Then he looked me directly in the eyes for the first time, and in a low voice, he said simply, “Sergius, why are you so hard on me? I’ve always been as honest with you as I could.”
I nodded. There was a moment when my voice thickened just a little, and I had to hurry over my words. I could not help it, I still cared about Eitel, and so I lied just a little and said, “I’m sorry, maybe you were a little too honest for me today.” His eyes brightened for an instant, and then despite myself, not knowing if I were cruel or if it was more important to be honest, I had to try to hurt him again. “I suppose,” I said, “that it wasn’t fair to build you up into more than you are.”
He was ready for that, however. “Yes,” he said, “you’re old enough now to do without heroes,” and he touched me on the shoulder and turned back to his house.
I did not receive the letter until the end of the week. In the meantime I had the opportunity to hear enough about Eitel; each night in my furnished room I would read some item about his fortunes. For the week after he testified the gossip columnists wrote about him as if he were the hero of a sermon, and when that had worn itself down I saw only a few more items. There was an announcement by Supreme Pictures that they had bought an original screenplay entitled Saints and Lovers, written by Charles Francis Eitel and Carlyle Munshin, to be directed by Eitel and produced by Munshin. If anyone had curiosity to wonder how Munshin could have collaborated with Eitel, it was explained in most of the gossip columns that Munshin and Teppis had convinced Eitel of his duty to testify before the Committee. It was the sort of story which could not be probed too carefully, but for that matter it never was, and Eitel slipped out of the news for a while. He was busy casting his picture I would see by a line in the papers every now and again.
Long before this he sent me Elena’s letter, and I read it through, stumbling through page after page of her handwriting. She wrote with blots and smudges, crossing out words, writing uphill and downhill, adding notes and parentheses and arrows in the margin, and her letter seemed a distance from the conversation I had with Eitel in his living room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DEAR CHARLEY,
I can just see you smile when you read this. What a stupid girl she is you’re going to think, but there’s nothing new in that because we both know I’m stupid and I’m crude, and besides I remember what you once said to me, “Elena, don’t use all that psychoanalitical talk, and think that that’s going to make you cultured.” Well, don’t forget that I’m cultured in a very funny way because there’s no such thing as a Catholic who doesn’t have some culture. Only in another way you were right, and that’s what I was hoping people would think until you punctured that idea. But you couldn’t begin to imagine how scared I still am to write a letter to you, you’re such a critic, but in high school I got my best marks in English, it’s true whether you care to believe it or not, I even got A’s, I didn’t tell you, but then you wouldn’t have believed it no matter what I said. I hate to write this way Charley because I know I sound like a fishwife as you took the trouble to tell me one time, but the important thing for me is that I’m able to write you a letter.
But I’m not saying what I want to say at all. I started to write this to thank you because in your own way you were very good to me, and you’re a much kinder man than you think about yourself, and I could cry for you Charley when I think about you, except I can’t yet, why should I lie? I still feel bitter to you, but what I hope is that five years from now or I don’t know when, some years in the future, I’ll really be able to think about you and be grateful because even though you were a snob and what a snob you are Charley, you hated being that way just as I hate being the way I am, and I mean it.
You see I started this letter for one reason only. I wanted to tell you not to feel guilty because it’s ridiculous. You don’t owe me anything and I owe you a lot. Something very disturbing has happened since I’ve been with Marion Faye, as a matter of fact it happened before that, the night we were with your friend D. B. and his wife Z., and we ended up getting exactly what we deserved, and I hate the memory of that night—except I don’t know because probably we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere anyway. But if I’m really going to tell you the truth, it happened much much earlier than that, even before I met you, the night before as a matter of fact, and you know what the truth is? I don’t think I ever loved anybody in my whole life. Not even myself. I don’t know what love is. I thought I did with you, but I don’t. Because you see I know I don’t love Marion, and yet, I’m not saying this to hurt you Charley, but sexually, and Marion’s very weird, I don’t want to give the particulars but there’s one way he’s like you, he thinks if he’s doing something dirty, that’s going to change the world or blow up the world or something of the sort. Anyway there is something about him so that in certain ways it’s just as good as it was with you. I know what you’re going to think. You’re going to say of course it’s always been like that with her but it isn’t true, and the first time I fooled with Marion, that time when you and I were getting started, I didn’t want it to be good with him that night and it wasn’t because I wanted to believe I was in love with you. I even lied to you afterward and said I knew Marion when I was a kid but it’s not true. I met him in a bar right here in town, and I let him pick me up one afternoon and I knew he was a pimp, I knew his reputation, and even if I didn’t, he made no bones about it. Now, I know that I can’t fool myself any longer, and I’m no good, I’m no good Charley, I’m a prostitute like everybody else which I never thought about myself. My mother always used to say I was no good, and all of a sudden yesterday I thought to myself what if she’s right, and that’s frightening, Charley. I don’t know how to say it but what if all the stupid jealous people are right?
