Three Short Novels (12 page)

One afternoon she encountered him in a restaurant where she had gone for coffee and cake after shopping. He told her that he suffered
from a heart condition, gazing at her with an appealing, sorrowing gleam of doubt, as if no woman could love him because his heart was impaired. Everything he did now was hesitant—shyness and hesitancy had become part of the act of the aging celebrity. Years ago he had pretended to be surprised by adoration; now he was truly surprised by deterioration. It was cancer he was dying of. Her father, who was his physician, had told her.

He lived in a small apartment, riding a slow, clanking elevator to get up to it and going along a narrow, dark hallway with mustard-brown walls flecked with gilt. Outside, the building was very white in the sun. It rose to twelve floors, way above the others around it, and had its own parking lot; the interior was a dark hive. His bed opened out from the wall; the curtains were heavy and floral, and so was the upholstered furniture. Slick photographs of himself in his most famous roles were pinned to the walls of the small kitchen.

The love she made to him in the dark apartment was tender and asked for nothing in return. Lying against him, caressing his grateful body, she invited him to come and live with her. He opened alarmed eyes: “Not an old man with a heart condition.” She kissed the gray, crinkled hairs in the shape of a triangle on his belly and told him that she knew his trouble, that he had no reason to hide it from her, and that she would take care of him.

She knew that he saw her as her father saw her—uncritically, aware of her faults but amused by them, and amused by her virtues, as if she were still a child forming and growing, and it was not known how she would turn out; but she knew that he was wondering about her reason for wanting to take care of him. At no other time, with no one else, had she demonstrated self-sacrifice. Since he had always carried on a detached flirtation with her, one that an actor would feel called upon to engage in with the daughter of his best friend, she was able to convince him that she had always been drawn to him and that she was making up now for the years she had denied them the rich possibilities
of an affair. When he protested that the presence in her home of a man to whom she was not married would be unacceptable to her friends, she mimicked the disapproval he was anticipating on the faces of her friends, and the mimicry roused his actor's admiration for those who put something over harmlessly and with bravura. So he gave up the apartment that he had lived in for seven years and came with his suitcases to her house, and she began to devote herself to him as if it were an involvement she had looked forward to all her life.

She saw to his every comfort, she brought him gifts, cakes of the most lavishly expensive soap, leather brushes, silk pajamas, and at night she went into his room to make love to him. She knew he continued to wonder about her, and that he found no reason for bringing him into her home and giving over her days and nights to serving him. When he was no longer ill at ease, when he no longer accepted her devotion with an edge of toleration as if it were forced upon him, she knew that he no longer wondered.

David had always been entertained by the actor, humored by him, livelier with Max than with anyone else. But now he seemed to have no memory of their friendship. Her son avoided the guest just as he avoided her, but his avoidance of her was more demanding than ever. She felt that his need of her was greater than anyone's need of her, ever, and that her need of him was a somnabulist's need beyond waking caution, and so they passed each other in the house, asking of each other something more than anyone else was able to give. He was rapidly growing tall, and they had a joke about it, the only joke left between them—that he would wake up some morning and raise the roof; and each morning she pretended that he had grown another yard in the night, and she slipped by him, cowering. He was as tall now as his father had been, not heavy in the legs or afflicted with his father's clumsiness, but slender, and there was always a calm alertness in the turn of his head, a grace in the turn of his body.

He was always alone. He brought no friends home, and she sometimes
wondered if he had any, but this lack of friends did not trouble her. Instead, she was pleased about it because he seemed in his aloneness to be a more convincing figure of a boy who was to become a man sought after, a man who would make aloneness a way of life and be sought after because of it. His aloneness was proof that he would make something of his life, and she desired this with more fervency than she had ever desired anything for herself; but, passing him and wanting to touch his chest or his face or his dark head to bless him on his way, she held back her hand because she knew it could not bless him.

She devoted herself to Max with the intensity of a penitent. She saw to everything and to that desire which she thought uppermost after his desire to live. She came at night into his room, wearing a negligee or a kimono. She came barefoot down the hall, clean and fragrant from an hour of bathing and massaging herself with lotion; and even during the steep, downhill months, when he often seemed oblivious of her, she continued to come to him.

One night she lay down beside him as usual and opened her clothes in her usual way that was a caressing open. He had lain all afternoon and evening in sedated sleep, moaning and alert to his moaning, waking at the sounds with a start and a look of dread. He took her wrist and thrust her hand away, at the same time turning his face away from hers.

“It's obscene,” he complained. “There comes a time when it's obscene.”

She was not sure that she had heard him right. He seemed to be muttering in a dream. Wounded, unmoving beside him, she asked him if he was awake.

“God says there's a time and a place for everything,” he said, his face turned upward again. “I'm awake.”

“Let a man die in peace,” he said. “Let a man get hold of his mind before he dies. No distractions. I never knew what my mind was for except to make a woman or a buck. Leave me alone so I can get
acquainted with my mind. You act like I wait here all day thinking of you. It's obscene when it's not the right time, and the time's not right anymore for me. Last night I dreamed of earth turned over. You know, with a shovel. Or maybe I dreamed it a minute ago. I saw how it looks to God, and I don't like it that way. I'm afraid to see things that way.” He sat up to cover himself with the folded blanket at the foot of the bed, unfolding it over himself as he lay down again, unconscious of his act.

She sat up, her back to him, covering her breasts with her negligee. All her life she had been expecting this castigation from men for intruding on their lives, even though they beckoned and begged.

