NICOLE KIDMAN WAS SITTING ON HER BACK PORCH, LOST IN thought. It was hot, the flies were everywhere, and she thought to herself that it would soon be evening. The thought pleased her. Dark rain clouds were gathering from the east, and bringing from time to time a breath of moisture in the air.
Tom Cruise, who managed an outdoor theatre in town, was standing in the middle of the garden looking at the sky.
“Again!” he observed despairingly. “It’s going to rain again! Rain every day, as though to spite me. I might as well hang myself! It’s ruin! Fearful losses every day.”
He flung up his hands and went on, addressing Nicole Kidman:
“There! That’s the life we lead, Nicole Kidman. It’s enough to make one cry. One works and does one’s utmost, one wears oneself out, getting no sleep at night, and racks one’s brain what to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one’s public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music-hall artists. But do you suppose that’s what they want! They don’t understand anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather! Almost every evening it rains. It started on the tenth of May, and it’s kept it up all May and June. It’s simply awful! The public doesn’t come, but I’ve to pay the rent just the same, and pay the artists.”
The next evening the clouds would gather again, and Tom Cruise would say with an hysterical laugh:
“Well, rain away, then! Flood the garden, drown me! Damn my luck in this world and the next! Let the artists have me up! Send me to prison!—to the scaffold—to the moon! Ha, ha, ha!”
And next day the same thing.
Nicole Kidman listened to Tom Cruise with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face, and bangs combed forward on his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor; as he talked his mouth worked on one side, and there was always an expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her.
She was always fond of someone, and could not exist without loving. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who now sat in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; she had loved her aunt who used to come every other year from Australia; and before that, when she was at school, she had loved her English master. She was a gentle, softhearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind, naïve smile, which came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, Yes, not half bad, and smiled too, while lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, “You darling! You pet!”
The house in which she had lived from her birth upward, and which was left her in her father’s will, was at the extreme end of the town, not far from the theatre. In the evenings and at night she could hear the band playing, and the crackling and banging of fireworks, and it seemed to her that it was Tom Cruise struggling with his destiny, storming the entrenchments of his chief foe, the indifferent public; there was a sweet thrill at her heart, she had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at daybreak, she tapped softly at her bedroom window, and showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, she gave him a friendly smile. . . .
He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a closer view of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hands, and said:
“You darling!”
He was happy, but as it rained on the day and night of his wedding, his face still retained an expression of despair.
They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office, to look after things in the theatre, to put down the accounts and pay the wages. And her rosy cheeks, her sweet, naïve, radiant smile, were to be seen now at the office window, now in the refreshment bar or behind the scenes of the theatre. And already she used to say to her acquaintances that the theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane.
“But do you suppose the public understands that?” she used to say. “What they want is a clown. Yesterday we put on a serious play and almost all the boxes were empty; but if Tom Cruise and I had been producing some vulgar thing, I assure you the theatre would have been packed. Tomorrow Tom Cruise and I are doing a very substantial work. Do come.”
And what Tom Cruise said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like him she despised the public for their ignorance and their indifference to art; she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the behavior of the musicians, and when there was an unfavorable notice in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to the editor’s office to set things right.
The actors were fond of her and used to call her “Tom Cruise and I,” and “the darling”; she was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums of money, and if they deceived her, she used to shed a few tears in private, but did not complain to her husband.
They got on well in the winter too. They took the theatre in the town for the whole winter, and let it for short terms to another traveling company, or to a conjurer, or to a local dramatic society. Nicole Kidman grew stouter, and was always beaming with satisfaction, while Tom Cruise grew thinner and yellower, and continually complained of their terrible losses, although he had not done badly all the winter. He was accustomed to being an active man, and so long as he was inactive, he seemed as though he was wilting. He used to cough at night, and she used to give him hot raspberry tea or lime-flower water, to rub him with eau de cologne and to wrap him in her warm shawls.
“You’re such a sweet pet!” she used to say with perfect sincerity, stroking his hair. “You’re such a pretty dear!”
