She sighed. “No family?”
“None here. Not much anywhere else. A few in New Orleans, my family’s
original base.” I waited for her to ask if I never got lonely living
in a house on the river, remote from others; but she saw nothing
extraordinary in this.
“It must be fine,” she said slowly. She broke a leaf off a flowering
bush whose branch, heavy with blooming, quivered above our heads as we
sat on the garden bench and watched the dim flash of goldfish in the
muddy waters of the pond.
“I like it,” I said, a little disappointed that there was now no
opportunity for me to construct one of my familiar defenses of a life
alone: I had, in the five years since my days of travel had temporarily
ended, many occasions on which to defend and glorify the solitary life
I had chosen for myself beside this river. I had an ever-changing
repertoire of feints and thrusts: for instance, with the hearty, I
invariably questioned, gently of course, the virtue of a life in
the city, confined to a small apartment with uninhibited babies and
breathing daily large quantities of soot; or then I sometimes enjoyed
assuming the prince of darkness pose, alone with his crimes in an
ancient house, a figure which could, if necessary, be quickly altered
to the more engaging one of remote observer of the ways of men, a stoic
among his books, sustained by the recorded fragments of forgotten
bloody days, evoking solemnly the pure essences of nobler times a
chaste intelligence beyond the combat, a priest celebrating the cool
memory of his race. My theater was extensive and I almost regretted
that with Iris there was no need for even a brief curtain raiser, much
less one of my exuberant galas.
Not accustomed to the neutral response, I stammered something about
the pleasures of gardens; Iris’s calm indifference saved me from
what might have been a truly mawkish outburst calculated to interest
her at any cost (mawkish because, I am confident, that none of our
deepest wishes or deeds is, finally, when honestly declared, very
wonderful or mysterious: simplicity not complexity is at the center
of our being; fortunately the trembling “I” is seldom revealed, even
to paid listeners, for, conscious of the appalling directness of our
needs, we wisely disguise their nature with a legerdemain of peculiar
cunning). Much of Iris’s attraction for me ... and at the beginning
that attraction did exist ... was that one did not need to discuss so
many things: of course the better charades were not called into being
which, creatively speaking, was a pity; but then it was a relief _not_
to pretend and, better still, a relief not to begin the business of
plumbing shallows under the illusion that a treasure chest of truth
might be found on the mind’s sea floor ... a grim ritual which was
popular in those years, especially in the suburbs and housing projects
where the mental therapists were ubiquitous and busy.
With Iris, one did not suspend, even at a cocktail party, the usual
artifices of society. All was understood, or seemed to be, which is
exactly the same thing. We talked about ourselves as though of absent
strangers. Then: “Have you known Clarissa long?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I met her only last winter.”
“Then this is your first visit here? to the valley?”
“The first,” she smiled, “but it’s a little like home, you know. I
don’t mean Detroit, but a memory of home, got from books.”
I thought so too. Then she added that she did not read any longer and I
was a little relieved; somehow with Iris one wanted not to talk about
books or the past. So much of her charm was that she was entirely in
the present. It was her gift, perhaps her finest quality, to invest
the moment with a significance which in recollection did not exist
except as a blurred impression of excitement. She created this merely
by existing. I was never to learn the trick, for her conversation was
not, in itself, interesting and her actions were usually calculable in
advance, making all the more unusual her peculiar effect. She asked
me politely about my work, giving me then the useful knowledge that,
though she was interested in what _I_ was doing, she was not much
interested in the life of the Emperor Julian.
I made it short. “I want to do a biography of him. I’ve always liked
history and so, when I settled down in the house, I chose Julian as my
work.”
“A life’s work?”
“Hardly. But another few years. It’s the reading which I most enjoy,
and that’s treacherous. There is so much of interest to read that it
seems a waste of time and energy to write anything ... especially if
it’s to be only a reflection of reflections.”
“Then why do it?”
“Something to say, I suppose; or at least the desire to define and
illuminate ... from one’s own point of view, of course.”
“Then why ... Julian?”
Something in the way she said the name convinced me she had forgotten
who he was if she had ever known.
“The apostasy; the last stand of paganism against Christianity.”
She looked truly interested, for the first time. “They killed him,
didn’t they?”
“No, he died in battle. Had he lived longer he might at least have
kept the Empire divided between the old gods and the new messiah.
Unfortunately his early death was their death, the end of the gods.”
“Except they returned as saints.”
“Yes, a few found a place in Christianity, assuming new names.”
“Mother of God,” she murmured thoughtfully.
“An unchristian concept, one would have thought,” I added, though
the beautiful illogic had been explained to me again and again by
Catholics: how God could and could not at the same time possess a
mother, that gleaming queen of heaven, entirely regnant in those days.
“I have often thought about these things,” she said, diffidently.
“I’m afraid I’m not much of a student but it fascinates me. I’ve
been out in California for the past few years, working. I was on a
fashion magazine.” The note was exactly right: she knew precisely
what that world meant and she was neither apologetic nor pleased. We
both resisted the impulse to begin the names again, threading our
way through the maze of fashion, through that frantic world of the
peripheral arts.
