Me? Is this an actual, a nonrhetorical question? Is the monologue about to become a dialogue?
I say: “He’s a real puzzle, isn’t he?”
Conrad’s indignant talk of lies unnerves me, since I myself am here under false pretenses. I’ve led Conrad to believe I’ve come to Miami on business. In fact, I have no business, here or elsewhere. My time is my own. As of four weeks ago, I’ve quit my job on Wall Street, as a partner specializing in debt restructuring at the investment firm of Gribben Brothers. Conrad has already made a couple of references to my “expense account”—seeking, no doubt, to excuse the extravagance of his monumental gourmandizing. But he needn’t apologize. Oh, it would be a shame to correct him—to diminish even by one baby shrimp his delight in this meal. He is draining his fourth piña colada.
“Wes a puzzle?” Conrad manages to sound incredulous. “Sure, and maybe I’m a genuine two-hundred-fifty-pound eggplant. Wes a puzzle? You got to be kidding, it’s the simplest thing in the world, actually. Take it from Conrad, the trustworthy accountant. There was nothing puzzling about Wes. You just have to know the system. The system? Conrad’s system for dealing with Brother Wes. Now all you ever had to do with Wes was this: first, listen to what he said; second, note it down carefully in your brain; third, put a negative sign in front of it. And then you had the truth, simple as that.”
“Well, maybe the whole story’s more complicated than that. Tell me about Wes’s first wife.”
“Klara?” He gives me a challenging look.
“Yes,” I say. “Klara.”
“Miss Klara Kuzmak.”
“Yes. I gather it’s all pretty complicated. Quite a jumbled story.”
“Complicated? Jumbled?”
To anyone who didn’t know Conrad well (and I don’t, yet), this particular mannerism might be unsettling. You utter a word or phrase and instantly hear it come booming bombastically back at you, loaded with exasperation, mockery, pity, dismay. It pains him—that’s what he wants to convey. Your stupidity pains him. He says, “Why, it’s the simplest thing in the world. Wes was young, he was twenty-one, he was packed with juice.”
“I think he was nineteen, actually, when they met. Twenty when they married.”
“All the more whatever. The point is, he had no more brains, especially back then, than an Irish setter. Maybe later he got smarter. Smart as a poodle, say. As far as Klara was concerned, he had one thought in his brain. It was, I’m going to get into that girl’s knickers— a goal that was all the more exciting because she’s fresh from Warsaw.”
“I think it was Cracow.”
“Wes wasn’t particular. Didn’t know Poland from Pittsburgh. And when she announces she’s pregnant, he has a second thought: Avoid a public scandal.”
“Was she very beautiful? Sally says so.”
“No doubt Sally called her ‘a beautiful creature.’ Or ‘a ravishing being.’ Or some other Sallyism that no one else on earth, unless they were trying to make a joke, would try to get away with. But was Klara beautiful? Not later on she wasn’t. The girl was ballooning before she was out of her twenties, and in her thirties the real weight problems started. You see I had occasion to see her, a couple of times, later on . . . But let’s say, yes, the girl had her moment, her glory day in the sun. The point is, Wes hardly knew her, hardly knew his wife. Wes didn’t want to know his wife.”
“But now that he’s gone, you must miss him terribly.”
“Miss him? Terribly? How much do you think Wes would miss me, if I’d gone first? How much do you think he could have missed anyone? Wes was looking out for number one—and how did he do that? By convincing everyone around him he was number one.”
Conrad pries with a fork at a dab of cheese, congealed against the slope of one of his many plates, stabs it, and pops it into his mouth. The way the old wrestler hunches over his plates, you’d swear he expected me to go after one of them. Still, he looks terrifically pleased with himself.
But then into his once hauntingly beautiful eyes—those eyes whose whites have yellowed, whose voluminous green-gold irises have receded beneath the chubby puffiness of his cheeks—a flash of pain glints. Or maybe it’s a look of fear. Conrad is—so Sally has advised me—a man in very shaky health.
