Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

“They’re just taking a walk.”

  “I can’t tell you how many walks I’ve taken in my time that ended exactly the way I wanted them to. Of course now I have to walk a little longer. But still….”

  “Charlie, really.”

  “Really what? If you pose as a Don Juan, everybody’s down on you. But if you pose as an unsuccessful Don Juan, everyone envies the effort and sympathizes with the failure. That gives you more freedom.”

  For a moment she was startled. It sounded so much like her own reasons for these little public games.

  Charlie stared at the startlets in the pool. Apparently he still felt benign. “You know, when they bail a few more of the guppies out, I think I’ll go in,” he said. “I haven’t gone for a swim this year.”

  But when the guppies were bailed out, he didn’t go. He looked a little lonely.

  XIV

  ALONG the road, about fifty feet from the pool, two horse-faced people in riding habits, black coats, fawn breeches immaculately cut, and very expensive boots, pedaled by on bicycles. To ride is essential. To run the car at unnecessary, which is to say private, moments is merely expensive. Luxembourg is like that.

  “Where have they got to now?” asked Charlie.

  “Who?”

  “Paul.”

  “I think he’s telling her about his childhood, from the look of them.”

  “Nonsense. I know all about that. He didn’t have one.” He looked at his discarded lemon.

  “It is hard to remember, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What?”

  “What one was like.”

  “I never try.”

  He took that in good part. “They’ve got a funny film at five,” he said. “Come along and see it and let’s leave them here.” Apart from being a judge, he was also an inveterate, though not incessant, movie-goer. He even watched the documentaries. Boning up on scenery, he called it.

  XV

  DOCUMENTARIES were scheduled in the late afternoon, on the theory that anyone who goes to documentaries wouldn’t be helped much by a drink at seven anyway. First on the program was an American short, badly transcribed from a video tape, of William Faulkner, looking rather like Tom Thumb, talking to a Negro. Both the Negro and William Faulkner seemed mad as hops, which, considering the photography, was understandable enough. This was followed by a color film in which some Javanese threw a goat into a volcano. It meant something ethnically, and fortunately the volcano had been extinct at the time, though it was a pity about the goat. This, in turn, gave way to something abstract from Canada, to prove that the twentieth century had reached the 49th parallel, and now the Canadians were sending it back. Then the feature came on.

  “Ah,” said Charlie.

  It was a French scissors-and-paste job called The Golden Years. It began well with a glimpse of Sarah Bernhardt, looking battered but immortal at the funeral of a friend, carried in a litter, with a rug over her knees. She may not have been an actress exactly, but she had been able to have quite a long audience with the world, all the same.

  There had been nothing particularly feminine about the Divine Sarah, who at seventy still looked like a boy cardinal. About the world’s great enchanters there seldom is. There is always something subtly androgynous about them.

  Lotte found herself watching with absorbed dismay. If I had been born a hundred years ago, I suppose I should have been her, she thought, though she always wanted to become the Divine Sarah, and I became the Divine Lotte merely by accident. The Divine Sarah looks maternal, and wasn’t one scrap. Whereas I don’t, and am always worrying about my secret chickens, hatched or not.

  There were other differences. Once Sarah discovered Sardou wrote perfect parts, she marched him off and kept him locked up on a diet of breadcrumbs to write them for her. Sarah played Juliet at sixty, Phèdre to please the critics, Hamlet whenever she felt like it, and herself all the time. Whereas I am merely allowed to impersonate myself impersonating myself in a film now and then, and Charlie has never written anything for me at all. They just bring me a Lotte part from time to time, like a pair of old galoshes they found somewhere, and are they mine?

  The Divine Sarah was followed by the less Divine Mistinguett, and by Maurice Chevalier. As we know, for the French have told us so, most celebrities and all life’s golden moments are, by their nature, French.

  So naturally, when the film turned black, it turned German. The worst thing that can happen in Paris is that we may not have charged the American tourists enough. There were some brief clips of flappers shopping. How quickly women used to walk in the 1920’s, as though what they wanted was just ahead of them, and they had to catch up before it got away. Then came the serious bits. Despite all improvement in communications since, the French have never quite given up brooding about the consequences of the Ems telegram, and so there were long clips of the Germans being punished for Sédan, Alsace-Lorraine, and, presumably, like the rest of the world, simply and justifiably for being non-French.

