by Lore Segal
When the doorbell rang, Ilka, wishing this were any other night and she quiet and decent in her bed, ran down the stairs, opened the door. Leslie stepped inside, closed the door deliberately behind him. He reached for Ilka. “How did this ever happen?” chattered Ilka, ineffably moved by his gravity, his absorption in herself. This was Leslie’s hand that traced her arm to the elbow, moved down the length of her back as if over some rare and delicate thing; outlined her arm from the wrist upward; hovered, had an intention. Leslie’s hand lay lightly trembling along the side of Ilka’s breast. It was Ilka’s hand and it was his sex for which she reached.
“Is the baby asleep?” Leslie asked her.
“Yes.”
“Shall we go upstairs?”
Ilka walked ahead and turned to ask him, “Are you going to be all right?”
Leslie said, “Yes,” and Ilka understood with the tenderest interest that Leslie had had lovers before her.
Leslie asked, “And you?”
“Oh!” said Ilka. “I have nothing to lose.”
“Oh, not so!” he said
“This is happening?” said Ilka.
When they lay down with each other, Ilka prevented his motion by raising her head to the window. “Can we do this with that?”
“We can,” said Leslie. “The tree may not fall in the forest but whether we hear it or not, the screaming goes on at all times. You know that. What must we wait for?”
With the returned stillness after love, Ilka remembered to worry. “Hadn’t you better go?”
“God, no!” said Leslie and drew her against himself and lay so still Ilka thought he slept and got out of her side of the bed, palpated the blackness for her shirt, and reaching the door found it blocked by his body and his appalled voice saying, “Are you going? Where are you going?”
“To check the baby.”
“Of course. Go and check the baby. Are you coming back?”
“Yes!”
When he was putting his socks back on Ilka said, “I hope Eliza will not pay for our fun.”
Leslie said, “Will not. Will not.”
Ilka was relieved to be clear about this—about anything—and fervently agreed.
“We’re too old. There would not be time to recover. I have to be in New York next month. Come with me. Would your mother take care of Maggie?”
On Sunday, Ilka called and Eliza picked up. Ilka said, “There’s a razor blade in my throat. Maggie and I better stay home. We shouldn’t give you our colds?”
Eliza asked, “Are you in bed?”
“Yes. In bed, no. Yes.”
“Leslie and I will come and bring breakfast.”
“No!” shouted Ilka. “No, no, no, no. I can’t have you bothering. We can come.”
Ilka was surprised that Leslie, who opened the door, looked just like Leslie.
Ilka sat at Eliza’s kitchen table with her head stupid and stuffed full of cotton wool. The razor blade inside her throat had turned into a flap of skin she could not cough up, or swallow down.
“You look terrible,” Eliza told Ilka.
“I am terrible,” Ilka said.
Eliza made her hot tea and rum. Eliza said, “I saw the girl in the supermarket. Your mummy must be very, very sick,” she said to the little girl on her lap, “or she would be asking ‘Which girl?’ so she could be seeing the girl’s point of view and defending it.”
“I’m not defending anybody,” said Ilka, her lips thick as if the universal dentist had injected a local paralysis.
Maggie rolled herself up and went to sleep on Eliza’s lap. Eliza said, “Why don’t Leslie and I keep her overnight, so you can go home and enjoy your cold?”
“No, no, no, no!” shouted Ilka.
On the way home Ilka passed the Bernstines’. Cassandra stood on her hind legs at the iron gate and barked at Ilka.
Institute business sent them on trips. Leslie and Ilka planned dates and times, flights and hotels, and Ilka’s mother came and took care of Maggie. “If I let her, she would take her away for good.” It shocked Ilka that joy should be so easy. Habit is the enabler.
MISTRAL
Then it was a year since Ilka and Leslie had become lovers. Ilka asked Leslie if he knew how many nights they had got to spend with each other and Leslie folded his hands under his head, computed and named a number.
“That is correct,” said Ilka. “When I go to check on Maggie you no longer block the door with your body!”
