Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

  Of all the strays she had picked up from time to time and helped on their way, in exchange for company, Unne alone needed no help and wanted no company. And yet she would not go away. And she was the last person Lotte wanted to see just then, or to be seen with by Charlie. She did not want to be caught out.

  Unne looked round the room as though it wasn’t there, which very probably it wasn’t, found Lotte, who was, and came over. She was wearing a little nothing of gray wool which defined her exactly.

  “You weren’t in your room,” she said. Her voice was like the rest of her, remote, but gentle. “Miss Campendonck thought maybe I should come ahead.”

  “Damn Miss Campendonck!”

  Charlie looked amused. “And do you always do what Miss Campendonck tells you?” he asked.

  Unne, who was the daughter of a diplomat, was quite the equal of Charlie. “I don’t care for Paris much,” she said. “Besides, Bill’s back.”

  Bill was Lotte’s accompanist. Apparently Unne didn’t care for him much, either.

  “Miss Campendonck said she’d be along Thursday, they’ll all be along Thursday, and are you certain she’s to have a north room?”

  Charlie screwed his monocle in. “Sometimes I think Miss Campendonck has tumbled to the truth. You’re nothing but a booking agent for your own camp followers,” he said unkindly. “You can introduce us now, if you like.”

  Lotte introduced them, though she would have preferred to ram his monocle into his mouth, instead. If he had decided to play Cheshire Cat, he might at least have had the decency to fade out on cue and leave them alone.

  He wouldn’t, of course.

  Then Paul came back.

  To her surprise, Unne seemed to like Paul. As much as she ever liked anyone. Lotte relaxed. That would make the visit easier.

  X

  SHE liked these responsibilities, which we keep for six months and then let go. They are substitutes for the children we might have had. But sometimes responsibilities lie in wait to assume us, rather than we them, and of that she had always been afraid. She had known Unne off and on now for a year. A year with anybody else would have exhausted her patience, which was to say, her curiosity. But Unne was self-contained. She had seen what was behind all that decorum only once.

  A diplomat’s daughter learns tact, but has no home. She has at best only a temporary foothold in permanence, when the tour of duty is a long one. She learns she has no part in other people’s lives. Now she was going away from everyone she had pretended, for the past two years, she had known all her life. It was at that farewell party that Lotte had acquired her.

  Unne was upset. Her only security was to live in a world in which nothing is ever moved, and the people we see today are the people we will always see. Hence that calm. In herself she carried the stability she needed and could find nowhere else. The world is empty. It is a lovely garden we may visit only during visiting hours, when the owners are away. Unne knew that at fifteen, and was capable of being resigned to it at twenty. At forty she might even enjoy it. But not at twenty-three.

  Lotte had found her seated alone, halfway up the back service stairs, with her head in her arms, pretending not to cry. They had toasted her away, and unable to bear it, she had smiled with pleasure and then hidden here.

  “Isn’t there anything more to the world than a dinner party?” she asked.

  It was useless to tell her that for well-conducted people the world is a dinner party, and nothing else.

  “Isn’t there anything, anywhere?”

  Lotte was compassionate. There are some people to whom the best way to be kind is not to lie. They are the people like ourselves, who do not mind being told the truth, because what we believe the truth to be is what they believe it to be.

  “No,” she said.

  Unne leaned against her. “I want to touch someone,” she said. “I want to feel warm.”

  Lotte was powerless to help. Such things made her uneasy. She was the wrong sex. What Unne needed was the cool heat of a vast difference between the sexes, and more affection than sensation. But why say so?

  Instead she said, “Why not come to Paris with me?”

  In the beginning she had been grateful for the company. There are times when a light in one’s own house comes to look as lonely and as exclusive as the lights in other people’s houses, whom we do not know either, as we walk by. But it is rather depressing, also, to see a pale carbon of yourself when young. Yet she was glad Unne was back.

  XI

  THE next day they were locked up in their rooms, at least until the festival began, for a storm had blown up during the night. The rain on the terrace had the angry, desultory sound of men peeing against a wall. It was full of small beer, and besides, might give birth at any moment to Orion, for rain is an emotional conductor.

  Paul was in his bedroom reading a book Charlie had not written. Charlie was in the living room toying with the remains of a stale croissant and trying to write a book which Paul would not read. Nor would he read it himself. He did not write the sort of book he liked to read. His own favorite reading consisted of memoirs, gossip, history, and cheap thrillers, the bloodier the better. His books were about what happened to people he could no longer remember or had never known.

  He was a one-book author. Having written it, he sensibly did not try to write it again, but instead wrote other books. As a matter of fact, he did not know how he had written it, though it was reputed good.

  “I may not live up to my promise,” he told Lotte once, “but at least I succeeded in living it down.”

  He had a wonderful freedom, for the books he wrote now had made him rich, whereas that one good book, halfway good book anyhow, had preserved his reputation. When he and Lotte were young, they had neither of them expected this life they lived now. At least he hadn’t. Women, if the worst comes to the worst, have always the hope of marrying well. But he had had no hope at all.

