by Michel Déon
‘Mad,’ was Getulio’s only reply as he slumped into an armchair.
When their suitcases were packed and handed to the men, the girls walked downstairs like queens, ignoring the summons of the desk clerk, holding out their bill. Getulio paid. As they were about to get in the car, he held Arthur back.
‘Let me have fifty dollars for the gas. I’ll pay you back when we get there. The banks are shut this morning.’
Arthur only had twenty dollars to keep him in chocolate bars and bread till Monday. Elizabeth, understanding rapidly, pretended she had forgotten her handbag, put her arm in his and walked back to the hotel. She took a hundred dollars out of her coat pocket.
‘Give him this. He won’t take it from me if you’re there.’
‘If he pays me back, where shall I send the money?’
‘Don’t worry: he’ll never pay you back.’
Getulio pretended to find it completely natural that his penniless associate should suddenly have a hundred-dollar bill in his pocket.
‘You really don’t want to come?’ Augusta said, stamping her feet on the pavement.
A gust of misery surged up in Arthur’s chest, choking him. He would have given anything to go with them, but he did not have that anything.
Augusta had snowflakes on her eyelashes. As they melted they rolled down her cheeks like tears.
‘You think I’m crying, don’t you?’
‘No, I’d never think that …’
‘Getulio will arrange for you to come down for a weekend.’
‘I’ll start saving.’
Leaning forward to kiss Augusta on the cheek, he held her left hand and pressed her palm with his thumb in the place where her glove left some skin exposed. She responded with a fleeting squeeze back. Elizabeth was more demonstrative, putting her arm around Arthur’s neck and planting a kiss on his lips.
‘You know that we love you, don’t you … Without any good reason. Fortunately! That’s what love is. Completely wild. Irresponsible. You’d better not cheat on us.’
Arthur stood on the pavement until the car was out of sight. A hand waved in the rear windscreen. It was Augusta. Or was he seeing things? The snow was falling more and more thickly.
Thinking about the two girls helped to change his feelings about university life. The memory of his six days on board the Queen Mary, of the girls’ tumultuous appearance at Beresford and their departure blanketed in snow bound his past and present together, and the two sylphs, blonde and brunette, cheerfully accompanied his days. He could have nursed a thousand regrets at not having been able to go to New York with them, but in fact he had never been so cheerful. His fortnight in Boston with the O’Connor family went by in no time. The O’Connors’ touching desire for their fifteen-year-old son to speak French, their curiosity about France, and the aura of respect with which they surrounded Arthur, as if he were a youthful ambassador of a victorious nation rather than one defeated and torn apart by its internal strife: it all conspired to temper his feelings of regret.
When classes restarted in January he immersed himself in work. Getulio was several days late, without explanation, as though worldly powers had unduly detained him in order that he might assist, by his genius, in resolving some problems of intercontinental magnitude. He cultivated such mysteries wilfully, impressing his American fellow students but leaving Arthur cold.
As luck would have it, soon after the beginning of term the university library asked Arthur to translate a series of recent journal articles. The fee would pay for a weekend in New York. Arthur tackled Getulio, in the hope that he might offer to drive him there. Via a roundabout and confused explanation Getulio revealed that the 1930 Cord was no longer in its garage, but had gone to the breaker’s at Christmas. On the return journey to New York after the ball he had fallen asleep. No one had been hurt, and afterwards the three of them had not been able to stop laughing.
‘Nothing makes you laugh as much as death when you have a lucky escape from it,’ Getulio said. ‘It makes you feel like doing it all over again, like a matador with the muleta. We’ll take the train, along with the storekeepers. It’s amazing what you can hear in a railroad car.’
Getulio’s way of living transformed defeats into victories with a touching virtuosity. When he got off the train at Grand Central Station and discovered Augusta was not there to meet him, he remembered that she loathed organ music; and there was the charming old lady with a double chin, dressed in black and with a straw cloche hat crammed on top of her bun, who had been belting it out for twenty years for the benefit of all departing and arriving passengers.
