Old Acquaintance Page 4

  For stars are supposed to have romances only with other stars. Being a woman-of-the-world type, as she had explained right back at them, when they asked who Charlie was, she had been able to make the studio swallow hard and say, yes, it was all right for her to be seen with ordinary people, that is, people not stars, so long as they were in some way eminent. She had swallowed even harder, smiled her faraway smile, and agreed with them.

  She had really enjoyed it, that eight months with Charlie. It had been a little idyll, the appearance of how reality should be, and at the same time, one had been spared the good-night kiss at the door, and the foot in the door, too, if it came to that.

  He had been discreet about his young men. He had been glad to take shelter with her. He had presented his young men only as a cat presents you with a dead mouse, to prove it is of some use, even though its heart really isn’t in mice at all.

  It made a change from reality, that visit, and had looked well in photographs. Charlie had been good at the game. It was a game he played himself, with his wives. He knew exactly what the game consisted of. He finished his drink at the house, before the previews, and said not, “Shall we go?” but “Shall we go on now?”

  He was a dilettante. The romance of acting had always enthralled him. He knew what to do, if not quite how to do it, for an American audience. That hadn’t mattered much. As the glamorous woman who comes from somewhere else, she had been allowed some latitude. She wasn’t supposed to fit into American folkways, she was supposed to flaunt them, though no more than they could stand. Charlie, as the equally good European novelist who knows how less wholesome people live, had been quite acceptable.

  It was such a saving, those public romances the studio provided. It saved one from feeling. It allowed one to pretend there was something more to life than work, and investment properties in Sherman Oaks, after all.

  Charlie had been the ideal house guest. He never appeared in that high-ceilinged, pseudo-Spanish living room until one was willing to appear in public oneself. And he knew the exact irony of the public romance.

  They had fun, plotting what they would do and say, and who would photograph it and write it down when they did. And here it was, for a moment, back again, that period. Here it was back again, except for Paul.

  Since she liked him so much, she had studied Charlie. Charlie was the black-faced comedian at the carnival fun fair. He sat there, on his board over the water tank, longing for someone to hit him so he could be shot down into the water, get the suspense over with, and come up blubbering the way Bert Lahr used to do in burlesque. It always happened eventually. She winced at the thought of that. When it happened she would have to deal with it. She preferred him dry on his board.

  “Nemo repente fuit turpissimus,” she said, just to show that, though everyone but Charlie had forgotten it, she was not of good, but what was more important, of respectable German family, her father the perfectly ordinary professor at a perfectly ordinary German gymnasium. It was something she found it difficult to remember herself.

  “Juvenal,” said Charlie. “I suppose you came early in order to check the lighting?”

  That was a dirty dig. Close friends always spade the dirty digs. They are allowed that freedom. “No,” she said, “but I will.” And went to change.

  And she would, thought Charlie, and always had, for there is a deus ex camera, as well as a deus ex machina, and hers had descended, on a boom, in an aureole of klieg lights, many years ago, bringing riches and youth, and that wonderful final privacy, the flickering emotions of a purely public face.

  VII

  THERE is always something surrealistic, and therefore tawdry, about evening dress in the afternoon.

  The animals go in two by two

  But what is the rest of the world to do?

  said Charlie, watching the first arrivals, and thinking about Genesis. At previews the precedence is reversed: first into the Ark go those least likely to survive. Supporting players come next. And then, the stars. After the stars, like the blue plush pallbearers in Pinocchio, come the technicians, the friends of friends, and others responsible for the interment of the Blue Fairy. Also bankers, financiers, international celebrities, and ex-Queen Soraya, who has been known to go to as many as three movies in one day, in the same manner as the taffeta duchesses of the sixteenth century went to mass. Their confessor, in this case, was the columnist, their court painter the photographer.

  Movie people might not be enjoying themselves at the time, but they always wanted to see the photographs afterswards, for in the photographs they were enjoying themselves, you could tell by the smile, that constituted proof. These people used photographs the way other people use mirrors, to see if they looked all right, and for the sheer joy of being able to see themselves at all. It was bird and cat, all the way. They went on with what they were doing, until some sixth sense told them a shutter was about to click, and then they turned to smile.

  It is the great class symbol of our age, the public smile. The famous wear it for the photographer, the way Spanish noblemen wore black. In portraits of the past, nobody smiles but tarts and imbeciles. It was the age of character. This is the age of personality. Therefore we smile. If we do not feel pleasure, we can at least show it. It isn’t an emotion that smile, it’s a rictus.

  Therefore Charlie smiled. He and Lotte made a noticeable couple. They always had. He was grateful to her for that. His fourth wife, when she saw the photographs, and she would see them, his fourth wife saw all photographs, would be annoyed. Charlie, photographed with his wives, always looked like a slightly embarrassed big-game hunter standing beside somebody else’s lion. With Lotte, the appearance was different. Then they themselves looked like lions, placid and safe, in their own private Kruger National Park.

