The Ravishing of Lol Stein (11 page)

"I won't leave Tatiana Karl."

"Good. You're supposed to see her again."

"Next Tuesday."

The violin stops. It withdraws, leaving behind it open craters of immediate memory. I am frightened, appalled by all other people but Lol.

"And you? When will I see you?"

She tells me Wednesday, sets a time and place.

I don't return home. Nothing is open in town. So I walk to the Beugners' house and go in by the garden gate. There is a light in Tatiana's window. I knock on the window. She is used to my knock. She dresses quickly. By now it's three in the morning. She is at great pains not to make any noise, although I am certain Peter Beugner knows exactly what is going on. But she's the one who insists on acting as though our affair were some great secret. She thinks that in South Tahla she passes for a dutiful and faithful wife. She intends to keep her reputation intact.

"But what about Tuesday?" she asks.

"Tuesday too."

I parked the car a fair distance from the gate. We drive past the Beugners' house with our lights out, then head for the Forest Hotel. In the car, Tatiana asks:

"How was Lol after we went home?"

"Rational."

W
HEN
I
WENT
to the window of the room in the Forest Hotel, where I was waiting for Tatiana Karl, on Tuesday at the appointed hour, dusk was just descending, and when I thought I could discern, between the hotel and the foot of the hill, a gray form, a woman about whose grayish blondness there could be no doubt whatsoever, I had a violent reaction, although I had been prepared for any eventuality, a very violent reaction I could not immediately define, something between terror and disbelief, horror and pleasure, and I was tempted by turn to cry out some warning, offer help, thrust her away forever, or involve myself forever with Lol Stein in all her complexities, fall in love with her. I stifled a cry, prayed to God for help, I ran out of the room, retraced my steps, paced the floor like a caged animal, too much alone to love or not to love, sick, sick of my frightful inability to admit what was happening.

Then my emotion abated to some slight degree, it contracted, and I was able to contain it. This moment coincided with the one when I discovered that she too must have been able to see me.

I'm lying. I did not move from the window, my worst fears confirmed, fighting back the tears.

S
UDDENLY
THE
BLONDNESS
was different than before, it moved then came to rest. I had the feeling she must have become aware that I had discovered her presence.

So we both looked at each other, or so I believed. For how long?

At my wit's end, I turned my head away, toward the right side of the rye field where she was not. From that direction, Tatiana, in a black suit, was arriving. She paid the taxi and started walking slowly past the alder trees.

Without knocking, she gently opened the door to the room. I asked her to come over and join me for a minute at the window. Tatiana came. I showed her the field of rye and the hill beyond. I was standing behind her. Thus it was that I showed her to Tatiana.

"We never look at the view. From this side of the hotel it's really quite beautiful."

Tatiana saw nothing, she returned to the other side of the room.

"No, it's a depressing view."

She called me.

"Come, there's nothing to see."

Without so much as the slightest preliminary caress, Jack Hold came over to Tatiana Karl.

Jack Hold possessed Tatiana Karl, ruthlessly. She offered no resistance, said nothing, refused no demand, marveled at the intensity of his passion.

Their pleasure was great, and mutual.

That moment when Lol was completely forgotten, that extended flash, in the unvarying time of her watchful wait, Lol wanted that moment to be, without harboring the slightest hope of perceiving it. It was.

Holding her in a tight embrace, Jack Hold could not bring himself to move away from Tatiana Karl. He talked to her. Tatiana Karl was not quite certain for whom the words which Jack Hold said to her were intended. She was under no illusion whatsoever that they were addressed to her, nor did she believe they were meant for some other woman who, that day, was absent, but thought rather that, through them, he was unburdening his heart. But why this rather than some other time? Tatiana sought the answer by thinking back on their affair.

"Tatiana, you're my life, my life, Tatiana."

That day, Tatiana listened to her lover's wild words, at first simply pleased and happy, as always, to be a vaguely defined woman in the arms of a man.

"Tatiana, I love you, I love you, Tatiana."

