Four
1
THEY WERE DIVORCED IN THE fall. I wish it could have been otherwise. The clarity of those autumn days affected them both. For Nedra, it was as if her eyes had been finally opened; she saw everything, she was filled with a great, unhurried strength. It was still warm enough to sit outdoors. Viri walked, the old dog wandering behind him. The fading grass, the trees, the very light made him dizzy, as if he were an invalid or starving. He caught the aroma of his own life passing. All during the proceedings, they lived as they always had, as if nothing were going on.
The judge who gave her the final decree pronounced her name wrong. He was tall and decaying, the pores visible in his cheeks. He misread a number of things; no one corrected him.
It was November. Their last night together they sat listening to music—it was Mendelssohn—like a dying composer and his wife. The room was peaceful, filled with beautiful sound. The last logs burned.
“Would you like some ouzo?” she asked.
“I don’t think there is any.”
“We drank it all?”
“Some time ago.”
She was wearing slippers and brown velvet pants. On her wrist were bracelets of silver and bamboo, her hair was loose. She was leaving to achieve a life, even though she was forty. She used the figure forty, in truth she was forty-one. She was miserable. She was content. She would do her yoga, read, calm herself as one calms a cat. Monkey breed tirty, tirty-two times each minute, monkey lib twenty years. Frog breed two, tree times each minute, go beneat mud in winter, frog lib two hundred years.
“That’s insane,” Viri had said. “Frogs don’t live two hundred years.”
“He’s thinking of something else.”
“They’d be as big as we are.”
She would have difficulties, of course, but she did not fear them. She was confident of what lay beyond. Perhaps—so many thoughts and ideas, most of them brief, came to her—she would even achieve, in the end, a kind of new, more honest understanding with Viri; their friendship would deepen, unfettered at last. In any case, she could imagine it as she could imagine many things. She was turning away from all that was useful no longer; she was turning to face what might come.
The next day she left for Europe. The car stood before the house in the late afternoon. From afar it seemed like any other departure, like one of the thousands that preceded it.
“Well, goodbye,” she said.
She started the engine. She turned on the radio and left quickly. The road was empty. The lights of nearby houses were on. In the early darkness, going swiftly, she passed the ghostly white fence of the field where Leslie Dahlander had ridden her pony. The silence of that meadow bade goodbye to her in a way that nothing else had. It was solemn, dark, like the site of a sunken ship. The pony was still alive. It had foundered; it was in a field beyond the house. And now she began to weep, without bowing her head, tears for someone’s dead child streaming down her face as the six o’clock news began.
Viri was left in the house. Every object, even those which had been hers, which he never touched, seemed to share his loss. He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light—that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained.
“Perhaps we should go out to dinner,” he said to Danny.
They hardly spoke. They ate in silence, like travelers. When they returned to the house, it stood lighted and empty like some hotel in the outskirts, open but lost.
“Hello, Hadji,” he said. “We got you something good to eat. Poor old Hadji, your mother’s gone.”
He held the dog in his arms. The gray muzzle lay against his chest, the stiffened legs hung down. Danny was cutting into scraps the steak they had brought back.
“Don’t worry, Hadji,” Viri said. “We’ll take care of you. We’ll still have fires. When it snows we’ll go down to the river.”
“Here, Papa.” She handed him the dish. She was crying. “Poor Danny.”
“I’m all right. I’m just not used to it yet.”
“No, of course not.”
“I’m going upstairs.”
“I’ll light a fire,” he said. “Perhaps you could come down in a while.”
“Yes, perhaps,” she said. She was like her mother, provisional, discreet. She had a fuller figure than Nedra and a somewhat cruel mouth, the lips soft and self-indulgent, the smile irresistible, sly. Her face had the sullen resignation of girls who are studying subjects they see no use for, girls betrayed by circumstance, forced to work on Sundays, girls in foreign brothels. It was a face one could adore.
2
THAT WINTER NEDRA WAS IN Davos, which she had been mistakenly told she would find an interesting town. It was oppressive even when covered with snow. The sun was dazzling, however. The air, clear as spring water, filled her room.
At lunch one day she was introduced to a man named Harry Pall.
“Where do you live, in Paris?” he asked her.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“You look like Paris,” he said. He poured wine generously into his glass, then gestured with the bottle toward hers. “I’d love some,” she said.
His hair was curly, his eyes a fading blue. He was fifty, with a large torso and a face coming apart from age like wet paper. He dominated the table with his power and voice, and yet there was something in him that touched her immediately. It was the resemblance to Arnaud. He was like some battered survivor of the same family, the older brother who would die without pain, convivial, still joking, leaving a hundred dollars for the nurse. His hands were paws. He was the last of the bears, or so it seemed. Wine, stories, friends; he was a man lying fully clothed in the stream of days.
“I don’t want to leave anything,” he confessed. To his ex-wife, definitely not. “She has everything, anyway, except my lawyer’s home telephone number.” To his son, that was different. He would leave his son some mistresses, “Like Dumas did.” He laughed. “You’re sure you’re not from Paris?”
“Why do you say Paris?”
“You’re tall, like a Dior model.”
“No.”
“An ex-Dior model. There’s a time in life when everything becomes ex—ex-athlete, ex-president, expatriate, x-ray.” The food was spilling from his fork. He found it again. He ate steadily. “Where are you staying?”
She named the hotel.
“In Davos?” he exclaimed. “Terrible town. You know it’s the setting for The Magic Mountain. What are your plans for dinner? I’ll take you to the Chesa, it’s my favorite place in Europe. You know the Chesa? I’ll come by for you at seven.”
He rose abruptly, settling the bill amid cries from friends which he ignored, waved and walked out. She saw him putting on his skis, his face red from the effort. He had an extraordinary face, a face on which everything was written, lined, coarse, like the bark of a tree. The glass he had been drinking from was empty, his napkin was thrown to the floor. When she looked again he was gone.
She returned to her hotel in the late afternoon. There were no letters. A subdued race of people was leafing through the Zurich and south German papers. She asked for tea to be sent to her room. She took a hot bath. The chill of the day which was part of its glory began to leave her in feverish waves, and a sense of well-being, of bodily delight replaced it. Afterwards, as after all deep pleasure, she was a bit undone. It was evening. The last, cold light had gone. A vague disorientation came over her, a feeling of nonexistence. Swallows were screaming over the stained roofs of Rome. The sea was crashing at Amagansett on a beach gray as slate. She was pulled by terrestrial forces to places far away. She could not seem to summon herself into the present, into an hour as empty as that before a storm.