Part 7 (2/2)

He sold some jewels and became rich, but still in the evenings he would sit on the bank and sing his love songs, and sometimes he would throw a bracelet or necklace into the river, because it was so beautiful.

Then he went traveling. He was on a s.h.i.+p, and suddenly, in the middle of the ocean, the s.h.i.+p stopped and would not move. ”It's the Tsar of the Waters,” the sailors said. ”There must be someone on this s.h.i.+p he wants.” So they all drew straws, and the fisherman got the short straw and remembered his promise. ”That's right, the Tsar of the Waters does want me,” he said, and he jumped over the side of the s.h.i.+p; and right away the s.h.i.+p began to move again.

The fisherman sank down, down, to the bottom of the ocean, until he came to the door of the tsar's palace. ”What took you so long?” the tsar asked him. ”I got tired of waiting, so finally I had to send for you.”

They ate and drank, and then the tsar said, ”I would like you to marry one of my daughters.” And he brought his daughters before the fisherman, and each was lovelier than the one before; but still, the fisherman thought that none was as pretty as his little river. But then the youngest daughter came, and the fisherman cried out: ”This girl is as beautiful as my River Volkov.”

And the tsar said, ”That's funny, her name is Volkov.”

The fisherman saw that she was wearing a necklace and bracelet, and they were some of the jewels he had thrown into the river.

And so they were married, and they went to her room together and were very happy. Before they slept, she said, ”Will you always sit beside me at night and sing to me?”

And he said, ”I promise.”

And they fell asleep. In the night, his foot touched the foot of his bride, and it was so cold he woke up. The moon was s.h.i.+ning, and he saw that he was lying on the ground, and one of his bare feet had slipped into the cold River Volkov, and he knew that he was still poor.

When she finishes, they lie there quietly for a moment. Then Malcolm lifts his leg so that his foot touches one of hers. She can't feel it, but she sees it. She smiles and turns in his arms and she kisses him, not lingeringly but not briefly either. His hand moves, and for a moment her breast is resting in his palm. Then she turns her head away from him and closes her eyes, and he puts his hand back where it was, and they lie without moving until the water starts to cool.

Getting out is not as elegant as getting in. He's afraid of her wet body slipping out of his wet hands, so he drains the tub and they both get very cold waiting for it to empty, and then he has to squirm out from beneath her without letting her heels and b.u.t.tocks bang down on the hard porcelain. His soggy briefs sag ridiculously as he drips all over the bathroom floor getting towels, and he wraps her up and puts her back on the hallway floor while he dries himself and grabs some spare clothing he keeps on the top shelf of the linen closet (but no underwear-the need for dry underwear at work has never arisen before). By the time he has remade her bed and come back to collect her, she is s.h.i.+vering on the floor.

And even once she is back in bed again, with Malcolm sitting in the tweed armchair beside her, it takes a long time for her to get warm.

The News from Spain.

Driving to the interview, the biographer got lost. His wife, in the pa.s.senger seat, squinted at the piece of paper on which he'd scribbled the directions the day before. ”Turn left at the Mobil station. Did you do that already?”

”Liza,” he said, ”do you see any Mobil stations out here?”

They were driving through a neighborhood of enormous houses set behind enormous fences.

”I'm just trying to-”

”I know,” he said. ”I'm sorry.”

It was February, but there was no snow on the ground. Maybe it didn't snow much here, out by the ocean. They wouldn't have known. They'd flown in the day before from L.A., which is where he-his name was Charlie-had lived all his life. Liza was from the Northeast, but inland: a small college town in Vermont.

They were on their way to see a woman named Alice Carlisle (at least that's what Charlie thought her name was; later she would correct him), who had been married to the race-car driver Denis Carlisle in the early 1960s. There had been a group of four drivers-The Four, the press had called them-who were always lumped together, written about together. They'd trained together, partied together, raced together. They'd had looks, brains, nerve, and an almost unearthly casual glamour: it was hard to believe, looking at the photographs, that there had ever been any real people who looked like this, much less the coincidence of four of them together in the same sport at the same time. Charlie, who was working on a group biography, had already interviewed the two who were still alive. One lived not far from him, in Orange County; and the other, who'd been hit by a car about ten years ago and lost part of his leg-how weird, to survive all those race tracks intact and then get slammed returning a video to Blockbuster-was now in an a.s.sisted-living place near Las Vegas.

