The Ravishing of Lol Stein (2 page)

Tatiana, her best friend, still there too, was stroking her hand, which lay on a small table beneath the flowers. Yes, it was Tatiana who had offered her this gesture of friendship throughout the night.

With dawn, Michael Richardson's eyes had searched for someone at the far end of the room. He had not found Lol.

Anne-Marie Stretter's daughter had long since left the ball and gone home. Her mother, it seemed, had not noticed her leave, or missed her presence.

Doubtless Lol, like Tatiana, like the couple themselves, had failed to take into account this other aspect of the matter: that with daylight it would come to an end.

The orchestra stopped playing. The ballroom seemed virtually empty. There were only a few couples left, including the one they formed, and, behind the green plants, Lol and that other girl, Tatiana Karl. They had failed to realize that the orchestra had stopped playing: after the break, at the moment when it should have started in again, they had moved back together, like robots, deaf to the fact that there was no longer any music. It was at this point that the musicians filed past them one by one, their violins enclosed in funereal cases. They had made a motion as if to stop them, perhaps to speak to them, but in the end they did not.

Michael Richardson wiped his forehead with his hand and scanned the room for some sign of eternity. Lol Stein's smile, then, was one such sign, but he failed to see it.

For a long time they had stared at each other in silence, not knowing what to do, how to emerge from the night.

It was at this point that a woman well along in years, Lol's mother, had entered the room. Insulting and reviling them, she asked them what they had done to her child.

Who could have informed Lol's mother about what was taking place that night at the Town Beach casino? It could not have been Tatiana Karl, Tatiana Karl had not left Lol Stein's side. Had she come on her own?

They glanced around, to see for whom these insults were intended. They did not respond to them.

When Lol's mother found her child behind the cluster of green plants, a tender, plaintive moan flooded the empty room.

When her mother had reached her side and had touched her, Lol had at last let go of her grip on the table. It was only then that she had realized, vaguely, that something was drawing to a close, without quite knowing what it might be. The screen which her mother formed between them and her was her first inkling of it. With a powerful shove of her hand, she knocked her mother down. The vague, emotion-filled wail ceased.

Lol cried out for the first time. Then, once again, there were hands around her shoulders. She surely had no idea whose they were. She would not let anyone touch her face.

They began to move, to walk toward the walls, searching for imaginary doors. The half-light of dawn was the same indoors and out. At last they had found the way to the real door and had begun to move slowly toward it.

Lol had gone on screaming all sorts of things that made perfect sense: it wasn't late, it was only the early summer dawn that made it seem later than it really was. She had begged Michael Richardson to believe her. But as they kept on walking—they had tried to prevent her but she had wrenched free—she had run to the door and hurled herself against it. The door, latched to a jamb at floor level, had resisted her efforts.

With lowered eyes, they moved past her. Anne-Marie Stretter began to descend the stairs, and then he, Michael Richardson. Lol's eyes followed them across the garden. When she could no longer see them, she slumped to the floor, unconscious.

L
OL
, M
ADAME
S
TEIN
relates, was taken home to South Tahla, and remained in her room, without once leaving it, for several weeks.

Her story, as well as that of Michael Richardson, became a subject of common gossip.

During this period, they say, Lol's collapse was marked by signs of suffering. But what is one to make of suffering which has no apparent cause?

She kept on repeating the same things: that it wasn't late, it was only summer that made it seem so.

She uttered her own name with anger: Lol Stein—she always referred to herself by her full name.

Then, more explicitly, she complained of being unbearably tired of waiting that way. She was bored, so bored she wanted to scream. And, in fact, she did scream that she had nothing to think about while she was waiting, she demanded, with childlike impatience, an immediate remedy for this deficiency. Yet none of the distractions that had been offered her had in any way affected this condition.

Then Lol stopped complaining altogether. Little by little, she even stopped talking. Her anger waned, grew discouraged. The only times she did speak was to say how impossible it was for her to express how boring and long it was, how interminable it was, to be Lol Stein. They asked her to try and pull herself together. She didn't understand why she should, she said. The difficulty she experienced in searching for a single word seemed insurmountable. She acted as though she expected nothing further from life.

Was she thinking of something, of herself? they asked her. She didn't understand the question. It seemed as though she took everything for granted, and that the infinite weariness of being unable to escape from the state she was in was not something that had to be thought about, that she had become a desert into which some nomad-like faculty had propelled her, in the interminable search for what? They did not know. Nor did she offer any answer.

Lol's collapse, her state of depression, her immense suffering—time alone would be the healer, they kept saying. Her collapse was judged to be less serious than her initial delirium, it was not expected to last very long or result in any basic change in Lol's psychic constitution. Her extreme youth would soon bring her out of it. Her condition was easily explainable: Lol was suffering from a temporary inferiority complex for the simple reason that she had been jilted by the man from Town Beach. She was presently paying—it was bound to happen sooner or later—the price for the strange absence of pain she had experienced during the ball itself.

Then, although she still remained aloof and uncommunicative, she again began to ask for something to eat, for the window to be opened, to be allowed to sleep. And before long she began to enjoy having someone beside her to talk to her. She agreed with everything that was said and related in her presence, with every assertion made. To her, every remark was of equal importance. She was an avid listener.

She never asked for any news of them. She posed no questions. And when they thought it necessary to apprise her of their separation—she only learned later of his departure—the calm way she reacted was taken as a good sign. Her love for Michael Richardson was dying. There could be no question about it, it had been with a part of her recently-recovered reason that she had learned this news, this rightful reversal of events, this rightful retribution which was her due.

The first time she went out was at night, alone and without telling anyone she was going.

