“You’d better get her out of here,” Nedra whispered.
“Don’t worry.”
“He’s going to get her into bed, I can see it.”
“She’s had a little too much to drink,” Jivan said.
“Yes, but nothing that you gave her.”
“She told me she didn’t like the wine.”
“Why are you whispering, Nedra?” Viri called.
“It’s fun,” she said, smiling.
She poured more brandy. She was like a silver Christmas helix, a foil decoration turning slowly, the dazzle descending only to reappear time after time.
“You play beautifully,” she said.
She excused herself to say good night to the children. Viri went up afterwards. He kissed his daughters. Sitting on their beds, he felt the warmth of their rooms, the chambers in which they slept and dreamed, were secure. Their books, their possessions filled him with a sense of accomplishment and peace. On the stairs he heard voices, the sensual chords from below. Kate was sitting near Arnaud. Her teeth had a bluish cast to them, the blue that flourishes on pure white, in diamonds. He had a moment of concern for her—no, not concern, he realized, but covetousness. He was like a sick man as he thought of her, stricken and unhappy. The pain he felt was a phantom pain, like that in the toes of a missing leg. It was only desire, which he hoped would leave him, which he prayed would not.
Nedra was talking to her. “I wish I’d had your courage when I was your age,” she said.
Kate shrugged. “I don’t really like California.”
“At least you’ve lived there. You’re seeing what it is.”
“My mother doesn’t like the idea. She’d like us to be married.”
“Yours is a better way,” Nedra said.
She poured them each a little more brandy. Jivan and Viri were listening to the music; Arnaud sat sprawled near the fire, his head back, his eyes closed. The snow was still falling, even the roads had disappeared.
The elegance of the evening, the dishes remaining on the table, the ease with which Nedra and her husband treated each other, the understanding which seemed to stream from them, all of this filled Kate with a feverish happiness, that happiness which lies within the power of another to confer. She was drenched with love for these people who, though they had lived nearby all through her childhood, it seemed she was suddenly seeing for the first time, who were treating her as someone she longed at that moment to be: one of themselves.
“Can I come and see you while I’m here?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“I mean, I really like to talk to you.”
“I’d love to see you,” Nedra said.
One afternoon, then. They would walk together or have tea. She had never set foot beyond the borders, this woman Kate suddenly loved, this woman with a knowing face, not at all sentimental, who leaned on her elbows and smoked small cigars. She had never traveled, not even to Montreal, and yet she knew so well what life should be. It was true. In her heart she carried an instinct like that of a migrant species. She would find the tundra, the deeps, she would journey home.
Arnaud’s eyes were open. They were uninquisitive, calm, a signal that he was returning slowly. His face was soft, like a child’s. “For some reason, I am being urged to sleep,” he murmured. “Your house is so warm and good.”
“You may do anything you like,” Nedra said. “You should have anything you want.”
There was a silence. “You told me that once before,” he decided.
“And I’ve always practiced it.”
“Anything I want… you’ve practiced that?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m waking up,” he said.
He had not moved, but his eyes were alert. He was bearlike in his languor. One saw his innocence—that is to say, the innocence of great actors—as he came awake. “You’ve stopped playing, Kate,” he said.
She began again. She struck a few mournful chords, they fell slowly from her narrow fingers. In her thin girl’s voice, her head down, she began to sing. She sang on and on. She knew endless words, they were her true eloquence, the poems she believed in. The sheets, they were old, and the blankets were thin…
“My first boyfriend used to sing that,” Nedra said. “He took me for a weekend to his family’s summer house. It was after the season, they were all gone.”
“Who was that?” Viri said.
“He was older than I was,” she said. “He was twenty-five.”
“Who?”
“I had my first avocado there. I ate it, pit and all,” she said.
Three
1
AT SIXTEEN, FRANCA CHANGED. She began to fulfill her promise. As if in a day, the way leaves appear, she suddenly had the power of self-possession. She woke with it one morning, it was bestowed upon her. Her breasts were new, her feet a little large. Her face was calm and unfathomable.
They were close, mother and daughter. Nedra treated her like a woman. They talked a great deal.
The world was changing, Nedra told her. “I don’t mean changes in fashion,” she said. “Those aren’t really changes. I mean changes in the way one can live.”
“For instance.”
“I don’t think I know. You’ll feel it. You’ll understand far more than I do. The truth is, I’m rather ignorant, but I am able to feel what’s in the ground.”
There is warmth in families but not often companionship. She loved talking to Franca, and about her as well. She felt that this was the woman that she herself had become, in the sense that the present represents the past. She wanted to discover life through her, to savor it for the second time.
There was a party at Dana’s one evening during the holidays. Dana, whose face already had a curious dead expression, one almost of resentment, but after all, what can you expect, as Nedra said, the father a drunkard, the mother a fool. She was reading a book on Kandinsky that night, heavy, beautiful, the paper smooth. She had seen his exhibition at the Guggenheim, for the moment she was dazzled by him. In the silence of the evening, in that hour when all has been done, she opened it at last. He had come to painting late, she read; he was thirty-two at the time.
She called Eve. “I love this book,” she said.
“I thought it looked good.”
“I’ve just started reading it,” Nedra said. “At the beginning of the first war he was living in Munich, and he went back to Russia. He left behind the woman—she was a painter, too—that he’d been living with for ten years. He saw her again just once—imagine this—at an exhibition in 1927.”
The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
She laid the book down open beside a few others. She wanted to think, to let it await her. She would go back to it, read again, read on, bathe in the richness of its plates.
Franca came home at eleven. From the instant the door closed, she sensed something wrong. “What is it?” she asked.
“What is what?”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It was terrible.”
“How?”