‘You’re always sick,’ I yell at the slamming bathroom door. ‘Besides, it doesn’t matter if you’re sick. You’re dead.’
A dreadful sound emerges from behind the bathroom door.
‘Monsieur Voltaire, I’m sorry. Are you—are you throwing up?’
He returns from the bathroom, his face a pale green. ‘No less unpleasant when you’re dead.’
‘Look, this was just the first production. We could order the revivals. You know, I don’t think you’re giving this a chance. It should cheer you up.’
His complexion, always pale, is now bleached. One lethal eyebrow is aimed at me, unconvinced.
‘Shall we give it a try?’ I persist.
He is mopping his brow with a lacy handkerchief. Who will do this man’s ironing when his linen supply runs out?
I look at his rococo finery, his proud stance, his expression rigid with pride, and it hits me. I am looking at the greatest playwright of the Enlightenment overcome with Opening Night nerves, a man who took so badly to the boos greeting the debut of his Artémire that he mounted the stage to argue and heckle right back at his audience. How is a dead playwright going to argue with an equally dead audience if this doesn’t go down well?
In goes the CD and the overture strikes up.
We give Bernstein his head. Bold and a hundred percent American Broadway, the opening strains send homesickness for New York flooding over my being. How confident the young Bernstein was! Who else would put an operatic aria in the middle of a musical comedy? Who else but Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman could marry the satirical brittleness of Voltaire’s age to the martini-dry cynicism of the Wall Street suits of the fifties? Or take V.’s lovers star-crossed by eighteenth-century greed, lust, and war, and turn them into a twentieth-century couple arguing between a future on Park Avenue versus the Connecticut countryside?
Max Andersen’s portrayal of Pangloss is acerbically bright. Barbara Cook’s lilting Cunégonde has turned Voltaire’s two-dimensional character into a canny, sexy, worldly Parisian demi-mondaine. And when New Yorkers, expecting something cornfed like Oklahoma’s Curley the Cowboy or South Pacific’s Nellie Forbush, rubbed their eyes at Professor Pangloss singing a parody of Leibniz’s philosophy, ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds,’ who else but Lenny would publish a defense of his opera in The New York Times?
Come to think of it, Voltaire would.
I lean back and for the next hour, soak it in. This is the young Bernstein—brave and brilliant. The composer plays with form: tangos, waltzes, mazurkas, and gavottes sparkle, one after another. It’s improbable, ambitious, and simply wonderful.
I’m heartsick for it all—the overflowing theater district sidewalks during intermission, yellow cabs with immigrant drivers, sunny winds sweeping up leaves in Central Park, the fall fashion line-up, umbrella hawkers in the rain, stretch limos gliding up Lexington, an empty August weekend rollerblading in the humidity-thick air down squishy-soft asphalt streets. I think of the first sign of autumn, the banners of the Met flapping in the quickening September breezes, Christmas windows at Saks.
Too soon, the swelling finale lifts me up and then suddenly, it’s over.
I have been so moved, tears are running down my cheeks. Outside the front yard, the unwelcome whine of old Berner’s power-saw breaks my reverie. This is the twenty-first century, the place St-Cergue, Switzerland. I’m sitting on the floor in my gardening jeans and old moccasins, but I’ve just been transported to a first night in 1956 in an overheated Manhattan theater, my nose full of cigarette smoke and Chanel No5, my ears filled with gorgeous harmonies and witty delivery.
V. clears his throat and surveys my tear-streaked face.
Finally he speaks. ‘The music was rather loud.’
I look at him in a harmony-induced haze.
‘But not bad. Pas du tout. Not bad. I liked Cunégonde’s aria, yes, very much.’
The rest of the day is anti-climactic. I hide my disappointment. What did I expect? How could a man of his time attuned to Handel, not even familiar with Beethoven, turn on to Leonard Bernstein? V. was used to kicking unwashed theater-goers out of his path from the wings in order to perform and more accustomed to small-scale amateur theatricals in palaces and private villas. His fans preferred little recitations in a country garden or a whispering salon. How could Voltaire imagine the excitement generated by an original Broadway musical in those golden days of Bernstein, Rogers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe?
