“I’m no prig,” I told Nan Bridge, and clasped her breast and bit her ear.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, buster?” she shouted.
“Four months ago I would have called you out for that,” I told her lamely and left her house that afternoon and went to the next three days early, determined to be more careful.
I was staying with Courtney and Buffy Surface in Connecticut. Claiming a tennis elbow, I excused myself from the doubles early in the first set. Courtney and I were partners against Buffy and Oscar Bobrinage, the other houseguest. My plan was for Buffy to drop out and join me. I sat under a wide umbrella in the garden, and in a few minutes someone came up behind me. “Where does it hurt? I’ll rub it for you.”
“No thank you, Oscar.”
“No trouble, Brewster.”
“I’ve a heating pad from Chase Manhattan in my suitcase, Osc,” I told him dejectedly.
That night I was more obvious. I left the library and mentioned as casually as I could that I was going out for a bit of air. It has been my observation that the predisposition for encounter precedes encounter, that one must set oneself as one would a table. I never stroll the strand in moonlight except when I’m about the heart’s business, or cross bridges toward dawn unless I mean to save the suicides. There are natural laws, magnetism. A wish pulls fate.
I passed the gazebo and wondered about the colors of the flowers in the dark, the queer consolidation of noon’s bright pigment, yellow sunk in on yellow a thousand times as if struck ’ by gravity. I thought of popular songs, their tunes and words. I meant for once to do away with polite conversation should Buffy appear, to stun her with my need and force. (Of all my friends Buffy was the most royally aloof. She had maddening ways of turning aside any question or statement that was the least bit threatening.)
I heard the soft crunch of gravel. “Oscar?”
“No, it’s Buffy. Were you looking for Oscar?”
“I thought he might be looking for me.”
“Voilà du joli,” Buffy said. She knew the idioms of eleven modern languages.
I gazed into her eyes. “How are you and Courtney, Buffy?”
“Mon dieu! ¿Qué pasa? Il est onze heures et demi,” she said.
“Buffy, how are you and Courtney?”
“Courtney’s been off erythromycin five days now and General Parker says there’s no sign of redness. God bless wonder drugs. Darauf kannst du Gift nehmen.”
“Do you ever think of Madrid, Buffy?” Once, in a night club in Madrid on New Year’s Eve she had kissed me. It was before she and Courtney met, but my memory of such things is long lasting and profound. I never forget the blandest intimacy. “Do you?”
“Oh, Brewster, I have every hope that when Juan Carlos is restored the people will accept him.”
“Buffy, we kissed each other on New Year’s Eve in Madrid in 1966 before you ever heard of Courtney Surface.”
“Autres temps, autres moeurs.”
“I can’t accept that, Buff. Forgive me, dear, but when I left the game this morning you stayed behind to finish out the set against Courtney. Yes, and before that you were Oscar’s partner. Doesn’t this indicate to you a certain aberrant competitiveness between you and your husband?”
“Oh, but darling, we play for money. Pisịca blândă pgarịe raŭ. Didn’t you know that? We earn each other’s birthday presents. We’ve an agreement: we don’t buy a gift unless we win the money for it from the other fellow. I’ll tell you something, entre nous. I get ripped off because I throw games. I do. I take dives. I go into the tank. Damit kannst du keinen Blumentopf verlieren. Isn’t that awful? Aren’t I terrible? But that’s how Courtney got the money together to buy me Nancy’s Treehouse. Have you seen her? She’s the most marvelous beast. I was just going out to the stables to check on her when I ran into you. If you’d like to accompany me come along lo más pronto posible.”
“No.”
“De gustibus.”
“That’s not a modern language, Buffy.”
“People grow, darling.”
