The last of her kind, p.28
The Last of Her Kind, page 28
My dear girl, he called her. My darling girl. And the first time he saw her naked: “You do understand, I hope, I mean, you won’t mind if I, that I”—touching her breasts—“I cannot call you George.”
“George! Why, it’s you, isn’t it?”
If she did not recognize him in that first instant, it was not so much because he had changed (though he had changed quite a bit) as that she would not have expected to see him here, outside a secondhand bookshop on Eighth Street. They had found themselves side by side, looking in the window at the books on display, which included, as she would always recall, the old two-volume Modern Library edition of Remembrance of Things Past, with a photograph of Proust propped next to it, and the price: $15.
“What a lovely surprise! It’s been ages, hasn’t it?”
It had nearly broken her heart then and there: the old bluffness, which she remembered so well, the forced joviality (“Let’s all have something nice”). That he could summon that tone even now … Perhaps it was the pity in her own expression that undid him. While the false smile remained frozen on his lips, his eyes spurted tears. The effect was grotesque, but instead of being repelled, she had felt her heart swell with tenderness. It had come to her automatically what to do. She took his arm and led him around the corner, to a café. He had let himself be led meekly, waving a handkerchief that he had taken out, surrendering to her care. That handkerchief. The only man she would ever know to carry one: so old-fashioned, the large, snowy man’s handkerchief.
Mercifully, the café was empty, and dimly lit.
“Anywhere you’d like,” said the young waitress, her voice imparting not welcome but indifference.
They chose a table toward the rear.
“I am so sorry,” he said, sitting down, words muffled by cloth. And it came back to her like an echo: “So, so terribly, terribly sorry.” “It was—seeing you—you know—” He did not have to explain. For him, she had only one association. He had never seen her before without Ann, and no doubt Ann, too, had appeared to him on the sidewalk a moment ago: the lost and wayward daughter, the ghost of her pre-murderess, pre-convict self.
The waitress came, a girl in loose peasant blouse and tight miniskirt, and took their order for tea.
The handkerchief was gone, discreetly folded back into a pocket. The smile was back. The gracious manner was back. “You are extremely kind,” he said, looking straight into her eyes. And now that the crisis was past and he was all right again, enough about him! How was she?
She was in love. It had begun already outside the bookshop, with his tears and her pity, and Proust looking on.
It had been a bold thing she had done, taking charge of him, but now she felt hopelessly shy. Earlier, she had been to the movies. She and her sister had seen Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de … The film was from 1953, and it had affected her in a way few contemporary movies about love ever did. Later she would recite the entire story, and he would say, “Maybe none of this would have happened if you’d seen a different movie that day.” Maybe.
She had walked her sister home and was on her way home herself when she passed the bookshop.
“I live uptown,” she said, “and Solange lives down here, but we see each other a lot. She works in a record store.” She did not add that Solange was probably not long for that job, or how difficult it was for her to hold any job, or how she had just been released from the p-ward.
“How wonderful that she found you,” he said almost rapturously. “I remember how terribly upset you were when she ran off.” And another echo came pealing: “Your poor mother.”
He asked her about Visage—it pleased her that he had remembered this about her—and she explained that she was now back in school. “I have one more semester.”
The waitress arrived with the tea.
The table was only the size of a chessboard. They were forced to sit close. Knee bumped knee. Hand reaching for sugar brushed hand.
How different he looked. He had aged, of course. It had been ten years. But the real difference she was seeing was not about age.
He was still handsome. He was one of those lucky men whose hair thinned slowly, and mostly at the sides. He still bore his resemblance to former mayor of New York John V. Lindsay, whose exact age-fifty-nine-he was. His face had lost some of its sculpted shape; there were lines, there was a pallor, a look of less than perfect health. She remembered how she had always admired his immaculate appearance. But today she noticed a stain on his shirt collar, a patch of gray stubble on his neck, fingernails that needed trimming. (This would change. Each time she saw him after this, she would find him, as in the old days, flawlessly groomed and dressed. “Because of you,” he would say. “You made me care again. You gave me back my pride.”)
He said, “I suppose you know all about Ann. From the papers.” She nodded, but she did not speak. Then he told her something she did not know: his wife was dead.
“Her heart,” he said, briefly closing his eyes. “She had already begun to have trouble in her thirties—not the usual thing with women, but it ran in her family. It was something we always worried about. It was why we didn’t have more children. The doctor advised against it.” (Why had Ann never spoken of this?) “And Sophie always said it was a mistake, because it was bad for Ann, being an only child. When things started to go wrong, Sophie insisted it was because Ann had been so lonely growing up, though I myself have never believed this. And then came all the stress of the trial and so on. Of course, it isn’t right to blame Ann for Sophie’s death. I would never do that. As I say, there was a family history. Sophie’s brother died before he was even forty. Though I can tell you, the whole terrible business was very hard on poor Sophie. You cannot imagine what she went through.” His eyes watered, but he did not reach for the handkerchief.
