“We know each other very well, and we’ve never lied to each other. All my motions seem rutted here, and I can’t get out of them. I think we both need to take some time away from each other, because of the bad way I keep hounding you with my intemperate rage. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to bring myself to heel, and I need to bring myself up short, to confront the grimness of life without you.”
“Are you sure I’m not one of the motions you want to get away from?”
“Entirely sure. You’re the one motion and rhythm I want and need to get back to, and every day I tell myself that, and every day the Black Dog, the Black Bile, whatever, takes me by the throat and twists my every intention to the ugly outburst. I need to hear from you right now just how bad it’s been.”
“It’s been bad. I won’t deny it. And at its worst I’ve wondered whether I am finally seeing your true nature. From the time we met at Sally’s gallery until David’s death we were all pleasure-loving people. David loved almost every minute of living till the end, and if he were still alive he would still be loving it, even without a leg. And I intend to go on trying to find pleasure in my life; but you seem to recoil from the very notion of pleasure, even when you might find some relief in it; it’s as though you’ve got some grim, bile-laden gene, preaching to you in a rasping voice that to find pleasure is to betray memory.”
“My poor love. Harsh but fair.”
“The other thing is your famous anger. I get angry myself. You know, I had a son, and I lost him, too. Remember? And sometimes I am literally sick with anger. But I don’t use it as a flail on other people.”
“And I use mine that way?”
“Look at it and see. Do you get a cheap thrill out of it? (Not pleasure, of course.) You’re articulate and you’re quick, and the worst of you, I believe, rather likes blowing people away. If I’m right, along with your decency there’s a bit of a bully left in you, and it’s a rotten thing. And it’s destructive, too, not just to the people you hurt, but to yourself. It’s as though you torch the whole landscape with your flamethrower, and then when you finally look at what you’ve done, you find it ugly—MacIver’s handmade Menin Road. So it’s self-perpetuating: the anger at the ugliness of what you’ve made makes you angry again.”
“Why did you wait till now to say this?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. I’ve tried to talk to you about it before, but you weren’t ever receptive to hearing it—it got the distracted brush-off line, ‘Yeah, right—I know’ or ‘Yes, I keep trying to turn it off, but I can’t right now.’ ”
“Yes, I’m sorry again, I can remember more than a couple of those. I’m hearing it now.”
“So what do we do?”
“What do you think of this idea that we spend a short time apart—in touch, but apart? I’ve hurt you, and seen you withdraw from me, and I have to stop that or lose you. I was hoping we would spend the summer together as usual, and I would get medication, to kick the psyche into a better frame of mind, and get myself in better physical shape, and work hard on the house. I would tell Andrew that I’d like to take him up on his offer of a leave, so I wouldn’t be at Columbia in the first semester and ready to slip easily back into the recent pattern of clobbering students and colleagues. Instead I was thinking of taking up the offer of my old friends in Edinburgh, and spending a term there. And I wouldn’t go till the end of September, because they don’t start till later, and finish in early December. The brainy Brits have a good idea there—keep actual school time to a minimum. So we would be back together by Christmas, and hopefully I could give you a brand-new mint MacIver as one of my presents. I’m also thinking I might start a new research interest— moving on a war. I want to study Lord Lovat and his first regiment of commandos in World War Two. Most of them were his tenants, gillies and crofters off the Fraser estates, all clans-men of his. I would talk to them—what the war was like, but more on what it was like to be plucked out of the highlands in the first place, and what it was like to be going back there, after seeing Paris etcetera. Most of them would be in their late forties, early fifties, so there should be plenty of them around with their stories. The question is, what do you think of the plan, and where would you be?”