  So they had to watch shots of the inflation period (she could remember it. It isn’t pleasant for a professor’s daughter to have to borrow a pair of stockings and sing in a cabaret, to eat); a glimpse of Stresemann, looking like an indignant, well-bred Lenin, but also like her father (he had not approved of cabarets, her father); Bolshevik rioters fresh out of the closed factories; and other symptoms of world disturbances never to be found in France.

  “Here we are,” said Charlie.

  She didn’t know where. It was only another shot of rioters being beaten back by old-fashioned policemen in funny hats. She didn’t like to watch the 1920’s. It was too much like riding the bucket back down the well. When she was about six, out in the woods, ahead of her parents, in the must-have-been autumn woods, because she could remember the leech cling of the damp brown leaves, she had stepped through the rotten cap of an abandoned well, fallen, and struggled down there up to her waist in she didn’t know what, for what seemed hours. That was what her own youth meant to her.

  Then the clip Charlie had been waiting for came on. She didn’t like that either.

  She never watched her past. She always wanted it to be now, always now. But there she was, in the film that had made her famous, plump, bleached, awkward, raucous, in an enormous fuzzy wig that looked the way it had felt, undignified and horrible, when all she had wanted was dignity, comfort, safety, and decorum, the things she had now. The things, it doesn’t matter how we feel, which we must never lose, no matter what we have to pay for them.

  She shut her eyes. She did not want to be embarrassed by that flabby ghost. She did not want to see how it envied her. She did not want to remember anything. She just wanted it to be now.

  The film came to an end after a while. They went out into what was left of the day.

  She should not have come this close to home.

  XVI

  THE evening was quiet. It usually is. The nocturnal amusements available to us are curiously few. We could go to bed with each other, of course, but after thirty this is seldom exciting, though we do it anyway. We can read, but we seldom have the right book. Cards and gambling are available to the inarticulate. There are night clubs. Conversation is best, but so few people really know how to talk. We can dance.

  “Dance away the night,” said Jerome Kern, in one of his more touching and thus less popular songs, “and we’ll all be together at the dawning.”

  Would we were. At dawn we fall asleep.

  It was a charming song. She would have liked to add it to her repertoire, but it was too late to do so now. Now she only sang the faster numbers.

  XVII

  “HAS it occurred to you,” said Charlie, “that we have more time to ourselves than we had in the dark backward and Abysm of, say, three days ago?”

  Yes, it had. She was lonely. She would have felt fed up to the gills, if she hadn’t enjoyed the role she had to play in this world so much.

  “It’s rather convenient, it gets us off the hook,” said Charlie. “Not onl
y does it solve an always awkward social problem, but it leaves us with some time to ourselves. In fact, come to think of it, too much time. I’m even beginning to catch up with my reading again.”

  It was Charlie’s habit to read in bed before going to sleep. It was also his habit to drink coffee in bed, alone, in the morning, until he could move. After two weeks with anyone he began to get restless, until he could reestablish both. This had ruined his sex life, as he often said, but it had kept him sane. He always returned to his routine, like a traveler who, no matter what he has seen along the way, is relieved to get home to a place where he knows where everything is.

  He couldn’t help it. The allurements of the flesh are all that count in life. Everybody says so. He said so himself. He even believed it. But he preferred reading.

  It was his misfortune to be attracted to young men whose literacy was limited. Otherwise he might have settled down with one of them and never remarried again at all.

  The real time for playing around is the afternoon, but since he usually worked all morning, by afternoon Charlie was too tired. What he wanted to do then was relax. So there simply wasn’t any time for these people he spent so much of his time tracking down.

  It was an anomaly. But whatever would we do without reading? Without reading we would go mad.

  Lottie, who did most of her reading in the afternoon, was beginning to get restless. She was beginning to count the days until the arrival of Miss Campendonck and the rest of the clowns. Still, she had to admit that Charlie was taking it well. She was relieved. Not, however, as relieved as all that. What, if anything, was going on?

  Together they went down the stairs to the lobby. That film had bothered her. It brought things back. And the lobby here had the same movements left and right, the same entrances, as the lobby of the old Adlon in Berlin, where she had first met those American producers, thirty years ago, who like all flesh-peddlers had been explicit about which part of her they had wanted, not to buy, but sell.

