My Nine Lives Read online

  When she returned to New York, Lucia looked as harrowed as if she too had served a long sentence. During all her time in India she had been able to see Vijay only very rarely. She had visited him in jail as soon as she arrived and had found him cheerful; he had made friends with his jailers and was in a position to pay for all sorts of perks. He assured her that his confinement would soon be over and asked her not to visit him again. She realized that he was embarrassed by her presence and the amusement it caused to both jailers and fellow prisoners. However, when he was not released as quickly as expected, she attempted to see him again: only to be refused admittance to him while other prisoners whistled and made sweet sounds to invite her into their cells. By this time she had run out of money and had to vacate the lodging she had taken in a transit hotel. While waiting for me to send her more money, she slept under the arcade outside the American Express office, along with other foreigners waiting for their checks from home. She was still refused admission to see Vijay in jail, and there was no news of his next court date; so when her money came, she took the train to the little town where her dance teacher had gone to stay near her teacher, her revered guru, her transference god.

  Here another disappointment awaited Lucia, for her teacher had in the meantime had a falling-out with her guru and was attempting to set up a rival school of her own. She welcomed Lucia with her usual fervent kisses, smearing her with her melting lipstick and mascara, but instead of teaching her about disinterested love, she drew her into the feud. With one shabby little school intriguing against the other, all the students were involved, and the affair had become a local scandal. In this atmosphere it was difficult for Lucia to keep her own ideals intact, and abandoning the dance, she got the train back to Delhi. On the way she was diverted by the sort of adventures young girls alone in India always have, and she went with various people who invited her to their homes, some out of a spirit of pure hospitality, others with more mixed motives. She felt she was getting to know the country of her heart on another level—a deeper level—and continued to make her way toward her original destination.

  Although she arrived at a time when Vijay was out on bail, she had no opportunity to meet him. She did what I used to do—lingered at a corner of his street to watch him from a distance shepherding his family of stout ladies. Once she went into his shop, but he pretended not to see her, so she took a cup and saucer and carried them where he sat by his cash desk. He took her money, and when he gave her the change, said, “Lucia, go away; go home.” Before she could speak, another customer came up to pay, so she left with her purchase unwrapped. She stood outside his shop, blinded by tears, not knowing what to do; finally she smashed the cup and saucer on the sidewalk, watched by two hawkers—one selling pens and watch-straps, the other demonstrating mechanical toys—both of them shaking their heads and laughing at yet another crazy foreign girl.

  After several weeks out on bail, Vijay had to appear for his next court date. It was easy for Lucia to slip into the chamber, dense and sweaty with relatives, reporters, scribes and a crowd of onlookers. She was too far back to hear the exchanges between judge and lawyers, but she had a good view of Vijay among the other accused. He looked rested after his stay at home, freshly shaven, in his shiny suit and broad tie; he was completely sober, in a way she had never seen him in New York, facing the judge with an expression simultaneously proud and submissive to fate’s decree. At this hearing, bail was revoked for most of the accused; and amid the ensuing pandemonium—relatives wailing, lawyers protesting—Lucia managed to fight her way to the front of the crowd watching the prisoners being led to the vans outside. When Vijay was led past her, she managed to touch his sleeve. She hardly felt the angry push by the policeman to whom he was chained: for at that moment Vijay turned his face to her, and he smiled at her the way he used to—with affection, grateful for her love and puzzled by it, and also in apology for himself, his own condition. It was only a second before he was dragged on, with a passage being cleared for him among the clamoring, pushing crowd. The next time she tried to see him in prison, she was again refused admission, and the time after that she was told that he had been taken to hospital.

  Since this was not the prison hospital but a general one, it was easier for her to see him. She was used to Indian hospitals, having had to go for a series of rabies injections after a stray dog had bitten her. The crowds and smells, the mutilations, the red stains that may have been blood or betel juice were not so different from what she had witnessed in other places, such as the railway stations where she had sometimes spent the night. Vijay was behind a screen put up around his bed, and she had to walk the length of the ward, stepping around patients on the floor for whom beds had not been found. It was very crowded, not only with patients but with their families surrounding them. Again it was not so different from the railway station, each family picnicking on food brought in little pots.

