Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  To Louise, Dr. Vinograd said very seriously, “I’m terribly sorry we’ve had so many interruptions.” He pulled at his tie; any minute now, he would certainly say, “What are you thinking about?” It was not foreknowledge, it was not déja vu, it was simply familiarity.

  “What were you thinking about all that time?”

  A-boat. A-boat. To stop herself from laughing, Louise said very quickly, “I know why my sister wouldn’t write to me.

  Elisabeth walked around the streets of Stockholm, her blondness the same as the city’s pure white light, her cold, even features the same as its architecture. Cameras were slung over her shoulders and her small eyes squinted into the distance, envisioning in it a building which did not yet exist. Her clothing also seemed blond, which in these streets appeared unremarkable like everything else about Elisabeth, but, exactly like the photograph in the Times, was the purposeful opposite of what was true. She stopped now and then to buy things; she smiled though she did not mean it, she spoke in perfect Swedish, she counted up her change and left. At an outdoor stand she bought flowers, and in her stark, blond, grainy apartment, placed them in a dark-red cut-glass vase. The vase did not exactly belong with the apartment, but stood out in its own old-fashioned vivid beauty just for that reason. It had belonged to her husband’s family for generations, and had been given to Elisabeth as a wedding present. She walked with it carefully, nimbly, quietly to the kitchen, where she filled it with water and, still carrying it, managing it easily, went past her sons’ bedroom. It was neat and colorful, this room, filled with unusual, ingenious European toys. The two little boys, Per and Arne, tiny and towheaded, were playing together, rolling on the floor, giggling and shrieking. Elisabeth smiled and raised one finger to shush them; it was possible, even, that she might have hugged them, but she was carrying the flower-filled vase, which she did not return to the living room. She walked on with it farther back into the apartment and put it down finally on a small white ledge in the study. In this room, wide-windowed and curtainless, the light was ice cold and the stillness absolute: it was exactly what Elisabeth liked. Two high, slanted drafting tables and raised high-backed chairs were facing opposite walls. On one of the chairs sat Elisabeth’s husband, his body straight, long, and lean, his hair very fair but slightly curly. Only the back of him was visible, he was concentrating on a blueprint on the slanted drafting table. The phone rang—the short several buzzing rings of European phones. Elisabeth’s husband got up to answer it. He did not say hello, but said, “Bjelding,” and after a brief conversation consisting mainly of Swedish monosyllables, hung up the phone and noticed the vase and flowers on the sill. He smiled at Elisabeth and more or less grasped her hand. They stood that way for a few minutes, and then sat down, both of them, on their high-backed chairs which faced opposite walls. Occasional Swedish monosyllables floated between them in the ice-cold light of the room which Elisabeth loved. She had climbed directly onto the screen of a Bergman movie, and had allowed nothing and no one to stop her.

  “She’s afraid I’ll contaminate her and make her crazy.”

  “Explain to me how that—” Dr. Vinograd was beginning, but the phone rang.

  The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, Symposium on Suicide, Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Language and Thought in Schizophrenia, Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory, Wayward Youth, Searchlights on Delinquency, Character Analysis, The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Men Under Stress, Patterns of Mothering, Modern Clinical Psychiatry, Dreams and the Uses of Regression.

  “We’ll have to talk about that next time, Louise. It’s very important. And next time, I promise you, I’ll have the answering service pick up the phone. In the meantime, get a hold of some college catalogues and find out about registration. Anyway, you can register late, it doesn’t matter.”

  He had not said, “Our time is up.” Standing up herself, Louise felt as if she would have to say it for him, but instead said, “Are you Canadian?”

  Dr. Vinograd smiled. It was the same surprising, boyish smile that had come with his suggesting history. “I was brought up in Montreal.”

  Beyond the waiting room, a narrow hallway separated Dr. Vinograd’s office (LAWRENCE VINOGRAD M.D.) from his apartment: against one wall, which was as far as Louise could see, was a pair of skis. They stood upright, ready, waiting. Rumpled, heavy Dr. Vinograd went skiing down mountains in the snow! His expression lightened from exhilaration and surprise; his wide Russian cheeks grew red and boyish from the cold. Wearing a ski jacket like everyone else, he did not pull at his tie, a gesture characteristic since boyhood; also, there were no phones to answer. It was possible, of course, that he would break his leg.

