Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  After the hair wash, Mac picked Freddy up, over her protests, carried her back to their bed and started to dry her hair with a towel. It was, fortunately, cut shorter than it had been before she started stunt work, because she had to tuck it under wigs so often that she’d hacked away at it from time to time for the sake of convenience, but he still had difficulty dealing with the rebellious mass of tangled strands. Once her hair was half dry, he started to comb it out, dealing gently with each damp, snarled curl. She looked up at him with engrossed, dreamy eyes, half-child, half-woman, like a Da Vinci angel, he thought, standing by in an Annunciation scene.

  “Where’d you learn your technique?” she asked.

  “I had a big, smelly, shaggy dog when I was a kid.”

  “You never told me,” she said accusingly.

  “He ran away.”

  “That’s the saddest story I ever heard,” Freddy blurted, and burst into tears.

  Stunned, for he had only been joking, Mac tried to get her to stop, but the more he cuddled her and told her it really hadn’t happened, the harder she cried. Finally she subsided into little hiccuping sobs mixed with a wail of “Poor, poor little dog,” until finally she lay silent, sniffling in his arms.

  “What was that all about?” he asked when she had calmed down.

  “I don’t know,” she said in muffled tones, into his chest.

  “I think you’re having a delayed reaction to the accident.”

  She sat up and gave him a fragment of her old smile, shaking her head in negation.

  “No. It can’t be that. I’ve figured out the accident completely,” she assured him, as she had so often during the week in the hospital. “The riggers who packed the dynamite had to have miscalculated the lengths of the fuses, not that they’ll ever admit it. That’s the only thing it could have been. Everything else went perfectly.”

  “Understanding it is one thing, Freddy, but coming to grips with it emotionally, being able to accept that it actually happened to you, is another. You’ve had a big shock, even if you still refuse to realize it.”

  “I didn’t say that it wasn’t a shock. And I ruined my best chute. But I’ve had other accidents, I’ve broken bones before.” Her bravado was intact.

  “Not accidents like this,” Mac said somberly. “Freddy, when are you going to give up stunt flying?”

  “When are you going to marry me?”

  A silence fell between them. Since Freddy’s eighteenth birthday, over half a year before, she had mentioned marriage a number of times, but indirectly, lightly, glancingly, in a way that still had permitted McGuire to cock a sardonic eyebrow at her, to treat her words as if they couldn’t possibly be considered anything but one of her impudent jokes, and to continue with whatever he had been saying. Now she had asked the question in a tone of raw, unblushing, absolute appeal that demanded to be answered. He’d been dreading this moment. It had been inevitable, looming larger month by month. He hesitated and finally, shaking his head, he said, “Freddy, look—”

  “I don’t like the sound of answers that begin that way. When, Mac?”

  “Freddy, darling, I—”

  “Look at me. When, Mac, when?”

  “I can’t,” he said, in agony, “I can’t.”

  “You’re not married. What do you mean, ‘can’t’? You can, nothing would be simpler, we could fly to Vegas today and be married before sunset. You mean you won’t, don’t you?”

  “I mean I won’t. It wouldn’t be fair, Freddy. It would be unforgivable. You’re only eighteen—I’m forty-two—we’re generations apart—I’m too old for you!”

  “And you know perfectly well how little difference that makes to me,” she responded fiercely. “I’ve never loved anyone but you. I will never marry anyone but you. I swear I never will. No matter how old you get, you’ll never be free of me, you know that, Mac. I’ll be hanging around when you’re a hundred and I’m pushing eighty. The older we get, the less difference there’ll be.”

  “Freddy, that’s the most ridiculous argument in the book, and it’s nonsense. It skips over all the years in between eighteen and eighty. You’re still a kid—I know, I know, but it’s true—with all your life as a young woman still ahead of you, and I’m a middle-aged man who’s lived most of the best years he’s ever going to have in him. That’s real.”

  “You’re not fair!” she said, passionately aware of injustice.

