In Search of Love and Beauty Read online

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  To Whom She Will (US Amrita)

  The Nature of Passion

  Esmond in India

  The Householder

  Get Ready for Battle

  A Backward Place

  A New Dominion (US Travelers)

  Heat and Dust

  Three Continents

  Poet and Dancer

  Shards of Memory

  East Into Upper East

  STORIES

  Like Birds, Like Fishes

  A Stronger Climate

  An Experience of India

  How I Became a Holy Mother

  Out of India (Selected Stories)

  © Copyright 1983 by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  First Counterpoint paperback edition 1999.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 1927–.

  In search of love and beauty / by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

  p.cm.

  I. Title.

  PR9499.3.J5151999

  823—dc2199-20011

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

  COUNTERPOINT

  P.O. Box 65793

  Washington, D.C. 20035-5793

  Counterpoint is a member of the Perseus Books Group.

  10987654321

  FIRST PRINTING

  BOOK DESIGN BY LINEY LI

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-879-1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for its generous support.

  Contents

  Acknowledgment

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  I

  Everyone always knew that Leo Kellermann had something, was something, special. He himself knew it better than anyone, so he could always afford to be relaxed and confident, even when things were not going well. And for years and years they had not gone well. He had come to New York in the thirties as a penniless refugee, but he had never really had any difficulty in getting people to look after him. That was because he was so talented, and handsome, and charming—and young too, at that time; vital and young, so that everyone had wanted a share in him.

  He had entered Louise’s life with a phone call from her friend Regi. “An Adonis!” Regi had described Leo to her. “An Apollo! A god.” Well, naturally, Louise had known to discount most of that, for she was used to Regi’s temporary enthusiasms for any new acquisition—a hat, a coffeepot, or a person; just as long as it was hers. And sure enough, when later that day she met him at Regi’s, she saw that he fell far short of her description. He was fair, it was true, blond as an Adonis, with round, blond curls all over his head; and his eyes were round too, and porcelain-blue; and his complexion was clear and of a pinkish hue; but he was certainly plumper and softer than a well-proportioned god had any right to be.

  There was no doubt that he was very charming. Of course, it was a perfect setup for him in Regi’s smart Park Avenue apartment, done up in the Bauhaus style she had brought with her as absolutely the latest thing. He was being shown off, amid coffee and rich pastries from Blauberg’s, to her circle of women friends—all, like herself (and Louise), German and Austrian refugees who had managed to get their money out but felt bored and stranded. Leo thrilled them, and he knew it, and played up and shone for their benefit; and Regi looked around triumphantly—“Well, what did I tell you?”—and, without laying aside the offhand manner that was her style, egged him on to unfold talent after talent.

  “And—eh—Leo—didn’t you say you were with Reinhardt for a while?” “Only two years.” “And that poem you published in Querschnitt?” “Not exactly a poem, more a play. A play in verse.” “You must tell us about Freud. Can you believe it—he actually met Freud?” “Long ago. Before Reich. After Reich, well—” He shrugged, disposing of Freud. He often shrugged, disposing of things and people; not least of his own talents as they were brought up one by one—as an actor, an analyst, a choreographer, for a short time a political activist—he had done it all, but so far everything was only a stepping-stone, a gradual ascent toward those heights that it was his destiny to attain.

  They all felt it, that afternoon at Regi’s: that they were in the presence of a yet undefined genius. Fortunately, he was by no means an aloof genius. He didn’t just sit there and let himself be admired. It was a two-way traffic, and while he allowed them to glimpse into his soul, he also looked into theirs. Yes, he had that wonderful gift of making each one feel—even those of them who were no longer so very young or good-looking—that he was in intimate contact with her, on the deepest and most thrilling level; and moreover, that he had absolutely no difficulty in understanding as well as condoning whatever secret, or secret longing, she might be harboring.

  And while they sat there, on Regi’s tubular furniture, and wondered in what way he would finally make himself known to the world, they didn’t realize it was just that: in his ability to know those who, like themselves, wanted to be known, to be found out and probed to the core of their being. Needless to say, it took a lifetime of struggle and experiment and education for this special gift of his to be recognized on the scale it deserved; so that by the time he had reached his present eminence, most of the people at that original coffee party were either dead or senile or had long ago given him up as a charlatan.

  But Louise stuck fast to him through all those years; or was stuck fast, for sometimes it was against her will. She could not free herself from him, nor would he let her go. In the earliest years, when he was still in New York City and didn’t have anyplace else to go, he had lived with her and Bruno in their apartment; later, when he began to expand his activities to other parts of the country, he took it for granted that, if he so pleased, he could base himself with her during his visits to the city. More and more, he had better options open to him than Louise; and once he became famous, if he even phoned her, it was a big favor he did her, for old times’ sake.

  Here is Louise in her sixties after one such phone call. They had by this time known each other for over thirty years, and she might have been expected to take his calls more calmly. But it was not so, and she was upset for the rest of the day. He had called her from California, and the sound of his voice put her in a state, so that in self-defense she was gruff with him and said, “What do you want?”

