Lillian on Life (4 page)

I
n those days you could wear the same outfit to work every day as long as it was presentable. I had to buy a second one, though, because I was cold. I hadn't realized how quickly fall comes on in that part of Europe. The one I bought in a shop near the office was dark green tweed. The jacket was shorter than the beige one, with heavy buttons that felt so good as I slid them through their buttonholes. They felt dependable, and hugged me securely inside. I had to have the sleeves let down, of course. The pockets on the jacket could accommodate my whole hand, and I discovered they were even big enough for the paperback copy of
The Brothers Karamazov
I had brought with me from the States. I also bought shoes. Good leather no-nonsense German lace-up shoes for walking the streets to work and back. I changed into my pumps when I arrived at Mr. Jessop's office in the morning. In the pumps I was six feet tall, and I loved it. I've never minded getting attention for my height, except from Mother. “For God's sake, put a necklace around that
thing
,” she said to me once, as I was about to go out. She was referring to my neck.

At the end of each day I put the walking shoes on for the trip home and the four-story climb to my room, formerly a maid's quarters. Once there, I took some marks out of my bag and put them in one pocket, and put
The Brothers
into the other. Downstairs, a few doors along, was a small restaurant. I would order, then open the book. I felt small again in the evenings, and horribly self-conscious. I didn't stand out for my height in the evenings, but for my foreignness.

I suppose a few words of the unbelievably complicated novel went down with my schnitzel, but I can't say I'm sure I ever digested a full sentence. It never occurred to me to toss it and get a book that suited me better. I was supposed to have read it in college, and I was still trying. It was important to me to finish it. I will one day.

I would have gone insane if Mr. Jessop's office hadn't been in the bureau where he had formerly worked as a journalist. He was all work, and the monotony would have killed me. Being in the bureau gave me the chance to interact with the interesting people working around us. One of the girls who typed for the journalists, Sofia, invited me to a dinner party. Very informal, she said, but still, I had nothing to wear, only suits. I had no choice but to go back to the only shop I knew. Whatever I bought would require alterations, and I didn't have the time to look around in other
shops in town. I'd seen other places on my weekend walks, but I couldn't remember where they were. I always meant to note them down when I got home, but I never did. And beyond not being able to imagine seeking them out, I couldn't imagine going into them. Every time I thought about entering a place where
The Brothers
couldn't protect me, I practically stopped breathing.

Bells rang when I opened the shop door and a stout
Frau
of about fifty appeared. She had a blond chignon, and up close a dark mustache as well. She wasn't the same woman from before. After a few moments she understood that it was best not to talk to me, and merely shadowed me with a helpful air as I looked at a few things on the racks. The one I finally pulled all the way out was navy blue grosgrain.
“Ja. Ja,”
she said, pumping her head. She took the dress from me and marched off to the fitting room, a door next to a set of three mirrors.
“Ja? Ja?”
she kept saying as I changed. I could get into the dress, but the fitting room didn't fit me at all. I'm sure she heard my elbows knocking the walls, my bottom jangling the old doorknob. When I came out, she looked at the dress on me and said, “Okay,” taking me by the hips and pulling me into position in front of the mirrors. At first I couldn't really see the dress at all, just her hands, which were a man's hands although her short nails
were painted a deep red. They first came around the front of my ribs to test the slack there, then tugged at the fit on my hips, then shot up to grab the fabric at my shoulders. Soon she was inserting pins here and there and here and there, and the dress took shape around me. The sleeves began right at my shoulder joint and went to my elbow. The neckline was low but showed no cleavage. The darts respected that my breasts are small but nonetheless present, especially when lifted. She lifted them decisively, pressing a hand on the skin above each one and pulling upward, placing them where they ought to go. The skirt was to the knee, straight. I looked like a candlestick, but I was used to that, ever since skirts became streamlined.

She put her firm hands on my hips and popped her head out from behind my shoulder.
“Schön?”
she asked.

“Ja,”
I said.
“Schön. Ja. Danke.”

She made it clear to me with the calendar that the dress would be ready the next evening.

