Old Acquaintance (3 page)

GOODNESS
only knows what Turgenev would have made of Mondorf-les-Bains. In his day, if you were incurably well-to-do, you went to Baden-Baden or Spa, took your waters like a little gentleman, saw people every day you only had dinner with once a month at home, which cast over the roulette of life a certain conspiratorial intimacy, played a little baccarat, wrote
Smoke,
and if there was nothing else to do, pulled on your lavender kid gloves with some satisfaction, recognized as a reassuringly familiar sound the abrupt click of the snaps, if you used snaps, and went for a promenade. But then Turgenev had the great advantage of dawdling his life away after an actress, whereas Lotte merely was one.

She was alone in her room. She did not like that. She did not like to be alone at night in any room, which was why she traveled everywhere with a small plug-in nightlight in her purse, just in case.

She had lit only one lamp. Most of the light, and all of the chatter, came from down below, on the terrace. Outside her window was an apple tree, whose boughs were gently swaying. It must have rained here, too, for the clear air brought the apple odor up to her. She went to the window and looked out. Below its parasol of green and white boughs, the trunk of the tree disappeared down through a gray flagstoned terrace whose balustrade was topped with white geraniums in glaring white pots. There were striped umbrellas,
and from underneath them the sound of equally striped laughter.

And there, by himself, backed by the geraniums, was Charlie. It had been at least two years since she had last seen him, but she wasn’t surprised. There is always room at the top, as Webster said, but only because there aren’t many people at the top, and so you always see them again from time to time. She was pleased. Charlie’s was an old familiar face, and there were times, these days, when she just plain got fed up with the young. Besides, she was fond of him.

She got dressed and went downstairs. The best joke in this world is oneself. And Charlie had a fine infectious ability to make the joke at least seem enjoyable.

*

Everybody here was waiting for something. Perhaps some of them even knew for what, though he doubted it. But when the lull came which announces an entrance, he recognized it for what it was at once. It was Lotte’s lull, the lull you get at a children’s party, when the more sophisticated older children wonder whether they dare to be enthralled again or not this year.

It was also Lotte’s entrance. The great secret of the entrance is never to blench. As far as he knew, Lotte never had. He admired her for that: he was shy himself. She knew her role and he knew his. That helped. It was her business to make the entrance, his to be seated, so that he could rise when she appeared, and give her somewhere to steer for. Just when these characters we have are assigned to us he had no idea, but he was glad they had been, for the way to persist in this world is to excel in a character part. Indeed, we have no choice. There are no others. So when Lotte came in, obediently he got up.

Recognizing the technique, from the inevitable routines of her earlier motion picture period, she smiled, recognized him,
cut to him, cut to her, walked steadily into an invisible camera, while it backtracked toward his table, let him hold her chair, cut to chair, sat down, cut to him.

“I’ve been waiting,” he said. He spoke in English. No subtitles were necessary.

Realizing it was just routine dialogue, the audience on the terrace left them alone, and they could return to that very public thing, their private lives, in English, German, and just enough French to do the shopping with.

“I was wondering when you were going to turn up.”

“I didn’t even know you were here.”

“But everybody knows you’re here.”

“I didn’t come for the Festival.”

“I know. Nonetheless, the Festival will almost certainly come to you. They can’t very well leave you out, now can they? How was Cannes?”

“I didn’t go. They left me out. It was a Lollobridgida year.”

“It’s rather like the Chinese Calendar, isn’t it?” said Charlie. “You know. The Year of the Rabbit. The Year of the Hare. The Year of the Fox. I wonder who it is this year?”

“Shirley MacLaine probably. She’s a liberal. When the films are really bad, they always send over a liberal. It makes a good impression,” said Lotte. “The Poles get the prize with a significant story about somebody who lived in a public sewer during the Occupation, and Shirley MacLaine gets the applause. It’s fair enough.”

“And what about you?” He sounded amused.

“Don’t be an idiot. I’m not an actress any more. I’m a tradition. There’s no place in a night club for a yule log, so when they feel festive, they drag me in.”