She thought, If it is true he does not blame Ann for Sophie’s death, it is a miracle.
Suffering builds character. No, she did not believe that. But one thing she did believe suffering could do was to lend character to a person’s face. It was ironic, she thought, how suffering could make a person more attractive. Like melancholy, which, for whatever odd reason, often beautifies and dignifies. He had always been handsome, but there was now this important change. The old blandness was gone. The old wax-figure look. Tragedy had etched him, and there was a new intensity and intelligence about Turner Drayton’s face.
He had retired early, he was telling her. It had been years since he could concentrate on work. A nephew was running the family business. After Sophie’s death he had not wanted to go on living in their house in Connecticut (“I was sure I’d go mad”). He had not sold the house, but he had closed it up and signed a lease on a furnished apartment in a new high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was a gamble. He did not have many friends in the city, but the move had brought the distractions he’d been hoping for: new neighborhoods to explore (which was what he happened to be doing in the Village that day), concerts and exhibitions, and, above all, the ballet, to which he might go several times a week during the season. Some days he set out early (“like a tourist”) and took in various sights, getting around as much as possible on foot, stopping in various restaurants for meals, not returning to his apartment till late. He wanted to be as tired as possible—exhausted, ideally—when he went to bed. There was a pool in his building where he swam every day. Weekends, he drove to Westchester, where his brother lived, and the two of them played golf.
His brother and his brother’s wife were now his most frequent companions. Their names were Clifford and Edie, and they would come into the city a few times a month, and the three of them would go out together. Clifford and Edie had just talked him into signing up with them for a group tour to the People’s Republic of China.
Listening, she formed her own idea of this brother and sister-in-law, imagining them not only trying to keep their bereft relative busy but also to find him a new wife. The trip to China was almost a year away, and they would be gone for about a month. She could tell by the way he spoke of it that he had agreed to go along more to be a good sport than because he was truly excited by the prospect. In the same spirit, he had allowed his brother to talk him into seeing a therapist, but this had not worked out well. “The doctor kept wanting me to go back and tell him about my childhood, as if that had anything to do with what happened to Ann or Sophie. He kept saying there were deeper roots to my sense of loss, for heaven’s sake, as if the obvious weren’t reason enough. He gave me pills to help me sleep, but beyond that he was worse than useless. I once burst into tears of frustration, and he was triumphant. ‘Aha! Now at last we are making progress!’ I never went back.”
He was not used to talking so much. He was not used to talking about himself at all. She was careful not to interrupt. The café began to fill with people. The waitress turned up the music. It was noisy but not unpleasant. They were perfectly content to linger as the room kindled into life, and even the waitress warmed up. “Hi, guys. You getting hungry?” And so they ordered sandwiches.
The last time he had seen Ann, he said, had been at Sophie’s funeral. Though he had never accused her, Ann was convinced that he blamed her for her mother’s death. She said it would be better if he did not visit her after that, because it would be too hard for her. “That was her excuse, her reason for not wanting to see me anymore.” Some demon drove him to keep up the habit of writing to her, sending whatever there was in the way of family news, though he knew this was of no interest to her, and she rarely wrote back. About her life in Maryville he knew almost nothing. “Except that I’m sure she prefers her fellow inmates to any of her relations, especially me.” He did not think he would live to see her released. He knew it was possible he might never see her again. After her trial, with Sophie’s blessing, he had set up a trust fund for Officer Sargente’s two children. At first he had hesitated to tell Ann, but Sophie said of course they must tell her, and Ann might have ended up hearing about it anyway.
“She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t against it, but she thought I should have done something to help Kwame’s family, too. As always, it came down to the same bitter quarrel. She said I was incapable of feeling the same generosity toward the Bloods because they weren’t white.”
To her surprise, he took her hand. “You’re so good to let me go on and on like this, George. But it’s such a comfort to be able to tell you—there aren’t many people who would understand the way you do. You knew Ann. You knew how—how tangled everything was with her. Oh, just listen to me: talking about her in the past tense as if she were dead. But don’t think she’s dead to me, please don’t think that. I may be dead to her, but she is not dead to me.” His eyes watered again. He let go of her hand. “Not a day goes by that I don’t relive the whole nightmare. People tell me I have to stop obsessing like this and move on. But I’m still a long way from being able to do that. If she would only agree to see me again, needless to say I’d be there as soon as they let me. She’s the only child I have. Just imagine, if you had never found your sister again.”
Which of them knew it first, that they would go home together?
Before, she would not have believed she could feel desire for a man almost sixty years old. Before, he would have been ashamed to think of himself seducing or being seduced by a woman half his age. But both at some point that evening knew that they would go home together, and both wanted it desperately to happen.
