The Hothouse by the East River (2 page)

She
says, ‘You aren’t getting annoyed, are you?’

‘Me?
No.’

She
says, ‘I came to Carthage where there bubbled around me in my ears a cauldron
of unholy loves.’

‘Elsa,’
he says, ‘just take it easy. Relax, you have to relax.’

Arriving
home she says, ‘I managed to rattle Garven again today.’ She curves herself
into the most comfortable chair, with her back to the window, and smiling into
the reflection of sky in the glass of a picture, as if congratulating it. — ‘I
rattled him. He said he wanted to establish a person-to-person relationship
with me.’

Paul
says, ‘Have you nothing better to do with your money than waste your doctor’s
time with it?’

‘Not
much.’ Then she adds, ‘Tra-la-la’ to the simple notes of doh-ray-mee.

‘I
wouldn’t be in his shoes. I wouldn’t like to have to read a woman,’ Paul says.

She
laughs half-privately; at least she does not go near the window and share the
joke with whatever it is out there on the East River, invisible to everyone
but herself, that she takes such notice of through the windowpane, day after
day.

He
says, ‘I went along to the shoe store.’

‘Did
you see him?’

‘Yes,
it was Kiel, all right.’

‘Helmut
Kiel,’ she says.

‘Yes,
Helmut Kiel.’

She
says, ‘Not Claus, you see.’

‘No,
Helmut Kiel.’

‘So you
see, it wasn’t my imagination,’ she says.

‘Elsa,
I never said it was your imagination, Elsa. Sometimes you imagine things. I
just had to be sure, that’s all, Elsa. It was certainly put out that he died in
prison. There’s some mystery about him. Always was.’

She
laughs and is over by the window again, as he had feared, in the attitude of
communing with a sort of friend about the high humour of what he has just said.
He stands in the middle of the room.

‘Did
Kiel recognise you, Elsa?’

‘I
think so. Did he recognise you?’

‘No, I
saw him through the window from the street. He didn’t see me.’

‘Are
you sure?’ she says.

It is
better when she says something than nothing when she sits by the window,
although when she speaks it’s likely to be bad. Because she usually says
something ordinary, as if everything were all right.

Everything
is not all right.

‘Sit by
one of the other windows, Elsa, for a change.’

‘There’s
nothing to see from the other windows.’

‘Well,
there’s the street, isn’t there? And the people, the traffic.’

He
knows, now, that she has been smiling.

‘Oh,
for God’s sake, Elsa, why sit by the bloody window at all?’

He
pronounces bloody as ‘blawdy’, this being a word he has not learned as a child
in Montenegro from his English governess. ‘Bloody’ he had learned from the
English during the war when his ear was no longer receptive. Apart from such
late encounters with the vernacular his English is good. He is sure she is
smiling out to the river. ‘The bloody window all day.’

And he
says, ‘You’re still a young woman, Elsa. Sitting by windows all day …‘ He has
said this before. Sometimes it seems certain that she knows he is not being
honest. But there is something else he is concealing as he speaks. Perhaps she
knows it.

‘Not
all day,’ she says. ‘I sit here mostly late afternoon, mostly in the evening.’
This happens to be true.

The
window-bay of the room, jutting out fourteen stories above everything, is
considered to be a feature of luxury. These great windows cover a third of the
east wall which overlooks the river, the whole of the north wall towards the
street, and the adjoining corner of the west wall from where can be seen the
length of the street with the intersection of avenues diminishing in the
distance as far as the Pan Am building. Within the rectangular space are the
plants and ferns which any normal person would put there.

Sometimes
there is a marvellous sunset pouring in the west window, but Elsa prefers to
watch the river. The sunset from the west spills the shadows of Elsa’s palms
and ferns all over the floor, all over Elsa and the curtains by the east
window. Out of the west window, on good days at sunset the Manhattan rooflines
are black against the brilliance while the sky over the East River darkens
slowly.

