Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  She sat down on a stool and gazed over his head, silent as Buddha.

  Al took a step forward. "How 'bout some coffee, Claude?"

  "No." He stared at his mother. "You're going to tell me. I should have made you tell me a long time ago."

  "Tell you what?" she said.

  "Goddamn it! No more bullshit." He advanced to the counter and slammed down both his fists. She did not flinch, but stared straight ahead, rubbing her upper lip with her forefinger as if working out a puzzle.

  "What's done is done," she said.

  "Were you married? Or was it like"—he swept his arm to indicate the apartment—"this?"

  "I was married."

  "Then why ...," he began.

  "I married Henry Rawlings in Toronto, Canada, two days before he shipped out."

  "Canada!"

  "He was Canadian."

  "What ... why..." In his surprise and confusion he stumbled over his words. "Why didn't you tell me this? Who was he? Did he have any family? Maybe there are people up there—"

  She interrupted him. "I met him in show business. He had no family. It was very quick, and to tell you the truth I didn't know much about him. We were kids. The war was on."

  Claude considered this, glancing at her, unwilling to believe he was getting the whole story. Something in her eyes revealed a deep stubbornness, an obduracy. "Well," he said, challenging her, "I can go to Toronto. I can find out who he was and what happened to him, since you don't seem to know or even care."

  "That would be a waste of time," she said.

  "I've got plenty of time."

  She glanced at Al.

  Claude jumped. "Leave him out of it! This has nothing to do with him." He turned to see Al, looking thoughtful, nodding quietly while fixing Emma with his eyes. Claude did not know how to interpret this gesture. He swung back to his mother. "There'll be military records."

  "The thing is," Emma said, and paused, her hands coming together on the counter, "you've got the name, but I can't really say if he was your father or not." Again she glanced very swiftly at Al. "I don't know. My guess is, he wasn't."

  After a moment of paralysis, his mind simply not working, he began a kind of mental free fall, turning and spinning without direction. He sank onto a stool and tried to collect himself.

  "You mean ... you mean...," he said.

  "I was a showgirl, Claude." There was the faintest catch in her voice. "I can't tell you who your father was."

  For a long time the room was silent. Then Al moved forward, slipped behind Emma, giving her a pat on the shoulder as he passed, and began to make coffee. His back was to Claude.

  "You knew about this?" Claude asked Al.

  "Yeah. We got no secrets."

  "Well good for you," Claude said bitterly. "You're a lucky man." He stared at his mother and saw a tear forming in her eye. He wanted to strike her. A ridiculous tear, he thought, a useless, mawkish, cheap tear. What he did was get up and leave without another word.

  Claude and Lady holed up in Obromowitz's room for three days. Lady was serious about not going back to her parents' house, though she'd called her mother to tell her she was safe and well, and not to worry. Claude still thought she was being extreme—something made him uneasy, perhaps the abruptness of her decision—but he said nothing directly.

  They talked all day. They talked having hamburgers at Prexy's. They talked in the delicatessen buying cornflakes. They talked late into the night, side by side in bed. They were young and preoccupied with the future, with the great open expanse of life that lay ahead of them. Claude was excited with his prospects in music. He wanted to play, but above all now, suddenly he saw it clearly, to compose. There was much work to be done. He confessed that he knew he might be fooling himself, that there was no way to know if he had the talent to write great music, but he was going to try.

  Lady revealed a great deal of ambition, but in the abstract. She did not know what she would do, but whatever it was, it would be real. She expressed scorn for her mother's volunteer work, scorn for her father's make-believe work, and scorn for what she took to be a retreat from reality on the part of practically the whole upper class. She confessed that in many ways she had felt like a prisoner most of her life. What she would work at involved, in her mind, choosing among what seemed to her an almost infinite number of possibilities. She was quite sure she could do anything she set her mind to, but she was vexed by the fact that choosing one possibility precluded the others.

  The decision to get married did not occur in a single moment, but rather emerged gradually. Once, when they had gone on an early morning walk near the Hollifield campus, a bank of heavy fog had swallowed them. They'd leaned on the top rail of a split-rail fence, both of them silent, entranced by the nacreous softness. Suddenly they'd heard hoofbeats, and then, so close they both fell back, there was the massive head and neck of a white horse looming over them, floating in the mist.

