Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Do you know who this is?’ said Waldeck almost weakly. ‘It’s Carlitta.’

  Eileen was entitled to a second or two in which to be taken aback, to be speechless in the face of coincidence. In that moment, however, the coincidence did not even occur to her; she simply took in, in an intense perception outside of time, the woman before her – the brown coat open to show the collar of some nondescript silk caught together with a little brooch around the prominent tendons of the thin, creased neck; the flat, taut chest; the dowdy shoes with brown, punched-leather bows coming too high on the instep of what might have been elegant feet. And the head. Oh, that was the head she had seen before, all right; that was the head that, hair so sleek it looked like a satin turban, inclined with a mixture of coquetry, invitation, amusement and disdain towards a ridiculously long cigarette holder. That hair was brown, after all, and not the Spanish black of the photographs and imagination. And the face. Well, there is a stage in a woman’s life when her face gets too thin or too fat. This face had reached that stage and become too thin. It was a prettily enough shaped face, with a drab, faded skin, as if it was exposed to but no longer joyously took colour from the sun. Towards the back of the jaw line, near the ears, the skin sagged sallowly. Under the rather thick, attractive brows the twin caves of the eyes were finely puckered and mauvish. In this faded, fading face (it was like an old painting of which you are conscious that it is being faded away by the very light by which you are enabled to look at it) the eyes had lost nothing; they shone on, greedily and tremendous, just as they had always been, in the snow, reflecting the Neckar, watching the smoke unfurl to the music of the guitar. They were round eyes with scarcely any white to them, like the beautiful eyes of Negro children, and the lashes, lower as well as upper, were black and thick. Their assertion in that face was rather awful.

  The woman who Waldeck said was Carlitta took Eileen’s hand. ‘Isn’t it fantastic? We’re only up from Ohio this morning,’ she said, smiling broadly. Her teeth were small, childishly square and still good. On her neglected face the lipstick was obviously a last-minute adornment.

  ‘And this is Edgar,’ Waldeck was saying, ‘Edgar Hicks. Carlitta’s husband.’

  The tall, sandy-haired man shook Eileen’s hand with as much flourish as a stage comedian. ‘Glad to know you,’ he said. Eileen saw that he wore hexagonal rimless glasses, and a clip across his tie spelled in pinkish synthetic gold ‘E.J.H.’

  ‘Carlitta Hicks—’ Waldeck put out a hand and squeezed Carlitta’s elbow. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Sure is extraordinary,’ said Mr Hicks. ‘Carlitta here and I haven’t been up to New York for more than three years.’

  ‘Ach, no, darling,’ said Carlitta, frowning and smiling quickly. She used her face so much, no wonder she had worn it out. ‘Four at least. You remember, that last time was at Christmas.’ She added to Waldeck, ‘Once in a blue moon is enough for me. Our life . . .’ She half lifted a worn hand, gave a little sudden intake of breath through her fine nostrils, as if to suggest that their life, whatever it was, was such that the pleasures of New York or anywhere else offered no rival enticement. She had still a slight German accent to soften the American pronunciation of her speech.

  Everyone was incoherent. Waldeck kept saying excitedly, ‘I haven’t been out of South Africa since I arrived there twenty years ago. I’m in New York two days and I find Carlitta!’

  There was time only to exchange the names of hotels and to promise to telephone tomorrow. Then the theatre bell interrupted. As they parted, Waldeck called back, ‘Keep Sunday lunch free. Stefan’s coming. We’ll all be together . . .’

  Carlitta’s mouth pursed; her eyes opened wide in a pantomime ‘Lovely’ across the crowd.

  ‘And yet I’m not really entirely surprised,’ Waldeck whispered to his wife in the darkening theatre. ‘It’s been happening to us in one way or another all the time. What do you think of the husband? What about Mr Edgar Hicks from Ohio?’ he added with a nudge.

  In the dark, as the curtain rose, Eileen followed it with her eyes for a moment and then said, ‘I shouldn’t have known her. I don’t think I should ever have known her.’