“I’ve learned that you will ‘slip downstairs and bring us up some chilled white wine and some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine ruddy-skinned pears,’” quoted Leslie. “I don’t think of us as lovers,” he said.
“So what are we?”
“Fucking friends.”
Ilka, shocked and thrilled at the word in Leslie’s mouth, called her friend Jacqueline in New York and told her that Leslie thought they were fucking friends.
“Does he?” said Jacqueline, who had got used to Ilka and her affair. Ilka missed the old greedy interest of Jacqueline’s disapproval.
It was Eliza who proposed a holiday together, in Norway maybe. She tended to the North. It fell to Ilka to make inquiries, write the letters: the house she had found was in Provence. “Do you mind?” she asked Eliza.
“You have closed the deal?”
“Actually, yes.”
“I mind.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ilka, and meant it.
They arrived tired and frazzled in the late afternoon and Ilka crossed into a dream of creeping ivy-covered ground and a dovecote and a six-foot topiary egg. The house was stone, severely symmetrical except that the finial urn on the left corner of the rooftop drooped its rim “like melting chocolate,” said Eliza.
“Our own Marienbad!” said Ilka.
“Always hated Marienbad,” said Eliza.
“It’s beautiful, don’t you think!” Ilka urged her glum companions. The façade was dappled gold, speckled, striated by age and weather. “Our own Diebenkorn,” said Ilka.
They unlocked the door. Ilka’s mother said, “For a hundred years has nobody dusted.”
Eliza brushed against a wall and came away with a white, with a golden shoulder. “It is returning into its original matter.”
Ilka said, “‘The ache of antiquity,’ Henry James called it.”
“The refrigerator is like working hammers,” said Ilka’s mother.
They had shopped on the way and picnicked at the long deal table. Ilka caressed its gouges and scars. The four grown-ups watched Maggie’s head descend and come to rest in the butter. Leslie carried the sleeping child up the stairs. Ilka came behind him. He said, “A summer of not making any love, heaven help us!”
“Oh but the happiness of knowing you are in the house, to expect—to see you—walking into the room …”
“Ah,” said Leslie.
“Leslie, don’t you think it’s beautiful here?”
“There’s only one bathroom,” said Leslie.
“Eliza and Leslie, why don’t you take the front room,” proposed Ilka. “Maggie and I can sleep in here. Mum, how’s this for you? Apple trees standing in rows outside your window.”
Ilka’s mother said, “The bathroom shower goes down by a hole in the tiles.”
“Which are all the earth colors with sky blue lozenges! This wallpaper is original I bet you.”
“It’s curling off the walls,” said Eliza. “The mattresses are kapok, knots and craters. I cannot sleep here.”
Now Ilka’s stomach knotted.
During that first restless night, the ancient Verquières refrigerator sighed before hammering into its active cycles. In the morning the Verquières shower refused hot water to any American who rose after 7 A.M.
Ilka took Maggie into the garden. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, Maggie! The ivy was sere. It was the color, and made the sound, of packing paper. Ilka and Maggie shuffled around the topiary egg and round and round the dovecote. Only Ilka loved the liquid monotony of the cooing white
birds. They lifted, at intervals, all together, raising a rusty cloud and beating it with wings.
Eliza sent Ilka and Leslie to the village to look for milk. “Flora and I will make the lunch.”
“She doesn’t let me do anything,” complained Ilka’s mother. “Don’t worry about it,” said Ilka and saw her mother was going to chafe and to worry. Ilka and Leslie, with Maggie riding his shoulders, had returned bringing milk, a four-foot baguette, and local information. They had counted the thirty-four houses remaining after the Albergencian massacre of 1345 from which the village had never recovered. “Madame Chelan, the baker, says our topiary egg is the monument to the present owner’s mother, who is buried underneath.”
“That’s nice,” said Eliza.
The five of them drove around the country. “Maggie watch the water!” The amenable little girl turned her head toward the narrow, sparkling canal along the left side of the lane. Not once did they meet another car. “Wave, Maggie.” Maggie waved to the pair of sad-eyed, brown men who effaced themselves into the hedge.