  The afternoon was sunny but cold. Mondorf was too small to allow for the usual parade of limousines, but it took place anyway. The theatre was a detached building without a porte cochère, though with a portico, and since it lacked a drive, was accessible only across a flagged path flanked by lawn. The porch was supported by Atlantids of the blubbery, squirming kind which always look as though they had just taken worm pills when what they really needed was a breast pump. Quite possibly they symbolized something. But then, quite possibly, so do we.

  Mondorf is not a heavily populated community, even during the water-taking months. Thus, no doubt, the explanation of the film festival, but it made for a thin audience, so that the guests looked more as though they were trailing disconsolately away from a party at dawn than as though they were the life of it, arriving strategically late.

  Ahead of him walked Mr. and Mrs. Herman D. Blatz. A film distributor. They were a ruthless couple. When she divorced him, he divorced her. That showed you how ruthless they were. Things like that show a real hate. Last time she had asked for custody of the family Bernard Buffets (over forty) and a half interest in the Cézanne watercolor. That had given Blatz a bad scare. Nowadays he collected Riopelle. Nobody is going to ask for a half interest in your Riopelle. The Nicholas de Staël was safe, too, for Nicholas de Staël doesn’t rate for beans in America, where most of their divorces were held.

  Paul walked behind with his starlet. She’d never get anywhere, but her furs were good. They made an attractive couple, though their perfumes clashed, and Charlie, who had an acute sense of smell, was annoyed about that. The starlet was using something heavy and sweet. Lotte would never have made a mistake like that. Lotte, at her most careless, never smelled of anything stronger than sun-warmed windfall wood, smooth and clean and light-struck among the ferns.

  Though the rest of her might not be, her smile was real. He was touched. It hadn’t occurred to him before, that she was really glad to see him again.

  Since he felt the same way about her, the realization of how she felt made him feel a little lonely. They had the wrong kind of sophistication, he and she. It cut them off from everything that wasn’t real. Which is why we pretend all the time, he supposed. Or rather, wh
y we pretend to pretend, which is sadder.

  He had forgotten her smile. He always did. What he remembered of her, and of very few people in this world, if you came right down to it, wasn’t what she looked like, but what she was. That nonsense jingle about Genesis did very well. “What is the rest of the world to do?” And yet we go on doing it.

  The little procession swept into the portico and left the lawn about the way it had looked before.

  VIII

  LOTTE had accepted two duties. The first, and less important, was to make a small opening speech. The second, and the more so, was to present one of the prizes, the one for best actress, she believed.

  The stage was flanked by flags of all nations, or at any rate, of all nations which made films. The screen was concealed by a curtain hung in Vienna folds, like a window, though there was nothing behind it to see until the projectors came on.

  There were no chairs on the stage. The judges and speechmakers were seated in the front row and went up, when called upon, to be introduced by an M.C. That was just as well. One cannot be glamorous and a sitting duck at the same time.

  She was described as someone I am sure you all know and love.

  Equally sure that they did not know her, for she had always covered her tracks well, and that the love of stage-folk is merely a mutual conspiracy, Lotte walked to the stage with leggy assurance, though missing that theme song which had trumpeted her triumphant return from limbo in every major night club in the world. Alas, for La Vie en Rose one needs spectacles of the same color, and Lotte, who was myopic, faced her audience as though speaking into the background of a fantasy by Goya.

  Seeing them was like looking down on the world she had surmounted. She felt exactly like a mountain climber. There isn’t anything up there, but at least you can see how you got up, and the air is bracing (actually there was a cold draft coming from somewhere).

  Her little speech only took two or three minutes. She was gracious, bland, enchanting, her voice carefully plumped out with quiet laughter, kind, benign, and definitely an elder statesman.

  Then the show was on. Surely only a very foolish person would enjoy to watch himself lurching about up there, through a series of arbitrary dramatic hoops made out of celluloid. You have to be catlike to enjoy that sort of vanity, and Lotte was doggy. A puppy may bark at a mirror, but then he sighs and decides to ignore it.

  Lotte ignored it. She had seen films before.

  IX

  AFTERWARDS the four of them had dinner. The starlet was not amusing, but one has a duty to be civil. She seemed both to be overawed by them and to regard them as irrelevant. They were too old and odd, and Paul, though attentive, was not a professional. It seemed unlikely she would ever be a star. Almost certainly, she would marry a shoe manufacturer and be replaced by someone else just like her. They did not worry about her and she did not worry about them.

  Charlie addressed himself to the wine list with a blank deceptive indecision, monocle and all, which would not have fooled a fly. Having been poor when young, he enjoyed these ceremonies all the more now he could afford them. Though he knew wines well, it was their names he ordered by.

  Beaujolais was good for certain late afternoons. It suggested a gentle, well-fed melancholy. Médoc (which he didn’t like) he ordered when he could, because the name fascinated him (something to do with Langue d’Oc, le prince d’Acquitaine à la tour abolie, and all that. Thieves have their rhyming slang, and so do the extremely civilized, though no professor has yet compiled it in a dictionary in which to look themselves up). Chambertin was his favorite to drink, but he always forgot to order it, because the name displeased him, he didn’t know why. A mixture of Chamberlain and libertin, perhaps. On white wines he was less good. Chablis was drinkable. Bordeaux he loathed.