Charlie had found Alice thanks to something that at first seemed terrible: a magazine article by another writer about Giles McClintock, one of The Four. The article was called ”The Countess and the Race-Car Driver.” Liza had seen the t.i.tle on the magazine cover at the supermarket, and looked inside to see who the race-car driver was. Charlie would not have needed to look; he was aware that Giles had had an affair with an earl's wife that had gone on for a year or two and ended shortly after the death of the earl in mysterious circ.u.mstances. He had asked Giles about it, dutifully but queasily, in the residents' lounge at the a.s.sisted-living place in Nevada; Giles had said, ”Jesus Christ, I can't believe all you guys are still asking about that. For the millionth time: no f.u.c.king comment.” Which had made Charlie drop the subject, and which should, he said to Liza after she brought the magazine home, have been a tip-off that another writer was working on The Four.

Charlie had skimmed the article saying, ”s.h.i.+t. s.h.i.+t. s.h.i.+t.”

Liza had tried to be comforting-”He might not be working on a book, and even if he is, it'll be different from your book”-and kept him company while he drank almost an entire bottle of pinot noir.

She was twenty-four, eight years younger than Charlie. The difference in their ages was starting to seem smaller to her than it had at first, when she'd been a student in his intro-to-journalism course and she had liked him for taking himself-and her-seriously.

Charlie had ended up getting in touch with the other writer; he couldn't stand waiting, not knowing, while that other book might be ticking somewhere like a bomb. But the other book was not about The Four-it was about scandals. In the course of the conversation, the writer had given Charlie some leads he'd gathered while researching the countess story. Among them was Alice's phone number.

So here they were, in a white rental car that had Iowa plates, though they'd picked it up at the airport in Boston this morning after spending the night at a hotel near the runways. Liza had left the curtains open and lain on her side in the enormous bed late, awake (still on California time), while Charlie slept next to her. On her other side, nestled loosely in the curve of Liza's body, the baby had sat up, solemnly shredding Kleenex. ”Another airplane,” Liza had whispered to her, every time one took off or landed.

Liza glanced back now at the baby, asleep in her car seat, her head slumped on her shoulder. ”She's going to be hungry when she wakes up.”

”So then you'll feed her,” Charlie said. Then, ”Sorry, Liza, I just can't seem to find my way back to the main road-”

”I know.” What she knew was that he hadn't really wanted to bring her and the baby along on this interview. He was worrying that they would make him look unprofessional, enc.u.mbered. Liza hadn't planned on it either. In fact, she had imagined spending the day in Boston, silently, in the aquarium, pus.h.i.+ng the stroller up the ramp that spiraled around the big central tank, showing the baby the penguins and the sea lion show. But when Charlie had mentioned to Alice on the phone yesterday that he was traveling with his wife and daughter, Alice had said to bring them along, she would give them all lunch. Liza, changing a diaper on the desk in their hotel room, heard his side of the phone call, his hearty ”yes”; and then she'd seen the look of dismay, anger almost, that lingered on his face when he'd hung up the phone, because ”yes” had been the only answer he'd been able to come up with.

Early that morning Alice had taken the dogs for a walk on the beach. This was part of her job, but Marjorie had come with her. Marjorie often delegated something to Alice and then did it along with her, partly because she never quite trusted anyone else to do a task, however minor, as competently as she would have done it herself, and partly because they liked each other. (Which didn't mean that there weren't things-quite a lot of things-that annoyed each of them about the other.) They walked fast, the dogs running ahead and then coming back to circle them, while the cold winter sunrise went on over the ocean. They talked, about a party Marjorie and Arch had been to the night before, about wanting to lose weight, about a biography of Georgia O'Keeffe they had both been reading. Marjorie had almost finished it; Alice said, ”Well, I'm still in her early thwarted lonely years, but it's hard for me to feel the anguish since I know how it all turns out.”

”Yes, we do know that, don't we?” Marjorie said, laughing. ”We do know how it all turns out.” She often laughed too hard about some little shared observation, Alice had noticed, as if the sharing were a strange, rare thing that, once arrived at, had to be lingered over, a truce, before Marjorie wandered back into her own lonely, exacting, impatient span of territory.

”Would you be able to stop by the library today?” Marjorie asked. ”They called yesterday to tell me my books are in, the Edith Wharton I ordered from the main branch, and the new Anne Tyler.”

”Oh, Edith Wharton, I love Edith Wharton,” Alice said. (She had noticed that she tended to gush whenever she was preparing to disappoint or cross Marjorie.) ”But actually, today might not be the best day for that. Unless they're open late?”

