by Hugh Hood
“Then we see you all over the little town, and the surrounding country, on narrow side roads, among trees, in sunlight, at night. He drives and you sit beside him, closer and closer, with your hair blowing in your eyes, breeze from the open windows. Here we find most of the camera tricks, some amusing dissolves, perhaps some impressions of speed, shot from the hood of the car, the road speeding underneath you, half-perceived images of the other traffic. A comic attempt to park in a too small space. Your friends are worried about you, but you are ecstatic, you are in love. He is subtly evasive about himself, but always terribly strong, charming, pleasing. He takes you everywhere that he can afford, completely away from the quiet of the bookstore and the university. He’s very generous, and we see that he loves you.
“One weekend he takes you for a long excursion in the country. I haven’t chosen the exact location, but there should be a lake or a river, some woods, and nearby a restaurant or café, perhaps in a village, where he takes you for lunch. While you are eating, he tells you quite quietly that he loves you; then after a few moments of silence while you smile at him happily he begins to act very exuberantly. He does little tricks with his napkin, making a rabbit’s ears out of it. He blows enormous smoke rings. After each trick he gives a whoop of laughter, and you smile. He is in a state of intense elation. We begin, faintly but unmistakably, to realize that all is not quite right with him.
“After lunch he quiets down and you walk through the woods and along the river, then into woods again. There’s tremendous tension between you, each waiting for the other to make a sudden gesture. All at once you shiver as if with cold, and he wraps you in his fine driving coat. You walk before him to a grassy slope in the woods and throw yourself down, and he falls on top of you in agony. We cut to a peasant walking along a road through the woods, a man who looks like Bourvil, that type. He sees the big Chevrolet parked at the roadside and stops to walk around it admiringly. He looks around him and puts his hand in the window to touch the horn ring. The horn sounds and he jumps guiltily. He’ll remember the car.
“Quick cut to a very tight close-up of your face and neck; silence; he strangles you. The only sound on the track is a very faint choking noise from your throat. Cut to your roommate’s face as she sits in a café with the mousy little man who likes you. A jukebox begins to play and they get up and dance. Her face is dreamy and absorbed as she dances slowly. Cut to the glass in the front of the jukebox; the music gets a bit louder and we watch the record spinning round and round, and that’s the end.”
6
At midnight they stood close together just outside the front door, on the steps leading up to the sidewalk. “Le métier, c’est tout,” said Jean-Pierre thoughtfully. “Renoir used to say that, when I worked with him. ‘Restez toujours fidèle au cinéma.’”
Rose lifted her head from his shoulder. “What does that mean? It’s your favourite word.”
“Métier?”
“Yes.”
“Professionalism. No. Devotion to craft. No. Seriousness, calling, vocation, technique, all these things. Expertise is a part of it, but not the whole, which is where Americans can go wrong, thinking that technique and expertise can storm the gates of heaven. You have to have devotion too, love, consuming ambition to use the medium properly.” He laughed ruefully, knowing that he couldn’t really translate the idea. “Métier, c’est tout.”
“Do I have it?”
“You? You’re an amateur.”
“After thirty-five pictures?”
“Oh my darling, I know that you can walk and stand and wear clothes and speak, and that you are a star. The rest I can supply. Cary Grant has it, I suppose, and Bette Davis, and plenty of directors, Hawks, Wilder, Aldrich, Lester. Film, pure and simple.”
“I see what you mean.”
“So what about it, will you come to Paris with me? You have something that has been in none of your pictures, and with this script I can deliver it.”
This was very shrewd, Rose thought. “I know a little French,” she said, “and I could read dialogue off a board.” Jean-Pierre stroked her cheek with loving attention. “It’s a very strong story and a wonderful title. You don’t think I’m too old?”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “I’m going to pay you a great compliment. Did you see La Dolce Vita?”
“Uh-huh.’’
“Do you remember the girl in the sports car? She played his wife in Otto e Mezzo. And last year she was in Un homme et une femme.’’
“I remember her vividly.”
“Isn’t she beautiful? Anouk Aimée, an absolutely marvellous woman, with that quality of goodness. That reminds me of you, and if I can get it across you’ll be marvellous too. You are marvellous anyway, but it’ll be on the screen and the public will see. You don’t have to have breasts like melons to be a woman.’’
“I hope not,” she said. They joined hands and climbed up to the sidewalk It was still very warm, but clear and not humid, starry, intensely dark. A policeman idled at the end of the block. He stared curiously as Rose and Jean-Pierre embraced. They might already have been in Paris, they drew so close, held on so tight, and were so obviously, profoundly, lovers. They moved in towards one another, pressing hard and clinging dizzily, bathed in the warm night air, kissing as though their lives depended on it.
“Aahhhh,” Rose gasped, “aahhhh, my life isn’t over.”
“Just getting started.”
