Iris
P.S. You might let him know that Julian’s not living in any sort of rathole if that’s what he’s worried about. It’s more like a palace. Also it’s probably best not to mention Lili right now, don’t you think?
The Botanicals! It was the first clue Bea had that Julian, sulky and stubborn, had a wisp of wit. The rest was wisp upon wisp: the girlfriend, hardly more solid than the rumor or dread she’d been before. And that infuriating I’ll thank you forever, with its tone of entitlement, its expectation of being served; its command. Iris might wear Margaret’s bland look, but oh! she was Marvin’s daughter. And she was at it still, duplicity engendering duplicity: having inveigled Bea into outflanking Marvin, she was ordering a second maneuver. The first had been easy enough; he had swallowed it almost benignly, and wasn’t there more than a touch of triumph in outwitting Marvin? But to do it yet again, another round of sleight of hand, when she had no interest in these young people’s lives, their plots and intimacies, their alien bodies and whatever effluvium might pass for their souls. Iris and Julian, niece and nephew, flesh of her flesh, who had never cared to seek her out, or she them. They were mutually incurious and mutually superfluous. It was fear (Marvin’s fear) that was tossing them all into a single dirty drawstring sack — Marvin, at home in California, tightening the cord. He was afraid of Europe. He was afraid of Paris. Bea saw in him a kind of terrorized primitive — his Paris was no more than the platitudes of the postcards, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe; and grimly below, diseased and bloody dungeons engulfing his boy. Beneath those famed public monoliths were interiors a visitor could never fathom; and in Marvin’s naked grasp of it, his son, no longer merely a visitor, had penetrated that unnatural dark. Julian was a captive of Europe. He was gradually turning foreign.
His sister was abetting him. Worse, she was coercing Bea into a further scheme she ultimately had no taste for — what was she to say to Marvin? If Marvin was a lion to be bearded, then Iris ought to take on the bearding herself. She had lied and run off — let her feel the poundings of her father’s roar. It was only just, it was what she deserved; Bea, for her part (but she had no part in any of it), intended to remain an outsider to this California crisis — California, where the capricious seductions of too warm air and too much sun melted away familial ties, parents from children, husbands from wives; where, for years and years now, Leo had, after all, become the captain of his fate, and where, though they lived in their fancy houses with those red-tiled Spanish roofs and hanging balconies, possibly less than a mile apart, Leo and Marvin would never meet.
The girl’s urgings: arrogant, dictatorial — but also a plea. A plea for fraudulence and fabrication. It came to Bea that the two of them, Iris and Marvin, had ceded to her the means to punish: the father for his tyranny, the daughter for her evasions.
Then what was she to say to Marvin?
The cold and dangerous truth.
9
August 18, 1952
Dear Marvin,
It’s a bit surprising that I haven’t had so much as a word from you about the many days’ delay in Iris’s return, though by now you must be getting somewhat impatient. Even knowing that she’s missed her lab work (I recognize how this must upset you), you’ve given her, and me, a good deal of leeway. In fact, I’ve been half expecting the telephone to ring itself hoarse. I can only attribute your indulgence to your trust in me, and to your belief in the worthiness of your plan. I write now to tell you a hard thing, with this caveat. If when you receive this you attempt to phone, I promise you I will absolutely not listen to a rant. If you begin one, I will instantly cut you off. I do not agree to be yelled at, or accused, or belittled. I have no responsibility for any of it. Here are the facts. Your trust, and your plan, and my mistaken trust in your daughter, have all failed. It seems that Iris never had any intention of schooling me in her brother’s character and circumstances — as far as she’s been able to surmise them from a distance. She has now closed that distance. She is with Julian in Paris. This was as much a bolt from the blue for me as it will be for you. On the positive side, you will recall that you yourself considered, if only fleetingly, the idea of sending Iris alone. Apparently this was her thought as well. She feels for her brother, and she, more than anyone, certainly more than I, will have the means to persuade him to come home. On the negative side, she gives no sign of her own return — make of this what you will.
