To See You Again (19 page)

He rambled on, but I wasn’t listening at all; I was thinking Gloria.
Gloria
had moved out to Phoenix or Tucson, to me almost the same place. Out West. Of course she must be Ran’s true direction. That night we had one of our bad quarrels, about something else—naturally.

  •  •  •

I went out to visit him in October, which was not one of our best times together.

For one thing, the place itself was so strange that it made us seem alien even to each other. Surrounded by the bizarre, inimical desert, the flat, palm-lined, unnaturally sunny town, Ran’s apartment had the look of a motel: stucco, one-storied, part of a complex built around a large, much too blue swimming pool, in which it was never quite warm enough to swim.

Motels have always seemed somehow sexual to me, and I was unable to rid myself of fantasies involving Ran and Gloria: had she visited him there, did she maybe come for visits frequently? All morning, every day, when Ran was off teaching his classes, I would ransack his apartment (though tidily, a cautious spy), every cranny and corner, drawer and wastebasket, his desk, even the linen closet, in a search for Gloria, any trace of her—a quest that was as compulsive as it was humiliating, degrading. And it was also fruitless, yielding up nothing but a crick in my back, a broken fingernail and dust.

At night we went out and ate Mexican food and drank too much Mexican beer, and, out of character for us, we neither quarreled nor talked very much. I was afraid—in fact, I knew—that if we did talk much of it would lead to a fight, and any conversation might summon Gloria. And Ran had, seemingly, almost no energy. He coughed a lot, and we almost never made love.

(But then tonight, Ms. Heffelfinger, as I remembered that time, from such a long distance, and I recalled my desperate
need to
know
about Gloria, I came to an odd conclusion: I thought, How strange of me to care, when really it didn’t matter. What was the difference, finally, whether or not Gloria spent an afternoon or a weekend with Ran, within those garish stucco walls. Even whether or not they made love. I could almost hope they had; I could almost, if belatedly, halfheartedly, wish for a little almost final happiness for Ran. But not too much, and I was still consoled by the fixed idea that Gloria would have been uninteresting in bed.)

When he came back to Hilton, at the beginning of the following summer, I knew that Ran must be very sick indeed—his speech was so radically altered. Whereas before he had said everything so elaborately, with such a smoke screen of complicated verbiage, now he spoke very simply and directly, as though he had not much time or breath remaining. Which in fact he did not: he had what we now know as emphysema, he was dying of it.

That summer we spent most evenings in Ran’s huge high glassed-in living room, watching fireflies and the lengthening shadows, among the barely stirring summer leaves, the flowering shrubbery.

“Sometimes I can’t remember when you first came here,” Ran said one night. “Was it before or after Lucinda killed herself?”

“Just after,” I told him as I digested what I had only half known, or heard as rumor before, what he thought I already knew—Lucinda’s suicide. And I sadly wished that he had been able to say this before; it might have eased some pain for him, I thought. And I thought about Lucinda, her long novels and small madrigals, her dislike of the “cluttered” landscape, and I cursed her for adding to a deeply guilty
man’s store of guilt. In the long run, really, Gloria had done him a lot less harm.

“I guess by now I think you’ve always been around,” he said, with a new half-smile, so that my heart lurched with an aching, unfamiliar tenderness for him.

On another evening of that summer Ran told me that he was going to sell his house. “It’s too big,” he said. “Taxes. So many rooms. Maids. The windows.” He had a new and alarming habit of quick breaths between almost each word, and deep difficult breaths between sentences. Now, after such a labored pause, he added, “I’m tired of it.”

“You lying bastard.” Fear made me rough; it was at about this time that I began to adopt my stance of gruffness, to perfect my just-not-rude snort. “You wouldn’t know what to do without this house,” I told him, and then I laughed. “But if you really want to sell it, I’ll buy it from you.”

That night was as close as we had come to quarreling for some time, but in the course of those hours we worked out a highly original real-estate deal, whereby I would buy Ran’s house, but I would not take possession of it until I had paid for over half of it, by which time we both knew that Ran would be dead.

