In Search of Love and Beauty (13 page)

For answer, Louise rushed off to the table to hug and kiss Natasha who went on eating cake; she was used to these attentions from both Louise and Marietta. Of course, it had been a long time since they had been able to take such liberties with Mark.

He didn't like them taken with Natasha either; he
frowned and said, “Leave her alone, Gran, can't you see she's enjoying her cake.”

His wise, admonitory air made her laugh; she even dared ruffle his hair and laughed even more to see the way he rebuked her by smoothing it down again. “Look how cross he is,” she said to Leo on the other side of the table.

“Take no notice,” Leo aligned himself with Mark. “She's crazy. All women are crazy. You have to look out for them.” He jerked his head toward Regi on the sofa: “What's the matter with her? Why is she not joining us? Madam!” he called. “Won't you give us the exquisite pleasure of your enchanting company?” He and Mark exchanged looks of amusement.

“You have the most horrible hideous loud voice, did you know that?” Regi complained from her sickbed. “You always sound as if you're addressing an audience. I suppose you do it so often it's impossible for you to speak like a normal human being anymore.”

“A normal human being,” Leo repeated. “That's an ambiguous, not to say a tricky, concept.”

“There, now we're going to have a clever lecture for free,” Regi said from the other room. Getting into the old game of sparring with Leo, she seemed for the moment to forget her headache.

“Would you call yourself a normal human being?” Leo inquired of Mark. “If so, where do you set up your standards? And what about her?” He pointed at Natasha and glanced at her too, but only for a moment: there was something in the way Natasha was staring at him—was it in fear? in fascination? She often looked at him like that. He turned away and said irritably, “She has chocolate in her hair.”

Mark found this to be true and wiped it off, taking the opportunity of wiping the rest of her face too.

“Do you think your grandmother's normal?” Leo continued
his discussion with Mark. “And your mother—where is she, by the way?—and Regi over there—”

“Come in here so I can hear all your wonderful philosophy!” Regi called in challenge.

“Yes, where is Mother?” Mark said with the frown that, even at that early age, characterized the sense of responsibility he felt toward the women in his family. “It's time to cut the cake. May I leave the table, Gran? Thank you,” he answered himself while Louise was still crying out, “Bless you, little worm!”

Mark searched for his mother in various rooms—the apartment was as spacious as a house—and found her in Louise's bedroom. Marietta was on the flowered chaise longue which stood at the foot of the bed. This bed was the marital one Louise had shared with Bruno, and also Bruno's mother with his father, so it was old and heavy with primal scenes.

“We're supposed to be celebrating Gran's birthday,” Mark said, looking at his mother where she lay on the chaise longue, smoking and thinking. “Everyone's waiting for you. We're going to cut the cake.”

“Go away,” Marietta said but corrected herself at once, calling out, “Come here, come here, darling!”

Mark continued to stand at the door: “Natasha's covered with chocolate. Someone will have to clean her up.”

“I'll do it. Only just sit with me for one moment, darling.”

“I haven't got time.”

“Mark, give Mother a kiss.”

At this familiar line, his frown deepened. “Not now,” he said and retreated before any demands could be made of him. He was anxious to have the sixty candles lit—the birthday party had to be conducted along its proper lines, and he felt himself to be the only one there responsible enough to do so.

But—wouldn't you know it—by the time he returned to
the dining room, Leo and Louise had wandered away from the table, leaving the cake unlit and uncut and Natasha smearing herself with the remains of her own plate as well as Mark's. No one heard his protests, for they were busy talking around the sofa on which Regi lay. In complete disgust, he made Natasha get down from her chair and led her away to wash her in the bathroom.

Regi had really forgotten her headache now. Although her affair with Leo had ended long ago, there was still something very potent to her in his presence; or perhaps this stemmed from the weight of all their past together, hers and Louise's and his, and all their feelings for each other.

