Old Acquaintance Page 8

  A pretty stretch, the Bayonne road. It had been like driving across time to meet Goya, who had had similar reasons for going there, from a different direction and earlier on. Perhaps they would meet.

  But they hadn’t.

  Sometimes Charlie lost the thread of his own labyrinth. But he always managed to find it again, and at least it kept him safe from the Minotaur. That’s what comes of free associations. The ship entered the Piraeus, the king committed suicide, somebody remembered to change the sail now it was too late, the black came down, the white went up, and there he was, back on the Normandie.

  We are in northern waters. As we get older, we move farther north. There is a heavy fog, but it must be just after dawn, for the mist is nacreous, golden, and yet faintly blue. Though it has no shape, the mist, it seems to have the shapes of shape. It has forms without form. Like those two plates with which Goya concluded the Disasters of War, though the virgin may be secular, there is no doubt whatsoever about the light. The light is real. The light is everywhere.

  Through the windows of the for’ard first-class saloon one can catch a glimpse from time to time of icebergs, or perhaps one’s attention is caught only by the glitter of diamonds, or of flawed selenite, from the Cave of Swords. The grinding of the ice against the hull and the lurch come later. In this game they always do.

  The saloon is large. All the furniture is under dust covers, and seems to have taken a cautious step on its own while no one was looking. It is motionless now. A cocktail party is in progress, though there is nothing to drink. All the people one has ever been fond of, and lost sight of, are there, beautifully dressed, though the lapels of the dinner jackets sometimes look mildewed green, and there seems no logical reason why the fringe of a dress of 1926 should still look fashionable in 1939. The atmosphere is discreet but warm. There will be no rioting. We are friends again because we know the lifeboat davits are broken, and that therefore we must go down together. This makes us amiable. I go from group to group. Sometimes the conversation is audible and sometimes it is not. What is audible is what we said before, trivial things, the proper things for people to say while they wait. What is not audible is what we meant to say, and would so much like to say.

  And then comes the sudden lurch….

  *

  “Where on earth are you?” asked Lotte. They were alone at the table. Unne and Paul were gone.

  “On the Normandie,” he said. “It is the name of a boat that sank.”

  None the less, the liner poured smoothly on without him, “past the houses, past the headlands, into deep eternity.” He was sorry to be back. If he could just have stayed on that boat, for once, until it sank, he might have learned something. But he never could. Either someone interrupted him, or else he woke up.

  “Yes,” said Lotte. “I know.”

  He wished she hadn’t said that. It made him uncomfortable to think that she might.

  XXIII

  UNNE came back with a game of her own. Her manner was deceptive. She had her own devices for burning the world to a cinder, cool appearance or no. Other children have dolls. What Unne liked to do was change the clothes on an idea.

  Her game, which was not private, was called Dinner Party. No doubt it was a piece of pedagogy from her diplomatic days.

  First you choose your year, in this case, 1814. Then, if you really want to make everybody’s life hell, you choose a place, in this case, Paris. Then you assemble your guests. They must severally represent the different professions and estates. They must be of the right ages, and it must be possible for them to have met historically. The seating has to be arranged, either with tact or malice, or better yet, with both. When you have finally got them settled, you decide what they say to each other, if possible by using quotations, or references to quotations, from their works and memorabilia.

  Paul, with unexpected forethought, and much greater knowledge than Lotte would have expected, chose the Duke of Wellington, who was chiefly famous for saying as little as possible, and that tart. Either Unne had primed him in advance, or else he liked his heroes taciturn. Canova was present. Charlie plunked for Palmella.

  “He wasn’t in Paris. He was in London that year,” said Unne.

  “Very well then,” said Charlie. “Talleyrand. They can talk about the war together. Do you know what Talleyrand said he did during the war? He said, ‘I survived.’” Charlie was beginning to look annoyed. The damn girl seemed to have read as many memoirs at twenty-three as he had in his early fifties. Either she was lying about her age, or else it wasn’t natural. Come to think on it, it was Sieyès not Talleyrand.

  “Mme. de Staël,” said Unne. “Napoleon hated her. She must have enjoyed Paris very much after the 100 Days.”

  It just so happened that like everybody else who reads a lot, Charlie had his pet hates, and took them seriously. He had once been locked up in a guest house for one solid rain-drenched week with very dull guests and nothing to read but Mme. de Staël’s L’Allemagne in a small-print edition with smelly pages.

  “Mme. de Staël was a fool,” he snapped. “Women don’t sway history. They may take a nip and tuck in it here and there, but sway it, no. At the very most, they set the fashion while the men set the traps. And all you get out of that sort of thing is more rabbits.”

  Unne looked startled.

  Paul tried to intervene. He didn’t get anywhere. He didn’t have the necessary fluids. Pouring oil on troubled waters is one thing. Pouring water on troubled oil is quite another.

  Lotte opted for Mme. Récamier. By the time she met Chateaubriand they were both too old for anything but peace and quiet. Therein lay their romance.

  Unne wondered if Mme. Récamier would have been asked. She had been so famous under the Directoire, after all.

  The conversation died. Charlie was back at his own games again.