  Now he was miserable in comfort, which meant that, except at three in the morning, when his sleeping pill didn’t work, he was never miserable. He enjoyed his life very much. He never tired of watching it. “You will admit that, if it was not life, it was magnificent,” said Fitzgerald once, speaking up from squalor, of the carpeted existence of the rich. Being rich himself now, Charlie agreed. Nor had he ever been tempted to slash his wrists over a chorus boy. Suicide he left to Seneca and the proper time. The world is full of chorus boys, the woods are full of wives, but we have only one pair of wrists. He always treated razor blades with caution. There is a temptation in them, even though we do not feel it. They have the seductiveness of all dangerous things. If we are to survive we must lash ourselves to the mast.

  Of course to write books is only to play with dolls, but it is by playing with dolls that a child learns how people behave. So Charlie found the work interesting enough.

  To be second-rate is not the same as to be a fraud. If you are a fraud you worry. If you are second-rate, you are allowed to putter and to have your vanities. He liked to spend all morning searching for the mot juste to fit in a passage that didn’t really deserve one. A good brood over the alchimie du verbe was thoroughly enjoyable. Because of course it didn’t matter. He could afford to fribble away his time that way, and since he could not succeed, he did not have to worry lest he fail.

  However, though he liked the contiguity of the world, he never could abide someone in the same rooms while he was working, so he got up and told Paul to take Unne downstairs for a drink and leave him in peace.

  To his surprise, Paul seemed to like the idea. But instead of getting peace, Charlie just found himself thinking about Lotte. He called her up.

  “I’m still in bed.”

  “I’ve seen you in bed before.”

  The number of people who were allowed in to that presence before it had its face on must be limited, but he was one of the permissible. She hesitated, and then told him yes, to come along.

  Going down the hotel corridor it occurred to him that he had
read in Musil (though Charlie never read authors when they first came out, he did believe in being on to the latest thing, so he always read them when they were revived) the idea that people live in hotels because it gives them the illusion of living in a country house, and they can’t afford a country house any more.

  Suppose, then—it was another one of Charlie’s imaginary novels (in reality Charlie wrote only about the more expensive sort of refugee, or about his own past, though not often, since he couldn’t remember his own past very well, not having had one)—that you took one of those charming tales by Turgenev, in which the world is a country house, Adam has a commission in the army, Eve has just come back from her finishing school, and Razumov, whatever his ideals, wouldn’t hurt a fly really, and moved the setting to a hotel, but to this kind of hotel, a hotel for the resident or at least the migratory rich.

  No, it wouldn’t do. Turgenev’s people have all graduated to sports cars, and scorn the brake. That ruins their charm. It has also changed their nature.

  He went into Lotte’s sitting room without knocking, and on into the bedroom. She was in bed, but it was plain she had been out of bed long enough to do something to her appearance before getting back into it in order to give the impression that she had not yet gotten up.

  “I sent Paul off to amuse Unne,” he said, curling up on the coverlet. He felt boyish. But then the last time he had curled up on Lette’s coverlet was two wives and five or six Pauls and four novels and fifteen years ago, when he had been staying with her in Beverly Hills. The posture erased the interval.

  She must have been thinking of that too, for her face had the faintly puzzled look it got sometimes, when she was thinking of one of those few of her many temporary houses in which she had felt at home. Yes, she was definitely doggy. That’s the expression a dog sometimes gets when you take him back to visit the new tenants in the old house.

  There were times when Charlie repented of having so suavely groomed himself into a cat. But there had been no choice. No other role had been possible. It was also true that you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.

  He wished he hadn’t thought of that, because he couldn’t remember, come to think of it, whether a sow’s ear had any down on it or not. If it didn’t have any, then the point of the proverb wasn’t quite what he had always thought it was.

  He wanted to ask her, but thought better not. Sometimes people shook like whippets when you asked them things like that. So he said nothing.

  After a while, as though in a temper at being ignored, the rain even stopped, and the sky, like a tractable child, brushed back its clouds, forgot its tantrum, and took once more to smiling.

  XII

  “WHAT’S she like?” asked Lotte.

  “What’s who like?”

  “The current wife.”

  Charlie was willing, in general terms, to talk about his young men. He didn’t like to talk about his marriages. They were one of the few things in his life he was ashamed of.

  “My first wife I went to bed with; my second wife went to bed with my young men, she saved a good many souls in her time, I can tell you that; and the third I don’t know anything about. The current one lives in Switzerland. Which is why I’m here. She collects antiques. Stocks and bonds mostly.”

  He had forgotten his monocle. He seemed to miss it.

  “Oh,” said Lotte. It was one of his set pieces. She could remember the first wife, vaguely, a mousy, boyish, unobtrusive little creature who had thought Charlie a genius, and had no other interests in life at all. She didn’t even seem to mind the young men much. In those days they had all been young together. As for these divagations, they had been the thing to do.

  … and later, the one thing one could not help doing. He never referred to her. But Lotte did know that even now, when he was lonely, he sent her money. When eventually she had given up hope that he would come back, she had remarried. She had also aged. He refused to see her.

