Foreign Bodies (10 page)

Iris had that morning again sent her away — Julian feeling a bit better, the fever gone down, but no patience at all for a talk . . . She
had said nothing of what she had seen in the rue des Rosiers, and why should she? Iris would traduce it.

The squawk of a metal chair pushed back. The man in the farthest cubicle was taller than the height of the partition; for a moment his head reared above it, disembodied. When he emerged, Bea saw that he was wearing a frayed business suit, with a vest too big for him. He carried a cane and limped. But no, it wasn’t a limp — an archaic little bow, rather, that engaged the shoulders and the knees: he was immensely dignified. He had the air of a judge or a senator. On second thought, it
was
a limp: one leg inches shorter than the other. He put out a ceremonious hand to the woman in the cubicle, murmuring in what must surely have been German — or was it Dutch? Or something else? Two fingers were missing: lopped off how, where, why?

He was the last to leave. Bea could not discern from his abruptly submissive back whether anything good had come of his time in this place. But judge or senator no more: his clothes were too shabby.

A rustle of papers; a lamp was switched off; the woman stepped out; and Bea sprang.

“Lili,” she called.

She wondered if she would be recognized. Was it likely? To have been so put off, and in the first minutes of having set foot in that cavernous flat! Iris cold, Julian taunting. It hardly helped — it worsened things — that Iris had tossed out a promise: “Another time, when Julian’s in better shape,” while Lili in her man’s shirt hadn’t spoken at all; Lili had kept her recondite peace. Out of that silence she had fixed on Bea with those two watchful grooves drawn into a trench between her eyes. An unquiet track that seemed to gaze all on its own. But fleetingly.

And Julian’s hands on her breasts.

Lili was answering calmly, “Iris sends you? But Julian is all right, yes? Already last night he was almost well.”

How matter-of-fact she was; how formed and finished; how unperturbed and unsurprised. She was used to everything, and ready to expect anything. The world was as it was.

“How can I tell how he is? And nobody knows I’ve come looking for you, Iris has nothing to do with it. She won’t let me see him. Not for days.” She was breathless; open to quarrel. “If I don’t get to see him, then I’ve wasted my time, there’s no point to any of it —”

“Come,” Lili said, “sit.” Behind the partition she turned on the lamp. A typewriter, stacks of sheets, something resembling a ledger. A small ticking clock. “They are like excitable children, they hide their secrets.” She tugged a little on the cuffs of her sleeves — as if her blouse didn’t fit at the wrists — and looked steadily at Bea. “I hide nothing.”

“What sort of place is this? I saw the sign, what do you do here?”

“It is to go out, only to go out. This man, you see how broken, in his home once a scholar of Goethe.
Das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn
, you know this? There they open willingly.”

Bea said, “Then you speak German?”

“Whatever is needed we speak. So many laws in so many countries, it is not always possible they will permit. So many will not permit, and when one permits . . .” She wrinkled out a quick ephemeral frown. “Your nephew, he makes it romantic, he makes it noble —”

This was scarcely the conversation Bea had counted on; she did not entirely understand it. The furry accent, the too considered English — stiff, more than a bit off. And she thought again: tasteless, in mild weather those long sleeves.

“But if you have him living with stories of people like that, that man with the terrible fingers,” she protested, and burst out: “Julian’s too young to be made so sad.”

“Julian sad, no! Theatrical, you saw how theatrical. Also his sister. He is like a boy in a play.”

“A play? His family thinks it’s time he became serious.”

Marvin-ventriloquism. Or not: plain on the face of it, the boy was all anarchy.

“His sister is not so serious. A wildness, a wild bird.”

“Don’t you like her?” The instant it was out, Bea felt it as something only a tactless American would ask.

“She should not have come. She makes a complication. Also you should not have come.”

“Especially if I can’t get to talk to my nephew. Days and days gone by, and I’ve seen Julian for a quarter of an hour, if that. Not that I can blame him.” An unforeseen glimmer of candor: how could she blame herself for an identical disregard? “We don’t know each other,” she admitted.

“A nephew who is for you a stranger. And still you speak of family.”

Bea said lamely, “New York and California are a continent apart.”

“Have you no husband, no son, no family of your own? If you do not know your nephew, why do you run to him, why have you an interest in him?”

