by Susan Sontag
You get what you want, and that makes everything right.
She fell asleep after they made love a second time, her head on his chest and her leg thrown over his thighs: though he still wanted her, he had to let her be, for she must be exhausted; he tried to follow her into sleep, but was barred by unslaked desire, and joy. He spent the rest of the night drifting toward sleep, bearing Maryna’s body, and at the edge of sleep coming awake again with the thought, But I am still awake. When dawn came, he did sleep, waking a few hours later to find her still flung across him, and wondered if he could move without her knowing; she must sleep on, as late as possible, to have all her strength for another Adrienne tonight.
But she was awake, and was covering him with kisses. “Oh, how alive I feel!” she cried. “You have given me back my body. What a second performance I shall give. And all our Polish friends, who must have been speculating about why Bogdan isn’t here in San Francisco, will be sure it’s because of you. My Maurice will surely notice, when I nestle against his chest to recite the fable of the two pigeons, that the girlish Adrienne is not as shy as she was last night. Mr. Barton will wonder, What has happened to that dignified lady from Poland? Success seems to have quite gone to her head. Her head!” She bent over and began to kiss his groin.
“The Polish lady is in love?” said Ryszard.
“The Polish lady is definitely—recklessly—indecently—imprudently—in love.”
After two more performances of Adrienne, on Thursday night Maryna opened in Camille and, after a third Camille at the Saturday matinee, closed the week with another Adrienne. The houses were always full, the ovations more prolonged and rapturous, the cohort of opulently dressed admirers the jubilant Barton led backstage ever larger. She greeted them by name after only the first visit, the liquid energies of her performance quick-drying in the rush of these greenroom exchanges—she was winsome (“Yes, thank you, thank you … ah, you are too kind”), easily amused, inviolable. If they only knew the price I have paid—must go on paying—to do what I do! And now she had another secret: the usual after-the-show lightheadedness was thickened with sexual suspense. But the well-wishers had to be sent away, and their flowers given to her dresser and the property-men to make space for the next day’s flowers, before, at last, she could return with Ryszard to the hotel.
Largest among the floral tributes massed together in her dressing room before the performance on Saturday evening was a giant basket plaited in the shape of a tower with tier upon tier of red, white, and blue flowers. From the belfry hung a square sheet of gold-bordered vellum.
“A poem,” said Maryna. “Unsigned.”
“Of course!” Ryszard exclaimed. “It was inevitable. You’ve captured the heart of another writer. Give me his poem and I’ll tell you, with complete objectivity, whether my new rival has any talent or not.”
“No”—Maryna laughed—“I shall read it to you. It can’t be as difficult as a sonnet by Shakespeare, and, luckily for me, Miss Collingridge is not here to mend my pronunciation.”
“The good fortune is mine.”
“Là, mon cher, tu exagères! Jealous men may be exciting on the stage but in real life they soon become very boring.”
“I am boring,” said Ryszard. “Writers are boring.”
“Ryszard, my sweet Ryszard,” she cried—he groaned, happily—“you’re going to stop thinking of yourself and just listen.”
“When do I do anything else?”
“Sshhh…”
“But first I have to kiss you,” he said.
They kissed, and did not feel like separating.
“You still want to oppress me with my rival’s poem?”
“Yes!” She picked up the vellum again, held it before her, and declaimed, in what Polish critics had called her silver register:
Hither, unheralded by voice of fame,
Except as a fair foreigner you came.
Light was the welcome that we had prepared—
Even our sympathies you scarcely shared;
Not—
“Oh, Madame Mareena, dear Madame Mareena,” Ryszard crowed, “sympathies. Not sympaties.”
“Sympathies is what I did say, you dolt,” Maryna exclaimed, and leaned over to kiss him before continuing:
Not as the artist whom your people knew—
As some fresh novice did we look on you.
“Aha, my rival is a mere drama critic!”
