“D’you know I’ve only been down there once in my life … to the stores. I couldn’t have been more than ten. I was angry with my mother, so I went down all by myself one Saturday afternoon.” The tone of my voice showed that it was still an adventure to me.
“Was it forbidden, then?” he asked.
“Oh yes. Quite forbidden; the natives, and unhealthy …” I did not think to pretend otherwise my mother’s distaste for the stores.
I was right; I did not need to. “We survived very well,” he laughed, as if he knew my mother, too. Perhaps, knowing me, shaped by my mother, he did.
“You certainly have,” I said with a little gesture of my face toward his books; I did not know why.
“Yes.” Now he was thoughtful.
I remembered something, seriously—”By the way, perhaps I should have said, but you seem to know so much—”
He smiled at me again, that expressive smile that had an almost nasal curve to it, gently. “Yes I know; it’s Helen. Helen of Atherton.”
It was a title. Perfectly sincerely, I could hear it was a title. And although the obvious reference that came to mind was ridiculous, it made me blush. Entirely without coquetry I suddenly wished I were better looking, beautiful. It was something I felt I should have had, like the dignity of an office.
Chapter 12
The Aarons did not live behind the Concession Store any more, but in a little suburban house in the town. There was a short red granolithic path from the front door to the gate, and the first time I went there a fowl was jerking cautiously along a row of dahlias. Joel said, opening the gate for me, the sun laying angles of shadow on his face: “I often thought about going into your house, but I never imagined bringing you to mine.”
It was a Saturday morning, and I had met him coming out of the stationer’s in the main street of Atherton, carrying a paper bag from which the head of a paintbrush protruded. “My builder’s supplies.” He waved the bag. I knew all about the model hospital he was making as part of his year’s work as an architectural student. He had explained the sketches for it to me in the train.
“Did you remember the ambulance for the front door?”
“—Come with me to buy it.”
The town had taken spring like a deep breath; it showed only in the bright pale brushes of grass that pushed up newly where there were cracks in the paving, the young leaves on the dark dry limbs of the trees round the Town Hall, but we felt it on our faces and I on my bare arms. There was a feeling of waking; as if a cover had been whipped off the glass shop fronts and the faded blinds. When we had been to the bazaar, he said: “You’ve wanted to see my hospital and you’ve heard so much about it — why don’t you come home with me now? If you’re doing nothing, it’s not far—” So we walked slowly to his home in the light glancing sun, talking past the bits of gardens where children scratched in the dust, women knitted on their verandas, a native girl beat a rug over a wire fence.
It was only when he spoke at the gate that our interested talk dropped lightly and suddenly. The faint sense of intrusion that quietens one when one is about to walk in on someone else’s most familiar witnesses came to me. It was suddenly between us that we really knew each other well; oddly, it seemed that a matter for laughter — Joel’s eyes silently on me from a distance — really had secreted a friendship that it had only been necessary for us to speak to discover. Since that morning on the train we had been companions on every journey, and with an ease that comes to relationships most often as a compensation for the dulling of years, very rarely with the immediacy of a streak of talent.
Yes, we knew each other well, the young to the young, a matching of the desire for laughter, meaning and discovery which boils up identically, clear of the different ties, tensions, habits and memories that separately brewed it. But this brown front door with the brush hairs held in the paint, an elephant-ear plant in a paraffintin pot below the bell, watched Joel Aaron every day. Inside; the walls, the people who made him what he was as the unseen powers of climate shape a landscape; force flowers, thick green, or a pale monotony of sand.
He lifted the mat made of rolled tire strips, looking for the key, and dropped it back. “Ma’s home, then.” He smiled, and the door gave way to his hand.
It was not spring inside the Aarons’ house. The air of a matured distilled indoor season, an air that had been folded away in cupboards with old newsprint and heavy linen, cooked in ten-years’ pots of favorite foods, burned with the candles of ten-years’ Friday nights, rested in the room with its own sure permeance, reaching every corner of the ceiling, passing into the dimness of passages with the persistence of a faint, perpetual smoke.
Joel was not aware of it as one cannot be aware of the skin-scent of one’s own body; he picked up some circulars that the postman had pushed under the door and threw them onto a chair. The house opened directly into the living room where there was a large dark table with a crocheted lace cloth, high-backed chairs set back against the wall, a great dark sideboard with two oval, convex-glassed pictures above it. A pair of stern, stupid eyes looked out from the smoky beard of an old photograph; the face of a foolish man in the guise of a patriarch. But next to him the high bosom, the high nose that seemed to tighten the whole face, slant the black eyes, came with real presence through a print that seemed to have evaporated from the paper: a woman presided over the room.
Past a green leatherette sofa with shiny portholes for ash trays in the arms, Joel led me through the white archway into the passage. A refrigerator stood against the wall as if in a place of honor; our footsteps were noisy on thin checkered linoleum that outlined the uneven spines of the floor boards beneath it like a shiny skin. In his room, Joel showed the self-conscious busyness that comes upon one in one’s own home. He put out the little rough dog that had been sleeping on the bed, kicked a pair of shoes out of sight, cleared one or two rolls of plans off the table that held his model.
To me the model was a cunning and delightful toy and I exclaimed over it with pleasure. I made him take the miniature ambulance out of its packet and place it under the portico.
“What I’m worried about, you see, is this—” He knew I could not detect the functional pitfalls of his design, yet he hoped for reassurance in itself, even the reassurance of ignorance. I tried to separate my intelligence from my fascination with the perfect little windows, the flower boxes made of cork. “I see. I see …”
He had a way of looking up penetratingly to see if the face of the person to whom he was speaking confirmed his words. It was quick, earnest, almost a request. “I’ll show you, here on the plan — somewhere here—” His long olive-skinned hands unrolled the paper on the bed, we knelt on it together, rumpling the blue taffeta cover that smelled of dog. The plan shot up again like a released blind. He picked it up, blew down it. He said calmly, as if the thing had dwindled to its proper small importance; “Well, there’ll be no problem getting it back again after it’s seen. I’ll take five minutes to break it up.” I protested, but he only smiled at me, swinging a leg. “You might want to look at this,” he said, “and these”—he was pulling books out of an old high case that stood by his bed—”Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright — the high priests—”