The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Nora Jane gathered all the things into a wicker basket and carried it to the kitchen and then went into her room to dress for the day. She was missing two classes at Berkeley today and she was keeping a crazy, scary secret.

  After ten years of never getting pregnant again and wanting to, she was three days late. Drugstore test kits had confirmed it. I can’t tell him until I know for sure, she decided. I can’t even mention this unless it’s certain. He would go crazy. I don’t even want to bring it up. He won’t notice. He’s involved with Sebranek’s coming and Ms. Searle.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Put her hand to her mouth. Began to chew on her fingers. Then she left the mirror and began to run water into the tub. Then she began to sing.

  A passerby might have thought a great diva was in the tub as the opening notes of “Quando m’en vo’soletta” began to fill the room. When Nora Jane sang to herself she was always alone with her grandmother Lydia, in the long hot days of summer, in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the part of her childhood that she treasured and could bear to remember. Mirlitons were growing on the fence behind her grandmother’s house. A morning glory vine twined around the pillars of the porch. It was fragrant and divine and her grandmother Lydia there beside her to save her from her mother and all the other evils of the world.

  Nora Jane stepped into the tub of hot water and sank down below the waves. Don’t think about New Orleans, she told herself. The past is a swamp. Adrien Searle is coming to the store and we get to take her out to lunch. Not to mention telling Freddy about this baby.

  Nora Jane sank back into the waves. She was in her first semester at college so the timing would be the way things usually end up happening. The minute you forget about wanting something it shows up.

  I have to be careful telling Freddy. If he acts too happy it might make the girls jealous. I don’t want them jealous of some little baby before it’s even born. What if it was a little boy as crazy as Freddy? Or as handsome as my father. She shook her head and got out of the tub and started drying herself.

  Well, I have to tell him today. I have to stop being so secretive about things. I’m as bad as I was when I was young.

  She went into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of slacks and a blue and white striped polo shirt. She ran a comb through her hair, found her car keys, and ran. She pulled out of the garage in her little red Miata and headed toward the expressway. I should eat something, she decided. You can’t go around skipping breakfast when you’re pregnant. She pulled off the highway at McDonald’s and ordered a sausage biscuit and a cup of orange juice and ate them as she drove. It was ten-thirty. If she hurried she would have time to tell him before the reading.

  He’s so crazy, she decided. It’s absurd to like your husband as much as I like him. But I wish he wouldn’t worry about things. He’ll find a way to worry about this pregnancy. He’ll read about a hundred books. He’ll probably sign us up for some of those dopey parenting courses. Well, I’m not going.

  She found a parking place behind the store and went in the back and found Freddy by the cash register, rearranging books.

  “Thanks for coming down early. How are you?” He smiled his dazzling smile.

  “I have to talk to you right away. Come in the office.”

  “Oh, God, is it something about the girls?”

  “No. It’s something good. At least I think it’s good. Come on. Hurry up.” She took his arm and led him up the stairs to his office. She shut the door and stood holding it. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “I’m pretty sure. I did two drugstore tests. I think it’s true. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Oh, God, my darling one.” He went to her and took her in his arms. Then he began to cry. Laughing and crying.

  “Don’t you dare cry. Oh, God, I knew this was going to happen. That’s why I didn’t tell you last night.”

  “You knew this last night and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I wanted to wait one more day. And do a second test.”

  “I knew this. I dreamed it last night. I had this little boy and I was holding his hand. We were in a valley. At the foot of some mountains.”

  “You did not. You did not dream this. And we don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy.” Now she was laughing too. They were leaning on Freddy’s desk, laughing as if they knew the funniest thing in the world.

  Sebranek Conrad had become a great man, almost by accident. He had not sought out greatness. He had just been a scrawny hardworking kid from upstate New York who had dreamed of going into publishing. His neighbor in the village of Rhinebeck, New York, was a publisher, a man whose family owned a publishing house in Boston. When Sebranek was a teenager he had done odd jobs for this man in the summers. He had chopped wood, cleaned barns, groomed horses, planted trees, mended fences, always side by side with the talkative Irishman. Often, as he grew older, the man would have him to the house to meet visiting authors. Sometimes the authors would work by their side. Hemingway had come to the farm and John Fowles had been a visitor one summer. Sebranek had grown up knowing writers and was fascinated by the world they inhabited.

  He had worked his way through Yale and done well there, graduating magna cum laude and with other honors. Afterward he had gone to work for a publishing house in New York owned by one of the men he had met on his mentor’s farm. By the time he was forty he was a senior editor. By the time he was fifty he was editor in chief.

  “I was lucky to be there in those years,” he was fond of saying. “At the end of publishing as we knew it. I was there and I’m still there and will be to the end. Adrien and I are holding on very well, thank you.”

  He looked across the room at the sleeping body of his lady love, the feared feminist writer Adrien Searle. She was sleeping on her side, curled up like a child. She could sleep anywhere. She never woke at dawn to worry about the day. She lay down beside him and did not stir for eight or nine or ten hours. This fascinated Sebranek and he envied it. When they were younger he would sometimes wake her in the middle of the night and ask her what time it was. She would answer to within a minute of the time and go immediately back to sleep.

