East Into Upper East

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  When he arrived at Ma’s new place, she had one of her song sessions going. He found all the people who used to come to Tammy’s assembled here. But Minnie’s interior decorator could have walked in and been perfectly satisfied that nothing had been disturbed: even the tables were still laid, and the little porcelain fruit-tarts unchipped. Ma’s people had simply flowed over the design like water over a grotto, leaving it perfectly preserved while drowning it forever. Only the hi-fi system had been disassembled—there was no need for it, since Ma’s voice was more powerful than any high-tech machine; and the table on which it had stood now served as her seat or throne on which she sat as she had on Tammy’s dining table, with her legs tucked under her. From here she conducted her sing-song; sometimes hers was the only voice to be heard, for the others had forgotten the words and trailed off till she started them up again. She was not totally absorbed in the performance but dropped from time to time into conversation, encouraging everyone to lift up their spirits along with their voices, or only inquiring if the lentils had been stirred. When she saw Ross entering with his suitcases, she called to him gladly and invited him to sit up front; but when he preferred to remain at the back, she explained to the others, “He’s shy. And he won’t sing.”

  “I can’t,” Ross said.

  “You won’t,” she said and smiled in that flirtatious way she had with him.

  But now her song was ascending to its climax, and she opened her arms wide as though to sweep them up to its height. What was it that she was making them sing? No one understood the words, she had never translated or explained them. Nevertheless, they all did their utmost, gathering strength and voice to follow her lead. Only Ross sat silent. He could still feel the touch of Tammy’s hand in his, and when Ma’s eyes sought him out in the crowd to exhort him to sing, he shut his palm as though it held something precious that he did not want to let go. Ma was singing with all her might, so that he wanted to stop his ears against her; nor did he dare raise his eyes to her but kept them lowered to his hand balled into a fist.

  “Sing, Ross, sing!” she exhorted him and sang and swayed and shone and shimmered, till he knew he could not withstand her. He scrambled up from the floor, and without a glance in her direction, he picked up his suitcases and escaped into the elevator. Her voice followed him down twenty-seven storeys and even into the street—or was that just his fancy, and fear? Anyway, he did not feel safe till he was in the opposite part of the city, the part he knew so well, and outside Tammy’s apartment building and then inside that marble vault, where the doormen were all new, for the old ones had followed Ma and had lost interest in holding down their jobs.

  A SUMMER BY THE SEA

  Lying on the beach, I could hear their voices all day long. Sometimes they sounded like bird song, but when I opened my eyes they were all men. He—Boy, my husband—was very happy in their company. How everything sparkled on those long days on the beach: the ocean, the sky, the sand, and that group of handsome men in swim trunks, their bronzed limbs glistening with drops of water and grains of sand, scattered all over them like pearls.

  Then there were the days when my mother was there with us. Those were not so good. She bothered them and she bothered me. By myself, I was happy just to lie near them, mostly with my eyes shut, and to hear their voices. I didn’t expect to take part in their fun, and didn’t really want to or need to. But Mother hated to be left out. She liked talking and laughing, but what she said bored them, and what they said bored her.

  “What are they talking about?” she would ask me. “What’s all that rubbish? Giggling like a bunch of kids.” She would get disgusted with them and go off by herself, splashing in the ocean and making friends with other people. She usually joined some group, and we could hear her voice shouting above theirs and, looking over at her, we saw her—very bright in her bright bathing suit, with her gold-red hair and her jewels glistening in the sun, and her too-white skin that never tanned, and the operation scar showing over the top of her bikini.

  She suffered from insomnia, and she would walk the house at night, looking for someone to talk to. Boy and I would lie very still, not daring to turn on the light or talk or read, in case she found us awake. The nights were very long and boring whenever she was there. The days weren’t so bad, because I would pretend to be busy looking after the friends, or to be asleep on the beach, so that Mother couldn’t ever really get hold of me for one of her tête-à-têtes. But sooner or later she managed it, and then it would always be the same—about Boy, and our marriage, and his friends, on and on, as it always had been from the beginning and even before.

