Evening had appeared. The light was gone. The street outside trembled with buses, with enormous, fleeing cars. Along the river was stretched an endless procession which Viri would join. He would move with it, his legs weary though he had not walked, his neck aching slightly, borne alone homeward, listening to the endlessly repeated news.
8
NEDRA ROSE LATE IN SUMMER AND winter, whenever she could. Her real self lay in bed until nine, stirred, stretched, breathed the new air. Long sleepers are usually nonconformists; they are pensive and somewhat withdrawn. Her hair was rich and clung to her. She bound it in various styles. She bathed it, she wore it damp. One thinks of the ten, the twenty gleaming years of her ascendance. She is a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner; the man seated next to her smiles. She knows what she is doing, that is the core of it; still, how could she know? Her acts are unrepeated. She does not perform. Her face is a face that electrifies—that sudden, exploding smile—and yet, she somehow gives nothing.
Her hair smells of flowers. The day is calm. The sun is still forming, the river is spilling light.
She has no friends, she says. Rae and Larry. Eve. It’s very difficult for her to make friends. She has no time for friendship, she is quickly disappointed. It is the shopkeepers who love her, the people on the street who see her passing, wrapped in herself, staring in the windows of bookstores at the beautiful, heavy volumes of painters, the Italian edition of Vogue.
“Tell her how much we love her and miss her,” the men who have the little shop for soap and perfumes near Bonwit’s cry. “Where is she? We don’t see her now that she lives in the country. Tell her to come by,” they say. They love her height, her elegance, her hazel eyes.
She is interested in certain people. She admires certain lives. She is subtle, penetrating and sometimes mischievous, strongly inclined to love and not overdelicate in the ways that must be taken. All of this is written in her dream book. Of course she does not believe it, but it amuses her and parts of the book are very true. Eve, for instance, is exactly as described. It’s also quite close to Viri.
One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love. Soon after they were married, perhaps an hour after, even Viri longed for this. His possession of her became sanctified; at the same time something in her changed. She became his closest relative. She committed herself to his interests and embarked on her own. The desperate, unbearable affection vanished, and in its place was a young woman of twenty condemned to live with him. He could not define it. She had escaped. Perhaps it was more; the mistake she knew she would have to make was made at last. Her face radiated knowledge. A colorless vein like a scar ran vertically down the center of her forehead. She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.
In the summer they went to Amagansett. Wooden houses. Blue, blue days. Summer is the noontime of devoted families. It is the hour of silence when the only sound is sea birds. The shutters are closed, the voices quiet. Occasionally the ring of a fork.
Pure, empty days. The sea is silver, rough as bark. Hadji has dug a hollow in which he lies, eyes narrowed, bits of sand stuck to his mouth. He always faces the sea. Franca has a black tank suit. Her limbs are shining and strong. She is afraid of the waves. Danny is more courageous. She goes out in the surf with her father; they scream and ride on their bellies. Franca joins them. The dog is barking on the shore.
That whistle of the sea in the long afternoon, the great beds of brown foam, of kelp brought up by the storms, the mussels, the whitened boards. To the west it is steaming, a long, brilliant stretch as if in rain. In the dunes Franca has found the dry husk of a beetle. She brings it, quivering in her hand, to Viri. It has a kind of single horn.
“Look, Papa.”
“It’s a rhinoceros beetle,” he tells her.
“Mama!” she cries. “Look! A rhinoceros beetle!”
She is nine. Danny is seven. These years are endless, but they cannot be remembered.
Viri sleeps in the sun. He is tan, his fingernails are bleached. On Mondays he goes to the city on the train and returns on Thursday night. He is shuttling between one happiness and another. He has a new secretary. They work together in a kind of excitement, as if there were nothing else in their lives. The isolation and indifference of the city in summer, like a long vacation, like a voyage, casts its spell on them. He cannot get over her niceness, the beauty of her name: Kaya Doutreau.
Near him on the beach lie two young women on their stomachs. Beyond them, scattered, are families, clothing, men sitting alone. It’s late. The sea is empty. Down near its dying edge walk a bearded young man in Levis, naked to the waist, and a girl in the slimmest of bathing suits. They are talking, heads down. The new freedom pours from them; their lives seem infinitely useful and sweet.
Sometimes at noon, reflected in shop windows, he sees himself and a child, sees them as if looking into the stream of life, among cakes and Bordeaux wine. For a moment they stand there, their backs to the street. They have almost finished their errands. Her face is against his arm. They are speechless, united. She has a straw hat. Her feet are bare. He is overwhelmed with a sense of contentment. The sun fills the summer town.
They return to the house. The faded sound of car doors closing. Danny is feeding the rabbit near the kitchen step, a black rabbit with two white paws and a spot on his chest; they call it his star. His mouth moves hastily as he eats. His ears lie flat.
In the brimming paper bags Viri finds a carrot. “Here,” he says.
She slips it through the wire of the cage. The rabbit ingests it like a mechanical toy.
“He likes lunch,” she says.
“What about breakfast?”
“He likes that, too.”
“Does he wash his hands?”
The carrot greens are vanishing in little jerks.
“No,” she says.
“Does he brush his teeth?”
“He can’t,” she says.
“Why not?”
“No sink.”
Danny is less obedient; she has a stubborn quality. She is less beautiful. In the summer her leanness and tan skin conceal it. She goes out in the deep water in a rubber tube, daring, kicking like an insect. It is morning, the surf falling forward, its white teeth hissing on the shore. Viri watches, sitting on the sand. She waves at him, her shouts carried off by the wind. He understands suddenly what love of a child is. It overwhelms him like the line from a song.
Morning; the sea sound faint on the wind. His sunburned daughters walk on creaking floors. They pass their life together, in a compact that will never end. They go to the circus, to stores, the market shed in Amagansett with its laden shelves and fruits, to picnics, pageants, concerts in wooden churches among the trees. They enter Philharmonic Hall. The audience is hushed. They are seated, the programs in their laps. To listen to a symphony is to open the book of faces. The maestro arrives. He collects himself, stands poised. The great, exotic opening chords of Chabrier. They go to perfomances of Swan Lake, their faces pale in the darkness of the Grand Tier. The vast curve of seats is lighted like the Ritz. A huge orchestra pit, big as a ship, a ceiling of gold, hung with bursts of light, with pendants that glitter like ice. The great Nureyev comes out after, bowing like an angel, like a prince. They beg each other for the glasses; his neck, his chest are gleaming with sweat, even the ends of his hair. His hands, like those of a child, play with the cape tassels. The end of performances, the end of Mozart, of Bach. The solo violinist stands with her face raised, utterly drained, the last chords still sounding, as if from a great love. The conductor applauds her, the audience, the beautiful women, their hands held high.