Their love is gentle and discreet. If it were a plant it would be a fern, light green and feathery and delicate; if a musical instrument, a flute. If a painting it would he a water lily by Monet, one of the more pastel renditions, with its liquid depths, its reflections, its different falls of light. “You’re my best friend,” West tells Tony, stroking her hair back from her forehead. “I owe you a lot:” Tony is touched by his gratitude, and too young to be suspicious of it.
They never mention Zenia, Tony because she thinks it will upset West, West because he thinks it will upset Tony. Zenia does not go away, however. She hovers, growing fainter, true, but still there, like the blue haze of cigarette smoke in a room after the cigarette has been put out. Tony can smell her.
One evening Zenia appears at their door. She knocks like anybody else and Tony opens, thinking it is a Girl Guide selling cookies, or else the Jehovah’s Witnesses. When she sees Zenia standing there she can’t think of what to say. She’s holding a skewer in her hand, with chunks of lamb and tomato and green pepper threaded onto it, and for an instant she has a vision of herself plunging the skewer into Zenia, into where her heart should be, but she doesn’t do this. She just stands there with her mouth open, and Zenia smiles at her and says, “Tony darling, it was such work to track you down!” and laughs with her white teeth. She’s thinner now, and even more sophisticated. She’s wearing a black mini-skirt, a black shawl with jet beading and long silken fringes, fishnet tights, and knee-high lace-up high-heeled boots.
“Come in,” says Tony, motioning with her skewer. Lamb blood drips onto the floor.
“Who is it?” calls West from the living room, where he’s playing Purcell on the spinet. He likes to play while Tony is making dinner: it’s one of their little rituals.
Nobody, Tony wants to say. They had the wrong address. They went away. She wants to thrust her hands at Zenia, push her back, slam the door. But Zenia is already over the threshold.
“West! My God!” she says, striding into the living room, holding out her arms to him. “Long time no see!” West can’t believe it. His eyes behind his rimless glasses are the shocked eyes of a burned baby, the amazed eyes of an interstellar traveller. He doesn’t get up, he doesn’t move. Zenia takes his upturned face in her two hands and kisses him twice, once on each cheek, and then a third time on the forehead. The fringes of her shawl caress him, his mouth is level with her chest. “It’s so good to see old friends,” says Zenia, breathing out.
Somehow or other she ends up staying for dinner, because who are Tony and West to hold grudges, and what is there to hold them about anyway? Wasn’t it Zenia’s defection that brought them together? And aren’t they touchingly happy? Zenia tells them they are. They’re just like a couple of kids, she says, kids on one long picnic, playing sand castles at the beach. So darling! She says she’s delighted to see it. Then she sighs, implying that life has not treated her as well as it’s been treating them. But then, she hasn’t had their advantages. She s-lived on the edges, out there where it’s dark and sharp and there are scarcities. She’s had to forage.
Where has she been? Well, Europe, she says, gesturing towards a higher, a deeper culture; and the States, where the big folks play; and the Middle East. (With a wave of her hand she invokes deserts, date palms, mystic knowledge, and better shish kebab than anything capable of being grilled in Tony’s wee Canadian oven.) She avoids saying what she’s been doing in these places. This and that, she says. She laughs, and says she has a short attention span.
About the money she made off with she tactfully says nothing, and Tony decides that it would be parochial of her to bring it up. Zenia does say, “Oh, there’s your wonderful lute, I always loved it,” as if she has no memory whatsoever of her own kidnapping of this instrument. West seems to have no memory of it either. At Zenia’s request he plays a few of the old songs; though he doesn’t do folksongs much any more, he says. By now he’s into a cross-cultural study of polyphonal chants.
No memory, no memory. Does nobody but Tony have any memory at all? Apparently not; or rather West has no memory, and Zenia’s is highly selective. She gives little nudges, little hints, and assumes a rueful expression: she has regrets, is what she implies, but she has sacrificed her own happiness for that of West. Hearth and home are what he needs, not a feckless, mossless rover like Zenia, and Tony is such a busy little housewife—isn’t this cunning food! West is where he belongs: like a houseplant in the right window, just look how he’s flourishing!
“You two are so lucky,” she whispers to Tony, a mournful catch in her voice. West overhears, as he is meant to.
“Where are you staying?” Tony asks politely, meaning, when are you leaving.
“Oh, you know,” says Zenia with a shrug. “Here and there. I live from hand to mouth—or from feast to famine. Just like the old days, remember, West? Remember our feasts?” She’s eating a Viennese chocolate, from a box West brought home to surprise Tony. He often brings her little treats, little atonements for the part of himself he’s unable to give her. Zenia licks the dark chocolate from her fingers, one by one, gazing at West from between her eyelashes. “Delicious,” she says richly.
Tony can’t believe that West doesn’t see through all this, this blandishment and prestidigitation, but he doesn’t. He has a blind spot: his blind spot is Zenia’s unhappiness. Or else her body. Men, thinks Tony with new bitterness, can’t seem to tell one from the other.
A few days after that, West comes home later than usual. “I took Zenia out for a beer,” he tells Tony. He has the air of a man who is being scrupulously honest even though he’s been tempted not to be. “She’s having a rough time. She’s a very vulnerable person. I’m quite worried about her.”
Vulnerable? Where did West pick up that word? Tony thinks Zenia is about as vulnerable as a cement block, but she doesn’t say so. Instead she says something almost as bad. “I suppose she wants some money.”
West looks hurt. “Why don’t you like her?” he asks. “You used to be such good friends. She’s noticed, you know. She’s upset about it:”
“Because of what she did to you,” says Tony indignantly. “That’s why I don’t like her!”
West is puzzled. “What did she do to me?” he asks. He really doesn’t know.
In no time at all—actually in about two weeks—Zenia has reclaimed West, in the same way she might reclaim any piece of property belonging to her, such as a suitcase left at a train station. She simply tucks West under her arm and walks off with him. It doesn’t look like that to him, naturally; just to Tony. To West it looks as if he’s on a rescue mission, and who is Tony to deny the attraction of that?
“I admire you a lot,” he says to Tony. “You’ll always be my best friend. But Zenia needs me.”
“What does she need you for?” says Tony in a small clear voice.
“She’s suicidal,” says West. “You’re the strong one, Tony. You’ve always been so strong.”
“Zenia is as strong as an ox,” says Tony.
“It’s just an act,” says West. “I always knew that about her. She’s a deeply scarred person:” Deeply scarred, thinks Tony. That can’t be anyone’s vocabulary but Zenia’s. West has been hypnotized: it’s Zenia talking, from the inside of his head. He goes on: “She’s going to fall apart completely unless I do something:”
Something means that West will move in with Zenia. This, according to West, will give Zenia back some of her lost confidence in herself. Tony wants to hoot with derisive laughter, but how can she? West is gazing at her earnestly, willing her to understand and to absolve him and to give him her blessing, just as if he were still in control of his own brain. But instead he’s a zombie.