In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  “It’s practical,” Leo said, amused and unperturbed, smoking his cigar.

  “I’m surprised you let him run around this way,” she told Louise. “But of course you always let him do just what he likes. You’ve never known how to control him.”

  “No,” Louise said. There was a big brown leather pouf which she drew up close by Leo’s armchair. She sat down on it; she leaned her broad back against his leg and he let her rest there.

  “It’s my opinion,” Regi was saying, lying opposite them on the sofa, “that a woman has to use her influence with a man. She must mold him, make him into a better person, or what’s the point of a relationship?”

  She felt Leo looking at her over the top of Louise’s head. He had always looked at her with amusement, and she didn’t know that it was a different kind of amusement now. Unconsciously, in a movement that was ancient and instinctual in her, she coquetted one hip and her legs at him. She thought this was still effectual—and why not? since her clothes and hair and jewelry were as bright as ever and her teeth even better for she had had them all capped. She was particularly proud that she had kept her figure, unaware that it was no longer svelte but completely skeletal.

  “All you’ve done all your life,” she accused Louise, “is spoil him.”

  “It’s my birthday,” Louise said cheerfully, “you can’t make me quarrel with him today.” He dug his leg deeper into her back and this gave her great happiness and security.

  “I give you up as a bad case,” Regi said. “And my head is splitting. I wish Ralph were here to give me my head massage, he’s so gentle, you have no idea; when he does it, I just go to sleep like a baby.”

  Mark, leading a washed Natasha by the hand, came into the salon: “We want to cut the cake.”

  “Call your mother,” Leo said.

  “Mother won’t come. She’s in Gran’s bedroom.”

  “I’ll get her,” Leo said. He stubbed out his cigar and withdrew his leg from behind Louise’s back without warning, so that she toppled and had to steady herself.

  Leo went into Louise’s bedroom. He shut the door behind him. He looked down at Marietta lying on the chaise longue—a very different sight from Regi laid out in the salon. Leo ran the tip of his tongue over his lips, which were as full and moist as ever.

  “Leo, please go away and leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “But I want to talk to you very much.”

  He turned the key in the door to lock it. He lowered his great bulk on to the end of her chaise longue. He said: “Anyway, I think it’s time you and I had a little chat together.”

  “Thank you very much. I don’t need an analyst.” Marietta couldn’t help laughing—here she was lying on a couch and there was Leo, who had by now a reputation for his own brand of psychospiritual therapy, sitting at the foot of it.

  “No,” Leo said, “that’s not what I was thinking of at all.”

  Marietta couldn’t believe it: he put his big heavy hand on her, first on her ankle, and then as she watched incredulously, he let it slide upward on her calf, and then under her dress, on her thigh and next he slid it in the top of her tights. “You’re crazy,” she said—but she herself seemed to be, for she was still laughing.

  Leo just kept on. He didn’t say anything more; he couldn’t, he was breathing too heavily.

  “Crazy,” Marietta was repeating. She too was beginning to pant a little—but with what? Here was the man she detested more than anyone else in the world—an ugly old man who was bringing his hands into her most secret places, and she didn’t do anything except laugh and say “crazy.” Then she said, “Not now, Leo” and “Not here.” “Why not here and now,” he said, and anyway things had gone too far. He lay on top of her and held her with one hand and with the other he fumbled at the placket of his ludicrous nursery suit. Marietta was in a turmoil of conflicting feelings. Principally, there was fear: supposing this delicate little chaise longue broke beneath them (he was very heavy); or if they made too loud a noise, he in his excitement or she in whatever it was she was in, and the others—Mark! Louise!—heard them and came and rattled at the door? And then there was fear of him too, on top of her and so big; and fear of herself—of what she was feeling now, more intensely, if the truth were told, than with anyone ever before, just as the hate she had for him was more intense than anything she had ever had for any other man.

  Louise and Mark were lighting the candles on the cake. They had carried it into the salon and stood it on a round marble table there, near Regi, so that she could enjoy it too. But she wasn’t enjoying it; she looked at them with a jaundiced eye as they lighted all those candles. And as if that weren’t bad enough, there was a big sixty written in icing in the center. “There’s absolutely no need to shout it out over the housetops,” Regi grumbled. On her own birthday she never had more than just one candle.

