Five years ago, I watched my father die.
His vacant corpse had lost the man I knew,
the man who used to sing a lullaby
at night or tell me tales from Paradou,
the little town where phantoms sob and sigh,
their windy voices keening, calling to
the ones they left behind. They frightened me,
those spectral beings of eternity.
Today, I’d like to face those ghosts again
because I’ve understood the dead don’t grieve,
the living do. Dear God, change now to then,
I pray. Dear God, grant me one reprieve.
Return me to the long-lost regimen
I loved. One bedtime kiss and I’d believe
my father knows the truth: the part I played
required a stoic mask. Beneath, I was afraid.
I cleared my throat. Genie and I had visited Max, Inga, and Sonia one summer in Le Paradou, a tiny town in Provence, not far from Les Baux, where they had rented a house. I remembered Max grinning in the candlelight that flickered on the table as we sat outside in the cool air. A cigarette between his teeth, smoke circling upward, he had raised his glass in a toast to the season, to the good life, to family.
Sonia looked up at me, “You don’t hate it, do you?”
While I was shaking my head, she continued, “It’s the same form as Byron’s Don Juan. These octaves are usually comic, you see, but I wanted to see if they could be serious.” She paused, and I thought of Mr. T.’s linguistic machinations and crazed rhymes. “There’s supposed to be one about September eleventh next, but I haven’t been able to write it. I’ve tried over and over again, but it’s too hard. Maybe I’ll just have a blank there—a nothing, a big empty spot with only the date.” Sonia looked at me, her expression suddenly fierce. “Then there’s these two.”
They say the young don’t know mortality,
but that’s all wrong. I feel it in my bones,
my brain, my eyes, my limbs, in all of me,
in dreaded things as well, like telephones
that ring with news of fresh calamity,
in sounds I hear before I sleep, the moans
of disembodied voices in my head,
my own despairing echoes for the dead.
Policemen came one day to search our roof,
two long-faced men with gloves and plastic bags.
They climbed the stairs in hope of finding proof
that body parts still lay beneath the flags
we flew before their meaning turned to spoof.
I see him clearly still. He kneels and drags
the tar, an officer whose empty eyes
betray no hope, no sorrow, no surprise.
Just before she had pronounced the last word, we heard the sound of Inga’s key turning in the lock. My sister came rushing into the room, and Sonia burst into tears. I hadn’t seen Sonia cry since she was a little girl, and the sound made me temporarily speechless. Inga ran to her daughter, threw her arms around her, and began a vociferous apology as she held her daughter’s dark head to her chest, but after only a few moments Sonia pushed her mother away and in an adamant voice said, “What’s going on? What’s going on? I want you to tell me. Now!”
Inga leaned back in the sofa between Sonia and me. Her forehead creased before she spoke, and her blue eyes looked mournful.
“It’s about Dad isn’t it? What does that Burger woman want?”
“Linda Fehlburger.”
“Yes!” Sonia said. “What does she want?”
“She wants me to talk about my marriage to your father, and I don’t want to do it, not to her. She’s gone around trying to get to all our friends and half-friends. . . . She’s been after them, as they say, ‘for dirt.’ She’s relentless, but I think she’s finally gotten the message.” Inga looked down at the floor. “Don’t worry, darling,” she said. “You mustn’t worry.”
Sonia didn’t press her mother further, which surprised me at first, but then I thought perhaps she didn’t really want to know. It was safer that way.
Inga made cheese omelettes, and the three of us talked pleasantly about nothing much. I noticed that with the presence of her mother, Sonia’s body had changed—the hair-twisting, hunched girl had reverted to her sweet but inscrutable old self. At about midnight, my niece excused herself. Before she left the room she put her long arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. “I love you, Uncle Erik,” she said. “And thank you for coming.”
This tribute, I’m glad to say, arrived like a welcome glint of sun through clouds in winter, and as I said my goodnight to Sonia, I felt a sudden warmth rise to my cheeks.
That was the night we talked, my sister and I, about what she had been hiding. She didn’t blurt it out but flew in circles around the story at first, and I didn’t push her. “Remember the scene in Into the Blue, when she wakes up and doesn’t recognize him?”
“Of course,” I said. “I watched it again a few weeks ago.”
“It’s a really terrible moment, isn’t it?” Inga continued. “To be seen but not known. He’s turned into a stranger again. And then there are those paintings she’d done of him that he finds in his room after he’s searched high and low for her, and he takes them out behind the inn and burns them, an inflagration of himself. We know then that he’s given up.”
I nodded.
“This trouble,” I said. “It’s about the movie?”
“That’s where I was tonight. I was visiting Edie Bly.”
“The actress from Into the Blue?”
“Yes,” Inga said. She turned to the window as if the actress could be found across the street.
