VADIM No, darling, no. My daughter may come down any minute. Sit down. LOUISE (examining an armchair and then settling in it) Pity. You know,
I’ve been here many times before! In fact I was laid on that grand at eighteen. Aldy Landover was ugly, unwashed, brutal—and absolutely irresistible.
VADIM Listen, Louise. I have always found your free, frivolous style very fetching. But you will be moving into this house very soon now, and we want a little more dignity, don’t we?
LOUISE We’ll have to change that blue carpet. It makes the Stein look like an iceberg. And there should be a riot of flowers. So many big vases and not one Strelitzia! There was a whole shrub of lilac down there in my time.
VADIM It’s October, you know. Look, I hate to bring this up, but isn’t your cousin waiting in the car? It would be very irregular.
LOUISE Irregular, my foot. She won’t be up before lunch. Ah, Scene Two. (Bel wearing only slippers and a cheap necklace of iridescent glass—a Riviera souvenir—comes down at the other end of the living room beyond the piano. She has already turned kitchenward showing the beau-page back of her head and delicate shoulder blades when she becomes aware of our presence and retraces her steps.)
BEL (addressing me and casually squinting at my amazed visitor) Ya bezumno golodnaya (I’m madly hungry).
VADIM Louise dear, this is my daughter Bel. She’s walking in her sleep, really, hence the, uh, non-attire.
LOUISE Hullo, Annabel. The non-attire is very becoming. BEL (correcting Louise) Isa.
VADIM Isabel, this is Louise Adamson, an old friend of mine, back from Rome. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot of her.
BEL How do you do (question-markless).
VADIM Well, run along, Bel, and put on something. Breakfast is ready. (To Louise) Would you like to have breakfast too? Hard-boiled eggs? A Coke with a straw? (Pale violin climbing stairs)
LOUISE Non, merci. I’m flabbergasted.
VADIM Yes, things have been getting a little out of hand, but you’ll see, she’s a special child, there’s no other child like her. All we need is your presence, your touch. She has inherited the habit of circulating in a state of nature from me. An Edenic gene. Curious.
LOUISE Is this a two-people nudist colony or has Mrs. O’Leary also joined?
VADIM (laughing) No, no, she’s not here on Sundays. Everything is fine, I assure you. Bel is a docile angel. She—
LOUISE (rising to leave) There she comes to be fed (Bel descends the stairs in a skimpy pink robe). Drop in around tea time. Fay is being taken by Jane King to a lacrosse game in Rosedale. (Exits)
BEL Who’s she? Former student of yours? Drama? Elocution?
VADIM (moving fast) Bozhe moy! (good Lord!). The eggs! They must be as hard as jade. Come along. I’ll acquaint you with the situation, as your schoolmistress says.
6
The grand was the first to go—it was carried out by a gang of staggering iceberg movers and donated by me to Bel’s school, which I had reasons to pamper: I am not an easily frightened man but when I am frightened I am very much frightened, and at a second interview that I had had with the schoolmistress, my impersonation of an indignant Charles Dodgson was only saved from failure by the sensational news of my being about to marry an irreproachable socialite, the widow of our most pious philosopher. Louise, per contra, regarded the throwing out of a symbol of luxury as a personal affront and a crime: a concert piano of that kind costs, she said, as least as much as her old Hecate convertible, and she was not quite as wealthy as, no doubt, I thought she was, a statement representing that knot in Logic: the double-hitch lie which does not make one truth. I appeased her by gradually overcrowding the Music Room (if a time series be transformed into sudden space) with the modish gadgets she loved, singing furniture, miniature TV sets, stereorphics, portable orchestras, better and better video sets, remote-control instruments for turning those things on or off, and an automatic telephone dialer.