‘Bach on a harpsichord, on a flute, piano, violin: Augusta loves him. But on the organ he makes her hysterical. Don’t ask me why …’
Arthur was staying at a modest hotel on Lexington Avenue. Having made his disapproval clear, Getulio promised to come by at eight for dinner.
Instead it was Elizabeth who arrived.
‘Apparently Augusta isn’t well. Nothing serious. Don’t make that face! Getulio’s staying with her. You’re lucky: I’m free tonight.’
Something in her had changed. He could not say exactly what, and perhaps it was only because, wrapped in an old belted raincoat and wearing a military beret, she looked less feminine than she had at Christmas. But at the trattoria she led him to, in the middle of Greenwich Village, he realised that she was offering him a privileged glimpse into her other life. New York was not, for her, a playground for the high-society shenanigans of a spoilt heiress, but the arena for her only real passion, the theatre, which freed her from her oppressive background.
In the first stage of her conversion she had moved from her apartment on 72nd and Fifth and into an apartment above the trattoria where they were eating. The trattoria was a meeting place for many of the Village’s artists, which explained how she knew practically everybody at the nearby tables and was kissed a dozen times by new arrivals and as many times by those leaving. For several weeks she had been looking after a handful of unemployed actors and was now looking for a theatre for them that – as she explained at length – would not be a theatre where audience and actors would look at each other mimicking real life, but a space where they would collaborate together in the dramatisation of a play.
Arthur listened carefully to her explanation, which he found not without good sense, despite the revolutionary tinge she gave it.
‘And do you know who I’m going to put on first?’ she said with a triumphant look.
‘No idea.’
‘Henry Miller! Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.’
When he failed to show the requisite enthusiasm Elizabeth went on, with a hint of condescension, ‘Oh, I get it! You don’t know Miller … you should be ashamed, you French were the first to publish him. Like James Joyce. And Anaïs Nin, surely you know who she is?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘His lover during his Paris years. She hasn’t published much, apart from House of Incest. I’m putting on a production that’s a dialogue taken from their books. Do they really not mean anything to you?’
‘Give me time. I’m discovering your country, I’m a diligent student, and actually quite a boring one. I was brought up on different authors from you, apart from Mark Twain who I reread every year. When does it start?’
‘Next month. We rented and converted a loft in the Bowery—’
‘Which is not really famous for its intellectuals.’
‘That’s exactly what we want: to take the theatre to the people.’
A couple stopped on their way out to discuss the sets with Elizabeth. When the woman, who was black, placed her hand on the table, it was extraordinarily fine. The man had his arm around her waist. They did not acknowledge Arthur during the conversation, or as they left.
‘It’s because you’re dressed like a bank clerk: suit, white shirt, blue tie. You don’t know how to dress. I wanted to tell you the moment I saw you. Always too neat, with your starched collar, your too-light socks with your dark suit, your ties that are
so straight! Liberate yourself. Stop looking like an usher! Follow Getulio’s example. No one ever knows what he’s going to wear, yet every time he appears he looks like a king. That said, when you come to my show you have to put on all your most disgusting clothes if you don’t want to be refused admission. Well, I’m exaggerating slightly, but you get the picture.’
Now she was the way she had been on the boat: acid, cynical, funny, always ready with a cutting remark, and with that ever-present complex that she would never rid herself of. Impossible to live with in the long term, maybe, but very attractive for the space of an evening or a few days away. A hunch, however, told him that the moment had not yet come and he should not force the pace.
‘Why did you get your hair cut so short? You look like a lesbian.’
‘I had enough of being, you know, the Vassar girl who swings her thick shining hair for a shampoo advert.’
They were finishing dinner when one of the waiters picked up a guitar and began to sing a canzone napoletana.
‘I suppose they think I’m a tourist,’ Arthur said. ‘Let’s go … Is there a bar near here?’
