All That Is

21


AZUL



The year he had the house, the spring of that year and the summer were the happiest time of his life although some of the earlier times he had forgotten. There hadn’t been the money to do much except buy a little furniture for the upstairs, but in the bareness, the simplicity, was ample room for happiness. There were the seasons, the trees, the grass that was a little too long sloping down to the water, the sun a mirror on the windows of the houses across from them.

Summer mornings, the light of the world pouring in and the silence. It was a barefoot life, the cool of the night on the floorboards, the green trees if you stepped outside, the first faint cries of the birds. He arrived in a suit and didn’t put it on again until he went back to the city. The house couldn’t be locked—the catch on the kitchen door was misaligned. The sills were cracked by the weather and peeling, he’d scraped and filled some of them but hadn’t gotten around to the painting. Buying the house had meant a cash payment of more than fifty-five thousand dollars. He had managed to scrape it together. He had never been much concerned about money. He earned thirty-four thousand a year, and that didn’t include lunches and often dinners that were on the expense account. His apartment was rent-controlled, and he was paying less than half of what the rent should really be. Going to Europe twice a year was at no expense to himself, and occasionally that was true of other places, Chicago, Los Angeles. In almost every way his life was comfortable.

Beatrice had left nothing, the long illness had used up everything she had. He expected to be his aunt Dorothy’s heir, but he had no idea of what that might amount to. Dorothy lived in a small apartment with the piano that Frank had liked to sit at in the afternoon and play the light, tinkling music she loved. She lived on a little income she had and Social Security. Every summer for a couple of weeks she visited Katrina Loes, a childhood friend who had a house in the Thousand Islands. She had never asked for anything—her needs were modest. If you ever need anything … Bowman had said. The answer was always, she didn’t.


When Anet came back from school that summer, she had changed, although she was still loving towards her mother and even-tempered. She had felt the pull of common life, of others, a particular person perhaps, though she seemed not to have a boyfriend. She was conscious of being attractive. She was trying it out, not on Bowman. She was used to Bowman and called him Phil. She was not much in evidence through the summer, she was off with her friends, playing tennis or at one of their pools or endlessly, it seemed, talking.

One hot afternoon, she was up in her room and they suddenly heard a terrifying scream. Christine ran to the stairs.

“What is it? Anet!” she cried.

Anet had rolled over on a wasp. The sting had awakened her. She was in pain and weeping. It had been so sharp and unexpected. Christine was trying to comfort her. Bowman came with a washcloth soaked in cold water.

“You’ll be all right,” he promised. “Hold this on it. Where did it go?”

“Where did what go?”

“The bee.”

“I don’t know,” Anet said, sobbing.

“When they sting you, they lose their stinger. It tears loose. It has barbs on it. Don’t try and pull it out.”

It had not been a bee though no one knew. Anet had been sleeping in shorts that were now half-pulled down.

“You’ll be all right,” he said.

“It hurts.”

She was breathing in hitched, uneven breaths.

“Do you see it?” she asked.

As if they were campers, she pulled the waistband still lower, turning her head to look down at herself as she did. She was perfect except for a small area of redness.

“It doesn’t look bad,” Bowman said with some understatement. “Now let’s see the other one,” he joked.

“The other one is fine,” she said cooly.

But he felt comfortable with her, treating her like a child, even his own child, and perhaps she felt it as well.


Early one evening he sat outside smoking a cigarette and looking at the smooth surface of the pond that was absolutely still and across to the other houses where lights were already on and a car was slowly making its way, half-hidden by trees, to one of them. The sky was clear and a deepening blue. To the west he could see a bank of clouds filled with occasional blooms of light. There was no sound, it was too far off. Only the darkness of the clouds being eerily lit. Finally there came a first faint rumbling.

Christine came out on the porch.

“I thought I heard thunder.”

“Yes. Look over there.”

She sat down beside him.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she said.

“Just once in a while,” he said. “I only smoke Gauloises, like the French movie stars, but you can’t get them here. This is just an ordinary cigarette.”

“Oh, look at that,” she said.

