Foreign Bodies Read online

  “And when it comes to Iris?”

  “I’m no different from Julian. It’s only that I let him believe I’m different. It’s taken me longer.”

  “To do what?”

  “To get away.”

  A stillness blundered between them. The girl stood up and began to roam here and there, from the bookshelves to the window — the late sun just starting to slant toward dusk — to the aging Käthe Kollwitz prints on the walls to the striped davenport with its worn brown cushions. And finally to the grotesquerie of the grand piano, too roaringly huge in this modest space: a stupendous lion in a cramped cage. Watching Marvin’s daughter examining the entrails of her past (the museum-shop prints, the flaking paperbacks, the piano on its thick paws, Iris’s finger striking a key), Bea took in with new knowledge how everything in this overly familiar room was foreign to the girl, and poor, surely, to this offspring of affluence. In Marvin’s bragging snapshots the big house in California resembled a castle in the shape of a conquistador’s hacienda. Marvin the conqueror! The girl wandered off into the bedroom and back again: how unblemished she was, how young, what a limitless tract of unsullied years stretched ahead, and what was all that, Bea scolded herself, if not commonplace middle-aged envy? Her entire body was no better than a latticed basket leaking stale lost longings. That damn piano! That damn Leo!

  And now this trespasser who called her aunt. Aunt? Then like it or not, swallow the role and act the part.

  “You must be tired,” Bea said. “You can have the bedroom, and I’ll take the davenport. It opens up quite nicely.”

  “I was really thinking a hotel —”

  “You’ll have enough of that in Paris.”

  “No, I’ll be staying with Julian . . . Paris? Aunt Bea! Then you’ll do it? You’ll call dad?”

  A conspiracy. Reckless. “All right,” Bea said. She felt a kind of pleasure in disobeying — no, deceiving — Marvin.

  6

  THE GIRL LEFT the next morning. Bea walked out with her to Broadway, where even at that early hour — the buildings all around still gray with sleep — taxis were sure to be cruising. Iris had declined breakfast.

  “I’ll be fine, there’s always something to eat in the terminal. Or else on the plane —”

  “And meanwhile,” Bea said, “your father will be eating me alive.”

  “I wonder how it started, you and dad, the way things are —”

  Bea thought this worth no more than a grunt. “My brother doesn’t like me, that’s all.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s not so unusual. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau —”

  But then a yellow light winked toward the curb, and Iris vanished. A phantom. A visitation. A brevity! And without an instant’s intimacy. A young stranger who came and went. Or came, and touched a random key on the piano, and dissolved with its sound.

  The call to Marvin turned out not to be a trial. Bea had expected bullying and booming, Marvin’s blowhard tactic. But he was almost pacific, even ingratiating: not in the mood, it seemed, to eat her alive.

  “Good,” he said, “looks like the two of you are hitting it off. She tell you about those fool magazines the boy got involved with? Didn’t pay a red cent. He won’t grow up. His sister’s worth two of him, you saw that. Sure, let her take a few more days, what’s the harm? Pump the kid, she knows her brother inside out, so all right, as long as she can paint you his portrait, if you get my drift —”

  Paint his portrait! This was Marvin struggling to put on the dog, You understand that Margaret would go if it was feasible, but as you are aware she is somewhat neurasthenic, or lurching into a foreign tongue, what he presumed to be Bea’s language, the uppity language of Poesy: the featherheaded birds’ choir. She could not accuse him of satire or even sarcasm. Forget white-shoe Princeton, Marvin at his most genuine had a voice out of the streets. There was a kind of innocence in it: he was earnest, he was oblivious, he was honestly trying to please her, he was working at being conciliatory. He was seeing her, for the moment, as useful.

  “Even if Iris gets to miss her lab?” Bea said: edging toward peril. By this time, she calculated, the girl had already been three hours in the air.

  “Leave it to my daughter, she’ll make up for it, she’ll manage. That kid can cope with anything — listen, if she didn’t have this big exam coming up, some sort of big review, I’d have her make the trip herself, not that you didn’t have the same idea. But couple more days with her aunt, I’m not worried, it’s an investment. The more time with Iris, the more you’ll get the picture, no big surprises when you see what you’ve got to tackle. So let her bring you up to speed, keep her at it, take her around if that helps, show her the city.”

  Poor Marvin: he was out of breath, making the best of it. Julian the hard, hard case.

