The Talented Miss Highsmith (9 page)

Like the chance encounters in her stories, Highsmith's meeting with this young journalist was familiar in its ordinariness. But it was also the kind of meeting with which she liked to ignite the spiralling paranoias of her murdering “hero-criminals.”

Compliments were offered by Chris Petit. Miss Highsmith was “one of the two or three authors who mattered to him.” A favor was asked: he'd like to do an interview with her for
Time Out
. Perhaps, because Pat was canny about such things and intent on receiving good value for her investments, there was a little probing of mutual intentions on Pat's part before the interview was actually granted. But she did grant an interview to Christopher Petit—and rather easily, too. She would be in London briefly, she told him, after the festival ended. He could see her there.

Pat was usually eager for publicity—her letters to editors are full of helpful suggestions for
her
kind of public relations, the kind that don't get too close and ruin a writer's workday—and she kept tabs on everything her publishers and agents did and didn't do for her. But, like the title of one of her short stories, this encounter with the young journalist produced “nothing that meets the eye”—for now. For now, it was just one of those serendipitous meetings between hopeful youth and middle-aged achievement that punctuate the career of every successful writer.

So Pat gave Chris Petit a number where she could be reached in North London (it was at the two Barbaras' studio in Islington), and that was that. It was a leisurely beginning to a complicated episode—just the way she said she liked to start her novels.

“I am inclined to write books with slow, even tranquil beginnings, in which the reader becomes thoroughly acquainted with the hero-criminal and the people around him.”
³⁰

Meanwhile, the film festival was in full swing and so were Pat's most volatile feelings. Like Colette—whose work Pat once “defended” against an “attack” by the illustrious French writer Nathalie Sarraute during a Paris luncheon (Sarraute had maintained that Colette was too “feminine” for her; the much-younger Highsmith gathered the courage to disagree)
³¹
—Pat was still capable of the premonitory strike, of writing her own life before it happened. In the plots she has been notating for her “4th Ripley,” Tom is deeply and ambiguously attached to an attractively wealthy teenage boy. And Pat Highsmith, at fifty-seven years of age in the city of Berlin, has just been “bowled…over…knocked…mentally on the floor” by a twenty-five-year-old girl: an up-and-comer on Berlin's avant-garde art circuit who enjoys slipping into male drag.

Tabea Blumenschein was the star of experimental director Ulrike Ottinger's new film,
Madame X,
and she had been Ottinger's live-in lover for the last seven years. Pat's feelings for Tabea, kindled on a previous trip to Berlin, flared up now at the festival, although Pat was still involved in her three-year-long relationship with the French novelist and translator Marion Aboudaram.

Tabea—deploying equal amounts of makeup and flair—liked to get herself up as both a louche boy and a flamboyant woman. As a boy, she was dark and sneering, with a disreputable mustache and an ear loop. Dressed as a woman, she was a glamorously assertive blonde whose S&M accoutrements were part of her impersonation.

An enthusiastic participant in the sexual, social, and artistic experiments with which Berlin's (and New York's and Paris's and London's) art world amused itself in the late 1970s (“T. spoke often of the Berlin discos, the one-night-stands,” Pat wrote),
³²
Tabea was also an eclectic maker of art: she designed costumes, she painted and drew, she acted in films. Without her makeup—there is a pale photograph of her with an unadorned face, plump and puppyish and blinking into the sun—Tabea seems hardly to exist. Her face paint, her disco nights, and her elaborate rotations of dress and disguise and transformation were all raw materials for her fresh identities. It was half performance art, half character armor, and wholly fun for a twenty-five-year-old caught up in Berlin nightlife. If, that is, you didn't think too deeply about what those impostures might be concealing.

Pat always thought deeply about impostures and concealment, but for a woman like her—a woman in late middle age, profoundly repetitive in her habits, writing characters who were themselves obsessed with transformation—Tabea's quick-change artistry and avant-garde glamour arrived as a
coup de foudre
.

“Pat,” says Tabea Blumenschein,

Pat's courting habits, always a little unusual, were, with Tabea, strongly marked by her fetishes. As though she couldn't quite distinguish between herself and Tabea (whose behavior in Berlin in the 1970s resembled Pat's behavior in Manhattan in the 1940s), Pat often doubled the presents she bought for Tabea, purchasing one item for the young woman and a twin item for herself.

Amongst her gifts to Tabea were a “flick knife,” a wristwatch with a black face and no numerals, an odd mirror, and striped shirts that she insisted on calling “sailor clothes.” (They both liked sailors: Pat was first attracted to Tabea because she appeared as a sailor in a campy sailor film by Ulrike Ottinger, and Tabea, in the present day, still paints jaunty pictures of sailors.) Pat bought a mysterious object for which she paid “3 pounds liquid” and which she described to a perplexed Christopher Petit as a “Filthy Paperclip.” This object, mailed out to both Pat and Tabea with the label “Toy Airplane” on it, might have been an erotic toy, but Pat's reference to it was so coy that its purpose was entirely obscured.

Despite her dislike of sex on film, Pat had always warmed to dirty jokes, filthy limericks (she was the author of many an unprintable verse), and vulgar descriptions. She liked to refer to the third French village she lived in, Montmachoux, as “Mount-my-shoe,” thus neatly connecting her distaste for the habits of dogs to a slur on her surroundings, and she always found verbal and visual jokes involving human sexual parts and bathroom habits hilarious. She happily described to friends a joke photograph she kept of a woman with one naked breast caught in a washing machine mangle (the photograph is excruciating to look at), captioned: “You think you've got problems?”

