Live a Little, page 20
Si Zetlin and Shimi were on nodding acquaintance, that was all. Other than the Bukovel’s schnitzel, the two men had no common interests. Zetlin wore a football supporter’s scarf, and flew to Las Vegas to see Barbra Streisand. He looked women up and down in the street. He asked favours of virtual strangers, such as Shimi Carmelli.
“Will you walk with me?” were four more words than either had ever spoken to the other.
Shimi would rather not have, but he’d been brought up to be polite. What Zetlin wanted could be summed up in a sentence. He wanted Shimi to disburden him of his wife. For one evening, initially, and then they’d see how things panned out. That wasn’t, of course, how he put it. Slipping his arm into Shimi’s in the old European way, he told of his wife’s longing to be a card reader and her admiration, in particular, for Shimi’s skills. He brought out a photograph of her from his wallet. This is her. Shirley. He couldn’t believe Shimi hadn’t noticed her at the Fing Ho and been aware of the intensity of her interest. Did he think she was going for the chow mein? No sir: she was going to see Shimi. So the favour was this: would Shimi give her lessons. Would he, at the very least, take her out to a dinner—Zetlin even had a time and place in mind—and talk to her about it. There would be a fee, naturally (though the niceties required Shimi should not discuss money with her).
Shimi didn’t believe a word of this. He had certainly noticed, and heard, Shirley Zetlin. Overflowingly buxom like a Bavarian waitress, she wore low-cut Oktoberfest blouses and interrupted her own conversation with loud laughter, as though she couldn’t wait for anyone to find her as entertaining as she found herself. If she had left her husband far behind in this race, she still had many friends and admirers. The question, therefore, had to be asked: what could cartomancy possibly add to her portfolio of charms?
But sometimes an instinctively suspicious man will choose—for no good reason other than boredom with himself—to act entirely out of character. Maybe he was more than usually lonely that week. Maybe he half-hoped that he was wrong and Shirley Zetlin really was an admirer of his. Maybe the Bukovel imposed a loyalty to Si. Maybe something in Shirley Zetlin’s effervescence struck him as desperate.
They met, anyway, at an intimate Italian restaurant in Chelsea. She wore a blouse for bending forward in and Shimi began by explaining, in some detail and at some length, the history of the ars cartomantica—how, although it was Chinese in origin, the modern version was Southern European, especially popular in Italy where women wanted to learn who their future suitors would be and what their husbands were up to. That might not have been a good early note to strike. Shirley Zetlin withdrew her blouse from the table, sat as far back in her seat as she was able, and yawned.
“Is this your only subject of conversation?” she said.
Shimi reeled as from a blow.
“It is hard for me to avoid the conclusion,” he said after ten minutes of hostile silence in which she wouldn’t look up from the wine list, “that you are not, after all, interested in what I do. I must assume that you are here under an equally erroneous impression.”
“Si said you liked me.”
“Liked you?”
“And that you could get us tickets for Barbra Streisand.”
“And you would compromise your honour for that?”
“Don’t get any ideas,” she said.
“Believe me,” Shimi said. “I have none.”
Their expressions were those of natural predators eyeing each other in the jungle.
They waited to see who would strike first.
Shimi wondered if this was the longest Shirley Zetlin had ever gone in her adult life without laughing.
Eventually it was she who rose from the table in a flurry of frills. “I will kill my husband,” she said.
“Kill him for me too. I presume the purpose of this ruse is to give him time away with his mistress.”
What happened next Shimi could never have expected. Shirley Zetlin fell back down into her seat, covered her face, and began to sob into her hands.
A cold wind rattled the shutters of Shimi’s soul. Afterwards he would wonder what other men would have done. Taken her in their arms? Apologised, though the first blow had been cruelly struck by her—bored out of her life, was she; how bored did she think he was? Patted her hand? Admired her blouse? Told her there were worse husbands in the world than Si? Told her that some men wore women’s underwear?
But he did none of those things. It would seem that I am even more callous than I am inept, he thought.
He sat, immovable and unmoved, as the tears flowed, until at last the restaurant manager suggested he take the lady home.
“Call her a taxi,” Shimi said.
He could have been ordering the removal of a dead animal.
He put her into the taxi without a word. And then walked the several miles home.
Back in his bathroom he scrubbed away the night.
But he hasn’t forgotten any of it.
And now she wants to come and see him do magic tricks in the Widow Wolfsheim’s ballroom.
The Princess has a change of plan.
“I think you should come to me,” she tells him.
He isn’t sure what that means. Sit next to her? Come into her arms? Move in with her? “As in…?”
“As in come to me. Why are you acting dumb?”
“Come to you how?”
“Come to my abode. Live a little.”