  “We should be married,” he said to himself. “She should give in on that. At least she could have my insurance and my social security.” He rubbed his eye with his hand, straightened out a kink in his neck, felt his glasses bearing down on the bridge of his nose. Sixty-four was all right but not as good for traveling as it once had been. Well, she had wanted him along and he had come. Mission, her new book was called, and she swore it was her last.

  He walked across the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. “We need to get up now,” he said. He lay down beside her. He began to caress her arms and breasts. Kissed her soft hair. She woke and started giggling. “You’re too old for this,” she said. “I know I’m too old for it. Take your clothes off, please. Just this once more and then I’m giving this up forever. Hurry up, it’s your absolute last chance to make love to me.”

  Later, while they were dressing, she brought up the thing they didn’t want to talk about. “Do you think Johnnie will come?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he will even call?”

  “It’s been in the papers and I had my secretary call and tell him we were here. He knows where we are. He would have called the hotel if he wanted to see us.”

  “Why didn’t you call him yourself?”

  “I tried to. He doesn’t have a phone. You have to leave messages at some service. He doesn’t talk to me on the phone. You know that. If he contacts me at all it’s an undated note with no address. He’s in full retreat, Adrien. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Well, this is his territory now. In a way we’re invading his territory.”

  “Ungrateful sons who don’t speak to me don’t have territory as far as I’m concerned.”

  “At least he stopped taking drugs.”

  “We assume he stopped. Don’t worry about Johnnie, Adrien. Worry about your poor old starving editor. I need to e
at breakfast before I face this crowd.”

  “Do you think there will be a crowd?”

  “Of course there will be. Your fans love you. Well, come along. You look fine. I’m starving. Let’s leave this room.”

  They had a quick breakfast in the hotel cafe, then a car came to pick them up and delivered them at two minutes past eleven to Clara Books. Sebranek took Adrien’s arm and they walked into a sea of admiring fans. Adrien was wearing a yellow sweater and gold earrings. Her hair was a riot of dark gold curls. Her smile was honest, her courtesy unfailing. “Thank you for coming here,” she was saying. “I’m so pleased to be here. So pleased to get to know you.”

  Sebranek left her to her fans and joined Freddy by the front cash register. They were old compadres of several battles. When Sebranek first published Salman Rushdie, Freddy had been the only bookstore in Berkeley to display the books in his front window. Clara had been bombed in retaliation for that. Freddy had rebuilt the front windows and put the books back in them. The store had been bombed on Wednesday. By Saturday afternoon the windows were repaired and the Rushdie books were in both of them.

  “How’s the book tour?” Freddy asked. “Are you sorry you started this?”

  “It’s only three cities. I’m enjoying myself. It’s a revelation, to tell the truth. More publishers should go to bookstores. Maybe I’ll start accompanying all my authors.”

  A line had formed of people trying to get into the room where Adrien was going to read. Freddy and Sebranek watched the people for a while, stopping every now and then to talk to someone who came their way. There was only one front entrance. Neither of them saw Johnnie come in. He was a familiar figure to Freddy. Just because he was in full retreat from his family didn’t mean he had stopped reading books.

  Adrien read the first twenty pages of her book. Then the audience asked her questions. They were hesitant, silly questions at first, but, as she seemed to give of herself with good humor, the questions became more serious.

  Johnnie walked around the edge of the crowd. He was wearing a coarse beige jacket and a pair of shorts. His hair was cut as short as a Marine recruit’s. He had a backpack full of books over one arm. He was taller than Sebranek and handsomer. He looked like Northern California. He looked like Northern California had been invented for him.

  “Are you reading any contemporary poets?” he asked Adrien when she recognized him and pointed his way. “Is there anyone new you can tell us about?”

  “I should ask you to tell me,” she answered. “I don’t haunt bookstores as I used to. I used to ferret out writers, find poems. I was looking for them, I was on the prowl for writing and now I am like a domesticated wolf. I eat and sleep and write and watch movies and stay home and wait for things to come to me. Perhaps I’ll spend the afternoon searching this bookstore and the next time someone asks me that I’ll have a better answer.”

  “Have you read Michael Atkinson?” a young girl asked. Then the audience joined in and began to tell each other about poets. Sebranek saw his chance and went to his son and embraced him. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “I don’t know if you got any of the messages.”

  “I can’t stay long. I just came by to say hello. I have a meeting in an hour that I can’t miss. I’m involved in something I want to talk to you about soon, Dad. I can’t talk about it yet. But I may need your help with it soon.” Johnnie moved back into the children’s section. His father followed, reaching for his billfold, taking out money.

  “Stay and have lunch with us. It’s just Freddy and Adrien and myself. Or perhaps we can see you later.”

  “Don’t give me that. I don’t want money.” Sebranek was pushing a hundred-dollar bill into Johnnie’s pocket. “Don’t do that, Dad. I’m a grown man.”

  “I want to give you something. I want to do something. I don’t want this rift between us. Your mother and I are on good terms. Why can’t you and I be? We need to spend some time together. I’m coming back out here in July. We could go to the Oregon coast or climb a mountain. Will you think about it?”