Sofia picked me up in a taxi, wearing a very modern black-and-white dress, so we looked absolutely terrible together. One of us looked ridiculous, and I could only assume it was me, since these were her friends we were joining and she knew what was appropriate. Sure enough, all eyes were on me as we went through the open door at the top
of the narrow stairs. I noticed the door was a beautiful buttercup yellow, and it reminded me of home, and then everyone looked at me and I blushed from the roots of my hair to the spaces between my toes, the way I always have. It was a full-body fever, especially because everyone was sitting at a long low table, looking at my thighs then up my nose.

Sofia introduced me to our host, Laszlo. He stood up and was over six feet, and Hungarian. His heavy hair hung in shiny waves, and his eyelashes sprang away from his blue eyes as if the color surprised them. His eyes weren't pale blue like George Junior's; they were more like lapis. He invited me to sit by him while Sofia plopped down elsewhere. I folded myself in three and sat, mostly on my right hip, leaning toward him. The wine we brought was opened. Finally there was some red flowing after the endless glasses of Liebfraumilch being poured all over town. Everyone spoke English for a few minutes, but when Laszlo passed me a plate of sliced salami and told me I was so beautiful I could be a Magyar princess, it was back to German for everyone but us. There was sour German bread, and boiled potatoes, big bowls of butter, olives, pickles, and wine, wine, wine. I found myself telling Laszlo about buttercups, and he got me a pen so I could draw one on a napkin. I knew I
wouldn't be able to, but I tried because Laszlo's eyes were sparkling, even though it was a pretty napkin and a shame to spoil it. By this time I'd had to extend my legs under the table and a man and a woman having an intimate chat were leaning toward each other right over my feet. We were drinking our wine out of juice glasses. That was another reason I agreed to draw a buttercup. The normal rules didn't appear to apply. Nor did the artistic rules of proportion. I couldn't get it right. By the time we'd collapsed into giggles the napkin had a whole wacky garden on it, but not one buttercup. Laszlo invited me around again the following night and I said yes.

I left the party before Sofia. We waved across the room. The next day was Saturday, so I didn't get the chance to ask her if she'd be at Laszlo's again for dinner. They seemed like good friends; I just assumed she'd be there.

Nobody was, though. I guess I showed up around eight, and still the stairs were quiet and the buttercup door closed. There was no answer to my knock, but the handle turned, so I went in. There was only one lamp lit, as there had been the previous night, and the table was bare except for an unlit candle in a wine bottle and a heel of bread. My heart thumped so hard my ribs hurt. The insides of my cheeks
were tingling. There was a sudden clattering and whistling on the stairs and I knew it was Laszlo. The whistling stopped and the clatter increased and I knew he had noticed the open door. I took a step behind it, as if that could possibly have interrupted what was without any doubt about to take place. I heard the sea in my ears.

I saw him first, as he looked around the room. His arms were full of groceries. When he finally found me, I felt the shock waves of the shudder that ran through his body. He half placed, half dropped the groceries on the floor and took the statue I had become into his arms, asking me questions, not waiting for answers, calling me Princess, licking my face. I remember his tongue better than I remember anything else.

Such things weren't called rape back then.

I ate bread and cheese in my room the next day after sleeping late and mending the blue dress. It hung quietly next to my suits in the narrow wardrobe. I didn't go out. On Monday, Sofia came to my desk wearing a huge smile.

“Just what you needed, am I right?” she said.

“Friday night was lovely, thank you,” I said.

“Friday? Friday was just dinner. You get dinner every night. I'm talking about Saturday.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling the fever of my blush. I tried to tidy a few papers.

She waited, but nothing came out of my mouth. “Interesting,” she said. “Welcome to Bohemia.”

That night I put
The Brothers
in my pocket and went downstairs and ate sausages. This was decades ago now, but I remember that it was sausages because I stared at them for ages while my mind ran circles around what Sofia had said to me.
Just what you needed.
It was humiliating to think that she had pegged me so easily as a novice. And that Laszlo had imagined that I would come to him alone after only one meeting. But they were both right. In Europe it seemed people regularly knew you better than you knew yourself.

