Stories

by Doris Lessing

  That word “affected,” have you ever really thought why it is applied to actresses? (You have of course; I’m no foreign country to you, I felt that, but it gives me pleasure to talk to you like this.) The other afternoon I went to see Irma Painter in her new play, and afterwards I went back to congratulate her (for she had heard, of course, that I was in the auditorium and would have felt insulted if I hadn’t gone—I’m different, I hate it when people feel obliged to come back). We were sitting in her dressingroom and I was looking at her face as she wiped the makeup off. We are about the same age, and we have both been acting since the year … I recognised her face as mine, we have the same face, and I understood that it is the face of every real actress. No, it is not “masklike,” my face, her face. Rather, it is that our basic face is so worn down to its essentials because of its permanent readiness to take other guises, become other people, it is almost like something hung up on the wall of a dressingroom ready to take down and use. Our face is—it has a scrubbed, honest, bare look, like a deal table, or a wooden floor. It has modesty, a humility, our face, as time wears on, wearing out of her, out of me, our “personality,” our “individuality.”

  I looked at her face (we are called rivals, we are both called “great” actresses) and I suddenly wanted to pay homage to it, since I knew what that scoured plain look cost her—what it costs me, who have played a thousand beautiful women, to keep my features sober and decent under the painted shell of my makeup ready for other souls to use.

  At a party, all dressed up, when I’m a “person,” then I try to disguise the essential plainness and anonymity of my features by holding together the “beauty” I am known for, creating it out of my own and other people’s memories. Of course it is almost gone now, nearly all gone the sharp, sweet, poignant face that so many men loved (not knowing it was not me, it was only what was given to me to consume slowly for the scrubbed face I must use for work). While I sat last night opposite you and your wife, she so pretty and human, her prettiness no mask, but expressing every shade of what she felt, and you being yourself only, I was conscious of how I looked. I could see my very white flesh that is guttering down away from its “beauty”; I could see my smile that even now has moments of its “piercing sweetness”; I could see my eyes, “dewy and shadowed,” even now … but I also knew that everyone there, even if they were not aware of it, was conscious of that hard, honest workaday face that lies ready for use under this ruin, and it is the discrepancy between that working face and the “personality” of the famous actress that makes everything I do and say affected, that makes it inevitable and right that I should say, “I don’t want a husband, I have so many husbands.” And I tell you, if I had said nothing, not one word, the whole evening, the result would have been the same: “How affected she is, but of course she is an actress.”

  Yet it was the exact truth, what I said: I no longer have lovers, I have husbands, and that has been true ever since …

  That is why I am writing this letter to you; this letter is a sort of homage, giving you your due in my life. Or perhaps, simply, I cannot tonight stand the loneliness of my role (my role in life).

  When I was a girl it seemed that every man I met, or even heard of, or whose picture I saw in the paper, was my lover. I took him as my lover, because it was my right. He may never have heard of me, he might have thought me hideous (and I wasn’t very attractive as a girl—my kind of looks, striking, white-fleshed, red-haired, needed maturity; as a girl I was a milk-faced, scarlet-haired creature whose features were all at odds with each other; I was pretty only when made up for the stage) … he may have found me positively repulsive, but I took him. Yes, at that time I had lovers in imagination, but none in reality. No man in the flesh could be as good as what I could invent, no real lips, hands, could affect me as those that I created, like God. And this remained true when I married my first husband, and then my second, for I loved neither of them, and I didn’t know what the word meant for years. Until, to be precise, I was thirty-two and got very ill that year. No one knew why, or how, but I knew it was because I did not get a big part I wanted badly. So I got ill from disappointment, but now I see how right it was I didn’t get the part. I was too old—if I had played her, the charming ingenuous girl (which is how I saw myself then, God forgive me), I would have had to play her for three or four years, because the play ran for ever, and I would have been too vain to stop. And then what? I would have been nearly forty, too old for charming girls, and then, like so many actresses who have not burned the charming girl out of themselves, cauterised that wound with pain like styptic, I would have found myself playing smaller and smaller parts, and then I would have become a “character” actress, and then …

