I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  Stephen said, ‘Come on!’ But Emily was crying openly, suffocated with tears. She gasped, ‘I can’t speak, it’s so touching. It’s real. Oh, Stephen, I wish we could have done that and be no more; no more harassments.’

  People were passing them, going home from work, poor Frenchmen in cloth sandals, toil-stained trousers, with sunk faces, tired eyes, a desperate expression. They walked on and Emily said, ‘You see, Paris stands no nonsense. It says, Here it is, the truth is evident. And passer-by, the truth of your life is evident.’

  ‘Let’s be gay, not miserable.’

  He hailed a taxi and said ‘La Tour d’Argent.’

  ‘But you must have a table!’

  ‘Oh, I think they’ll take us in.’

  It was all arranged. ‘You like it so much and I thought we would come here together when the others had gone; to celebrate and because you’re smart and we’ll sell your foul serial.’

  ‘Oh, my darling! Yes, it is my favourite, my dear beloved Tour d’Argent. We really have lots of things to celebrate and how I adore splendour. Ah, me, a weakness.’

  ‘A weakness that I adore. I have it too.’

  The headwaiter came up, kissed Emily’s hands, saluted Stephen. The women, unlike those in the streets, were fashionably dressed. They had a table from which they could see Notre-Dame, and all the lights of Paris just coming on, and though dimmed, rich enough in the beautiful May evening. There were old furniture, a big fireplace, well-spaced tables, beautiful women, rich and canny men, ease, glitter, luxury; and the miseries of Paris, six storeys down, all forgotten.

  They ate some shrimp, pressed duck, a special duck, their duck with their number on it. They rolled up the duck on a little cart (and Emily called it the ‘duck tumbril’) took it to the duck-press, and the duck-waiter carved it, pressed the bones, cooked the sauce, grilled parts of the duck—and with this they had pommes soufflés, a salad, two or three wines, and pancakes in caramel with hot cream and kirsch inside.

  Said Emily, ‘I am floating! After Duclos takes power, crepes flamandes for the masses! Our battle-cry! Pressed ducks for the people. And this gent here with the lean, tense, haunted face, inspired and revolted at the same time by the near perfection of his sauce or the utter perfection of his duck, the triumph, the despair, he shall be head Duck Commissar; oh, certainly that is a thing that will happen in Red France.’

  They looked at each other and laughed. Emily said, ‘If the people here knew what we thought! Supposing we told this respectable little man with his white collar and muttonchop whiskers that we are looking at him as a handpicked candidate for the guillotine!—and we look just like swinish, American Middle-West, luxury-bound two-cent rakehells. Oh, poor man!’

  They looked with sympathy at the poor man who was with his well-dressed, plump wife, strangely cobwebbed with wrinkles, and two long-legged, long-haired modern daughters, all bent over their duck.

  The waiter came and took away some crumbs, a cigarette butt.

  ‘What service!’ sighed Emily.

  Stephen said, ‘The cigarette smell upsets the other diners. We ought to have some courtesy.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t when we’re so happy. The tumbrils will be here soon enough.’

  They started to laugh, a little, much, wildly. Emily cried, choking, ‘Oh, if they only—in this setting, in this restaurant, knew what we thought!’

  After a while, with the coffee and brandy, they began to talk about moving. They had better look around for a smaller, better place, with a garden or near to a park for Giles. Stephen said, ‘There is the parc Monceau, which I hate; there is the avenue Foch, too dear. I’ll go to an agency tomorrow. And no cellars in this one; no cellar workrooms for you.’

  But Emily began to talk morbidly of their futures, if they had any; and whether they could keep on living in Paris, and what they would do, poor hunted creatures that no one wanted; and she began to complain of the cold. She was afraid to be out, like this, in a pressed, too-suffering city. Why were they here with these dreadful, heartless people? Let them go home!

  ‘I must go home, Stephen, I’m afraid: something will happen. I must get home and look at my work and sleep and sleep. I sleep so little. Let us go home.’

  They went home. Emily went at once to her basement and after a while he heard her typing. He went down, told her to stop; but she said, Oh, no, now she was here she felt happy, she had a function, here she was herself, here she had freedom from all the fears.

