Presence: Stories

  “Is it upsetting you?” Lucretia’s voice was deep; she always seemed to imitate a man when she had to perform a duty.

  “No!” Cleota laughed, surprised at her own sharpness. And instantly the feeling came over her that for some reason she was being got at by Lucretia tonight—she had brought the fortune-teller for a reason. What? If only they would both leave! Now, before this dreadful intimacy thickened! It had never been like this, not even in their beds at school when they had talked into the nights—from the beginning there had been an unspoken agreement to leave truly private matters untouched. It had been not a relation through words, but something like the silent passage of light from sun to moon, as when Lucretia had let her hair grow after Cleota stopped cutting hers, or took to wearing rings when Cleota returned with some for herself from Mexico. Facing her lifelong friend now, seeing the oddly broken smile on her face—was it a cynical smile?—she felt the fear of one who has wielded the power of example without having known it and must now deal with the revolt of the unwittingly oppressed. It flashed through her mind that Lucretia had moved to the country only because she had, and would never, never straighten out the chaos of her house because it was only an imitation of this house, and that her chains of projects—starting her shrub nursery, then designing shoes, now breeding horses—were not the good and natural blossoms of her joyous energy, as she always tried to imply, but abortive distractions in a life without a form, a life, Cleota saw now, that had been shaded by her own and Stowe’s. Cleota stared at the seemingly guilty and dangerous eyes, sensing—what she had always known!—that a disaster had been spreading roots through her friend’s life this last thirty years and now had burst it apart.

  Lucretia took a swallow of her drink and said, “Bud’s left me, Cleota,” and smiled.

  Cleota’s spine quivered at her prophecy come true. She cocked her head like a dog that has been summoned and does not know whether to approach or flee. “When?” she asked, merely to fill the silence until she could think what to say.

  “I don’t know when. He’s been on his way a long time, I guess.” And now she raised her arms, put them around Cleota’s neck, and—much the taller—rested her head awkwardly on Cleota’s shoulders. In a moment Cleota pressed her lightly away, and they looked at one another, changed.

  “Are you divorcing?” she asked Lucretia. How dreamily unfeeling that embrace had been!

  “Yes,” Lucretia said, red-faced but grinning.

  “Is it another—?”

  “No,” Lucretia cut her off. “At least I don’t think there’s anybody else.” And, glancing at the pot, she said, “Coffee’ll be cold, won’t it?”

  The coffee? Cleota only now remembered why she had come into the kitchen. She got the cups down and set them on the tray.

  “It won’t be much of an adjustment anyway,” Lucretia said, behind her.

  “You don’t seem very upset. Are you?” Cleota turned to her, picked up the tray, thinking that she had never before asked anyone such absurdly personal questions. Some dangerously obscene thing had invaded her person, she felt, and her house, and it must be stopped. And yet Lucretia appeared not to notice. It suddenly seemed ages ago since Stowe had been here.

  “I’ve been miserable for a long time, Clee,” Lucretia answered.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Yes.”

  They stood in the middle of the kitchen under the hanging bulb, looking at each other.

  “He’s actually moved out?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Look for a job, I guess. I think I’ve had it up here anyway.”

  “Oh,” Cleota said.

  “I’m glad I could tell you alone. Without Stowe.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “He likes Bud so.” Lucretia laughed dryly. “I’d feel ashamed to tell him.”

  “Oh, Stowe won’t mind. I mean,” she corrected, “he’s never surprised at anything.” She laughed at Stowe’s childish insulation of mind, his somehow irritating ignorance of people’s relations, and said, “You know—” and broke off when Lucretia smiled as though celebrating Stowe’s trouble-blind charm.

  Cleota picked up the loaded tray. “Have you known her long? Madame?”

  “Only since yesterday. She came up to buy the horses. She has a place near Harrisburg or somewhere. She’s fabulous, Clee. Let her do you.”

  Lucretia’s persistence again pressed down upon Cleota, like some sort of need for her complicity. Trudeau walked in, bowing a little to both women to apologize for interrupting them. “We’ll have to leave, Cleota.”

  He gripped her hand, which she offered him under the tray, and held it under some terrific pressure, which only leaving her house would evidently alleviate. She felt she could not ask him what the matter was because it was obviously the girl’s insisting he must take her away even without coffee. Cleota reddened at his embarrassment, telling him, “It was nice to see you again, John. I think the driveway light is still on.”

  Trudeau nodded thankfully for her unquestioning farewell, but his honor seemed to forbid him to turn away too soon from the openly bewildered look in her face.

  “Tell Stowe I left my best,” he said, letting go of her hand.

  “Yes.”

  Now he turned away, a slight shift in his eyes confessing to her that his life was misery. The three entered the living room together.

  Saint was already in her coat, a black pile, and wore a black gauze veil over her head. She was looking out at the driveway through the pane in the door and turned to Trudeau, who immediately got his coat and joined her. She glanced once at Cleota, who had hardly time to put the tray on the table when both of them were gone.

