Foreign Bodies Read online

  20

  IT WAS ANOTHER country. Deep summer ruled autumn. Women strolled in the streets half dressed, in halters and shorts, with pearl-painted toenails peering from high-heeled sandals. The smell of frying things flooded out of eateries and greased the air. Streams of cars on ribbons of highways: Los Angeles haphazard and fragmented, as if an entire city had been dropped from the sky to be broken into shards and scatterings, the pieces flung miles apart. She had expected mountains, blue cones merging into a gray horizon. Instead, only these shards of towns with their Old World names and their New World obstreperousness.

  The Suite Eyre Spa: an English manor set in an English garden. California! — where everything was a replica of somewhere else. The parking lot was hidden behind a stand of palm trees; abutting it a long lawn fenced by rose-mobbed trellises, its grass so shockingly green that it looked newly painted. Pools of flower beds wound artlessly through, as if a wild growth of peonies and zinnias had sprouted of themselves. Oak benches were dispersed among them, and these too pretended to have aged naturally in their soil. And beyond, the manor with its six white Georgian pillars and broad shadowy porch lined with cushioned wicker lounge chairs and urns over-flowing with bougainvillea. But no one walked in the grounds or loitered on the benches or waited on the porch. A sanatorium in the hush of a communal indoor doze; or a flock of rich men’s wives under a spell.

  She passed a reception desk — no one was there, though a half-full coffee cup rested on its blotter — and then moved on through a corridor of doors, some shut, many open. Women sleeping. Medicated into torpor, self-lulled into immobility. The toxin of despair. Impulse may have brought her here; yet impulse was the frail carapace of what felt long calculated. Or if not calculated, then stored and readied. Her motive was shrouded even from herself.

  Margaret’s door was shut. On the doorpost a ceramic plaque: on it someone had crayoned MRS. M. NACHTIGALL. She turned the knob and looked in — and in and in, as into one of those mirrors that reflect other mirrors, far into infinitude. A suite of unfurling rooms, rows of windows, white curtains, brightness all around, bowls of unrecognizable flowers. An indefinable odor — medicinal, and foul, or else it was the flowers . . . the smell was repugnant. The flowers were silk, did silk breathe out so wormy a breath? A woman in a pleated dress — no, a nightgown or a long smock — sat in a straight chair in front of an easel. But her eyes were on the white wall behind it.

  “Margaret,” Bea said.

  The eyes moved. The woman did not.

  “It’s Beatrice. From New York.”

  “New York?” That voice: the bodiless timbre, the light quick syllables. Drained, veiled, softened almost below the threshold of Bea’s hearing. “Marvin’s sister?”

  She stood up then. Bea had forgotten how tall Marvin’s wife was, but she could almost recover her face, mainly through the scrim of a snapshot or two, possibly decades old. It was one of those perfected faces, geometrically proportioned and aligned, that are beautiful on a girl of eighteen but wear badly: too much symmetry, like good manners early inculcated, turns flat. Margaret’s face, Margaret’s manners, were both perfected.

  “How nice to see you again,” Margaret said: a practiced chatelaine. As if they had met over cards only last week. Yet with the exception of a single perfunctory mumble and nod in a public corridor, they had never unaffectedly met. After his marriage — how many years ago! — Marvin had removed his new wife to the farthest end of the continent, and kept her sequestered there — because, he said, this was where the future of aircraft lay, and where he would make his fortune. The wedding itself, in a modest New England chapel, was all unhappy Breckinridges, and altogether bare of unhappy Nachtigalls. Bea’s mother, and then her father, had gone to their graves without ever having heard their daughter-in-law’s even-tempered vowels, or marveled at her rounded aristocratic forehead and its precisely placed horizontal eyebrows. Nor had they witnessed her as a bride, except in the serenely posed Bachrach photograph that acknowledged their awkward wedding gift — it had bypassed the designated registry and arrived woundedly in a thin envelope. Marvin journeyed alone to his parents’ funerals. As for Bea, she was belatedly introduced to Margaret in New York, at the Princeton Club one afternoon, no more than an hour or so before Marvin hurried his wife and little daughter into a hired car to take them to that significant alumni reunion where Marvin would be honored as a lavishly philanthropic donor, and where he could not expect to greet his old classmate and brother-inlaw. Margaret’s brother had been killed the year before in the crash of a private plane after a drinking party; the woman in the passenger seat died with him. By then AMERICA’S HARDWARE EMPORIUM had expired, and all elderly Breckinridges and Nachtigalls, including Bea’s three unmarried aunts, were dead. And by then Bea had long been Miss Nightingale. From Marvin’s point of view, Bea guessed, she was the least likely of all known Nachtigalls to embarrass him. He had brought her on that one occasion — it was rooted in her mind with an indelible agelessness, like a movie still — to be offhandedly presented to Margaret and his child. The Margaret of the movie still was steadily smiling, and the child no more than an elusive flash of white-blond head.

