Blind Date (27 page)

She would never tell him anything about herself. Not a passing reference to her family, her school, or her friends. Levanter had examined her belongings and found out that she carried a lot of cash but no driver's license or any document that could identify her.
She refused to answer his questions about her life away from him, dismissing them as utterly irrelevant to their sporadic meetings. For a while Levanter thought that, like Gibby, she came from a wealthy and distinguished family and did not want her origins to affect her relationship with him. Later, it crossed his mind that she might be kept by a rich, older married man who was a public figure.

But though she would reveal nothing about her private life, Serena always wanted to know about him, his friends, his business acquaintances, his interests in things other than herself. Soon he began taking her to cocktail parties and dinners, and all his male friends were delighted with her.

One night, after a party attended by well-known political people and celebrities, Serena asked why he was interested in her when he had so many more fascinating contacts.

“To friends who have known me for years,” he told Serena, “I try to be what they want me to be. Only with strangers like you am I what I really feel myself to be.”

Serena was a good listener, and as she sat spellbound she reminded Levanter of a game he had participated in as a student in Moscow.

One autumn, Levanter and several other students were assigned by the university to give lectures at a collective farm near the capital, traveling to and from the farm by train. There were always peasants taking the train to a farmers' market on the way, and they invariably listened in on the young people's conversation. A student who was a good storyteller would begin a tale; as the train approached the market station, the drama would mount, with the narrator piling incident upon incident of comedy and tragedy, of betrayal and passion, of happy reunions and incurable illnesses. The peasants would stand open-mouthed, swallowing every word, laughing or crying or gasping with terror. The train would stop at the market, but they were so engrossed, so afraid to miss a word, that they never moved. As the train pulled away from the platform and began to pick up speed, the story would end abruptly. The
peasants would then suddenly become aware that they had missed their stop. But they were never disappointed and never failed to thank the student for his story. The farmers' market would always be where it was, they said, but a storyteller took their minds to places where they could not travel. Each day a different student would tell the story, luring another group of peasants, who would also miss their station. At the end of the week, the student whose storytelling had caused the largest number of peasants to miss the market stop won the game.

Serena had contempt for any predictability in lovemaking. She was upset when she triggered Levanter's orgasm too soon. To her, an orgasm was a failure, the death of need. What touching was to the body, desire was to the mind: all she wanted was to sustain the passion, to make desire flow incessantly.

Often, when her body wriggled under his tongue, she seemed so engrossed in sensation that he thought she would not even feel it if he bit into her flesh.

For Serena, just as passion was demonstrated by gesture, desire was expressed by language. She would ask him continually about his feelings and responses. When his mouth was on her flesh, she wanted to know whether he felt that his tongue was shaping her. When she kept him aroused, she asked if he was aware of her giving him pleasure, or of himself, or only of the pleasure. And each time they were together, she kept demanding that he tell her what it was that made him want her so much.

Levanter could not link his need for Serena to any particular attitude, to any particular yearning. When she was not with him, he was an objective witness to his own need, viewing it as if it belonged to another man. When she was with him, he was devoted to her, like a criminal who could not part company with an accomplice.

He wondered whether it was her body that he wanted or simply her way of perceiving him, of giving him a sexual reality that he had lacked before. He recalled a young woman he had once met in
Switzerland. Then, as with Serena, he did not understand the nature of his desire.

He had just walked into a drugstore in ValPina. A nurse was pushing a large pram toward the exit, and he peeked in. Only a face showed above the blanket. Levanter was surprised to see that it was the face of a woman in her early twenties. He thought it was a special kind of wheelchair and tried to see how her body was fitted into it. The body outlined under the blanket was no bigger than a baby's. The woman seemed to be conscious of his curiosity and smiled at him. He smiled back at her and was astonished by the beauty of her features. The nurse cleared her throat to get his attention, then threw him a look of reprimand as she pushed the carriage out of the shop.

The proprietor of the drugstore, who had observed the encounter, told him that it was a woman in the baby carriage. She was twenty-six years old, the child of a well-known, prosperous foreign family. As an infant, she contracted a bone disease that left her grossly deformed; the doctors did not expect her to live, but the family was able to provide the best possible care and she had survived. Her head was of normal size, but the rest of her body was stunted and she had no legs.

Thus she had to be fed and cared for by others. Even though she was so greatly handicapped, the proprietor said, the young woman was intelligent and had been living a rewarding life. She went to school, spoke four languages, and was about to receive an advanced degree from one of the best art schools in Europe.

Levanter asked whether he could be introduced to her; as an investor, he explained, he was interested in the concrete predicaments that life set for each of us. The proprietor agreed to introduce him and the next day telephoned to ask him to a party given by a friend's son, who went to the university with the young woman and had invited her.

It was a crowded party; she arrived about an hour after it began. Wrapped in a short blanket, she was carried in without much effort
by a young man, who propped her on the sofa between two pillows. As most of the guests knew her, her arrival caused no unusual commotion. Several students came over to say hello; two or three sat around her on the sofa, others came and went. Slowly, Levanter made his way toward her. Soon the person who had brought him to the party introduced them. The girl smiled and, in an even, soft voice, said she recognized him from the drugstore.

Levanter was struck by the scope of her deformity. Short, twisted arms, with no elbows and unbending, barely mobile, fingers, stuck from her tiny torso like the forelegs of a baby toad. Under the blanket, her body appeared to be not much larger than the head it supported.

“I understand you are a student,” said Levanter. “What do you study?”

“History of art,” she answered.

“Any particular period?”

“A particular subject,” she said. “The role of the human head in Christian art.” She smiled thoughtfully. “As you can see, I have a vested interest in my studies.”