  Instead, I lay very ill, not wanting to get better, ill with frustration, I thought, but really with the weight of years I did not know how to consume, how to include in how I saw myself, and then I fell in love with my doctor, inevitable I see now, but then a miracle, for that was the first time, and the reason I said the word “love” to myself, just as if I had not been married twice and had a score of men in my imagination, was because I could not manipulate him, for the first time a man remained himself, I could not make him move as I wanted, and I did not know his lips and hands. No, I had to wait for him to decide, to move, and when he did become my lover I was like a young girl, awkward, I could only wait for his actions to spring mine.

  He loved me, certainly, but not as I loved him, and in due course he left me. I wished I could die, but it was then I understood, with gratitude, what had happened—I played, for the first time, a woman, as distinct from that fatal creature, “A charming girl,” as distinct from “the heroine”—and I and everyone else knew that I had moved into a new dimension of myself; I was born again, and only I knew it was out of love for that man, my first husband (so I called him, though everyone else saw him as my doctor with whom I rather amusingly had had an affair).

  For he was my first husband. He changed me and my whole life. After him, in my frenzy of lonely unhappiness, I believed I could return to what I had been before he had married me, and I would take men to bed (in reality now, just as I had, before, in imagination), but it was no longer possible, it did not work, for I had been possessed by a man, the Man had created in me himself, had left himself in me, and so I could never again use a man, possess one, manipulate him, make him do what I wanted.

  For a long time it was as if I was dead, empty, sterile. (That is, I was; my work was at its peak.) I had no lovers, in fact or in imagination, and it was like being a nun or a virgin.

  Strange it was, that at the age of thirty-five it was for the first time I felt virgin, chaste, untouched, I was absolutely alone. The men who wanted me, courted me, it was as if they moved and smiled and stretched out their hands through a glass wall which was my absolute inviolability. Was this how I should have felt when I was a girl? Yes, I believe that’s it—that at thirty-five I was a girl for the first time. Surely this is how ordinary “normal” girls feel?—they carry a circle of chastity around with them through which the one man, the hero, must break? But it was not so with me, I was never a chaste girl, not until I had known what it was to remain still, waiting for the man to set me in motion in answer to him.

  A long time went by, and I began to feel I would soon be an old woman. I was without love, and I would not be a good artist, not really, the touch of the man who loved me was fading off me, had faded, there was something lacking in my work now, it was beginning to be mechanical.

  And so I resigned myself. I could no longer choose a man; and no man chose me. So I said, “Very well, then, there is nothing to be done.” Above all, I understand the relation between myself and life, I understand the logic of what I am, must be, I know there is nothing to be done about the shape of fate: my truth is that I have been loved once, and now that is the end, and I must let myself sink towards a certain dryness, a coldness of intelligence—yes, you will soon develop into an upright, redheaded, very intellig
ent lady (though, of course, affected!) whose green eyes flash the sober fires of humorous comprehension. All the rest is over for you; now accept it and be done and do as well as you can the work you are given.

  And then one night …

  What? All that happened outwardly was that I sat opposite a man at a dinner party in a restaurant, and we talked and laughed as people do who meet each other casually at a dinner table. But afterwards I went home with my soul on fire. I was on fire, being consumed…. And what a miracle it was to me, being able to say, not: That is an attractive man, I want him, I shall have him, but: My house is on fire, that was the man, yes, it was he again, there he was, he has set light to my soul.

  I simply let myself suffer for him, knowing he was worth it because I suffered—it had come to this, my soul had become its own gauge, its own measure of what was good: I knew what he was because of how my work was afterwards.

