Celebrity Chekhov

by Ben Greenman

  All the while Jack Nicholson wore a pitiful, imploring smile, as though he were asking Jamie Foxx for a personal favor.

  Then all three sat in armchairs and were silent. Jack Nicholson’s story had not satisfied either Adam Sandler or Jamie Foxx. It had been dreary to listen to the story of a poor old man who ate gooseberries. They wanted to talk about elegant people, about beautiful women. They counted on Jack Nicholson for that. The people in the paintings that hung on the wall were beautiful, and they had once loved and laughed, maybe even in this inn, and this seemed better than the story, as did the fact that lovely Zoe Saldana was still moving noiselessly about.

  Jamie Foxx was fearfully sleepy; he had been up since four in the morning looking after the inn, and now his eyes were closing; but he was afraid his visitors might tell some interesting story after he had gone, and he lingered on. He did not go into the question whether what Jack Nicholson had just said was right and true. His visitors did not talk of miniature golf courses, nor of pools, but of something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.

  “It’s bedtime, though,” said Adam Sandler, getting up. “We have to try to get back to the Moosehead Lodge.”

  “No, please,” Jamie Foxx said. “Stay here tonight. Have lunch with me tomorrow. I have a few other friends coming over.”

  Jamie Foxx said good-night and went downstairs to his own room, while the visitors remained upstairs. They were taken to a big room with two old wooden beds decorated with carvings. The big cool beds, which had been made by the lovely Zoe Saldana, smelt agreeably of clean linen.

  Jack Nicholson undressed in silence and got into bed.

  “Can man ever be forgiven?” he said, and put his head under the quilt.

  His cigarettes were on the table, and they had been soaked in the rain and smelled strongly of stale tobacco. Adam Sandler could not sleep for a long while on account of the oppressive smell.

  The rain beat at the windowpane all night.

  ABOUT LOVE

  At lunch next day there were very nice pies, lobster, and steaks; and while the men were eating, the cook at the hotel came up to ask what the visitors would like for dinner. He was a man of medium height, with a puffy face and little eyes; he was close-shaven, and it looked as though his moustaches had not been shaved, but pulled out by the roots. Jamie Foxx explained that Zoe Saldana was in love with this cook. As he drank and was of a violent character, she did not want to marry him, but was willing to live with him without. The cook was very devout, and his religious convictions would not allow him to do this; he insisted on her marrying him and would consent to nothing else, and when he was drunk he used to abuse her and even beat her. Whenever he got drunk she used to hide upstairs and sob, and on such occasions Jamie Foxx hung around the hotel to be ready to defend her.

  The men began talking about love, and not just Jamie Foxx, Adam Sandler, and Jack Nicholson, but a few friends of Jamie Foxx who had dropped by for lunch: Eddie Griffin and Katt Williams.

  “How love is born,” said Jamie Foxx, “why that manager does not love somebody more like herself in her spiritual and external qualities, and why she fell in love with the cook—how far questions of personal happiness are of consequence in love—all that is known; one can take what view one likes of it. So far only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: ‘This is a great mystery.’ Everything else that has been written or said about love is not a conclusion, but only a statement of questions that have remained unanswered. The explanation that would seem to fit one case does not apply in a dozen others, and the very best thing, to my mind, would be to explain every case individually without attempting to generalize. We ought, as the doctors say, to individualize each case.”

  “Perfectly true,” said Adam Sandler.

  “Individualize, of course,” said Eddie Griffin.

  “We artistic types have a partiality for these questions that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized, decorated with roses, nightingales; we decorate our loves with these momentous questions, and pick the most uninteresting of them, too. When I was younger, just after In Living Color, I had a friend who shared my life, a charming lady, and every time I took her in my arms she was thinking how much her rent cost and if she could afford to fly back to Missouri to see her family. In the same way, when we are in love we are never tired of asking ourselves questions: whether it is honourable or dishonourable, sensible or stupid, what this love is leading up to, and so on. Whether it is a good thing or not I don’t know, but that it is in the way, unsatisfactory, and irritating, I do know.”

  It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People who lead a solitary existence always have something in their hearts that they are eager to talk about. In town, bachelors visit the restaurants and bars on purpose to talk, and sometimes tell the most interesting things to waiters and bartenders; in the country, as a rule, they unburden themselves to their guests. Now from the window we could see a gray sky, trees drenched in the rain; in such weather we could go nowhere, and there was nothing for us to do but to tell stories and to listen.

  “I have lived out here for a while,” Jamie Foxx began, “since just after Booty Call, I think. I am a kind of sedentary man by temperament. I’d rather do nothing than do something. But when I bought this place, there was a big mortgage on it, and as it was in the days before Collateral, not to mention Ray, I felt like I had to do lots of heavy lifting around here to get by. My body ached, and I slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me that I could easily reconcile this life of toil with my essential laziness. I set myself up in the biggest suite. I lived well in town and in the towns nearby. But one day I befriended a man who came to my room and drank up all my liquor at one sitting. It suddenly was clear to me that I needed to focus my attentions, and so I stopped going to fancy restaurants and ate more here. I became part of life in the hotel, and it became part of me.