“I'm sorry I stared at you yesterday,” said Levanter.

She laughed. “Don't be sorry. I like being noticed. I've spent years trying to persuade my nurse that the only unkind ones are those who don't want to look at me. But she still disapproves of the staring.” She paused, then laughed again. “She should see the stares I get when I hitchhike!”

For a moment, Levanter thought he had misunderstood her. “When you what?” he asked.

“Hitchhike,” she said. “Each summer a friend takes me to the main highway and thumbs a ride for me. Of course, I always have money and my papers with me. Eventually, someone — a man or woman, a couple, or even a family — comes along who does not mind picking me up. After that, I'm on my own — passed from hand to hand, from car to car, traveling across Europe.”

“Aren't you afraid?” asked Levanter.

“Afraid of what?”

“Of strangers. Someone could hurt you.”

She looked at him. “Hurt me?” She seemed surprised. “Most of the people I meet are protective of me. They are even reluctant to let me go, afraid that people they pass me to won't take care of me as well as they have.”

Her voice was weak, and Levanter moved closer to hear her better. The fate that had mangled her body took nothing away from the wholeness of her face. The features were singularly expressive, giving trace to the nature and intensity of her thoughts and feelings.

“When I first began hitchhiking,” she said, “my parents were afraid I might be kidnapped and held for ransom. But that never happened. I'm sure even professionals couldn't bring themselves to kidnap just a head. After all, isn't it the head they threaten to send back when their demands are not met in time?” She laughed again.

The young man who had carried her in approached them. She introduced him to Levanter as her boyfriend. He carried her off to the buffet.

Levanter realized he had been imagining himself as her lover. He examined the feeling carefully and found nothing morbid about his craving. What fascinated him about this young woman was that she had incorporated her deformity into the totality of her life. She was a woman, and her view of herself in the world was that of a woman. Her view was as mysterious and exciting to him as that of any woman he had ever desired. He wanted to become an object of her emotions and her passions, to enter her world and be given her knowledge of it.

Later in the evening, Levanter asked the girl for a date. She told him politely that she was too emotionally committed to her boyfriend to see anyone else.

Levanter's New York apartment was in mid-Manhattan, on a high floor, with a terrace overlooking one of the city's busiest intersections. Occasionally, to amuse themselves, he and Serena would aim his powerful garden hose over the high wooden fence on the terrace and shoot a stream of water down onto the avenue below, trying to hit hansoms carrying tourists from the big hotels
toward Central Park. The perfect score was to strike the passengers but not the horse and the driver; when the passengers were soaked, they would scream, and the driver, uncomprehending, would instinctively stop the carriage; by the time he started up again the passengers would have received a double drenching, but still would not know where it came from.

One summer night, a Hollywood studio held a giant reception for the New York première of a film in the new marble mezzanine of the subway station under the intersection. A crowd of spectators, press photographers, and a television crew had gathered on the sidewalk. The entrance to the subway was directly under Levanter's terrace, and he and Serena, their hose ready, were able to see the event both in immediate view and, as the event was nationally televised, in close-up on the television set Levanter had moved out to the terrace for the occasion.

First, an actor known for his macho performances stepped from a long black limousine, waving to the crowd, which roared in response. Just as he was blinded momentarily by the floodlights, Levanter and Serena turned the hose on. In seconds, they could see their torrent on TV, washing over the man's rugged features, upsetting his smooth toupee. As his make-up began to dilute right in front of the zoom lenses, he covered his head and ducked into the subway.

A famous Hollywood golden-youth couple emerged from their sleek auto and embraced before the cameras. They were just about to kiss for the benefit of millions of fans when the first dose of water blasted their perfect profiles. Dripping wet, they scurried to the subway, colliding at the entrance.

Levanter and Serena accomplished several successful dousings before the police, the cameramen, the press, and the crowd, all laughing, looked up to see the source of the stream; nothing was visible in the dark but endless rows of indistinguishable windows and terraces.

Once, after they had soaked several carriages, Levanter and Serena noticed the doorman from a building across the way pointing
to the pool of water in the middle of the street. He kept motioning toward the sky as he talked to a group of curious passers-by. Levanter and Serena went down and walked over, pretending they had just noticed the puddle.

“It hasn't been raining, has it?” said Levanter to the doorman. “Where did the puddle come from?”

The doorman looked at him and Serena. “I can tell that you folks don't live here in the city,” he said with a wise grin.

“No, we don't,” said Serena.

The man gestured at the surrounding high-rise apartment houses, hotels, and office skyscrapers. “It's quite a place down here, as you can see,” he said solemnly. “All these tall buildings generate a lot of magnetism. Every few days that magnetism makes a little cloud, right about here.” He pointed straight above the pool of water. “A small cloud, it's true, but it produces enough rain to make this puddle and sometimes to sprinkle on hansom cabs going by.” Proud of his explanation, he looked at his listeners for some sign of appreciation of his knowledge.

Levanter and Serena nodded thoughtfully.

“On different days, that little cloud may move just a couple of feet to the left or maybe to the right,” the man continued. “There's no end to nature's mysteries,” he concluded as another knot of people gathered around to hear his theories.

Serena phoned. She was flying into Los Angeles and was free to spend the night with him, she said. He immediately canceled his other plans and agreed to collect her in three hours at the airport. Almost automatically, he asked where she was.

“There is no message,” she whispered.

Levanter took a taxi to the airport. He was half an hour early and dismissed the cab. He wandered through the lounges, watched the departing passengers lined up to pass through the gates of the electronic surveillance gadgetry, had a cup of coffee, and finally went to stand at the entrance of the terminal, where he was to meet her.