by Paul Monette
Our overstuffed chairs were drawn up in a semicircle around the piano, and we sank back into them and nearly disappeared into the upholstery. We four had not retired to the living room as the Carroll ancestors must have done, jocular, florid, anticipating a two-dollar cigar and a cordial. And talking about whatever it was men talked about when, the dance at dinner ended, the men and women retreated into different rooms to be with their own kind. Because we were gay, we were accustomed to sitting through the hours after dinner without women, and we had rollicked into the library a few times during the last couple of weeks, Aldo and David and I, to spend an Edwardian hour over brandy, though we talked rather more about buggering even than the Edwardians. But not tonight. While we waited for the singing, each of us kept his own counsel. It was cool enough that David had laid a fire, and we stared into it until Madeleine came.
I have seen her make each of the entrances she makes in her thirty-one films, as well as several walks onstage in theaters. Her unrecorded entrances into dining rooms and train compartments and hotel lobbies are even more riveting. Particularly if you catch them from the beginning, because you watch her size up the place in the first moment and then move through it as if she'd met a lover there long ago and they'd had a crazy time, or she'd said good-bye to one and left him there. But tonight I didn't know she was in the room until I heard the first chord from the piano, and she began "I Miss You Most." The piano was close enough to the fire to catch the light, and she never turned on the lamps that stood on both sides of her like obelisks. So we peered out at her from the darkness of our chairs. I do not know if the others saw her come in and sit down or whether she nodded and smiled at them first, but I don't think so. She seemed unconscious of us, as if this too might be private and she was thinking aloud to get it right in the memoir. She always did the sappy little intro to the first song as if it were a letter to a lover she's well rid of. Tonight she did it fast, as if she hated herself for wanting him back.
"I miss you most in London," she said, playing the piano behind it, "because I get lost in the fog. I get to Paris and don't know where to eat, and you would. You're better with native guides than I. But I don't travel anymore. I miss you most in things I can always do without."
So she sang "I Miss You Most" in English, then in French "Don't," and then "The Only Men I Go With," in American. She brought the longing and smolder of the first two songs to an end with the laughter that roused the third. She was magic tonight. The phrasing was all honey and butter. The quality of being distracted from us by the music only made her come across more intimately. That is the paradox of the lover she most embodies, as if she has her head buried against your neck while she stares out across the ship's rail. It is not sure which irony dwells in her eyes (and, when she sings, in her voice), the slapstick of the past she is forgiving or the loss of illusion about what comes next. When she launches into the whore's tough and comic song, you find yourself relieved to take a break from the hurt, laughing because she shows she has the other side in her that shrugs it all off and knows what it wants and gets it.
But watch yourself. When I give them up,
They've lost their golden touch.
They'll take you out in taxicabs
And order dinner dutch,
she sang, and she finished with a bang and a swipe at the keyboard and tipped her head back and let out the one-syllable laugh. Then she swiveled a quarter-turn on the piano stool and faced the four of us.
"Am I supposed to do this for free?" she asked. She was talking about applause.
"You're fabulous," Aldo said. "What do you want? Four people clapping hands sounds like a bridge party. We're taking it in like Zen, Madeleine. We're letting the outside become the inside."
"I don't like it," she said, drawing up one knee in her folded hands and looking at him narrowly. The tuxedo was the darkest thing in the dark room, and her white, studded shirt lit up her face like a footlight. "It's like amateur night. No no," she said as the breeze of protest began in my chair, "I'm not the amateur. But it's been too long since I've played a small crowd. I don't know what to do."
She meant it. What seemed so private as she sang, a dream she was having at the piano, where the music was as muted and as even as the breathing that comes with sleep—all of that aura of removal had two sides too. She didn't want to be apart from us, neither as pure performer nor mythological beast.
"You see?" Aldo said triumphantly. "These things matter after all, and you can't sing in a bad room any more than you can sing in an apron. But it's all right. Sing."
But he was wrong. She wasn't having anything like a tantrum, and she wasn't pretending to be modest. I think she was ready to sing the rest of the dozen songs and keep working at the texture, finding the right size for the room and for all of us. But she wanted us to cooperate. She seemed not to know what to do with our preconceptions of her. She must have felt that we each saw her so absolutely and secretly, not even sharing it with one another, that she couldn't begin to be herself and take care of us at the same time. She didn't have to worry about me tonight, because I was on her side. But Aldo especially thought we couldn't stop working on the creation of the authentic Madeleine Cosquer who went on and on singing and falling in love, because she was more real than the world she sang in. Not Madeleine. She was unencumbered right now by the myth of herself. She was ready to release us from our service to it.
Oh, I thought, I am going to be just as much of a moralist on this side of the mountain as I was on the other side. The deer wouldn't flee from me now, but the weather was as changeable here as there.
"I'll sing," she said, letting go of her knee and swiveling back to the keyboard. "But I want to be looking at all of you. Get up and come over here. You look like a board of directors."