“Quiet!” she said. Curling her right hand, with her thumb and index finger Maryna tapped herself on the chest, twice, a venerable thespian gesture, mock-cleared her throat, and dropped into her celebrated velvet tone:
Mark the great change! Since that eventful night,
Only your wondrous art remains in sight.
Despite the fetters of a foreign tongue—
“Fetters,” Ryszard hooted.
“Ryszard, I’m not going to let you stop me!”
Despite the fetters of a foreign tongue,
Jealousy round your matchless talent hung;
Enraptured we acknowledge your success—
Success the greater as expected less.
“But now he’s going to kiss the hem of your robe, this little drama critic.”
“And why not?”
Keep Polish memories in—
She stopped.
“What’s the matter, Maryna? Darling!”
“I don’t— I don’t know if I can read the final couplet.”
“What does the beast say about you? Tear it up!”
“No. Of course I can finish.”
Keep Polish memories in your heart alone,
America now claims you for her own.
She put it down and turned away.
You get what you want, and then you’re in despair.
“Maryna,” said Ryszard. “Darling Maryna, please don’t cry.”
* * *
BY MID-MORNING on the day after the opening, seven journalists had set up restless, rivalrous encampments in the mammoth Parlor of the Palace Hotel; Maryna descended at noon. Ryszard had come down an hour earlier to say that Madame would soon be with them, and to send a telegram to the editor of the Gazeta Polska announcing his forthcoming full account of Maryna’s American debut, which was certain to make all Polish hearts throb with pride. Learning a day later from his editor that a rival Warsaw newspaper was dispatching someone to San Francisco to cover the event, Ryszard rushed ahead with not one but two long articles, the first describing Maryna’s performance in detail, the second its ecstatic reception by the first-night public and by the critics, who were, as he put it, “all, to a man, enraptured by the womanly charms and the incomparable genius of our Polish diva.” No need to remind his readers who Maryna had been, only to recount what she had gloriously, and in truth, become.
Who—what—she had been, that was Maryna’s subject in adroit conversation with the smitten local journalists waiting at the Palace that morning; and there were many more in the days that followed. Giving interviews entailed rewriting the past, starting with her age (she lopped off six years), her antecedents (the secondary-school Latin teacher became a professor at the Jagiellonian University), her beginnings as an actor (Heinrich became the director of an important private theatre in Warsaw where she made her debut at seventeen), her reasons for coming to America (to visit the Centennial Exposition) and then to California (to restore her health). By the end of the week Maryna had begun to believe some of the stories herself. After all, she’d had a plethora of reasons for emigrating. “I was ill.” (Was I ill?) “I always dreamed of going on the stage in America.” (Did I always mean to go back on the stage here?)
Then there were the unnecessary inventions. Maryna knew why she said she was thirty-one: she had already turned thirty-seven. Or why she said that only acute exhaustion brought on by years of overwork in Poland could have induced her to agree to a term of rustic seclusion (“Can you picture me, gentlemen, for ten months among chickens and cows?” she said, laughing): she didn�
�t want anyone to think she’d been one of those simple-lifers. But why had she said that the farm was near Santa Barbara? No one would think less well of her if she said it was outside Anaheim. And why tell different stories to different interviewers? Usually her father was an eminent classics scholar still teaching at Kraków’s noble, ancient university, who, when his daughter became, “what do you call it, stagestruck?” she said prettily, had vehemently opposed her hopes of an acting career (“but I was determined and left Kraków for Warsaw, where I made my debut in 1863”); but more than once he was a man of the mountains, a misfit only son, a dreamer, who committed to memory the verses of the great Polish poets during long solitary weeks in the high Tatras tending the family sheep, and having quit his village for Kraków hoping to gain admittance to the university, never succeeded in finding better than humble employment, never adjusted to city life, and did not live long enough to be proud, as she knew he would have been, of his actress daughter. Perhaps one tires of telling the same story again and again.
