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Authors: Cynthia Ozick
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sanity in his bidding. The boy had somehow to be extricated. He reeked of chaos — it wasan enveloping fume all around him. Chaos in his anger, chaos in this slovenly precarious abandoned flat. How did he keep himself alive? He was homeless, jobless, futureless. He was careless — he hadn’t bothered to tie his shoelaces. And worse: he hadn’t bothered to put on his socks: she discovered she was sitting on a dirty pair, with holes at the heels.
— The elevator’s squeal, a commotion in the corridor, a treble female voice. Scratchings in the keyhole — the key hadn’t been forgotten. A girl flew in — it was Iris — followed more soberly by the other one, Iris calling out, “Hey, sicko, we’ve brought you a cure-all, and a nice old-timey hot-water bottle for sick little old granny . . . Catch!”
A red rubber shape landed in Bea’s lap. A faceless homunculus with a thick neck. And here was Iris’s hand in midair, with her mouth startled into the beginning of a cry; but the cry came under instant guard, and slowly, coolly, Iris’s pale look traveled from her aunt cradling the rubber thing to her brother scowling, his fleshy chin on fire, to her own gauzy stocking hanging from a framed print of a waterfall.
“Aunt Bea —” and let the syllables burn out.
The other one drew a cylindrical vial from its paper wrapper and set it down; then stood mutely.
“It makes no sense,” Iris said. “It’s gone beyond. It’s pointless that you’re here. There’s nothing you can do, and it doesn’t matter now.”
But Julian, freeing himself from his swaddlings, got up and wound his arms around the other one. She was small and dark and thin and unbewildered. Scrawny, Bea saw, rather than slender, spiky at the shoulders. She was not young — or anyhow not young as Iris was young; she was a woman completed. Her collarbone protruded. With her cautious gaze fixed on Bea — Bea the intruder — she eased herself, familiarly but consciously, back into Julian’s chest, drawing his hands down across the front of her shirt. It was a man’s shirt, with long sleeves; her warm breasts were hidden there. She did not care how she dressed, or how she looked. Long sleeves in mild weather.
“Lili,” Julian said, in a voice so growly and proprietary that Bea knew — it was as elusive and penetrating as an odor — that sex lurked behind it. Lubricious impulses. Surely his fingertips must be pressing into those twin nipples under the shirt. Bea imagined it, she imagined her own breasts under a man’s urgent palms, pressing, kneading, the hard knuckles hurting the feeling flesh, the tender glands, she imagined her body as a floating vitrine, you could see into it, she imagined it as a movie, the movie music swirling upward, the camera trundling in for the close-ups, you could watch the heavings of the ovaries and the uterus contracting, and the shining slime of liver and spleen . . . spleen, one of the medieval humors, and what were the other three? This was her brother’s son — her nephew. Inner life? The boy was no better than a savage. He was surprisingly plump, even his eyelids, swollen pink and fat as petals. A random drop hung from the tip of his broad nose. The stretched nostrils dripped mucus. And rasping, coughing between the words, he was intending to mock her. “Lili,” he said, “since this is turning out to be a family reunion, you might as well meet my father’s sister, come to save us all.”
Spleen, he was full of spleen!
12
I T DEVELOPED , when Iris found him, that he and Lili were living in a clinic. A kind of clinic, with a capacious waiting room intimating certain therapeutic overtones — not that there was any of the expected equipment, or even an examining table, anywhere in sight. During the months Dr. Montalbano was away — he had other clinics in other cities to attend to — Julian, in exchange for the use of the apartment, was to inform anyone who inquired that the clinic was
— The elevator’s squeal, a commotion in the corridor, a treble female voice. Scratchings in the keyhole — the key hadn’t been forgotten. A girl flew in — it was Iris — followed more soberly by the other one, Iris calling out, “Hey, sicko, we’ve brought you a cure-all, and a nice old-timey hot-water bottle for sick little old granny . . . Catch!”
A red rubber shape landed in Bea’s lap. A faceless homunculus with a thick neck. And here was Iris’s hand in midair, with her mouth startled into the beginning of a cry; but the cry came under instant guard, and slowly, coolly, Iris’s pale look traveled from her aunt cradling the rubber thing to her brother scowling, his fleshy chin on fire, to her own gauzy stocking hanging from a framed print of a waterfall.
“Aunt Bea —” and let the syllables burn out.
The other one drew a cylindrical vial from its paper wrapper and set it down; then stood mutely.
“It makes no sense,” Iris said. “It’s gone beyond. It’s pointless that you’re here. There’s nothing you can do, and it doesn’t matter now.”
But Julian, freeing himself from his swaddlings, got up and wound his arms around the other one. She was small and dark and thin and unbewildered. Scrawny, Bea saw, rather than slender, spiky at the shoulders. She was not young — or anyhow not young as Iris was young; she was a woman completed. Her collarbone protruded. With her cautious gaze fixed on Bea — Bea the intruder — she eased herself, familiarly but consciously, back into Julian’s chest, drawing his hands down across the front of her shirt. It was a man’s shirt, with long sleeves; her warm breasts were hidden there. She did not care how she dressed, or how she looked. Long sleeves in mild weather.
“Lili,” Julian said, in a voice so growly and proprietary that Bea knew — it was as elusive and penetrating as an odor — that sex lurked behind it. Lubricious impulses. Surely his fingertips must be pressing into those twin nipples under the shirt. Bea imagined it, she imagined her own breasts under a man’s urgent palms, pressing, kneading, the hard knuckles hurting the feeling flesh, the tender glands, she imagined her body as a floating vitrine, you could see into it, she imagined it as a movie, the movie music swirling upward, the camera trundling in for the close-ups, you could watch the heavings of the ovaries and the uterus contracting, and the shining slime of liver and spleen . . . spleen, one of the medieval humors, and what were the other three? This was her brother’s son — her nephew. Inner life? The boy was no better than a savage. He was surprisingly plump, even his eyelids, swollen pink and fat as petals. A random drop hung from the tip of his broad nose. The stretched nostrils dripped mucus. And rasping, coughing between the words, he was intending to mock her. “Lili,” he said, “since this is turning out to be a family reunion, you might as well meet my father’s sister, come to save us all.”
Spleen, he was full of spleen!
12
I T DEVELOPED , when Iris found him, that he and Lili were living in a clinic. A kind of clinic, with a capacious waiting room intimating certain therapeutic overtones — not that there was any of the expected equipment, or even an examining table, anywhere in sight. During the months Dr. Montalbano was away — he had other clinics in other cities to attend to — Julian, in exchange for the use of the apartment, was to inform anyone who inquired that the clinic was
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