  They had got them all lighted now—no, there was one left, Mark saw it and lighted it, and then he said, “I’m going to get Mother.” He went to Louise’s bedroom, and when he found it locked, he was really annoyed and called angrily through the door.

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming!” Marietta called back.

  And in fact, she and Leo soon reappeared. Then all was ready. Even Regi managed to get up and they stood around the blazing cake and sang for Louise who held her hands clasped before her—one of them with a widow’s two wedding rings—giving thanks in her heart for such an abundance of happiness with all her dearest ones around her.

  Marietta went to India every year, and on her sixth visit she had her most meaningful encounter there, or her deepest immersion and enchantment (after that, it all went downhill). This was when, on Ahmed’s recommendation, she visited a woman singer who lived in a town in a Rajasthani desert state. Her name was Sujata; she was a Hindu woman though, as happened often among musicians, with Muslim affiliations. Sujata received Marietta lavishly; at first because Ahmed had sent her and because she was a foreign guest, and then afterward for her own sake, as a friend.

  Marietta had never had a friend like Sujata. She was a queen, regal in her personality and in her manner of living. She had a large, strangely assorted, ill-defined household where it was impossible to tell who was who and why they were there: except that they were there because of her, living on her bounty and in her affections. Growing up in a family of courtesans where every girl was taught to sing, dance, and be delightful to men, Sujata had turned out to be one of those jewels that every family like hers hopes and prays for—a great singer. Her fame soon spread, and she became very much in demand to sing at weddings, state and public entertainments, and former royal courts. Her fees rose and so did her status and that of her entire family. They gave up their room on the floor of a house divided up between a dozen families like theirs and rented one that was entirely their own. It became known as Sujata’s house and retained the name long after her death and when the rest of her family was scattered.

  Marietta never discovered where everyone slept in the house except that a great many of them slept together, crammed side by side into some little room or out in the courtyard. Marietta herself, as an honored guest, was the only one besides Sujata to be given a room of her own. It was a tiny, whitewashed cubbyhole from where she could hear and smell all that went on in the house: the instrumental and vocal music, the ankle bells and stamping dancer’s feet, the smells of clarified butter and essence of jasmine, of rotting garlands and bad drains. The only time the house was silent was not in the night—something was always going on then—but during the hottest part of the day, in the early afternoon. At that time everyone sank down in the coolest corner they could find, too sleepy to eat or fight or even find work for the shriveled little servant boy who was at everyone’s beck and call. Sujata retired to her room; often she invited Marietta to come in and lie beside her on the mattress which took up almost the entire floor, covered with a white sheet and many bolsters and cushions. The room was kept as cool as possible with water sprink
led on fragrant grass screens and a noisy fan churning from a corner, but Sujata was very large and very hot and the scent she used gave out a pungent, hot smell. She loved touching Marietta. She spanned her hands around Marietta’s waist, marveling that they went all the way around; she compared Marietta’s slim thighs with her own huge ones deeply inscribed with white stretch lines; not to speak of Marietta’s little pink-nippled breasts and the brown mountains Sujata carried. Sujata admired her and kissed her and gave her shiny pieces of silk to wear.

  They communicated in a mixture of Hindi, English, and common feeling. Sujata told her about her beginnings as a singer when she had been taught by her grandmother. She remembered her grandmother as very old—though actually she couldn’t have been much older than Sujata was now. Her voice had been too cracked for her to sing, but she had retained her sharp mind, her sharp ear, and an exquisite sensibility to the finest nuances of music. This made her an excellent though very exacting and impatient teacher, and all the girls in the house tried to hide when it was time for their lesson with her. Sujata also tried to hide, but her grandmother always found her and dragged her out and then those terrible lessons began. But slowly Sujata began to realize that, terrible though they were, full of blows, curses, and tears, she wanted them; and once, when her grandmother had failed to find her hiding place, she had come out on her own to have her lesson. For there were those moments of pitch and intensity when suddenly she got something right—she never knew how, but suddenly she was in some higher place she hadn’t suspected was there, though her grandmother seemed to know all the time that it was: and when it happened, her grandmother gave out a cry and pressed Sujata’s head into her lap, so that forever afterward when—unexpectedly, always unexpectedly—she reached some highest moment of her art, her feelings of rapture and recognition became mixed up with the memory of her grandmother’s lap and the darkness there and smell of unwashed clothes and tobacco and betel.

