The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (91 page)

“That is true,” Harry said. He looked at one child, then the other. “Are you glad to be on holiday?”

The boy nodded vigorously. “Yes, thank you.”

“And you?” Harry asked.

The girl, who was reclining again, opened her eyes and looked steadily at him. “Not madly.” She closed her eyes again and crossed her arms over her chest, as though she were sunbathing, or dying.

“Sit up, sweetheart,” Mrs. Reitz murmured. “Well!” she said, casting a misty look at the room in general. “At least we’ve been lucky with the weather. They said it’s been raining and raining and raining,” she explained to Kate. “I was afraid it was going to rain today.”

“But it didn’t,” Mr. Reitz said.

“No,” Mrs. Reitz agreed. “It didn’t.”

“We have good luck with the weather,” Mr. Reitz said, “but bad luck with the traffic. It took us all day to get here. We expected to arrive at three o’clock. But we arrived almost at seven.”

The girl emitted a small sigh, which floated down among them like a feather.

“Now,
you’ve
determined it’s best to drive up tomorrow…” Mrs. Reitz furrowed deferentially at Kate, as though Kate were a senior scholar of traffic.

“I’ll be taking the train,” Kate said.

“The train!” Mrs. Reitz said. “What a
marvelous
—”

“I want to take the train,” the little boy said mournfully. “I wanted to take the train,” he explained to Kate. “But we can’t because of the Porsche.”

“That’s the problem, sweetie,” Mrs. Reitz said absently, reaching over to a small silver bowl of mixed nuts, which Harry was nervously plundering. “Excuse me!” he said, retracting his hand as though it had been bitten.

“I am so sorry!” Mrs. Reitz exclaimed. “Oh, I am simply starving.”

“I can imagine,” Harry said distractedly.

“And I suppose spring holidays are the reason for all this damned, if you’ll pardon me, traffic,” Mr. Reitz said. “Yes, the only occasions on which one has the opportunity to travel with one’s family, others are traveling with theirs. What a paradox!”

The boy’s straw slurped among the ice at the bottom of his drink.

“Darling,” Mrs. Reitz said. “Your father was merely making an observation.”

The boy blushed red. “My baby,” Mrs. Reitz said. She drew him to her and stroked his silky hair, smiling first at her husband, then at Harry. “You know, I absolutely adore this place. It’s so romantic. Don’t you just keep imagining all the things that must have gone on in these rooms? Oh, my. For hundreds of years!” The boy sat stock still until his mother released him, recrossing her legs and primly readjusting the hem of her little skirt.

“Good heavens—” Harry glanced at his watch “—they’ll have been waiting with our table! I do wish we could ask you to join us, but, that is, they’re very strict. Please excuse us.”

“What an ordeal!” he said to Kate as they were seated. “How horrible! Was I terribly rude? I suppose I should have invited them to dine with us. And why not? Would it be possible for them to bore us any more than they already have? But yes, on reflection, yes. I feel I might still recover.”

The dining room was an aerie, a bower, hung with a playful lattice of garlands. Its white tile floors were adorned with painted baskets of fruit, and there were real ones scattered here and there on stands. But even as the waiters glided by with trays of glossy roasted vegetables and platters of fish, even while Harry took it upon himself to order for her, knowledgeably and solicitously, Kate felt tainted. Despite the room’s conceit that eating was a pastime for elves and fairies, Mrs. Reitz’s carnality had disclosed the truth: this aggregation of hairy vertebrates, scrubbed, scented, prancing about on hind legs, was ruthlessly bent on physical gratifications—tactile, visual, gustatory, genital…The candles! The flowers! A trough providing mass feedings for naked guests would be less pornographic.

The Reitzes were being led to their own table. Mrs. Reitz waggled one set of fingers in their direction, holding her jacket closed beneath her collarbones with the other, as if an enormous wind were about to whip it open, exposing her.

“One encounters these terrible people wherever one goes,” Harry said. “They all know me—it’s the unfortunate side of my work, if I can use such an elevated term for, actually, my little hobby…They’re all clients, or friends of clients. Clients of clients…”

Despite Mrs. Reitz’s speedy (and uncalled for!) assessment of Kate as out of the running, Kate thought, Mrs. Reitz was probably not much younger, really. The bouncing gold hair, the vivacity, the strained skin suggested it…

All those years ago, when she’d finally confessed to her mother about Baker and Norman, Kate had waited quietly through her mother’s initial monologue. “Don’t worry,” her mother said grimly. “I won’t say I told you so.”