  “I’ve got us tickets to a play,” Bea said. A truth that lied. To use up the extra ticket, she intended to invite Mrs. Bienenfeld. The play was Othello. Afterward, if Mrs. Bienenfeld agreed (she had a husband and a teenage son at home), they might stop for dessert in one of those barely lit Village places: candles in saucers.

  “A play’s fine,” Marvin said. “If it was me, I’d pick one of those Broadway musicals, I hear South Pacific’s still on. So hey, did you fix it to get time off?”

  “Not yet.” The spore of betrayal.

  “Well look, don’t you wait till the last minute, I want you out there as soon as we know. Eventually he throws his mother a bone, he comes up with the new place he’s at. Moves around a lot, that’s how they do it. I mean the drifters. I want that boy back here!”

  The booming was beginning.

  “Regards to Margaret,” Bea said, and hung up.

  7

  IN THE END — the end of what? ah, she knew, she knew — she did not invite Mrs. Bienenfeld to Othello. It was being put on in one of those avant-garde cellars in a part of the Village that was really still the Lower East Side. You went down a flight of cracked stone stairs stinking of urine, canine or human (evidences of both species, a dried-up turd pile, the lost heel of a shoe with the nails sticking up), and stepped into the dark, where rows of battered folding chairs faced a narrow raised platform. The costumes were makeshift and clumsy, and you could see into the wings where the actors were fiddling with wigs and swords, getting ready for the next scene. You could also glimpse a comical lineup of Heinz ketchup bottles, noble Shakespearean blood, on a wooden shelf. The idea of these places was to do the unexpected (the primal word was “transgressive”): the Moor played by a white woman in blackface and pantaloons, breasts suppressed by a wide silk band; Desdemona a lipsticked young Negro in a yellow peruke. Or else, to save on expenses, the whole thing would be set in Manhattan, with a backdrop of impressionistic skyscrapers and the actors in contemporary clothing.

  So — in the end — she tore up the tickets. It was because of the piano: the connections might be invisible, but they were there, palpable and audible. Audible for sure! The piano was Leo’s; years ago he had left it behind. Not permanently, he said, only for a few weeks — one day soon he’d send the truckers for it. Bea herself was a musical blank. A deaf chromosome, a missing vertebra. Leo knew this when they married: he valued it. Bea, thinking it over (she often drifted in that direction, even nowadays), believed it was this spinal absence, more pronounced than a mere lack of aptitude, that had pleased him from the start. It kept him immaculate: she could not contaminate him with half-knowledge or meaningless praise. The piano was his mind, his mind was the piano. She had never once touched it, except (obviously!) to dust the legs, the looming sheen of the frame. Her obedient cloth barely skimmed white teeth and thin black lozenges; she didn’t dare set off the secret hammer within, shaped like a foot in a velvet sock, the crier of the cry. The piano was protected territory. She had no entrance there, partly out of ignorance, partly out of reverence. The piano was worshiped.

  And out of the ether, uncalled for, invading, this calamitous foreign body, this unknown niece, this Iris
, this scrutinizing violating blue eye, had fingered a key and brought out a sound. A single sound, lone, unattached, desolate. Even chaste. Whereas Leo had sent out thundering swarms, armies clashing, raging unkempt battalions, war whoops, warplanes arcing and plunging, great crushing tanks on giant crashing treads. The noises of ecstatic gods who could kill.

  In those days Leo was a beautiful boy. There was no other way to say it. Handsome is outer and ephemeral. Leo’s beauty was Platonic, embedded in a theory of the world and its implausible reality. His round eyes hinted at the cycle of eternal things, and an inch above them were the faint, just-beginning lines of an intelligent frown. He was not very tall, but this only drew more attention to his head. Leo’s curly head seemed larger than it was because of the very black hair that pushed aggressively upward from his ears and forehead, with no admixture of commonplace dark brown or traces of the Jewish tendency toward the reddish. Out of the forest of wavy blackness, its puffs and folds and spirals glinting as sporadically as foliage in sunlight, two steel eyes took you in with an unrelenting judgment. The nose was severely ideal, like a schoolgirl’s drawing; under it the mild grin. It was this unsettling contradiction — the kindly mouth and Leo’s brazen, strict, assessing stare — that shocked Bea into what she scarcely wanted to admit: an instant wash of infatuation. He acknowledged that they were bound to meet. Destiny was opposed to their never meeting; if you tried to defy destiny, especially if you happened to live merely one city block away, you would implode. And again the careless grin.