Shimi is still unsure what all this means.
Amused by his perplexity, she throws wide her arms, making a web of her embroidered shawl. “I see what you are thinking….How do I resist the lure of the spider woman? Most men, I have to tell you, have never tried.”
Shimi is not going to say I am not most men. He inclines his head in tribute to her powers.
“Rest assured,” she goes on, “you are safe from being eaten alive.”
“What aren’t I safe from?”
“That’s a big question. How do you feel about scrutiny?”
“Anxious, but I can take it.”
“Sarcasm?”
“I am glad to be the occasion of it.”
“Interrogation?”
“I am growing accustomed to it.”
“Then you have nothing to fear.”
“But no reason to change our base of operations either. Surely we can continue scrutiny and interrogation perfectly well here. And there’s a nice enough room inside.”
Here is still Regent’s Park. They are at the same cafe. They are becoming so familiar the staff know them. “Have a lovely day,” an Italian waitress tells them when they leave. “I hope you’ve had a beautiful weekend,” the same waitress says when they return.
“I cannot bear the stress of their expectation,” the Princess says. “How lovely can a day be? Do I dare tell her that I didn’t have a beautiful weekend? I’m nearly a hundred. It’s a miracle I have a weekend at all.”
A Polish waitress overhears her. “Ah!” she says.
“Ah what?”
“It’s nice you had a beautiful weekend.”
“They fool me to the top of my bent,” the Princess says.
Shimi is growing accustomed to the way she puts things. “They intend no harm,” he suggests.
The Princess recoils in surprise. “Understanding doesn’t become you,” she says.
“It’s a good thing then that I have so little of it.”
Unlike Ephraim, he means, but she knows what he means.
“Between us,” she says, “we can squeeze out about as much sympathy for our fellow beings as a mosquito carries in its heart.”
“And yet here we are.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Here we are deep into ripe old age.”
“Did anyone ever say that showing compassion played a part in keeping people alive?”
“Yes. My doctor. The kind of heart live longer, he tells me. I have a friend”—he means the Widow Wolfsheim—“who gives me fridge magnets reminding me that the person who puts others first is left standing last.”
“Do fridge magnets warm your fridge?”
He smiles at her. “I have also read,” he goes on, “that having a pet can add years to our life.”
“What about a pet grievance?”
He sighs. “I think my friend would say that doesn’t count.”
“I bet she would.”
“Who says it’s a she?”
“No man ever gave another man a fridge magnet. Or cared how long he lived. So what’s yours?”
“My what?”
“Pet grievance.”
“It will take too long to tell it. The moon will be out before I’m finished.”
“Then come back to my flat. It’s warmer there.”
They take turns complaining of the cold, as though at any time they can only generate enough heat to warm one of them. Today it’s her turn to freeze.
His ears prick to the word “flat.” She hasn’t used it before. He’s been imagining her in a mansion.
“Do we need it to be warm? We could wear more clothes.”
“How could you wear more clothes. You already look like a bear.”
He smiles. The bird and the bear. This is not the first time he’s smiled today.
“I like it out here,” he says.
“Describe it.”
“What do you mean describe it?”
“If you like it out here you ought to be able to say where here is. What’s the tree we’re under called? What kind of cloud is that? Do you ever see the sky? Do you even know there’s a sky up there? Without looking down, tell me what surface we are on—grass, gravel, a Persian carpet? What’s the table we’re sitting at made of? What can you smell? What can you hear? What bird is that?”
“I like being me here—what’s wrong with that? I’ll bet that tree couldn’t tell you where it is. Doesn’t mean it’s not enjoying being here. Not everything has to be put into words. Not everything has to be known to be felt.”
“Ephraim used to say that.”
“Well, we were brothers.”
“But so different. You with so much energy for yourself. Ephraim with so much energy for other people. He should have had a bit more of what you have.”
“But I don’t have the saving grace.”
“What do you call the saving grace?”
“I call it what you call it. The grace to save another’s life.”
Or at least the grace to try, he muses, back in Little Stanmore with his wasted mother trembling in their house of fear.
“You’ve grown grave,” the Princess says. “Did he save you?”
“No. But he would have saved our mother if he could have.”
“Don’t all boys want to save their mothers?”
“I will need another lifetime to think that one through. And then another lifetime to punish myself.”
“You are a glutton for it. Saving lives isn’t everything. Saving one’s own is just as important. Maybe more. That was at the heart of my argument with Ephraim. He wouldn’t save himself.”
“From what?”
“His demons. Alcohol for one…”
“I thought he gave that up.”
“Yes, but he bore the mark of Cain. He helped others achieve what he’d achieved, but seeing yourself forever as a man who has given up drinking isn’t exactly a liberation from it. He never freed himself.”