  Lying in Obromowitz's bed with'Lady's head on his shoulder, Claude said, "Well, it's good I'm going to be making more money now. We're going to need money."

  "Money's no problem," she said sleepily.

  "Your father and mother...," he began.

  "I have money of my own. Lots of it."

  He thought this over for a minute. "That's good. As long as we have enough. There's no romance to being poor, I can tell you."

  She shifted her head and he could feel the warmth of her breath on his nipple. "My great-grandfather left me a trust fund."

  "I know about those. That's how I got the Bechstein," he said.

  "Well, there's five million dollars in mine," she said with a yawn. "Can't touch the capital, though. Only the income."

  They were married the following week in a civil ceremony at the Municipal Building. There were no guests.

  PART THREE

  17

  FIVE YEARS LATER he awoke to the sound of Lady placing the breakfast tray beside him on the wide bed on her side, which she had vacated as usual an hour or two earlier. Eggs, bacon, toast, tea, and the New York Times. He pulled himself up to lean against the headboard while she went over and sat on the window seat, looking out at the tiny garden. Slightly hung over, he rubbed his eyes, what time is it?"

  "Ten," she said. "Don't forget you've got the doctor's appointment at eleven-thirty."

  "Right." He began to eat. Years ago, when they had first moved into the townhouse, she had brought him breakfast in bed to celebrate their first day of residence. For some reason she had continued the practice, always getting up before him no matter how late they retired. She never sent Esmeralda, the maid, but always brought it herself.

  "What did you think of them?" she asked. The previous night they'd had a young poet and his mildly raucous wife to dinner. Everyone had drunk a good deal of wine except Lady.

  "Very Harvard."

  "He works awfully hard on his charm."

  "Hmm." He sipped his tea.

  "And he name-drops. I hate that."

  "Well." Claude waved his hand. "He's clever anyway. And she was fun."

  "Poor thing. He's half Jewish and her parents still give her a hard time."

  "Fuck 'em," Claude said.

  "Exactly." Lady had not seen her own parents since before her marriage. She occasionally talked to her mother on the telephone. Claude thought he'd seen her father getting into a distant cab on Lexington Avenue a year ago, but he hadn't been sure. It did not seem extraordinary to him that people could live within a mile of one another on the East Side of Manhattan and never bump into each other. In New York City it was possible—indeed, it required no particular effort—to live privately, to choose, if one was rich, precisely how much of the outside world one wanted to deal with. In the case of Lady and Claude, that was not very much.

  For Lady the house was a protected oasis of domesticity, safety, and stasis. From it—especially in the first years—she had planned her careful forays outside. The committee to re-elect the junior senator. Assistant executive dir
ector of the Prison Commission. Assistant stage manager of a small off-Broadway production. She had worked in publishing, law, politics, and photography, always getting paid (no matter how little) and always leaving after a few months. These jobs were in the nature of experiments. A testing of the waters. After each she would repair to the house. Claude thought it slightly odd, whether she was working or during one of the increasingly long periods of not working, that she had never invited to the house anyone with whom she had been professionally involved. The house was off limits to the people she'd worked with, while at the same time open to those who had worked with Claude. He'd thought this might be an expression of extreme modesty on her part, but in truth he was so preoccupied with himself and his music, he didn't give the matter much attention.

  Now, as he noticed her attire—the familiar modest dark green suit, white blouse, single strand of pearls—he realized it must be a school day. She taught art appreciation at Spence, her alma mater, twice a week. Her profile caught the gray light from the garden, and he was struck yet again by her beauty. A calmness, a mysterious repose that, paradoxically, he often felt the urge to disturb.

  She got up from the window seat. "I'll be back at five," she said, and left the room.

