THE BELLS IN THE Main House were striking nine o’clock when I arrived at the Guide’s Quarters to see Barbara. The big clock over the doorway was a minute fast. I made a note: tell Gilliatt to have it corrected. There were clocks everywhere these days. I had tried the experiment of eliminating all clocks—of neutralizing time. It was a failure. The unexpected result was panic. The guests had to know where they stood in finite terms. Absence of hours does not simply eliminate time as the natural element: it replaces it with anxiety. Time is the lesser of the evils.
Barbara sat on the edge of the bed. She wore a slip. It struck me that I had never seen her half-dressed. Only clothed or naked. The unfinished look added to the despair described by her face and the forward arc of her body.
“What is it, Barbara?” I sat down next to her.
Blue eyes blinked. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I studied her face for a clue. What I saw: the bland, American beauty; some Iowa innocence. Of both she was sublimely unaware.
“Whatever it is—” I began.
“A kid—” she said.
Impossible, I thought. Issue from Barbara and myself, would be a Norman Rockwell painting of the Sabbath in Odessa. Huckleberry Finn with a yarmulke hiding in the woods because the Rabbi was looking for him to continue Bar Mitzvah instructions. (I quote Gilliatt the day he got wind that Barbara and I were having an office affair.)
The silence around us was complete. Perhaps just the ticking of a clock could be heard.
“Two days ago,” she said.
“A guest?”
“Yes.”
“Who chose—?”
“He’s dead!”
“You know you can’t get involved.”
“I know.”
“He wasn’t—related to you, or anything, was he?” With so much traffic at the various Academies there have been some pretty wild coincidences.
Barbara shook her head. “Children should be out of it,” she said. “We shouldn’t take them.”
“If we didn’t somebody else would. We have to deal with what is. Not what should be.”
“It’s too unreal.” The shaking movement continued, a moving cloud of yellow around her shut eyes. “How much real despair can a young kid feel? It’s a fake suicide. But it’s just as final. Oh, Christ—” She was weeping. She used more passion in her abstract grief than she did in making love. For some people the personal is a damper, while the death of a strange child can turn them on.
There was a knock on the door.
“Yes,” I called out.
The door opened a crack. Gilliatt’s face peeked in. A cigarette was pasted to his lower lip. “Sorry to intrude,” he said. “But the cinema couple are here. Mr. and Mrs. Cardillo. You’re supposed to show them around the Academy.” He grinned.
“Cardillo,” he repeated. “Jewel and Max Cardillo.” He was gone. The word in the dream had been reviens, after all. After all—after so much. Unable to think about it and unable not to think about it I turned back to Barbara. I looked at her, her back describing a defeated arc, her yellow hair splayed out in a hopeless heap on her shoulders. Gilliatt’s interruption had implanted in my mind the obvious solution to the problem. I don’t know whether it was hearing Jewel’s name or if Gilliatt’s half-leer had triggered the notion—but clearly the remedy for Barbara’s despair was to make love to her. It might only be a temporary aid, but it could put her back in action—long enough to give me the time I needed to get this most disturbing and problematical day properly under way. Without hesitation I released her from her slip, peeling it off like a shell from a shellfish. I held her breasts in my hands. The pink nipples were ringed with pastel aureoles. Their very weight in my hands called to mind the difference—Jewel’s breasts were lighter in weight, darker in color, softer in texture. I made love to Barbara quickly, as if to prove the principle of indifference. Jewel, Barbara … anyone. All breasts and thighs weighed the same on the inner scale.
When I left Barbara she had repaired the damage weeping had done to her eyes and was starting to put on her uniform. I could not be sure how successful the experiment had been. Something mechanical in the movement of her arms as she raised them to slip on her blouse warned me against over-confidence.
For myself—well, I had not been looking for a cure, only a temporary distraction. The urgency of an old question had been aroused and temporarily stilled. It was a question that had had an intermittent life in my thoughts since I had lost Jewel. Such a question was the texture against which the dream of the previous night had played itself out. I considered it a victory that the tormenting question had been successfully relegated to the dream world. Such questions as the faithfulness of non-existent or ex-loves belong to dreams. In daylight they’re too close to comedy for comfort.
Now, I stepped outside into the snowy morning full of wonder at myself: that I could have ignored the name Cardillo on the application papers, on Gilliatt’s sardonic tongue. Perhaps he had known while I’d remained in a state of happy forgetfulness.
I walked into the brilliant sun dazzled and disturbed. I thought of my father; of the sun-landscapes of the Florida Keys; of the two of us huddled over books as he tutored me—math, Maimonides, physics; of my strange, isolated childhood under a private blue sky. It had been a childhood ringed with a wild, Talmudic sort of aphorism for every eventuality. I’d recognized their reverse sound the day I met Gilliatt. Perhaps it was why I tolerated him.
Why should memories unexpectedly accompany me on my walk to the Main House? Why not? If Jewel could arrive here, then I was prey to anything in the world of impossibility. I took in the sweep of the whitened hills behind me, the crusty trees that sparsed out as the hill became the approach to the formal gardens, and the pebbled path along which I walked. I was sharply conscious of the Academy as refuge at that moment. My continuing, silent monologue to the hills, the burning or frigid sky, the sea—how far could it be carried? This marvelous silence around me on which I relied so much—how long would it continue? I cherished the notion, of course, that I was sending people back, every day, with a sense of the massive silence within which we speak to each other and to ourselves. I was a bridge between the world and the people, our “guests.” Like any bridge, I could be crossed in either direction. But what if one day the monologue became a dialogue?
A blackbird fluttered to the snow, pecked at something invisible or perhaps imaginary. It flew back to a bare bough. These hills, that stone covered with dead and living initials—surely something so silent must have a great deal, or something awful, to say.
The wind was picking up velocity. Gusts were grabbing the corners of drifts and whipping them across the vanishing paths. The wind created a small, artificial blizzard between the Guide’s Quarters and the Main House where Jewel and Max were waiting for me. I didn’t know which I was finding it tougher to face: mad Max’s incoherent, tortured blustering against everything in creation—or Jewel’s impossible ambiguity. Jewel, helpless, incapable of truthfulness or change: perfect!