Foreign Bodies Read online

  And Julian had spoken of his mother.

  “Lili is thinking of something more conventional,” Bea said.

  Lili’s small mouth constricted — fitfully, invaded by an erratic beat. In that foolish blouse concealing her bony secretive arms, she looked helpless and clownish.

  “No,” she said. “Julian must be. I will do.”

  And again Bea reflected, as she had in the sight of those hanging hooks, coat hooks or butcher’s hooks, She is used to everything. The world is as it is. She is ready to expect anything. Had Lili imagined that this dreaming boy, restored to his native opportunities, would take on the gravity (théologie!) of a serious scholar? Did she harbor the ghost of a lost husband, and hope the new would somehow replicate the old? Still, the world is as it is; it was plain that Lili was prepared to carry this boy — his weight, his hunger — on her frail frame forever. She would work in heartless offices and earn her sparse wages, while Julian sits with his books (whatever they are, black spines with gilt lettering,), meditating on the Great Naught, the no-God that fails to rule the universe. Then Lili was complicit, obdurately complicit; entangled. And perhaps they would have a child? A child fathered by a wraith, by a dreamer of nothingness. Bea could not foresee a child. She grieved for loins without fruit. She grieved for Julian. Something — what? was it only a mood, was it this confinement in the cave of the ebbing storm, what was it? — something in her had shifted; veered. In the deeps of night those sounds behind her bedroom door. She had seen him suckle his wife’s fingers, as if he could milk what she was made of. Had he also suckled the black milk of her nightmares?

  He shut his book and stood up. His look was not for Lili. It was for Bea.

  “Tell me about my mother,” he said.

  She was in need of steadying; she distrusted her legs. She answered him dully: “I will,” and fell back into the chair he had vacated. Marvin’s chair: was it a spell? It had bewitched him into speaking so.

  “I want to see her. I thought when we go west —”

  “What?” Bea said.

  “Julian,” Lili broke in, “we must wait before you tell this, it is not the way —”

  He was quick and terse: “Lili doesn’t want that job anyhow.”

  “But I understood from what she wrote —”

  “Change of plans, we’ve got connecting tickets. We’re not staying.”

  Then Lili, with her pained cautious vigilance: “Please, you are so very kind, this fine hospitality, we are grateful, we make such a diffi-culty in your home —”

  “The thing is,” he pushed on, “I don’t want to run into my father. I’ve got to see my mother, even if I have to do it in . . . in that place. But only when he’s not around.”

  Bea was silent: the silence of her fear. It was now; now. It could not be put off. She had schemed, she had played it out — how to begin; over and over she had played it out. But in the scene in her mind it was she who would begin. She was lassoed: he had caught her in a noose.

  “My father must’ve told you how they work it out. Visiting times, when he goes to see her, things like that. So that I don’t have to run into him.”

  “I was there,” Bea said finally. “I flew out there when I left Paris.”

  “You saw my mother?”

  “She was painting.”

  “Painting?”

  “A landscape, yes. A night scene, a kind of field. It was . . . lovely. I saw . . . so much talent. My own misunderstanding — or Iris’s — I didn’t expect it would be the type of place it turned out to be when I got there. I expected — you know, a rest home, it’s what your father called it. Marvin’s satire —”

  “A loony bin. That’s where he stashed her, didn’t he?”

  “She told me she’d chosen to go.” In a manic seizure she tacked it on: “Was chosen, actually.”

  “She told you that?”

  “It was . . . a kind of retreat. An artists’ retreat. Marvin made fun of it, he wouldn’t take it seriously. Rows of easels everywhere, all over the lawns. And music! Piano music. Composers, concerts going on. They even had a Blüthner —”

  And Julian, fixed, rapt: “What’s that?”

  “A famous old grand, a sort of European Steinway. Your mother seemed very happy. You have to . . . you have to apply to get into an environment like that, it’s an honor to be admitted. It’s regarded as a distinction. A prize.”