Conrad sips from his piña colada and then, with a fastidiousness belonging more to Wes than to himself, applies his napkin daintily to his full lips. He says, “But of course I do feel his absence.” And adds, with just a hint of affection in his stylistic snappishness: “Damn it, he was my brother, after all.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Isn’t it all too gorgeous for words? I think I’ll have a cigarette.”
“Probably a good idea.”
“It’s my first one of the day,” she explains to me.
The stone wall the two of us are leaning against commands the surrounding countryside and if the scene isn’t “too gorgeous for words,” it’s probably too gorgeous for my words anyway. What could be more beautiful than the Burgundian countryside, and who could do it justice? Certainly not a jet-lagged foreigner who flew into France yesterday and is on only his second visit to Burgundy.
This is wine country, where everything your eye settles upon conveys a feeling of meticulous cultivation. It’s as though it’s all being minutely monitored—the soil, the rainfall, the flow of the air itself—as though the entire landscape is steadily amassing toward that concentrated moment when, some years from now, a cork will be tugged free with a little pop of anticipation and a fine purple rivulet spill into the sun.
And everywhere you look, history looks back at you. The stone wall we’re leaning against—does it date back a hundred years? Two? Seven? Eight? In the distance stands a tumbledown Cistercian abbey whose oldest ruins—so Sally informs me—do in fact date back eight hundred years. The Cistercians began here in Burgundy. Sally has taken for a month a little house in a little town called Domat, and has rented a car. The house belongs to friends back in Michigan, and a last-minute cancellation has recently opened the place up for another month. Sally has decided to take it. She will have two months in France.
We’ve stopped on our drive to peer at the abbey in the distance. The combination of the weather and the scenery and my jet lag and my recent and still-not-quite-real but nonetheless heady and liberating joblessness all conspire to render my imagination particularly lively and susceptible, and the distant abbey yields a dizzying chain of images: generations of monks rising to the sound of bells . . . bells ringing across the decades . . . decades interchangeable as acorns ripening and dropping away.
Good Lord, what a day this is! The colors are subtle and perfect. The hills drift away in a marriage of dusty greens and tawny browns, and overhead two long chains of white cumulus clouds extend like mountain ranges. Between them lies an unsounded blue valley, down which a silver aircraft, traveling south, trails a silken line. It’s but one strand of a projected web—a strand destined to dissolve, probably, before being linked to another.
Generally, Sally allows herself one pack of cigarettes a week, which she purchases on Monday mornings. This rations her to three cigarettes a day, with the complication (which she welcomes—a little variation that keeps the game interesting) that there falls one day per week when she must restrict herself to two. It’s a good game, which she has played successfully for decades now, and there are times when you’d swear it’s a defining gesture, that there’s no other region of her life where Sally’s quite so idiosyncratically and appealingly herself as in this business of her smoker’s arithmetic.
The game engages, first, her resolute self-discipline—she will keep this potentially deadly vice in check! And, second, her fondness for ceremony, exhibited not only in the strictness of her schedule but in her habit of publicly declaring her intentions before lighting up. (You can imagine her, alone back in her house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, announcing to her house cat—or even to a potted cactus—“I believe I’ll have a cigarette.” And adding: “This will be my firs
t one of the day.”) And, third, it engages her submerged but spirited pleasure in rebellion. She may be just a year shy of sixty, yet there’s a trace of schoolgirlish mischief in her gaze when she lifts the little cylinder to her lips, as though she expects to have some stern taskmaster—her father? Mr. Hennepin, the high school principal?—snatch it from her fingers at the last.
But there’s more, even yet, to be read into her smoker’s motions, for there’s a touch of fumble to them, even after all these years—from which a stranger might extrapolate, accurately, to Sally’s struggles with locks and keys, with corkscrews and blenders and VCRs and safety pins and manual transmissions and can openers. Although she strikes a tennis ball with a certain amount of hard-won grace, Sally’s approach to the world of mechanical devices is adversarial; in her hands, objects are all too eager to snap when meant to bend, to bend when meant to hold fast.