She could have said she was merely tailoring her reminiscences to make herself comprehensible: work of a foreigner. (And yes, she said, “Yes, I am especially pleased to have made my American debut in San Francisco.”) Or acknowledged, with a smile, that fabulating was simply an actress’s sport. Rachel, she had heard from one of the senior actors at the Imperial Theatre, told the most extraordinary untruths about herself to journalists when she came to perform in Warsaw twenty years ago. (“Like many exceedingly imaginative people,” as this charming man had put it with great delicacy, “Rachel was given to what in other persons would be called lying.”) But it’s not easy to remember which of the stories you relate about your life are true when you relate all of them so often. And all stories respond to some inner truth.
Of course it is impossible, and imprudent, to explain oneself fully when one has become a foreigner. Some truths need to be emphasized to jibe with local ideas of seemliness (she knew Americans liked being told about early hardships and rebuffs by those crowned with wealth and success), while some truths, the ones that have their just weight only back home, are best not mentioned at all.
The morning after her debut three candidates for the role of Maryna’s personal manager had also been waiting in the Palace lobby, eyeing each other sullenly, but Maryna signed on with the first with whom she conferred, Harry H. Warnock, who had come recommended by Barton. Ryszard was troubled, as he told Maryna later, by the speed with which she’d acquired this professional spouse. “Spouse?” Of course he didn’t like him, Ryszard lumbered on, but that was not the point. Did she realize that from now on Warnock would always be with her (with us, he meant), was she sure he was the kind of man whose proximity she could tolerate for long, and so on, and perhaps Maryna hadn’t understood how important a decision she had made, since personal managers did not exist in the Polish theatre. But Warnock was persuasive: he proposed a brief tour later that month in western Nevada (Virginia City and Reno) and northern California (Sacramento, San Jose), a debut in New York in December, and after that a four-month national tour. And Maryna was impatient and drunk with triumph. They agreed about repertory. Maryna would do mostly Shakespeare—she had played fourteen of Shakespeare’s heroines in Poland and planned to redo them all—while continuing to offer Adrienne Lecouvreur and Camille and, in the more provincial communities that filled out any comprehensive tour, a few melodramas (“But not East Lynne!” she said; “What do you take me for, Madame? I know when I am dealing with an artist”). The money promised was stupendous. Indeed, they were on the way to agreeing about everything, until Warnock mentioned that he was glad some of her Polish friends had thought last night to tell him she was a countess. He’d find good use for that in making her a star!
“Ah, no, Mr. Warnock!”—Maryna wrinkled her nose with distaste—“This would not be right at all.” For such a profanation of the family name she would never be forgiven by Bogdan’s brother. “That is my husband’s title, not mine,” she said. And, hoping to appeal to the democrat in this rotund man with the diamond scarfpin, “Artist—actress—is title enough for me.”
“We’re not talking about you, Madame Marina, we’re talking about the public,” said Warnock amiably.
“But it is I on the playbills! How can I be both Marina Zalenska and Countess Dembowska?”
“Easy,” said Warnock.
“Unthinkable in Poland,” she cried, and knew she had already lost the argument.
“Well, this is America,” said Warnock, “and Americans love foreign titles.”
“And— And it would be so vulgar for me to allow myself to be called a countess in my professional life.”
“Vulgar? That’s an awfully snobbish thing to say, Madame Marina. Americans don’t feel chastened when they’re told that something they enjoy is vulgar.”
“But Americans like stars,” she said, smiling severely.
“Yes,” he said, “Americans like stars.” He shook his head reproachfully. “And if they like you, you can make a lot of money.”
“Mr. Warnock, I do not come from another planet. In Europe the public dotes on stars. People like to worship, we know that. Nevertheless, in Poland, as in France and the German-speaking lands, drama is first of all one of the fine arts, and our principal theatres, those maintained by the state, are devoted to an ideal of—”
While Maryna, sitting with Warnock in one of the reception rooms of the Palace, was calmly trying to make the manager of her future American career appreciate for just a moment the prestige and privileges that accrue from a career at Warsaw’s Imperial Theatre—secure employment and steady promotion through the ranks, exemptions from conscription into the Czar’s army, and the guarantee to all, upon retirement, of a handsome pension for life (“An actor is a civil servant,” she said; “A what?” he exclaimed)—Rose Edwards, pacing back and forth in Barton’s office, was in full cry. “As you know, Angus, I am not stupid, and I must tell you straight out that I cannot play after such a genius. And in dear old East Lynne!—I shall be trounced by the critics. Will you think badly of me if I cancel my week? You cannot, you are a friend. Announce that I am ill, Angus. And, as a friend, might you consider paying my hotel bill and the cost of my getting here and traveling on just as comfortably to the following week’s engagement? Yes? No?”