  Yes, even before we were married she liked to question me about Boy. He was quite different from any son-in-law she had expected. She had disliked his family almost from the beginning—his mother and two sisters (“those crazies,” she called them)—but she could not dismiss Boy, not just because he was part of me and so part of her but because he fascinated her. His good looks and his refinement were like heirlooms that had come into the family, and she wanted to have them appraised. She could not ask me enough about him, and the longer we were married the more pressing and intimate her questions became.

  Boy used to teach a course in art history, but since our marriage he’s been concentrating on his own research. That leaves him with a lot of time on his hands and makes him very dependent on having friends. Hamid has been his special friend for some months—they had got very close in New York, where they both liked to go to afternoon movies—but Mother hadn’t met him until she came to stay with us in this cottage on Nantucket that Boy and I usually rent in the summer. She and Hamid got on very well together. They kidded around and seemed to have the same sense of humor, and Mother really became like a girl, with all that teasing and joking they did together. He called her by her first name, Bea, and treated her as if they were the same age. Naturally, she liked that and opened up to him completely. What she didn’t know is that behind her back he called her Golden Oldie, and laughed at her with Boy and the others. I tried to warn her, but of course she wouldn’t listen; she knew better.

  “You don’t understand, Susie,” she said. “You don’t know anything about these things. You never did.” I am her only daughter, and it’s one of the regrets of her life that I haven’t turned out to be fun-loving and sexy, like her. “He’s my type,” she told me about Hamid. “We have the same chemistry.”

  Hamid had a lot of chemistry. I am not usually sensitive about this (as she has told me often enough), but I could feel that. There was a change in our circle after he entered it. Before that, it was always Boy we were all centered around—not that Boy is bossy or selfish or anything but just because we all wanted to do what he wanted and we didn’t really get any fun out of anything unless he was behind it heart and soul. Perhaps this was because we all loved him so much. But I guess Hamid had a stronger personality than the rest of us, including Boy. Or maybe it was because he is a foreigner, an Oriental—someone different in an exotic way—and we kept looking at him with fascination to see what he would do next.

  At first we thought he must be some kind of prince, on account of his looks, but he was too poor for that. He never had any money at all. Not that it bothered him, because there were plenty of people eager to pay for anything he needed. Boy said that maybe he came from one of those very ancient royal lines that were extinct now, except for a few last descendants working as coolies in Calcutta. Or maybe, Boy said—he has plenty of imagination and also quite a bit of oriental background, thanks to his study of art history—Hamid was a descendant of a line of famous saints, dating back to the thirteenth century and handing down their sainthood from generation to generation. When I said that I didn’t think there was anything saintly about Hamid, Boy said, “Oh, no? Just have a look at his eyes.” So the next time he was near me I did, and while I had to admit they were very beautiful, I couldn’t see anything in them except an eroticism so deep that he had to keep it partially curtained by lowering his black satin la
shes.

  Mother always got up later than the rest of us, and then it took her a long time to get herself ready to appear on the beach. “Here comes Golden Oldie,” Hamid would say to us, but when she got closer he would call out to her, “Good morning, Madame!” in a cheerful voice. “Or should I say ‘Good afternoon’?”

  “You can say ‘Good evening,’ for all I care,” Mother replied pertly, and they carried on from there, topping each other with childish jokes, and always looking over each other with impudent, knowing looks. The other friends would pretend to be engrossed in their own doings. One was reading Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals, and another building something in the sand, and Boy lay face down, with his head buried in his arms. I kept my eyes shut; I didn’t want to have to see Mother, with her face—so carefully made up, with green eyelids—exposed by the blazing light from sea, sun, and sand.

  “Can’t you stop her?” Boy sometimes asked me. I wanted to say, “Can’t you stop him?” For Hamid was leading her on, no doubt about that. He needed a lot of reaction from people, and although he got plenty in our house from Boy and Boy’s other friends, perhaps he needed women as well. In that department, there was only Mother and me, and he had given up on me quite quickly.