  “Sure. I have to leave now, Dad. I really have to be somewhere in half an hour. I want to talk to you. I’ll call you next week when you get back.” Johnnie was moving toward the door, still facing his father. Behind them the crowd had surrounded Adrien and she was signing books.

  “What are you doing? Are you working? What’s going on?”

  “No time now, I’ll tell you later. When I get it squared away. It’s still in limbo. Well, you look great, Dad. So does Adrien. I’ll buy the book when I have time and read it.” He stopped and allowed Sebranek to embrace him, then he was gone, out the turnstile and onto Telegraph Avenue, and his father followed him and watched him down the street. His youngest son, tall, proud, arrogant, who had once been a sickly, asthmatic child coughing his way around the streets of Brooklyn. It was easy to see how the transformation had occurred. The same hard will had driven the child that seemed to drive the man. We don’t know them when they are grown, Sebranek told himself. They go off and become a mystery to us. If they would let us in we would not understand what we were seeing. “For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” The Prophet. We cannot walk in their shoes nor save them from sorrow. Parallel worlds, enigmas. So be it.

  Johnnie caught a streetcar and took it to the last stop. He got off and walked the next two miles to an abandoned warehouse where he and four other young people had made an after-school hangout for deserted and homeless kids. He threw his book bag into a corner and dragged the ladder out onto the floor and began to put a new net on the basketball goal. He had stopped on his way to the streetcar and bought it with the hundred-dollar bill Sebranek had stuffed in his pocket. The rest he had spent on parts for the stove. “I’ll fix that stove as soon as I finish here,” he told the redheaded girl who stood with her hands on her hips watching him. “You’ll be baking cookies by the time school is out.”

  “So did you see your dad?”

  “Yep. He bought this net. What did you find out about the lease?”

  “He’ll extend it if we repair the bathroom. It’s going to cost six or seven hundred dollars to do that. Connie said she’ll put in five hundred from her dividend check but that won’t pay for all of it. I’ll get a job if I have to.”

  “You have a job.” Johnnie took off his jacket. He reached in the pockets reflexively. There were three more hundred-dollar bills folded together. “That son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “That goddamn controlling bastard.”

  When the last book was signed and the last fan listened to, Nora Jane drove Sebranek and Adrien to Chez Panisse. Freddy was following in his car. “He doesn’t like to wait at Chez Panisse,” Nora Jane explained. “He has this thing with them that’s been going on for years. He can’t believe they won’t give him a table when they say they’re going to. But he loves the food so much he has to eat there. It’s better if he comes after we get a table. It’s so volatile between him and the maître d’. Well, they have these goat cheese pastries that are worth any wait.”

  “I’ve been there,” Adrien said. “I used to stay in Berkeley in the fall. I had some friends who lived here.”

  They were in Nora Jane’s convertible. Sebranek was in the front seat. Adrien was squeezed into the back. She picked up a book from the floor. It was Little House in the Big Woods. “Is this good? I’ve never read these books.”

  “Lydia loves them and Tammili hates them. They’re fraternal twins, you know. Do you know about them? Our daughters?”

  “I heard that Freddy delivered them in a house in the woods under terrible circumstances and a helicopter came and there was a big rescue and everyone lived. That’s Sebranek’s version.”

  “That’s it. Then we got married and here we are. Well, Freddy hates the story now. He thinks the girls will hear it when they grow up and think they were in danger because we were counterculture people or something. One minute he’s so liberal and the next he’s as conservative as t
he pope.”

  “Sebranek does that.” Adrien laughed.

  “Every six months I beg her to marry me in a church.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “I don’t know why we don’t. Maybe I think it would end up in People magazine. My love turned into a People anecdote.”

  Nora Jane swerved to avoid a truck, then swerved back to the center. “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “I’ve never had a wreck in my life.” She turned into the street of the restaurant, drove smartly down three blocks, expertly backed into a parking place, and turned off the motor.

  They went into the restaurant and settled down to wait in a rattan-furnished lounge. Its windows looked out upon a garden and a street. The smells from the kitchen were subtle, rich, pungent, clean. Light fell down through the shuttered windows and the skylights. Palm fronds moved in the breeze from the air-conditioning vents. “Freddy said you bought Salman Rushdie’s apartment in New York,” Nora Jane said. “That’s so brave of you. I’d like to know about it if it’s something you can talk about.”

  “We benefited from that, not him.” Sebranek put his arm around the back of the wicker love seat, uncrossed his legs. “It’s a dream apartment, overlooking Central Park. Something I’d never have been able to afford. I had trouble adjusting to that part of town at first, but Adrien loves it. She likes grandeur.”

  “It’s a mixed blessing.” Adrien smiled at her. “I feel like we’re at ground zero in that place. It’s beautiful and comfortable but sometimes it seems we really aren’t in New York City. It’s the Middle East, in the heart of feuds so ancient and bloody that anything which touches them is spoiled. Too many dead on both sides. Husbands, fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers. I had it redecorated, the old wallpaper removed, floors redone. Still, it’s the place where Salman lived. Nothing changes that.”