  “After a little while I started to make my way around town again, and to acquire a new group of friends. They knew me as the man who owned the hotel, nothing more. Of all my acquaintanceships, the most intimate and—to tell the truth—the most agreeable to me was my acquaintance with Jay-Z. He had been in hip-hop and then retired; he was a businessman at that point. We got along famously. One day when we were killing time, he said, ‘Hey, come to dinner.’

  “This was unexpected, as I knew very little about Jay-Z’s personal life, and I had never been to his house. I went to my hotel room to change and went off to dinner. And here it was my lot to meet Beyoncé, his girlfriend. At that time she was still very young. It is all a thing of the past; and now I should find it difficult to define what there was so exceptional in her, what it was in her that attracted me so much; at the time, at dinner, it was all perfectly clear. I saw a lovely, intelligent young woman, such as I had never met before; and I felt her at once as someone close and already familiar, as though that face, those cordial eyes, I had seen somewhere in my childhood.

  “At dinner I was very much excited, I was uncomfortable, and I don’t know what I said, but Beyoncé kept shaking her head and saying to her husband:

  “ ‘Jay, what do you think?’

  “Jay-Z is a good-natured man, one of those simple-hearted people who firmly maintain the opinion that once a man is a guest, he should remain so, eternally welcome.

  “And both Jay-Z and Beyoncé tried to make me eat and drink as much as possible. From some trifling details, from the way they made the coffee together, for instance, and from the way they understood each other at half a word, I could gather that they lived in harmony and comfort, and that they were glad of a visitor. After dinner they played me some of her music; then it got dark, and I went home. That was at the beginning of spring.

  “After that I spent the whole summer here without a break. The memory of Beyoncé remained in my mind all those days; I did not think of her exactly, but it was as though her light shadow was lying on my heart.

  “In the aut
umn there was a theatrical performance for some charitable object in the town. I went into the VIP area, and there was Beyoncé; and again the same irresistible, thrilling impression of beauty and sweet, caressing eyes, and again the same feeling of nearness. We sat side by side, then went to the lobby.

  “ ‘You’ve grown thinner,’ she said. ‘Have you been ill?’

  “ ‘Yes, I’ve had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy weather I can’t sleep.’

  “ ‘You look dispirited. In the spring, when you came to dinner, you were younger, more confident. You were full of eagerness, and talked a great deal; you were very interesting, and I really must confess I was a little carried away by you. For some reason you often came back to my memory during the summer, and when I was getting ready for the theatre today, I hoped I would see you.’

  “And she laughed.

  “ ‘But you look dispirited today,’ she repeated. ‘It makes you seem older.’

  “The next day I lunched with Jay-Z and Beyoncé. After lunch they drove out to the lake, where they had a boat, and I went with them. I returned with them to the town, and at midnight drank with them in quiet domestic surroundings, while the fire glowed. And after that, every time I went to town I never failed to visit them. They grew used to me, and I grew used to them. As a rule I went in unannounced, as though I were one of the family.

  “ ‘Who is there?’ I would hear from a faraway room, in the drawling voice that seemed to me so lovely.

  “ ‘It is Jamie Foxx,’ answered the maid.

  “Beyoncé would come out to me with an anxious face, and would ask every time:

  “ ‘Why is it so long since you have been here? Has anything happened?’

  “Her eyes, the way she did her hair, her voice, her step, always produced the same impression on me of something new and extraordinary in my life, and very important. We talked together for hours, were silent, thinking each our own thoughts, or she played for hours to me on the piano. If there was no one at home, I stayed and waited, talked to the maid, or lay on the sofa in the study and read; and when Beyoncé came back, I met her in the hall, took all her parcels from her, and for some reason I carried those parcels every time with as much love, with as much solemnity, as a boy.

  “There is a proverb that if a poor man has no troubles he will buy a bad car. Beyoncé and Jay-Z had no troubles, so they made friends with me. If I did not come to the town, I must be ill or something must have happened to me, and both of them were extremely anxious. They were worried that I, a talented man with endless potential, should, instead of devoting myself to my work, live in the country, rush round like a squirrel in a rage. They fancied that I was unhappy, and that I only talked, laughed, and ate to conceal my sufferings, and even at cheerful moments when I felt happy I was aware of their searching eyes fixed upon me. They were particularly touching when I really was depressed, when I was being worried by some studio or had not money enough to pay off an old girlfriend. The two of them would whisper together at the window; then he would come to me and say with a grave face:

  “ ‘If you really are in need of money at the moment, my wife and I beg you not to hesitate to borrow from us.’

  “And he would blush to his ears with emotion. And it would happen that, after whispering in the same way at the window, he would come up to me and say:

  “ ‘My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this present.’

