Seducing Ingrid Bergman (10 page)

She stands out, not because she’s tall, but because she has a perfect face, with everything symmetrical, and this perkiness bursting from her chest as she waves. She’s wearing a simple print dress, her hair curled, with a vivid strip of lipstick like a danger sign across her mouth.

I press through the crowd to get to her. I look her full in the face, give her a winning smile, take her waist in my arms and kiss her. She resists at first, leaning back, but then slowly closes her eyes. Her mouth opens and the sensation is glorious, floral. Though I don’t count the seconds, I’m conscious of kissing her for longer than Ingrid kissed her GI.

I clamber back onto the jeep. I can still taste the salt of her kisses on my mouth. I reach for the cameras, take them from Ingrid, knowing full well that she’s been watching me with the same appalled attention that I reserved for her. The straps tangle again as she tries to unburden herself too quickly.

‘Did you enjoy that?’

‘Did
you
?’ I say.

‘You made your point.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I didn’t realize it was a competition.’

I fasten the cameras back around my neck. ‘I thought we were just having a bit of fun.’

She doesn’t look at me.

‘You’re not angry, are you?’

‘You want me to be?’

She still can’t bring herself to look me in the eye. She stands straighter, readjusting her collar, subdued for a moment, but she soon recovers her toughness, lifting her chin. She recommences singing, accepts another extravagant bunch of flowers. The actress in her emerges in a determined smile.

I check the focus and start taking photographs again.

For the next few minutes we are careful to ignore one another.

I try to concentrate on getting some pictures. But the jeep jolts a lot as it battles through the crowds and I struggle to keep my balance. One dizzying lurch coincides with a moment when a big white cloud hurries over a tall building. And it seems for one terrifying instant, the way I see it through the lens, as if the building might fall on top of us.

*   *   *

We get back to the Ritz in the late afternoon. The bar is crowded, teeming with people, with no place left to sit down.

There’s a kind of defiance, a mania even, in Ingrid’s wish to celebrate. A desperate edge laces her suggestion that we work our way through the cocktail list.

The glasses grow sticky in my fingers, the taste of the liquor over-sweet.

Ingrid is combative, fuelled by the drink. ‘How do you think the French feel,’ she says, ‘when the GIs whistle and offer stockings to every pretty girl they see?’

‘Can you blame them?’

‘When people are starving, and Allied officers dine free?’

‘You eat pretty well.’

‘I pay my way.’

‘You can afford it.’

‘When there’s no fuel, yet military jeeps are everywhere.’

‘Is that why you leapt on your GI earlier?’

She turns on me, a fury fed from within. ‘You think I don’t see through you? Your pathetic attempt to get even, your childish effort to prove yourself?’

I hold a silence.

She almost spits at me. ‘It’s about time you grew up.’

‘That’s good coming from you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Someone who spends her days making
The Bells of St Mary’s
while the rest of us fight a war.’

‘You think it’s more grown-up for a man to click a camera?’

‘While you behave like a schoolgirl on a dare?’

This stings her, I can tell. She gathers herself, leans forward. ‘I know your game, Capa. You do your best to appear light-hearted but you don’t fool me.’

I finish my drink. A last ice cube slips into my mouth. I crunch it noisily between my teeth.

Her lips tighten as if crushing a bubble between them. She rolls the glass between her hands. ‘You act like life’s a joke. You shrug things off and move on, to the next girl, the next war, the next poker game or whatever it is you do to pass the time.’

I can see from her braced look that she fears I’ll mock her. And she’s right, this is my instinct. I ask her if she knows what it’s like to be arrested, if she knows what it’s like to be beaten, what it’s like to be shot at for no reason – or worse, because you’re a Jew. Instantly I regret it.

Her eyes are shiny as she drains her glass. She says no, she doesn’t know what that’s like, but she knows what it’s like to lose a mother at three, her father a few years later, and she knows what it’s like for men to treat her as though they own her, and she knows what it’s like to feel adored by people all over the world and still feel empty inside.

I sit there blinking while the tirade breaks like the ocean over my head.

‘Can’t you be serious for a moment?’

I match her defiance. ‘What do you want to be serious about?’

She slams her glass down on the table. ‘Anything,’ she says.

‘Are you trying to frighten me?’

‘I thought you were fearless.’

‘I’m scared of
you
.’

‘You see?’ She slaps the table.

‘What?’

‘There you go again.’

‘I try to make you laugh, that’s all.’

‘Well, maybe you try too hard.’ She looks around as if conscious for the first time in a while of other people, and the fact that they might be listening. She begins chewing her lip with worry.

