by Evergreen
She knew that, while she was having her bath, he would go to the drawer in his dresser and take out the picture. Tonight she got quietly out of the bathtub and put on her robe. By opening the door very quickly, she was able to catch him holding the photograph up to the light. She caught a familiar glimpse of the Madonna pose, the long hair curving, the child on the lap, before he put it back in the drawer.
They stood there looking at each other. "You should never have married me, Theo," Iris said at last. "What are you saying?"
"You don't love me. You never have. You're still in love with her."
"She's dead."
"Yes, and if she had lived you'd have been happier than you are with me."
"At least she wouldn't have nagged me!" "There, you see? Well, it's too bad, isn't it? Perhaps I should accommodate you by dying. Except that that still wouldn't bring her back, would it?"
He slapped his fist into the palm of his hand, making a loud crack in the room. "Of all the stupid, childish—Iris, how long is this going to go on? I shouldn't have said that about nagging, I really didn't mean it. But I don't know why you're so insecure. You value yourself so little! It's pathetic."
"Maybe I am insecure. If you think I am, why don't you help me?"
"Tell me how. If I can, I will."
She knew she was burning bridges and yet she couldn't refrain. "Tell me that if you had known she was alive you would still have chosen me. Tell me you love me more than you ever loved her."
"I can't say that. Don't you know that every love is different? She was a person, you're a different person. That's not to say that either one was better or worse than the other."
"That's an evasion, Theo."
"It's the best I can do," he said gently enough.
"All right, then. Answer the other half of my question. If you had known she was alive would you have left me and gone to her? Surely you can answer that."
"Oh, my God," Theo cried. "Why do you want to torture me?"
She knew she was beating him like a helpless dog on a leash. Once on the street she had seen a man doing just that and had been sickened by it. But she couldn't stop.
"I ask you, Theo, because I have to know. Don't you see it's a matter of how I am to live, to exist?"
"But this is brutal! I simply cannot, I cannot answer these pointless questions."
"So we get back to what I said in the beginning. You never wanted to marry me, really."
"Why did I do it, then?"
"Because you knew my father half expected you to—"
"Iris, if I hadn't wanted to, ten fathers couldn't have made me."
"—and because you were lonely and worn out and came to rest in my family. And yes, because, after all, I'm intelligent enough for you, and have your tastes, or had. Your cultured European friends can come to our house and I know how to talk to them. But that's not love."
Theo considered a moment. Then he asked, "What do you mean by love? Can you define it?"
"Semantics! Of course I can't. Nobody can, but everybody knows what he means when he uses the word."
"Exactly. Everyone knows what 'he' means. So it's a different thing for everyone."
"Oh, this calm, philosophical trickery! Putting me on the defensive! When all the time you know what I'm talking about."
"Very well, let's define it then, let's try. Would you say that being unselfish, thinking of the other person's welfare and good, is a part of love?"
"Yes, and one could do that for one's aged grandfather."
"Iris, you're twisting my meaning. You're making unnecessary grief for yourself. If I only knew what you want!"
Her lips began to quiver. She put her hand to her mouth to hide it. "I want ... I want . . . something like Romeo and Juliet. I want to be loved exclusively. Do you understand?" "Iris. Again I have to say—that's childish, my dear."
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"Childish? All the world is enthralled with it! It's the most intense, deep, marvelous thing that can happen to a human being. It's what the world's art and music and poetry are all about. And you call it childish!"
Theo sighed. "Maybe I used the wrong word again. Not childish. Unreal. You're talking about emotional peaks, high moments. How long do you think they can last? That's why I say unreal."
"I'm not stupid. I know life isn't a poem or an operatic drama. But still I would just like to experience some of those 'high moments,' as you call them."
"And you don't think you have?"
"No. I've been sharing you with a dead woman. And now with a lot of cold and silly featherheads as well."
"Iris, I'm sorry for you. Sorry for us both. Did the photograph bring all this on tonight? All right, I won't look at it anymore. Time would have brought that to a stop anyway," he said bitterly. "But if that won't satisfy you— It seems there's something in you that doesn't want to be satisfied, that wants to suffer."
"Ah, so now we are going in for psychoanalysis!"
"You don't have to be an analyst to see things. You want to be hurt, otherwise you would listen to my reasoning."
"Reason has nothing to do with it. This is something I feel. And you can't reason yourself out of something you feel. Or else you would reason yourself out of remembering Liesel, wouldn't you?"
Theo passed his hand over his forehead. "Can we continue this in the morning? It's past midnight and I'm exhausted."
"As you wish," she answered.