  23 FINAL ARRANGEMENTS

  TIME PASSED. BUT THERE came the old round of arguments, fierce disputes, savage accusations, regrets for folly which had seemed happiness once, casting up of accounts for things which had been only innocent joy at the time. She asked wildly, ‘I make $8,000 a year even in my worst years, Christy provided for—you have $12,000 a year—why are we broke? Why am I driven like this to slave so that I can’t sleep and need stimulants and doctors? Does Vittorio need a wife earning $8,000 a year? And yet Vittorio is not a hero: there are hundreds, thousands of men like him in Europe. He gave up all this to do what he’s doing.’

  Vittorio had come and gone, had spent an evening with them, from seven until three in the morning and it had been one of the best evenings of their lives. Would have been if only Vittorio had let anyone speak but himself! said Stephen. But Emily had been triumphant, catching ball with Vittorio, laughing at his gold. Stephen cried irritably, ‘Oh, go and marry Vittorio. I can see you living in Belleville, huddled over one gas flame with Vittorio, listening to his eternal chatter, getting shoved out of one country after another—losing touch with everyone. You like to rough it—at the Ritz. You have illusions about yourself. You love luxury. What’s wrong with that? The poor get a damned bad deal. Everything sold to them is rotten, poor, bad workmanship, worst materials. I can see you trying to eat with Vittorio or any other hero on twenty francs a month. With Vittorio you’d never eat in the Tour d’Argent or Véfour in your life.’

  She defended him. Vittorio had eaten in all those places and given it up.

  Stephen enquired, beginning to laugh, ‘But why must you give it up? I don’t see why he had to give it up. He could have gone on working at his profession and been a communist.’

  ‘He knew that was playing at it. The company he kept was rotten.’

  ‘And so he still is wild about a thoroughly bad society woman, an adulteress, a lesbian, a thief, a prostitute, a hanger-on of rich men, and from what I hear, she’s famous in two capitals for her dirtiness!’

  Emily blushed. She said more humbly, ‘I don’t know what his motives are, but I am sure they’re noble ones!’

  Stephen said, ‘What rot! It’s sympathy for those noble Roman wounds on his face.’

  ‘She, too, I suppose. Everyone would say, she married the communist martyr with the crucified face! How many of us try to quit our past via some other person. It can’t be done.’ She looked sad.

  Stephen said, tenderly, ‘You’re a passionate, hot-hearted, great-natured little girl and you’re really only a girl. Every woman suddenly shows what a girl she is.’

  Emily implored, ‘Stephen, take me seriously. I am not a girl. Can’t I admire Vittorio without wanting to marry him?’

  Stephen said laughing, ‘No, you want to marry him. And I won’t let you.’

  She turned away, ‘I’m bitterly insulted, humiliated. Vittorio represents to me what we ought to be and are not.’

  Next time they went out he took her up the rue de Belleville, almost to the Buttes-Chaumont where, in a side street, above a painter and decorator, he showed her the black-faced, eighteenth-century apartment house where Vittorio lived. He had one room on the fourth floor. He had to walk up dusty stairs from a cobbled street of poor children and little food-shops.

  ‘You couldn’t write even one of your stories in a setting like that.’

  ‘I could. I started out with nothing.’

  ‘You were using up your adolescent strength. You couldn’t now. You’ve other habits, some of them
bad habits, you’ve been ill, you’re worn with feasting, with working on drugs, with me—worrying about me.’

  He took her back to the centre, to ‘their dear Véfour’, asking her if she did not feel happier then. She ate a great deal, but resentfully.

  ‘You’re buying me off. I ought not to give up my feelings. They’re real; they’re honest.’

  ‘But they’re not practical.’

  ‘But you haven’t told me why we have to live in such grandeur?’

  He smiled in the elegant, trifling way that she had admired first of all in him, ‘I’m a gentleman. I can’t live any other way. I have to have clean and good clothing, my two baths a day. Think that you’ve never lived with a man who doesn’t wash enough and who changes his shirt—maybe once a week.’

  She was restless. Teasing, trifling, annoying, Stephen detailed his advantages.

  ‘You’re pinning me down with a hundred pinpricks,’ she exclaimed.