  Number two had been Jewish. She was dead now. You heard her records, sometimes, authentically scratchy, in the houses of fanciers of the early 1930’s. Whatever magic they had had was long gone. And number three?

  She couldn’t remember number three, either.

  But number four had been going on for a long time now, almost six years. It was because they seldom saw each other, she supposed.

  She thought she understood. She should not have teased him by bringing the subject up. And so she turned it, like an old dress, and the other side did quite well.

  She asked about Paul to prevent Charlie’s asking about Unne.

  The truth about the Unnes in her life was Lotte’s best-kept secret. The way to protect one’s virtues is to assume a mask of vice. Then everyone is so mollified to have an excuse to think the worst of you, that they are quite content to leave you alone. She had tried women, of course. When we are young and bored and rich for the first time we try everything. But she hadn’t cared for that sort of thing. Now she just kept them round for company, which was what Charlie did, she suspected, with his young men. Her young women were rather like Charlie’s wives, in a way, except that she didn’t have anything anywhere quite to match his young men. But she, too, wrote checks when she was lonely, to people she preferred not to see.

  There was Bill, her accompanist, of course. She was fond of Bill. But as for emotion, she had carefully locked that away in a box years ago.

  XIII

  AT one-thirty Unne came in to ask if they might go swimming. They could have lunch by the pool. It was sunny enough to do that now. Paul had gotten them a table.

  “You like that young man, don’t you?”

  Unne looked flushed from hurrying upstairs, except that Unne never hurried.

  “I think he’s quite nice.”

  Lotte recognized the answer-to-an-awkward-question-asked-during-a-tea-party tone, but ignored it.

  “You know what he is, of course?”

  “Oh, my goodness,” said Unne. “People aren’t what they are. May we go?”

  Lotte thought about it and then said yes.

  *

  The swimming pool was the usual fashionable fish fry, with slim bodies well oiled, under a sun like a cooking lamp, baste every half hour and turn. Only the young go in the water. Their elders are warier and come down only at dusk.

  Charlie sat at a white enameled cast-iron table, sucking the lemon from his Collins glass, holding it clumsily the way a boxer does between rounds. He wore nothing but some gingham plaid swim trunks and his monocle, which dangled beside the Greek coin he had picked up somewhere as a periapt. He had kept thin and trim. All the same, at his age, no matter how good the trim, what you really look like is a half-unfolded camp cot, with the canvas wrinkled at the folds. But he could have looked far worse. Lotte couldn’t feel that Paul suffered any great hardship, less, certainly, than the average starlet had to put up with.

  She herself was not exposed. She had taken precautions. If you are famous for your legs, that usually means your legs are too thin. Otherwise they wouldn’t photograph well. The only person famous for his legs who had legs that were too thick was Nijinsky, and he, as we all know, went mad. Also, as you get older, you get sinewy. The phrase, if she remembered it correctly, was “stuck together with spit.” So though she had nothing against swimming in her own swimming pool, Lotte did not think it wise to go swimming in an outdoor pool surrounded by starlets draped in the manner of an Ingres bathhouse. So she wore slacks.

  She sat there and watched Charlie suck his lemon. They’d had crab for lunch. Luxembourg is too far inland for crab. It didn’t sit well.

  Paul, stripped to the waist, was exactly what she would have expected. He had a swimmer’s body, a broad chest, and was muscular in the right places. Like most such people, he didn’t so much use his body as wear it, like a very well-cut suit of clothes, with the air of negligence which comes from being sure of what one has on. Such people never look naked. They do look as though they had another body, somewhat more huma
n and rumpled in design, under the actual body they are wearing. Paul must have done weightlifting at some time in his life. He had the weightlifter’s manner of being his own artifact, and a connoisseur at that.

  Unne looked exactly what she was, well-bred all over, without a seam anywhere. She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit, not from any sense that a bikini was vulgar, but from a birthright certainty that it was not quite her sort of thing. Nor was she wrong.

  At the moment both of them were in the pool, splashing each other decorously.

  “How are you?” asked Lotte, feeling on the back bench herself.

  “Avuncular,” said Charlie. “As always, avuncular.”

  He seemed to mean it. He must feel safe. If Unne was with Lotte, then it was safe for her to be with Paul. Charlie wasn’t jealous of people, only of their doing something he couldn’t. Paul couldn’t. That explained that.

  The afternoon went by.

  Paul and Unne clambered out of the pool and went off hand in hand toward the bar. Charlie looked after them mildly.

  “Nemo repente fuit turpissimus,” he said.

  Lotte burst out laughing.

  “Well, I like Latin,” he said. “It dignifies our griefs. Of course I have to use a crib.”

  “They seem to get along well enough.”

  “When I’m grief-stricken,” said Charlie, persisting, “I always use a crib.”

  “Very well, what does it mean?” He had completely forgotten, she supposed, that she had used it earlier.

  “No one ever reached the climax of vice at one step,” said Charlie, with satisfaction. “Juvenal. I found it in a book of quotations. I thought at the time it might come in handy some day.”