She watched his face with pleasure, seeing some life in the eyes and animation for the first time, she thought, since October. “I love the new research project, but the thought of a mint MacIver is a little alarming. What if I don’t like it? Like a new, sassy car model, where you can never find what opens the flap to the gas tank, and the windshield-wiper switch turns up the stereo speakers in the back. I like my old battered MacIver model, for all its rattles and engine noise, its gas guzzling and rusting tailpipe.” She gave her soft, merry laugh—she loved to score on him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Let’s not take that any further. The question is, what would you be doing with yourself?”
“Aha! By a curious chance, this very day I have been offered the perfect Andrew analogue.”
And it turned out that Karl Ferenyi, a graceful and civilized old collector, who admired Margaret, and for a long time had urged her to do illustrations for handsome volumes he would produce, had finally hit on one she was prepared to consider— a lavishly printed and bound edition of Paradise Lost, to be made in Paris, on almost as opulent a scale as William Morris’s Chaucer. It would be a long extension on what she had been doing, but her present grief made the large, dark theme attractive. Twelve original plates in the volume, one for each book of the poem, and she could pick the text or theme of each plate for herself, making her own match to particular passages that caught her eye. The terms would be generous.
Margaret was now eager to do this. She knew Milton, and she knew Blake on Milton, and though she wondered whether her reverence for both of them might inhibit her, she had already picked her theme and an emphasis within the theme, which would give the hint of coherence to the twelve plates on their separate pages. She would paint falling figures, and the emphasis common to all of them would be that the bodies must have weight, be subject to gravity, and not simply ethereal spirits, because they were all sinners. She had already chosen the text for her first plate: Him the Almighty Power / Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Sky / With Hideous Ruin. 1:44–46. “I’ve been thinking about it all day,” she said. “And the phrase that keeps turning in my mind is the phrase free fall—I think it’s almost an oxymoron. The only free fall I have ever seen is that of trapeze artists, when, weary after their nerve- and muscle-burning stunts on the swinging bar and the split-second catches in the bright lights, they can suddenly let themselves go and drop down loose and free into the safety net below, on their way back to earth. But most falls aren’t free—there is always the tension, it seems to me, between what you are falling from and what you are falling to.”
MacIver listened to her, admiring and envying once more the richness of his wife’s inner life, the way her experience, however traumatic, seemed to flow, almost at once, always naturally into streams of creative impulse in the center of her, and color them. He told her.
So the evening where they spelled things out together turned brighter at this decision that they would be the better part of three months apart, but the distance between them would be only the one hour and fifteen minutes on British Caledonian, from Edinburgh to Paris.
“And what are the rules on visitation?” he asked.
“Oh, surely three weekends. We can handle that, even if you’re still an ogre, and we can’t get by with fewer.”
“Are we playing them on a home and away basis?”
“No, we’re playing the first one in Edinburgh in October, and the other two in Paris. I can’t be in Scotland in the cold.”
“What about sex? Are we committed to monk and nun?”
“Monk and nun except on visitation weekends, when we become Abelard and Héloïse.”
“How will you handle the ancient, insinuating Ferenyi?”
“Unlike some other people, Ka
rl is content with other parts of me than my body.”
“The swine.”
They talked on. How would they spend their time, when they weren’t talking to commandos or painting Milton? MacIver confided a little sheepishly that he might volunteer to help coach the rugby team at Heriot’s. “They make a lot of me there.”
“Do they ever,” she said, feigning indignation. “It was obscene how they fawned over you there when you took me back after we were married. But you are an utter, utter cad. I had been flattering myself that you wanted to get back in shape to appeal to your poor wife, and it turns out you just want to strut in front of teenage boys. . . .”
“Not strut, but at least to trot down the field, if I can’t sprint down it. What are you going to be doing all fancy-free in Paris in your loose hours?”
“I may have to work harder than I like. I’ve never illustrated a book before, let alone such a luxurious volume. And I’ve never collaborated with a team of people before. I always liked the solitude of being an artist. But now I’ll have to learn new things, but that’s all right because I’m in the mood for some company. Otherwise, I’ll do what one always does in Paris, I’ll pick up shiny chestnuts in the Place des Vosges and watch children float ancient wooden toy boats with faded sails in the ponds of the Tuileries gardens and sit in cafés and sip what the mood of the moment orders and drink in everything else, and go to concerts in churches in the evening, and read. And occasionally I’ll think of you.”
