The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Of course I will. As soon as we have a break. Come on, get in bed. I like San Francisco. It’s a nice drive. We’ll take the BMW. It’s driving good since I got the new tires. Get in bed. Let’s get some sleep.” Then Claudine gave up for the day and climbed into the bed and let Sandy cuddle up to her. Their neuroses fit like gloves. They were really very happy together. They hated the same things. They liked to make love to each other and they liked to sleep in the same bed. It was the best thing either of them had ever known. They even liked Zandia. Neither one of them liked to take care of him but they didn’t hate or resent him. Sometimes they even thought he was funny.

  Lunch at the Best Restaurant in the World

  “So why was I chosen for this? That’s what I keep asking myself. It’s like a tear in the fabric of reality. Maybe I heard him walking by the window. I have a perfect ear for music. Well, I do. Maybe I saw him by the fence and knew he’d be wanting to get to the pool. All mothers are wary of pools. I’ve been watching to make sure no one drowns in our pool for years. Maybe there’s a logical explanation. I’m sure there is. It only seems like a miracle.” Nora Jane was talking. She and Freddy and Freddy’s best friend, Nieman Gluuk, were at Chez Panisse having lunch. Nora Jane was wearing yellow. Freddy had on his plaid shirt and chinos. Nieman wore his suit. It was the first time the Harwoods had been out in public since the night Nora Jane pulled the child from the swimming pool. Nieman had been with them almost constantly since the event. Actually he had been with them almost constantly since they were married ten years before. Nieman and Freddy saw each other or talked on the phone nearly every day. They had done this since they were five years old. No one thought anything about it or ever said it was strange that two grown men were inseparable.

  “Three knights were allowed to see the Grail,” Freddy said. “Bors and Percival and Galahad. They were pure of heart. You’re pure of heart, Nora Jane. And besides, you’re an intuitive. The first time Nieman met you he told me that. He says you’re the most intuitive person he’s ever known.”

  “Maybe this means I shouldn’t go to college. It means something, Freddy. Something big.”

  “You think I don’t know that? I was there too, wasn’t I? I watched it happen. What it means is that there’s a lot more going on than we are able to acknowledge. Thought is energy. It creates fields. You picked up on one. You’re a good receiver. That’s what intuitive means. Maybe I’ll go to school with you. Just dive right into a freshman science course and see if I sink or swim.”

  Nieman sighed and shook his head from side to side. “I can’t believe you had this experience just when you were getting ready to try your wings at Berkeley. It’s a coincidence, not a warning. It doesn’t mean the girls are in danger or that we are in danger. No, listen to me. I know you think that but you shouldn’t. The point is that you saved his life, not that his life was in danger. You will always save lives in many ways. It’s all the more reason to go back to school and gain more knowledge and more power. Knowledge is power, even if it does sound trite to say it.”

  “I wish they hadn’t put it in the papers.” Nora Jane turned to Nieman and touched his hand. She was one of the three people in the world who dared to touch the esteemed and feared Nieman Gluuk, the bitter and hilarious movie critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. “The whole thing only lasted about six minutes. I can barely remember any of it except the moment I knew to do it. Freddy remembers pulling him out better than I do.”

  “We must never forget it,” Nieman said.

  “A man who had it happen to him last year called last night. He went through a glass door to get to a pool and saved his nephew. He thinks it has something to do with water. Water as a conductor.”

  “It proves a lot of theories,” Freddy added. “I was there too, Nieman. I witnessed it. I was in bed with her.”

  “Excuse me.” They were interrupted by a waiter, who took their orders for goat cheese pie and salads and wine. “It was the single most profound thing that ever happened to me in my life,” Freddy went on. “I will be thinking about it every day for the rest of my life. A tear in the cover, a glimpse of a wild, or perhaps exquisitely orderly, reality that is lost to us most of the time. Think of it, Nieman. The brain can’t stand to consciously process all it senses and knows. We’d go crazy. The brain is a filter and its first job is to keep the body healthy. Occasionally, perhaps by accident, it sees a larger reality as its domain. Altruism. Well, it’s so humbling to be part of it.” He looked down, afraid they would think he wanted them to remember what he had done in the earthquake of 1986. But they knew better. He had forbidden his friends ever to speak of that. “Well, let’s don’t talk it all away. It’s Nora Jane’s miracle. I want to take her up to Willits for a while to think it over but she can’t go. She starts school in three days, you know.”

