by David Plante
I made myself write Sonia a thank-you note.
I didn’t see her for some months. As I was entering a house in Hampstead for New Year’s Eve, I saw Sonia rush out from a side room to me, as though she had been waiting for me; she put out her cheeks, turning her face away, for me to kiss her, then stepped back, and spoke to me in very rapid French. For a moment, I wondered if she had mistaken me for someone else. She took me by the sleeve and pulled me into the side room, saying, all in French, that I must help her, that I would understand: at the party was a young woman who had been married to and divorced from a queer, and Sonia noticed that at the party the young woman had been talking for a long time to a nice, very straight man who showed signs of interest in her, but hadn’t gone so far as to ask her for a date; I was to flirt with the young woman so the nice, very straight man would become jealous and immediately ask her for a date. “You may be American,” Sonia said, “but you’re French by blood, and you understand these things.” I didn’t want to say: Hardly. Sonia introduced me and we all sat together, Sonia and the man in armchairs, the young woman and I on a sofa. Sonia spoke without stopping. She said, “They took away the drinking laws, everyone became an alcoholic; they took away the gambling laws, and everyone became a gambler; now they’re taking away the laws against homosexuals, and everyone is becoming queer.” Then she jumped up, grabbed me by the hand, and pulled me out of the room, saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear? He made a date with her.” I hadn’t heard. Sonia took me around the rest of the party.
We saw one another often. I went to her house for luncheon, tea, drinks, dinner. I continued to meet people, some of whom became friends. Sonia came to my small flat in Battersea for dinner.
Whenever I went to Sonia’s house I was apprehensive. Often, Sonia chose what I could only think of as a victim, usually a male; to whatever this guest said, Sonia responded, in French or English, “How ridiculous!” Sometimes I was the victim.
I would get home from an evening of being victimized, angry and depressed, and swear I’d never see Sonia again. The next morning, however, I’d ring her to say what a lovely dinner party she’d given, and how I longed to see her again soon.
She was able to produce in her parties an intimate sense of family reunion, as if everyone there was related and could join in the talk about those relatives who were absent. When did anyone last see So-and-so? At her house, Sonia could make one feel one had been taken into a large, peculiar family. On these evenings I would leave imagining I was a promising nephew in her large family.
We had luncheon, for the first time just the two of us together, in a small restaurant. She was talking, on and on, about a shelf in her bathroom which was on the point of collapsing. I had imagined that when I was alone with her our conversation would be intimate: we would talk about what we couldn’t talk about when we were with others. Perhaps I had wanted to talk to her about what I considered most relevant to a relationship: feelings and thoughts.
I said, “I wonder if I feel more isolated here in Europe than in America.”
She said, “You might as well ask if you’d feel isolated on Mars. The question doesn’t have much consequence. No, no. Don’t think about it.” She drew in on her cigarette. “Now, I’ve got to get that shelf put up properly, as I have some French house guests coming.”
I thought: All right, we’ll talk about the shelf.
“It probably needs rawl plugs to hold it up,” I said.
“Rawl plugs? What are they?”
I explained.
“How clever of you,” she said. “I didn’t think you were so clever. I thought there might be a reason for my liking you. And are rawl plugs difficult to put in?”
“I’d be pleased to put them in for you.”
“That really is too kind. Really, really. I’d give you lunch.”
We made a date for me to come to fix the falling shelf to the bathroom wall, and then I thought we’d get down to talking about what, to me, would give the luncheon its importance: I would tell Sonia a little about my inner world, and she would tell me a little about hers. But she went on talking about what else was needed for the shelf, and when we parted she said, “That was lovely,” and I wondered why she thought it lovely when nothing we’d talked about, it seemed to me, had been what I considered important.
After a large lunch in her kitchen, she showed me up to the bathroom with the collapsing shelf. She had bought a box of rawl plugs, and she had as well a hand drill, a masonry bit, a hammer, a screwdriver, as I’d asked, some brand new. I thought she would leave me, but she remained in the bathroom, talking as she watched me work. When I removed the shelf, plaster dust fell from the screw holes, which were too big for the rawl plugs, but I felt I couldn’t explain that, that that would have been too complicated, and, while Sonia talked, I went on working. I sweated. The shelf, when I got it up, wobbled.
Sonia said, “You are clever. Thank you so very very much.”
It was as if I had done her a great service for which she would never be able to repay me.
The rawl plugs became a term of our friendship.
Sometimes I was invited to parties by people she had introduced me to, and often I would find her at the party. Once, as I entered a room, I saw Sonia standing in front of the fireplace with the painter friend at whose show I had first met her in Paris. I went to them, but Sonia, her face drawn as with the fatigue of her seriousness, was too occupied with the painter to take me in, and she turned her back a little to me. I spoke to others. When the painter left, early, I saw that Sonia was standing alone, and I went to her again. She asked me to get her another glass of wine.