  When Lucia reached the screen at the end, she found a policeman sitting outside it on a stool; he had a rifle but was asleep, so she slipped quickly around the screen and was alone with Vijay. He was lying under a blanket on a bed as narrow as a plank; probably it was a plank. He was hooked up to some sort of machine, which took up almost the entire space and appeared to be very old, for it both wheezed and pounded noisily. Vijay himself made no sound at all, he didn’t even seem to be breathing; maybe the machine was doing it for him—Lucia felt that she and the machine were alone together. It occurred to her that Vijay might already have gone, have died, without anyone knowing; she put out her hand to touch his face but at that moment the policeman erupted behind the screen, shouted loud abuse and pushed her out. She walked away without protest, feeling she had seen and accomplished nothing; some of the patients or their family members called out to her, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. During all this time in India, she had never managed to understand a word of any language, only signs and gestures, which she may have misinterpreted.

  The one thing she had kept in the course of all her wandering was the key to my apartment, and she went straight there on arrival in New York. When I returned from the office, I found her asleep on the sofa, still in the thin cotton rags in which she had traveled around India. All the color had faded from her hair and from her face, with only her eyes ringed with kohl; the soles of her feet were black with the mire and dust of the continent she had traversed. She slept for a long time, and when she got up, she was still exhausted. She stayed with me for two weeks, and I thought she had no plan for anything further, but it turned out that she had.

  She was going to stay with her mother in Connecticut—she made a face to show how distasteful this prospect was to her, but “Somebody has to,” she said. It seemed her mother had been through a bad time while parting company with her latest boy friend, or was it another husband? Lucia wasn’t sure, and her father wasn’t sure either, and anyway he had completely washed his hands of his ex-wife and pronounced her to be a mental case who should be committed. She had tried to kill herself again, and again unsuccessfully—which showed, Lucia said, that she really didn’t mean it and only wanted someone to take care of her. So Lucia was going down there to try and do that, though they had never got on together. Her mother used to dress her up in clothes, like pink tutus and matching tights, that even at the age of four Lucia had despised; and later, when she was a teenager, her mother taunted her with her lack of boy friends. She had scorned and ridiculed Lucia’s commitment to Indian dance, so that Lucia had refused to see or speak to her for months. She hadn’t even said goodbye to her mother before leaving for India, but since her return, they were constantly on the phone to each other. “She’s calmed down,” Lucia said, “and I guess I have too.” Anyway, the subject of Indian dance was no longer an issue between them, since Lucia had decided that it was not for her. “I thought I could do it,” she said, “love in spite of, love as absence—all that Krishna and gopi stuff;” but now she was giving everything up, dance and love, and was going to stay
with her mother. Well, she was not looking forward to it—as anyone would understand who knew her mother! But now, in her sixties, who else was there for her except Lucia? No one.

  4

  Springlake

  WHEN WE decided to sell the house, my brother George kept saying, “It’s The Cherry Orchard, American style.” But this was far from being a close parallel. For one thing, we aren’t all that American—not in the way that Madame Ranevsky and her brother were Russian. I suppose this is one of the differences between America and pre-revolutionary Russia: nobody here goes back as far as they did, where generations of landowners handed down their estates, their houses, their serfs from father to son. There are a few hereditary estates left in our area—rambling houses on the Hudson River, with the descendants of the original owners still in them though without the means of keeping them up, so that the roofs are leaking, the curtains hanging in tatters.