  Leo was Laura Coopersmith’s cousin, and Laura was Bea’s classmate at Hunter College: the two of them, in the new low-waisted frocks that showed their knees, sat together in history and English. Laura had contrived a pair of spit curls, each one a brown comma set in the center of a cheek. From her neck waggled a long loop of fake Woolworth’s pearls: it was, she said, the “flapper look,” copied from the pictures in society columns featuring debutantes and nightlife. But this was as far as she would go in boldness. She was serious about her future as a high school teacher and had chosen history as her subject because, she believed, it was factual and objective and couldn’t be argued with. She admired Leo and disliked him: when he wasn’t teasing her, he ignored her. He was an out-of-towner from Chicago, studying piano and composition at Juilliard. To satisfy his frugal parents he had agreed to board with his uncle’s family in New York — Laura’s father and Leo’s father were brothers. Both were salesmen, Laura’s father in paper goods and Leo’s in textiles. The music, Laura explained, was from Leo’s mother’s side. She had hoped to become a professional singer, and once gave a concert of Schubert Lieder at the local Y in Des Plaines. Somewhere in Leo’s gene pool there lurked a remote yet renowned cantor. Folklore had it that cantors, when they were not outright fools, had low intelligence. Such defamation could not apply to Leo. He was reading Nietzsche and Aldous Huxley.

  Bea, in her private way, hid her infatuation from Laura, who would only have jeered at its pointlessness: Leo isn’t for the likes of you. The likes of Bea! Laura’s goals were meager. In her senior year she became engaged to Harold Bienenfeld. Her wedding dress had a six-foot lace train. At the close of the ceremony the ring boy, in charge also of the rented cage, released four practiced white doves. They circled over the startled guests and then flew docilely back into their cage. Its floor was thick with mottled droppings.

  “I suppose you’ll be the next one,” Leo said.

  “The next what?” Though of course she knew.

  They were standing side by side near an ice sculpture — twin mermaids embracing — at the base of which lay wide oval platters of sliced melon, layer upon layer of pink, orange, green, studded with swollen strawberries still attached to their leafy stems. The strawberries resembled surgically removed organs freshly lifted from the gash in an anaesthetized belly.

  “Bride, wife, mother, teacher.”

  “I’d rather be an Indian chief,” Bea retorted.

  “There can’t be two chiefs in one tribe.”

  “Who’s the other?”

  “Your sibling, Prince Marvin. Only he’s the other kind of Indian, a Princeton rajah. And you’re the pauper who got sent to a public college, for free.”

  “Marvin’s good at math. They gave him a scholarship.”

  “And what are you good at?” Leo asked. She was almost certain he wasn’t needling her. He was looking for useful information. Or else — it was what she feared — whatever she might say would mean nothing to him, it was only prattle to pass the time.

  At nineteen Bea was truthful. “I want to make my mark in the world,” she told him. The instant it was out, she felt humiliated.

  “An aspiration as admirable as its expression is trite,” Leo said, and gave her an impatient little push. “Hey, come on, a waltz, even if they’re lousy at it. Baboons on harmonicas, who cares?”

  Trite: should she be hurt? Truthful was reckless. He judged her by his cousin Laura, by the intertwined frozen mermaids (“Sapphists,” he muttered), and by the second-rate wedding band; he judged her by Harold Bienenfeld, who was going into his father’s accounting business. If you mean to make your mark, how else can you put it? Better never to tell. If you told, it was only natural that you’d be ridiculed. At the end of the dance, he let her drop backward in a dip, a ballroom maneuver she had seen only in the movies. The fast swooping motion, thrusting her nearly all the way down with her head close to the floor, and up again into the cavern of his long jacket sleeves breeding warmth, whirled her into a moment of vertigo. His face streaked in her vision.

  “A mark? Any old mark?” — as if nothing had intervened. “Or is there something explicit you have in mind?” A stir of nausea. She slowed her breath, hoping to thwart an upward-creeping gas bubble. It broke silently in her throat. “Because,” he said, “I’m all for the explicit. You’ve got to know, and you’ve got to know that you know. Beethoven of the twentieth century, for instance, that’s me. Maybe Stravinsky. Hindemith maybe. Kiddo, just call me Doctor Faustus. Captain of my fate.”

