It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (10 page)

All the while the half sister’s strange face continued hovering in his mind’s eye, gazing at him with its look of unasked-for sympathy. Again he heard her voice: “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” He shook his head violently. “Too bloody right I don’t,” he muttered as he got off the bus. The people getting on stared at him, but he didn’t notice. He was in the thick of a battle, and it seemed to him he needed every ounce of his strength to defend himself.

The two women appeared in Conrad’s office late one afternoon in March. Olga, the mother, had rouged cheeks w'rinkled like walnut shells and wore several rings on her gnarled fingers. The daughter was blond, with a flat, handsome face and a full figure that she carried with confidence. According to her resume, she was thirty-eight years old. Her name was Lydia Krasnova.

The two had come from the former Czechoslovakia, where they had worked in a flower-growing cooperative until the fall of communism. After making their w ay to the States, they had settled in Albany, opening a flower stand near the Rensselaer train station with the help of a loan from an emigre business fund. From there they’d scoured the area for a plot of land where they could start their own growing business. They’d found a two-acre lot a few miles outside the city. There was a house on the property, which they’d moved into, and a dilapidated cottage, which they rented out. Now they were looking for some capital to start building the greenhouses.

The mother, who spoke little English, eyed Conrad silently while Lydia did the talking. The presentation was polished and thorough. They had priced heaters, ventilation systems, and sprinklers; found suppliers for soil additives and fertilizers; talked to distributors; and set up preliminary agreements with wholesalers in New York.

Conrad listened without interrupting. At the end he told the women he needed to make some calculations of his own, but he knew already that he was going to give them the small sum they were asking for. He had had more than two decades of experience in the kind of small business venture they were describing, and he had an instinct for a sound proposition.

On their way out the mother pointed a bony finger at the framed photograph on his desk. “Your daughter?”

“No. That’s my wife.”

“Young!”

“Well. . . She died. Nine years ago.”

“Oh! I . . . Sorry . ..”

“That’s okay.”

The old woman looked helplessly at her daughter. In an easy gesture Lydia turned back and looked at the photograph, placing her hand on the desk next to the frame.

“You must miss her,” she said.

“I do.”

“What was her name?”

“Margot.”

“She’s pretty.”

“Thank you.”

They left. In the quiet room Conrad looked out through the window. A cement barge was gliding down the river in the evening light. It moved slowly, almost too slowly for Conrad to gauge any movement at all, but he watched until it disappeared.

Preparation of the site began that summer. On Conrad’s first visit Lydia and her mother w'ere in rubber boots, overseeing the clearing of the trees. The logging crew had cut down a thick stand of hardwoods and were dragging the stumps out of the dirt. Chaos of one kind or another always prevailed at the beginning of a new project, and this was no different except perhaps in its raw physi-cality and the fact that these two women, one so bent and ancient, the other so immaculately elegant, were its source. The place was cratered like a bomb site, with huge, mutilated trunks lying in piles, great tangles of upturned roots that seemed to writhe in the light, and a powerful, almost animal smell of sap in the air. The wood was going to be sold at the lumberyard, and the women, who seemed to know about such things, were instructing the loggers to hide flaws in the trunks by roughing the surface with the toothed edge of the backhoe’s metal bucket.

“More! More!” the old woman screeched at the driver over the roar and clank of the huge machine. “Good! Stop!”

A week later bulldozers leveled the dirt, and soon after that the contractor brought in the steel and glass for the houses themselves. Tunnel frames with plastic sheeting would have been cheaper to build but harder to heat in winter, and in this, as in all other aspects of the project, the women had persuaded Conrad that the higher-priced option was the only one that could possibly merit serious consideration. There was something lofty, almost aristocratic about these women, Conrad thought, and he found that he approved of this. Lydia, with her queenly bearing and calm practicality, had begun to fascinate him.

They liked to play bridge, and on discovering that Conrad knew the rudiments of the game, they invited him to join them, summoning for a fourth the tenant they had installed in the small cottage next to their house.

This was an old man with little startled red-rimmed eyes and wisps of white hair standing upright as though he’d seen a ghost.

His name was Mirek, and he too was Czech, a distant relative of theirs, who had managed to emigrate in the sixties and lived in Brooklyn, running a used book business until a few years ago, when the lease on his tiny store expired. When Olga and Lydia had looked him up, he was doing menial jobs for a coin and stamp dealer in Manhattan. He had complained so bitterly of the difficulty of keeping body and soul together in the city that later, when the time came for the women to find a tenant for the one-room cottage on their new property, they had decided to ask Mirek if he would like to move there himself. At first he had refused, even less certain of how he would make a living outside the city than inside. But in quick succession two things had happened to change his mind: he had been mugged on the subway, and then the dealer he was working for had moved to Florida. And so he had decided to take his chances with the women. The only job he had found so far was bagging groceries at a Grand Union two miles away, but he seemed cheerful and optimistic about his prospects.

All this came out over the course of several evenings as the bridge games developed into regular weekly events. The four of them sat at a card table in the front room, which had been furnished in an ornate, old-fashioned style, with net curtains, gold-striped wallpaper, and a crimson plush sofa with lace antimacassars. The stakes were small, though the mother saw to it that debts were paid promptly, and she kept a tin box full of change for the purpose. Conrad and the old man partnered each other, and as they almost always lost, a rueful bond established itself between them, and they were able to make up for the sometimes awkward fact of their being barely able to understand a word each other said by an ongoing pantomime of commiserative gestures—sighs, grimaces, outstretched hands.

