In Search of Love and Beauty Read online

  As he drove, Mark liked to daydream that he had spent more of his boyhood here than he actually had. He had never stayed long enough with his paternal grandmother to make any friends—these he made in the smart prep schools he attended—but imagined what it would have been like if he had, and what sort of boys they would have been who knew how to do all sorts of country things. And more and more it was this sort of boys, or as he imagined them, whom he chose for his closest friends: fair, wholesome, Anglo-Saxon, from simple families from somewhere within the heart of the country; so that, in being with them, he also felt he was acquiring a greater share of something—a landscape, a country, a way of being—that he longed for but only half possessed.

  “Are you sure you want that?” Mark asked Kent as he watched him open a bottle of Sauterne.

  Kent didn’t answer; he didn’t have to, the way he poured himself a very full glass was in itself enough.

  “You ought to have a glass of milk or something,” Mark half scolded, half coaxed.

  Kent lay on a sofa, drinking his wine and sinking into one of his silences. Mark had learned to live with these silences, though he still wasn’t sure what they portended. Sometimes it seemed as though Kent were thinking nothing at all; but then again it might be that he was descending into deep, dense territories within himself that he couldn’t share with anyone. The only thing one could be sure about was that he didn’t like to be disturbed—Mark knew that perfectly well, but he was always doing it.

  “You ought to be reading something,” he said. “There are all those copies of Art Forum you haven’t even opened. What’s the matter with you? I thought you were supposed to be interested. I thought that’s why we got all those subscriptions. I thought you wanted to learn.” Mark could hear himself, and he sounded like someone else—like his own mother, like Marietta when she was trying to get some reaction out of him, Mark.

  And predictably, just like he himself did with her on such occasions, Kent got up and announced: “I’m going out.”

  “Where? Where are you going?”

  “Out.” Kent spoke in an accent as flat as the midwestern plains his forefathers might have come from. Actually, he wasn’t sure where they came from, for he had never met his father and in fact didn’t know who he was.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mark said. “You know perfectly well all these people are coming. Lincoln and Christopher and all. . . What, you don’t want to be here? I think you should. You certainly should. It’s time you mixed with a finer type of person.” Mark hated this phrase and himself for using it. But he couldn’t help himself—it was too exciting to have Kent towering over him in this way, scowling. He kept his eyes fixed on the glass of wine in Kent’s hand; he wanted to bring him to the point of smashing it to the floor and stamping on it, perhaps even first flinging its contents in Mark’s face.

  Sensing that this was what he was being tempted to do, Kent carefully put the glass down. He went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, regarding his chin. But he left the door open for Mark to follow him.

  “You don’t have to shave,” Mark said. It was surprising how rarely Kent did have to shave—for such a rugged type, his beard growth was scanty.

  Kent’s answer was to plug in his razor. Mark, contradicted, put in his place, sat on the rim of the tub and watched him go through this manly activity.

  “I want to talk about the weekend,” Mark said after a while. He sounded carefully casual, though it was always an important subject between them. Ever since they had been together, Mark had tried to make it an axiom that their weekends belonged to each other. But Kent, stubbornly resisting the assumption, never divulged his plans till the last possible moment; mostly he had none, but he didn’t admit that, any more than he admitted Mark’s right to include him in his.

  “I thought we might go to the Academy,” Mark said. “Just for an hour or two to see Natasha, and then there’s something else I want to do. I’ll tell you when we get there . . . It’s a new project,” he dangled. “We could leave on Friday evening.”

  “I’m busy Friday.”

  Kent went into their bedroom, Mark trotting close behind. Kent really seemed to be getting himself ready to go out; he drew a comb through his hair, flung a fatigue-style Italian jacket over one shoulder.

  “Lincoln and Christopher are expecting to see you. They especially said. They like you. Even if you don’t like them.”

  “I don’t.”

  “No, and I know why. Because they make you feel inferior, uneducated, which you needn’t feel at all, Kent. You have such tremendous potential. Everyone says so. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if finally you beat everyone at their own game.”

  Kent, not interested in any of that, went back into the living area where he recovered his glass of wine.

  “Don’t have any more of that,” Mark said, following him still. “It’s not nice for you to be drinking in the middle of the afternoon. I mean it,” he said—so sincerely that Kent defended himself: “What if I’m thirsty?”

  “Then drink milk, I told you. Or a Tab or something. But milk is best, a growing boy like you,” he said with husky tenderness; and on the wave of that went on in a rush: “I really do have this new project I want you to know about. We could check in at the Blue Boar Inn—you liked it there, didn’t you? It’s comfortable anyway, and not too pretentious for a place like that. You’ll come, Kent, won’t you?”

  “I might,” Kent said. “I might not.”

  “What sort of a damn-fool answer is that?”

  “Damn-fool answer to a damn-fool question,” Kent said, and then he barked out a laugh at his own (unwonted) display of humor.

  “Sometimes I think you’re just a big lout. A big stupid lout, you know that? And put that down,” he said, looking at the glass in Kent’s hand. “Just put that right down.”