  Marietta saw a lot of little old women around the house, former singing and dancing girls who could no longer practice their profession and had to be taken care of. One of these was Sujata’s mother. Weak, silly, and pleasure-loving, she had not played much of a part in her daughter’s early life—there were always plenty of others to look after children in the household—so that Sujata had hardly been aware that she was her mother. Until the grandmother died: then, while that frail, tough old corpse lay on her bier, smothered in flowers and with her jaw tied up, at that moment of grief and loss, Sujata’s mother had remembered that she had a daughter, and clinging to Sujata, stifling her in her embrace, she had screeched that now only her daughter was left to her and all her hopes and life lay in her. And Sujata, holding the plump, aging little courtesan in her arms, had accepted the charge; and along with her, that of all the others whom her grandmother had ruled over—the light-minded girls and the equally light-minded and even more carefree little old women that they became—Sujata understood that now it was her turn to protect and provide for them.

  Sujata also had a daughter—a low-spirited, discontented girl who wanted nothing to do with the family profession and was certainly unfit to learn any of its arts. Ambitious for her to have an education, Sujata had sent her away to boarding school and afterward to college. Only the girl wasn’t smart enough for so much higher education, and for this she blamed her mother and Sujata also blamed herself. The daughter was the result of a relationship Sujata had had with a rich businessman who had been her protector for many years. Sujata had respected but not loved him, and now it was as if all the love she hadn’t had for the father was lavished on the daughter—who looked exactly like him, with the same muddy complexion and flabby features of his merchant caste. Sujata felt she could not do enough for this girl, she wanted her to have everything in the world there was to enjoy; but the girl suffered from bad digestion and enjoyed nothing, and the more the mother tried to do for her, the more surly she became and even sometimes seemed to hate her; but that only spurred Sujata on to further feats of loving and giving and she spent much time thinking up what more she could possibly do for her to make her happy.

  Love: Sujata lived for it. Not one love but many, and of many different kinds, shading off into each other so that it was difficult to know where one ended and another began. There was her son—a different story altogether from her daughter. Her son’s father had been a pimp and occasionally a pickpocket, an unworthy youth in every way—but what charm, what sweetness and tenderness and delicacy! Of course he had disappeared long ago—evaporated like a drop of dew, except that here he was again in the son he didn’t know existed. The boy was a replica of his father: playful, beautiful, irresponsible—Sujata hated these qualities in him and also hated herself for being nevertheless unable not to adore them in him as she had in his father. It was all just a vicious circle she had got herself into—of boundless love where she was as ready to die for this feckless boy as she had been for his father (and nearly had when he left her).

  And now, what was worst of all, worse than anything, Sujata was in love again. Yes, and with a boy—her son’s friend, the same age as her son—but the way she loved him was not as a son, it was with sex and everything. It was shameful, and she was ashamed, knowing perfectly well that the time for all that was past; and in communicating all this to Marietta, Sujata did sometimes cover her face in shame. But when she raised it again, it was flushed with laughter that became as uncontrollable as the tears falling from her eyes in streams. Then she grew very serious and very seriously she asked Marietta, as though expecting her to have the answer, that if it was so wrong to have these feelings, then why were they sent? Why did they come to a human being—as suddenly, unexpectedly, irresistibly as those notes of perfection, those high moments of highest art that her grandmother had taught her to lie in wait for? If it was wrong, if it was shameful, then why was it there? And why was it so glorious?