As ever,
Beatrice
August 23, 1952
Bea:
All right, you’ve given me a shock. I suppose that was the idea. And no, I won’t be phoning. At this point I simply don’t care to hear your voice and whatever cock-and-bull story you’ll come up with in that schoolmarmy sleaze of yours. It may shut up those slum kids you’ve decided to sacrifice your life to, but it won’t get to me. And please don’t tell me you had no inkling my daughter was heading for Paris! It won’t hold water, I’m on to what you’ve been up to, I knew it the minute I got back and found this pile of shit you’ve sent me. Actually I’ve been in Mexico on a deal — we’re selling them helicopters, not that some of those honchos down there can tell an engine from a horse’s ass. The plain fact of it is I assumed Iris was back at school. She’s got her own little place just off campus — she said she wanted her independence so I set her up out there at never mind the cost. I’ve always done what I could to please my children, and for what return! Anyhow it wasn’t easy on Iris living here with Margaret the way she’s been. Right now, for the last month or so, Margaret’s being treated in a very good rest home, the Suite Eyre, here in Beverly Hills. I came back to an empty house, except for the housekeeper, and I won’t deny that I deliberately keep this woman as blind as a bat — I don’t need a servant to snoop into my family’s comings and goings. I sacked the last one when she started asking why Margaret sleeps so much in the afternoons. Of course I can’t let Margaret know about Iris, at least not right now, I’m afraid she’d just slip over the edge. She’s always had her nerves, but what’s made her sicker than usual is Julian’s disappearance. That’s how she says it, Julian’s disappearance. As if he’s gone up in a puff of smoke, as if something horrible’s been done to him. And now Iris! So I ask you, why did you let this happen? Why did you let my daughter do this? What’s this crazy business about her not coming back? Why in God’s name didn’t you STOP her? You shit, you never stopped her! My kids are running from me, and why? What have I done? What haven’t I done? Did I neglect them, did I hurt them? Sometimes I feel it’s a curse, but for what? I don’t know, I don’t know. All I know is that I want my son to come home. He doesn’t belong there, it’s the wrong place for him, they’ve swallowed him up over there. You tell me Iris will get him back. But what if whatever it is over there swallows her up the same as Julian? I’m a dead man, I’m dead, for God’s sake, Bea, can’t you understand what I’m going through?
Marvin
You shit. This pile of shit. Marvin back in street mode. Marvin undone.
10
THE NEW HOTEL was surprisingly full for September, and though it was less expensive than the last one, it was also, for the money, surprisingly shabby. But on short notice she was lucky to find a room at all, and she could afford nothing better — what foolishness, a second trip two months after the first! Summer was officially over, the tourists were still swarming, and the better-off Parisians who habitually escape the city in August were trickling back. The taxi from the airport had dropped her in front of a narrow pair of steps at an ordinary wooden door, when she had expected a marquee and a man in uniform. She was obliged to prop the door open with one foot while struggling to swing her suitcase over the threshold and into the tiny lobby. The young clerk at the reception counter made no move to help.
The room turned out to be stifling. Its single window, partly blocked by a battered wardrobe, looked out on a dirty alley. A wide bed with a gully in the middle of its belly consumed nearly all the space there was, and a narrow pathway at its flank led
to what had been advertised as “Spacious Private Bath with Shower.” The toilet and the washbasin were jammed together catty-corner, almost obstructed by a huge tub in which a serpentine hose lay coiled.
