“How did it happen?” Vickie said.
“She ran into an underpass. On the parkway.”
“When?”
“Early in the morning. Late last night.”
“What was she doing out, early this morning, late last night?”
“We’d had a quarrel. She was angry, she ran out, she drove away.”
Silence.
Then Leslie picked it up. “Why did you quarrel?”
“Oh, Les, it’s so complicated. We quarreled because we live together and living together is hard.”
Vickie’s voice came in cold and hard. “In other words, she finally gave it to you.”
My head jerked up. “What?”
“For never being here, for never being really nice to her, for never paying any attention to us.”
“Oh, Vick, Vick!” I cried then, it had been a long day, I couldn’t help it. And they stood or sat where they were, I couldn’t see them but I could sense the stillness in that room. Then Vickie got up, she moved towards me, she stood a foot away, she watched me. She must have felt terrible, it had probably never occurred to her that I could be hurt by anything, that I could cry, that I could be defeated. She inched closer. She put her hand on my arm. She laid it there very lightly, then removed it, as if I might jump up and hit her.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said in a thin little voice.
The real fall from innocence: realizing her power, realizing that she could hurt, she could make me cry.
“It’s okay, Vick,” I said, wiping my face. “Where’s Jonathan?”
“In his room, probably,” Mark said. Mark and Leslie were sitting there on the floor, as erect and trembling as catkins.
I got up, I staggered to my feet. That drink had hit me, I was exhausted. I left the den and went to Jonathan’s room. The kids trailed behind me.
He wasn’t in his room. We searched the house. He wasn’t anywhere. The kids went outside, they looked all over. Jonathan was nowhere. I went back to the den and poured myself another drink. I thought: just what I need, a runaway kid. I was about to go out to the car, to drive around the neighborhood searching for him, when Vickie came into the den.
“It’s okay,” she said. “He was sniffling in his closet I heard him. He’s in his room.”
We went to Jonathan’s room. He was curled up into a ball on the floor of his closet, in a corner, sniffling. I pulled him up, I pulled him out, I carried him to the bed, I sat down with him on my lap, I held him, he laid his head against my shoulder, he bawled. I sat there holding him, stroking his back, stroking his head, kissing his hair, saying, “Okay, honey, it’s okay,” and as I did that I felt him, his little body, felt his backbone, his vertebrae under his shirt, such little bones, so fragile. And I smelled him, he smelled of sweat and dirt and lamb chops, child smell, smell of flesh, childflesh, sweaty hair sweet as corn. His body was warm and his heart was beating very fast and his sobs were coming more slowly, were dying down. And I felt his body, the delicate ribs, the delicate vertebrae, thinking how fragile he was, how fragile we all are, Edith in the hospital with her fragile body smashed to smithereens, ruined, ruined, all of us ruined, and I rocked him, I laid my head against his and I let myself cry too, twice in one day, some record, but I was tired, I didn’t care, let them see. I let the tears run down my face, I knew the kids were standing there gaping. I didn’t care.
And he fell asleep with his arms tight around my neck, fell asleep out of pure emotional exhaustion, and I looked up at the kids to say I think we’d better undress him and get him to bed the hell with his bath tonight, and then I saw Vickie’s face, she was staring at me, she looked at me as if she were watching something inconceivable.
And I knew, oh, well, we weren’t close, Vick and I, when she bothered to talk to me at all she shot a nasty crack of some sort, and I didn’t like it, and I’d told Edith she had to do something about it, but I didn’t really pay that much attention to her. But here she was, looking at me as if I were a stranger, as if it had never occurred to her that I might do something like that, comfort a baby. As if men never did things like that. As if—the way you feel sometimes—as if men were an occupying army that marched around shouting
Achtung!
Now hear this! And shifted their rifles and shoved the barrel at a kid’s butt, pushing. But couldn’t, ever, possibly, sit there rocking a baby.
She didn’t know I’d done that to her tens of times when she was a baby. She couldn’t remember back that far. Because along the line I’d stopped doing it, I’d rocked Leslie a little, Mark once or twice, Jonathan never, I think.