“Humph,” said Charlie, and put his monocle in. Lotte watched this operation without favor. Women always like to pretend they were born full-blown yesterday morning, but men get stuck. The reason they can go on being boyish is that
somewhere along the line they stopped dead in their tracks. Charlie had stopped dead in his tracks about 1926. He was a journalist in those days, very much on to the new thing, the new thing being a fashionable splattering of English mannerisms. Hence the name Charlie, which had been his bar name and stuck to him. And hence the monocle. It had appeared two months after his first successful novel, and he had never given it up. It was his private jeweler’s glass to the sparkle of the rich. It was also the one really annoying prop in his own private
portrait
d’apparat.
She did not like monocles. She did not like the sickening chink when they fell to the length of their cord and hit the edge of the table. And furthermore, she was always afraid of getting a glass chip in her eye when they did.

Very few people can put a monocle in without exposing their teeth. Charlie’s teeth were a manly yellow. She didn’t particularly care for that either. He smoked too much.

A man six foot two should not use a quizzing glass, and there isn’t anything else you can use a monocle for, except, perhaps, to look at the small print on deeds of trust, or at a public, and therefore faintly hostile, phone book.

Names in one’s own private address book were usually writ large.

“Ah, there he is,” said Charlie, and looked put out.

She didn’t bother to turn around. One thing about Charlie’s young men, or, for that matter, his wives, was that though he changed them frequently, they were always the same sort of young man (or boyish woman), so that all you had to do was to learn their names for this year, and proceed as before. It made life much simpler, even for Charlie, perhaps. She didn’t know. Nor would she ever have asked. They were friends. They discussed everything but their emotions.

Or am I being unpleasant about his wives? He was married again, she supposed, though she hadn’t heard about it. Other
wise he wouldn’t have been haring round this way. Or was it still the same wife? Between wives, Charlie was celibate and discreet. It was only when he had one tucked away somewhere that he fetched his young men up out of their boltholes for a public airing.

“This is Paul,” said Charlie, obviously wishing it wasn’t. “He’s been playing golf.”

They represented a status symbol of some kind. First came the white drawing room, the Manet, and the sports car. Then came the young man. Paul, like most such, but somehow better than most, she suspected, looked half bronze Hellenistic Prince and half brown plush six-foot teddy bear. Like the others, he sat there courteously, quietly waiting, in slacks, white socks, loafers, and a well-cut sports coat. He looked shy. Being shy herself, she decided to help him out. The Pauls of this world are mannerly, soft-spoken, and very good at emptying ashtrays, lighting cigarettes, and making tactful and lonely little trips off to get more ice.

Lotte took out a cigarette, and sure enough, it was lit. When she looked up, Charlie was laughing at her.

“You always do that,” he said.

Paul did not look uncomfortable. He did look as though he had disappeared into a more congenial world inhabited only by the American Olympic Team of 1960. But mediocrity has its own standards, and they are sometimes astonishingly high. He shifted his legs lazily and smiled at her, from some security of his own. Then he excused himself. He had to change.

Charlie relaxed. He always found these first meetings a strain, she remembered now.

“Where did you find him?”

“I was playing golf.”

“You don’t play golf, Charlie.”

“On the contrary, I played it for two miserable, rain-soaked, agonizing weeks. He’s a golf pro.”

She was amused. “I thought maybe it was skiing. God help you if you ever meet someone who plays volley-ball.”

“Ice hockey.” Charlie was feeling impudent again.

“Tobogganing.”

“I’ve been tobogganing. It’s terrible.”

“Lacrosse.”

“Tennis on the whole was the worst.” He looked quite young. “Where’re your freaks?”

“I left Miss Campendonck in Paris,” said Lotte primly.

“Goddamit, I didn’t mean Miss Campendonck. But it’s good to see you. You never change.”

One way to keep young in this world is to march along firmly in the company of those you were young with. That meant Charlie. The others were scattered or dead. The war had seen to that, the war and time.

“We never do,” said Lotte. “We use up all our strength just to stay where we are.”

It was a pleasant evening, drowsy, the dusk beyond the terrace flickering with luceoles. She enjoyed herself. And when, inevitably, at the end of it, as usual, they went to their separate rooms, she didn’t mind being alone at all. For given company in the evening, after a certain age, and on the whole, we’d much rather be by ourselves at night.

Out there somewhere, below the window, in the dark, the luceoles flickered at random and inevitable as tiddlywinks by Bach. It was curious, how knowing Charlie was in his room, on the same floor, always soothed her. She had gone to sleep with this same snug feeling in Beverly Hills fifteen years ago, when he had been staying with her there.

