Twice Told Tales (7 page)

“I’ve read your Hemingway story,” I told Noah. “I see why you’re so high on it.”

“You’re not supposed to see that,” he said. “You’re the younger waiter.”

“No imagination … ?”

“No sense of the danger of ordinary life. But you’re not thirty yet. You can still take it easy for a while.”

“Tread water?”

“That’s the idea.”

Then I told him, “Ivan wants me to do a project with him.”

We were in Berlin, having a drink at the Kempinski, an awful spread-out, lobby sort of affair, but it was where the Berlin Festival people all stayed. I was on sabbatical; my little film on the French actor had been entered in the festival, had won nothing, but I had been noticed. That felt like winning.

“Ivan,” Noah said. “My God, he’s going to start with Ivan. You never go by the book, do you?”

It was an old complaint. I’d never done anything by the rules … I played the piano passably well but only by ear … I went to three colleges which is to say none that I ever completed … I played tennis with the club pros but I had my own weird service and no topspin.

“Ivan,” Noah said. “I’ve had to do with Ivan a few times.” I was supposed to understand everything from that. And then, “Playing with Ivan the one thing that might be worse than losing—is winning.”

Years passed, more than a decade, marked by the confusion of work—even of love. I made a good deal of money but kept little of it and was married once and kept little of it, not even a child. Ivan and I had some success. It became important for me to realize how different I was from Noah. I didn’t want to tread water while he swam the mysterious Industry Crawl. I didn’t want to play young waiter to his older one. Yet
nada
was nothing to me. That part was accurate. I had always slept well. Perhaps because the men in
my
family have always lived into their eighties. Chronic low blood pressure.

Even when I got into the tight spot that changed everything—I took money from the production budget to cover personal expenses—even after Ivan found out and the L.A. District Attorney’s office came into it—I slept well. And when it became clear that I was not going to go to jail, even though everything was now changed, my only regret was Noah. He’d borrowed some money from me; some trouble with one of his children had found him short of cash. And I was concerned that something pure in Noah, something clean and well-lighted, might worry that he had unknowingly borrowed stolen money.

We had it out one evening in L.A. It started over vodka Gibsons at Chasen’s. There was a waiting line even if you had a reservation and I could tell Noah was not at his most patient that evening. I couldn’t tell if it was being kept waiting, or just L.A. itself, in which Noah never felt comfortable. Perhaps it was me and the scrape I’d just gotten out of.

“I guess you’re not going to have any real trouble about it,” he said.

“Well, they’re not going to press it hard.”

“Too many of Ivan’s friends have done worse.”

“I don’t need a whitewash,” I said.

“We need a table. But in the meantime let me say that I am glad you will stay free—I cannot envision you in jail—and I am not going to mention it again.”

An hour and a half later we were both in the L.A. County Jail. Noah’s edge had gotten sharper and sharper as the line got longer. Finally the headwaiter stood an inch too close to Noah while telling him the usual lies about how long the wait would be and Noah hit him. He didn’t push him away—he hit him. We’d both been drinking more than usual—I’ve noticed you drink more standing up than sitting down—and we’d been kept standing too long. Also, I’d been waiting for months to find out if I was going to prison and Noah had been waiting to find the true story and then the line at the restaurant—one delay too many.

“Well,” Noah said, amused at last that evening, “interesting place.”

“Unexpected.”

“Thus interesting.”

“Ivan’s lawyer was trying to make it quite interesting until we all agreed on things. But here I am in jail, anyway,” I said.

“But thanks to
me,
no thanks to you,” Noah said. “I’m used to places like this.”

“You?”

“Well, not lately and not real jail—Army jail …” And he told me the story of the snowy weeks in Bastogne before the big German attack and how his redneck sergeant got the fixed idea that Noah was a Jew and that it was important for Noah to admit it or deny it. Noah would not tell the son-of-a-bitch that he was part Indian and part Lutheran and the sergeant found many excuses to jail Noah for this or that offense but finally they had to fight it out the day before the German attack came. And they rolled on the floor of the latrine and even though Noah was losing—or so he said—the sergeant pulled a knife on him, slashed his face, and at least Noah got to go home.

