Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  Vivian. In large letters, with pencil, her name was scrawled across the top of the scrap of paper. I want you to die. If you die I won’t have to. I hope when you read this it will be like a curse that works. Maybe you won’t even get to this line. He had not signed his name.

  She left the city that day, driving her mother, and her mother’s two poodles, to her parents’ summer home on the shore of Lake Tahoe. She lay out in the sun on the wide deck of the house, drowsing and pretending to drowse, wakened often by the fear that he was gazing down at her from upstairs, sometimes shaken awake by her mother, who said that she had been crying in her sleep. In her mother’s face she saw how her own face must appear down on the cushions. Her mother’s face, bending over hers, was her own face in the years to come, the face of herself as a past woman, alone and alarmed; and she drew her mother down upon her.

  At her mother’s urgings she had her hair cut and bleached again, and she had a manicure and a pedicure. She bought flamboyantly flowered, very slim dresses from the resort shops, and delicate sandals with high heels and no backs, and, urged by her mother to a display of this artful care of her person, she strolled out with the two poodles into the crowds. Although she despised them for their yapping and the tension of their bodies, she reluctantly enjoyed the spectacle of herself and the dogs, whose fur was the white of her hair, all three of them exquisitely groomed.

  After her mother’s return to the city with the dogs, Vivian stayed on, spending her afternoons in the cool bars and in the casinos, bringing home her small winnings and sometimes a man she had chosen to sit down by. A long time ago, her first love after the birth of her son had separated her body from the infant’s, but now the men she brought to her bed to obliterate her son failed to convince her that the body she lay against was not her son’s, and waking with someone beside her was always a time of panic.

  On her return to the city, late in October, she sold the house with its furnishings and antiques, taking with her only enough for her small apartment on Green Street in a building of four apartments signed over to her by her father shortly after the war. With her mother she sailed to Hawaii. On the boat, her mother, excited by the voyage, imagined that everyone mistook them for sisters, that her twenty-five years beyond her daughter’s age were swept away by the sea winds. They stayed at one of the more seclusive hotels where they could settle down for a time without the constant bustling change of other guests and, in March, returned home by air.

  She took a separate taxi, declining to go home to her mother’s house. In the apartment, she sat down on the sofa, clasping herself, shivering with the change of climate as if the transition from sun to fog had taken no more than a minute. When the sound of the cab driver’s footsteps, running down the stairs, was gone, the silence in the apartment, whose location and existence her son was ignorant of, became the silence that had swallowed both herself and her son.

  Not long after her return, Joe Duggan, the attorney who had often visited in the time of her marriage to Russell, asked her out to dinner. He had separated from his wife; she had learned this some time ago. She disliked the man; he had always insinuated a knowledge of her and it had seemed to her that the basis for any insinuation was ignorance. She felt that he conversed not with her but with the woman he thought she was, while she sat listening to the dialogue like a third person. But, as in other times when she had been in need of someone, her criticism of her companion began to seem flimsy, and she wanted to believe he was capable of that knowledge of her most personal self. Then everything became attractive—his indisputable voice, his obviously elegant clothes, and his little blond mustache that was like a stamp of approval on his face.

  In his apartment, with its leased view of the bay and the bridges, he inquired after David, and she told him what she had told her parents, that the boy was attending a private school in the East. He recalled the night at Clearlake when David had danced with all the women, also recalling that she had gone upstairs before the others. Insinuative, self-amused, he lay beside her, recalling.

  “You’ve got everything, Viv,” he said, “but one thing.”

  “What?” she asked, afraid.

  “Something you had with Russell.”

  “What? What?”

  “Something I couldn’t have then. Now that you’re with me, you don’t have it anymore. All it is is what I couldn’t have then.” He held in his laughter; she felt the sputter against her throat. “Otherwise, you’ve got everything.”

  She could not bring herself to push him away. He knew so very little that his ignorance of her was like an unbearable vulgarity. And yet, with his lewd curiosity, he seemed to know everything, if only because he suspected everything. Lying beside him, she found that the memory of her son, the night with her son, was being reduced to what it would be in Duggan’s mind if he knew about it, even as her life was being reduced to what it was in his mind. His curiosity forgave everything because everything fed his curiosity. Unresisting, she lay under him, kissing him in return, accepting his ignorance of her as if it were a forgiving wisdom.

  In July, a few days before David’s birthday, a letter came from him, postmarked El Centro, California, and forwarded from the house she had left. The handwriting was a barrier between him and herself, a fence beyond which all his experiences in the past year had gone on. It was written in ink, the letters neater and smaller than in the first letter. He was working, he wrote, on a date farm near the Mexican border. On his seventeenth birthday he wanted to enlist in the army, and that was why he was writing to her—because he required her consent.