  This one was Lifeboat. An ocean liner has been hit by the enemy and is dramatically sinking, ass over backwards, with all its lights ablaze. There is flotsam everywhere, including the human. A satisfactory amount of screaming and shouting wafts over the water. The other lifeboats are either smashed or else pulling, overcrowded, away. Everyone one ever knew is on that boat, and the people one is confronted with at the moment are all struggling in the water.

  In the foreground floats still another lifeboat, intact, in which nobody but me is sitting. I have a coat flung across my shoulders, a jewel box in my lap, and I am smoking a cigarette, cool as a cucumber. Various people splash alongside. If they are worth saving, I haul them aboard. If I don’t like them, which is to say, if they are definitely not worth saving, I push them under. The gesture of the hand used to push them under is the gesture you use to throw a football, and gives deep and abiding satisfaction.

  As Unne came alongside, Charlie threw away his cigarette, placed his hand on that neat if wet blond head, and very deliberately and with satisfaction pushed her under. Then he lit another cigarette.

  Under the circumstances, Lotte thought it best to get him out of there.

  XXIV

  “THAT wasn’t very nice,” she said.

  “Why the hell should I be nice? I pay for him, don’t I? When I pay good money, I expect to get good service. Not to have to sit around in a goddam peepshow. I do not, I never have, nothing would ever induce me to pretend I did, I cannot stand, Mme. de Staël,” he said. “Any woman who would wear a turban, Benjamin Constant or not, is no friend of mine.” His rages tended to be erudite: a novelist is a specialist in general information, and besides, he always defended himself with a fine skunk spray of culture when the chase got too close.

  “Charlie, shut up.”

  “I am shut up. I have been shut up for two weeks here. I’m going silly.”

  But after a while he cooled down.

  “Not even an American Ph.D. would have invented a game like that,” he said. “Scandinavia must be horrible.”

  She had to admit she agreed. But then most games are horrible. In view of that, the place of origin
doesn’t much count.

  XXV

  PAUL was doing his duty, which meant he must be scared. He wasn’t very good at it. But Charlie had his own methods of compensation, so he didn’t mind that. On the contrary, he was touched.

  Somewhere along the line he’d stumbled across the truth that far from losing themselves in the sexual act, most people take refuge from it, and make it satisfactory, only by vanishing into a private fantasy. What’s the use of having a mind if you can’t compensate?

  He had been curious. Unfortunately, when he had asked other people what their fantasies were, they’d shut up at once. He had struck against one of the strictest taboos in the world, a sterner one, even, than the one which forbids us to mention that we masturbate. What with Proust, Sacher-Masoch, The Well of Loneliness, and Jean Genet, one would have thought nothing secret to exist. That masturbation was not discussed he could see the reason for; after all, there is no point in putting information into the wrong hands; but he was sorry about the fantasies. He would have liked to know.

  Come to think of it, he had never mentioned his own to anybody either. His own took place in a Piranesi world, though not the Carceri. They were deeper down than that. Once well launched on a return voyage there, and he was momentarily content. That Victorian, Howard Sturgis, once wrote a novel called All that was Possible. This was all that was possible. He always had a good time down in that cellar. He always came back definitely refreshed. Imaginary bruises have no color, and imaginary tortures leave no wounds. It was better that way. Yet it was perhaps a pity that the available passions were so inevitably vitiated by our real desires, and our real desires, for that matter, by the available passions.

  After Paul had gone, he picked up All that was Possible again, which he had with him, which was why he had remembered it, and read until three in the morning. We must never underestimate the Victorians. Some of us read novels because we cannot live, and others of us return to them with a sense of relief, as soon as we have. The Victorians did both.

  Charlie felt mollified.

  XXVI

  IF you want to hang on in the movie world, not only do you have to be up with the early bird, you have to be up before the technicians. So when Charlie looked out the window after a bad night and saw Lotte striding purposefully toward the Casino, he sent down for breakfast, shaved hastily, and followed after her. It always soothed him to see professionals at work. He liked to be there when they fixed mercury on the windows and turned them into mirrors. You may not be able to see so much that way, but at least you can see yourself. At first we want to watch the view. Later, we have to check to see if we are still there in front of it. We save vanity until last, like a small child with a dinner plate, who always saves the best until last.

  He had not been to the Casino before. It was abandoned. It had been abandoned for some time. Lotte’s act would reopen it.

  From the outside it did not look like much, but from the inside, better, for it was decorated, though rococo, with an almost Hindu passion for small squares of mirror embedded in plaster of Paris. The main room was shadowy, but the mirrors relayed what light there was, as though from star to star. It takes a long while to reach us from Aldebaran, but we see it anyway.

  If you had taken Sans Souci, the Galerie des Glaces, the Amalienburg, and St. Petersburg during the season, run them all together and thrown out the good bits as not worth saving, what you would have had left, he supposed, was something like the Casino. It was the Cosmic Opera House all over again, except that in the Cosmic Opera House there are no mirrors, only distances and stars.

  Lotte looked lonely out there, in the middle of the dance floor, talking with the grips, like God on the fifth day.

  Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

  God said: Let Newton be! and all was light.

  That was what Lotte was up to. Charlie would not have dreamed of disturbing her.

  “Turn the candles up,” she said. “We’ll see how it blends,”

  One ray descended upon her, with the astute precision of a magic wand. Since the wizard was getting on, the gesture trembled, until it hit its aim. She was only a face, hovering in semidarkness. There was a glimpse of leg.

  Then the lights flared up, seen not first in themselves, for they were covered with decorous hoods, but reflected in the mirrors, in thousands of broken images the shape of candles. In the blackout numbers they gutter and go out.

  Charlie leaned against an abandoned tea wagon to watch.

  He realized why he had never been tempted to put her in a novel. It was because what she really was did not exist. It was only a matter of lighting. He knew her as a private person, which was what they both pretended to be. At that they were quite good. But once the legend took over, reality disappeared, leaving only an historical certainty. He, she, and history were only a matter of lighting, nothing more. Because you see it, you think you know what it is.

  He had seen her movies, even if she did not read his books. They were not good movies, though she had been good in them, now and then. He had always wished that in addition to the regular schedule of the latest feature, film box offices would post the exact running time of those few scenes in it which are worth the bother. But that would not have been democratic. In a democracy we are supposed to dip our water, mealy bugs and all, no matter how fastidious our thirst, or slight our hunger. We are supposed to see the feature through.

  Well, he had. It was a pity he remembered her best in a part she had never played, as Nefertiti, a little old, a little tired, but always youthful, walking the desert alone with a greyhound and flowing veils, at Aketaten, after the others had gone home to Thebes, the ultimate refinement of a polite vacuity, but all the same, with a sad will to live, a good smile, and all the knowledge to know how.

  The veils, however, she had used, in some film about the Russian county aristocracy, in 1917, when the Bolsheviks came. There had been a lovely little country house by Cameron. Across its lawn, at dawn, from French windows which somehow looked Viennese, she had swept in white veils, just as she was to over again, in Morocco, a decade later, to even less purpose, but she had been beautiful. She would always be beautiful. She had seen to that herself, and was out there on the floor, seeing to it now.

  The Bolsheviks had not harmed her. Neither had her cameraman. She found herself on the Orient Express instead, a penniless refugee. By now, of course, she is the glamorous Eurasian, her White Russian blood well behind her. She copes. But she retains her little smile. The smile is Nefertiti’s. Nowadays she played glamorous Germans of a certain age, just as he wrote books about them. The thrill had become a stereotype. The smile remained.

  During a visit to Dahlem, he had hauled himself up entirely too many stairs, to take a look at Nefertiti. Germany was gone. He was gone. The world was gone. A war makes us refugees from what we were. But Nefertiti had not gone. She was totally unaffected. In 3,300 years she had lost nothing more essential than the outer cartilage of an ear. What the Mona Lisa was to the nineteenth century, and Guido Reni’s little boys to the eighteenth, she is to us. But what does she know? And does she know she knows?

  In Lotte’s case, he rather suspected, yes.

  Unexpectedly, the tea cart skittered out from under him and ran away like a small animal or a frightened child, across the floor, up against her shins. Lotte cursed.

  “It’s just me,” he said.

  She looked angry, as what magician would not, to find an observer from the Institute for Psychical Research taking notes on the spells. But even Charlie was part of her audience.

  “You startled me. How long have you been there?”

  He knew the tactful answer to that. “I just came in.”

  “I want to get to work again,” she told him. “I’m only happy when I’m working.”

  He wished he could have said the same. “That’s called the Puritan Doctrine. Gide loved it. Or, if you prefer, the Earthly Paradise. Or, if you prefer, Nirvana. No wonder the Mahayana caught on. In Ce
ylon they’re Hinayana. They must be tropical Calvinists.”

  She wasn’t interested in that.

  “Sing something,” he said.

  With a quick girlish look, she climbed up on the stage and did just that. She did a parody of herself, very funny. If you can parody yourself better than the parodists do, you’re still safe; you’re still sane.

  The electric candles had not been turned off, they caught at the mirrors, which reflected neither him nor her. Lotte had the advantage of being on a podium, so she caught a glimpse of something she hoped he had not seen.

  In some unidentifiable but reflected part of the house Unne had appeared, with Paul behind her. In several fragments the mirrors caught them up. They embraced, heartily. Obviously they had done so before. In one mirror in particular she saw an enlargement of a young jaw, and mouth on mouth. That startled her. But she was fond of Charlie. She did not want to see him hurt. So she went on singing.

  “I thought I’d find you both here,” said Paul, coming forward. “It’s time for lunch.”

  They had been holding hands. They weren’t now.

  “He’s quite right,” said Lotte, and gave her hand to Charlie, to help her down.

  How guiltless the young are, she thought. It is because it has not yet occurred to them that anybody can see them in the mirror but themselves.

  “Let’s not go back to Mondorf,” said Charlie, though they were in Mondorf. “I know a place a little way out, and really, the wine isn’t at all bad.” He adjusted his monocle.

  It seemed a poor defense against reality, just then.