  I knew him better than his wife did, or could (she was there too, a nice woman in such beautiful pearls)—I knew him better than he does himself. I sat opposite him all evening. What was there to notice? An ageing actress, pretty still, beautifully dressed (that winter I had a beautiful violet suit with mink cuffs), sitting opposite a charming man—handsome, intelligent, and so on. One can use these adjectives of half the men one meets. But somewhere in him, in his being, something matched something in me; he had come into me, he had set me in motion. I remember looking down the table at his wife and thinking: Yes, my dear, but your husband is also my husband, for he walked into me and made himself at home in me, and because of him I shall act again from the depths of myself, I am sure of it, and I’m sure it will be the best work I can do. Though I won’t know until tomorrow night, on the stage.

  For instance, there was one night when I stood on the stage and stretched up my slender white arms to the audience (that is how they saw it; what I saw were two white-caked, raddled-with-cold arms that were, moreover, rather flabby) and I knew that I was, that night, nothing but an amateur. I stood there on the stage, as a woman holding out my pretty arms; it was Victoria Carrington saying: Look how poignantly I hold out my arms, don’t you long to have them around you, my slender white arms, look how beautiful, how enticing Victoria is! And then, in my dressingroom afterwards I was ashamed; it was years since I had stood on the stage with nothing between me, the woman, and the audience—not since I was a green girl had I acted so—why, then, tonight?

  I thought, and I understood. The afternoon before a man (a producer from America, but that doesn’t matter) had come to see me in my dressingroom and after he left I thought: Yes, there it is again, I know that sensation, that means he has set the forces in motion and so I can expect my work to show it…. It showed it, with a vengeance! Well, and so that taught me to discriminate; I learned I must be careful, must allow no second-rate man to come near me. And so put up barriers, strengthened around me the circle of cold, of impersonality, that should always lie between me and people, between me and the auditorium; I made a cool, bare space no man could enter, could break across, unless his power, his magic, was very strong, the true complement to mine.

  Very seldom now do I feel myself alight, on fire, touched awake, created again by—what?

  I live alone now. No, you would never be able to imagine how. For I knew when I saw you this evening that you exist, you are, only in relation to other people, you are always giving out to your work, your wife, friends, children; your wife has the face of a woman who gives, who is confident that what she gives will be received. Yes, I understand all that, I know how it would be living with you, I know you.

  After we had all separated, and I had watched you drive off with your wife, I came home and … no, it would be no use telling you, after all. (Or anyone, except, perhaps, my colleague and rival Irma Painter!) But what if I said to you—but no, there are certain disciplines which no one can understand but those who use them.

  So I will translate into your language, I’ll translate the truth so that it has the affected, almost embarrassing, exaggerated ring that goes with the actress Victoria Carrington, and I’ll tell you how when I came home after meeting you my whole body was wrenched with anguish, and I lay on the floor sweating and shaking as if I had bad malaria; it was like knives of deprivation going through me, for, meeting you, it was being reminded again what it would be like to be with a man, really with him, so that the rhythm of every day, every night, carried us both like the waves of a sea.

  Everything I am most proud of seemed nothing at all—what I have worked to achieve, what I have achieved, even the very core of what I am, the inner sensitive balance that exists like a sort of self-invented super instrument, or a fantastically receptive and cherished animal—this creation of myself, which every day becomes more involved, sensitive, and delicate, seemed absurd, paltry, spinsterish, a shameful excuse for cowardice. And my life, which so contents me because of its balance, its order, its steadily growing fastidiousness, seemed eccentrically solitary. Every particle of my being screamed out, wanting, needing—I was like an addict deprived of his drug.

  I picked myself off the floor, I bathed myself, I looked after myself like an invalid or like a—yes, like a pregnant woman. These extraordinary fertilisations happen so seldom now that I cherish them, waste nothing of them, and I both long for and dread them. Every time it is like being killed, like being torn open while I am forced to remember what it is I voluntarily do without.

  Every time it happens I swear I can never let it happen again, the pain is too terrible. What a flower, what a fire, what a miracle it would be if, instead of smiling (the “sweetly piercing” smile of my dying beauty), instead of accepting, submitting, I should turn to you and say …

  But I shall not, and so something very rare (something much more beautiful than your wife could ever give you, or any of the day-by-day wives could imagine) will never come into being.

