Isabelle greeted him with a kiss, running from the house to embrace him. “I missed you,” she said lightly.
“I’ve missed myself,” he said. “Has Max been wanting to get to work?”
“Max took most of his entourage to see the Dover Castle. He asked if you and I wanted to go and I said no. I don’t believe he even knew you had gone off.”
“Did I get any calls?” he asked.
“Someone rang up this morning while we were all having breakfast and then hung up without speaking a word. If you want that one, you can have it.”
Terman went into one of the back rooms on the first floor and in a little over an hour rewrote a scene that had been troubling Max. The house was empty when he finished work and after taking a plum from the refrigerator he went out for a walk. He wondered if he should lock the outside door and didn’t.
He walked along the water’s edge, had the illusion, looking into the fog that veiled the French coast, that he had gone as far as he could go. After awhile, tired of his own company, he sat down on a bench near the strand and took his son’s letter from the breast pocket of his jacket. He was about to reread it when he heard his name in the air, saw himself frozen inescapably in the sights of his caller.
The recitation of his name startled him. When he looked up he expected to see a gun pointed in his face.
“I saw a child drown,” Isabelle said.
It seemed like an odd thing for her to say to him and he looked up from his letter with a bemused grin.
“Terman, for pity’s sake!” Her voice trilled. “A child, three, four years old, was drowned in the channel. I saw a man walk into the water with his clothes on and carry out this lifeless little creature.” She pointed down the beach toward where a crowd had formed.
The news made its way — his distraction so great — as if it had been beamed across the channel into France and back again. “A child was drowned?” The question was rhetorical.
She felt compelled to tell the story to him from beginning to end.
“You tell it very well,” he said.
“It’s so terrible, isn’t it?”
He put his arm on her shoulder and they walked back to the Kirstners’ house, circumventing the crowd of mourners. It worried him that he felt nothing for the child, imagining it by turns as his own or as himself.
“They’ll hate themselves, won’t they?” she said. “I can’t imagine a marriage surviving something dreadful like that. They’ll take to blaming each other, don’t you think.”
The image of the child face down in the water kept him company, the child embryonic, the water like amniotic fluid. He held the oppressive image before him, suffocating in the water himself yet unable to feel the slightest compassion.
When they were back at the house he showed her his son’s letter.
“What do you make of it?” he asked when she returned it to him without a word.
“There’s the obvious thing,” she said. “And beyond that I couldn’t even begin to guess.”
He took back the letter, reinserted it in its envelope and returned it to his jacket pocket. “What’s the obvious thing?” he asked.
She gave him one of her narrow-eyed glances and slipped out of the room. “I thought school was out,” he imagined her saying.
Terman fell asleep over the Observer, lost the world for the briefest of interludes. When he woke up Max Kirstner and the others were back. Isabelle had gone off somewhere, had left him as he dozed, their conversation stuck in the broken teeth of some obscure misunderstanding.
When he opened his eyes he had the sense that he had been immersed in water for a dangerously long time.
Kirstner and Tumsun and another man, an international actor with an impassive boyish face, a man who gave the impression in his films of being raptured with self-admiration, were talking in French. Marjorie and a woman named Sylvie, an actress who had come with Tumsun, were in the kitchen, confiding in echoing whispers over preparations for lunch.
His presumptive conspirator took him aside at first opportunity. “I’d like your opinion of Emile as Henry Berger. He’s not absolutely right, though he has a certain quality that’s in the script. The suspicion of irony in even his most sincere gestures.”
“And the suspicion of sincerity in even his most ironic gestures.”
Kirstner pulled him over into a corner, one eye on the others as he talked. “You need anything?” he asked. “You all right?”
“When someone asks me if I’m all right,” Terman said, “It’s gererally because he’s doing something to make me feel not all right. What are you doing to me, Max?”
Max apologized exaggeratedly for having ignored him, said he hoped that Terman could manage without him in the afternoon as he promised to show Emile and some others the local color, a chore (he assured him by pursung his lips) he would prefer to avoid. “You’ll be all right?” he asked, his arm on Terman’s shoulder. “Of course you will be.”
“Of course I will be,” Terman said.
They had lunch in the garden — oysters, baked ham, paté, cheese and white wine — Emile insisted on drinking bourbon — and sat until it was almost four o’clock.
When Max got into his car to show Emile the sights the afternoon was fading into retrospect. Marjorie and Sylvie elected to sunbathe in the enclosed garden, to make use of what remained of the hot sun. Tumsum thought of going along for the ride — he had already had the tour once — but decided to take a nap instead. Isabelle couldn’t decide what she wanted to do, said she would take a ride into town with Max if he was going past the shops. Terman, not asked to come along, went into the workroom to look over the scene he had written earlier in the day.
He was composing an answer to Tom’s letter when he was interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he called. When he stood up he could see the sunbathers in the garden from his window. There was no response to his invitation, and the knock, if that’s what it was, had not repeated itself. He considered throwing the door open, though instead moved closer to the window to glance at the two women in the garden. They each wore only the bottom half of a bikini, and Terman, not ordinarily a voyeur, appraised them from the window. They lay at right angles, or almost right angles, head to cheek, forming a bent L, Marjorie on her back, Sylvie, who seemed a miniature of the other, on her side. He imagined himself embraced between them.
“Who is it?” he called, turning his head away from the garden.
He returned to the safety of his typewriter, found himself waiting for a second knock at the door. He was unaccountably out of breath, disturbed by the failure of events to define themselves. “Why can’t you just accept me as I am?” he wrote to his son.
Henry Berger wakes to find himself strapped to a bed in a small punitively antiseptic hospital room. After a moment, a woman in a nurse’s uniform comes in and locks the door behind her.
Nurse: My name is Adamantha. I’ll be looking after you until you’re well again, sir. If there’s anything I can do to make your stay with us more pleasurable, I would like to know what it is.
Berger: I’d be obliged, sweetheart, if you unstrapped my hands.
Adamantha: Are the straps too tight, sir?
Berger: Too tight? Yes.
Adamantha: I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Only Dr. X has the authority to remove the straps. They are there, do I need to tell you, for your own good.
Berger: You can do anything for me but remove the straps. Is that right?
Adamantha wheels a tray of food over to the bed.
Adamantha: I’ll be your hands for you, sir. I’ll give you nothing to complain of, I promise. Would you like your lunch or would you like to have your massage first?