The Camera Always Lies

by Hugh Hood

  Seth took a step backwards.

  Charity said, “I didn’t want to be just another Hollywood tramp with five husbands. I wanted to get married.”

  “We are married.”

  “Oh, I could kill you if you don’t stop saying that. You know what I mean. You don’t even like me very much.”

  This was so accurate that he could think of no reply.

  She went on bitterly, “I could have got out of being a sexpot. I don’t want that; it just makes you silly. I want to be a real person, like some of these French stars we’ve met around. I don’t want to be a joke. If there’s anything in the world I don’t want to be, it’s a dirty joke with my big ass and my big front, and every little masturbator in the U.S.A. thinking of me instead of his wife.”

  “Where do you get these ideas?”

  “God damn you, Seth! Can’t you get it through your head that I’m not a dumb bunny even though I look like one? I’m no brood mare, not an animal. I know how all you people look at me and what you’re thinking. You’ve never looked at me as anything but furniture for your bedroom.”

  Unfortunately this was nearly true too. In the beginning, Seth thought, I may have harboured some vaguely protective feelings towards her, and I may have been pretty bored with Rose. Like a traveler in the Alps who ascends a range of mountains which he takes to be the highest, Seth now began to discern new ranges, new heights.

  He saw that there might be a kind of life, a system of personal morality, in which you did not discard your wife as soon as you had grown bored with her, but instead studied with her the ways in which to dissipate the boredom, which was after all a product of your mutual relations. Perhaps if one was really married, the union was indissoluble.

  I thought Rose was mine forever, but apparently she belongs to this Fauré. This was the first time these questions had occurred to him. He saw Charity move before him in the beautiful room and was aware of matters that were wholly unfamiliar. He saw the girl clearly: young, in magnificent health, bewildered though not malicious, with nothing in her mind, not vicious but unformed. And he began to see himself: a fool, a deluded man. I ran away from what I had, he thought, and now I have nothing. This child doesn’t know me, or care about me. What can I do?

  It’s wonderful to be getting married for the first time.

  “Look,” he said, advancing on the frightened girl, “don’t shrink from me, I’m trying to help us. Look, we made a mistake, that’s true. But we can fix it. We don’t have to give up on ourselves, just because we pretended we were in love. I see what we wanted. I was looking for fresh sex and I guess you were after some free advertising.”

  Charity looked at him with round eyes and nodded mutely.

  “Either we get a quick divorce and start all over again, or we can try to save what we’ve put into this.” He felt exhausted and didn’t know what to do. “I don’t know that I’ve ever loved anybody,” he said, “I don’t know what it feels like. Isn’t that awful?”

  Charity began to cry. “Me too,” she said.

  “Well Christ, we’re not helpless. You’re beautiful, and I’m rich and famous. Surely we can make something out of that.”

  “I’m famous too,” said Charity, crying, “and I want to make a picture. I haven’t worked all year, and Rose is going to make lots of them here.”

  “Don’t cry, Charity. I own scripts. I have Walden out at work, lining things up. You’ll be working in six weeks.”

  “Really, Seth?”

  “That’s a promise. And between the two of us, we’ll kill them.” He put his arms around her and kissed her with passion. He thought possibly I can get to love her, and vice versa. He felt that something had been rounded off.

  11

  Going out to Kennedy in the early morning for a departure, you catch the sun coming up out of the Atlantic, tipping Long Island with an extraordinary orange brilliance, and it was into this bursting light that Peggi drove, the trunk of her car loaded with hand baggage, and the back seat with the absorbed lovers, ready to go. It was the last day of September, a Saturday, and Jean-Pierre had promised to take Rose to Mass with him at Saint-Merri the following morning. They were going to start the picture in ten days, the sooner the better, because they meant to have it in release by next spring.

  Taking the eastbound jet at this hour would get them into Orly in plenty of time to dine with a fine leisurely hunger; they had a dinner reservation au grand Véfour, made for them by the Paris office of Films Vinteuil (an assistant director and a secretary), and they talked away behind her like kids going to a birthday party—of dinner, wines, the future, finance, their film, which grew into shape as they talked it over.

  It seemed to Peggi that Jean-Pierre made his films the way a kid makes a snowman, starting with a small hard centre, patting and adding here and there, sculpting, shaping, accepting any solid new substance brought to the work by others, working freely and flexibly without a vast overload of economic structure weighing him down.

