Abandon (45 page)

Camilla sent no letters, and made no calls; no doubt she was hiding in someone else’s apartment now, putting whatever concerned her where she would never have to see it. He stepped around the books, the places they’d seen together, and it felt sometimes as if he was living on the outskirts of himself, at a safe distance from the tumult of the inner city.

The new last chapter on calligraphy was easy enough to complete— writing itself as a kind of art, so just the transcribing of the holy words, the copying of them, became a prayer—and he devoted most of it to the master calligraphers who managed, in all their work, to leave some trace of themselves, some hidden signature, and yet to take everything else of themselves out of their creations, as if they’d had no part in them. A few days before Christmas, he completed the last sentence of the dissertation, and looked up to realize that, thanks to the extension, he was now six months ahead of schedule, instead of six months behind.

One chilly afternoon, just after the New Year, a card arrived from her—an image from a Persian manuscript, of course, now kept in Oxford—and inside it, in the familiar looping scrawl, she wrote, “I hope you’re doing well. I’m not so great. I lost the best chance I ever had. I don’t expect another one very soon. Your fond admirer, Camilla Jensen.”

In the same mail, another card, in the antiquated blue-black script he remembered from his undergraduate days, made out to “John Macmillan, Esq.”—and inside, a Renaissance picture of a Florentine Virgin, her ornate blue shawl, imported from Arabia, covered with Arabic characters that said, “There is no god but God” (his old professor’s idea of a joke, no doubt).

I was very happy to receive news of your completed thesis; well done. I wonder whether you shouldn’t go to Persia now you’ve met your obligations towards it. Not that you will necessarily find much there; but until you do go, you shall always think you might.

Gratuitous advice from a superannuated counsellor.

With warm regards,
Benedict Mowbray.

Christmas had been quiet, and over the New Year, celebrations had seemed inappropriate: one year before, he’d been in the Taj, slipping under the surface of the world to find the secret flame burning in the basement; a year from now, whatever happened, he’d be in another country—the fellowship stipulated that much—and the poems that had kept him company for all these years would be behind him. He thought sometimes of the book in the bank, and put the thought away.

Outside, the light had resumed its winter sharpness, as if someone were outlining every detail with a razor-point black pen, so the days were particular in a way they could never be in the broad-brush summer. Sharpness in the elements highlighting uncertainty everywhere else.

He’d set aside the whole of January for putting together his footnotes—tidying up the loose ends of the thesis—and after the early months of restlessness, he was beginning to recapture the gift of sleep. Sometimes whole weeks would go by without a night of sleeplessness. One night, when the phone began ringing in the dark, he got up as if still asleep and stumbled through the room.

“Hello,” he said, and there was nothing.

“Hello,” he said, and was about to put the phone down—a student prank, he assumed—when he heard something at the other end, not so much a voice as a sound, so distant it felt as if it were coming from the far side of the world. He had a vague image of bells in New Mexico, and waking up in the predawn quiet to look at the stars through the window, after a dream of Isfahan.

“Camilla,” he said slowly. “Is that you?”

He heard only low breathing at the other end, and then what sounded like choking, or someone laughing so hard she couldn’t get the words out.

“Camilla, is that you? What’s happening?”

She didn’t say a thing, and he imagined someone shuddering, speechless, at the other end. He thought of the time once when they’d come so close to breaking one another that he’d gone out to take a walk before the damage would be irreversible. When he’d come back, he’d seen her through the window, in the long black dress she’d put on for a special occasion, sprawled across the bed, shaking convulsively, as if in a fit, her small hands fisted at her sides. As haunting a sight as he’d ever seen, of someone locked into a small space with the person she most feared (herself).

“I was hoping you would call,” he said now, to try to draw her out. “I’ve been wanting to hear your voice.”

“My father’s dead.”

“What’s that?”

“My father’s dead! Can’t you hear anything? They found him in his study.” She cackled in a wild way, and he realized that what he was hearing was the opposite of laughter. “It was the excitement of his birthday, the doctor said. Going out on a high note.” And she shrieked again, as if it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

“I’ll be right there. Are you at home?”

“Don’t!” she said into the receiver. “Don’t come any closer! Stay where you are.”

He stopped for a moment, to let her retrieve herself.

“You need someone, Camilla,” he said at last, when she said nothing. “Someone who cares for you.”

“If I need someone who cares for me, I don’t need you. Come any closer and I’ll kill you.”

He let her cry, or get out whatever was inside her, and then just said, “If there’s anything you need, I’m here. If you want something, anything at all, just tell me.”

“Whatever I need, it isn’t you.” And the phone came slamming down around him.

There was no getting to sleep after that; he thought of her alone, in a city haunted by the person she saw as her tormentor, he imagined her putting on her long dress slowly. A few hours later, while it was still dark, there came a knock on the door and, half expecting it, he went to the side door and let her in. Her face was ash, and her white skin against the white dress gave the impression of someone who couldn’t touch the ground.

He held her briefly, and she fumbled past him. “I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I didn’t know where to go.”

“I’m glad you’re here. You’re safe. What can I get you?”

And then, realizing that what she needed most was a freedom from all choice, he led her into the bedroom and made a space for her.

“Is there anything you’d like?”

“A new father.” Her voice was still strange, as over the telephone. “I think I need to sleep.”

“Sleep; I’ll be here beside you.”

He sat beside her as she lay and saw her fall into another space. It had been a long time since he’d seen her in this position, smelled her face cream, watched the calm that stole over her face when she was resting. She stirred once, a few minutes after she’d nodded off, and he put a hand out to assure her he was there. Awake, it had seemed as if some aspirant Camilla was in his room, the amateur actress come once more; asleep, it was her again in his bed.