Toward Lent he went to the city to collect a new troupe and hike in the mountains, and without him she could not sleep, but sat all night at her window, looking at the stars, and she compared herself with the hens, who were awake all night and uneasy when the cock was not in the henhouse. Tom Cruise wrote once to say that he had scaled one mountain and was about to take a second, adding some instructions about the theatre.
Then came a period of weeks without word, and then one Sunday, late in the evening, a ominous knock at the gate. It persisted and intensified; someone was hammering on it as though they meant to break it. The cook went flopping drowsily toward the gate; Nicole Kidman overtook her and hurried to answer the knock.
“Please open,” said someone outside in a thick bass. “There is a telegram for you.”
Nicole Kidman had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time for some reason she felt numb with terror. With shaking hands she opened the telegram and read as follows:
TOM CRUISE MISSING. NO BLIZMAN NEWS FOR WEEKS.
FUFUNERAL TUESDAY.
That was how it was written in the telegram—“fufuneral,” and the utterly incomprehensible word “blizman.” It was cosigned by the stage manager of the theatre company and one of Tom Cruise’s hiking guides.
“My darling!” sobbed Nicole Kidman. “My darling! Why did I ever meet you? Why did I know you and love you? Your poor heartbroken Nicole Kidman is alone without you!”
The funeral took place on Tuesday in the city. Nicole Kidman returned home on Wednesday, and as soon as she got indoors, she threw herself on her bed and sobbed so loudly that it could be heard next door, and in the street.
“Poor darling!” the neighbours said as they crossed themselves. “Nicole Kidman, poor darling! How she does take on!”
Three months later Nicole Kidman was coming home from mass, melancholy and in deep mourning. It happened that one of her neighbors, Keith Urban, walked back beside her. He was the manager at the local lumberyard who sang a bit. He wore a fringed jacket, boots, and a gold watch chain, and looked more a man on a stage than a man in trade.
“Everything happens as it is ordained, Nicole Kidman,” he said gravely, with a sympathetic note in his voice, “and if any of our dear ones die, it must be because it is the will of God, so we ought have fortitude and bear it submissively.”
After seeing Nicole Kidman to her gate, he said good-bye and went on. All day afterward she heard his sedately dignified voice, and whenever she shut her eyes she saw his honey-colored hair. She liked him very much. And apparently she had made an impression on him too, for not long afterward an elderly lady, with whom she was only slightly acquainted, came to drink coffee with her, and as soon as she was seated at the table began to talk about Keith Urban, saying that he was an excellent man whom one could thoroughly depend upon, and that any girl would be glad to marry him.
Three days later Keith Urban came himself. He did not stay long, only about ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when he left, Nicole Kidman loved him—loved him so much that she lay awake all night in a perfect fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was quickly arranged, and then came the wedding.
Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman got on very well together when they were married.
Usually he sat in the office till dinnertime, then he went out on business, while Nicole Kidman took his place, and sat in the office till evening, making up accounts and booking orders.
“Lumber gets more expensive every year; the price rises twenty percent,” she would say to her customers and friends. “Only fancy we used to sell local timber, and now Keith Urban always has to go for wood to the next town over. And the freight!” she would add, covering her cheeks with her hands in horror. “The freight!”
It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and ages, and that the most important and necessary thing in life was timber; and there was something intimate and touching to her in the very sound of words such as “baulk,” “post,” “beam,” “pole,” “scantling,” “batten,” “lath,” “plank,” etc.
At night when she was asleep she dreamed of perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long strings of trucks, carting timber somewhere far away. She dreamed that a whole regiment of six-inch beams forty feet high, standing on end, was marching upon the timber yard; that logs, beams, and boards knocked together with the resounding crash of dry wood kept falling and getting up again, piling themselves on each other.
Nicole Kidman cried out in her sleep, and Keith Urban said to her tenderly: “Nicole Kidman, what’s the matter, darling?”
Her husband’s ideas were hers. If he thought the room was too hot, or that business was slack, she thought the same. Her husband did not care for entertainments, and on holidays he stayed at home. She did likewise.
“You are always at home or in the office,” her friends said to her. “You should go to the movies, darling, or to the circus.”