In the sky there had been a jagged line of intense white that went to the ground. After what seemed a long interval came a soft, muttering thunder.

“There’s going to be a storm.”

“I love storms. I can hear it.”

“If you count the time you can tell how far away it is,” he said.

“How do you do that?”

“It’s about one mile for every five or six seconds between the lightning and the sound.”

She waited until there was another flash of lightning and began to count.

“What was that, about twelve seconds?”

“Just about.”

The thunder had been indistinct, it was hard to tell. There was now a clear bank of dark clouds, and the thunder became more threatening, like the roar of an enormous beast. The storm was coming closer, it seemed to be coming with greater speed. The sky was dark and lit by erratic flashes and voltage. A wind had risen. It smelled of rain.

“Are we going to stay out here?” she said.

“Just for a couple of minutes.”

The great storm cloud, the front edge of it, was already moving over them. It was almost black and of immense size, like the side of a mountain. It seemed to cover the world. Lightning struck about half a mile away with a tremendous crackling and almost immediately it struck closer with an ear-splitting crash.

“We’d better go in.”

“Come with me,” she pleaded.

“I’m coming.”

They were barely inside when there was another great flash of lightning. The thunder seemed overhead. From where she had been let out on the road, Anet came running towards the house and in by the kitchen door. She was frightened.

“You should have stayed in the car!”

It had become night. It was almost completely dark. They sat together in the living room and amid the thunder heard the first distinct sound of rain. Soon it was a torrent. It poured down. Suddenly the lights went out.

“Oh, my God.”

“Are we all right here?” Anet cried.

There was a loud, violent crack and the room went bright as lightning struck just outside. In that instant he could see the two of them, their arms around one another and their faces white.

“No, no, it’s all right,” he said.

“Can it come inside?” Anet cried.

“No. It can’t.”

From time to time as the rain fell he saw them in flashes that were less intense. Then almost abruptly the rain lessened. The thunder was further away. The earth seemed calmed. Finally Christine said,

“Is it over?”

“I think so.”

“How long do you suppose the lights are going to be out?” Christine said.

“We have some candles.”

“Where?”

“They’re in one of the kitchen drawers,” he said. “I’ll get them.”

He found and lit one. In its faint light they sat shaken.

“I was afraid it was going to hit the house,” Anet said. “What if it had hit the house?”

“Do you mean, would the house catch fire? Probably. You weren’t frightened, were you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s all over. I was born during a big thunderstorm.”

She was still unnerved.

“Maybe you’re used to them,” she said.

The thunder had become soft and distant.

“Is this the only candle?” Christine said.

“There’s just the stub of another one.”

Outside it was now evening. After a while he went upstairs to see if the houses across the pond had any lights.

“No,” he said coming down. “There’ll be lights in town. Let’s go in and get something to eat, and we’ll find out what’s going on.”


At the Century he had a late lunch with Eddins in the library. They sat at a table near the window looking down, more or less, at the street. Eddins was wearing a blazer and a yellow silk tie. He and a partner were buying the agency—Delovet was retiring, he said. They’d agreed on a price and on which books Delovet would continue to receive a portion of the commissions.

“I think most of the clients will stay with us,” he said. “No plans to change the name.”

“No, that’s going to go down in infamy.”

“Well, there is that, but we’d rather it just go smoothly.”

“Why is he retiring?”

“You know, I’m not sure. To devote himself more to pleasure, not that he hasn’t always. He’s gotten away with a lot.”

“What happened to the actress?”

“Dee Dee?”

Delovet had finally broken up with her. She had become a drunk. The last time Eddins saw her, she had fallen down some stairs at a party. You poor, drunk woman, Delovet told her. She was long gone. Delovet was taking his harem to France.

“Travel still seems to have its allure,” Eddins said. “Too many people though, too many tour buses. There’s no parking anywhere. I recall when I was a boy, there were 130 million people in the country, I remember the figure, we learned it in class. There was a thing called recitation, perhaps that was something else. The world was smaller: there was home, there was the Nawth, and there was California—no one had ever been to California. Vincent,” he said, beckoning to a waiter, “could you put this in the freezer for a few minutes? It’s a little warm.”