Marjorie was annoyed, as Alice had known she would be. She liked to request things in a voice of extreme graciousness, and if she found she couldn't get what she wanted (which did not happen very often), part of her annoyance came from having her graciousness exposed as a mere mannerism.

”Thursday is the late night,” she told Alice. ”You know they close at three all winter. It really is a little inconvenient for me not to have those books today, and I'm not planning to be anywhere near the library or I'd pick them up myself. Are you sure you couldn't manage to find the time?”

Here was where Alice's job was confusing. She was given a studio apartment and a salary-not as big as it would have been without the apartment, but generous nonetheless-and in exchange she walked the dogs, took the cars to be washed, and when Marjorie and Arch were away (they traveled a lot), collected mail, watered plants, and let piano tuners and upholsterers into and out of the house. Alice was supposed to jump when Marjorie said ”jump”-but it was confusing because they were sort of friends, and because Marjorie didn't think she ever said ”jump.”

On the whole, though, Alice felt she owed them a lot more than they owed her. Certainly they needed someone like her, a trustworthy errand runner and occasional caretaker. But they could manage without her-they would simply find someone else. Whereas she, without them, would be broke and alone.

She had met them eight years earlier, one night at a country club. They belonged to it; Alice was there as the guest of an old friend, a widow, whose husband had once directed Alice in a play in London. It was close to Christmas, and the club had been particularly festive-there had been an oyster bar, and a martini fountain, and an air, Alice thought, of tired, concocted opulence, as if the club had done this sort of thing so many times that it was sick of itself, going through the motions. Still, she enjoyed the whole thing-oysters, candlelight, the smell of balsam, men in black tie. She'd been flirting lightly with a quite attractive man when she'd noticed a tall woman in a dark red tunic with a million pleats coming toward them. Oh, Alice had thought, the wife. But then the three of them had ended up having a giddy, nutty conversation-afterward she couldn't remember the content (probably there hadn't been much), just the champagne-like fizz of it. They'd asked Alice and her friend to join them at dinner. Then they had invited Alice to the next few parties they'd thrown-they lived in one of the greatest of the great houses along the water-and then Alice and Marjorie had lunch together a few times.

Alice had been working as a bank teller then, which she'd started when she got out of real estate (before that she'd been a decorator, and before that an actress). She was coming up to the age for mandatory retirement, and trying not to think too much about what would come next. Something would turn up, she had to believe. What had turned up was that Marjorie, who drank at these lunches, said emphatically that this was perfect, Alice must come to her and Arch; they needed someone to look after them. A grown-up, said Marjorie, someone with imagination and a life of her own, not some stupid kid who would need to be told all the time what to do. Alice, who didn't drink at all anymore but got a lot of vicarious, nostalgic pleasure from watching other people do it, was touched by Marjorie, who had up until now merely amused her. ”I will come,” she had said, ”and I will tell you right now, though I bet you won't want to hear it, that your grace and tact are just extraordinary.”

So Alice had this perplexing, nuanced job, which had saved her life and which made saying even a rare ”No” to Marjorie somewhat complicated and difficult. Alice thought it was a bit like a pinball machine, the ”No” a little silver ball that you shot off as strategically as you could, but always with a sense of randomness, and then you stood and watched it ricocheting and bouncing off a series of moods and obligations and generous acts and small stored resentments and moments of grat.i.tude and ingrat.i.tude, wondering curiously where it would come out. It might help to send another silver ball after it, to careen around and run into it, perhaps altering its course: an explanation.

”It's just that I have these young people coming to spend the day,” she told Marjorie. ”A writer, in fact. He's working on something about Denis.”

”Oh, how exciting,” Marjorie said, vexation apparently forgotten. ”Now, is this the same one who was here-let's see, was it two years ago? Three?”

”No, that was a screenwriter,” Alice said.

”And did anything ever happen about that? Do you hear from him?”

”He sent me a couple of Christmas cards, but not this past year. No, I'm sure I would have heard if a movie had actually been made.”

”Yes, we'd probably notice that, wouldn't we?” Marjorie said, laughing. ”We'd notice if we were at the movies and it was the story of Alice. I think we'd notice.”

As they came up from the beach, with the inexhaustible dogs streaking ahead of them down the length of the pergola, webbed with winter-bare rose canes, Alice told Marjorie that she always felt a little peculiar when these writers showed up, because the truth was she didn't really remember all that much. ”I don't mean that my memory's going. It's not about going gaga.”

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