He was very good-looking, but he seldom washed. His dirt was so ingrained that she couldn’t get him clean in the shower stall. She had to take a room at the Plaza to force him into the tub. Then for a while she could bear the smell of him. He appealed to her to help get a work permit, and she took him to Steinsalz, Ithiel’s lawyer. Later Jean-Claude refused to return her house key, and she had to go to Steinsalz again. “Have your lock changed, dear girl,” said Steinsalz, and he asked whether she wanted Ithiel billed for these consultations. He was a friend and admired Ithiel.

“But Ithiel told me you never charged him for your services.”

Clara had discovered how amused New Yorkers were by her ignorance.

“Since you took up with this Frenchie, have you missed anything around the house?”

She seemed slow to understand, but that was simply a put-on. She had locked the emerald ring in her deposit box (this, too, an act suggestive of burial).

She said firmly, “Jean-Claude is no bum.”

Steinsalz liked Clara too, for her passionate character. Somehow he knew, also, that her family had money—a realestate fortune, and this gained her a certain consideration with him. Jean-Claude was not the Steinsalz type. He advised Clara to patch up her differences with Ithiel. “Not to use sex for spite,” he said. Clara could not help but look at the lawyer’s lap, where because he was obese his sex organ was outlined by the pressure of his fat. It made her think of one of those objects that appeared when art lovers on their knees made rubbings on a church floor. The figure of a knight dead for centuries.

“Then why can’t Ithiel stay faithful?”

Steinsalz’s first name was Bobby. He was a great economist. He ran a million-dollar practice, and it cost him not a cent. He sublet a corner office space from a flashy accountant and paid him in legal advice.

Steinsalz said, “Teddy is a genius. If he didn’t prefer to hang loose, he could name his position in Washington. He values his freedom, so that when he wanted to visit Mr. Leakey in the Olduvai Gorge, he just picked up and went. He thinks no more about going to Iran than I do about Coney Island. The shah likes to talk to him. He sent for him once just to be briefed on Kissinger. I tell you this, Clara, so that you won’t hold Ithiel on too short a leash. He truly appreciates you, but he irks easy. A little consideration of his needs would fill him with gratitude. A good idea is not to get too clamorous around him. Let me tell you, there are curators in the zoo who give more thought to the needs of a fruit bat than any of us give our fellowman.”

Clara answered him, “There are animals who come in pairs. So suppose the female pines?”

That was a good talk, and Clara remembered Steinsalz gratefully.

“Everybody knows how to advise lovers,” said Steinsalz. “But only the lovers can say what’s what.”

A bookish bachelor, he lived with his eighty-year-old mother, who had to be taken to the toilet in her wheelchair. He liked to list the famous men he had gone to high school with—Holz the philosopher, Buchman the Nobel physicist, Lashover the crystallographer. “And yours truly, whose appellate briefs have made legal history.”

Clara said, “I sort of loved old Steinsalz too. He was like a Santa Claus with an empty sack who comes down your chimney to steal everything in the house—that’s one of Ithiel’s wisecracks, about Steinsalz and property. In his own off-the-wall way, Steinsalz was generous.”

Clara took advice from the lawyer and made peace with Ithiel on his return. Then the same mistakes overtook them. “I was a damn recidivist. When Jean-Claude left I was glad of it. Getting into the tub with him at the Plaza was a kind of frolic—a private camp event. They say the Sun King stank. If so, Jean-Claude could have gone straight to the top of Versailles. But my family are cleanliness freaks. Before she would sit in your car, my granny would force you to whisk-broom the seat, under the floor mat too, to make sure her serge wouldn’t pick up any dust.” By the way, Clara locked up the ring not for fear that Jean-Claude would steal it but to protect it from contamination by her wrongful behavior in bed.

But when Ithiel came back, his relations with Clara were not what they had been. Two outside parties had come between them, even though Ithiel seemed indifferent to Jean-Claude. Jealous and hurt, Clara could not forgive the little twit from Washington, of whom Etta Wolfenstein had given her a full picture. That girl was stupid but had very big boobs. When Ithiel talked about his mission to Betancourt in Venezuela, Clara was unimpressed. An American woman in love was far more important than any South American hotshot. “And did you take your little helper along to the president’s palace to show off her chest development?”