They noticed the shocked policeman, laughed and defiantly kissed again, longer than before, enchantingly. He drew back only to gaze at her enraptured. “You’ll come?”
“Oh my dear love,” she sighed, “I will follow you anywhere.”
7
You can’t set up long-term European residence overnight; it takes weeks and even months to do the thing right. You have to close your house, store the furniture or sell it, get a passport, your shots, any necessary visas. Your car goes up on blocks in a garage, or is sold. You need letters of credit or transfers to foreign banks of American funds at (unhappily) official rates of exchange. There’s much to be done.
For Rose and Jean-Pierre there was the further complication of their marriage ceremony, where it should be performed. “I’m sure you’re perfectly free,” he’d said. “I don’t believe you’ve ever been married in any real sense.”
She had invited an even closer embrace. “I haven’t thought about it. I just want to be married to you.”
They decided to aim at getting over to Paris around the beginning of October. Jean-Pierre was used to doing business by cable, so he stayed in New York to help Rose arrange her affairs, working on the script of Les honnêtes gens and helping his girl compose confused lists, conventionally headed “Things to do.”
He bought a portable typewriter and a supply of stationery and came every morning to East Sixty-first Street, happy to get out of his apartment. He spent part of the day roughing out the proportions of the movie, and the rest of it giving Rose advice, sometimes of dubious practicality, and kissing her assiduously and lovingly.
“Again,” she sighed, much stirred. “Why don’t we get married here, right now?”
“No, we’ll be married in the parish church of Saint-Merri, with organ music, banns, everything. We’ll take our time and do it right.”
“At least set a date.”
“You’re reversing our roles. It’s the bride’s affair to set the date, once she knows the ground rules. As soon as possible.”
“How long will the arrangements take?”
“Not very long. Perhaps till around Christmas.”
“It’s only August,” said Rose unhappily. She saw immense delight, final contentment, looming up before her, and wanted to make certain that it was not a mirage. “My lawyers are checking the marriage records in Palm Springs. They’ll have full information in a few days.”
“There’ll be no trouble about that;
it was a straight civil ceremony. Did you write for your baptismal certificate?”
All this made her feel forgetful and cared for. She was entranced by the formalities, foreseeing that once married in this way there’d be no getting out. She knew that she would never want to get out, and like a sweet good girl she went dutifully through the preparations, for travel, for marriage, getting birth and baptismal certificates and photocopies of the records of her first marriage, a passport, her shots. How wise it is, she thought, to surround the really important choices with ritual and formality, to assure us of their meaning and value. It gave her great pleasure to leap each small hurdle.
When she’d married Seth it had been a casually convenient arrangement, settled quickly and without reflection. She’d been sleeping with him for several months, and he had apparently gotten to like her particular ass, so to speak. Lovemaking had been inconvenient in many ways: they had to drive for miles looking for motels; they couldn’t use the same motel too often for fear of being identified. After one of these sessions Seth had, one early afternoon, raised himself on an elbow beside her and said, “Rose, for Christ’s sake, we’d be better off married.” And she’d agreed.
Neither had thought through what they were doing. They certainly had some kind of strong mutual attraction, and later on a solid emotional tie; but it didn’t seem to her, thinking it over after it was finished, that the insides of the relationship had been there, the essence, the whatever it was that filled an affair out. Something had been missing that left them connected mainly by good-natured irony and a strange passivity on both sides. “We’d be better off married, Rose.” But they hadn’t made it.
This time around, with her marriage postponed for three months or more, and her flight to Europe to arrange, she wanted very much to sleep with Jean-Pierre, and at the same time felt a counterbalancing strong wish to put off the consummation until all the formalities had been gone through, at which delightful time their love-making would be sweeter because waited for. Her contemplations, imaginings, wantings, hesitations, the waiting, the strongly reviving sexuality of her nature, all conferred enormous benefits. After the first marriage there is no other.
She began to enjoy dropping into an office-supplies store and Xeroxing everything imaginable, in a dozen copies or more.
She said to Jean-Pierre, “I have photocopies of my vaccination and of the monogram on my underwear.”
“You’re a wonder.” He went on with his script.
“Ça va?”
He looked up with a grin. “Ça va, m’amie.”
“When do I get to see it?”
“When it’s finished, naturally, not before.”
She wasn’t used to that answer from a writer. Usually writers rushed pages to her hot from the platen, so as to get a commitment on which they could then raise money at a bank. The thought of banks and bankers made her laugh.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said smiling, “a little surprise.”
“For me?”
“Partly, partly.”
“I suppose I’ll have to wait.”
“I’ll see you for a cocktail,” she said, and went out, over to Fifth and up, to the French Consulate for the next in a series of appointments.
