Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

  “This is Paul,” said Charlie, obviously wishing it wasn’t. “He’s been playing golf.”

  They represented a status symbol of some kind. First came the white drawing room, the Manet, and the sports car. Then came the young man. Paul, like most such, but somehow better than most, she suspected, looked half bronze Hellenistic Prince and half brown plush six-foot teddy bear. Like the others, he sat there courteously, quietly waiting, in slacks, white socks, loafers, and a well-cut sports coat. He looked shy. Being shy herself, she decided to help him out. The Pauls of this world are mannerly, soft-spoken, and very good at emptying ashtrays, lighting cigarettes, and making tactful and lonely little trips off to get more ice.

  Lotte took out a cigarette, and sure enough, it was lit. When she looked up, Charlie was laughing at her.

  “You always do that,” he said.

  Paul did not look uncomfortable. He did look as though he had disappeared into a more congenial world inhabited only by the American Olympic Team of 1960. But mediocrity has its own standards, and they are sometimes astonishingly high. He shifted his legs lazily and smiled at her, from some security of his own. Then he excused himself. He had to change.

  Charlie relaxed. He always found these first meetings a strain, she remembered now.

  “Where did you find him?”

  “I was playing golf.”

  “You don’t play golf, Charlie.”

  “On the contrary, I played it for two miserable, rain-soaked, agonizing weeks. He’s a golf pro.”

  She was amused. “I thought maybe it was skiing. God help you if you ever meet someone who plays volley-ball.”

  “Ice hockey.” Charlie was feeling impudent again.

  “Tobogganing.”

  “I’ve been tobogganing. It’s terrible.”

  “Lacrosse.”

  “Tennis on the whole was the worst.” He looked quite young. “Where’re your freaks?”

  “I left Miss Campendonck in Paris,” said Lotte primly.

  “Goddamit, I didn’t mean Miss Campendonck. But it’s good to see you. You never change.”

  One way to keep young in this world is to march along firmly in the company of those you were young with. That meant Charlie. The others were scattered or dead. The war had seen to that, the war and time.

  “We never do,” said Lotte. “We use up all our strength just to stay where we are.”

  It was a pleasant evening, drowsy, the dusk beyond the terrace flickering with luceoles. She enjoyed herself. And when, inevitably, at the end of it, as usual, they went to their separate rooms, she didn’t mind being alone at all. For given company in the evening, after a certain age, and on the whole, we’d much rather be by ourselves at night.

  Out there somewhere, below the window, in the dark, the luceoles flickered at random and inevitable as tiddlywinks by Bach. It was curious, how knowing Charlie was in his room, on the same floor, always soothed her. She had gone to sleep with this same snug feeling in Beverly Hills fifteen years ago, when he had been staying with her there.

  IV

  IT was dawn. The sky was gray turning to chrysoprase turning to real blue, and some ring-necked doves were cooing in a pine tree. The gardener had been up early. The air was pungent with the smell of new-mown grass. At that hour it is impossible to tell whether the day will be sunny or overcast, we are too surprised to be alive. We find ourselves wheeled out of unconsciousness on a hospital dolly or a morgue tray, feet first, so clearheaded that we feel fuddled and cannot remember what was done to us in there. We do not know where we are, but only that we are there again. We made it. We are still alive. That makes us smile with pleasure, like a shy and grateful child given a candy it wanted so much, it could taste the taste of not being given it, but here it is, after all, not just any old gift, but exactly what one wanted.

  Something is missing of course. We feel scooped out and we can see the stitches. But we are not missing. We are back again. We do not know the prognosis. But we are there. That’s marvelous.

  Lotte was waking up. It took her a while, these days. Birds were singing outside and there was plenty of light in the room, in fact, too much. She had nothing against songbirds, but these sounded like a bedspring, left to rust in a vacant lot, being jounced by guttersnipes. She’d had a bad night. That pishtush about what a marvelous mechanism the human body is is a lot of pishtush. There’s nothing in it. That look of immortal youth takes hours. The only marvelous thing about the machine is that it runs at all, and the better the car, the more time it needs in the garage. So Lotte stayed in bed. Under thirty your body runs you. Over thirty, if you’ve any sense and know how, you’re old enough to fight back, and woe betide you if you don’t know how.