  The waiter put bread down in front of them, the best French bread this side of New Orleans. Nieman held out a loaf to Nora Jane and they broke the bread. They ate in silence for a while.

  “Fantastic about Berkeley,” Nieman said at last. “Brilliant. I wish I could go. I feel like a dinosaur with my old knowledge. My encyclopedia is twenty years old. Every year I say I’ll get another one but I never do.”

  The waiter brought more bread. Nieman buttered a piece and examined it, calculating the fat grams and wondering if it mattered. “Our darling Nora Jane,” he went on. “Loose on the campus in the directionless nineties. I should write a modern opera for you. The problem is the ending. Shakespeare knew what to do. He poured in outrageous action, tied up all the loose ends, piled up some bodies, and danced off the stage on the wings of language. Ah, those epilogues. ‘As you from crimes would pardoned be. Let your indulgence set me free.’ Oh, he could lift the language! The modern stage can’t bear the weight of so much beauty, so much fun. It’s too large an insult to the modern fantasy, boredom, and self-pity. I went to three movies last week that were so bad I didn’t last for the first hour. I just walked out. They began hopefully enough, were well acted by fine actors, then you could see the money mold begin to grow, the meetings where the money people in group think begin to decide how to corrupt the script. Well, let’s not ruin lunch with such thoughts. After lunch shall we go over to the campus and walk around and get you accustomed to your new domain, Miss Nora? I heard the brilliant translator Mark Musa is here for the semester to teach The Divine Comedy. You might want to take that. We could go by and see if he’s in his office and introduce ourselves.”

  “There you go,” Freddy said. “Trying to take over what she takes. I pray to God every day to make me stop caring what classes she takes.”

  “The only answer is for you to go with me. You too, Nieman. Why not? Life is short, as you both tell me a thousand times a month.”

  “Life is short,” Nieman agreed. “We could do it, Freddy. We could think of it as a donation to the university. Pay tuition as special students, sign up for classes, and go as often as we are able. I could take Monday and Tuesday off. I’m going to list the names of seven movies and then leave a blank white space. Think of us back on the campus, Freddy. Freddy was valedictorian of our class, Nora. But you know that.”

  “His mother’s told me a million times. I think it was the high point of her life.”

  “That’s what she wants you to think. The high point of her life was when she flew that jet to Seattle in the air show. No, I guess it was when she played Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? You know who she’s going out with now, don’t you, Nieman?”

  “I heard. It’s a terrible shadow, Freddy, but you have survived so far. Well, shall we do it then? Register for classes?”

  “Yes. I’m taking biology, physics, and a history course. I want to see what they’re teaching. It can’t be as bad as I’ve heard it is.”

  “I’ll take Musa’s Dante in Translation and a playwriting course. I’ll go incognito and write the play for Nora Jane and we’ll put it on next year as an AIDS benefit.”

  “I’ll
sing ‘Vissi d’arte’ from the side of the stage while twelve little girls in long white dresses run around the stage doing leaps. Would that be a conclusion? Then a poet can run out on the stage and read part of ‘Little Gidding.’ Imagine us all going to college together.”

  “Meeting for coffee at Aranga’s. When I was a student I was touched by old people going back to school. We will touch their silly little hearts. At least, Freddy and I will. You’ll drive them crazy. I don’t know, Freddy, maybe she’s overeducated already.”

  “I want a degree. I’m embarrassed not to have a college degree. I’m the first person in my family in three generations not to have one.” She sat up very straight and tall and Nieman and Freddy understood this was not to be taken lightly.

  “Then let’s go,” Freddy said. “If you will allow us, we will accompany you on this pilgrimage.” She turned her head to look at him and he fell madly in love with the sweep and whiteness of her neck and Nieman watched this approvingly. After all, someone has to be in love and get married and continue the human race.