“I’ll ask you the same.” And dared it: “What is it you want from Julian?”

Lili dipped her head. A few threads of gray at the crown. “I had once a husband. I had once a son.” Up rose her chin, a warning, a wall. She would go no further with this. “Today I have Julian.”

A husband, a son. People like that, one of those. There was no innocence in this woman.

“Next to Julian,” Bea said, “you seem . . . old.”

“I am already one hundred years, yes! But I am
for
him. I do him good, is this how you say it? I do him good.”

“And what possible good can he do you? A boy in a play! The two of them, you call them children —”

“He becomes less and less a boy. At the same time he is a man.”

“Oh, in
that
way —” It was her worst so far.

“In all ways. Do not mistake him. He is a man.”

“A man,” Bea repeated foolishly.

“You see now why you should not have come. Your niece tells you this. Also I tell you. And you see for yourself. It is done. It was not my wish, Julian wished it, he wished it and wished it. And so.”

Unthinkable. Unconscionable. Done? Then the boy was in for it. He was beyond rescue, beyond even punishment. He was lost to fathomless incoherence.

Lili stood up; her hand went to the lamp. But it stopped midway, with a palm open to judgment — Bea made it out almost to be an appeal.

“You must believe me. I do him good,” Lili said. “Now nothing is hidden, you see?”

It came to Bea then that the excitable children’s secret was out. Lili had once had a husband. Now she had another.

Iris stood in the doorway: a sentry on the alert.

“
Tomorrow
evening? Is this about dinner again? We’ll think about it. Can’t you just put it off a bit longer? Julian needs another couple of nights to recuperate, at least — that awful cough, not that it’s not on its way out, Lili’s eggnogs maybe. He’s really getting on, it’s only that his mood’s so bad. You won’t want to come in,” she persisted, “he hasn’t had much of anything to eat, and he’s cranky —”

Boorish,
piggish
to be packed off, time after time, day after day, like a peddler, like a beggar!

“We haven’t once had a proper visit, or even talked a little. He snubs me —”

“Because you’ve got to give dad his report, that’s why. Interrogation at headquarters, isn’t that the idea? Look, Julian’s fine, he can do without anyone’s supervision, you can tell dad that.”

“And what do I say about you?”

Iris rolled her eyes. Boorish, piggish! And something telltale, fumelike, on her breath.

“Don’t you get it, that you’re just another leash? We don’t need it, we’ve been on a leash all our lives —”

“A leash? When for years I’ve had nothing to do with either of you —”

“Exactly. And then you show up here, and tug at the rope.”

“It was you who came to me,” Bea said.

“I was sent.”

Mulish! — the two of them. These coddled Californians, with no inkling of endurance. They had lived without winter. And if anyone had Julian on a leash, hampering his future, stopping up his youth, wasn’t it Lili? Oracular, too alien to comprehend. But unwilling to lie.

A blank day, then. Bea had it before her. An hour to change her return ticket, and afterward what? Another go at the Louvre, why not? — it was inexhaustible. A fake reprise of the summer, when she’d been no more implicated in these foreign intrigues than the usual tourist, a vacationing unmarried teacher (
have you no husband, no son?
), a triteness, and not . . . whatever she was now. A leash. A leech. They didn’t want her, they were wary of her — possibly they would indulge her enough to let her pay for a meal, and good riddance. They were afraid of her: she was a messenger, an emissary. They took her to be Marvin’s surrogate. They knew what Marvin was capable of.

The dazzling length of the Galerie d’Apollon, a gold-encrusted hall, and then on through the vastnesses of those brilliant corridors opening into still more brilliant rooms, Etruscans, Greeks, Romans alive in their marble veins and thick marble necks where pulses once throbbed, and on the old walls kings and warriors and highborn ladies in fluted silks, and pastoral riders shadowed by the weighty crowns of trees. A thousand resurrections, Magna Graecia becoming Naples, goddesses brought low, kitchen jugs venerated. Dust-unto-dust spited. She saw an embossed ebony cabinet, vines, leaves, fruits, beasts, niche within graven niche, every inch carved, curled, figured. She saw, in a small vitrine, a tiny polished lion, crouching, one paw extended: the gilded claws glittered. She looked and looked and looked — her eyes thirsted. In all this proliferation, paint dried centuries past, stone knees of dead monarchs, every object
made
, hardwon, it was humanity, it was civilization . . .