He
cannot remember exactly what day it was that, on returning to the flat at seven
in the evening — or six… if he could remember the season of the year…

In the
evening — he cannot exactly remember the day, the time of day, perhaps it was
spring, or winter, perhaps it was five, six o’clock…

He is
standing in the middle of the room. She is sitting by the window, staring out
over the East River. The late sunlight from the opposite window touches her
shoulders and hair, it casts the shadow of palm leaves across the carpet, over
her arm. The chair she sits in casts a shadow before her.

There
is another shadow, hers. It falls behind her. Behind her, and cast by what
light? She is casting a shadow in the wrong direction. There’s no light shining
upon her from the east window, it comes from the west window. What is she
looking at?

He
looks. Welfare Island. The borough of Queens across the river. The river moving
past a moored barge.

She
says, without turning her head, ‘Why are you standing there? Why don’t you get
a drink?’

Or she
says, ‘Pierre just left.’

Or, ‘I
bought a pair of shoes today.’

The day
is getting darker. He switches on the floor lamp, although the room is still
light enough.

Her
shadow does not move. He comes and stands beside her, looking out. There is no
beam of light coming in from the East River or the sky. But she goes on looking
and receiving; perhaps she’s begun to smile. She casts a shadow behind her as
she moves her chair to make room for him. Today she began a new course of
analysis, or perhaps she began last week.

She is
saying, ‘I bought a pair of shoes.’

Or,
‘Pierre doesn’t know what to do.’

Or,
‘Katerina ran out of deodorant in Castellam-mare.’

Paul
turns to go to the kitchen for ice. At the door he turns again.

His
heart thumps for help. ‘Help me! Help me!’ cries his heart, battering the sides
of the coffin. ‘The schizophrenic has imposed her will. Her delusion, her
figment, her nothing-there, has come to pass.’

‘Did
Kiel recognise you, Elsa?’

‘I
think so. I saw Garven today.’

‘I’m in
danger from Kiel, and all you can talk about is your own problem.’

‘I
don’t have a problem. It was your idea that I should go to Garven.’

He is
dressing; she comes through from her bathroom into her bedroom.

‘Garven
has the problem anyway,’ she says. ‘The problem of me is his, not mine—’ The
light from his table falls upon her. Her shadow bends towards it.

He
holds his breath — ‘Let me out! Let me out!’

He will
not sleep beside her in bed any more. Never again, never again. No man can
sleep with a woman whose shadow falls wrong and who gets light or something
from elsewhere.

He
watches her walk into her bedroom. The last time they dined out the hostess had
to fuss with the candles at the table, which was unaccountably darkened over.
Or was it the time before that? The last time, maybe, was when they were all
looking at the newly acquired Kandinsky: ‘Just stand aside a little, Elsa —
Paul — standing in the light? There’s a shadow… who?… how?’

Nobody
has really noticed it, and yet everyone has noticed it. Pierre and Katerina —
perhaps they have talked of it between themselves:

‘Mother
is terrifying. Have you seen how her shadow falls?’ No, they wouldn’t say that.
Pierre would telephone to Garven, perhaps. No, Garven would think him crazy.

Has
Garven noticed?

No,
Garven is too busy with his problem.

Paul
shouts into the bedroom, ‘You don’t care what happens to me! Can’t you realise
what it means, that Kiel is alive and has come here to New York?’

‘Have
him checked,’ she replies in a practical voice as if it were a question of a
cavity in a tooth.

‘I’ve
had him checked,’ he shouts. ‘He’s got every cover. There’s a Helmut Kiel,
deceased, on the prison records at Hamburg. He’s got a new name, obviously; new
papers, a job in a shoe store, everything. What do you care?’

He
feels easier after this row. Helmut Kiel is a definite danger to his life, but
preferable to the torture of that something of Elsa’s out there on the river.

‘Are
you ready?’ he says.

Or
perhaps he says, ‘Now, pull yourself together.’

