Old Acquaintance Read online

  This game was bits and pieces of novels he had no intention of writing, but would have enjoyed to read, social comedies and lost classics mostly; though when he was in a savage mood, understanding women’s novels were always fun. There was that American classic, The Sun Has Rays, for instance, very sensitive, The Sun Has Rays, very understanding, a love story (it unbares the secrets of a woman’s heart) with heterosexual undertones, set in Wisconsin. The authoress wore tennis shoes and was the intellectual of her community. Her name was Olivia Higgens Pratt.

  “Murder story, hell!” said Charlie, to an imaginary but hostile critic, “it’s straight autobiography. You only have to look at the woman to know that.”

  Reluctantly he put Olivia Higgens Pratt back into the toy box. They were old friends, Olivia and he, but just for now she wouldn’t do. For Mondorf, which was where he was now, Turgenev seemed best, and not the best Turgenev, either.

  Very well then, Turgenev.

  Charlie, sitting in the middle of his hypothetical novel, all by himself, not the sort of novel he had made a small fortune baking over and over again, with less and less yeast, in a constantly cooler oven, but the sort of novel he did feel at home in, was quite content. He even knew how this particular novel began:

  The really good Russian novelists, which is to say, Turgenev, and perhaps Sologub, who suffered from brevity, and Tchekov, but Tchekov’s longest efficient reach was the novelette, and Goncharov, there’s nothing wrong with Goncharov, and, of course, Gogol, always begin their novels in the same set way:

  “On a certain morning in March, 18—, a Mr. Y—walked up the steps of No.— C— Street, in the City of G—”; and instead of being annoyed, you couldn’t feel that the world was more specific, or comfortable, or exact. What’s more, you feel that you know Mr. Y—, he’s a friend of yours, and you like him very much. But times have changed since then, and Lotte couldn’t exactly say she was at G—, and it wasn’t a certain morning in March, either, it was halfway into April; and there wasn’t any Mr. Y—; there never had been.”

  Lotte didn’t know exactly where she was, except that she was in a car, driving through it fast. What she enjoyed was that nobody else knew exactly where she was, either. She did that sometimes: she couldn’t bear to be alone for longer than the safe light of an afternoon, but when she got thoroughly fed up with her accompanist, her hairdresser, Miss Campendonck, particularly Miss Campendonck, and, in this case, Unne, she jumped into a car and went on ahead of them, secure that before she had the chance to get into trouble they would catch up with her.

  That’s what she’d done this time; Miss Campendonck had been out. Unne had gone shopping. The hairdresser was having her hair done, and her accompanist was in Amsterdam. So Lotte had left a note in the sitting room, gone down to the garage, taken out the Alfa Romeo, and left Paris with one hand on the horn. The car made good time through the landscape of Limbo, and she liked Limbo in the daytime. In Limbo you can almost remember who you are.

  That town she had just left behind must be Rheims, so if she turned right, she would be on the Luxembourg road, with nothing to worry about until Saturday. She didn’t stop, of course. In her world one visited only fixed stars and contiguous constellations. Between them she never stopped, for in interstellar space it is necessary to use the overdrive, which makes stopping extremely difficult, unless one has a wreck or runs out of fuel. However, the view as one travels is impressive, and helps to pass the time. She never tired of it.

  As she drove, one luxury opened out into another. On the left the fields were green plush. On the right the fields were green plush. Directly overhead, the sky was an expensive blue. If one lives in the country, one has to work it one way or another. But if one is merely passing through it, there it is, complete, an expensive artifact. Over stone walls, the flowering trees had all been made for the Russian royal family, by Fabergé. They made her feel like a rich child.

  Here and there across the landscape it had rained recently, so that from an air reeking of humus she passed in and out of cool empty air which smelled of diamonds, as though above her the string had broken on an enormous lavaliere. Several chalcedony cows and a jade horse whizzed by. It is very rich, that part of France. All the cabbages have banknotes under them, instead of babies.