“Something happened to us, Erik, to me and Max around the time of the movie, well, no, before it, actually. It was after Sadie died. Max didn’t know his mother’s death would hit him so hard. His panics started then. It was terrible until he got the medicine. He used to look at me in a certain way. I mean for years and years. His eyes were so alive and shining, and then they went dim.” Inga bit her lip for a moment. “Well, one night we were fighting about something that I’ve completely forgotten, and he looked at me and said, ‘Maybe it would be better if we lived apart for a while.’ ”
I looked at her. “But Max never left you, did he?”
Inga shook her head. “No, but when he spoke those words it was like losing my insides. Isn’t that funny? I mean, it happens all the time, to everybody, but I realized then, at that moment, that we had different ideas about it all. For me, marriage was, is an absolute. Max had been married twice before. . . .”
“Yes, but not for long,” I said.
“That’s true. Nevertheless, those words hurt me so much.” Inga pressed both her palms to her chest. “Even at the time, a part of me thought, ‘Oh, God, this is so banal.’ ” She pronounced the last word dryly and with an ironic coldness I had rarely heard from her before. “The aging husband feeling his age gets tired of the all too familiar wife. . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“I told him I didn’t want that. I said that marriage can be hard; it’s always changing, but that I loved him terribly. He was kind then. God, he could be so kind, but I didn’t want kindness. Once he started working on the movie, I hardly saw him anyway. He was on the set, went to rushes every night, came home after I was already asleep. He was happy though, keyed up, but happy. He loved the work.” Inga took a breath. “But you see, the trouble between us was my fault.” Her lips quivered for an instant. “I was difficult then, half mad, actually, when I think of it now. I’d finished my book. It was so hard to write, so painful, but I knew how good it was, how unusual. I also knew, or thought I knew, that it would be attacked, or worse, ignored, and I felt I couldn’t bear it. I carped and moaned and complained about my fate as the forgotten, misunderstood woman intellectual. I suffered in advance what I feared would happen, and I made Max suffer.”
“But your book did very well,” I said.
“You shoul
d know, Mr. Psychoanalyst, that reality isn’t the problem.”
I smiled.
“It didn’t help,” Inga continued, “that by then whatever Max uttered—I mean, he could say, ‘I had eggs for breakfast’—and it was as if God had spoken.”
“He was attacked, too. All his life, Inga.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not excusing myself. I began to understand how crazy I’d been, how difficult, vain, and blind. The irony was that I’d been writing about seeing, about how we perceive the world and that, as Kant said, we can’t get to the thing in itself, ever, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t a world out there. The problem is that we’re all blind, all dependent on preordained representations, on what we think we’ll see. Most of the time, that’s how it is. We don’t experience the world. We experience our expectations of the world. That expecting is really, really complicated. My expectations became crazy. I was never taken as seriously as I wanted to be. I starting wishing I were a man. I wished I were ugly.”
“Not really,” I said.
“Half really. Because the world is prejudiced, I got angry. My perception of my very serious important self and the way I imagined others perceived me were out of wack.”
“Imagined is the key word,” I said.
Inga frowned. “I know. But Erik, there were people, both before and after Max died, who didn’t recognize me without him, people I’d had conversations with, had cooked dinner for here at the house, people I knew, not dear friends but people who should have known me. He became the sole context for their perception of me. It wasn’t Max’s fault. He hated it. He felt sorry for me, and of course my pride was terribly wounded. When I first saw the movie, I thought the forgetting scene was written for me, but inverted. A woman forgets a man.”
“You’ve forgotten people, Inga. In fact, I’ve seen people come up to you, and you don’t remember them at all.”
Inga wasn’t listening. “Now I think that it was about something else, the scene.”
“What?”
“It was about Edie.”
I felt a clutch in my chest. “In what way?”
“He fell in love with her, Erik. He was the one who wanted to cast her. She hadn’t been in much, you know, just a couple of obscure independent films, but he fought for her. I think he fell for her before he ever spoke to her. She was very young then, very pretty, and wild. I remember her dancing at the wrap party and thinking to myself that she had something savage in her, like an animal, not really cruel, but thoughtless, if you see what I mean. That’s very desirable, isn’t it? Men love that.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes, you do. You married one of those girls.”
I ignored the comment. “You’re telling me they had an affair.”
“Yes.” Inga’s face was rigid and her eyes cold.
“Did you know then?”
“No, but I was suspicious. I was jealous of her because I felt the tug in him. I’d never felt it before, not like that.”
“Whatever happened between them, Max came back to you.” I said these words in a low voice, and I’ll never forget my sister’s face as she listened to me. She was smiling—a taut, grim, callous smile. A piece of hair fell over her left brow and she wiped it away.
“That’s what I always thought, Erik, that if there had been something between them, it didn’t matter because he returned to me.” Inga pressed her palms together as if she were measuring the length of her fingers. “But tonight she told me that she left him, that he wanted her desperately, but she threw him out, ended it. So, you see, I may have had Max by default.” Inga was still smiling, and I found her brittle expression hard to look at.