Anyway, I saw her looking at me and I understood that I’d become inhuman for her a long time ago and she couldn’t quite grasp what she was seeing. And I thought about how good it felt to sit there holding Jonathan’s little body, feeling him needing me, feeling me needing him, feeling us tied together by bone and flesh and heartbeat and the rhythms of life. Love. I understood love then, at that minute. For the first time.
And I said to Vickie, “Where are his pajamas?” and she found them, and we undressed him, gently, took his little body out of his pants and shirt and slid the pajamas on, and we all kissed him, asleep as he was, and stroked his head and tiptoed out and turned off the light.
And Vickie didn’t remember with her head that I’d rocked her like that once, but maybe she remembered with her body. Because after we closed the door, she turned and put her arms around me and held me and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
Dolores was silent when he finished. She stood there, her knife dangling in her hand, chunks of veal sweating on the cutting board before her. No, he was not Mach if he could
see
Mach; was not Mach if he could tell this, if he could say
his need and mine.
“And to think I wanted you on a white horse,” she said.
He turned his head sharply, startled out of his mind’s place. And she went to him and held his head against her, embraced him, saying, “When you’re so much better off it, so much better.”
And let herself forget, for a time, what Edith had had to do to get him that way, what Edith had had to pay.
D
OLORES HAD NOT GONE
on a business trip with Victor since the terrible night in Manchester, but when he said he had to go to Paris in April, she cried “April in Paris! I’ve never seen April in Paris!” He grinned, and said he had a week’s work there, so if they spent the surrounding weekends, they would have nine days of Paris in April.
April in Paris proved to be damp and chilly most days, with some rain and not a chestnut blossom in sight. But it didn’t matter. Dolores loved Paris, and knew her way around the central part of the city without a map, something she never mastered in London. She walked continually, never tiring of Paris streets. She probed and poked into little neighborhoods that were unfamiliar to her, always finding a fine little café in which to sit and rest and observe. She went to parts of the Louvre she hadn’t visited before, gaped at the startling new Beaubourg, and browsed in the little art shops facing the river on the Left Bank.
At night, she and Victor would go out in raincoats and walk along the Seine on the lower path, something she’d never done with a lover, something she’d always wanted to do with a lover. They walked with their bodies close together, holding hands, speaking little. They spent all their energy savoring the scene, storing it up against dearth. They went to a café on the Ile, opposite Notre Dame, and stared up at the different cathedral revealed by the spotlights—spare, stark, eerie, and angular, it was beautiful and overpowering. It was inhuman, Dolores thought, thinking too that humans had made it, just as humans performed the behavior they called inhuman, humans had made it purposely to dwarf the human, to awe it. They sat looking at it, drinking café filtre, holding hands, drinking the scene in too, cellaring it, like camels, against the desert.
One Saturday they went to Chartres by train, and stood for hours at the portals and the windows, Victor enraptured by the blue madonna, Dolores, as always by the gargoyles. And by some happy chance, an organist was practicing for a concert to be held in the church the next evening, and Victor and Dolores were able to sit down and listen to him rehearse, hearing the whispering shuffle of the tourists’ feet, a tap of heels on the marble floor, low conversations, sudden sharp orders to children. And they watched the arches rising and the light flooding in through the clerestory, dim light radiating around the stained glass. And heard the Bach that comprehended it all, that grumbled with the tired feet, was sharpened with the smell of bodies damp and soiled from use, that soared up from the floor and sang, touching with delicate fingers the highest point where the arches met, tingled against glass, which trembled and sang too.
Body and minds heavy with lading, they took the late train back to Paris, sitting opposite each other so they could see the other’s face, silent, eyes and mouths speaking without words, saying nothing new, nothing startling, only the same utterness, the emotional-totality of their bond. They could not bear to take their eyes away from each other, yet they did, turning to gaze at a wistful figure, to listen to a man berating his wife, to watch a middle-aged couple sit in the silence of years of marriage. And they commented, continually, on these events, with tiny twists of mouth or eyebrow, with flickers that seemed mere light rippling on their faces. Their delicate communication ranged from amusement and malicious delight to pity or contempt or simple interest. It was fun and a luxury, this silent communication, it hung on the reverberating air between them and took up all the space around them. And through it all they were gazing at each other’s faces as a portraitist would, limning them inside their own heads, etching them on the inside of the eye against absence.