  She was unable, for a few days, to answer the letter or to go a notary to make out her consent. The request from her son surrounded her with the terrors of the world, as if only now she had been born into the midst of them. One night she dreamed that he was dying. He lay on her bed, in an army uniform, his head shaven. He begged her to lift him and carry him away in her arms to some place safe from death, but she was unable to approach him. She had entered the room with a group of strangers behind her, who appeared to be waiting for her to save him, but she could do nothing. The sensation of dying was in herself as it was in him.

  She sought out a notary and found one in a hotel, in a cubicle off the lobby, a gray-haired woman whose eyes seemed a part of her bejeweled spectacles. In the legalistic words suggested by the notary, she gave her consent for her son to enter the army, and, after the consent was typed and she had signed it, she asked for an envelope. Then, pushing pennies across the corner of the desk with the tip of a gloved finger, she asked apologetically to buy a stamp.

  Early in September, Duggan flew to Washington in the interests of a case, and from there to New York. The first few nights he telephoned her. On the fifth night he failed to call and she lay awake, reading, knowing it was too late for him to phone, but expecting him to wake up in the middle of the night on the other side of the country and remember that he had not phoned her, and in his imagination see her waiting. She fell asleep, waking at one o’clock to the light of the lamp she had left on, and, in that moment of surprising light, she was reminded of Max and of his plea to her to leave a light burning for him. She could not recall the date that he had died because she had never known the date. It was a short time after he was taken away; she had been told the day, but she had not known the date of that day and she had not attended his funeral. One night was as good as another as long as a year had gone by. He would, she felt, forgive her if she were in error by a few days.

  With the light full on her face, she lay against the several pillows she had propped herself with to read, glad that there was no one around to ridicule her about the ritual or to disapprove of it, no one around to feel like an outsider in what might appear to be a most personal engagement of hers with someone not there. The light in the room seemed remote from its purpose. It was simply a light in an apartment among hundreds of lights in apartments all over the city, and how was one light to be separated from all others as the one that remembere
d him and lit his way? The purpose of the light was remote from the light, even as the ritual was remote from her, even as the man himself had been remote, even as all of them were remote. There was no illumination of anybody other than herself, lying alone, waiting for one of the remote ones to return and lie down beside her.

  The Lights of Earth

  “A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory may be rescued from the oblivion which overtakes others.”

  MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

  1

  Years after the night of that strange little party her memory played a trick on her. Her memory set him among the others, the guest of honor who heard every word, who saw every gesture and every expression on every face. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t even expected that night. He must have been still in Spain or New York or down in Los Angeles or over the continent on his way back to San Francisco. He must have been up in the sky, somewhere over all, as the suddenly famous ones seem to be.

  The name of the couple whose house it was, the house where she had not been before and was never to enter again, seemed of no consequence and she didn’t quite hear it. Later, when she knew the name of the wife, she was unable to say that name aloud. An ordinary name to anyone else, for her it was the shattering presence of the woman herself. The couple had asked Claud, a friend of Martin—the guest of honor who wasn’t there—to bring Ilona along. Just by her presence and even without a word she might tell them something about the man who was her lover. Even though he was to appear soon, any day, their impatience threw open the door to her as wide as it would have been had he accompanied her. They must have been hoping for someone like him to come into their lives, each one’s hope so ardently secret from the other that he must have seemed inevitable.

  The oval glass in the oak door of the Victorian house was etched so profusely with grapes and leaves and tendrils it served as an impenetrable silver mist that with utmost graciousness denied you a view of what went on inside. A lamp or a chandelier in some far room glinted off the entwined grapes and turned them gold, now one and now another, a matter of how you shifted your feet or your eyes.

  Claud had ridiculed the host on the way over, but now at the last moment the desire to be presentable forced him to comb down his hair, tossed by the wind. He wore a sportcoat with only one button missing and each pocket held a pack of cigarettes to protect him from his perverse need to smoke the couple’s. Ilona had refused at first to come along. She had come only because the couple’s curiosity about the man who was her lover stirred her own curiosity about something she wanted not to think about at all—a premonition of loss.

  Grasping Claud’s arm, shaking Ilona’s right hand with his left, the host drew them inside, the three awkwardly linked. The host’s jeans were faded, his hiking boots were grayed by rough use, and the most humble garment of all was his gauzy shirt from India. In those years, the early seventies, some affluent young were imitating the poor of the world. The shirt, however, failed to lessen his chest’s prosperity. It was as obdurate as all other wealthy chests, narrow or broad, that she’d slipped by or asked something of, a job or simple directions, or brought something to, a tray of whatever was ordered.

  Beyond the wide doorway to the dining room, the several persons lounging around the long table were like actors on a stage, made small by their surroundings and each striving to be seen and heard. Except one, who had no need to strive—the one among the women who was beautiful, and Ilona knew at once that the woman was the wife of the man who was guiding Claud and herself toward the table and knew that she was the eventual one, the one who takes away the lover, the one who is a reward in a time of rewards, and she wished for herself a time when presentiment of loss would never bother her because she would be wise enough to know that loss was as natural as breathing.

