by Brian Moore
When I put the second roll of microfilm into the machine, I stood behind him, waiting to show him which part was relevant. He said, in a cold voice, ‘Don’t lean over me.’ I could have killed him, who did he think he was, rude bastard, the big writer lording it over humble library slaves. But then he laughed his Mad Hatter laugh and said, ‘You’re too distracting.’ Was it that night he took me to dinner or was it the night after? I don’t remember. What I remember, happened about three months later. I shut my eyes now and see myself coming out of the bathroom of a suite in the La Salle Hotel in Montreal, my face made up, my hair down around my hips and me naked, having at the last moment decided to make my entrance without my slip. I was feeling high from the Bloody Marys and the wine at lunch, feeling terribly excited, yet guilty about doing this to Jimmy. I remember there was a moment as I entered the bedroom when I began to hope, foolishly, that by some miracle Hat and I would just lie together on the bed and kiss and feel each other up and perhaps it wouldn’t count as adultery. And at the same time a little part of me was worrying that I hadn’t taken off my lipstick, would it smear all over the pillow? Then I thought of my bra and girdle which I’d hidden under a towel on the towel rack in the bathroom and what if, afterwards, he went in first and pulled that towel out and my bra and girdle fell on the floor? The girdle was cheap and old.
So there I was, going naked into adultery and, as I went into the room, Hat stood waiting, looking at me. He was naked too and I couldn’t help staring at it. He had no hard-on, which frightened me. I thought: he admires me in my clothes, he always says I look like a model, maybe my body is a disappointment to him?
But in that uneasy first moment he did the right thing, coming towards me, kissing me, leading me towards the bed, lying down beside me. At once, I felt his penis stiffen and throb against my thigh and oh, then we had lots of kissing and hugging and feeling each other up and, at last, loving, but the thing was I didn’t come and neither did he, although, not knowing him then, I thought he had. Afterwards, I remember, there was a tenderness between us, there were I love you’s and do you love me’s and yes I do’s, the first prayers for our earthly kingdom, the first of those litanies I would come to know as the prayers of failure and then I hid in the bathroom while Room Service came in with the ice and it grew dark, and I remember us sitting naked on a little love seat, arms around each other’s waists, glasses of whisky near us, looking down at the snow as it silted slowly into the back courtyard of the La Salle Hotel. We had a feeling as though we’d both run away from home and everything was a joke with us, a guilty joke, a world turned on its side. And later, very late that night, I lay awake beside Hat in the dark and I remember a tiny feeling that it hadn’t been all it might have been, a feeling so small, so unwelcome to my mood that night that I dismissed it. I never should have dismissed it. Never. For the central thing was no better than it had been with Jimmy. I was still as I was, still as I had been that first time in the motel room in Calais, Maine. The tenderness, the I love you’s; that was fear. The jokes and giggles were mild hysterics. I knew it, yet I did not want to know it and that was my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.
Did Hat know it too? What did Hat really think, what thoughts drove down the back roads of Hat’s mind when he stopped pretending and became himself? I was supposed to be the actress, yet, for me, acting was an enthusiasm, something I did, yet never mistook for what it is not. But Hat acted his whole life, every day, every hour, devising all sorts of business, character touches, lines, for the role he created as Hatfield Bell. The total actor, the Hat-type has no need to appear on a stage, no time to learn another man’s lines, pretend another man’s play. An actor like Hat is his own play. Yet does he understand it? Underneath all the Hats who was really there? Will the real Hatfield Bell please stand up? But oh, Hat, old Hat, you can’t stand up any more, you’re six feet under. Show’s over.
Hat in Kingston under a stone. My father’s grave in the snow in the army cemetery in Halifax, the little stone cross so packed around with soft wet snow that it no longer was a cross but a phallus. Old Dan Dunne. ‘We will all die soon enough without us dwelling on it,’ my Aunt Maggie used to say. She was my father’s older sister and like old Dan Dunne she too is dead. I remember that she had a moustache. And that she was very tall, nearly as tall as old Mrs Dowson, Janice’s mother. It’s funny, I haven’t thought about Janice since we said goodbye today. She phoned this morning at the very moment I went out into the hall, chasing after poor old Mr Peters. When I got back to the apartment the receiver lay waiting on my bed. ‘Mrs Sloane, she said her name was,’ Ella Mae informed me. I picked the receiver up. Janice on the phone is like no one else. She talks into it as though she were sinking on the Titanic or taking the last plane out of Saigon.
