Old Acquaintance (6 page)

“
WHAT’S
she like?” asked Lotte.

“What’s who like?”

“The current wife.”

Charlie was willing, in general terms, to talk about his young men. He didn’t like to talk about his marriages. They were one of the few things in his life he was ashamed of.

“My first wife I went to bed with; my second wife went to bed with my young men, she saved a good many souls in her time, I can tell you that; and the third I don’t know anything about. The current one lives in Switzerland. Which is why I’m here. She collects antiques. Stocks and bonds mostly.”

He had forgotten his monocle. He seemed to miss it.

“Oh,” said Lotte. It was one of his set pieces. She could remember the first wife, vaguely, a mousy, boyish, unobtrusive little creature who had thought Charlie a genius, and had no other interests in life at all. She didn’t even seem to mind the young men much. In those days they had all been young together. As for these divagations, they had been the thing to do.

… and later, the one thing one could not help doing. He never referred to her. But Lotte did know that even now, when he was lonely, he sent her money. When eventually she had given up hope that he would come back, she had remarried. She had also aged. He refused to see her.

Number two had been Jewish. She was dead now. You heard her records, sometimes, authentically scratchy, in the
houses of fanciers of the early 1930’s. Whatever magic they had had was long gone. And number three?

She couldn’t remember number three, either.

But number four had been going on for a long time now, almost six years. It was because they seldom saw each other, she supposed.

She thought she understood. She should not have teased him by bringing the subject up. And so she turned it, like an old dress, and the other side did quite well.

She asked about Paul to prevent Charlie’s asking about Unne.

The truth about the Unnes in her life was Lotte’s best-kept secret. The way to protect one’s virtues is to assume a mask of vice. Then everyone is so mollified to have an excuse to think the worst of you, that they are quite content to leave you alone. She had tried women, of course. When we are young and bored and rich for the first time we try everything. But she hadn’t cared for that sort of thing. Now she just kept them round for company, which was what Charlie did, she suspected, with his young men. Her young women were rather like Charlie’s wives, in a way, except that she didn’t have anything anywhere quite to match his young men. But she, too, wrote checks when she was lonely, to people she preferred not to see.

There was Bill, her accompanist, of course. She was fond of Bill. But as for emotion, she had carefully locked that away in a box years ago.

AT
one-thirty Unne came in to ask if they might go swimming. They could have lunch by the pool. It was sunny enough to do that now. Paul had gotten them a table.

“You like that young man, don’t you?”

Unne looked flushed from hurrying upstairs, except that Unne never hurried.

“I think he’s quite nice.”

Lotte recognized the answer-to-an-awkward-question-asked-during-a-tea-party tone, but ignored it.

“You know what he is, of course?”

“Oh, my goodness,” said Unne. “People aren’t what they
are.
May we go?”

Lotte thought about it and then said yes.

*

The swimming pool was the usual fashionable fish fry, with slim bodies well oiled, under a sun like a cooking lamp, baste every half hour and turn. Only the young go in the water. Their elders are warier and come down only at dusk.

Charlie sat at a white enameled cast-iron table, sucking the lemon from his Collins glass, holding it clumsily the way a boxer does between rounds. He wore nothing but some gingham plaid swim trunks and his monocle, which dangled beside the Greek coin he had picked up somewhere as a periapt. He had kept thin and trim. All the same, at his age, no matter how good the trim, what you really look like is a
half-unfolded camp cot, with the canvas wrinkled at the folds. But he could have looked far worse. Lotte couldn’t feel that Paul suffered any great hardship, less, certainly, than the average starlet had to put up with.

She herself was not exposed. She had taken precautions. If you are famous for your legs, that usually means your legs are too thin. Otherwise they wouldn’t photograph well. The only person famous for his legs who had legs that were too thick was Nijinsky, and he, as we all know, went mad. Also, as you get older, you get sinewy. The phrase, if she remembered it correctly, was “stuck together with spit.” So though she had nothing against swimming in her own swimming pool, Lotte did not think it wise to go swimming in an outdoor pool surrounded by starlets draped in the manner of an Ingres bathhouse. So she wore slacks.

