Foreign Bodies Page 7

  Nostrils streaming, red-faced, her brother rushed on, spilling the beans, though Iris could hardly string them together — it was and wasn’t the old Julian. The old closeness, the old confidences, the old reckless Niagara drenching, but the beat was different, self-repudiation, he was telling her what he had relinquished, the stale simulacrum of himself he had come to despise. All that was finished . . . almost. There was, in a way, one leftover: Dr. Montalbano.

  “The man who intends to throw you out,” Iris said.

  “Us. Lili and me, but only when he gets back. It won’t matter, we’ll be together —”

  “Fine, and where do you go then?”

  A grimace. “You asked that before. Stop sounding like dad.”

  She heard it herself: the spurt of impatience. Of exasperation. The money she had brought him would melt away in less than a month, and then what? And he had a wife. A foreign wife! If he had shed what he was, a footloose floater, what did he suppose he had become?

  “He’s an American anyhow,” Julian said.

  “Who?” She could not follow; he had jumped ahead, or behind.

  “And he’s not an MD, and it’s not his real name either. He’s from Pittsburgh.”

  “Julian —”

  “The thing is,” he pressed on, spitting it out, “they’re practically all Americans, and they’re all fakes.”

  “The one with the wig too?”

  “The wig was real enough. He hated wearing it, so he killed himself finally. And by the way, all these cafés are unionized to the hilt. I got in through the cracks — Dr. Montalbano started me off. Poor old Alfred introduced us, I owe him a lot, he put me in touch with someone who got me jobs.”

  “But what is he, if he isn’t a doctor —”

  “An out-and-out scam for all I know, but he goes all over, he’s got clients everywhere, there’s a clinic in Milan and another one in Lyon, and it’s made him rich. Lili doesn’t like him, she’s always wanting to get away. He cooks up potions out of turnips and onions.”

  It was comical and it was awful. Suicide, charlatanism, vegetables. And a wife, a wife! She had taught him everything, he said — good God, was this her everything? An aimless creature like himself, but worse, human debris discharged from the diseased bowel of Eastern Europe — Romania, where was it really, what did it signify — and wouldn’t this, Iris recognized, have been her father’s thought precisely? There was no way to escape her father: he lived inside her brain. She saw that Julian had chosen Europe. He meant to stay. He would never come home.

  — No way to escape her father’s brain? But Julian had done it, hadn’t he?

  13

  Paris, September 5

  Dear Marvin,

  It’s been more than a week since I got here, and I’ve left you in limbo, so I suppose I owe you some news. You wanted me here, and here I am, who knows why. It can’t be what you call family feeling — mine, if I have any, goes backward toward mama and papa, especially papa, but turns blank concerning the next generation. Unlike you, I haven’t got any next generation, and therefore nobody to grieve over. I see that you’re grieving, and Margaret too. May I say that I regard these lamentations of yours as spurious and inappropriate? You carry on as if your children are dead, when they’re very much alive, and in fact I’ve invited them to have dinner with me here at the hotel. The place is something of a disappointment, in spite of the expense, but there’s a whiz of a chef in the kitchen, maybe the owner himself. I’ve been having my meals here nearly every evening, and always alone, not for want of trying — Iris keeps putting me off. I’ve felt anything but welcome since I arrived, and it’s not likely that any good can come of my hanging on. They’ve been shying away from any overture from me, Julian in particular. At this point I hardly know why I made the effort (it was an effort, I had to impose on a colleague to take my classes). I imagine it’s something to do with Iris — that one night she was with me in New York. The look of her, her hair, her California voice, the California way she was dressed. I was jealous — I suppose I was jealous, old lady that I am, and please don’t ask me to explain.

  As for Julian — your boy has his likes and dislikes, doesn’t he? For one thing, he doesn’t much like his father, and there’s no chance of his getting to like his father’s sister. It’s not just obstinacy. From the little (the very little!) I’ve observed, he’s resistant because he’s fearful. He’s afraid of you, it seems; I conclude you’ve made him afraid of me. Well, true, these are no more than intuitions — hints — so you don’t have to take them as gospel. You’ve always scorned impressions in favor of proofs, or so you say. You’ll be surprised to hear that I scorn them too, they’re no solider than cloud shapes — Leo once accused me of wanting to compile a dictionary of clouds! Believe it or not, I’m as practical as you are, not that I could ever think like you. Even long ago you used to argue that people are no better than predictable formulas — chemical compounds. So if you want to apply any of that to your son, there may be a weightier element than you’ve known so far . . .

  As if all she meant was that Julian was putting on pounds! And where, oh where, did that spring from, that incomprehensible specter of Leo?

  She tore the sheet into strips (thin hotel paper, the ink bleeding into it). Not the kind of letter she ought to be writing to Marvin. Maundering. Verging on the precarious — she saw where her errant speculations were leading: to the woman wearing long sleeves in mild weather.

  She began again:

  It’s been quite some time since I got here — exactly where you’ve wanted me to be! — so I suppose I owe you some news. The news isn’t good. I’ve accomplished nothing, and it turns out there really is a girlfriend involved, as it happens not French . . .

