The Ravishing of Lol Stein Read online

  Lol's collapse, her state of depression, her immense suffering—time alone would be the healer, they kept saying. Her collapse was judged to be less serious than her initial delirium, it was not expected to last very long or result in any basic change in Lol's psychic constitution. Her extreme youth would soon bring her out of it. Her condition was easily explainable: Lol was suffering from a temporary inferiority complex for the simple reason that she had been jilted by the man from Town Beach. She was presently paying—it was bound to happen sooner or later—the price for the strange absence of pain she had experienced during the ball itself.

  Then, although she still remained aloof and uncommunicative, she again began to ask for something to eat, for the window to be opened, to be allowed to sleep. And before long she began to enjoy having someone beside her to talk to her. She agreed with everything that was said and related in her presence, with every assertion made. To her, every remark was of equal importance. She was an avid listener.

  She never asked for any news of them. She posed no questions. And when they thought it necessary to apprise her of their separation—she only learned later of his departure—the calm way she reacted was taken as a good sign. Her love for Michael Richardson was dying. There could be no question about it, it had been with a part of her recently-recovered reason that she had learned this news, this rightful reversal of events, this rightful retribution which was her due.

  The first time she went out was at night, alone and without telling anyone she was going.

  John Bedford was walking on the sidewalk. He was about a hundred yards from her—she had just that moment come out—in front of her family's house. When she saw him, she hid behind the gatepost.

  John Bedford's account of that night's events, as told to Lol herself, contributes, it seems to me, to her recent history. They are the last clear facts. After which, they fade almost completely from this story for ten years.

  John Bedford did not see her leave the house, he took her to be some girl out walking, someone who was frightened by him, a man alone, so late at night. The boulevard was deserted.

  Her silhouette was young, lissome, and when he came abreast of the gate he looked in.

  What caught his attention was her smile, an apprehensive smile, admittedly, but none the less clearly overjoyed at seeing this chance stroller, him, coming by that evening.

  He stopped and returned her smile. She emerged from her hiding place and came toward him.

  Nothing in her manner or way of dress gave any hint of her condition, except perhaps her hair, which was in disarray. But it was possible that she might have been running, and there was a bit of wind that night. It was entirely possible that she had run to this spot from the other end of the deserted boulevard, thought John Bedford, for the simple reason that she had been frightened.

  "I can walk with you, if you're afraid."

  She did not answer. Nor did he press her. He began to walk on, and she started walking beside him, with obvious pleasure, almost sauntering.

  It was when they reached the end of the boulevard, out where the suburbs began, that John Bedford first realized that she was not headed anywhere in particular.

  This intrigued John Bedford no end. Of course the idea of insanity occurred to him, but he dismissed it. As he dismissed the notion of an amorous adventure. She was doubtless playing some game. She was very young.

  "Which way are you going?"

  She tried to concentrate, glanced back down the boulevard, from where they had just come, but did not point back in that direction.

  "Well . . ." she said.

  He burst out laughing, and she laughed with him, wholeheartedly.

  "Come on, let's go in this direction."

  Meekly, she went back the way they had come, following him.

  Still, he was more and more intrigued by her silence. Because it was coupled with an extraordinary curiosity about the places they were passing, no matter how completely ordinary they might be. It was as though she had not only just arrived in town, but that she had come there for the specific purpose of looking for or discovering something—a house, a garden, a street, even some object which, presumably, was extremely important to her, something she could find only at night.

  "I live not far from here," said John Bedford. "If you're looking for something, perhaps I can help you."

  She answered distinctly:

  "I'm not."

  Whenever he stopped, she stopped too. He amused himself by testing her. But she failed to notice the game he was playing. He continued walking. Once he stopped for a considerable length of time: she waited for him. John Bedford gave up the game. He let her do as she pleased. While seeming to lead the way, he followed her.

  He noticed that by being extremely careful, by pretending to follow her every time they turned a corner, her momentum carried her along, she kept on walking forward, but no more or no less purposefully than the wind which sweeps into whatever nooks and crannies it chances to find.

  He made her walk a little longer, then it occurred to him, in order to see what her reaction would be, to come back to the boulevard, to the spot where he had found her. She stiffened visibly as they passed a certain house. He recognized the gate behind which she had hidden. The house was large. The front door was still open.

  It was at this point that it struck him that she might be Lol Stein. He did not know the Stein family, but he knew that she lived somewhere in that part of town. Like all the solid, middle-class citizens in town, most of whom spent their vacations in Town Beach, he knew what had happened to the girl.

  He stopped, took her hand. She did not resist. He kissed the hand, there was a stale odor about it, an odor of dust, on her ring finger was an extremely beautiful engagement ring. The newspapers had already carried the story of wealthy Michael Richardson's liquidation of his land holdings, and of his departure for Calcutta.

  The ring exploded in a dazzle of light. Lol looked at it, yes, she too looked at it in the same curious way she looked at everything else.

  "You're Miss Stein, aren't you?"