She sat there and watched Charlie suck his lemon. They’d had crab for lunch. Luxembourg is too far inland for crab. It didn’t sit well.

Paul, stripped to the waist, was exactly what she would have expected. He had a swimmer’s body, a broad chest, and was muscular in the right places. Like most such people, he didn’t so much use his body as wear it, like a very well-cut suit of clothes, with the air of negligence which comes from being sure of what one has on. Such people never look naked. They do look as though they had another body, somewhat more human and rumpled in design, under the actual body they are wearing. Paul must have done weightlifting at some time in his life. He had the weightlifter’s manner of being his own artifact, and a connoisseur at that.

Unne looked exactly what she was, well-bred all over, without a seam anywhere. She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit, not from any sense that a bikini was vulgar, but from a birthright certainty that it was not quite her sort of thing. Nor was she wrong.

At the moment both of them were in the pool, splashing each other decorously.

“How are you?” asked Lotte, feeling on the back bench herself.

“Avuncular,” said Charlie. “As always, avuncular.”

He seemed to mean it. He must feel safe. If Unne was with Lotte, then it was safe for her to be with Paul. Charlie wasn’t jealous of people, only of their doing something he couldn’t. Paul couldn’t. That explained that.

The afternoon went by.

Paul and Unne clambered out of the pool and went off hand in hand toward the bar. Charlie looked after them mildly.

“
Nemo
repente
fuit
turpissimus
,” he said.

Lotte burst out laughing.

“Well, I like Latin,” he said. “It dignifies our griefs. Of course I have to use a crib.”

“They seem to get along well enough.”

“When I’m grief-stricken,” said Charlie, persisting, “I always use a crib.”

“Very well, what does it mean?” He had completely forgotten, she supposed, that she had used it earlier.

“No one ever reached the climax of vice at one step,” said Charlie, with satisfaction. “Juvenal. I found it in a book of quotations. I thought at the time it might come in handy some day.”

“They’re just taking a walk.”

“I can’t tell you how many walks I’ve taken in my time that ended exactly the way I wanted them to. Of course now I have to walk a little longer. But still….”

“Charlie, really.”

“Really what? If you pose as a Don Juan, everybody’s down on you. But if you pose as an unsuccessful Don Juan, everyone
envies the effort and sympathizes with the failure. That gives you more freedom.”

For a moment she was startled. It sounded so much like her own reasons for these little public games.

Charlie stared at the startlets in the pool. Apparently he still felt benign. “You know, when they bail a few more of the guppies out, I think I’ll go in,” he said. “I haven’t gone for a swim this year.”

But when the guppies were bailed out, he didn’t go. He looked a little lonely.

ALONG
the road, about fifty feet from the pool, two horse-faced people in riding habits, black coats, fawn breeches immaculately cut, and very expensive boots, pedaled by on bicycles. To ride is essential. To run the car at unnecessary, which is to say private, moments is merely expensive. Luxembourg is like that.

“Where have they got to now?” asked Charlie.

“Who?”

“Paul.”

“I think he’s telling her about his childhood, from the look of them.”

“Nonsense. I know all about that. He didn’t have one.” He looked at his discarded lemon.

“It
is
hard to remember, isn’t it?” he said.

“What?”

“What one was like.”

“I never try.”

He took that in good part. “They’ve got a funny film at five,” he said. “Come along and see it and let’s leave them here.” Apart from being a judge, he was also an inveterate, though not incessant, movie-goer. He even watched the documentaries. Boning up on scenery, he called it.