And that, Ms. Heffelfinger, in brief, is how it went. I bought Ran’s house, and soon afterward, early that fall, he died, and I moved in. I sorted and labeled and stored away all his papers, his manuscripts, his library, as though it had all been infinitely valuable, which, to me, it was. (He had kept no letters from Gloria, which was both gratifying and frustrating.)

  •  •  •

After so much heavy thought, and so much to drink, I should have awakened the next day in a state of hung-over exhaustion—a state that my poor guilty Presbyterian Ran used to describe as being “richly deserved.” But I did not feel terrible, not at all. I got up and made myself a healthy breakfast, and then I telephoned the inn, for Candida Heffelfinger.

She came over promptly, in answer to my invitation (a summons, it must have sounded like), and she looked as I had imagined that she would: contrite and tired, and rumpled. Unlike me, she could not have slept well.

She told me that she had been walking around the town, and how much she liked it, and I agreed. Then we both admired, again, the bright fall view from my windows.

And then she said, “I’ve been thinking—and I hope this won’t sound presumptuous, but would you mind if I shifted the focus of our talk a little? I mean, so many people have written about the legendary love affair.”

This was irritating: she was saying to me exactly what I had meant to say to her.

I snorted. “I suppose you mean to take another tack, and zero in on our fights?”

“Oh no, of course not. I wouldn’t—”

“In point of fact,” I told her, “the written accounts are remarkably close to the truth. I was in Italy, and Gloria Bingham visited here for a while, and then she left. Ran and I both had our flings, but no one else mattered much to either of us.”

Candida seemed to find that statement both moving and final, as I did myself. She was silent for a while, and then she said, “I really meant about your work. It’s interesting, your beginning with those small figures. The gain in scope.”

“It undoubtedly had something to do with my physical size,” I told her, very dry.

“I can understand that,” she said. Well, I believed that
she could, indeed; we are about the same height. Big ladies.

“What really happened,” I then told her, “was in Italy, for the first time, I saw real Michelangelos. In the Bargello, and in the Vatican, St. Peter’s—”

We talked for several hours, and I saw that I had been right all along about Candida; my instincts still were fine. She was very nice indeed, and smart. I liked her. Our talk went on all morning, and into the afternoon.

I had a marvelous time.

In the late Forties, just after the Second World War, a large party—in fact, a dance—took place in a small castle in Central Europe. It was late August, a very black, hot still night. In the castle’s million-windowed central hall, American music, on records, issued from a Victrola. Glasses and pitchers of pale watery wine were set out on a long table. An elderly man in a shabby white coat poured out the wine and changed or turned over the records—indifferently, since he did not speak English and disliked the music.

Couples, some in costume, most in some variety of festive or at least dressed-up attire, danced out on the floor; other people stood about in clusters, in animated or sometimes serious conversation. The next day, everyone there would be leaving the castle, the American professors, instructors, American wives and all the European students, for this had been an experiment in international education, and the six weeks were just over.

One person, the very distinguished Professor Howard Stein, an elegant Bostonian, brilliant, of a high, exacerbated consciousness, was neither dancing nor talking to anyone. He
was listening to the saccharine, meretricious music—longing for Mozart, for a soaring of Bach—and thinking that the experiment, the seminar, had been a failure. With deep embarrassment, and perfect clarity—his fate—he recalled the speech that he himself gave on the first afternoon of the conference, in a small clearing, among romantic statuary, beside the castle’s lake. They had all come to this place, he had said and now could hear himself saying, from widely divergent histories, geographies, in some cases opposing ideologies, but they were all now united in staunch and sober anti-Fascism, were all opposed to the forces of darkness recently defeated.

Wild applause and cries of approval, in various languages, greeted those remarks, and later, fervent handshakes from moist-eyed colleagues, fellow teachers at the eminent Midwestern university that had sent them all there.

