Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  I turned him over. He gasped as I inched into him, and I held him tight around the chest as we lay connected. And we heaved and buckled on the beach, rolling about as we began to feel there was no limit to the space we had happened on. Our legs splashed in the tidal pool. At last, still inside him, I hunched back on my knees and rotated him slowly on my cock, bringing him all the way round so that he faced me. When he came, he wiped the cum from his stomach and held his wet hand against my mouth, and the first smoky taste of it took me over the edge. I came staring into the sun.

  In the quiet that followed, we exchanged names, keeping things in the odd order of gay love. But I have said enough about love. Once started, of course, I could flesh out in detail all the succeeding passions of that day on the beach, but I can see too that I have to stop talking about David and me as well, although I am perverse and find myself now reluctant to. But here is the skeleton of the flight from Georgia. David was staying at Sea Island with the mousy, clean-handed dean of his college, a closet case who had invited David there during the spring break of his senior year. Not to fuck him. Just to see him stripped down to a bathing suit. David understood the bargain he had struck and knew that he could cheat as well. So he spent his naked days miles from the house of the longing queen and came back late, giving the dean only the briefest glimpse of his dark and loaded body as he slipped into his room to dress for dinner. If David seems here like a mean whore, like the bastard Madeleine took him for, it has less to do with him than with the business of gay life. In one of the crueler customs of that country, the men who have made it out of the closet walk all over the men who stay in. It is the closet they are raging at; but the college deans and the priests and the live-in sons, paralyzed by their hidden wish, get beaten because they are in the way.

  We rode back together in the late afternoon, David holding on behind me, his head resting on my shoulder. I tethered the horse at the front gate of the house, leaving it to my cocained sailors to lead him back up-island to the stables. I threw what little I had into the backseat of the Chevy, and David and I drove over to the dean's little cottage. I do not know what David would have said, but there was no occasion to explain, because the dean was fast asleep, getting through the day until David came back. While David packed, I stood in the kitchen door and waited. The dean had baked a cake and frosted it. He had arranged a tropical bouquet on the kitchen table. On a wheeled table, a clutter of bottles and glasses attended the cocktail hour, when he would unveil an intricate plate of hors d'oeuvres and lead the way to the terrace.

  We drove all night and stopped along the road to make love at dawn, in North Carolina I think. I held back about mentioning the deer and have kept it a secret after all. I think now that I wanted something wholly my own out of that enormous act of change. They had waited in a circle around my horse to see what I would do, and because they ran when they did, they never found out. I know I have kept them to myself for my own reasons, but I have been true to their modesty as well. The deer have stayed free in my heart for knowing when to go. I knew I was doing the opposite. I gave up my freedom freely. You know that without knowing why, and you drive for a day and a half up the East Coast to see if it will come clear. It doesn't. But by then you are home, and you think you can accommodate the changes. There, after all, is your own bed in your own room. You've been there before.

  "Madeleine," I said, coming out of a silence in which I tried to see what Madeleine wanted to warn me of, couldn't see it, and started to shake. "I haven't had a very easy year."

  "Rick, I don't think you ever do."

  "This is different."

  "Is it?" she asked, sharper than she wanted to, or sharper than we are accustomed to, she and I. "Ever since that boy left, you've suffered like a goddamned widow. When the pain went away a little, you got angry. For years you've been trying to prove the pain is different for you. But it isn't."

  I steered straight. My hands stopped shaking on the steering wheel. In Bad Dream, in 1931, Madeleine gets into a taxi at the Place de l'Opéra; she is leaving Charles Boyer for the last time, except he doesn't know it. "I'm out of cigarettes," she says through the window, and he takes out his case and offers her one, and then he lights it. The taxi driver seems to know that the scene is not over yet. "You know, Philippe," she says through the smoke, "I haven't been a woman for two years now." She means she has been a whore. "I feel so happy when I'm with you, but when I'm not, I feel like a widow. I have a dream where I open my closets and the clothes are all black." The cab drives off. Boyer is going to tell his wife tonight that he is leaving her, and he is going to meet Madeleine at the train tomorrow morning. But we already know she is on the way to the station now. It cannot be. And so I didn't expect to win this argument with Madeleine, but I had it out anyway. I wanted the warning where I could hear it plain.

