Confronting, that first morning, the tremendous difficulty of teaching the class: how, by what method, to tell you about geography, history? I opened the Book I’d brought upstairs with me for no particular reason, without knowing, when I picked it up, what use I might put it to, and began reading you one passage or another. For example, the passage concerning the Verdurins, where the Writer describes the horror of the furniture throughout their house, which seeks to give an impression of wealth and succeeds, but of an execrable newly gotten wealth, not a mark or a wrinkle on the upholstery, every finish perfect and all the more horrible for its perfection. The constant impression of running into a wall of bad taste, a mirrored surface, to the point that sometimes I couldn’t make myself go inside, hesitating, thinking: if I don’t slide open the glass doors.
Surer now that I would know how to teach the boy. A flexible pedagogy, not forcing him into any subject, any particular branch of knowledge. It was, for that matter, what I’d have wanted for myself: not to have wasted months making my way through mathematics and algebra. To adopt the Writer as the sole basis, transmute the knowledge the Book contained into wisdom. A boy who was happy when I met him because he didn’t have to go to school — and what boy wouldn’t be, Petya?
6
A sense of having arrived finally settling into me, the impressive view beyond the garden wall, the highway parallel to the bay that I’d driven along that first day, gazing up, trying to guess which of the houses it was. Without, of course, ever imagining anything like this: the magnificent layout of the rooms, the bedspread stretched taut to a degree I would be incapable of achieving, ever.
The excellent idea of these houses with swimming pools, the days I would spend swimming, reading until all the light had gone out of the sky and the ones inside the house were coming on. The perfume that wafted up from the rough fabric when I leaned down to drop my towel in a movement that brought my eyes close to the deck chair. So strong a scent that I could visualize her, the lady of the house, walking along the edge of the pool in the same dress she wore that night, pale cream with a green patterning, the fabric stretching across her legs as she walked toward where I lay. Precisely the abandoned wife I would want for a house like that, undoing her hair before lying back onto the deck chair and impregnating it with her perfume.
Enveloped from that first day in the sound of the sea and wondering from the beginning how the waves could be audible, a thing quite impossible at the distance we were. Until I discovered a few silver columns in the living room that didn’t look like, couldn’t possibly be, but, on closer inspection, proved to be speakers, a very slender, very expensive type of speaker. Impossible to say which speaker it came from, of course. I couldn’t tell if it was the one under the gem-encrusted lamp or another: the whisper of surf barraging the coast.
A thing I’d not heard of before, a new style for that type of house, rich people’s house. But why the stereo? Why not simply, and better, the real sound of the air, the trill of the birds? To what end the plasma screen’s aquarium of tropical fish I’d watch rise through their water, shifting from side to side like real fish, with the slight movements and trailing bubbles of real fish?
The cool breeze that greeted me the next day when I opened a door by accident, taking it for the door of my room, and air came wafting across enameled mosaic, afternoon light softly illuminating the tessellated sea of a floor. A design I couldn’t take in without moving several steps back into the hallway to study from there the whole effect, the tub at floor level, the hard, clumsy head of a marine animal affixed there. Revolving, twisting its tentacles as I circled the tub in amazement. So much money! A simple bathroom transformed into a sanctuary! At the end of each looped tentacle: a three-paneled mirror, a rosewood chest of drawers, an enameled scale — like some sea monster in an engraving holding a sailboat, a bit of broken mast, a sailor in the air.
Ignoring all the other details, the many-eyed sponge, the nebulizers with their perfumes: my eyes on the faucets, gleaming at floor level and over the sink, plump as birds with puffed-out plumage. The delicate, unmistakable sheen, the doubloon glint. As I drew closer, the radiance intensified along with my certainty that yes, gold — but it cannot be! (I drew even closer.) Gold! Gold faucets in the bathrooms! How could it be? All the astonishment of finding chamber pots and spittoons wrought of finest gold on an adventure in some mythic kingdom. Nothing to draw attention to the fact, though, no sign attached nearby to explain the faucets or point arrows at them, the labels carefully peeled away that first day, the ones that said eighteen-karat gold. Without dwelling on it for a second, or maybe so, in the early weeks, tilting the head and half closing the eyes to the bright gleam, happy at the touch of the precious metal’s smooth patina, but then dipping one toe into the tub to check the water temperature, immersed in the flow of days, without a thought for the faucets. Cool water splashing against green porcelain. And now there I was, standing at the edge of that tub as if at the mouth of a well, staring, hypnotized, at the bubbles.
7
Because the Writer speaks, finally, of a young man (right away, when he says: many years younger), almost a child, a late-blooming adolescent: me. Who goes on to fall madly in love, yes, I concede that, stupidly in love, which makes it all forgivable, even the very reprehensible abandonment — how I condemn myself for it! — of the Book. Younger that afternoon than I am now, Petya. I’d gone down every hallway of that mansion, finding bolted doors, daggers in the air, like a knight dragging his feet laboriously along in his blued armor, the tree in the window blue as well, the birds on its branches turquoise blue. Knowing I would never leave that place, at least not through the same door I’d come in by, knowing that, with every step I took, the configuration of the castle’s corridors was shifting behind me.
In love, Petya, and prepared to distort the spirit of the Book, to wrest from its pages all that my heart and the heart of the woman I loved were seeking. Anything: a man hoisted upon a coat of arms, the most outlandish plan anyone could imagine, and the greatest danger, as well. My face turned toward those pages without knowing, the day I first arrived at your house, that it would all turn out this way: the text’s meanings passing over my face, their colors iridescing.
Happy, Petya, when the man I might have taken for a Filipino butler, had I been a character in some California noir thriller, opened the door and I discovered, before taking a single step, the blue gem of the swimming pool sparkling in the distance. How to understand it? All that money? How was it come by?
Dishonestly. Certainly not earned, as your mother tried to make me believe, from the sale of a unique invention patented by your father. Because that was the first thing she told me, but then, as if she were someone whose level were constantly changing, she spoke of a sale of military surplus, mutually exclusive and contradictory versions of the (illicit) origin of that money. Multiple interpretations, Petya, infinite meanings. Pausing before one explanation, exploring it, then moving on to another. Without suspecting that I would spend hours in the middle of your room trying to gather up the various meanings the Writer placed in the Book and find a way to leave that place and the tangled mess that I myself, of my own free will …