An empty bench; she sat down gladly, wearily, before a Flemish tapestry that stretched from one end of the gallery to the other. A million colored threads, faces, hands, topiary, minutely pebbled paths,
a stream. Little fishes in the transparent water. She imagined Marvin beside her, gaping all around and seeing nothing. Belittling what he couldn’t plumb. Amnesiac America, America the New. What’s new is good, workable, efficient. Engineered.

But what he was capable of!

“T
HE LAST SUPPER
,” Iris said. “That’s what Julian called it when I got him to come. For dad’s sake, not that he cares.”

The last minute, the eleventh hour. Bea had booked a midnight flight. In her odious room two floors above, her bags were packed and ready.

“He thinks you’re going to crucify him,” Iris said. “Fatten him up for the slaughter, serve his head on a platter.”

Her ears had reddened; she was emptying glass after glass — it was soon evident that the three convivial bottles Bea had ordered wouldn’t suffice. Julian, his mind on his meat, went on feeding as if he had been famished for months. The boy was a carnivore, the boy had an appetite! And beside him Lili, half screened by the heavy curtain that secluded this corner of the dining parlor and overhung the heaped-up bowls and bubbling sauces and tubs of dumplings and trays of tarts sent parading around them. Fragrances of what was yet to come flowed in from the kitchen. Bea had been extravagant!

But a fiasco, all of it. A futility from beginning to end. She was glad enough to be on her way. Goodbye to their mysteries, their entanglements, their concealments — she had been drawn in and kept out. In the subdued light Lili dwindled into a fragile little old woman in a shawl. Bea saw again that double crease etched in her forehead: two cut-off railroad tracks. She was picking at a lone lettuce leaf. Glancing over, Julian ladled out a large potato and set it on her plate.
Steam, and the honeyed scent of some unfamiliar herb, spiraled upward.

“Madame Bones,” he said, “eat.”

And to Bea, abruptly: “Do you know how my mother is?”

These were the first words he had spoken to her.

“Your father tells me she’s in a rest home.”

“A rest home? You mean a storage bin. An asylum.”

Iris said, “She agreed to it, Julian, I told you. The place is absolutely posh, with all the amenities. She was perfectly happy to go.”

“He
put
her there. Dumped her.”

“She was sleeping all day, she didn’t know what time it was. She was getting sort of . . . confused. You don’t have to bring this up now —”

“Why not? He’s the one who makes her crazy, isn’t he?” And once more to Bea: “He’ll make you crazy too. What’re you going to tell him?”

“That his son is a stubborn loafer,” Iris said.

“No, really,” he pursued, “when he starts grilling you. You’ll have to say
some
thing, right?”

“What would you like me to say?”

But Lili — disquiet in her quiet — intervened. “You should say what you know.”

“What Bea knows,” Iris said, “is that we got away, we’re on the lam. Like Hansel and Gretel. Only we never intended to drop any idiot crumbs.” Belligerent. Erratic. Erratic? The girl was smashed!

“Iris, you’re having too much wine,” Julian said.

“Julian, you’re having too many cakes,” she answered.

The nettling, the bickering, the ingrained impatient intimacy (Bea could hardly tell one from the other) went back and forth between them, while Lili sat gazing at the drenched potato in her dish like an augur reading a fate. She seemed as distant from these American offspring as that ebony cabinet in the Louvre, with all its little hidden compartments. Lili herself was obscurely recessed and crannied — and was it collusion, or else some mystical tie between them,
that compelled the brother to lash out a charge as biting as his sister’s?
Interrogation at headquarters
. And what
would
Bea tell Marvin, and what might come of it? Was this the incessant worry of the house almost from the hour Bea broke into their lives? Surely they murmured together, they turned it over, they pecked at the possibilities; what
would
she tell Marvin? They asked it uneasily, they asked it urgently, because Julian was homeless and jobless and reckless and rash. Did they hope, if only Bea could deliver a fitting story, that Marvin would soften and shower his capricious boy with money? Was some clandestine chance of it couched in the darkling groove between Lili’s eyes?