Shouts of glee. Franca, radiant, was taller than the girls around her. She was clearly their star.
The automobiles turned slowly into the drive to pick up exhausted guests, the lights in the windows came on, a haze filled the evening. Hadji lay exhausted among the debris. At last there was quiet.
“Some of them are nice children,” Nedra admitted. “I’m very fond of Dana. But isn’t it strange—do you suppose it’s because they’re ours—Franca and Danny are different. They have something very special I don’t know how to describe.”
“Jivan misread half the lines.”
“Oh, the puppet show was marvelous.”
“He stepped on Scaramouch—by mistake, of course.”
“Which one is Scaramouch?”
“He’s the one who says, I’ll make you pay for my head, sir.”
“Oh, too bad.”
“I can fix it,” Viri conceded.
The room was silent, littered with bits of paper. The events of the day had already a kind of luminous outline. The frog, like a shipment of damaged goods, lay in pieces on the table, destroyed by countless blows.
She would make dinner after a while. They would dine together, something light: a boiled potato, cold meat, the remains of a bottle of wine. Their daughters would sit numbly, the dark of fatigue beneath their eyes. Nedra would take a bath. Like those who have given everything—performers, athletic champions—they would sink into that apathy which only completion yields.
2
“ARE YOU HAPPY, VIRI?” SHE asked.
They were in traffic, driving across town at five in the afternoon. The great mechanical river of which they were part moved slowly at the intersections and then more freely on the long transverse blocks. Nedra was doing her nails. At each red light, without a word, she handed him the bottle and painted one nail.
Was he happy? The question was so ingenuous, so mild. There were things he dreamed of doing that he feared he never would. He often weighed his life. And yet, he was young still, the years stretched before him like endless plains.
Was he happy? He accepted the open bottle. She carefully dipped the brush, absorbed in her acts. Her instinct, he knew, was sharp. She had the even teeth of a sex that nips thread in two, teeth that cut as cleanly as a razor. All her power seemed concentrated in her ease, her questioning glance. He cleared his throat.
“Yes, I suppose I’m happy.”
Silence. The traffic ahead had begun to move. She took the bottle to allow him to drive.
“But isn’t it a stupid idea?” she asked. “If you really think about it?”
“Happiness?”
“Do you know what Krishnamurti says? Consciously or unconsciously, we are all completely selfish, and as long as we get what we want, we believe everything is all right.”
“Getting what we want… but is that happiness?”
“I don’t know. I know that not getting what you want is certainly unhappiness.”
“I’d have to think about that,” he said. “Never getting what you want, that could be unhappiness, but as long as there’s a chance of getting it…”
They had only to reach Tenth Avenue and the street would be empty, open, as on a weekend; they would be free, speeding onto the highway, rushing north. The gray, exhausted crowds were trudging past newsstands, key shops, banks. They were slumped at tables in the Automat, eating in silence. There were one-legged pigeons, battered cars, the darkened windows of endless apartments, and above it all an autumn sky, smooth as a dome.
“It’s difficult to think about,” she said. “Especially when he says that thought can never bring you to truth.”
“What can? That’s the real question.”
“Thought is always changing. It’s like a stream, it moves around things, it’s shifting. Thought is disorder, he says.”
“But what is the alternative?”
“That’s very complicated,” she agreed. “It’s a different way of seeing things. Do you ever feel you would like to find a new way of living?”
“It depends what you mean by a new way. Yes, sometimes I do.”
It was the day Monica died, the little girl with one leg. The surgeons had not removed enough, there was no way to do it. She had begun to have pain again, invisible, as if it had all been for nothing. That pain was the knell. After it came fever and headaches. She swelled everywhere. She went into a coma. It took weeks, of course. Finally—it was in the evening, Viri was bringing in wood, bits of bark stuck to his sleeves, his arms filled, he was making a bank of cut ends, a parapet that would last through the winter when she died. Her father was still at work. Her mother was sitting there in a folding chair, and her child ceased to breathe. In an instant she was gone. She was lighter suddenly, much lighter, she lay with a kind of terrifying insignificance. Everything had left her—the innocence, the crying, the dutiful outings with her father, the life she had never lived. All these weigh something. They pass, dissolve, are scattered like dust.
The days had lost their warmth. Sometimes at noon, as if in farewell, there was an hour or two like summer, swiftly gone. On the stands in nearby orchards were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments. In the distant fields, seas of dank earth far from towns, there were still tomatoes clinging to the vines. At first glance it seemed only a few, but they were hidden, sheltered; that was how they had survived.
Nedra had a basket full of them. Viri had two. The weight was astonishing. They were like wet clothes; they were heavy as oranges. A family of gleaners, their faces dirty, their hands dark with the stain of this last moist earth. It was a field near New City; the farmer was their friend.
“Pick the small ones,” Viri told his daughters.
Their baskets were filled as well. They were putting the little ones in their pockets, those that were partly green. They moved down the endless rows, straying back and forth, tiring, learning to stoop, to work, to feel the naked fruit in their hands. They cried out to each other, sometimes they sat on the ground.
At last they reached the end. “Papa, we have so many!”
“Let me see.”
They stood near the car, tomatoes piled around them, the dirt still clinging, the air turned chill. Nedra looked like a woman who had once been rich. She held her hands away from her. Her hair had come loose.
“What are we going to do with all these fucking tomatoes?” she laughed. Her marvelous laugh, in the fall, at the edge of the fields.
“Come on, Hadji,” she called, “you filthy beast.” His nose was caked with earth. “What a day you’ve had,” she said.
Their fingernails were black, their shoes encrusted. They put the tomatoes in the unheated entry to the kitchen as Jivan drove up in the dusk.
3
“THERE ARE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT marriage. I love the familiarity of it,” Nedra said. “It’s like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it’s implanted in your skin, you can’t get rid of it. You’re hardly even aware of it any more. I suppose I’m very conventional,” she decided.
“In some ways…”
“If you asked people what they wanted, what would most of them say? I know what I’d say: money. I’d like a lot of money. That’s the one thing I never have enough of.”
Jivan said nothing.
“I’m not materialistic, you know that. Well, I am, I suppose; I like clothes and food, I don’t like the bus or depressing places, but money is very nice. I should have married someone with money. Viri will never have any. Never. You know, it’s terrible to be tied to someone who can’t possibly give you what you want. I mean, the simplest thing. We really aren’t meant to live together. And yet, you know, I look at him making puppets for them, they sit there with their heads close to his, absolutely absorbed by it.”