In Search of Love and Beauty (4 page)

Ahmed was a musician and had come to the United States with a troupe of other Indian musicians and dancers. Marietta had attended one of their recitals to see the dancers; although her own artistic career had not prospered, she was still interested in all forms of dance. However, it was Ahmed and his sarod who fired her—and to such an extent that at the end of his recital she felt impelled to climb up on the stage where he sat. It was a shabby little hall, which had quite recently been a porno cinema, and the stage too was small and shabby and so was the mat that had been spread out for Ahmed and his accompanists to sit on. Marietta was dressed rather smartly—she was going on to a cocktail party—but she just hitched up the tight skirt of her dress and knelt right there in front of everyone on her stockinged knees and bowed her head to Ahmed and called him Maestro.

Later, she arranged for him to give her sarod lessons, and later still, when the rest of the troupe went back to India, he moved in with her in her Central Park West apartment. But it wasn't him, she always insisted, it was his sarod, his music; and not even that but the world it opened—the world beyond world—the promise of peace and fulfillment that was like a hand laid on her restless heart. Ahmed himself was a very restful person; one might even say phlegmatic. While he plucked the most melting, alluring, ethereal sounds from his sarod, he himself sat there completely impassive, with a deadpan expression on his face. If he felt that he was ravishing his audience beyond their endurance, he might permit himself a flicker of a smile and one naked toe to twitch under him, and that was all. His manner off the platform was equally imperturbable. Perhaps that was what drew Marietta—herself so
infinitely perturbable. Otherwise it was difficult to know what she saw in him. He was far from a romantic figure: small, thin, grizzled, he was in his late forties and already a grandfather several times over.

He was glad to move in with Marietta. He liked life in the West. He drank Scotch, smoked incessantly, and watched late-night movies on TV. When Marietta had a crisis of some sort, he wasn't in the least upset. He didn't expect her to be anything but irrational. He stroked her as he might a cat, and she curled up beside him as though she were one.

He was also a good intermediary between her and Mark. Mark was ten years old at the time, and as once it had been his greatest bliss on earth to lie in his mother's embrace all night, and to help her dress, and to be her inseparable companion—“She'll make that boy into a homosexual,” Leo had warned Louise—so now his favorite occupation was to tease her, contradict her, make her mad. They fought incessantly. Ahmed took it all in his stride—he knew about mothers and sons, how alternately they adored and exasperated each other, and he also took it for granted that the relation with her son was the strongest in a woman's life. He helped her by entertaining Mark—whom he liked as he liked all children, naturally and without fuss—and he took him and Natasha out to see cartoon films at which he laughed more than they did.

But one day he decided it was time to return to India. It was impossible to tell whether this decision was the result of slow gestation or came to him on a sudden impulse; nor was it clear whether it was due to homesickness, or because he was tired of New York, or of Marietta. He didn't give her much time to get used to the idea. One day she came home from her showroom to find him packing. He was leaving the next day.

Five months later she followed him to India. Ahmed wasn't distressed by her surprise arrival. On the contrary, he seemed to like it. He at once began to spend a lot of time in
her hotel room, enjoying once again the Western luxuries he had missed since his departure from New York. He took her everywhere and was proud to be seen with her. Fair and shining, she was like a trophy he had brought home from his foreign tour, or a luxury article he had smuggled past customs. Her enthusiasm over everything amused him. How she exclaimed! And at what he considered such common, everyday things, one was almost ashamed of them. She adored, simply adored, the bazaars and the merchants sitting inside their booths amid their goods: copper pans, or silver ornaments, textiles fluttering in the wind, gaudy sweetmeats—such colors, she had never seen, never dreamed such colors! She liked the smells, too, of incense and clarified butter, and even the denser ones of rotting vegetables and more sinister rotting things—even those didn't bother her, for she regarded them as part of everything: as the beggars were part of it all, and the corpses on the pyres, and the diseased people healing themselves in the sacred river, and the very fat priests.