“Buffy, as your houseguest I demand that you listen to me. I am almost forty years old and I am one of the three or four dozen truly civilized men in the world and I have been left a fortune. A fortune! And though I have always had the use of the money, I have never till now had the control of it. Up to now I have been an adventurer. The adventures, God save me, were meant to teach me life. Danger builds strong bodies twelve ways, I thought. Action and respite have been the pattern of my existence, Buffy. Through shot and shell on hands and knees one day, and breakfast in bed at the Claridge the next. I have lived my life a fighter pilot, beefed up like a gladiator, like a stuffed goose, like a Thanksgiving turkey. I am this civilized…thing. Trained and skilled and good. I mean good, Buffy, a strict observer till night before last of every commandment there is. Plus an eleventh—honor thy world, I mean. I’ve done that. I’m versed in it, up to my ears in it as you are in idioms. I was an environmentalist a decade before it was an issue. When I first noticed the deer were scrawnier than they’d been when I was a boy and the water in the rivers where I swam no longer tasted like peaches.
“I’ve been a scholar of the world—oh, an amateur, I grant you, but a scholar just the same. I understand things. I know literature and math and science and art. I know everything. How paper is made, glass blown, marble carved, things about furniture, stuff about cheese. This isn’t a boast. With forty years to do it in and nothing to distract you like earning a living or raising a family, you can learn almost all there is to learn if you leave out the mystery and the ambiguity. If you omit the riddles and finesse the existential.
“No, wait! I’m perfectly aware that I’m barking up the wrong tree—do you have that idiom, my dear?—but looky, looky, I’m speaking my heart. I’m in mourning, Buff. Here’s how I do it. By changing my life. By taking this precious, solipsistic civilization of mine—Buffy, listen to me, dear; it’s not enough that there are only three or four dozen truly civilized men in the world—this precious civilization of mine and passing it on to sons, daughters, all I can get.”
“Was ist los?” she said miserably.
“Time and tide.”
“Pauvre garçon.”
“Buffy, pauvre garçon me no pauvres garçons.”
She looked at me for a moment with as much feeling as I had looked at her. “Jane Löes Lipton.”
“What?”
“Jane Löes Lipton. A friend of my sister Milly.”
“What about her?”
“Ah.”
“Ah?”
“She’ll be Comte de Survillieur’s houseguest this month. Do you know the Comte?”
“We did a hitch together in the Foreign Legion.”
“Go. Pack. I’ll phone Paris. Perhaps Milly can get you an invitation. In bocca al lupo.”
I missed her at the Comte de Survillieur’s, and again at Liège, and once more at Cap Thérèse and the Oktoberfest at München. All Europe was talking about her—the fabulous Jane Löes Lipton. One had only to mention her name to elicit one of those round Henry James “Ah’s.” Nor did it surprise me that until the evening in Buffy Surface’s garden I had never heard of her: I had been out of society for three or four months. These things happen quickly, these brush fires of personality, some girl suddenly taken up and turned into a household word (if you can call a seventy-room castle a household or “Ah” a word). Once or twice I had seen an old woman or even a child given this treatment. Normally I avoided such persons. When their fame was justified at all it was usually predicated on some quirkishness, nothing more substantial than some lisp of the character—a commitment to astrology, perhaps, or a knack for mimicry, or skill at bridge. I despise society, but who else will deal with me? I can’t run loose in the street with the sailors or drink with the whores. I would put off everyone but a peer.
Still…Jane Löes Lipton. Ah. I hadn’t met her, but from what I could gather from my peers’ collective inarticulateness
when it came to Miss (that much was established) Lipton, she was an “authentic,” an “original,” a “beauty,” a “prize.” And it was intriguing, too, how I happened to keep missing her, for once invited to the Comte’s—where I behaved; where, recovering my senses, I no longer coveted my neighbor’s wife and re-dedicated myself to carrying on the good work of my genes and environment in honorable ways—I had joined a regular touring company of the rich and favored. We were like the Ice Capades, like an old-time circus, occasionally taking on personnel, once in a while dropping someone off—a car pool of the heavily leisured. How I happened, as I say, to keep on missing her though we were on the same circuit now, going around—no metaphor but a literal description—in the same circles—and it is too a small world, at our heights, way up there where true North consolidates and collects like fog, it is—was uncanny, purest contretemps, a melodrama of bad timing. We were on the same guest lists, often the same floors or wings (dowagers showed me house plans, duchesses did; I saw the seating arrangements and croquet combinations), co-sponsors of the same charity balls and dinners. Twice it was I who fell out of lockstep and had to stay longer than I expected or leave a few days early, but every other time it was Jane who canceled out at the last minute. Was this her claim on them, I wondered? A Monroeish temperament, some pathological inability to keep appointments, honor commitments (though always her check for charity arrived, folded in her letter of regret), the old high school strategy of playing hard to get? No. And try to imagine how this struck me, knowing what you do about me, when I heard it. “Miss Löes Lipton called to say she will not be able to join your Lordship this weekend due to an emergency outbreak of cholera among the children at the Sisters of Cecilia Mission in Lobos de Afuera.” That was the message the Duke’s secretary brought him at Liège.