  Not French? Surely this would put Marvin in mind of one of those reckless flyaway New York girls nowadays flooding Paris — their pictures were always turning up in Life magazine, excitable girls in their purplish ankle-length postwar skirts; so she scratched out not French and went on to mix in, among the quotidian, a salting of fraudulence.

  . . . and whether serious or a passing fancy it’s hard to tell. Iris has moved in with the two of them in some sort of house-sitting arrangement, though who knows what they call it over here. The beauty of it is they’re not liable for rent (anyhow the young woman seems well employed — I’ve met her only once). It’s a spacious place in a building with a concierge, it’s respectable enough, and Julian’s given up waiting tables. But I’m not wanted, it’s been a fool’s errand, and there’s not a smidgeon of hope I can do anything with either your son or your daughter — I can’t even get Iris to agree to having dinner! There’s no use my staying any longer, one week of trying is more than enough. Iris is a riddle, and your son won’t budge.

  What she’d left out! A risky reticence. Lili a passing fancy? And if this deceptiveness was so unsatisfactory as to be cruel, the truth might have been worse. She hadn’t told Marvin that the woman Julian was living with was a foreigner (a foreigner even in foreign France) who undoubtedly spoke a clumsy English as harshly accented as their grandfather’s, the greenhorn who peddled pots and pans. Though to be honest, so far she hadn’t heard the woman utter a word.

  The letter remained unfinished. How to go on with it?

  14

  IRIS HAD PUT Julian to bed. His cold was worsening. He was feverish; he dozed, and woke, and dozed again. Bea had seen nothing of him.

  “You should keep away,” Iris told her. “He’s so awfully irritable, he hates being sick. He was always just like this at home. No one could get near him.”

  “Shouldn’t he have a doctor?” — the auntly thing.

  “Lili knows what to do, she’s very good at it. She makes him a sort of eggnog every night, for his cough —”

  So Bea was flicked off, dismissed. The other one — Lili — was invisible. She had her job, she was at work all day until evening. Her “job,” her “work,” as if this glittering metropolis with its home-grown impenetrability had a u
se for what she was! She belonged nowhere, a stray, a drifter. Julian had attached himself to her, or she to him. He depended on her, she was his support. The case was even worse than what Marvin might think, his son living on a woman’s wages, puny as they must be.

  “Then I’ll come back when he’s a little better,” Bea said. “In the morning?”

  “The morning’s too soon.”

  “But you’ll let me know? I won’t be staying much longer. And mostly I’ll be sticking to my room.”

  “What a shame,” Iris said. “You’re here, it’s Paris, why not go out and see things?”

  Was this spite or indifference? Did the girl suppose she had come for another holiday? Bea had had her holiday. She was feeling her purpose less and less; it grew more and more remote.

  “It’s Julian I want to see,” she said.

  “Julian’s all right.”

  “I’m all right,” croaked a broken voice from a far room. “Tell her to go away, can’t you?”

  The brother and sister: thick as thieves; but that was long ago. There was something between them even now, a fresh cabal, an understanding to be kept, above all, from Bea.

  It muddled her. She was disordered, she could not bear her room, and the afternoon had hardly begun. She was left with Paris, all of Paris, and what was the use of Paris now, and all that old history, and all these bright autumnal streets?

  She asked the young hotel clerk where the nearest cinema was. He reached under his counter and spread out a wrinkled brochure.

  — Which film does madame wish to see?

  — Anything will do.

  — An American film?

  — It doesn’t matter.

  — Whispering Winds, very popular. Two locations, one in the rue Mouffetard, the other in the Marais. You don’t want to go to the Marais, madame, it’s not pleasant there.

  Not pleasant? It suited her spirits, it suited her furies. She seized on it as if a horoscope had predicted the whip of recurrence: it was meant to be, Leo again driving her on, just as, in New York, he lashed her from neon marquee to neon marquee, in quest of his mood, his fakery. Her furies there, her furies here! She was repudiated, how they were gulling her, the brother and sister, thick as thieves, getting rid of her, spiting her! . . . Eyes sealed shut in yet another dirty cavern, the overhead lights not sufficiently dimmed, the projection booth growling, congestion, confined human sweat, wrappers crackling, garbled murmurs all around, restless, what were they saying? That foolish Technicolor ship burning at sea, the terrified lovers clinging to a splintered mast, ludicrous Gallic cries escaping their mouths seconds after their lips had shaped the words . . . in the rue Mouffetard the film hadn’t been dubbed. Her eyelids sprang open, they would not obey, she could not beat off the flaming images, those gaudy scenes exploding before her, the music dissolving, evaporating into the make-believe hazards on the screen, those storming cymbals and horns and crashing drums, Leo’s idiocies!

  She turned to face the crowd, a laughing wave chewing, rocking, exhaling unhealthy odors, too worldly, too bruised for artificial dread, and saw, half a dozen rows behind her — or thought she saw — the woman from the Luxor, where last July the perfumed airy mannequin had floated by. Was it the same angry head of wild black twisting curls? Or were all these laughing outraged heads alike?

