by Lore Segal
It was a barn of a restaurant and they were the only patrons. The table was not big enough for their party, so Aziz and his friend and the proprietor sat at another table. The lone singer on the wooden platform accompanied himself with a steady driving beat on a curious stringed instrument. Herb sat beside Ilka, and Ilka said, “If he were American he’d be tossing his hips and showing his glottis, and yet he gets in the same amount of sex standing ramrod straight and sliding his tones like diphthongs.”
Boots said, “What’s wrong with tossing your hips?”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong…”
“I didn’t say you did,” said Boots, “but yougotchawatchout for people putting America down.”
“I wasn’t putting it down,” lied Ilka. “I meant some cultures do things one way and some another, which is interesting.”
“That’s right!” Boots held out her glass and said, “Gimme one more whatchucallit. Like some women flash their ankles, and some women flash their smarts.”
Ilka reddened and said, “That’s true! That’s just what I do! That’s clever of you!” She looked at Boots with surprised admiration.
Boots said, “Gotchawatchout for people with their vocabulary walking off with other people’s husbands.”
Ilka blinked, looked and was staring down the two sheer abysses of Boots’s pale eyes that had no bottom, and no surface from which Ilka could have caught the rebound of something as distinct as hatred.
* * *
—
Ilka sat in the car, silent, her throat blocked while the well-bred Dotty Tottenham persevered in worrying about her lawn, which she had left in the care of a friend’s son home for the hols. Ilka was subliminally grateful for the warmth of Herbert’s thigh alongside her own. In her imagination Ilka was explaining herself to Boots: “You’re accusing me of something I accused myself of. You’re using ammunition that I gave you, against me. And what good does it do you to squeeze me into the narrowest idea of me?” Ilka longed for Leslie. Ilka tried to think that Boots had not meant what Boots had meant.
* * *
—
The Ithaca lay asleep in the cradling water. The little foyer, empty except for their drunken, yawning selves, looked seedy. Had the light in here always been so brown? The marbleized linoleum was all worn in front of the purser’s desk and in front of the triangular corner counter.
Boots said, “I’m dead. Aziz, that was a really great, great, great evening. You’re an ab-so-lute love! Listen, what do we owe you?”
The stout friend was gone. Aziz drew up his slender young person, threw his head back, and laid his hand upon his heart. “You are my guests, the guests of my country.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Boots. “I don’t know what you make, but I can just about imagine it’s not enough to take eight people out to dinner, and god knows what those cars and hookahs and those roses set you back for. You’d make life a lot easier for everybody if you’d tell us and we’ll divvy it up between us and go to bed. Otherwise we’re going to stand here till we figure it out which is going to be a real pain.”
Aziz kept shaking his head. He covered his eyes with his hand.
Boots said, “I’ve got my pen. Anybody got a piece of paper?” She and Tom Tottenham leaned their heads over the purser’s desk and started counting the dishes in the restaurant on the water plus the ouzo. “Aziz, did we drink two or three bottles of that other thing—what’s it called?”
Aziz put his forehead on the counter with the postcards and the toothpaste and covered his ears.
* * *
—
Herbert had got up to say goodbye. Ilka was glad it was so early she would not be likely to see Boots again, but here was Boots with her morning face, in her robe. Boots embraced Ilka, Ilka embraced Boots. They exchanged addresses. Ilka looked back from the little launch chugging through the sheer white dawn and waved to Boots and Herbert waving from the ship’s railing.
* * *
—
Leslie had said, “Let’s not have confusion. I’ll come and meet you when you get through custoMs. Sit in the waiting area and I will find you.”
The area was under reconstruction. A temporary screen cut off Ilka’s view of all but the approaching feet. The variety of women’s shoes and ankles was an entertainment, but Ilka learned that she wasn’t sure she would know Leslie’s shoes in a crowd. Did Leslie wear cuffs on his trousers? Ilka could tell those gray ones weren’t Leslie: Leslie would not saunter to meet Ilka. And he was too heavy for the bounce of those flannels; that was a young man. The navy pants were running, and Leslie did not run. That pair of good brown shoes, not new, driving at a steady forward pace toward Ilka—Leslie was coming.