  V

  In the chilly room, Rebecca repeated, “I’m absolutely positive, darling. Where did I meet you? Just give me a hint!”

  Very quickly Maria said, “That’s Louise Weil, Rebecca, and this is Julie Dresner.”

  “Dresner, Dresner…Of course I know you! Your father is that marvelous, brilliant lawyer.”

  “He’s a psychiatrist.”

  “You have an uncle who’s a violist. With that wonderful new chamber group—I remember them from Spoleto!”

  “My cousin. He plays the oboe.”

  “Your sister was a camper at Bucks Rock when my younger daughter was a counselor there.”

  “I don’t have a sister.”

  “Didn’t your parents have a house on Fire Island? Years ago—you would have been a baby.”

  “Martha’s Vineyard. They just sold it.”

  “Wait a minute, darling. Your father’s a psychiatrist, the house is on Martha’s Vineyard, you’re an only child…Didn’t your mother write a book about indoor plants? It was just reissued?”

  “Yes,” Julie said. “Her plants! It’s the only thing that stupid bitch ever cared about.”

  “Darling! What a terribly unfair thing to say! Your mother always cared about so many things. Why do you think she wrote that book in the first place? You don’t know! You don’t remember! You don’t know what those times were like! And I don’t only mean McCarthy, though you probably don’t know who he was either! A big blur on the television screen—that’s all it was to you!” Rebecca’s hands were shaking so hard that a section of tangerine fell to the floor. Her face, already puffy and red, became an even darker, more alarming color as she bent down, and a fringe of her choppy gray hair grazed the table. Matthew giggled. There was a smell of sawed wood, cold, and tangerines. It was not “like” anything, Louise thought, and realized that the uneasy, sleepy distance had left her.

  Maria looked very surprised. She said, “What was this book?”

  “Oh, you know,” Julie said, fully raising her head, but still sneering. “My mother wrote that stupid, boring book for stupid, bored housewives. How to make your plants look beautiful. How to make your house look beautiful. It’s all just a reflection—how to make yourself look beautiful, that’s really all it is. All ego. All self.”

  “Julia. Darling. I know I yelled at you and I’m sorry about it, but if you keep talking that way I’m going to have to yell at you again. And it does terrible things to my blood pressure.”

  Matthew said, “Her name isn’t Julya, its Julee.”

  Louise looked at Rebecca: she had regained her balance, but the rosiness of her cheeks no longer looked like wind-burn.

  “And you’re another one, Matthew! Don’t think I don’t see it coming! Sitting there with your sandwich and your drawing paper—did I get one word? One hello? One kiss? One anything? Go ahead and giggle, Matthew. Life is so funny.”

  Maria sneezed. “God damn it if I now get a cold. I can’t afford it from my screwed-up sick leave. I would have the time, it’s only from the stupid cutbacks, they are always hedging and hawing.”

  “Darling, I know. Sometimes I feel so discouraged about the future. We were all so careful, we were all so selfless. We were going to raise the best, the freest generation of chi
ldren ever known in the history of mankind. And we did. They’re wonderful. But sometimes I think: My God, after all, what are we? A few generations up from the monkeys, a few generations down from the trees. And monkeys! At least monkeys don’t kill each other.”

  Maria began sneezing spasmodically and shaking things out of her purse. “Monkeys are I think the one animal Matthew didn’t ask me for yet. Yes, angel? Damn it if I can’t now find even tissues, I know I have some. And also histamines. It’s maybe only sinus and not a cold. I hope.”

  “Maria, darling! Don’t take anything,” Rebecca said. “I’ll make you some tea. My marvelous Lapsang Souchong, you’ll love it. It’s from a wonderful couple who know everything about tea. They go all over the world looking for it and they’ve been to Ceylon and the Amazon and everywhere! Leon calls them the Teacups because their name is Kupperman and because you know Leon, I hate to say it, in some ways he’s a very conventional person. And some people might think they’re a little bit kooky or a little bit nutty, but as far as I’m concerned, I don’t see what’s wrong with having a special interest or with pursuing it! And that’s something young people could learn—that you have to pursue things and social change doesn’t come overnight.”