“Keith Urban and I have no time to go to the movies,” she would answer sedately. “We have no time for entertainment except for country music. What’s the use of these theatres?”
On Saturdays, Keith Urban and she used to go to the evening service; on holidays to early mass, and they walked side by side with softened faces as they came home from church. There was a pleasant fragrance about them both, and her silk dress rustled agreeably. At home they drank tea, with fancy bread and jams of various kinds, and afterward they ate pie. Every day at twelve o’clock there was a savory smell of beet-root soup and of mutton or duck in their yard, and on fast-days of fish, and no one could pass the gate without feeling hungry. In the office the samovar was always boiling, and customers were regaled with tea and cracknels. Once a week the couple went to the baths and returned side by side, both red in the face.
“Yes, we have nothing to complain of, thank God,” Nicole Kidman used to say to her acquaintances. “I wish everyone were as well off as Keith Urban and I.”
When Keith Urban went away to buy wood or to tour, she missed him dreadfully, lay awake and cried. Sometimes in the evening she used to see a young man named Brad Pitt, to whom they had let their lodge. At length, after these chance meetings had occurred enough times that they no longer seemed random, she began to engage him in conversation, as he had a pleasant face and a curiosity about many matters that also interested her. He started to talk to her about architecture and activism and play cards with her, and this entertained her in her husband’s absence. She was particularly interested in what he told her of his home life. He was married and had a number of small children—sometimes he said three, sometimes he rolled his eyes and said that three was just an approximation, and that the actual total might be six or seven—but was separated from his wife because he suspected she had been unfaithful to him, and now he was impatient with her and the children in ways that saddened him. And hearing of all this, Nicole Kidman sighed and shook her head. She was sorry for him.
“Well, God keep you,” she used to say to him at parting. “Thank you for coming to cheer me up, and may you have your health.”
And she always expressed herself with the same sedateness and dignity, the same reasonableness, in imitation of her husband. As Brad Pitt was disappearing behind the door below, she would say:
“You know, Brad Pitt, you’d better make it up with your wife. You should forgive her for the sake of your children. You may be sure the little ones understand.”
And when Keith Urban came back, she told him in a low voice about the young man and his unhappy home life, and both sighed and shook their heads and talked about the children, who, no doubt, missed their father, and by some strange connection of ideas, they bowed to the ground before them and prayed that God would give them children. Though those prayers were not answered directly, for six years the couple lived quietly and peaceably in love and complete harmony.
But one winter day after drinking hot tea in the office, Keith Urban went out into the yard without his cap on to see about sending off some timber, caught cold, and was taken ill. He had the best doctors, but he grew worse and died after four months’ illness. And Nicole Kidman was a widow once more.
“I’ve nobody, now you’ve left me, my darling,” she sobbed, after her husband’s funeral. “How can I live without you, in wretchedness and misery! Pity me, good people, all alone in the world!”
She went about dressed in black and without makeup. She hardly ever went out, except to church, or to her husband’s grave, and led the life of a nun. It was not till six months later that she opened the shutters of the windows. She was sometimes seen in the mornings, going with her cook to market for provisions, but what went on in her house and how she lived now could only be surmised.
And yet, there was evidence to assist in this surmise. For one, there was the sudden reappearance of Brad Pitt, who came by now regularly to drink tea with Nicole Kidman and read the newspaper aloud to her. There was also the fact that, meeting a lady she knew at the post office, Nicole Kidman said to her: “There is no proper planning for buildings in our town, and that’s the cause of all sorts of problems. One is always hearing of a foundation that sinks into the snow, or a roof that is torn off by wind. The fitness of domestic buildings ought to be as important as that of people.”
This was clearly an opinion she had acquired from Brad Pitt, though she claimed it as her own. It was evident that she could not live a year without some attachment, and had found new happiness in the lodge. In anyone else this would have been censured, but no one could think ill of Nicole Kidman; everything she did was so natural. Neither she nor Brad Pitt said anything to other people of the change in their relations, and tried, indeed, to conceal it, but without success, for Nicole Kidman could not keep a secret. When he had visitors, and she poured out tea or served the supper, she would begin talking of gables, of levees, or missions to treat onchocerciasis. Brad Pitt was dreadfully embarrassed, and when the guests had gone, he would seize her by the hand and hiss angrily:
“I’ve asked you before not to talk about what you don’t understand. When we actors who enjoy architecture and activism are talking among ourselves, please don’t put your word in. It’s really too much.”