Ahmed's friends invited her to be with them at their all-night music sessions and to drink opium dissolved in almond juice and milk. They appreciated her cries of “Fantastic! Fabulous! Oh, Ahmed, it's too much!” They took her boating on the crowded river, drinking and playing music like a royal party. The women in Ahmed's family also enjoyed her company. Crammed together in inner rooms, they were avid for outside entertainment. Marietta was a show for them: they admired and enjoyed everything about her—her lithe figure, her blond hair worn loose and long, her scanty summer frocks. And she let them touch her to their heart's content and slipped off her costume jewelry for them to try on. She watched them cook and ate in abundance and pretended she was interested in the recipes. She wondered and wondered at everything and exclaimed and shone with joy so that there was absolutely no language barrier—feeling streamed out of her. And she detected a deep understanding in them, for in
spite of their secluded lives, they were intelligent women and sharp and worldly. They probably guessed Marietta's relationship with Ahmed and took it for granted: everyone knew what men did once they were out of the house, and who could blame them for what they did as far away as abroad? No questions were asked. Marietta loved their acceptance of everything—of their condition, their womanliness; she felt they were deeply intuitive and above all wiser than anyone she had ever known. She longed, for a while, to be like them.

But although, after the first visit, she returned to India every year for a period of six years, she never again spent much time with Ahmed's family. Instead she traveled around, mostly on her own, mostly in planes and hired cars. She wanted to see everything but as herself, making no attempt to merge with people and landscape. She enthused about Indian materials, but when she had clothes made out of them, they were to her own design and Western taste. She never took to a sari or any other form of Indian dress, and her sandals remained Italian and high-heeled.

She met other Western women traveling around India. Some of these had attached themselves to a guru, or were going around in search of one. Marietta was interested in their quest, as she was interested in everything else she met with, and occasionally she followed them to their ashram. But she could never stay there long. It was too vapid and inaesthetic for her and not what she had come to India for. The ashrams always seemed to be situated in dust bowls, and the followers of the gurus had the same drained, infertile air as the landscape. As for the gurus themselves, although they varied in personality, there was something about all of them that reminded her of Leo: not so much in themselves, as in the effect they had. Moreover, while Marietta kept excellent health all through the rest of her travels, every time she visited an ashram she got some infection; so she stopped going.

Whenever she arrived in a big city, she at once checked
into a luxury hotel. There she had long, cool showers and trays sent up to her air-conditioned room. Young men whom she had met came to visit her. They were eager Indian youths who were excited by being in an expensive hotel, and also by her. They examined the clothes she had unpacked and sprayed themselves with her scents. They slept with her and were ashamed if their lovemaking was too frenzied to be sustained. But she didn't mind—it wasn't for sex that she liked being with them, it was for themselves. They were charming and pure.

When Mark grew up, and before launching himself into the property business, he traveled a great deal and to all sorts of places. Sometimes his family would hear from him in California, and then from Mexico, or from Paris, from Rome, from Istanbul; they never knew from where it would be next. Not that they ever heard much—a phone call, a postcard, and that was all. They didn't know what he was doing, or whom he was with, and he discouraged questions. All he allowed them to do was send him money, and sometimes he applied to his grandmother for it, and sometimes to his mother; each thought it a privilege to supply him. Then one day he would turn up again, as unexpectedly as he had departed.

His absences were prolonged and hard to bear for all three women. The worst of it was that, even when he did come home, they never knew when he might decide to be off again. Once, when he had been back less than two weeks from a three-month absence, Marietta came home from her showroom to find him packing up again. He said he was leaving for London in the evening.

She stood in the doorway of his room and said, “You've got to be joking.” Her voice shook.

His reaction to her presence was to perform his task a trifle more slowly, deliberately, thoroughly. Mark was always
thorough and deft. He had small, neat hands, and it was a pleasure to watch him do anything; he himself took pleasure in his own dexterity. He smoothed his shirts, he fitted his socks into carefully prepared interstices; his suitcase was laid out as exactly as a diagram.