John Bedford was walking on the sidewalk. He was about a hundred yards from her—she had just that moment come out—in front of her family's house. When she saw him, she hid behind the gatepost.

John Bedford's account of that night's events, as told to Lol herself, contributes, it seems to me, to her recent history. They are the last clear facts. After which, they fade almost completely from this story for ten years.

John Bedford did not see her leave the house, he took her to be some girl out walking, someone who was frightened by him, a man alone, so late at night. The boulevard was deserted.

Her silhouette was young, lissome, and when he came abreast of the gate he looked in.

What caught his attention was her smile, an apprehensive smile, admittedly, but none the less clearly overjoyed at seeing this chance stroller, him, coming by that evening.

He stopped and returned her smile. She emerged from her hiding place and came toward him.

Nothing in her manner or way of dress gave any hint of her condition, except perhaps her hair, which was in disarray. But it was possible that she might have been running, and there was a bit of wind that night. It was entirely possible that she had run to this spot from the other end of the deserted boulevard, thought John Bedford, for the simple reason that she had been frightened.

"I can walk with you, if you're afraid."

She did not answer. Nor did he press her. He began to walk on, and she started walking beside him, with obvious pleasure, almost sauntering.

It was when they reached the end of the boulevard, out where the suburbs began, that John Bedford first realized that she was not headed anywhere in particular.

This intrigued John Bedford no end. Of course the idea of insanity occurred to him, but he dismissed it. As he dismissed the notion of an amorous adventure. She was doubtless playing some game. She was very young.

"Which way are you going?"

She tried to concentrate, glanced back down the boulevard, from where they had just come, but did not point back in that direction.

"Well . . ." she said.

He burst out laughing, and she laughed with him, wholeheartedly.

"Come on, let's go in this direction."

Meekly, she went back the way they had come, following him.

Still, he was more and more intrigued by her silence. Because it was coupled with an extraordinary curiosity about the places they were passing, no matter how completely ordinary they might be. It was as though she had not only just arrived in town, but that she had come there for the specific purpose of looking for or discovering something—a house, a garden, a street, even some object which, presumably, was extremely important to her, something she could find only at night.

"I live not far from here," said John Bedford. "If you're looking for something, perhaps I can help you."

She answered distinctly:

"I'm not."

Whenever he stopped, she stopped too. He amused himself by testing her. But she failed to notice the game he was playing. He continued walking. Once he stopped for a considerable length of time: she waited for him. John Bedford gave up the game. He let her do as she pleased. While seeming to lead the way, he followed her.

He noticed that by being extremely careful, by pretending to follow her every time they turned a corner, her momentum carried her along, she kept on walking forward, but no more or no less purposefully than the wind which sweeps into whatever nooks and crannies it chances to find.

He made her walk a little longer, then it occurred to him, in order to see what her reaction would be, to come back to the boulevard, to the spot where he had found her. She stiffened visibly as they passed a certain house. He recognized the gate behind which she had hidden. The house was large. The front door was still open.

It was at this point that it struck him that she might be Lol Stein. He did not know the Stein family, but he knew that she lived somewhere in that part of town. Like all the solid, middle-class citizens in town, most of whom spent their vacations in Town Beach, he knew what had happened to the girl.

He stopped, took her hand. She did not resist. He kissed the hand, there was a stale odor about it, an odor of dust, on her ring finger was an extremely beautiful engagement ring. The newspapers had already carried the story of wealthy Michael Richardson's liquidation of his land holdings, and of his departure for Calcutta.

The ring exploded in a dazzle of light. Lol looked at it, yes, she too looked at it in the same curious way she looked at everything else.

"You're Miss Stein, aren't you?"

She nodded several times, uncertainly at first, then with more and more assurance.

"Yes."

Still meekly, she followed him home.

There she lapsed into a state of happy nonchalance. He talked to her. He told her that he was an executive in an airplane factory, that he was an avid amateur musician, that he had just come back from a vacation in France. She listened to him talk. He said that he was happy to have met her.

"What do you want?"

In spite of a visible effort, she could not manage a reply. He let the matter drop.

Her hair had the same odor as her hand, the odor of some long-unused object. She was beautiful, but there was a sadness about her, as though the blood were slow to circulate in her veins, a grayish pallor. Her features were already beginning to fade into that pallor, to bury themselves anew in the depths of her flesh. She had grown younger. She looked no more than fifteen. Even when I met her later, she still had that morbidly young look about her.

She wrenched her eyes away from the intensity of his gaze and, with an imploring whimper, said:

"I have plenty of time, oh, how long it is!"

She raised herself toward him, someone suffocating, coming up for air, and he kissed her. That was what she wanted. She gripped him tightly and returned his kiss, kissed him hard enough to hurt him, as if she loved him, this total stranger. He said to her, and his voice was kindly:

"Maybe you two can start all over again."

He liked her. She aroused in him his special penchant for young girls, girls not completely grown into adults, for pensive, impertinent, inarticulate young girls. He broke the news to her without meaning to:

"Perhaps he'll come back."

She groped for words, said slowly:

"Who's gone away?"

"Didn't you know? Michael Richardson sold off all his real estate. He's gone to India, to join Mrs. Stretter."

She shook her head the way people often do, a trifle sadly.

"You know," he said, "I didn't blame them the way most people did."

He excused himself, saying he was going to call her mother. She made no effort to stop him.

Her mother, after she had received John Bedford's call, arrived a second time to bring her daughter home. It was the last time. This time Lol followed her, as a few moments before she had followed John Bedford.

John Bedford asked for her hand in marriage without ever having laid eyes on her again.