  But the Margaret who stood before Bea now was all flicker and twitch, an engine pumping mechanical civilities. “Are you staying at the house? Did Marvin manage it? He could be away, he’s always on the run, but then the housekeeper’s there until six —”

  She broke off; the engine had failed.

  “No, no,” Bea reassured her, “it’s you I’ve come to see. And I’m at a motel, I rented a car at the airport —”

  “Marvin wouldn’t like it. He’d be afraid of my getting upset, but I’m not upset at all. My husband has the idea that I’m unwell. I’m perfectly well, you can see for yourself.”

  Bea trailed after the painter’s smock: it fell to Margaret’s ankles and brushed her bare heels. She was leading Bea from one sunlit space to another, passing an unmade bed tumbled with pillows. They came to a room where two armchairs flanked an ornamental fireplace. The fireplace was fake, its useless hearth hidden behind a large unframed landscape. Settling into one of the chairs, mentally measuring, Bea speculated that this prodigal parade of invalid’s accommodations could easily swallow her own apartment three or four times over.

  She gestured toward the fireplace. “That painting, is it yours?”

  “Oh, I don’t do trees and things. The person who was here before me did it, I could never do anything like that. They say I could if I tried. They tell me I have some talent. They’re expected to say things like that. It’s therapy, you know.”

  With Margaret seated opposite and to the side, Bea could see only her profile, the thin nose pale as a wafer, the pale truncated eyelashes, the mouth drawn flat. In this place, a distance from where she had come in, the bad smell was not so strong. But she felt helplessly stymied — what had she supposed was to be gained from this dubious visit, these vapid courtesies of accepting and denying? The woman was flat through and through.

  “Then you’re satisfied here,” Bea said.

  It was meant as a question; it was not spoken as one. It received no answer. Instead Margaret said, “You won’t believe me, will you? That I’ve always been interested in my husband’s family — you’ll say there’s been no sign of it.”

  “Well, here I am, the family entire. The last of the Mohicans, there’s no one else. But you’ve got a big enough clan of your own, don’t you? There’s always one or two mentioned in the magazines.”

  “It’s only some cousins now. We’re in touch at Christmas, though not lately —”

  “The cousin in the Cabinet. The governor. The other governor. And the congressman who flew his own plane.”

  “My poor brother. It was horrible. So long ago, Iris was only a baby, and my son wasn’t born, but he dreams it, Julian’s always told me he dreams of falling in flames —”

  She had turned to face Bea. Her voice had altered (was it because of that plane on fire, was it
because of her son?); it coarsened to a rough noise, ragged as the work of a saw. “I’m satisfied, yes! The way Marvin sees it, his wife’s run away, his son’s run away, the only one who hasn’t run away is his daughter. Why else do you think I came here? How else do you think I got here? And where else on earth could I go?” Her eyes were stretched wide, the lower lids lined with their narrow crescents of blood. “I — cannot — live — with my husband!”

  The mild madwoman mildly incarcerated was all at once taking on a kind of sanity: it swept over Bea that it was the sanity of illumination. Clarity had stripped Margaret of the anodyne of manners. Her wild mouth, and the wilderness spitting out of it, impelled a tilt of her forehead and chin: she was becoming three-dimensionally alive.

  Bea said slowly, “Do you mean you wanted to come? You chose to?”

