Joe said, “He couldn’t make it. Very bad cold. I was on the phone with him this morning. He was upset. He’s fond of Leslie.”
“How did they meet?” asked Ilka, but Joe had moved on to rescue a guest who was standing by herself: Sylvia Brandon in her grand skirt. She wore a beautiful silver sweater. Ilka wanted it.
Martin Moses was saying, “Never been to a party yet where Winterneet has actually showed up. If you’re free Friday come to a shindig I’m throwing for a lot of graduate student types. Winterneet is guaranteed not to show. Winterneet is not invited. I’m going out and say something to Leslie Shakespeare.” Martin Moses walked out onto the porch, and Ilka went over to Sylvia Brandon and said, “I’m Ilka Weisz.”
Sylvia Brandon said, “I’m Sylvia Brandon.”
Ilka said, “We met at the elevators when they were all going to the basement.”
Sylvia Brandon said, “I’ll get our statisticians to do a study of the laws of improbability.”
Now Jenny Bernstine cried, “Someone be brave! It would be a public service to start the salmon. Sylvia! Ilka! Somebody!”
People were moving in from the porch. Ilka saw the new director momentarily alone, slipped out, and said, “I have a theory,” and told him about the Egyptian sculpture. It seemed to take a very long time.
The new director said, “I understand that we’ve got you teaching in the adult program at the university.”
“English for Foreigners. I’m a foreigner,” said Ilka in despair: once embarked on this routine of self-conscious inanities there’s no way back to good sense and propriety. If Ilka had met herself at this moment, at this party, she would have written herself off
as an ass and walked away. The new director with the beautiful head and the English voice did not walk away and seemed not to be looking for some better opportunity over Ilka’s shoulder. He regarded her attentively, without pretending to any peculiar interest. Ilka understood that she was talking to a patient man who might choose to distinguish between an ass and a person showing off at a party. Ilka said, “Talking to you makes people nervous. I wonder if my students feel like that talking to me?”
Leslie Shakespeare’s eyes widened ever so slightly; he could be seen to be thinking. He said, “Probably so.” Ilka was relieved and sorry when Joe Bernstine came to fetch his guest of honor. “Leslie, we need you to circulate. We need you to come in and eat.”
The new director said, “Well then, that’s what I’ll do.” He looked behind him, saw nobody, and putting his hand not on but just in back of Ilka’s back, moved her through the door ahead of him: he was not going to leave anybody alone on the empty porch.
“It is possible,” Ilka said to Martin Moses at the buffet table, “that our new director is a nice man.”
The day after the reception Alpha Stone called to invite Ilka for drinks. Sally Friedman called. Her brother and the little boys had gone back to Toronto. Was Ilka free for dinner? Alicia Aye invited Ilka for cocktails, and Thursday Gerti looked Ilka in the eyes and asked her if her blouse was from Vienna? Ilka said, “I was seven when I left Vienna.” Gerti Gruner said, “This pattern is reminding of the blouse of my Tante dead in Belsen,” so then Ilka asked Gerti if she would like to have a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. But where had Gerti Gruner gone?
Ilka saw Gerti’s back diminishing down the perspective of the corridor in pursuit of a man who stopped and turned out to be Professor Zee. Professor Zee’s right leg and right shoulder remained set in the direction in which he had been, and would have
liked to continue, going. He was leaning a little backward from what Gerti was saying to him at too close a range. Whatever she was saying had a certain length and several parts. Ilka watched Gerti’s head and plump shoulders working with that slight agitation which accompanies the act of speaking. The elevator came, opened, and closed. Professor Zee’s mouth opened. What he said was brief. Gerti’s shoulders went back into action and when they ceased, Professor Zee walked on. Gerti Gruner turned, increasing in size up the corridor toward Ilka. “I ask Professor Zee when he has his hour in his office.”
The cafeteria was a depressed area. There was a coffee automat and a sandwich automat. Ilka revolved the display of sad buns with their evil fillings and said, “Hope must certainly spring eternal. Every time I come down I’m looking for something wonderful to have materialized.” But where had Gerti gone? Ilka saw her backing Professor Sylvia Brandon into the opposite wall. Gerti Gruner’s shoulders went into converse with Professor Brandon, who was looking directly at Ilka. Ilka could tell that Sylvia Brandon did not recognize her.