DOCUMENTARIES
were scheduled in the late afternoon, on the theory that anyone who goes to documentaries wouldn’t be helped much by a drink at seven anyway. First on the program was an American short, badly transcribed from a video tape, of William Faulkner, looking rather like Tom Thumb, talking to a Negro. Both the Negro and William Faulkner seemed mad as hops, which, considering the photography, was understandable enough. This was followed by a color film in which some Javanese threw a goat into a volcano. It meant something ethnically, and fortunately the volcano had been extinct at the time, though it was a pity about the goat. This, in turn, gave way to something abstract from Canada, to prove that the twentieth century had reached the 49th parallel, and now the Canadians were sending it back. Then the feature came on.

“Ah,” said Charlie.

It was a French scissors-and-paste job called
The
Golden
Years
. It began well with a glimpse of Sarah Bernhardt, looking battered but immortal at the funeral of a friend, carried in a litter, with a rug over her knees. She may not have been
an actress exactly, but she had been able to have quite a long audience with the world, all the same.

There had been nothing particularly feminine about the Divine Sarah, who at seventy still looked like a boy cardinal. About the world’s great enchanters there seldom is. There is always something subtly androgynous about them.

Lotte found herself watching with absorbed dismay. If I had been born a hundred years ago, I suppose I should have been her, she thought, though she always wanted to become the Divine Sarah, and I became the Divine Lotte merely by accident. The Divine Sarah looks maternal, and wasn’t one scrap. Whereas I don’t, and am always worrying about my secret chickens, hatched or not.

There were other differences. Once Sarah discovered Sardou wrote perfect parts, she marched him off and kept him locked up on a diet of breadcrumbs to write them for her. Sarah played Juliet at sixty, Phèdre to please the critics, Hamlet whenever she felt like it, and herself all the time. Whereas I am merely allowed to impersonate myself impersonating myself in a film now and then, and Charlie has never written anything for me at all. They just bring me a Lotte part from time to time, like a pair of old galoshes they found somewhere, and are they mine?

The Divine Sarah was followed by the less Divine Mistinguett, and by Maurice Chevalier. As we know, for the French have told us so, most celebrities and all life’s golden moments are, by their nature, French.

So naturally, when the film turned black, it turned German. The worst thing that can happen in Paris is that we may not have charged the American tourists enough. There were some brief clips of flappers shopping. How quickly women used to walk in the 1920’s, as though what they wanted was just ahead of them, and they had to catch up before
it got away. Then came the serious bits. Despite all improvement in communications since, the French have never quite given up brooding about the consequences of the Ems telegram, and so there were long clips of the Germans being punished for Sédan, Alsace-Lorraine, and, presumably, like the rest of the world, simply and justifiably for being non-French.

So they had to watch shots of the inflation period (she could remember it. It isn’t pleasant for a professor’s daughter to have to borrow a pair of stockings and sing in a cabaret, to eat); a glimpse of Stresemann, looking like an indignant, well-bred Lenin, but also like her father (he had not approved of cabarets, her father); Bolshevik rioters fresh out of the closed factories; and other symptoms of world disturbances never to be found in France.

“Here we are,” said Charlie.

She didn’t know where. It was only another shot of rioters being beaten back by old-fashioned policemen in funny hats. She didn’t like to watch the 1920’s. It was too much like riding the bucket back down the well. When she was about six, out in the woods, ahead of her parents, in the must-have-been autumn woods, because she could remember the leech cling of the damp brown leaves, she had stepped through the rotten cap of an abandoned well, fallen, and struggled down there up to her waist in she didn’t know what, for what seemed hours. That was what her own youth meant to her.

Then the clip Charlie had been waiting for came on. She didn’t like that either.

She never watched her past. She always wanted it to be now, always now. But there she was, in the film that had made her famous, plump, bleached, awkward, raucous, in an enormous fuzzy wig that looked the way it had felt, undignified and horrible, when all she had wanted was dignity, comfort, safety, and decorum, the things she had now. The things, it doesn’t
matter how we feel, which we must never lose, no matter what we have to pay for them.

She shut her eyes. She did not want to be embarrassed by that flabby ghost. She did not want to see how it envied her. She did not want to remember anything. She just wanted it to be now.

The film came to an end after a while. They went out into what was left of the day.

She should not have come this close to home.