Other People’s Lives
Stories
Johanna Kaplan
For my father
and in memory of my mother
Contents
Other People’s Lives
Sickness
Sour or Suntanned, It Makes No Difference
Dragon Lady
Baby-sitting
Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary
About the Author
Other People’s Lives
I
WHAT STRUCK YOU FIRST about the Tobeys’ apartment, not counting the zany clutter of half-together furniture and piled-up arts-and-crafts materials, were the very long halls and huge white walls, empty of anything but the photographs of Dennis Tobey in what had to be called his former life. Caught in the heightened, unusual, and possibly excruciating lighting of theatrical shots, he did not at all stare out at you personally, but there in his various peculiar and austere dance costumes, his mind and body engaged elsewhere, he was clearly reflecting the famous agony and ardor of his art. It seemed embarrassing and arrogant at the same time. Also, he looked very thin.
Louise Weil, who was standing by herself in this empty strangers’ apartment in her new blue boots—bought for new health and new life—was concentrating very hard on being struck with what she knew she was supposed to be struck with. What if she couldn’t even do that much? Her coat was dripping so that she was afraid to sit down, her boots—high, shiny, and fashionable—were uncomfortable and hard to take off. What if she were found out struggling over them like a child or a cripple? She stood there sweating and staring: she had brought ill-health with her in the pools on the floor and the sour wet smell of her clothing. Naturally. Probably, when Maria Tobey came home, she would ask Louise if she wanted to take a shower—a normal question. But by that time her medication would have worn off, she would say no, the sweat, dampness, oily hair, and sourness of her body would stay with her, invade Maria Tobey’s sheets and furniture, and it would be totally clear to everyone around exactly the kind of burden Maria had been stuck with. What if the phone rang now? Who would she say she was? How would she explain what she was doing there? What if the phone rang now? She would have to stumble her way through the apartment, leaving the marks of her streaky disorder everywhere. Still holding on to her suitcase, she looked up again at the pictures of Dennis. The acute pain in his expression, whether contrived or genuine, was repellent, familiar, and catching.
“What’s that? What are you doing?” said the voice of an invisible questioner, having found her out taking her medication publicly.
“I’m just taking a pill.”
“Why are you taking it? What is it for?”
“It’s for my health,” said Louise, finishing off this smug, naggy spy, and towed along by the brief, dependable euphoria that came with waiting for the pill to take effect, she counted up, in wonder, these things: that she had found her way out of Grand Central with a suitcase, gotten a taxi in the freezing rain, that she had paid, tipped, and arrived at the right building and—despite the confusion of elevators, lobbies, and unmarked doors—at the right apartment. And not only that: since there was nobody home (a possibility she had been told about), she had been able to find the key where Maria Tobey had left it—not under the mat as in all books and movies, but, for safety, covered by the sand and stubs in the metal ashtray near the back elevator.
“For my health,” Louise said aloud, meaning “to my health,” not a wish, but a dare. That she was no longer in Birch Hill, where right now, at five o’clock, she would ordinarily be getting ready for supper and the doctors’ cars would be pulling out to their homes and their families. It was just the time of day when the trains beside the Hudson were rushing past, carrying all the passengers away to their far-off towns, their lit-up houses, and their normal lives. It was possible, of course, that they would crash.
“Matthew? I know you took your schoolbag, but this time you forgot your lunch. I did not find the turtle and if you can’t even be responsible for a turtle—a little turtle—what the hell are we going to do with a dog? Matthew!”
“Hello?” Louise said. “Nobody’s here. I’m Louise Weil.”