  A few miles farther on, she stopped for an excellent lunch, an omelette and a salad, nothing more, at a gingerbread inn. Her French was fluent, though if you listened you could just make out the subterranean rumble of the German thirty years down. But it is harder to gouge a German than an American, so the omelette was well cooked, the service good, and the bill reasonable.

  Since she was an American citizen, she saw no reason why she should not behave in an American way. She turned the radio on to Radio Luxembourg and let the jazz blare over her, cleansing the countryside by the latest method, the electronic agitation of molecules, as she pressed her way up to seventy with a neatly shod determined foot. She could hear birds singing in the nearest bushes, despite the speed. They were clockwork, of course, like everything else in the world, but the workmanship was impeccable and the sound remarkably like that of a music box, the kind whose roll is plucked by jeweled butterflies.

  So she sang herself. The wind ruffled her hair, and smoothed back the flesh against her cheeks, rippling along the soft golden down very pleasantly. On her left hand was a square zircon the size of a postage stamp. On her right, only freckles. Her hands looked the oldest part of her, but since they were capable hands, she didn’t mind that. She was grateful to them. They had seen her through a lot.

  “Why don’t I do this more often?” she wondered.

  But as the shadows began to grow longer, the cows in the meadows to run down, the machinery of the moving trees to rust, and the sky to shade off toward heliotrope, she began to get uneasy. She always did at dusk. It is that time of day when the streets are empty, a newspaper rustles over the cobbles, and the first lights look far too dim.

  The border, when she reached it, depressed her. It is the symbol of our age, the impassable border, and that between France and Mondorf is very like the one the refugee sees, with nothing on one side, nothing on the other, and a black and white striped pole in between. Even an American feels a little nervous at a border. On the other side, you accelerate with relief, as though you had just managed to squeeze through an only exit much too small for you, with the devil right behind.

  But ten minutes later she was in Mondorf, alone—it would be nice some day to be met without being put to the stratagem of sending someone on ahead to do so—but still, there. Now I am safe again, she thought. Now everybody will recognize me, and so I can hide from myself again.

  A refugee from what?

  II

  CHARLIE was in the bathtub, feeling pleased with himself, since he was not conscious of himself at all. He could not bear to go anywhere alone, so the bathtub was the one place where he could indulge the luxury of being by himself. One of his firmest rules, with people he knew perfectly well didn’t give a damn about him, was, “No matter how much you may love me, you do not come into the bathroom while I am there.”

  Perhaps they loved him very much, at that, for they never did. Not even his first wife had dared to do that, and as for his other wives, they had had bathrooms of their own.

  He had been there about half an hour and had no desire to move. He was playing one of his favorite games, one he had been playing now for forty-five years.

  The tub was deep, the water was two-thirds of the way up the sides, but even so, Charlie’s folded legs stuck out. The curve of the thigh and the bulge of the calf, as he bent the legs outward, formed two large hills, almost identical, on either side of a channel. The curls of hair along them stood in for foliage. The scene was Tahiti in an eighteenth-century engraving, or the islands off Cochin China. The summit of the knees was about two thousand feet. In the distance (he liked symmetry) the chromium outlet valve was like a pale moon, whose reflection glimmered on the water. He made little waves. Lo
ngboats put out from shore, like La Pérouse looking for something, Treasure Island, or a novel by Paul de Kock. In the foreground, smack in the path of the moonlight, lay Penis Rock, which was not a goal but a channel marker of some kind. Its scrotum made a little beach. Sometimes the longboats came ashore to gather turtle eggs from the sand, birds’ eggs from the dome of the rock itself. It was a protected area, a natural game refuge, because it was so inaccessible. The natives never visited it. But one night the longboat came alongside, shipped oars, and some of its sailors had been the first white men ever to set foot there.

  Charlie laughed at himself, felt faintly embarrassed, and submerged, to play his other game, which was submarine. He lay underwater and blew out through his snorkel. When he surfaced again, the knee cliffs were bathed in moonlight, the rock was so low in the water, and so ghostly, that it was hard to believe that anyone had ever set foot on it at all.

