The Great and the Good

by Michel Déon

  ‘Why did you choose the most expensive hotel in Paris when you didn’t have a cent?’

  ‘My friend, it’s perfectly clear that you have no idea how to live. I’d have been just as unable to pay in a third-class hotel, so it was far better not to stint myself.’

  Six months later Helen Murphy-Mendosa died in London of a heart attack, and Getulio’s affairs took another upward turn.

  ‘In short,’ Zava said as they left the meeting, which had lasted all afternoon, ‘things worked out much more smoothly than we expected them to. So now I’d love to ask you to come and spend the weekend in the country – Arthur would be so pleased to see you – but you don’t much like the countryside, do you?’

  ‘I’ll come and see Arthur next month. I’ll stay a bit longer and you can lend him to me one afternoon and I’ll take him to the zoo. Tomorrow I need to be in Paris.’

  ‘Would you like me to drop you at your hotel? I have a car and a driver. Which is a luxury that’s not really a luxury if you need to get to New Jersey. To be honest, those round-table discussions, thrashing out points of detail, bore me horribly, and when I’m bored I feel a terrible weariness pressing down on me. I get to the point of regretting I’m not deaf any more.’

  ‘If you have time, you can drop me at the Copacabana.’

  ‘A meeting?’

  ‘No, just force of habit.’

  The bar was heaving, as it was every evening at that hour. Arthur had hardly had time to find a space at the counter and order a Pimm’s when Getulio’s head popped up from the centre of a cluster of drinkers gathered round him and Arthur heard him shout over the clamour, ‘I’ll bet you’re here to root for Elizabeth in The Night of the Iguana. She’s divine. Makes everyone else fade away. Tennessee adores her.’

  Was he flexing his knees or sitting on a low chair, suddenly appearing like that, a puppet bobbing up out of a stifling circle of friends then vanishing again? Using his elbows and shoulders to jostle his way through the standing crush sipping its martinis and whiskey sours, Arthur inched towards the back of the room in pursuit of details: where was Elizabeth’s show, and what lay behind Getulio steering him towards her after so many years? Arriving within reach of the group that had hidden him, he found an empty space. Getulio called to him from the door as he shouldered it open.

  ‘A thousand apologies … I’m expected elsewhere. See you here tomorrow, same time. Go see Elizabeth, you won’t regret it!’

  The world on the other side of the swing door carried him away, and as he let it go it swung back and forth several times, leaving staccato images of a man in an elegant Homburg waving an umbrella at a yellow cab, into which he disappeared.

  The double magic of lighting and make-up had miraculously preserved Elizabeth’s sparkle as it had been at twenty, although she was nearing twice that by now, and the generous fervour of her youth had been rekindled in her face from the moment she stepped onto the stage. Arthur only had eyes for her, heard only the timbre of her voice, hardly roughened at all by her life’s excesses. How could he not want to talk to her?

  Draped in a polka-dotted black silk kimono, her head bent towards a mirror surrounded with blinding light bulbs, she was cleaning her face, tanned with make-up. He watched her ball of cotton wool, which she held between her slender fingers with their white nails, wipe first the ridge of her nose, then her forehead and her temples. She had said, ‘Come in!’ without turning round, and now he bent down to the level of her head, his chin brushing her hair, so that his reflection could be seen in her mirror.

  ‘No! Arthur, it’s not you!’

  ‘Yes! It’s me.’

  ‘How many years?’

  ‘The best part of twenty.’

  The cotton wool continued its dance along the arch of her eyebrows, around the corners of her mouth, over the tip of her chin which she thrust forward with a grimace.

  ‘You could have let me know you were coming. Six months ago I was wonderful as Desdemona.’

  ‘You forget.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We had a falling-out.’

  ‘And we haven’t got one today?’

  ‘We’re enjoying a general amnesty. A global one.’

  ‘What if I turned down your amnesty?’

  ‘You won’t turn it down. Your passion’s all spent. You’re playing on Broadway and you’ve given up insulting your audience.’

  ‘Times have changed. You don’t need to keep breaking down walls that have already collapsed. Anyhow I have much too much work. I’m on stage every night, and every morning I’m filming from 6 a.m. to midday.’

  ‘When do you sleep?’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘I didn’t ask who you slept with, I asked when.’

  She laughed openly.

  ‘I know you did, you big idiot, but I’m allowed to tease you, aren’t I? Guess who came to my dressing room last night! It makes it even more bizarre that you should come tonight. Did you spread the word to each other?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You and Getulio.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for a hundred years.’

  Face to face, he would not have lied to her. It was much easier to lie to her reflection. And weren’t they in a theatre, a place tailor-made for the most arch misunderstandings, for cross purposes and barefaced lies, cuckolds magnificent and sad, lovers concealed in wardrobes and providential entries and exits? The auditorium breathed again as the traitor was unmasked … yet here they were on their own, without an audience to call out to them that they had forgotten their lines. There was no logic to the play they were making up as they went along, intent on not hurting one another; there was nothing romantic to be invented in a dressing room that smelt of sweat, worn underwear, cheap rice powder and greasepaint. The explanation which neither she nor he felt any inclination to seek could wait another twenty, thirty, sixty years, until, with one foot in the grave, they finally turned to solving the puzzle and surrendering the missing pieces of a game that had been rigged from the start. Elizabeth untied her kimono and it slid off her bare, freckled shoulders.

