Old Acquaintance (7 page)

THE
evening was quiet. It usually is. The nocturnal amusements available to us are curiously few. We could go to bed with each other, of course, but after thirty this is seldom exciting, though we do it anyway. We can read, but we seldom have the right book. Cards and gambling are available to the inarticulate. There are night clubs. Conversation is best, but so few people really know how to talk. We can dance.

“Dance away the night,” said Jerome Kern, in one of his more touching and thus less popular songs, “and we’ll all be together at the dawning.”

Would we were. At dawn we fall asleep.

It was a charming song. She would have liked to add it to her repertoire, but it was too late to do so now. Now she only sang the faster numbers.

“
HAS
it occurred to you,” said Charlie, “that we have more time to ourselves than we had in the dark backward and Abysm of, say, three days ago?”

Yes, it had. She was lonely. She would have felt fed up to the gills, if she hadn’t enjoyed the role she had to play in this world so much.

“It’s rather convenient, it gets us off the hook,” said Charlie. “Not only does it solve an always awkward social problem, but it leaves us with some time to ourselves. In fact, come to think of it, too much time. I’m even beginning to catch up with my reading again.”

It was Charlie’s habit to read in bed before going to sleep. It was also his habit to drink coffee in bed, alone, in the morning, until he could move. After two weeks with anyone he began to get restless, until he could reestablish both. This had ruined his sex life, as he often said, but it had kept him sane. He always returned to his routine, like a traveler who, no matter what he has seen along the way, is relieved to get home to a place where he knows where everything is.

He couldn’t help it. The allurements of the flesh are all that count in life. Everybody says so. He said so himself. He even believed it. But he preferred reading.

It was his misfortune to be attracted to young men whose literacy was limited. Otherwise he might have settled down with one of them and never remarried again at all.

The real time for playing around is the afternoon, but since he usually worked all morning, by afternoon Charlie
was too tired. What he wanted to do then was relax. So there simply wasn’t any time for these people he spent so much of his time tracking down.

It was an anomaly. But whatever would we do without reading? Without reading we would go mad.

Lottie, who did most of her reading in the afternoon, was beginning to get restless. She was beginning to count the days until the arrival of Miss Campendonck and the rest of the clowns. Still, she had to admit that Charlie was taking it well. She was relieved. Not, however, as relieved as all that. What, if anything, was going on?

Together they went down the stairs to the lobby. That film had bothered her. It brought things back. And the lobby here had the same movements left and right, the same entrances, as the lobby of the old Adlon in Berlin, where she had first met those American producers, thirty years ago, who like all flesh-peddlers had been explicit about which part of her they had wanted, not to buy, but sell.

She would always be grateful to her first director for having told those gentlemen not only what she had to sell, but for having the decency to consult her in the matter. He had been homosexual, of course. In that business, if they treat you with any respect they always are. But such people have a lesson to teach: they alone know the commercial value not of what we are, but of what we aren’t. Her first popularity she owed to those lessons in the androgyne, for though men liked her, it was women who went to her pictures, and American women long to be a father to their sons. She had taught them how.

To that ambiguous image she owed everything. But ever since the Adlon, hotel lobbies had made her nervous. She didn’t know why.

CHARLIE
was puzzled. Something was going on, but he didn’t know what. So, as usual when he was perplexed, he played dead.

As far as he knew, nobody had ever seen this game but his sister, and his sister was dead now herself. There was nothing even remotely sinister about the game. On the contrary, it was one of his favorite ways of being privately happy. But to an outsider it would have looked odd, therefore he was careful that no outsider should know about it.

When he was about six, and his sister eight, they had both been impressed by the lying-in-state of their Uncle Felix. Not only was Uncle Felix the only rich member of the family (he had been a city councilor), but they were the poorest members of it, so poor that until his death they had never been asked to Uncle Felix’s house. Uncle Felix was their Dutch uncle, and lived beside one of the statelier canals in Amsterdam. The body was laid out in the front parlor on the left. Never before had Charlie been in a house that smelled so good, of silk upholstery, polished maple, and a fine waft of cooking odors from the kitchen in the basement as they went in through the ground floor. The corpse had looked so contented and sleek and well fed, lying there with pious hands, under the dream of all warm winter comforters, the sort of comforter Charlie had always wanted on his own cold bed. The room had flickered in the companionable glow of gasoliers. Candles burned quietly in important candelabra. Nobody had looked in the least worried, or cross, or put out,
and before the coffin was closed, the children had been sent down to the kitchen, where the cook had stuffed them with
sauerbraten
(it had been waiting in the crock for Uncle Felix, and was a little overripe, but they weren’t told that), with potato pancakes, the best
sauerbraten
and the best potato pancakes Charlie had ever eaten.