‘If you can put up with bourbon, my place is better. And you’ll get something by Henry Miller to take away.’
She lived in a pretty duplex under the roof. Her bay window looked out onto a scraggy false acacia that was lit by a floodlight at its base, whose cone of blinding white light pushed the surrounding buildings into the shadows.
‘Whose idea was that?’
‘Mine. Everyone likes it. I switch it off at midnight.’
She poured two bourbons into cups which he suspected her of having chipped deliberately.
‘What do you think of my apartment?’
‘Where do we sit?’
‘On the floor. Progress has abolished couches.’
Poufs and cushions littered the floor, with ashtrays and trays laden with unmatching glasses, an ice bucket, an open turntable, and piles of long-playing records. Three mattresses laid next to each other on the floor and covered in Mexican fabric had to be the bed.
‘Yes, right first time: that’s where I sleep. When Aunt Helen came to visit, she looked everything over and didn’t show any surprise. All she said was, “Well, at least you can’t sink any lower.”’
Leaning back into a pouf, Elizabeth stared into her cup as if she was looking into a crystal ball.
‘I could do without her opinion, but she’s one of my trustees, and apart from my monthly allowance I have no funds to put any shows on without her. Since my parents died, she’s rarely reined me in, and right now I need her to pay for the cast during rehearsals.’
She might just as well have said ‘my cast’. Everything rested on her. From a folder she took out some photos of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and the two actors who would be playing them on stage. Anaïs Nin in person might not have possessed the incendiary beauty of her writing, but the young woman who was to play her was instantly striking, with burning eyes, a small forehead, and a pout of tremendous disgust that dominated the lower half of her face. Arthur saw Miller for the first time in Elizabeth’s portrait by Brassaï: his lopsided face, tremendously sensual mouth, superb forehead. Undeniably handsome in his way, and Arthur took an immediate liking to him, a pariah in American literary circles, which were just as closed as those of high society. Elizabeth lent him her two clandestinely imported Tropics. They finished the bottle of bourbon, then two cans of lukewarm beer.
‘I’d ask you to stay over,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but I’m dog-tired and George may come back, and in any case he’ll be here at the crack of dawn and won’t like finding someone else in the apartment.’
Arthur did not ask who George was, and instinctively decided that he was one of those ephemeral men who passed through Elizabeth’s life the way he himself would, when the time came. There was no urgency. Elizabeth placed her hands on his shoulders.
‘Don’t believe half of what Getulio tells you. There was no accident on the road from Beresford to New York. When he parked outside my place to drop me and my cases off, a Cadillac pulled over and a young guy, cigar in his mouth, striped trousers, frock coat, got out holding a chequebook. Bought Getulio’s Cord … just like that. For his museum. Getulio pocketed the cheque and that night we went on a spree. He paid a year’s rent for Augusta and ordered three suits for himself. Did he pay you back that hundred dollars I gave you?’
‘No. But you warned me. I expect it’ll be the same story with what I gave him to come down this weekend.’
‘Unwise boy!’
‘It doesn’t cost a fortune and I enjoy being his creditor. Is Augusta really ill?’
Elizabeth stroked his cheek with disarming tenderness.
‘It’s going to be so hard,’ she said, shaking her head with compassion. ‘So very hard … But I understand why you feel this way. She’s unique. Really unique, whereas women like me are everywhere. If you lose me here, you’ll find me in Vienna or Paris or London or Rome, and yes, sure, there’ll be some extra detail or a detail missing, a different name, but, generally speaking, the same. So perhaps you can understand why I’m running away from it all by cutting my hair short, living in a loft, putting Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin on stage in an attic in the Bowery where there’s nothing but drunks and bums mouldering under the pillars of the elevated subway.’
She kissed him. He went back to his hotel by taxi. Beyond the Village, the city slept.