Ithiel sensibly said, “Let’s not beat on each other too much,” and Clara repented and agreed. But soon she set up another obstacle course of tests and rules, and asserted herself unreasonably. When Ithiel had his hair cut, Clara said, “That’s not the way I like it, but then I’m not the one you’re pleasing.” She’d say, “You’re grooming yourself more than you used to. I’m sure Jascha Heifetz doesn’t take such care of his hands.” She made mistakes. You didn’t send a man with eyes from Greek mythology to the bathroom to cut his fingernails, even if you did have a horror of clippings on the carpet—she’d forget that she and Ithiel were the Human Pair.

But at the time she couldn’t be sure that Ithiel was thinking as she did about “Human.” To sound him out, she assumed a greater interest in politics and got him to talk about Africa, China, and Russia. What emerged was the insignificance of the personal factor. Clara repeated and tried out words like Kremlin or Lubyanka in her mind (they sounded like the living end) while she heard Ithiel tell of people who couldn’t explain why they were in prison, never rid of lice and bedbugs, never free from dysentery and TB, and finally hallucinating. They make an example of them, she thought, to show that nobody is anybody, everybody is expendable. And even here, when Ithiel was pushed to say it, he admitted that here in the U. S., the status of the individual was weakening and probably in irreversible decline. Felons getting special consideration was a sign of it. He could be remote about such judgments, as if his soul were one of a dozen similar souls in a jury box, hearing evidence: to find us innocent would be nice, but guilty couldn’t shock him much. She concluded that he was in a dangerous moral state and that it was up to her to rescue him from it. The Human Pair was also a rescue operation.

“A terrible crisis threatened to pinch us both to death.”

At the time, she was not advanced enough to think this to a conclusion. Later she would have known how to put it: You couldn’t separate love from being. You could Be, even though you were alone. But in that case, you loved only yourself. If so, everybody else was a phantom, and then world politics was a shadow play. Therefore she, Clara, was the only key to politics that Ithiel was likely to find. Otherwise he might as well stop bothering his head about his grotesque game theories, ideology, treaties, and the rest of it. Why bother to line up so many phantoms?

But this was not a time for things to go well. He missed the point, although it was as big as a boulder to her. They had bad arguments—“It was a mistake not to let him sleep”—and after a few oppressive months, he made plans to leave the country with yet another of his outlandish lady friends.

Clara heard, again from Etta Wolfenstein, that Ithiel was staying in a fleabag hotel in the Forties west of Broadway, where he’d be hard to find. “‘safety in sleaze,’ Etta said—She was a piece of work.” He was to meet the new girlfriend at Kennedy next afternoon.

At once Clara went uptown in a cab and walked into the cramped lobby, dirty tile like a public lavatory. She pressed with both hands on the desk and lied that she was Ithiel s wife, saying that he had sent her to check him out and take his luggage. “They believed me. You’re never so cool as when you’re burned up completely. They didn’t even ask for identification, since I paid cash and tipped everybody five bucks apiece. When I went upstairs I was astonished that he could bring himself to sit down on such a bed, much less sleep in those grungy sheets. The morgue would have been nicer.”

Then she returned to her apartment with his suitcase—the one they took to Cortina, where she had been so happy. She waited until after dark, and he turned up at about seven o’clock. Cool with her, which meant that he was boiling.

“Where do you get off, pulling this on me?”

“You didn’t say you were coming to New York. You were sneaking out of the country.”

“Since when do I have to punch the clock in and out like an employee!”

She stood up to him without fear. In fact she was desperate. She shouted at him the Old Testament names of their unborn children. “You’re betraying Michal and Naomi.”

As a rule, Ithiel was self-possessed to an unusual degree, “unless we were making love. It was cold anger at first,” as Clara was to tell it. “He spoke like a man in a three-piece suit. I reminded him that the destiny of both our races depended on those children. I said they were supposed to be a merger of two high types. I’m not against other types, but they’d be there anyway, and more numerous—I’m no racist.”

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