  “But Iris . . . you heard her, she said mom was starting to lose it —”

  “I don’t know about any of that, why Iris would say those things. Resentment, maybe — a falling out. She left, didn’t she, without even telling Margaret she was leaving? Your mother and I had a good visit, we hadn’t met in years. We talked and talked.”

  “What about?”

  Bea temporized. “Well, she was a little angry with your father. You know how sarcastic he can be. She told me she was glad to get away for a while.”

  A sprinkling of truth in the craze of invention. These mad fabrications, this spigot of fable. It had come on her, an invincible torrent, a devouring, lie, lie, lie, it was corrupt! He believed her, he was ravenous to believe her. She was feeding him joy. The skin of his face glowed around the yellow strands of mustache. He, a poet (the doves of the Marais), the scion of a painter, a prizewinner!

  Yet all of it risky — a figment too easily contradicted. The son would reliably keep his distance from the father, but if he was heading for California, where Iris would soon be immured, then wouldn’t Iris . . . no! A senseless contingency. Julian would not be traveling to see his mother, there was no mother to see . . .

  It could be evaded no longer.

  Tentatively, Bea felt her way. “If the two of you are thinking of going out to L.A. —”

  Lili said crisply, “We go first to Texas.”

  How grotesque the name was in her mouth. It did not accord with nature.

  “Texas? Why Texas? Do you know anyone there?”

  “Lili’s got this friend, not exactly a friend. She heard from him just before we came over, they used to work together. He could be her father, the way he was so pleased when he found out she isn’t alone. That she’s got me, and a ring on her finger.”

  “From Poland,” Lili said. “A good man.”

  “And out there’s as decent as any other patch of earth,” Julian argued. “Better for us than most. This time it won’t be only Lili — we’ll both be . . . you know . . . outsiders.”

  “But how will you get on?”

  “We’ll make out all right. Lili always does. And this Kleinman says the area’s full of good chances for someone who can manage Spanish —”

  Good chances among the scorpions and desert tracts! And Julian casting himself as a stranger in his own land.

  “And then,” Julian said, “in a week or two, when we get on our feet, we’ll go out to see my mother. I never knew anything about mom’s doing art, she never used to, and dad would’ve sneered anyhow. The way he’s been with me —”

  Out of the whole cloth, and he believed it! Did Lili? How would she not, and what did it matter, if Margaret was dead?

  “Julian,” Bea said — she was creeping toward it on her belly, warily, like a frightened dog — “I told your mother you were coming home. I mentioned it in a letter when I got back to New York, she was so looking forward to it —”

  This made him bristle. “Well, I haven’t come home, have I? As far as we’re concerned — Lili and me — Texas is another country, that’s the point.”

  That’s the point. Marvin’s argot, Marvin’s insistence. But under the hard rind, the soft boy.

  “They found it in her pocket, it was only a few lines. The pocket of her dress. Somehow . . . somehow . . . an accident on the road, she was hurt, no one knew where she was going —”

  Lili gave a cry. It was the same cry Bea had heard in the night.

  “On the road?” Julian said. “What road?”

  “The one just outside . . . outside the retreat.” The lying word di
sgusted her now. She had fed him gladness only to blight him. Blight upon blight.

  “Then she’s in the hospital —”

  “No,” Bea said. “No.”

  “Julian,” Lili murmured, and grasped both his hands, and forced them around her ribs, to lock them there.

  He took hold of her with a splintered whinny that was not a whinny — what was it then? A mazy sickened noise not from the pit of the throat but out of some nameless buried misshapen organ — the devil’s music — good Lord, the boy was drowning in his father’s laughter!

  “What a joke, divinity school, are you crazy? I wish, I wish,” he scratched out, “there could be a God, and there isn’t, there isn’t, there’s nothing —”

  He went trailing after Lili. The shut door became one with the wall. He had left his book on the chair. Now Bea could see what it was: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. Soon they would be gone, into that other country of their willed eclipse. She did not regret it. She did not expect to see them ever again. This soft, soft boy . . . infatuation would fade.