The respectable old Dutch families use the front door only for funerals. Otherwise they go in on the ground floor, through an arch under the front steps. Charlie had always been annoyed by that piece of protocol. Of course Uncle Felix wasn’t Dutch or even respectable, but he could afford a respectable Dutch house, so when the coffin was closed, the pallbearers took it out through the first-floor front door, and then down the steps. It meant a lot to Charlie. If you were dead you got to use the front door. Not otherwise.

So when they got back to Berlin, he crawled up on the sofa, in the badly furnished front room, laid himself out, and got his sister to light the kitchen candles, while he lay there with piously folded hands and his eyes shut. Of course there weren’t any
sauerbraten
and potato pancakes afterwards, but if he lay there long enough, there would be.

He made an arrangement with her. He’d play house with her if she’d play dead with him. The game went on for several years, and then went underground, the way most children’s games do, without any warning, like an elevated train into a tunnel.

It emerged, fresh as paint, some time during the course of his second marriage, after a quarrel, he supposed. He was alone in the apartment, crawled up on the sofa, suddenly remembered the game, and had been playing it ever since, whenever life got too much for him and he needed rest. When he closed his eyes he could even smell the smells of that fine house, years ago. If he kept his eyes closed long enough, and his hands folded, he would most assuredly get
sauerbraten 
and potato pancakes. He would just float away, feet first, into heaven. He would be able to use the front door. With his eyes closed, he could see yes, that nobody would look put out, or worried, or cross with him again.

Whatever else you said for it, it at least gave him a rest period. His sister had been fond of him, he supposed. But there had never been anybody to tuck him in.

When his thoughts strayed in that direction, Charlie invariably sat up.

It must be five. The lighting was bad. And Paul hadn’t come in yet. “Sometimes,” says the foolish American matron in the
New
Yorker
cartoon, facing a sunset of optimum vulgarity, “I think the cocktail hour is the most beautiful hour of the day.” Charlie didn’t happen to agree. He did have a drink, and sat there listening to the silence, which bothered him. Inhabited silence soothed him. For empty silence he had no use.

It is only a game, of course. Everything is a game. But even chess players must have their moments to relax, though he doubted it. It was his theory that all chess players were of monster birth, like blue babies, except that they did not die.

Across from the sofa on which he had been lying, propped up on a chiffonier, behind a glass jar of white lilacs (a homage to Manet, he always chose his flowers from art, and had no sympathy with gardeners or with nature of any kind) was a sizable painting by Slabbinck, a Belgian whom he admired, of a blue table covered with a red cloth, on which sat two coffeepots and three yellow bowls. It was a good picture, but not what he wanted to see just then. He looked round the room in search of something more familiar.

Those pictures Charlie dragged about with him were there not so much for themselves as for windows. They allowed him to peer out of the world in which he was trapped into other worlds which he preferred. They were good pictures:
Charlie liked the glass in his windows clear; but that is what they were there for. Not being very happy with the present, he liked an eyeglass to the past. Hence the monocle. Hence the pictures. Like most of the rich, he was not really contemporary. The present does well enough, but for solace, there is nothing like a trip home, to the past, which is where all that money came from. It is difficult to prestidigitate the present without a few props, and pictures were his props, though the trick is not so much to take the rabbit out of the hat, as somehow to get it back in.

He found what he wanted soon enough. Back in went the rabbit, long ears, shovel teeth, kick in the stomach, and all.

Charlie did not have a Tiepolo or a Guardi. The best Guardis were in museums and a Tiepolo was beyond his means. That left Canaletto, but the Canalettos he liked were either too large or else in Dresden, in which case they were by Belloto. What he did have was a Maulpertsch. He didn’t like it much. Maulpertsch was too red, which reminded him of that wet baby smell the Germans knew so well how to paint. One thing about Reynolds’s children, they may have been sentimental, but at least they were dry. He would have preferred a Carlone, or even a Casanova, though he didn’t care for the Seigneur de Seingault much, and applied the prejudice to his more successful relatives, and abhorred Russia besides, but he had the Maulpertsch. It gave him access to eighteenth-century Venice, no matter who it was by.

If all this had happened in eighteenth-century Venice, Charlie would have felt happier. The present excites. Only the past exalts. In the past we are all nobler than we are now. One of the real comedowns Charlie had experienced was to discover that the rich are not
sui
generis
witty. He had expected, on joining that international fraternity, drawing-room comedy at the least. Alas, the rich prefer decorum and the milder less accurate talents of a Noël Coward, to Goldoni,
E. T. A. Hofmann, or, at a pinch, Sheridan. Even about Offenbach, who scored them, the rich had a tendency to mutter
charmant
,
charmant
,
mais
bourgeois
,
bourgeois
, a word they had picked up, despite themselves, from Karl Marx, and repeated with the assiduity of Oscar Wilde honing an epigram. Wit sets the fashion, but fashion, alas, is dead set against wit.

