“Your life,” Marina told her, “is the only real one I know.” Nedra said nothing.
“I’m sorry now that I didn’t go with you.”
“Well, I wasn’t accepted.”
“I know, but you’re one of them.”
The theater was nomadic. One week it was in a rehearsal hall, the next in the ballroom of some rundown hotel. His performances were never the same, whether beneath the lights or during quiet days. They met in cafés. She wore oval, steel-rimmed glasses.
“What are those for?” he asked.
“Very small print.”
“No, you have perfect eyes. I can tell from the color, the clearness.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Of course it does,” he said. “Everything speaks through the body. The way someone moves, how they look at you—from that you can tell worlds if you know what to look for. Everything is visible.”
“Nothing is.”
Their legs were touching beneath the table. “Especially that,” he added.
“These are the real hours,” she said.
The afternoon is fading. She shows him photographs of her family, Franca, forgotten days.
“This is your daughter?”
“Incredibly.”
Later he brings forth, without a word, a picture of his own. It’s a clipping of a Van Dongen painting of Picasso’s mistress, the famous Fernande. She is naked, displayed like a tapestry. The resemblance to Nedra is startling.
“Where did you find it?”
“I’ve had it for a long time,” he said. “Even if you cannot marry, you must have some idea of a wife. So I’ve carried her around. She’s very convenient.”
Nedra felt a spurt of jealousy.
“I don’t believe in marriage, and I have no time for it,” he said. “It’s a concept from another age, another way of living. If you do what you really should do, you will have what you want.”
“That’s true.”
“The Bhagavad-Gita,” he said.
In the evening at the hour when, across small gardens, one can see people gathered in lighted rooms, she lies, her legs each pointing to a corner of the bed, her arms spread wide. From the street comes the faint sound of horns. Her eyes are closed; she is caught like a marvelous beast. Her moans, her cries excite him beyond anything. It takes a long time. Afterwards she lies naked, unmoving. She kisses his fingers. They are bathed in silence, in the long, swimming afterdream. She knows quite well—she is absolutely convinced—these are her last days. She will never find them again.
7
DANNY’S WEDDING TOOK PLACE AT the house of a friend. It was in the country, near Ossining, a wedding somehow old-fashioned despite its youth and informality. The day was warm. It was like Sundays in small villages. Her mother and father were there, of course, her sister, her lover, Juan. She was marrying his brother.
Theo Prisant was taller than Juan, younger, not as well-formed. He was still in school, his last year of law. Before he had ever met her he had heard his brother talk… the daughter of an architect, nineteen, she was fantastic in bed. An incandescent fragment was struck off in some sort of darkness. A longing and envy flooded through his veins.
“What do you mean, fantastic? What’s so fantastic about her?”
“She’s incredible.”
He was eager to meet her, half afraid. When he saw her for the first time, it was as if her clothes fell away before his eyes. He grew dizzy. He hardly dared show interest; he was ashamed of his knowledge. It was a knowledge which doomed him, singing in his ears from the first moment, whispering to his blood.
Their first time together they went to the Metropolitan, up the steps of which her father had once run. It was afternoon, lingering, serene. In the great guarded halls he could hardly look at her though she was at his side. He was aching to talk, to be able to speak to her as if nothing were at stake. He was conscious only of her limbs, her hair, the things he knew she had done. She seemed beautiful and calm. Everything reflected her, everything suggested love: the torsos, the clean, marble limbs, the roll of muscle that encircled the hips of a Greek boy. He was standing a bit behind her. He saw her gaze pass over the shoulders, the stomach, pause at the genitals and scribed, curling hair. It was as if she were scorning him. They walked on; his mouth was dry, he could not even make a joke. She cared nothing about him, he could feel it.
And now in a suit and a straw hat, the kind farmers wear, a dandelion in his buttonhole, he stood, possessor at last of the woman his brother had found, had prepared for him, brought to him unknowing. His face was young, his hands brown from the sun. He had met Viri a number of times but hardly knew him, and Nedra only once. He was waiting for them to arrive.
They were late. They parked where the road had broken and washed away—there were already eight or ten cars—and walked up a small stone path to the house together. It was a house shaded by huge trees. There were glasses gleaming on a buffet table inside, fruit, flowers, cake. The sunlight poured through large windows. Several cats strolled past their feet.
“I’m glad to see you,” Theo told them.
“We’re glad to see you.”
“What a lovely house,” Nedra said.
“Come and meet our host.”
She found her daughters upstairs. They wept together, they wept and smiled. They wiped the tears from Danny’s face that were running in straight lines down to her mouth. When Viri appeared hesitantly at the door, she began to cry all over again.
“What are you crying for?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Me too.”
A vast, brilliant day, the trees sighing, the rooms a bit warm. The ceremony was brief, a cat was rubbing against Viri’s leg. The wedding march was played as the bridal couple entered the reception room. In that moment as he saw his daughter in sun-struck white, near now to another, departing, already gone, he felt a sudden pang of bitterness and loss, as if he had somehow been proved a failure, as if his whole life could be dismissed in a word.
They drank red wine and opened the presents. They turned to Viri for a toast.
“Theo and Danny,” he began. He raised his glass and looked at it. “Come what may, you are entering the true happiness, the greatest that one ever knows.”
They all drank. There was a telegram from Chicago, MAY YOUR LIFE BE STREWN WITH FLOWERS NOW AND FOREVER. SEND PHOTOGRAPHS, ARNAUD. They talked about him; perhaps he knew they would. They told adoring stories. These stories had become his true existence, he was like a character in a play one imitates and admires. He could not fail or disappear. He was like a marvelous guest who leaves early, the memory of him lingering, made stronger by being cut off at just the right moment.
The marriage car departed, abruptly it seemed, suddenly there were waves, farewell cries, it was starting down the road, a Labrador running beside it.
“Well, there they go,” someone said.
“Yes,” Viri agreed.