  She knew how. So she was still in bed when the phone rang. The Festival had caught up with her.

  That she still had a career, she owed to being a good scout, easy to get on with, obliging, polite, generous, and you never hear a word against her, which as a matter of fact she was, and much preferred to her public image, which was of a Ninon de l’Enclos traveling in foreign parts, the beautiful lady who never says thank you. So she agreed, besides it would be one in the eye for the management at Cannes, broke the connection, and then dialed Charlie’s room. He wasn’t there. She had forgotten. He was an early riser. But usually he stayed in his room, Paul or no Paul, and worked until noon. These little toddles out into the daylight weren’t like him. She wondered where he could be.

  V

  HE was at the theatre. Theatres had fascinated him ever since somebody had given him a purple Russian puppet as a child.

  Mondorf didn’t have a movie palace large enough to house the Festival (it would award the Prix Luxembourgeois, which should embarrass the Russians a bit, should they by any chance win it), so it had been necessary to use this bijou piece of nonsense instead. The theatre had been built by a nineteenth-century duke, at the caprice of someone like Cléo de Merode, in between kings at the time, down on her luck, but well up on the Almanach de Gotha. Charlie felt quite happy there.

  When he was a young tourist he had once gone to Vicenza during the winter, that being the fiscally convenient season for young tourists. The snow had turned Palladio into a pastry cook. The theatre there, being ducal also, but from a private period, had had no foyer to the street. So he had entered that wonderland along a board fence and through a service door.

  The guide had left him alone in a Monteverdi Rome built by jewelers for the use of dwarfs. He had been fascinated, in particular, by that little town in diminished perspective that could be seen through the arches of the screen, exactly as some provincial Bibiena had left it, so he climbed up on the stage and stared through the arches. “Open identical doors on identical death,” he remembered. Literacy has its uses. It is at any rate a great consolation, it provides the pleasure of consanguinity, although an arch leads not to death, but to the past. It was unexpectedly cold on the stage and all the seats behind him were haunted full. A little hesitant about not what he would, but what he would not, find back there, Charlie ducked his head and entered the past, trudging uphill over creaky, splintered boards, with painted loggias at eye level, and doorways up to his knees. As one went to the rear, the past got smaller, and going round in back, he couldn’t help noticing the past was also lath and batten work behind, in short, a Potemkin village. The same streets are sent ahead and set up for our arrival. We see what we want to see. We spend our life going down the same street, having the same adventures.

  He was disappointed. He had hoped to meet interesting people back there, courtesans on cothurni, boy cardinals, and a G.I. or two, himself at always twenty, and a man with bird-cages on his back. It was his theory that everyone who had ever wandered backstage was still there, caught like flies in amber. He had only wanted to join them. Everything we have ever lost is back there, everyone we have ever loved. But he couldn’t see them. And what was worse, he couldn’t touch them either.

  Those who love us are stagier. They are not ba
ck there, but ranting out in front. Those weren’t the people he was searching for.

  Ever since that trip to Vicenza, he had always thought of the past, and himself entering it, as a trudge uphill through a Roman arch, over splintered boards, through a diminished town, into a world of lovely mustn’t touch. The world is nothing else but lovely mustn’t touch, like Mr. Wilde’s fruit: touch it, and the bloom is gone.

  He was glad to be alone these days. We can be affectionate only by learning our roles and keeping an appropriate distance. In a way he wished he had never walked up, he wished he did not still continue to walk up, on the present like a treadmill, slipping behind us, that Bibiena street.

  The present theatre had no scena. It had only a proscenium encrusted with white plaster cherubs.

  Well, that’s the way things go. The lights grow dim in the Cosmic Opera House, in this case the rather tatty nineteenth-century theatre the duke had provided. Once, no doubt, real people, at any rate, relatively real, had occupied this stage, to sing of very unreal passions. But now, instead, the space was occupied by a large, white, which is to say silver, screen, across which, this afternoon, a group of essentially foolish people would watch themselves flitter like solarized shadows through heartwarming human drama and, in one or two cases, the very best photography that art and hokum could provide.