  In the street she understood where she was. She had stumbled into the neighborhood of the displaced. They choked off the sidewalks, arguing, shrugging, laughing. Always this ironic laughter! They laughed at cheap films, they laughed at the weather, they laughed at grandeur, they laughed at the absence of grandeur. Here nothing was grand, everything was pinched and used up. It was half past five, the sun still glaring in the shop windows, an indoor café no bigger than a stall letting out a smell of sweet pastry mixed with the breath of the sleepless. The road was clogged with cars, those squat little domes, and not a taxi among them. She had come by taxi, how else to search out the errant corners of Paris? An eddying blur of languages, and no one to ask — but if she walked on, wouldn’t there be a bus? Perverse to have run after Leo a second time in a single week, and in a faraway city! Perverse of Leo to have pursued her across an ocean! He had led her to this hallucinatory place, where the wiry-haired woman from the Luxor and her idling companions were multiplying like mad, spilling out of the shops, barricading the pavement in garrulous clusters. Pigeons flapped at their feet, pecking at the litter of peels and crusts, hopping fearlessly: not even the brisk stamp of a shoe could frighten them into flight. Homeless tramp birds, with eyes like the eyes of fish, feeding on scraps. The doves of the Marais, light-years distant from those tamed and overfed doves at Laura’s wedding . . . Julian knew these streets, he had seen these human scavengers scurrying out of the shops with their meager pickings, a cabbage, a half loaf of bread, keeping themselves alive. He knew them, and what could it mean to a boy like that?

  One of the shops as Bea approached it was not a shop at all. Blinds covered the windows, and over the door, painted in black letters on the transom, a sign, and out of the door in quickstep . . . could it be? If the woman from the Luxor was everywhere, why not the perfumed mannequin, with her long arms? And why not Lili? Could it be Lili, this one particular particle in the flow of urban humanity? Certainly it was Lili, and almost as certainly it was not, yet possibly . . . but the throng ahead, like quicksand, had swallowed her up.

  Bea went scratching in the bottom of her bag for a pencil, and on the back of the stub of her movie ticket she copied the words on the transom: CENTRE DES ÉMIGRÉS. 24, RUE DES ROSIERS.

  15

  IT WAS A LONG narrow space, with the look of an ordinary office. A double line of cubicles, and an alley between: tall makeshift partitions. Bea could not see over them, but the hidden voices ascended in flocks, a fugue of indecipherable cadences, plea and despair, despair and plea. And then a sudden muteness, as if the entire crew of a ship had stopped breathing all at once; and then, in the heart of the silence, a sob like a breaker foaming. The place had the vestigial smell of what it must once have been: a boucherie, say, with slaughtered carcasses hanging in bloody rows: a series of hooks at the rear attested to these. Or were they only commonplace coat hooks? Or did the smell steam out from living bodies in travail? A queue that had earlier trailed from the vestibule into the street had diminished to three or four. The cubicles were emptying out.

  She had come by stealth, but not yet as a spy. A spy would lurk and observe and vanish. Her idea was to waylay Lili at the close of the day, to ambush her at an unclaimed hour . . . If this storefront bureau should be Lili’s lair (it smacked of a kind of public charitableness), out springs Bea to seize her! And if not? Then yet another blunder into Europe’s wailing wall — she had caught sight of it in the cinema, among those wounded laughers, the victims, the refugees. Marvin’s mandate, his ukase, to look the thing in its blooded eye, those gypsy swarms his son had fallen hostage to . . . his son!

  Iris had that morning again sent her away — Julian feeling a bit better, the fever gone down, but no patience at all for a talk . . . She had said nothing of what she had seen in the rue des Rosiers, and why should she? Iris would traduce it.

  The squawk of a metal chair pushed back. The man in the farthest cubicle was taller than the height of the partition; for a moment his head reared above it, disembodied. When he emerged, Bea saw that he was wearing a frayed business suit, with a vest too big for him. He carried a cane and limped. But no, it wasn’t a limp — an archaic little bow, rather, that engaged the shoulders and the knees: he was immensely dignified. He had the air of a judge or a senator. On second thought, it was a limp: one leg inches shorter than the other. He put out a ceremonious hand to the woman in the cubicle, murmuring in what must surely have been German — or was it Dutch? Or something else? Two fingers were missing: lopped off how, where, why?

  He was the last to leave. Bea could not discern from his abruptly submissive back whether anything good had come of his time in this place. But judge or senator
no more: his clothes were too shabby.

  A rustle of papers; a lamp was switched off; the woman stepped out; and Bea sprang.

  “Lili,” she called.

  She wondered if she would be recognized. Was it likely? To have been so put off, and in the first minutes of having set foot in that cavernous flat! Iris cold, Julian taunting. It hardly helped — it worsened things — that Iris had tossed out a promise: “Another time, when Julian’s in better shape,” while Lili in her man’s shirt hadn’t spoken at all; Lili had kept her recondite peace. Out of that silence she had fixed on Bea with those two watchful grooves drawn into a trench between her eyes. An unquiet track that seemed to gaze all on its own. But fleetingly.