Uncertain Voyage Read online

  “I’m exhausted,” she told him, smiling.

  “Gallery feet,” he said, nodding. “But if you can endure a little more of the dog that bit you I think we may soon sit down. I see trees over there, and benches.”

  “Botanik Häve,” read Melissa helpfully from a sign.

  He consulted his map. “Botannical Gardens. Not much farther, can you make it?”

  “I could wish for a St. Bernard with a flask,” she admitted.

  “We should have brought our own. Art galleries are notoriously dry.”

  They reached a bench and sat down, and Adam lit cigarettes for them. “Bliss,” she murmured ecstatically.

  “Absolute,” he agreed. “It’s always a relative thing, is it not?”

  “Mmm.”

  He turned his head and looked at her appreciatively. “You are extremely good company.”

  “Always,” she teased, smiling.

  “You’re made up of such contradictory bits and pieces —naïve and yet not at all naïve. I believe I could make a real sophisticate of you in three months’ time.”

  “With a diploma and badge saying ‘true sophisticate’?”

  “At least.”

  He grasped her hand and they sat contentedly in the warm sun without speaking until Adam said suddenly, “Happy?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I’m thinking that it’s almost worth growing up crooked to arrive at this moment when I sit in the sun in Copenhagen, Denmark, and wriggle my toes.”

  “Peculiar expression, crooked.”

  “One I’ve always used—always.”

  “You’ve told me where it’s taken you but what causes this—crookedness, as you put it?”

  “Why, love of course,” she said flippantly. She turned her head to stare across the park for this was a difficult matter to speak about. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “That doesn’t answer your question, does it, because what is love? But I read in a textbook last year about how they investigated six women who’d been rejected as children. They tried to discover the difference in them, you know? What made some all right and others—well, like me.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s funny. The mothers who said to their children. ‘I loathe you, get out of my sight’ or ‘You’ve been in my way ever since you were born, you brat’—the funny thing is, these girls were the healthier ones.”

  She had startled him. “They were?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Because as children they knew where they stood. They knew they were rejected, disliked, not wanted. They knew, and it freed them to find substitutes, their knowing gave them a sense of reality. It was the others—the mothers with dripping sweet voices and devouring arms—” Her voice trembled and when she resumed it was cold, impersonal. “They covered up their hatred and resentment. They would say ‘I love you, now go away.’ And the child would feel the dislike, yet it was cloaked in the name of love and the child grew bewildered and full of despair. How can a child come to grips with hostility that’s masked as love? It gives the child nothing solid in his life to grow against, and it’s unendurable and so after a while the bewildered child begins to just give up. He or she withdraws from life. From entanglements.”

  “Withdraws,” he mused. “You paint a terrifying picture. But you scarcely seem withdrawn, you know, you appear very outgoing and just see where you are, you’re sitting in a park in Copenhagen, Denmark.”

  She looked at him and said softly, “It happens inside, Adam. Inside of me there are four barbed wire fences around my heart and at the very center a brick wall. I’m afraid of closeness, of feeling.”

  “Of feeling…” He frowned.

  She hesitated. “Even of expressing it,” she admitted. “I remember there was a patient of Dr. Szym’s I used to talk with over a period of weeks. At first it was ‘how are you’ and then, very shyly, we exchanged news of our progress. One day as he was leaving the office he suddenly and impulsively reached out a hand and touched my arm. As a gesture of—well, of warmth, of thanks.” She shook her head. “Inside of me I jumped, I really did. That one small gesture—it alarmed me.”

  “Like an invasion?”

  She nodded eagerly. “Yes, you do see it, don’t you. That’s why I jumped. And yet I was so warmed by it really, I felt so touched by the gesture I wanted to cry. It meant he liked me. I want life, you know, we all want life even when we’re conditioned against it.”

  “How repeatedly you must have been hurt once to react that way,” he said soberly.

  “You’ll have me crying, Adam, really you will. Talking to you is like talking to Dr. Szym except that you sympathize.” She jumped to her feet to end a conversation that had touched deep chords inside of her.

  Adam was smiling. “And psychiatrists don’t sympathize?”

  “Well—they sympathize with the suffering but not with the cause, if you know what I mean. I mean, they know very well that their patients have spent years feeling sorry for themselves so why perpetuate it? They don’t say ‘oh you poor thing,’ they say ‘all right, that happened, but what are you going to do about it?’ They treat patients as adults—or as potential adults,” she said with a wry smile, “which is flattering, too, but it’s terribly nice to be sympathized with. As an equal. As a fellow human.”

  “As a fellow traveler,” he said with a twinkle. “Do sit down, where are you going?”

  She sat down. “In my country the expression ‘fellow traveler’ has disagreeable implications, you know. I hoped we were going to have some lunch. You know, we really must visit that Tuborg beer factory,” she added sternly.

  “Yes, and the palace—”

  “And rent a bicycle—”

  “And that sailboat—”

  “They’ll ask what you saw in Copenhagen,” she teased.