She
says, ‘I’m ready, are you? I don’t have a problem. Katerina…’

Pierre’s
apartment in East Seventy-sixth Street is beautifully cool this summer. Paul
envies the silent air-conditioning system of his son’s apartment, distributed
from a noiseless central equipment throughout the house, and once more decides
to move from the apartment by the East River down there in Forty-fourth Street
where the air-conditioners hum separately in each room.

‘Look,’
says Paul, ‘it was before you were born, a long time ago.’

‘But
Father, be reasonable and methodical, that’s all I say. See a lawyer. Have the
F.B.I. make a thorough investigation. And if you can’t leave it at that, have a
private firm investigate the man. ‘Paul does not want to leave this evenly cool
apartment. He lingers, even having said all he has wanted to say, even to the
point of beginning again. ‘It was when your mother and I were young, in
England, during the war…’

The
apartment is cool in its decorations. Very little furniture, like a
psychiatrist’s consulting room. Elsa has said she enjoys a sense of repose when
she visits her analyst.

‘Then
I’ve got the problem of your mother on top of it,’ Paul says.

‘Leave
that to Garven. It’s Garven’s problem.’

‘Oh, is
it? Oh, is it Garven’s problem?’ Paul says. ‘Sometimes I wonder.’

‘Wonder
what?’ says Pierre with a sudden stare that betokens, surely, an innocent
question.

‘Have
you ever thought there was something strange about your mother?’ Paul says.

‘Yes.
What else does she see Garven for? But we shouldn’t let her go away again. Not
into the clinic, not there. It isn’t necessary. Not with modern drugs and
therapy and so on.’ Pierre is anxious for him to leave; he has something else
to do, or is perhaps afraid that his father will say too much.

‘I
think about Kiel, real name Mueller, that’s the main problem,’ Paul says.
‘Anything you can think of, let me know. I just wanted to put you in the
picture, Pierre, in case anything happens to me.’

‘Don’t
worry.’ Pierre looks out of the window.

Pierre,
looking out of the window, resembles his mother more than usual.

His
shadow falls in folds on the curtain, cast by the lamp behind him, his shadow
falls where it should fall. It moves as Pierre moves. The father says, ‘I want
you to have the whole picture, Pierre.’ He watches his son’s movements as if
almost hoping the tall young man could cause things to happen by the mere
waving of that wand, his body.

‘I have
the picture, I think.’

‘Yes,
but the picture, the whole picture and nothing but the picture,’ Paul says.
‘Pierre, it’s a complex matter. If your mother can’t rouse herself or feel
anything about my predicament with Kiel, then I’m in all the greater danger,
Pierre.’

Pierre
looks round, briefly and with an irritated opening of his lips, as if to say
‘Don’t “Pierre” me. ‘After a while he sits down and says, ‘Mother is no fool.
She doesn’t panic, that’s all.’

‘Panic!
I don’t say she ought to panic. I say she might show some concern. After all,
she saw the man. It was your mother who first saw him in the shoe store. She
simply told me. She sat there calmly and told me, as if it were something as
meaningless as a pair of shoes.’

‘Shoes
have meaning, Father.’

Paul
wants to hit his son, and scream at him that his rotten education has made him
unfit for the modern world, and it has been his mother’s rotten money that has
sent him the rounds of the world to every school of Art History that money can
buy. Paul lays his palms on the arms of his chair and for the usual reason that
deters people from violence of word and deed, refrains from it. He says, ‘She
sits looking out. She remembers Kiel very well. She remembers what happened
when we were engaged during the war. She knows that Kiel was a double agent and
went to prison after the war. She heard that he died in prison and now she’s
seen him in New York. But if one makes any appeal to her sense of its
significance she’s not interested. She’s away and out of reach. She looks out
of the window and I stand there like a grocer who’s come to demand payment of
an overdue bill from, say, Michelangelo while he’s up on the scaffold of the
Sistine Chapel, painting the ceiling. She says, “Go and get a drink.” That’s
what she says, and I’m only a little figure far beneath her and her thoughts.’