  ‘Turn round,’ she said.

  A wisecrack about her sudden modesty, a reminder of the event that had led to them falling out, would have been in bad taste. Did she remember the pleasure they had shared, and how, sometimes, they had thought those pleasures were love? A youthful mistake, for certain. And did she really remember the production in which she had played a psychopathic woman arousing a black doctor? He felt it was doubtful.

  ‘Are you married?’ he asked.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘If you’d asked me that question, I’d have given you the same answer.’

  ‘You can turn round now.’

  Black jeans and a poppy-red angora sweater made her slim figure look simultaneously bulkier and thinner; she was not tall but she still had a lovely body. A black band held her ash-blond hair off her forehead and ears, whose lobes, distended by the fashionably heavy earrings she had worn in her hippy phase, were the only defect of her classically beautiful face. A capacious carpet bag with an imitation shell clasp swung from her hand. She looked pleased with her middle-American disguise.

  ‘Do you like my sweater?’

  ‘It’s revolting. The only thing you’ve forgotten is a pair of rhinestone-framed spectacles.’

  ‘I knitted it myself.’

  ‘That makes it worse. I can’t believe you took up knitting.’

  ‘It’s something to do between scenes when I’m filming.’

  She laughed, tilting her head sideways, the way she used to when her natural side took over and gave her back her schoolgirlish gaiety.

  ‘I’ll take you out to dinner.’

  ‘I’m exhausted, and we have a matinée tomorrow. Come and get me between the shows.’

  ‘I’ll be in France.’

  ‘Oh … All right, let’s have a snack together then. Quickly.’

  ‘Sardi’s?’

  ‘Good idea. And it’s right across th
e street.’

  ‘We fell out there for good.’

  ‘Are you sure it was there?’

  Had she really forgotten? At her most chic, when she slipped back into her Bostonian accent, when she wasn’t swearing or yelling a pornographic song as she swept the stage, or covering her dungarees with paint as she slopped it over a set or stinking of fish glue after she had been putting up incendiary posters, at her most chic she had no rival at seeing off an enterprising bore, playing the fool in front of a bluestocking, and coming out with a whopper like her ‘Are you sure?’ in a tone of such sincerity that it was hard to doubt her.

  Sardi’s always kept a table for her, and despite her fancy dress and dark glasses, or possibly because of the disguise, a murmur followed her as she walked between the tables. Yes, it was her, and her observers found it delightfully modest that she took herself and her figure so unseriously and was so negligent of the assets the fairies had blessed her with in the cradle: a genuine distinction, a family celebrated among the American elite, delicate features, talent, a captivating voice, honey-brown eyes, and a body that was carefully looked after but concealed with conspicuous self-effacement beneath clothes that were both too big and in hideously bad taste. Few, equally, had forgotten that on her parents’ death she had inherited a sizeable fortune that her early extravagance had failed to dent. Arthur remembered magazine profiles that had paid tribute to her as the most intelligent actress of her generation, who had imbibed, from her breakfast coffee onwards, page after page of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology or Being and Nothingness. When election time came around, of course, she campaigned for the Democrats. But he knew her well enough: the truth was that she only read her own parts and anyhow would not have understood a word of either Husserl or politics. Her talent excused her from educating herself outside the theatre, and she had, apparently, finally wearied of the scandalous and strange that she had once courted in the tumultuous days of her youth. Like many actresses, her real talent lay in having a musical voice and a primitive instinct that led her through the labyrinth of her lines better than a thousand drama classes. In short, she possessed, without knowing it, a gift that she underestimated and that no one could have taught her. As gifts go, it was a fragile thing, at the mercy of the next bad play that, with her touchingly mediocre judgement, she would unsuspectingly throw herself into. An article by Truman Capote in the New Yorker had already created something of a legend around her, to which she was beginning to acquiesce. Recognising the transformation, Arthur was burning to poke gentle fun at her, in the hope of regaining something of the tone of their old relations. Sitting down, she removed her dark glasses, took a lorgnette out of her hideous bag and held the menu up to her face.

  ‘You’re already long-sighted!’

  ‘No. Not really. The lorgnette was a producer’s idea. I’m the only woman in New York – aside from a few great-grandmothers who don’t have anything to do with the theatre – to use a lorgnette. Wait a while, and in six months’ time, after a few magazine pieces about it, everyone will have one. Then I’ll throw mine away.’

  ‘If I were you, I’d get myself a chihuahua and let it eat the foie gras off my tournedos Rossini and leave the rest, while I chewed a piece of raw celery. You’d have the table next to you slack-jawed with admiration and the one on the other side calling the maître d’ and demanding he throw you out. There’d be a terrific punch-up and the publicity in the next Vanity Fair would be incredible!’