  So white wines usually turned out to be a Sylvaner, because of Aeneas Silvius, perhaps, which suggested pig-a-back out of Troy, a Delacroix he liked (because of the posture), while the fire was going, though since the picture actually had something to do with the Good Samaritan, it also suggested the more nearly austere Popes and Gibbons’s silver swan, who living had no note.

  “A Sylvaner ’53,” said Charlie, looking forward to the wine cooler. He was fond of the sound of ice, the chichi of the bucket, and the glitter of diamonds.

  Paul wanted to dance with the starlet.

  “What, again?” asked Charlie, staring balefully at a runny egg mayonnaise. That English restaurants should serve bad French food we expect, and even praise. That continental restaurants should serve bad English food was going too far.

  He was annoyed. Lotte didn’t see why he should be. A warm milk glass egg mayonnaise is a sickening goody, no matter where served, and if Paul wanted to pretend he was a ski instructor being nice to a rich American, she didn’t see why he shouldn’t. Having dissembled by the imitation of vice, she had a wistful attitude toward those whose real dream was to simulate virtue. Perhaps the poor boy misses women, she thought, of his own age, but did not say so. Since her mind often made unfortunate because automatic connections, she was always careful to leave the wit to those who needed it. She did not like to cause harm.

  “Why don’t they come back?” said Charlie. “I don’t want another cocktail before dinner. I want dinner.”

  They came back, though not soon enough. The starlet drew a thin tulle gauze over her shoulders, having felt the chill.

  The waiter wished to consult about the salad dressing. He had the manner of a culinary Metternich. In the concord of Europe, the problem of salad dressing looms large.

  Paul made a dart for independence. “Salad cream,” he said.

  Charlie’s monocle fell out. The waiter looked perturbed.

  “It’s something I learned about in England,” said Paul. “It saves trouble.”

  “I’ve been there,” said Charlie, who maintained very high standards, chiefly by piling his preferences by main force on top of other people’s whims. “It’s like boot polish, only yellow.”

  “Well then, Green Goddess salad dressing,” said Paul.

  “Heh?”

  “Green Goddess salad dressing.” Paul was being stubborn. These little scuffles for independence can be embarrassing. Lotte looked at the view.

  The starlet blinked her eyes. The salad cream dialogue had puzzled her, but now she knew where she was.

  “The Green Goddess,” said Charlie slowly, “is the name of a play. It is about a wicked rajah who is extremely nasty to some English people whose plane has just crashed. The plane has crashed because it ran out of salad cream. It is by Mr. William Archer, the admirer of Ibsen.”

  “You mean like A Doll’s House,” said the starlet, unexpectedly.

  “I mean it is a doll’s house,” said Charlie. “I don’t care what they did in Kenya. Kenya’s doomed anyway. If you want to be pukka, you can go be pukka in the provinces. Here you have lemon juice, lots of vinegar, and very little oil. Probably the Americans will do it as a musical. Why not?”

  “Do what as a musical?” asked Lotte, seeing he was trying to duck back into nonsense, where he belonged.

  “A Doll’s House,” said Charlie bleakly. “Set in Kenya. With an all Negro cast. It’s either about Apartheid or the brotherhood of man, depending how you look at it.”

  Feeling benign, now he’d made them uncomfortable, he took Lotte off to dance. He needed air.

  “That was cruel,” she said.

  “Have you ever tasted salad cream?” he asked.

  “No, but …”

  “Then don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

  Lotte thought she understood quite well. She could now relax. Once Charlie had managed to be unpleasant about something, he became so apologetic that he went round being saccharine to everyone for days. The rest of the evening would be his own variety of thistledown. And Charlie, in his thistledown mood, though difficult to follow, was often quite funny when eventually he came down out of the upper air and took a deep breath.

 
They were now alone. The starlet had excused herself. It was getting late. She had to return to her producer. If she stayed any longer, she said, she’d turn into a pumpkin.

  “Very likely,” said Charlie, after Paul had taken her off, “she will in any case. If he has to go through that ridiculous performance, he might at least have the taste to pick on someone like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “That woman over there….”

  Casually, Lotte turned around to look, and for once in her life, was genuinely startled. “My God!” she said.

  “Lovely, isn’t she?”

  It was Unne.

  She was certainly noticeable. Men of Charlie’s preference were always bowled over by Unne, as had been Hans Christian Andersen, her original creator. She had a mute and ethereal distinction. She did not belong in time. She was a snow princess and an ice queen. When she was a child, surely, her dolls must have been made of snow. You could tell that by the frostbitten sting of her hands. She had loved them so, but that had merely melted them all away. Too much breeding had made her, not febrile, as it does some, but quiet as a mirage. She did not belong on that terrace. She did not belong anywhere. She merely floated through the world in her bubble. The bubble touched gently here and there, but she never did. With both hands outspread, in childish wonder, she merely watched. When she was at last an old woman, no doubt she would pose for her portrait with folded hands, exactly the same, untouched, a stranger in her own body, but older. So men like Charlie thought of and described her. Perhaps, but Lotte found her maddening.