Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (7 page)

Oskar intervenes between the two Jehanes. Marcus says to him, “It is your second day in Rome. You have left your hotel and walked through the Villa Borghese. Trees and children. The Latin sense of design. Your wife hangs heavily on your arm; you walk a little too fast for her. You made a mistake marrying her. She asks questions: ‘What is that? What is that?’ And ‘that’ is only the water clock. Yesterday with her was dull. Today seems it will be dull, too. But you don’t show irritation; you are good-natured. Always. You are clean in the sense that you never rebuke yourself. You have a very fine sense of life. Do you understand?” Oskar nods, his face slipping into lines of ease, intensely good-natured and impenetrable; his face looks scrubbed. Marcus gazes at him and says, “Good.”

He glances over Oskar’s shoulder at Liselotte, the Munich stripteaser who is to play Oskar-Willi’s wife. She sits in a canvas chair beneath a tree, in speckled light and shadow, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed. Marcus thinks, Her tooth still hurts. Oh, does she feel self-pity! And he grows cold, froglike. He beckons to Whitehart. “Tell her just to play she is in a strange city. Tell her not to try to act. I don’t want to touch her mood.” Whitehart winks, and hurries off. Marcus stands, measuring the two realities of Liselotte with the fingers of his mind. Her real inexperience and nervousness, her attempt to deceive the camera and to appear not like a striptease artist from Munich, will become on film the unhappy manner of a middle-class lady whose manners are all at sea with her pretenses. Her heavy breasts will be the lure and misinformation that caught Oskar-Willi. (Marcus thinks with amusement of Oskar-Willi’s illusions, and how easily he is fooled.) The audience, Marcus
hopes, will recognize in Liselotte’s two realities the same blur of identity that obscures the people they know.

M
ARCUS TOOK
refuge in principle (his determination strengthened by a Gary Cooper film; the theater was dark, like chaos—the images on the screen clear and large, light-filled) when his trying to figure out what he felt, or what Robin was like, or Sukie, led him to the admission that he was guessing, that he did not
know.
He went to the school doctor and asked for a sedative, giving as the reason that he was studying too hard. He told Sukie he couldn’t see her in Boston over Easter vacation. “Nanna’s come up from Florida. I owe it to her—I want to see her. It’s not that I don’t want to see you, but I owe it to her.”

But then Sukie followed him to Scantuate with her mother, Robin, and Gamma Foster; Gamma Foster wanted to smell the lilacs and the sea, and sat all morning on an open porch, wrapped in a blanket, not reading, not sleeping. (She fell the following winter and broke her hip and became an invalid until her death four years later.) The children roosted in the light damp chill of an upstairs porch. The wicker couch creaked when Robin stretched out and laid his head in Sukie’s lap.

Marcus stood up and said, “I want to go photographing at Miller’s Pond.”

“What a dreary idea,” Robin said.

“I don’t feel energetic,” Sukie said.

Marcus looked at Sukie and saw a short, square-shouldered, moon-bodied girl. He bit his thumbnail. “I’m going,” he said.

“All right, all right,” Robin said. “What a bore. Our master’s voice.”

“Where was Moses when the lights went out?” Sukie asked, with a giggle.

“If you don’t want to come, don’t!” Marcus shouted, holding to his principles like a monk to a cross, exorcising demons.

“We’re coming. We’re coming.”

He did not get back to Nanna’s in time for lunch, and Nanna complained he had given her no warning he would miss the meal: “I didn’t know if you were stricken with illness. Or perhaps in a highway accident.”

He apologized—“I’m sorry. I was photographing. There wasn’t a phone”—but he wasn’t humble.

“Please don’t do it again. You know how easily Cook is unsettled.”

“Oh. Well, I’d better warn you I might miss lunch the next few days. I’ll be out photographing.” He was distracted by a sensation that he was being rude, yet he did not back down.

The next evening, Nanna said dryly, “I do not want to monopolize your time, but I had hoped to see something of you during your spring vacation, because I thought I might send you to Europe this summer.”

Marcus said, “Oh,” and stopped photographing, and told Sukie he was going to Europe.

He went to Europe with Mrs. Tredwell, Sukie, and Robin; Robin arranged the party. Europe made Marcus uneasy; it was an old prostitute armed with devices to catch the eye and the absence of principles. He told himself that he must be careful not to turn into a shallow person. He wrote Nanna every day, and the salutation, “Dearest Nanna,” evoked in him a spasm of sorrow. Europe had the strangeness of a carnival on the edge of town under a night sky, the lights of the Ferris wheel lifting and falling, and the shouts of the exiles echoing from behind the rim of colored lights.