Marietta tried to calm herself by showering and changing. She made herself fragrant with soap and talc and toilet water; she brushed her hair—still blond, though no longer naturally—she wore a long loose robe of pastel silk. All the time she was alert to sounds from Mark's room. She heard him move about and once he talked on the phone, laughing his light, pleasant laugh. She had to restrain herself from rushing in there and snatching the receiver from his hand; she had tried that before, in their life together, and it had not done her any good. Her heart beat loud and sharp. She lay down on her sofa and tried to at least look relaxed. She shut her eyes, she waited for him.

When he strolled in from his packing, he seemed pleased to see her so apparently calm. He touched her robe: “Nice. Is it new?” he rewarded her. She opened her eyes and looked into his. “I bought it months ago. I've worn it hundreds of times.” He turned away.

Marietta's apartment was as light as Louise's was dark. She had low, deep furniture upholstered in raw silk, a shining gold Buddha, and on the walls some exquisite gold-framed Indian miniatures. Her Oriental rugs bloomed with delicate floral motifs. One wall was entirely taken up by windows, framing her view of Central Park. Mark stood against this and looked over the wide green vista and the blue reservoir. He could feel his mother behind him, her gaze into his back, so that he resisted turning around for a long time.

“Why London, could you tell me?” she said at last.

“I have to go.” He spoke in a firm, kind voice and turned back into the room. He was anxious above all to avoid a fight,
not for his own sake—all he need finally do was pick up his suitcase and go—but for her: so as not to leave her in the painful way he had to once or twice before.

“You don't have to go at all. Not at all.” She sat up on the sofa: “You're getting more and more irresponsible. You're going to be like your father. You're never going, to do anything.”

Mark shrugged; he could take that lightly, for he knew it wasn't true. He wasn't in the least like his father. She knew it too; she knew him to be like herself; part of herself.

“Come here,” she said. “Sit here. No, I'm not going to make a fuss. I only want to talk to you. Come on.”

He approached warily. When he was close enough to grab hold of, she resisted the temptation and waited with bated breath for him to sit beside her. Her heart beat terribly hard with this effort at self-control, it was like a stone flinging itself against her ribs.

“When you're not here,” she said when he was perched, somewhat cautiously, beside her, “I wait for your calls—rare enough, God knows. Any news of you. Yes, yes, I know, darling, I shouldn't, but there it is all the same. I do it. . . . Don't sit like that, poised for flight, it's too—” She laughed to swallow up that last word, and the laugh ended on a sob and she raised her hands as though to clutch the front of his shirt but let them fall again and lie, veined and fine with beautiful rings, in her lap.

“My goodness,” Mark said. “What a fuss. As if you'll never see me again; as if I'm going forever. As if I'm shipping out to Australia instead of a quick trip to London.”

“How quick?” she quickly pounced, so that he closed up again, guarded himself. She put her hands before her face and her shoulders shook; she wept like a little girl.

He was moved by both pity and exasperation; the latter was stronger, but nevertheless he gathered her into his arms. He said, “Why do we have to go through this every time?
Every
time?
” With her face buried against him, he stroked her back. He rather liked doing that—he had always liked it—feeling her slender back through the fine silk, it gave him a luxurious sensation; but at the same time he turned his wrist to look at his watch. She held herself stiffly, wanting this to go on forever but knowing that it would stop very soon.

Natasha came home and found them like that. Mark looked at her over their mother's back; he usually managed to make her understand without having to say anything. She understood now. She went into his room, she saw his packed bags. She sat down for a moment on his bed; but she didn't bother him with her feelings—which was just as well, for he had his hands, literally, full with his mother.

“I feel so strange nowadays, darling,” Marietta was whispering into his shirt where her face was hidden. “Sort of trembly all the time—can't you feel it? . . . What do you think it could be? Could it be my menopause?”