The Courts of Love Read online

  He went back out the way that he had come, wiping his prints off the door handle, locking, then unlocking the door. He walked across the yard and climbed over the fence and let himself down into Clyda’s backyard. “Where have you been?” Claudine asked. “Zandia’s been looking for you. I want to take him down and rent him a video. You want to go with us?”

  “I used to know that woman who lives next door,” Sandy said. “I knew her in New Orleans. So what are they, rich Jews or something?”

  “They run a bookstore,” Clyda answered. “I’ll go with you to the video store. I need to get out of the house myself.”

  Claudine sighed. “Well, Momma, I just wanted to get Zandia off to myself for a while. I don’t like to have everyone in one car.”

  The next morning Claudine and Zandia and Sandy got into Claudine’s BMW and started driving back to L.A. “I know she got her feelings hurt,” Claudine was saying. “But I couldn’t take any more. I don’t know how I grew up with her working on me morning, noon, and night. It’s a wonder I survived. My analyst says it proves what a powerful personality I have that I got away from her. What was all that shit she was telling you about Scientology?”

  “She’s just lonely, baby. She’s an old lady and she’s lonely. It was nice of her to keep the kid so long. Don’t go bad-mouthing your mother. You should have seen the one I had. When I had one, which wasn’t long. I like your old lady. I think she looks good for her age and she leaves you alone.”

  “Well, it’s over. We did it. Let’s go home and get back to our own life. That’s what I told her. I said, Mother, I have a life of my own, believe it or not, and I need to get back to it.” Claudine bent over the wheel, pulled out onto the eight-lane that runs along the coast. “At least it isn’t raining.”

  III

  At five minutes to ten on Monday morning Nora Jane was settling into a seat in the back of the history class. A tall man in a gray shirt came into the room and put his books on the professor’s desk. He was overweight and soft in the face but he had intelligent eyes and huge black-rimmed glasses and he rolled up his sleeves as he waited for the class to assemble. There were thirty or forty students when all the seats were filled. Nora Jane got out a notebook and a pencil. She began to write. “Walls and foyer, decorator white. Porch ceilings, French blue. Tammili and Lydia’s rooms, sunshine yellow, ask them. Go by Goyer’s Paints this afternoon.”

  “Where to begin to talk about the history of the world? How to begin to sort out the threads that led to the Golden Age of Greece and the first historian, Thucydides? Agriculture, the domestication of animals, the wheel, pots to store food, ways to carry water, the idea that man has a soul. Where does history begin? Is history a concept of the brain? Does time move in one direction? What is a Zeitgeist? What is an inventor? Is he only a sort of point man, the natural next step created by the force or need of many brains, or is he a lone individual stumbling onto a good idea? What is an idea? Who drilled the first well? Was it a pipe in the ground or a boy or girl sucking moisture from the earth with a straw or reed? Tell me the difference in a hat, a roof, and an umbrella.

  “Water, food, shelter, keeping the young alive. Are these the things man needs? When there is an earthquake in San Francisco, what are the first things the survivors do? You do not run into the living room to save the video recorder or the Nikonos. You run to save the babies. . . .” The professor’s voice was deep and soothing. Nora Jane got chills listening to him talk. She was thrilled to be here in this class with her books beside her on the floor. If only Sandy doesn’t go over to their school today and kidnap them. They wouldn’t go with him. The school wouldn’t let them go. I have the mobile phone. I could go out in the hall and call the school. I will in a minute. I have to. I can’t stand it.

  “Our hold on the earth is tenuous at best,” the voice was saying. “It doesn’t seem so if you are an English-speaking citizen of the United States of America and don’t live in a ghetto. We wake up with our automobiles and jet helicopters and computers and video cameras and houses full of every imaginable sort of thing and we know we have gotten rid of the lions and tigers and bears and wolves and bacteria. Unfortunately we have replaced them with the AIDS virus and antibiotic-resistant tuberculoses, by threats to the very air we breathe and polluted lakes and rivers. Also, the same comets that perhaps destroyed the dinosaurs are aiming at us in the sky. . . .”