They lay down in the wide bed. Her heart began to pound. Her hands were clenched and her arms held straight at her sides. She wondered whether sleep would come to relieve her. And she knew by the sound of Theo's breathing that he was not sleeping, either.
After a while she felt his hand upon her, sliding over her shoulder, touching it softly in a gesture meant to comfort. Then his hand went to her breast.
"No," she said. "I can't. I don't feel anything. It's gone."
"What do you mean, gone? Gone for always?"
"Yes. It's dead. It died in me." She began to weep. Cold tears slid down her temples into her hair. She made no sound, but she knew he was aware. He put his hand out again, trying to reach her hand, but she drew away. Then she heard him turn, heard the
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swishing of the sheets, and knew that he had turned his back to move as far apart as he could.
Early in the morning, after a night with only an hour or two of sleep, Theo got up and went downstairs. He had no trouble finding the number he wanted in the New York City telephone book. He paused a moment.
A week or two ago, coming out of his dentist's office—he went to a dentist in the city—he'd had to wait at the threshold for the slackening of a sudden downpour. And this girl, a dental technician in the next office, had come out and stood there waiting with him. She was about thirty-two, he guessed, a Scandinavian with all the frank, healthy grace of her kind. They had stayed there talking until the rain stopped, talking about skiing and New York and where she'd come from in Norway.
Then he'd told her how he had enjoyed talking to her and she'd said, "Call me up if you ever want to talk some more. I'm in the book."
So here he was. His finger moved the dial.
"Hello, Ingrid?" he said softly, when he heard her voice. "It's Theo Stern. Remember me?"
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The car hummed northward through the glittering cold that Theo loved. Winter had always been his time. He loved sifting snow in gray air; the spare design of branches, so Japanese; the expectation of fires, thick soup and quilts. Crossing the line between Massachusetts and Vermont, he thought that it was not very different from Austria.
He leaned forward, trying to adjust the radio, but the farther he got from the city the more it faded and Mahler's Ninth was scratched out by static. When he switched it off there were no sounds but the click of the windshield wiper and the clack of the tires.
It would be good to have Ingrid riding along. Her presence was pure ease and had been so for almost a year. Neither her laughter nor her silences demanded anything of him.
Once every week he went to the city to teach and, taking the rest of the day and evening off, spent the hours with her. He was so absolutely free there in those two small rooms! She'd have good music playing and bread baking in the oven. The bed was next to the windows where hanging plants, which were the only curtains, dropped their green shade and moist fragrance onto the bed. Sometimes they lay all afternoon listening to music, while Ingrid smoked the sweet cigarettes that he had come to associate with her. When he left he was enlivened for the rest of the week.
But it would have been foolhardy for them to travel and arrive together. You never knew whom you might meet, although he had
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chosen this little ski resort because it was out of the way and he had never met anyone who had even heard of it, much less been there.
He had mentioned to Iris, knowing that she would refuse to go with him, that it would be nice to take a few days off for skiing. "There are pleasant things for you to do while I'm on the slopes," he'd said. "You could take walks around the village and look for antiques." But she had declined.
"You go, it will do you good," she had said, with the polite concern one has for one's friends.
Things were like that between them.
But he could think of no way to change them. Iris' mood had gradually dimmed. (Clouds drift one by one across a sunny sky; you look up after only an hour or two and are surprised to find that the sky has grown completely dark.) She hadn't moved out of their room because all the others were occupied; but had instead removed their bed and bought twin ones. She had waited for him to make comment but he had made none. If that was the way she wanted it, Theo had thought angrily, that was the way she would have it. Everything that could be said about what stood between them had already been said, anyway. He remembered having heard stories about couples a generation or two ago, who lived out their lives beneath one roof without speaking to each other. He had never believed it was possible to live that way, but he saw now that it might be. Not that they lived without speaking, Iris and he; they were both far too concerned as parents to inflict anything like that on their children. No, they made decent conversation at the table and went to P.T.A. meetings and local dinner parties with unsuspecting friends. (He almost never went to the club anymore. Iris had been right about that; it wasn't the atmosphere he really wanted, and his weekly day with Ingrid more than made up for its loss, he thought now, smiling to himself.)
So that's the way things were. He hadn't been able to change Iris' thinking, nor had she changed—but she had changed his a little, he reflected. Yes, in an odd way some of her convictions had begun to influence him. Things she had said, dredged out of what tortuous channels, chambers and coves of her mind, had begun to seem true. Or to have some truth in them, at least.
Perhaps she is right and I didn't really want to be married? Sometimes I think—and I'm sad and ashamed of thinking it—that I really didn't want to be. I was so tired, I remember. I just wanted
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rest. Maybe all I wanted was some sunny rooms, a piano in a bay window, birds in the trees outside the window, and there wasn't any simple, efficient way of having these things without being married. Could that be?