  He read the paper for a while, got out of bed, took a shower, and dressed. Gray flannel slacks, a pale yellow Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, and a cashmere sport jacket custom made by a tailor on Madison Avenue. As he brushed his hair a snippet of a melodic phrase popped to the front of his mind. Three notes and a passing tone, out of nowhere. He instantly recognized where the phrase wanted to go in the piano piece he was writing. Standing perfectly still, staring at the mirror but seeing nothing, he worked the phrase into the music in his mind, noting with a rush of pleasure how it connected to the other lines, how it solved certain problems, how it sparked the rhythm.

  Recently he'd had a talk with Weisfeld about this phenomenon—the sensation of being a receiver, of the stuff arriving as if by cosmic special delivery. It was both tremendously exciting and slightly scary. "It's good, it's good," Weisfeld had said. "Practically everyone describes this. Who cares where it comes from? Let somebody else worry about that. And don't worry about controlling it. When it happens, it happens. Don't force it. Use it"—he held up a finger—"if it's good."

  "It always seems good," Claude had said. "Better than anything I could think up myself."

  "So?" Weisfeld had shrugged. "What can I tell you?"

  Claude put down the hairbrush and went out into the hall, taking the stairs two at a time as he descended one flight and pushed open the door to the music room. He sat down at the Baldwin and went to work, knowing he had only half an hour but unable to resist.

  In the event, he was late for the doctor.

  "I'm sorry," he said as he sat down. "I got into something. I really should get a wristwatch."

  Dr. Maxwell was a cheerful, roly-poly urologist of about fifty. He had seen Claude appear in concert several times, and confessed to a lifelong love of music, particularly opera. He was the leader of an amateur recorder quartet that he had formed with some of his medical colleagues. During his first examination of Claude's genitals he had abstractedly hummed an aria from Tosca while palpating a testicle. Now he sat down behind his desk, opened a file, and then stared off into the middle distance.

  "It's too bad we don't have a history," he said.

  Claude noticed Dr. Maxwell's uncharacteristically blank expression. "I never saw a doctor till I got to college, as I said." He waited, beginning to grow uneasy.

  Dr. Maxwell tapped the file with the tips of his fingers. "Well, first of all, from the anatomical point of view everything is completely normal. No blockages, no stray tubes or bad valves. Normal, normal. You're in remarkably good health generally, as well, so that's something to be thankful for."

  "I get the feeling I'm about to hear something I'm not going to like," Claude said.

  Dr. Maxwell nodded. "You are not producing live sperm cells, I'm sorry to say."

  Claude stared into the man's steady gray eyes. "What does that mean? Why not?"

  "It means there are no live sperm cells. None at all. Why? I'm not sure." He leaned forward and closed the file. "But that's the reason Lady hasn't gotten pregnant."

  Claude's thoughts suddenly fragmented, skittering off in all directions, fading, slanting, or bouncing back on themselves. After a moment the spasm subsided and he realized he was still looking at the doctor. "Can we fix it? Is there some kind of treatment?"

  Dr. Maxwell shook his head. "I can only guess at the cause. There are any number of viral agents—mumps, orchitis, undulant fever, for instance—and since we lack a medical history..." He shrugged and made a gesture in the air with his hands. "There are chemical agents, certain toxins. In fact, there are a lot of ways it could have happened. The best bet is an undiagnosed childhood illness from the right viral group. You might have had swollen testicles—there's no atrophy, by the way—or then again maybe not. Fever, chills, nausea almost certainly."

  "You mean all this time I've..."

  "I imagine so," Dr. Maxwell said. "I can't say with certainty, but it seems most probable. The trouble is, there's not much the sperm cells can tell us. Their only abnormality is the fact that they're not alive. Spermatogenesis itself is a process we don't understand very well."

  Claude sat silently, staring at the closed file. He could see his own name on the tab. Part of his mind was trying to let the information in, and part was trying to keep it out. He felt a floating sensation, and simultaneously Dr. Maxwell seemed to be receding in space, like a trick shot in the movies. Claude watched the doctor's lips moving.

  "Let me say again that in every other regard you are completely normal. The aspermia has no effect on your libido, your sexual life, desire, performance, and so on. You can and should consider yourself the same as other men, because that is the case—emotionally, anatomically you are the same. However, you cannot have children. You must reconcile yourself to that fact."

