An Evening of Long Goodbyes

by Paul Murray

  ‘You know that last night the play finished its run – well it did, anyway, and we were having the wrap party in the theatre in town, except I didn’t really feel like being there, because it was sort of sad, you know, the end of our first play and the first thing we had done together. Anyway I said it to Harry and he said it was weird because he’d just been thinking the same thing, so he said why don’t we just leave? So we left. He knew how to get up to the theatre roof from the fire escape. It was so lovely, Charles, you could see the whole city spread out, it was so peaceful, and all these stars were out, and I just knew that something was going to happen…’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ I interjected warily.

  ‘Well that’s when we had the amazing conversation.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘It was just…’ she said dreamily, ‘it was so… have you ever had one of those conversations where you’re so connected with the other person that you stop being sure which of you is talking, because when they speak it’s like they’re articulating all these thoughts you’ve had that you’ve never been able to put into words before? He was telling me these things, like – like for instance about The Cherry Orchard when I didn’t get the part that time, Harry was saying you know Stanislavsky’s thing you can’t act Chekhov you have to live him, well that in Amaurot I’ve basically been living Chekhov for three years only I didn’t realize, and I was trying to be someone else when I was already exactly what they needed – God, he’s so insightful, it was like – like hearing my own heart speak up and tell me exactly what it was thinking, and you know it’s so weird because he and I have known each other for years, and now suddenly we find out we’re so alike, little things even like we both like Doris Day and Mozart and Hart Crane, and the way the wind when it blows through the pylons it sounds like it’s singing…’ She stopped and repeated to herself, as if in disbelief, ‘God.’

  ‘At the same time, it’s not as if your heart’s been especially quiet up until now,’ I felt compelled to point out.

  ‘Yes, but Charles you know what it’s been like since college ended,’ she said, ‘stuck out here in the house, feeling like I wasn’t alive, even, like I was in this little closed-off area that was contiguous to life, and sort of along the same lines as life, but not actually life – and now suddenly in a single moment everything just opens up I mean it’s so exciting, don’t you think it’s exciting?’

  ‘What about Frank?’

  ‘What?’ she broke off mid-gush. ‘What do you mean, what about Frank?’

  I hesitated. I didn’t know what I meant. It had just come out.

  ‘Since when do you care what happens to Frank?’ she said.

  Suddenly I felt very confused. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It just seems like an offhand way to treat somebody, that’s all.’

  She groaned. ‘Charles, you’re not going to start, are you?’

  ‘I’m not starting anything,’ I said. ‘But a few weeks ago I seem to recall you being all set to move in with him. And while we’re on the subject, you don’t even like Doris Day.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doris Day, as long as I can remember any time “Que Sera Sera” has come on the radio you’ve made juvenile vomiting noises, and then last year when I was watching Pillow Talk you said she looked like an Aryan sex doll –’

  ‘Well, so what? What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Yes, but Mozart too, I distinctly remember you telling me that people who liked Mozart ought to be made to ride around in elevators for the rest of their lives. And those ghastly pylons, in fact all of those things you just said you have in common –’

  ‘People change, don’t they?’ she broke in. ‘Why are you being like this? Can’t you for once just be happy for me, instead of trying to pick holes? I mean, for months you did nothing but complain about Frank, and I know you’ve developed one of your stupid crushes on Mirela. So isn’t this what you wanted? I mean, what is it exactly that you want?’

  Once again I found myself stuck for an answer. A Roman candle came to my rescue: it detonated right outside the window, throwing a hellish red up on the bedroom wall; the rumble took several seconds to die away. ‘What’s going on there anyway?’ her voice crackled from far away. ‘It sounds like the peasants are storming the battlements.’

  ‘They’ve stormed the battlements,’ I said glumly. ‘They’re having their wrap party.’

  She laughed. ‘Poor old Charles,’ she said. ‘And here’s me shouting at you on top of everything. You know I promised myself that I wasn’t going to shout at you this time. I haven’t even asked you how you are. How are you?’