Anyway here is something I never told you about at all. And that is that the day I left you, I had a funny little moment when I wanted to laugh because you know what popped into my head?—“Well, girls, here we go again.” That’s what I thought, and the reason is that I said the same thing to Collie, that for once I was giving a man the gate. And yet, do you know what’s funny, there were three or four men who asked me to marry them, two of them on the first night, and yet I always turned them down cause I thought they weren’t good enough for me. One of them was even a gangster, did you know that? My doctor used to tell me that I had the idea I was a queen and an empress and a man-eating tiger and of course he was right. I’m very conceited at bottom. I want to give you the best example of how stupid I am. When Collie went out the door and he and I were through, do you know what I did? I tried to commit suicide. I was always too ashamed to tell you but it’s the truth and the funny thing is I told Marion about it the first afternoon I knew him about how after Collie left I just sat in the hotel room Collie had rented for me, a horrible hotel room cause Collie was always so cautious, and the terrible thing about it was that I thought I loved him for so many years and then toward the end I thought I hated him but the fact of the matter was I wasn’t feeling anything. And then I started to drink by myself which I almost never do and I just felt alone and just a little bit scared, but the trouble was I started to get dizzy and I got so terribly dizzy that the room wouldn’t stand still and the weird thing about it was that this seemed worse to me than anything else, I had the feeling I was going to die if the room didn’t stop moving, and so I don’t know how I got to that point but I had the feeling I had to kill myself or otherwise I was going to die—isn’t that fantastic? Anyway I had a package of sleeping tablets in my room and I took all of them, there must have been five or six, and after I took them I was worried I was going to throw them up but it didn’t happen that way, I just got dizzier, and then there was a thought kept coming into my mind. I kept thinking of what Collie would always say to me in the old days when we were having a fight. He’d always say, “Don’t talk about it now, honey. We’ll work something out, but right now I’m clearing up a problem in my analysis.” He always used to say that and so while I was sitting in that
hotel room drunker than a dog I just kept saying to myself as if I were the voice of Collie Munshin or something, “Don’t worry, Elena, we’ll work something out,” and I kept answering him, “Collie, we sure will cause I’ll haunt you.” And then I kept saying to myself that I couldn’t die because if I did I would haunt Collie and this began to bother me so much that I had the feeling I had to call him up and tell him not to worry, that I wouldn’t do anything to bother him, and I was going to make it a nice quiet sophisticated little call but the moment I heard his voice on the phone I was terrified, I thought I was talking to my doctor or to St. Peter, I don’t know what I thought, but I started screaming at him that I was going to die and I’d taken poison, and I remember Charley that I couldn’t stop crying after I hung up the phone and I was feeling so sick and dopey and the room still wouldn’t stop moving until I was ready to get down on my hands and knees and pray for it to stay still. And when Collie came over he was very business-like at first and slapped me a couple of times because I guess I was in hysterics and then he asked about the poison and I pointed to the tube and I remember him saying, “Thank God, you idiot,” and then he began to laugh, and I felt worse than I ever did before or since because I knew I couldn’t do anything right, I couldn’t even kill myself, and I found out later that all I’d taken were sedatives and not even sleeping pills, and he made me throw them up and had the hotel send up coffee and he kept pouring it down me so that it wasn’t even necessary to bring a doctor into it. Why do I tell you this? I don’t even know, except that a couple of hours later by nighttime when I wasn’t sick any more, just very nervous, and I didn’t care that I was losing Collie, I just felt that I hated him and he even seemed a stranger to me, I began to get excited at the way he had made me throw up and the way he had seen me throwing up, and I don’t have to tell you how weird that is for me because you know how I didn’t like for you to see me even without makeup and I’ve always wanted some kind of personal privacy, so much so that even now I feel ashamed writing about this thing of getting excited because Collie had seen me throw up but somehow that seemed very very exciting, and I went to bed with Collie. This is what I wanted