‘Mary, I’m not late?’
‘No, no. Where are you?’
‘I said I’d call at one. It’s not after one, is it?’
‘No, no, that’s fine.’
‘Oh, thank God. I was at the Gotham Book Mart and I decided to wait until I came uptown before calling you. I made a reservation at that place you told me about, Le Plat du Jour. It’s not far from you, is it?’
‘The where?’
‘Le Plat du Jour. The one you told me about in Montreal. All right?’
I had never heard of Le Plat du Jour but, knowing Janice, I thought it better not to argue. ‘Fine,’ I said.
‘So, I’m, let’s see, I’m at Seventy-Second and Third now. I’ll get a cab and pick you up in, say, ten minutes? Okay?’
‘Fine.’
I put down the phone, looked again at my face, put on some lipstick, went into the hall, and left fifteen dollars in the Mexican bowl for Ella Mae. We’re shy about money, she and I. I did not tell her when I’d be back. If I say I’m coming back late, she leaves early.
So, eight minutes after Janice’s phone calls, I went out with no farewells. When Janice says ten minutes, she means it and no sooner did I step out of our building than I saw a cab pull in across the street and from the rear windows, waving like a drowning woman, Janice, signalling me.
When I think of Janice Sloane I see her eyes, those enormous ice-blue eyes which are her distinguishing mark, like de Gaulle’s height, or Churchill’s cigar. But, after her eyes, I think ‘Janice and Charles’, for there is that about the Sloanes, they are a couple, indivisible, so when I saw Janice there in the cab it occurred to me she’d said she was here on her own and, as I crossed the street, I wondered why Charles wasn’t with her.
She opened the cab door. ‘Darling, Mary. Oh, you look gorgeous. God, I feel so dowdy. I should have worn my Dior. I mean my lousy Dior copy, oh God, is it terribly chichi, this place? Reassure me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Are you sure it was I who recommended it?’
‘It was you, of course it was you, you told me about it last year in Montreal. I wrote it down, never mind, God, I look like Methuselah, Dior copy or no, so forget it, how are you, are you happy, you look happy. You look wonderful.’
‘Lady?’ said the driver. (He was one of those surly morons whose boorish sentence inversion New Yorkers mistake for wit.) ‘So, are we going someplace?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Janice pulled open her handbag, took out a little English leather-bound pocket diary and hunted among its scribbles. ‘It’s Le Plat du Jour, at 25 East 65th Street.’
‘That supposed to be a restaurant?’
‘Let’s go,’ I said to him, very crossly. ‘You have the address, okay?’ (Why is it people like him are always putting down people like Janice?) I turned to her, determined to freeze the cabby out. ‘So,’ I said. ‘You’re here till Monday?’
‘Yes, Monday.’ Impulsively, she leaned over and kissed my cheek. ‘Mary, it’s so good to see you.’
And I – I’m sentimental or easily moved or empathetic or whatever, but I felt like weeping – I gave her a squeeze and kissed her cheek and I thought I do miss her, there’s something about people from home �
�� about Canadians (we were all so involved with each other once, perhaps that’s it). Oh, this feeling of love, it’s false, I know it, but I did feel it and, as I say, I almost wept. In reunions, first moments are the best moments. For, during them, we have not realized they are all there is.
‘Oh, Mary,’ Janice said. ‘It’s so good for me to get to New York. Not that, as you know, I don’t love Montreal and things are happening there, it’s getting better all the time and the house, we’ve really done a lot since you saw it, but anyway, oh, well, there’s something so liberating about being here, even just sitting here in this cab going down Park Avenue and being with you and going to lunch – oh, listen, let’s have Bloody Marys, okay?’
I said yes, of course we would, said it as an adult might say it to reassure a child, smiling at her, but at the same time a cold little thought started up in me, a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, for if I had stayed with Hat I would be back in Canada, trying to convince myself Montreal was something it isn’t, still coming down to New York, like Janice, a kid to a party. Except that I knew it would be worse for me: if I had stayed with Hat, New York would have been a reminder of Terence, a reminder of what might have been.
