"Yes. We come into his establishment and he chats us up in French. And this courtesy is possible, though we are Jews, because we can answer in acceptable French…."
"I like to hear you when you're drunk, Chick, talking and sketching freestyle. You're right to insist that Kurbanski has a sad look…."
Ravelstein had come to agree that it was important to note how people looked. Their ideas are not enough-their theoretical convictions and political views. If you don't take into account their haircuts, the hang of their pants, their taste in skirts and blouses, their style of driving a car or eating a dinner, your knowledge is in complete.
"One of your best pieces, Chick, is the one about Khrushchev at the UN pulling off his shoe and banging it on the table. And almost as good is your sketch of Bobby Kennedy, when he was the Senator from New York. He took you along on his Washington rounds, didn't he?"
"Yes. For one whole week…"
"Now that was one of your sketches that held my interest," said Ravelstein. "That his Senate office was like a shrine to his brother-a huge painting of Jack on the wall. And there was something savage about his mourning…."
"Vengeful, was what I said."
"Lyndon Johnson was the enemy, wasn't he. They had gotten rid of him by making him vice president-a kind of errand boy. But then he was Jack's successor. And Bobby needed arms to retake the White House. Full of hate. They were very handsome men, both brothers. Bob was half the size of Jack," Ravelstein said, "but an alley fighter. Most amusing of all were those walks from the Senate office building to the Capitol. Those were wonderful questions he asked you-like, 'Tell me about Henry Adams.'
'Brief me on H. L. Mencken.' If he was going to be President, he thought he should know about Mencken."
It thrilled Ravelstein to talk about celebrities. At Idlewild, once, he had spotted Elizabeth Taylor and for the better part of an hour tracked her through the crowds. It especially pleased him to have recognized her. Because she was so faded, it took some doing. She seemed to know that her glamour was gone.
"You didn't try to talk to her?"
"Uh-uhn."
"As a best-selling author you were on equal footing with other celebrities." But no. He and I were sitting, as we had sat for years, in his living room, and he was in his Japanese gown. It fell away from his body on all sides. His bare legs were like prize-winning marrows because his ankles were so swollen-"That fucking edema!" he said. The top half of Ravelstein was as lively as ever. But the disease was gaining on him, and he knew it as well as any doctor. Not only did he talk more about the memoir I was appointed to write but he had curious things to tell me. About the persistence of sexual feelings, for instance. "I've never gotten so hot," he said. "And it's too late in the day for partners. I have to ease myself…."
"What do you do?"
"A hand-job. What else is there? At this stage, I'm humanly out of the running." The thought of it made me flinch. "I'm fatally polluted. I think a lot about those pretty boys in Paris. If they catch the disease they often go back to their mothers, who care for them. My old lady is a poor thing, now. Last time I saw her I asked, 'Do you know me?' and she said, 'Of course. You're the fellow who wrote that famous best-seller everybody talks about.'"
"You told me that."
"Well, it's worth repeating. Her second husband is also in a finishing school for nonagenarians. I'll beat them both, though. At this rate, I'll reach the finish line before my mom. Maybe I'll be waiting for her."
"That's aimed at me, isn't it?"
"Well, Chick, you've often talked about the life to come."
"And you're a self-described atheist, since no philosopher can believe in God. But this is no belief with me. It's only that my amateur survey shows that nine people out often expect to see their parents in the life to come. But am I prepared to spend eternity with them? I suspect I'm not. What I'd prefer would be to be accepted to study the universe, under God's direction. There's nothing original about this, unless it is after all a tremendous thing to grasp the collective longing of billions of people."
"Well, we'll soon find out, you and I, Chick."
"Why? Do you see the signs of it in me?"
"I do, yes, to be frank about it."
As if he were ever anything else.
Oddly enough, I didn't mind hearing this from him. He might, however, have given a thought to Rosamund. He was at times not quite clear about my connection to her-naturally disoriented by his illness. He had assumed the role of the benevolent intercessor, counselor, arranger. This was, in part, due to the influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the political theorist and reformer. But he had initially been drawn to Jean-Jacques by his strong belief in the love that knits persons and societies together. At times he might admit that Rousseau, the genius and innovator whose ideas-his great mind-had powerfully dominated European society for more than a century, was (almost necessarily) himself a nutcase. To get a bit closer to the principal topic here, he had been taken by surprise when he learned that in marrying Rosamund I had not bothered to consult him. I was willing to admit that he might know more about me than I myself knew, but I was not about to put myself in his custody and rely on him to run my life for me. It would also be unjust to Rosamund. I shan't make speeches here about dignity, autonomy, and all the rest of that. She and I had been together for something like a year before Ravelstein knew that we were what tabloid journalists would call "an item." I have to say, however, that when we did get married he was quite good-natured about it, showing no resentment. People were doing naturally what people always had done. The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether. I was perfectly willing to amuse him by being typical, true to form. In the final months he reviewed his opinions of his close friends and favorite students and found that he had been right about them all along. I had never told him that I had fallen in love with Rosamund because he would have laughed, and told me that I was being an idiot. It's very important, however, to understand that he was not one of those people for whom love has been debunked and punctured-for whom it is a historical, Romantic myth long in dying but today finally dead. He thought-no, he saw-that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement. I'm not going to describe Eros, et cetera, as he saw it. I've done too much of that already: but there is a certain irreducible splendor about it without which we would not be quite human. Love is the highest function of our species-its vocation. This simply can't be set aside in considering Ravelstein. He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his judgments.
He often spoke well of Rosamund. He said she was earnest, hard-working, had a good mind. She was a pretty and lively young woman. Young women, he said, were burdened by what he called "glamour maintenance." Nature, furthermore, gave them a longing for children, and therefore for marriage, for the stability requisite for family life. And this, together with a mass of other things, disabled them for philosophy.
"There are young women who think they can keep a husband alive forever," he said.
"Do you think that covers Rosamund's case? I almost never think of my calendar-years. I'm forever hiking across the same plateau with no end in sight."
"There are significant facts that have to be lived with but you don't have to let them engross you."
When he referred to his sickness it was almost always in this oblique way. Ravelstein was making his final arrangements. Nobody volunteered to talk to him about them. The one exception was Nikki. But Nikki was, in a special sense, family. If Ravelstein had a family it would be an exotic one, because he had no use for families.
Nikki, the handsome Chinese prince, would inherit. The rest of us in one degree or another were not heirs but friends.