  ‘But Carlitta hasn’t changed at all!’ said Waldeck.

  Waldeck was on the telephone, talking to Stefan, immediately after breakfast next morning. Passing to and fro between the bedroom and the bathroom, Eileen could see him, his body hitched up on to the corner of the small desk, smiling excitedly at what must have been Stefan’s quiet incredulity. ‘But I tell you he actually is some sort of farmer in Ohio. Yes. Well, that’s what I wanted to know. I can’t really say – very tall and fairish and thin. Very American . . . Well, you know what I mean – a certain type of American, then. Slow, drawling way of speaking. Shakes your hand a long time. A weekend farmer, really. He’s got some job with a firm that makes agricultural implements, in the nearby town. She said she runs pigs and chickens. Can you believe it? So is it all right about Sunday? I can imagine you are . . . Ach, the same old Carlitta.’

  Sunday was a clear, sharp spring day in New York, exactly the temperature and brightness of a winter day in Johannesburg. Stefan rang up to say he would call for the Brands at about eleven, so that they could drive around a little before meeting Carlitta and her husband for luncheon.

  ‘Will it be all right if I wear slacks?’ asked Eileen. She always wore slacks on Sundays in Johannesburg.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Stefan gravely. ‘You cannot lunch in a restaurant in New York in slacks.’

  Eileen put on a suit she had bought in London. She was filled with a childlike love and respect for Stefan; she would not have done the smallest thing to displease him or to prejudice his opinion of her. When he arrived to fetch the Brands he said, equally gravely, ‘You look very well in that suit,’ and led them to his car, where his wife, whom they had met in the course of the week, sat waiting.

  His wife was perhaps an odd choice for Stefan, and then again perhaps she was not; she went along with the presidency, the wealth and the Fifth Avenue apartment, and left his inner balance unchanged. She was not so young as Eileen, but young, and a beauty. An American beauty, probably of Swedish or Norwegian stock. Hers was the style of blonde beauty in which the face is darker than the hair, which was not dyed but real. It was clean and shiny and almost silvery-fair, and she wore it as such women do, straight and loose. She wore black, and when she stood up you noticed that hers was the kind of tall figure that, although the shoulders are broad and the breasts full, tapers to too-narrow hips and too-thin legs. Her eyes were green and brilliant, and crinkled up, friendly, and on the wrist of one beautiful ungloved hand she wore a magnificent broad antique bracelet of emeralds and diamonds. Otherwise she was unadorned, without even a wedding ring. As she shifted along the seat of the car, a pleasant fragrance stirred from her, the sort of fragrance the expensive Fifth Avenue stores were then releasing into the foyers of their shops, to convince their customers of the arrival of the time to buy spring clothes. When she smiled and spoke, in a soft American voice without much to say, her teeth showed fresh as the milk teeth of a child.

  Eileen thought how different were this woman and herself (with her large, Colonial, blue-eyed, suburban prettiness) from the sort of girls with whom Waldeck and Stefan had belonged in the world that was lost to them – girls of the twenties, restlessly independent, sensual and intellectual, citizens of the world with dramatic faces, girls such as Carlitta, inclining her dark Oriental head, had been.

  The four drove through Central Park, rather threadbare after the snow and before the blossom. Then they went down to the East River, where the bridges hung like rainbows, glittering, soaring, rejoicing the heart in the sky above the water, where men have always expected to find their visions. They stopped the car at the United Nations building, and first walked along on the opposite side of the street, alongside the shabby, seedy shops, the better to see the great molten-looking façade of glass, like a river flowing upwards, on the administrati
ve block. The glass calmly reflected the skyline, as a river reflects, murky green and metallic, the reeds. Then they crossed the street and wandered about a bit along the line of flagstaffs, with the building hanging above them. The Brands resolved to come back again another day and see the interior.

  ‘So far, there’s nothing to beat your bridges,’ said Eileen. ‘Nothing.’

  They drove now uptown to an elegant, half-empty restaurant which had about it the air of recovering from Saturday night. There they sat drinking whisky while they waited.

