Light Years (12 page)

“Could we hear something?” Chaptelle said.

He waited, ignoring the children, while Viri selected some records. The music began. It was like a powerful medicine. Chaptelle grew calm.

“Valle-Inclan had only one arm,” he declared. “He cut the other off so he could be like Cervantes. Are you interested in Spanish writers?”

“I don’t know very much about them.”

“I see.”

He ate with his head close to the plate like a man in the dining hall of an institution. He did not eat much. He wasn’t hungry, he commented, he had eaten a sandwich on the train. As for wine, he had none. He was forbidden to drink any alcohol.

Afterwards they played Russian bank. Chaptelle, almost indifferent at first, became very animated.

“Ah,” he said. “Yes, I have a talent for cards. When I was twenty I did almost nothing else. What is this? Is this the jack?”

“The king.”

“Ah.
Le roi
,” he exclaimed. “Yes, I remember.” Viri drove him to the train. They stood on the long, deserted platform. Chaptelle peered down the empty tracks.

“It comes from the other way,” Viri told him.

“Oh.” He looked in that direction.

They entered a small waiting room where a stove was kept going. The benches were scarred with initials of travelers, the walls dense with certain primitive drawings.

“Can you lend me a few dollars for the taxi?” Chaptelle said unexpectedly.

“How much do you need?”

“I don’t have any money with me. I have only a ticket. At least I can’t be robbed.”

Viri had withdrawn what money he had. He held out two dollars. “Is that enough?”

“Oh, yes,” Chaptelle said grandly. “Here, a dollar is enough.”

“You might need it.”

“I never tip,” Chaptelle explained. “You know, your wife is a very intelligent woman. More than intelligent.”

“Yes,” Viri agreed.

“Du chien
. You know that expression?”

The floor beneath their feet had begun to tremble. The high, lighted windows of the train rushed by and abruptly slowed. Chaptelle did not move.

“I can’t find my ticket,” he announced.

Viri was holding the door. A few passengers had stepped down; the conductor was looking both ways.

“Why don’t you get on and then look for it?”

“I had it in my
poche … Ah, merde!”
He began to mutter in French.

There was the piercing sound of a whistle. Chaptelle straightened up. “Ah, here,” he said.

He hurried out and stood, indecisively, trying to see which doors were open. There was only one, in which the trainman stood.

“Where does one go up?” Chaptelle asked. The trainman ignored him.

“There, where he is,” Viri called.

“But that’s two cars away. That’s the only one they open?”

He began to walk toward it. Viri expected the first jerking movement of the wheels at any second. The trains were electric and accelerated quickly.

“Wait, here’s a passenger!” he shouted. He detested himself.

Chaptelle was casually climbing the steps. The train began moving before he had taken a seat. He bent over slightly in the aisle to wave with an awkward motion, palm forward, like a departing aunt. Then he was gone.

“Did you get him aboard?” Nedra asked.

“He’s one of a kind,” Viri said. “I hope.”

“He’s invited me to come to France.”

“It would be a trip you would never forget. What do you mean, he’s invited you? Doesn’t he know you’re married? This evening, for instance, did he think it was just a coincidence we were here together?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with marriage. I mean, as a man he has no attraction for me. I wouldn’t hide it.”

She was lying in bed, white pillows behind her, a book in her hand. She seemed quite reasonable.

“We’d stay at his mother’s,” she said.

“Nedra, you don’t even speak French.”

“I know. That’s why it would be so interesting.” She could not keep from smiling. “His mother has an apartment on Place St. Sulpice. It’s a beautiful square. You can walk out, he says, there’s a balcony all around with an iron railing.”

“Wonderful. A railing.”

“Fireplaces in the bedrooms. It isn’t dark, he says. It’s on the uppermost floor.”

“Linen is supplied, I presume.”

“His mother
lives
there.”

“Nedra, you really are extraordinary. You know I love you.”

“Do you?”

“But as for going to France …”

“Just think about it, Viri,” she said.