And especially Louise's for Leo: this was her sixtieth birthday; she was a tall, dignified, gray-haired figure in a burgundy silk gown and black pumps, but when he was there she still trembled. The air vibrated with her feelings for him. It astonished Regi, irritated her, and as always she couldn't keep off the subject: “What do you see in him?” she asked for the thousandth time. “It's because you never meet anyone new. You need to get out among people instead of sitting here with grandchildren—and him,” she said, pointing at Leo comfortable in the deepest chair in the house. “You look terrible,” she told him. “You've aged a hundred years. And what are these ridiculous baby clothes you wear?” she said, referring to his pastel-colored bib overalls. “As if it isn't perfectly obvious that you're in your second childhood.”

“It's practical,” Leo said, amused and unperturbed, smoking his cigar.

“I'm surprised you let him run around this way,” she told Louise. “But of course you always let him do just what he likes. You've never known how to control him.”

“No,” Louise said. There was a big brown leather pouf which she drew up close by Leo's armchair. She sat down on it; she leaned her broad back against his leg and he let her rest there.

“It's my opinion,” Regi was saying, lying opposite them on the sofa, “that a woman has to use her influence with a man. She must mold him, make him into a better person, or what's the point of a relationship?”

She felt Leo looking at her over the top of Louise's head. He had always looked at her with amusement, and she didn't know that it was a different kind of amusement now. Unconsciously, in a movement that was ancient and instinctual in her, she coquetted one hip and her legs at him. She thought this was still effectual—and why not? since her clothes and hair and jewelry were as bright as ever and her teeth even better for she had had them all capped. She was particularly proud that she had kept her figure, unaware that it was no longer svelte but completely skeletal.

“All you've done all your life,” she accused Louise, “is spoil him.”

“It's my birthday,” Louise said cheerfully, “you can't make me quarrel with him today.” He dug his leg deeper into her back and this gave her great happiness and security.

“I give you up as a bad case,” Regi said. “And my head is splitting. I wish Ralph were here to give me my head massage, he's so gentle, you have no idea; when he does it, I just go to sleep like a baby.”

Mark, leading a washed Natasha by the hand, came into the salon: “We want to cut the cake.”

“Call your mother,” Leo said.

“Mother won't come. She's in Gran's bedroom.”

“I'll
get her,” Leo said. He stubbed out his cigar and withdrew his leg from behind Louise's back without warning, so that she toppled and had to steady herself.

Leo went into Louise's bedroom. He shut the door behind him. He looked down at Marietta lying on the chaise longue—a very different sight from Regi laid out in the salon. Leo ran the tip of his tongue over his lips, which were as full and moist as ever.

“Leo, please go away and leave me alone. I don't want to talk to you.”

“But I want to talk to you very much.”

He turned the key in the door to lock it. He lowered his great bulk on to the end of her chaise longue. He said: “Anyway, I think it's time you and I had a little chat together.”

“Thank you very much. I don't need an analyst.” Marietta couldn't help laughing—here she was lying on a couch and there was Leo, who had by now a reputation for his own brand of psychospiritual therapy, sitting at the foot of it.

“No,” Leo said, “that's not what I was thinking of at all.”

Marietta couldn't believe it: he put his big heavy hand on her, first on her ankle, and then as she watched incredulously, he let it slide upward on her calf, and then under her dress, on her thigh and next he slid it in the top of her tights. “You're crazy,” she said—but she herself seemed to be, for she was still laughing.

Leo just kept on. He didn't say anything more; he couldn't, he was breathing too heavily.

“Crazy,” Marietta was repeating. She too was beginning to pant a little—but with what? Here was the man she detested more than anyone else in the world—an ugly old man who was bringing his hands into her most secret places, and she didn't do anything except laugh and say “crazy.” Then she said, “Not now, Leo” and “Not here.” “Why not here and now,” he said, and anyway things had gone too far. He lay on top of her and held her with one hand and with the other he fumbled at the placket of his ludicrous nursery suit. Marietta was in a turmoil of conflicting feelings. Principally, there was fear: supposing this delicate little chaise longue broke beneath them (he was very heavy); or if they made too loud a noise, he in his excitement or she in whatever it was she was in, and the others—Mark! Louise!—heard them and came and rattled at the door? And then there was fear of him too, on top of her
and so big; and fear of herself—of what she was feeling now, more intensely, if the truth were told, than with anyone ever before, just as the hate she had for him was more intense than anything she had ever had for any other man.