What a stupid idea. The CD case lies open and abandoned in a corner of the living room. I splash cold water on my puffy eyelids and drive downhill to meet Theo’s bus. I ask him too often whether he enjoyed himself. Is he glad he went? Was his breathing okay? Did he fall down a lot? Was the food good?
He says he had a ‘pretty’ good time. The skiing went ‘okay.’ The food was ‘all right.’ At dinner, the family hears the details.
‘Mick cried every night because his parents told him just before he got on the bus that they’re getting a divorce,’ he announces. ‘I stayed home on Friday morning because I was a little breathless. The teacher told me to vacuum the chalet because she said I had nothing to do. Mathias offered to stay behind. He’s one of my buddies. He wiped the tables.’
‘Where was your teacher?’
‘Playing with her new baby.’
It all sounds a little bleak. ‘I guess you’re sorry you went?’
He looks at us startled. ‘Oh, no, we spent the evenings capturing girls and administering the Tickle Torture. I was the Chief Executioner. ‘
I sleep deeply, relieved to have Theo safely under our roof again, until I’m awakened by the sound of shuffling feet. My bedside clock reads two in the morning. What’s wrong now?
All the children are zonked out in their beds. I creep across the second floor. V.’s bed is empty. Peering down through the banister into the living room, I spy him, waltzing in circles. He’s wearing the stereo earphones over his nightcap, and tangling his dancing slippers up in the cord. He is singing to himself, his thin lips barely moving and the billowing sleeves of his nightshirt waving as he moves with Bernstein’s music.
He looks so alive! The sadness that lingered from reliving Émilie’s death has finally dispersed. He doesn’t see me, so lost is he in the soaring flights of his singing characters. One showman captured the spirit of another across the centuries, and now that attention and appreciation are reciprocated. I feel quite left out by their genius. I slip back to bed.
The next morning I find V. hollow-eyed, but good-humored at breakfast, mixing the dregs of his first coffeepot of the day with a fresh pot of chocolate. He is humming what sounds a lot like Bernstein’s ‘Eldorado’ number. He eyes me carefully, but says nothing. He’s holding something back, but why? Never shy or fearful, what would silence that whiplash tongue? Again and again, he glances across the table over the top of the Bran Flakes box.
He stirs a little sugar into his Qian Lung cup with the only silver spoon he could find, a baptismal gift engraved with Alexander’s ‘A.’ It may be my imagination, but the tinkling of silver on porcelain seems unusually persistent.
I give in. ‘Oh, what is it?’
He draws himself up and clears his throat. ‘Oh, nothing, really. I have been thinking, I admit. Perhaps it is a folly, nothing more, Madame, but I beg your counsel.’
This is suspiciously coy.
Finally, he spits it out. ‘I simply ask myself whether this gentleman, this Monsieur Bernstein, would care to look at some of my other works for musical adaptation? Alzire, I think, since it’s set in America? Or, Zaïre, perhaps? He’ll find in it traces of Othello, and I admit that while in exile in England, certain themes used by English authors attracted me irresistibly, so that later, I borrowed them. . .’
It’s going to be a very long day.
Chapter Twenty COURTS AND CLUBS
A brilliant morning signals the end of winter in the mountains.
The sun’s rays skate across the distant l
ake surface and bounce off the icicles clinging to our pines. Icy drips drill deep holes through the snowy crust of our yard.
In late autumn, the ground floor of the house was shadowy and cold under its wide, low eaves. Now the low-lying sun shoots its beams right into my office. V. has hung an orange Indonesian sarong as a make-shift curtain to shield his eyes. The thin cotton gives the room a lovely glow, and certainly perks up the complexion of any dead middle-aged house poet and well-known throne-licker who happens to be staying on indefinitely.
Although I feel V. is getting a bit underfoot, he’s been careful never to get under Peter’s feet, nor to move anything in his presence. In fact, V. spends as little time in my husband’s company as he spent in poor Monsieur du Châtelet’s. Today, however, my phantom friend is hopping this way and that to avoid my husband who crisscrosses the house with a measuring tape in his hand, counting out the square meters of our house and cursing under his breath.