  At the end of this intensely free process there appeared a brilliant, almost improvised imitation of an action. Hearing them talk about their picture, and remembering that part of it, the title, would be her contribution, Peggi grew silent and glum. She would have liked to work as freely as that, but nobody did so here. She felt like asking, “Aren’t there parts for me in Europe?” But the situation didn’t allow it; for that kind of part they would naturally use European character people. She thought if I were only a star.

  She was sure that they’d never come back.

  Following an airlines bus which had slashed around her and in towards the turnoff, she began to circle nearer and nearer the main building, coming across the flat between the parkway and the airstrips. The sun mounted. The clouds that had formed just before dawn grew wispy and were shredded as the air moved and warmed for the day. Later it would be very fair. The clouds were streaked pink and orange, and between the streaks was a variety of soft rich grays. Pink, brownish-gray, pink-to-orange, fleecy gray, then behind sheer deep blue. Morning.

  All at once the car shot up a ramp, which turned and allowed them a grand perspective of distant Manhattan, shrouded in mists that rose and drew off as they watched. In spite of herself, Peggi’s heart lifted. She’d seen this sight a hundred times, arriving by jet from the Coast, and it never failed to move her, the fragile shapes so distant, yet so sharp and clear.

  The parking attendant slid into the driver’s seat, as the three of them superintended the movements of the baggage. They had to pay for a lot of weight over the allowance, and then they moved on to the Air France board to check the departure time. All was ready; they could line up, check in, and go aboard.

  “I told you I’d get you here at the right time,” said Peggi.

  “You’re a sweetie,” said Rose. “Listen, what are you doing in the next while, that you haven’t told us?”

  “I’m guesting on Crossword next week. I may do some television this season.”

  “If you ever come to Paris . . .”

  “Of course you’ve got to come, the sooner the better,” said Jean-Pierre, giving her a hug.

  The flight was called, interrupting their embrace. She followed them to the boarding gate, then crossed to a window and watched them go aboard in the middle of a crowd. At the stairs, predictably, two photographers and a stewardess picked them out of the throng and drew them to one side. When the plane had filled, as the jets began to whistle, Rose and Jean-Pierre posed on the stairs, waving, smiling, embracing. Peggi saw it all through the wall of glass like a silent movie. Rose spoke, laughed, called out to one of the photographers, whom she seemed to know. The jet whistle grew, penetrating the thick glass. Peggi could hear nothing else; it made her dizzy.

  The stewardess went inside, the stairway was withdrawn, the door drawn up and locked electrically, and the plane turned away.

  She noticed that she was
holding the claim cheque for her car crushed into a moist ball in her fist. She unfolded it with difficulty and went briskly off and handed it to the attendant. In a surprisingly short time, the car appeared. She tipped the attendant and climbed in, and followed the arrows slowly towards the exit.

  Halfway back to the parkway, she saw the Air France flight go by on the takeoff, so she stopped her car and leaped out, standing by the side of the service road and shading her eyes. Even at this considerable distance she could pick out the sound of that particular plane, a high forceful whoooooo-oosshhhh and whine. The windows looked very small. Nobody would see her from there, but she lifted her hand anyway and waved, turning her head to follow the plane as it lifted off.

  The plane rose into the intense blue, the clouds all gone now. It gained altitude at that peculiar angle the jets always seem to hit, a more acute angle than one expects; it seemed to hang for a moment without forward motion, rising straight up in a very slow climb, hanging . . . hanging. The sound diminished. The plane receded; its image grew smaller, as it turned eastward and headed out over the ocean.

  It was now the middle of the morning. The light had stopped changing so quickly, and the Manhattan buildings seemed fantastically sharp-edged in the clear air. Peggi drove away fast, towards the dangerous city.

  Hugh Hood (1928–2000) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer, essayist and university professor. Hood wrote 32 books: 17 novels, including the 12-volume New Age novel sequence (influenced by Marcel Proust and Anthony Powell), several volumes of short fiction, and 5 of nonfiction. He taught English literature at the Université de Montréal. In the early 1970s he and fellow authors Clark Blaise, Raymond Fraser, John Metcalf and Ray Smith formed the well-known Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group, which popularized the public reading of fiction in Canada. In 1988, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.