Forty-eight hours later, when they finally left each other (though not for long), she was more his than she would ever be anyone’s. And he, for the first time in years, felt hope, permitting himself to believe that perhaps his life had not come to an end after all, that there existed still the possibility for some kind of happiness, and that he had every right to seize it.
Names. To him she was now Georgette; and, “I have to get used to calling you Turner, Mr. Drayton.”
She went back to the bookshop on Eighth Street. She wanted to buy the copy of Proust that had been in the window. She wanted to buy it as a gift for Turner. But it had been sold.
The next time she saw him, he was carrying it. “I bought it for you!”
It was a time of small wonders. A few nights later he took her to the ballet. An all-Balanchine program, ending with Vienna Waltzes, which Balanchine had choreographed not long before. Turner had seen it several times. (“I could see it many more times and never tire of it.”) But for her, it was not only her first Vienna Waltzes (she, too, would see it many times); it was her first night ever at the New York City Ballet.
She had heard so much about the company, she thought she was prepared. But she was not. She watched each performance with mounting excitement, squeezing Turner’s hand. By the end of the last waltz, she was shaking. She did not understand how the dancers—of a beauty and ethereality that seemed scarcely human—could return to ordinary life when the curtain came down; could go home, like any mortal member of the audience, and brush their teeth and go to bed. As for the man who had created what they’d just seen—
“Well, in one way he is most definitely mortal.”
They were in a restaurant. Not the Café des Artistes, not the Russian Tea Room, but a much smaller Midtown restaurant that, though completely full, remained almost as hushed as a study hall, and where the menu the waiter handed her—with such an air of gravity it might have been a declaration of war she was about to sign—did not show any prices.
“Yes,” Turner explained apologetically. “They’re very old-fashioned here. The ladies aren’t supposed to worry their pretty little heads about prices.”
It was a French restaurant, and she could not help wondering whether it was the same French restaurant he and Sophie had chosen for that first (and last) luckless dinner with Ann and Kwame. Ann! She knew exactly what Ann would have made of such a place—“a bourgeois horror show”—and what she would have made of Vienna Waltzes. It’s everything in the world I hate. All that beau monde frippery, the clothes and the jewels, all that luxury and waste … The glorification of a society from which ninety-nine percent of humanity would have been barred … The diamonds would have come from South African mines … the fruits of slave labor …
She glanced around the room, surprised that no one else appeared to have heard that loud, angry voice.
The waiter arrived with their first courses. The thought of Ann in her cell at that moment while the two of them sat here threatened to—
“Do you remember the last waltz?”
Who could forget? The woman in white satin and bejeweled hair who seemed to awaken alone in a ballroom and proceeded to dance her ravishing, heartbreaking solo.
That woman, the dancer who had performed the role, Turner was explaining, was the love of the choreographer’s life. “He created that dance specifically for her.”
Were they married?
No. It was not as simple as that. In fact, it was quite complicated. Suzanne Farrell had joined Balanchine’s company in 1961, when she was sixteen years old. “But he was more than forty years older than she, and he was married to someone else.” Now all his passionate love went into making ballets for this unattainable girl and molding her into his ideal ballerina. The result was some of the greatest dance of all time. When at last Balanchine was able to get a divorce, he wanted his beloved to marry him, but she would not. When she married someone else, Balanchine was devastated. And vengeful. Suzanne Farrell, now the City Ballet’s beloved star, was forced to leave the company.
“But then he repented and asked her to come back?”
No. It was she who, after performing in Europe for several years, wrote to him and asked to come back. He was past seventy then, and she was thirty. Whatever suffering they had caused each other was forgiven, and with his favorite’s return he threw himself once again into making new dances for her, including the last waltz in Vienna Waltzes, one of the greatest roles he would ever make for her—and what was this ballet about if not love, the enchantment of love, the hope and the hopelessness of love, its beauty and strangeness and the suffering it brings?
Call it a happy ending. The setting for The Earrings of Madame de … also happened to be Vienna, and in it, too, the lovers danced and danced—in fact, that was their courtship, one endless waltz—perhaps to the very same music she had heard at the ballet that night. (All waltzes sounded the same to her.) As in the ballet, the same beau monde trappings: ball gowns, tailcoats, dress uniforms, decorations, ostrich plumes, jewels—the diamond earrings that mean so little to the Countess when they are a gift from her husband the General that she sells them without a pang, only to have them become her most cherished possession when, by a twist of fate, she receives them back, a gift from her lover the Baron.
“You know,” Turner said, “after all the trouble started with Ann, Sophie lost interest in just about everything she used to care about, her antiques and her gardening, her charity work, even her friends. Going out. She did not see the point in going to something like the ballet anymore. But for me it was the one thing that I found took me completely out of myself for an evening and gave me real consolation. The sheer beauty of it. In fact, it had never meant more to me.”