Peter hired a local accountant to do our first Swiss tax return. This Einstein has just confessed to a costly mistake involving the ‘rental value’ of our residence. This refers to the absurd tax due on the profit we would theoretically make if we rented out every square meter of livable space, even though we’re occupying the house ourselves. Sometimes the Swiss seem determined to make their country unwelcoming. I now realize why so many Swiss rent rather than buy their home. This tax flies in the face of American experience that home ownership builds communities. In our case, paying it will wipe out the last of our savings, already savaged by the vague mathematics of our long-gone contractor.
In his willingness to push us over the final brink into bankruptcy, our accountant tossed off revised figures that include floor space under sharply slanting roofs—space that only Stuart Little could occupy in comfort. My Swiss husband is law-abiding within a centimeter of the regulations and he’s measuring every centimeter himself. He marches back and forth across the house, crawling around corners, eliminating hundreds of francs worth of rental value, and bringing the taxes down, franc by desperate franc.
‘Why don’t we just hire a new accountant?’ I ask.
He glowers. ‘Why would the next be any different? I think we can manage if they agree to take the payment in installments. ‘
I beat a retreat, muttering, ‘Sorry, I still think in inches,’ to find V. in his frothy shirtsleeves of finest lawn, poking away at my laptop keyboard. The printer churns out fresh pages. We’ve argued politely for some weeks over the use of my computer. This guy is a fireball of words bursting to get out. Will he try to equal the ninety volumes he wrote during his lifetime before he vacates my office?
More worrying, will he ever vacate my office?
He charmed my Internet password out of me just last week and within twenty-four hours, had set up a day-trading account with Charles Schwab. I shut that down before he landed both of us in debt, and quickly changed my pin code. Now I catch him filling his leather notebook with calculations, trying to work out the likely variations on the spelling of my name. I’ve foiled him, with an all-numerical password. Of course we are paragons of politesse at all times, never discussing this openly, but he leaks frustration.
Just last week he whined, ‘I always paid for the outgoing post of my houseguests! You can check the correspondence of that tedious Madame Graffigny who lived with Émilie and me at Cirey. It’s one of the few nice things she said about me in her letters. Now, I want to use the é-mail.’
‘E-mail. Eee, not é, and the answer to you, Monsieur, is snail mail. La poste des limaces. I’ll be happy to pay your postage.’
Lately, he’s obsessed with his correspondence with Frederick the Great. Frederick’s boys-only entourage seems to have made V. impatient with me, with all women who would delay his rise to Chief Groupie at yet another European throne. I would have thought his disenchantment with Versailles had cured him of seeking kingly approval.
Moreover, the repeated refusal of the Academie Française to admit V. to its ranks should have taught him the irrelevance of joining elite clubs. But, oh no. Now he’s pining to return to the posturings of that motley court in Potsdam. Possibly because when Fred heard V. couldn’t get into the Académie, he said, ‘If Voltaire can’t get in, then who the devil is in it?’
Well, the next time he threatens to move to Fred’s, I’ll personally pack up all his scientific junk and rotting books myself. As they don’t weigh a material ounce, the shipping should run cheap. He’s only headed for another disappointment, but then, he lived before Groucho Marx.
Not that I don’t understand the attraction of ‘courts.’ When we arrived in New York from Hong Kong, I was more than ready to tackle a fresh crowd. The excitement I felt for our new life at the United Nations lasted so briefly, it is hard to recall my initial enthusiasm for the diplomatic whirl. It was soon evident that under the then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the atmosphere was clubby and elitist enough to please Voltaire. The whiff of corruption lingered on from the days of Perez de Cuellar, with appointments within the Secretariat distributed like party favors, and scandals of sexual favoritism or harassment stinking up certain corridors.
Peter was appointed the first full-time Permanent Observer to the United Nations for the ICRC. This status was shared along a bank of seats in the General Assembly with permanent observers of the Holy See, the European Union, the Palestinian liberation Organization, and even Switzerland, not yet a member.