‘Ingrid, can I ask you a question?’ I say. ‘Why are you here?’

She regards me dumbly.

I speak as softly as I can. ‘Why aren’t you home with your family?’

The hardness in her eyes melts into what seems a vengeful pleasure. ‘Tell me, Capa,’ she says. ‘Where’s home for you?’

*   *   *

With the firecrackers going off outside, we go on in silence to her room. She doesn’t invite me up, I just follow. And when she sees me coming, she does nothing to stop me, just tells me to grab a bottle of Evian from the bar.

From the window of her bedroom, we look out. People are on their balconies, watching a small fireworks display flash like summer lightning in the dark. For a few minutes, we listen to the high crack and watch the scattered stars and rain of gold-dust falling everywhere.

Back inside, we leave the shutters open. Ingrid asks me to draw the curtains. She switches on the bedside lamp.

The room is hot and seems glazed after the cocktails. I pour two glasses of water. The carpet takes on a stretchy quality, a special vividness of its own.

She’s going to ask me to leave now, I’m convinced, and I try to think of something to say, some way of rescuing the situation, some way of restoring good faith. But then she does something I don’t expect.

I watch as she removes her tortoiseshell grip and shakes her hair beautifully loose. It spills like a liquid onto her shoulders. Then, as though performing the simplest operation, she begins undoing the buttons of her blouse.

The glass of water is still in my hand. I feel its cold weight in my fingers. Without warning she moves towards me, extending her arms, laying them flat across my shoulders.

Trembling, shy, she looks at me.

Accidentally the glass touches her belly. She flinches a little. Involuntarily she shivers, half-closing her eyes. Her lips pull apart with a moist tug of flesh. ‘It’s cold,’ she says, with the beginning of a giggle.

I put the glass down.

Her perfume wafts at me, wild and magical.

I lift her hair and press my lips to the shadowed side of her neck. A rose colour deepens across her throat. Her whole skin changes tone. My hands reach inside her blouse, my arms encircle her waist.

She puts her head on my shoulder and hugs me. She says that I’m her gypsy newspaperman, that she’s glad she met me, and glad to have shared this day with me in Paris. She’ll never forget it, she says.

‘You’re far too lovely for me,’ I tell her.

‘Don’t say that.’

‘It’s true,’ I say.

‘You’re the brave one. I just pretend for the cameras.’

‘Are you pretending now?’

She looks at me and confesses, ‘I’ve tried pretending. It didn’t work.’

Cast down, her lashes are so long, I notice, they almost touch her cheeks. When she looks up, her face lifts out of shadow. Her eyes are slices of paradise.

Shifting her weight onto one leg, she reduces her height by several inches, lending her an air of submission. The dabs of red on her lips and cheeks seem a leaking through of something brilliant from beneath.

As she tilts her head upwards, a sweet scent is released, a mixture of lipstick, perfume and another nameless odour – a distillation probably of her skin. I sense the swell of her breasts, feel the inward female flare of her hips. At the base of her neck, I notice, are these tiny blonde hairs, a down so delicate and golden that I want to cry out.

My hands rise inside her blouse, steady as though holding a drink, brimful. My lips are within an inch of hers. I feel the warmth of her breathing. Her eyes close slowly. Her mouth opens and we kiss.

My fingers enjoy a sudden mad freedom. There are straps to negotiate, stocking tops to unroll, webs of elastic and silk to unravel. With a snap, the long light weight of her is exposed. And there she is, bright as a light-bulb, with that electric texture to her skin, a fine-grained pallor that seems almost unearthly.

‘This isn’t supposed to happen,’ she says.

Shame becomes a vapour in the heat. I sense something widen inside her, a warm space open, soft and shapeless.

Through the curtains the lights of fireworks splinter, drizzling in a fan of vivid sparks. The room shivers with each new explosion, the window shakes in its frame, and there’s a kind of animal snarl on her lips as she whispers to me to make love to her, please – except the way she says it is not so ladylike.

Her body stretches to a thinness, golden. Blindly her eyes slide upwards. The room tips in the direction of her neck.

I sense her fall through space with a luxurious shudder until the waves in her subside, and the different colours of the fireworks mix with the festive energy inside us as the two of us become one, all the colours turning suddenly to white inside my head.

For the rest of the night, with my eyes shut tight in silence, I feel the tiny pressure of her breath, delicate, trembly, like a bird’s feather on my neck. And from somewhere deep inside me, her smell – locked up and stored as though for a long time – is released like a perfume, and I just sink, the way water does sometimes without warning over a ledge, into the deepest, sweetest sleep.