“You sound embittered,” Shimi says. “Was the other side of his being a saviour that he let you down?”
The Princess looks at him with hooded imperiousness. It is like meeting the stare of a hawk, Shimi thinks. But she is hearing something, far away.
Now, he decides, has to be the time to ask. “Was he your lover?”
“What if I tell you I can’t remember.”
“I won’t believe you.”
“That’s hardly gallant.”
“I put my brother’s honour first. I don’t want him to be forgotten as a lover.”
If it’s bitter he’s after, she does him a bitter laugh. “I wouldn’t concern yourself about that overmuch. There are many who won’t have forgotten him. They crowded the chapel, you saw so yourself.”
“I take it you mean men and women?”
She shrugs. “I don’t care about any of that. It wasn’t the indiscrimination I regretted, it was the profligacy. He kept nothing for himself. The profligacy tired him—morally. He didn’t like how he lived. He didn’t like himself.”
“Am I to take it that he didn’t like himself after he became your lover?”
“You can take it any way you like. I repeat what I have said to you. I don’t remember.”
“You have spoken to me of other lovers.”
“Only the ones I remember.”
“What determines, do you think, who you remember and who you don’t?”
“Ah—if only I knew that.”
Something vaporous has fallen about her. Shimi decides he will take advantage of that. “How did he save your son?”
She slowly cranes back her head and looks up to the sky. Dark, heavier-weight clouds are on the chase, chivvying whatever’s softer than themselves out of the way. It is no sky for gentle dispositions. Shimi lowers his eyes and takes in the arch of the Princess’s throat. She must have been a charmer, he thinks again. Lucky Ephraim. Or not.
She is a long time looking. “What was it you asked me just now?” she enquires, coming back.
“How did he save your son?”
She seems to be on the point of disappearing into the sky again but thinks better of it and pushes her face close to Shimi’s. It is a provocative action. She could be wanting Shimi to kiss her. Or she could be wanting him to slap her.
But she has a definitive answer to his question.
“He showed him love.”
They keep coming back to love. Could that be accidental?
Accidental or not, they are united in drawing back from the subject the moment it arises.
It takes a couple more conversations in the park, on which the sky is darkening earlier and earlier, for him to ask if the love Ephraim showed her son was the love she hadn’t.
“Well it could never have been the same order of love, could it?”
That isn’t what he means. She knows it isn’t. “I am not implying,” Shimi rushes to assure her, “that your love was in any way deficient.”
“Yes you are and you are right to. My love was in every way deficient. Perhaps most of all by virtue of its being too great.”
Shimi blows air. “That’s not a paradox you’d permit me to utter,” he says.
The Princess, too, blows air. She shivers under her shawls. “Very well,” she says, pointing a finger at him—this is something he must take note of: sit up at the back. “I had my first child when I was a mere child myself. It was shortly after the war started. Women had children because they thought they’d never see their husbands again….In my case I was right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You are always being sorry for things you didn’t do. Which makes me wonder what on earth you did do. Assuming you were alive then, what was happening to you while I was labouring to bring forth Neville?”
He doesn’t want her to stop the minute she has started. This is her story not his. He’ll come to his love-deficiencies later. “Go on with you,” he says.
“I can keep. And I don’t want you to feel left out. I know how hard it is for a man to listen to a woman.”
“It is hard for a man to listen to anyone. I never heard a word that was said to me at school.”
“That’s because I was never your teacher.”
He looks hard into those grey Atlantic eyes. She has warned him she has no sense of humour. He has warned her the same about him. But there is a sort of choking underwater mirth in her which, frankly, he prefers to humour. When none of it’s a joke, then all of it is. The mistake is to go looking for laughter. Yes, he wishes she had been his teacher.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she says.
“Why not?”
“It reminds me.”
“Then I’ll look away.”
They fall silent, listening to Nastya, at the other end of the park, on the phone to the Eastern Bloc.
“Go on with what you were saying,” he says at last. “You had your first child…”
“At seventeen. A son. Sons are what I have. This one…Remind me why I’m telling you this?”
“We agreed we couldn’t talk about love—”
“Love!”
So she can do a passable expostulation after all.
He raises a placatory hand. He hasn’t forgotten. Ground rule five. Neither party is, under any circumstance, to look for the renewal of sexual feelings.
“You told me,” he goes on, “that Ephraim saved your son by showing him love. Whereupon conversation ceased. We agreed we couldn’t talk about love until we’d cleared the obstacle to our talking about love.”
“And what was that?”
“Our unwillingness to talk about love.”
“And then what?”
“And then we agreed to turn unwillingness to our advantage and talk about it after all. Beginning with yours.”