Louise and Mark were lighting the candles on the cake. They had carried it into the salon and stood it on a round marble table there, near Regi, so that she could enjoy it too. But she wasn't enjoying it; she looked at them with a jaundiced eye as they lighted all those candles. And as if that weren't bad enough, there was a big sixty written in icing in the center. “There's absolutely no need to shout it out over the housetops,” Regi grumbled. On her own birthday she never had more than just one candle.

They had got them all lighted now—no, there was one left, Mark saw it and lighted it, and then he said, “I'm going to get Mother.” He went to Louise's bedroom, and when he found it locked, he was really annoyed and called angrily through the door.

“Yes, yes, I'm coming!” Marietta called back.

And in fact, she and Leo soon reappeared. Then all was ready. Even Regi managed to get up and they stood around the blazing cake and sang for Louise who held her hands clasped before her—one of them with a widow's two wedding rings—giving thanks in her heart for such an abundance of happiness with all her dearest ones around her.

Marietta went to India every year, and on her sixth visit she had her most meaningful encounter there, or her deepest immersion and enchantment (after that, it all went downhill). This was when, on Ahmed's recommendation, she visited a woman singer who lived in a town in a Rajasthani desert state. Her name was Sujata; she was a Hindu woman though, as happened often among musicians, with Muslim affiliations. Sujata received Marietta lavishly; at first because Ahmed
had sent her and because she was a foreign guest, and then afterward for her own sake, as a friend.

Marietta had never had a friend like Sujata. She was a queen, regal in her personality and in her manner of living. She had a large, strangely assorted, ill-defined household where it was impossible to tell who was who and why they were there: except that they were there because of her, living on her bounty and in her affections. Growing up in a family of courtesans where every girl was taught to sing, dance, and be delightful to men, Sujata had turned out to be one of those jewels that every family like hers hopes and prays for—a great singer. Her fame soon spread, and she became very much in demand to sing at weddings, state and public entertainments, and former royal courts. Her fees rose and so did her status and that of her entire family. They gave up their room on the floor of a house divided up between a dozen families like theirs and rented one that was entirely their own. It became known as Sujata's house and retained the name long after her death and when the rest of her family was scattered.

Marietta never discovered where everyone slept in the house except that a great many of them slept together, crammed side by side into some little room or out in the courtyard. Marietta herself, as an honored guest, was the only one besides Sujata to be given a room of her own. It was a tiny, whitewashed cubbyhole from where she could hear and smell all that went on in the house: the instrumental and vocal music, the ankle bells and stamping dancer's feet, the smells of clarified butter and essence of jasmine, of rotting garlands and bad drains. The only time the house was silent was not in the night—something was always going on then—but during the hottest part of the day, in the early afternoon. At that time everyone sank down in the coolest corner they could find, too sleepy to eat or fight or even find work for the shriveled little servant boy who was at everyone's beck and
call. Sujata retired to her room; often she invited Marietta to come in and lie beside her on the mattress which took up almost the entire floor, covered with a white sheet and many bolsters and cushions. The room was kept as cool as possible with water sprinkled on fragrant grass screens and a noisy fan churning from a corner, but Sujata was very large and very hot and the scent she used gave out a pungent, hot smell. She loved touching Marietta. She spanned her hands around Marietta's waist, marveling that they went all the way around; she compared Marietta's slim thighs with her own huge ones deeply inscribed with white stretch lines; not to speak of Marietta's little pink-nippled breasts and the brown mountains Sujata carried. Sujata admired her and kissed her and gave her shiny pieces of silk to wear.