He waited all the next morning for Getulio, who did not appear. Stupidly he did not know where to look for him, nor where to telephone Elizabeth so that she could give him Getulio’s number. If he went back to her apartment he risked putting her in an embarrassing position if he stumbled on the ‘George’ of the night before. With more courage in the face of defeat than he thought he possessed, Arthur immersed himself in museums and loitered in Central Park and downtown New York until dusk. There was no message for him when he got back. He returned to the trattoria in the Village for dinner, but Elizabeth did not appear, either alone or accompanied. They sat him at a small table by the door where the waiters ignored him. The couple who had talked to Elizabeth the night before – he mainly remembered the young black woman’s lovely hand – walked past him without recognising him. The following day, arriving ahead of time at Grand Central Station, he hid himself in one of the front carriages as his sole revenge (Getulio having left him his return ticket). A few seconds before the train pulled out, he saw the Brazilian’s scowling face as he ran frantically up the platform from the back of the train, trying to find Arthur. Eventually, as the carriages clattered under the East River, a breathless Getulio, his tie askew and hair all over the place, appeared in the corridor, looking incensed.
‘You might have waited on the platform! I looked for you everywhere.’
‘I thought you’d be staying with Augusta. How is she? I hope you found someone to replace you at her bedside.’
Getulio paused, not knowing whether to react or pretend he had not heard.
‘She’s much better this morning, thank you for your concern. Did you get my message at the hotel?’
‘I didn’t get anything.’
‘Truly? That’s ridiculous. I called several times, left my telephone number, asked them to put me through. You were never there.’
The truth was that he wanted Arthur to feel guilty for not having stayed next to the telephone and having been so careless in matters of friendship. Several times he harked back to the extraordinary set of circumstances that had kept them apart during their short visit, preventing the Frenchman from seeing Augusta. She had been in tears about it, would you believe? Oh, not much, just the odd tear or two that wash away a sorrow. The conductor came by. Getulio delved in one pocket after another with mounting anxiety.
‘My ticket! I lost my ticket!’
Arthur pulled both tickets out of his pocket.
‘Fortunately I think of everything.’
From today, he had decided, he would make Getulio suffer. For a week after
they got back he did his best to avoid him, and he only came into contact with him because they had to sit the same exam. Getulio, having spent several – very profitable – nights playing poker, had no memory whatsoever of the lecture on the Rome–Berlin axis. Arthur, with princely magnanimity, or perhaps delighted to score a point, gave him the key dates and an essay plan. The plan backfired when the results were announced and the professor held up Getulio’s essay at length as a model. Its merit was all the greater, apparently, because he had lived through the war at a very great distance from where it was happening. The essay’s author was a marvellous actor when it came to modesty. Failing to thank Arthur, he ventured some advice on the best way for innocent Americans to deal with modern history. This was a mistake, because he did not foresee that the opportunity would present itself again a week later. Enjoying a remarkable run of good luck, he was going to bed at dawn after a marathon series of poker games, which was as good a way as any of displaying the insouciance of a superior being. For the following exam Arthur ruthlessly gave him a prophetic quote by Keynes that was actually by Bainville, unilaterally restored the Austrian monarchy during the inter-war period, and changed by a year the date of the Wall Street crash. The professor of modern history looked dismayed, attributing Getulio’s errors to tiredness. At the end of the class Getulio rounded on his friend.
‘I suppose you thought that was funny.’
‘My turn to, as you say, jerk you around.’
Neither of them being of a disposition to explain themselves, Arthur suggested a basic remedy.
‘We haven’t done a circuit of the campus for a long time. How about a half-hour jog to get our heads straight?’
They put on tracksuits and set out around the buildings, elbow to elbow. Less fit, his lungs clogged with the accumulated nicotine of his epic card games, Getulio gritted his teeth. On the last circuit, white-faced, he had to sit down. Arthur put on his most pleading tone of voice.
‘Don’t tell me you’re going to die on me, just like that … without giving me Augusta’s address and Elizabeth’s phone number.’
