Abandon (12 page)

Outside he heard a car slow down, then stop. An ignition turned off, and a door was slammed. Footsteps on the gravel, and then a knock at a door, next door.

He picked up the phone to make sure it was working—nine-fiftyseven—and then went out to the beach, so he wouldn’t hear the sound of a knock, the absence of a knock. When he came back, having tried to extend the walk for as long as he could, there was still no car in the place he’d left open for it—he checked—and he went into the bedroom and turned off all the lights.

In bed, he was in Paris again, and the now ubiquitous Martine was at his side, watching the rain slant into the gutters, and the pigeons on the slate-grey rooftops, a red-and-blue umbrella far below, and a man pushing and pushing at a button. “It’s what’s so heartbreaking,” she was saying as she turned away, and walked back into the room, the dark. “The sense that if you ever let yourself go, really let yourself go, something rather wonderful might come out. But you won’t. And one keeps on hanging on, just in case.”

Then she’d said nothing, and he’d remembered that her silences had always been much harder to answer than her words.

He saw another figure now, in her sister’s kitchen, looking as if she were the only person on a long line of folding grey chairs in some institutional hallway. At the very far end, alone. He started counting the chairs to put himself to sleep—“sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three”—and then, suddenly, he heard a knock, so faint it sounded as if it wanted to take itself back already.

He lay where he was; the red digits on the clock said 10:37.

“Hello.” A small knock again. “Sorry. It’s me.”

He lay and lay where he was, and then went slowly over to unbolt the door. “I’m sorry,” she said, and he saw someone who seemed not to have filled herself in today. Her eyelids were red and bruised, and there was a stain at the side of her dress. She’d put on something blue, to match her eyes, but the light had changed long since.

“I got you this,” she said, and pushed a card into his hand.

“What happened to you?”

“The usual.” One word too many, he saw, and she would flee. “I was trying and trying so hard . . .”

“So hard you didn’t even call.”

“I wanted to call. Really I did. But then I’d have never come.” She looked bereft, as if she’d thrown her hopes into the fire. “I thought you’d be mad.”

“Why shouldn’t I be mad? You’re three hours late.”

“I knew you’d be,” she said, and there was almost an echo of comfort in her voice, as if she could relax into her fears again. “I knew if I tried too hard . . .”

“You’d go wrong.”

She nodded, looking towards the ground. “It always happens like this.”

“Well, you’d better come in, for a moment. It’s late enough as it is.”

“Thank you. Do you want to see your card?”

“Not terribly, to be truthful.” He turned it over and saw an ornamental Persian miniature: a garden made to look like Paradise, a stylized prince and princess underneath a tree, the sky all around them a jeweled glaze of blue and gold. Inside, the printed message came from Rumi: “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” She hadn’t written anything inside it, but he felt touched and startled all at once: giving him messages about “lovers” when she’d hardly managed to bring herself to his door.

“It’s on the back,” she said. “I didn’t want to take away from the poem.”

He turned the card over and saw her writing, sloping and sprawling across the space, in the blotchy ballpoint he remembered seeing in her shirt pocket the first time, at the sister’s house. “Thank you for giving me a chance,” she’d written in her broken scrawl. “I’m sorry in advance if I disappoint you. I disappoint myself, every day, every moment. You’re the first person in a long time who’s given me a chance to show I might not be completely worthless.”

It was like everything about her: proclaiming her unfitness in every syllable, and yet, in the proclamation, in the cry that was sounding just beneath the words—someone raising up a hand as if to be pulled up—it asked for something else and said she was staking everything on this. We are something more than the sum of our mistakes, he thought, and then completed the thought: “But that doesn’t make the mistakes any less costly.”

“I had some mango juice ready for you. Almost three hours ago.”

She looked down.

“A whole meal, actually. More than that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and her arms were around him, her head buried in his shoulder as she sobbed and emptied herself out completely.

“I always blow it.” The force of her self-impatience heartbreaking to see. “I always do. Every time someone shows the slightest interest in me, I push them away.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“Why do you think? I’m scared. If I really want something, it’ll be taken away from me. It always has in the past.”

“So you try not to want anything?” She nodded, caught up in a small space with her greatest enemy. “Not the ideal quality in a friend. Even in an acquaintance.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I know I’ve blown it.”

“I should be getting back to sleep. If you’d like an orange juice before you hit the road . . .”

“Thank you. I didn’t mean to let you down like this. All the trouble you’ve taken . . .”

He pushed the START button on the CD player, and somebody began to sing of the beaches of Tahiti when the moon is full. The mango juice was cool, and a little color came into her face; her fear had the capacity to erase her entirely, to turn her into a walking shell of some kind, and yet whatever was opposed to it, which came out more slowly, began to fill her face with light. She showed every last feeling on her face (strange, he thought, in an actress), and that made her more dangerous than anything: she could make you believe that you had the capacity to bring the light back to her pale complexion.

“You went to all this trouble. Just for me. People usually don’t do that.”

“I went to much more trouble than you can see. I wanted to make you happy. I’m going to Spain soon, and I thought this would be the last chance.”

