Old Acquaintance (4 page)

BECA
USE
she wanted to ask a favor, a thing she did not like ever to ask of anyone, Lotte had climbed back into what she always thought of as battledress, the normal costume, that is, of a frail, defenseless, indefatigable, spritely woman of fashion, soundly rich; in other words, the little black dress, three strands of pearls, and the kind of slim spiked heels that always look as though they could kick in your skull and had.

Then she knocked on Charlie’s door and was told to come in.

“Oh, I thought you were the boy with the drinks,” said Charlie, coming out of one of the inner rooms.

“I didn’t know you drank this early.”

“I don’t. But I always hope someone will bring me one, all the same.”

Lotte sat down and looked around her. In the years she had known him, Charlie had never asked her to the house. This was because he didn’t have a house. Or if he did have one, his current wife was living in it, and he was not. What he did have was an art collection.

Wherever he went, hotel room, three-room suite, such as this was, rented apartment, or villa by the seaside for the summer, the art collection was the first thing unpacked, though, with two exceptions, its contents varied, depending upon how horse trading had gone that year.

The first exception, and the first thing to be unpacked, anywhere, was the small Boudin. Once the Boudin was propped
up somewhere, Charlie knew he was at home, gave a grunt, took off his coat, went into the bathroom, had a shower, and rang for a highball. That Boudin was indispensable, even when he was staying in a private house. Everyone who had ever entertained him knew that. The pictures in any room he slept in came down. The Boudin went up.

Once the highball had come he lit a Camel, stared at the Boudin, lit another Camel, and then unpacked the other indispensable possession, which was a shallow dish about eight inches in diameter, a shiny white soft-paste fourteenth-century Korean semi-porcelain of the Yi Dynasty. He used it as an ashtray, and it always had to be on the night table beside his bed. She’d seen that ashtray and that Boudin on a cheap Greek tramp steamer, in a cowboy hotel in Wyoming, and at the St. James et d’Albany, as well as in her own house. Wherever he was, he wasn’t happy unless that dish lay beside his bed at night while he slept, like a pale, acquiescent, reassuring moon.

That is, he called it an ashtray. What it really meant to him she had no idea, but she did know he never allowed a cigarette to be put out in it, or any ash to fall in it, either. For that he used a cheap square glass thing instead. The one time she had used it, he’d fidgeted for a while, and then, with a wry self-deprecating smile, had gone into the bathroom with it, wiped it clean with a damp face towel, and brought it back.

“Nobody’s ever done that before,” he’d said. He hadn’t been angry. But it was the closest to scared she’d ever seen him.

She understood the Boudin well enough (it represented stylish ladies and gentlemen, standing about on the beach at Trouville, just out of reach of the sea. It was the usual Boudin). He’d bought it with the first real money he’d ever earned; he’d been wretched, poor and anonymous when they were both young together in Berlin; and no doubt it represented
the sort of ideal family he’d never had. But the ashtray, except that it was beautiful, was beyond her.

There were a few new things.

“They’ve asked me to make an opening speech,” she said. “Will you play escort, Charlie?”

“I told you they’d catch up with you. Yes, of course I will. Besides, I thought you knew. That’s why I’m here. They made me a judge.”

“Made you a
what?
”

“Well, they could have done far worse,” said Charlie, who was not good at scripts. “It’s like the law. If you’re incompetent enough, naturally, people feel you’re impartial. So they make you a judge. Besides, I’m a
name.
In fact, sometimes these days, I wonder if I’m anything else.
‘Nomen
et
praetera
nihil,’
you know.” He liked to quote Latin. It gave things a fine sacerdotal imprimatur. Of course he didn’t do it accurately, but he did it just as well as the average parish priest. The secret of being able to speak any foreign language with assurance is never to speak it to the natives. And since the Romans were all dead, he felt safe.

“It’ll be like old times,” he said. “We’ll fob Paul off with a starlet. I was going to do that anyway. Are you sure you came here alone?”

She didn’t answer that.

“A pity,” he said. “We could have thrown them together. The younger generation, you know.”

Yes, she knew. But she, too, had been thinking about old times.