FROM
HALF THE KINGDOM
THE ARBUS FACTOR
On one of the first days of the New Year, Jack called Hope. “Let’s have lunch. I’ve got an agenda,” he said. No need to specify the Café Provance—nor the time—fifteen minutes before noon when they were sure of getting their table by the window.
They did the menu, heard the specials. Hope said, “I’m always going to order something different,” but ordered the onion soup. Jack ordered the cassoulet saying, “I should have fish. And a bottle of your Merlot,” he told the unsmiling proprietress, “which we will have right away.”
“We’ll share a salad,” Hope said. She watched Jack watch the proprietress walk off in the direction of the bar: a remarkably short skirt for a woman of fifty. Hope saw the long, bare, brown, athletic legs with Jack’s eyes. Jack, a large man, with a dark, heavy face now turned to Hope. “So?”
“Okay, I guess. You?”
Jack said, “My agenda: If we were still making resolutions, what would yours be?”
Hope’s interest pricked right up. “I’m thinking. You go first.”
Jack said, “Watch what I eat. It’s not the weight, it’s the constantly thinking of eating. I don’t eat real meals unless Jeremy comes over.” Jeremy was Jack’s son.
Hope said, “I’m going to watch what I watch and then I’m going to turn the TV off. It’s ugly waking in the morning with the thing flickering. It feels debauched.”
Jack said, “I’m not going to order books from Amazon till I’ve read the ones on my shelves.”
Hope said, “I’m going to hang up my clothes even when nobody is coming over. Nora is very severe with me.” Nora was Hope’s daughter.
The wine arrived. Jack did the label-checking, cork-sniffing, tasting, and nodding. The salad came. Hope helped their two plates. Jack indicated Hope’s hair, which she had done in an upsweep. “Very fetching,” he commented.
“Thank you. Here’s an old resolution: Going to learn French. What’s the name of my teacher when we got back from Paris? I once counted eleven years of school French and it was you who had to do the talking.”
Jack said, “I want to learn how to pray.”
Hope looked across the table to see if he was being cute. Jack was concentrated on folding the whole piece of lettuce on his fork into his mouth.
Hope said, “I’ll never understand the theory of not cutting it into bite sizes.”
The onion soup came, the cassoulet came. Jack asked Hope if she would like to go back.
“Back? Back to Paris!” Jack and Hope had lived together before marrying two other people. Jack subsequently divorced his wife who had subsequently died. Hope was widowed.
“To Paris. To Aix,” said Jack.
“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Hope said. “Were you and I ever in this garden together? Did we walk under century-old trees? Did we lie in the grass and look up into tree crowns in France, or in England? Was it an old old English garden? Is this a garden in a book?”
“What’s to stop us?” Jack said.
There were a lot of reasons, of course, that stopped them from going back. Two of the littlest were this moment flattening their noses against the outside of the restaurant window. Ten-year-old Benjamin stuck his thumbs i
n his ears and wiggled his fingers at his grandfather. Hope made as if to catch her granddaughter’s hand through the glass. Little Miranda laughed. “I’m just going to the bathroom,” Hope mouthed to her daughter, Nora, out on the sidewalk.
“What?” Nora mouthed back, her face sharpened with irritation. “She knows I can’t understand her through the window,” Nora said to Jack’s son, Jeremy, and Julie, the baby in the stroller, started screeching. Jack said, “You stay with the kids. I’ll go in and get him and see what she wants.”
Jeremy walked into the restaurant passing Jack and Hope on his way to the corner where, an hour ago, he had folded up his father’s wheelchair. Hope stood up, came around the table, kissed Jack, and got kissed goodbye.
