In Search of Love and Beauty (26 page)

Besides speaking about Mark, they also spoke about themselves. Or rather, he spoke about himself (what could there be to say about her? he tacitly assumed). He told her how he was a photographer: not a very good one yet, he admitted, but he was working at it and Mark was helping him. It was one of the reasons he so much valued Mark's friendship. Kent became, for him, remarkably voluble, even animated: Mark would have been surprised if he could have seen and heard him speaking to his mother. But that was just what Kent loved—not only speaking to Mark's mother but also to
a
mother. As a child, he had loved his mother inordinately and had thrust himself on her for attention in every way he could. There had been no father, and she had had to work hard at various jobs—as a taxi dispatcher, in a cookie factory—to support them both. He had resented the fact that every moment of hers wasn't his, that she was thinking about money when she should have been thinking about him. And
then, as he grew older, and into the snobberies of adolescence, he resented other things about her. He began to feel that his love for her was ill-bestowed because she didn't have the pretty clothes he craved for her nor the leisure to look after her appearance the way she, and he, deserved. All this was amply corrected in Mark's mother; and not only in her but also in the place in which they sat together under chandeliers. That too was what he had dreamed of as a child—to go out to such a place with his mother for whom even the local diner had been out of reach.

Around this time of her first acquaintance with Kent, Marietta had a letter from Ahmed. She was surprised, for it was almost ten years since she had heard from him. She didn't expect to, for she knew that keeping up contact by correspondence was not something that would occur to him. He was resigned to the fact that life swept people apart irresistibly and forever. However, this letter was for a specific purpose. Cast in traditional form, it began and ended with formal, flowery phrases directly translated from Urdu: “By the grace of God we are enjoying health and happiness,” it started off, and immediately launched into a recital of events that spoke of everything but health and happiness. Someone called Abida, whom Marietta could not remember, had left for the heavenly abode; another called Sayyida had been left paralyzed from an attack of polio (was she a daughter or a granddaughter?—so many years had passed since she had last seen them that Marietta had lost track of the generations). Ahmed himself was suffering from a swelling of the ankles that made it impossible for him to walk, so that he had to be carried like a child from place to place; one courtyard wall had collapsed in the last monsoon and no means had yet been found to repair it; and kindly to send one thousand rupees at earliest convenience. This request was made without circumlocution halfway through the letter, which continued with
more news, mainly of the weather and the inflated price of all food and other commodities.

She sat with the letter in her hand. It was an aerogram form and had grease stains on it; to get everything in, the writing was cramped like the narrow rooms they lived in. It seemed to her that it held the same smells too, of spices, pickles, and perfume essences, of mangoes, tobacco, and drains. She tried to visualize Ahmed as he was now, old and sick and being carried from room to room; except for his swollen ankles, he would be very thin and dried-up, shriveled away. He was over seventy years old now! Hawking and spitting—he had always done a lot of that; he smoked too much. She thought about him having to write to her to ask for money. He would be quite matter-of-fact about it. He had been that way when they lived together. He had hardly earned anything—he taught a few pupils, and gave a concert every now and again, with the impresario usually cheating him. But he didn't need much, living in her apartment, taking all his meals there except every afternoon he drank tea in an Indian restaurant with friends; and for his cigarettes. She always kept money in a drawer and he took what he needed; it was very little. He wasn't shy about taking it, though; nor when he had to send money home—he would tell her the exact amount and whom to make it out to.

She thought of him with affection. He had always been so tolerant, even of what he didn't understand, so accepting of everything, including her. He made jokes about what couldn't be helped—for instance, when the impresario wouldn't pay him. He would turn up his eyes and one palm to heaven as if appealing to higher powers to share the joke. When he had bad news, he didn't speak and smoked more than ever; then he got over it by himself, without further comment or complaint. It saddened her to think how far away he was in space and time—irrecoverable, irrevocable. She could still see him so clearly: the way he smoked with
relish, enjoying every puff, the cigarette so close to the end that it almost burned the two fingers between which he held it and brought it up to his lips. His eyes were half closed against the smoke, and he looked calm, pleased, placid like a Buddha, though a skinny one.

Marietta and Kent met again, and more than once, and he even began to visit her in her apartment. With his feline instinct for adopting nice homes, he made himself easy on her raw-silk sofa. He was much larger than anyone she had ever had in there, and altogether—in his designer cowboy clothes-consorted strangely with her very light furniture and her gold-framed miniatures. He had stopped talking to her by now; they were in agreement—about Mark, that is—and there wasn't anything else he had to say. At first his habitual deep silences bothered her, but then she got used to them and talked her way through them.

Once when he was there, Mark called. It was a routine call—he was usually on the phone to her at least once a day, often more—but very strange for her, with Kent sprawled there, gazing into the distance. “Yes, yes,” she said while Mark was giving her instructions—he always gave her instructions in the course of his calls, with regard to her financial affairs, or her health—there was really no area of her life with which he was not in the closest touch. And of course he knew every tremor, every inflection. “What's up?” he said. “No, no, nothing”—playing with a little gold pencil by the phone, trying not to laugh—“No, really, nothing.” She knew he didn't believe her, but what could she tell him?

“What did he want?” Kent asked. The casual familiarity with which he spoke—and Mark's voice still in her ear—made her stop smiling. She said, “I think we ought to tell him, about us meeting.”

“Why,” Kent said, not as a question but as a negative.