“Oh!” the woman said. Her arms were full of packages, she, too, was wet from the rain, her thick blond hair was slipping out of a bun. “My God, it’s terrible out there. Do you think he could be outside in this weather? Because if he is anywhere near Riverside Park, I’ll kill him. Both Andrew and Jonny Axelrod were mugged there on Friday and Jonny is a strong kid. Hefty. Heavy? Hefty? Whichever one you say, I don’t know. My God, do you know that you can’t even take a shower in this house? That damned boiler is broken again and some idiot has torn down the notice. He won’t ever have it fixed, the bastard, he only wants it to go co-op and I’m not going to another tenants’ meeting tonight, I don’t care who rings the bell. Do you know what they love? Petitions. I’ll tell them they can forge my signature, I don’t care. I know it’s unmoral—amoral? Immoral? It’s not moral, but they have so many lawyers. What do you think?”
Louise stared at her: she had put down the groceries, taken off her coat, and fallen into a chair—all in one movement. As she closed her eyes now briefly, it was like a mistaken wind-down in an old-time movie. So this was Dennis Tobey’s wife: a little slovenly, a little plump, but on the whole she had the healthy, unselfconscious prettiness of hard-working peasant girls who did not worry over themselves in mirrors or anywhere else, and who, though they sweated profusely, smelled of hay.
“Have you been here long? Did Matthew telephone? Did you see somewhere a turtle?”
“No,” Louise said, and picked something out among all her confusions. Maria Tobey, the defected Russian dancer, had a very strong German accent. No one had told her.
Diagnosis was, in everyone’s opinion, a tricky thing. The first time Louise came to Birch Hill, at fifteen, she had not been able to eat, sleep, or go to school for a long time, but had gone on practicing her cello, which consistently, and regardless of the time she spent struggling over the peg-board and her fingering, remained to her ear out of tune. She practiced and practiced, but her intonation did not improve. Neither did anyone else’s: listening to records or the radio, it was amazing to realize how many respected performers and famous orchestras allowed themselves to be sharp or flat. Was it possible that they didn’t know it?
“This is absolutely typical—but typical—American musicianship,” her mother said.” In Vienna such a thing was not possible. In Vienna a concert was a concert. Viennese concerts have for me ruined anything else.” Which was a line stolen entirely from Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, though it was possible her mother honestly believed it to be her own thought. Stefan Zweig had committed suicide in Brazil; he left a note.
Pablo Casals, living in Puerto Rico, did not have faulty intonation, but hummed, audibly hummed on all of his records. It did not matter; he was a very old man. He got up early every morning and practiced for hours every day till the sun became too hot. Years before, on a mountain-climbing expedition in the U.S., he had fallen and injured his arm. “Thank God,” his first reaction was supposed to have been, “now I’ll never have to play the cello again.” He did not mean it: he got up early every morning and practiced for hours every day. Louise, living in Washington Heights with her mother, did not get up early most days; could not. She clung to the whiteness of the sheets, which were pure in themselves and which banished the babble of melodies which she could not control, and of intonation which she could not perfect—though her birthday was the same as Pablo Casals’. He had not always lived in Puerto Rico.
Louise had not always lived in Washington Heights, but had been born in the Dominican Republic, a country she did not remember. Her mo
ther remembered it all too well: a country whose climate had ruined the fairness of her skin, forcing it into unnatural splotches, a country which had ruined her marriage and forced her to keep company with all kinds of other Jews who had been able to buy their way in. These people were grateful to the Dominican Republic, even Trujillo, for saving them from death and hiding, and for putting an end to the endlessness of waiting for visas. Louise’s mother was not grateful to the Dominican Republic: it had ruined her idea of herself—a lovely, young, promising voice student. In Washington Heights she went on giving piano lessons and writing letters to a friend of her young days who now lived in London.
The first time Louise went to Birch Hill, her mother moved to England for good. Her father, who was paying for her, remained in the Dominican Republic, where he dealt in the import and sale of American agricultural equipment, and where he had had for years another family: actual Dominicans. Her sister Elisabeth went on living in Sweden, where she was married to a Swedish architect, and was also an architect herself.
“You look like a little Dutch girl,” said a beautiful, dark-haired girl who lived on her floor.