  Ilona, seated across from the woman, looked instead at the couple’s son, close to three years old, who sat elevated by cushions next to his mother, turning his gaze from one face to another, bending over his plate to see who was speaking at the end of the table, to see who was laughing. The little boy bore his resemblance to his mother like a gift whose value he knew about. His eyes, like his mother’s, seemed balanced by serenity, by the trust that all he was to desire of life would be granted, and Ilona called upon reason to rescue her from her archaic view of the world that saw it divided between those who appeared to be blessed and those who appeared to be forsaken, and reason failed. She tried then to imagine at this table a great writer of the past, say a century ago, someone who had observed compassionately women who went unnoticed, but if that figure, whoever he was, were really to be at this table, absorbed again in life, his gaze would be on the beautiful wife, amazingly like a woman who had enthralled him a hundred years ago.

  The host at the head of the table was accusing his guests of envy, envy of the man somewhere up in the air. “Severe envy. It’s worse than hepatitis. More people die of it. Nausea, insomnia. But the worst symptom is impotence.”

  “You know that for a fact?” someone asked, and someone else laughed.

  “Impotence,” the host repeated. “Of the mind. Of the hand that holds your very own little pen. Look at Claud. Claud hasn’t written one word in ten years and he’d like you to think he couldn’t care less, he’s through. But look. Overnight his hair’s turned white and the whites of his eyes have turned green. Claud, let everybody see your eyes.”

  Claud was smiling, smoking a cigarette of his own. His hair was as dark as ever and his eyes as clear as they ever were. “If I’m dying it’s not from envy. It’s from what that Frenchman, Péguy, said—You die of your whole life. Not just one shock.”

  The host brought up a Time from under his chair, already open to the photograph of the absent guest of honor, and held up the magazine for all to see. Ilona had read the review weeks ago and the other guests must also have read it then, but everybody complyingly raised their eyes. Except the wife, who was placing tidbits from her own plate onto her son’s plate, while the child gazed up anxiously at the picture, afraid of missing something so important to his father.

  “One of those faces that haven’t been lived in yet,” the host said. “He’s thirty-four and he looks nineteen and he’ll look nineteen when he’s ninety, God help him.”

  “I think . . .” A girl, afraid to contest with the host, appeared to be talking to her plate. “I think he deserves all the praise he’s been getting.”

  Down came the magazine, down beside his plate, and his hand came down flat on the small picture. “I agree, I agree. That’s why I’ve called you all together. To sing his praises. We’ll practice every night, we’ll gather here every night, and the night he walks in the door a heavenly choir shall greet him.”

  Like falsely obedient children who’ve bested a parent they took up their forks and wineglasses again, complacently silent. When the array of delicatessen delights on each plate was one or two bites less, the chatter began again—nothing about the novel itself but everything about those persons who were welcoming Martin Vandersen into the world: critics, and the movie producer who had bought the screen rights to the novel, and the director at whose villa on the Costa del Sol Martin had been a guest, and the actor who was sought for the lead. “Sought,” cried the host, staring wildly upward. “One lousy actor sought like in ‘they sought God,’ like in ‘they sought justice.’” But though they pleasurably interrupted one another with details about the lives of those legendary persons who were surrounding Martin at this birth, they appeared to be baffled over why they were so affected by somebody else’s recognition, somebody else’s entry into the light. She saw the bafflement in their eyes and heard it in their voices.

  Out in the living room the host sat down at Ilona’s feet, took off his boots, and attempted the lotus position. Apart from them, the others were talking loudly and his wife was upstairs, putting the child to bed.

  “She had a lover in Italy last year,” he said, low. “A good man. A fine sculptor. American, living in Florenc
e. We would have been great friends if he hadn’t been her lover. Your Martin reminds me of him. I met Martin a couple of days before he left, ran into him and Claud, and his resemblance to her last year’s lover was remarkable. The looks, the wit.” His glance slipped sideways on its way up to her face. “What’s he like? I mean when you get to know him.”

  Bearing a tray of decanters and goblets, his wife came into the room, and the question seemed asked for her. They would have to answer the question themselves, each with a secret answer.

  The man at her feet rocked back and forth, gripping his ankles. “How long have you known him?”

  “Oh, four years.” The number of years for lovers was supposed to mean something, a measurement of depth or truth, but numbers were revelations only for scientists. The things she knew about the lovers she’d never tell this man, and one was that love was never certain—who but herself thought it could be?—but that under the uncertainty of love lay the certainty of comradeness. What else wouldn’t she tell? That when Martin had reminded her a time was to come when he would be elsewhere, she had listened reasonably and amenably, but they had pained her, those reminders, and once, afraid that if their time together was without love it was a wasted time, she had gone so far as to quote Camus. “You enrich the future by giving all to the present.” Because she disparaged her own words, because her own words lacked persuasion, she relied on time-honored words. After that heavy-laden quote he did give up his warnings and reminders, perhaps believing that she already knew about endings and about elsewhere. But he was not persuaded to give all to the present.