Foreign Bodies (6 page)

“Lots?
Lots?
For God’s sake, Bea, the real thing doesn’t crop up in clumps, they don’t graduate them a dozen a year, it shows up maybe once in every five generations, why can’t you understand this? And ‘music school,’ very nice, I like the way you put it. Music school, high school, allee samee, what’s in my head all day is no different from what’s in yours, is that what you’re telling me —”

“Well,” she said, “what do you want to do?”

“Do! That’s just it, I want to do it, actually
do
it, not go on pretending to be just another up-and-coming composition drudge when I’m already there. I feel it, I know it, I know what’s in me, I’ve got my ideas. Gershwin, Schönberg, Cage, don’t think I’m not on to them, what they’re up to, and you bet your life I intend to leave them all behind —”

Leo, burbling, gurgling, winding on and on, half satiric, self-seduced, concealing what he really meant by telling what he really
meant: he meant to make his mark in the world, she saw this, she believed him, it was nothing like her own insubstantial fantasies, she had abandoned these, oh easily, easily, they had evaporated, leaving not a rack behind; her fantasies were no more than a dictionary of clouds. Leo’s talk was artifice and rattle and shuttlecock; but (she knew this) it masked the detonations of his will. It was as zigzag and made-up as the crashing music in his mind.

Which was why, in the end, Bea tore up the tickets. The nerve of that girl, that so-called niece: a stranger, an intrusion, an invasion. A violation! Those secretive roving eyes, that casually encroaching finger daring to strike a note, any note, one key interchangeable with another, one poison as bitter as any other, a trespass, a violation! Laura might have been accommodating, she was always willing to do a favor, but what was
Othello
to her? Laura and Harold preferred the movies; they went often.

So did Bea, but alone, clandestinely: she had her reasons.

August 14, 1952

Dear Aunt Bea — you don’t want me to call you that, but it’s hard to change. I’ve always thought of you as the Unknown Aunt, and maybe you’ve thought of me as the Non-Existent Niece. When I barged in on you in New York (that has to be how it felt for you), we weren’t really at home with each other, were we? It was only one night, and even if it sounds unreasonable and selfish, I did want you to know me a little, at least enough to defend me. What must you have been thinking when I didn’t turn up last Friday, as I’d promised? A whole week’s gone by, and I wonder whether you’ve heard from dad, or is he still stuck with whatever it was you cooked up to tell him, some nice soothing story about how you just had to have more time to get the lowdown on Julian.

What I hope you’ll help with now is another big fib to ward off dad, though I can’t think what it should be — I know he’s going to have himself a meltdown, and the truth is I can’t face it. So I’m leaving it to you to do it for me, maybe out of that family feeling dad’s suddenly discovered he wants from his long-lost sister. You saw the postmark, you’ve already figured out that I haven’t left Paris. I’m not coming back, anyhow not for a while, I never meant to, and you’re right to condemn me as the most horrible liar in the world, but I
had
to fix it somehow to get away without dad breathing down my neck every
minute. I’m here with Julian and Lili (Julian calls the two of us, Lili and me, the Botanicals), and I can’t tell how long it’ll be — there’s a lot to take in. I can’t explain it all in this letter, since I want finally to get it in the mail, and I know I should have written days ago. Please don’t blame me too much, it’s only that it’s so complicated here, more than I ever guessed. Whatever you can do with dad, I’ll thank you forever.

Iris

P.S. You might let him know that Julian’s not living in any sort of rathole if that’s what he’s worried about. It’s more like a palace. Also it’s probably best not to mention Lili right now, don’t you think?

