In Search of Love and Beauty Read online

  She didn’t know that Leo had only agreed to take her on because Mark was secretly paying her salary. Leo never paid anyone unless he absolutely had to; and mostly he didn’t have to, getting all the services he needed from the people who came to train with him. It was, in fact, considered part of the training; Leo didn’t believe in spiritual without physical work, and participation in lectures, classes, and workshops automatically involved participation in the household and other chores connected with the running of the Academy.

  Natasha’s job, thought up by Mark, was to take charge of students’ files. Perhaps she was the one person in the house who could be trusted not to divulge them, so Leo agreed to let her do this. She had to keep the old files in order and type up the new ones, and she didn’t mind it because she found she could do it and didn’t often get into a tangle. She also didn’t mind living in the attic with the other female students. Usually new members of the Academy were installed in one of the comfortably furnished bedrooms on the second floor, until the arrival of other new members, when they had to move up into the attic or down into the laundry room with the rest of the working force. But Natasha was put into the attic right from the start.

  The house, large, heavy, and dark, was physically oppressive to her, and she spent as much time as she could out on the grounds. These had been left tangled and wild, and Natasha wandered along the paths winding among trees and bushes with withered berries on them; or she sat in a little broken pavilion by a body of water that had dead lilies floating on it. She liked being here best of all when the sun set and sky and water brightened and everything else darkened.

  No one took much notice of her. Even Stephanie, the girl with whom she shared one of the cubicles into which the attic was divided, was hardly aware of her. It wasn’t that Stephanie was a particularly selfish girl, but she was self-absorbed: well, they all were, that’s what they had come to the Academy for. Self-centered here wasn’t a bad word, it was an aim, an ideal. It meant self-development, progress, even creation, and it had to be worked at. And Stephanie did work at it, terribly hard. “I’ve got this big block in me to overcome,” she told Natasha. “A big huge block of wrong thinking and wrong living.” However, it wasn’t so much her own fault as her mother’s who, in addition to giving her insufficient love, had instilled in her her own wrong attitudes. At one time Stephanie had hated her mother—also her father (a very successful lawyer), though less so because he was just weak; but now she felt sorry for them for being all screwed up. When her mother phoned, from New Mexico where she was living with a younger man, a potter, Stephanie tried to be patient with her. “Why don’t you grow up, Mother,” was now her only reproach. But she didn’t spend much time thinking about her—not like in the past, when she had thought about her all the time—she couldn’t, because of working so hard at thinking about herself.

  Often at night, when they were alone together in their cubicle, she shared these thoughts with Natasha. Their bunk was against the wall, just under one of the round windows that lit up the attic at either end. On moonlit nights, Stephanie could be seen lying in the upper bunk, in her flimsy nightie, her hair spread over the pillow, one arm behind her head, and her eyes shining with tears of longing for self-improvement. And while Stephanie sighed and whispered her psychological secrets, there were similar sounds from all the other cubicles; and one could hear soft sounds of weeping too, for everyone was having a hard time with herself, that was why they were all there in the first place.

  All, that is, except Natasha. She felt quite guilty at not feeling guilty enough about herself: she who was worse than any of them! For they were all good at something, all were useful, and with what dexterity they cooked and cleaned and gardened and whatever other tasks Leo allotted to them. Whereas Natasha sometimes got even her files mixed up and had to call in Stephanie to help her out. And yet Natasha was the only one there who didn’t sigh and confess at night but, on the contrary, lay down with a light and happy heart as if she had done a great day’s work.

  Marietta could never be persuaded to visit the Academy. It had been in existence now for seven years and the movement within it had grown and prospered, but Marietta hadn’t been there even once. Yet she was very interested in all Mark’s other ventures, knew all about his other properties, and dropped in at his office more often than he liked. But she didn’t even want to hear about the Academy of Potential Development.

