Country Girl: A Memoir (39 page)

Because I never went to university, I always found the environs of any campus forbidding, what with all those bicycles and lockers and gowns and anonymity. In the classroom itself, I was conscious of Vladimir Nabokov’s unbending proprietorial judgment, berating the “buxom best-sellers.” The other teacher that came to my mind was Joyce, with his dilatory methods, swerving from one subject to the next, the courtesans of ancient China and the pregnancy of the Virgin Mary.

I would read to my students at first, something stirring, the escalating glee of Iago’s jealousy, or Faulkner’s biblical parables of the Deep South, but they were more eager to have their own work read and did not take too fondly to my reminding them of Lorca’s edict for the writer: “true poetry, true effort and renunciation.” One of the students was Walter Mosley, who was eager to learn, whose tastes were eclectic, and who understood the tug and traction of a perfect short story. It intrigued me long after, when he had published his famous Easy Rawlins series of crime fiction books, that I had called him aside one day and said, “You’re black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing, there are writing riches therein.”

On the days when I did not teach, I corrected the students’ work, wrote the reports, and then walked around New York as I had never done in any other city.

Sometimes it was as if I saw ghosts, or certainly saw things that other New Yorkers had not seen. Once, I was on my way to
Traveller
magazine, which at that time was on Madison Avenue near Thirtieth Street, when at a corner I saw a group of black men, wearing caps, silent, elderly, all with sticks, waiting, as I believed, for an appointed onslaught. There was something so apprehensive about them, standing there, like avenging figures from the Old Testament, waiting for their doom.

Often I would repair to the seventh floor of the Home Section of Bergdorf Goodman. It was filled with treasures: tables, coffee tables, tallboys, whatnots, exquisite plates, glasses, ivories, cranberry bells, a veritable palace that my mother would have reveled in. One day on the escalator I sighted an outfit in the fashion department and immediately jumped off at the next floor to have a look at it. Designed by Valentino, it was a beautiful green silk georgette with pale, embossed rosettes of gold. I went week after week, watching, waiting for the price to be marked down. Each time I returned, I was certain that it would be gone, but it wasn’t, it was waiting for me. Then one week it reached a figure that, though still exorbitant, I could just afford. To my dismay, it was a two-piece, when what I wanted was a jacket without the matching, skimpy miniskirt. A manageress was called. She was Chinese and smiled bafflingly at my pathetic request. Eventually, for seven hundred dollars, the jacket was mine, and as I held it, in its folds of wrapping, I might have been holding my trousseau. On the seventh floor, I sometimes imagined what it would be like to be a wife, a wife of privilege, that is, with several packages, being escorted to the
side door, where a chauffeur would be waiting to take her to a white house, upstate—the gravel nicely raked, the wide lawn bordered with cedar trees, onyx lamps at “his and her” sides of the enormous bed—but then I would remember the stories of John Cheever—rancid marriages, drink, infidelities—and my daydream would come to an abrupt end.

It was in a lamp shop that I had my next little adventure. For some time I had been admiring an orange lamp, the glass shade of which had the delicate droop of a toadstool and was dotted with brown speckled spots. It would not, I reckoned, be too awkward to carry home. Eventually I went in to inquire the price. I was greeted profusely. The young man, in a black suit and black suede shoes, moved with a stealthlike ease. He was Middle Eastern, and his voice was very quiet, saying what an honor it was to have me drop by.