Dolores insisted that Victor go with her on the boatride on the Seine (too touristy, he said). “I take it every time I come to Paris and I love it every time and so will you,” she said. They had a sunny afternoon, and they sat with the Germans and the Italians and the Scandinavians and the Americans and the crackly loudspeaker offering multilingual incomprehensibilities, and sailed down the river, under the bridge, along the Iles, past the heroic buildings of old France.
Victor insisted that Dolores go with him to the top of the Eiffel Tower (“and you called the boat trip too touristy?”) because in all his trips to Paris, he had never been up, his trips being business trips, leaving little time for pleasure of that sort. The lines were not as long as they are in the summer, and they got there within an hour. But the view was disappointing, because the day was overcast and they could not see far. So Dolores tugged at Victor’s hand and led him to the Arc de Triomphe and they climbed that, and then they stood in the magic circle at the very heart of the old city, gazing in wonder at the broad tree-lined avenues spoking out and away, and turned and there was the Bois looking like a great forest in the middle of the very civilized and most beautiful city in the Western world.
Both wanted to go again to Sainte-Chapelle, the little chapel built by Louis the Saint and connected to his palace. The room glittered with the dancing light of the stained-glass windows, and Victor said it was as if religion had merged with Merlin, and this was a faery place. Dolores wondered what the world had seemed like to him, to Saint Louis, what the world out-of-doors had seemed, that he could have built
this
indoors.
Victor wanted to go to Versailles, but Dolores put her foot down on that one. He was adamant, he said one had the right to see it once, that she had, after all, and so she was forced to give in. He found it fine, impressive. But Dolores kept muttering, “No wonder there was a revolution.” He’d point to a gilt frame, a painting, a vase:
Ugh
, Dolores said. The only things she liked were the carpets.
Victor launched into theory. The monarchy may have been selfish, but look what it left behind!
Ugh
, Dolores repeated. Art, Victor continued, ignoring her, always flourishes in cultures that have an elite, an aristocracy, a class with the leisure and wealth to appreciate and foster it. “Since we got government by committee, look at the stuff we get, look at Soviet art.”
“If this is the sort of art aristocracies foster, I’ll take anarchy any day,” Dolores said. “And I think American art is fine. It’s vital, it’s thinking.”
“You like yellow canvases?”
“That isn’t all there is to American art …”
“The trouble with American painting is that it thinks too much,” Victor said. “And artists aren’t taught craft. Look at the work on that gold hand mirror: there’s probably no one alive who could do that today.”
“And why should they? That’s part of a different vision, when men declared themselves gods and ate up everybody else’s dinner. Our artists aren’t aiming for anything like that.”
“You’re right. They’re aiming for art without content.”
Their disagreement was total: it was aesthetic, moral, and political. But they liked it. Both of them were inclined to be contentious and both of them usually won their arguments. It was a pleasant change to argue with someone who responded strongly and would not give in, to argue in a closed circle, knowing you would never win. It made the argument
play
, which was liberating to the mind and the spirit.
“Victor,” Dolores was snarling with a smile, “sometimes I think you haven’t read a piece of history since you were in high school.”
“Dolores,” he snarled smiling back, “I sometimes wish I could get inside your head and see what broken gear in there is making an intelligent woman say such stupid things.”
“I get pretty sick of being in my own mind,” she admitted. “It’s so convinced, so relentless, so grim.”
“Okay, let’s change,” Victor decided, as they ent
e
red the Hall of Mirrors and Dolores said
Ugh
for the fiftieth time. “You use my mind and I’ll use yours. Mine is quite brilliantly full of facts and figures, names and dates. And in the place where your mind is grim, mine’s a blank.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Dolores said. “For an hour a day, anyway. Like airing out the rooms.”