David rose first, as if he had been waiting for the chance, and went to stand in the curve of the grand piano. Then Tony and I got up at the same time and moved to the other side, so that we were between the piano and the fire. Aldo hedged a little by standing next to her, as if he might turn the pages of the music, except she wasn't using any.
"You too," she said ironically, looking at David. I thought it was David, but he must have seen that her eyes weren't focused on him, and he turned around. Then I saw Phidias at the far end of the room, just inside the french doors. His unobtrusive entrance seemed more pointed because of the stormy exit through the doors upstairs. She began the fourth song as he came across the room: "Who Was the Man without the Hat?" But she stopped short in the third line when he joined the group, standing next to David. He looked at her but not at the rest of us.
"What do you want me to sing?" she asked him. She was breaking the order. "Who Was the Man without the Hat?" came next, something she could talk as much as sing, and it rested her voice, and then there were only two more numbers before she took a small intermission. "I only sing three notes," she told me the summer I met her, "and singing the highest one gives me a sore throat." Even before she embarked on the second career, she knew it was going to have to work by illusion and preconception. She didn't blame us for the expectations we brought to her. She had started it.
"You should ask them," Phidias said, meaning us. "I never heard you sing before."
"Not ever?" she asked. It genuinely fascinated her. Her fingers just rested on the keys while they talked.
"I don't think so," he said, a bit puzzled now. You could tell he didn't spend much time in the past, or that he didn't keep his eyes open when he was there. "Did you used to sing?"
"I think so. I sang when I was a little girl. The nuns taught me."
"But not these songs," Aldo said slyly at her shoulder. Aldo was all right. He probably gave up and decided that at least the press wasn't covering it. No one need ever know she changed the order of the songs.
"Can you remember what you sang to me?" Phidias asked. "I can't."
She squinted for a moment at the challenge, then smiled and turned to her right, to Tony and me.
; "He doesn't realize," she said, very pleased with herself, "I'm a regular encyclopedia of the period. My subject is ancient history." She turned back to Phidias. "How about this?"
It was a song about a girl in the city who dreamed of having a farm, and there were fey little puns in every line on the names of the animals in the barnyard. This was to show how naive she was. It sounded like nuns and had nothing to do with the rest of the program; that is, with love and time. Madeleine sang it through on its own terms, neither cynical nor sentimental. Because her voice took on some of the earnestness and concentration of a child's, she was out of character as much as the song was. She finished it up in about thirty seconds.
"It's pretty," Phidias said, "but no, I've never heard it."
"Damn you. One of us is being senile. And it's not pretty, it's crap. I must have done my singing by myself." There was a small snap of dismissal in her tone. Again she turned to us, but it was really Tony she spoke to. She had not forgotten that this was his concert. "That's how I learned to act, too. I took Racine out into the vineyards and recited it. And then I sang."
I had never thought of Madeleine learning how to be Madeleine. The picture she drew sounded a bit like an operetta, with the peasants in the field breaking into song, and I guessed that the story had suffered from having been overremembered and heightened some in the memoir. Also, it confused me that Madeleine and Phidias were referring so openly to the past. I thought: nobody's supposed to know about it. And then I thought: why not? And couldn't come up with an answer. Neither, I suppose, could they.
"You must have heard her sing in a movie" Aldo said, mildly amazed.
"I only saw a couple, and all she did was talk. Hey, Madeleine, I remember how much you used to talk."
Madeleine smiled and started playing the melody of "Who Was the Man without the Hat?"
"Didn't I talk your ear off, Phidias?"
"All night long."
"What about?" David asked Madeleine.
"Becoming a singer," Phidias said. Then he looked over at Aldo as if to apologize. "She talked about it."
"But I wouldn't sing for you?" Madeleine asked in a curious voice, as if she couldn't believe her own perversity. "You know, I think you're right. I didn't dare sing. I was saving it up for the producers." She shook her head. This time she looked exclusively at me, and she seemed startled by the trick of her memory. "What if I'm making it all up?"
"It wouldn't matter, would it?" I said. "It isn't going to hurt anyone."
"I knew I could sing," she said, seeming to remember it right for the first time, "but I wouldn't do it until I found someone who could discover me. I never sang for free. It would have been unprofessional."
She had stopped playing, and she started again and then began the song.
Who was the man without the hat,
The one who didn't come back?
As she went through it, I saw her young again in France, full of her secret future and making plans. She was a professional from the beginning, even before she was admitted into the profession, and the improbable farmer husband was kept in the dark. I couldn't imagine what the two of them had been like, but too much had probably intervened for them to be sure themselves. Here they were, with different stories. It happened that Phidias's version had prevailed for the moment, but it would go back and forth. And if the scene of the secretive farmer's wife saving up to go to Paris to meet Lindbergh sounded as much like an operetta as the scene with the girl who recited Racine in the fields, then it went to show that the past is always an operetta if it is seen from far enough away. But it was hard to say what was going on in Madeleine's mind. No one had asked her to tell the truth in her memoirs, but it was what she appeared to be pursuing.