“Winterneet is not invited. Pizza is in the kitchen,” Martin Moses said as he welcomed each guest at the door. The rooms were small. There were too many people in the kitchen. Ilka’s triangle of pizza behaved like Dali’s watch and kept folding away from her mouth. Ilka carried her glass of wine into the other room. Martin Moses was sitting on a mattress on the floor with an attractive lot of younger people leaning their backs against the wall. He budged everybody over to make room for Ilka. He had a gallon bottle of white wine on his lap and topped off Ilka’s glass. The young people were high and tended to hilarity. The mattress was covered with a lightweight cotton throw that had an Indian pattern and tended to bunch. Ilka kept wanting to smooth it back over the exposed black-and-white ticking. The mattress
was inching away from the wall. Everybody got up to push it back, and that’s when Ilka saw Gerti Gruner standing in the doorway. Gerti was staring at Ilka. Ilka asked Martin Moses to change places with her and sat down with her back to Gerti.
Martin Moses asked, “Why is Gerti Gruner staring daggers at you?”
“Because she keeps inviting me to supper and I’m never available and here I am in your house, at your party. That’s horrible, isn’t it—talking about her right behind her back?”
“Behind your back, actually,” said Martin Moses.
Ilka said, “I have a theory that Gerti Gruner used to be a plump, pretty Viennese girl with one of those delicious chins, so she thinks when she wants something she is going to get it, and what she wants is me.”
“Aha?” said Martin Moses with interest.
“No, I mean to be her Viennese cousin and Vienna is so long ago. It’s sad, actually,” Ilka said, “because I’m in possession of a piece of information not available to Gerti Gruner: Gerti Gruner can’t have me. Is she still standing in the door?”
“Still staring daggers,” reported Martin Moses.
“There’s a Viennese expression: ‘
Nicht mit der Hacken zu derschlagen
.’ It means something like ‘With an axe you couldn’t do her in.’ I have several theories about Gerti Gruner,” Ilka said, all the time wishing she were not saying these things to Martin Moses, whom she hardly knew. Ilka kept hoping—she kept meaning—to stop, nevertheless she kept right on, and Martin Moses kept filling up her glass from his bottle. “One theory,” said Ilka, “is Gerti Gruner is missing the human component that tells one person that she is being a pest to another person, or, two, Gerti Gruner knows she is being a pest and doesn’t mind it. I actually think there’s something ever so slightly the matter with Gerti Gruner. She looks one right in the eyes which is not a thing normal people do to each other.”
“Sure they do,” said Martin Moses.
“Look into my eyes,” said Ilka. “
Into
, not
at
my eyes.” Martin looked into Ilka’s eyes, blinked and looked away. Ilka said, “We think we look into each other’s eyes because the language says we do, but the language is wrong.”
“People we love we look in the eyes,” Martin said.
“We do not. Particularly people we make love with, particularly when we are making love with them. That’s when we
close
our eyes. I think I better go home.”
But in the front door stood Gerti Gruner barring Ilka’s exit. “Oh! Hello! So! How are you?” squealed Ilka.
“You come tomorrow to supper in my house,” said Gerti Gruner, “isn’t it?”
“I think I can’t. Not tomorrow,” said Ilka looking in her handbag for her date book. Ilka’s date book confirmed that tomorrow Ilka was having dinner with the Stones.
“Sunday,” said Gerti.
Sunday Ilka was having dinner with the Zees. Ilka’s date book showed next week to be entirely filled up, which astonished Ilka, who continued to feel that her days were empty: These several events did not essentially count, because if the institute hadn’t happened to have hired a new director, the Bernstines would not have given him a reception, and Alpha Stone would not have seen Ilka at it and remembered that they had been meaning to have her over, nor could she have introduced Ilka to Alicia Aye. These invitations didn’t
prove
anything. If Ilka hadn’t happened to have got talking with Martin Moses, she wouldn’t have so much as
known
he was having a shindig. And, if she hadn’t tried the Friedmans a fourth time, they wouldn’t have so much as known of Ilka’s existence, and then there would have been nobody all week except Gerti Gruner on Thursday. Ilka looked up and Gerti Gruner was looking daggers not, as a matter of fact, into Ilka’s eyes: Gerti Gruner’s eyes met not Ilka’s eyes, but each other where their line of vision crossed at a point in front of the bridge of Ilka’s nose.
“I make
Sacher Torte
with
Schlagobers
,” said Gerti Gruner, who knew, as everybody always knows, and minded, as everybody minds, that she was being a pest. It was something she had learned to live with. What Gerti Gruner could not learn was how to survive in an absence of cousins.
