“A knightly compliment,” she said, and picked up the menu. “What on earth is Arctic char?”
“Not a compliment. I mean it.”
Her startled gaze rose from the menu but paused before meeting his. She stared at his necktie, or at the tip of his goatee, maybe he should shave it off …
“Look at me, Nora.”
She still didn’t meet his eyes. But alarm was slowly fading from her face, and a soft acceptance replaced it. And his heart leaped like one of her kangaroos.
“Look at me,” he pleaded.
“I don’t dare.”
Those three words were the closest to an admission of love he would ever hear. They were enough. During the next five years, until the onset of Victor’s illness, she arrived once a season, like a quarterly dividend. They spent the afternoon in his not-quite-wide-enough bed. The sky told them when it was time to leave for her train — a merciless five o’clock sky, royal in December, slate in March, turquoise in June, cornflower in September.
THE ARMOIRE WITH THE BEARDED CHERUBIM that had kept them company in Greg’s skylighted room was not in fact Hungarian. It was Albanian. As he edited “The Castle of Lubasz” Greg worried about this discrepancy, as if someone might peek through the small lie and discern the larger one. But suppose some indulgent readers did spot the falsehood? They’d only smile, and continue to buy enough whisky, cashmere throws, first editions, signed etchings, and retirement condominiums to keep advertisers happy; they’d continue to write appreciative letters to the editor. They weren’t going anywhere, were they? — for if they did shiver with wander-lust, any other travel magazine, full of Galápagos tips and Parisian hideaways and Middle East excavations, would serve them better. The World Enough demographic ideal was content to sit in a leather chair islanded on a Persian rug, and smoke a cigar and read.
Greg stopped worrying.
The final envelope, rather flat, was on his desk the day the Cul-lens’ daughter called from Godolphin. “They’re gone,” she said, and halted. “Both,” she said.
Icy tongs gripped his vocal cords. After a while, “Both?” he managed.
“They died twelve hours apart. She probably swallowed something, Uncle Greg.” There was a prolonged sniff. “Even though I was here, and my kids …”
They talked some more and then hung up. Greg opened the envelope.
Azula
The kingdom of Azula is shaped like a circle, not a perfect one, for its volcano juts westward as well as upward, but, rather, a circle with a bulge. Azula is completely surrounded by a river. The river was thought to be a lake until a current was discovered, flowing counterclockwise. The water reflects the sky — our sky, a faithful and steady blue.
Azula was established in 1678 by a land grant from Rudolfo the Fifth to a rogue musician. The country flourished under the musician’s rule. Now it is nearly deserted. But the mosaics on the floor of the royal mansion have hardly faded since the days of glory. Beetles in constant motion add to the complicated mystery of the tiles … In our cobwebbed suite, ecru draperies droop, like flesh from an old elbow … There is no roof. The nearby hospital for incurables is considerably decayed — the veranda on its second story should not be stepped on, as Nora discovered almost to her destruction. Two cured lepers inhabit the place.
In fact, Azula is a haven for couples: crows, who mate for life, dwell in noisy twosomes in our ruined rafters; and we are served by a man and woman lawfully married; and a pair of cassowaries occupy the courtyard. Their flightless majesties resemble huge pillows whose feathers have burst through their casings. Necks curve seductively; faces ardently woo.
Amenities? A plank for a toilet, a bucket for a shower, an unvarying diet of fish and root vegetables, ragged shrimp nets for sheets. And the blessed absence of needles, conversation, trays, periodicals, grandchildren, and enemas.
Here we wait, beetles below and crows above and cassowaries without. The lepers tend the garden. The female servant cooks and the male servant fishes. And Nora and I swim and dine and embrace, ah, my lovely; my lined darling … Get that clever artist to draw the author’s beauteous spouse; forget my battered mug.
Soon the volcano will erupt or the earth crack open; or perhaps one hot afternoon we will simply fail to emerge from the river, will sink into that blue that never changes, unlike the fitful New York sky you and she watched those afternoons Greg you bastard.
No, no, Greg silently screamed. I was a paladin. I kept her happy for you, Victor you fool.
HIS PENCIL WAS TWIRLING between his fingers as if it had a will of its own.
Victor you fool, his mind kept repeating as if it, too, acted without his control. Nora my dearest. He moaned helplessly.
His fingers tightened; the pencil stopped twirling. “Rudolfo” would not do: a name out of operettas and Christmas ditties. Call the king “Godolpho.” And the river — can its end really be its beginning, or … He felt rather than saw the art director shamble in.
For the contributors’ page, Greg gave Katsuko a studio photograph of Nora to work from. The art director added a snapshot from his own wallet. When Katsuko submitted the finished drawing, she remarked in that uninflected way of hers that she wished she had known the subject. Greg looked at the picture, and there in brown ink on cream paper was Nora: the playful mouth, the luminous irises, even the slight pleating of the lids. One eyebrow lifted, the lips parted, Oh, Greg, sometimes I have to escape from his intensity, I get scorched, you are so cool, darling, like a winding-sheet.
To illustrate “Azula” the collaborators ignored World Enough’s extensive files. Instead they performed a rare misdemeanor: they rifled the expense account. They flew to Cairns to photograph cassowaries. They went to Istanbul to hunt down mosaics. They found a leper hospital in Jerusalem.
Then the two exhausted old men took the jumbo back to New York. They arrived early in the morning. At Greg’s apartment they dropped their satchels in the living room and hung their neckties on the cherubim and, in suits and shoes, lay down side by side on the skimpy bed. Steadily they watched a sky streaked with gray and puckered with small clouds. Shortly after noon the streaks and puckers disappeared. A quantity of satin stretched before their eyes like a chivalric banner. “True blue,” Greg said. The art director stood up on the bed and pointed his lens and clicked and clicked.
IF LOVE WERE ALL
I.
“BEFORE YOU CAME HERE — what did you do?” Mrs. Levinger asked during Sonya’s first month in London.
“Books.”
“Wrote?”
“Kept.”
“Well then. Think of this enterprise as a balance sheet. On balance the children are better off. Don’t you have a handkerchief, Sonya? Take mine.”
The sort of incident that triggered this exchange — the removal of a child from his cohort by medical personnel — would occur frequently, but Sonya had just witnessed it for the first time: the kindly faces of doctor and nurse; the impassivity of the other children, imperfectly concealing their panic. Many wore cardboard placards, like Broadway sandwich men. london, londres, lond, england, the boards variously said.
“There is something a little wrong with your chest,” the doctor had told the child, in German.
“We will make it well,” the nurse said, in French.
The little boy spoke only Polish and Yiddish. He spoke them one after the other as he was led away. Then he screamed them, one after the other, stiffening his legs so as not to walk. “Mama!” he called as he was lifted up, though his mother was no doubt dead. “Big sister!” he cried as he was carried off, though his big sister, a girl of eight, had fallen to the floor.