“On the double, Dad!” Jeremy said, “I need to get back to the office.”
“I’ll call you,” Jack said to Hope. “We’ll have lunch.”
Hope mouthed to her daughter through the window.
“Julie, shut up, please! Mom, WHAT?”
Hope pointed in the direction of the ladies’ room.
Nora signaled, You need me to go with you?
Hope shook her head, no. One of the reasons for the Café Provance, was that its bathrooms were on the street floor, not down a long stair in the basement.
Gathering coat and bag, Hope opened the door into the ladies’ room and saw, in the mirror behind the basins, that her hair was coming out of its pins. She took the pins out and stood gazing at the crone with the gray, shoulder length hair girlishly loosened. Hope saw what Diane Arbus might have seen. She gazed, appalled, and being appalled pricked her interest. “I’ve got an agenda: The Arbus factor in old age,” Hope looked forward to saying to Jack the next time it would be convenient to Jeremy and Nora to arrange lunch for them at the Café Provance.
THE ICE WORM
The nurses on the rehab floor had assumed that Ilka Weiss would transfer to the eleventh floor for residents, but the daughter, Maggie, came once again, and took her mother home. Ilka lay on the couch and Maggie brought a blanket. Young David helped her to tuck and pat it around his grandmother’s legs. “So, go on with the story,” the child said.
“So, the next time King David went down to fight those Philistines…” went on his grandmother.
“Jeff and I try and stay away from the fighting parts,” Maggie said.
“Mom, you can go away and take Stevie,” the child said. “Stevie, stop it.” The baby’s newest skill was turning pages and he was practicing on the King James Bible on Ilka’s lap.
She said, “Not to worry. I know the story in my head. Let’s let Mommy and Stevie stay, because we’re coming to the baaaad stuff.”
“Go on,” the little boy said.
“And King David,” went on Ilka, “was a great soldier, the soldier of soldiers, but he was getting old. King David was tired. His spear was an encumbrance.” She demonstrated the difficulty with which the aging King David drew this weapon out of its sheath. “His armor felt too heavy. Climbing up the hill, he had to reach for one little low bush after the other because his balance wasn’t what it used to be. He watched his young soldiers with a thrill of envy—with a thrill and with envy—how they ran on ahead while he stood and just breathed. Couldn’t tell if it was his hiatus hernia, his heart, or an attack of anxiety because all three felt the same.”
“And,” young David prompted.
“And Isbibenob, a Philistine of the race of giants, was wearing his new armor. His spear weighed three hundred shekels.” Ilka lightly swung the idea of that superhuman weight over her head. “He was about to strike King David down when—Stevie, if you don’t leave King James alone, Grandmother can’t check the name of the fellow—here he is, in verse 17: Abishai. Who came and struck Isbibenob to death.”
“Mom!”
“Sorry!” Ilka said. “And King David’s men said to King David, ‘You’re becoming a liability. Next war, you’re staying home.’ And there was another war.” Ilka looked apologetically at her daughter. “And there was another giant. He had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—which is how many digits, quick!”
“Twenty-four.”
“Very good,” said Ilka. “And this giant with his twenty-four digits just laughed at King David, and mocked him.”
“Why?” asked the boy in a tone of strong disapproval.
“Why? Why indeed!” said his grandmother. “Because King David was old? Because he was a Hebrew? Just because he was on the other team? But King David’s nephew—his name was Jonathan—came running, and Jonathan knocked that mocking, laughing giant down, just a little bit. Knocked the wind out of him.”
Young David suggested, “They should have tried talking it out,” in which he was going to remember being reinforced by a hug from his mother, and his grandmother’s kiss on the top of his head, for both women were against striking people dead, and the younger believed there was something one could be doing about it.
“They should have talked,” Ilka agreed, “without precondition. And now,” she went on, “King David got really, really old and stricken in years. They brought him a blanket and another and more blankets but he could not and could not get warm.”
