Authors: Roberta Latow
‘Jay.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t worry about it, it’ll all be all right.’
‘And what about all this morning stuff?’
‘You’ll have to find another way to get your day going, Jay, but don’t do anything hasty now. Don’t say something you’ll regret.’
‘Oh, I don’t intend to.’
‘Good, come on. The children will be up and downstairs. It’s a wonderful day.’ She kissed him on the cheek.
‘You do love me?’ he asked. A man less vain might have begun to doubt it.
‘I’ve always loved you, Jay. I just kept forgetting what a selfish pig you are, that’s all.’
They both laughed. ‘How could you forget that? The whole world knows it. And I would have thought my ex-wives had drilled that into you by now.’
That was one of his endearing features, he could face up to himself. But to think that it meant he was about to change would have been a triumph of hope over experience. Pigs would fly? Not this one.
About three in the afternoon, Rick turned up and a group assembled to undertake a long walk in the park. It was crisp and cold out. The kind of weather that wanted to snow but was too cold to do it. Mimi felt terribly happy: Rick noticed that at once. There were about eight of them meandering in pairs over a stone bridge. Rick, with one arm around Mimi’s shoulder, steered them away from the others to lean against the side of the bridge. For some moments they stood together, viewing the park in its cold winter splendour, the fringe of buildings and skyscrapers in the distance, one of the best of New York City’s landscapes.
‘You seem different from yesterday,’ he told her.
‘Something has happened.’
‘Good or bad?’
‘Oh, good. Very good.’
Rick smiled, feeling a tremendous surge of affection for her, and bent down and kissed her with an intensity that he had not displayed for some time. They gazed into each other’s eyes. It was a long, searching look that passed between them.
‘I’m having a moment of déjà-vu,’ he told her, a sexual huskiness in his voice.
‘Oh? You think we’ve lived this moment before?’
‘I know we’ve lived this moment before. It was on a Greek island called Patmos, when we first met. I felt your hunger then, I feel it now.’
‘Hunger for what?’ she asked, rather coyly, he thought.
‘Something to still your heart.’
That disarmed her. ‘You can be very perceptive about me, Rick.’
‘Ah, if only I had been clever, too.’ He gave her a cryptic look. ‘You were like a starved child who didn’t know how to come out and play with life then. I was your first sexual playmate. I sense now you might be ready to come out and play again.’
‘I think you may be right. But that was a long time ago. I have to ask myself, what about a woman now in mid-life, restless, with the heart of a young woman, still with some of the innocence of a child? I’ve become restless, Rick, with my children, my marriage, my work. It’s all moved on, it’s all changing. But it’s my life, and I think I have to go out and add to it. Or die. I found out something: no one else does it for you, adds to your life, no matter how much you think they do. That’s an illusion. You do it all yourself.’
They were lingering too long. The children had walked further ahead of them and were calling for Rick and Mimi to catch up. Hand in hand they resumed their walk. ‘The things you do in the name of survival,’ she said.
‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
‘Merely that I’ve become a mistress of compromise in the name of survival, only to find out at my age that survival isn’t everything. Sometimes you can pay too high a price for it. My mother did, in a concentration camp, and it haunted her for the remainder of her life. Finally she committed suicide. I read something recently about survivors, the Jews of the Holocaust, and how many of them in their old age commit suicide as they come closer to facing death once more. Maybe they made too many compromises for their survival. You …’ She hesitated, as if she wasn’t quite sure she should go on, but at last she smiled at him and continued, ‘It was you who taught me to play with life, a lesson I haven’t forgotten.’
She kissed him on the cheek, then put her arm through
his and treated him to that enchanting Mimi smile. They continued walking.
‘Has Christmas triggered all this?’ he asked her, not at all unhappy with what she was telling him.
‘No, not Christmas. Jay, actually. World events, maybe. The sheer passing of time. It could simply be that. Or else facing my own mortality. Who knows? But maybe a combination of all those things has made me restless, wanting to begin all over again. Perhaps this time without survival so much in mind. After all, I have done all that. Maybe I am a woman with many lives to live. This time around I might try one with less compromise and more passion in it.’ She began to laugh.
‘Have I missed something?’ he asked.
‘Yes, actually you have. Only this morning I accused Jay of having no passion for me. All the passion he has in his life is for himself. What he doles out is the left-overs. He has been cheating me of real passion all our married life.’
‘Don’t be hard on him, he’s been a great husband and a good father.’