They went home easier than they had been since October, and the next day, without prodding, MacIver phoned the well-connected dean to see if he had any recommendation for a therapist.
“Ah, yes,” said Andrew. “Excellent. Do you want a man or a woman? Be very careful what you answer.”
“I’ll leave it entirely to you. But you do understand that I want the person who lets me leave with the fewest words spoken, but holding in my big mitt an illegible prescription scrawled on white paper, which will however lead directly to some Merlin elixir which restores me to myself and general happiness in a matter of days.”
“I understand everything perfectly,” said the dean, playing with his smooth shrink’s voice. The trouble with Andrew is that he does, thought MacIver. He’s really very irritating.
Irritating or not, the next morning he sent in the phone number of a woman, whom MacIver called at once, and found to be pleasant voiced, matter-of-fact, and with several slots available in her schedule over the next few days. He took the first one, and a youngish woman, late thirties he calculated, greeted him at the scheduled hour and took him into a light, sparely but elegantly furnished room with some nice drawings and small paintings, which he would have liked to explore.
“I don’t know what Dean Repton told you about me,” he began.
“He told me that you and your wife had lost a wonderful son in Vietnam in October, that things had been very hard for you since then, that you had, to use his words, one of the great marriages of our time, and the two of you are about to go abroad. So where I can help you best right now, it seems to me, is to give you something that helps ease the burden; it won’t change any of the facts, but it may have the effect of letting a little more light in, so you can attend to other things besides the sorrow itself. I gather that we may have a little time to get the dose right before you go off, and then I could send you on your way with enough medication to hold you through Christmas. But it will help if you tell me exactly what your symptoms have been over these last few months.”
So MacIver told her, and well, with sharply focused vignettes of each kind of lost control—the sudden flash-fury to hapless students, the listless unyielding wall of moroseness rebuffing Margaret’s loving efforts to reach him, the extraordinary depth of fatigue pulling him back to bed at eleven after he had slept from ten at night to nine in the morning, the complete desertion of any powers of concentration, forcing him to write out a sentence in a book in the hope that slowing the attention to each laborious letter might bring understanding of the whole thought, and finally the continually haunting final picture, crowding back unbidden at every hour, of his son in the hospital morgue. He told it all in an even voice, with pauses. “I don’t know if any of that helps,” he said. “My wife Margaret could tell you a lot more.”
“That is quite enough for what I need,” the young doctor said quietly. As he was on his way to the door with his prescription, she added an afterthought: “I actually know you both from your work.”
“Ah! How so?” he said.
“In college my history professor had us all read Voices Through the Smoke for our course on the twentieth century, ‘Death of Victoria to Victory over Japan.’ ” She was both charmingly embarrassed and amused at herself at the same time. “He said, I remember, it was the first book of history to display the horrors of war extended indefinitely forward in individual lives with the sustained force of a poetic image.”
“Did he now? I think Thucydides may have got there first, but it is in fact exactly what I tried to do. How nice of you to mention it to me. But how do you know Margaret?”
“Oh, I own a Margaret Westleigh! It used to hang right there on the wall, but I liked it so much I had to have it at home.”
“Can I ask what it’s a picture of?”
“Yes, of course. It’s one of her softly lit interiors, with the viewer looking in from outside, and there’s a young woman, whom you see in profile, with her hand half-extended, clearly deliberating whether to pick up a photograph on the table in front of her.”
“I remember that picture!” MacIver exclaimed. “It was hanging in her show at the Gordon Gallery in 1947 on the day I met her for the first time. It tells a story, doesn’t it, but you’re never quite sure what it is. You have to assume, though, that the young woman is not in her own room.”