“They made their cathedrals like movie theaters!” he protested. Robin said,
“Voilà,
Moses!” Mrs. Tredwell looked at Marcus curiously.

Sukie complained he was avoiding her. He said, “But we’re with your mother. I’m like a guest—the laws of hospitality!” Sukie said, “I hate my mother. My mother doesn’t matter.” She said, “Oh, God, what am I going to do! You don’t want me anymore.” He took her into his arms. Robin was in the next room, arranging the day’s plans with Mrs. Tredwell. Marcus matched Sukie’s eagerness; the wickedness of the situation so worked upon his senses that he was startled by the pleasure. Afterward, he was ashamed, and avoided looking at Sukie. Sukie said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “I have a cold.” He thought, Oh, God, I’m cuckoo. At lunch, he drank too much and desperately imitated the Europeans as animals—as terriers, as poodles, then as amorous cocker spaniels—for Mrs. Tredwell, who laughed. She used the baritone register of her voice and said warmly, “We’ve never particularly liked Jews in our family. You might call us anti-Semitic. But we’re
all
terribly fond of you.”

The drunken seventeen-year-old Marcus clung to the moral nicety of the point that he must not allow the mother of the girl he slept with to be fond of him, and he became surly toward Mrs. Tredwell. “That’s an Irish compliment,” he said. “You’re more impressed with your own sentiment than with me.”

I don’t like her, he assured himself. He told himself that he mustn’t be a whore. His thoughts were dark, astronomical. His judgments of himself and of Sukie and Robin and Mrs. Tredwell were jumbled, as if several movies were being shown at once on the same screen. On the way back to Avignon, while Robin drove the car and Mrs. Tredwell talked, Sukie in the back seat beside Marcus indulged herself in a skittish series of blandishments and displays and sidelong glances from some reservoir of erotic imagination. His nerves reacted in a strained and exaggerated way, like a child’s—everything was mythological and immense; it was as if his nerves and the world were new to him: Mrs. Tredwell was fascinated by him. “You seem so old for your age.” He scowled at Mrs. Tredwell. Later, he said, “Sukie, we have to straighten out.” Sukie said, “You get pleasure making me hate myself.” He said, “Why can’t you admire me when I’m trying to do the right thing?” Mrs. Tredwell and Robin were walking ahead of them in the vineyard they were visiting above the Rhone on an afternoon when the sky was as much white as blue. Sukie went pale and said, “You’re crazy. You’re sick. You’re really neurotic.”

That evening, Robin asked Marcus why he was treating Sukie so badly. “It’s a matter of honor,” Marcus said. Robin blinked. “You really don’t make sense, Pony.” Marcus shouted at him, “You wouldn’t understand! You’re slimy.” Robin went white. “You’re self-destructive,” he said, and lit a cigarette.

The hillsides above the road were green. Marcus was silent and haughty. Honor froze his face. He had always thought of love as being like the view from the windows of his father’s apartment at dusk, when the taxis in great numbers flock back from upper Manhattan with the lights on their roofs—jewels on their foreheads—alight. Now he thought of it as the sprung works of a clock which moved the hands improperly. Mrs. Tredwell was growing bored with him. He observed to himself that Mrs. Tredwell did not understand Sukie, that she was not a good mother. Sukie had become hollow-eyed and captious. “You think in clichés,” she said to Marcus. She said, “Everyone knows photographs can’t do what painting can.” She said, “You have so many opinions because you’re self-conscious and can’t feel anything.” He lay in bed, somber in the dark.

Often at night in various towns, Robin would slip out and hunt for women. Then Marcus would lie tautly spread-eagled in bed, hating the solitude in the room, jealous of Robin, contemptuous of himself. He felt
himself grow vague and sulky with concupiscence. Mrs. Tredwell was amused by him again, smiled at him again; she spoke of the noli me tangere of adolescence in her husky voice. Marcus winced, drew back, and stared at her with large eyes. She said, “You’re impossible!” and ignored him. Sukie was cool.

Marcus wrote Nanna, “I think of Scantuate often. It’s hard to travel with people day in and day out.” He found a kind of relaxation in becoming aimless and passive. He watched Sukie and Robin giggle together in Juan-les-Pins; they walked, arms around each other, affectionate cousins. Sukie said, “He’s kind to me. I feel better with him than with you.” In Verona, the party went through the Castel vecchio, Mrs. Tredwell with Sukie and Robin; Marcus followed a different route through the rooms. Robin began to ridicule Marcus in public. In Venice, he said, “Tell us what you think about the view.” He moved his arm in a semicircle. “What’s the great man’s opinion?”