  “And he would give me cuff links, a cigar case, or a hat, and I would send them old books and collectible movie posters I found. In early days I often borrowed money, and was not very particular about it—borrowed wherever I could—but nothing in the world would have induced me to borrow from Jay-Z and Beyoncé. But why talk of it?

  “I was unhappy. At home, in the restaurant, in the bar, I thought of her; I tried to understand the mystery of a beautiful young woman’s marrying someone so uninteresting; to understand the mystery of this uninteresting, good man, who believed in his right to be happy; and I kept trying to understand why she had met him first and not me, and why such a terrible mistake in our lives need have happened.

  “Sometimes in town when we ran into one another, I saw from her eyes that she was expecting me, and she would confess to me herself that she had had a peculiar feeling all that day and had guessed that I would come. We talked a long time, and were silent, yet we did not confess our love to each other, but timidly and jealously concealed it. We were afraid of everything that might reveal our secret to ourselves. I loved her tenderly, deeply, but I reflected and kept asking myself what our love could lead to if we had not the strength to fight against it.

  “It seemed to be incredible that my gentle, sad love could all at once coarsely break up the even tenor of her life, of the household in which I was so loved and trusted. Would it be honorable? She would go away with me, but where? Where could I take her? It would have been a different matter if I had had a beautiful, interesting life—if, for instance, I had been struggling for the emancipation of my country, or had been a celebrated man of science, or a painter; but as it was, it would mean taking her from one everyday humdrum life to another as humdrum or perhaps more so. As I say, I was a sedentary man, not at all the figure people saw on screens in films like Miami Vice and Law Abiding Citizen. And how long would our happiness last? What would happen to her in case I was ill, in case I died, or if we simply grew cold to one another?

  “And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She thought of her husband, her friends, and of her father, who loved the husband like a son. If she abandoned herself to her feelings, she would have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and in her position either would have been equally terrible and inconvenient. She was tormented by the question of whether her love would bring me happiness—would she not complicate my life, which, as it was, was hard enough and full of all sorts of trouble? She fancied she was not industrious nor energetic enough to begin a new life, and she often talked to her husband of the importance of my marrying a girl of intelligence and merit who would be a help to me.

  “Meanwhile the years were passing. Beyoncé already had two children. When I arrived at their house, the staff smiled cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Jamie had come, and hung on my neck; every one was overjoyed. They did not understand what was passing in my soul, and thought that I, too, was happy. Every one looked on me as a noble being. And grown-ups and children alike felt that a noble being was walking about their rooms, and that gave a peculiar charm to their manner toward me, as though in my presence their life, too, was purer and more beautiful.

  “Beyoncé and I used to go to the movies together, always walking there; we used to sit side by side, our arms touching. I would take the popcorn from her without a word, and feel at that minute that she was near me, that she was mine, that we could not live without each other; but by some strange misunderstanding, when we came out of the theatre we always said good-bye and parted as though we were strangers. Goodness knows what people were saying about us in town already, but there was not a word of truth in it all.

  “In the latter years, Beyoncé took to going away for frequent visits to her mother or to her sister; she began to suffer from low spirits, she began to recognize that her life was spoiled and unsatisfied, and at times she did not care to see her husband nor her children.

  “We were silent and still, and in the presence of outsiders she displayed a strange irritation in regard to me; whatever I talked about, she disagreed with me, and if I had an argument, she sided with my opponent. If I dropped anything, she would say coldly:

  “ ‘Nice work.’

  “If I forgot to get her a soda in the movie theatre, she would say afterward:

  “ ‘I knew you’d forget.’

  “Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives that does not end sooner or later. The time of parting came, as Jay-Z decided, as he had before, that he was not simply a businessman, and that he needed to return to his career as a performer. They had to sell their furniture, th
eir cars, everything. When they left, everyone was sad, and I realized that I had to say good-bye not only to their home. It was arranged that at the end of August we should see Beyoncé off, and that a little later Jay-Z and the children would join her.

  “We were a great crowd to see Beyoncé off at the station. When she had said good-bye to her husband and her children and there was only a minute left before the train was to leave, I ran into her compartment to put a basket, which she had almost forgotten, on the rack, and I had to say good-bye. When our eyes met in the compartment, our spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears—oh, how unhappy we were!—I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

  “I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and left forever. The train had already started. I went into the next compartment—it was empty—and until I reached the next station I sat there crying. Then I walked home.”

  While Jamie Foxx was telling his story, the rain left off and the sun came out. “Excuse me,” Jamie Foxx said. “I have to go take care of something over at the miniature golf course.” The other men went out on the balcony, from which there was a beautiful view of the pool, which was shining now in the sunshine like a mirror. They admired it, and at the same time they were sorry that this man, who had told them this story with such genuine feeling, should be rushing round and round these hotel grounds like a squirrel instead of devoting himself to science or something else that would have made his life more worthy; and they thought what a sorrowful face Jamie Foxx must have had when he said good-bye to her in the train and kissed her face and shoulders. A few of the men had met her in the city, and Katt Williams knew her and thought her beautiful.