“Exactly,” she laughed. “But is she in her lover’s room looking at a photograph of him and his wife, or in her father’s room, and the photograph’s of him and an unknown woman, not her mother? And so on. I can speculate for the rest of my life!”
They parted with pleasure at having met, but as soon as he closed the office door, he hastened across Fifth Avenue and sat on a bench with his back to the Park, and tears welled up within him from the telling. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he scolded himself. “Perhaps we’ve all got some Ben Winterbourne in us.”
However, the dinner downtown and this visit to Dr. Ehrlich were a turning point for both of them, sending them on the way back together. They had a very productive summer on the Cape, with Margaret completing no fewer than five of her Milton paintings, and sketches of another four, and MacIver working very hard at getting fit, cycling miles every morning, running every evening on Newcomb’s Hollow beach after the crowds had left, and during the day cutting cords of wood at the chopping block, swinging like an executioner. Margaret could observe him from the window: “You’re getting much more accurate,” she remarked. “Before, I used to worry about your feet, but now you could split a match lengthwise.”
Their European adventure was everything they could have wished. Ferenyi had taken a beautiful studio for Margaret on the Ile Saint-Louis, overlooking the Seine, and MacIver had sublet the flat of P. G. Walsh, a good classicist on leave, high up on Castle Hill looking out to Holyrood. They kept to their visitation schedule, both craving for the calendar to move faster after each visit was ended. Edinburgh disarmed itself for the first one into one of its splendid autumnal moods of mellow gold; Paris was always Paris. As they had in their first beginnings before they were married, in both places they left rumpled sheets behind, and turned gentle faces to each other as they went about their short days.
Work went well, too. Ferenyi was ecstatic with Margaret’s Milton paintings, and, to his delight, she got heavily involved in the process of design of the whole book. Territorial jealousies between the great craftsmen he had enlisted were largely hushed in her presence; she saw the best in each person’s work, and she saw ways to make the best c
ombine to make them all look better.
MacIver immediately got caught up with his commandos; these were not broken men, like the victims of the gas attacks. They had seen much more of war than he ever had, and much worse things. Most of them seemed to him, as they met in each soldier’s pub of choice over beer or whisky, to possess a kind of quiet containment; they all had in their bones the often splendid, often desolate rhythms of burn, loch, glen, and moor. Some had gone back to old estates and stayed, most had not. Whatever had been thrown at them in their lives, they had more than managed. To his surprise their largest concerns seemed mostly for their children, who had far fewer assurances in their modern lives than Lovat’s men and their wives had brought from their almost feudal childhoods.
He gave two afternoons a week to Heriot’s rugby First Fifteen. Their regular coach, Glen Duncan, an enormous second-row forward, who in his day had also played for Scotland, had hugged the air out of him and said, “This is what we need. You do the backs, and I’ll do the forwards. The little fuckers will die for you.” So the old Ginger Fox dusted off some of his ancient guiles and throughly enjoyed himself. He taught them how to study the man marking them for a weakness (“He may well tackle better to one side than the other, preferring to lead with his right shoulder, say, so you’ll know which way to cut on him”); the small tough scrum-half Kevin reminded him of his friend Terry, but he needed more strings to his bow. (“You’ve got a lovely long serve from the bottom of the scrum, but if you use it all the time, you just keep showing the wing-forward where his target is going to get the ball; we need to work with you and Gary on getting some variety in there. Don’t forget the blind side.”) He had never known a team more eager to learn, both with the ball and defending. Once, feeling particularly frisky at practice, he took his place in the line as they passed down the field, with just the faintest hint of his old bullish stride and even side-step, but Coach Duncan had caught a glimpse from an adjacent practice field, and started chanting Mac-I-ver! Mac-I-ver! and the rest of the team stopped whatever it was doing and loudly joined in, so he had had to flick the ball to the young center next to him, before he tore something and died of humiliation.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 14
