"Not just now, I'm not."
"Well, I grant you the Russians are not so humane as they want us to think. All those Eastern empires are police controlled."
"And the dark forest is the soul, but you can't expect to take refuge from the GPU there. I'm not in the mood for wit, though."
"I know," said Ravelstein. "She notified you that you have no more access to her body. Your lease has expired. But it was never meant to be permanent. People can't be expected to live without love or the simulacrum of love. A nice friendly sexual connection is what most have to settle for."
I didn't expect Vela to appear in court when the formalities were completed, but turn up she did in a high-buttoned jacket, more like heraldry than feminine dress, brass buttons from the throat to the knees, with the makeup and tight hair of a ballroom dancer. It is probably impossible to convey the messages she was emitting. I had had my chance, given with extraordinary queenly generosity, and it was obvious that I just didn't have what it took.
She had worked out an esoteric rationality which was utterly un knowable but based on eighteen-karat principles. All the same there was a lame side to her queenliness. If you thought you could say where she was coming from, you were mistaken. "It may have seemed that such a man (Chick) could be my husband, but that was an error-Q. E. D." She walked away in her curious stride, each step forward a dig-only the toes were involved. The heels were on their own. This was not in the slightest grotesque. It was curiously expressive, but no one would ever be able to say what it meant.
Rosamund had not been one of Ravelstein's stars but very good in her way. "She does the work as well as anybody. Her Greek is more than adequate, and she doesn't miss a thing, understands the texts perfectly well. Very nervous and unsure about herself. And she's very attractive, isn't she. Not a voluptuary type but genuinely pretty."
He didn't know it, but I had been, for once, ahead of him. wasn't going to have Ravelstein vet Rosamund for me. I couldn't let him arrange my marriage as he did for his students. If he lacked all feeling for you, he didn't give a damn what you did. But if you were one of his friends it was a bad idea, he thought, for you to take things into your own hands. It troubled him greatly to be kept in the dark on any matter by his friends-especially by those he saw daily.
The ambulance bringing Ravelstein home from the hospital came softly to the curb, and Rosamund and I stood up. I closed the book I had been reading on the letter Keynes had written to his mother about his duties as Deputy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. In silence the wheeled stretcher came by quickly and I saw the smooth naked melon of Ravelstein's head preceding us through the Alhambra arches of the arcade and beyond the shade plants and the water trickling in the mossy basin. Nikki came hurrying after the stretcher through the brass-and-glass doors.
Rosamund and I took the passenger elevator to the top of the building. Mischievous kids pressed all the buttons so that often you stopped at every floor. The continual opening and closing of doors made a fifteen-minute trip of it, and when we reached the top Ravelstein was already in bed-but not in his four-poster. A hospital bed had been ordered, and above it a mechanic was installing a large triangle, equilateral, of tubular stainless steel. Ravelstein could use it to shift his weight. When he had to move to a chair for physical therapy, the base of the triangle was slipped under his thighs. As he weakly gripped the steel tubing the bosun's rig was raised very gradually by the small whirring machine at the foot of the bed. Suddenly you saw his wasted legs being drawn up, out of the sheets. And because he couldn't fully open his eyelids, the look of alarm was only half formed.
He might have been musing over matter, over the physical management of life, the innumerable ways there were to be damaged, wounded, even killed-an unusual line of thought for him. A nurse had suddenly appeared and the mechanic (a technician from the hospital) stood by as her backup. Ravelstein was swung over the side of the bed and lowered, very slowly, into the wheelchair. Dr. Schley's aim was to get Abe on his feet to rebuild his muscles. The long, long legs had no calves and on the white inner arms you could see the veins. You couldn't help but think of the contaminated blood in them. While the nurse tried to cover his genitals, he seemed to be musing over a pressing question-perhaps whether it made sense to struggle so hard for existence. It didn't, but he struggled nevertheless. He gripped the steel, which was probably very cold, the two fists were close to his big ears, near the occipital hair that stuck out, below the bald line. There are bald heads that proclaim their strength. Ravelstein's head had been like that. But now it had become the vulnerable kind. I believe he knew what a picture he made, "piped over the side" in a naval sort of rig, wide open to terror-to ridiculous hysteria. By now, however, he was detached from his triangle and already sitting in the wheelchair; the triangle slipped out from under him, and Nikki took him on a tour of the flat. Rosamund and I followed from room to room.
Nothing had been disturbed. Maintaining the apartment were the two ladies-the Polish woman Wadja, who did the real cleaning on Tuesdays, and black Mrs. Ruby Tyson (far too old for real work), who let herself in on Fridays. Mrs. Tyson's function was to keep up the dignity of the households where she worked. To Wadja, Ravelstein was just another loud Jew-her savage imagination had pictured the money he controlled, and he was rowdy, incomprehensible. Ruby understood him better: he was a professor, a mysterious white personage. As nearly as any honky could, he took into account her problems with her prostitute daughter, her jailed criminal son, and with the other son whose HIV troubles and scrambled wives and children were too complicated to describe. On quiet afternoons he, Ravelstein, would sometimes listen, sympathetic, half dreaming, to Ruby Tyson s stories-really beyond his reach or interests. The old woman presented herself as quiet, dignified, and sadly reserved. You can imagine how Ravelstein would have listened; the chaos the life of such people must be. This good old woman had learned the white game from the deans, provosts, and other academic bureaucrats whose beds she made, and whose parlors she dusted. And, of course, their family problems, the esoteric, psychiatric secrets of their wives, she would tell Ravelstein by the hour. In his apartment she did nothing; most of the time for which he was charged she sat on a bar stool in the kitchen. Now and then she climbed down and baked a pie. The stout, strong, aggressive Wadja attended to the scrubbing and scouring. It was Wadja who moved the furniture, cleaned the toilets, ran the vacuum, scoured the pots, washed the crystal. Easily overheated, she took off her dress and her slip. She worked in a giant bra and swelling Zouave bloomers.
At the sight of him in the wheelchair Wadja's face was torn between compassion and irony-a cocked eyebrow. A mass of suspended comment slid down the pug-nosed slope of her face. Well, it was very bad! But then, he was a Jew as well. You sometimes heard her muttering "Moishala" as she wiped or polished objects. Feeble in the earliest days, Ravelstein greeted her with a lifted forefinger, saying to Nikki, "For God's sake, keep her away from the Lalique."
"She swishes the wine glasses under the tap," Ravelstein said to me. "She chips them on the faucet. I showed her the damage. She started to weep. She said she'd buy me new glasses from Woolworth's. I said, 'You know what those Lalique glasses cost?' When I named a figure, she grinned. She said, 'You jokum, Mister.'"
"You told her the price?"
"You can't help thinking these women are just as rough with men's penises," he would say. "Just imagine-if they were glass."
A certain amount of documentation might be offered at this point to show what I was to Ravelstein and Ravelstein to me. This was never altogether clear to either of us-the principals. Ravel stein would have seen no point in talking around this. He said he was more than satisfied that I could follow perfectly well everything that was said. When he was sick, we saw each other daily and we also had long telephone conversations as close friends should. We were close friends-what else needs to be added? In my desk drawers I find folders containing pages and pages about Ravelstein. But these data only seem to go into the subject. There are no acceptable modern terms for the discussion of friendship or other higher forms of interdependence. Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.