And what he had said turned out to be, quite simply and horribly,
not true
. Many of the German and Austrian students, and one of the Italians, a skinny young woman, had gradually and sometimes inadvertently revealed themselves as Nazi-Fascists still. During the second week of the seminar, the Danish students, a splendidly blond and handsome group, had left in a body, having recognized one of the Germans as a former professor who had been forced to leave Denmark because of Nazi sympathies. (The German left too, a day later, with a face-saving story of illness.) At a poetry reading a German student loudly remarked that Heine was not a German, he was Jewish. And a supposedly “reconstructed” Austrian, who had spent time in a POW camp in Texas and had been horrified at the Southern treatment of Negroes, announced, when asked, that he saw no relationship between that treatment of a “race” and what had gone on in Germany. That same Austrian and the Italian woman were later overheard (by Howard Stein) in a shared reference to “our Navy.”

The question about the treatment of races had been put to the Austrian by Howard’s least favorite wife of an instructor, one of his own former students; an unbearably serious young woman, too thin, with hyperintense brown eyes, who was just then dancing past with an authentic anti-Fascist, a young Italian who was known to have fought with the partisans.

Diana McBride, the young American wife not liked by Howard Stein, would surely have agreed with him, however, about the seminar. In fact, earlier in the evening she had said to the university dean who organized the whole thing, in her half-tentative, half-bold way, “Wouldn’t it have been better to have it in a more friendly country, like France?”

“You should not make that suggestion unless you are prepared to act on it, to perform the work of removal,” she was told, with considerable force, by the dean. Of necessity, he believed that the seminar had been a great success.

Silenced by power, although uncomfortably aware of the illogic of what he had said, Diana felt that everything she had done, all summer, had been wrong. To begin with, their very presence at the seminar, hers and her husband’s, was suspect. The other instructors were chosen for academic distinction, whereas Braxton McBride was asked in the hope that his father, rich old William McBride, would contribute substantially to the project. Instead, Mr. McBride’s contribution was as penurious as were most of his gestures, and there Braxton was, already announced as an instructor. Hideously embarrassing: Diana felt it much more than Braxton did. He behaved as he always had, like a plump rich spoiled only child, taking interest in and appreciation of himself for granted. Not bothering to please anyone.

Diana, in many ways her husband’s opposite, took very
little for granted, and sometimes she tried too hard to please; it was this latter quality which had gone so wrong with Howard Stein on one of the first days of the seminar. They were coming home from a group excursion to a neighboring, larger and grander castle, and by accident, surely, Diana and Howard sat down next to each other in the long open truck, the transportation for that day’s excursion. Wildly casting about for something to say to the distinguished critic, her former professor, Diana seized upon the passing scenery: a gentle landscape of woods and meadows. “It looks rather like New England, don’t you think?” she observed (unavoidably tight-voiced, and stilted). Dr. Stein turned fully on her; he glared as what she took to be tears of rage filled his eyes. “Most emphatically not,” he said, and he turned around to begin a conversation with a knot of Spanish students (Loyalists) on his other side. Confronted with his narrow back and the black, patrician shape of his skull, Diana felt tears sting her own eyes.

Howard Stein had a reputation for not liking wives, even for being rude to them; still, Diana was sorely aware of it.

However, the afternoon before the dance, a good thing happened to Diana: in the neighboring town, in a small shop, she found a pretty dress which fit her perfectly, a dark silk, embroidered with small flowers. It was a little peasanty, a costume, but perfect for the farewell dance. And since for six weeks there had been nothing to spend money on but ice cream at the local PX, she had plenty of traveler’s checks.

Generally, Diana did not like the way she looked, but that night, in that dress, she felt transformed. It fit her so smoothly, seeming to shape her thin body; its sheen added color to her face and eyes.

And then that nice boy, Vittorio, asked her to dance.

  •  •  •

Out on the porch, Stanley Morris, from Brooklyn, a young, enthusiastic and most promising instructor, was vigorously embracing a young Estonian girl, and at the same time deciding that he would, after all, marry the dark, graceful, intelligent and clearly rich girl whom he had met on the boat coming over.

With her natural elegance, Vassar, Phi Beta, she would be a terrific asset wherever Stanley went; even at Harvard, his wild and not unfounded hope, she would fit right in. And she was sexy, too; those nights on the boat were wonderful.