  ‘I insist that you become my press secretary immediately.’

  ‘I’d have liked to, but it’s a bit late now.’

  ‘I never understood what it is you do. Things didn’t go too well at the beginning, I gather. Getulio helped, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Before I became an intern at Jansen and Brustein, he suggested I work as a bouncer at a nightclub where he and Augusta used to go with their friends. His generosity and willingness to humiliate knew no limits.’

  The maître d’hôtel interrupted them. For someone who only wanted a snack Elizabeth was not lacking in appetite. Arthur ordered champagne.

  ‘I see things are going better now,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Oh, distinctly.’

  ‘I didn’t understand what you were studying at Beresford either, or what you wanted to do afterwards.’

  ‘Beresford taught me the theoretical side of the art of business. The practical side turned out to be more tortuous and also less scrupulous. Let me put it this way: for a number of years I’ve been a financial adviser, which is to say a sort of intermediary who steers a skilful path around the frontiers of legality. But don’t worry: I cheat no one, unlike Getulio.’

  ‘He nearly cost me rather a lot. He certainly cost me something. Not too much. No more than a fair price for his charm. He cost Aunt Helen a lot more than that. She ended up snuffing it. He must have screwed her too much, the poor thing.’

  She raised her glass.

  ‘Let’s drink.’

  ‘Yes, but just to us two.’

  ‘Have you forgotten Augusta?’

  ‘I’ll never forget Augusta.’

  ‘I didn’t doubt it for a second. What I really liked about you was that you didn’t give a damn about the theatre, and that you never made fun of me.’

  ‘Up to a point.’

  ‘Oh, do let’s stop talking about it! You’re really the only one who remembers.’

  ‘Imagine if your production had been as big a hit as Ionesco’s Bald Prima Donna. You’d be up to your seven thousand three hundredth theatrical fuck by now. But how could you then do it with the man you loved when you got home from the theatre?’

  ‘All right! It was a mistake,’ she laughed. ‘But I did it. I went a bit mad. Maybe that’ll be something that was missing in your life, to have done something completely mad. But I did it. It’s in the past.’

  A very young girl in a modest pink velvet dress with a lace collar was standing at Elizabeth’s side, a notebook and pen in her hand.

  ‘Excuse me for interrupting you … I’d so like to have your autograph. I simply adored you in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’

  Elizabeth looked up at her admirer, hesitated for a couple of seconds, generously wrote a few words and signed. The girl gave her a quick timid bow and went back to the neighbouring table.

  ‘How did you sign?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Very simply: Elizabeth. Like the queen. For the rest of her days that delightful child will think she met Elizabeth Taylor. Someone must have told her I was called Elizabeth and was acting in a play by Tennessee Williams.’

  ‘I’m catching a glimpse of your kindness.’

  ‘No, my modesty. Learned by being hit over the head. And you’re not entirely blameless in that department either. Do you think it’s funny to be attracted to a man who makes no secret of loving another woman?’

  Broadway was spilling would-be diners onto the street, and soon the restaurant was full. Elizabeth lifted her hand repeatedly, wiggling her fingers in a comical greeting as actors streamed in in pairs, their faces still shiny with make-up remover.

  ‘We could have chosen a more private restaurant for our reunion.’ Arthur was irritated by the jokey hellos. ‘I honestly wonder if a man has ever had you to himself.’

  She raised her eyes and sighed.

  ‘My art’s not the art of being sincere, except onstage.’

  ‘Excuse me! You’re so right. Every night your audience sleeps with you. That must be sexually exhausting. A real person on the side must seem dull.’

  ‘You weren’t “on the side”.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Arthur closed his eyes, reliving the evening when he had found her waiting on the stairs outside the lift.

  He felt Elizabeth’s fingers drumming on the back of his hand.

  ‘Hey! Wake up … You’re having dinner with me.’

  ‘I can see you now, you and Augusta and Getulio on the promenade deck of the Queen Mary, with your reefer jacket and your sailor’s cap and
long strides, and Augusta turning her head away so she didn’t have to look at the ocean, which she hated.’

  ‘I’d forgotten that completely. Who was more beautiful?’

  ‘Augusta.’

  ‘Yes. I get it, you know … We poor North Americans are at a great disadvantage, up against all that charm and Latinness with our doe eyes and flaxen hair. But she didn’t screw, did she? Not straight away, anyway. Tomorrow you can tell me the next episode.’

  ‘There won’t be a tomorrow. I’m catching the morning flight to Paris.’

  ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘In a month, or a year. It’s not very predictable.’

  ‘We must see each other again. Or perhaps not. We’re not going to go round again, are we? I’ll be going to France in the spring, to see my Madeleine. She’ll be eighty. The day she goes, I really will be an orphan, and who’ll hold me in their arms and let me cry then?’

  He saw her back to 78th Street in a cab. A doorman in a red tailcoat, with a bulge under his arm from a pistol holster, hurried to open the cab’s door.