When she awoke, she pushed herself deeper into him, as if to shut out the light.

“Can I get you anything?”

“Nothing’s going to bring him back.”

He smoothed her hair, sang a soft song he remembered she liked. When she awoke more fully, she was a little more herself. “Here we go again. I come to you and leave all this garbage on your doorstep.”

“I’m just happy to see you. I’d been thinking of how I’d get to see you.”

“Like you get to see a sleepless night.” The bitterness was the only part the actress had got right.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No. I don’t.”

She slept most of the day, and when it was dark, the small new candle burning as before (he’d gone and bought a new one after she’d taken the old one away), she said, from where she lay, “There was this call in the middle of the night. I went over, and there was an ambulance parked outside. The Browns, the Gottliebs were there. My mother was in her bed crying. I didn’t think I could ever feel sorry for her before.”

“She must be devastated.”

“She’s got his will, his safety box. That’s all she cares about.”

“But she was crying.”

“She was crying. She misses him. Now she doesn’t have anyone to use.”

“What do you feel like doing?”

“Running away, hiding. The same things I always do.” The anger came out in every direction, and it didn’t matter whom it stung; the world had done what it always did, which was to let her down.

“She wore at him and wore at him. Day after day for thirty years. Rubbing at him till there was no him left.”

“But he stayed.”

“Of course he stayed. He was too weak. She made him think she’d die if he left her on her own.”

He went into the kitchen and brought her juice. Then, settling down beside her again, “There isn’t anything you want?”

“Just take me away. Anywhere.”

They got into his car, he wrapping her up in his coat and bringing along blankets, and they drove to the ledge just beneath the once-abandoned house. Planes hovered over the town below, red lights winking on their tails, and the grids of yellow lights shivered and blurred as if ready to be snuffed out. Occasionally a car would come around the bend, and crazed shouts would pass into the mountain silence, Californian revelers off to practice whatever forms of private worship they observe outside the city walls.

“Thank you,” she said, taking long breaths and looking out the side window. “I needed this.”

“L.A. is very far away.”

“It never happened,” she said. “It doesn’t exist.”

The next day, again, she spent all the daylight hours in bed, not coming to the phone when Kristina called, not stirring in response to anything he said. She woke towards nightfall, and he asked her the same question he always asked, so she would know she was at home.

“What would feel nice?”

“Do you have some juice?”

“Juice we can do.”

She was coming back to shore at last; a little color had returned to her cheeks, and her voice had come up a few notches from the deep. But they were still walking over splintered ground; he was ready to see her wince and recoil at any moment.

“Is that all?”

“Do you have anything to read to me? I think that would feel nice.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Something from your poems. Like a year ago.”

She’d given him an opening to ask about the manuscript, and, as a kind of reassurance, he asked her nothing. Instead, he went over to the desk, where he kept the photocopies he’d made, and came back with the pieces of paper, as if they were just sheaves from the usual papers on his desk. He didn’t know yet how much she even knew of the content of the poems. When she moved up to squeeze his hand, he noticed the ring he’d given her on the wedding finger.

“Here goes. These have never been heard by human ear before. Hot off the press.”

She pressed herself into him and closed her eyes.

All night aflame,
I turn and turn.
The wind shakes my trees.
I shiver in my bed.
The world spins all around me.
Heavens fall, angels scramble at my feet.
I turn and turn,
The ground is rich with stars.

“They don’t sound like the usual ones,” she said, and he, looking down at her, couldn’t tell if it was canniness speaking, or innocence. “They don’t even sound like they’re from the same culture.”

“I can read you P. G. Wodehouse instead,” he said, not taking the bait. “S. J. Perelman or something, to make you relax.”

“No. This is nice. Go on.”

These words, my wounds, a homesickness.
A bird calls above the sea.
A light on the shore, a light.

He was trying to read her poems whose provenance he didn’t know—not the ones that were from the best-selling Rumi anthology— but whatever her response to them, he couldn’t tell: her eyes were closed and her breathing was regular.

When you left, I did, too.
No I at home any more.
Only this candle, this quiet burning.

Her body was so still, he thought she might be sleeping.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here. I’m listening.” He looked at her, and thought how the poems would have sounded even to him, two or three years ago: mystification, perhaps, empty portent.

We never move, the earth spins round.
The heavens come down, and the ground rises up.
Why talk, then, of your whirling?
It is the skies that turn, not we.

“They’re all the same,” she complained. “They all say the same thing. It’s like watching the dervishes in L.A., turning and turning again and again.”

“That’s why I hoped they’d put you to sleep.” And, for the first time in the new year, he heard her laugh. “One more, and then I’ll leave you in peace.”

Down this street, down that one,
To the center of the maze.
Nothing waits for us but silence.

“‘But silence’!” she announced, with what might almost seem delight. “That’s a Johno phrase!”

When she awoke—night had become day again, day night—she was closer still to the person he knew, and he thought she might yet be herself, so long as she was far from Los Angeles. But the life she knew looked more like an empty house than ever, her only formal and practical protector gone, her sister always off on mysterious errands, and all of her, legally, in the hands of the person she regarded as a demon. He’d thought of her life before as a small hut on the edge of the abyss; now it was as if the roof was gone, and the wind had blown away one wall, so all she could see from where she lay was empty space. She needed fortification, he thought as he watched her sleep; and when she’d been in need of someone to hold, she hadn’t gone to Greg’s house, or Kristina’s: she’d come to him.