“You kept away from Vedanta?” A group of transplanted English writers
at this time had taken to oriental mysticism with great eagerness,
an atonement no doubt for their careers as movie writers. Swamis and
temples abounded among the billboards and orange trees; but since it
was _the_ way for some it was, for those few at least, honorable.
“I came close.” She laughed. “But there was too much to read and even
then I always felt that it didn’t work for us, for Americans, I mean.
It’s probably quite logical and familiar to Asiatics, but we come from
a different line, with a different history; their responses aren’t
ours. But I did feel it was possible for others, which is a great deal.”
“Because so much is really _not_ possible?”
“Exactly. But then I know very little about these things.” She was
direct: no implication that what she did not know either did not
exist or was not worth the knowing, the traditional response in the
fashionable world.
“Are you working now?”
She shook her head. “No, I gave it up. The magazine sent somebody to
take my place out there (I didn’t have the 'personality’ they wanted)
and so I came on to New York where I’ve never really been, except for
week ends from school. The magazine had some idea that I might work
into the New York office, but I was through. I have worked.”
“And had enough?”
“For that sort of thing, yes. So I’ve gone out a lot in New York, met
many people; thought a little....” She twisted the leaf that she still
held in her fingers, her eyes vague as though focused on the leaf’s
faint shadow which fell in depth upon her dress, part upon her dress
and more on a tree’s branch ending finally in a tiny fragment of shadow
on the ground, like the bottom step of a frail staircase of air.
“And here you are, at Clarissa’s.”
“What an extraordinary woman she is!” The eyes were turned upon me,
hazel eyes, very clear, the whites luminous with youth.
“She collects people, but not according to any of the usual criteria.
She makes them all fit, somehow, but what it is they fit, what design,
no one knows. I don’t know, that is.”
“I suppose I was collected. Though it might have been the other way
around, since I am sure she interests me more than I do her.”
“There is no way of telling.”
“Anyway, I’m pleased she asked me here.”
We talked of Clarissa with some interest, getting nowhere. Clarissa was
truly enigmatic. She had lived for twenty years on the Hudson. She was
not married but it was thought she had been. She entertained with great
skill. She was in demand in New York and also in Europe where she often
traveled. But no one knew anything of her origin or of the source of
her wealth and, oddly enough, although everyone observed her remarkable
_idée fixe_, no one ever discussed it, as though in tactful obedience
to some obscure sense of form. In the half-dozen years that I had known
her not once had I discussed with anyone her eccentricity. We accepted
in her presence the reality of her mania, and there it ended. Some
were more interested by it than others. I was fascinated, and having
suspended both belief and doubt found her richly knowing in matters
which interested me. Her accounts of various meetings with Labianus in
Antioch were quite brilliant, all told most literally, as though she
had no faculty for invention which perhaps, terrifying thought, she
truly lacked, in which case ... but we chose not to speculate. Iris
spoke of plans.
“I’m going back to California.”
“Tired of New York?”
“No, hardly. But I met someone quite extraordinary out there, someone I
think I should like to see again.” Her candor made it perfectly clear
that her interest was not romantic. “It’s rather in line too with what
we were talking about. I mean your Julian and all that. He’s a kind of
preacher.”
“That doesn’t sound promising.” A goldfish made a popping sound as it
captured a dragonfly on the pond’s surface.
“But he isn’t the usual sort of thing at all. He’s completely different
but I’m not sure just how.”
“An evangelist?” In those days loud men and women were still able to
collect enormous crowds by ranging up and down the country roaring
about that salvation which might be found in the bosom of the Lamb.
“No, his own sort of thing entirely. A little like the Vedanta
teachers, only he’s American, and young.”
“What does he teach?”
“I ... I’m not sure. No, don’t laugh. I only met him once. At a
friend’s house in Santa Monica. He talked very little but one had the
feeling that, well, that it was something unusual.”
“It must have been if you can’t recall what he said.” I revised my
first estimate: it was romantic after all; a man who was young,
fascinating ... I was almost jealous as a matter of principle.
“I’m afraid I don’t make much sense.” She gestured and the leaf fell
into its own shadow on the grass. “Perhaps it was the effect he had on
the others that impressed me. They were clever people, worldly people
yet they listened to him like children.”
“What does he do? does he preach? work?”
“I don’t know that either. I met him the night before I left California
and I haven’t seen anyone who was there that evening since.”
“But now you think you want to go back to find out?”
“Yes. I’ve thought about him a great deal these last few weeks. You’d
think one would forget such a thing, but I haven’t.”
“What was his name?”
“Cave, I think. John Cave.”
“A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent.” Yet even while I
invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that _this_ was
to be Clarissa’s plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed
in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris’s own name,
had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood,
the leaf’s fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now
live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into
a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and
of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my
imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor’s chisel.