  “We had I think chamomile tea, I don’t know what,” Maria called out as Rebecca went off through the door to the kitchen. “It was from some kind of roots, you can pick them. Not real tea. Also not real coffee, my cousin Klaus used always to complain that he missed his bean coffee. We made it from hickory. Chicory? I don’t know what. Real coffee, bean coffee I had first when I went to West Berlin. It tasted to me, I don’t know what, funny. I had first to get used to it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve always said, Maria! You can get used to anything. And it has nothing to do with age! Some people, even if they’re young, can get stuck—in a rut—and that’s it! And other people can go on and on—changing. Exploring. Look at me! If I can adapt, at my age, to living in a freezing house, without any heat, with no one around and isolated in the country. Without even a stove working properly! And it isn’t as if the builder didn’t have time, God knows I called him enough times.” Rebecca’s voice suddenly got louder as she came in carrying a tray. She said, “Anyway, what can I do?”

  “That’s a beautiful teapot,” Louise said. It was delicate hand-painted china—pale flowers on a black background—and contrasted oddly with the heavy brown clay mugs.

  “Thank you, darling.” Rebecca beamed. “It’s an antique, but I didn’t have the heart to part with it, so I decided, What the hell! I’ll call it a fringe benefit.” She looked at Louise for the first time and, immediately turning to Maria, said, “Weil? You said her name is Weil? Is she related to the perfume people? Because we met them in Greece—in one of those marvelous ruins, it was in the middle of a downpour and there was no place to take shelter.”

  The Kuppermans, a slightly kooky, slightly nutty couple, were tramping through the tropical underbrush of an out-of-the-way Caribbean island. They were both wearing high boots and safari suits, having learned from long experience to be prepared for anything when they were pursuing their special interest. Still, the heat and the mosquitoes were getting to them, and out of all the plants and roots they had looked at and touched they hadn’t found anything that could qualify as tea. The air was very heavy; it felt as if it might rain. A bird screeched above them. Mr. Kupperman touched his head for droppings and said, “Do you think we could have made a mistake? That this place is better known for coffee? Or papayas?” Mrs. Kupperman, bent over with her special tea shovel, the same one she had taken along on every trip, said, “That’s exactly what you said in the Amazon. Remember? I hate to say it, but in some ways you’re a very conventional person.” The bird screeched again and Mr. Kupperman said, “The last time we heard a bird screaming like that was in Ceylon and we got caught in a monsoon.”

  “If I only listened to you,” Mrs. Kupperman said, “we’d just be stuck and in a rut. It’s a good thing I’m open to change and flexible.”

  “But there isn’t even anyplace to take shelter. Do you hear how that bird sounds?”

  Just as Mrs. Kupperman was reluctantly getting up, still holding on to her tea shovel, they heard a slight rustling sound close by. There, in a tiny clearing which they hadn’t even noticed, stood a delicate-looking, olive-skinned little girl who was staring at them and smiling. She had long black hair, her eyes were shy, and her features were Indian. Months later Mrs. Kupperman told her friends that the child had stepped out of the jungle like a vision, making it impossible for her to speak. At the time, though, what she did was grip her husband’s shoulder and cry out, “My God! Did you see that? What an adorable child! Will you just look at that face? She’s precious!”

  “Here we go again,” said Mr. Kupperman. “Starting in with natives! For all we know, right in back of that adorable, precious little face there’s a bunch of adorable brothers, uncles, and cousins waiting around with their blowguns.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” said Mrs. Kupperman, who for years before her retirement had been a high-school Spanish teacher. “But I’ll ask her where we can go just in case it does rain—for your sake.”

  Uneasily, Mr. Kupperman leaned against a tree. He was determined to look casual, friendly, and unafraid for the moment when the blowgun party would decide to make itself visible. Meanwhile Mrs. Kupperman began speaking to the child in Spanish, plying her with questions. She spoke over-loudly, over-slowly, pausing and enunciating each syllable as if it were a dictation. The little girl, who was not a vision, but might just as well have been, did not respond in any way. She remained standing there, continuing to stare at them politely and smile shyly. As Mrs. Kupperman repeated her questions even more slowly and with growing impatience, Mr. Kupperman, seeing how useless his wife’s efforts were, decided that simply looking unafraid would not save them. He would step forward, turn out his pockets, open his hands, and call out with high-spirited, brotherly conviction, “Productos Tropicales!”