I
T
was dawn. The sky was gray turning to chrysoprase turning to real blue, and some ring-necked doves were cooing in a pine tree. The gardener had been up early. The air was pungent with the smell of new-mown grass. At that hour it is impossible to tell whether the day will be sunny or overcast, we are too surprised to be alive. We find ourselves wheeled out of unconsciousness on a hospital dolly or a morgue tray, feet first, so clearheaded that we feel fuddled and cannot remember what was done to us in there. We do not know where we are, but only that we are there again. We made it. We are still alive. That makes us smile with pleasure, like a shy and grateful child given a candy it wanted so much, it could taste the taste of not being given it, but here it is, after all, not just any old gift, but exactly what one wanted.

Something is missing of course. We feel scooped out and we can see the stitches. But we are not missing. We are back again. We do not know the prognosis. But we are
there.
That’s marvelous.

Lotte was waking up. It took her a while, these days. Birds were singing outside and there was plenty of light in the room, in fact, too much. She had nothing against songbirds, but these sounded like a bedspring, left to rust in a vacant lot, being jounced by guttersnipes. She’d had a bad night. That pishtush about what a marvelous mechanism the human body is
is
a lot of pishtush. There’s nothing in it. That look of immortal youth takes hours. The only marvelous thing
about the machine is that it runs at all, and the better the car, the more time it needs in the garage. So Lotte stayed in bed. Under thirty your body runs you. Over thirty, if you’ve any sense and know how, you’re old enough to fight back, and woe betide you if you don’t know how.

She knew how. So she was still in bed when the phone rang. The Festival had caught up with her.

That she still had a career, she owed to being a good scout, easy to get on with, obliging, polite, generous, and you never hear a word against her, which as a matter of fact she was, and much preferred to her public image, which was of a Ninon de l’Enclos traveling in foreign parts, the beautiful lady who never says thank you. So she agreed, besides it would be one in the eye for the management at Cannes, broke the connection, and then dialed Charlie’s room. He wasn’t there. She had forgotten. He was an early riser. But usually he stayed in his room, Paul or no Paul, and worked until noon. These little toddles out into the daylight weren’t like him. She wondered where he could be.

HE
was at the theatre. Theatres had fascinated him ever since somebody had given him a purple Russian puppet as a child.

Mondorf didn’t have a movie palace large enough to house the Festival (it would award the Prix Luxembourgeois, which should embarrass the Russians a bit, should they by any chance win it), so it had been necessary to use this bijou piece of nonsense instead. The theatre had been built by a nineteenth-century
duke, at the caprice of someone like Cléo de Merode, in between kings at the time, down on her luck, but well up on the Almanach de Gotha. Charlie felt quite happy there.

When he was a young tourist he had once gone to Vicenza during the winter, that being the fiscally convenient season for young tourists. The snow had turned Palladio into a pastry cook. The theatre there, being ducal also, but from a private period, had had no foyer to the street. So he had entered that wonderland along a board fence and through a service door.

The guide had left him alone in a Monteverdi Rome built by jewelers for the use of dwarfs. He had been fascinated, in particular, by that little town in diminished perspective that could be seen through the arches of the screen, exactly as some provincial Bibiena had left it, so he climbed up on the stage and stared through the arches. “Open identical doors on identical death,” he remembered. Literacy has its uses. It is at any rate a great consolation, it provides the pleasure of consanguinity, although an arch leads not to death, but to the past. It was unexpectedly cold on the stage and all the seats behind him were haunted full. A little hesitant about not what he would, but what he would not, find back there, Charlie ducked his head and entered the past, trudging uphill over creaky, splintered boards, with painted loggias at eye level, and doorways up to his knees. As one went to the rear, the past got smaller, and going round in back, he couldn’t help noticing the past was also lath and batten work behind, in short, a Potemkin village. The same streets are sent ahead and set up for our arrival. We see what we want to see. We spend our life going down the same street, having the same adventures.

He was disappointed. He had hoped to meet interesting people back there, courtesans on cothurni, boy cardinals, and
a G.I. or two, himself at always twenty, and a man with bird-cages on his back. It was his theory that everyone who had ever wandered backstage was still there, caught like flies in amber. He had only wanted to join them. Everything we have ever lost is back there, everyone we have ever loved. But he couldn’t see them. And what was worse, he couldn’t touch them either.