Tatiana acquiesced, in a comforting, maternally tender voice:

"Yes. I'm here. Here beside you."

At first simply pleased and happy, as always, to see how free someone could be with her, then, suddenly, taken aback by the pernicious intention of the words.

"Tatiana, my sister, Tatiana."

To hear that, to imagine what he might say if she were not Tatiana, ah! sweet words!

"How can I do even more to you, Tatiana?"

We must have been there for at least an hour now, all three of us, an hour since she had seen us appear in turn in the frame of the window, that mirror which reflected nothing and before which she must have shivered with delight to feel as excluded as she wished to be.

"Maybe, without realizing it . . ." Tatiana said, "maybe you and I . . ."

It was dark at last.

Again Jack Hold began, with ever increasing difficulty, to take Tatiana Karl. At one point, he spoke constantly to some other woman who could not see, who could not hear, and with whom, in intimate contact, he strangely seemed to find himself.

And then there came a time when Jack Hold no longer was able to take Tatiana Karl again.

Tatiana Karl thought that he had fallen asleep. She granted him this moment of respite, snuggled up against this person who was a thousand miles away, who was nowhere, in the fields, and waited until he would seize her again. But she waited in vain. As he lay sleeping, or so she thought, she spoke to him:

"Ah, those words, you shouldn't say them, they're dangerous."

Tatiana Karl was sorry. She was not the woman he might have learned to love. But why couldn't she be, why couldn't she be the one just as well as someone else? It was understood from the start that she would merely be his South Tahla mistress, that this would define the limits of their love, she did not want the sudden and overwhelming change in Michael Richardson to play any part in her affair. But now, suddenly, were these words of love wasted?

That evening, Tatiana says, for the first time since the Town Beach ball, she again discovered, she again savored the full sweetness of sentiment.

I went back to the window, she was still there, there in that field, alone in that field in a way she could never reveal to anyone. She told me, at the same time as I became aware of my love, of her inviolable self-sufficiency, a giantess with the hands of a child.

He went back to the bed, stretched out beside Tatiana Karl. They lay folded in each other's arms, bathed in the evening coolness. The sweet smell of ripe rye drifted in through the open window. He mentioned it to Tatiana.

"Can you smell the rye?"

She breathed in, she could smell it. She told him it was getting late and said that she had to go. She arranged to meet him three days later, fearing he would refuse. On the contrary, he agreed, without even checking to make sure he was free that day.

At the door, she asked him if he could give her any inkling as to his feelings.

"I want to see you again," he said, "to keep on seeing you again and again."

"You shouldn't talk like that," she said, "you really shouldn't."

After she was gone, I turned out the lights and waited, in order to give Lol a chance to leave the field and get back to town without any risk of running into me.