“I’m from the Dominican Republic,” Louise said to shut her up, but knew in a way what she meant. The Dutch-girl strain ran all through her family, allowing her mother in youthful, rosy, clear-featured vivacity to have had an affair with a highly placed, unsuspecting Nazi official. He had called her “ma petite,” been unwilling to give her up, and even wanted to adopt Elisabeth. “He adored Elisabeth,” her mother said. “For him, Elisabeth was as precious as she was for me.” In the end, it was this Nazi officer who had personally helped arrange for the visas, and personally stolen all the family belongings.
The Dutch-girl strain in adored and precious Elisabeth, despite the climate of the Dominican Republic, had left her fair-skinned and nearly towheaded; it had allowed her to make herself Swedish, so that as the wife of Anders Bjelding and mother of Per and Arne—two tiny towheaded boys living in Stockholm—she could easily never have heard of Elisabeth Weil, let alone been her.
The Dutch-girl strain in Louise herself had left her chunky, full-cheeked, unclear in coloring and appearance, and, by mistake or mutation, clumsy, as if she were constantly clogging around in invisible wooden shoes. That such shoes had once actually sat by the doors of Birch Hill was, in fact, very likely. An estate built high above the Hudson, it was exactly in the country of the old Dutch patroons. In the rooms upstairs, young girls had practiced the virginal, their eyes elsewhere, their fingering perfect. Against half-open casement windows, they mulled over letters, surrounded by fruit bowls and cool white jugs. They had lived, all of them, in the perfect light and order of unending Vermeers.
There were no birches in Birch Hill. Skinny, scrawny Russian trees, silly in their tiny, pathetic intimacy, what would they be doing there?
The second time Louise went to Birch Hill, at nineteen, her mother was still living with her old school friend Trude in London. The neighborhood was called Swiss Cottage, a name which offered the suggestion of abandoned, rosy-cheeked schoolgirl holidays in cuckoo-clock, flower-filled Alpine meadows. Her father was still living in the Dominican Republic with his delicate-looking, black-haired wife and four delicate-looking, black-haired daughters. Their eyes were shy, their faces were Indian, they seemed absolutely beautiful; they came in pictures.
What also came in pictures was Elisabeth. On one of the back pages of the Entertainment section of the Sunday Times there was a short article about a new, unusual building in Stockholm designed by Anders and Elisabeth Bjelding. Above the article was a photograph that was very hard to make out. It looked like a blueprint photographed so as to give you an idea of what the building would one day look like, but was in fact a picture of the actual building photographed to look like a blueprint. In the foreground was the figure of a girl with grainy, wind-blown hair and cameras (also grainy) slung over her shoulders. The girl, though it didn’t say so, was Elisabeth; the photographer, in discreet small print, was A. Bjelding.
Louise herself had gone to Oberlin College, where she took an overdose of various pills when she was alone in her practice room. She did not blame her cello or even the college, where she had managed to last less than a month. She had spoken to very few people and nobody made any sense. She was furious at her doctor, who had left Birch Hill and moved, for his wife’s sake, to California. The climate of wintry New York State was ruining her, she had told people. She was from California, this whiny bitch, and, in Louise’s opinion, looked it.
When Louise finally left Birch Hill two years later, it was because her father could no longer afford it. His business was being badly affected by the Recession. In the meantime, Birch Hill had become much more expensive and Louise was not the first patient who had had to leave in such a peremptory way. Either you went back to your family or you went to a state hospital.
In open conferences, through which Louise sat dumb and purposely slightly over-medicated, it was clear that no one could see sending her to a state hospital. She was not, they said, “state-hospital material,” despite her suicide attempt, which no one remembered as well as she did. By this time she had gone through so many changes of doctors that her attachment was not to a particular person, but to the place itself. She felt at home in Birch Hill in a way she could not imagine feeling anywhere else.
“Ma petite,” her mother’s brief and occasional letters to her had begun. Only one person, a doctor freshly back from Vietnam, suggested that she go to London. He was accustomed to dispatching people, helicoptering them here and there; he did not know Louise at all and spoke in a cold, dismissive, patronizing voice, as if she were not in the room. Up to then he had been doodling on a lined medical form, and when he surprisingly raised his donkey’s face to say “London,” his brayed contribution ended in a yawn.