In fact, she never had told Kate so. On the contrary, she’d been elated by Baker’s family, his appearance, his education, his law firm…“I can’t say I’m overly surprised about…this other person, but does he have to move
out
? Why can’t people of your generation set aside your personal appetites for one instant? The children are going to be confused enough as it is! Oh, I simply can’t believe he’s leaving you for—for—for
an electrician
! Well, but I’m sure he’ll continue to support you.”

Kate had smiled faintly. “You are? He’s going into public-interest law.”

“My God, my God!” her mother cried. “Oh, I suppose I should feel compassion for him. He was always so weak, so lost. But why did he have to marry you? Why did he feel he had the right to ruin your life while he was working things out for himself? Well, and yet I can understand it. I suppose he thought you could help him. You were always such a sweet girl. And not, if you don’t mind my saying so, very threatening, sexually.”

“And the worst thing,” Harry was saying, “is that they all seem to want something from me. I don’t know what! Perhaps they imagine I’ll be able to pick up some piece for a song, something to transform a salon from the ordinarily to the spectacularly vulgar. Some great, blowsy, romping nymph with an enormous behind…”

Kate contemplated him as he talked decoratively on. One had to acknowledge, even admire, such energy, so strong a will to enjoy, to entertain, even if, as was clearly the case, it was only to entertain himself.

“Giovanna tells me you’re a teacher,” he said unexpectedly, laying down his fork and knife as if her response required his full attention.

“Nothing very exalted, I’m afraid,” Kate said. “Just high school biology.”

“It sounds rather exalted to me,” he said. “I should think it would be rather a beautiful subject.”

Kate glanced at him. “It is, actually. Hmmm…” She noted the sudden haloed clarity of her thought, the detailed vibrancy of her awareness, and concluded she was drunk. Natural enough—she’d certainly been drinking. “I have to admit that I do find it beautiful. Of course, what I teach is very rudimentary—basic evolutionary theory, simple genetic principles, taxonomies, a lot of structural stuff. Pretty much what I learned myself in school. You know, an oak tree, a tadpole, the shape of its growth, the way the organism works…”

“I understand nothing about biology,” he said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing at all…”

“Oh, well. Neither do I, really.” Kate found she was laughing loudly. She composed herself. “I mean, not what’s going on now, all the fantastic molecular frontiers, the borders with chemistry, physics…the real mysteries…”

He rested his chin on the backs of his clasped hands and gazed at her. “What seems so simple to you—a tree, a tadpole—those things are completely mysterious to me!”

“Actually, I’m not being at all—” Was he, in fact, interested? Well, it wasn’t her place to judge. At least he was pretending to be. At least he was—Stop that, she told herself; a conversation was something that humans had. “I mean, I’m not being…Because actually it’s all hugely…It brings you to your knees, really, doesn’t it? You know, it’s really quite funny—there are my students, rows of little humans, staring at me. And there I am, a human, staring right back. And I’m holding up pictures! Charts! Of what’s inside us. And the students write things down in their notebooks. Our hearts are pumping, the blood is going round and round, our lungs are bringing air in and out…
Class, look at the pictures. These are our lungs, our kidneys, our stomachs, our veins and arteries, our spleens, our brains, our hearts…
There we are, looking at
pictures
of what’s going on every instant inside our very own bodies!”

“I don’t even yet have it straight. Where any of those things are,” Harry said ruefully. “My kidneys, my spleen, my heart…”

Kate shook her head. “It’s a wonder we can understand anything at all about ourselves…We can’t even see our own kidneys.”

“Ah!” Harry grunted. “So I have recovered, after all.” He summoned the waiter to order for Kate a little chalice of raspberries and scented froth, then sat back to observe as she took the first spoonful. “Extraordinary, no?” he said. “It’s up to you. I’m not allowed.” He smiled briefly and shallowly, then rubbed his forehead. “To tell you the truth, it’s a rather stressful trip for me, always—going back to this little farmhouse of mine. I spent summers there in my childhood…Really, I’m very glad to have had a pretext for stopping here overnight.”

Harsh tears shot up to Kate’s eyes. Fatigue, she thought. “Tell me…”

“Yes?”