  "Then you think David is dead for me, and I just cling to it out of pride. But if there's nothing there, why are you so worried about me seeing him again?"

  "Oh Rick, because you want the pain back."

  "Well, then help me."

  "I will."

  "Sing if you have to."

  We had been driving south for forty-five minutes, and we had just turned off the main road. For a long time the highway had seemed to parallel the sea, edging a marsh at one point, blowing here and there with a sea wind. But now we had come into deep forest, the sea nowhere near. I do not like woods at all, and I have twice been trapped in the brute meeting of forest and rocky surf, once in Maine and once in Oregon. I have not revisited either friend who tricked me there. Madeleine was right that I was being testy, and I was probably doomed to feel alien on Mrs. Carroll's land, even if it had turned out to be Capri. But a narrow, tedious little Massachusetts beach was what I was hoping for. Imagine my relief when we nosed out of the woods and drove among the fields of the Carroll dairy. A couple of wide machines were busying up and down, doing the first haying, and the smell of grass was overwhelming. I saw plain, dumb cows in all directions. The pressure of the woods lifted, and I felt light and perky as we turned through the great stone gate and began to move across the fields toward the dairy.

  "Rick?" There was something unexpected in Madeleine's voice, as if she were rearranging the songs for a midnight show. "Have you ever been here before?"

  "No, dear. No one ever invites me to the country. Can you bear how pastoral it is?" A dairy, I thought. What can go wrong at a dairy?

  "I know this place."

  "From where?"

  "I stayed here."

  "When?" I asked. Most of Madeleine's life is public record. It is safest to assume, for any given month of any given year, that if Madeleine is not making a film or doing a nightclub tour, then she is vacationing in certain given places. In Monaco or Rio, Baden-Baden, Mykonos. Not in a starchy sea town off Route 3.

  "In the war. An American woman I met in Paris, just after the war. I was out of money. I had to get back to Hollywood, but I was sick. She brought me here for a while."

  "Was the name Carroll?"

  "Yes. Beth Carroll. Is she still here?"

  "I don't know."

  Having crossed the fields, we drove among bleaching, rose-colored cow-barns and found ourselves in a kind of square surrounded by garages and the farmers' houses. Larger than a farmyard, and more formal, more architected. It was paved with gray flagstones, and the watering trough in the center circled a stone fountain. Like a little village—and from one screen door a woman with a face deadened by Novocain stared out at us. We were not fired upon. But unless David was shacking up with a sweaty farm boy, it was not clear how we were supposed to proceed.

  "You go through that arch, Rick," Madeleine said, pointing between two houses.

  "Wait a minute, Madeleine. When did you last see this woman?"

  She turned to me and took off her glasses. As she often does, she lowered her eyelids by a fraction to get the effect of irony and disbelief that other people get by lifting an eyebrow. As if to say: I know people
ask questions as stupid as this, but when did you start doing it?

  "The morning I left. We weren't having a good time anymore. As I recall, we stood outside the garage. I wanted to go for a drive, and she said I couldn't go out in the car without the chauffeur. If it hadn't been that, it would have been something else. I picked up a shovel and swung it and cracked the windshield. It was a Mercedes."