*   *   *

Like snow that falls in secret during the night, then presents itself vividly in the morning, it’s wonderful to wake up and discover Ingrid next to me, sleeping. She lies with her arms spread above her head, braced as if for a fall, her hair mussed and fanned across the pillow.

In the dim light of the early morning, she seems the only thing that is real. And waking next to her, my heart feels crowded. I’m afraid of nothing. I can feel myself breathe.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘I’m feeling.’

We look at each other lying together, arms touching, in the long mirror. My head feels different, as though a space has been cleared, and I don’t care what anyone says or thinks because I’m happy. I feel like I want to run and fly.

In the bathroom, I look at myself in the mirror and wonder how I came to be here with her in this place now. If I’d been told this was a possibility even a week ago, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The pipes sing with the luxury of hot water. The taps sparkle. Steam issues like a blessing from the long white mouth of the tub.

‘If I’d known, I would have brought a book,’ I say, when she enters the bathroom minutes later.

‘What book?’

‘
War and Peace
.’

She tuts. ‘
Anna Karenina
is much better.’

I watch as she twists her hair into a bun and pins it. She takes a small bottle from her toilet bag, drops its contents like a magic potion into the bath. A sweet smell lifts to fill the air. She swirls the water until it froths. Then she steps right in, one foot testing the water, the other following. She slides in opposite, her legs astride mine, her arms stretched along the sides of the tub.

The water swings for an instant, rises. She sinks down, lifting the bubbles to her nose. Suds slop over her breasts. And when she sits up again, skin glistening, the water spills from her body like torn silk.

I think of Tolstoy’s women as the glossy tops of Ingrid’s shoulders shine above the water. Her knees form small islands. Her throat grows rosy from the heat.

She slips one foot onto my thigh. I run my finger along the scribble of a blue vein on her ankle, then feel the toughness of her heel, the tautness of her calf, the hollow at the flat back of her knee. The muscles twitch in her long clean limbs. Her eyes close slowly.

Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have done much reading after all.

*   *   *

Irwin can’t believe it.

‘The answer to your question,’ I tell him, ‘is yes.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘It’s true. I swear it.’

‘You’re bullshitting me.’

‘It’s your fault.’

‘Mine?’

‘You told me to be nice to her.’

‘So?’

‘So I was.
Very
nice.’

‘All right, then,’ he says. ‘What does she have for breakfast?’

‘Guys like you,’ I say.

I glance up to see if there’s any detectable change, any afterglow or far-flung radiance staining the sky above us. There’s nothing. Just the usual sunshine, the birds in the trees, pretty women in floaty dresses, and the tinkle of cups and saucers in the café.

Maybe I’m mistaken.

Did I imagine it? It does seem incredible.

Maybe nothing happened after all.

*   *   *

Ingrid has felt this mixture of fear and wonder before.

There was that exercise in the Stockholm Theatre where she was told to close her eyes and fall backwards, trusting her partner to catch her before she hit the floor. She recalls the instant of fear before the sensation of sinking blindly but faithfully through space. And she remembers a school visit to the caves at Lummelunda: the guide leading them down into the echoey cavern, the walls slick with moisture, the shape of the rocks menacing but beautiful in the electric lights. The guide asked if anyone had experienced darkness before –
real
darkness. She wondered what he meant by that. A starless night in the country? The dark of her bedroom once the curtains were closed? ‘When I say
real
darkness,’ he said, ‘I mean
absolute
darkness, the total absence of light.’ The guide then counted down dramatically: 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 – and switched off the lights. Ingrid wasn’t sure for a moment whether in her fear she’d closed her eyes or not. She tried opening and shutting her eyelids but the effect was the same. She could see nothing. Dense and impenetrable, this was a different order of darkness to anything she’d experienced before. And the silence, too, was unnerving; it was as if no one breathed. She wanted to reach out and touch someone, to make sure that the others had not deserted her, leaving her in the cavern alone. It was then that a bizarre thing happened. First of all, the silence was broken by a dripping sound, which sounded loud and close even though she knew it was probably far away. And then more fantastically, her eyes staring wide, she began to see something. Within the darkness, slowly there began to appear little blue glints, pale glimmers of blue light. Was this a flaw in her eye, an optical illusion, a visual trick? No, she was convinced it was something outside her, a mineral brilliance, a glitter coming from inside the rock, and the bits of blue began to burn like tiny stars in the dark until, without warning, the lights were switched back on and voices filled the space of the cave again – nervous, excited, relieved – as at the end of a great play.