Those who love us are stagier. They are not back there, but ranting out in front. Those weren’t the people he was searching for.

Ever since that trip to Vicenza, he had always thought of the past, and himself entering it, as a trudge uphill through a Roman arch, over splintered boards, through a diminished town, into a world of lovely mustn’t touch. The world is nothing else but lovely mustn’t touch, like Mr. Wilde’s fruit: touch it, and the bloom is gone.

He was glad to be alone these days. We can be affectionate only by learning our roles and keeping an appropriate distance. In a way he wished he had never walked up, he wished he did not still continue to walk up, on the present like a treadmill, slipping behind us, that Bibiena street.

The present theatre had no scena. It had only a proscenium encrusted with white plaster cherubs.

Well, that’s the way things go. The lights grow dim in the Cosmic Opera House, in this case the rather tatty nineteenth-century theatre the duke had provided. Once, no doubt, real people, at any rate, relatively real, had occupied this stage, to sing of very unreal passions. But now, instead, the space was occupied by a large, white, which is to say silver, screen, across which, this afternoon, a group of essentially foolish people would watch themselves flitter like solarized shadows through heartwarming human drama and, in one or two cases, the very best photography that art and hokum could provide.

At least in the theatre at Vicenza real people had once conducted the rites, whereas here all one could do was sit in darkness, eat popcorn, and watch the better part of Peter Schlemihl at one’s leisure.

We all know what film festivals are.

There is the magnificent Czech film which probably is magnificent, if you could just see it, for all the red filter photography. The negative has been stored in a barn for twelve years. Still, it is very moving, very intense. It will get the prize, unless the Polish film wins instead. The Polish film is exactly the same, except that it takes place in a sewer. At the end of the Polish film the hero emerges from the sewer, takes a look around, and then goes back down again. In Central Europe it is always groundhog day. All you see is the lid fitting back on again, in the middle of an empty street. This represents life. If the Poles are feeling cheerful this year, a water truck goes by. This represents hope and shows the eternal continuity of things.

There is the technically proficient costume drama from the U.S., and in daring years, a musical. The U.S.S.R. has sent along a film completely free of propaganda, but you won’t see it, because at the last moment it was withdrawn because it was completely free of propaganda. Japan has entered two films, one about a prostitute who thinks a lot, the other a horse opera about a horse who doesn’t, but it is adapted from a classic, so it must mean
something,
and the color shots of water weeds under a burning castle are well worth watching, though not perhaps for quite that long. They represent the
tangledness
of life. It was a flop in Tokyo but a smash hit in London.

There is the second film to be made in Paraguay, though with foreign technicians. The second film to be made in Paraguay, like the first, is almost inevitably about bandits. The heroine has the sullen look of a woman six thousand
miles away from Central Casting, without a telephone. There is the film the Belgians (or the British, Portuguese, or Dutch) made just before leaving the Congo (or Gold Coast, or Angola, or New Guinea), and, on the afternoon devoted to short subjects and documentaries, the film the Congolese, or Ghanaians, or Angolans, or Hottentots, made about getting it back. The Belgian, British, Portuguese or Dutch film is about folk customs and water birds. The Congolese or Angolan film isn’t. These are in color. They always get a special prize.

The Finns have sent a nature film, about winter, very long; the Swedes an adaptation from Strindberg, even longer; and the French, as usual, are being French. The rape scenes in the Finnish and Swedish films take place in the open country, to the sound of bird calls and running water. The French rape scenes take place in a bed, to the sound of heavy breathing, only. If the film is Italian, you sometimes hear some rather nice progressive jazz. You can also differentiate the entries by the heroines’ breasts. The Swedes don’t have any, the Finns don’t want any, and the Italians’ sway around with all the tethered irresponsibility of tied cheeses jerking on their strings in a high wind.

There would be five days of it, and the one thing you could be sure of, was that absolutely nobody would send a comedy, except maybe the Russians, and Russian comedies do not amuse. Charlie went back to his room. He could always pretend, he supposed, that Cléo de Merode was somewhere behind the screen, a very solid ghost, making faces and finger-shadow rabbits at an audience which undoubtedly had no idea who she had been.