  Finally, Mrs. Kupperman could no longer control herself. She stopped smiling at the girl, and with terrific disgust screamed into the comfortless jungle air, “Casa! Casa! Where’s your house, darling? My God! Don’t you even know that?” At this point the little girl stopped staring. She turned around and on her lithe brown legs began skipping away casually, agilely through the high, coarse grasses and the strange, spiny plants.

  “Come on!” Mrs. Kupperman yelled to her husband. “Hurry up! She’s trying to tell us to follow her. Young people are wonderful, and no matter where I go they always gravitate to me because of my attitudes.”

  The Kuppermans, in their high boots and safari suits, made their way through the dense and difficult ground, trailing after this beautiful, vision-like child who had in no way signaled or beckoned to them. Suddenly they lost sight of her.

  “I knew I didn’t like this,” Mr. Kupperman said. “Running around with no maps in the middle of a jungle! With a monsoon coming up!”

  “You’re being rigid again,” said Mrs. Kupperman, though she was worried herself, and because they were out of breath, they both stopped and for the first time looked directly around them. There, only a few yards ahead of them, was no jungle at all, but a large and beautiful house with a wall of greenery around it. Through the greenery, which was pleasant and not steamy or ominous, they could see “their” little girl and three others like her swinging through the air, high above the wall and the garden. Delicate-looking and black-haired, all of them, their eyes were shy and their faces were Indian. They swung higher and higher and were not afraid; occasionally their voices rang out through the tropics in the bell-like shrillness of childhood.

  “There she is!” Mrs. Kupperman called out, pointing in triumph, though she could not actually tell which was the girl they had seen before. They crossed the road and, drawing closer to the house, noticed a neatly lettered name plate. “Weil,” Mrs. Kupperman read aloud in surprise. “Weil…Weil…Do you think she’s rel
ated to the perfume people?”

  “I don’t know who I’m related to,” Louise began to say aloud, but Rebecca was no longer interested.

  “Oh my God! Look at this! I almost forgot!” she said, beaming again and pointing with pudgy, outspread hands to the carefully arranged table. “I don’t want you to think I’m dogmatic, and I wouldn’t want you to get the idea, especially you, Julia darling, that I would ever interfere with anyone’s free choice, but this is one thing—one thing that I absolutely have to insist on. Honey! With Lapsang Souchong, if you put sugar in it, you might just as well pour it down the drain.”

  Still sneezy and sniffling, Maria began pouring out the tea, carefully holding and turning the strainer as if it were either a total novelty or else an object she hadn’t seen for so long a time that it might be calling up memories.

  “Yucch, Mommy,” Matthew said, as the steam rose from the teapot and the cups. “It smells like bacon.”

  “Oh, Maria! He’s so sensitive. It’s not as if I believe in heredity, everybody knows the difference that environment and exposure makes—otherwise what would be the point of it all! But just look at him! Listen to him! He’s just like Dennis. Even his nose is sensitive!”

  Maria said, “My nose is stopped off. Stopped up? And I can’t smell anything. How can it be like bacon?”

  “Because it’s smoked, Maria. That’s what’s so specially marvelous about Lapsang Souchong. It has a wonderful distinct smoky aroma. And taste! So just don’t anybody ask me for sugar because it’s the honey that brings it out. Here!”

  Rebecca put the jar of honey on the table. Louise saw no sunlight in the room, but a slow, golden, streamy, comfortable reverie: honey in a jar. There was no sunlight in the room but this leaden, brown, sticky syrup—a hot, sick, fevered, gluey ball. This sun was diseased and tropical, quarantined in a glass jar. “Cordon Sanitaire”—a technique conceived and named by Marcel Proust’s father, a neat, precise French doctor, efficient and disciplined for the public good. A small man, probably, with a beard or mustache which he curled or pulled at, a characteristic gesture left over from his student days. In his high-ceilinged, large, neat, official room—bureaucratic, but his—he pulled at his mustache and puzzled over methods to improve life for people he would never know. And possibly didn’t care to. At home, his small son choked, sneezed, drank tea with lime-flavored cookies, and dreamed and dreamed constantly in his own private cordon sanitaire. He had no regard at all for the public good.