  Instead … I sit and consume my pain, I sit and hold it, I sit and clench my teeth and …

  It is dark, it is very early in the morning, the light in my room is a transparent grey, like the ghost of water or of air; there are no lights in the windows I see from my own. I sit in my bed, and watch the shadows of the tree moving on the brick wall of the garden, and I contain pain and …

  Oh my dear one, my dear one, I am a tent under which you lie, I am the sky across which you fly like a bird, I am …

  My soul is a room, a great room, a hall—it is empty, waiting. Sometimes a fly buzzes across it, bringing summer mornings in another continent, sometimes a child laughs in it, and it is like the generations chiming together, child, youth, and old woman as one being. Sometimes you walk into it and stand there. You stand here in me and smile and I shut my eyes because of the sweet recognition in me of what you are. I feel what you are as if I stood near a tree and put my hand on its breathing trunk.

  I am a pool of water in which fantastic creatures move, in which you play, a young boy, your brown skin glistening, and the water moves over your limbs like hands, my hands, that will never touch you, my hands that tomorrow night, in a pool of listening silence, will stretch up towards the thousand people in the auditorium, creating love for them from the consumed pain of my denial.

  I am a room in which an old man sits, smiling, as he has smiled for fifty centuries, you, whose bearded loins created me.

  I am a world into which you breathed life, have smiled life, have made me. I am, with you, what creates, every moment, a thousand animalculae, the creatures of our dispensation, and everyone we have both touched with our hands and let go into space like freed birds.

  I am a great space that enlarges, that grows, that spreads with the steady lightening of the human soul, and in the space, squatting in the corner, is a thing, an object, a dark, slow, coiled, amorphous heaviness, embodied sleep, a cold stupid sleep, a heaviness like the dark in a stale room—this thing stirs in its sleep where it squats in my soul, and I put all my muscles, all my force, into defeating it. For this was what I was born
for, this is what I am, to fight embodied sleep, putting around it a confining girdle of light, of intelligence, so that it cannot spread its slow stain of ugliness over the trees, over the stars, over you.

  It is as if, since you turned towards me and smiled letting light go through me again, it is as if a King and his Queen, hand in hand on top of my mountain sit smiling at ease in their country.

  The morning is coming on the brick wall, the shadow of the tree has gone, and I think of how today I will walk out onto the stage, surrounded by the cool circle of my chastity, the circle of my discipline, and how I will raise my face (the flower face of my girlhood), and how I will raise my arms from which will flow the warmth you have given me.

  And so, my dear one, turn now to your wife, and take her head onto your shoulder, and both sleep sweetly in the sleep of your love. I release you to go to your joys without me. I leave you to your love. I leave you to your life.

  Lions, Leaves, Roses…

  As I went towards St. Mark’s Bridge, where slow water drowned this summer’s leaves, she accosted me, grinning, tugging with both hands at the ends of her red-spotted kerchief. “The sun always follows me,” she said, looking at the midday sun, as brilliant as a sun in Italy, but lower in the sky, it being October and our end of the earth tilting back and towards the cold of the winter which would begin next day or next month. “Yes,” she said, “the sun’s always after me, yes and the moon too.” She looked for the moon, not visible that day, while the sunlight lit all the sky, the shedding trees, the brilliant grass and us standing on the pavement by the bridge and the canal.

  No moon, only one of her familiars present, and her face changed to suspicion. To save the moment from grief, I said quickly, “You’re lucky to have the sun for your friend.” Again her face spread in glee, she bent hooting, squeezing out triumphant laughter, and I walked on, envious of her whose cracked mind let the sunlight through. For I was walking that day to catch a fragment of late summer in this clouded year, to catch and have it, and for this purpose it was necessary to walk with emptied mind, and all senses awake, and thoughts, whether dragon-flies or blow-flies swatted well away.