“She’s Catholic?” I asked.
“What? Jane? Good Lord, I shouldn’t think so.”
Then, at Cap Thérèse, I learned that she had again begged off. I expressed disappointment and inquired of Mrs. Steppington whether Miss Lipton were ill.
“Ah, Jane. Ill? Jane’s strong as a horse. No, dear boy, there was a plane crash at Dar es Salaam and Jane went there to help the survivors. She’s visiting in hospital with them now. For those of them who have children—mostly wogs, I expect—she’s volunteered to act as a sort of governess. I can almost see her, going about with a lot of nig-nog kids in tow, teaching them French, telling them the Greek myths, carrying them to whatever museums they have in such places, giving them lectures in art history, then fetching them watercolors—and oils too, I shouldn’t doubt—so they can have a go at it. Oh, it will be a bore not having her with us. She’s a frightfully good sailor and I had hoped to get her to wear my silks in the regatta.”
Though it was two in the morning in Paris, I went to my room and called the Comte de Survillieur.
“Comte. Why couldn’t Jane Löes Lipton make it month before last?”
“What’s that?” The connection was bad.
“Why did Miss Löes Lipton fail to show up when she was expected at Deux Oiseaux?”
“Who?”
“Jane Löes Lipton.”
“Ah.”
“Why wasn’t she there?”
“Who’s this?”
“Brewster Ashenden. I apologize for ringing up so late, but I have to know.”
“Indians.”
“Indians?”
“Yes. American Indians I think it was. Had to do some special pleading for them in Washington when a bill came up before your Congress.”
“HR eleven seventy-four.”
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
“The bill. Law now. So Jane was into HR eleven seventy-four.”
“Ah, what isn’t Jane into? You know, I think she’s become something of a snob? She has no time for her old friends since undertaking these crusades of hers. She told the Comtesse as much—something about finding herself.”
“She said that?”
“Well, she was more poetic, possibly, but that’s how it came down to me. I know what you’re after,” the Comte said roguishly. “You’re in love with her.”
“I’ve never even met her.”
“You’re in love with her. Half Europe is. But unless you’re a black or redskin, or have arranged in some other way to cripple yourself, you haven’t a chance. Arse over tip in love, mon cher old comrade.”
We rang off.
In the following weeks I heard that Jane Löes Lipton had turned up in Hanoi to see if there weren’t some way of getting negotiations off dead center; that she had published a book that broke the code in Oriental rugs; that she had directed an underground movie in Sweden which despite its frank language and graphic detail was so sensitive it was to be distributed with a G rating; and that she was back in America visiting outdoor fairs and buying up paintings depicting clowns and rowboats turned over on beaches for a show she was putting together for the Metropolitan entitled “Shopping Center Primitive: Collectors’ Items for the Twenty-Third Century.” One man said she could be seen in Dacca on Bangladesh Television in a series called “Cooking Nutritious Meals on the Pavement for Large Families from Garbage and Without Fire,” and another that she had become a sort of spiritual adviser to the statesmen of overdeveloped nations. Newspapers reported her on the scene wherever the earth quaked or the ships foundered or the forests burned.
Certainly she could not have had so many avatars. Certainly most was rumor, speculation knit from Jane’s motives and sympathies. Yet I heard people never known to lie, Rock-of-Gibraltarish types who didn’t get the point of jokes, swear to their testimony. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. If most was exaggerated, much was true.
Ah, Jane, Candy Striper to the Cosmos, Gray Lady of the Ineffable, when would I meet you, swap traveler’s tales of what was to be found in those hot jungles of self-seeking, those voyages to the center of the soul and other uncharted places, the steeps and deeps and lost coves and far shelves of being? Ah, Jane, oh Löes Lipton, half Europe loves you.