  ‘Well –’ I began.

  ‘Charles,’ her voice cut across me, ‘sorry to interrupt, but I have to go to a meeting now so before I forget the reason I wanted to see you – I wanted to tell you that I know everything’s going to work out, for both of us. I mean that’s what all this stuff I’ve been going on about has made me realize, that things do change, and… and just when it seems everything’s against you, that’s exactly when something’ll appear out of nowhere and suddenly it’ll all be different. I just wanted you to know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said stiffly.

  ‘And the other thing was, will you tell Frank we need a wheelchair for the play, if he comes across one?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’d better go. Remember what I said.’

  Deep in thought, I mooched back into the living room. Frank had emerged from the bathroom, and was silently watching television with Droyd. On the street, fireworks continued to crack like enemy artillery; huddled in the shifting light, the two of them had the look of soldiers caught in a foxhole. ‘Bel wants a wheelchair,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ Frank said, without looking round.

  I sat down on the sofa. I felt like I’d been walking through a hurricane. I wasn’t used to hearing Bel so happy. It made me nervous. It was like a car driving in a gear that it didn’t actually have. I wondered what that bounder had said to her, up on the roof.

  ‘ – forces allege that this is just one of dozens of similar sites scattered across the region,’ the television said, showing a soldier kicking dirt away from the ground to reveal what looked like a pile of washed-out rags.

  She was right about one thing, though. For months I had prayed for the day when Frank would be given the heave-ho. There was nothing I wanted more than for her to be rid of him, his rusty white van, his mutilated gerunds. Now that the day had come, surely I was due a moment of jubilation or triumph or at least a cold sense of closure and the transience of all things. Yet as I sat on the dysmorphic sofa, waiting for the flush of victory to sweep through me, all there seemed to be was an annoying hollow feeling.

  This was absurd! Hadn’t I been paying attention? Had my life really grown so complicated that its most fundamental notions of right and wrong no longer held? Good God, now that one tiny success had presented itself, was my own soul going to step in and turn it to defeat?

  ‘Good God,’ I uttered involuntarily.

  ‘What’s that, Charlie?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing, bit of a twinge is all,’ patting my bandages; he returned to the television and I to grapple with the mounting evidence of inner mutiny.

  I tried to counter it. I pointed to the facts. I recalled his odious groping sessions with Bel. I remembered how he’d blown up my Folly. I took in the mournful cherubim on the shelves around me, the lonesome garden ornaments, the inconsolable tallboy, all torn from people’s houses. From the corner of my eye, I considered Frank himself, staring at the television, the can of Hobson’s propped on his exposed belly moving, with a noxious quiver, slowly up and down. None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away.

  The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume my job hunt: it was all I could do to drag myself from the bedroom floor to the sofa. With every passing day
my financial affairs grew more ruinous, and it became harder and harder even to conceive of how I might dig myself out of the hole I was in – which only compounded my ennui, and my disinclination to do anything about it. Instead I threw myself into my Gene Tierney project: I wrapped myself in her movies, lost myself in them, just as she had tried to lose herself years before. I watched each one avidly, meticulously cross-referencing it with her biography, charting the trajectory that emerged.

  If you looked at her life from start to finish, it seemed clear that her marriage to Oleg Cassini was the event that set loose all the other catastrophes that befell her – the initial transgression that woke the Furies until then lying dormant at the edges of her life. Marrying him, in fact, was about the only rebellious thing she ever did. She had been reared to be a nice girl, and she had always done exactly what she was told – living frugally with her mother in Hollywood, sending her pay cheques back to the company her father had set up, catching hell from him for any extravagance: and then Cassini came along.