  She nodded several times, uncertainly at first, then with more and more assurance.

  "Yes."

  Still meekly, she followed him home.

  There she lapsed into a state of happy nonchalance. He talked to her. He told her that he was an executive in an airplane factory, that he was an avid amateur musician, that he had just come back from a vacation in France. She listened to him talk. He said that he was happy to have met her.

  "What do you want?"

  In spite of a visible effort, she could not manage a reply. He let the matter drop.

  Her hair had the same odor as her hand, the odor of some long-unused object. She was beautiful, but there was a sadness about her, as though the blood were slow to circulate in her veins, a grayish pallor. Her features were already beginning to fade into that pallor, to bury themselves anew in the depths of her flesh. She had grown younger. She looked no more than fifteen. Even when I met her later, she still had that morbidly young look about her.

  She wrenched her eyes away from the intensity of his gaze and, with an imploring whimper, said:

  "I have plenty of time, oh, how long it is!"

  She raised herself toward him, someone suffocating, coming up for air, and he kissed her. That was what she wanted. She gripped him tightly and returned his kiss, kissed him hard enough to hurt him, as if she loved him, this total stranger. He said to her, and his voice was kindly:

  "Maybe you two can start all over again."

  He liked her. She aroused in him his special penchant for young girls, girls not completely grown into adults, for pensive, impertinent, inarticulate young girls. He broke the news to her without meaning to:

  "Perhaps he'll come back."

  She groped for words, said slowly:

  "Who's gone away?"

  "Didn't you know? Michael Richardson sold off all his real estate. He's gone to India, to join Mrs. Stretter."

 
She shook her head the way people often do, a trifle sadly.

  "You know," he said, "I didn't blame them the way most people did."

  He excused himself, saying he was going to call her mother. She made no effort to stop him.

  Her mother, after she had received John Bedford's call, arrived a second time to bring her daughter home. It was the last time. This time Lol followed her, as a few moments before she had followed John Bedford.

  John Bedford asked for her hand in marriage without ever having laid eyes on her again.

  Their story soon became common knowledge—South Tahla was not large enough to remain silent about and absorb such an adventure—and of John Bedford it was said that he was capable of loving only women whose hearts had been broken and, what was more serious, that he had a strange penchant for young girls who had been jilted, and driven mad, by someone else.

  Lol's mother informed her of the peculiar offer made by the chance stranger. Did she remember him? Yes, she did remember him. She accepted. John Bedford, her mother told her, would be obliged to move away from South Tahla for several years, because of his work. Would she agree to that too? She agreed to that too.

  One day in October Lol Stein found herself married to John Bedford.

  The wedding was not a strictly private affair, for Lol was much better, so it was said, and her parents wished, insofar as it was possible, to make her forget her earlier engagement. They took the precaution, however, of not inviting any of Lol's former friends, not even her best girlfriend Tatiana Karl. This precaution actually backfired. It only lent substance to the belief, held to by some, including Tatiana Karl, that Lol was a deeply disturbed girl.

  Lol Stein was thus married, without wanting to be, in the way that she wished, without her having to resort to the grotesque incongruity of a choice, or to repeat, in what, in the eyes of some people, would have amounted to a kind of plagiarism, the crime of replacing the man from Town Beach who had just jilted her with some unique person of her own choice, and above all without having betrayed the exemplary abandon in which he had left her.

  LOL MOVED away from South Tahla, the town where she had been born, and went to live in the town of Uxbridge, where she remained for ten years.

  During the years that followed her marriage she had three children.

  For ten years, it was thought by everyone around her, she was faithful to John Bedford. Whether or not this term had any meaning whatsoever for her is doubtless something we will never know. The two of them never once discussed either Lol's past or that extraordinary night at Town Beach.

  Even after she was better she was never interested in learning what had become of the people she had known prior to her marriage. The death of her mother —Lol had wished to see her as seldom as possible after her marriage—left her dry-eyed. But this indifference of Lol's was never a subject of serious concern to those around her. They discounted it by saying that she had grown that way from having suffered so terribly. She, once so tender—they said that as they talked about everything else relating to her past, which had now become dead coals—had naturally grown somewhat hard, and even a trifle unjust, since her unhappy love affair with Michael Richardson. They found excuses for her, especially when her mother died.

  She seemed confident about her future, appeared to have little desire to modify it. When she was with her husband, it was said, she was relaxed, and even happy. Sometimes she accompanied him on his business trips. She went to his concerts, urged him to continue with his music, encouraged him in fact to do anything his heart desired, not excluding, it was also said, being unfaithful to her with some of the younger girls who worked in his factory.

  John Bedford claimed that he loved his wife. He said that he loved her still, the way she was, the way she had always been, both before and since their marriage, that he did not believe he had changed her so much as chosen her wisely and well. He loved this woman, this Lola Valerie Stein, this calm presence by his side, this sleeping beauty who never offered a word of complaint, this upright sleeping beauty, this constant self-effacement which kept him moving back and forth between the forgetfulness and the rediscovery of her blondness, of this silken body which no awakening would ever change, of this constant, silent promise of something different which he called her gentleness, the gentleness of his wife.