to tell you. It was never very exciting with Collie before, but I have an awful confession to make, and this may hurt you, but do you know that Collie was pretty good, very advanced like you only he was fat sort of, he’s crude but he’s not so crude, and I always used to act that it was great with him, and in a way it was because it was my fault not his, you see I never trusted him, and when a girl doesn’t trust a man deep inside her then I guess she’s cold although it’s a complicated subject and who am I to talk about it because I couldn’t have trusted you the first night I met you, I think maybe I even disliked you a little bit, because I remember I was jealous that Sergius liked Lulu, and you seemed so superior and condescending to me, and yet I wasn’t acting with you, you’re the first man in my life in a way except even that’s a lie because on the night before with Collie I’m telling you about, that is the night before I met you and we went to the party and all, I really let go with Collie, I thought I was in ether or something, and suddenly with Collie I had the feeling that I was free. I don’t know how to put it but it just seemed as if you could find something like that no matter where you went, and the funny thing was that Collie and I had a long talk afterward and we decided that he would see me just for a night every now and again, and he would pay me, pay me just like a call-girl. I think we arranged it should be fifty dollars, and when he left I guess he wanted to make it clear to me that we weren’t living together any more, not in any way except for a quick hour once in awhile, and so he told me that for the following day he was sending you over and what you have to realize Charley is that first day we were together, all that evening at the party and then later in your house, I kept thinking that you were going to be a customer I suppose the word would be and I was fantastically excited. I don’t mean to say that I was acting because I wasn’t, I was fantastically aroused but you see I didn’t know then and I don’t know now if it was because of you as a person or because of the situation, and the next day when I began to realize that of course you hadn’t thought of me as a call-girl, and Collie had never said a word that way, I was very depressed and very happy and I didn’t know what I felt. You were so good to me and so decent that I began to get very confused, and that’s when I made my mistake cause I should have had the sense to clear out then, but all I could think of was that little hotel room I had, and I was afraid I would go nuts in there, and I didn’t want to go back to the city because who could I go to see? And so of course I just drifted into things with you and before I knew it there I was in a love affair again, and I didn’t believe it, I didn’t want to believe it, because you see it made me confused again, and that last time I made love to Collie I realized that in a way you could eat up the whole world if you wanted to, if only you didn’t fall for all the talk that the middle-class squares give you, and you were making me fall for them. I hate the kind of thing that happens to women where they go out with a man maybe two or three times and immediately they’re forced to start thinking about marriage. That’s how my mother got married and a lot of my sisters and what a drudgery sort of life they have, everybody’s so afraid to live. I am, too, and it’s silly. Once I remember I had a girl friend and she had a steady boy friend and I used to fall into a thing with the two of them on a Saturday night when Collie was off at one of his big movie parties, and I know you won’t believe it, I don’t want to remind you of Don Beda, but it was very different with those friends because I would feel all right the next day and the three of us liked each other like good friends and I almost never felt low-down about it. I mean as an example it used to be almost as much fun eating breakfast on Sunday as it was the night before, but that’s because we kept it uncomplicated and the girl liked me very much and nobody was asking anybody else to solve their whole life for them. But that’s what you were asking me and what I was asking you and I resented it just as much as you did. That was why I slept with Marion Faye the first week I knew you, but I was a coward, I had to keep telling myself that you were wonderful and that I was in love, that life was marvelous and love was marvelous and Charley I’ve been such a phony cause I’ve been scared and hanging on to you, and the time Collie came to visit us I didn’t want to look at him, he seemed repulsive to me, and the reason he seemed so fat and repulsive was because I kept thinking that I had enjoyed myself with him too, at least one night anyway, and I wanted to believe that I was in love with only you.