Finally, a stranger could hardly fail to note her infectious relish in the whole process of lighting up. This isn’t a desperate smoker, longing for a fix. Even if she flounders a bit, this is someone whose every gesture—the scratch of the match, the dancing link of flame and cigarette end, the first sweeping inhalation of smoke—says, Isn’t this a treat!
Seeing her keen pleasure as the smoke fills her lungs and her eyes drift over the French landscape, I’m reminded of pleasure of another sort—a far more earthbound pleasure. I’m reminded of Conrad, hunching protectively over his many dishes of tapas. “I haven’t really told you about my trip to Miami,” I say.
“How is Conrad looking?”
“Terrible, frankly.”
“Do you mean fat-terrible? Or do you mean sick-terrible?”
“I don’t know. I guess I mean so-fat-terrible-it’s-hard-to-say-if-he’s-also-sick-terrible.”
“I worry about him. I hate to be the bird of ill omen—literally ill omen. But I can’t help feeling he’s very sick.”
“I can’t imagine he’d conceal it if he was. He seems to conceal very little these days.”
“Oh but that’s just it: He would. I had to prod and prod before prying out of him the information that his doctor’s urgently calling for bypass surgery. Advice which I fear he plans to ignore.”
“I suppose he’s frightened.”
“Maybe bitter is more like it? Feels they’ve mistreated him? And by ‘they,’ I mean the entire American medical establishment. It seems he doesn’t feel he’s really been himself since he had the last surgery—the prostate surgery a couple of years ago. Of course the weight gain started some years before that.”
“And he isn’t so ill it took away his appetite. He consumed enough at dinner to feed your average slim-hipped French family of four.”
“Well isn’t that the point? After you’re told you have ninety percent blockage in one of your main coronary arteries, what do you do? Do you consent to bypass surgery? No, you go out and eat enough for a family of four.”
“And drink six piña coladas.”
“I honestly think I’d feel better if you told me six martinis. Truly, that man’s sugar consumption is horrifying to contemplate.”
“And ate two pieces of mango cheesecake.”
Sally flicks the ash on her cigarette and inhales pensively. “And I remember when Conrad didn’t like sugar. For twenty, thirty years, he didn’t like sugar. He had me convinced, maybe he had himself convinced—I suppose it was the old wrestler’s attempt to keep the weight off by eliminating the very thought of temptation.”
“And eventually the sweet tooth came out of the closet.”
“Out of the closet and straight into the pantry. I was with him not so long ago when he ate seven brownies. Sizable brownies. It’s as if Conrad just said to himself one day, I like sugar and I like cream and I won’t be deprived of them any longer. He’ll give himself diabetes . . .”
“We talked about all sorts of things. Including Klara Kuzmak.”
I watch Sally’s face closely. A fine net appears: delicate vertical fissures around her lips as she draws tightly on her cigarette.
“Poor Klara,” she sighs, releasing the name on a cushion of smoke. “She died before any of us and who would have predicted that?”
“Conrad tells me that in later life she got fat.”
“So I’ve heard. I only saw her the one time. Still, she made an indelible impression. And you know what? You want to know something that surprised me, that may not be altogether believable? When I heard she’d died, I truly felt bereft. Oh I did, I felt so sad. A light had gone out. She’d been such a beauty.”
“Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
“Yes. God help her, such a gruesome way to go.”
“But something troubled me later, something I didn’t think to ask Conrad at that time. He spoke, rather mysteriously, of keeping in touch with her. Why would he do that—in what connection? And what about Wes? Did he stay in touch with her too?”
One second, two seconds, three, four, five—Sally, staring out over the French hills, ponders my question. Then she says, “Did Wes stay in touch with Klara? Possibly. If so, he obviously wasn’t about to tell me. Yet I don’t think so. I don’t think he wanted to, frankly. I think he wished she would just sort of go away. But Conrad? Maybe. Maybe he was acting as what I guess you’d call Wes’s liaison? The dealings between the two brothers were always so unbelievably complicated, really. And if Conrad was always sniping at Wes—indeed, still is—nonetheless he could often be prevailed upon to serve as Wes’s deputy.”