“Cezanne country, the colors of our tiles!” To the west a wall of rock reared out of the flat, ochre landscape. Here and over there a row of candle-straight trees, planted shoulder to shoulder, formed fences against the prevailing wind, and the rows of perfectly spaced apple trees stood under the sun on single legs upraising patient, fruit-laden arms.
Eliza went up to bed early. Leslie wanted Ilka to come out into the garden but she said, “I promised Maggie I’d read her a story. ” “I will read her,” said Ilka’s mother, but Ilka said, “I promised her.” Making love in the garden frightened Ilka. The next day she suggested the little Verquières hotel, but Leslie said, “I would be so embarrassed, I couldn’t do anything.” Ilka and Leslie sat at the long wooden table together. She liked to talk about their bad behavior. Leslie did not. “You don’t think we are dreadful?”
“One must live, to live,” Leslie said.
“She let me shell the peas,” Ilka’s mother reported to Ilka.
At dinner Eliza badmouthed Winnie. She told about Winnie covering every surface of the apartment with his papers, before he went to move in with Susanna and left them to take care of his boxes.”
“Dear,” said Leslie.
“He hates you,” Eliza said.
“He does not,” said Leslie. “Why does he hate me!”
“One has one’s reasons,” Eliza said, “to hate you.”
“That may be so,” said Leslie.
Eliza told the story of Winnie’s taking Una to London and, worst of all, bringing her back to Concordance with him. Eliza badmouthed Joe Bernstine. “He made Leslie leave a cozy berth at Oxford …”
“He didn’t ‘make me.’”
“So Leslie could run the institute for him.”
“He ran it for twelve years …”
“And stopped you from writing your book …”
Leslie looked nettled. “I haven’t stopped writing.”
“So he can write his book.”
On the third morning the bathroom shower stopped yielding anybody water, hot or cold, any time of the day.
“The pain-in-the-neck of antiquity,” said Eliza.
The two sad-eyed men who had effaced themselves into the hedge—or it might have been two other sad-eyed men—came to the gate, Algerians looking for work.
At lunch Eliza seemed more excited and angrier and returned to the attack on Winnie, his wives, his boxes, his Nobel acceptance speech composed when he was twenty-three.
“That will do,” said Leslie to her.
And taking up with little Una; Winnie skedaddling off to the West Coast on the day they lost the baby.
Leslie sat beside Eliza and ate his soup.
Late that same afternoon, the lush golden day turned a yellow gray. A mortal heat laid itself across the silent, unpeopled lanes, the massacred village, the dead ivy, the house with the melting stone urn and walls returning to the dust from whence they came. Maggie woke late from too long a nap, climbed into her mother’s lap, cried and held Ilka in a steel embrace. Something in the distance cried, it wept as if Matsue’s howl had followed them home to its European genesis. It was a low whine with a muddy multiplicity of voices like a distant organ. The season’s mistral.
Ilka’s mother pried the screaming child out of Ilka’s arms. “Let’s you and me go and play. Let’s go. Come.”
Eliza stood in the kitchen, her hair on end. Leslie went to her and said, “You can not blow here, with the child. Do you want to go home now?” Eliza picked a glass off the table and threw it at Leslie. It bounced off the back of his hand and shattered on the floor. Eliza went up the stairs into the master bedroom. Leslie followed her but she had shut the door, fastened it on the inside and screamed. Maggie came running and butted her head into Ilka’s stomach.
The mistral howled close.
Leslie said to Ilka, “Can you sit with me?”
“Maggie,” Ilka said, “you get to sleep with Omama Flora! Will that be fun?”
The child burrowed her head under Ilka’s arm.
“Yes, you want to sleep with Omama,” said Ilka. “Yes, yes, yes!”
Leslie and Ilka sat at the table. He said, “You need to find someone who is at liberty to love you.”