  The symphony that never was, the God that never is.

  52

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK a watery December sun was already turning the gutters into impassable rivers. Bea pulled on her galoshes; she was going to work. The return of the ordinary, the predictable: in an hour or so Caesar would be assassinated, and her young men (they were nearly men) would burst into celebratory pandemonium. Shakespeare was teaching them cynicism, and why not?

  The bedroom door opened. Lili came out, still in her nightgown.

  Bea said, “Is Julian all right?”

  “He sleeps now. Today we go.”

  The nightgown was sleeveless. A hollow in the upper arm. A second mouth, misplaced — lipless, speechless.

  “Today? Already?”

  “My husband wishes it.”

  “I thought you’d want to stay on at least a few more days —”

  “He wishes it.”

  “I hurt him, no wonder. I had to,” Bea said. “I couldn’t not. His mother . . . I had to tell him, he had to know.”

  “Sometimes,” Lili said, “the mad seek death.”

  “Nobody knows what she had in mind.”

  The note in her pocket, am I to blame?

  “But her mind was not right?”

  “Yes and no. It’s difficult to say, we were scarcely acquainted. Poor Julian, I’ve gone and broken his heart —”

  “His mother was broken, no?”

  The fecal daubs, the barefoot flight.

  “I suppose so,” Bea said.

  “This other woman — she is whole. Whole and clever.”

  “What are you saying, what other woman?”

  “The artist, the woman who paints —”

  “Ah,” Bea said. How transparent she was to Julian’s wife: as if he had married a sibyl.

  “He will keep her now, this other woman. The clever mother who paints.”

  “It isn’t true, Lili. You know it isn’t true.”

  “For my husband it is true. How good you are!” she said.

  “He won’t see through it? You have —”

  “He is like an angel, like a child, he sees everything and nothing.”

  Bea said leadenly, “You once called him a man.”

  In Lili’s small dark face the tired grooves made a tigerish delta. “Only a man will weep in his bed,” she answered.

  And again: “How good you are!”

