The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (92 page)

When the buzzing of the girl in his head grew unbearable, he would convert it into thoughts of the astonishing Russian sleigh bed he had come across in an antique store that he would pass by again on his way to the farmhouse tomorrow. Things, things—at his age! But it seemed that age only increased his appetite to acquire.

The shop was one of several in the area he returned to often, ostensibly to pick up an item for one client or another. These places sometimes came into possession of surprisingly good pieces—occasionally an object that perhaps would have been consigned to a museum had it not, fortunately, fallen into ignorant hands, to be rescued then by him.

He had bought the most fetching little Madonna at one of them on his last trip. He noted the bed at the time, but the Madonna had simply absorbed all his attention, until he got her settled into the right spot. Only then did he begin to remember the bed—its fluent maple curves, its allusion to careless pleasure…This time he would buy it for certain. Assuming it was still there! Oh, why hadn’t he called weeks ago, when he realized how badly he wanted it?

But the problem remained: Where to put it—Rome? Paris? Both places were small, and he already had remarkable beds in each…

He could move one of them out here, to the farmhouse. But that was the point. He always meant to be emptying the place out so he could sell it. And yet, each time he saw it…Those summers, when he was ten, eleven, twelve…Those were happy years, insofar as years could be said to be happy. Years filled with sensations so potent they seemed like clues to a riddle.

The place wouldn’t bring much of anything, once the money was divided between himself and his surviving brother. It was a nuisance; it would simply eat cash if it were to be kept from falling to bits. His brother, and his own sons, one in Istanbul, one in London, showed no particular interest in it. Only he, only he was enslaved by the memory of the sun on the leaves around the door, the way the fruit tasted in the morning…

It was dark when you entered. As you opened the shutters, grand, churchly prisms turned everything in their path to phantoms. The cool aroma of the waxed stone floors blended with the smell of sun-warmed herbs. First the big room, then the room they’d used informally as a library, then the huge kitchen…At the long wooden table, almost transparent in the light falling from the high window, sat the girl. Water dripped slowly somewhere, onto crockery or stone. He turned, readjusting his pillow. Perhaps he had slept for some minutes.

The bar was now empty except for a sprawling group of five or six men and a woman, which was scaling peaks of drunken happiness—a TV crew, the waiter told him; they had filmed a commercial nearby that day. One of them was pounding away on a small piano in a corner, and the others sang along, loudly and terribly, arms around shoulders. Harry sipped a cognac and regarded them with melancholy affection. They were still young, almost young. For an instant he could see, as if it were incandescently mapped, the path of years that lay ahead of each of them, its particular sorrows, joys, terrors…He’d have one drink, and return to his room.

When the girl appeared in the doorway, he restrained himself from jumping to his feet. For a moment he hadn’t understood that she was real.

She approached; he stood and bent over her hand.

“I thought I might find Mother down here,” she said vaguely.

Wordlessly, he pulled out a chair for her.

“Huh. Well, I guess Franz has learned to sleep with his eyes open,” she said. “May I have a drink, please?”

He was glad for the excuse to walk over to the bar and stand there for some moments while glasses were warmed and cognacs were poured; his brains were in such a clamor that he’d hardly been able to hear what she had said, let alone make sense of it. The TV crew was now singing an American popular song, stumbling over the words and filling in with la-la-las. Harry had read somewhere recently about the woman who’d written the song and recorded it. She’d grown up in a ghetto, he recalled, impoverished; the song was the story of her life.

The girl stared down at the little candle on the table, in an aureole of her own silence, impervious to the racket of the TV crew. After a few minutes he dared to speak. “Do you go to school in Zurich?”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Fortunately not. I’m at a boarding school in the States. One more year, and I’m free.”

Tears kept coming to his eyes, as if he had been broken open; impressions, almost visible, were floating up around him, released from the hidden world by an enchanted touch: damp leaves and earth, a dappled meadow—treasure no doubt collected by his yielding and ravenous childhood senses, and stored. Every once in a while, some magic girl could unlock it. Then how to keep aloft in the radiant ether?