THE TALK IN ELIZA’S KITCHEN
A
lpha Stone said, “Winterneet couldn’t make it. He’s in Copenhagen.”
“Never you mind Winterneet,” said Ilka and looked gladly around the room full of her new friends and colleagues at the Concordance Institute. Here were her hosts Alpha and Alfred Stone, here were the Ayes and the Zees and the Cohns and the Bernstines. How could Ilka’s back tell the difference between empty air and a body—male? Director Leslie Shakespeare was standing right behind Ilka listening to his wife Eliza making Yvette Gordot laugh. “Your wife is terrific,” Ilka said to him.
“Yes, she is,” said Director Shakespeare, and he and Ilka stood and listened together.
“That was before I stopped Leslie from doing the things he likes to do,” Eliza Shakespeare was saying. She was Canadian, a
plain woman nobly built on the grand scale, wide in the shoulders, with a length of thigh. Her hair was so fine and electrically charged it attached itself to her cheeks and temples. She had to keep palming it away.
Alpha called everyone into the dining room.
Ilka was seated between Professor Zee and Leslie Shakespeare and at the furthest remove from Mrs. Shakespeare who was entertaining her end of the table with a highly colored anecdote about a groom who had inadvertently locked Leslie into the stables, making him miss the equestrian tryouts for the Olympics. Ilka glanced at Leslie’s great head brooding over his soup. “Did he really lock you in?” she asked him.
“No,” said Leslie.
“Are you really an equestrian?”
“I was,” said Leslie.
“No, you weren’t,” said Ilka, “and I can prove it.”
Leslie looked at Ilka.
Ilka said, “People I sit next to at dinner are not equestrians, and I’m sitting next to you.”
Leslie smiled.
“I can prove you never tried out for the Olympics.”
Leslie laughed.
“People I know are as likely to try out for the Olympics as they are to climb Mount Everest.”
Leslie blushed.
“You climbed Mount Everest!” Ilka said so loudly that Eliza said,
“Before I stopped him.”
“Did Eliza stop you?” asked Ilka.
“As a matter of fact she did.”
At the far end of the table Eliza was embarked on a tale about the sherpa who carried Leslie’s tent out onto the blinding white
expanse and disappeared. “Nothing as far as the eye could see except his abominable snow prints.”
It felt silly to keep asking Leslie what, in Eliza’s stories, was the truth. Ilka kept looking sideways at him. He said, “It was a preliminary expedition to test new equipment.”
“And Leslie tested a new type of nylon rope by falling off a mountain and hanging upside down with a simultaneously spinning and yo-yoing motion . . .”
Here Leslie said, “Dear, did you ask Alpha for Mrs. Beaton’s recipe for gooseberry fool? Our real estate man,” persevered Leslie, “showed us two gooseberry bushes in our back garden. Did you know that growing gooseberries is forbidden in several states of the Union?” And having got the left side of the table discussing Mrs. Beaton’s Cookery and the right side listing the obsolescent laws that continue on the books, Leslie returned to the soup in his plate. Ilka looked down the table at Eliza who had been stopped in the middle of her story. Eliza’s head was bent over her plate and her eyes were hidden.
This was before Ilka got a car, and the Shakespeares offered to drive her home. She walked down the dark path with Eliza behind Professor Stone walking the director to his car. Eliza said, “It wasn’t the gooseberries out back, it was the tiny tomatoes in the front that made Leslie buy the house.”
Ilka sat beside Leslie. Eliza, in the backseat, said, “Alfred Stone looks like something out of
Steve Canyon
. The iron jaw, the jutting forelock.”
“Tremendously good-looking,” said Ilka.
“I don’t think so!” said Leslie. “You think he is good-looking?”
“Yes,” said Ilka and Eliza.
Ilka said, “By the way, do we know there really is a Winterneet?”
“There used to be, before he got his Nobel Prize,” Eliza said.
“But you affirm, categorically, that Winterneet exists?” asked Ilka. “I cried when I had to leave New York and come to live in Concordance. All my friends said, ‘Winterneet lives in Concordance. ’ My friend Jules knows someone who knows someone who played golf with someone who knows Winterneet. At my interview, Zack Zee told me Winterneet had done the institute a lecture series, and Jenny drove me by his house. Alpha said Winterneet was in Copenhagen. Maria promised to have him to dinner but he had not got back from the Coast. The Bernstines made you a reception, and he had a cold. Martin Moses invited me to a party given for the express purpose of not being stood up by Winterneet by the simple expedient of not inviting him.”