  “I got Marvin to agree to it. He thinks he got me to agree to it.” She ground out a sour laugh. “Can you understand what he’s made of me? Oh, but by now I can outthink him, I can think rings around him. I don’t blame you if you can’t see it. Why should you see it? Only I would imagine his sister . . . you lived with him once, you grew up with him, you had the same mother and father. I’ve always tried to imagine all of you, especially that mother of his, and if you’re anything like my husband, I ought to hate you. That’s what he’s good at, hating. You know what he’s hated since he was a boy, what he’s hated more than anything in the world?”

  “No,” Bea said; though she thought she knew.

  “That hardware store. That putrid hardware store. I never saw the place, I never smelled the place, he’s told me how it smelled, paint, kerosene, insect spray, who knows, but I owe my whole life to it. My whole life, because he was ashamed. He said he was poisoned by it. A poison needs an antidote, doesn’t it?”

  She jumped up and bent her long body over Bea; her fingers forced pits into the velvet arms of the chair. The big gray short-lashed eyes came too near.

  “You changed your name, didn’t you?”

  “When I was married I did for a while. But I went back afterward.”

  “You changed the name you were born with,” Margaret insisted.

  “I’m a teacher, no one could pronounce it —”

  “It’s German? Or I suppose it’s that Yiddish. You don’t think I could pronounce it? Or any of my own people? You’d have to gargle phlegm to get it right. Marvin changed everything else, just not his name. To torture himself, or maybe to impress my family with his so-called pride. He worshiped them, you know. Not that they took any notice of it —”

  “It would be hard not to notice what a success he’s made,” Bea said. Was she defending Marvin, could it be? Or was it a hurt to her good-natured, modest father that she meant to rebuff, the memory of her father in the back room under an old-fashioned lamp, sunk in some novel, while her mother tended to business up front?

  “Plastic airplane parts,” Margaret spat out. “Advanced flatware, my brother called it — with Marvin, he said, the apple didn’t fall far from the shop. My husband’s good with money, it’s the drop of Jew left in him. All the rest is mine.” She pulled herself erect and stared down at Bea. “He’s turned himself into what he thinks I am. That crest! All that research on the sacred family escutcheon! If Marvin could find a way to crawl inside my bloodstream, he’d do it.”

  Bea said, “Why don’t you just take it for what it is? Flattery, or aspiration —”

  “You’re trying to pacify me, I recognize the tone. The therapists here talk like that. Can’t you understand, my husband has no existence! He doesn’t exist. He has no self.”

  Marvin the egotist: no self? Margaret, Bea saw, was intelligent. She had entered into a knowledge beyond the commonplace. She twisted up her face: the equidistant geometries crumpled.

  “That green on the crest,” she said, “stands for water. The water James Watt took from the Clyde — that’s the boy who invented the steam engine just from watching a kettle boil, it’s in all the school-books. Breckinridges are descendants of Watt on the maternal side, did you know that?”

  “No,” Bea said.

  “Well, my husband knows it! And he expects his children to live up to it, it’s their heritage, noblesse oblige, they have to be worthy, they have to distinguish themselves. And he sees it in Iris — the chance of it. She’s got the brain for it, he says, if she sticks to it. My poor daughter, he has her living in that lab night and day. But Julian . . . it’s not only those nightmares, Marvin calls it an attraction to atrocity, he thinks Julian’s in love with anything that’s contaminated, can you believe such terrible words? Anything deformed, anything ruined, and he rushes to it — his own son!”

  Then this was the moment — Margaret pacing to the make-believe fireplace and back, shoulders shrunken, clutching herself: the moment for telling. Bea stood up and took Margaret’s hand — a hint of tremor in the fingers.

  “He’s afraid, Marvin’s afraid, that’s why! That thing Julian sent us, from some magazine they put out over there — about filthy birds in the streets. Ghetto stuff, Marvin said. He worries that Julian’s some sort of throwback —”

  “Margaret,” Bea said. “I’ve seen him. In Paris.”

  “Julian? When, how?” Margaret’s hand leaped free, as from an electric charge. “What’s my son doing over there? Why doesn’t he come home?”

  “He didn’t confide in me, you know. It was all so brief — he seems well enough, even a bit on the plump side. I had the impression that he’s gotten fluent in French. Some people would call that polish.”

