Free Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick Page B

droves and armadas of letters, all with the same cracked cry: show me a way out, find me my niece, my lost second cousin, out, out! Lili took in these entreaties and hungers, she typed them soberly on white paper headed with an official logo. The life-throb was intense in her, he said, she had taught him everything. He had come to Paris like all those others, he’d gotten to know that crowd, he was at the far edge, he was nobody, but it was easy to get wind of where they partied, they’d begin at the Tabou at nine or ten at night and go on into the dawn, he’d tag along to the Monaco and the Napoléon, and always there was Alfred, this fellow from Brooklyn, bleached-out eyes nearly yellow, no lashes, bald as an apple, the squat middle of him round as Humpty Dumpty, short fluttery taffylike fingers, a yellow wig (no exaggeration!) wobbling on his shiny pate, Alfred knew them all, George Plimpton and Jimmy Baldwin and the rest of them, and once he’d actually made a pass at Julian, and offered to get some of his stuff into one of those magazines springing up all over Paris, poems and things — this was how he got into
Merlin
and
Botteghe Oscure
, and you remember how dad had fits — but when you came right down to it he wasn’t the real thing, and most of the others weren’t either, making it up for the sake of the parties, the whiskey, the local girls, the fake Beauvoirs, the girls from New York,the glamour, the fantasies of fame, it was all pretty exciting then, the kind of life he couldn’t have imagined back home, the pointless hole he’d been cornered into, or pushed through, dad’s clumsy ambitions for him, a ladder leading nowhere, the rungs at the top missing . . .
    Nostrils streaming, red-faced, her brother rushed on, spilling the beans, though Iris could hardly string them together — it was and wasn’t the old Julian. The old closeness, the old confidences, the old reckless Niagara drenching, but the beat was different, self-repudiation, he was telling her what he had relinquished, the stale simulacrum of himself he had come to despise. All that was finished . . . almost. There was, in a way, one leftover: Dr. Montalbano.
    “The man who intends to throw you out,” Iris said.
    “
Us
. Lili and me, but only when he gets back. It won’t matter, we’ll be together —”
    “Fine, and where do you go then?”
    A grimace. “You asked that before. Stop sounding like dad.”
    She heard it herself: the spurt of impatience. Of exasperation. The money she had brought him would melt away in less than a month, and then what? And he had a wife. A foreign wife! If he had shed what he was, a footloose floater, what did he suppose he had become?
    “He’s an American anyhow,” Julian said.
    “Who?” She could not follow; he had jumped ahead, or behind.
    “And he’s not an MD, and it’s not his real name either. He’s from Pittsburgh.”
    “Julian —”
    “The thing is,” he pressed on, spitting it out, “they’re practically all Americans, and they’re all fakes.”
    “The one with the wig too?”
    “The wig was real enough. He hated wearing it, so he killed himself finally. And by the way, all these cafés are unionized to the hilt. I got in through the cracks — Dr. Montalbano started me off. Poor old Alfred introduced us, I owe him a lot, he put me in touch with someone who got me jobs.”
    “But what is he, if he isn’t a doctor —”
    “An out-and-out scam for all I know, but he goes all over, he’s got clients everywhere, there’s a clinic in Milan and another one in Lyon, and it’s made him rich. Lili doesn’t like him, she’s always wanting to get away. He cooks up potions out of turnips and onions.”
    It was comical and it was awful. Suicide, charlatanism, vegetables. And a wife, a wife! She had taught him everything, he said — good God, was this her everything? An aimless creature like himself, but worse, human debris discharged from the diseased bowel of Eastern Europe