A Book of American Martyrs(160)
In the living room were mismatched furnishings. Leather sofa, upholstered chairs, glass-topped coffee table. Against a farther wall was a display of what appeared to be antique musical instruments, predominately strings; on the hardwood floor a large, faded but still beautiful rug of the kind Naomi knew to be “Persian”—quite a dazzling rug, in fact, that reminded Naomi of a smaller rug in Madelena’s living room. The walls were solid-packed with mostly hardcover books. Naomi wondered if, like the books in Madelena’s apartment, these were carefully alphabetized.
“And how d’you find New York, chère Naomi? A ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’—n’est-ce pas?”
Now Kinch turned his full attention upon his younger visitor. You could see, in the way in which he addressed Naomi, and in his manner of seeming to care about her remarks, that he had cultivated a courteous teacherly self; he had had experience with young people. Though he might consider Naomi’s replies no more than schoolgirl banality he would not turn upon the nineteen-year-old the satirical manner he turned upon the silver-haired Madelena with whom he seemed to share a complex history.
Naomi thought, with horror—Could they be lovers?
The way in which Madelena observed Kinch, that was clearly affectionate, yet exasperated; her unease in his presence, that shaded into a kind of dread, or into emotional anticipation, a kind of gaiety—this did suggest a history even more complex, Naomi thought, than with the courtly white-haired Laslov.
And the more closely you considered Kinch’s young-old face, the more likely it seemed that Kinch was older than he appeared at first glance. There were fine, near-invisible lines at the corners of his ruined eyes, and his hair was graying and receding from his forehead. Naomi noted that the fingers on both Kinch’s hands were nicotine-stained. His wide, sensuous mouth was not a young mouth. If the sexes were reversed it would not be at all bizarre to suspect that a vigorous and attractive man in his seventies might be having an affair, or some sort of emotional entanglement, with a woman in her mid-fifties.
Of course, they’d met years before. When both had been younger, and Kinch had not been so incapacitated. Naomi supposed.
In his kindly-teacher mode Kinch inquired of Naomi how old she was, and where was her home in Michigan; were her university courses exciting and challenging to her; what were her plans for after graduation, and—“What is your life’s passion? Have you stumbled upon it yet, or are you still searching?”
“I—I don’t know yet,” Naomi said. Life’s passion was a daunting term.
She tried to deflect Kinch’s interrogation by speaking with enthusiasm of the New York City Ballet, exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum, the documentary by the Israeli filmmaker. Walking with Madelena in Central Park in a light-falling snow . . . (Or was this a blunder? Thoughtless? For Kinch could not walk with anyone in Central Park in a light-falling snow.) She was feeling slightly panicked trying even to recall her life back in the Midwest.
She told Kinch that yes, she’d been “searching”—she guessed. She was nineteen years old and felt sometimes as if she were twice that age, or half that age—“I haven’t been very happy for a while which makes time pass slowly, yet at the same time I haven’t exactly ‘lived’—which makes me immature, stunted. I don’t know what to do with my life that will make any difference to anyone else. I don’t even feel sometimes that it is my ‘life’—it could be anyone’s life, I could be anyone, except that my father died prematurely which makes me different from most people—but Daddy’s death didn’t happen to me, it happened to him.”
But why had she said Daddy?—a child’s word. Better for her to have said my father.
She did not want to say My father was killed—“assassinated.” This was claiming too much for herself—a way of raising her voice, to capture attention. Though she supposed that Madelena must have told Kinch such a crucial fact in both their lives.
With his left, sighted eye Kinch was staring intently at her. He seemed actually to be listening to her. And Madelena too was listening intently though with a kind of apprehension as if dreading what Naomi might utter next.
“Well, Naomi! You are being very honest. But it isn’t just at age nineteen that one feels as you do—at least, your remark about feeling immature, stunted. And some of us are in fact, as you say—‘immature and stunted’ no matter our age.” Kinch laughed, and began coughing wheezily.
Madelena asked, in an undertone, if Kinch needed his inhaler and Kinch shrugged irritably, and did not reply.
“Madelena tells me you are interested in documentary filmmaking? Though ‘film’ is not the correct term any longer, is it?—everything is ‘digital’ today. The beautiful old films of the past will never be replicated . . .”
At this point Sonia returned with a plate of quartered mangoes to set beside the cheese tray. Kinch looked at her, and at the mangoes, with an expression of disdain.
“Why on earth are you bringing us these? Take them away, please.”
This was startling. Had Kinch forgotten he’d sent Sonia away to prepare the mangoes? Seeing that Madelena did not seem about to intervene, maintaining a discreet neutral expression, Naomi surmised that she must say nothing either.
Without a flicker of expression dour-faced Sonia retreated.
“As Baudelaire observed—‘Parfois, j’adore les mangues. Et parfois mangues sicken moi.’”