  Polish! Was it justifiable to lie to an invalid? The ruthlessness of honesty: it was impossible to be truthful to Margaret. Her neck was hunched; she had crossed her arms and thrust her fists into her armpits. She was attempting to curl herself into a ball; it was not passivity. She was a bullet, a cannon, a salvo. Little by little the shots erupted. “Marvin had this idea,” she said, “a way to get him back. A capitulation, Marvin gave in, he actually gave in! Julian won’t do science, he can’t do science, he’s not made for it, so all right, something else, as long as it gets him to come home . . .”

  Margaret’s eyes, the color of water, swam toward Bea like a pair of sharks. “He looked him up — that fellow. That fellow,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The one you used to be married to.”

  “Leo?” Bea cried. “What’s Marvin got to do with Leo?”

  “My husband knows everyone in L.A., don’t ask me how, he has all these contacts, he gets in touch with people who get in touch with other people . . . he found out where that fellow lives, not far from us, in fact, Bel Air Circle, so he went to see him, it’s only around the corner —”

  “He saw Leo? Why? Why would he do that, what possible business could Marvin have with Leo?”

  “It’s the way Julian is, how he thinks — it’s all unreal, Marvin says, it’s dreaming —”

  “What’s that got to do with Leo Coopersmith, for God’s sake!”

  The invalid was in command. Bea had come to condole, to sympathize; or to test her daring, her restraint — was that why she had come? It was certain she had come in kindness. But the visit had turned topsy-turvy; Margaret’s volleys were flying fast. Bea no longer felt kind.

  “The movies. Hollywood. Marvin thought he could get Julian some sort of job he’d fit into, something he’d really like, to lure him —”

  “And did he mention me? Is that what you’re saying? Was I his . . . his reference?”

  “You were married to the fellow.”

  “And then I wasn’t. Marvin went to Leo for help, is that it? He went begging to the oboe?”

  “Oboe, what’s that? He’s in the movies, he’s a famous movie composer, isn’t he? And my husband doesn’t beg. He never begs.”

  Bea said grimly, “Margaret, listen. Julian isn’t about to come back, there’s no sign of it. He’s got himself married. To a displaced person — you know what that means, a displaced person? And your daughter isn’t living
in her lab, she’s with your son and his wife. In Paris. Right now. I left them yesterday.”

  The water trembled; the sharks vanished. The tiny whitish eyelashes blinked.

  “I don’t believe you,” Margaret said. “Marvin never told me anything like that.”

  “He doesn’t know any of it. I’m the spy who was sent behind enemy lines to bring back the news. Fresh intelligence, Margaret.”

  “I don’t believe you. Iris is in school. Julian’s too young to be married. You should go away now.”

  “Yes,” Bea said.

  They walked, side by side, from cell to cell — the sun had moved lower, the windows were dull now — until they came to where the easel stood. Here the bad smell worsened.

  “You should see my work,” Margaret said. “My therapy.”

  She swiveled the easel to show Bea. Dark sky, dark hills, dark barren ground. A central smudge that appeared to approximate the figure of a woman, or was it a man? All of it dark and lavishly laid on.

  Marvin’s wife had mastered the art of human excrement.

  21

  FOR HIS TWENTY-THIRD birthday Julian received a check from his father, accompanied by a businesslike note explaining how to circumvent the bank’s discount on foreign money, so as to change dollars into francs without a loss of value. His father was good at such shortcuts, but Julian was indifferent: he had no intention of beginning what was certain to become a quarrel with some factotum in a bank, and anyhow Marvin’s instructions, thickened by numbers and percentages, were over his head. It was enough that the figure on the blue paper rectangle promised another installment on Mme. Duval’s rent, and a whole week free of waiting on tables. Not that Julian despised shortcuts in general — it was Alfred who’d introduced him to a certain François who got him jobs under the table, or however they said this in French, and it was through Alfred that his little thing on the Marais had reached the Princess, and from the Princess had ascended to print. Print! It had happened twice, but now Alfred was dead, and he was on his own, without an intermediary, though he still kept a covetous eye on the Paris Review. Without Alfred, who was fearless and knew everyone, he had no chance there, he wasn’t good enough, he wasn’t diligent enough, or confident enough. He was what they called him at home, a luftmentsh, or at least his father called him that, his mother wouldn’t have known such a word, it meant an inconsequential person, an impracticality made of air, she would have defended him . . .