  “Excuse me,” Nora Jane muttered to the girl on her right, and leaving her books, went out into the hall and called the twins’ school and talked to the receptionist. “Their grandmother is picking them up at three-thirty,” she told the girl. “Mrs. Ann Harwood. She has a pale gray Bentley or else a black Porsche. Don’t let them leave with anyone else for any reason. Unless you call me first. Here’s the mobile phone number. . . . Okay, I know. Well, thank you.”

  She went back into the classroom and took her seat and listened to the rest of the lecture. Then she put the books into her backpack and put it on her shoulder and struck out across the campus to find Nieman and Freddy.

  Nieman and Freddy were at their designated table at Aranga’s waiting for her. “I may sell Clara too,” Freddy was saying. “Now that he knows where we are. Of course, Nora Jane always told him they might not be his. The whole time she was pregnant she told him that. Isn’t that just like her, the darling. Of course the thing is he’s AB positive and so am I and so are both of them. It’s such a bizarre coincidence.”

  “Is he bright enough to remember all that and call it into play? I thought he drank.”

  “Well, obviously he doesn’t anymore for what it’s worth. He’s bright, Nieman. Lydia tests at 130. Just because she’s not as smart as Tammili. Of course, psychopathic personalities are never dumb. That’s been proven.” Freddy played with his coffee cup. “I hope she’s all right. Where is she? She got out at eleven.”

  “It’s ten after eleven. Maybe you should prepare to buy him off. I hate to keep bringing this up, but you could just offer him money.”

  “Solicit blackmail? So we can spend the rest of our days wondering when he’ll show up wanting more? It’s frightening, Nieman. We can’t know what he’s thinking. What he’s up to.”

  IV

  “I don’t know why that woman who saved him never came back to get the present,” Claudine was saying. They had stopped at San Jose to get lunch and were still on the road. Claudine was driving and Sandy was watching Zandia and manning the CD player. “Two ounces of Joy I bought her. I wish I’d just taken it home with me. I thought she was rude, didn’t you? I keep thinking they think I’ll sue for letting him fall in. I keep reading fear of lawsuits, don’t you? Did you see the way they beat it out of there?”

  “I told you, I used to know her. Maybe there’s something she doesn’t want her husband to know that she thinks I’ll tell him.”

  “She had a bad reputation, huh?”

  “I didn’t really know her. She just went to our church. Well, that’s over, baby. You’re right about one thing. If your mother wants to see the kid she can come and visit us.”

  “If she ever saw our condo maybe she’d buy me a bigger one. She’s got tons of money but her shrink tells her not to give it to me. I hate his guts, the son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Think about something good. You’re making wrinkles, baby, worrying about things like that. We’ve got plenty going on. I hope that deal down in Mexico works out. We could have a lot of fun living down there for a while. I love it down there. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a breakthrough script for you.”

  “Sandy, Sandy, Sandy,” Zandia yelled from the car seat. “Sandy, Sandy, Sandy.”

  “He’s crazy about you,” Claudine said. “I think he likes you better than he does me.”

  Later that afternoon, while Claudine was at the store, Sandy found a piece of stationery and wrote a letter to Nora Jane.

  Dear N.J.,

  It was really good to see you looking so happy. Your husband looks like a nice guy. You shoul
dn’t have run off like that. I saw you leave. I thought, there she goes. She always did think she was invisible when she had her head in the sand.

  Don’t worry about me, baby. I’m glad you got a life. I got one too. We’re doing a film in Mexico as soon as we finish this one.

  Thanks for saving Zandia. I really like this kid even if I do wish sometimes the little helicopter blade on his hat would fly him off to cloud land for a couple of weeks. Around here we call him IN YOUR FACE.

  Take care of yourself. Love always,

  Sandy

  He carried the letter around for a couple of days, then he tore it up.

  Freddy Harwood called his old friend Jody Wattes, who had given up a profitable law practice to be a private investigator, and asked him to put a tail on Sandy. Then he and Nora Jane and Tammili and Lydia moved back into their house while they waited for the new one to be renovated.

