Collected Stories

coffee from his Pyrex measuring cup, lie on his bed (the sheets were maybe changed annually) to refine his thoughts, passing them through his mind as if the mind were a succession of high-energy chambers. It was the thinking that mattered. He had those thinking dark eyes shining inside the densely fringed lids, big diabolical brows, authoritative not unkindly. The eyes were set, or let into his cheeks, at an odd angle. The motif of the odd angle appeared in many forms. And on Sullivan Street he required no special consideration. He bought his own salami and cheese, cigarettes, in the Italian grocery, carried them to his third-floor walk-up (rear), working until drink time, perfectly independent. Uptown, he might accept a lift in a limousine. In the soundproof glass cabinet of a Rolls, Katrina had once heard him talking during a half-hour ride downtown with a billionaire Berliner. (Escaped from the Nazis in the thirties with patents for synthetic rubber, he had bought dozens of Matisses, cheap.) Victor was being serious with him, and Katrina had tried to keep track of the subjects covered between Seventy-sixth Street and Washington Square: the politics of modern Germany from the Holy Roman Empire through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; what surrealist communism had really been about; Kiesler’s architecture; Hans Hofmann’s influence; what limits were set by liberal democracy for the development of the arts. Three or four other wonderful topics she couldn’t remember. Various views on the crises in economics, cold war, metaphysics, sexaphysics. The clever, lucky old Berlin Jew, whose head was like a round sourdough loaf, all uneven and dusted with flour, had asked the right questions. It wasn’t as if Victor had been singing for his ride. He didn’t do that sort ofthing.

Dorothea tried, and tried too hard, to find the worst possible word for Victor. She would say, “He’s a Tartuffe.”

“You called me Madame Bovary,” said Katrina. “What kind of a pair does that make us?”

Dotey, you got your B. A. fair and square. Now stick to plastic bags.

Such comments, tactfully censored, seemed to swell out Katrina’s lips. You often saw a sort of silent play about her mouth. Interpreted, it told you that Victor was a real big shot, and that she was proud of—well, of their special intimacy. He confided in her. She knew his true opinions. They were conspirators. She was with him in his lighthearted, quick-moving detachment from everything that people (almost all of them) were attached to. In a public-opinion country, he made his own opinions. Katrina was enrolled as his only pupil. She paid her tuition with joy.

This at least was one possible summary of their relations, the one she liked best.

Passing down the glass-walled corridors of the airport, Katrina didn’t like the look of the sky—a kind of colic in the clouds, and snow gusts spitting and twisting on the fields of concrete. Traffic, however, was normal. Planes were rolling in, trundling toward the runways. The look of the sky was wicked, but you didn’t want to translate your anxieties into weather conditions. Anyway, the weather was shut out when you entered the VIP lounge. First-class lounges were always inner rooms, low-lighted, zones of quiet and repose. Drinks were free, and Victor, holding a glass, rested his legs on a coffee table. His stick was wedged beside him in sofa cushions. The action of the whiskey wasn’t sufficient, for his yellow-green corduroy car coat was zippered and buttoned for warmth. As she kissed him the Cabochard fragrance puffed from her dress, scarf, throat—she could smell it herself. Then they looked each other in the face to see what was up. She wouldn’t have said that he was sick—he didn’t look it, and he didn’t have about him the sick flavor that had become familiar to her during his illness. That at least! So there was no cause for panic. He was, however, out of sorts, definitely—something was working at him, like vexation, disgust. She knew the power of his silent glooms. Several objects had been deposited at the side of the sofa. His duffel bag she knew; heavy canvas, stained, it might have contained a plumber’s tools, but there was something else with it, just around the corner.

Well, I was sent for, and I came. Was I needed, or was it extreme tetchiness?

“Right on the dot,” she said, turning her watch on the wrist.

“Good.”

“All I have to do is make it back.”

“I see no reason why you shouldn’t. It didn’t give you a lot of trouble to arrange, did it?”

“Only ducking a date with the court psychiatrist, and chancing the usual heat from Alfred.”