  ‘I don’t know what we can do with the husband,’ said Waldeck, shrugging and giggling.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Stefan. ‘Alice will talk to him. Alice can get along with anybody.’ His wife laughed good-naturedly.

  ‘You know, he’s worthy . . .’ said Waldeck.

  ‘I know,’ said Stefan, comforting.

  ‘Same old Carlitta, though,’ said Waldeck, smiling reminiscently. ‘You’ll see.’

  His wife Eileen looked at him. ‘Oh, she’s not,’ she said, distressed. ‘She’s not. Oh, how can you say that to Stefan?’ The girl from South Africa looked at the two men and the woman who sat with her, and around the panelled and flower-decorated room, and suddenly she felt a very long way from home.

  Just at that moment, Carlitta and Mr Edgar Hicks came across the room towards them. Stefan got up and went forward with palms upturned to meet them; Waldeck rose from his seat; a confusion of greetings and introductions followed. Stefan kissed Carlitta on both cheeks gently. Edgar Hicks pumped his hand. In Edgar Hicks’s other hand was the Palm Beach panama with the paisley band which he had removed from his head as he entered. The hovering attendant took it from him and took Carlitta’s brown coat.

  Carlitta wore the niggly-patterned silk dress that had shown its collar under the coat the night at the theatre, the same shoes, the same cracked beige kid gloves. But above the bun and level with the faded hairline, she had on what was obviously a brand new hat, a hat bought from one of the thousands of ‘spring’ hats displayed that week before Easter, a perky, mass-produced American hat of the kind which makes an American middle-class woman recognisable anywhere in the world. Its newness, its frivolous sense of its own emphemerality (it was so much in fashion that it would be old-fashioned once Easter was over) positively jeered at everything else Carlitta wore. Whether it was because she fancied the sun still painted her face the extraordinary rich glow that showed against the snow in the picture of herself laughing in Austria years ago, or whether there was some other reason, her face was again without make-up except for a rub of lipstick. Under the mixture of artificial light and daylight, faint darkening blotches, not freckles but something more akin to those liver marks elderly people get on the backs of their hands, showed on her temples and her jawline. But her eyes, of course, her eyes were large, dark, quick.

  She and her husband consulted together over what they should eat, he suggesting slowly, she deciding quickly, and from then on she never stopped talking. She talked chiefly to her two friends Waldeck and Stefan, who sat on either side of her. Edgar Hicks, after a few trying minutes with Eileen, who found it difficult to respond to any of his conversational gambits, discovered that Alice Raines rode horses and, like a swamp sucking in fast all around its victim, involved her in a long, one-sided argument about the merits of two different types of saddle. Edgar preferred the one type and simply assumed that Alice must be equally adamant about the superiority of the other. Although his voice was slow, it was unceasing and steady, almost impossible to interrupt.

  Eileen did not mind the fact that she was not engaged in conversation. She was free to listen to and to watch Carlitta with Stefan and Waldeck. And now and then Carlitta, forking up her coleslaw expertly as any born American, looked over to Eileen with a remark or query – ‘That’s what I say, anyway,’ or ‘Wouldn’t you think so?’ Carlitta first told briefly about her stay in London when she left Germany, then about her coming to the United States, and her short time in New York. ‘In the beginning, we stayed in that hotel near Grand Central. We behaved like tourists, not like people who have come to stay. We used to go to Coney Island and rowing on the lake in Central Park, and walking up and down Fifth Avenue

  – just as if we were going to go back to Germany in a few weeks.’

  ‘Who’s we?’ asked Stefan. ‘Your sister?’

  ‘No, my sister was living in a small apartment near the river. Klaus,’ she said, shrugging her worn shoulders with the careless, culpable gesture of an adolescent. Stefan nodded his head in confirmation towards Waldeck; of course, he remembered, Klaus had followed her or come with her to America. Poor Klaus.

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Stefan.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He went to Mexico.’

  Her audience of three could guess very well how it had been. When she had tired of Coney Island and the outside of Fifth Avenue shops and the rowing in Central Park, Klaus had found out once again that in the new world, as in the old, he had nothing more than amusement value for her.