Presently he was reeling off his credentials. He had been to Cornell and afterward to Harvard Business School, but his real interest was the esoteric. He ran the store only to please his old man. When he heard that I was a writer, his interest quickened. He had stories to tell, stories that would make my hair stand on end. Hinting at a racy past that might easily have slipped from the pages of
The Arabian Nights,
he said that if we got to know one another, he might share some of these adventures with me. We could collaborate: his vast experience, my craft, wow, man, we could have a movie deal. The lamp was mine. For nothing. He was no tomcat, no sir, he could have all the ditzy blondes he wished for, all the alimony junkies who hung around, except that he had taste, he had soul, and he had the esoteric. He was suggesting that he and I go across to the Plaza Hotel, where he kept a permanent suite, so there would be no hassle at the desk with passport or ID. The suite was massive, two bathrooms, and the color scheme was soothing. I began to envisage scenarios. I would be in a kimono, oyster silk, eating Turkish
delight or sherbet off a wooden spoon. I would be the Emma Bovary that Woody Allen put into a short story, who, having got a taste of the high life, refused to go back into the novel and commit suicide. Then again I would be a corpse, zipped up in a black plastic bag and brought out by the servants’ entrance. He saw that I was hesitating, and presently I was the proud possessor of two lamps, which he would have shipped to London. The second lamp was green, the green of a grotto, and I imagined them on a table or a desk at home, winter evening, gray London light, and those bewitching lamps with veins of color rippling through them.

Being as I was from the “old country,” he listed the several blends of Irish whiskey in the Plaza cocktail cabinet, and how agreeably the time would pass, listening to music, sipping our cocktails, and getting to know one another. He was so close to me now that I could see the lettering engraved on the gold medallions that hung on his dark chest. The whole experience, he could promise, would be etched in my mind forever. It was on the word “etched” that I got shaky. I made for the door and he followed. We were now outside, his voice barely audible, because in the adjoining doorway a man with cats and a litter of kittens, whose station it was, was holding up a cardboard sign alerting passersby to his pitiful circumstances.

I was sometimes invited to do readings in different states across America.

In a revolving restaurant in Duluth, I saw that it was snowing outside, and I felt like someone trapped inside a paperweight. “I will never get out of Duluth,” I said to myself, and I watched the traffic down below, seeming to go at a snail’s pace, crawling, as it were, along the several lanes, the headlights so
wan. Bob Dylan had left Duluth just as Scott Fitzgerald had left the wheaten steppes of Minnesota, though he modeled Gatsby on a local tycoon who built the railroads joining the Great Lakes with the Pacific Ocean.

I had been invited to give a reading in a college that was a few miles outside the town, the invitation so beguiling that I found it difficult to decline. Reality was different. Duluth and its big lakes were for oceangoing vessels and not for me. Earlier that day I had had a walk down Main Street, a main street with its sad, sullen aspect, like main streets all over the world. In the porch of a church, along with various flyers, there was an announcement for a song competition, the winning prize being a trip for two to New York to see the musical
Anything Goes.
There was the Red Bull Inn, from which not a single sound emitted, and, farther along, a queue of men waiting to give blood, for which they would receive a stipend of two dollars a pint. I pitied them, just as I knew that they would despise me for my pitying of them. They wore wadded jackets, quiet men, dour men, the kind of men Bob Dylan would write a great, lonely lyric about.

Something had happened after my reading that unnerved me.

I kept being told that it was “outstanding,” and the word circulated in the room where a party was being held. It was very genial. The women wore long skirts and sensible shoes, and there was a selection of salads and dips, along with white wine and mulled red wine in a jug. I was drinking the red wine when an eager young student asked me why I had been so unforgiving of my mother in my fiction, and lo, the glass of red wine literally floated out of my hand and I no longer felt outstanding. I can still see the little crimson puddle on a white rug. A message from beyond.

Up there in that revolving room, I thought of all the writers
who had written about snow: Nabokov’s snow-smothered estates, Hemingway’s evocation of the creaks that the skis made up in the Austrian ski slopes, John McGahern’s drops of blood on a wounded owl, dragging a steel trap across snows, and Sylvia Plath’s line “The snow has no voice,” except that it had: it was telling me, as it castled beyond the several panes of window, that I would never get out of Duluth. Four days later I did.

It is true to say that on my trips away from New York I felt somewhat stranded. In Los Angeles, where I had gone to meet producers who had taken an option on my short story “Paradise,” I was more or less confined to a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, taking the odd stroll in their tropical gardens. I received large bouquets of flowers, but met nobody, and in the adjoining bungalow a man with a loud voice would ring his stockbroker in New York very early each morning and give a bawling out to the person at the other end of the line.