  In his younger days, Leo had traveled all over the country trying to establish different centers, which usually collapsed once his back was turned. He had spent many years in California and had a whole different life out there that Louise knew nothing about; all she knew was that, at unspecified intervals, he would suddenly appear in the city, in her apartment, and take over his usual bedroom there. Sometimes he stayed a day, sometimes three weeks, and would not be heard from again till he turned up the next time.

  It was his habit, when he came on one of these sudden visits, to dash in, unpack, have a bath, dress, telephone, and dash out again. Louise was expected to help him in all these practical chores, and usually she loved to do it, down to scrubbing his back where he sat in the tub. Bruno was also kept busy. It was his task to answer the telephone and take down messages for Leo, and he was as meticulous, not to say fussy, in this as in everything he did. There would have been work for Marietta too, but she locked herself in her own room and practiced modern dance movements to her phonograph played very loudly.

  Every now and again, Louise had her moments of rebellion. One morning, when Leo had just got in from Los Angeles and was in a great hurry to be off to a series of appointments, she remained in her bedroom and sat on the bed and brooded. When Leo called to her from the bathroom to come and scrub his back, she didn’t answer but stayed where she was, one elbow supported on her knee, her brow on her clenched fist. He had to call several times more before she would go to him—and then not joyfully as she usually did but with dragging feet.

  Leo liked very hot baths and the bathroom seemed to be dissolving in vapors. More hot water was running, making the tub overflow with bubbles out of which Leo emerged pink, plump and naked as a pagan god.

  He urged her to hurry; he held out the loofah to her, sticking it out of the bath like a trident. She didn’t take it; she said, “No, leave me alone,” and put her hands behind her back. Leo stopped singing; he turned off the tap; he listened in silence and apparently with respect while she broke out: “You don’t write, you don’t call, you don’t even know if I’m alive or dead. I
don’t know if you are. Weeks and months.”

  “I called you—when was it?—in March.”

  “From a phone booth, collect.”

  “I was on my way somewhere.”

  “Yes, you were in a hurry. You must have been at a gas station—”

  “Right. On my way to Santa Barbara.”

  “—and you jumped out of your car full of other people and dashed in the phone booth and dashed out again so you could drive on and get on your way with all these other people that I don’t even know who they are. I’m tired of it,” Louise said; and continued: “And all the time I think, when’s he coming? I want it so much that I can’t understand why it’s not happening. I wait for the mail—I look at the phone and it’s all dead and doesn’t ring and when it does it’s someone else, it’s never you. I can’t live like that. It’s not worth living like that.”

  “Yeah,” Leo agreed. He didn’t defend himself; he just sat there waiting, still holding the loofah sticking out of the bubble bath; till at last she approached the tub and sat on the edge of it and took the loofah from him. His back rippled with pleasure as she scrubbed it. She did this thoroughly, and though not sullenly, yet as a heavy duty: as something laid upon her that she couldn’t escape.

  It was a strange fact that the one thing Leo had always found difficult to get out of Louise was money. They had had plenty of scenes and arguments about it, starting from way back when they had first got to know each other. In fact, the subject had come up on his very first visit to Louise. This was a few days after they had been introduced at Regi’s. Leo had come to follow up that introduction—not only with Louise but with several of the other ladies he had met there. Although no promises had been exchanged, each of them seemed to expect him; he had that capacity for arousing expectations. So, like the others, Louise was not in the least surprised to see him when he called. He sat with her in her huge salon, under the chandelier hanging down in clusters of swollen grapes, and unfolded his huge plans; and so excited her that she had to hold herself down by clutching the edge of her chair. He talked brilliantly, sometimes flicking his tongue over his lips; he too was excited—by his own plans (he really meant them), by her excitement, and also by her presence. In the same way that his tongue flicked over his lips, his eyes flicked over her—her strong hips and thighs pushing through her dress. They talked on one level, they felt on another. It was all beginning. At the end of a long afternoon, he got up—young, plump Adonis that he then was—and stretched himself and smiled. She too smiled and got up and gave him her hand. He took it and held it and they exchanged looks laden with promise. But when he said he needed a hundred dollars, her expression changed, and she withdrew her hand. He went on smiling.