Angels All Over Town (22 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said, as soon as I was able to speak.

“That is all right,” Emile replied, benevolent and forgiving. Why the hell was
I
apologizing when he was the rude one? My mind was full of righteous indignation, but my voice was full of contrition. At that instant I hated Emile Balfour. Tomorrow some Paris paper would report that we were having a romance, and I hated him.

The driver drove down a narrow street, barely wide enough for the car. He stopped in front of a tiny bistro with a carved gold snail above the door. Without waiting for the driver, Emile opened the door and we stepped out. An old man, his dress shirt and black tie covered by a starched white apron, greeted us without appearing to recognize Emile. He led us through a narrow room to a dark wood booth. There were no cushions. Emile and I sat opposite each other, illuminated by the green shaded lamp hanging overhead. Kitchen noises clattered a few feet away, and the odor of garlic was omnipresent. My stomach growled loudly.

“They have the best lamb in Paris,” Emile said. “Allow me to order for us?”

I nodded, feeling sodden. How could I have expected to dazzle Emile Balfour and become a movie star? What a charade! When the waiter had uncorked a bottle of red wine and taken our order to the chef, Emile settled back against the booth and told me a story about his latest movie. How he was shooting right on schedule, how the leading man drank too much every night but so far had been sober on the set, how Emile would see that the actor never found another job if he screwed up the film. I listened, letting amusement alternate with sympathy on my face. Emile looked pleased, like someone who knew that he was fabulously handsome and famous and had somehow managed to make an hysterical woman calm down before she raised the roof.

The waiter brought our dinner: grilled lamb with rosemary, flageolets, baby carrots, and fried shoestring potatoes. Emile chewed some food, then went on with his stories. Occasionally his eyes would flick charmingly, meeting mine, but mainly they roamed the room. I continued to nod at him, but I was thinking: with men it always came down to the same thing. I wanted things from them, and I would compromise myself to get them. With my father I had wished for devotion. I had agreed to overlook his nights at the Blue Danube as a means of exerting emotional blackmail. I
will
forgive you if you love me. I
will
be a Good Girl if you love me. With Emile I wanted a starring role, and I was, by sitting in that restaurant, allowing him to use me as a publicity stunt. I would pretend to be his new lover if he would give me a job. Suddenly a terrible thought struck me: what if he really expected me to
be
his new lover? My father had always warned me about guys like him. What would I do, how would I react, when he made the pass? Would I go willingly, trying to not think of Sam? Perhaps I had just discovered why Lily and Margo had found true love and I had not; with men, they were not constantly patting their pockets for currency with which to barter.

After dinner we drove to the Crillon. Emile and I sat quietly in the limousine’s vast back seat while revelers passed by, peering into the black windows, trying to see through their own reflections. Some of them brought their faces so close to the glass, their noses touched and left imprints. I sat upright, watching the faces, waiting for Emile to touch me. The faces appeared quizzical, like faces observed through a one-way mirror in a department store dressing room or a police lineup. As Delilah, I had seen a lineup. About two years ago Delilah had been raped by a champion golfer, during Mooreland’s annual benefit tournament. Beck and her father had flanked her while she sat in a small room at the Mooreland police station, watching the men parade onto the stage, standing before the height lines, their heads resembling musical notes on a staff. The men had faced the window, which must have looked to them like a mirror, because some of them had crouched, peering into the glass, smoothing their hair and moustaches. The perpetrator had a bushy blond moustache. Delilah had identified him, but he ended up beating the charge because he always played in the same foursome as the judge.

“So, now you have seen something of Paris,” Emile said, smiling warmly.

“Yes. Thank you so much.” I was stiff, waiting for him to say, “Now let’s go upstairs,” but he only smiled. He sat at his end of the long leather seat, wedged into the corner.

“I imagine your tour will be arduous, but perhaps it will be pleasant, knowing that you will soon return to Paris. You can come to my studio and read for me. Of course I say ‘read,’ but for an actress of your abilities, that might be insulting.”

“I’ve never acted in a movie.”

“No, that is true, and although I trust Chance’s judgment when he tells me you are capable, I have investors who must see for themselves. Don’t worry; they are money men, not artists. They will see a little show, give us the money, and that will be that.”

“That will be that?” Was he telling me that the audition was just a formality, that the part was mine for the asking? I felt a slight surge of adrenaline, and held on to the seat.

But Emile shook his head and smiled wryly. In the dim light, his face looked very young. “Well, I am afraid we must do a little test. As you say, movies are different from television. I like to improvise in my work, to give the picture more creative range, so perhaps we will see how you improvise.”