  Oleg Cassini was Russian, the son of a Countess who had fled to America after the defeat of the White Army; he was also a designer and a playboy and had not been to Yale, and as such could not have been further away from what Gene’s parents thought of as a suitable match if they had sat down and planned it. They would not countenance the romance. Gene’s father said that if she married Cassini he would have her declared mentally instable. The studios concurred: and whatever about her parents, in those days no one defied the studios. They had made you, and they could destroy you just as easily. But Gene was in love.

  She thought that once they were married, and there was no longer anything anyone could do about it, things might die down; so, travelling in disguise, she and Cassini eloped to Las Vegas. On the night of their wedding Gene came back to Los Angeles, having agreed with Oleg, in the interests of diplomacy, to spend it apart: only to find that her mother had already fired the servants and flown home to New York City. And worse was to come.

  Parents and studio now joined forces. Paramount fired Cassini and Gene’s studio, Fox, refused to take him on. Her parents, meanwhile, complained to the press that Cassini had taken advantage of their daughter, and tried to have the marriage annulled. Suddenly the newlyweds found themselves blacklisted by Hollywood society, deserted by their friends. Cassini was still out of work; Gene, on the other hand, was working constantly, and they saw each other increasingly rarely. As the pressure began to tell, her father and mother started calling her up at all hours, trying to persuade her to leave him. In the midst of all this, during the shooting of Heaven Can Wait, Gene discovered she was pregnant; and America entered the Second World War.

  After so much personal turmoil, the war must have seemed something of a reprieve. Old differences were set aside; the nation busied itself ‘pitching in’. Gallant Cassini joined the cavalry; Gene, like most of the stars, took part in bond drives to raise money for the war effort. She toured around the country, speaking at factories and outdoor rallies. A week before she went down to Kansas, where Cassini’s division was stationed, she appeared at the Hollywood Canteen to entertain the marines. A few days later she was diagnosed with German measles.

  She had kept quiet about her condition – the studio would suspend an actress’s salary if she became pregnant on their time. In 1943, the connection had not yet been made between German measles in early pregnancy and brain damage in very young children. Gene gave birth prematurely in October to a baby girl, weighing two and a half pounds. She named her child Daria.

  It was a year later that the newspapers picked up on the story of the rubella epidemic in Australia that had apparently produced a generation of severely retarded infants, and Gene began to admit that her baby might not just be a late developer, but was having serious problems. Specialists were called out at great expense (paid for by Gene’s old flame Howard Hughes, then beginning his own retreat from the world after his disfiguring plane crash). They all said the same thing. The damage had already been done, while the baby was still in the womb, and it could not be undone. The best thing for everyone now would be for the child to be put in an institution.

  Gene was tormented by guilt and confusion. Hadn’t she always tried to be good? Hadn’t she always done what people asked? What had she done to bring this catastrophe down on top of her and those she loved? She resisted as long as she could; but she was twenty-four years old and after everything that had happened the pressure was too much. Daria was put in a home, where she would remain for the rest of her life with the mind of a nineteen-month-old infant.

  One quiet Sunday years later, at a tennis party in LA, Gene happened to be approached by a fan. This young woman was an ex-marine; she said she had met Gene before, at a show in the Hollywood Canteen during the war. ‘Did you happen to catch German measles that night?’ the woman asked. Gene said that she did, as a matter of fact. The woman laughed and said the whole camp had come down with German measles, but that she had broken quarantine, to sneak out and meet her favourite star.

  Anyone else would have screamed, or punched her; but Gene, who had been reared to be nice, merely smiled and turned away.

  It seemed to me that after that her films became a kind of refuge for her. Not the work, nor the scripts, but the movies themselves: as the betrayals mounted up, as the birth of their child achieved what the combined forces of parents and studio could not and her marriage to Cassini slowly fell apart, it seemed to me that the movies became places where she could hide herself, where she could disappear. Take, for example, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, in which she plays a widow who falls for the ghost that haunts the cottage she has moved into. The ghost, played by Rex Harrison, first catches her eye in the form of a portrait in the living room – which seems a neat flip of what happens in Laura, where the cop falls in love with the painting of Gene, who has been murdered. People falling for ghosts, people falling for paintings, in more and more of her movies I found this secret tendency elaborated: a tendency for the movies to create spaces for her within them, interstitial spaces of one kind or another – as if, although she couldn’t make the movies hers, she had elicited a secret pact whereby she could escape into them and exist away from life, untouchably, as an image; as if in here, after all, she found her true domain – the illusory, the shadowy, the in-between –

  ‘Charlie, this is like the fuckin most borin film I’ve ever seen in me life.’