After the game coffee would be served; then Olga would gather up the cups and withdraw to the kitchen, which would be the old man’s cue to leave. Conrad and Lydia would linger on in the front room, talking together with growing comfort and familiarity.

One evening after Mirek had gone home and Olga had disappeared off to the kitchen, the two of them found themselves sitting together in an unusually charged silence. What was there to say? They knew as much about each other as conversation could reveal. Conrad had told her all about his past: growing up in Troy the son of an appliance dealer and an assistant school principal, his steady luck as an investor in local businesses, the feelings he still had for his wife, the brief relationships with other women he had had since her death, the unaccountable tension between him and his daughter, eleven years old when her mother had died and now studying some subject he had never heard of at a college two thousand miles away. For her part Lydia had talked dispassionately about her impoverished childhood; her alcoholic father, who had died when she was young; her ex-husband, a former party official who had punched her in the stomach when she was pregnant, causing her to miscarry. These things she had described in a deliberately detached manner, with faint disgust, as if her father’s decline and the behavior of her husband were subjects that offended her because they reflected badly on herself. A woman of her worth, she seemed to imply, ought to have done better than this with the men in her life.

All of which had made a strong impression on Conrad. The thought of this attractive, intelligent woman, whom nature had clearly designed for a life of luxury and ease, living under such circumstances had awakened a protective instinct in him, while her lack of self-pity filled him with admiration.

Looking at her in silence now under the warm light of the pink-shaded lamps, her eyes resting candidly and unflinchingly on his own, he felt bewitched and at a loss for words. With every second the silence seemed to move them more deeply into a place of mysterious communion. It was Lydia who spoke.

“Why don’t you show me your house? We’ve never been there.”

“Now?”

“It isn’t far ...”

“All right. I will.”

He drove her into Albany, her presence beside him registering itself as a bright vibrancy, the source of some new power that seemed to be surging into his life, driving out the heavy loneliness that had hung inside him like some gray immovable cloud since his bereavement.

The house was on a quiet street in one of the older parts of the city. Lydia took his arm as they climbed to the front door. She stepped inside ahead of him, walking slowly through the downstairs rooms while he switched on lights behind her. The place was clean and orderly, furnished simply in Margot’s taste: a few primitives and Federal-era antiques; a porcelain washstand with enamel jugs and bowls; arrangements of dried flowers that she and their daughter used to make, from which all but the last ghost of color had faded.

Lydia turned to him with a smile. “You haven’t changed anything, have you?”

“Since Margot? I guess not.”

“Do you feel strange bringing me here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a little.”

“I would feel a little strange.”

She moved on, climbing the stairs past the utility rooms on the first landing and on up the next flight, looking into the room Margot had used as a study, the daughter’s old bedroom, an upstairs parlor with a tiled Dutch stove, Conrad turning on the lights as she moved from room to room. At the threshold of the bedroom that he and Margot had shared he held Lydia back and placed a kiss on her lips. As she moved softly against him, he felt that he had been favored by fortune with a piece of extraordinary luck. He was not a gregarious man, certainly not the type who found it easy to strike up new relationships. The few women of his acquaintance who had flung themselves at him after Margot’s death had not attracted him, and despite a few brief affairs, he had begun to suspect he was too old or too uninteresting for the ones who did. He had his businesses to occupy him—shares in a carpet warehouse, interests in a chain of Laundromats and a storage rental company—and there were couples from the days of his marriage who still invited him to join them for dinner. But he had come to think of his life as a man, a member of the male sex, as essentially over. Now, however, as Lydia responded to his embrace in the doorway with tender, uncomplicated warmth, he sensed the possibility of this life beginning again, keen as ever, perhaps even richer for its shadows of loss and grief, and as he drew her across the threshold into the bedroom, a feeling of great joy came into him.

They entered then on a phase of rapidly deepening intimacy. Was this possible, at the age of fifty, to have desire suddenly running through your days like a torrent from some underground spring? Such things apparently had a life and logic of their own. Before long every trace of reserve had vanished from their love-making. No woman Conrad had known before, not even Margot, seemed quite so sheerly, so poignantly naked as Lydia when she undressed, and none had ever come to his bed with such open delight. The effect on Conrad was intoxicating. He walked into his office each morning feeling as though he had spent the night drinking at the fountain of youth. That winter he proposed and was accepted with an unhesitating serenity that seemed to confirm his feeling of a deep judiciousness in the prospect of their union, a convergence with the forces of destiny.

Meanwhile the greenhouses were finished: four in a row, the clean panes of glass glittering in the steel frames of their walls and pitched roofs. A Mexican foreman had been hired, and he and his workers had planted several hundred shrubs in the carefully prepared soil. There was a gravel courtyard out front with a fountain in it that sent up thick, petal-shaped curves of water from a granite bowl. At night the water was lit from below with a powerful crimson light. The women had seen such a fountain at one of the greenhouse operations they had visited in the course of planning their own and had resolved to build one just like it. Now, as you approached the house along the winding county road after dark, you saw first the reddish gold glow of the night growing lights illuminating the sky above the treetops, then the sparkling, light-filled glass of the greenhouses themselves, with the fountain in front shimmering like an enormous, glowing rose.

There was some discussion about where they would all live after the wedding, which was set for the following April. Conrad had assumed that Lydia and her mother would want to move into his house, which was larger and grander than theirs, but they wouldn’t hear of moving away from their greenhouses.