I love to improvise. “Fine,” I said. Now that business was concluded, he would touch me. Perhaps he would slip his hand around the back of my neck, pulling my face into his lap. Right here, with all the voyeurs outside. But instead he tapped the glass partition behind the driver’s head, and the driver sprang out of the car. He opened my door and leaned inside, waiting for instructions.

“Walk Mademoiselle Cavan to the elevator,” Emile commanded. Almost as an afterthought, he reached for my hand and kissed it.

“
A bientôt
,” he said.

“Good night,” I said, backing away from the car, waving at him until the driver slammed the door and left me staring at my own reflection in the black glass.

Chapter 13

S
houldn’t a grand tour of Europe be electrifying? Especially when one has just fallen in love? I had expected it to be. I had expected to fly through the cities with my eyes wide open, taking in the richness so I could write to Sam about it. I had planned to stand before the little pond in the Tuileries and watch the children sail their model sailboats and describe the bright hulls, the fluttering of the cotton sails, the music of the children’s language, in long letters. The barges puffing along the Seine. Breakfast alfresco beneath gray-and-white umbrellas at the Crillon. But in Paris I had developed narcolepsy. How could I write long letters to Sam when I kept falling asleep? From the moment Emile Balfour had dropped me at the hotel, I could not keep my eyes open. I had slept until noon the next day, had barely stayed awake through breakfast with Jason, had fallen asleep, upright, in the limousine on the way to the airport. Emile had sent the script to me by messenger, but I had no will to read it.

On the plane to Zaventem, I slept. In the cab, driving southwest to Brussels (a city I had never visited), I slept. We finally reached the Ste. Claire, a tiny hotel adjacent to the Grand’ Place. I rested my elbow on the grimy mahogany front desk while Jason checked in, and I fought to stay awake. Only a few minutes, and then I’ll be alone in my room, I told myself, listening to Jason’s voice rise in anger and not caring why.

“The rooms are on air shafts,” Jason told me.

“I don’t care,” I said. I adored natural light, had never stayed in a room facing an air shaft in my life. The one time a desk clerk had put me in a room facing an air shaft, I had found another hotel.

There was one bellman assigned to carry both my and Jason’s bags. He opened the door to my room first. The space was a cubbyhole with dim, brassy light fixtures and greenish reproductions of Frans Hals portraits. Not even Rembrandt. The air shaft was hidden by a heavy brown-and-orange floral curtain. I sat in the room’s single chair (straight-backed), forgot to tip the bellman, and was treated to a guttural Flemish insult. He slammed the door and I could hear him burping at Jason in the hall. From a room across the air shaft I could hear a telephone ringing. I knew Chance Schutz, and I knew that he would never knowingly book us into such a terrible place. If I had felt one bit less miserable, I would have raised a stink and gotten us out of there. Instead I stumbled to the bed, lay on top of the mustard-colored spread, and fell asleep.

I have never believed that one needs to be
worthy
of love. But during those first days in Europe, I felt that way about Sam. Sam Chamberlain, a straightforward oceanographer, son of upstanding geologists, involved with a scheming harpie like me. Sam wasn’t offering any resistance. I was unused to simplicity, to love without guile. With Sam I knew the simple joys. The sea, the shore, the sand, the waves, sandpipers, tidal pools, clean salt air, lovemaking in the turret room. With Sam I had not even considered bargaining power.

But what did I know of him, after all? Could you judge a man by the way he acted on vacation? When he was over a hundred miles from his permanent residence? Perhaps he lived in squalor, over a seedy nightclub that he would visit whenever he was free for the evening. Perhaps he was a compulsive liar; perhaps he was not an oceanographer at all but a pornographer. The words even had the same ring. Perhaps he enticed women like me to fall in love with him, then threw them over for their sisters. In my narcoleptic state I entertained these ideas and worse ones. I lay awake on the mustard-colored spread as long as I could, until the voices rising up the air shaft became as spellbinding as a chanting coven of witches. Their message was “Sleep, sleep.” I resisted, playing out scenarios in which Sam would hurt me, I would hurt Sam, Sam would hurt me, I would hurt Sam. Then Emile Balfour would drift into my mind, his lean face and handsome tuxedo, and I would think of the things I would do to become his new star. Pretend to be his new lover. Become his new lover. Do whatever he told me to do. But for now I would sleep.