  The next day, instead of her taking her lesson with Madame Suzanne, Stephen took her out and bought her a beautiful blouse, a new hat and a pair of gloves. Then he sent her back to work.

  But she became morally ill again and questioned everything.

  Their happiness was injured by the system they had, of each reading his manuscript to the other. She and Stephen tore the work to pieces, especially Emily’s, for hers was to sell. The next day she had to do it again, worn and frustrated, ‘bleeding’ as she said; and she vented her weariness and disappointment in recriminations.

  ‘You’ve ruined my talent, with your expensive tastes and selfish idleness. You’ve sponged on me, you’re a parasite. I’ll never forgive you.’

  Emily took to her bed.

  Suzanne came to her bedroom and gave her lessons, reported on Christy and Giles. Emily furiously confided in her, begged her to bring Vittorio to see her.

  ‘Tell him I’m very sick; I want him to tell me about Danton!’

  ‘Read about Danton!’

  Emily explained that she had become passionately interested in the monstrous figure of the corrupt revolutionist. She cried laughing, ‘No, I must have someone to tell me, from Vittorio’s viewpoint. Tell him I want to know all about the gula-immense, gula-immensa! Vittorio says there is hope for everyone. So let him tell me what hope for the gula-immensa!’

  ‘This is no way to learn.’

  ‘It is the only way to learn for a backward, blank-minded, selfish American like me,’ she cried viciously.

  Stephen said quietly, ‘Please bring Vittorio along Suzanne, and let us have a ray of sunshine for a change. All that she says about Americans anyway is not for her but for me.’

  Emily smiled radiantly. She wrote a note to the revolutionist and when it had gone off, she lay back and thought about Vittorio’s poverty, which irked her and stood in her way. It must be remedied somehow. She said to herself, ‘If I had the decency, I would go to work, sweep the field as I can if I try and keep them all—all my poor friends.’

  If she made a lot of money, she could send some to Vittorio, anonymously, have a false legacy sent to him! But then he’d give it to the Party? That would never do. Or to the serpent in Rome? Worse still! Yes, of course, he’d buy some Paris trifle for the Roman woman, a rope of emeralds, say. How could she, Emily, improve his lot, make him happier, fitter company, yet not give him that slippery thing, money? ’Twas mine, ’tis his and has been slave to thousands. No, no. Last time she had seen him he mentioned some trouble he had been in. He had said with a twisted smile, doleful and comical, ‘You see, it is easy for them to recognize me,’ and he had touched the scars; ‘and then I cannot see them coming anything like as well.’

  Emily looked at Stephen with a smile next time he entered her bedroom, ‘Oh, for a million dollars!’

  ‘All I can offer you now is the equivalent, a letter from Vittorio, saying he’s coming. Did you mind my opening it?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a bit late now to ask, isn’t it? One of these days though—but no one is trying to get me away from you. Worse luck!’

  ‘Worse luck!’

  Vittorio came to dinner. He came early for aperitifs as requested, with his usual large bouquet and some fine chocolates. As usual he charmed them all. He sat by Emily’s bedside before dinner and in between her fits of violent coughing, brought on by a bad cold she had caught lying on the floor in an unheated cellar, he told her about Danton, H. T. Buckle (with Stephen), Kafka (with Christy), Jules Verne (with Giles).

  Vittorio went away at three in the morning, all of them, with Christy, having laughed, argued, coughed, drunk, eaten, expostulated, expounded, denounced, vituperated and rejoiced their way through the evening. Vittorio had done a fair part of his translation of Emily’s The Wilkes-Barre Chronicle. He took away with him Stephen’s latest manuscript, said he would write a letter to friends, Italian and French publishers.

  Vittorio said, ‘The book looks good. It must be published. All our lost literature, ours on the left, all the good writing of this world today must not be lost. We must work to have it published. We must not let them crush or uproot all our flowers, for the west is not going down but coming up; and books like yours and Emily’s are some of those flowers. Your works are fine politically, and aesthetically fascinating, an honour to your country and should be known here, all over Europe, in the Soviet Union, in the eastern democracies, in all those places where they fancy American culture is represented by your mucker and immodest writers; they despise you wrongly, but accordingly. This is valuable writing; for the America of the future, for the Party and for me, my dear friends, for me your dear friend.’