  The longboats now lay in the cove of his left knee, where the water lapped with a soft, mezzotinto sound.

  The game amused him. In fact, by now he even knew the names, or the faces, anyhow, of the people in the longboat. The second lieutenant he liked particularly. But the stern old party at the tiller really shouldn’t have been Admiral Bligh:

  Admiral Byng

  was a dear old thing:

  But Admiral Bligh:

  Oh my!

  That was called a clerihew. We get both our suits and our nonsense from England. Whenever Admiral Bligh looked a little too much like his father, Charlie submerged. When he came up the scene was more peaceful. La Pérouse was back again, but the night being chill, he reached up and poured in more hot water.

  The phone rang.

  Charlie, like most tall men, and he was six-two, which made him attractive to taller women, damn it, had an imagination which, like Gulliver, was always wading ashore at Lilliput with the whole Blefescu fleet behind him. Handing it over, he got up and answered the phone.

  It was just Paul to say he’d been detained. He was using his furry moth-wing voice. Charlie hung up and went back to the bathtub. The Pacific is a large ocean. At the moment it looked empty and cold. A longboat floated upside down on the water. Charlie rescued the soap, released the drain and smiled at himself in the shaving mirror.

  Among his private maps, of which he had a good many, devoted to such subjects as the exact location of all lavatories in the principal cities of Europe, in New York, and in Beverly Hills (he had done time there once, too), for he had a small bladder, was a special chart marking those hotels whose bathroom mirrors were flatteringly lit. In Michelin, he would have given this one three stars.

  These people are enchanting, no doubt, and we are very lucky to be able to afford them, but at fifty-odd an hour to oneself is well worth the hoarding.

  So Charlie dressed, went downstairs, wondered when Lotte would turn up, wondered if she would be surprised to see him, knew at least that she would be pleased, and hoarded it.

  III

  GOODNESS only knows what Turgenev would have made of Mondorf-les-Bains. In his day, if you were incurably well-to-do, you went to Baden-Baden or Spa, took your waters like a little gentleman, saw people every day you only had dinner with once a month at home, which cast over the roulette of life a certain conspiratorial intimacy, played a little baccarat, wrote Smoke, and if there was nothing else to do, pulled on your lavender kid gloves with some satisfaction, recognized as a reassuringly familiar sound the abrupt click of the snaps, if you used snaps, and went for a promenade. But then Turgenev had the great advantage of dawdling his life away after an actress, whereas Lotte merely was one.

  She was alone in her room. She did not like that. She did not like to be alone at night in any room, which was why she traveled everywhere with a small plug-in nightlight in her purse, just in case.

  She had lit only one lamp. Most of the light, and all of the chatter, came from down below, on the terrace. Outside her window was an apple tree, whose boughs were gently swaying. It must have rained here, too, for the clear air brought the apple odor up to her. She went to the window and looked out. Below its parasol of green and white boughs, the trunk of the tree disappeared down through a gray flagstoned terrace whose balustrade was topped with white geraniums in glaring white pots. There were striped umbrellas, and from underneath them the sound of equally striped laughter.

  And there, by himself, backed by the geraniums, was Charlie. It had been at least two years since she had last seen him, but she wasn’t surprised. There is always room at the top, as Webster said, but only because there aren’t many people at the top, and so you always see them again from time to time. She was pleased. Charlie’s was an old familiar face, and there were times, these days, when she just plain got fed up with the young. Besides, she was fond of him.

  She got dressed and went downstairs. The best joke in this world is oneself. And Charlie had a fine infectious ability to make the joke at least seem enjoyable.

  *

  Everybody here was waiting for something. Perhaps some of them even knew for what, though he doubted it. But when the lull came which announces an entrance, he recognized it for what it was at once. It was Lotte’s lull, the lull you get at a children’s party, when the more sophisticated older children wonder whether they dare to be enthralled again or not this year.