The room had emptied out. They were not in a hurry. Eddins had a book on the best-seller list and a sizeable advance for another.

“Dena wanted to travel,” he said. “She always longed to see the Leaning Tower. She wanted to have dinner on the Nile looking out at the pyramids. She should have married a more successful man, some tycoon. I should have been more of a success. She was an absolutely wonderful woman. I can’t tell you. As a man, I feel it would not be right. You’ve traveled, you’re lucky. I remember the English woman. What became of her?”

“She’s in London,” Bowman said. “In Hampstead, actually.”

“Ah, you see, I don’t even know where that is. Hampstead. Probably some place with great lawns and women strolling in long gowns. You know, I never saw her—you told me about her, but I never had the chance to see her with my own eyes. Superb woman, I’m sure. You’re still handsome, you swine. Was she tall? I don’t remember. I prefer tall women. Irene isn’t very tall. I’m afraid she’s not going to become tall. That would be a lot to ask. Should we have another bottle of this warm wine? No, I’m afraid that would be too much. Why don’t we have something at the bar instead?”

They had often stood at the bar as new members when Eddins was wonderfully sociable. He was still sociable and even better dressed. He tightened his silk tie slightly as they went down to the bar.

“Now, Christine,” he said. “How is Christine?”

“What do you mean, how is she?”

“Nothing, just in the ordinary conversational way. I haven’t seen her. She’s living in the country? You have her quartered out there?”

“Stabled.”

“You villain. Have you ever thought of settling down.”

“There’s nobody more settled than I am.”

“Getting married,” Eddins explained.

“There’s nothing I’d like to do more.”

“I remember your last wedding, your first wedding, that is. Whatever happened to that sultry girl who was having an affair with your rich father-in-law?”

“He died, you know.”

“He died? It was that intense?”

“No, no, that had nothing to do with it. He was married again, happily married. That was quite a while ago. It seems like centuries. People still had family silver.”

“I’d like to think that particular girl never got any older. Whatever happened to her? What do you suppose she’s up to these days?”

“You know, I don’t have any idea. Vivian might know.”

“Vivian was quite good-looking, too.”

“Yes, she was.”

“Women have that quality. They’re going to let them be members here, what’s your position on that? Probably not the good-looking ones, just the ones you avoid at parties. We’re in the middle of the woman thing. They want equality, in work, marriage, everywhere. They don’t want to be desired unless they feel like it.”

“Outrageous.”

“The thing is, they want a life like ours. We both can’t have a life like ours. So, the old fellow died, eh? Your father-in-law.”

“He died, and my father died.”

“Sorry to hear that. Mine did, too. He died just this last spring. It was sudden, I couldn’t get there beforehand. I come from a small town and a respectable family. We knew the doctor, we knew the president of the bank. If you called the doctor, even at some god-awful hour, he’d come to the house. He knew you. He knew your whole family. He’d held you up by the feet when you were two minutes old and whacked you to get the first wail of life out of you. Decency, that was a word you lived by. Loyalty. I’m loyal to all that, boyhood, the Old South. You have to have loyalty to things. If you don’t have loyalty, you’re alone on earth. I have a wonderful photograph of my father in his infantry uniform, he’s smoking a cigarette. I don’t know where it was taken. Photography is a tremendous thing. In this photograph he’s still alive.”

He paused as if to reflect or turn the page.

“I’m selling this book to the movies,” he said. “Handsome sum of money, but what jackals they are. Unworthy. They have too much money, limitless. I had a writer named Boyd, an ex-preacher, he could write, he had the gift. I couldn’t sell his stories. It’s a shame. He wrote a story I’ll never forget about a blind pig, it would break your heart. His ambition was to sell a story or two to Harper’s. Not very much to ask, other people managed to do it, other writers who for some reason or other they preferred.”

They shook hands on the street. It was past two and a beautiful afternoon. The light seemed unusually clear. He walked up Madison then. There was no neighborhood quite like it—the galleries on the side streets with fragments of statues, the bourgeois apartment buildings on the corners, monuments really, not of impressive height, eight or ten stories with wide windows. The traffic was not heavy, the green of the park only a block away. On the sidewalk the few tables of a small restaurant were empty now. Women were shopping. An old man was walking a dog.