Mr. Jessop never learned the first thing about me, though. And he was the most boring interesting man who ever lived. I've never yawned so much in my life as I did in that little office, typing and typing, listening to him explain why he'd left something out or put something back in so ignore the cross-outs. There were times when his brown metal filing cabinet and he seemed interchangeable to me. Both were plain, both contained pure information, neither had character.

Still, my life hinges completely on that office. If it hadn't
been located there, brown filing cabinet and all, then the magazine wouldn't have known about me, and wouldn't have picked me up as a secretary for the Paris bureau when my six weeks were through. I wouldn't have lived in Paris, and I wouldn't have met Willis. I wouldn't have moved to London, and I wouldn't have moved to New York. I wouldn't have met
Ted.

S
o many people say that everything happens for a reason. I've always felt that things happen because the things before them happen, that's all. I met Willis because I wanted to sit in the sun, and that morning the sun was hitting the tables of a café that Willis passed on his way to buy a newspaper.

I met him the moment I became comfortable in France. I was sitting with a cup of coffee. In Paris, I didn't need
The Brothers
. Coffee kept me company. I was reflecting on how easy it had been to buy a new kettle, and he walked up to my table and practically shouted, “You're new. When'd you hit town, Slim?”

I blushed, but I kept my cool. I'd grown up a little in Germany. “Not that new,” I said.

“New or not,” he said, “welcome.”

“Why did you assume I spoke English?” I asked.

“It's always worth a shot,” he said, grinning. “Plus, no European woman would sit at a café with a kettle on the chair next to her.” He picked the kettle up and sat himself
down on the chair. For the duration of the conversation he held it on his lap. Every once in a while he tapped out a rhythm on it with his fingernails.

I've noticed this all over the world. There are foreigners who are aware they are guests in their adopted country, and there are others who behave like they're in a playground. This was Willis. He was a magazine photographer with an amazing eye for line, and he swept me up in his lanky, uncensored, Texan fun. He erased David. He eclipsed Laszlo. He shouted, he snorted, he roared, he applauded. He bought me a little Jaguar convertible from a friend who was leaving. It had been gently used, and it accepted my legs.

I bought myself a really attractive driving outfit. It had trousers a bit like jodhpurs, and a gray tweed jacket. I wore a cream silk scarf with it. It's a shame women have stopped tying a scarf around their heads for driving. With the right scarf, never a bandana of course, it looks so elegant. There's no dignity in tousled hair, and no one cares anymore. A bit of Grace Kelly was in all of us those days. I can't understand why we couldn't go through the sixties and free love and all that with our hair intact. I wore kaftans and I lit candles and I draped myself in beads, but I never saw the need not to do my hair. We're not cavewomen. Cavewomen don't drive.

Willis didn't give a damn about the Joneses. I wished I didn't. I still wish I didn't. I care mostly about the little things, though. I don't wear white after September. I don't serve ice cream after dinner unless the little tub is on a nice china plate. Even though I only ever make coffee in my Melitta, I still keep the silver coffee set that came to me when Poppa died on display on the sideboard. I hardly ever polish it, but it still looks right. It's important that it's there, where I can get to it if I want it. These things mean a lot to me. For the big things—what someone might call moral things, the fundamental life philosophy things—the Joneses had no part in that for me. Isn't that amazing? I can get so caught up in worrying about my hair, but the fact that the love of my life was a married man, that was no big deal. It was painful, but how society saw it didn't touch me. How my family saw it—how they chose not to like Ted—that hurt me. That hurt hugely. But the Joneses? No. Never. That's love, you see. You can't argue.

Part of Willis's attraction was his devil-may-care attitude. But when he asked me to dinner on the day we met, it wasn't his attitude that made me accept. It was the event—a gala reception for Henry and Clare Boothe Luce. She had recently become ambassador to Italy. Willis made a big deal about her illegitimate birth to a dancer, over the glasses of
wine that he bought us to drink in the sun. Then he bought me a black satin dress. “Don't you dare wear a necklace,” he told me when I stepped out of the dressing room to show him. Whatever happened between us in the next few years, I'll thank him for that as long as I live.

That was a lovely party. I felt scared and alive, and Willis started dozens of conversations for me. He'd leave me alone with people just long enough for a little chat, and then would drag me to meet someone else, in a pattern that became set in cement. Going to a party with him was exhausting. It was a crash course in socializing.