  "Oh." Lovers. I am not in the habit of being dumb about Madeleine's women friends. Sometimes there has been a secretary or companion who has remained with her for several months, but for the most part she and her lovers have touched glasses and passed on. She is a solitary woman who does not always keep her distance but who always knows how much she is keeping it or letting it go. She has had two husbands, neither of whom knew her very well, though she loved them after a fashion. She has had at least one friend, me, a decidedly mixed blessing. And then there have been the people she has simply known, as different as her escorts at chemin de fer in weary little casinos and the refugees she smuggled out of bomb zones in her entourage. The women she loved have constituted her most truly private life; and that, I think, is why they had to be left behind. Madeleine has not been evasive about being gay, though the world has chosen not to notice. But she has lived her life as a continuous international event, a kind of cultural touchstone, and has never had the time to love at length. She could not otherwise have become, in the rarefied company of stars that go on from sky to night sky—Garbo and Piaf and Marlene—the type of a woman in love. Her beauty endures hand in hand with her sense of the irony in this.

  There is some truth in what I've said, and it is what I believed in June, believing that it showed how much I appreciate Madeleine. But I have buried the truth in left-handed compliments. My insights about her have been colored by my own clock of a heart, which still ticked in June and didn't feel and was the size of a river-washed stone that fits in your pocket. The women she loved were not half-loved. I can sing you (badly) every song she has ever done, but it is as if I have not listened at all.

  I know you much too well

  To love you like a girl.

  It isn't right,

  But every night

  I grow a little old

  Just knowing you.

  I am sure I heard that song first on the radio from my cradle (Madeleine, forgive me), but I heard it last on the Friday night before we came here. It was the encore in the middle of the thirty-two curtain calls. The truth does lie in time, as the song makes clear, but it is both harder and more life-giving than I have said.

  "She could make you laugh about anything," Madeleine said. "I hope she's there. You'll like her."

  I drove on through the arch and out of the village, and from there the road swept down through more fields, crossed a wooden bridge over a trickle of a stream, and went up again, perversely, into deep woods. The house would after all be in the woods and on the rocks, I thought, and then realized I could ask Madeleine all about it. But she seemed given over to her own memories. I kept quiet. To touch wood, I said again to myself that only the mildest things could happen so close to a dairy. Madeleine took off her scarf and stowed it in the bag she carried. Then she made herself up, her hands at her face working with the concentration and abandon of an old clown making himself happy. Madeleine has beautiful skin, and I never feel she uses makeup to cover anything up. (As far as that goes, she has worked from the inside out. When she last had money, she had a lift of the face and of the thighs, and she has done Switzerland for monkey glands and drunk the vivid waters of countless secret springs, most recently in Nepal.) She just touched her face with a fat brush that she powdered up on a palette whose dozen colors seemed all the same to me. A PENCIL AT THE EYES. A fingertip of burgundy rouge smoothed over the lips.

  Mind you, she does this so well that she does this while we are driving. I do not tell her to mind the bumps on the wooden bridge. She has made up in tanks in North Africa. In bunkers between bombs. They say that when Renoir was old and arthritis had frozen his fingers, his model would arrive at the studio in the morning and strap the brush to the painters hand. It is done with the wrists, he would say, not the fingers. I do not know how painting is done. But I bet it becomes like breathing for those who endure. Second nature. Much of Madeleine's life was lived by this sixth sense. She had done her own face in films before there were makeup men, and when the labor law required that she finally submit to one, he became a kind of consultant only. I don't think he ever touched her face.

  As we came up into woods again, she reached over and tapped my arm and said, "We're almost there. Brace yourself, Rick. It's very lonely." The pines oppressed me. But just when I thought I would scream at the pines' dead-needle floor and the toothpaste smell, Madeleine saved me. Her perfume was the final scene. She brought out a crystal flagon and drew the stopper. Even in a convertible in the wilderness, it blew my way like a garden in full flower. This is the formula Patou made for Madeleine in the thirties, and it is locked in a Swiss vault or something. The story goes that she left behind a small valise full of silk stockings when she sang for the liberation army in 1944. A bottle of the Patou was packed inside. The valise became a good-luck charm for the advancing army, and it was passed from company to company. It was so thrown about that the perfume finally leaked all over the stockings. In the last days of the war, an American general got hold of the cache, and he passed out the stockings one by one as medals or battle ribbons to his bravest men. I don't know how it was done, whether he draped the stocking around the neck or balled it up and threw it in a soldier's tent. But the story survives.