My telephone jangled sometime later. I struggled up from the quicksand depths of sleep to answer it. First I heard the voice of the hotel operator, and then I heard the voice of Margo. Even though she must have realized it was the middle of my night, she gave me no chance to waken.

“I can’t believe you did it, Una. It reminds me of a whore.”

“What does?”

“You with Emile
Balfour
.”

It had hit the American papers? I suppose I should have anticipated that and called Sam. “That’s completely false. The whole thing was a publicity setup. How did you get this number, anyway?”

“I called Chance Schutz. Una, you should try to imagine how Sam feels. He’s sitting downstairs now, talking to Matt about it. We read it in the ‘Celebrity File.’”

The “Celebrity File”—a highly reliable column in the Westerly
Gazette
. “Don’t believe it. Sam doesn’t, does he?” I asked, beginning to feel alert and alarmed.

“There was a picture of you sitting at a cozy little table with his arm around you.”

“Oh, Margo, we were talking business,” I said, glad they hadn’t used the one where he was kissing me. “Let me talk to Sam.”

“Good. But I’m going to tell him you called here, okay? I think it would help.”

I thought about it. It would help get me off the hook, but it would remind me of my father and one of his buddies getting together to cook up an alibi. “No, don’t lie about it. I wouldn’t be calling now, anyway. It’s the middle of the night.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you up,” Margo said, her voice softer. “But it was quite a shock. Do you swear it isn’t true?”

“I swear. Now please get Sam.”

Silence on the line. I sat straighter on the bed and touched my cheek, which was imprinted with the bedspread’s honeycomb design. Voices still sang down the air shaft, and the elevator rumbled through the hotel like approaching thunder. I remembered the lightning storm with Sam and felt a sharpness in my chest.

“Hi there,” he said.

“Hi. I hear you saw the paper.”

“Yeah. Your sister’s pretty upset. She says you’re not the type to fall in love on a different continent every other day.”

“She’s right. The whole thing was a publicity stunt. I didn’t even know about it until it was halfway over. I should have called you.”

“You probably should have. Are you having fun over there?”

I glanced around my ugly room and my eyes filled with tears. Hearing Sam’s voice at the end of a transatlantic cable made me feel sick and lonely. “Oh, sure.”

“Did you have your audition?”

“Not yet. We’re going back to Paris when we finish the tour.” Until that moment I hadn’t known that I would want to go through with the audition. I did not like Emile Balfour, but I wanted the part. I still wanted the part.

“Well, good luck, then. Now that I know he’s not my chief rival.” Sam’s voice sounded stiff and a little tentative. He was having doubts about me. I could hear it through the wire.

“He’s not. I promise. I miss you—you can’t believe how much.”

“I miss you too. I sent a letter to your hotel in Nuremberg.”

“I sent one to Watch Hill. Two, actually. I’ll send the next one to New York.”

“It must be really late for you. You’d better go to sleep. Sweet dreams.”

“Sweet dreams.” I hung up the phone and found myself cured of narcolepsy. I began to unpack my bag, thinking about the sound of Sam’s voice, trying to determine what I had heard in it. Distrust? Disappointment? Jealousy? Regret? Or nothing? How could I know what Sam felt about me when I didn’t know what I felt about myself? The call had cured me of narcolepsy, but now I had insomnia.

Belgium is full of American personnel, both civilian and military, all potential
Beyond the Bridge
fans. Army, NATO, private industry. Chance had arranged for Jason and me to host a luncheon at the SHAPEHOW Club. (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe Homesick Officers’ Wives Club.) We would host others at SHAPE and others at NATO. We were driven southwest from Brussels on the Chaussée de Mons. Jason scribbled in his journal while I stared out the window at the warrens of houses and a ruined castle in the distance. Jason and I had reached a silent accord: we would not intrude on each other’s misery. I heard his pen scratching paper. It symbolized one of the great differences between us: Jason would immortalize his blackest thoughts, while I wanted no record of mine. I kept trying to recall the nuances of my conversation with Sam while at the same time trying to dispel them.
Had
I heard distrust in his voice, or was it simply a reflection of my
own
?
Am
I worthy of such a man, and do I want to be with a man whom I need to feel worthy of? By the time we had driven onto the massive base and stopped in front of the SHAPEHOW Club, a pretty brick building, I felt so confused I was tempted to tell the driver to take another spin around the block.

“Remember, we’re doing this for our country,” Jason said, touching the back of my hand.

“I’ll try.”