Formal protocol dictated that during the heady autumn days of the General Assembly meetings, we would dine out once or twice a week, always seated in the middle of the long banquet table while pride of place at the head and foot of the table was reserved for the ambassadors and wives of Security Council permanent member states. This meant that more often than not, I found myself next to the PLO’s Observer, a dentist-turned-diplomat. Our conversation stuck to the safe stuff: real estate, local schools, and vacation spots. Occasionally I got the Papal Nuncio instead. He liked to talk about Jean-Paul II’s Popemobile.
Cocktail receptions filled the calendar. The point was to circulate, to meet, to represent, to discuss, to fix dates for more meetings to discuss . . . At times, racing past two or even three other harried UN couples to make an appearance at the same five receptions in one evening, the obligations seemed less onerous than comic. Night after night, the same people and the same discretion that prevented any substantial conversation for fear of diplomatic offense.
UN wives quickly arrived at their own pecking order. The wives of Security Council permanent members were the head chickens, these matrons reigning from their apartments on Sutton Place, the Waldorf Astoria or Park Avenue. The wives of alternative members of the Security Council exploited their husband’s temporary rotation on to the pantheon with a social fury, knowing that a good performance in New York might mean the promotion of their spouse to Foreign Minister once back home.
Those wives with intellectual ambitions presided over foreign policy tea parties, while others blessed with more beauty than brains kept their mouths shut but dressed to the nines.
Some Middle-Eastern wives carried heavy political baggage in their little chain-link purses. During the Gulf War, some of the Arab ladies were awkward with my friend Christine, the charming French wife of the Palestinian dentist because she wasn’t Arab. The Europeans treated her carefully because she was married to an Arab rather than a European. Of course, the Israelis and Americans labeled her clearly in the Palestinian camp . . . Well, Christine and I laughed together; all these relations ebbed and flowed one season or peace agreement later with no more court fanfare than a rise in hemlines.
The wife of one of the Balkan ambassadors was very insistent on Serbia’s millennial claim to Kosovo. While she bent my ear over a minuscule but chic plate of fusion cuisine at the restaurant Vong, I was embarrassed by a flash of bare breast underneath her expensive leather vest, her nipples stiff with political excitement. She enlivened all our years at the UN with her argumentative passion and
excruciating dress sense. Her most memorable entrance was at a reception attended by President Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Douglas Hurd and others at the opening of the General Assembly. It was easy to spot her in a crowd of hundreds. She wore a hat with a two-foot high antenna springing skywards in a white ping-pong ball—the Martian from Belgrade.
A place could be earned at ‘court’ by good humor, discretion, and usefulness. A lack of interest in craft bazaars could be dangerous. An ironic aside could get you branded. An inability to sit through a three-hour lunch culminating in an hour-long raffle of native products could prove lethal. To someone like myself, who had prodded, questioned and investigated to earn my keep, this life was a strange form of mental repression.
Some women tried innovation, like the Finnish lady who served reindeer hors d’œuvres or the cheerful New Zealander who decorated her sunny apartment with bold Kiwi paintings. Other wives were clearly overwhelmed and miserable—birds in gilded cages. The statuesque young blonde Lebanese bride of the middle-aged German ambassador inexplicably fled halfway through her second year of duty. The wife of an Undersecretary General departed New York permanently when her husband took his secretary-cum-mistress to official functions in her place. Such specters lingered like remembered casualties in Chanel haunting the forced gaiety of the social battleground.
Somewhere beyond all of this, there were real casualties, real tragedies and real UN operations, Red Cross delegations, struggling in often impossible, and even dangerous conditions in the field to help victims of poverty, hunger and war. All that was far, far away from UN headquarters.
One April evening, I recall, a shoulder-to-shoulder crush of party-goers attending an EU cocktail soirée parted like the Red Sea to avoid conversation with my husband: he had made himself deeply unpopular earlier that day by being one of the first to officially categorize the slaughter in Rwanda as ‘genocide.’ Terminology like that was a dangerous call to action and might force the UN community to, well, actually do something.
A Visit From Voltaire Page 24