  Leo himself issued many invitations to her—which she ignored as she did her best to ignore everything to do with him. But Leo had never given up. He loved it when people resisted him, nothing pleased him more. “It’s like fishing,” he said—actually, he never fished at all, it would have bored him to death, as did every sport. “It’s no fun unless the fish resists; unless it struggles—flaps and fights and wriggles for its life until—yupp! you’ve got it: up in the air where you want it, dangling there, with all your hook, line, and sinker inside it.” He tended to use this image for both his sexual and his spiritual conquests.

  He and Marietta didn’t meet very often, she saw to that. At most once a year—which was when, without fail, Leo came to Louise’s birthday party. At one time these parties had been very elaborate, for Louise had had many friends in her youth and middle age; but as the years went by, fewer and fewer people remained, so nowadays the celebration was confined to the family: that is, Marietta, Mark, Natasha—and Leo. If she happened to be around and was on speaking terms, Louise’s friend Regi also sometimes joined them. But Leo, even in these latter days of his grandeur, never failed to show up, and without being reminded. Sometimes he and Natasha were the only guests—that was during the years when Marietta was going through her Indian phase, and Mark was off somewhere on some trip of his own. Then Leo felt very bored and soon fell asleep, leaving Louise and Natasha to entertain each other.

  But when Marietta was there, Leo stayed awake. It was as though her antipathy to him acted as both goad and amusement. In earlier years, he tried to get her to attend his lectures and workshops; later, to visit the Academy. She always said “I’m not your type.” And he would say “Try me out,” and smirk knowingly around his cigar.

  But, in fact, she was his type. He attracted many followers who were like Marietta; that is, successful, high-strung women with problems. And perhaps, if it hadn’t been for their earlier relationship, she too might have turned to Leo in her (frequent) moments of crisis. Instead, she turned in various other directions. When her marriage failed, she started a fashion business, a line in sportswear, which became very successful; for, in spite of her erratic, high-flown nature, she turned out to be a first-class businesswoman—a talent perhaps inbred in her through her father’s line of German-Jewish entrepreneurs, and in turn transmitted by her to Mark. But besides outward activity, she also needed intense inner fulfillment. Leo knew it, and was ready to supply it, as he did to so many others. Marietta looked elsewhere. Above all—in reaction to her mother, for she had seen where that led—she didn’t want a lover. She had her son, and that was enough for her, she said: her fulfillment lay in Mark. She added Natasha to him. But still something was missing, and Leo pointed it out to her year after year at Louise’s birthday party. And every time he did that, she turned from him in greater revulsion, but every time also she became more restless. So it was perhaps no accident that it was only a few days after one of these birthday parties that she discovered Ahmed and with him India and the particular brand of fulfillment to be discovered there.

  Ahmed was a musician and had come to the United States with a troupe of other Indian musicians and dancers. Marietta had attended one of their recitals to see the dancers; although her own artistic career had not prospered, she was still interested in all forms of dance. However, it was Ahmed and his sarod who fired her—and to such an extent that at the end of his recital she felt impelled to climb up on the stage where he sat. It was a shabby little hall, which had quite recently been a porno cinema, and the stage too was small and shabby and so was the mat that
had been spread out for Ahmed and his accompanists to sit on. Marietta was dressed rather smartly—she was going on to a cocktail party—but she just hitched up the tight skirt of her dress and knelt right there in front of everyone on her stockinged knees and bowed her head to Ahmed and called him Maestro.

  Later, she arranged for him to give her sarod lessons, and later still, when the rest of the troupe went back to India, he moved in with her in her Central Park West apartment. But it wasn’t him, she always insisted, it was his sarod, his music; and not even that but the world it opened—the world beyond world—the promise of peace and fulfillment that was like a hand laid on her restless heart. Ahmed himself was a very restful person; one might even say phlegmatic. While he plucked the most melting, alluring, ethereal sounds from his sarod, he himself sat there completely impassive, with a deadpan expression on his face. If he felt that he was ravishing his audience beyond their endurance, he might permit himself a flicker of a smile and one naked toe to twitch under him, and that was all. His manner off the platform was equally imperturbable. Perhaps that was what drew Marietta—herself so infinitely perturbable. Otherwise it was difficult to know what she saw in him. He was far from a romantic figure: small, thin, grizzled, he was in his late forties and already a grandfather several times over.