Yet I did want children, another little boy-as if anything could bring back that first one! But these were beautiful children: Jimmy, a bright rascal; sensitive, thoughtful and sometimes difficult Steve; Laura, pink and curly—but how does a man begin to describe his darling, only little girl?
I wish it was enough for Iris that we have all this, and that life is—was—good together. Because it was good together! But that's not enough ... she wants something I don't seem able to give her. I feel—I have felt—sometimes as if I had given coins to a beggar who needs more than I have to give. She wants me to adore her. I don't adore her.
Before they were married Iris had trembled in his presence; he had seen that she was in love with him and been very moved. He remembered having thought that he would be so good to her (then perhaps, after all, he had really wanted to marry her?), and, in turn, enjoy her quiet ways, the refinement of her face. A lovely lady, she was. Stuffy concept in America, but still valued in Europe, or at least it had been when he had lived there. Reason enough in Europe, the best reason, in fact, for choosing a wife.
But he hadn't expected the intensity of her love. Those trusting, worshiping eyes! A man could feel guilty without having done anything. Her soul was in her eyes. All that grave emotion! It was almost frightening. To be responsible for the survival of another soul!
He frowned. His thoughts had made his head ache, or perhaps it was only the woolen cap that was tight. He pulled it off. If he had met Iris away from the vitality and welcome of her home—the first home he had been in for so many years—if he had met her in an office, say, sitting with pad on knee, her dark, pensive eyes looking past him to the corners of the room—would he have been as easily drawn to her? The truth was: no. Yet, once having known her subtle and resilient mind, her shy pleasure in being with him, he had quite simply wanted to be with her. They had slipped into a pattern of understanding, and a common language. It wasn't that often that two people were able to walk so easily in the same rhythm through the world, including the rhythm of sex.
They had had all that, and yet he was unable to talk to her
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about this obstinate, fixed idea that he must feel for her and toward her in just such and such a way, just so and so and in no other way nor for anyone else, either present or past.
Women! But not all women.
That first time with Ingrid she had told him, "You have the body of a dancer or a skier. V-shaped, tapering from the shoulder to the hips. Especially marvelous for skiing."
Theo had been amused. "I happen to be fairly good at skiing."
"You see? I could tell. So different from a boxer's body, for instance."
"You're an expert on male bodies?"
She'd laughed. "I've seen enough of them!" And when he didn't answer, "You're not shocked?"
"Of course not. Just surprised. You don't seem to be-"
"A tart? But how provincial of you! Does one have to be vulgar to take pleasure in what was made for pleasure? Must sex be either sanctified or else damned?"
"I don't know. But most people, especially most women, see it that way, don't they?"
"It's a simple pleasure, that's all, that's what I believe. Like wine or music. When you tire of it you change the brand, or turn off the record."
"I hope you don't tire of me too soon," he had remarked another time. They were eating fettuccine Alfredo. She had a wonderful appetite. That was another thing that made him feel good to be with her. She wasn't always whining about calories the way most women did these days, and how she'd have to starve all next week to make up for tonight. The fettuccine kept slipping off her fork and she began to laugh. Then he laughed, and it had all been so completely silly. He hadn't laughed with such foolish high spirits in—how long?
"I don't expect to tire of you," Ingrid had said frankly. "I still love Beethoven and if you don't believe I still like Chateau Mouton Rothschild, you can try me."
"All right, I will," he had answered and summoned the wine steward.
Then she had grown serious. "But when you tire of me, do me a favor, will you? Call me up and tell me so. Don't lie and make considerate excuses for not keeping dates. Don't try to break it to me gently. Just say, Ingrid, good-by and it's been great, but good-by. Will you do that, Theo?"
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"All right, but I don't want to think about it. We've just begun," he'd said.
Still, the freedom, the freedom, like an invigorating breeze! If women only knew!
He had been able to talk to her about Liesel. For the first time he had been free to spill everything out, with no modesty, with no hesitation. Everything. And Ingrid had carefully listened. He had talked for hours while she lay on the bed, smoking cigarettes. He had talked and talked. He had told how, at first, he hadn't been able to believe
in the death of Liesel or their child; how once, in a London restaurant during the war, he'd heard a woman at a table behind him speaking with a foreign accent, an accent he'd fancied Liesel would have had if she had known how to speak English. He had made an excuse to get up from the table and look at the woman. That was how mad he had been!
He had even recalled that young chap in London whose wife had been killed in the bombing of their house and how he, Theo, holding the fellow's hand, had sworn to himself: No, it's crazy to love and make yourself so vulnerable. I don't ever want to be so vulnerable again.