  At least in the theatre at Vicenza real people had once conducted the rites, whereas here all one could do was sit in darkness, eat popcorn, and watch the better part of Peter Schlemihl at one’s leisure.

  We all know what film festivals are.

  There is the magnificent Czech film which probably is magnificent, if you could just see it, for all the red filter photography. The negative has been stored in a barn for twelve years. Still, it is very moving, very intense. It will get the prize, unless the Polish film wins instead. The Polish film is exactly the same, except that it takes place in a sewer. At the end of the Polish film the hero emerges from the sewer, takes a look around, and then goes back down again. In Central Europe it is always groundhog day. All you see is the lid fitting back on again, in the middle of an empty street. This represents life. If the Poles are feeling cheerful this year, a water truck goes by. This represents hope and shows the eternal continuity of things.

  There is the technically proficient costume drama from the U.S., and in daring years, a musical. The U.S.S.R. has sent along a film completely free of propaganda, but you won’t see it, because at the last moment it was withdrawn because it was completely free of propaganda. Japan has entered two films, one about a prostitute who thinks a lot, the other a horse opera about a horse who doesn’t, but it is adapted from a classic, so it must mean something, and the color shots of water weeds under a burning castle are well worth watching, though not perhaps for quite that long. They represent the tangledness of life. It was a flop in Tokyo but a smash hit in London.

  There is the second film to be made in Paraguay, though with foreign technicians. The second film to be made in Paraguay, like the first, is almost inevitably about bandits. The heroine has the sullen look of a woman six thousand miles away from Central Casting, without a telephone. There is the film the Belgians (or the British, Portuguese, or Dutch) made just before leaving the Congo (or Gold Coast, or Angola, or New Guinea), and, on the afternoon devoted to short subjects and documentaries, the film the Congolese, or Ghanaians, or Angolans, or Hottentots, made about getting it back. The Belgian, British, Portuguese or Dutch film is about folk customs and water birds. The Congolese or Angolan film isn’t. These are in color. They always get a special prize.

  The Finns have sent a nature film, about winter, very long; the Swedes an adaptation from Strindberg, even longer; and the French, as usual, are being French. The rape scenes in the Finnish and Swedish films take place in the open country, to the sound of bird calls and running water. The French rape scenes take place in a bed, to the sound of heavy breathing, only. If the film is Italian, you sometimes hear some rather nice progressive jazz. You can also differentiate the entries by the heroines’ breasts. The Swedes don’t have any, the Finns don’t want any, and the Italians’ sway around with all the tethered irresponsibility of tied cheeses jerking on their strings in a high wind.

  There would be five days of it, and the one thing you could be sure of, was that absolutely nobody would send a comedy, except maybe the Russians, and Russian comedies do not amuse. Charlie went back to his room. He could always pretend, he supposed, that Cléo de Merode was somewhere behind the screen, a very solid ghost, making faces and finger-shadow rabbits at an audience which undoubtedly had no idea who she had been.

  VI

  BECAUSE she wanted to ask a favor, a thing she did not like ever to ask of anyone, Lotte had climbed back into what she always thought of as battledress, the normal costume, that is, of a frail, defenseless, indefatigable, spritely woman of fashion, soundly rich; in other words, the little black dress, three strands of pearls, and the kind of slim spiked heels that always look as though they could kick in your skull and had.

  Then she knocked on Charlie’s door and was told to come in.

  “Oh, I thought you were the boy with the drinks,” said Charlie, coming out of one of the inner rooms.

  “I didn’t know you drank this early.”

  “I don’t. But I always hope someone will bring me one, all the same.”

  Lotte sat down and looked around her. In the years she had known him, Charlie had never asked her to the house. This was because he didn’t have a house. Or if he did have one, his current wife was living in it, and he was not. What he did have was an art collection.

  Wherever he went, hotel room, three-room suite, such as this was, rented apartment, or villa by the seaside for the summer, the art collection was the first thing unpacked, though, with two exceptions, its contents varied, depending upon how horse trading had gone that year.