I was with her the whole evening, as I felt if I left her no one else would speak to her; and, also, she spoke about the painter so obsessively there was no way to break in upon her. The painter’s friend had died, perhaps killed himself, and Sonia talked about that. I kept fetching her glasses of wine, and she became very drunk. By nine-thirty, before the food was brought out, she was too drunk to stay. She was talking so quickly I imagined her talk would break through the human limits of talk and become something else. She lurched when she moved. I said I was going home, and could I give her a lift in a taxi? She followed me out. In the taxi, she went on talking, in a higher and higher pitched, accusing voice, about how unhappy the painter was.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “None of you understands what desperation is. You won’t help. I could kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill you all for your lack of sensitivity. He is suffering. Does any one of you care? Do you ring him up? Fuck all if you do.”
I had to contain my anger, and, getting out of the taxi, showed her to her door to make sure she got in. It was about ten o’clock, and instead of returning to the party I went home, feeling that, as I did not understand real desperation, I understood nothing. Sonia did understand.
I asked her to a dinner party to which I’d asked people I hadn’t met through her, people she didn’t know, or hardly knew. She arrived early; she’d been to a drinks party and was drunk. I gave her more to drink, and she, laughing in a hard, dry way, her head thrown back, told me she hadn’t wanted to come to a dinner party, had wanted to go home and to bed. As she laughed, I laughed, my laughter as hard and dry as hers. She said, “I hate dinner parties,” and laughed. I laughed.
I drank a lot.
A woman novelist came. Sonia was very attentive to her, and the moment the novelist put a cigarette between her lips, Sonia jumped across the room with a lit cigarette lighter for her.
They talked, as if alone, about queers.
The novelist said, “I don’t trust them.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Sonia said. “Let me tell you about queers.” She laughed.
I laughed. I said, “Stop it.”
Sonia said to me, “You listen to us. There are a few things you should know.”
I said, “Why don’t we talk about Jews?”
The other guests came: a male novelist, his lady frien
d, a television producer, an Irish tenor.
I said, “Thank God you’ve come.”
“Why?” the male novelist asked.
“They were ganging up to talk about nothing but queers.”
We all laughed, hard, dry laughter.
I gave everyone drinks.
To get off the subject of queers, I congratulated the male writer on a book he had recently published.
Sonia said, “I won’t read it. I’m sure it’s awful.”
We all laughed.
More hysterical than anyone, I was incoherent, kept knocking over glasses, and tripping as I served food. In my small room, we were crowded together about the gas fire, on chairs and my bed, eating from our laps.
And all the while Sonia talked, talked more rapidly than I have heard anyone else talk, ever. The others were silent.
Sonia stopped for a moment, there was a pause, and I thought: I’ll just go and leave them all here to fate as there’s nothing I can do.
She said to the tenor, “Will you sing some Irish songs with something about liberty in them?”
I thought: I must go. If they don’t all go now, I must.
The tenor sang, his face raised and his eyes closed, medieval Irish songs, and after he finished the silence was terrible.
In a burst, Sonia gave a history of Ireland from 1169 or some such early date, which went on and on, all jumbled. She involved Israel in Irish history, and her pro-Irish sentiments gave way to pro-Israeli sentiments. She had flipped her lid. Nothing, I thought, could put it back on.
The only person she looked at, intently, was the woman novelist. Sonia kept jumping up to light her cigarettes.
When Sonia paused, I asked the male novelist if he would sing. He did. He sang “Jerusalem.”
I asked others to sing. The television producer did.
I sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Sonia refused to sing, as did the other women.
All the guests left at exactly ten o’clock.
While I cleared up the plates, glasses, overfilled ashtrays, I felt sick. I went to bed.
Two days later, I went to Sonia’s for dinner. I was worried that the evening she had spent with me would in ways I couldn’t imagine be continued. The female novelist was there.
Sonia put me on her right. She spoke calmly. That there was no hysteria about her almost disappointed me. Everyone else was calm too.
Over dessert, Sonia said to me, “I feel I was too rowdy at your flat the other evening. I’m very sorry about it. I was drunk.”
I said, “I thought you were spirited.”
“I was nervous,” she said. “I always lose control when I’m with people I don’t know.”
The evening was a bright family evening, and, again, I felt that Sonia gave me a place in that family; she made me feel that I belonged in London. For her, as for me, any family in London was a made-up family; she was entirely devoted to it.
I had a vision of Sonia giving or going out to, every day, luncheons, teas, drinks, dinners. But I saw that these required as great an effort when she went out to them as when she received; I think she often hated them.
I felt this: that what she really wanted was to lie on her bed in a darkened room.
More and more, she said, “Ridiculous! Ridiculous!”
That ridiculous became a state of the world. I could not imagine that there was some particular trouble in Sonia’s life which gave rise to such a general condemnation because Sonia would not allow me to imagine it. Whatever it might have been she kept it to herself, but there were outward signs of something kept in. She seemed to become physically uncoordinated, and sometimes, going into or out of a restaurant, tripped. Once, she fell in her house and hurt her jaw and lower lip so she had to have stitches. A tiny vein, like a fine, bright red worm, appeared just inside a nostril. She became prone to infections: a toe, a tooth. If I asked her how she was, she laughed and said, “Awful,” but that was all about herself. She’d quickly start talking about something else.