He reached his own conclusions. We are public entertainers. That is why the rich won’t take us in. They prefer their own amateurs, or someone like Tom Moore, who never groveled, only because his life was one affable kowtow. Lord Byron, we must remember, came down out of Scotland by accident, and all the other scribbling peers, Platen, Raglan, Acton, to name a few, were recusant, including Berners (Charlie had had his Paris period, too).

Come to think of it, Byron had not been in Venice in Charlie’s favorite era, which was a good twenty years before Napoleon.

“I wish we were in Venice,” said Charlie.

We are on the square before St. Mark’s. The first thing we notice is the silence. This is long before the
vaporetto
, Harry’s Bar, and Peggy Guggenheim. We are watching an opera at the
Fenice
. This means, of course, that, except during the arias, we are chiefly watching each other.

I am the mysterious, rich, and enviable stranger, an English milord probably, who suffers from a secret sorrow and so sees nobody but Consul Smith. Among other things I am a Rosicrucian, and one of the few people ever to have slept with Cagliostro’s wife for free. This is not because she liked me, or even because I liked her, but because he liked me. The setting is one half Berman and one half James Pryde, but the music is better, and there is no orange peel in the Grand Canal. The air smells of eau de Bengale and meat sauce. The young man beside me, though he looks like Paul, is actually
as good company as Thomas Gray, and I have not quarreled with him yet. He writes sestinas, so he may be Alfieri instead.

Into the square flounces a woman known as
La
Gazza
La
dra
. She has stepped from a gondola. Her maid holds a parasol over her head. Both maid and mistress wear white masks, but the parasols have a black lace fringe. If you really want to see what they are like, look at a sketch by Domenico. He is not so good as Gianbattista, but he has his points. Or do I mean Gian Lorenzo?

Or do I mean Longhi?

No, I do not think so, Longhi’s women are not this robust. She is more like a Crespi, or a Piazzetta slimmed down.

At any rate it is only an operetta, so who did the scenery doesn’t matter.
La
Gazza
Ladra
is the celebrated singer. She has made even the castrati look to their laurels, and not to their laurels alone. She is a little past her prime now, but not much. Dr. Burney, who was through here last year, admired her shakes, and she is great friends with Michael Kelly, and other people like that. They admire her professionalism. What most of the world, including me, admires, is her.

Ten or twelve years ago, when we were in the full springtime of life, or at any rate, when I was only forty and she had not yet gotten immortal about our ages, we had a brief affair in Rome; continued it in Naples; followed it up in Vienna; had it talked about in London; heard with pleasure that it had been spoken of favorably in Madrid, and was considered
le
tonnerre
in Lisbon. Neither one of us has ever found anybody else with whom we were ever able to repeat those few golden moments.

Now, at last, we are together again.

“
Là
ci
darem
la
mano
,” she sings (it was a flop in Vienna, but a big success in Prague. It is Prague that counts). “How are you,
darling?
”

I get up, narrowly avoiding Hemingway’s Major, who does
not belong here yet, but is here anyway and trying to get back to his hotel.

“Mimi,” I cry.

We are together again. We allow those golden moments to steep in the teapot of our affections, until I am greatly afraid they are much too strong. Never mind: before sending off Thomas Gray, a long-distance gondolier I retain in my employ, to tiddle her maid in an alley, I made sure the tea was sent up with lemon. So we have lemonade instead.

“There was never anybody else but you,” she cries in my arms, while down below we hear the plaintive cries of the friendly neighborhood pistachio seller. “Of course there have been other men, but they were never real.”

From our separate beds we admire each other, dreaming together of a warmth we never had, but not making the mistake of bumping into the night table in our pajamas, either.

as Alfred de Vigny put it.

“But, oh, darling, I have an engagement in Vienna on Thursday, and the communications are vile,” says she. “Do you suppose I should change horses at the border, or can I just ride Miss Campendonck?”

*

The trouble with that kind of nonsense is that one never wakes up from it. One always believes it just remotely to be possible. So Charlie sensibly went to sleep, where nothing is possible. He had never so much as kissed Lotte, except in public, for the photographers. He hated that kind of insincere affection.

But the last thing he remembered, before he went to sleep, was the lovely light in that Venetian bedroom (it was the bed
room from Carpaccio’s Dream of St. Ursula, but with a tousled, intimate bed). It was a pity that it did not and could not now exist.

They were completely compatible. They had never had even the whim to touch.

The only truthful autobiography, perhaps, would be an accurate description of the life we hoped to live.