Then she sang "The Next Morning." Tony was listening politely, as he had all along, a smile frozen solid on his face. He had left his drink beside his chair, and he seemed withdrawn from all the attitudes we had about Madeleine. He was the rapt audience, and that was odd because you would have thought the rest of us, so possessive in differing ways of the woman we seemed to stand guard over; would have been under a spell while the music played. But I knew what it meant. Tony was responding as Madeleine's fans are accustomed to, and somehow it was the measure of what an outsider he was. Everyone else in the room was working secretly to make this concert something different.
And finally "What Do You Want?"—the song among the dozen that I thought of as David's and mine. He didn't know it, since I had always in the past avoided all mention of Madeleine and hid her records in the bottom of a trunk. I loved it for its pugnaciousness, for its warning to the lover not to over-step the boundaries. Just give me one good reason, it said, to give up what I've got for you.
What do you want? I told you no,
I'm busy Saturday night.
My friends have tickets to a Ziegfeld show,
And all we do is fight.
At the same time, the singer seems to yearn for the one good reason. I looked over at David, and my insides shook with desire. The song reminded me that I used to hate David for keeping me captive sexually, for turning me off to anyone else as I fell more cruelly in love. I did not need to be told that it was my fault and not his. I had lived with a paradox of my own, loving and hating and loving and hating until they were much the same. And by then, I suppose, I had worn us out. It did not fill me with anger anymore to love David, though I had a twinge while Madeleine was singing that you can only love that way once, and I missed it.
Why do we always fight like this?
Don't call me again, all right?
I'll just come over and give you a kiss.
Don't let me stay the night.
Aldo allowed for a small pause so that the ambiguous last line could break our hearts or rattle them at least. Then he called: "Intermission." We relaxed and began to move closer to talk to her, shrinking our circle, but Madeleine put up her hand and touched Aldo on the arm.
"That's enough, isn't it?" she asked. A chill brushed the base of my spine. She turned to Tony. "Do you get the idea of it now? The second half is just more of the same, only my voice gets weaker and weaker. I do the last number in sign language."
"Thank you," Tony said, letting her out of the full contract. "It was much more than I hoped for. They don't exaggerate about you. There's no one to compare you to."
"The others have all retired," she said. "But thank you."
For a moment I was so upset, upset out of all proportion to what was going on, that it was as if she had pleaded with Aldo: I can't do it, I'm too old. I had always known she would have to say something of the sort some day, and thinking about it made me hold my breath every year at the concert in June until it was over and they were on their feet applauding. This was the crisis Madeleine and I had been heading for all along, and it was the point of the changes we had made in the evening's concert. It was an inevitable result of the open-ended visit she had paid this summer. Though I loved her with no qualifications and felt unabashed and self-important at having a star of my own, I paid dearly for it, with a terrible case of nerves that lasted from April to June. For thirteen years, I dreaded that she would be old, more than I ever dreaded she would die. The three days I spent with her would serve to reassure me, and then I would forget about it until the next year.
But here it was. I couldn't avoid the moment now. I was holding my breath even as it happened, so I forced it out like a long sigh of relief and then plunged in, for once not testing the depth or the temperature.
"You'd better not sing anymore," I said. "If you do the whole concert, we'll feel obliged to pay you, and we can't afford you."
"I'm cheaper than Frank Sinatra," she said. She wasn't ready to be agreed with quite so fast. "Or since it's a small crowd, I could give you a discount."
"No dear," Aldo said. "No deals. As your manager, I can't let you give it away. I have to think about my ten percent."
"You see," I said, "you're a natural resource. I think your price is regulated by l
aw."
"What do I know about money?" she asked with a shrug of her velvet shoulders. "I still think in francs."
"Money is the stuff you give away," Aldo remarked.
"Well, what shall we do now?" she asked, closing the lid on the keys. "I'm overdressed for everything." She looked up at David. "Do I look like a maître d' in this getup?"
"You look fabulous," Aldo said. He never missed a cue.
"Why don't you let us sing the rest?" David asked.
"The rest of what?"
"The rest of the concert," I said. How can it possibly work, I thought.
"Oh no," Aldo said. "We'll sound like the munchkins."
"So what?" Madeleine trumpeted, and she opened up the piano keys. "I think it's a marvelous idea. Can any of you play?" We all shook our heads no. "All right. I'll play."
So, without an intermission, the second half began. I looked across the piano at David, wondering where he had learned it. He was going to know the words as well as I did, I was sure, and I had always assumed she had no meaning for him. Until now, I thought he had heard of her the way you've heard of a first-class writer you know about and never read, like the non-Americans who win the Nobel Prize. I guess I took it in for the first time, what Phidias said about David taking care of Mrs. Carroll. He didn't patronize Madeleine, didn't diminish her wishes and fears, and he zeroed in on what kept her strong, tuned to the things she took pride in. Madeleine picked out the spare and lonely music of "When We Were New" and waited for David to take up the lyric. I suppose she had no doubts that Aldo and I would chorus along, so she didn't have to look at us. We looked at each other and agreed it was the best thing anyone had come up with.