her features at her arrival from Rosedale. Camus replaced Keats. Her marks deteriorated. She no longer wrote poetry. One day as Louise and I were packing for our next trip to Europe (London, Paris, Pisa, Stresa, and—in small print—Larive) I started removing some old maps, Colorado, Oregon, from the silk “cheek” inside a valise, and the moment my secret prompter uttered that “
shcheka
” I came across a poem of hers written long before Louise’s intrusion into her trustful young life. I thought it might do Louise good to read it and handed her the exercise-book page (all ragged along its torn root but still mine) on which the following lines were penciled:

“Almost Poundian in purity,” remarked Louise—which annoyed me, because I thought Pound a fake.

Château Vignedor, Bel’s charming boarding school in Switzerland, on a charming hill three hundred meters above charming Larive on the Rhône, had been recommended to Louise in the autumn of 1957 by a Swiss lady in Quirn’s French Department. There were two other “finishing” schools of the same general type that might have done just as well, but Louise set her sights on Vignedor because of a chance remark made not even by her Swiss friend but by a chance girl in a chance travel agency who summed up the qualities of the school in one phrase: “Many Tunisian princesses.”

It offered five main subjects (French, Psychology, Savoir-vivre, Couture, Cuisine), various sports (under the direction of Christine Dupraz, the once famous skier), and a dozen additional classes on request (which would keep the plainest girl there till she married), including Ballet and Bridge. Another
supplément
—especially suitable for orphans or unneeded children—was a summer trimester, filling up the year’s last remaining segment with excursions and nature studies, to be spent by a few lucky girls at the home of the headmistress, Madame de Turm, an Alpine chalet some twelve hundred meters higher: “Its solitary light, twinkling in a black fold of the mountains, can be
seen,” said the prospectus in four languages, “from the Château on clear nights.” There was also some kind of camp for differently handicapped local children in different years conducted by our medically inclined sports directress.

1957, 1958, 1959. Sometimes, seldom, hiding from Louise, who objected to Bel’s twenty well-spaced monosyllables’ costing us fifty dollars, I would call her from Quirn, but after a few such calls I received a curt note from Mme. de Turm, asking me not to upset my daughter by telephoning, and so retreated into my dark shell. Dark shell, dark years of my heart! They coincided oddly with the composition of my most vigorous, most festive, and commercially most successful novel,
A Kingdom by the Sea
. Its demands, the fun and the fancy of it, its intricate imagery, made up in a way for the absence of my beloved Bel. It was also bound to reduce, though I was hardly conscious of that, my correspondence with her (well-meant, chatty, dreadfully artificial letters which she seldom troubled to answer). Even more startling, of course, more incomprehensible to me, in groaning retrospect, is the effect my self-entertainment had on the number and length of our visits between 1957 and 1960 (when she eloped with a progressive blond-bearded young American). You were appalled to learn the other day, when we discussed the present notes, that I had seen “beloved Bel” only four times in three summers and that only two of our visits lasted as long as a couple of weeks. I must add, however, that she resolutely declined to spend her vacations at home. I ought never, of course, have dumped her in Europe. I should have elected to sweat it out in my hellish household, between a childish woman and a somber child.

The work on my novel also impinged on my marital mores, making of me a less passionate and more indulgent husband: I let Louise go on suspiciously frequent trips to out-of-town unlisted eye specialists and neglected her in the meantime for Rose Brown, our cute housemaid who took
three soapshowers daily and thought frilly black panties “did something to guys.”