6

EVE WAS TALL. HER FACE HAD
cheekbones. Her shoulders slumped when she walked. The shelves in her living room were bent beneath the books. She worked for a publisher; oh, you’ve never heard of him, she said. Her life was one in which everything was left undone—letters unanswered, bills on the floor, the butter sitting out all night. Perhaps that was why her husband had left her; he was even more helpless than she. At least she was gay. She stepped from her littered doorway in pretty clothes, like a woman who lives in the
barrio
walking to a limousine, stray dogs and dirt on the way.

Her ex-husband came to visit her. He sat hunched in a chair by the fireplace, an overnight bag near his feet. His suede jacket was stained, the pockets torn. He was only thirty-two; he had the face of a derelict. His eyes were spent, they had nothing in them. When he spoke, it was agony—enormous, long pauses. He was going to … build a model with his son, he said.

“Don’t keep him up too late,” Eve said. She was leaving in the morning for Connecticut, where they still owned an old house they used alternately.

“Listen, while I think of it …” he said.

Silence. Children were skating in the narrow, blind street. The afternoon was fading.

“The willow near the pond,” he said. His voice was lost, wandering. “You should call Nelson, the guy who gardens, while you’re there. It needs …” He stopped. “Something’s wrong with it,” he finally said.

“The one that’s not growing?”

A pause.

“No, the one that is,” he said.

He’d been living with a young woman. They ate in restaurants; they appeared at parties. When he stood up his pants were empty; they hung in the back like an old man’s.

“He’s so sad,” Eve said.

“You’re lucky he’s gone,” Nedra told her.

“She doesn’t even keep his clothes clean.”

“That’s why he’s sad.”

Eve laughed. There was gold behind her teeth; it made them dark at the edges, a halo of bitumen, like a whore’s. She was ready to laugh. She was funny. Her life had no foundation. She was only vaguely devoted to it, she could treat it lightly. It was this that made her irresistible—these smiles, this carefree air.

They were like sisters, the same long limbs, the same humor. It was easy for them to imagine themselves in each other’s place.

“I’d like to go to Europe,” Nedra told her.

“Wouldn’t that be marvelous?”

“You’ve been to Italy.”

“I have, haven’t I?” Eve said.

“What was it like?”

Their words drifted off in the late afternoon. They were sitting in the worn love seats. Anthony was at a friend’s. His schoolbooks were on the table, his bicycle in the kitchen. The untidiness of the apartment and its little garden were pleasing to Nedra; she could never live like that herself.

“Well, I was there with Arnaud,” Eve said.

“Where did you stay? I’ll bet Arnaud is great in Rome.”

“He loves it. You know, he speaks Italian, talks to everyone. Long conversations.”

“And what did you do?”

“Usually I kept on eating. You know, you sit in those restaurants for hours. He reads the menu, he reads everything on it. Then he discusses it with the waiter, he looks to see what people at the other tables are eating. If you’re in a hurry, forget it. He says, no, no, wait a minute, let me see what he says about the … the
fagioli.”

“The
fagioli …”

“I forget, what are
fagioli?
I don’t know. We were always eating them. He likes
bollito misto
, he likes
baccala
. We ate, we visited churches. He knows Italy.”

“I’d love to go with Arnaud.”

“He likes very small hotels. I mean,
minute
. He knows all of them. I learned a lot. There are certain kinds of bugs you can let live on your body, for instance.”

“What?”

“Well,
I
never did, but that’s what he claimed. He’ll never marry,” Eve said.

“Why do you say that?”

“I know it. He’s selfish, but it isn’t selfishness. He’s not afraid of being alone.”

“That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes. On the other hand, I am,” Eve said.

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m terrified of it. I think I fear it more than anything. He knows how to face it. He likes people. He likes to eat, go to the theater.”

“But eventually he’s alone. He has to be.”

“Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t bother him. He’s content, he knows we’re thinking of him.”

She was terrific, Eve; that was what he said. She was generous in every way. She gave books, dresses, friends, she graced rooms with her hard, dissolute body, her wanton mouth. The kind of woman seen on the arm of a boxing champion, the kind who is not married, who appears one morning with blackened eyes.

They were thinking of him.

“Yes,” Nedra agreed, “that is a difficulty. How is Arnaud?”

“It’s his six-month birthday next week. I mean, it’s halfway between.”

“Do you celebrate that?”