There was a bookshop further up that he liked. The owner was a slight man in his fifties who was always dressed in a suit and came, it was said, from a well-to-do family in which he was the errant son. From childhood he had always loved books and wanted to be a writer, later copying out pages of Flaubert and Dickens by hand. He’d imagined himself in a light-filled room in Paris working in solitude and had eventually gone to Paris but was only lonely there and unable to write.

The bookshop was in his image. There was only a small display window, and the shop was narrow in front, squeezed by an adjoining stairway to the apartments above, but it widened in back to the size of a room that was filled from top to bottom with shelves of books any of which Edward Heiman could put his hand on without hesitation, as if he had originally placed it there himself. His recommendations could be relied on. His customers were largely known to him, if not by face, then by name, although people unfamiliar to him also came in and lingered. He had grown up a block or two away on Park Avenue where he still lived, and it was to the disappointment of the family that he’d become a bookseller. Best-sellers were displayed on a pedestal in front though sharing the space with lesser-known books.

He did much of his business by telephone. Customers would call and order books they had heard of, and they would be delivered that day to the apartment, sometimes including a title or two of his choosing that could be returned. His idea of what was worthwhile was not without its own cachet, worthy books that had eluded the critics—all but the most perceptive—and when opened had a seductive power of information or intellect or style. Women particularly liked his advice and found him sympathetic although his manners made him seem almost shy. He had a fondness for women who wore masculine clothes, he had once remarked to Bowman—Japanese women especially. He liked women writers, even those whose reputation was based on second-rate or even political work. Men had had all the advantage for centuries, he felt, and now women were having their turn. The excesses were to be expected.

“Clarissa,” he said in his quiet voice. “That’s a terrifying book. It deserves response. We don’t sell many copies of Clarissa, of course, but that doesn’t mean much. Whitman gave away more copies of Leaves of Grass than he sold, which I could do with any number of books here. We’re not selling much John Marquand or Louis Bromfield either, but that’s a different matter.”

He was married although his wife never came around. Someone described her as very attractive. Not in the physical sense. It was her entire person.

A woman as unique, then, as her husband with something like his tastes or perhaps with tastes of her own. He lived in the world of books. She was not that interested in books, she preferred clothes and certain friendships. There were too many books altogether—you might read one once in a while … Edward Heiman was perhaps like Liebling or Lampedusa in his own Sicily. Their wives were off somewhere.

Bowman continued walking. It was a part of the city he liked, a comfortable, well-off part where eccentricities could be paid for. The white brick building where the old writer, Swangren, had lived was only a few blocks away, and Gavril Aronsky’s chaotic apartment was nearby. The Savior had been a notorious book, half a million copies sold at least. Baum had never uttered a word of regret for not having published it. Aronsky had written four or five more books, but his reputation had gradually become thinner and thinner. As he aged, he had become thinner also until he finally looked like a starving bird. When someone mentioned The Savior, Baum had remarked merely,

“Yes, I know the book.”

In Clarke’s a soft feeling of reminiscence came over him. The bar was almost empty at that hour of the afternoon. The crowds had gone back to their offices. There were a few drinkers down near the front window where the sunlight prevented you from seeing them clearly. He was remembering Vivian and her friend, Louise. Also George Amussen and his lasting disapproval. His two daughters had shared his love of horses and had each married the wrong man. The thing about Vivian was that she was—Bowman hadn’t really understood it at the time—so ineradicably part of it, the drinking, the big houses, and cars with mud-crusted boots and bags of dog food lying in back, the self-approval and money. All of it had seemed inessential, even amusing.

He ordered a beer. He felt himself floating in time. He could see himself in the mirror behind the bar, shadowed and silvery, as he had seen himself years before when he had just come to the city, young and ambitious with the dream of finding his place there and all that implied. He studied himself in the mirror. He was midway or a little past that depending on where you began counting. His real life had begun at eighteen, the life he now stood at the summit of.