  “I still don’t know why we went over to Grandmother’s to begin with,” Tammili was saying. “Or why all of a sudden we have to have a house on the beach. It’s because the neighborhood is anti-Semitic, isn’t it? You just don’t want us to know. I don’t think people should move because of things like that. So is that what’s going on?”

  “No, it is not.” Nora Jane was doing all the lying on this matter. Not that she was good at it, but she was better than Freddy was. “I have always wanted a house on the beach. I never really liked this house. This house is pure nineteen seventy. I want to look out a window and see you playing on a beach. If we are going to live near an ocean, we might as well live on it.”

  “We want room to grow and change,” Freddy added. “We might want some foreign exchange students. More dogs. Anything can happen. Besides, think how happy it is making Grandmother Ann.”

  “I’ll have to get up at six in the morning to get to school.”

  “Maybe you’ll want to change schools in the next few years. We’ll go and look at some. You might want to go to a different school that’s closer.”

  “You aren’t telling me.” Tammili stood with her hands on her hips.

  “We’re evolving,” Freddy said. “Rilke said, You must change your life. Are you afraid to live in a different house, Tammili?”

  “No. I just want to know what’s going on. You all are up to something and I want to know what it is. Grandmother’s getting married to that guy, isn’t she? Is that it?”

  “I doubt it,” Freddy answered. “It wouldn’t be like her to get married.”

  Nora Jane went to her daughter and put her arm around her shoulders. “Your college student mother is going to write a report on the new cave they found in France. Come help me pull up the data on the computer. Will you do that?”

  “They told us about it.” Tammili got excited. “They showed us a picture of the paintings. There was a herd of animals so good no one could paint it any better. I almost fainted. They showed it to us today in art class. You had that too? They talked about it in college?”

  “Uncle Nieman knows about it.” Lydia had come into the room from the shadow of the door where she had been listening. “Uncle Nieman’s been inside the one at Lascaux. He’s one of the few people in America who ever got to see it.”

  “It was a religion.” Tammili took her mother’s hand, began to lead her in the direction of the room with the computer. “They weren’t very big or they couldn’t have fit through the crawl spaces. I bet they weren’t any bigger than Lydia and me. I can’t believe you guys are going to college. It’s amazing. Come on. I know exactly where to find it. It was all in the newspapers a while ago. Uncle Nieman made me copies of the stories. I’ve got them in my room somewhere.”

  Lydia and Tammili and Nora Jane disappeared in the direction of the computer and Freddy walked out onto the patio and looked up at the stars and started making deals. Just keep them safe, he offered. That’s all. Name your price. I’m ready. Don’t I always keep my word? Have I ever let you down?

  Going to live on the beach, his father answered. Well, that’s all right until the big storms come.

  What’s it like up there? Freddy asked.

  I don’t know, his father answered. I’m too busy watching you to care.

  On the Problem of Turbulence

  “Where were we ten years ago, that’s what I have to remember,” Nora Jane Harwood said to herself many times during those terrible days of April.

  “Natural flowing shapes,” Nieman Gluuk consoled himself by musing. “‘Great rivers meander in wide curves to the sea. In the sea itself the Gulf Stream meanders, making loops, swinging east and west. Great rivers of warm and cold water fight in the sea.’ As Schwenk says, ‘the flow wants to realize itself regardless of the surrounding material.’ You cannot fight these powers. But it does not mean we’re doomed. We could learn to ride on the waves as surfers. . . .”

  “Chaos,” Freddy Harwood said to them both, wiping his glasses on his sweater, then pushing them back onto his face. “Toni Morrison’s house burns down weeks after she wins the Nobel, children are bombed and starved, Mother goes out with that fool, sects surround us, so dark and so many, we cannot even discern the enemy. The enemy is everywhere and is still what it was three thousand years ago. Ignorance reigns, is fed and breeds. . . .‘The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Yeats.”

  “Don’t wear yellow when I wear yellow,” Tammili said to her twin sister, Lydia. “You always copy me.”