“Viv, listen, little girl,” he pleaded. “You have to remember I'm not always in my right mind. Now this way I feel, about the dream, you know, that might mean I'm out of my mind. Maybe I'm not in touch with the mighty things, maybe I'm just dreaming crazy dreams cut down to my size. I don't say no to you because I'm thinking mighty thoughts. Maybe I say no because I'm tired, I don't have the old stuff in me anymore. That's the only reason, there's no big reason. You hear me, Viv?”

She said nothing, leaving him to his dream. Someday, some year, somebody was to be left out of her last dream, no matter how much she might love that person, even more than her life.

After that night, she never came again to caress him, and never caressed him while she bathed him and changed his garments unless he caught her hand and laid it upon himself. But in the last months when he could not leave his bed, she was at his call every hour, alleviating—as her father had instructed her—his coughing and his suffering. She lost weight and neglected her appearance. She went around unbathed, her cotton dresses, her linen dresses, bought in anticipation and in enticement of the pleasures of other summers, now soiled and stained. Oblivion was an expression in his eyes; his
eyes grew darker each day, more globular, the depths going back to forever, and she felt that she, too, looked that way from gazing so long into his face.

Her father visited Max every other day as the months wore on, concerned more about his daughter's condition of servitude than he was about his friend. His friend was dying, he was not the first or the last to die. When, before, her father had come once a week to play chess with his friend, he had seemed to accept her devotion to the man as something aberrant, inexplicable, and yet something he expected of her and was not surprised by. Now he was surprised at the endurance of her devotion.

One day he sat with her in the patio under the large fringed and scalloped pink umbrella she had bought just before the end of her marriage to Russell, and that now seemed frivolous. For some days her father had tried to convey to her with his deploring eyes his fear that she had lost her mind. She sat under the umbrella with him, her bare legs out in the sun. Every year at the beginning of summer she had always engaged in an indolent race with other women of her circle to acquire an early tan; now, after having denied herself most of the summer sun, it seemed to her that she had not felt the sun's warmth for years. But because her legs were responding to the sun, because she wanted to drop her knees apart, and because her feet in frayed gold mules were warmed, the arches drawing up, she turned her pink canvas chair with great effort toward the table to put herself in the shade again, to deny herself the sun that the man in the house was to be denied forever. With her elbow on the table, she held her chin in her hand, smoking, offering her pale face to her father's deploring eyes, remembering that she was intolerable to him whenever, as a child, her hair was frizzled by a permanent wave or she had grimaced or acted clumsy. On display for him now were her broken fingernails, the spots on her dress, her hair growing in darker, each separate disrepair a separate unhappiness for him because each
particular of her beauty had once been so important to her.

“What's going on?” he demanded. “For a while I figured it was some old fixation, some old girlish passion you never let on about, but that's ridiculous. It was ridiculous when I thought of it and more so now as he gets worse. You want to tell me what's going on?”

“He's more comfortable here than at his place,” she said.

“That tells me nothing,” he said. “The reason he's more comfortable is that you're waiting on him every minute of the day and night. God, I don't know how you stand it. You're not used to anybody dying, like I am, and even I couldn't stand the continual proximity. I avoid dying people. What I want to know is why. You want to tell me why?”

She was silent, her chin in her hand, gazing away from him as if troubled by the sun around her. His mind was pat, she thought, his and her mother's and her brother's, and she waited now for him to produce a pat answer to the question he had asked her. He was, she felt, way up in the top row of the gallery, unable to make sense of her performance, straining for the simple meaning of it.

“It's punishment,” he said.

“For what?” she asked him, wondering if he could, in his way, actually come upon an answer.

“It's
like
punishment,” he said, more cautious.

“For what?” she repeated.

“You tell me,” he said. “You tell me for what.”

She cradled her face in both hands, confronting him with her full face like a child waiting for an answer to a riddle. “For my crimes?”

“What the hell crimes have you committed? If it's punishment for a crime, it's one you only imagine you committed.”

“I didn't imagine my life,” she said, grimacing against the tears, observing his disgust with her grimace and with her fingernails set up to conceal it. “Sometimes I
think
I imagined it.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “You're nowhere near the menopause and
you're wailing about what you did and didn't do with your life.” He reached out to grasp her wrist, consolingly.

“You don't like to see my face when it cries,” she said, pulling away from his hand. They sat for several minutes in silence.

“Maybe I'm punishing myself because I let too many men see me cry,” she said. “I shouldn't have done that to them, or to me. And I don't mean just cry. There are ways of crying other than this way. There are ways like accusations, like belittling, like ways I don't want to say. If you think I'm punishing myself, taking care of Max, you may be right.”

Again they were both silent. Then, veering away from the unfamiliar, her father went on. “You ought to make yourself attractive to him. It worries him that you're neglecting yourself. He told me. He feels responsible, of course. Otherwise,” he said, having received no promise, no reply, “he'll figure you want everybody to know what you're doing for him. You're making something terribly public about it, looking that way.”

“Nobody sees me,” she said.

“So nobody comes by anymore?” he asked, derisively.

“Max's wife, his last one,” she said. “That's all.”

“Your son sees you,” he said. “He's more important than the others, anyway. You ever wonder what he thinks—his mother waiting on a stranger day and night, looking like a hag?”

“He'll understand when he's older.”

“I'm older and I don't understand.”

“You're not David.”

She walked beside him around the house to his car, impressing her presence upon him, her ravaged presence, so that if ever he was to have any greater knowledge of her, he would remember that she had atoned for whatever she had done in her life that ought to be atoned for.