  An hour later they were on the Berkeley campus, walking along the sidewalks where Freddy and Nieman had walked when they were young. Nora Jane had been on the campus many times but never as a student. It was very strange, very liberating, and she felt her spirit open to the world she was about to enter. “I’ll be Virgil and you be Dante and Nora Jane can be Beatrice,” Nieman was saying. “The possibility of vast fields of awareness, that’s what this campus always says to me. I used to think I could get vibrations from the physics building when the first reactor was installed and all those brilliant minds were here. I used to feel the force of them would dissolve the harm my mother did to me each morning. She would pour fear and anxiety over me and I would step onto the campus and feel it eaten up by knowledge. She was enraged that I was studying theater. She was very hard on me.”

  “You had to live at home with her?” Nora Jane took his arm to protect him from the past.

  “She wanted me to go to medical school and be a psychiatrist, as she was seeing one. I would say to her, Mother, theater is psychotherapy writ large. The actors on the stage do what people do in ordinary life, keep secrets, say half of what they’re thinking, manipulate, lie. Because it’s writ large on the stage or screen the audience is on to them. They leave the theater and go out into the world more aware of other people’s behaviors, if not of their own. Still, she was not convinced. She still thinks what I do is frivolous.”

  “She can’t, after all these years?”

  “Can she not? I’m an only child, don’t forget that.”

  “I am too and so is Freddy. We’re the only-child league. Like the red-headed league in Sherlock Holmes.”

  They linked arms, coming down the wide sidewalk to the student union. “This is like The Wizard of Oz,” Nieman said. “In The Divine Comedy they walked single file.”

  “Well, these are not the legions of the damned either,” Freddy added, “although they certainly look the part.” They were passing students, some with rings in their ears and noses and lips and some wearing chic outfits and some looking like they were only there because they didn’t have anything better to do.

  “Let’s go to the registrar’s office and get that over with,” Freddy suggested.

  “I will fill out any number of forms but I am not sending off for transcripts,” Nieman decreed. “If they start any funny stuff about transcripts I’ll drop my disguise and call the president of the university.”

  “We aren’t pulling rank, Nieman,” Freddy said. “We go as pilgrims or not at all.”

  “You go your way and I’ll go mine, as always. Yes, it’s beginning to feel like old times.”

  “Don’t talk about the sixties or I’ll hit you. I was in a convent school kneeling in the gravel before the statue of the Virgin and you were here getting to read literature and hear lectures by physicists. It isn’t fair. You’re too far ahead. I’ll never catch up.”

  “No competition please. We’re in this together.”

  By five that afternoon it was done. Freddy was signed up to audit World History and Physics I and Biology I. Nieman was taking Dante and had met Mark Musa and promised to brush up on his Italian and Nora Jane had her books and notebooks for English, History, Algebra, and Introduction to Science. They had sacks of books from Freddy’s bookstore and the campus bookstore.

  When they were through collecting all the books they went to a coffeehouse across the street from the campus and picked out a table where they could meet. “I don’t know if this table will be large enough,” Nieman said. “Students will be flocking to us, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t scare me like that,” Freddy said.

  “Don’t turn my education into an anecdote,” Nora Jane decreed. “Or I’ll get my own table and have my own following.” She piled her books up in front of her and looked at them. She was proud of them. She was on fire at this beginning.

  The Incursions of the Goddamn Wretched Past

  It was the Sunday morning after the wonderful Friday when Nora Jane, Freddy, and their best friend, Nieman, spent the afternoon on the Berkeley campus signing up for classes and being filled with happiness and hope.

  It was Sunday morning and Freddy and Nora Jane were on the patio reading the Sunday newspapers and watching Zandia, who was brandishing a plastic sword in the air. He was standing on a ladder by the fence that separated the houses and pretending to poke them with the sword to punish them for ignoring him.

  Because Nora Jane had saved Zandia’s life he thought he had a claim on her. He thought she was a mean, bad girl to sit there reading the newspapers when he didn’t have a thing to do. “I’m killing you,” he called out in his annoying, high-pitched voice. “You are Nora Jane Captain Hook. I’m swording you.”

