Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [80]
Affable as ever, he rose and shook my hand. His movement scattered dozens of file cards and slips of paper. Ariel got him seated again, covered his shoulders with a blanket, and put all the cards and slips in order again. He did not thank her. He did not even seem to notice her presence, in fact, his mind, no doubt, fixed on the firm, upward march of progress.
Ariel dragged me out into the garden, clutching my arm. “You see what he’s like!” she hissed.
I nodded sympathetically, though it seemed to me that Will was much the same as ever, caught up in his work to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
“He’s getting worse and worse,” Ariel said. “He pretends to be working just so as not to have to talk to me.”
I murmured calming phrases. If Will had in fact developed a way of shutting himself off from Ariel’s ceaseless rancor and complaining, I thought, he was a lucky man, and a smart one, too. I recognized the symptoms easily enough. My father had always been stone-deaf to the voices of his wives, though in fact his hearing was acute when there was something he wanted to listen to. He could hear a whisper from across a soundstage if it concerned his work, particularly if it was in Hungarian.
“Perhaps Will should have a hearing aid?” I suggested, though hearing aids, I knew, were no cure for that kind of deafness.
“He won’t have one,” Ariel said lugubriously, in her strange, guttural baritone.
That seemed to me proof of real common sense on Will’s part. Ariel’s grip was rendering my arm numb, but I could think of no polite way to escape from it. “I have to do everything,” Ariel went on. “Whole passages of the book are my work, you know.”
This was news to me. That Ariel busied herself with footnotes and hunting for the exact quotation or fact that Will needed I knew well, if only because Ariel never failed to mention the fact in her letters, which usually ended with the handwritten warning, “Don’t mention any of this to Will!” (Will’s letters often ended with a quick note from Ariel at the bottom, reading, “Pay no attention to what Will has written above.”) But it had never occurred to me, nor to Max Schuster, that Ariel might be doing any of the actual writing.
“I do my share of the work,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s wrong that I don’t get any credit?”
I had no opinion one way or the other, but I knew that publishers had an almost superstitious dread of changing a winning formula. After nearly thirty years of publishing Will Durant’s books, I doubted that Max would be overjoyed at the idea of adding Ariel’s name. It seemed impolitic to suggest this to Ariel, who was still clinging to me fiercely. Indeed, I had the impression that unless I agreed, she might never let go, so I nodded encouragingly until she released her grip.
We were standing in front of a sizable swimming pool, empty and overgrown with weeds. The Durants’ garden, a fairly narrow and pinched space between the house and the wall, had the look of a set for Rain, a tropical jungle that threatened to engulf us from every side. One thing that can be said in favor of Los Angeles is that it is usually light and sunny, but here there was a dark closeness like that which so dismayed the Roman troops in the Teuteborg Forest before they were massacred by Arminius’s Germans. I am not normally afraid of plants, but there was something aggressive and claustrophobic about the garden that made me edge my way gingerly back toward the house, careful to keep my feet on the narrow flagstone path, not that the house itself was very much more cheerful.
All the same, it was with a certain sense of relief that I regained Will’s library—partly because Ariel had gone off to get tea. There