“Inga,” I said. “You know life isn’t like that. You can’t assume such things. Let’s say Max had run off with her. Would their affair have lasted? For how long? He might have been back in your arms in a week.”
“She has his letters, and she’s going to sell them.”
I groaned. “It was Edie you were talking to in the park when Burton saw you.”
“To publish the letters, she needs my permission. Because Max is dead, I own their contents, but she owns the physical letters and can do whatever the hell she wants with them.”
“Well, then, it’s not a problem,” I said.
“But the contents can be paraphrased, used. It’s happened before.”
My sister stood up and walked to the window. She had her back to me, but I could see in her shoulders and neck that she had braced herself, had tethered the emotion inside her as tightly as she could. She placed her long thin fingers on the window frame and said, “I feel I’m in the middle of a bad soap opera or some secondary plot in a late-eighteenth-century French novel. I’m continually aware of how unseemly it is, how smarmy. I mean it’s one thing for this to happen, and it’s another for it to be trumpeted all over the place, for people’s inner lives to be bought and sold like a bag of cheap goods, and I have to play the dull, stupid part of the wronged wife.” For several seconds she said nothing as she pressed both hands on the glass. “What’s truly odd,” she said to the darkened street, “is that I’ve suddenly discovered that I lived another life. Isn’t that strange? I mean, now I have to rewrite my own story, redo it from the bottom up.” After another long pause, my sister wheeled around to face me. She clenched both her fists and shook them at me, her face tense and livid. “I have to add at least two new characters.” Inga kept her voice low, and I understood that she was being careful not to wake Sonia. She shook her fists at me again and then, in a single, distraught motion, gripped her head.
I stood up and walked toward her. When I reached for her hands to take them, she said in a quiet, shaking tone, “Don’t, don’t touch me. I’ll break down.”
“Inga,” I said.
“There’s more.” Inga let her hands fall to her sides. Her eyes were blank, and her voice had a detached, unfamiliar quality. As she spoke, her face lost all its color and I saw her sway for an instant. “I’ve had the lights for a while. I’m dizzy. It’s my damned head.” She put one hand on her stomach.
After I guided Inga to the sofa, I found her pills, gave her a drink of water, and covered her with a blanket. She said, “She claims that Max is the father of her son.”
I didn’t respond for a few seconds. Another child, I thought, a son. “Do you think that’s true?”
She shrugged her shoulders. We both knew that intense emotion could bring on her migraines, and once she was lying back with her head on a pillow, Inga relaxed into the relief that sometimes only illness can offer. She smiled at me. I’ve seen it countless times in my patients—that weak hospital smile. We talked on, our voices quiet and our words slow. Inga told me that Edie had been involved with someone else at the time she was seeing Max, so she had doubts about the story. When I asked why Edie had waited all these years to announce the identity of her son’s father, Inga said, “She’s divorced now. The man’s out of her life, and I guess she started thinking about Max.” My sister hadn’t seen the letters in question. Edie had refused to give her copies, and she had been coy about what was in them. She had hinted, however, that they had some special meaning beyond the fact that Max had written them to her. I reasoned that although the Fehlburger woman might be snooping for a story, it was unlikely that her magazine would fork over the money to buy the letters. Max’s papers were in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and I knew that scholars needed permission to visit the archive. Would a private collector be interested in them? I didn’t know enough about it. I understood that, for Inga, protecting Sonia was what mattered most. “I can’t bear to see her hurt by this,” she said.
At around one-thirty, I looked over at my sister under the blue blanket. She had her legs curled up near her chest, and her delicate face looked pale and exhausted. I told her she should go to sleep. She reached out to touch my hand and said, “Not yet, Erik. I want to talk to you a little more, but not about this business. Now that the house is gone
, I’ve been thinking a lot about you and me when we were little. Do you remember how I used to make you play prince and princess?”
“Yes,” I said, and began to smile. “I remember I drew the line with you when I hit six or seven. No more Snow White, no more Sleeping Beauty.”
Inga smiled back at me. The faint violet-colored shadows under her eyes made them look deeper. “When you were really little, you used to like to be the princess. I’d dress you up like a girl and play the prince.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You liked to be dead and wake up. You could do it over and over again. Later, you would only play the prince. I loved lying there waiting for the kiss to wake me, pretending you weren’t my little brother. I loved opening my eyes and sitting up. I loved miracles.” She closed her eyes and then, while they were still closed, she said, “It was erotic. Being stirred to life.” She took a breath. “It’s been happening to me these days with Henry. I’d almost forgotten that there could be frenzy.”
I didn’t answer her. The word frenzy echoed in my mind for a few seconds and then Inga said, “Maggie Tupy.”
“Little Maggie Tupy from down the road. I liked her.”
“Do you remember the day we danced in our slips for you? Maggie and I wore them outside in the open air. It was exciting, so close to nakedness, and I felt that I had to pee, but I didn’t really. I must have been nine. I remember running and twirling until my head felt all light and I had an ache in my side.”
The Sorrows of an American Page 14