  Lol's home was a model of neatness. This obsessive orderliness, both in space and in time, was more or less of the kind she desired, not quite but almost. The schedule she set for their daily routine was rigorously adhered to. And likewise everything in the house had its proper place. It would have been impossible, everyone around Lol agreed, to come any closer to perfection.

  Sometimes, especially when Lol was not at home, John Bedford must have been struck by this impeccable order. By this taste, too, this cold, ready-made taste. The decoration and furnishing of the bedrooms and living room were the faithful facsimile of model rooms displayed in store windows, and Lol's garden was the replica of all the other gardens in Uxbridge. Lol was imitating someone, but who? the others, all the others, as many people as possible. On afternoons when she was not there, didn't her house become the empty stage upon which was performed the soliloquy of some absolute passion whose meaning remained unrevealed? And wasn't it inevitable that John Bedford was sometimes afraid of it? That it was here that he had to be on the lookout for the first sign of thaw, of the winter ice breaking? Who knows? Who knows if he heard it one day?

  But it takes very little to reassure John Bedford, and when his wife was present—which was most of the time —when she presided over her kingdom, it tended to lose its aggressive quality, was less prone to raise disturbing questions. Lol made her order seem almost natural; it suited her perfectly.

  Ten years of marriage passed.

  One day John Bedford was offered a choice of several better positions in various towns, one of which was South Tahla. He had always slightly regretted having moved away from South Tahla after his marriage, which he had done at the behest of Lol's mother.

  Ten years had also gone by since Michael Richardson's departure. And not only had Lol never once alluded to it, as she grew older she seemed to become increasingly happy. Thus, if John Bedford had a moment's hesitation about accepting the offer, it was not difficult for Lol to persuade him otherwise. She merely said that she would be most happy to move back into her parents' house, which till then had been rented out.

  John Bedford respected her wishes.

  Lol Stein furnished and arranged her own house in South Tahla with the same impeccable care as she had the one in Uxbridge. She managed to instill in the new house the same icy order, to run it according to the same clocklike schedule. The furniture was the same. She worked very hard on the garden, which had been allowed to go to seed, she had already devoted considerable time to the earlier garden in Uxbridge, but this time, as she was laying out the pathways, she made a mistake. She wanted the garden paths to fan out evenly around the porch. But none of them intersected, and as a result they were unusable. John Bedford was much amused by the error. They laid out other, lateral paths which intersected the first ones and made walking a practical possibility.

  Since her husband's position was a much better one than before, Lol, at South Tahla, hired a governess and was thus relieved for the first time of the full responsibility of the children.

  She had some free time, a great deal of free time all of a sudden, and she got into the habit of taking walks through this town where she had grown up, and through the surrounding areas.

  While at Uxbridge Lol had rarely gone out, so seldom in fact that her husband had sometimes forced her to go out for the sake of her health, here in South Tahla she took up the habit on her own.

  At first she went out only when she needed to do some shopping. Then she went out without any pretext whatever, regularly, every day.

  Within a very short time these walks became indispensable to her, as everything else she had done had previously been: punctuality, order, sleep.
/>
  TO LEVEL the terrain, to dig down into it, to open the tombs wherein Lol is feigning death, seems to me fairer—given the necessity to fill in the missing links of Lol Stein's story—than to fabricate mountains, create obstacles, rely on chance. And, knowing this woman, I believe she would prefer that I compensate in this way for the lack of cold, hard facts about her life.

  Moreover, in doing so I am always relying on hypotheses which are in no way gratuitous but which, in my opinion, have at least some slight foundation in fact.

  Thus, even though Lol never said a word to anyone about what follows, the governess does remember it vaguely: the calm of the street on certain days, the occasional passage of lovers strolling by arm-in-arm, the way Lol shied away—the woman had been working at the Bedfords only for a short time and had never before seen her act this way. And since I, for my part, seem also to remember something, let me go on:

  After she was settled in her house—there remained only one more bedroom on the second floor to furnish— one afternoon on a gray day a woman had passed Lol's house, and Lol had noticed her. The woman was not alone. The man with her had turned and looked at the freshly painted house and the neat grounds in which the gardeners were working. As soon as Lol had seen the couple turn into the street she had hidden behind a hedge, and they had not seen her. The woman had also looked up at the house, but less pointedly than the man, as though she were already familiar with it. They had exchanged a few words which, in spite of the quiet street, Lol had not been able to catch, except for the isolated phrase, spoken by the woman:

  "Dead maybe."

  After they had passed the Bedfords' grounds they had stopped. He had taken the woman in his arms and, furtively, had kissed her long and passionately. The sound of a car had caused him to let her go. They had parted. The man went back up the street the way he had come, walking quickly now, and had passed the house without so much as glancing at it this time.