  "Yes, I understand," Claude said.

  "It can take getting used to, but my patients—I mean those in the same situation—have done well. Particularly those with a passionate interest in their work, like yourself. I suppose it helps them retain a sense of proportion. They tend not to dwell on things."

  As the man went on talking, Claude gradually came back to himself. He barely heard what was said. Finally Dr. Maxwell walked him out to the door. At the last minute he grabbed Claude's elbow and caught his eye. "Mr. Rawlings," he said, "do not blame yourself for this." He waited for his words to sink in. "This is fate," he said, "as impersonal as the stars."

  Claude found himself walking along the street without any clear idea of where he wanted to go. He wound up at the Ninety-first Street entrance to Central Park and proceeded to the reservoir, where he sat down on a bench and watched three pigeons scuttling at his feet.

  That his body had betrayed him' was a surprise, certainly, and yet there was something familiar in it, something that harked back to childhood and his anger at being thin and weak, his resentment at being trapped in his ridiculous skin. He had wanted nothing more than to transcend his body, to leave it behind through love and music. He had allowed himself to believe he was succeeding, but now, in an almost sinister fashion, hidden at a microscopic level, his old enemy again pulled him down. The gross, mute, stupid machine of his body was once again filling him with shame.

  In years to come Claude's sterility would mean different things to him, rising and falling in importance according to where he found himself at various stages in his life, forcing him into tortuous philosophical speculations he might otherwise never have entertained, sometimes creating in him an almost unbearable sense of isolation, but sometimes, oddly enough, lending him a near-mystical appreciation of the value of life, of its unspeakable beauty. But for the moment, sitting on the park bench at the age of twenty-six, he was preoccupied with the practical.

  Lady's announcement some m
onths earlier that she had ceased using her diaphragm for the past year had stunned him. He could not understand why she'd kept it a secret, why he had not been included in the decision to have a child. He'd resented it more than he'd allowed himself to admit—not only for the fact itself, but because it tied in with other ways in which she kept him at a distance. For all her ambition she was a rather fearful person, he'd discovered, with a tendency to build elaborate defenses for herself before they were necessary. Silence, privacy, and occasionally secrecy were second nature to her. She could not share her sense of what was happening to her with him, could not reveal her sense of herself to him, and as a result he felt she didn't trust him.

  It was confusing because he believed that she loved him, and if it was a guarded, somewhat timid love, it was nevertheless all that he knew, with nothing to compare it to. In every way that was possible for her she was supportive, generous, and as caring toward him as she might have been toward her own child. She made so few demands on him he felt almost lonely.

  Educated by the movies, he had believed love would conquer all. It was not easy for him to give up that hope. But in their lovemaking she retained that distant air of an observer, of someone at a slight remove, never holding his lust against him but never understanding it either. He was, perforce, and without knowing it, a clumsy lover, utterly preoccupied with his own anxiety. The most common themes in his dreams of Lady were these: he would speak but have no voice; he would be in a position of great danger, but she could not discern the danger and hence remained calm and undisturbed; he would play the piano for her and she would try to change the music by turning the dial of the radio. In almost all his dreams she exhibited a kind of nonmalevolent obduracy against which any efforts of his own were futile. In his dreams he was a man beating his head against a brick wall, and knowing it.

  He got up from the bench, the pigeons scattered, and he walked along the path. The fact that he could not have a child forced him now to think about why she had wanted one in the first place. To move deeper into life, perhaps. She had been unable to find any kind of work to which she could commit herself, and despite her silence he had glimpsed a certain amount of anguish and frustration. She might understandably consider motherhood as good work, something she could control and do well. (Had she not mothered him?) Nor would it be out of character for her to think of it as largely a private, feminine matter, particularly since the greater share of the responsibility would redound to her rather than him. Although Claude had not been privy to the steps she'd gone through on the way to her decision, he nevertheless recognized it as an act of courage. She had been driven very deep into herself, doubtless deeper than ever before, to come to such a point, to take what must surely seem to her the most profound risk of her life. And of course she'd done it alone.