  “God damn it, don’t you think I know that! I wasn’t fair when I made love to you the first time, because if I’d stopped it then, this would never have happened. I blame myself every damned day for being so weak, but I couldn’t help it, I’d been in love with you for too long, I couldn’t resist you, and I still can’t resist you about anything … except this. I won’t marry you, Freddy. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “No wonder your dog ran away,” Freddy said lightly. “I don’t really want to get married anyway. I just thought I should make an honest man out of you, but you’re such a moralistic old fart that I’ve changed my mind.”

  “I knew you’d see the light,” Mac said, lying as fluently as she. So she still thought that he couldn’t see through her, after all these years, did she? Freddy, the girl who’d never, ever, in her whole life, given up on anything she wanted, Freddy who thought he’d believe that she could run hot and run cold about marriage? “Ready for your sponge bath?”

  “Nope. I’m still clean from yesterday’s sponge bath. You can inspect me if you don’t believe me. Go ahead, I’m not ticklish.”

  “Delphine asked me the strangest thing this morning,” Anette de Lancel reported to her husband, and fell silent.

  Vicomte Jean-Luc de Lancel sighed with the pleasurable resignation that only many decades of marriage bring. He knew that whatever odd remark Delphine had made, he was destined to hear about it in every detail, embroidered by speculation and comments on human behavior, as nonessential to whatever had actually been said as the illumination of a single letter on a long medieval manuscript, but not until he had shown himself worthy of the basic information by prying it out of his wife. He set himself to the familiar task, fortified by the well-iced champagne they were drinking as a cooling nightcap on an exceptionally warm night in August of 1938. Eventually, in less time than it usually took, he was successful.

  “She wanted to know if, only hypothetically, of course, I’d ever heard of any sure way to fall out of love,” Anette de Lancel revealed, in tones of fascination mixed with worry.

  “What did you tell her?” he asked, interested in spite of himself.

  “Jean-Luc, you’re missing the point entirely. Obviously, if she wants to fall out of love, she must be in love with someone unsuitable. And she must be at her wits’ end to actually consult me. Someone as independent as Delphine wouldn’t ask a mere grandmother’s advice in any other circumstances.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought her capable of falling in love,” Jean-Luc said, mildly surprised.

  “Jean-Luc!” Anette was truly shocked.

  “I’ve never met a girl less likely to be carried away by an emotion, still less an unrequited one. Still, she has put on an impressive exhibition of moping since she invited herself to visit us. I thought it must be something about that theatrical career of hers.”

  “Not theatrical, darling—the cinema.”

  “It’s the same thing, a lot of nonsense. I’m still waiting to hear what advice you gave her.”

  “I said to imagine that if someone, a hypothetical someone, was in love and didn’t want to be, she should imagine, as graphically as possible, that the man in question had all sorts of utterly disgusting personal habits that she would only find out about when it was too late—and she just said it was a good idea, without, I could tell, intending to even try it—and I think it’s not bad advice at all, as a matter of fact, don’t you? She thanked me in that very sweet, sad way of hers, and took poor Guillaume’s car out for a long drive all alone.”

  “Hmm.” Jean-Luc took Anette’s hand. T
heir oldest son, crusty to the last, had died of cancer only three months before, unmourned by the wife and children he had never had, but sorely missed by his parents and by all the workers in the vineyards, who had respected him even if they hadn’t been particularly fond of him.

  “Well, don’t worry, my dear,” he said. “With girls that age, love isn’t a serious business. Delphine’ll grow out of it, whatever it is.”

  “She’s twenty, not fourteen, Jean-Luc. That’s quite old enough for … oh, anything … and everything. I can’t help worrying.”

  “Just don’t let yourself get involved, Anette, I beg of you. The last time you got involved in Delphine’s problems we gave a dinner party, and look what that led to,” he warned, and prepared to climb into the high old bed they had shared for almost sixty years.