‘Gosh,’ Janice said, sweeping all of Park Avenue into her gesture. ‘How I envy you this. Yes, I do. But not the way you think. I envy you because you can live here and not miss Canada. You don’t miss it, do you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Although, sometimes, I miss people from home. My mother, for instance.’ But if I thought I was going to get a word in about my mother, I had another think coming. ‘There you are,’ Janice said. ‘You see? We’re different, I mean I’d miss Montreal. Of course you weren’t born there, you don’t feel that way, only people who were born there do, I suppose. But you know, when I think of all those years I used to dream of living in Paris or New York I know now that was day-dreaming, because, no matter where I was, I’d miss Montreal. I used to be ashamed to admit that even to myself, but Dr Raditsky says it’s part of finding out, you know, finding out what it is I really want behind what I think I want. And guess what? I think I want beautiful hardwood floors. Isn’t it disgusting, but the thing that really pleases me now when I feel a bit down is to go into the living-room and look at my new hardwood floor. The floor, for Godsakes. But it’s so beautiful. Isn’t that silly?’
She laughed and I laughed with her for it was silly, but I was thinking, yes, she’s right, perhaps Dr Raditsky’s doing her some good after all. This is probably the truth and now she can admit it.
‘Hardwood floors!’ she exploded it again. ‘Oh, listen, have you seen the Marat-Sade?’
I said no.
‘But why not?’ She looked upset. ‘Is it awful?’
I said no, I’d hardly been to any plays this season. I said, you know, when you live in New York you get lazy and, besides, Terence prefers movies.
‘Oh, does he?’ Her wonderful eyes went blank, turning off Terence in a way which, at once, angered me. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Everybody thinks it’s stunning theatre. The Marat-Sade, I mean. But a bad play.’
Who is everybody, I wondered? Which magazine? And how could bad plays be stunning theatre? I suppose I was irritated at her cold look when I mentioned Terence and so I wanted to get back at her. I said, ‘I hear the most stunning thing about it is that one of the actors shows the audience his bare bum.’
She laughed. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it’s a fag play, they all are nowadays. By the way, Davy Powell sends you his love.’
I thought of Davy, I saw his grey hair, his grey suit, his air of ‘sincerity’. He’s a druggist, a dull man who grows faintly bitchy in drink, his voice slurring into queer talk. The boy who used to live with him committed suicide by jumping off Jacques Cartier bridge. Janice and Charles whisper this fact to other guests, usually while Davy’s holding forth in their living-room. Oh God, oh Montreal, where it’s still ‘chic’ to know a queer. How great to have left it for ever, to have said goodbye to Davy Powell, Blair and Peggy O’Connell, the Leducs and all of them, so smug and small, so sick for horrors and gossip.
‘And Blair,’ Janice said, as though I’d spoken out loud, ‘sends you his love. Of course, he’s still your slave. And, oh, yes, I meant to tell you that other fan of yours, Ernie Truelove, has broken up with that girl, Sally something, Sally . . .? But, oh, I’m here, I’m in New York, what am I doing talking about poor old Montreal, my God, this place, I love it. Wait, is that the Pan-Am building?’
‘That’s it, all right,’ I said.
‘And do helicopters really land on it?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘They don’t land there no more,’ the cab driver said. (Oh, he was determined to get in on things.) ‘The service don’t pay,’ he told us. ‘Yeah, it’s too expensive. Besides, people was complaining about the noise.’
‘How interesting,’ Janice said, and, of course, that was enough, he was off, talk, talk, talk, talk, all the way over to First Avenue and a restaurant I was sure I’d never recommended, but which looked fairly promising, the sort of place the guidebooks list as Moderate to Expensive. I paid the cab, although Janice tried. I remember thinking, not a Bloody Mary but a martini. For, suddenly I felt trembly and tense. I knew she was going to mention Hat.