We traveled a lot too. One early summer, he had the task of photographing the three hundredth anniversary of a Provençal vineyard. We took the Jaguar, but Willis drove. Even in the passenger seat he drove, so it was easier to give him the wheel entirely. It was August, when the vineyards are green and the grapes are dark and round but not ready yet. We drove all day, leaving Paris in the cool of six a.m. People don't realize how quickly Paris surrenders to fields as you go south. It's almost immediate. And it's flat.

Willis was the kind of guy who shot out of bed like a rocket in the morning, and naturally he wanted to drive without stopping. I complained until he stopped in a village bar for coffee and a pee, and I found out where we could get
bread. I'd brought cheese and sliced ham, and tomatoes to eat like apples; he'd brought wine.

I never tire of the wind when driving, and I love the amazement you feel that it's suddenly so peaceful when you stop. I hope that is what death is like. Peaceful when you stop.

We drove for hours and hours. Willis didn't want to consult a map; he was sure he could find the place, not too far from Cassis. It was probably after two when we stopped to eat, by which time the cheese was perfectly soft. The wine cut it perfectly. Willis knew what he was doing with wine. He hadn't studied, but his arms just seemed to reach for the right bottle. We were sitting on a low hill, facing away from the road and toward a yellow valley. “I've got half a mind to take you right here in the grass,” Willis said.

I looked at him. “You talk like that and still expect me to introduce you to my parents?”

“Come on, kiddo,” he said. “Your daddy must have taken Mother in the grass a time or two. If his life's been worth living at all.”

The image was so ridiculous I laughed. Willis laughed too, and bit me on the neck. Once we were in the car again I kept thinking about it, though. It was impossible to imagine Mother and Poppa in the grass. She demanded a more
distant form of homage. But what kept me thinking was the idea that Poppa may have had someone else in the grass at some point in his life. Maybe in France. Maybe during the war. He would have been so good at it, so considerate. He would have made an effort to make sure her clothes didn't get dirty, her skin didn't get pricked or stung. He was a charming Midwestern man, and I started to get angry that Mother denied him this simple pleasure.

We arrived at our hotel in the late afternoon. The sun was strong but it was cool in the shade of the buildings. Willis parked around behind the hotel and propped the bonnet open so the poor car could cool down. I walked around the sand-colored stone building and looked at the little wildflowers growing here and there in the grass beyond the parking lot. “Go on in,” Willis shouted over at me, but I shook my head and pretended to be really interested in the flora. I just couldn't walk up the front steps and sign a lie into their guestbook. He always wanted me to push the boundaries. Sometimes what he felt was a playground was more of a gauntlet for me. So I waited. He signed us in as “M. et Mme. Willis Long” and we sat down in the restaurant for an early dinner. Another thing I like about driving is that whatever you eat when you've finished
a long journey tastes fantastic. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a green salad so much. We started with that and ate at least another course if not two, but the salad is all I can remember.

Now I've learned to travel with everything I could possibly need, but back then I kept getting caught unprepared. There was the time we went to Monaco so Willis could photograph the royal family, and we were invited to a reception, and I had to buy gloves. I didn't know that gloves had to be two inches above the elbow for shaking royal hands. At that time, the fashion was for evening gloves to be cut a few inches
below
the elbow, so I bought those. Everyone else's gloves were longer than mine. I was trembling as we approached Princess Grace. All I could think of to do was to keep my elbows tight against my ribs, so that she wouldn't notice the breach of protocol. I must have looked horribly malformed. She was wonderful, though. So warm, even though she really did look like porcelain. It was hard to think of her as real, but then you looked at Rainier's ears, and you knew she had to be. As long as one of them looked like a normal person, you knew they both were.

This time, we were invited to have dinner with the owner of the vineyard—a count—and his friends. I hadn't
even considered the possibility. I wouldn't presume. I had my driving suit, a white blouse, and a cotton sweater; that was it. The only boutiques were miles away, and there wasn't time. I didn't want to accept. Willis insisted. “Imagine turning this guy down!” he said. “God.”

“Imagine showing up for dinner in
tweed
,” I said back. He didn't understand anything.