“Actually, I’ve hardly lived in Zurich at all,” she said. “Mother married Franz when I was eleven, and they shipped me off to school when I was thirteen. I spent summers with my father, anyhow.”

“And where does he live, my dear?”

“Oh, he’s still near Dallas. Bossing a bunch of cows around. He’s got some new kids…” She propped herself up at the table on her elbows, her long, delicate forearms together, her chin in her palms. “Mother and Franz! What a joke.”

He smiled gently. “It’s quite mysterious, what attracts one human being to another…”

“Not in this case,” she said. “I mean, did you notice the size of his bank account?” She frowned, studying the small flame in front of her. “So…Mother said you have places all over.”

“Really,” he said. “All over?”

“But—I mean, where do you live?”

“Here and there. Like you.”

Her green-blue gaze lingered on him, then withdrew. “She said you’ve got a title, too.”

“Oh, lying around in a drawer somewhere.”

She poked at the soft wax of the candle for a few moments, allowing him to watch her. “So, why don’t you use it?” she asked.

“Evidently it’s not necessary!”

She glanced at him quizzically, then smiled to herself and poked again at the candle. “Okay…Well, your turn…”

“My turn…All right…Well, why off to school at such a tender age?”

“Want to guess? Or want me to tell you.”

He was sorry he’d raised the question. Any number of scenarios, all of them sordid, sprang to mind.

“I bet you can guess.”

“No,” he said. “You needn’t—”

“Because Mother thought I was having an affair. With my piano teacher.”

How many more years was his heart going to stand the sort of strain to which he was subjecting it now? “And were you?” he asked, against his will.

“Not exactly. You know. I’d go over to his apartment after school with my schoolbooks and my sheet music and my little uniform. Mother loved it that I had to wear a uniform, obviously. She’d still have me in anklets and hair ribbons if she could. And one day Mr. Schulte sort of wrestled me off the piano bench onto the floor. I mean, he left my uniform on. I guess he liked it, too. And then we’d work on Brahms. So that’s sort of how it went every Tuesday. He hardly ever spoke to me, except for, you know, you should practice more, watch the tempo here, don’t hold your wrists like that, this is legato…” She glanced at Harry speculatively, then sat back demurely with her drink.

How pitiable she was. Her bravado, her coarseness, her self-involvement—completely innocent. Perhaps never again would she be so dazzled by the primacy of her own life. “Was he—”

“The first, uh-huh. Not Franz, if that’s what you were thinking. No slummy boys in an alley…”

It was not what he’d intended to ask. No matter. He closed his eyes and listened to her clear voice; behind the shining veil, she continued to talk.

“…The sad fact is that Mother had this humongous crush on Schulte, it was totally obvious. He was always sort of kissing her hand and, you know,
gazing
at her with big, soulful eyes…” The girl sighed languorously. “Actually, I have to admit he was kind of attractive, in a creepy kind of way…”

One of the singers had toppled off her heights of drunken joy and was now crying; a few of the others were embracing her, mussing her hair, singing into her ear, and attempting to rock her to the music, such as it was. The girl directed an abstracted stare of distaste in their direction, then looked away, obliterating them. The word “kidney,” throbbing on a flat, stylized shape, hung for an instant in Harry’s mind. Then the girl dangled her empty glass by the stem and Harry caught his breath, seeing her in her flouncy bedroom, dangling a pen, with which she was about to record her most intimate feelings. A gilt-edged diary, a heart-shaped lock…

“Are you happy enough, my dear?” The question leapt urgently from him.

“Enough for what? Oh, well. It lies ahead, right?”

“It does,” he said passionately, tears coming again to his eyes. “It does…”

An expression of pure derision passed quickly across her face.

“Ahead or behind,” he amended, and the candle between them received a tiny smile. “Ahead or behind. That you can count on…”

Just beyond the cordial room, the world was whispering. Harry—it had been a long time since he had thought of himself as anything other than Harry, though what off hand joke or misunderstanding had landed him with the name he no longer quite remembered—closed his eyes to let the shimmering air, the faint ruffling of the sea from outside the open windows reach him, embrace him. “It’s a remarkable night,” he said. “Shall we walk for just a bit?”