I realized that Sonia made me aware that everything I said and did, my very tone of voice and gestures, was vain. When I was with her her effect was to make me see my life as meaningless, as I knew she saw her own life. She did not impose this on me; it happened by my being in her presence. I could have decided not to be a friend of hers, but I was, I think, a close friend (she introduced me to others as a close friend); I wanted to be a close friend perhaps because I felt she saw the truth, and I respected her for seeing it. I would think: She’s right, everything is ridiculous.
Then she’d say to me, “Life being life, which is awful, of course we’ve got to be friends and help one another. Of course.”
She helped her friends in need as if she, herself, had no need of help.
When a friend died, she seemed not to grieve. I think she grieved privately, and the only evidence I had of that was when she stated in a direct way that she had been weeping all the night before. Her eyes looked swollen. But other than her stating this there was no way I could get her to talk about what she had wept for. I knew that if I did try to talk to her about her grief, she would, harshly, tell me I didn’t understand.
There were weeks when I didn’t see her; I had become used to seeing her weekly. If I rang her in the late morning, her voice sounded as if I’d just woken her. If I rang her in the late afternoon, she sounded as if she were about to go to bed.
When we did meet, she’d say, “I haven’t seen anyone in a long time. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t.”
I wanted to help her, as she would have helped me; but when I said, “Please let me know if I can do anything,” she smiled, then frowned.
A friend did go to stay with Sonia to care for her. In the late morning, she’d bring a tray up to her, and would either find Sonia in a darkened room, her head lifted a little from the pillow, saying angrily, “You fucking well woke me just when I’d fallen asleep,” or, in a bright room, sitting up in bed, saying, as she stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray, “Enfin. I thought breakfast would never come.”
We wondered what was wrong with Sonia.
Then, unexpectedly, she sold her house, and a short time after she moved to Paris. There was something manic in the move, as if Paris were a solution to a problem which had no other solution. She told the newspapers that she was going to get a job reading and translating for a French publisher.
In Paris, she remained in close touch with her friends in London. We discussed her when we met. No one understood quite why she was living in Paris in what appeared to be self-imposed exile: she did not seem to have a job with a publisher; she did not seem to be seeing her French friends; she was in Paris for no apparent reason.
2
She and I corresponded. Her letters were affectionate, and as if filled with small fresh bunches of flowers.
But I was worried about Sonia, and, in a letter, asked her if she’d like to join me the coming summer in Italy, where I was part-owner of a stone house in the mountains. I’m not sure I expected her to take me up. She did, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake.
There were lots of letters and telephone conversations between us about Italy.
She was to drive down from Paris and meet me in the South of France, where I had gone to stay with members of her London “family.”
My host said to me, “Poor thing, going to Italy with Sonia.”
“She seemed lonely in Paris,” I answered. “I thought I’d try to help her. But I’m worried that everything will go wrong in Italy.”
“Well,” he said, “if she doesn’t like it she can leave quickly enough. She’ll say, ‘Zut alors,’ and she’ll be off.”
His wife said, “The boss will be tough, but, you’ll see, you can count on her being helpful.”
One afternoon before Sonia arrived an American writer came to tea, which we had under the mulberry tree. When I said I was going to Italy with Sonia Orwell, she said, “You’re out of your fucking mind.”
Sonia a
rrived from Paris in great heat, sweating. Instead of sitting in the shade and having cold white wine, however, she picked up the hostess’s secateurs and went into the garden. After a while, the hostess and I went to look for her and found her cutting away at a rose plant, flinging the cuttings out on to the gravel. We stopped at a distance and simply watched her. Quietly, I said, “In Italy, I think I’ll let her do exactly what she wants.”
Whenever Sonia and I met one another, outside or inside the house, she’d say, “We must talk about our trip,” then walk away as though she didn’t want to talk about it. She always carried her handbag. I’d say, meeting her, “We should at least study maps,” and she’d throw her head back and say, “Oh, maps!” and walk away, her bag held by its strap, as if she were on her way, in a hurry, to a specific place where she had to do something much more important than discuss maps with me; then she’d stop ten feet away, suddenly uncertain where she was going, turn and say, “No, maps are essential, we must have maps.” She’d then go off in another direction with her bag, stop, not sure where she should go, and go off in still another direction.
In the afternoon, we settled with tea and maps, and Sonia asked me if I would ring a garage in Rapallo—the point on our route at which, she calculated, she would have driven her new car 3,000 miles, so would have to have it serviced. She could not speak Italian. I rang the French operator in Marseilles to place the call. The connection was bad. The operator said, “I can’t hear you. You’ve got to speak louder.” I shouted. She said, “Speak louder. Where are you?” I shouted more, “But I’m shouting! Bouches du Rhône!” She said, “Well, I don’t understand. It’s obvious you don’t speak French.” A fury passed through me. I shouted, “I speak French! You don’t understand French!” She said, in that matter-of-fact way, “If you don’t speak French—” I slammed the receiver down. I was trembling, angry not only with the telephonist, with all of France, but angry that Sonia should have heard me.