By the time he finished the story I was quite sober but he seemed still high, sitting in the stone corner of the cell waiting for my lawyer to find us.

Something in me, though, was not sober, not quieted. Being white middle-class citizens we were not really in jail. My lawyer was at home when I called, so we were in jail as much as if we had been in a car accident in some ambiguous circumstances. We spent an hour and a half in a vast grimy waiting room—but it wasn’t much different than the big, wooden-benched waiting rooms you see on jury duty. It was not prison to people who might have to know prison. Oddly, the only specific details I remember are a puddle of indeterminate origin at the entrance to the waiting room, the extraordinary surreal height of the judge’s desk, and a man in a grey pin-striped suit with a vest, who read a newspaper with great calm. I assumed he was a lawyer but when he stood up and was taken away I saw that he was handcuffed to the policeman who’d been sitting next to him.

Later, in the Polo Lounge Bar I said: “Okay, now I know how you got that scar.”

“Okay, now you know.”

“That sounds like there’s something much more important that I
don’t
know.”

“I’m sorry I hit the waiter.”

“He wasn’t a waiter. It was very important to him that he wasn’t a waiter,” I said.

“Don’t do that, boy,” Noah said. “I don’t need any credit for hitting him. It was a dumb thing to do. And I don’t need any credit for being cut by the sergeant in France, either.”

“My God,” I said. “How did we land there, in such a place?” I shook my head.

“We didn’t,” he said. “We’re here, drinking brandy.”

“True …”

“We never actually land anyplace,” Noah said. His voice was a little too loud for the bar, the evening, the circumstance. “We don’t live in places.”

“Oh?”

“We live in time. One of the best-kept secrets. Middle-class nomads all. Think of all those cities—and if you’re in a city that is not your one city it becomes a matter of hotels and bars. Now if you’d stayed in Madison, Wisconsin, where—” His sip gave me license to interrupt.

“Where my father and mother live their lives—their places …”

“At least Ivan never shows up in Wisconsin. The trouble might never have happened.”

“It didn’t happen. I
did
it! I took the money. And it took being kept waiting for a table to make you hit me with it.”

“No,” Noah said. “No, no, no, I never used it and I won’t now …” But something made me sorry that Noah had told me about the sergeant and the scar. I don’t know exactly why but they seemed connected to the intense words about place and time which had given way to a simple reproach for having become, for a brief moment in a careless way—a thief.

“I’m just as bad,” Noah said. “What you lose is the starting place. Maybe that’s why it pissed me off so much, Cipriani keeping me waiting—Harry’s was one of my homes—and that’s a stupid confession to have to make, that a bar or a restaurant can be like a true place.”

He waited long enough for me to contradict him. Or long enough for me to realize that the poor maitre d’ at Chasen’s had received the punch begun in Venice so long ago. When I said nothing he put his glass down and stood up. It was the first time I saw him unsteady on his feet. He looked down at me, somehow disappointed. Perhaps because I’d gone so far away from my starting place. But that may have been only my regret of the night pasted onto Noah.

“My place,” he said, “is that little Hemingway story. A Clean Well-lighted Place …”

I was disgusted.

“Balls,” I said. “You haven’t even got that story straight.”

“It’s hard to get stories straight,” Noah said. “But at least mine is small, cut down to scale … Four pages … an old, suicidal drunk and two waiters one young and confident, one old and uncertain …”

“Uncertain, sleepless,” I said. I knew what I was doing.
“Because all the men in his family die young.
That’s crap …”

“It doesn’t matter if it is,” Noah said, “my young friend …” His old familiar tone was back for a moment. “It’s all part of my story. Maybe you should get yourself a story.”

“I thought I was in yours,” I said and moved my hand, almost invisibly, for the check. I wanted this to be over. Noah looked strange.

He said: “If a story is the only place left, then we sing our songs for ourselves, past present and sometimes there’s more pain in a pop song than a sergeant’s knife …”

I listened coldly, never having seen or heard Noah out of control before, as if the simple fact of hitting a headwaiter and being in a jail again, even so briefly, had broken the skin of old wounds, wounds I would never know about.