  He was glad to move in with Marietta. He liked life in the West. He drank Scotch, smoked incessantly, and watched late-night movies on TV. When Marietta had a crisis of some sort, he wasn’t in the least upset. He didn’t expect her to be anything but irrational. He stroked her as he might a cat, and she curled up beside him as though she were one.

  He was also a good intermediary between her and Mark. Mark was ten years old at the time, and as once it had been his greatest bliss on earth to lie in his mother’s embrace all night, and to help her dress, and to be her inseparable companion—“She’ll make that boy into a homosexual,” Leo had warned Louise—so now his favorite occupation was to tease her, contradict her, make her mad. They fought incessantly. Ahmed took it all in his stride—he knew about mothers and sons, how alternately they adored and exasperated each other, and he also took it for granted that the relation with her son was the strongest in a woman’s life. He helped her by entertaining Mark—whom he liked as he liked all children, naturally and without fuss—and he took him and Natasha out to see cartoon films at which he laughed more than they did.

  But one day he decided it was time to return to India. It was impossible to tell whether this decision was the result of slow gestation or came to him on a sudden impulse; nor was it clear whether it was due to homesickness, or because he was tired of New York, or of Marietta. He didn’t give her much time to get used to the idea. One day she came home from her showroom to find him packing. He was leaving the next day.

  Five months later she followed him to India. Ahmed wasn’t distressed by her surprise arrival. On the contrary, he seemed to like it. He at once began to spend a lot of time in her hotel room, enjoying once again the Western luxuries he had missed since his departure from New York. He took her everywhere and was proud to be seen with her. Fair and shining, she was like a trophy he had brought home from his foreign tour, or a luxury article he had smuggled past customs. Her enthusiasm over everything amused him. How she exclaimed! And at what he considered such common, everyday things, one was almost ashamed of them. She adored, simply adored, the bazaars and the merchants sitting inside their booths amid their goods: copper pans, or silver ornaments, textiles fluttering in the wind, gaudy sweetmeats—such colors, she had never seen, never dreamed such colors! She liked the smells, too, of incense and clarified butter, and even the denser ones of rotting vegetables and more sinister rotting things—even those didn’t bother her, for she regarded them as part of everything: as the beggars were part of it all, and the corpses on the pyres, and the diseased people healing themselves in the sacred river, and the very fat priests.

  Ahmed’s friends invited her to be with them at their all-night music sessions and to drink opium dissolved in almond juice and milk. They appreciated her cries of “Fantastic! Fabulous! Oh, Ahmed, it’s too much!” They took her boating on the crowded river, drinking and playing music like a royal party. The women in Ahmed’s family also enjoyed her company. Crammed together in inner rooms, they were avid for outside entertainment. Marietta was a show for them: they admired and enjoyed everything about her—her lithe figure, her blond hair worn loose and long, her scanty summer frocks. And she let them touch her to their heart’s content and slipped off her costume jewelry for them to try on. She watched them cook and ate in abundance and pretended she was interested in the recipes. She wondered and wondered at everything and exclaimed and shone with joy so that there was absolutely no language barrier—feeling streamed out of her. And she detected a deep understanding in them, for in spite of their secluded lives, they were intelligent women and sharp and worldly. They probably guessed Marietta’s relationship with Ahmed and took it for granted: everyone knew what men did once they were out of the house, and who could blame them for what they did as far away as abroad? No questions were asked. Marietta loved their acceptance of everything—of their condition, their womanliness; she felt they were deeply intuitive and above all wiser than anyone she had ever known. She longed, for a while, to be like them.