My forays into the film world were intermittent. In 1963, after I had left my husband, I had worked with Desmond Davis on
Girl with Green Eyes
and found it so happy and congenial that I used to walk up Curzon Street in the evening, looking forward to the next day’s collaboration. Sometime after, I was invited to do a brief stint of rewriting on a film in Rome, with the director Damiano Damiani. Our method of working was this: I would write each day, and each evening he would come to the Hassler Hotel, having read the previous day’s work, and in a charming but resigned way, he would hand me back the pages and say, “I think it is an herror.” Eventually, in that same lobby, the producer called me aside to say that my services were no longer required and my successor was being escorted to the table where I had just sat.

For the adaptation of Andrea Newman’s
Three into Two,
directed by Peter Hall, in which Claire Bloom, with beautiful restraint, played the deceived wife, Frances, I worked with the
American producer Julian Blaustein. Each morning, when I arrived at his flat in Chesham Place in London, he would hold up a white card, always with the same perplexed question:
“What is the motivation of Frances’s vagina?”
I didn’t have an answer.

It was in London one bright, solitary Saturday evening that a surprise call came from John Huston, whom I had not seen or heard from for at least ten years. There he was, with that inimitable, persuasive voice, inviting me to Puerto Vallarta to work with him on a script. I was jubilant. It was a novel by A. E. Ellis called
The Rack,
and there, in the heat of Mexico, I would hope to construct love scenes set in a sanatorium in the deep snows of Switzerland. The script sessions went well, and Huston was full of praise at first for scenes that I had written. He would arrive each morning about eleven, like a high priest, in a long white tunic shirt, coughing on the stairs. He was followed by his dog Don Diego. From the maid, Lupa, I knew that Don Diego could tear a person to pieces. At the canine school to which he went, Don Diego had been taught certain key words, which when spoken were the cue to go for the jugular. It was not always easy to concentrate on script matters, seeing Don Diego’s rhubarb gums and dark molars, knowing that if, by the merest fluke, I uttered one of those key words, I would be a goner. Not that I could mention it. Huston loved animals and only respected people who also loved animals. “Honey, I can’t stand cowards” was a refrain I heard many times.

Things went well for the first month, although I almost expired in the heat and was covered with various creams and sprays to ward off the mosquitoes. I had been relieved of all my possessions, so that my wardrobe for the remaining ten weeks was scant, not that it mattered.

For his birthday that August I had managed, with what I might only call clairvoyance, to find the only two bottles of
Dom Pérignon in all of Puerto Vallarta. Huston came with his much younger girlfriend, Mariella, and it proved to be one of those enchanted nights. He was at his most expansive, as he talked and reminisced, recalling his affection for certain actors, but especially Bogey and his father, Walter Huston, calling him “Dad, Dad” with the sentiments of a young man. He talked too of the house in Ireland, St. Clarens, and the Galway hunts, the paintings of Juan Gris, and the first time he saw Bernini’s
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
Sometime later he began to reverse his opinion of the script, vehemently and relentlessly. Scenes that he had admired, he now hated. Dialogue that he had said was written “only by a spirit” was now useless. “What is this, honey, what is this half-baked rubbish?” he would ask, and I became so unsure, so certain of my own failure, that I could not tell if “Hello” was a good line or a disastrous line. After he left each day around lunchtime, I would indulge in a bit of weeping. Lupa asked why I was crying. In halting Spanish I said I was crying for home and for my children and for roses. It sounded somewhat pretentious, but my vocabulary was limited. The next morning she arrived with three roses that she had stolen from some garden on her way to work. Three roses, wilting in the heat. We put them in a tumbler of water, and when Huston came for yet another tense session, he noticed them, saw their depleted condition, and asked, “Which of these is you, honey?” I pointed to the most limp of the three, at which he chuckled and said, “Oh my my, you do yourself a disservice, I think you’re that one.” His voice was low and conducive as he picked another rose, only to see the petals fall one by one in his hand with the whiteness of milk. Four more blistering weeks to go.