  Stephen said, ‘Ah, Vittorio, thank you. I longed to hear that just once. I feel happy, warm, good again. I was beginning to regret my whole life, to wish I’d been trained to be a fine, second-rate clerk or a tea-taster; something at least useful everywhere.’

  ‘Why should you feel like that at any time? Whatever happens there is always hope for everyone.’

  When Vittorio went Stephen smiled at his wife, ‘There’s a fine, warm, civilized, literate, decent person, my God. I wish there were a few like him in America, who understand that life is what it seems and also complex, not what it seems. He’s enthusiastic, good, generous; he believes in people. He even seems to think it’s part of a friend’s duty to believe in people’s work and not to squash hopes and ruin fervour.’

  Emily sighed and laughed, ‘Oh, leave Vittorio alone. If only this thing goes well darling and we can make it into a play and a musical comedy, we’ll buy a car and go all over Europe. We’ll put Giles in an expensive, good school and roam Europe. Damn the Party and all its works. We’re not made for the garret and the backroom and we’re never happy but when we’re alone together spending money in a nice genteel way, but never counting. That is the only way to live. We’re not made to be these serious, philistine, dumb, bureaucratic things, commissars and gauleiters and party hacks, how dull; too bad for them and us. Take Vittorio. He’s boring after all, compared with what he must have been as a wit of Roman society. Do you suppose he talked to his wily serpent dame about Danton, Marat and Blanqui? No.’

  Stephen said, ‘Who knows? They may have thought it very cute. Oh, I hate that guy too. He’s always stealing thunder, he’s a show-stealer.’

  ‘Oh, he cheered me up when I was so low and dull but he can talk you into the ground and five fathoms under. Still he is better than those who know nothing but the machine and the line, nor know there is any other culture than Five Year Plans. My God, what people! How did we ever put up with them? It was after 1929. Everyone lost his shirt. The other world looked like the only hope and all through the hungry thirties, the USA did not look like the hope of mankind. Well, we were Marxists and we ought to have seen so far ahead as to know the USA would pull out of it, with such resources, such unexpendable bottomless resources. A young giant. It doesn’t matter what it does, really. We were crazy to get into that mess.’

  ‘But that mess was the only organization you ever kne
w,’ he said laughing, and kissed her. ‘Your head is made of wool, inside I mean.’

  ‘Yes, but it cramped my style forever. And I saw you too as a hero riding on a green horse into the tombs; and my, it seemed such a big thing to me.’

  She howled with laughter.

  She received some unpleasant mail from the United States, however; not only a request from the Literary Monthly asking her to state her views plainly, to say she was against the Soviet Union; but a strange query from the editor of a popular manual of biographies to whom she had written very fully. He said, ‘Do you intend to return to the United States? If so, when? If not, I don’t see how I can publish your biography in a dictionary which will be of intense interest only to United States teachers, chemists, executives, treasurers, national organization heads, newspapermen, manufacturers and librarians. These will be interested in knowing if you are living in the United States, what your plans are with regard to the United States. If you are unable to answer in the affirmative, that you are contemplating an early return to the United States, the biographer does not think he can include you in a normal United States contemporary biographical dictionary. Kindly answer by airmail.’

  This strange letter at first made them indignant, later it upset them. To be excluded would lose them sales. They answered him. Why not? They expected to return to the United States very soon. They were merely getting some facts, figures, helpful data to write a book between them about Europe 1950 and would return home in the near future.

  ‘That will hold him off, the goddamn blackmailer, I’m not obliged to return to my own home country for him. I’m free,’ said Emily.

  ‘By the way, what about your passport, Emily? Did you get it? It’s out of date.’

  ‘Oh, Jehosaphat, I’ll get it tomorrow.’

  She went while he was at work and when he returned, that was the first thing he asked her about. He was very anxious. She, though, was merry, sparkling and naughty, with a demoniac twinkle. She laughed, ‘You thought there would be so much trouble! Why, I got it right away. There was no hesitation, as you said there might be. You scared me for nothing. It’s my country isn’t it? They were very nice and helpful and cooperative.’