  Very late one night, when Hamid and Mother were sitting together out on the porch talking in low voices, Boy suddenly went rushing out there in his pajamas. I heard him say, “What are you doing, for Pete’s sake, out here in the dark?”

  “Ah-ha-ha!” replied Mother playfully, but with a hysterical note in her voice.

  By the time I came out, Boy had turned on the light. There was Mother in full regalia, in a silver-spangled halter dress and actually wearing her dangling diamond earrings, and Hamid was stretched out on the painted wooden porch floor at her feet, in his very short shorts, with grains of sand still clinging to the hairs on his thighs.

  “Can I speak to you?” Boy said to Hamid. “For a moment?” He seemed rather frail in his pale blue pajamas. His fair and (unfortunately) thinning hair was tousled, from drawing his hands through it in his nervousness.

  Hamid sat up on the floor. He looked powerful and almost angry. We all waited for him. At last, he reacted favorably. He said, “Okeydokey,” and heaved himself up from the floor, using Boy as a support. They went in together.

  “How can you stand it?” Mother said to me.

  We could hear them arguing inside—or, rather, Boy arguing. He tried to keep his voice low, so that we couldn’t hear what he said, but that just made it more intense and passionate. Hamid made only an occasional remark, in a soft voice, as if he wanted to cool him down. But Boy was not cooled down.

  “Well, I can’t stand it,” Mother said at last. She went down the porch steps, onto the beach, into the dark. I could see her pacing up and down there, like a firefly in her spangly dress and jewels.

  I didn’t want to join her but I knew she expected me to. As soon as I did, she fell on my neck and wept. She said it was for me. But that was an old story, and these tears came from somewhere new. Unexpectedly, she began to talk about Daddy. “I keep thinking about him these days,” she said. “Not like he was later, with all those tarts he had”—she pulled her familiar sour face—“but in the first years.”

  Of course, I had heard all about those early years, when Daddy had been making his first million and Mother had given up a promising (she said) singing-and-dancing career to be married to him. The fun, the jokes! I never quite made out what these had been, because usually she laughed so much remembering them that she couldn’t get out the words.

  “How he’d have hated it here!” she said now. “He’d have been bored to death. And so am I. I don’t know how you can like it.”

  “You know I like it,” I said. Boy and I had chosen this house on a remote section of the beach.

  “Daddy liked being by the sea, too, but only if he could look at it from the terrace of some Grand Hotel,” she said. “Sitting there with his binoculars—he looked at some other things besides the ocean, I can tell you that. Well, I guess that was his nature. He had these strong, manly appetites, God rest his soul.”

  I went right to the edge of the water. I looked and listened to the waves and really enjoyed that. But she came and stood next to me.

  “Can I tell you something?” She said it like a secret. “He reminds me of Daddy. Hamid. Not that they look alike or anything, but there is something. Maybe it’s because they’re both strong—strong, sexy men. He was telling me about his first experience today. He was only twelve, can you believe it? He was seduced by a servant girl, but she stank so much it put him off women for years. Everyone knows they’re ambidextrous over there. It’s all right over there. It’s expected.”

  “Can we go back in now?”

  “You know something, Susie?” she said. “You’re a moral coward. I wouldn’t have believed it that a daughter of mine and Daddy’s—Because we always did everything we wanted to.”

  I said, “How do you know I don’t?”

  The next morning, Boy sat gloomily on the beach while Hamid laughed and joked with the other friends. When Mother came to join us, in a new lavender bikini and a matching headscarf, Hamid turned all his attention on her. Of course, she was delighted and reacted twice as much. Neither of them seemed to care when Boy got up and went away. After a while, I followed him into the house. He was in the kitchen making crêpes—he tends to start cooking when he’s upset.

  Boy is so sensitive that when he is emotionally worked up he quivers all over. It is as if his body is just the thinnest, finest sheath around his soul, totally inadequate to protect him against the roughness of this world. That’s why I feel I have to do everything to protect him, even though I know that I’m just as inadequate and unprotected. Boy hates me to see him when he is upset. He doesn’t want me to know these things about him, so I have to pretend I don’t.