And she would look at him with astonishment and dismay, and ask him in alarm: “But, Brad, what am I to talk about?”
And with tears in her eyes she would embrace him, begging him not to be angry, and they were both happy.
But this happiness did not last long. Brad Pitt departed for what he said was a distant place. And Nicole Kidman was left alone.
Now she was absolutely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his armchair lay in the attic, covered with dust and lame of one leg. She got thinner and plainer, and when people met her in the street they did not look at her as they used to, and did not smile to her; evidently her best years were over and left behind, and now a new sort of life had begun for her, which did not bear thinking about. In the evening Nicole Kidman sat in the porch, and heard the band playing and the fireworks popping in the theatre, but now the sound stirred no response. She looked into her yard without interest, thought of nothing, wished for nothing, and afterward, when night came on she went to bed and dreamed of her empty yard. She ate and drank as it were unwillingly.
And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it is not to have any opinions! One sees a bottle, for instance, or the rain, or a man driving in his car, but what the bottle is for, or the rain, or the man, and what is the meaning of it, one can’t say, and could not even for ten thousand dollars. When she had Tom Cruise, or Keith Urban, or Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman could explain everything, and give her opinion about anything you like, but now there was the same emptiness in her brain and in her heart as there was in her yard outside. And it was as harsh and as bitter as wormwood in the mouth.
Little by little the town grew in all directions. The road became a street, and where the theatre and the timber yard had been, there were new turnings and houses. How rapidly time passes! Nicole Kidman’s house grew dingy, the roof got rusty, the shed sank on one side, and the whole yard was overgrown with docks and stinging nettles. Nicole Kidman herself had grown plainer and older; in summer she sat in the porch, and her soul, as before, was empty and dreary and full of bitterness. In winter she sat at her window and looked at the snow. When she caught the scent of spring, or heard the chime of the church bells, a sudden rush of memories from the past came over her, there was a tender ache in her heart, and her eyes brimmed over with tears; but this was only for a minute, and then came emptiness again and the sense of the futility of life. The black kitten rubbed against her and purred softly, but Nicole Kidman was not touched by these feline caresses. That was not what she needed. She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason—that would give her ideas and an object in life, and would warm her old blood. And she would shake the kitten off her skirt and say with vexation:
“Get along; I don’t want you!”
And so it was, day after day and year after year, and no joy, and no opinions. Whatever the cook said, she accepted.
One hot July day, toward evening, just as the cattle were being driven away and the whole yard was full of dust, someone suddenly knocked at the gate. Nicole Kidman went to open it herself and was dumbfounded when she looked out: she saw Brad Pitt, grayer and dressed more plainly. She suddenly remembered everything. She could not help crying and letting her head fall on his breast without uttering a word, and in the violence of her feeling she did not notice how they both walked into the house and sat down.
“My dear Brad Pitt! What fate has brought you?” she muttered, trembling with joy.
“It is good to see you, Nicole Kidman,” he told her. “I have retired from both acting and from thinking about architecture, and moved back to this part of the country. I am reconciled with my wife, you know.”
“Where is she?” asked Nicole Kidman.
“She’s in the city with the kids. I have come here to look for lodgings for my youngest son, a place where he can stay while he goes to school.”
“Good gracious, my dear soul! Lodgings? Why not have my house? Why shouldn’t that suit him? Why, my goodness, I wouldn’t take any rent!” cried Nicole Kidman in a flutter, beginning to cry again. “He can live here, and then I will get to see you at times, when you bring him or pick him up. Permit me that kindness, at least. Oh dear! How glad I am!”
Next day the roof was painted and the walls were whitewashed, and Nicole Kidman, with her arms akimbo, walked about the yard giving directions. Her face was beaming with her old smile, and she was brisk and alert as though she had waked from a long sleep. Brad Pitt’s wife arrived—a beautiful lady with full lips and a peevish expression. With her was her little boy, who was ten although small for his age. And scarcely had the boy walked into the yard when he ran after the cat, and at once there was the sound of his gay, joyous laugh.
