The others rushed forward to help her up. She was hurt but no one suspected how badly—except Eric who had seen old ladies slip and fall more than once before, on the ball-room floors round which he had led them in the fox-trot, the peabody, and the old-fashioned waltz. They usually broke a hip and had to be taken away in an ambulance; once, one of them had died before they could even call the ambulance. Some of them died in the hospital, but others came out again and hobbled around a while longer. However, none of them ever came back to dance again.
After Mark had gone to join the others in the dining room, Natasha didn’t want to stay in the house with them. She walked down the hill to wait for him in Jeff’s cottage. She hoped he wouldn’t be long because, with the wood stove gone out, it was cold in there. She huddled in the garbage-dump armchair, with her hands in the pockets of her coat; her breath came in vapors. The cold outside seemed to be taking over the deserted cottage as if it were a dead tree with a hollow trunk.
She was relieved when she heard a car and got up to lift the latch from the door. But it was Leo who rushed in—like a wild man, wearing nothing over his monk’s robe, his silver ornament swinging. He didn’t say anything but his eyes rolled around the room, and when all he saw was Natasha, he said, “Where have they gone?”
She couldn’t tell him; she really didn’t know. She said, “Has Grandma come?”
He seized her arm as if she were unwilling to go with him; though at the same moment she was saying, “Take me back to the Academy.” He hustled her into his car. She was surprised to see that it was his own car—a very small red sports model that he had had for thirty years. His followers wouldn’t let him drive it anymore because it was so old and also because he was such a mad, erratic driver. And he drove madly now, with Natasha beside him: the tiny car lurched and groaned as he wildly, doggedly drove it over the slippery road; it heaved and thumped and boiled. Natasha, who had never learned to drive, didn’t realize how dangerous it all was. Instead, she was glad to be speeding back to the Academy where Louise and Marietta were waiting with Regi and the birthday cake.
But after a time she realized that he was driving in the wrong direction, not toward but away from the Academy. It took some time longer before she plucked up courage to point this out to him. It was doubtful whether he heard her: he was hunched over the wheel, wheezing as loudly as the old car, his heavy, sack-like body lurching every time the car lurched from one side of the road to the other. Natasha said it again: “Leo, we’re going the wrong way.”
He was muttering; he was saying, “I’m going to find her. We’ll find her.” It was crazy. He looked and sounded crazy. His face was inflamed, his nose swollen, tears were coming out of his eyes and falling down his cheeks onto the steering wheel. He was making sobbing sounds like a baby or a very old man. Natasha was awestruck: “He really loves her,” she thought. At the same time, this thought depressed her, for it seemed to her that there just wasn’t enough love to go round and never would be—not here, not now—with everyone needing such an awful lot of it.
Although it was still afternoon, dusk was falling—imperceptibly, for all day the clouds had not cleared and there was no sun to set, only sky and white earth to fade together into a colorless twilight. This was relieved by one single star that had appeared and glowed dimly in midair. It didn’t occur to Leo to turn on the lights—he was too sunk in other thoughts that made him mutter as he lurched and drove and wept. It seemed to Natasha that the pale twilight, the fading earth were swallowing them up, sucking them in, as into water or clouds. Nevertheless, she was glad to be there with him: not that she could do anything as, blinded with tears, he drove them farther into snow and mist, but at least so he wasn’t alone.
They carried Louise into the den and laid her on the leather couch. She sighed when they did that—probably with pain, but perhaps also because she felt satisfied to be there in that hot, close room full of Leo’s cigar smell. Regi’s cake had been taken out of the box and placed on the round table in the center where it shone pink and festive.
Regi wanted the candles lit. There were four of those—for herself, Louise always had the full amount (on her last birthday, her cake had blazed resplendently with eighty-four candles); but for Regi she left out the first digit. When everyone ignored her, Regi became more plaintive and loud—until she penetrated whatever it was that made Louise keep her eyes shut. Anyway, Louise opened them and said, “Let her”; so then Eric lit the four candles. They made a very pretty sight, and Regi laughed and clapped her hands, and Louise too seemed to smile as she shut her eyes again.
But the very next second something happened within her—it was as if a stone broke through a vein and lodged itself inside her lungs: filling her with a sensation surpassing all others, a pain so sharp that it became transporting. She cried out, though just once and not very loudly, and only Marietta heard her. “I’m coming!” was what Marietta heard—as she had heard her mother exclaim once before, years and years ago when she had watched her and Leo from behind the screen. And Marietta wondered now as she had wondered then—What’s she mean? Where’s she coming? Where’s she going?
Regi gathered herself together to blow her four candles out, but although she tried very hard, she only managed three and one remained. Nevertheless, Eric praised her for her effort, and then he said, “Now let’s try again—one more time, okay?” So Regi took another deep breath and blew the last one out, terribly pleased with herself.
In Search of Love and Beauty Page 25