Mrs. Tredwell and Sukie smiled, and Marcus said contemptuously that San Marco was like an advertising cutout: Want to feel bright? Try Brioschi.

Sukie was in love with Robin. Had always been, she said. “It was a strange—I don’t know—some kind of detour or something I took with you.” Robin said, “Pony, we need your help. I helped you.” Sukie said, “Please, Pony, I’m not the kind of girl who can go too long without sex.” She said something about being passionate. Marcus said, “Sure, I understand.” He pretended to go to the movies with them, and when they sneaked up the back stairs to Robin and Marcus’s room, he wandered in the
calle
behind the Piazza San Marco until he was approached by two middle-aged, dog-faced whores and their shiny-haired pimp. Then he went off with them.

The next night, he rode with Sukie and Robin and Sukie’s mother in a gondola down the Grand Canal, the moonlight and the commune’s floodlights playing on the façades of palaces (dozens of gondolas laden with other tourists floated by in the dark; the water breathed its sourish stench), and Mrs. Tredwell and Sukie and Robin laughed and chattered. Marcus sat quietly. It did not matter what Sukie and Robin did. He was corrupt; he looked down on them; they were children.

M
ARCUS SURVEYS
the extras for the next shot—an old man in a straw hat, a shabby and badly dressed young man, a young girl who
radiates disdain to keep at a distance the lusts of passersby, and others who are to play the bystanders, among whom, not quite touching them, the movie is to occur. Where Oskar and Liselotte are to walk has been marked on the pavement in chalk; the camera, mounted on a dolly on tracks, holds Oskar’s and Liselotte’s faces and the reflections in Oskar’s sunglasses (of the obelisk, a spume of leaves from the underside of the trees, the old man in the straw hat). The reflected obelisks jog up and down like inverted sewing-machine needles when Oskar strolls with Liselotte, stitching the moment with the laws of optics and history. At a signal, the disdainful girl begins to walk briskly. Her reflection appears in the lower-left-hand quadrant of Oskar’s sunglasses, balloons upward when Oskar’s head turns to glance at her, and slides off to the right and disappears when Oskar restores his head to its former angle, parallel to his wife’s.

A few weeks after the return from Europe, in the sudden quiet in Scantuate after Labor Day, Marcus went to Stedham’s Moor with his camera. Sukie found him there; he looked up and saw her watching him—an ash-blond, pseudo-profound, well-bred girl standing in the gelid light, among the tall brown grasses and the rocks. “Are you going to be mean?” she asked him, a lost girl:
Who will love me? Who can I trust?
“I couldn’t stand it if I thought you were going to be cold and hateful toward me.”

“I’m not that kind of person,” Marcus said proudly.

The scene is retaken. Between takes, Liselotte probes at her tooth with her tongue. “This is work for imbeciles,
hein?”
Marcus says to her. “No, don’t look up.” She tenses and petrifies with self-control. To Oskar, Marcus says, “The mouth, Oskar—emptier. You’re an ordinary person, like those imbeciles”—he gestures toward the people gathered behind a barricade of sawhorses, watching them—“and your emotions are not well defined. You are bored,
mon cher,
but you do not admit it too openly. Your wife is a distinguished woman—you chose her; you respect your own judgment. Do you understand?”

Oskar’s face blankens slightly.
“Ja,
” he says.
“Ich verstehe.”

They commence the next shot. Oskar takes a step, tugging Liselotte after him; Marcus thinks, The ego and the whore. The reflection in Oskar’s sunglasses is first of Liselotte’s forehead, then of her breasts, then the obelisk, the street, and the leaves.

How much did Nanna see? Sukie and Robin were secretive about their affair. Marcus never discussed his sexual adventures with Nanna.
But Nanna was old, shrewd; surely she guessed. She clung tightly to his arm when they walked on the bluff. She said, “You have become an interesting-looking young man.” She did not go to Florida that winter until after Christmas, but stayed in Scantuate, giving as her reason that she felt like enjoying the cold weather; but Marcus was sure it was to be near and help him. He was starting college and might get into trouble. Nanna asked him about Sukie. “She likes someone else,” Marcus said evasively. “She and I are still friends.” “I’m glad,” Nanna said. “Gamma Foster hasn’t been well. You never do your imitations anymore.” He saw Sukie at college from time to time. The people he knew said of her she was a very stupid girl, a snob, shallow, affected. One of Marcus’s cousins (she also told him Nanna was cold and hadn’t loved her husband and children: “She was crazy about her father and nursed him, and you know that kind of thing. He was one of those citizenship-mad Jews, very anxious to win awards”) mentioned that Sukie had always had a reputation in Scantuate: “Definitely loose.”