We went in, down two steps into a little entrance foyer with a cloakroom on the left and, on the right, a reservations desk, a sort of podium with an electric light fixture over it; the kind used to light expensive oil paintings. And at this podium in a black suit, a fat, butter-complexioned Frenchman. Owner? Headwaiter? Who knows? ‘Madame Sloane,’ Janice announced. ‘J’ai réservé pour deux.’
Owner-Headwaiter listened, staring at Janice as though she were a remarkable talking mynah bird. He gave a little sigh, then, without consulting his reservations chart, picked up two menus from a pile, waved them in our faces to show we should follow him and follow him we did, two women going by the stares of the martini men at the little bar down into the long narrow room, all the way down to (wouldn’t you know it?) a place right next to the kitchen door, where Owner-Headwaiter pulled out a table and indicated two places on the banquette by the wall. I prefer to sit opposite my fellow guest, not side by side, but if I did that, I would be in the direct line of waiters backing out of the kitchen with plates of food. So I accepted my fate and sat beside Janice while Owner-Headwaiter locked us in by pushing the table back into place. ‘Je vous remercie bien,’ Janice announced loudly, although why she should thank him for the worst table in the room is beyond me. Owner-Headwaiter put down two menus. ‘Bon appétit,’ he said, fingersnapping for a waiter, turning away, leaving us. The waiter came, a stout, bald man in his late forties, wearing a waiter’s short red jacket and black evening trousers. I don’t think Janice looked at him: she was too busy seeing who, if anyone, had noticed that she speaks French. ‘Would you like a cocktail, madame?’ the waiter asked and at that point Janice turned and said loudly, ‘Oui. Deux Bloody Mary, s’il vous plaît,’ nodding in a dismissing way, causing the waiter to back off at once and so much for my thought that I’d like a martini. Then turned to me, her face anxious. ‘Seriously, Mary. I look like hell, don’t I?’
‘Nonsense, you look wonderful.’
She sighed. ‘How could I?’
‘What do you mean? What’s wrong?’
I waited, but got no answer. Instead, she lifted her head, a movie heroine facing the firing squad, picked up the menu, and asked, ‘Have you seen the Turner show at the Museum of Modern Art?’
I said no, not yet, I’d heard it was very crowded and she said she must go, it was one of the things on her list and by that time the waiter was back with the Bloody Marys.
‘Oh, I need this,’ she said, gulping hers as though it were Coke.
‘What is it, Janice? Could I help?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘What do you hear from Montreal these days? You still keep in touch with the O’Connells, don’t you?’
I said no, n
ot really, Christmas cards was about it, I’m a bad correspondent. I said I suposed she, Janice, was my closest contact there nowadays.
‘You mean you don’t write anybody, none of the old crowd?’
I said no. I said my mother was the only person I wrote to regularly and then I was going to tell her about today’s letter from Mama, about the polyp and my worry about it and how I’d phoned home and spoken to Dick. But, before I started, she asked what time it was. I looked at my watch and told her one fifteen, and as I did, she drank down the rest of her Bloody Mary and held up her empty glass. ‘Listen, would it be awful if we had another?’
I remember that I’d drunk only a little bit of mine and I felt less trembly, less worried about her mentioning Hat and so I said I’d still got some, but why didn’t she go ahead? After all she was the one on holiday.
‘Eh, bien.’ She moved her voice up a register so that the other diners would hear. ‘Garçon? Garçon?’ The waiter, who was coming along the aisle of diners, three plates of roast beef on his right arm, a bottle of red wine and two glasses in his left hand, nodded, harassed, as though to say he’d be there in a moment and there was Janice, her left hand raised, looking around at the other diners, then calling loudly to the waiter as soon as he had deposited his roast beef and wine. ‘Quand vous avez un moment, un autre Bloody Mary, s’il vous plaît.’ The waiter, coming back past us, said ‘Just one?’ and Janice nodded and then, at last, the waiter spoke his first words of French. ‘Bien, madame.’ And Janice called back, ‘Merci,’ as though she were delivering lines from a stage, then turned to stare quite shamelessly at a man who was lunching with two other men at the banquette across the way from ours. The man looked up, looked at her. He was just a man, in his thirties, with a tab-collared shirt and a freckly face, but I went stiff in embarrassment because Janice pointed straight at where he was sitting.