“Surely Wes could have found somebody more reliable?”
“Than Conrad? In his way, Conrad can be quite reliable.”
“You ever notice when he tells a story, he’s always got some crucial detail wrong—some name wrong, some fact wrong? I can’t imagine what sort of accountant he was . . .”
“Well perhaps I don’t mean reliable so much as discreet,” Sally says.
“Discreet? Even less true, I’d’ve thought.”
“You’re thinking he’s a gossip? Because he likes to be in the know? But Conrad can keep a secret when he wants to. He’ll amaze me sometimes with some little nugget he’s been hoarding away for twenty years.”
“Even so, in the end he gives the game away.”
“In the end, maybe we all do. Maybe you do?”
But what does Sally mean by this?
She goes on: “Anyway, I can understand how Conrad would have wanted to follow up on Klara Kuzmak. The journalist in me recognizes it as ‘a great story.’ ”
For twenty-one years, from 1971 until 1992, when her second husband was diagnosed with colon cancer, Sally worked at a suburban Detroit newspaper, the Eastsider, briefly as a reporter but mostly as an editor. It was a job that suited her—working for what she called “our little paper.” Its small circulation scarcely mattered in the end: She enjoyed, for its own sake, correcting typos, solecisms, dangling modifiers. The Eastsider was a surprisingly literate and, in an old-fashioned way, literary paper. It says a lot about Sally, surely—raised on the Reverend Karl Koekkoek’s rhetorical flourishes, on Victorian novels, on spelling bees and recitation days— that one of her favorite anecdotes recalls the occasion when she managed to slip rodomontade into an article about sewage recycling. “I don’t know. It’s as though Conrad always wanted to see the outcome of Wes’s adventures—or misadventures. As if he was more curious about Wes than Wes was. Or less willing to put the past behind him anyway. For many years it was Conrad, not Wes, who kept me posted on Sultan affairs. He would tell me how Wes was really doing, and I suppose he’d share with Wes any news of mine. He made himself an indispensable presence somehow.”
“A sort of diplomat.”
“Yes, the world’s most undiplomatic diplomat. That’s Conrad.”
“Tell me about the one time you met her. Klara.”
“That’s a very familiar story by now.”
“Even so, I’d like to hear it.”
“And it’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere.
I don’t know when, if ever, I’ve liked a stone wall as much as this one . . .”
It was a raw January afternoon in Stags Harbor [so Sally begins, opening a tale of midwestern sleet and darkness while looking out over French hills basking in a high-summer sun], and this would have been, I don’t know, 1960 I guess. No, ’61, ’61 of course, because I was pregnant. That’s a key element to my story.
This was in the smallest house on Majestic Avenue—in what I liked to think of as downtown Stags Harbor. I was terribly proud of the place. I remember the walls boasted some “original art”—a pair of watercolors painted by the chairman of the art department at Bayview.
Wes had gone off early to work and I’d spent all morning reading. That was one of the great unforeseen advantages of those first years of marriage to Wes; I don’t think I ever read so many books in my whole life. He didn’t want me to work, of course, which would have impugned him as a provider. Actually, back then my thinking wasn’t much different from his, and it would certainly never have occurred to me that I, as a pregnant woman, belonged in the workplace.
When I was growing up, there’d always been such a wrangle over my reading—burying my nose in a book, as Poppa used to say. (Poppa never caught me reading—he always caught me “burying my nose in a book.”) And of course he looked down especially on novels, which were a frivolous form, and I know this makes me sound like I’m a hundred and fifty years old, as if I grew up in another country and another century, but I can only assure you that that’s really how things were, in the Admiraal home, growing up in Restoration in the 1940s. Right in the middle of America, right in the middle of the century. That’s how it was, and I can only apologize so many times for not having been reared in a great Parisian literary salon. You reach a point where you do have to say, But that’s how it was. That’s what the Church told us. That’s what we all believed. I wasn’t really free to read all I wanted except when I was sick.
[“And so”—I interject—“the little girl bookworm arranged, psychosomatically, to have a sickly childhood.”
A Few Corrections Page 4