But in the morning she found the lobby transformed by a circle of little breakfast tables lit by sharp slashes of sunlight and crowded with staccato British chirps and the low catarrh of German. She drank the very good coffee, nibbled at a bit of brie and a croissant, and set out. She had left behind her guidebook — it was useless for her present confusions — but had extracted from its pocket a compact map of Paris. The map was a mystery anyhow — you could see the names of streets, and where they met or diverged, and, in spread-out red type, the Roman numerals that identified this or that arrondissement: all of it meaningless. In New York you readily knew the difference between the glittering Fifth Avenue of the museums and the impoverished Fifth Avenue of the tenements, though no street map could hint at what a mere two miles’ distance might signify. Here in Paris, what was it to be mad about Proust (she had brought her yellowing copy of Swann’s Way to read on the plane), or bookishly familiar with history and kings and revolutionaries and philosophers? It counted for nothing when you were puzzling over how to get from the IXth to the VIIth on an unexceptional Tuesday in the middle of your unexceptional life, and when you were feeling dismissed by the conscientious weekday faces streaming past, faces that had mundane tasks and were set on exactly what they were and how they were to be done. She could not understand this city, it was an enigma, or else it was Paris that comprehended whatever passed through its arteries, and it was she, the interloper, who was the enigma.
She was an enigma to herself. She had come away calmly enough, a curious calm, a sleepwalker’s calm: the bus to the bank, the hypnotic mechanical packing, the interview with her rough-hewn principal.
— You ask this now? At the last minute, just at the start of the new term?
— Mrs. Bienenfeld says she’ll cover for me, won’t that take care of it?
— It’s too much, she has her own classes. And she isn’t credentialed to teach English, you can’t mix puddings!
— She’ll be fine. She’s glad to do it, she’s a friend.
— You mean she’s your patsy. Well, if she’s that willing, she can take two of yours, but for the other two it’ll mean an extra teacher from outside and extra pay, and we’ve got guidelines and a budget. All right, you’re worth something around here, you give us some class, so I’ll go for it, but Mrs. Bienenfeld better keep your guys in line, you’ve been good about that. Hell, what’s this really about, Bea, another run to Paree, you got a French kisser hidden away over there? Miss Nightingale, lady of the night, oo-lala!
And then Laura:
— Bea, I can’t do your syllabus the way you have it, all this Whitman and Hawthorne and God help me, A Tale of Two Cities, they’ll spit it out! Can’t you change it to stuff I can handle?
— Wing it, Laura, wing it.
Her rough-hewn principal, rough-hewn Laura. Her own life ragged and low, scorned by Marvin, scorned by Leo — by Leo, who had put her there! Then why hadn’t she climbed out of it?
On the rue Mouffetard (she saw this on the side of a building) she stopped and looked all around. She had been walking in the wrong direction — she was nowhere near the numbers on the back of Iris’s envelope. The morning cool had begun to retreat. Despite the growing mob, a frenetic swirl of tourists with their cameras and bags, she was sickeningly alone. She had smuggled herself into this unnatural scene, displaced, desolate, and to what end? Marvin, hollow Marvin — she hadn’t answered his letter, she had told him nothing. She was all contradiction — resentment and indifference — and then this . . . this harebrained plummeting into Paris. To do what? To rescue whom? Marvin from his torment, the brother who abused her? Bea from a low and ragged life? That note, that broken blow, as of glass splitting, a wallop to the brain — she had thought herself content, reconciled, resilient, orderly days, an orderly life: until Iris’s finger hurled her into turmoil. The stab at that single uncanny key, a short-lived overturning looking-glass sound — it had a pitch, an accent, she could not recall whether bass or treble, boom or screech, a splinter of glass that wormed through her veins and flowed with the flow of her blood . . . Leo’s untouchable instrument. The girl’s touch, a golden girl, and what was Bea, if not aging, ragged, and low?
She turned down a street of cavelike stalls hung with souvenirs, key chains, rings, ashtrays, bracelets, each engraved with a minuscule Eiffel Tower, painted ties and scarves and banners, row upon row of porcelain trivia. And squeezed among these importuning shops in this unidentifiable neighborhood, yet another outdoor café. She ordered scrambled eggs and cold juice, more out of politeness than hunger, and showed the elderly waiter her map, pointing to the street she wanted. Madame — laughter in an old creased Levantine face — it is far from where you are now, very far! Madame should not think of walking, under this hot sun she will drop in the road, the police will come and place her in hospital, hospital for foolish Americans who drop! Never mind, he was one who liked Americans very much, he especially liked American cinema, back there in America did she know Weesperin Weens? A very good film, the woman so beautiful, only in the American cinema do women have such red lips and whole teeth, in fact she is right now in a cinema just here, not ten meters away . . .