“Is that your cat?” he asked Nicole Kidman. “When she has little ones, can I have a kitten?”
Nicole Kidman talked to him and gave him tea. Her heart warmed and there was a sweet ache in her bosom, as though he had been her own child. And when he sat at the table in the evening, going over his lessons, she looked at him with deep tenderness and pity as she murmured to herself:
“You pretty pet! . . . My precious! . . . Such a fair little thing, and so clever.”
“ ‘An island is a piece of land which is entirely surrounded by water,’ ” he read aloud.
“An island is a piece of land,” she repeated, and this was the first opinion to which she gave utterance with positive conviction after so many years of silence.
Brad Pitt’s son began going to the school. His mother departed to visit her father overseas. His father used to go off every day and would often be away from home for three days together, and it seemed to Nicole Kidman as though the boy was entirely abandoned, that he was not wanted at home, that he was being starved, and she carried him off to her lodge and gave him a little room there.
And for six months the boy lived in the lodge with her. Every morning Nicole Kidman came into his bedroom and found him fast asleep, sleeping noiselessly with his hand under his cheek. She was sorry to wake him.
“Come,” she would say mournfully, “get up, darling. It’s time for school.”
He would get up, dress, and say his prayers, and then sit down to breakfast, drink two glasses of juice, and eat a bagel or an apple. All this time he was hardly awake and a little ill-humoured in consequence.
“You don’t quite know your math,” Nicole Kidman would say, looking at him as though he were about to set off on a long journey. “What a lot of trouble I have with you! You must work and do your best, darling, and obey your teachers.”
“Oh, do leave me alone!” the boy would say.
Then he would go down the street to school, a little figure, wearing a big cap and carrying a satchel on his shoulder. Nicole Kidman would follow him noiselessly. When he reached the street where the school was, he would feel ashamed of being followed by Nicole Kidman, he would turn round and say, “You’d better go home. I can go the rest of the way alone.”
She would stand still and look after him fixedly till he had disappeared at the school gate.
Ah, how she loved him! Of her former attachments not one had been so deep; never had her soul surrendered to any feeling so spontaneously, so disinterestedly, and so joyously as now that her maternal instincts were aroused. For this little boy with the dimple in his cheek and the big school cap, she would have given her whole life, she would have given it with joy and tears of tenderness. Why? Who can tell why?
When she had seen the last of the boy, she returned home, contented and serene, brimming over with love; her face, which had grown younger during the last six months, smiled and beamed; people meeting her looked at her with pleasure.
“Good morning, Nicole Kidman. How are you, darling?”
“The lessons are not difficult, but they load the students down with homework,” she would relate at the market. “In the first class yesterday they gave him some algebra and also Spanish. You know it’s too much.”
And she would begin talking about the teachers, the lessons, and the school books.
At three o’clock they had dinner together. In the evening they learned their lessons together and cried. When she put him to bed, she would stay a long time murmuring a prayer; then she would go to bed and dream of that faraway misty future when the boy would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have a big house of his own, would get married and have children. . . . She would fall asleep still thinking of the same thing, and tears would run down her cheeks from her closed eyes, while the black cat lay purring beside her: “Mrr, mrr, mrr.”
Suddenly there would come a loud knock at the gate.
Nicole Kidman would wake up breathless with alarm, her heart throbbing. Half a minute later would come another knock.
It must be a telegram, she would think, beginning to tremble from head to foot. The boy’s mother is sending for him. Oh, mercy on us!
She was in despair. Her head, her hands, and her feet would turn chill, and she would feel that she was the most unhappy woman in the world. But another minute would pass, voices would be heard: it would turn out to be Brad Pitt arriving for one of his short stays.
Well, thank God! she would think.
And gradually the load in her heart would pass off, and she would feel at ease. She would go back to bed thinking of the boy, who lay sound asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep:
“I’ll give you a piece of my mind! Get away! Shut up!”