‘A selfish bastard, a male chauvinist pig,’ she added.
‘Still a great guy.’ They both began to laugh.
‘He is, isn’t he? No, I won’t be hard on him. He did after all give me what I wanted, only not everything I wanted.’
The air seemed raw, a chill to it that would gnaw you to the bone. By the time the group was returning to the house they felt it badly. They rang the front doorbell several times before Ben, one of Jay’s sons from his first marriage, opened the door and greeted Mimi with a kiss.
‘You look like you could use a whisky.’
‘I’m frozen.’
‘We’re all downstairs in the kitchen where it’s warm. There’s a good big fire going,’ he told her.
‘You’re not going to believe this but I’m hungry again.’ That was Rick.
Robert, Mimi’s youngest, announced, ‘I’m going to try
and hold off for another hour before I pig out again.’
There was a rush to shed mufflers and fur hats, jackets and coats, and fur-lined boots. Mimi loved all that, the coming and going of people, the house filled with children, friends, family. She watched the brood as they dispersed, some up the stairs to the drawing room, others down to the kitchen, some to the library. She lined up the wet boots, shook out several scarves.
She felt happy, satisfied with her lot, the more so for understanding that a change was upon them. She smiled, content but a realist about the future. She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at herself in the hall mirror. Rick came up behind her. He stroked her hair and put his cheek next to hers. They gazed at their reflections.
‘What’s happening, Mimi?’
‘Destiny at work.’
He took her hand in his, clasped it and put the palm to his lips to kiss it. ‘Then I’ll say goodbye.’
‘Why goodbye?’ she asked, surprised and somewhat disturbed.
‘Because I have always known that I was never your destiny, any more than Jay is.’ There was emotion in his words, yet she saw affection and joy in his eyes for her. Abruptly he left her standing in the hall and joined the others in the kitchen.
Mimi trembled with emotion. Her present life was quite swiftly slipping into the past. Briefly she remembered their sexual passion for each other. Twice during the years since the twins were born they had had brief sexual encounters: a passionate, uncontrollably sensual few days in his house in Malibu, and another in Mexico. She had to close her eyes to calm her heart which was racing.
She started down the stairs. She could hear Jay talking. ‘Gorbachev’s
Glasnost
and
Perestroika
have a certain logic, but we’re talking here of a despotic empire, multi-ethnic, all at very different levels of civilisation. How do you liberalize
that? I think it takes another kind of logic. But Gorbachev’s grand design, whatever happens to it, we have to face. The power structure in the world is changing. It’s inevitable with what’s happening there and in the Third World, and it’s going to gather momentum faster than you think. Just look at what’s happened already. More elbow room was available and we’ve seen spontaneous action from those lost Communist-dominated countries outside the USSR. When the opportunity was there they grabbed it – first the Poles and the Hungarians. That spirit of defiance was like a tonic for Eastern Europe. It broke out in East Germany, and then in my wife’s own country, Czechoslovakia, and to a lesser degree maybe in little Bulgaria.’
Jay was laying down the law about the effect of Gorbachev’s attempts to liberalize the Soviet Union. An avid TV-watcher, he had gathered opinions as well as seeing the events. He could pronounce authoritatively on trends in Eastern Europe and particularly on what he termed ‘my wife’s own country’. He meant Czechoslovakia. He made it sound more significant than ‘little Bulgaria’, which he allowed to have had its share of upheaval too.
‘I don’t think we in the West appreciate what’s really happening.’ Mimi recognized the voice of a friend of theirs, a delegate from Great Britain to the United Nations.
She heard her son, ‘I’m not so sure we don’t appreciate what’s happening, maybe take a charge of excitement from it ourselves. I was there with my Dad in Berlin on November 10th. Then I was told it had been one of the great moments in history, when they broke through the Berlin Wall. Its coming down has changed the world. Maybe it’s the speed of it all that we don’t appreciate here, the swiftness of change. Having to respond and not knowing how because the changes are so enormous. Everywhere you look countries are being transformed. Even that’s a new kind of revolution. It begins to look more like a game of chess.’
‘They still shoot people who demonstrate on the streets.’ That was Jay again. ‘Only Romania,’ he continued ‘insisted on a real bloody revolution. Karel, Mimi’s father, would have loved to have been here, to have seen this day. The end of the Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, totalitarian structure of power in Europe. Finished for ever, one hopes.’