“Don’t!” said Ilka. They sat together through the night. Eliza had become silent but the howling outside did not let up. Ilka’s mother, coming down with Maggie the next morning, asked Leslie how he had got the purple bruise that covered the back of his hand.
Leslie said, “I hit it against the door post.” He picked Maggie up and set her on his lap but put her down when Eliza came in. She looked rueful, wanted to apologize. Leslie prevented her. “There is nothing for you to apologize for.” All day Leslie kept his person beside Eliza, sat, rose, went out, went up the stairs with her.
The mistral whined and would whine for some days after Leslie and Eliza had returned to America.
LESLIE’S SHOES
Ilka didn’t see that it was a phallus until she noticed a second one on the left; then she saw the whole row—another row on the right, an avenue of them. She was walking with the Cokers, an elderly couple from her table in the ship’s dining room, the second day out, on their third Greek island. Mr. Coker put on his glasses, recognized the five-footer on its stone pedestal, and took his glasses off. He polished them with a white handkerchief, laid them away in their hard case, and said, “Bifocals! Would you believe a hundred bucks?”
“Wow,” said Ilka.
“You can say that again!” said Mr. Coker and, shaking his head in admiration, returned the case into his breast pocket. Mrs. Coker carried a large beige bag. Ilka had meant to look at her across the breakfast table, but the eyes refused to focus on Mrs. Coker. Ilka once again dismissed the bizarre notion that Mr. Coker beat Mrs. Coker. We can’t deal with other people till we’ve cut them down to fit some idea about them, thought Ilka, and looked around for anybody to say this to. Ilka’s idea about the Cokers was that one didn’t tell them one’s ideas. She looked at the Cokers to see if they were cutting her down, but she could tell that the Cokers had no ideas about her.
Ilka looked over at the American woman, but she was looking through her camera, saying, “Belle, Hank, lovies, go stand over by the left one so I can get in all that sea behind you.” The American woman appeared to be traveling with that little bevy of good-looking younger people, but it was her one noticed. One always knew the table at which she sat, not because her voice was loud but because it was fearless. Ilka thought of her as the American woman although many passengers on the British cruise ship Ithaca were Americans. Ilka herself was a naturalized American, but this was a tall, slim, fair woman who moved as if gladly, frequently turning her head to look this way and that. She kept generating fresh and always casual and expensive pairs of pastel pants and sweaters.
Ilka stored her idea about the Cokers and her curiosity about the American woman in the back of her mind to tell Leslie, whom she was sched
uled to meet in an Athens hotel—a week from yesterday.
In the waiting area at Heathrow, Ilka had checked out the glum, embarrassed passengers with the telltale green flight bags and had yearned toward the interesting English group in the leather chairs by the window—two couples and a beautiful one-armed clergyman. They seemed to know one another. Perhaps they were old friends?
At the Athens airport the green flight-bag people had been transferred onto buses to take them down to the Piraeus, and the three men from the leather chairs turned out to be the three English scholars who came as part of the package. Professor Charles Baines-Smith knew what there was to be known about shipbuilding in the ancient Near East; Willoughby Austen had published a monograph on the identity of the Island of Thera with the lost island of Atlantis. It was the Reverend Martin Gallsworth who gave the lecture that first evening, after dinner, as the Ithaca pulled out of the wharf.
Ilka sat in a state of romance. She looked up at the Greek moon in the Greek sky and across the glittering black strip of the Aegean to the Attic coast passing on the right. She leaned to hear what the Reverend Gallsworth was saying about the absence, in the Hellenic thought system, of the concept of conscience which the Hebrews were developing in that same historical moment, some hundred miles to the east.
The two classy Greek women guides assigned to the Ithaca did not appear till breakfast, which they ate at a little table for two. Dimitra, the elder by ten years, walked with a stick, as if she were in pain—a small, stout, cultivated woman. Ilka liked her. She assembled the crowd in the foyer between the purser’s desk and the little triangular corner counter where one could buy toothpaste and postcards of the Ithaca riding at anchor or the little square pool on the upper deck. Ilka sent the Ithaca card to everybody at Concordance.