  It was also Lotte’s entrance. The great secret of the entrance is never to blench. As far as he knew, Lotte never had. He admired her for that: he was shy himself. She knew her role and he knew his. That helped. It was her business to make the entrance, his to be seated, so that he could rise when she appeared, and give her somewhere to steer for. Just when these characters we have are assigned to us he had no idea, but he was glad they had been, for the way to persist in this world is to excel in a character part. Indeed, we have no choice. There are no others. So when Lotte came in, obediently he got up.

  Recognizing the technique, from the inevitable routines of her earlier motion picture period, she smiled, recognized him, cut to him, cut to her, walked steadily into an invisible camera, while it backtracked toward his table, let him hold her chair, cut to chair, sat down, cut to him.

  “I’ve been waiting,” he said. He spoke in English. No subtitles were necessary.

  Realizing it was just routine dialogue, the audience on the terrace left them alone, and they could return to that very public thing, their private lives, in English, German, and just enough French to do the shopping with.

  “I was wondering when you were going to turn up.”

  “I didn’t even know you were here.”

  “But everybody knows you’re here.”

  “I didn’t come for the Festival.”

  “I know. Nonetheless, the Festival will almost certainly come to you. They can’t very well leave you out, now can they? How was Cannes?”

  “I didn’t go. They left me out. It was a Lollobridgida year.”

  “It’s rather like the Chinese Calendar, isn’t it?” said Charlie. “You know. The Year of the Rabbit. The Year of the Hare. The Year of the Fox. I wonder who it is this year?”

  “Shirley MacLaine probably. She’s a liberal. When the films are really bad, they always send over a liberal. It makes a good impression,” said Lotte. “The Poles get the prize with a significant story about somebody who lived in a public sewer during the Occupation, and Shirley MacLaine gets the applause. It’s fair enough.”

  “And what about you?” He sounded amused.

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’m not an actress any more. I’m a tradition. There’s no place in a night club for a yule log, so when they feel festive, they drag me in.”

  “Humph,” said Charlie, and put his monocle in. Lotte watched this operation without favor. Women always like to pretend they were born full-blown yesterday morning, but men get stuck. The reason they can go on being boyish is that somewhere along the line they stopped dead in their tracks. Charlie had stopped dead in his tracks about 1926. He was a journalist in those days, very much on to the
new thing, the new thing being a fashionable splattering of English mannerisms. Hence the name Charlie, which had been his bar name and stuck to him. And hence the monocle. It had appeared two months after his first successful novel, and he had never given it up. It was his private jeweler’s glass to the sparkle of the rich. It was also the one really annoying prop in his own private portrait d’apparat. She did not like monocles. She did not like the sickening chink when they fell to the length of their cord and hit the edge of the table. And furthermore, she was always afraid of getting a glass chip in her eye when they did.

  Very few people can put a monocle in without exposing their teeth. Charlie’s teeth were a manly yellow. She didn’t particularly care for that either. He smoked too much.

  A man six foot two should not use a quizzing glass, and there isn’t anything else you can use a monocle for, except, perhaps, to look at the small print on deeds of trust, or at a public, and therefore faintly hostile, phone book.

  Names in one’s own private address book were usually writ large.

  “Ah, there he is,” said Charlie, and looked put out.

  She didn’t bother to turn around. One thing about Charlie’s young men, or, for that matter, his wives, was that though he changed them frequently, they were always the same sort of young man (or boyish woman), so that all you had to do was to learn their names for this year, and proceed as before. It made life much simpler, even for Charlie, perhaps. She didn’t know. Nor would she ever have asked. They were friends. They discussed everything but their emotions.

  Or am I being unpleasant about his wives? He was married again, she supposed, though she hadn’t heard about it. Other wise he wouldn’t have been haring round this way. Or was it still the same wife? Between wives, Charlie was celibate and discreet. It was only when he had one tucked away somewhere that he fetched his young men up out of their boltholes for a public airing.