“I sent him some handkerchiefs,” Eve said. “He likes a certain kind of big workman’s handkerchief, and I found some. I don’t know, sometimes he drops out of sight for a week or two. Sometimes he even goes away. I wish I were a man.”

7

CHRISTMAS. TOM, THE OLD SUPER
, drinking as always. He had a lean face and an ulcerous ear. An honest man with bottles hidden in the basement behind the fuse boxes. He jumped back when Viri tried to hand him an envelope with some money in it.

“What’s that?” he cried. “No, no.”

“It’s a little something for Christmas.”

“Oh, no.” He had not shaved. “Not for me. No, no.” He seemed about to cry.

The draftsmen were bent over their tables in anticipation of their bonuses. The shops were glittering. It was dark before five.

Parked beneath a sign that prohibited it absolutely, Viri ran up the steps of the theater to buy tickets for
Nutcracker Suite
. It was a ritual; they saw it every year. Franca was taking ballet at Balanchine’s school. She had the calm and grace to be a dancer, but not the resolution. She was the youngest in the class, their legs rose in unison to dry commands, it was above Broadway, over a melancholy Schrafft’s.

Dusk in the city, the traffic, the buses pouring light, reflections in windows, optician’s shops. It was cold, splintering, a world filled with crowds passing newsstands, cut-rate drugstores, girls in Rolls-Royces, their faces lit by the dash.

Parking by hydrants as Viri went in to buy a single bottle of wine and write a check for it, or flat, white wedges of Brie, soft as porridge—nothing in abundance, nothing stored up—they cruised along Broadway. It was their natural street, their boulevard, they were blind to its ugliness. They went to Zabar’s, to the Maryland Market. They had certain places for everything, discovered in the days when they were first married and lived nearby.

The radio was playing, the parking lights were on. Nedra sat turned in her seat, talking to the children while in the store Viri was slowly moving to the head of the line. They could see his gestures through the window, could almost make out his words. The girl to whom he was speaking was sullen, rushed; she was picking up pastries with a square of waxed paper in her hand.

“You’ll have to speak up,” she said.

“Yes. What are those?”

“Apricot.”

“Ah,” he managed.

She had a wide, even mouth. She waited. He felt a sudden muteness, despair. Before him he was seeing a last image, as of a crude sister, of Kaya. Her breasts made him weak.

“Well?”

“Two of those, then,” he said.

She did not look at him; she had no time. When he took the package she placed before him, she was already talking to someone else.

In the car it was warm, they were joking, it smelled of the perfume Nedra was letting them try. They drove through residential streets to miss the traffic, back streets, little used ways, to the bridge. And then in the winter evening, the children grown quiet, home.

Nedra made tea in the kitchen. The fire was burning, the dog laid his head on their feet.

She adored Christmas. She had a wonderful idea for cards: she would make paper roses, roses of every shade, and send them in individual boxes. She spread the tissue on the table—not this, not that, she said—to find pieces she liked, ah, here! There was an almost theatrical excitement in the house. For days now, spread on window sills and tables in the rooms she preferred were beads, colored paper, yarns, pine cones painted gold. It was like a studio; profusion bathed one, caught one’s breath.

Viri was making an Advent calendar. He was late, as usual; a week of December had already passed. He had made a whole city, the sky dark as velvet cushions, stars cut with a razor blade, smoke rising from chimneys and vanishing in the night, a city that was a compendium of hidden courtyards, balconies, eaves. It was a city like Bath, like Prague, a city glimpsed through a keyhole, streets that had stairways, domes like the sun. Every window opened, so it seemed, and within was a picture. Nedra had given him an envelopeful, but there were others he had found himself. Some were actual rooms. There were animals sitting in chairs, birds, canal boats, moles and foxes, insects, Botticelli’s. Each one was put carefully in place and in secret—the children were not allowed to come near—and the elaborate façade of the city glued over it. There were details that only Franca and Danny would recognize—the names on street signs, curtains within certain windows, the number on a house. It was their life he was constructing, with its unique carapace, its paths, delights, a life of muted colors, of logic, surprise. One entered it as one enters a foreign country; it was strange, bewildering, there were things one instantly loved.