Ravelstein threw his head back at this. Shutting his eyes he flung himself bodily backward into laughter. In my own different style I did the same thing. As I've said before it was our sense of what was funny that brought us together, but that would have been a thin, anemic way to put it. A joyful noise-_immenso giubilo__-an outsize joint agreement picked us up together, and it would get you nowhere to try to formulate it.
In those days, Rosamund had a long ride on the elevated train. She crossed the huge breadth of the city, and she had the faces of her fellow passengers to train her thoughts and feelings on. She brought me the week's mail and the phone messages. For two years she had been my graduate-assistant, typing and faxing for me. Vela was condescending to her and would not even invite her to sit down. I would offer Rosamund a cup of tea and try to make her comfort able. Although slightly threadbare, Rosamund was ultra-neat, but Vela considered her a frumpy little thing. Vela's airs were grandly aristocratic. She bought herself very expensive costumes in strange materials like ostrich hide. One season she bought ostrich only-a large ostrich hat in bushranger style, with follicles from which the feathers had been pulled. She had an ostrich-hide bag slung over her shoulder and ostrich boots and gloves. On her full professor's salary, she had lots of money to spend. Her straight-profiled beauty was the only kind of beauty that mattered.
Vela said, "Your little Rosamund is dying to take care of you."
"I think she believes I'm happily married."
"In that case why does she always bring a bathing suit?"
"Because it's a long hot trip on the El and she enjoys swimming in the lake."
"No, it's because you can see her beautiful figure. Otherwise she'd go swimming at her own end of town."
"She feels safer here."
"You don't spend all your time dictating letters."
"Not all of it." I granted that.
"Well, what do you talk about-Hitler and Stalin?"
These, to Vela, were contemptible topics. Compared to chaos physics, they didn't even exist. And she was born, mind you, within an hour's jet flight of Stalingrad, but her parents had conspired to keep her impeccably innocent of the Wehrmacht and the gulags. Only her own esoteric studies mattered. Still, Vela curiously had a talent for politics. She made certain that people would think well of her. It was her wish that they should see her as a warmhearted, friendly, generous person. Even Ravelstein said of her, "People are flattered by her attentions. She buys the most expensive birthday presents."
"Yes. It's a funny thing how she attracts acquaintances and turns them away from me. I don't feel like getting into a spending con test."
"What are you trying to tell me, Chick, that she's some kind of space alien?"
I was familiar now with Ravelstein's ideas on marriage. People are beaten at last with their solitary longings and intolerable isolation. They need the right, the missing portion to complete themselves, and since they can't realistically hope to find that they must accept a companionable substitute. Recognizing that they can't win, they settle. The marriage of true minds seldom occurs. Love that bears it out even to the edge of doom is not a modern project. But there was, for Ravelstein, nothing to compete with this achievement of the soul. Scholars deny that Sonnet 116 is about the love of men and women but insist that Shakespeare is writing about friendship. The best we can hope for in modernity is not love but a sexual attachment-a bourgeois solution, in bohemian dress. I mention bohemianism because we need to feel that we are liberated. Ravelstein taught that in the modern condition we are in a weak state. The strong state-and this was what he learned from Socrates-comes to us through nature. At the core of the soul is Eros. Eros is overwhelmingly attracted to the sun. I've probably spoken of this before. If I speak of it again it's because I am never done with Ravelstein and he was never done with Socrates, for whom Eros was at the center of the soul, where the sun nourishes and expands it.
But in some respects I thought better of Vela than Ravelstein did. He was not vulnerable to her sort of charm. I on the other hand continued to see what others saw in her-crossing a room, dressed very expensively, so rapidly planting her toes that her heels hardly ever touched the ground. She had original notions about walking, talking, shrugging, smiling. American acquaintances thought that she was the soul of European gracefulness and elegance. Rosamund herself thought so. I explained that under it all there was really a special kind of attractive clumsiness. But all the prestige, her reputation in her branch of physics, the fat salary she was paid, her inimitable toppling glamour, were too hard for any woman to compete with. Rosamund would say, "What an unusually beautiful woman she is-waist, legs and everything."
"True. But there's a hint of artificiality about it. Like a stratagem. Like a lack of affect."
"Even after such a long marriage?"
I had hoped to make it work with Vela because I had had earlier marriages. But I had more or less given up the fight and for a dozen years or so had made no claims on Vela. In the morning she would slam out of the house and I would turn to my tasks and spend my days at them. Ravelstein, from the other side of the city, checked in on the telephone for an hour or two. At least once a week Rosamund came by public transportation from Ravelstein's end of town. I often suggested that she hire a cab but she said that she preferred the El train. Rosamund said that George, her fiancй, thought the El was perfectly safe. The Transit Authority policed them more effectively here than in New York.
Picking up Ravelstein's habit I taught her the term _louche__-dubious. Nothing like a French word to neutralize an American danger.
Everything just then was going from bad to worse. I had come back after the funeral of my brother in Tallahassee in time to see my surviving brother, Shimon, on what turned out to be the last day of his life. He said to me, "You're wearing a beautiful shirt, Chick-that's got class, the red-and-gray stripe."
We were sitting together on the rattan sofa. His cancer-wasted face wore the usual pert look of good humor.
"But I hear you want to buy a diesel Mercedes. I advise you not to do it," he said. "It'll be nothing but trouble." He was vibrating with the final urgency or restlessness. It was all but over now, so I promised not to buy the diesel. Then he said, after a long exchange of silent looks, that he wanted to climb back into bed. He was too far gone to do this. He had been a ball player once with strong legs, but the muscle now was all gone. I watched from behind, trying to decide whether to intervene. He had nothing left to do his will with. And then his head twisted toward me and his eyeballs turned up-nothing but blind whites. The nurse cried out, "He's leaving us."
Shimon raised his voice and said, "Don't get excited."
This was what he said often to his wife and to his children when they differed or began to quarrel. Not to let things get out of hand was his function in the family. He was unaware that his eyeballs had rolled back into his head. But I had seen this in the dying and knew that he was leaving us-the nurse was right.
After his funeral in the very same week, a few days before my birthday, I was loud and angry, kicking at Vela's bathroom door when I remembered my brother's call for calm, very nearly the last thing he had said. So I left the house. When I came back that night I found a note from Vela; she was sleeping over with Yelena, another Balkan-French woman.