“How come?” asked the boy.
“Because he was old,” Ilka said. “And King David’s men said to him, let us go out and find you a beautiful young girl to lie with you.”
“What for?” young David asked.
“To make him warm. The blankets hadn’t done any good. They sent out throughout all the land and found a beautiful young girl. Her name was Abishag the Shunammite and they brought her to the king.”
“Did she want to come?” asked young David.
“That is a troublesome question,” said his grandmother.
“I always thought it was horrible,” said his mother.
“Yes, it was! Well, hold on, now. You know,” she said to David, “how your mommy had to rush me to Emergency, and then I was in the hospital, and after that I had to go to rehab, and now your mommy has brought me back, and your daddy is coming in half an hour to take you and Stevie home, and mommy is going to stay and take care of me? Maybe Abishag was one of those people who stay and take care of people, like your mommy, because she is good, which is a great mystery to the rest of us.”
“Mom, don’t,” said Maggie irritably. “I do it because I want to.”
“Which,” said Ilka, continuing to address the child, “is another mystery. Good people don’t think they are being good when they like doing the good thing. If they did it with gritted teeth, then they would think that it was good! Isn’t that funny of them?”
The little boy was listening to the old woman with an alert, bemused look.
“And Abishag,” said his grandmother, “was young and beautiful and she cared for King David.”
“And made him warm.”
“No.”
* * *
—
“I’ve got an appointment with a Ms. Claudia Haze at the Kastel Street Social Service Office,” Maggie said to her husband. “Will you keep half an ear open for my mom?”
“I have an appointment downtown,” Jeff said.
Maggie asked Jeff what time he had to leave. Jeff asked Maggie when she expected to be back.
Maggie said, “That’s anybody’s guess. You’ll pick the boys up?”
“If I’m back in time.” We need not pursue a discussion of the daily logistics where both parties are married to their own priorities.
* * *
—
The man behind the desk at Kastel Street was not sure if Ms. Haze was in. He hadn’t seen her around.
Maggie said, “I have a 2:30 appointment.”
The man picked up the office intercom. He was in his fifties and had an unhealthy pallor suggesting skin dank to the touch. He wore a dark suit and his narrow tie looked to have been knotted by the hangman’s hand. Maggie imagined a wife who had married him, sat across from him at supper when he came home after a day behind his desk
in Kastel Street, who lay beside him in their bed. With the phone at his ear the man said, “Not at her desk. She may not have got back from lunch or have left for the day, but as I say, I haven’t seen her around.”
“It took me a week and half to get this appointment!” wailed Maggie.
“What I can do,” the man said, “is take down your information and leave it for her on her desk in her office.”
“Oh, okay,” said Maggie, “I guess. The argument I wanted to make to Ms. Haze—could I sit down?”
“Turn one of the chairs around.”
“Great. Thanks. I wanted to argue the advantage to the city if the department makes it possible for me to keep my mother at home.” The man behind the desk wrote down Maggie’s facts and dates on a lined yellow pad. “The first time I brought my mother home, the visiting nurse came Tuesdays, but we maxed out on the four-hour, three-afternoons-a-week caregiver, and by the time I’d got a sort of permanent home arrangement practically nailed down, my mother was back in Emergency.”
“And you’re back to square one!” said the man. His teeth were terrible but something not unsympathetic lurked about his mouth.
Maggie said, “So now I brought her home and the visiting nurse comes. The four-hour caregiver is no great shakes, but she comes. She’s okay. I sleep on the couch in my mom’s room. Rehab taught her to put on her stockings and shoes without having to bend down.”
“They’re good,” the man said. “Come a long way teaching the old people to do for themselves.”
“When she wakes up and starts putting her stockings and her shoes on, I get up and I tell her, Mom! This is two o’clock, middle of the night. She shakes her head. We laugh, get her back into her bed. Twenty minutes later she wakes up and puts her stockings and her shoes on. I get up…”