  53

  Christmas Eve

  Dear Aunt Bea,

  I’m all alone tonight — alone with dad, which is practically the same thing a lot of the time — and I thought I’d write to you, since I imagine you’re alone too, though you actually don’t do Christmas, or do you? It’s just that something odd happened this afternoon, and you might want to know about it in advance. Dad was grumpy about putting up the tree this year, not that I blame him, but our yard man delivered this big tall Colorado blue spruce just as he’s always done as long as I can remember. Nobody’d told him not to, and here it was, so I got Mrs. Hruska (she’s dad’s housekeeper) to help me get the tree things up from the storeroom in the basement. Two boxes full of these funny ornaments mom’s collected over the years, little silver donkeys and sheep, and the shiny red and green balls Julian and I used to want to lick when we were small, and the orange star for the top. We hung all the decorations except for the lights, because the wires were tangled in knots, and Mrs. Hruska is afraid of touching anything to do with electricity, she hates using the vacuum cleaner. Dad saw the whole thing when it was done — it was looking really beautiful — and didn’t say a word. I can’t tell whether this nice piney smell and having the house all Christmassy gives him a bit of a lift or makes him even sadder. He’s almost stopped going to the office, but he’s on the phone all day, and it’s not as though he’s let go of the ropes — it just seems that ever since the accident he doesn’t want to mix with people. By the time Phillip got back from Milan to bail me out it was way too late to get to the funeral, but Mrs. Hruska filled me in — mobs at the church, she said, including these rich hidalgo types up from Mexico dad does business with. I did go to mom’s grave, though (mom’s grave, it’s awful having to say that), but dad wouldn’t come with me and I had to stand there by myself and face what it said on the stone: CHERISHED WIFE, BELOVED mother. This was so stale and cemetery-ordinary that somehow it didn’t feel true to mom, I don’t know why. Maybe because if she could’ve picked her own epitaph it would’ve been something sort of neutral out of the Bible or the Gospels, something semi-religious like that. Just last week dad got a note in the mail from one of her Boston cousins, someone I’d never heard of, and took one quick look at the name and handed it over to me without reading it. It was signed Malcolm Alexander Breckinridge III, and went on and on about how this person remembered mom’s parents with so much respect and admiration, and how he hoped Margaret’s children had turned out to be good Christians despite everything, and it ended with condolences for Julian and me, not a hint of dad, as if he didn’t exist. Dad’s been getting lots of other condolence letters, mainly from connections of the firm and from the wives of the men on his teams. He barely glances at them. I can’t guess what he’s thinking. Even today — Christmas Eve! — he was on the phone for hours, all business talk, he’s spoken of putting in an extra line for me, so that I can get calls from friends, as if I cared. Ever since I came home — ever since Phillip — I’ve mostly lost interest in the way things were before. And anyhow it doesn’t make sense to go back to the lab when I’ve missed half the semester — not that they’d let me — my department chair’s nixed it, and my old lab partner, all on his own, wound up finishing this project we were working on — modifying a protein to get it to crystallize — my idea to begin with, by the way. We’d had all these protein plates set up in the cold room, and were waiting — I ought to say hoping like mad — they’d crystallize and grow enough to get x-rayed. It can take weeks and weeks, it could be months, for some protein crystals to grow, and sure enough, all that happened while I was away! Don’t think I’m jealous, I’m confident I can get started again next September, maybe on a different idea, and to please dad I will. I intend to impress him. It’s only that there’s so much dead time until then, alone in this house with how he is now, all beaten down . . . It might have been the tree that brought it on, those red and green balls or whatever, but when he finally got off the phone and gave Mrs. Hruska her Christmas money (she left early, right after we had the star tacked on, myself up on the ladder and Mrs. Hruska holding it steady), out of the blue he began to ask a whole lot of questions about Julian, did I know where he was, and if I ever hear from him. I said I honestly didn’t know anything at all, just whatever it was that he knew — I didn’t dare tell that probably they’d gone to Lili’s uncle — when the doorbell rang, and dad disappeared. “I’m in no mood, throw them a couple of dollars and get rid of them,” he told me — we both thought it was carolers going round the neighborhood, t
he way they always do on Christmas Eve. But it was a man out there, a man in his fifties I think, looking for dad. He explained that he’d been trying to phone much of the day and kept getting a busy signal, was our phone out of order, and since he lived more or less nearby, he figured he might as well walk over. Well, Aunt Bea, to make a long story short, he wanted to know whether dad had your address in New York — and who do you think it was? Your husband! Or used to be. We got to talking, I even asked him in, he almost said yes, but in the end he went away. Bea! Your husband! Wanting to be in touch!

  I hope your Christmas is a happy one. Happier than ours here, and maybe it will be.

  Iris

  54

  HE HAD WRAPPED it in three layers of tissue paper and shielded it with a pair of sturdy cardboards and inserted it into a padded mailing envelope — yet he knew it could not be arrested or suppressed any more than if he had attempted to encase a flame in a bundle of leaves. It burned on, it burned through whatever sheltered or concealed it. It would set her hands on fire! — those hands that had crazed him, the left stretched far like a cormorant’s wing, the right bunched into a rapacious hammer. Her fingerprints would dissolve and her knuckles turn to blackened dice; she had reaped this punishment, she was an avenging succubus, she had come on him with a suddenness, an ambush, she had meant to unman him. Her punishment was the blindness of her seeing — the blind clarity of her seeing: she would be made to look on those round black notes standing on their stems like black storks shrieking — a cryptogram of blots and filaments decipherable only by sound, and she — she who had mocked him for his impotence — would not, could not, hear! Her ears were blind to those black-blooded droplets raining down, tailed, slashed, some confined to their clef and others freed to race above and beneath it, the chaos of their terrain secreting syllogisms even as they erupted into a turbulence of crisis . . .