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Nothing

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18

We talked about books again. I had seldom spoken to anyone about

books except my father.

Or we talked about music, about the pre-Socratic philosophers, about

college in the U.S.

Or there was Vimini.

The first time she intruded on our mornings was precisely when I’d

been playing a variation on Brahms’s last variations on Handel.

Her voice broke up the intense midmorning heat.

“What are you doing?”

“Working,” I replied.

Oliver, who was lying flat on his stomach on the edge of the pool,

looked up with the sweat pouring down between his shoulder blades.

“Me too,” he said when she turned and asked him the same question.

“You were talking, not working.”

“Same thing.”

“I wish I could work. But no one gives me any work.”

Oliver, who had never seen Vimini before, looked up to me, totally

helpless, as though he didn’t know the rules of this conversation.

“Oliver, meet Vimini, literally our next-door neighbor.”

She offered him her hand and he shook it.

“Vimini and I have the same birthday, but she is ten years old. Vimini is

also a genius. Isn’t it true you’re a genius, Vimini?”

“So they say. But it seems to me that I may not be.”

“Why is that?” Oliver inquired, trying not to sound too patronizing.

“It would be in rather bad taste for nature to have made me a genius.”

Oliver looked more startled than ever: “Come again?”

“He doesn’t know, does he?” she was asking me in front of him.

I shook my head.

“They say I may not live long.”

“Why do you say that?” He looked totally stunned. “How do you

know?”

“Everyone knows. Because I have leukemia.”

“But you’re so beautiful, so healthy-looking, and so smart,” he

protested.

“As I said, a bad joke.”

Oliver, who was now kneeling on the grass, had literally dropped his

book on the ground.

“Maybe you can come over one day and read to me,” she said. “I’m

really very nice—and you look very nice too. Well, goodbye.”

She climbed over the wall. “And sorry if I spooked you—well—”

You could almost watch her trying to withdraw the ill-chosen metaphor.

If the music hadn’t already brought us closer together at least for a few

hours that day, Vimini’s apparition did.

We spoke about her all afternoon. I didn’t have to look for anything to

say. He did most of the talking and the asking. Oliver was mesmerized. For

once, I wasn’t speaking about myself.

Soon they became friends. She was always up in the morning after he

returned from his morning jog or swim, and together they would walk over

to our gate, and clamber down the stairs ever so cautiously, and head to one

of the huge rocks, where they sat and talked until it was time for breakfast.

Never had I seen a friendship so beautiful or more intense. I was never

jealous of it, and no one, certainly not I, dared come between them or eavesdrop on them. I shall never forget how she would give him her hand

once they’d opened the gate to the stairway leading to the rocks. She

seldom ever ventured that far unless accompanied by someone older.

When I think back to that summer, I can never sort the sequence of

events. There are a few key scenes. Otherwise, all I remember are the

“repeat” moments. The morning ritual before and after breakfast: Oliver

lying on the grass, or by the pool, I sitting at my table. Then the swim or the

jog. Then his grabbing a bicycle and riding to see the translator in town.

Lunch at the large, shaded dining table in the other garden, or lunch

indoors, always a guest or two for lunch drudgery. The afternoon hours,

splendid and lush with abundant sun and silence.

Then there are the leftover scenes: my father always wondering what I

did with my time, why I was always alone; my mother urging me to make

new friends if the old ones didn’t interest me, but above all to stop hanging

around the house all the time—books, books, books, always books, and all

these scorebooks, both of them begging me to play more tennis, go dancing

more often, get to know people, find out for myself why others are so

necessary in life and not just foreign bodies to be sidled up to. Do crazy

things if you must, they told me all the while, forever prying to unearth the

mysterious, telltale signs of heartbreak which, in their clumsy, intrusive,

devoted way, both would instantly wish to heal, as if I were a soldier who

had strayed into their garden and needed his wound immediately stanched

or else he’d die. You can always talk to me. I was your age once, my father

used to say. The things you feel and think only you have felt, believe me,

I’ve lived and suffered through all of them, and more than once—some I’ve

never gotten over and others I’m as ignorant about as you are today, yet I

know almost every bend, every toll-booth, every chamber in the human

heart.

There are other scenes: the postprandial silence—some of us napping,

some working, others reading, the whole world basking away in hushed

semitones. Heavenly hours when voices from the world beyond our house

would filter in so softly that I was sure I had drifted off. Then afternoon

tennis. Shower and cocktails. Waiting for dinner. Guests again. Dinner. His Then there are the leftover scenes: my father always wondering what I