I’m so neurotic and maybe I ought to write letters more because I never could talk to you and now I can, I suppose probably because we’re through, but there’re certain things you really ought to know cause you never could see them through my eyes like the sort of thing that happens with taxicab drivers. I don’t know why they always feel it about me but they know they don’t have to talk to me politely, and even the day I left your place and put in my suitcases and gave him Marion’s address, we hadn’t been driving two minutes and I was trying to think how I felt when the taxicab driver said to me, “Know this Faye character long, baby?” and he said it with a leer, just the same kind of tough guy leer my father always would have when he talked to a woman, and I got so angry I started screaming at him to keep his dirty mouth shut, right in the middle of the drive. And when I got to Marion’s and got inside the door I was ready for anything, I was hoping he would send me out as a call-girl right away. Did you ever have to put up with those kind of humiliations?
Anyway, Marion didn’t send me out. He just got me drunker and drunker, not that I needed much help, I don’t know if you know it or not, but I was drunk when I walked out the door on you, early that morning I’d called up Marion and told him I was coming over, and then I got so scared I filled a highball glass with whisky, and every time I went into the kitchen I would take a sip on it, and so I was looped when I got to his house, and he gave me more and then I don’t even remember the rest, all I can remember is that I kept th
inking, “How Collie is going to suffer, good for him! !” And that makes me wonder Charley if maybe in a certain kind of way maybe I loved Collie more than you since I remember thinking about him and haven’t thought about you much, not until I started writing this letter. And maybe in a certain way I love Marion more than either of you, I don’t know, I don’t even care, but for example sometimes with him it’s very erratic but when it’s good it seems to me that it’s just as good as it ever was with you, I don’t know maybe I’m shallow, maybe I’m nothing, so-what? I guess you were right when you used to tell me all I could think about was myself. But this I do know, at least there’s something doing with Marion, he’s not a coward and a snob like you, I don’t even know what he sees in me, but then that’s nothing new because I never could understand what anybody saw in me, but do you want to know the kind of stupid argument I have with Marion. I keep asking him to make me a call-girl and he says no, he says he wants to marry me and then I can become a call-girl. I suppose he wants to be a champion pimp. Like Don Beda or somebody. It’s impossible to marry him, he makes it a joke, and I don’t want to get married, I’m sick of the whole idea, and Marion does the sort of thing where he begs me to marry him, it’s the truth Charley, and when I ask him why, he says he likes the idea of me joining his mother’s coffee clotch (how do you spell that?) or some remark like that, and he insists we stay drunk all the time or on tea although frankly I don’t mind that part of it. Although sometimes on tea I get so scared I’m ready to climb a wall or maybe die of a heart attack. And Marion curses you. I think somewhere along the line you must have hurt him somehow. It’s all cockeyed. I don’t know where we’re going and it’s weird, I don’t want to hurt you if I say that he insisted on seeing Zenlia and Don Beda but you must have heard about that anyway, and I could tell you other things he does but it isn’t important, what I think is so rotten is that I’m writing about him as if he’s a stranger, and I’ve done something worse, I’ve talked to him about you the way I used to talk to you about Collie, very critically that is, and I feel ashamed every time, and the truth of the matter is that I’m a bitch and I never have grown up and you were right to call me a bitch, and I want you to believe that because Charley you’re such an unhappy and miserable man and it isn’t fair, I don’t know why I say it isn’t fair but I just wish you had some sort of break, some sort of luck, although what would be lucky for you would take a genius to say, but I suppose I have to confess that I’m as sick as you are to discover that I didn’t love you the way I wanted to, and I apologize for the things I’ve said against you. How could I have done that? Charley, you deserve something good. It isn’t fair.
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