  I sat down at the kitchen table, talking to him about his damn crêpes and pretending I was interested in whether he was going to make them Suzette or Gil Blas. And he pretended that that was all he was thinking about, too, frenziedly beating the batter. But he couldn’t keep it up, and finally he sat down next to me at the table and said in a low, mean voice, “Get her out of here! I can’t stand her another minute.”

  I knew how he felt, but I also knew how Mother felt. I murmured, “It gets awfully lonesome for her in New York.”

  “I don’t care!” Boy said.

  This was ludicrous. Boy cares more than any other human being in the world. He is so imaginative that another person’s unhappiness is as real and painful to him as his own. He is always asking me, “How’s your mother? Did you speak to her today?” A lot of the time, he phones her himself, to make sure she isn’t dying of loneliness in that big apartment of hers, with the gilt furniture.

  Luckily, I remembered something just then. I said, “Your sister Evie phoned last night. I forgot to tell you. She was—”

  “What?” he asked in apprehension.

  “Well,” I said, “she seemed okay, really. She spoke about going to visit Bobby at his summer camp, but then she—she—” I was upset, but I couldn’t help laughing. Evie had told me that she had to call the doctor in, because there were birds roosting in the valance of her dining-room curtains. She was in one of her disturbed states, and spoke very seriously.

  “Is she bad?” he asked. “Did Linda phone?”

  Linda is his mother. Every now and again, when Evie gets very bad and has to go away for a while, Linda and her other daughter, Paula, are constantly on the phone to Boy. He is the only male left in the family. His father is dead (drowned while drunk, at East Hampton), and Evie’s and Paula’s husbands left years ago.

  “I guess Linda would have phoned if she was really bad,” he said, putting that problem aside for the moment. “That leaves your mother.”

  When I started to defend her again, he said, “Doesn’t she realize how it looks? That everyone’s laughing at her?”

  “Who’s laughin
g?”

  At this point, Terry came to join us in the kitchen. He is an English boy, studying architecture in New York, and he had come to stay with us for the summer, along with some of the other friends. It’s a big cottage, and they all like to be together. Terry was forever following Boy around, and that was why he came to join us in the kitchen. But Boy, wanting to be alone to talk with me, got rid of him quite fast. Poor Terry! How different it had been last year, when Hamid had not yet appeared on the scene and Terry had been the apple of Boy’s eye.

  “Everyone is,” Boy said, as if no interruption had taken place. “To see an old woman like her making a fool of herself over—The whole beach is laughing. By the way,” he said to me in a different tone, “can’t you tell her not to wear a bikini? That scar—I mean, we all know, poor thing, but it makes you feel sick. Hamid asked me about it. He said, ‘Who slit her up?’”

  “Does it make him feel sick?”

  “No, it makes him laugh. Everything about her makes him laugh. He thinks she’s a ridiculous, ludicrous, silly old hag. He hates her,” Boy said. He held his head in his hands.

  I wanted to stroke his hair—which would have made him mad—so to resist the temptation I took the bowl of batter and began to beat it as hard as Boy had. After a while, he took over again—a good thing, because nobody makes crêpes the way he can, and also it was therapy for him, so by the time everyone came in to eat he was feeling better and was awfully nice to Mother, as if he wanted to make it up to her for having spoken unkindly behind her back.

  Later, Linda, Boy’s mother, did phone to say that Evie was bad again. She wanted Boy to come to the city to persuade her to go back in the hospital till she was better. His sister Paula also phoned, with the same message. He usually goes when they call him, but this time he was more reluctant than usual. He just couldn’t bear to leave Hamid, especially when Mother was there. It was a dilemma—he and I were very much aware of it, and so was Mother. (She wanted him to go, of course—very much.) I don’t think Hamid knew what was going on, though he knew something was up. That was typical of him. He was remote from us and our problems, but at the same time he was extremely sensitive to what everyone was feeling.