She sighed and sat herself up in her chair, throwing her hair back over her shoulders again.

No, he must send his afflicted princess up to sleep. He would lie down, himself, drifting along on whatever currents her inebriating presence had conjured up.

“I don’t know,” she said, dreamily. “I was thinking. We could go upstairs. Don’t you think? I mean, you could authenticate me…”

It seemed to him that she blushed faintly, though more likely it was only the flames that had roared up in front of his eyes. “I guess my room would be better,” she continued. “When and if Franz ever starts to snore, Mother is sure to be out prowling for you.”

They had put her in what they called the Rose Room, though except for the faint pinkish tone of the walls and the splendid four-poster, it was deliciously austere.

He perched on the chaise, in the muted light of the small lamp next to it, his lovely, dark farmhouse floating near him, the night just beyond the room’s closed shutters…Perhaps the nervous American schoolteacher was sitting on her balcony like a sentinel at the prow of a ship keeping them from harm…How many wonders there used to be for him! The miraculous human landscapes! Long, brilliant nights…Was there never to be one of those again? whatever role he’d been assigned in the girl’s drama—her drama of triumph, her drama of degradation—it was certain to be a despicable or ridiculous one. There was no chance—at least almost no chance—that she would receive from him what he so longed to provide: even a tiny portion of pleasure or solace. And when she remembered him, no doubt she would remember him with contempt.

Briefly he closed his eyes, luxuriating in the purity of her face and body, the glowing skein of sensation she was causing the air to spin out around him, his sharp thrill of longing—everything, in short, he was waiting (like a bride!) to lose. Lazily, as though moving into a trance, she dropped one piece of clothing, then another, on the floor.

When Kate awoke, it was already late. She opened her shutters and brightness was everywhere.

The night before, she’d sat for a long while on her balcony. The sky was extraordinary—terrifying, really, with great, flaring starbursts. How long had all those blades of cold light traveled in order to cross here and pass on through this one night’s heart? she wondered. Trillions and trillions of years.

She would have liked to be able to return to the cozy bar for the comfort of voices around her and a glass of something soothing. But for all she knew, the Reitzes were still there.

And the fact is, women of her age were conspicuous on their own. People tended to pity, even fear you. In any case, she was hardly the sort of person who could sit alone in such a room at this hour; one more drink could be a disaster. Oh, and worst of all—the kindness of the waiters!

So she listened to the sea altering the rocks below her, the wind around her shaping the trees, as the starlight shot past. Time itself made no sound at all.

Baker had told her about Norman—he was desperately sorry, he said, his beautiful, dark eyes imploring her not to turn away; but there was nothing to be done. And there she was at the edge of a cliff. She’d been walking along, and just where she was about to take her next step, in that instant there was nothing.

So she went back to school to get a teaching degree, and then there was far too much to do to brood about Baker. Only sometimes at night she’d awaken as if falling from a ledge, crying out—landing hard against what her life had turned out to be, her bedclothes limp with sweat and tears.

After Baker had been living with Norman for a while, it was as if he’d always lived with Norman. There was only a residue of feeling when she and Baker met, exchanging the children or going about their separate lives—a sort of cold ash that faintly recorded their footsteps.

She had been luckier than a lot of her friends, as she learned bit by bit; Norman was wonderful with the children—so forthcoming, so understanding…and often when he came by to drop them off he’d sit in the kitchen with her, chatting over a leisurely beer. Through the years, in fact, they’d become truly close.

Terrible, the body’s yearning, terrible. But you could always outwait it. First, there had been nothing in front of her, then—however ineptly—she, the children, Baker, and Norman wove together a swaying bridge, crossing step by cautious step over the awful chasm. And here, on the other side, Baker was dying.

The morning lobby was bright and busy. Harry was waiting to say goodbye to her, evidently, and the Reitzes were there, too. Harry put down the newspaper he seemed to have been trying to read, and stood to greet her, his arms open. “My dear! We’ve only just finished breakfast. We kept hoping you’d deign to join us.”