Yes, she said, Whispering Winds, I know it. And paid for her uneaten meal (but thirstily drained the juice) and stepped out toward where the waiter gestured, and there they were: the big crimson garish posters, the two familiar stars entwined in a kiss, the heroine’s blouse unbuttoned just enough to display the upper cushions of her ample breasts, the man’s arms bare and almost cartoonishly muscular. To her surprise the box office was open for business, though it was still early in the afternoon. In the startling sudden night of the auditorium, she felt a seedy stickiness: fresh gum underfoot, spills on the patched carpet. The movie was already under way; she shut her eyes. She had nearly every movement by heart, and much of the dialogue. She had no desire to look at the screen. At home, uptown and downtown, in the Village, in the Eighties, on Times Square, she had pursued this spoor from movie house to movie house, secretly, alone, listening to Leo’s mind. Leo’s mind! “I intend,” he told her once, “to throw out the usual components of the conventional orchestra, you see what I mean?” She did not see. He knew she did not see, but it gratified him that she listened. In the evenings, after five or six hours with those deafening boys in that deafening classroom, she listened. Leo in bed since morning, dreaming symphonies, dreaming operas. “What I’m just getting hold of is what nobody’s ever done before, two electric pianos, two bass guitars, two alto saxophones, a percussion ensemble, a boy soprano, a female chorus . . .” And another time: “The idea is to have a choir of fifty, a mezzo-soprano for Anna Karenina, or I haven’t decided, maybe it ought to be Bovary” — Leo exalted, carried away (and rested, Bea couldn’t help thinking), pouncing on the keys to show her a string of noisy passages, but then it was enough, it was only to give her the gist of it, the dramatic theme, steering her by the nape, his blazing look, the blazing engine of what he liked to call their harmony and counterpoint . . . The lovers were embracing, the movie was over, the credits were rolling past, almost too quickly to be read, but her eyes were busy now, she was ready for the name, it slid by in a second, Music composed by Leo Cooper-smith, and then the lights came on, and she took in the unswept dirt all around, and the four other moviegoers scattered in the seats, one of them a derelict stinking of something foul.
Leo’s mind!
The street was as brilliant as before: it was a Parisian sun renowned for setting as late as ten o’clock. Finding Julian could wait another day. She scouted a taxi and went back to her hotel to sleep off the deadly exhaustion of a foreign time zone.
11
A PALACE, Iris had written. To Bea’s American eyes that Sunday morning, it was venerably European — Romanesque windows, the lower ones swelle
d by rounded wrought-iron barriers, dark thick oblong stones rising like a vast wall, heavy wooden double doors carved into bunches of bursting grapes and a fat-stomached glowering Bacchus, all of it giving out some nearly olfactory opulence. Or else it was a latter-day mimicry, war-stained Paris refurbished, an architect’s willful deception or obsequious homage, stale modern Europe pretending to be ancient Europe. One of the doors stood open: a lamplit dimness, a marble desk and a concierge behind it — so this ducal manse was, after all, only another middle-class apartment building, though not of a kind you would ever see in New York.
Julian lived here.
She said his name to the concierge, who, it turned out, spoke English with a cockney sound, and was eager to explain why: it was lonely to sit all day in the half-dark without a living soul to talk to, only the comings and goings of the people upstairs, and nothing in her ears but the lift’s funny whistle. And of course she was English, anyone could hear it straightaway, she couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, she had married her second husband, a Frenchman from La Rochelle on the coast, they had met when she crossed over to Normandy to visit her first husband’s grave, a British soldier, you know, and here she was, stuck now in Paris, because her second husband was dead from the disease you can only whisper about . . . Please say again?
Foreign Bodies Page 5
