“You know what I mean.”
“Maybe I do. You know, you look wonderful. You look better than when I first met you. It’s natural, but I’ll tell you something you don’t realize. You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It’s not true. It’s very hard to find.”
“I haven’t been looking for it.”
“It’s like a tree,” he told her, “it takes a long time to grow. It has roots very deep, and these roots stretch out a long way, farther than you know. You can’t cut it, just like that. Besides, it’s not your nature. You’re not a child, you’re not interested simply in sensation. I don’t have another woman, I’m not married, I have no children.”
“You can marry.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Things will change.”
“Nedra, you know I love Franca. I love Danny.”
“I know you do.”
“It isn’t fair, what you’re saying.”
“I’m tired of looking on both sides of things,” she said simply.
She was above bickering. She had decided.
Her children became for her all there was, so much so that the remark of Jivan’s, about loving them, disturbed her. Somehow she found it dangerous.
Her love for them was the love to which she had devoted her life, the only one which would not be consumed or vanish. Their lives would be ascendent when hers was fading, they would carry her devotion within them like a kind of knowledge which swam in the blood. They would always be young to her; they would linger, walk in the sunshine, talk to her to the end.
She was reading Alma Mahler. “Viri, listen to this,” she said.
It was the death of Mahler’s daughter who had diphtheria. They had gone to the country and suddenly she became sick. It grew quickly worse. On the last night a tracheotomy was performed; she was choking, she could not breathe. Alma Mahler ran along the edge of the lake, alone, sobbing. Mahler himself, unable to bear the grief, went to the door of his dying child’s room again and again, but could not bring himself to go in. He could not even bear to go to the funeral.
“Why are you reading that?” Viri asked.
“It’s so terrible,” she confessed. She reached over and touched his head. “You’re losing your hair.”
“I know.”
“You’re losing it at the office.”
“Everywhere,” he said.
She was sitting in the armchair covered in white, her favorite chair—his, too; one or the other was always sitting in it, the light was good for reading, the table was piled with new books.
“Oh, God,” she sighed, “we’re in the grocery store of life. We sit here at night, we eat, we pay bills. I want to go to Europe. I want to go on a tour. I want to see Wren’s cathedrals, the great buildings, the squares. I want to see France.”
“Italy.”
“Yes, Italy. When we’re there, we’ll see everything.”
“We couldn’t go until spring,” Viri said.
“I want to go this spring.”
The thoughts of travel thrilled him too. To wake in London, the sunlight falling, black cabs queued outside the hotels, four seasons in the air.
“I want to read about it first. A good book on architecture,” she said.
“Pevsner.”
“Who is that?”
“He’s a German. He’s one of those Europeans who become strangely at home in England—after all, it is the civilized country—and live their entire lives there. He’s one of the great authorities.”
“I’d like to go by boat.”
The winter night embraced the house. Hadji, who was growing old, lay against a sofa, his legs stretched out. Nedra was borne by a dream, by the excitement of discovery. “I’m going to have some ouzo,” she said.
She poured two glasses from a bottle Jivan had brought at Christmas. She looked like a woman for whom travel to Europe was an ordinary act: her ease, her long neck from which there hung strings of Azuma beads, putty, blue and tan, the bottle in her hand.
“I didn’t know we had any ouzo,” he said.
“This little bit.”
“Do you know how Mahler died?” Viri said. “It was in a thunderstorm. He’d been very sick, he was in a coma. And then at midnight there came a tremendous storm, and he vanished into it, almost literally—his breath, his soul, everything.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“The bells were tolling. Alma lay in bed with his photograph, talking to it.”
“That’s exactly like her. How did you know all that?”
“I was reading ahead in your book.”
As they stood on the corner near Bloomingdale’s, the crowd passing, brushing against them, the buses roaring by, she said to Eve, “It’s finished,” by which she meant everything which had nourished her, most of all the city beyond the far margins of which she had found refuge, still subject to its pull, still beneath a sky one end of which glowed from its light.
Passing through the doors of the store she looked at those going in with her, those leaving, women buying at the handbag counters ahead. The real question, she thought, is, Am I one of these people? Am I going to become one, grotesque, embittered, intent upon their problems, women in strange sunglasses, old men without ties? Would she have stained fingers like her father? Would her teeth turn dark?
They were looking at wineglasses. Everything fine or graceful came from Belgium or France. She read the prices, turning them upside down. Thirty-eight dollars a dozen. Forty-four.
“These are beautiful,” Eve said.
“I think these are better.”
“Sixty dollars a dozen. What will you use them for?”
“You always need wineglasses.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll break?”
“The only thing I’m afraid of are the words ‘ordinary life,’ ” Nedra said.
They were sitting at Eve’s when Neil arrived. He had come to visit his son. The room was too small for three people. It had a low ceiling, a little fireplace covered by glass. The whole house was small. It was a house for a writer and a cat, off the street at the end of a private alley, a disciplined writer, probably homosexual, who occasionally had a friend sleep over.
“Too bad about Arnaud,” Neil said.
“It’s horrible.”
“Eve says he… may never talk right again,” he said to the water glass. He had a thin mouth, the words leaked out.
“They don’t know.”
“Would you like some tea?” Eve asked.
“Let me make it,” Nedra said, rising quickly to her feet. She disappeared into the kitchen.
“Rotten weather, isn’t it?” Neil murmured after a pause.
“Yes.”
“It’s a lot colder than… last winter,” he said.
“I guess it is.”
“Something to do with the… earth’s orbit… I don’t know. We’re supposed to be entering a new ice age.”
“Not another one,” she said.
4
THE SEASONS BECAME HER SHELTER, her raiment. She bent to them, she was like the earth, she ripened, grew sere, in the winter she wrapped herself in a long sheepskin coat. She had time to waste, she cooked, made flowers, she saw her daughter stricken by a young man.
His name was Mark. He made beautiful line drawings, without shadow, without flaw, like the Vollards of Picasso. He resembled them; he was lean, his legs were long, his hair faded brown. He came in the afternoons, they sat in her room for hours with the door closed, sometimes he stayed for dinner.
“I like him,” Nedra said. “He isn’t callow.”
Afterwards Franca looked up the word. Destitute of feathers, it said.
“She likes you. She says you’re feathered.”
“I’m what?”
“Like a bird,” she said.