“We ought to. It's stupid not to,” She found herself getting excited. Kent sat staring out the window, and his immovability excited her further. She began to pace the room, her arms crossed and her nails digging into her silk sleeves. She talked—she said things that came into her mind about how they shouldn't be meeting—then she contradicted them. He just sat there, with his tremendous capacity for just sitting. His physical presence overwhelmed her in a way that was strange to her. Even in her younger days, with lovers, she had never really been shaken by their physical presence; sex was always secondary. But now with Kent it loomed, it was as huge as he was.

“He wouldn't like it,” she was trying to explain herself.

“There are a lot of things he doesn't like,” Kent said with a grim sort of proprietorship; and at the same time he glanced at her with his clear and youthful eyes of beauty. When he did that, she stopped before a mirror and saw her face: how old it was, and ravaged, and what was that little pulse twitching in her cheek? She put up her hand to cover it, and noticed that this hand, veined and thin, was also twitching.

“You're worked up for nothing,” Kent said, absolutely calm and paternal. “Mark gets like that. I guess you're alike.”

“Naturally we're alike. He's my son, after all, good heavens.” She laughed—and could hear it come out hysterically. That was the way she was beginning to feel. She dared not look at Kent. The strange thing was that the sensation his presence evoked in her was not for herself but for Mark: the thought of what Kent was to Mark—what they did together-penetrated her as no physical relation of her own ever had done.

She continued—she couldn't stop herself—“And who are you to say who he's like? I should think I know him better than you do. It would be strange if I didn't.”

“There are a lot of things you don't know,” Kent said.
“You didn't know about me. And don't think I'm the only one—”

“The only one what?”

“The only friend he has.”

Why am I quarreling with this boy?
Marietta thought; but also,
What is he trying to tell me?
And next:
If he is going to say more, I won't listen.

Kent didn't say more. Instead, he got up. He had slow and deliberate movements always, so it seemed a long time before he was actually on his feet. It was like hoisting up a large stone statue—and Marietta felt that if she were to hit him, it would be like hitting against stone. And actually, she did feel like hitting him and trembled from head to foot with the effort of holding herself back. The only other person who ever made her feel that way—tempted her that way—was Mark himself; and as if she were talking to Mark himself, she said, “Sit down. Why are you going now? Why do you say these things—throw out these hints—and then go away?”

“I'm not getting in a fight with you,” he said. He let himself sink down again. “Bad enough I have to fight with him. I'm not going to start with you.”

His rough familiarity was the way a lover might speak to his mistress, or a son to his mother, but no one else in between. Marietta didn't know how they had got to that stage, but there they were.

He had said he didn't want to fight with her, but that was what he went on to do—continuing his fight with Mark, drawing her into it, to get her on his side or to hold her responsible: “What's he want a house in the country
for?
I keep telling him; and running off there every weekend when he should be at home . . . But of course we all know why.” He waited for her to ask, and when she did—“Oh,” he said, “you don't mean to say he hasn't
told
you?”

Marietta wasn't sure whom she was defending, herself or Mark: “He wants a place down there because it's where his
father's family came from. And he wants somewhere for Natasha other than Leo's . . .”

“Oh, yes, Natasha,” Kent said.

“He's very fond of her. They're very, very close.”

“I guess he hasn't told you about his other friends he has down there.” Kent pouted, but next moment he said: “And who's Eric? Do
you
know?”

“No. No, I don't.” Marietta put her hands to her temples; really, she wanted to put them over her ears and to say, please, no more, I don't want to hear any more; let me be. She who had so longed to be privy to all the secrets of Mark's life!

Kent wasn't through yet: “We have this fight every weekend. I want to stay in town; it's the one chance I have to be with him when he's not rushing off to his office or wherever. And I want to work on my photography. I really like to. It's what I do. I'm doing a lot of portrait studies now—here, want to see?”

Out of a manila envelope he drew some recent examples of his work. When she looked at the pictures, she saw that they were all of Mark—but as she had not seen him for a long time. Lit by sunlight filtered through white curtains, Mark lay stark naked on a brass bed. There was something very familiar to her in the expression on his face: wasn't it just the way he had once looked at her, years and years ago, when he was her own little boy and no one else's? This was the way he had lain on her bed after his bath, waiting for her to put his nightclothes on, looking at her with just those eyes with which he now looked into Kent's camera—full of flirtatious love. Some of Kent's studies, and these too were heartbreakingly familiar to her, were of Mark in back view. He hadn't changed at all—he was over thirty now but she saw that his back was still slender, long, and boyish, ending up in buttocks as sweetly rounded as a girl's.

Kent had his hair cut and it did not suit him at all. It made his ears and neck emerge naked and raw and also revealed a rash of small pimples on the back of his neck. He looked sullen and unattractive. “Why, he's just a lout,” Mark thought; he repeated the word in his mind, looking at Kent as with eyes newly opened.

He felt that it had been a long time since he had met anyone new, and now he was eager to go through all that again—to part from a new partner at daybreak and to come home, slightly reeling with drink and satisfaction, at that point of dawn where the light from the street lamps and the light of the morning are equally frail. He began to go around the usual places and to make some new assignations; but his pleasure in them was marred by the thought that he might meet Kent there. Once he thought he did see him—it was in a dimly lit bar, and through the crowd of bodies pressed together, through the smoke and noise, he thought for a moment he glimpsed at a little table for two against a pillar an older man entertaining a young man who might be Kent. Mark strained backward a bit so as not to be seen (he too was entertaining a young man, a boy really, very sweet, English but hoping to get a green card and work in the theater). But he kept wondering—was it Kent?—and couldn't refrain from leaning forward again in that direction to see if it was. It wasn't, and Mark leaned back, exhaling, he thought, with relief; and yet for the rest of the evening he was distraught, so that his companion was disappointed in him and pouted in a terribly attractive way and said, “You don't actually really care for me.”