“Why don’t you go there?” Louise said. “Or even better, go back to Vietnam.”
Stockholm was out of the question, though everyone was very impressed with Elisabeth’s reputation. Louise had, on her own, written to Elisabeth several times, but the only time she ever got an answer was one year at Christmas: a picture of Elisabeth’s two small, handsome, towheaded boys—naked, absorbed, and agile, playing at the seashore. Serious and European, their smiles bent the sun. “These are my nephews,” Louise had said, marveling over and over again. And it was true, but so what?
The Dominican Republic was mentioned, though Louise’s father had never at any point in her life suggested that she come and live with him. He had often invited her to visit—for a month, for a summer, and before she was sick, might even have meant it.
In the end, Louise’s social worker came up with a solution. She knew a family in New York who had a very large, old apartment and only one child. For various reasons which she did not go into, they could no longer keep up the rent and were now seriously looking for a boarder.
“The Tobeys,” Mrs. Zeitlin said with great accomplishment in her voice. “Dennis and Maria Tobey.” She stared around the room, squintily raising her tinted prescription glasses, as if removing them altogether would allow her to see what she was looking for.
“They live in Manhattan, these people?” the director asked her.
“Dennis Tobey.”
They lived in Manhattan, on the West Side, not much more than a crosstown bus ride away from any analyst Louise would be referred to. She would have the advantage of living with a family, and the assurance that though her father could no longer afford Birch Hill, he would still be able to take care of her living expenses in New York.
“Dennis Tobey!” Mrs. Zeitlin said excitedly, rushing up to Louise as soon as the meeting was over. “I’m so glad I thought of them. It’ll be marvelous for you, Louise. Absolutely marvelous.”
Still in the slowed dullness of her medication, Louise said, “I don’t know who that is. Who they are.”
“Louise,” Mrs. Zeitlin said over-gently, taking her hand and speaking in that particular social worker�
�s voice, “Dennis Tobey, the dancer.” And then gripping and shaking her so it seemed to Louise that Mrs. Zeitlin had suddenly become a ridiculous carousel of her long red hair and her whirling long peasant dress, “Louise! Dennis Tobey! The dancer! Dennis Tobey.”
Dennis Tobey, it turned out, was a dancer whom Mrs. Zeitlin had once studied with. Very early in his career he developed some kind of revolutionary and idiosyncratic combination of modern dance and ballet, and whenever he performed, there was no newspaper or magazine issue that came out without acclaiming him. He was an ordinary smalltown boy; he was a phenomenon. He worked day and night and, through singlemindedness, turned himself into a revered, living genius and a figure of glamour. People trailed after him constantly, but Dennis—pale, taut, ascetic, idiosyncratic Dennis—lived only inside his mind through his feet.
“You could always tell how far away he was,” Mrs. Zeitlin said. “And I don’t mean detached. I mean committed. Completely committed. You could see the ideas rushing through his head and his body so that he couldn’t stand still long enough to listen to you.”
On a cultural-exchange tour with his company through the Soviet Union, Dennis met a Russian dancer—Maria. The faraway, committed Dennis fell in love, and Maria, the Soviet ballerina, defected. Later, in New York, they married; it was a very romantic story, and Dennis’ career was in no way changed. Every new dance he created was acclaimed as before. People still trailed after them constantly—pale, taut, idiosyncratic Dennis and beautiful, energetic, high-spirited Maria. Much later, even, they had a child, a son. Only recently, within the past two years, Dennis had become very sick—Hodgkin’s disease—and was frequently in the hospital. Without him, naturally, his company had fallen apart, and now that he could no longer dance and make a living, the Tobeys needed a boarder.
“Imagine it, Louise! You’ll be living with the Tobeys. I envy you. Really. Aren’t you excited?”
Other People's Lives Page 1