I went to London and stayed in the Bottom, the tall new hotel there. Lonely as Frank Sinatra on an album cover I went up to their revolving cocktail lounge on the fiftieth floor, the Top of the Bottom, and ran into Freddy Plympton.
“She’s here.”
“Jane Löes Lipton? I’ve heard that one before.” (We hadn’t been talking of her. How did I know that’s who he meant? I don’t know, I knew.)
“No, no, she is, at my country place. She’s there now. She’s exhausted, poor dear, and tells me her doctor has commanded her to resign temporarily from all volunteer fire departments. So she’s here. I’ve got her. She’s with Lady Plympton right this moment. I had to come to town on business or I’d be with her. I’m going back in the morning. Ever meet her? Want to come down?”
“She’s there? She’s really there?”
“Want to come down?”
There’s been too much pedigree in this account, I think. (Be kind. Put it down to metaphysics, not vanity. In asking Who? I’m wondering What? Even the trees have names, the rocks and clouds and grasses do. The world’s a picture post card sent from a far hotel. “Here’s my room, this is what the stamps in this country look like, that’s the strange color of the sand here, the people all wear these curious hats.”) Bear with me.
Freddy Plympton is noble. The family is old—whose isn’t, eh? we were none of us born yesterday; look it up in Burke’s Peerage where it gets three pages, in Debrett where it gets four—and his great estate, Duluth, is one of the finest in England. Though he could build a grander if he chose. Freddy’s real wealth comes from the gambling casinos he owns. He is an entrepreneur of chance, a fortune teller. The biggest gaming palaces and highest stakes in Europe, to say nothing of hotels in Aruba and boats beyond the twelve-mile limit and a piece of the action in church bingo basements and punchboards all over the world, the newsprint for which is supplied from his own forests in Norway and is printed on his own presses. Starting from scratc
h, from choosing odds-or-evens for cash with his roommate at Harrow, a sheikh’s son with a finger missing from his left hand—he was left-handed—which made him constitutionally unable to play the game (“He thought ‘even,’ you see,” Freddy explains), taking the boy, neither of them more than fourteen, to the cleaners in the third form. It, the young sheikh’s deformity, was Freddy’s initial lesson in what it means to have the house odds in your favor and taught him never to enter any contest in which he did not have the edge.
Freddy has one passion, and it is not gambling. “Gambling’s my work, old bean,” he says. (He uses these corny aristocratic epithets. They make him seem fatuous but are as functional to his profession as a drawl to a hired gun.) “I’m no gambler at all, actually. I’m this sort of mathematician. Please don’t gamble with me, please don’t accept my bets. We’re friends and I’m ruthless. Not vicious—ruthless. I will never surrender an advantage. Since I know the odds and respect them, to ignore them would be a sort of cheating, and since I’m honorable I couldn’t think of that. Don’t play with me. We’re friends. I was never the sheikh’s friend, never the friend of any of those feet-off-the-ground Fleugenmensch sons of rich men I lived with at Harrow and Cambridge and who gave me my stake. Where I was meditative they were speculative. I like you, as I like anyone who doesn’t confuse his need with his evidence. Let’s never gamble. Promise. Promise?”
So he has a passion, but it isn’t gambling. It’s animals—beasts, rather. Duluth contains perhaps the most superb private zoo in the world, a huge game park, larger than Whipsnade and much more dangerous. Where Whipsnade hedges with moats and illusions, at Duluth the animals are given absolute freedom. An enormous, camouflaged electrified fence, the largest in the world, runs about the entire estate. (“We control the current. The jolt merely braces the larger animals and only stuns the smaller, puts them unconscious. I’ve installed an auxiliary electrical plant for when there are power failures”) Although from time to time a few of the animals have fought and occasionally killed each other, an attempt has been made to introduce as near perfect an ecological balance as possible, vegetarians and carnivores who find the flesh of the beasts with whom they must live inimical, some almost religious constraint in the jaws and digestion, some once-burned, twice-sorry instinct passed on from generation to generation that protects and preserves his herds.
Searches & Seizures Page 17