  – although much of this was lost on others –

  ‘Yeah, Charlie, and it’s time for Hollyoaks.’

  ‘Charlie, can you not just let us watch Hollyoaks and then you can watch the rest of this thing?’

  ‘Charlie, we know you can hear us so like why aren’t you sayin anything? Charlie?’

  ‘Blast it – because I know that once Hollyoaks is over you’ll want to watch Streetmate, and then Robot Wars and then that unconscionable Dawson’s Creek…’

  ‘I don’t watch Dawson’s Creek, Charlie.’

  ‘Well, you were certainly doing a good impression of it the other night. Confound it, can’t you just sit still for half an hour and then I’ll quite happily –’

  ‘I’d give her one, wouldn’t you, Frankie? Charlie, would you give her –’

  ‘Look, you scoundrels,’ rising apoplectically to my feet with the rolled-up television guide as though shooing a pack of mangy street dogs, ‘hang it, can’t you just leave me in peace for a few minutes more and then I swear to you I will return your deuced television!’

  ‘All right, all right… fuck’s sake…’ The pair of them slunk away to the kitchen, only to strike up from there a few moments later:

  ‘Hang it, Droyd, I wish to the devil you’d roll up an oul joint there.’

  ‘Confound it, Frankie, where’s me deuced Rizlas?’

  And then five minutes after that:

  ‘Frankie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘D’you ever see your reflection in a spoon, like, and just for a second you think, “Ah fuck, I’m ups
ide-down?”’

  ‘Yeah, o’course.’

  ‘Fuckin scary, isn’t it?’

  There was only so much insulation any film could give one, and tonight was the night I reached the end of my tether; I almost heard the snap. As if in a trance I rose from the couch and headed for the kitchen, and it’s quite possible that something terrible might have happened if I hadn’t been diverted by the telephone.

  ‘Yes, what? Oh…’

  It was Gemma Coffey from Sirius Recruitment. She had called to offer me a job.

  For a moment I was paralysed. Could it really be true? Out of the blue like this? Had the time come at last for me to step up to bat, to play my part in –

  ‘Charles?’ she said.

  ‘I’m here,’ I said faintly.

  ‘Well, can you do it?’

  I assured her that I could; I added how grateful I was to her for remembering me out of the millions that came to her door, and that I wanted her to know I believed in this job, whatever it was, and would do my level best to help make the dream come true –

  She said Good, but all that wasn’t so important with this particular job. ‘It’s only a temporary position, and it’s not quite as glamorous as the ones we discussed. It’s factory work, basically. You don’t have a problem with factory work, do you, Charles?’

  ‘It’s not a jar factory, is it?’ I said, there being only so many ironical twists I was willing to put up with in my life.

  Gemma said that it wasn’t, it was a bread factory in Cherry Orchard. I said that in that case, I didn’t have a problem, and that I was just happy to be a part of the Sirius Recruitment team. Gemma sounded pleased, though she pointed out that technically I would be employed not by Sirius Recruitment but by its sister company, Pobolny Arbitwo Recruitment. ‘But that’s not important,’ she said. ‘The important thing is that I’m not going to forget about you out there, Charles. Come through for me and I’m going to find something really special for you.’

  I told her she could count on me. She said she knew. She asked if by any chance I spoke Latvian. I said I didn’t. She said it didn’t matter. She gave me an address, the bus route to take, and a name to report to – Mr Appleseed – then we thanked each other and said goodbye.