“Tell me…Oh—well, tell me, then…Have you known Giovanna long?”

“For many centuries. Our families are vaguely intertwined, though I never met her until I was a young man. There was a party, very grand, and in all the enormous crowd, women in spectacular gowns, I caught a glimpse of a young girl. I remember every detail of that glimpse—the exact posture, the smile, every button on the dress. She was scarcely thirteen. There were eight years between us.”

His hand was resting on the table, three, maybe four inches from hers. “There were?” The cuff of his shirt was very white. She raised her eyes from it to smile at him. “Aren’t there still?”

He sat back and studied her, amusement and sorrow competing in his own smile. “Well, now it’s a different eight years.” He sighed, and signaled for the check.

“Oh, please, let me. You did lunch, and drinks. You’ve taken all this time—”

“Madam,” he said gently. “You will put your purse away for this one evening, please. But will you join me for a last drink in the bar? A digestif. And I will have, if you won’t find it too disgusting, a cigar.”

But the Reitzes were already ensconced again in the bar, and waved them over. Kate glanced at Harry, but he had gone completely unreadable; he had simply disappeared.

Mrs. Reitz slid to one side of her settee and patted the space next to her. Again, there was a scuffle. Harry won, and Kate found herself sitting with Mrs. Reitz, suffocating under a dome of her perfume like a dying bug, while he went off to commandeer a chair.

Well. All right. Fine. And a very good thing it was, actually, that Norman was an electrician! He’d completely rewired her little house. And that at a time when she was barely getting by, even with the money Baker managed to scrape up for the kids.

The waiter was already prepared with a cigar for Harry, undoubtedly in accord with ancient custom. “Here, please,” Mr. Reitz said. “One of those for me, too.”

“Oh, dear—” Mrs. Reitz fluttered toward Kate. “I know men have to have them, but I never get used to them, do you?”

“I never get used to anything—” Kate was startled by her own slightly swaggering tone. “I mean, except for the things that aren’t happening any longer.”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it…” Mrs. Reitz said cautiously.

Good. Kate had frightened her. But heavens! What was her—Why was she so—After all, Harry had stated quite clearly that he was repentant about having snubbed these people before dinner. The girl was slung out sullenly upon a curvy white and gold chair, far above the juvenile sniping of her elders.

“Ooch,” Mr. Reitz said, patting the prairielike region of his stomach. “It’s impossible to speak after such a meal. But, really, have you no good advice for us? Saturday, or Sunday, to Rome.”

“Whichever you choose—” Harry exhaled with pleasure “—you will wish you had chosen the other.”

“Let us be prudent,” Mr. Reitz said. “We will play the early bird. Let us be ready to make our final decision at breakfast.
If
—” he turned to the girl “—we think we can get up in good time, for a change.”

The girl lifted a long, shining hair from her dress and considered it. “We’ll do our best,” she said.

“I surely do envy you,” Mrs. Reitz said. “This little girl of mine has a talent for sleep. But I can never sleep near the sea at all. It makes me so
rest
less…”

“The sea?” Mr. Reitz said. “Restless? How very original. One is always learning the most surprising new things about one’s spouse! But it’s a good thing then about our room. I must say, I was quite annoyed earlier with the staff. I had my secretary specifically request the view. They swore she never did, but a people which is known for its charm is not often known also for its honesty.”

“I have a terrible time sleeping in hotels, myself,” Harry said. “Unfortunately, I’m always in hotels these days…How did it happen, how did it happen? Oh, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that it’s the same person who has lived each bit of one’s life. Yes, an hour or two of sleep, and then I’m up again, wandering around all night. In fact, I’d best go up now and try to get some sleep before I lose my chance.”

Kate attempted to smile pleasantly. “I think I’ll go up now, too.”

“And how is your room, my dear?” Harry asked.

Kate looked at him. Why hadn’t she just gone directly up after dinner?

“Good heavens, yes, where is my brain!” he said. “Glorious. Of course, you said—glorious.”

He did in fact lie in his room for an hour or so, letting images of the girl play over his nerves. Her exquisite throat, the curve of her cheek…the clear, poreless skin, so close in color to the brows, the lashes, the light, long hair…her startling greenish blue eyes. She was clever about clothes, obviously—that mother surely hadn’t chosen the dress, simple, and stylishly long, stopping just at narrow shins. On her feet she wore elegant straw sandals.