  ‘After three months—’ Carlitta had not paused in her narrative

  – ‘I went to stay with my sister and brother-in-law – she had been here some years already. But he got a job with a real-estate scheme, and they went to live on one of the firm’s housing projects – you know, a little house, another little house next door, a swing for the kids, the same swing next door. I came back to New York on my own and I found a place in Greenwich Village.’

  Ah, now, there was a setting in which one could imagine the Carlitta of the photographs, the beautiful, Oriental-looking German girl from Heidelberg, with the bold, promising eyes. And at the moment at which Eileen thought this, her ear caught the drawl of Edgar Hicks. ‘. . . now, our boy’s the real independent type. Now, only the other day . . .’ Edgar Hicks! Where had Edgar Hicks come in? She looked at him, carefully separating the flesh from the fine fringe of bone in his boiled trout, the knife held deliberately in his freckled hand.

  ‘Did you live in Greenwich Village?’ Eileen said to him suddenly.

  He interrupted his description of his boy’s seat in the saddle to turn and say, surprised, ‘No, ma’am, I certainly didn’t. I’ve never spent more than two consecutive weeks in New York in my life.’ He thought Eileen’s question merely a piece of tourist curiosity, and returned to Alice Raines, his boy and the saddle.

  Carlitta had digressed into some reminiscence about Heidelberg days, but when she paused, laughing from Stefan to Waldeck with a faltering coquettishness that rose in her like a half-forgotten mannerism, Eileen said, ‘Where did you and your husband meet?’

  ‘In a train,’ Carlitta said loudly and smiled, directed at her husband.

  He took it up across the table. ‘Baltimore and Ohio line,’ he said, well rehearsed. There was the feeling that all the few things he had to say had been slowly thought out and slowly spoken many times before. ‘I was sittin’ in the diner havin’ a beer with my dinner, and in comes this little person looking mighty proud and cute as you can make ’em . . .’ So it went on, the usual story, and Edgar Hicks spared them no detail of the romantic convention. ‘Took Carlitta down to see my folks the following month and we were married two weeks after that,’ he concluded at last. He had expected to marry one of the local girls he’d been to school with; it was clear that Carlitta was the one and the ever-present adventure of his life. Now they had a boy who rode as naturally as an Indian and didn’t watch television; he liked to raise his own chickens and have independent pocket money from the sale of eggs.

  ‘Carlitta,’ Stefan said, aside, ‘how long were you in Greenwich Village?’

  ‘Four years,’ she said shortly, replying from some other part of her mind; her attention and animation were given to the comments with which she amplified her husband’s description of their child’s remarkable knowledge of country lore, his superiority over town-bred children.

  Eileen overheard the low, flat reply. Four years! Four yea
rs about which Carlitta had said not a word, four years which somehow or other had brought her from the arrogant, beautiful, ‘advanced’ girl with whom Waldeck and Stefan could not fall in love because they and she agreed they were not good enough for her, to the girl who would accept Edgar Hicks a few weeks after a meeting on a train.

  Carlitta felt the gaze of the girl from South Africa. A small patch of bright colour appeared on each of Carlitta’s thin cheekbones. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the wine, too, that made her voice rise, so that she began to talk of her life on the Ohio farm with a zest and insistence which made the whole table her audience. She told how she never went to town unless she had to; never more than once a month. How country people, like herself, discovered a new rhythm of life, something people who lived in towns had forgotten. How country people slept differently, tasted their food differently, had no nerves. ‘I haven’t a nerve in my body, any more. Absolutely placid,’ she said, her sharp little gestures, her black eyes in the pinched face challenging a denial. ‘Nothing ever happens but a change of season,’ she said arrogantly to people for whom there were stock-market crashes, traffic jams, crowded exhibitions and cocktail parties. ‘Birth and growth among the animals and the plants. Life. Not a cement substitute.’ No one defended the city, but she went on as if someone had. ‘I live as instinctively as one of our own animals. So does my child. I mean, for one thing, we don’t have to worry about clothes.’