“… the weird light of Los Angeles,” he was saying, “though I can’t think of a place less likely to invoke angels. Okay, I’ll stop the jokes since you’re not laughing … I’ll talk about your soul … it lives only in bars because its birthplace has been lost and its destination is not known … so instead of a place it has time … a bar has closing time a place does not …”

“Noah,” I said.

“No reason to be embarrassed my friend, or to interrupt … I will sleep easily tonight … nothing is nothing tonight …
nada y nada pues nada …
here in the land of billboards plugging new records by new rock groups … I don’t think it has to do with the making of money or the spending or the very temporary jail … it has to do with the permanent absence of a place in our lives, yours and mine … (Noah’s disjointed monologue was no longer going unnoticed—two young women in hard-glinting metallic dresses were trying not to stare) … time is a desert and one is always thirsty in a desert … and making movies or money or love is all the same in time … and that,” Noah paused and touched his eyelids one after the other in mysterious ritual pause, “… and that is somehow too equal and easy. Something,” he said, “should be wrong …”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s all right, Noah. It’s over now.” He sat down next to me for a moment, then stood up, restless, nervous again, his face flushed to the tip of his aloof brow. Had I walked in just then I might not have recognized my old companion.

“Don’t count on that,” he said.

“I m not.”

“I know,” he said.
“Nada.”
I was tapped out of sympathy, the tirade had exhausted my patience, not quite fair since in decades of bar-meetings Noah’s style had always been spare sober, dry as Vermouth. But tonight my body was tired and my eyes ached from looking away.

Having had my fill of this new fantastical Noah, I stood up and beckoned for the waiter. Okay, I thought, I took the wrong road, I took the money and now I can’t take this any more. And we left that bar with a brief skirmish in which I insisted that I drive Noah to his hotel and the doorman could have Noah’s car brought around in the morning, but Noah said no, he was fine and I drove off first not wishing to see him leave.

We lost track of each other. I fled to Rome; everything seems distant and muted in Rome. All those ruins. Noah’s Hemingway movie remained unmade. It was a quixotic notion given the nature of movies, of the story, of Noah. I heard that he was now in the U.S. trying to set up an American production company.

I started hanging out at the bar in the Inghilterra, starting, too, the foolishness of trying to write stories. It was clear I was not going to make any more movies, with or without Ivan. So I haunted the Inghilterra. It was small and dark. The best bars seemed to be getting smaller and darker in spite of Noah and Hemingway. But it was several generations after Hemingway and the consoling darkness of interiors may have replaced the comfort of light, cleanliness, and order.

The Inghilterra bar was too small, because at that time I wanted very much to hide and observe and small places are exposed. But for some crazy reason, after my time with Ivan I wanted to watch writers like Moravia and Calvino come there to drink and argue with their stout publishers in stiff blue suits, white shirts, and dotted ties, dress they wore even in the summer Roman heat, and to watch the writers being interviewed by skinny, sweatered young journalists with portable tape recorders and cigarettes burning forgetfully down to their fingertips, the young people drinking strange semialcoholic drinks like Fernet-Branca and the writers drinking highly alcoholic ones like Grappa. No solitude here; no matter how early in the day I showed up there were always patrons; but the action was gentle, literary, about all I could handle in my convalescent condition. It was as if I was borrowing strength to learn how to stay with thinking up stories, learning how to live cheaply and ignore the seductions of money and petty power which had gotten me into trouble in the first place, just as Noah had warned me, and I had to borrow this real or imagined sense of integrity in a small foreign bar among people whose fame and authenticity was heightened by their speaking a language I understood little of but whose music and gestures I loved.

I had money put aside for maybe one year, and after Italy it was going to be France, partly because on a quick trip to Paris I met a woman at the bar at the Pont Royal, where you walk downstairs and it’s all somehow terribly serious and formal though it’s a long time since someone like Camus drank there. (You don’t stay at the hotel upstairs because the hotel people are cold and rude, but the bar is merely cool and there are times when detachment is desirable even essential.) Meeting this woman there—the only time I have ever “picked up” someone at a bar—colored what happened after that. She was just the kind of woman you meet, if luck holds, when the
nada
arrives and feels as if it will stay. It worked out well until one day she accused me of being disappointed; not such a terrible thing to say on the face of it, but not such a good thing either if you felt the way I was feeling.