Eve seemed worn, resigned. Arnaud had gone. He had never been the same, anyway. Whether it was physical or not, no one knew. She was thinking of remarrying her husband.
“Are you serious?” Nedra asked.
“We’ve talked a lot about it. Perhaps we should try it again. We do have a lot in common.” Nedra did not reply.
“He’s gone on a diet,” Eve said. “He looks quite well.”
“It wasn’t his weight that caused trouble.”
“He’s just showing that he wants to change. You don’t think it’s a good idea?”
“I don’t know. It just seems…”
“What?”
“That you’ve been through so much.”
“To be going back to the beginning, you mean?”
“It seems like giving up.”
“What can you do?”
“Let’s have some wine,” Nedra said. She drove to Vermont for an interview. She was nervous. There were fifteen or twenty others. They waited on benches near the barn. Kasine was receiving applicants in the kitchen. Sometimes half an hour would pass before the door would open, sometimes longer.
She waited through the afternoon and into evening. No one brought them food or anything to drink. They sat in silence. It became dark. It was April; it grew cold. Finally it came her turn. She felt weary. Her legs were stiff. She entered the house through a screen door.
Kasine was sitting at a bare table in dark glasses. He wore a chalky, black suit. She saw him in the village the next day in the same worn suit, a brief case in his hand like an accountant or lecturer. At the end of the table, impassive, sat Richard Brom. During the whole interview he said nothing.
She told them she’d had no experience. She told the truth: that somehow, without knowing, she had been preparing herself. Physically she was supple, strong. She had no responsibilities, no needs, she was free to devote herself completely. She had been reading St. Augustine…
“Who?”
“The Confessions,” she said.
“Yes, go on.”
There was the passage about our backs being turned to the light and our eyes seeing things lit by the light but not the light itself. That was what had overwhelmed her: the things lit by the light. She turned to look at Brom who sat immobile, as if not listening, as if in dreams.
“How old are you?” Kasine asked. He was looking at his hands clasped together on the table.
“Forty-three,” she said.
There was silence, as after a final question, the one that will linger. She felt a moment of helplessness, of anger.
“But that means nothing,” she assured them.
“We are a theater company,” Kasine said simply. If they accepted a young actress, he explained, she would of course grow older…
Yes, yes, she wanted to interrupt. She knew what would follow.
“I think for the present,” he said, “you should study elsewhere and see what happens. Perhaps it will make clearer whether or not there is a possibility for you here.”
This was the man who had written that just as the greatest saints had first been the greatest sinners, so his actors came from the most hopeless, the most desecrated and unlikely material he could find. But it was all the same—a woman asking for a passport, a work permit, anything; no matter what she said, she was no longer young.
“Age is not a true measure,” she said. “Surely nothing is so arbitrary here. I have more to learn, yes, but at the same time I know more.”
“It’s unfortunate,” Kasine said.
They were immune to her. She could not see the eyes of the man with whom she was speaking, she hardly dared glance at the other. She had shown them everything, her honesty, her devotion, it was not enough.
“Thank you for coming here,” he said.
There were four or five people still waiting. She tried to reveal nothing as she walked past them. She was like a woman leaving a cathedral, descending the steps, unapproachable, her face grave.
At midnight there was a knock on her door. A man was standing there holding something forth. It was Brom.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Come in.”
The room was cold. It was a novice’s room, bare floor, a small lamp. He did not smile, but neither was he distant. The range of possibilities of his mouth alone seemed infinite, but laid aside.
“Are you finished?” she asked.
“Not quite.”
She had washed her face. It was naked, the lines about her mouth and eyes were faint but eternal. She was a woman who had read, dined in restaurants, a woman to whom nothing need be explained.
He was a man of one talent, he had no minor interests, no flaws. He was like an illiterate, a martyr; there was no possibility for him either to the left or right. The severity of his life, its spareness, could be writ in an epitaph, a single line.
The land beyond the window, the trees, the dark hills were in moonlight. The moon itself was too large, too white. He had a chest like a runner’s, flat as boards. His arteries were thick, like a horse that has galloped. She was later to search them for scars. His fingers were strong.
It was as if they were aboard ship: some old, island steamer, clean and uncomfortable, the doors to the cabins thin. They were the only passengers.
“I think you’re discouraged,” he said. “Don’t be. You will find the way. You’ll find your new life.”
“I feel I’m just beginning to swim,” she said.
“I think you know how very well.”
“I’m just finding the river.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s only a question of having water.”
That was the first passus. A little later she added, “Except that now I want to fly.”
In the morning he gave her a small silver object from around his neck. It was a primitive fish, smooth as a dime. He allowed it no history. It was a kind of pass-safe; it would see her home.
She was living in a studio that Marina kept. It was down among trucks and littered streets. A couple with a child lived on the floor above her, she heard them arguing.
She bought a bedspread that was tan and rose, incense, dried flowers. There were books by the bed, a collection of magnifying glasses, a clock. Her daughters called her every day. She complained of nothing. She was filled with strength.
She wore the glinting fish and that alone beneath her dress when Brom came. Sometimes they had dinner late, after he had performed. He ate only lean meat then and salad, he drank wine, afterwards a bit of fruit. Scriabin was playing, Purcell. When he slept beside her, he was silent, still. His power did not leave him, it lay coiled. He was not muscular, but he was strong, like rope. They made love slowly. He was motionless, only an invisible flexing, faint as the gills of a fish. Her knees began to jerk. Moans came from her lips. Fifteen minutes, twenty, she was staggering, crying, he held her tightly, her arms against her sides, and began to roll a little one way and the other in a slow, meaningless annunciation. She was jerking like a slaughtered beast, the great, unstinted strokes had started, long, unending, like the felling of a tree. His hand was across her mouth as she tried to cry out, he was reeling, he fell as if shot from a foot away, abrupt, inexplicable.
An exhausted sleep from which she could not wake, a drunkard’s sleep. The night air poured over them. From the avenue came the sound of trucks.
A breakfast of chocolate and oranges. Reading, falling again into sleep. He said very little. They were deep in contentment; it was full, beyond words. It was like a day of rain.
Sometimes she went to see him perform. She sat in the audience, hidden among them, feasting on the sight of him, nourished by everything that existed between them and was unknown. She went to be able to watch him endlessly, to hoard, to steal his face, his mouth, the power of his thighs. Satisfied at last, she went to have a drink with Eve or dessert and coffee at the Troys’; they did not ask where she had been, they introduced her, she was more welcome than their guests, she was stunning, drunk with life, provocation written all over her. She was a woman both husband and wife liked to see, she excited them, they could talk in her presence, things that would have been unmentioned became easy, and at the same time the sweep of her life assured them somehow of the virtue of their own. She was living on more than she had, it was evident in her face, her every gesture; she would spend it all. They were devoted to her as one is devoted to the idea of life drunk in gulps. Her fall would confirm their good sense, their reason.