  She saw that under the mockery — of her, of himself — he was as driven as Marvin, the Princeton rajah. But still he was only a poor Chicago boy stuck with his father’s relations in a five-story Bronx walkup. Laura had told her that he slept on a foldaway couch in the dining room, where in the mornings he was in everyone’s way.

  “You’re not a bad dancer,” he admitted. “I’ve been with worse. But you’re never going to make it with the Bolshoi, so how about it? What’re you after?”

  He was someone who could hold on to a thread. He let nothing dangle, he followed through. The heat in his voice — was it artificial, pumped up? Anyhow she let it draw her out. “You’ll laugh,” she said, “because I’ve had different ideas at different times, and they all add up to the same. Sometimes I think I could be a foreign correspondent, or even a sort of detective, going all over to figure things out. And sometimes I think about archaeology, digging up old secrets everyone’s forgotten. But lately” — she was babbling, and did she dare? — “I’ve thought about making up a sort of dictionary.”

  “Miss Samuel Johnson, lexicographer. Pleased to meet you.” A relief: he wasn’t laughing. Instead he was examining her as if she was some unfamiliar insect or bird, or a kind of unknown root rumored to be edible. “But Miss Johnson, ma’am, one can’t help observing that none of these have any sensible connection —”

  “Oh, but they’re all just alike. They’re things that start out hidden, and then you find them out. I mean it wouldn’t be a dictionary of words, nothing like that. Nothing that’s ever existed before.”

  “How about cloud shapes? Elephants, giraffes, shoes, chimneys with smoke coming out, pies, puddings, cheese. Balloons, obviously. Tuna fish in or out of the can, with little cloud-drawings all around. Or what about a dictionary of famous crooks, serial killers, say, in alphabetical order —”

  “If you’re going to do that,” she said (a tug of confusion just behind her eyes), “I won’t
tell it.” And immediately did: “A dictionary of feelings. Moods. Smells. Feelings that everyone’s somehow felt, only there’s no name for them. Look,” she cried, “you can’t make fun of everything there is!”

  “I can of everything that isn’t. It sounds to me,” he said mildly, “that you’re well on your way to being a run-of-the-mill high school teacher. English lit, possibly — all that sensibility.”

  “And you,” she shot back, “are just a run-of-the-mill false prophet. And what’s more, you’re not on your way to it, you’re already there.”

  She was shamed: why hadn’t he heard what lay beating below that unlucky spew of wayward nonsense? It was inchoate; it was worse than clouds, it had no shape at all. I want to make my mark: this wasn’t what she meant really, it was foolishness, it was trite (yes!), a fantasy, a kind of crippled poem; she was incriminated. The trouble with liking poetry (she did like it, she liked it immensely), exhaling the words almost aloud but mainly under your breath so that no one would hear you freakishly murmuring, was that it inflamed you, it made you want your life on this round earth to count, the way the poet and the poem counted. Ah, love, let us be true to one another! for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new . . . A mark, a mark, a dent in history, a leaving — even (even!) if not her own. She all at once seized on it; this was what she was after: to be attached in some intimate way to a marvel, a force, a prodigy, the other side of the moon, where ordinary mortals could never go. Or to plummet into the sun! The big dark room was over-heated: gilt cornices, mirrored walls, dim chandeliers sprouting fat electric candles, statuettes of gods on fluted pedestals. A male singer in an oiled pompadour was whining slowly into a microphone, elongating the vowels like stretched taffy. The band had lurched into a foxtrot; couples pressed shoulders and hips close, the men’s bowties coming undone, the women’s armpits seeping sweat. And now the wedding cake was wheeled in on a cart, like a belated and infirm guest gallantly overdressed in too many fringes and tassels. On its topmost ledge stood the stiff little sugar bride and groom with their tiny black staring licorice toy eyes. A child in a long pink gown and a garland in her hair ran up to it and picked out the eyes to suck, and then spat them out. The ice sculpture was melting quickly. Nobody minded; its glory was past, and Leo, loitering, held his palm under the cold dripping tail of a mermaid, catching the drops that fell with the regularity of a metronome. Bea felt him burning there; it was as if his hand had caught fire and he was cooling it in ice water. Looking all around, and finally down at her blue satin party shoes with their nasty narrow toes that hurt, she knew him to be made of sulfur — he was a match, he could strike flames!