  “Well!” She laughed, blushing but relieved. “What happened?”

  “She got mad at me,” Madame Lhevine said.

  “Why?” Cleota asked, still tingling from Saint’s hatred of her. What a weird night it was! From out of nowhere a strange girl comes to hate her! And yet everything seemed to be somehow in order and as it had to be, all around her the broken cliffs of people’s lives sliding so deftly into the sea.

  “Her aunt couldn’t have been a gypsy. A gypsy is a gypsy, not somebody you just call a gypsy. I told her her aunt was not a gypsy.”

  “Oh,” Cleota said, her eyes very wide as she tried to understand what was so serious about Madame Lhevine’s point. “Are you a gypsy?” she asked innocently.

  “Me? No, I’m Jewish.”

  Lucretia nodded in confirmation. Evidently she also thought these identities important. Cleota felt that the two of them had the secret of some closed world, which gave them some assurance, some belonging sense. She swallowed whisky. Madame lit a cigarette and squinted her eyes in the smoke. Lucretia looked at the table and played with a match. A moment passed in total silence. Cleota realized that she was now supposed to ask Madame to tell her fortune. It was, she began to feel, a matter of their dignity that she ask. To refuse to ask would be to question their authenticity. And a feeling rose in Cleota again that she was being put upon, pressured toward a discipleship of some vague sort.

  “I can’t understand John,” she said to Lucretia. “Do you?”

  “It’s just sex,” Lucretia said, implying a surfeit of experience that Cleota knew she did not have. Or did she?

  “But that girl,” Cleota said, “she’s not very pretty, is she?”

  Lucretia was strangely excited and suddenly reached across what seemed like half the room to drag a small table over to herself with a pack of cigarettes on it. “What’s pretty got to do with sex?” she said.

  “Well, I don’t understand it. He must have his reasons, but his wife is much more beautiful than this one.”

  Cleota was perfectly aware that Lucretia was playing toward Madame Lhevine, acting out some new familiarity with degradation, but
she still could not help feeling on the outside, looking in at an underwater world. The world? She prayed Stowe had forgotten something and would suddenly walk in.

  Madame Lhevine spoke with certainty, an elder who was used to waiting for the issue to be joined before moving in to resolve it along the right lines. “The spirit doesn’t always love what the person loves,” she said.

  Oh, how true that was! Cleota sensed a stirring in her own depths, a delight in the quickening of her own mind.

  “It’s a difficult thing,” Madame went on. “Not many people know how to listen to the inner voice. Everything distracts us. Even though we know it’s the only thing that can guide us.”

  She squinted into the ashtray and truly listened as Cleota spoke. “But how can one hear? Or know what to believe? One senses so many things.”

  “How do you know your body? Your hands feel it, your eyes see it every day in the mirror. It is practice, that’s all. Every day we inspect our bodies, do we not? But how often do we set time aside to inspect our souls? To listen to what it can tell us? Hardly ever. People,” she said with some protest now, “scoff at such things, but they accept that one cannot sit down at a piano and play the first time. Even though it is much more difficult, and requires much more technique, to hear one’s own inner voice. And to understand its signs—this is even more difficult. But one can do it. I promise you.”

  With enormous relief Cleota saw that Madame Lhevine was serious and not a fool.

  “She’s marvelous,” Lucretia said, without any reserve now that she saw the impression made on Cleota.

  “I don’t tell fortunes,” Madame went on, “because there is really no future in the vulgar sense.”

  How kind she was! How her certainty even loaned her a loveliness now! To have lost touch with oneself, Cleota thought, was what made women seem unattractive. “I don’t understand that,” Cleota said, “about the future.”

  “Perhaps you would tell me more about what you don’t understand,” Madame said.

  Cleota was reached by this invitation; she felt understood suddenly, for she did want to speak of her idea of the future. She settled more comfortably in her chair and sought her thoughts. “I don’t really know. I suppose I never used to think about it at all, but—well, I suppose when one gets to a certain point, and there’s more behind than ahead, it just somehow . . . doesn’t seem to have been quite worth it. I don’t mean,” she added quickly, for she noted that Lucretia seemed oddly gratified with this implication of her failure, “I don’t say that I’ve had a bad time of it, really. I haven’t. It’s really got nothing to do—my idea—with happiness or unhappiness. It’s more that you . . . you wonder if it wasn’t all a little too”—she laughed, blushing—“small.” And before Madame could speak she added without any emphasis, “I suppose when the children aren’t around any more one thinks of that.” It struck her that she would never have shown such doubt with Stowe around, and she felt freed by his absence.

  “It’s more than the children not being around,” Lucretia said.

  “It’s that too,” Madame reminded Lucretia. “We must not underestimate the physical, but”—she turned back to Cleota—“it is also the climax inside.”

  Cleota waited. She felt she was being perceived, but not any longer by a merely curious mind. Madame, she felt, was seeing something within her with which the word climax was connected.