  The first exception, and the first thing to be unpacked, anywhere, was the small Boudin. Once the Boudin was propped up somewhere, Charlie knew he was at home, gave a grunt, took off his coat, went into the bathroom, had a shower, and rang for a highball. That Boudin was indispensable, even when he was staying in a private house. Everyone who had ever entertained him knew that. The pictures in any room he slept in came down. The Boudin went up.

  Once the highball had come he lit a Camel, stared at the Boudin, lit another Camel, and then unpacked the other indispensable possession, which was a shallow dish about eight inches in diameter, a shiny white soft-paste fourteenth-century Korean semi-porcelain of the Yi Dynasty. He used it as an ashtray, and it always had to be on the night table beside his bed. She’d seen that ashtray and that Boudin on a cheap Greek tramp steamer, in a cowboy hotel in Wyoming, and at the St. James et d’Albany, as well as in her own house. Wherever he was, he wasn’t happy unless that dish lay beside his bed at night while he slept, like a pale, acquiescent, reassuring moon.

  That is, he called it an ashtray. What it really meant to him she had no idea, but she did know he never allowed a cigarette to be put out in it, or any ash to fall in it, either. For that he used a cheap square glass thing instead. The one time she had used it, he’d fidgeted for a while, and then, with a wry self-deprecating smile, had gone into the bathroom with it, wiped it clean with a damp face towel, and brought it back.

  “Nobody’s ever done that before,” he’d said. He hadn’t been angry. But it was the closest to scared she’d ever seen him.

  She understood the Boudin well enough (it represented stylish ladies and gentlemen, standing about on the beach at Trouville, just out of reach of the sea. It was the usual Boudin). He’d bought it with the first real money he’d ever earned; he’d been wretched, poor and anonymous when they were both young together in Berlin; and no doubt it represented the sort of ideal family he’d never had. But the ashtray, except that it was beautiful, was beyond her.

  There were a few new things.

  “They’ve asked me to make an opening speech,” she said. “Wi
ll you play escort, Charlie?”

  “I told you they’d catch up with you. Yes, of course I will. Besides, I thought you knew. That’s why I’m here. They made me a judge.”

  “Made you a what?”

  “Well, they could have done far worse,” said Charlie, who was not good at scripts. “It’s like the law. If you’re incompetent enough, naturally, people feel you’re impartial. So they make you a judge. Besides, I’m a name. In fact, sometimes these days, I wonder if I’m anything else. ‘Nomen et praetera nihil,’ you know.” He liked to quote Latin. It gave things a fine sacerdotal imprimatur. Of course he didn’t do it accurately, but he did it just as well as the average parish priest. The secret of being able to speak any foreign language with assurance is never to speak it to the natives. And since the Romans were all dead, he felt safe.

  “It’ll be like old times,” he said. “We’ll fob Paul off with a starlet. I was going to do that anyway. Are you sure you came here alone?”

  She didn’t answer that.

  “A pity,” he said. “We could have thrown them together. The younger generation, you know.”

  Yes, she knew. But she, too, had been thinking about old times.

  “It’ll be like the public performance. I always did enjoy the public performance,” he said.

  So had she. Besides, it was always nice to see Charlie in a good mood, though his bad moods were funnier.

  It was a little wistful, the public performance, but he was right, she had enjoyed it. It had started years ago, in the mid-thirties, in Hollywood, which is to say, in Culver City, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Malibu, in those places which are not Hollywood, but for which the name Hollywood must do.

  She had her own way of dealing with reality. It had been foisted on her, originally, in the old days, by the studio, when she had been a constant star; and a star is a glamorous woman, a star must have romances, those being the days before every woman of the first magnitude had been forced to adopt two children to keep her box-office rating up. So the studio had provided romances, with a sort of weary patience. At first the technique had made her furious. But as time went by, she had gotten to enjoy it. She counted time as “the year I appeared with Gary Cooper.” “The year I appeared with Gérard Philippe.” Or whoever it was. “The year I told them to go to hell and went everywhere with Charlie.”