  In reply Kent was about to lift the glass to his lips—but Mark, always much quicker, put out his hand and held on to the other’s wrist. And they both looked down at Mark’s small square trim hand holding on to Kent’s wrist which was bony as a boy’s and stuck out of his sleeve. His arms were so long, he never could get shirts to fit him.

  “Let go of me,” Kent said.

  Mark wouldn’t; he began to breathe somewhat heavily, waiting to see what was going to happen. They stood holding on to each other as if in combat. Then Kent wrenched his wrist free with a jerk that made the wine in the glass spill out. It spilled over Mark, but it was unclear whether this had been deliberate on Kent’s part or not. Mark looked down at himself and then up at Kent. And this look sparked Kent off further and he did what seemed expected of him next—he smashed the glass on the floor and crushed it with his heel. Now it was Kent who was breathing heavily.

  “Great,” Mark said. “From my Tiffany set.”

  Kent crushed his heel on it again. Watching him, Mark wanted to beat his fists against his friend’s chest—but also to get down on his knees to him and say my darling, my love, my best beloved boy.

  When he got to the Academy, Mark found Natasha sitting on a mossy bank by a brook. She was alone and completely idle, but when she saw him she started up and scrambled quickly to her feet, stumbling a bit in her eager clumsiness.

  “I was just going back to the office,” she excused her idleness. Her eyes shone and shone at Mark’s unexpected appearance. She looked at him the way no one else in the whole world ever did: not like Marietta wanting to possess him but with pure selfless joy in his presence.

  How wonderful it would have been for both of them if he could have taken the same pleasure in her: could have, for instance, sat beside her on this bank, and with the background of the water trickling over stones, told her all about his new project. If only it could have been she with whom he wanted to share it more than with anyone; instead of thinking all the time of Kent, who had at the last moment refused to accompany him.

  “Do you want to get in the car with me?” he said to Natasha, in the rather dampening way he used w
henever he proposed something he knew would give her immeasurable pleasure.

  In the car she sat beside him as stiff and silent as a child who dares not disturb a preoccupied elder for fear of having an outing curtailed. And Mark was preoccupied, biting his lip as he drove, on the one hand trying to suppress thoughts of Kent, on the other to suppress his irritation with her for not being Kent. And after a while he did become more serene: the effect of driving through this beloved countryside, and also of Natasha’s happiness as she rode beside him, staring in front of her except for an occasional glance she stole at him.

  Every few miles they came to a little town or village facing the highway with an open store selling farm-grown fruit and vegetables, an oil company, a real-estate agent, a diner, or a lumber yard. They turned off one such stretch of road and drove into a deserted byway full of little openings disclosing lush green dells. Then they came to a wider opening which must have once had handsome gates and still had a little stone gatekeeper’s cottage to one side. They turned in here and bumped along an overgrown driveway winding upward till it reached a tall, narrow white house with a classical portico. “Oh,” said Natasha, “the burned house.”

  It wasn’t all that burned. There had been a fire here a year ago—deliberately started, it was rumored, by its owners for the sake of the insurance. The fire had caused more excitement than damage, and the local fire engine had turned out smartly, bringing the town and all its children in tow, and the whole thing had got photographed and written up in the local paper. Only the rear portion, which was a later addition to the house, had been damaged, and if the purpose of the fire had been to collect insurance, then its perpetrators would have been disappointed. At any rate, the house was now once again up for sale—as it had been for the last 150 years, changing hands over and over again, sometimes with only a few years’ interval. No one seemed to know what to do with it.

  Mark wanted to buy it. This was his new project, which he unfolded to Natasha. He wanted to buy it not as an investment but for himself and his friends on weekends and summer vacations. He planned to repair and restore it to what it had been in its heyday. Natasha listened to him with the same respect and enthusiasm with which she had listened to him from their childhood. She didn’t always understand his plans, but she always admired them. Now too she was nodding in rapturous agreement with what he said, even though she couldn’t really enter into his reasons. This may have been because she herself had no desire to acquire anything, and she certainly had no feeling for this strange, half-ruined mansion and the land on which it stood. After a while, he fell silent and preferred just to sit there on the steps of the portico. From here he could overlook what he intended to make his domain, for the house was perched on an eminence from which it sloped on one side into a little wood, on the other to a lake. Mark half shut his eyes—against the bright sun, partly, but partly also to shut Natasha out. She was so entirely the wrong person to be there with him. Her appearance was all wrong: her back as bowed as a seamstress’s, her pale ghetto complexion, her dark inward-looking eyes—no wonder that she had no feeling for this land or any conception of what it might be like to own it.

  It was not for her but for Kent that he wanted it; and it was of him that he thought as he sat beside her. He wanted to put Kent back into his boyhood surroundings—or rather, what he liked to think of as his boyhood surroundings: though really he knew that Kent had grown up among the disused factories, vacant lots, and coin laundries of a decayed nineteenth-century mill town, and didn’t belong here any more than Natasha did.