He was giving her a chance to pull herself away. And responding to her games, perhaps, with some of his own. The crooner sang guilelessly of stars in the Southern sky and how the trade winds made the coconuts fall to earth.

He looked unsubtly at his watch.

“It’s getting late.”

“I know. I don’t know where to go. They’re expecting me up north tomorrow.”

He sighed, so she would hear it, and went into his bedroom to pull out a few blankets. He threw them, with little grace, on the sofa, and said, “The bathroom’s over there if you need it. I’ll be going out first thing in the morning. But you can let yourself out; the door will lock behind you. I realize that gallantry demands that I give you the bed and take the sofa myself, but, frankly, I’m too tired.”

“Thank you. This is really kind of you.”

He went back into his darkened room and willed himself towards sleep. Eleven-forty became eleven-forty-one. A few hours later, it was eleven-forty-three. He could hear scuffling in the next room, a heavy thump, a stifled curse. He could hear sandals being slipped off—so it seemed—and a light-blue dress being pulled over a head. He could hear everything more vividly than if it had been taking place at his side, in the bed.

At one o’clock he went into the next room, his mind as overbright as a video arcade.

“Hi,” she said, stirring on the sofa.

“Hi. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” His excuses, he realized, were sounding as flimsy as hers.

“I’m fine. Just upset with myself. Empty and frustrated. You?”

“Not great.”

He came round to where she was lying, and she sat up, wrapped in blankets, her hair—she’d obviously washed and combed it in preparation for the evening—falling straight down, and making her seem naked in some way, undefended.

“What is it with you?”

“What isn’t it?” The bitter sound that always lay behind the brightness. “It always happens like this.”

“What are you scared of ?”

“Everything.” It sounded like she could tear herself into pieces. “Frightening you away. Not frightening you away. Getting involved with somebody I care about, and ending up with my heart broken. Not getting involved with somebody I care about, and then regretting it the rest of my life. Everything’s scary.”

“You sound like a movie.”

“Movies have happy endings.”

Anyone could see how this would play out: she’d make her worst fears come true, and then the lowest part of her could say she was right all along. She’d push someone away till he hurt her, and then say she’d been right to know she couldn’t trust. He thought, somehow, of what McCarthy had said, about the two different ways of seeing life: “The believer erects a temple in his mind, and that becomes the locus, the impetus, if you will, of his exertions. The unbeliever digs a hole, and then is assured of having no way out.”

“What can I—what can anyone—do to help?”

“Nothing. Ever. Everyone gives up on me. Usually way before this point.”

He smoothed away the moisture that was gathering at the corner of her eyes.

“What’s the cure?”

“I don’t know. If I did, maybe I could do something. All the time I was growing up, I was always sure I was going to be abandoned.”

“By your parents?”

“By everyone. I wanted to shout out, ‘Mr. Stork, Mr. Stork: you dropped me at the wrong house. Please come and take me to a place where they’ll really like me.’ ”

It sounded like a child’s complaint, but the sadness went deeper, if only because it had had twenty years to ripen.

“Maybe you can make the place where people will be kind to you?”

“I can’t. When I was young, everything I did was wrong. Whatever I did, they’d yell at me.”

She carried her frustrations with her everywhere she went, and then looked around her and saw the image of her frustrations.

“Camilla, I don’t know what to do. Why don’t you come next door, and I’ll read you something to help you get to sleep? To help
me
get to sleep!”

She followed him, swathed in blankets, tripping over the edge of them once, and then taking smaller steps: he could see a white nightdress underneath all the layers, bare feet. She moved across the room as if under a spell placed on her by herself.

In the bedroom, he stacked the pillows up against the headboard, pulled back the blankets on one side, and said, “Here. I’ll read you poems so boring they’ll put us both to sleep.” Picking up the volume of Rumi he’d put beside the bed, as if poems of surrender were the best way of making them drift off.

When the light came up, not many hours later, she was so deeply asleep that all the strain was gone from her, and her face was as clear as it must have been when she was feeling truly safe: for the moment, she had been taken by the stork to a place that was more accepting.

He left a tall glass of mango juice beside the bed, put the CD player on PAUSE at the song she’d said she’d liked, and picked up the book of Rumi from where it lay, facedown, pages splayed, on the bedside table. Then he set it down again, and took himself off to the library.

When he came home, in mid-afternoon, the house was immaculate. The dishes had been washed and neatly put back on their shelves. The counter had been wiped clean, and the blankets set back in the closet. The Rumi book—he noticed, though he’d told himself he wouldn’t—had been moved a little closer to the wall.

On the coffee table sat an envelope, and when he opened it, he found another card, showing a close-up of an elaborate carpet, so rich with golds and blues that it seemed the cover of a Quran, a prayer that was itself a proof of a divinity.

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love,” read the inscription (from Rumi, of course—as Sefadhi had feared, he was quickly supplanting Rilke and the Dalai Lama as the reigning king of greeting cards). On the back again, the small, looping scrawl. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting up with me and helping me get to sleep and opening the door to me when I came. I’m not used to so much in my life.”

Now she was gone again, out of reach (no address, no telephone number except the ones answered by machines, her sister’s voice, some man he’d never heard about), and he was left to get his thoughts together before next Monday, and the conference in Seville.