  He laughed. “Good God, what on earth shall I tell them? I’d have to say I behaved like a schoolboy, wandering the streets with a girl. I never walk at home; if I have an errand half a block away, I drive.”

  “I know,” she said delightedly.

  “And here I am sitting in a park holding your hand and resting two very tired feet. I haven’t visited a nightclub—”

  “—and of course they’ll ask about the famous Danish blondes—”

  “And instead I am with a very charming American, but in Copenhagen of all places.”

  “No sense at all,” she agreed.

  “And a very thirsty and demanding American at that.” He leaned over and slipped on his shoes. “I’ve never been accused of a lack of gallantry. How far is that restaurant in Tivoli, do you think?”

  “Miles. Simply miles.”

  “Good God. Well—ready?” he asked, rising.

  “At last yes,” she said.

  He held out his arms so that she walked into them and he held her for a moment, gently. “You have the uncanniest knack for looking fresh and rested,” he said.

  “That’s my unlived life,” she reminded him.

  He lifted her chin and gravely looked into her eyes. “And I have lived too well and too much, and forgotten all the simple pleasures of life. Thank you for this.” He kissed her lightly on the mouth and they began walking arm in arm down the path.

  “So I make you feel young then?” she asked flippantly, to cover the treacherous feeling of closeness she had survived.

  “Not young. Alive again.” He hesitated. “I’m not a particularly good person. I have crowded more into my life than most men but at times I have been, oh quite ruthless—”

  “With women,” she said, nodding gravely.

  “Yes.” He stopped and gave her a faint smile. “How do you know that?”

  She wanted to say, “Because I know you,” but she was afraid of frightening him. It seemed inconceivable to her that she already knew him better, in the space of a day, than she had known Charles during
their years of marriage. But she only returned his smile and shook her head.

  “One drifts into things carelessly, with hopes that are never realized, and—”

  “I know,” she said.

  “As it is, I have lived a full life—a sensuous, enjoyable, and quite splendid life—but not a particularly worthwhile one. The lines I see in my mirror each morning are lines of dissipation, I know this. I truly envy you beginning your life again, a second chance, a new change.”

  “I hope I don’t muff it,” she said wistfully.

  He stopped and looked at her. “Don’t, Melissa. We’re counting on you not to—all of us.”

  “All?” She was amused.

  “The ones who are denied it. The ones who have lost too much innocence to begin again.”

  “Or too much hope,” she said quietly, feeling the sadness that ran through this man like a thread. “You know,” she said, and stopped, smiling.

  “Go ahead. Say it.”

  She laughed. “I’m not the sort of person you’d know at home. Not at all. I’m not beautiful and I’m not sophisticated and yet—is it because of this or because we’ll never see each other again that we can talk like this?”

  “Does it matter? Isn’t it simply—enough?”

  She considered this a moment. “Yes—yes, it is enough,” she said, and realized that this was true. “I’m grateful, Adam.”

  He nodded. “One must always be grateful.”

  “Are you a fatalist?”

  He smiled. “I know that I very nearly didn’t take that four o’clock tour of Copenhagen yesterday—and yet I did.”

  She thought, “Yes and out of all the days in which either of us might have come to Copenhagen, out of all the dates blindly, casually chosen months ago for an arrival in this city, we entered that bus on the same day and at the same hour from points at opposite ends of the world. Could it be possible,” she wondered wistfully, “that somewhere out there—cutting through all the meaningless chaos—a Being or a Force had leaned over this crazy globe to give one very small Melissa Aubrey a gift of value to help her on…?”

  * * *

  —

  They sat on benches just above the water, the sun on their faces and a table between them. The sounds of water lapping against the piles held a drowsy, nostalgic note for Melissa, reminding her of long sunny Cape Cod afternoons as a child. A family of swans drifted on the pond below them, formal, elegant, and proud. Occasionally someone from the surrounding tables would walk to the railing and throw crumbs to the swans and they would dip their long necks graciously and with a touch of condescension.

  “Drink your beer,” said Adam.

  “I’m so busy looking,” she told him happily. She was remembering her first hours in Copenhagen when alone she had walked the streets and looked at the people in the outdoor cafés, and she had wondered then if she would one day have the courage to walk in among them and sit at a table. And it had seemed to her—was it only yesterday?—the story of so many lost years: Melissa walking past life and looking, always looking, always longing to enter the crowds and the laughter and take her place among them.

  Now she saw that to have gone in alone, forcing herself to perform a purely mechanical act of entering life, would have proven a sad and hollow gesture. It would have taken enormous courage that would have come to nothing, for she would still have been—alone. Imprisoned. Isolated. But Adam—and how could she ever thank him for this?—had come along to take her hand and help her; Adam was showing her the art of participation, the technique, so that her courage need not again be wasted. She was here now among the beautiful participants of the world, and she was truly here because with Adam she was a part of humanness, she too was talking and laughing, no longer outside looking through a glass window with her nose pressed longingly against the pane.