  The woods thinned, and we could see the house now, perched above the marsh on one side and the dunes on the other. As we approached the garden court, I saw David sitting on the bottom of the spiral stair, his head in his hands. He was hardly dressed, which wasn't fair. He stood up, and he was wearing cut-off jeans and was no longer a fawn, not any sort of boy at all. "Oh my God," Madeleine said, by which she meant he was beautiful. No, I wanted to say, or yes, but he is not the same. Now I was warning myself, and fast, as we pulled to a stop a moment away from him and he came forward smiling. Of course. I thought, of course he is older now, that goes without saying. But with me, if something goes without saying, it goes without seeing. He was beautiful, with the full, musky beauty of a grown man. I wanted him. And in the instant before he spoke and began to bring me home, I wanted only him and gave up gladly the boy he was.

  "If it had been another car," he said, "I would have blown the whistle."

  "I keep it as a souvenir," I said.

  He leaned on his elbow along the top rim of the windshield and looked down at us. His chest, once flat and clear, was dusted lightly now with hair, and the muscles were firm. He nodded at Madeleine and smiled what I suspected was a Florida smile. He was doing too good a job of not registering who she was.

  "Madeleine Cosquer," I said, "David Rowland," pointing them out to each other, thinking that the two names had finally come together with a click, like billiard balls. But I did not understand what David was doing.

  "I hope you'll let us wait on you hand and foot," he said in a breezy voice. "You deserve it after Friday night."

  "Were you there?" Madeleine said.

  "No, but the news travels. I heard you in Las Vegas three years ago. It was wonderful."

  "It was all right," she said. "I hesitate to ask what you were doing at the Desert Inn."

  "I was up to no good."

  She tipped her head back and let out a short laugh. She often laughs in single syllables. I sat stupidly, one hand still on the steering wheel, as if I planned to drive on.

  "But look at you," she said to him. "A man would be crazy to be good if he could look like you instead. I'd better warn Beth Carroll. I'm sure she's never been to Vegas."

  Madeleine seemed to double the bet as she threw the dice. She didn't mind him coming on strong. She rather liked it. All the same, she had to show her own armies. She told me later that, since he chos
e to appear like a naked hustler, she decided to find out how much he was hustling for. He didn't stammer or say gosh, but he lost five years of savvy in an instant. He glanced at me and then looked down.

  "I'm sorry, Miss Cosquer. Mrs. Carroll's dead. She died last Monday night."

  "I see. Suddenly?"

  "Yes. It was a heart attack, I think. Phidias says it was old age."

  "She must have been nearly eighty-five. I should be sorry for you if you think there's anything sad in that." She spoke easily, willing to go where the road led, the surprises of the last half hour taken in stride. So David seemed to know about Madeleine and Mrs. Carroll; and, since I had just been told myself, he had known it longer than I. I didn't know what might happen now, but I was not getting anywhere sitting still. These two were chatting like neighbors over a garden fence.

  "Who is Phidias?" I said.

  "He runs the place," Madeleine answered, a little chagrined that I was not keeping up. "Right, David? He'll live to be two hundred. Where is he?"

  "Oh, he's around," David said. "Why don't you come in and we'll have lunch. Someone will bring us horses, Rick, if you want to ride."

  He smiled at me a little shyly. There may be monstrous subterranean motives here, I thought, but he is also trying to make peace and do things right. Madeleine seemed so well and so in touch with the past that it seemed wrong not to risk the intricacies of the afternoon. We got out of the car, and Madeleine came around and took each of us by one arm and walked us across the terrace to the library doors. She squeezed my arm. David opened the doors, and we came into the cool room.

  "When I was here," Madeleine said, "you never knew where you were going to have lunch. Beth would have a picnic set in the summer house, or out in the woods somewhere. You couldn't second-guess her. We always met here at one for drinks, and then she would tell."

  "Would you like a drink?" David asked.