  Our house, Springlake—the one we were trying to sell—was bought by our father about thirty years ago, perhaps as a way of establishing himself as an American instead of the European immigrant he was. Or it may have been that he wanted to rival the landowners—in Silesia, Galicia, or wherever—whom he had perhaps heard or read about or admired from a distance in his youth. He had always wanted to be a rich man, and when he became one, he knew how to spend money like someone used to having it. But by the time he had bought Springlake and repaired and restored it with all its period detail intact, it was too late for George and me to accumulate childhood memories in it. We were already well into our adult lives; and when I pointed out to George how our house really didn’t fit into a Cherry Orchard context, he replied that our lives did—his, mine, and Teddy’s, our personalities.

  George liked to think of himself as a futile character. It suited him and was an excuse for not doing anything very much. It also suited our mother, who had made him into the companion Father was too restless and energetic ever to have been. George lived with her in her New York apartment till she died, and then continued there by himself, without ever changing anything; he even retained her ancient housekeeper. But he also began to spend weekends at Springlake, which we had jointly inherited. Here he made friends with the owners of other large houses who were mostly, like ourselves, newcomers to the area. They had made money in New York and had come to settle down as country gentlemen. They all became expert chefs and interior decorators—several of them had been professional decorators of other people’s houses before making enough money to buy and do up their own. They gave each other exquisite dinner parties, sometimes inviting the old ladies who still lived in the moldering mansions of their ancestors. These old ladies were good value at the dinner parties, for they had many stories to tell of their family past—of Cousin Hamilton who had accidentally shot off a foot while hunting in Africa with Cousin Billy—giving the new owners the sensation of being part of and maybe taking over from a genuine American aristocracy.

  While cheerfully admitting his own likeness to the futile brother in The Cherry Orchard, George also compared me to the sister, Madame Ranevsky. In denying it, I conceded some parallel to another Chekhov character—Madame Arkadina in The Seagull; and George agreed that yes maybe, if only because she was, like myself, an actress. And here George said no more, for he did not want to point out that Madame Arkadina had been a successful actress. George felt as badly about my career as I did myself. We had both had such high hopes of me! Since childhood, we had decided that I was going to be an actress and George a writer; and while he never published, I did get some parts after drama school and even had an agent, Paul, who has since lost interest in me. I don’t want to talk about this, or think about it. Success or failure don’t appear to be dependent on talent, as is clear to me when I compare my career to that of others who have become famous. My first husband Teddy used to say that I wasn’t hungry enough; and I have to admit that going to auditions and waiting to be called back after being snubbed and humiliated—all that was too degrading to me, a violation of the art to which I had dedicated myself. I never thought about money—of course Father saw to it that I didn’t have to—nor much about fame: for me all that mattered was the thrill of performance, the giving of myself on stage as in life.

  George says that my first husband, Teddy, represents Trofimov, the tutor in The Cherry Orchard. Trofimov is idealistic, ardently hopeful, very poor—all characteristics of Teddy, both then and now. Trofimov was in love with Madame Ranevsky’s daughter Anya—but of course this parallel would not hold, since Teddy is the father of my daughter Lisa; and Lisa is not like Anya but more like her sister Varya, with whom no one is in love. Lisa has been on anti-depressants since she was a teenager; these keep her in a more or less even mood, for though she has no highs, she does tend to go very low and then she becomes bitter and hostile to all of us, especially to me.

  One main character from The Cherry Orchard is missing in our little group. This is Lopakhin who has made a fortune and finally buys up the estate, the cherry orchard, on which his father and grandfather had been serfs. Or it may be that our father, George’s and mine, represents Lopakhin, at least in his ambition to own this house and with it a recognized, recognizable place in American society. Although as urban a character as the rest of us, he really enjoyed Springlake as a possession. At first he knew nothing about period furniture and wallpapers, but he soon made himself an expert on the subject, and while employing professional designers, he guided and did not succumb to their taste. But when it was all done, he didn’t spend much time here. All summer he preferred to be in Europe, so there were usually only weekends in the rest of the year. Our mother never cared to be here or to leave her Fifth Avenue apartment. So Father usually brought one of his girl friends, and since he liked company, he filled the house with guests who drove up from the city on Saturday afternoon and left again on Sunday night. George and I rarely joined him on these weekends. We had our own interests in New York, and anyway never cared either for his girl friends or his guests, all of them more socially ambitious and more money-orientated than my brother and I.