  Delphine sat by the window of her room and looked out at the generous, pregnant moon of August, and cursed herself bitterly. Something like this simply could not happen to her! It went contrary to all her firm ideas of how to live her life with a maximum of pleasure; it went contrary to her years of training in how to achieve and maintain power over men; it went contrary to all the sophistication she had grown into, beginning at college and then expanding confidently, until she became genuinely worldly in Paris, under Bruno’s guidance; it went contrary to everything she had learned about her body and how to satisfy it with a half-dozen lovers. It went against her will, a will she had felt so sure she could use to advance her interests. Worst of all, it went contrary to her deepest instincts of self-protection.

  You don’t fall in love with a man like Armand Sadowski! She pounded her fists on the window seat until the edges of her hands were bruised. You don’t even like a man like Armand Sadowski. Oh, but she did! Oh, but she had!

  When had this unthinkable thing happened? Had it been after the first weeks of the picture, when she realized that he was getting the best performance of her life out of her, and that her acting hadn’t been a result of the welling up of unreined sexuality on which she had counted since that first test for Mayerling with Nico Ambert? Was it perhaps merely that—the knowledge that she truly could act, that she wasn’t, as she had sometimes feared, without daring to admit it to herself, just a narcissistic girl who became so aroused by the crew and the lights and the camera, that somehow meaning poured into her performance from her own excitement?

  From the first day they worked together, Delphine had forgotten the existence of the crew. They were there simply to carry out orders that others gave them. The lights were only turned on for purposes of illumination, the cameras turned merely as means of making á record on film. She hadn’t been touched by a man since she’d started that film.

  Yes, perhaps her feelings were purely professional, perfectly normal admiration for a man who could give her direction as no one else ever had. A form of the classic admiration of a Galatea for a Pygmalion? It wasn’t unheard of for such admiration to feel like love. Transference, she’d heard it called by other actresses, and actors as well. Everyone knew that you had to be a little in love with your director. Directors were all highly seductive personalities in one way or another, or they didn’t get jobs. It was part of the great game of making a film. A little in love, she thought, just a little in love. That would be acceptable. But if she were only a little in love, it should have stopped when the making of the film was over, months ago, in June. She would have taken a lover by now—if she were only a little in love—and cured herself.

  Perhaps her feelings had sprung up when she realized that Armand Sadowski, of all the men she’d ever met, was the least impressed with her. Least was not an accurate word, Delphine thought, correcting herself mentally. He wasn’t just less impressed, he wasn’t impressed in the slightest. Wasn’t it human nature for someone who was as accustomed as she was to inspiring love, to become masochistically attracted to a man who was, as Margie Hall used to say, hard to get? Impossible to get? It must be that. If he had shown any of the signs of falling for her that she knew so well, her so-called love would have had a chance to disappear. Well, wouldn’t it? She hadn’t had the chance to find out. For a minute Delphine allowed herself to imagine Armand Sadowski displaying a romantic interest in her, and her head swam so dizzily that the moon swayed in the sky, like a kite on the end of a string on a windy day.

  No, it had all started at some unmarked moment during the making of the film, as a direct result of his manipulative personality, she decided, looking hastily away from the moon. What else could you call him but manipulative? He knew just what psychological strings to pull, just the right words and attitudes to use to get people to do his bidding. She’d watched him with the other members of the cast. He’d bullied and jollied and persuaded and conned them one and all, using his brash energy to get what he wanted.

  Then why weren’t the other actresses on the film in love with him too? She’d spent hours in purposeful but roundabout gossip with them, showing a friendliness that came as a surprise to them. Everyone had discussed Sadowski freely. He interested them all, but as a director, no more, no less. They were pretty sure he wasn’t married, they thought he didn’t have any one particular girlfriend, they knew his family had come to France from Poland ages ago, and they assumed that he was Jewish, but who knew for sure with the Poles? He hadn’t provided them with anything else to gossip about, hadn’t shown any personal attention to any of them, so their interest went only so far, and then turned, to Delphine’s well-hidden irritation, back to their own lives. Maybe Jewish, maybe unattached, of Polish origin for sure. Not much to chew on there.