“Una, you look smashing in that black, but take a look at your eyes.” He handed me a mirror from his satchel. Peering into it, I saw the violet crescents beneath my eyes. I rubbed them out with a dab of the white stuff Jason carried at all times. Like whiting out a mistake on a college term paper. Poof! I suddenly looked happy and rested, just like Delilah Grant.

The hall contained long tables covered with pink tablecloths and centerpieces of hothouse tulips. Someone had strung a huge banner over the stage:
WELCOME BECK AND DELILAH
!!! Everyone cheered when we entered. A tall woman with short dark hair shook our hands as we ascended to the stage.

“Well, hiya! I’m Shirley Morris,” she said to us in a deep Texas drawl. Her short hair had been razor-cut—punk style. Lines of gold studs rimmed both her earlobes. I glanced around the room for the buxom, floral-garbed, tightly permed officers’ wives I had expected to see, but the crowd was young and attractive.

“Charmed,” Jason said. “Now, Una and I thought we’d make a little speech, act out a couple scenes, and show a videotape.”

We ran through two scenes together: the fight between Beck and Delilah just after Delilah learned that Beck had kissed her patient, and the love scene immediately after Beck helped Delilah escape from prison. The women loved them. They cheered us. They called for an encore, but Jason plugged in the videotape instead.

That night I read the script, entitled
Together Forever
. I took a bath, wrapped my wet hair in a threadbare towel, and, wearing John Luddington’s old dress shirt, settled back against the rock-hard foam pillows. The secrets of a hundred hotel guests whined down the air shaft. Arguments, lovemaking, dance music, bathroom sounds. They distracted me for about four minutes, but suddenly the script took over.

It was about Anya, a widow from New York. She travels to Ponci, a wild island in the Tyrrhenian Sea where people live as though it were the last century. Ponci is the ancestral home of Paul, her late husband; upon arriving, Anya instantly feels that his spirit is somehow present. Fierce wild goats and a horse named Gangster terrorize the inhabitants, most of whom are fishermen and pirates. Anya falls in love with Domingo. He is the pirate chief. At first she waits for him on the hillside, shredding olive leaves and reading Proust, watching for his ship. She adores the black pearls and jeroboams of champagne he brings to her. After a while she sets sail with him, at first observing and then joining in the plundering of yachts. Then, one night, on their way up the hill, Domingo is trampled by Gangster; you get the feeling the horse contains the spirit of Anya’s dead husband. With Domingo dead, Anya takes over his pirate vessel. After Paul, there can be no other man for her.

When I finished reading the script, I felt like laughing.
Together Forever
had a bizarre sense of humor: black humor. I was left with the sense that Anya’s dead husband was haunting her, would never let her be free. And yet, in killing Domingo, he had unleashed a bold primitivism in Anya. It was a fabulous, strange, eccentric story. I sat on the mustard-colored spread and imagined becoming Anya. I wanted that part! The events in Paris, at Palace, rushed through my mind, but now they had a different color. Instead of seeming evil and contrived, they began to serve my purpose. Emile wanted to capture the American female, and I was the person to help him do it.

Next stop: Stuttgart, Germany. Where we would meet the wives of men stationed at the Seventh Corps headquarters. On the plane from Belgium I reread Chance’s briefing notes and felt high on
Together Forever
. Just to be considered for Anya was a triumph. She was funny, mysterious, and romantic. Delilah’s fans would love her. But how could I expect to win such a part? I felt sure that Emile had promised me the audition only because he owed Chance a favor. The papers had already published that picture of us together; perhaps that was all the publicity he wanted from me. My fans would see it, rush to see the next Balfour film, with me in it or not, and that would be that. I ached to bounce my ideas off Jason, but soap opera etiquette prevented me from flaunting movie possibilities to someone stuck in the cast.

I tried to write Sam a letter, but nothing came out right. Why couldn’t we go to Nuremberg first, where
his
letter would be waiting? I wanted to see how he felt before I betrayed myself.

I turned the pages over and stared out the window.

“Well, so far it hasn’t been too painful, has it?” Jason asked when he saw that I was unoccupied. “I mean, the lunches haven’t been bad at all, and Shirley Morris was darling. I love it—a punk army wife.”

“It’s been okay,” I said.

“This will be the high point of my trip,” he said, leaning across me to look out the plane’s window. “I plan to forget Terry here. Did you know that Stuttgart means ‘stud farm’? Stud garden, literally.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” I glanced at him, amused.

“Well, be forewarned. I intend to raise hell. Fortunately I’ve visited here before, so I know where to start.”