  “One sees that there will be no ecstasy,” Madame Lhevine said. “And that is when the crisis comes. It comes, you might say, when we see the future too clearly, and we see that it is a plain, an endless plain, and not what we had thought—a mountain with a glory at the top.”

  “Oh, I never thought of any glory.”

  “I am not speaking of accomplishment. I am speaking of oneness. The glory is only the moment when we are at one.”

  Death burst into Cleota’s mind, the complete sense of a dying; not any particular person, not herself, but some unidentifiable person lying dead. Then her oneness would be in her, and a glory, a beneficent peace.

  A quick joyousness raised her to her feet and she went to the sideboard and got a new bottle of whisky and returned to the table and, without asking, poured. Then she looked across at Madame Lhevine, her face flushed.

  “What do you do?” she asked, forbearing to say “now.” She did not want to impute any formal routine to Madame, any cheap ritual. Some truth was closing in, some singular announcement, which, she felt, must not be spoiled.

  “If you wish, you can simply put your hands on the table.”

  Stowe would laugh; her father would have looked at the ceiling and stalked out of the room. She raised her hands, and when she set them on the table it felt as though they had been thrust into a cold wind. Now Madame’s hands glided and came to rest with her middle fingers touching Cleota’s. They were old hands, much older than Madame’s face. The four hands looked like separate living animals facing one another on the table.

  Cleota awaited her next instruction, but there was none. She raised her eyes to Madame’s.

  The woman’s great age struck her anew. Her cheeks seemed to have sunk, she looked Slavic now, her skin cracked like milk skim, the veins in her eyeballs twisted like a map of jungle rivers.

  “Look in my eyes, please,” Madame Lhevine said.

  Cleota shuddered. “I am,” she said. Was it possible the woman had gone blind? Looking more sharply, Cleota saw in fact that Madame was not seeing, that her gaze had died, gone within. It was too appropriate, and for a moment she thought to break off, but a feeling came that she would lose by mocking; whatever her distrust, she felt she must continue to look into these black eyes if she ever was to hope again for a connection to herself.

  Now Madame Lhevine lifted her hands and patted Cleota’s and breathed. Cleota put her hands back in her lap. Madame Lhevine blinked at nothing, seeming to be putting together what she had heard or seen.

  “Is there an older woman—?” Madame broke off. “Is there an old woman?” she corrected.

  “My husband’s sister. She lives nearby.”

  “Oh.” Madame raised her chin. She seemed to be steeling herself. “She will live longer than he.”

  A tremor shook Cleota’s head; she looked stupidly at Madame Lhevine, her mind shocked by the picture of Stowe in his casket and Alice standing over it, while she must wait forever by herself in a corner, a stranger again. It seemed to her she had always had this picture in her head and the only news was that now someone else had seen it too.

  Cleota was agonized by the relief she felt at the image of Alice’s outliving Stowe. Simply, it wiped out her entire life with him. She had met him first in the gallery with Alice at his side, the air between them thickened by a too dense, too heavy communication. She had never broken into it herself, never stood alone in the center of his vision. Thirty years vanished, nullified. She was now where she had come in, with nothing to show.

  “I’m sorry I had to—” Madame broke off as she laid her hand on Cleota’s. The touch brought Cleota back to the room and an awareness of Alice hovering somewhere near the house. Anger puffed her eyelids. What Madame and Lucretia saw was the furious look that was sweeping up into her face.

  A car, driven fast, squealed to a halt in the driveway. The three women turned together toward the door, hearing the approaching footsteps outside, the steps of a man. Cleota went toward it as the knocking began and opened it.

  “Joseph!” she almost shouted.

  The young man threw up his hands in mock fright. “What’d I do?” he called.

  Cleota laughed. “Come in!”

  Now he entered, grinning at her and speaking the drollery that had always served best between them. “Am I too late?”

  “For what!” Cleota heard the girlish crack in her voice.

  “Whatever it is,” he said, taking off his zipper jacket and tossing it to a chair. “I mean
it’s late and I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “We’re obviously awake,” she taunted him, feeling a new cruelty torn loose within her.

  He felt hung up, facing the other two women, and so he shouted, “I mean will I be in the way if I come in for a few minutes because I’m not ready to go to sleep yet and I thought it would be nice to say hello! Is what I mean!”

  Lucretia also laughed. There was something aboriginal about him, in her opinion, as she had once told Cleota.

  “So hello!” he said and drew a chair up to the table, combed his fingers through his thick brown hair, and lit a cigar.

  “Have you had dinner?” Cleota asked.

  “I ate once at five and again at nine,” he said. Cleota seemed oddly charged up. He did not know if it was because he was intruding or because he was very welcome as the only man.

  He glanced toward Madame Lhevine, who gave him a nodding smile, and only now did Cleota realize, and she introduced them.

  “How long will you stay up here?”

  “I don’t know. Few days.” He drank what she put before him. “How’s Stowey?”

  “Oh, all right,” and she gave a quick, deprecating laugh. This had always given him a smoky sense of an understanding with her, about what precisely he did not know. But now she added seriously, “He’s having a show in Florida.”