  Try to be honest for once in your life, she told herself severely. It started when he took his glasses off and looked at you. That’s all he had to do to make you fall in love. Turn around in his chair and look at you. Pushover. A pathetic pushover, that’s all you are. Now what are you going to do?

  The casts on Freddy’s arm and ankle were removed by the end of August, and it was evident that it wouldn’t be long before she recovered her full strength. She hired a trainer to work with her every day, one of the tumbling team from whom she’d learned many tricks of equilibrium for various jobs. Now that she could get about without fear of falling, Mac was able to leave her alone at home, and return to his busy routine of giving lessons and managing his dual business, renting vintage planes and directing the flying stunts for Universal’s Saturday matinee serial, Ace Drummond, which had originally been inspired by the adventures of Eddie Rickenbacker.

  By the last day of September 1938, Freddy was able to fly her own plane again. She had made the down payment on the wildly extravagant Rider racer with the first big money she’d ever earned, unable to resist the beautifully designed new ship, one of the first completely streamlined planes, powered by a Pratt and Whitney 450-horsepower Twin Wasp Junior motor. It was painted entirely white, its low wings were cantilevered, and the landing gear was retractable. From its cockpit Freddy had more visibility than in any other plane she’d ever flown, and in it she won her first trophies at the International Aerobatic Competition at St. Louis in May of 1937. She competed valiantly in the Istres-Damascus-Paris Air Race in August of 1937, coming in third because of a delay caused by an unexpected storm over the Alps. In November of 1937 she flew the race from Vancouver to Agua Caliente, Mexico, in five hours and eight minutes, and came in fourteen minutes after Frank W. Fuller, Jr. That time was nothing to be ashamed of, but it had been fifteen minutes too many for victory. Still, she’d won the second-place trophy and she had won other, first-place trophies in a number of local races in early 1938. From early spring on, she had so much stunt work that she had not had time to enter any competitions.

  Now, as she cruised up along the coast toward Santa Cruz, she tried to decide if she wanted to take time off from the film work that had been offered to her, and start trying for new racing records. She had missed the National Air Races because of her accident, and today she didn’t care. So what if Cochrane had won the Bendix? Flying was enough, just in itself.
She didn’t need to prove anything, she thought, as she scanned scattered fields of daisies formed by the clouds on their wind-borne maneuvers, she didn’t feel like scrambling for that extra winning minute, she didn’t care if her navigation was sloppy, if she was lazily letting the Pacific, this morning sporting an overglaze of lavender, tell her where she was, without reference to any chart.

  This joy was what all pilots meant when they left the hangar for their planes, saying only, “I’m goin’ flyin’,” those always casual words from which excitement was never missing. Freddy was astonished by the necessity of the contentment she had been granted. She had missed, more than she had let herself realize, the plain and simple physical contact with her plane: the solid sound of the engine, that was not a roar or a growl or a thrumming or a throbbing, but a sound to which nothing else can be compared, the sound of an airplane engine. She had missed her good-smelling leather seat and the feeling of the shoulder harness across her body and her throttle and her stick and her rudders. She had missed her machine.

  She hadn’t fully recognized until today the full duality of flying. She could fill pages with lyrical descriptions of the sky, more pages with infinitely detailed discoveries of how the earth appeared from above, but without her own personal contact with her machine, it wouldn’t be more than what any passenger could see. If she weren’t at the controls, she wouldn’t be free. It was as simple as that. It was the only pure freedom she had ever known, and she must never be away from it for long.

  For a time she flew mindlessly, automatically tending the controls, letting her reflexes take over, as she sank deep into the nameless, primitive emotion that bound her to her ship.

  Eventually, Freddy realized that she was hungry, and she looked at her chart to find the nearest airport for lunch. She’d be at Santa Cruz in less than half an hour. The white Rider could make two hundred and fifty miles an hour whenever she chose, and the airport café at Santa Cruz was good. She wished she’d thought to bring a sandwich, as she turned the ship to head directly for the little coastal city. Even that tiny piece of navigation on a day like today was almost too much, but it was better than starving.