  “Want? Want? What should I want? Except to hear your beautiful voice.” And he laughed his great Olympian laugh. He was extra relaxed with her—amused, mocking, affectionate—he made a show of being so: in order no doubt to point up her opposite tendency to be extra tense with him, and on her guard. So that at the end of the conversation—as at the end of everything that had ever taken place between them—he came out the victor.

  “You’d think it would all end one day, you’d think it would be finished,” she grumbled to herself for the rest of the day. Although she was exceptionally upright, healthy, and strong for her age, now she dragged her feet as though they wore the same ball and chain he had attached to her heart all those years ago. She shuffled around her apartment, muttering and sighing, from room to room. It was a large, lofty, old West Side apartment, which she had had for over thirty years. All the furniture—the cabinets, the velvet sofa the size of a Roman bath, the Steinway grand, wh
ich no one ever played—came from Bruno’s family house in Germany. She never changed anything and didn’t have the place cleaned often enough, so that the carpets, the velvet upholstery, and the convoluted carvings of screens and furniture had an accumulation of dust that seemed to add to their ponderous weight. Every now and again she declared she would change everything, including the apartment, which was of course much too big for her alone. But she never even changed the photographs, so that Bruno, her husband—long since dead–was still in his dapper forties, her daughter Marietta a girl of sixteen, her grandson Mark the cutest, prettiest little boy of two anyone had ever seen, and Natasha a baby in her pram. There was no picture of Leo; she neither wanted nor needed one.

  Even after the most casual contact with him, it usually took her at least one whole day and night to get over Leo. Bruno had always pretended not to notice; and Marietta, as she grew up, had been angry with her and had shouted “You’ve been talking to him again! He’s done things to you again!” She would clench her teeth and her fists and say “I hate him,” and she did. Marietta couldn’t stand Leo, she couldn’t stand him near her, and whatever he did to try to win her only made her worse.

  This is what had happened when Marietta first got engaged. It was long ago, of course, when people—even free souls like Marietta—still got engaged. She was at that time training to become a dancer and was living at home; but she had gone to stay with Tim’s family in the country, and he had driven her back on the Sunday evening and had dropped her at the door of the apartment house. And she had come upstairs, radiant with her news. “Mother! Vati!” she had called, and then called again. There was no answer and she opened the doors and stormed from room to room, for it was inconceivable to her that there was no one home to receive the tidings she had so abundantly to give. She was on the point of opening the door of her parents’ bedroom when Bruno appeared from the study. “Don’t, Marianne,” he said (her father was the one person unable to learn calling her Marietta, which was what she had renamed herself).

  “Why, what’s the matter?” Her hand was on the door knob and she saw no reason to take it away.

  “Don’t,” he said and turned and shuffled back into the study.

  She followed him. It was dark in there, for though he was ostensibly reading, he hadn’t turned on the light. His book—Hermann und Dorothea, in German—lay facedown on the arm of his chair.

  Although she wanted light—and life, always!—she didn’t turn it on. She was afraid of what she would see. She came over to his chair and picked up Goethe and perched herself on the arm instead. “Vati, I’m engaged. I’m going to marry Tim.”

  “Child, dearest, how wonderful!”

  “If it’s so wonderful, why are you crying?”

  “With happiness,” he said and took out his big, white, monogrammed handkerchief, beautifully laundered by himself.

  She remained on the arm of his chair. She burned with fury. When the bedroom door opened—and then the entrance door, Leo letting himself out—she jumped up. She appeared in the doorway of the study just as Louise was crossing from the bedroom to the kitchen, to make herself a cup of coffee. Marietta announced: “I’m going to marry Tim and I shall never forgive you.”

  “Ach, tcha, child,” her father protested from the dark of the study.

  “Never,” Marietta declared to her mother across the hall, looking daggers out of her clear green eyes, beautiful and blank with youth. In fact, she forgave her that very evening—the three of them had a little celebration, with champagne and cake; and after Bruno, who always got tired very early, went to bed, Louise and Marietta sat up talking half the night, both of them tremendously excited.

  The peak of Leo’s career was reached when he was seventy with the acquisition of the house in the Hudson Valley. It was a late-Victorian house—dark, Gothic, overembellished, standing on fifty acres of overgrown land with a sunken garden and a lake that had only dead fish and weeds in it. By a quirk of fate, it was Mark—Marietta’s son, Louise’s grandson—who had helped Leo buy the house; and just as this acquisition was the high point of Leo’s career, so it was the beginning of Mark’s. It was, in fact, Mark’s first venture into real estate, and he had never looked back. Now, seven years later, Mark was making big deals, owned two apartment houses in the city, lived in an elegant loft, and had bought office space for his company in a sensational new architectural edifice in midtown Manhattan.