In the book she's writing now, her “4th Ripley,” Pat imagines Tom Ripley toying with the idea of acquiring the ultimate dirty joke: an inflatable doll wife and an inflatable doll mistress. Ripley, whose sexual instincts are perhaps most clearly expressed by his later bedtime readings of
Christopher and His Kind
by Christopher Isherwood and Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde (Pat's own bedtime reading), decides what Pat herself might have decided under the circumstances: that the rubber sex dolls are as threatening to him as “real” women are. “It would take all the breath out of a man” to blow those dolls up, Ripley thinks.
³⁴

In her most recently published work,
Edith's Diary
(1977), Pat made Edith's son Cliffie, a character so unattractive that readers can feel the motives she had in creating him (Cliffie was suggested by a boy of whom Pat was both jealous and scornful; a boy she later compared to the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer), fantasize about creating a doppelgänger of the woman who obsesses him. But what will he use? “The problem of the materials threw him off.”
³⁵
Pat's male characters can rarely be bothered to have sex of any kind.

During her thirteen days in Berlin, Pat's courting habits followed the rules of revulsion as closely as they obeyed the laws of attraction. Her most inspired idea for a romantic outing with a woman thirty-two years her junior was to take Tabea Blumenschein to a place made memorable by the courting rituals of another species—the crocodile pen at the Berlin zoo.
^*

“I shall remember the zoo, with its crocodiles, and Tabea leaning on a rail, on the left, gazing down into their heated pond. She remarked that they had wounded each other by their biting. True. The blood was visible.”
³⁶

Blood was usually “visible” when the talented Miss Highsmith fell in love. But from the onset of every love affair she was convinced that the blood would be her own. When Pat was Tabea's age, she was phrasing love as something that would empty the blood from her body.

“Tonight I want to rid myself forever of love, tear it out of me as I would a tick sucking my blood.”
³⁷

Pat burned, suffered, and died in love—and so, if they returned her feelings, did the women who loved her. Lynn Roth—her affair of a few separated weeks in 1953 and 1954—was someone whose pervasive influence she would compare to Tabea's. For now, the battered veteran of many love wars, Pat was confining herself to liquids and modest hopes: “To laugh and have a beer with [Tabea]—that seems all I want in life just now.”

So she drinks floods of beer and visits the aquarium with Tabea (“her favorite,” Pat says), as well as those attractively bleeding crocodiles in their hot-water bath. Berlin's distinctively double nature—two cities with opposing, “entirely artificial” governments, and it's worth your life to breach the Wall that separates them—is newly attractive to Pat. And Berlin's S&M nightlife, and the gratuitous sexual transformations of the artists who assist in it, cannot help but appeal to a writer who declared at the age of twenty: “We love either to dominate or to be mastered ourselves…. there is no love without some element of hate,” “nor a love without domination.”
³⁸

Unchanged in her inclinations since she first voiced those opinions, and an old if still somewhat naïve hand in these matters by now, Pat assessed Tabea as a girl who “need[s] a boss.” Tabea herself says: “I felt I couldn't live in Berlin alone…. I was so young…. I couldn't live [alone] like Pat was living.”
³⁹

No one could live “like Pat was living” for long, not even Pat herself. Falling in love with Tabea was a catastrophe for her. Pat's lover Marion Aboudaram witnessed the damage when Pat finally returned to Moncourt from Berlin and London:

On 11 April, Pat wrote a plain little poem to Tabea to show just where this love was leading her. Pat was feeling the “strange impulse or desire”

Although she adored boats, fantasized many times about being a sailor, and ended the lives of several of her characters in “deep water,” Pat had always feared dying in water. “[T]he thought of drowning is very unpleasant to me,” she told a British journalist in 1987. Naturally, she hid this true fact from her interviewer (Duncan Fallowell) in a haze of misdirection; telling him that her health was “excellent” and that her only illness had been “five cases of the flu.” This, after a life of racking hypochondria, serious blood diseases (chronic anemia and clotting deficiencies), grave arterial maladies (Buerger's disease), terrible problems with her teeth, and a very recent (1986) operation for lung cancer. She also left out the alcoholism, the anorexia, and the depression.
⁴²

 

It's 4 April, now, the morning of her interview with Chris Petit, the young journalist she met in Berlin. Pat left the film festival three days ago to go directly to London, bypassing her house in Moncourt. She writes that she is still “spinning” from the experience of spending time with Tabea Blumenschein. In London, Pat is staying once again at the Islington home of Barbara Ker-Seymer, the highly regarded avant-garde photographer of the 1920s and 1930s (when the avant-garde was still
en avant
), and Ker-Seymer's companion, Barbara Roett. The two Barbaras met Pat in the 1960s at the Cagnes-sur-Mer home of Annie Duveen, a lesbian relation of the art authority Sir Joseph Duveen. Annie Duveen, Barbara Roett says, “was terrified of Pat and didn't know why she was being swooped down on”: Pat could be as unsettling a houseguest as she was a hostess. But the Barbaras are as aware of Pat's eccentricities as they are sympathetic to the volatility of her current state—which has yet to involve (as did the last “crush” Pat brought to their house, the young journalist Madeleine Harmsworth) reservoir-sized applications of alcohol, faked telephone calls, and the slamming of interior doors.
⁴³

Chris Petit arrived in Islington to the crescent street where the Barbaras lived “early in the morning”—it was 11:00
A.M.
—to find Pat already (or still) drinking beer. Right away they discovered a shared taste: “we both smoked the same untipped French cigarettes and she was impressed because I had some Boyars.”

But Chris “found her sufficiently intimidating to make questions almost impossible to ask,” and Pat gave him a “rotten interview.” The talk was, he says, “of no consequence” except at the very end when Pat unexpectedly answered a question he put to her about her authorship of
The Price of Salt,
the pseudonymous “lesbian” novel she had never publicly claimed.