“It’ll be like the public performance. I always did enjoy the public performance,” he said.

So had she. Besides, it was always nice to see Charlie in a good mood, though his bad moods were funnier.

It was a little wistful, the public performance, but he was right, she had enjoyed it. It had started years ago, in the mid-thirties,
in Hollywood, which is to say, in Culver City, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Malibu, in those places which are not Hollywood, but for which the name Hollywood must do.

She had her own way of dealing with reality. It had been foisted on her, originally, in the old days, by the studio, when she had been a constant star; and a star is a glamorous woman, a star must have romances, those being the days before every woman of the first magnitude had been forced to adopt two children to keep her box-office rating up. So the studio had provided romances, with a sort of weary patience. At first the technique had made her furious. But as time went by, she had gotten to enjoy it. She counted time as “the year I appeared with Gary Cooper.” “The year I appeared with Gérard Philippe.” Or whoever it was. “The year I told them to go to hell and went everywhere with Charlie.”

For stars are supposed to have romances only with other stars. Being a woman-of-the-world type, as she had explained right back at them, when they asked who Charlie was, she had been able to make the studio swallow hard and say, yes, it was all right for her to be seen with ordinary people, that is, people not stars, so long as they were in some way eminent. She had swallowed even harder, smiled her faraway smile, and agreed with them.

She had really enjoyed it, that eight months with Charlie. It had been a little idyll, the appearance of how reality should be, and at the same time, one had been spared the good-night kiss at the door, and the foot in the door, too, if it came to that.

He had been discreet about his young men. He had been glad to take shelter with her. He had presented his young men only as a cat presents you with a dead mouse, to prove it is of some use, even though its heart really isn’t in mice at all.

It made a change from reality, that visit, and had looked well in photographs. Charlie had been good at the game. It was a game he played himself, with his wives. He knew exactly what the game consisted of. He finished his drink at the house, before the previews, and said not, “Shall we go?” but “Shall we go on now?”

He was a dilettante. The romance of acting had always enthralled him. He knew what to do, if not quite how to do it, for an American audience. That hadn’t mattered much. As the glamorous woman who comes from somewhere else, she had been allowed some latitude. She wasn’t supposed to fit into American folkways, she was supposed to flaunt them, though no more than they could stand. Charlie, as the equally good European novelist who knows how less wholesome people live, had been quite acceptable.

It was such a saving, those public romances the studio provided. It saved one from feeling. It allowed one to pretend there was something more to life than work, and investment properties in Sherman Oaks, after all.

Charlie had been the ideal house guest. He never appeared in that high-ceilinged, pseudo-Spanish living room until one was willing to appear in public oneself. And he knew the exact irony of the public romance.

They had fun, plotting what they would do and say, and who would photograph it and write it down when they did. And here it was, for a moment, back again, that period. Here it was back again, except for Paul.

Since she liked him so much, she had studied Charlie. Charlie was the black-faced comedian at the carnival fun fair. He sat there, on his board over the water tank, longing for someone to hit him so he could be shot down into the water, get the suspense over with, and come up blubbering the way Bert Lahr used to do in burlesque. It always happened
eventually. She winced at the thought of that. When it happened she would have to deal with it. She preferred him dry on his board.

“Nemo
repente
fuit
turpissimus,”
she said, just to show that, though everyone but Charlie had forgotten it, she was not of good, but what was more important, of respectable German family, her father the perfectly ordinary professor at a perfectly ordinary German gymnasium. It was something she found it difficult to remember herself.

“Juvenal,” said Charlie. “I suppose you came early in order to check the lighting?”

That was a dirty dig. Close friends always spade the dirty digs. They are allowed that freedom. “No,” she said, “but I will.” And went to change.

And she would, thought Charlie, and always had, for there is a
deus
ex
camera,
as well as a
deus
ex
machina,
and hers had descended, on a boom, in an aureole of klieg lights, many years ago, bringing riches and youth, and that wonderful final privacy, the flickering emotions of a purely public face.