For Bel’s birthday she gave her a Rain Sound machine to promote sleep; and to celebrate my birthday she murdered a neurotic’s night by getting me a thousand-dollar bedside Pantomime clock with twelve yellow radii on its black face instead of figures, which made it look blind to me or feigning blindness like some repulsive beggar in a hideous tropical town; in compensation that terrible object possessed a secret beam that projected Arabic numerals (2:00, 2:05, 2:10, 2:15, and so forth) on the ceiling of my new sleeping quarters, thus demolishing the sacred, complete, agonizingly achieved occlusion of its oval window. I said I’d buy a gun and shoot it in the mug, if she did not send it back to the fiend who sold it to her. She replaced it by «something especially made for people who like originality,» namely a silver-plated umbrella stand in the shape of a giant jackboot—there was «something about rain strangely attractive to her» as her «analyst» wrote me in one of the silliest letters that man ever wrote to man. She was also fond of small expensive animals, but here I stood firm, and she never got the long-coated Chihuahua she coldly craved.
I did not expect much of Louise the Intellectual. The only time I saw her shed big tears, with interesting little howls of real grief, was when on the first Sunday of our marriage all the newspapers carried photographs of the two Albanian authors (a bald-domed old epicist and a longhaired woman compiler of childrens’ books) who shared out between them the Prestigious Prize that she had told everybody I was sure to win that year. On the other hand she had only flipped through my novels (she was to read more attentively, though, A Kingdom by the Sea, which I began slowly to pull out of myself in 1957 like a long brain worm, hoping it would not break), while consuming all the «serious» bestsellers discussed by sister consumers belonging to the Literary Group in which she liked to assert herself as a writer’s wife.
I also discovered that she considered herself a connoisseur of Modern Art. She blazed with anger at me when I said I doubted that the appreciation of a green stripe across a blue background had any connection with its definition in a glossy catalogue as «producing a virtually Oriental atmosphere of spaceless time and timeless space.» She accused me of trying to wreck her entire view of the world by maintaining—in a facetious vein, she hoped—that only a Philistine misled by the solemn imbeciles paid to write about exhibitions could tolerate rags, rinds, and fouled paper rescued from a garbage can and discussed in terms «of warm splashes of color» and «good-natured irony.» But perhaps most touching and terrible of all was her honestly believing that painters painted «what they felt»; that a rather rough and rumpled landscape dashed off in the Provence might be gratefully and proudly interpreted by art students if a psychiatrist explained to them that the advancing thundercloud represented the artist’s clash with his father, and the rolling grainfield the early death of his mother in a shipwreck.
I could not prevent her from purchasing specimens of the pictorial art in vogue but I judiciously steered some of the more repulsive objects (such as a collection of daubs produced by «naоve» convicts) into the round dining room where they swam blurrily in the candlelight when we had guests for supper. Our routine meals generally took place in the snackbar niche between the kitchen and the housemaid’s quarters. Into that niche Louise introduced her new Cappuccino Espresso Maker, while at the opposite end of the house, in the Opal Room, a heavily built, hedonically appareled bed with a padded headboard was installed for me. The adjacent bathroom had a less comfortable tub than my former one, and certain inconveniences attended my excursions, two or three nights per week, to the connubial chamber—via drawing room, creaky stairs, upper landing, second-floor corridor, and past the inscrutable chink-gleam of Bel’s door; but I treasured my privacy more than I resented its drawbacks. I had the «Turkish toupet,» as Louise called it, to forbid her to communicate with me by thumping on her floor. Eventually I had an interior telephone put in my room, to be used only in certain emergencies: I was thinking of such nervous states as the feeling of imminent collapse that I experienced sometimes in my nocturnal bouts with eschatological obsessions; and there was always the half-full box of sleeping pills that only she could have filched.
The decision to let Bel stay in her apartment, with Louise as her only neighbor, instead of refurnishing a spiral of space by allotting those two east-end rooms to Louise—«perhaps I too need a studio?»—while transferring Bel with bed and books to the Opal Room downstairs and leaving me upstairs in my former bedchamber, was taken by me firmly despite Louise’s rather bitchy counter-suggestions, such as removing the tools of my trade from the library in the basement and banishing Bel with all her belongings to that warm, dry, nice and quiet lair. Though I knew I would never give in, the very process of shuffling rooms and accessories in my mind made me literally ill. On top of that, I felt, perhaps wrongly, that Louise was enjoying the hideous banality of a stepmother-versus-step-daughter situation. I did not exactly regret marrying her, I recognized her charm and functional qualities, but my adoration for Bel was the sole splendor, the