The Botanicals! It was the first clue Bea had that Julian, sulky and stubborn, had a wisp of wit. The rest was wisp upon wisp: the girlfriend, hardly more solid than the rumor or dread she’d been before. And that infuriating
I’ll thank you forever
, with its tone of entitlement, its expectation of being served; its command. Iris might wear Margaret’s bland look, but oh! she was Marvin’s daughter. And she was at it still, duplicity engendering duplicity: having inveigled Bea into outflanking Marvin, she was ordering a second maneuver. The first had been easy enough; he had swallowed it almost benignly, and wasn’t there more than a touch of triumph in outwitting Marvin? But to do it yet again, another round of sleight of hand, when she had no interest in these young people’s lives, their plots and intimacies, their alien bodies and whatever effluvium might pass for their souls. Iris and Julian, niece and nephew, flesh of her flesh, who had never cared to seek her out, or she them. They were mutually incurious and mutually superfluous. It was fear (Marvin’s fear) that was tossing them all into a single dirty drawstring sack — Marvin, at home in California, tightening the cord. He was afraid of Europe. He was afraid of Paris. Bea saw in him a kind of terrorized primitive — his Paris was no more than the platitudes of the postcards, Eiffel Tower, Arc de
Triomphe; and grimly below, diseased and bloody dungeons engulfing his boy. Beneath those famed public monoliths were interiors a visitor could never fathom; and in Marvin’s naked grasp of it, his son, no longer merely a visitor, had penetrated that unnatural dark. Julian was a captive of Europe. He was gradually turning foreign.

His sister was abetting him. Worse, she was coercing Bea into a further scheme she ultimately had no taste for — what was she to say to Marvin? If Marvin was a lion to be bearded, then Iris ought to take on the bearding herself. She had lied and run off — let her feel the poundings of her father’s roar. It was only just, it was what she deserved; Bea, for her part (but she had no part in any of it), intended to remain an outsider to this California crisis — California, where the capricious seductions of too warm air and too much sun melted away familial ties, parents from children, husbands from wives; where, for years and years now, Leo had, after all, become the captain of his fate, and where, though they lived in their fancy houses with those red-tiled Spanish roofs and hanging balconies, possibly less than a mile apart, Leo and Marvin would never meet.

The girl’s urgings: arrogant, dictatorial — but also a plea. A plea for fraudulence and fabrication. It came to Bea that the two of them, Iris and Marvin, had ceded to her the means to punish: the father for his tyranny, the daughter for her evasions.

Then what was she to say to Marvin?

The cold and dangerous truth.

August 18, 1952

Dear Marvin,

It’s a bit surprising that I haven’t had so much as a word from you about the many days’ delay in Iris’s return, though by now you must be getting somewhat impatient. Even knowing that she’s missed her lab work (I recognize how this must upset you), you’ve given her, and me, a good deal of leeway. In fact, I’ve been half expecting the telephone to ring itself hoarse. I can only attribute your indulgence to your trust in me, and to your belief in the worthiness of your plan. I write now to tell you a hard thing, with this caveat. If when you receive this you attempt to phone, I promise you I will absolutely not listen to a rant. If you begin one, I will instantly cut you off. I do not agree to be yelled at, or accused, or belittled. I have no responsibility for any of it. Here are the facts. Your trust, and your plan, and my mistaken trust in your daughter, have all failed. It seems that Iris never had any intention of schooling me in her brother’s character and circumstances — as far as she’s been able to surmise them from a distance. She has now closed that distance. She is with Julian in Paris. This was as much a bolt from the blue for me as it will be for you. On the positive side, you will recall that you yourself considered, if only fleetingly, the idea of sending Iris alone. Apparently this was her thought as well. She feels for
her brother, and she, more than anyone, certainly more than I, will have the means to persuade him to come home. On the negative side, she gives no sign of her own return — make of this what you will.

As ever,

Beatrice

August 23, 1952

Bea:

All right, you’ve given me a shock. I suppose that was the idea. And no, I won’t be phoning. At this point I simply don’t care to hear your voice and whatever cock-and-bull story you’ll come up with in that schoolmarmy sleaze of yours. It may shut up those slum kids you’ve decided to sacrifice your life to, but it won’t get to me. And please don’t tell me you had no inkling my daughter was heading for Paris! It won’t hold water, I’m on to what you’ve been up to, I knew it the minute I got back and found this pile of shit you’ve sent me. Actually I’ve been in Mexico on a deal — we’re selling them helicopters, not that some of those honchos down there can tell an engine from a horse’s ass. The plain fact of it is I assumed Iris was back at school. She’s got her own little place just off campus — she said she wanted her independence so I set her up out there at never mind the cost. I’ve always done what I could to please my children, and for what return! Anyhow it wasn’t easy on Iris living here with Margaret the way she’s been. Right now, for the last month or so, Margaret’s being treated in a very good rest home, the Suite Eyre, here in Beverly Hills. I came back to an empty house, except for the housekeeper, and I won’t deny that I deliberately keep this woman as blind as a bat — I don’t need a servant to snoop into my family’s comings and goings. I sacked the last one when she started asking why Margaret sleeps so much in the afternoons. Of course I can’t let Margaret know about Iris, at least not right now,
I’m afraid she’d just slip over the edge. She’s always had her nerves, but what’s made her sicker than usual is Julian’s disappearance. That’s how she says it, Julian’s disappearance. As if he’s gone up in a puff of smoke, as if something horrible’s been done to him. And now Iris! So I ask you, why did you let this happen? Why did you let my daughter do this? What’s this crazy business about her not coming back? Why in God’s name didn’t you STOP her? You shit, you never stopped her! My kids are running from me, and why? What have I done? What haven’t I done? Did I neglect them, did I hurt them? Sometimes I feel it’s a curse, but for what? I don’t know, I don’t know. All I know is that I want my son to come home. He doesn’t belong there, it’s the wrong place for him, they’ve swallowed him up over there. You tell me Iris will get him back. But what if whatever it is over there swallows her up the same as Julian? I’m a dead man, I’m dead, for God’s sake, Bea, can’t you understand what I’m going through?

Marvin

You shit
.
This pile of shit
. Marvin back in street mode. Marvin undone.

T
HE NEW HOTEL
was surprisingly full for September, and though it was less expensive than the last one, it was also, for the money, surprisingly shabby. But on short notice she was lucky to find a room at all, and she could afford nothing better — what foolishness, a second trip two months after the first! Summer was officially over, the tourists were still swarming, and the better-off Parisians who habitually escape the city in August were trickling back. The taxi from the airport had dropped her in front of a narrow pair of steps at an ordinary wooden door, when she had expected a marquee and a man in uniform. She was obliged to prop the door open with one foot while struggling to swing her suitcase over the threshold and into the tiny lobby. The young clerk at the reception counter made no move to help.

The room turned out to be stifling. Its single window, partly blocked by a battered wardrobe, looked out on a dirty alley. A wide bed with a gully in the middle of its belly consumed nearly all the space there was, and a narrow pathway at its flank led to what had been advertised as “Spacious Private Bath with Shower.” The toilet and the washbasin were jammed together catty-corner, almost obstructed by a huge tub in which a serpentine hose lay coiled.

But in the morning she found the lobby transformed by a circle of little breakfast tables lit by sharp slashes of sunlight and crowded with staccato British chirps and the low catarrh of German. She drank the very good coffee, nibbled at a bit of brie and a croissant, and set out.
She had left behind her guidebook — it was useless for her present confusions — but had extracted from its pocket a compact map of Paris. The map was a mystery anyhow — you could see the names of streets, and where they met or diverged, and, in spread-out red type, the Roman numerals that identified this or that arrondissement: all of it meaningless. In New York you readily knew the difference between the glittering Fifth Avenue of the museums and the impoverished Fifth Avenue of the tenements, though no street map could hint at what a mere two miles’ distance might signify. Here in Paris, what was it to be mad about Proust (she had brought her yellowing copy of
Swann’s Way
to read on the plane), or bookishly familiar with history and kings and revolutionaries and philosophers? It counted for nothing when you were puzzling over how to get from the IXth to the VIIth on an unexceptional Tuesday in the middle of your unexceptional life, and when you were feeling dismissed by the conscientious weekday faces streaming past, faces that had mundane tasks and were set on exactly what they were and how they were to be done. She could not understand this city, it was an enigma, or else it was Paris that comprehended whatever passed through its arteries, and it was she, the interloper, who was the enigma.