  Nevertheless, we kept the house for more than ten years after Father died. George would come for weekends, and sometimes he managed to persuade our mother to accompany him, wrapping her knees in the fur lap-robe she always kept in her car. While at Springlake, she never walked around the grounds but sat in the smaller sitting room, laying out her cards the way she did in New York, or talking on the phone to friends, telling them how bored she was here. Lisa too was bored whenever she came and could be seen wandering around the orchard—it was an apple not a cherry orchard but had been neglected so that only very few and very sour apples grew there. If George and I invited her to join us on our rambles around the estate, she always refused and continued to walk disconsolately by herself, chewing on a blade of grass before spitting it out.

  This left George and me free to discuss our problems and secrets with each other. In earlier years, these mostly concerned my career—a part I had tried or hoped for. I would explain my interpretation of it to George, and would act it out for him—and really nowhere, and with no one else, did I have the sense of fulfillment that I felt when performing for George. And it was the same when I spoke to him about my love affairs, of which I had many in those years, most of them finally as disappointing as my hopes as an actress. The disappointment was somehow of the same quality. And while my failure to get a certain part appeared inexplicable to both of us, that with a man was explained to me by George as due to my weakness for the weak, and for the needy in need of my money. This was where he compared me with Madame Ranevsky, who foolishly threw away quantities of money neither she nor her family could afford and allowed herself to be exploited by those who always betrayed her and left her (and even then she took them back!). Well, there have been stories like that in my life, but they are different from the one I’m telling now.

  It was not only my foolishness with money that made us decide to sell the house. After Father died, we tried to
keep it up and to make our weekends there enjoyable for ourselves and our friends. But more and more often something turned up that made us unable to leave the city—a concert, the opening of a friend’s exhibition, the beginning of what might turn out to be an interesting relationship. And while George and I never really thought much about money, we were discovering that the house was swallowing up a lot of it. One year we had to replace the entire electrical wiring, then dry rot got into the woodwork—all problems that left us dependent on local workers, who often abandoned us in the middle of a job because of personal troubles, with drugs or girl friends. So there was always a lot of unfinished work—one whole summer the floorboards in the drawing room were up, and for several weekends all the bathrooms were out of operation. The house was really draining away too much of our resources—that is, the money left to us by Father, which we had always thought of as inexhaustible; and probably it would have been, if either of us had had any sense of how to do anything with it except spend it.

  There was also my ex-husband Teddy. While most of my lovers have turned out to be exploitive, this could not be said of Teddy. It is true that he was always asking for money, but it was usually for some grand idealistic scheme he had become involved in. His own needs were very small; when I first met him, he was living in an abandoned shed on someone’s property, with no electricity or sanitation. Probably this was what attracted me—the romance of strolling through the woods, leaving behind Father’s mansion, and then to encounter this youth in his simple hut among the trees. The very first time I saw him he was naked to the waist and chopping wood, or trying to (he wasn’t good at it). We became friendly, and then more than friendly, and then I was pregnant with Lisa, so Father thought it best for us to get married. Everyone agreed that this was a good idea—even our mother, who was a terrible snob and might not have been expected to welcome a down and out son-in-law living in a hut. But Teddy was charming and goodlooking—fair and slight and full of romantic ideals. These qualities might not have appealed to Father, but what did appeal to him was the fact that, like Springlake and the furniture bought to go with it, Teddy was genuinely American. His family didn’t go back as far as it was possible to go back in America—but still, they had been here since at least the eighteenth century, mostly in the South where they were ruined by the Civil War. His mother was from Louisiana, partly French and completely mad; when I first met Teddy, she was still alive but in a state asylum so that she couldn’t attend our wedding. He didn’t seem to have any other relatives, which to me was part of his attraction—the way he was so unencumbered, truly free to live for his ideals.