  But although, after the first visit, she returned to India every year for a period of six years, she never again spent much time with Ahmed’s family. Instead she traveled around, mostly on her own, mostly in planes and hired cars. She wanted to see everything but as herself, making no attempt to merge with people and landscape. She enthused about Indian materials, but when she had clothes made out of them, they were to her own design and Western taste. She never took to a sari or any other form of Indian dress, and her sandals remained Italian and high-heeled.

  She met other Western women traveling around India. Some of these had attached themselves to a guru, or were going around in search of one. Marietta was interested in their quest, as she was interested in everything else she met with, and occasionally she followed them to their ashram. But she could never stay there long. It was too vapid and inaesthetic for her and not what she had come to India for. The ashrams always seemed to be situated in dust bowls, and the followers of the gurus had the same drained, infertile air as the landscape. As for the gurus themselves, although they varied in personality, there was something about all of them that reminded her of Leo: not so much in themselves, as in the effect they had. Moreover, while Marietta kept excellent health all through the rest of her travels, every time she visited an ashram she got some infection; so she stopped going.

  Whenever she arrived in a big city, she at once checked into a luxury hotel. There she had long, cool showers and trays sent up to her air-conditioned room. Young men whom she had met came to visit her. They were eager Indian youths who were excited by being in an expensive hotel, and also by her. They examined the clothes she had unpacked and sprayed themselves with her scents. They slept with her and were ashamed if their lovemaking was too frenzied to be sustained. But she didn’t mind—it wasn’t for sex that she liked being with them, it was for themselves. They were charming and pure.

  When Mark grew up, and before launching himself into the property business, he traveled a great deal and to all sorts of places. Sometimes his family would hear from him in California, and then from Mexico, or from Paris, from Rome, from Istanbul; they never knew from where it would be next. Not that they ever heard much—a phone call, a postcard, and that was all. They didn’t know what he was doing, or whom he was with, and he discouraged questions. All he allowed them to do was send him money, and sometimes he applied to his grandmother for it, and sometimes to his mother; each thought it a privilege to supply him. Then one day he would turn up again, as unexpectedly as he had departed.

  His absences were prolonged and hard to bear for all three women. The worst of it was that, even when he did come home, they never knew when he might decide to be off again. Once,
when he had been back less than two weeks from a three-month absence, Marietta came home from her showroom to find him packing up again. He said he was leaving for London in the evening.

  She stood in the doorway of his room and said, “You’ve got to be joking.” Her voice shook.

  His reaction to her presence was to perform his task a trifle more slowly, deliberately, thoroughly. Mark was always thorough and deft. He had small, neat hands, and it was a pleasure to watch him do anything; he himself took pleasure in his own dexterity. He smoothed his shirts, he fitted his socks into carefully prepared interstices; his suitcase was laid out as exactly as a diagram.

  Marietta tried to calm herself by showering and changing. She made herself fragrant with soap and talc and toilet water; she brushed her hair—still blond, though no longer naturally—she wore a long loose robe of pastel silk. All the time she was alert to sounds from Mark’s room. She heard him move about and once he talked on the phone, laughing his light, pleasant laugh. She had to restrain herself from rushing in there and snatching the receiver from his hand; she had tried that before, in their life together, and it had not done her any good. Her heart beat loud and sharp. She lay down on her sofa and tried to at least look relaxed. She shut her eyes, she waited for him.

  When he strolled in from his packing, he seemed pleased to see her so apparently calm. He touched her robe: “Nice. Is it new?” he rewarded her. She opened her eyes and looked into his. “I bought it months ago. I’ve worn it hundreds of times.” He turned away.

  Marietta’s apartment was as light as Louise’s was dark. She had low, deep furniture upholstered in raw silk, a shining gold Buddha, and on the walls some exquisite gold-framed Indian miniatures. Her Oriental rugs bloomed with delicate floral motifs. One wall was entirely taken up by windows, framing her view of Central Park. Mark stood against this and looked over the wide green vista and the blue reservoir. He could feel his mother behind him, her gaze into his back, so that he resisted turning around for a long time.