She was royally received at the Consulate; they knew her well by now and were used to her sometimes confused requests. It’s surprisingly complicated to transfer even quite modest capital holdings to a new country. People kept saying, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Apart from banking technicalities and the problem of finding a place to live in Paris, these later visits were pleasant formalities. On this next-to-last trip the staff bowed her into the Vice-Consul’s office immediately, where a big-boned marvellously dressed blond young man with an eight-centuries-old name rose to greet her: De Rohan? La Tremoïlle? Guermantes? The exalted descent stuck in her imagination, but not his precise rank and name, except that it was ancient and revered. He bowed, saw her comfortably seated, and started to chatter wildly about the French film industry, of which he was an enthusiast and connoisseur. He’d helped to finance films and admired Jean-Pierre’s work. He’d been overjoyed to find that Rose would now be a luminary of the European screen rather than of the American.
“ . . . a work permit? Purely a technicality. Your financial responsibility is clear, and your work will not take opportunities away from French actresses. I imagine you’ll play American girls.”
“At first. But I hope to learn French as well as Eddie Constantine or Jean Seberg.”
The Vice-Consul was pleased. “You’re thinking of adopting French citizenship?”
“I will adopt my husband’s citizenship, naturally.”
“You would have to choose one or the other after the lapse of a certain time, in order to enjoy full civil rights.”
“I know that. I think I should accept the civil responsibilities of the country where I live.”
“You have great faith in Monsieur Fauré.”
“I love him. I trust him.” The Vice-Consul felt ashamed. “Will it be necessary for me to see the Consul?” Rose asked, winding up the interview.
“Not necessary, but it will be his pleasure. He has asked me to arrange an appointment at your convenience, after Labour Day if that’s agreeable. He will be in Washington all next week, and will be back after the holiday.”
“That would please me very much.”
“Then I’ll telephone your home for a definite appointment at the end of next week. Your papers will be ready for your meeting with the chief. I know that he’ll want to hand them to you personally.”
He escorted her out of the building and she had the impression that he’d have bowed her all the way out of town if politeness had suggested it. She thought the young man would go far, and wondered why he wasn’t in Washington himself. They stood in the doorway of the consulate long enough for a female columnist to spot them as she cruised on her daily patrol of Fifth Avenue. Next morning there was an item in her column:
Glimpsed Rose Leclair on the doorstep of a friendly (?) European consulate this P.M. Does the petite sweet plan a flight to the City of Light with the new love, or a brute pursuit of the old? Where there’s Seth, Rosie, there’s Charity.
How many children you had, their legitimacy, your diet when well, and the frequency of your bowel movements when in extremis, anything was appropriate for the publicity mill. The lady columnist had thought that Rose would be glad of the exposure.
Bud and Danny saw the item and quickly looked over their contract with Rose. As they saw it, she couldn’t leave the country without first discharging her commitments to them. They had an option on her services for a second picture, and she owed them a publicity tour which she’d run out on when she tried to kill herself. The attempt had earned her some public sympathy and they hadn’t wanted to press for immediate fulfillment of the commitment; but now that she was getting around again they thought they should take some action. Maybe she could be forced to do some promotional work or coerced into paying a sum of money to get out of the option. They phoned the house, and Rose—all compliant innocence—agreed to come into the office and talk things over. They made an appointment for the Wednesday after Labour Day, the sixth of the month. They preened themselves on their enforcement of the strict terms of the contract. After all, they had their rights.
“I knew you’d see it our way,” said Danny agreeably, talking to her on the phone. He’d suspected she might try to make trouble. His idea of human life was that of perpetual war, where you screw others before they screw you. He often asked himself why he trusted Horler, and found no answer. There were no grounds for such trust, except that the need to confide in at least one person was inescapable. It seemed to Danny that if he couldn’t trust Bud, he couldn’t trust anybody, even himself, and he would therefore be utterly alone in the world. That way, he sometimes guessed,
lay total paralysis of the will, if not lunacy. He trusted Bud as a kind of necessary moral postulate, much as the Kantian postulates God, freedom, and immortality as the grounds of human action—indemonstrable but necessary hypotheses of the moral life.
“Come along any time, sweetie, what’s a good time for you?” He was casually, insultingly, nice to her, knowing that he had the ascendancy in the relationship. “We’ll work out something together. Huh? What?” He turned from the phone and muffled the transmitter against his pants. “Bud,” he said, puzzled, “she wants to bring Peggi, and that French fellow.”
Horler crossed the room and stuck his head out the door. The switchboard girl was busy doing her nails, and her intercom key was down. He wrote a note on a piece of paper and shoved it across to his partner.
“Hold on, love,” said Danny. He read the note, then crumpled it and put it in his pocket, nodding at Bud. The note read, “Be careful what you say; just make the appointment.” He spoke into the phone. “All three of you? Do you want to have lunch or not? Why not?” He seemed annoyed. “In the office then, right, we’ll be waiting, darling. Goodbye.”
He looked somberly at Horler. “That was a strange chat,” he said, obscurely worried.
“We’d have paid for lunch.”