  “You think I should go get him?” Nora Jane asked Freddy. “Clyda said his mother was coming this afternoon. Can you stand him for a while?”

  “Sure. Why not? Did that man call about the new pool cover?”

  “He’s coming Monday afternoon. Betty will let him in if I’m not here.” Nora Jane got up from her chair and walked down across the lawn to Zandia, who was continuing to threaten her. His grandmother met her at the fence.

  “Let me take him for a while,” Nora Jane asked. “We like to watch him play.”

  “If you’re sure you want him. I swear to God I’m worn out with him. I’m going to Maine Chance for two weeks the minute that he’s gone. I was going to the Golden Door but they’re full.”

  “Let us have him for a while. It will keep Freddy from reading the editorial page. It drives him crazy to read the editorials. Actually he shouldn’t even be allowed to read the papers.” Nora Jane helped Zandia over the fence and he stood beside her, poking his sword in the direction of his grandmother.

  “Claudine ought to be here by three or four. They sent me some stills from the set. You want to see them? She really is a pretty girl. I guess I’m too proud of her.” Clyda pulled some photographs out of the pocket of her jacket. She handed them over the fence, still talking. “That’s Kevin Kline in the background. That’s a Mardi Gras parade. These were made while they were still filming in New Orleans. That’s Claudine and the other one’s her boyfriend, Sandy Wade. They’re pretty handsome, aren’t they?”

  Nora Jane took the photographs. It was Sandy George Wade, her old lover. Ten years older and stronger looking and wider and twelve times as handsome, if it were possible for anyone that handsome to look any better. It was Sandy, on his way to San Francisco to ruin her life.

  “That’s her boyfriend?”

  “Yes. He’s very good-looking, isn’t he? They’ll be here this afternoon to get Zandia. Claudine wants to meet you and thank you in person. She’ll never forgive me if she doesn’t have a chance to thank you for what you did.”

  “I don’t know if we’ll still be here. We’re going to Berkeley starting tomorrow. There’s so much we have to do. Well, thanks for showing these to me.” Nora Jane
handed them back over the fence. “I’ll bring him back in half an hour. We have to leave pretty soon.” She took Zandia’s hand and hurried back across the lawn to Freddy. Tammili and Lydia were with him. Tammili had on a blue and white dress and Lydia had on shorts and a white T-shirt advertising an Amos Oz book.

  Lydia is his, Nora Jane said to herself. If he sees her he will know! Anyone will know. We know. Freddy will go crazy when he finds out Sandy’s coming. Well, I can’t wait. I have to tell him now. We have to leave. What hell is this? That we have to pay for the past forever. The terrible past. The mean past. It’s here every moment of our lives, weighing us down, ruining everything we do.

  “Take Zandia,” she said to Tammili. “Go find him some cookies. I have to talk to your father.”

  She pulled Freddy up from his chair and led him into the living room. It was a perfect room. High glass walls that looked out onto the bay. White marble floors with soft blue handmade cotton rugs. A long gold sofa. A Japanese tea box for a coffee table. A bowl of white roses beside the fireplace. Nora Jane pushed a button and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach began to play. Freddy had not spoken. He thought she was going to tell him someone had died. He was going over a list in his head. It had to be something Zandia’s grandmother told her. It wouldn’t be Nieman, or someone would have called.

  “Sit down,” she said. “Don’t go crazy when you hear this. We can deal with this. We are not hopeless in the face of what I’m going to tell you.”

  “Say it.”

  “Sandy Wade is the boyfriend of Zandia’s mother. They’re coming here today. This is real, Freddy. I just saw a photograph of him. We can’t let him see Lydia. He’s a human being. It would break his heart and then I don’t know what he’d do. He’s in a film with Zandia’s mother. Clyda has photographs of the girls with Zandia at the pool. He’ll see them. We can get the girls out of here but what about the pictures? Even if we could do something about that, Clyda will talk about them. He thinks they’re his. Both of them. I lived with him the whole time I was pregnant. Don’t forget that.”