  But at the time no one had wanted him to do business with Leo. Even Louise was wary of this collaboration between them. Wary on Mark’s account: the boy was young, untried, whereas Leo by this time knew all there was to know about the wiles of the world and was more than willing to use them. It wasn’t—she wouldn’t have said—that Leo was dishonest; but he had been around too long and had struggled and lost too often to neglect to snatch at, or manipulate, whatever advantage might come his way. But how to say that to Mark, without implying more than she wished to imply against Leo? And there was the further difficulty of Mark’s character: that if you said no to him, it spurred him on to yes. So Louise followed her usual policy, and inclination, with her grandson: of liking everything he did, and saying “Do whatever you like, little worm, you know best.”

  Marietta also followed her usual policy with her son: that is, she quarreled with him and tried to stop him from doing what he wanted. Like her mother, she knew perfectly well that this would only impel Mark further in his own direction. But she couldn’t help herself. It was out of an excess of love for him; love and fear—the fear being mostly that he would turn out like Tim, his father. So whatever it was he wanted to do, her first instinct was always to try to stop him. In the present case, there were also her own feelings about Leo—“That dreadful, fearful monster—how could you, darling, even go near him?” As usual, she carried her protests too far, and Mark slammed out of her apartment and wouldn’t speak to her for two days.

  The third person who didn’t like the Leo-Mark collaboration was Natasha, Mark’s sister (by adoption). Natasha didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. He always knew what she was thinking, as she did with him. Usually she most deeply approved—admired—whatsoever he undertook, and on those rare occasions when she didn’t, she tried her best to hide it. Always in vain. “Why don’t you speak?” he would ask. “Why don’t you open your mouth?” “But what should I say?” And she turned away her face, so he wouldn’t see the expression on it; for that was always very easy to interpret. She was one of those unfortunate people who can’t hide their feelings, least of all from those she loved. She tried to say it was a good idea to work with Leo, she said she liked it—so that Mark got mad at her for lying; and that threw her into despair, tears rushed into her eyes—but because she knew he couldn’t stand to see her cry, she went away and locked herself in her room, and when he pounded on the door, she called from inside that it was all right, she was not crying.

  None of them knew that Mark had been seeing Leo. It was a year after Mark had graduated. He had given himself that year off, but they all realized he was not idle in that time: Mark was not often idle, he was usually scheming something, though no one knew what until the time was ripe—that is, until he considered it ripe. If it had been left to him, they wouldn’t have known about his purchase of the house for Leo until it was an accomplished fact. But of course Leo was the opposite—he wanted everyone to know what he was doing and couldn’t shout it over the rooftops loud or soon enough.

  He had by then more admirers, followers, some—though not he—would say disciples, than he could accommodate, so that the halls in which he gave his lectures and the places he hired for his workshops were constantly overflowing. He was not surprised when Mark began to appear in the audience and asked for permission to sit in on the workshops. Leo was used to people wanting to be near him, and although he was usually indifferent to who came and went, he was pleased about Mark. He courted her grandson’s adherence to him as one more score over Louise, and—although he had long since surp
assed the necessity—he could never get enough of those.

  Mark also came to the Old Vienna where Leo held court at his own special table. Mark sat there and listened quietly, courteously; and Leo liked his presence so much that he encouraged him to come as often as he pleased—a privilege extended to few. But Mark, it appeared, wanted more; he wanted to meet Leo alone, without the presence of all those others. Leo made a face. “Alone? When am I ever alone? I’ve given up that luxury.” Mark smilingly insisted, and Leo—massaging Mark’s shoulder; he always like to touch people, be in touch—at last agreed, and told Mark to come early the next morning to the place where Leo was staying at the time.

  This was the town house of one of his rich lady admirers. Mark was let in by the butler—whom he recognized at once as someone he had met, though he couldn’t remember where. On inquiry, the young man discreetly reminded him, and they both smiled in remembrance and Mark said cordially, “Well, how are you?” and they reminisced a bit as they went upstairs. Mark was ushered into Leo’s bedroom, which appeared to be the principal bedroom in the house. It was a very feminine room and must have belonged to the mistress of the house who had respectfully vacated it for Leo.

  He lay—sprawled—in the four-poster amid floral sheets and under pastel curtains looped from the corkscrew poles. He looked like a stranded whale—Leo was huge by this time, bloated with food and the good humor engendered by his success. Mark walked around the room, admiring the paintings and the art objects; he even peeped into the bathroom, which had a chaise perçée and a basket piled with little soaps in the shape of fruits. Then he came and perched on the side of Leo’s bed. “Well,” he said, “but you’re comfortable here, I’m glad to see.” And he propped another fat, floral pillow behind his back, to make him more so.

  But Leo looked ill-pleased; he made a face to show something was missing from his life.

  “It’s so tasteful,” Mark urged.

  “Tcha,” Leo said. He added, “It smells of the five Ps.” The mere reference to a dirty joke put him in a better humor. He slapped Mark’s thigh and said, “You and I are the same: we don’t like women.”