In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Author:Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028791
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

III

One day Louise had a call from a young man whom she didn’t know. He said he was speaking from Regi’s apartment and would it be convenient for her to come over? No, no emergency, he said to Louise’s anxious inquiry—but he hesitated somewhat, so she realized she had better get herself over there as fast as she could. And fortunately Louise, though now in her eighties, could still move fast. Her hat askew, her coat flying open, her handbag bulging with spare glasses and wrong keys, she arrived at Regi’s Park Avenue apartment house. All the way there she kept muttering to herself: “I thought she was in Florida”—she said it over and over. She tried to remember when she had last seen Regi: no, Regi hadn’t come to this year’s birthday party (the eighty-fourth) nor the one before nor the one before that. It must be three years, four years, five—Louise muttered and muttered—the years were like the days now, both infinitely short and infinitely long as they shaded off into the nights and slipped into a big black hole and were forgotten. How luminous the past was by comparison, how each figure there glowed and moved and was alive, vibrant, real.

“I thought she was in Florida,” Louise muttered to the doorman at Regi’s apartment house, and again to the elevator man who took her up. She didn’t know them—she had been coming to this building for over fifty years and had been known by name to every doorman who had ever worked there; but the ones today, though old men themselves, were new to her.

And, “I thought she was in Florida,” she repeated to the stranger who opened Regi’s door—she didn’t look at but only past him to see where was Regi. What was wrong? Was something wrong?

“Who is it, why are you opening the door, what have I told you a hundred thousand times?”

That was Regi, all right. Louise followed the voice and found her in her bedroom, sitting in the middle of the bed in her fur coat. “Oh, it’s you,” Regi said. “Where have you been, keeping me waiting like this?”

“But I thought you were in Florida!”

“Ridiculous,” Regi said.

Yes, it was Regi—and yet there was something strange. Louise looked around her at Regi’s familiar bedroom with the white bed shaped like a shell and curling around her pink eiderdown (like a vagina, Leo used to say). The place was dusty, and the floors had lost their shine. In the past, Regi had been fanatical, firing maid after maid for not looking after her floors properly; but now the apartment lay unused for months and even years at a time, so its air of neglect was to be expected. The blinds were down, but that wasn’t strange either because Regi never had liked strong light. As for the smell in her bedroom, the cloud of stale perfumes—it was the ambience of her latter years, as of a shuttered, shut-up beauty salon: and yet, piercing through it, there was something else—what was it? A strange smell, acrid, sweetish, foul.

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