  “I didn’t see you wearing yellow,” Lydia lied. “I was in the other room. It’s a coincidence.”

  “Stop talking like Nieman. You just try to use the words he gives us.”

  “Well, so what? That’s what they’re for. Dad said so. He said any word you use belongs to you. I’m not afraid to say coincidence out loud.”

  Nine-fifteen in the morning. April one, nineteen hundred and ninety-five.

  Freddy Harwood sat at his desk in his office at Clara Books and thought about the past. The great days of Berkeley were over and there were those who said they would never come again. Freddy harbored a secret hope that they would come again. They might ride in on a revival of artistic freedom, a cure for AIDS might do the trick, one great stage play, new musical forms, a poet who could break the heart and make the soul sing.

  There had been the Stephen Mitchell translations of Rilke, that had seemed a breakthrough, the Danish novels of Peter Hoeg, Kilain Alter’s biography of Francis Alter. Other sightings. All was not lost.

  Freddy got up from his desk and wandered down into the pre-opening activity of the bookstore. He had dropped his daughters off at school, then gone to the store to begin sorting invoices for the spring books. It was a task he never minded doing. It was what he was doing the night Nora Jane walked into his life. My Nora, he thought, my life, my hope, my meaning. Freddy Harwood adored his wife and children. He loved them in a manner that seems old-fashioned in a cynical world. He lived to serve and protect them. Each act of his day was measured against his concern for their happiness and well-being. In his soul Freddy believed other men felt the same way about their families. He could no longer tolerate the knowledge of cruelty. Stories of wife and child abuse affected him so deeply he had stopped reading newspapers. His secretary, Frances, read them for him and told him what they said.

  “I read books,” he defended himself by saying. “Sooner or later anything worth reading will make it into a book.”

  The books that were on his desk at the moment included two translations of the Paradiso, one by Mark Musa and one by Charles Singleton, Fima, by Amos Oz, United States, by Gore Vidal, a book of essays by Robert Penn Warren, and the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin.

  Freddy Harwood had always been a sweet man. Now, in his forties, he had become a saint. Wise men and women sought him out. On any Saturday night his living room was filled with the best minds who lived in or passed through the Berkeley area. Last week it had been Abraham Pais and his son. Tonight it would be the great editor Sebranek Conrad and his companion,
the novelist Adrien Searle. Nora Jane was a big fan of Ms. Searle’s writings and had been up all night the night before rereading her books.

  Freddy’s secretary, Frances, cornered him by a stack of cookbooks. “It’s ridiculous to have a reading at noon,” she said. “We’ve tried this before and no one came. I had an appointment at the doctor but I canceled it.”

  “They’ll turn out. Her fans are loyal. Sebranek called last night and said they’d be here about eleven to sign stock. Do you have the reading space set up?”

  “Yes. Well, he’s the grand old man of publishing now. I want to thank him for not selling out. He’s never put his imprint on a book he was ashamed of publishing.”

  “Now I’m worried no one will come. Go in the office, Frances, and call the list of poets and some of Mother’s friends. Do it now.”

  “There’re seventy pre-orders. It’ll be fine. We always think no one is coming.”

  “Someday no one will. This is an idea that has outlived its time. It’s turned into souvenir collecting. Well, let’s make it as painless for Ms. Searle as possible.” He began to straighten the books on a sale table. He set aside some hardback copies of Brazzaville Beach. “Put these by the cash register with the new books. People should read this book.”

  “There’s no more room.”

  “Make room.”

  In their crazy outgrown glass and timber house overlooking the bay, Nora Jane was walking around the living room listening to an Italian grammar tape and picking up things the twins had left behind. There was a lunch box with a peanut butter sandwich untouched in its plastic bag. There was a fuchsia scarf Lydia was currently tying around her ponytail. There was a Barbie doll dressed for scuba diving, a plate of nachos, a copy of Little House on the Prairie with UGH written on the cover by Tammili. The UGH had been marked out with a red Magic Marker. Under it Lydia had written EXCELLENT.