The European lucidity and understanding. “It’s more difficult for a woman,” she says. The wine bottle has become empty and another unobtrusively appears. “A man can always, at fifty or sixty, start a new life, but a woman is used up. It’s not fair, but that’s the way life is.”
There is something very appealing about her, the lack of sentimentality, the frankness. She had an earlier marriage and a child, she reveals. He died, she says simply. A brain tumor. He was two. I calculate quickly, sometime just after the war. “He was only two,” she says again. That is the extent of self-pity. “He was absolutely normal and then it began. He would fall and hit his elbow, for instance, and cry holding his head — it hurt him there.”
One cannot say she is a stronger woman because of it, she was always such a woman. She has gone through the most difficult thing of all. She speaks three languages, perhaps four, and if she dreams of marrying again does not bother to confess it. Not surprisingly, the ex-wife and stepchildren are very close to her now. The ex-wife lives in Lugano. “She always comes to see me. She likes me to come there.”
I think of her and of Jonathan Swift’s mistress, Stella, a symbol of Europe, justly admired, as the stone that covers her says, for many virtues as well as for great natural and acquired perfection. One thing stands out: I have never heard her complain.
Drunken dinners, parties, really, where the food is ignored and they are jammed at the bar. At midnight the music is pounding; in the street the thin sleet of winter drives down. For some reason I think of the Village, where Pat Kenny lived when we were fifteen. Her parents were gone for the weekend, or at least the night. I did not know how to begin. We sat on the couch. She was pleasant. There was a copy of Robert Briffault’s Europa, a thick novel of the 1930s, in the bookcase. “Have you read this?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
She knew nothing of the passage that had electrified me, the gown torn from the back of the sumptuous woman who had cheated at cards and her hands quickly tied to a ring above her head. I did not know how to connect this to the two of us; it did not illustrate what was intended but it shared something. I wanted to see her wrenched from the vague, infuriating conversation we were having. I saw only the victim beneath her clothes, I wanted it revealed.
—
The years have their closure. Many of the people upon whom I had based characters passed from sight. It was only in part an accident. They had been consumed, my interest had waned. There were exceptions. The girl of A Sport and a Pastime I was always curious to see again, what had become of her, the details of her life, the closet in which her dresses hung, the drawer with her folded things, the bottles of perfume, shoes. I wanted again to lie there watching her prepare as if she were alone in the room, before the performance, as it were, putting on makeup, slipping into heels. She would be twenty-eight, thirty, completely changed. In fact she was married and living in Los Angeles. There were children. It was very like the book.
I had met her at Kennedy when she first arrived in America. She came through the crowd, innocent in her beauty, filled with joy. She was eighteen. Counts had coveted her. I met her also in dreams. I went through someone’s empty room and knocked at her door. “Yes, come in,” she said without asking who it was; I sensed she was expecting someone else. She looked up. Everything about her. I pulled up her dress in a single motion. The incredible nakedness. Laughing, she pushed it back down. In the dream I had lost the photograph of her, I didn’t have an address. “You say you adore, but I think it’s something else you like,” she said. She was curled up, wearing nothing. At the end of a crowded road under gray clouds my ship was preparing to sail. There was traffic, the imminence of departure. My heart was sick.
Nedra, the stylish woman of Light Years, I sometimes saw again, usually in the city, the last time in the house she now lived in alone — true to the book, she and her husband had eventually divorced. I loved her, her frankness and charm, the extravagance and devotion to her children. I never tired of seeing her and listening to her talk. She smoked, drank, laughed raucously. There was no caution in her.
Her old lover, one of them, sat with us that last night. Nedra had aged. The years had seized and shaken her as a cat shakes a mouse. Her jawline was no longer pure and there were small pouches beneath her eyes. Her nose had gotten larger. Her still-long hair had traces of gray. In her face, which I loved, was my own mortality. The lines at the corners of my mouth, which were more terrible than an illness — I jumped up to look each morning; they were there.
She was going to give him her father’s old tie pin, she said impulsively, it was the best thing her father had owned. “Do you still have the pearl cuff links?” she asked, pulling up the sleeve of his jacket. “No. They’re on the other shirt,” she guessed. He lived in a small house behind hers. I had no idea if they were still intimate — she was capable of every appearance of it without the thing itself.
Hers was a singular life. It had no achievements other than itself. It declared, in its own way, that there are things that matter and these are the things one must do. Life is energy, it proclaimed, life is desire. You are not meant to understand everything but to live and do certain things. Despite all I had written about her, there was more, and the carnal scenes, a minor element, I imagined entirely. It would have been gratifying to know if they were appropriate. Some things, however, she did not talk about.
She is gone, and the other wives, too, it seems, the ones men had; they are widowed or divorced, wise from intimacy, strong-voiced. The families, like old temple columns, are broken, never to be restored. When the world was young it seemed impossible. The unions were too firm, the comfort of an open, loving heart too great. I stood on deck one winter morning, coming back from Europe by boat, near to docking, the unawakened city in gray light. A family came to the rail nearby. They were German; they’d been in first class. The woman’s face was beautiful, that clarity, composure, and breeding that make one long for one more chance at life. I felt a burning, terrible shame. Everything I valued was suddenly made worthless and I was plunged into confusion, trying to imagine what this marvelous woman said, how she argued, sat down at the table, slept, dressed. I could not picture a single detail of her life. I was like a desperate young boy, kept from, not even knowing that the test of elegance was close inspection, and that to her husband she was quite a different person than she was to me.
“Moritz!” she called to her child. He was as handsome, with a white hat made of crudely sewn leather and square earflaps. He was seven or eight, well-mannered. He came and stood by her, near her side. Suddenly the concept of virtue as strength was real.
I often came across her opposite, the heroine of all our books and films, still young, divorced. In a bar she was wearing a kind of toque made from a colorful scarf, tight jeans, a turtleneck shirt. How had she been, I asked.
“Hello! I’m fine. I’m settling down.”
Though she was still broke, as she said. She was the daughter of a writer I knew who had reversed the usual sequence — he had published some novels first and then came the list of other roles: restaurant owner, bandleader, policeman. His daughter had been working as a waitress; she had her father’s unorthodox spirit. She was going to get another job when her complexion cleared up, she said. “It’s hard being alone. Will you buy me a drink?”
In fact, she hadn’t been alone. She’d had a guy for a month, very straight, she explained, but nice, Notre Dame, all that. He left. “He said I was taking up too much of his time. I wanted him to move in, but he didn’t love my children enough. He said he did, but he didn’t. Well, you know, it’s difficult. I should take the time to write down twenty lines a day, shouldn’t I?” she asked.