THERE
is always something surrealistic, and therefore tawdry, about evening dress in the afternoon.

said Charlie, watching the first arrivals, and thinking about Genesis. At previews the precedence is reversed: first into
the Ark go those least likely to survive. Supporting players come next. And then, the stars. After the stars, like the blue plush pallbearers in
Pinocchio,
come the technicians, the friends of friends, and others responsible for the interment of the Blue Fairy. Also bankers, financiers, international celebrities, and ex-Queen Soraya, who has been known to go to as many as three movies in one day, in the same manner as the taffeta duchesses of the sixteenth century went to mass. Their confessor, in this case, was the columnist, their court painter the photographer.

Movie people might not be enjoying themselves at the time, but they always wanted to see the photographs afterswards, for in the photographs they were enjoying themselves, you could tell by the smile, that constituted proof. These people used photographs the way other people use mirrors, to see if they looked all right, and for the sheer joy of being able to see themselves at all. It was bird and cat, all the way. They went on with what they were doing, until some sixth sense told them a shutter was about to click, and then they turned to smile.

It is the great class symbol of our age, the public smile. The famous wear it for the photographer, the way Spanish noblemen wore black. In portraits of the past, nobody smiles but tarts and imbeciles. It was the age of character. This is the age of personality. Therefore we smile. If we do not feel pleasure, we can at least show it. It isn’t an emotion that smile, it’s a rictus.

Therefore Charlie smiled. He and Lotte made a noticeable couple. They always had. He was grateful to her for that. His fourth wife, when she saw the photographs, and she would see them, his fourth wife saw
all
photographs, would be annoyed. Charlie, photographed with his wives, always looked like a slightly embarrassed big-game hunter standing beside somebody else’s lion. With Lotte, the appearance was different.
Then they themselves looked like lions, placid and safe, in their own private Kruger National Park.

The afternoon was sunny but cold. Mondorf was too small to allow for the usual parade of limousines, but it took place anyway. The theatre was a detached building without a
porte
cochère,
though with a portico, and since it lacked a drive, was accessible only across a flagged path flanked by lawn. The porch was supported by Atlantids of the blubbery, squirming kind which always look as though they had just taken worm pills when what they really needed was a breast pump. Quite possibly they symbolized something. But then, quite possibly, so do we.

Mondorf is not a heavily populated community, even during the water-taking months. Thus, no doubt, the explanation of the film festival, but it made for a thin audience, so that the guests looked more as though they were trailing disconsolately away from a party at dawn than as though they were the life of it, arriving strategically late.

Ahead of him walked Mr. and Mrs. Herman D. Blatz. A film distributor. They were a ruthless couple. When she divorced him, he divorced her. That showed you how ruthless they were. Things like that show a real hate. Last time she had asked for custody of the family Bernard Buffets (over forty) and a half interest in the Cézanne watercolor. That had given Blatz a bad scare. Nowadays he collected Riopelle. Nobody is going to ask for a half interest in your Riopelle. The Nicholas de Staël was safe, too, for Nicholas de Staël doesn’t rate for beans in America, where most of their divorces were held.

Paul walked behind with his starlet. She’d never get anywhere, but her furs were good. They made an attractive couple, though their perfumes clashed, and Charlie, who had an acute sense of smell, was annoyed about that. The starlet
was using something heavy and sweet. Lotte would never have made a mistake like that. Lotte, at her most careless, never smelled of anything stronger than sun-warmed windfall wood, smooth and clean and light-struck among the ferns.

Though the rest of her might not be, her smile was real. He was touched. It hadn’t occurred to him before, that she was
really
glad to see him again.

Since he felt the same way about her, the realization of how she felt made him feel a little lonely. They had the wrong kind of sophistication, he and she. It cut them off from everything that wasn’t real. Which is why we pretend all the time, he supposed. Or rather, why we pretend to pretend, which is sadder.

He had forgotten her smile. He always did. What he remembered of her, and of very few people in this world, if you came right down to it, wasn’t what she looked like, but what she was. That nonsense jingle about Genesis did very well. “What
is
the rest of the world to do?” And yet we go on doing it.

The little procession swept into the portico and left the lawn about the way it had looked before.