“Because you were talking to me, not to Betty, who I suppose is used to you.”
“What? What did I say?”
“The same thing you say so often. You need love without love. You prefer desire without desire. No, you weren’t talking to Betty. You were talking to me.” You put your mouth to Javier’s ear and whispered: “Do you know what you call me when we make love?”
Javier hid his face in the pillow. “Forgive me. Please, forgive me.”
You laughed and jerked the sheet off him.
“Stop it!” he cried sharply. “I tell you I don’t like it.”
“I’m not allowed to see it except when it’s stiff and hard? I’d like to see it taking a little nap sometime.”
“Then here, and stop talking.”
You moved between his legs and laughed. “Baby,” you said. “Big baby. What do you really think? Go on, chatter all you want to, I don’t really care. My darling. Do you know something? Today I’ve found out that you tell fibs.”
* * *
Δ “No, it was true. I made love to you twice because I thought that you had understood. You had to understand, for not long afterward you repeated it. They sent me along with the secretariat to a conference in London. A Modigliani show was on at the Tate.”
You agreed to meet there after the morning plenary session and Javier said goodbye to you, to Elizabeth with the falsely gray hair and the heavy eyebrows and the thick lips and the Chanel suit with its torero jacket embroidered with pearls. He arrived at the Tate at two in the afternoon and did not look for you immediately. He studied the paintings with a certain distraction, seeking first a spontaneous reaction to those women with long necks and eyes lacking the cornea, with dark pubes and thin lips, women he had always associated with the twenties but who now he realized were the living women of Thessaly, Mycenae, and Crete, lank and linear; and now it all came back suddenly and without warning, the smells and lights and sounds of the time spent in Greece. Those women of Modigliani’s, fixed in their frames, gave off scents of hyacinth and hibiscus, sounds of draymen’s horses clomping along the pavement, of carpenters’ hammers, the light of the sun filtering through to the bottom of the sea. The orange of the fishing boats, the blue of the Chapel of St. Nicholas, the white of the stairs and pedestals at Mykonos, the ocher and red of the warrior-saint altar-pieces, the Naples yellow of the windmills; once again the haze of incense, the smells of smoking pigs with their bellies open, of donkeys lying dead beneath vultures and flies, of frying chitterlings in the impenetrable kitchens, of garlic, olives, cheese. Javier turned with the feeling that he was being stared through as if his body were transparent, and there they were, the English girls who had come here to see themselves in the Italian mirror, today’s women with loose dark hair and low-cut sweaters and red, green, black stockings of filigree, looking with their black and green eyes at their own images reflected in the paintings. The models had returned to life and were visiting themselves. And behind them, the woman, her hair dyed black now and loose like that of the nude woman on the blue cushion in the painting at her back, her eyebrows plucked thin, her lips painted narrow, her mascara-weighted lashes curling around her clear eyes, her neck made longer by the frill of lace that extended to her waist. She herself had contrived that out-of-date get up, the dress as loose and shapeless as a tunic, falling from her shoulders like a pen stroke. In her smile was readiness, in her eyes was nostalgia. Her long pale hands were joined at the level of her hips with a kind of self-consciousness, the knowledge that they could serve to hide or isolate or protect the sacred parts of a body that belonged to herself and to him at the same time.
“This effort to remember is in reality an attempt to forget, Dragoness.”
* * *
Δ Do you remember? Irene Dunne played the absent-minded millionairess. Jean Arthur was the vulgar newswoman with a heart of gold, William Powell the ironic majordomo, Alice Brady the lady with bats in the belfry, Eugene Pallette the diabetic millionaire, Myrna Loy the wife with a good sense of humor, Roland Young the rich tourist with a fondness for ectoplasm, Cary Grant the epitome of natural elegance, Charles Ruggles the man of large means who won the English valet in a poker game. And beautiful, mad, irresistible Carole Lombard, and Mae West who winked one eye and said “Beulah, peel me a grape” and wriggled her hourglass body. And you and Javier were holding hands in the Brooklyn movie and watching The Four Daughters because John Garfield was in it and you had never liked any actor as much as you liked John Garfield, who looked like Javier and whose name was Jules Garfinkle and who had lived walking with humiliation on one side and danger on the other, intuitively the first existential hero, before Bogart or Brando or Dean: that living contradiction, the hero-villain, the saint-assassin, the artist-vulgarian who died fucking. And today when the television shows some old movie featuring John Garfield, you see to it that Javier is there to watch and remember.
You and Javier do not see eye to eye about Latin American artists and intellectuals. “They are all alike,” you say vehemently. “Using art merely to be able to feel like aristocrats, to climb into the oligarchy they pretend to be struggling against. Everything they do is so elegant, so nice, so pretty-pretty. It’s simply their way to escape from the horrors of the crude, foolish, stuttering middle class. That’s all. They may call it ‘form’ or ‘good taste’ but it is really impotence and fear and a longing for the past. And most of all it is vulgar social climbing.”
“And your gringo artists?” Javier retorts. “The hero with hair on his chest? Aren’t they trying to escape their different middle class by pretending to be stevedores, baseball players, tiger hunters, railroad workers, boxers?”
It ends calmly. “Florence Rice,” you say quietly. “Who remembers Florence Rice today? Or Arline Judge? So many lovely faces that once were as famous as Rochelle Hudson and Madge Evans and Jean Parker, and today no one even knows their names.”
You held hands together in the movie and the movie made everything the same for both of you. Then when it was over you walked out into that other movie that had not changed all through your childood: the kleikodeschnik standing outside the synagogue with his face contrite and his hands joined, the ototot forever trimming his old Russian beard, the languid and cultivated schönerjud who played chess on the second floor of a neighborhood café, the old woman waiting for the funeral to emerge, her handkerchief already open to receive alms from the mourners, the emancipated radikalke with the shrill voice …
“And would you like that I should be such a crazy woman like that, Beth? That is what you would like I should be?”
“No, Mama. I didn’t say that.”
“Then stop paying attention to your father. Let him play pinochle and feel modern. Let him be all wrong, only don’t let him know it. Come and take my hand, Beth. Lie down here beside me. We can’t escape it. It’s deeper even than we think. You will see if then he doesn’t understand what I have understood. That the important thing in life is what we are leaving behind when we die. Those who will cry for us.”
You squeezed Javier’s hand in the Brooklyn theater and again watching television today. John Garfield, playing the piano. “It doesn’t seem the same today, does it? Today there is nothing unusual about it.”
“Today there is no point in the mother tongue,” whispered Gershon.
“Shut up! What are you saying? Renegade! Goy!”
“All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient,” you say to yourself as the car leaves the shadows of the avenue of trees. It is one in the afternoon. Franz glances at his watch. The earth is white. White trees. White hillsides. The fine dust rises. Ahead is the river, the ford. “Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord.”