  Was it this innocence of a Cinderella that drew Adam? They totally balanced each other, she reflected, this man who had opened himself to life and lived fully and freely to the point of near-satiation; and herself, the woman who had been closed to experience for so long that the world now burst upon her with the freshness of a miracle. Experience and Innocence…at the end of either route lay despair, did it not? Perhaps this was the very real bond between them, the suffering implied by either extreme.

  “Whither next?” she asked of Adam, smiling.

  He glanced at his watch. “It’s after three. What do your gallery feet suggest?”

  “There’s that gorgeous exhibit of Danish exports—and,” she added helpfully, “it’s very nearby.”

  “Excellent. Then after that we can retire to our hotels, meet for cocktails at seven, and decide upon our evening.”

  “Our evening,” she said, laughing. “Oh these evenings that begin when mine used to be nearly ending!”

  “Was it really that narrow a life?”

  “Unbelievably so,” she told him, but not wanting to spoil the moment by discussing it. She was thinking how well Adam managed everything—wines, foods, taxis—and how creative life could be if a person met all the unknowns and stripped them of fears. Because the unknown, she mused, was made up of many small perils to the self, such as meeting headwaiters and wine stewards as well as more significant risks. Charles, she thought, would be thoroughly unnerved at encountering a maître d’, and he could never be persuaded into an elegant European restaurant: he would rather meet a snarling tiger than a wine steward, for from the tiger he could retreat with an amused and lofty smile, knowing himself homo sapiens, the superior, but a wine steward would confront him with his cowardice in the face of the unknown, the mysterious, and the worldly.

  But Charles had so arranged his life that he would never meet either, thus drawing the circle closer until the total withdrawal became accomplished. And then one day—voilà! she thought sadly—the circle became a noose.

  They arose and Adam guided her toward the steps. “Incidentally, you’re not being followed by an irate husband or a psychotic admirer, are you?” he asked with a smile.

  She laughed. “No, why?”

  “Chap strolling by on the path up there—see him? Short chap in woolly brown tweed. Extremely woolly tweed.”

  Melissa saw him and nodded.

  “By the sheerest of coincidences he was standing in the lobby of the State Museum when we left, a mile or two across town.”

  “Small world.” She was amused. “He’s certainly the least distinguished man I’ve seen in months. How on earth could you have noticed him?”

  Adam said with distaste, “I have never seen a more atrociously cut suit—look at it!—and he has the shockingly bad taste to wear a silk tie with it.”

  She burst out laughing. “What a fastidious person you are!”

  “It is one of my least attractive traits, yes.” He was quite serious, and glancing at him she became aware again of the ruthlessness underlying his charm; noted it and accepted it without either rationalizing it away, excusing it or censuring it. He was, quite simply, Adam.

  The man was standing uncertainly beside the path. As they mounted the steps, they came nearly face to face with him until he turned aside to light the cigarette he was fingering. He had a thin pale face and wore rimless spectacles, he looked like a clerk who worked in a sunless, underground archive. Unobtrusive was indeed the word for him, thought Melissa, unless—she amended with humor—one had an eye for badly cut tweeds. They strolled past, arm in arm.

  * * *

  —

  “Try escargots,” he suggested. “They’re snails, you know. Have escargot and you will be a woman of the world.”

  “Just like that,” she marveled.

  “Just like that.”

  “Then order me snails.”

  “Madame will have Vinbjergsnegle,” he told the waiter.

  “We seem always to be eating,” she pointed out.

  “O
n the contrary we have visited the State Museum, the Glyptopek which you had already seen, lunched in Tivoli—a cultural experience in itself—and visited shops in which the displays may very well have outdone the museums.”

  “I know. The color of their pottery and glass!” She shook her head in awe. “Unbelievable. I think the Danes invent new color wheels, my palette will have to be much brighter after this.”

  “I wish I might see some of your work.”

  “Perhaps one day you will—I plan a very good new life.” Even as she said this she was aware of the bravado behind her words.

  “You are fortunate to have your work.”

  It was all that she would have now, but she could not confess this even to herself. “You enjoy yours?”

  “Very much so.” He nodded. “And I enjoy life.”

  She smiled. “I know that. Is there anything you’ve not had?”

  “I’ve never loved,” he said simply.

  She looked at him closely. “The one experience missing in a lifetime of experiences…”

  “Yes—and the only truly fulfilling one.”

  She sighed. “I think—so very often—of how the word is flung about by young lovers, by Madison Avenue, by ministers and priests. And only a very few people are capable of love. Of intoxications but not love.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “You’re honest to admit it. Most people pretend, as I did. They spend their whole lives pretending they love.”

  “And feel nothing,” he agreed.

  She said wistfully, “Perhaps if one knows—and wants very much to love—it becomes a possibility. Do you feel all the things that happen to you?” she asked curiously.

  “Oh, life touches me,” he said. “Yet I can feel neither love nor hate. Somehow the spectrum of my emotions is limited.”