“We could go as twins in matching white shirts,” he said.

“Ha,” I said. “Even tweed is less offensive than clowning.”

“Tweed it is, then,” he said, and shot me with his fingers. “Gotcha.”

I had spent the day reading and strolling, and had to wipe the vineyard dust off my shoes. I did what I could with my hair, and put my eyeliner on very, very carefully.

The stone of the château gave off the accumulated warmth of the long summer day. We were greeted at the door by a butler, and Willis slapped him on the back as if they were old pals. I wasn't sure I knew how to behave, but I knew absolutely that Willis
didn't
. The valet escorted us along smooth stone floors, between cool stone walls. I was painfully aware that my comfortable flat shoes weren't making the
tip-tap
sound of a woman on her way to an
elegant dinner, and then we were ushered into a large room full of people and flowers. The evening sun reached straight in through the windows and made everyone look healthy and content. The windows looked down over the vineyards toward the village. A fine-boned older man in a double-breasted jacket, open-necked shirt and cravat turned to welcome us. He looked like David Niven. His smile was so large he must have found us very amusing.
“Enchanté,”
he said, and so did I, and Willis slapped him too. Then Willis recognized someone, and strode over to greet him. The count took my elbow and guided me to a linen-covered bar by the cold fireplace.

“I'm so sorry about my clothes, Monsieur le Comte,” I said.

“Henri,” he said, “please,” and passed me a glass of his rosé.

“Delicious!” I blurted, sounding as if I were surprised.

He laughed. Of course I blushed. I wanted to apologize but I couldn't form words. Putting down his own glass, the count asked me if I'd do him the honor of sitting next to him at the meal. He made a sign to the valet, who immediately opened the doors in the far end of the room, and took my elbow again.

The dining room was exactly as I would have imagined
the dining room of a French château. I checked off everything on my mental list: white linen, crystal glasses, silver cutlery, dark wood, wall hangings. Add to this half a dozen crystal vases of white roses and lavender placed every few feet along the immense table. We were eighteen for dinner. We arranged ourselves and sat. Willis was on the opposite side, farther down, between two women of a certain age. The sun was coming straight in through the windows, and I could feel the sweat trickling from my underarms into my bra.

Gentlemen ask you questions about yourself and look like they find the answer very interesting. When I told the count what I did, he said, “A fine assistant is a precious thing.” He asked about the magazine's methods for gathering news from behind the Iron Curtain. I certainly didn't know much, but I talked anyway. He continued listening actively, then said, “Don't worry. It will come up, the curtain. They will miss our wine too much.”

“Oh,” I said, “I'm sure those who drank it before are still drinking it now.”

“Precisely,” he said.

By this time we were eating lobster. A pair of white-gloved hands kept appearing between us and replacing the
previous course's plate with a clean one before I'd had time to finish. On the other side, another pair of gloves expertly served the next course between two large spoons. I wanted to eat but I was struggling. Between talking and enjoying the wine I couldn't really apply myself to the food, and then they took it away. I noticed the count didn't finish anything either, but where it may be elegant in a host I felt sure it was offensive in a guest. My napkin was covered in lipstick and upper-lip sweat.

And then the waiters came in with sorbet, little glass bowls of sorbet arranged in a circle around the decorative tops of pineapples. Each of us received one, and a pretty glass of calvados as well.

The count was talking to me as I looked down at my spoon, wondering if I could force myself to pick it up.

“This is what we call a
trou normand
,” he said. “A Norman hole. It's something to clean the palate between very different courses. Traditionally it should be an apple sorbet, but I adore pineapple. Please.” He indicated that I should go ahead and taste it.

I hate pineapple so much, it might as well have been a delicate serving of blood and hair. I tried to smile but it made my lip tremble. I looked at Willis, desperate for him
to recognize my predicament and get on his white horse, but he was deep into some tall tale and had too much of a head of steam to switch tracks.

He looked so happy. Stalling was my only option. “Please go ahead, Henri. I must excuse myself for a moment to use
les toilettes
.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, standing, signaling to the valet. “Take your time.” God knows I would. I'd stay long enough for the sorbet to melt.