Mimi stopped on the stair and flattened herself against the wall, listening to Jay talk about her father.
‘He predicted all this, Karel did. Thirty years ago he was prophesying all this. Well, which of them wasn’t, those old patriots? It was all that kept them alive. They had to believe it. No one else would. He would have loved to have returned to his Czechoslovakia, to see it for the first time able to shape the lives of its people without foreign interference. I wish Karel, or at least his daughter, had been in Prague in that exhilarating week in November. He would have said that it is our children, his grandchildren, who brought us freedom. It’s true. It was the intervention of those admirably disciplined young people that created the Velvet Revolution.’
‘You are quite right, Mr Steindler. It is all happening so quickly, and with so little violence that it seems more like a miracle than the active will of the people. I have no doubts that my friend Vaclav Havel will be elected President of our country. This is a new world.’
Mimi recognized the voice. It was full of hope and vigour. He spoke perfect English, but with an accent and tone reminiscent of her father’s. She felt quite shaken, touched to her very soul to hear it again.
She took a deep breath and descended the remaining stairs into the kitchen. Alexander was standing at the fireplace, glass in hand, and addressing her family and friends.
‘I’m full of hope and gratitude and belief that we can rise above the demoralizing effects of the hammer and sickle.’
‘But what a hard and long road,’ offered Mimi at the foot
of the stairs. Everyone turned to face her. ‘But exciting.’
She went to stand next to Angelica. ‘Thanks, Jay.’
‘For what?’
‘For appreciating my father.’ She left it at that and quickly stepped forward to shake Alexander’s hand.
‘It was very presumptuous of me to call on you like this, especially on Christmas Day. I would have phoned but I didn’t have a telephone number. I never use the telephone unless I must. Not my favourite instrument. You don’t remember me?’ Alexander felt compelled to say that: she seemed to him so aloof while he was so excited at seeing her again.
‘Yes, I do. I don’t remember much of that dreadful forty-eight hours in Prague, but I do remember you.’
‘Oh, good.’ He smiled, and a light came into his eyes. Mimi felt his warmth, his passion, and smiled back at him and suggested they find a more private place to talk, since he had taken the trouble to seek her out.
They were alone at last in the library. It seemed to Mimi an eternity from kitchen to the book-lined retreat. Alexander seemed somehow more handsome than she remembered. In his early forties, and still the sensualist, he was the man for whom she yearned in the quiet of the night.
He wasn’t particularly tall, nor was his a movie-star handsomeness, but there was about him a macho manliness that was exciting and engaging, and only intensified by the stillness and calm he projected. His chunky physique was matched by an intense sensitivity. Such contrasts enhanced the interest of him. Yes, she felt physically attracted to him. Possibly even more so free of the stress of that day they met near Prague, or the hysterics that preceded their wild passionate fucking. She had never, not for one day, forgotten what it was like to have his cock taming her cunt. Alexander carrying her away from the pain of mourning into sexual ecstasy.
It was a small thing but it stuck in her mind: he had
shaved off his moustache. He was better dressed than the last time she had seen him and well tailored, the salt-and-pepper tweed jacket, the blue shirt with button-down collar, the wool tie in a striking rust colour, and grey flannel trousers with turn-ups. He had seemed shabbier at her father’s funeral. He had a seductive charm, a natural sensuality that she found extremely attractive when alone with him in the seclusion of the library. That had not changed.
Alexander felt a surge of desire for Mimi. He had not forgotten her, nor her grief, nor their sexual rutting in the tall grass in the field. Did that sound crass? It wasn’t meant to, but they had been like two crazed animals whose intent was to couple to the death. She had held for him an immediate sensual attraction. A
coup de foudre,
not utterly unlike one featured in a novel he wrote soon after meeting her. His heart had been touched by the sight of Mimi Steindler, the daughter of Count Karel Stefanik. She had not become an obsession but a secret love, an unattainable goddess. Thus she had remained in the back of his mind as he got on with his life. Destiny cannot be rushed, only obeyed.
Alexander smiled at her, he couldn’t help it. He thought himself such a fool, a fool in love.
She went directly to him and raised his hands and kissed them, first one then the other, several times. He touched her hair, ran his fingers through it. He closed his eyes and tried to still his heart. He placed an arm around her shoulders and they studied each other’s faces. Just enjoying the scent of each other, the warmth, their pleasure at seeing each other again. ‘You’re so changed without your moustache. If I had seen a photo of you I might have not known you.’