“Dear, dear Rose!” Barton roared tenderly. “What I shall announce tomorrow in all the papers is that you have of your own free will withdrawn from your engagement here in favor of Madame Marina. The public will applaud your noble gesture, welcome you even more enthusiastically the next time you play at the California, and I’ll give you not only the expenses you’ve asked for but five hundred dollars as well.”
So Barton was able to report to Maryna that, as he had hoped, Rose Edwards was ceding her week.
In the second week Maryna repeated her Adrienne and Marguerite Gautier and, crossing at last truly into the English language, added Juliet. Tom Deane was delighted to do his Romeo, James Glenwood made an endearing Friar Laurence, and Kate Egan offered her crestfallen variation on Juliet’s Nurse, which Maryna forgave, as she had forgiven Kate for igniting the veil—altogether inadvertently? of course not—on the first night. Last year’s Juliet at the California Theatre had to feel glum about being shunted into the role of the Nurse, and obliged to be jolly and coarse with the subject of such headlines as “Debut at California Theatre Marks Epoch in Dramatic Art” and “World’s Greatest Actress Makes American Debut in San Francisco.”
Girding herself for the jealousy that invariably accompanies success, Maryna remembered her first year at the Imperial Theatre. Her coming had delivered a vivid insult to the old system, modeled on the Comédie-Française, in which the actors were recruited mostly from the Imperial’s dramatic schools, and the few outsiders admitted to the company had to start at the lowest rank. There was no precedent for the invitation Maryna had received from the theatre’s reform-minded new president, General Demichov, to come from Kraków to Warsaw for
twelve guest-star performances; equally unheard of, and most galling to the other actors, was that the life contract Demichov then offered her included the right to choose her own roles. How well Maryna had understood the scowls and sulks of her new colleagues, before she compelled them to love her. She always felt green-eyed at the success of any putative rival. (An ignoble fantasy: Oh, if only Gabriela Ebert could see her now!) But American actors seemed astoundingly generous. (She would try to imitate these Americans and improve her character.) In America actors often spoke well of one another, seemed eager to admire.
It felt so natural to Maryna to be engulfed by admiration, as it did to have found the freedom to accept Ryszard’s love. If there was a voice that said to her, Such an idyll cannot last, she could not hear it.
Ryszard heard it, conjured it up everywhere. He was leaden, reproachful: exactly what, a few days after they became lovers, he had promised Maryna he would not be. She had got that out of him by a chilling question. “Now that you have me”—they were lolling in bed late one morning—“what are you going to do with me?” But then, he thought, I would have said it anyway; I wanted her to think of me as light, light, light.
“What a question, my love! I’m going to look at you. As long as I can see you every day, I’ll be happy.”
“Just look at me? When could you not do that?”
“Now”—he drew her against his body—“I can look at you … closer.”
But of course it wasn’t as simple as this.
Ryszard thought he was a free spirit, unfettered by jealousy. How could he have known otherwise? Until now, the women he possessed he did not love and the woman he loved he did not possess. Now that he possessed her, or thought he did, he raged against all Maryna’s admirers. And, of course, there were letters from Bogdan, and the occasional telegram, whose arrival Maryna made no attempt to hide, and that meant letters went from Maryna back to Bogdan. But Ryszard had no right to expect an account of this correspondence. At first he’d been grateful that Bogdan went unmentioned. It was as if the man had been magically banished from the universe. Now it felt as if Maryna were simply protecting Bogdan by never talking about him.