  Leo’s room at the Academy was not called his escape hatch, but it still had something of that character. Certainly it remained the place in which he shut himself away from his followers. To them, it was more in the nature of his den, or lair, where he crouched; and woe to anyone who intruded on him there unbidden. But sometimes some of them were bidden, and when they emerged—some starry-eyed, some in bewilderment—it was usually difficult for them to talk about what had happened in there. One night Natasha’s friend Stephanie was summoned, and when she returned she flung herself facedown on her bunk above Natasha’s. Natasha got up to look at her and, seeing her shoulders shaking, put out her hand to touch her in sympathy; but when Stephanie raised her face, it could be seen that she was not crying but laughing.

  It was only several days later that she revealed the events of that night. She and Natasha were in the garden—most of the younger students spent whatever time they could out there rather than inside the heavy old house. The grounds covered fifty acres, and now in the summer they were green and dense, with little paths opening out into clearings in which stood a sundial, or a drinking fountain, a cluster of apple trees, or a statue of a girl with a bird. And everywhere there were Leo’s students, and even when they couldn’t be seen, hidden in the smothered turns and twists of the garden, they could be heard laughing and calling to one another as they performed their allotted tasks. Those working in the house also sometimes appeared at the windows, ostensibly to shake out dustcloths but taking the opportunity to linger there and lean out between the shutters.

  Stephanie and Natasha were in their favorite spot by the side of an incline; a stream trickled down one rocky side and into a brook curling within a narrow cleft below. They might have been sitting by a waterfall plunging from a rock into a ravine, except that it was all on a miniature scale. There was also a tiny pavilion, but on this warm summer night they preferred to sit on the ground with their backs against a tree. Another friend was with them, Jeff, who worked as a handyman around the place.

  Suddenly Stephanie flung herself facedown on the moss. Her shoulders shook the way they had done the night she had been with Leo, so Natasha guessed she was thinking of that. At last Stephanie said, “He’s so fat”; and this thought rendered her speechless for some time longer.

  It seemed she had been called that night to sleep with Leo. His bed was, as usual, made up for him on his leather couch (the same couch he had had in the escape hatch but now cracked and wrinkled like old skin and even ripped here and there). Stephanie was told to get in with him and lie against the wall. The couch was not very broad and Leo took up practically all of it, so that Stephanie had to lie sideways and pressed flat; and Leo, pushing himself against her, pressed her even flatter. She thought she would surely suffocate. It was not only that she lay there overwhelmed by Leo, but the entire room—his den—appeared to be closing in on her. The air was dense, for prone to colds, he did not often open the windows and he was constantly brewing strong coffee and smoking or half smoking his cigars.

  Nothing happened for a while. Leo did not speak at all, though he breathed very heavily and sometimes grunted. Then slowly his breathing mounted until, with one giant grunt, he heaved himself from his back onto his stomach, slipping Stephanie beneath him. He lay on top of her and all his organs pumped like bellows. His body was mighty, overflowing, of an insufferable weight: so that it was the stranger to feel his male member against her thigh, tiny and soft as a baby’s and as sweetly impotent. It was then that Stephanie began to laugh. She tried to convert these sounds into ones of pleasure, but Leo had heard too many of those in his life to be fooled. He rolled off her—she thought she would die of relief—and told her to go away. He wasn’t angry but displeased with her; he called her light-minded, a fool.

  The next day he had called her again—but only to explain that the whole thing had been a test: not for her but for himself, to ascertain whether he could withstand the temptation of a young girl-beside him. As she had witnessed, he had passed with flying colors, so he would like to know what the hell there was to laugh about. Well, there wasn’t really, Stephanie admitted, in telling this story to her two companions; but her lips were still twitching, and she concluded over-solemnly, “I guess it’s a pretty stiff test. You have to hand it to him.”

  Jeff made a guttural sound and, frowning with concentration, began throwing pebbles into the brook below. Jeff had a lot of thoughts—he was bursting w
ith them usually—but he didn’t believe in sharing them. All discussions were carried on within himself, in fierce and silent concentration, and he didn’t let anyone in on them until he had reached his own conclusions.

  “I’ve heard of that test,” Stephanie tried to draw him out. “They all do it. It’s part of the whole thing, like the forty days in the desert.” Jeff only frowned more and threw more pebbles, so she went on: “Just because you don’t believe in him anymore, that doesn’t mean he’s all phony. You’re just being subjective, Jeff.”

  It was true that Jeff no longer believed in Leo or in the Academy and was only waiting for the next thing, whatever it might be, to turn up so he could leave. Meanwhile, he was a much better handyman than any of the other, serious students, so Leo didn’t mind having him around, eating and sleeping for free.

  Jeff did not defend himself against the charge of subjectivity, but carrying on the argument inside himself, he got more and more excited and threw pebbles in fast succession; so that Natasha, afraid he might run out of them, began to hunt around to build up a new supply for him.

  She liked being here with these two. She admired them both. She had never before become friendly with two such people; it might even be said that she had never before been so close to anyone outside her own family. And sitting like this in the open at night, with stars tangled among the leaves and branches of the trees, was also new to her.

  “It’s easy,” Jeff said at last. “Anyone can do it.”

  “You can’t,” Stephanie said. Half turned away from him, she lifted her arms to do something to her hair, thereby pointing the profile of one little breast in his direction.