T
HE
FOLLOWING
DAY
I make arrangements to get away from the hospital for an hour in the afternoon. I go looking for her. I take a turn past the cinema in front of which she first found me. I drive past her house: the doors and windows of the living room are wide open, John Bedford's car is not there, it's Thursday, a school holiday, I can hear the laughter of a little girl coming from the lawn just outside the billiard room, then the mingled laughter of two little girls, she has only daughters, three of them. A maid with a white apron, young and rather pretty, comes out onto the steps, starts down a path toward the lawn, notices me parked in the street, smiles at me, and disappears. I drive off. I want to avoid going toward the Forest Hotel, I drive there anyway, stop the car and circle the hotel, keeping a good distance away as I do, I walk around the field of rye, the field is empty, she only comes when we're there, Tatiana and I. I leave. I drive slowly through the main streets of town, it occurs to me that she may be on one of the streets in Tatiana's neighborhood. There she is. She is walking along the boulevard which goes past Tatiana's house, about two hundred yards from the house. I park the car and follow her on foot. She walks all the way to the end of the boulevard. She is walking fairly fast, her gait easy and relaxed, a lovely sight to behold. She seems taller to me than on the other two occasions when I've seen her in the past. She is wearing her gray coat and a black, brimless hat. She turns right, into a street leading toward her own house, and disappears. Exhausted, I return to the car. So she's still taking her walks, and I can always manage a chance meeting if I can't bear to wait for our next scheduled date. She was walking rather fast, then at times she would slow down and stop, then off she would go again. She was taller than she had been in her house, taller and more slender. I recognized the gray coat, but not the black, brimless hat, she hadn't worn it in the rye field. I shall never accost her. Just as no one else accosts her. I shall never go up to her and say: "I couldn't wait for such and such a day, or such and such a time." Tomorrow. Does she go out on Sunday? Here it is Sunday. It is vast and beautiful. I'm not on duty at the hospital. One day separates me from her. For hours on end I go looking for her, in the car, on foot. She is nowhere to be found. Her house is still the same, with the bay windows open. John Bedford's car is still not there, no little-girl laughter now. At five o'clock I go to the Beugners for tea. Tatiana reminds me of Lol's invitation for the day after tomorrow, Monday. An awkward invitation. It's as though she were trying to keep up with the Joneses, Tatiana says, to act like a good middle-class housewife. This evening, this Sunday evening, I drive past her house again. Her house with the open bay windows. John Bedford's violin. She is there, she is sitting in the living room. Her hair is down. Three little girls move to and fro around her, busy doing something, but what it is I can't make out. She doesn't move, lost in her thoughts, says nothing to the children, the children say nothing to her. One by one—I remain there for a fairly long time—the little girls give her a kiss and leave the room. Lights go on up on the second story. She remains in the living room, in the same position as before. Suddenly she smiles to herself. I don't call out to her. She gets up, turns out the lights, and disappears. It's tomorrow.

It's a tearoom, not far from the Green Town station. Green Town is at least an hour by bus from South Tahla. She's the one who picked the place, this tearoom.

She was already there when I arrived. There weren't many people, it's still early. I spotted her immediately, sitting by herself, surrounded by empty tables. From the other end of the room, she smiled at me, a pleased, conventional smile, different from any smile I had seen from her before.

She greeted me pleasantly, almost politely. But when she lifted her eyes, I saw them filled with a wild, crazy joy with which her whole being must have been inflamed: the joy of being there, across from him, across from the secret he implies, a secret she will never reveal, and he knows it.

"My God! how I've looked for you, I've tramped the streets looking for you."

"I'm a great walker," she said. "Did I forget to tell you? I go for long walks every day."

"You told Tatiana," I said.

Once again I have the feeling I can stop right there, be satisfied with no more than simply having her there to look at.

Merely seeing her unnerves me terribly. She makes no demands as far as conversation goes, and is capable of enduring silence indefinitely. I want to do something, say something, a long-drawn-out bellow made up of all words fused into one and reduced to the same magma, intelligible to Lol Stein. I say nothing. I say:

"I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen."

"We're moving toward something. Even if nothing happens, we're moving toward some goal."

"What goal?"

"I don't know. The only thing I know anything about is the immobility of life. Therefore, when this immobility is destroyed, I know it."

She is again wearing the white dress she was wearing the first time I saw her at Tatiana Karl's. It is visible under her gray raincoat, which is unbuttoned. As I look at the dress, she takes off her raincoat, revealing her bare arms. Summer is in her cool arms.

Leaning toward me, she whispers:

"Tatiana."

I knew that she was asking me a question.

"We saw each other on Tuesday."

She knew that. She becomes beautiful, that same sort of beauty that, late at night four days before, I had snatched away from her.

She asks in a rush:

"How was it?"

I didn't answer immediately. She thought I hadn't understood the question. She goes on:

"How was Tatiana?"

If she hadn't mentioned Tatiana Karl, I would have done it myself. She is full of anxiety. She doesn't know herself what is going to ensue, what the reply is going to lead to. We are both face to face with the question, her admission.

I accept this. I already accepted it on Tuesday. And probably even from the very first moment I met her.