“Such behavior in this day and age,” said Victor. “Why does your husband have to interpose himself as if he were a principal, and behave like a grand-opera lunatic?”

“Well, you know, Victor. Alfred always had lots of assurance, but rivalry with you was more than his selfesteem could bear.”

Victor was not the type to be interested in personality troubles. Insofar as they were nothing but personal, he cared for nobody’s troubles. That included his own.

“What have you got there, with your duffel bag?”

“I’ll tell you as soon as we’ve ordered you some whiskey.” Early drinking was unusual; it meant he needed an extra boost. When his arm was raised, the signal couldn’t be overlooked, and the hostess came right over. In the old Mediterranean or in Asia, you might have found examples of Victor’s physical type. He towered. He also tilted, on account of the leg. Katrina had never determined exactly what was the matter with it, medically. For drainage it was punctured in two places, right through the flesh. Sometimes there was a deposit around the holes, and it was granular, like brown sugar. That took getting used to, just a lit-tie. He made jokes about his size. He said he was too big for the subtler human operations. He would point out the mammoths, they hadn’t made it, and he would note how many geniuses were little guys. But that was just talk. At heart he was pleased with the way he was. Nothing like a mammoth. He was still one of the most dramatic-looking men in the world, and besides, as she had reason to know, his nervous reactions were very fine. A face like Victor’s might have been put on the cover of a book about the ancient world: the powerful horizontal planes—forehead, cheekbones, the intelligent long eyes, the brows kinky with age now, and with tufts that could be wicked. His mouth was large, and the cropped mustache was broad. By the way the entire face expanded when he spoke emphatically, you recognized that he was a kind of tyrant in thought. His cheekbones were red, like those of an actor in makeup; the sharp color hadn’t left him even when he was on the critical list. It seemed a mistake that he should be dying. Besides, he was so big that you wondered what he was doing in a bed meant for ordinary patients, but when he opened his eyes, those narrow visual canals, the message was, “I’m dying!” Still, only a couple of months later he was back in circulation, eating and drinking, writing critical pieces—in full charge. A formidable person, Victor Wulpy. Even the way he gimped was formidable, not as if he was dragging his leg but as if he were kicking things out of the way. All of Victor’s respect was reserved for people who lived out their idea. For whether or not you were aware of it, you had one, high or low, keen or stupid. He came on like the king of something—of the Jews perhaps. By and by, you became aware of a top-and-bottom contrast in Victor; he was not above as he was below. In the simplest terms, his shoes were used up and he wore his pants negligently, but when his second drink had warmed him and he took off the corduroy coat, he uncovered one of his typical shirts. It resembled one of Paul Klee’s canvases, those that were filled with tiny rectilinear forms—green, ruby, yellow, violet, washed out but still beautiful. His large trunk was one warm artwork. After all, he was a chieftain and pundit in the art world, a powerful man; even his oddities (naturally) had power. Kingly, artistic, democratic, he had been around forever. He was withering, though. But women were after him, even now.

His voice strengthened by the drink, he began to talk. He said, “Vanessa says her teachers put heat on her to bring me for a lecture, but it was mostly her own idea. Then she didn’t attend. She had to play chamber music.”

“Did you meet her Cuban boyfriend?”

“I’m coming to that. He’s a lot better than the others.”

“So there’s no more religion?”

“After all the noise about becoming a rabbi, and the trouble of getting her into Hebrew Union College, she dropped out. Her idea seems to have been to boss Jews—adult Jews—in their temples and holler at them from the pulpit.

Plenty of them are so broken-down that they would not only acquiesce but brag about it. Nowadays you abuse people and then they turn around and take ads in the paper to say how progressive it is to be kicked in the face.”

“Now she’s fallen in love with this Cuban student. Are they still Catholics, under Castro? She books you for a lecture and plays a concert the same night.”

“Not only that,” said Victor. “She has me carry her violin to Chicago for repairs. It’s a valuable instrument, and I have to bring it to Bein and Fushi in the Fine Arts Building. Can’t let it be botched in Buffalo. A