  She would always be grateful to her first director for having told those gentlemen not only what she had to sell, but for having the decency to consult her in the matter. He had been homosexual, of course. In that business, if they treat you with any respect they always are. But such people have a lesson to teach: they alone know the commercial value not of what we are, but of what we aren’t. Her first popularity she owed to those lessons in the androgyne, for though men liked her, it was women who went to her pictures, and American women long to be a father to their sons. She had taught them how.

  To that ambiguous image she owed everything. But ever since the Adlon, hotel lobbies had made her nervous. She didn’t know why.

  XVIII

  CHARLIE was puzzled. Something was going on, but he didn’t know what. So, as usual when he was perplexed, he played dead.

  As far as he knew, nobody had ever seen this game but his sister, and his sister was dead now herself. There was nothing even remotely sinister about the game. On the contrary, it was one of his favorite ways of being privately happy. But to an outsider it would have looked odd, therefore he was careful that no outsider should know about it.

  When he was about six, and his sister eight, they had both been impressed by the lying-in-state of their Uncle Felix. Not only was Uncle Felix the only rich member of the family (he had been a city councilor), but they were the poorest members of it, so poor that until his death they had never been asked to Uncle Felix’s house. Uncle Felix was their Dutch uncle, and lived beside one of the statelier canals in Amsterdam. The body was laid out in the front parlor on the left. Never before had Charlie been in a house that smelled so good, of silk upholstery, polished maple, and a fine waft of cooking odors from the kitchen in the basement as they went in through the ground floor. The corpse had looked so contented and sleek and well fed, lying there with pious hands, under the dream of all warm winter comforters, the sort of comforter Charlie had always wanted on his own cold bed. The room had flickered in the companionable glow of gasoliers. Candles burned quietly in important candelabra. Nobody had looked in the least worried, or cross, or put out, and before the coffin was closed, the children had been sent down to the kitchen, where the cook had stuffed them with sauerbraten (it had been waiting in the crock for Uncle Felix, and was a little overripe, but they weren’t told that), with potato pancakes, the best sauerbraten and the best potato pancakes Charlie had ever eaten.

  The respectable old Dutch families use the front door only for funerals. Otherwise they go in on the ground floor, through an arch under the front steps. Charlie had always been annoyed by that piece of protocol. Of course Uncle Felix wasn’t Dutch or even respectable, but he could afford a respectable Dutch house, so when the coffin was closed, the pallbearers took it out through the first-floor front door, and then down the steps. It meant a lot to Charlie. If you were dead you got to use the front door. Not otherwise.

  So when they got back to Berlin, he crawled up on the sofa, in the badly furnished front room, laid himself out, and got his sister to light the kitchen candles, while he lay there with piously folded hands and his eyes shut. Of course there weren’t any sauerbraten and potato pancakes afterwards, but if he lay there long enough, there would be.

  He made an arrangement with her. He’d play house with her if she’d play dead with him. The game went on for several years, and then went underground, the way most children’s games do, without any warning, like an elevated train into a tunnel.

  It emerged, fresh as paint, some time during the course of his second marriage, after a quarrel, he supposed. He was alone in the apartment, crawled up on the sofa, suddenly remembered the game, and had been playing it ever since, whenever life got too much for him and he needed rest. When he closed his eyes he could even smell the smells of that fine house, years ago. If he kept his eyes closed long enough, and his hands folded, he would most assuredly get sauerbraten and potato pancakes. He would just float away, feet first, into heaven. He would be able to use the front door. With his eyes closed, he could see yes, that nobody would look put out, or worried, or cross with him again.

  Whatever else you said for it, it at least gave him a rest period. His sister had been fond of him, he supposed. But there had never been anybody to tuck him in.

  When his thoughts strayed in that direction, Charlie invariably sat up.

  It must be five. The lighting was bad. And Paul hadn’t come in yet. “Sometimes,” says the foolish American matron in the New Yorker cartoon, facing a sunset of optimum vulgarity, “I think the cocktail hour is the most beautiful hour of the day.” Charlie didn’t happen to agree. He did have a drink, and sat there listening to the silence, which bothered him. Inhabited silence soothed him. For empty silence he had no use.

  It is only a game, of course. Everything is a game. But even chess players must have their moments to relax, though he doubted it. It was his theory that all chess players were of monster birth, like blue babies, except that they did not die.

  Across from the sofa on which he had been lying, propped up on a chiffonier, behind a glass jar of white lilacs (a homage to Manet, he always chose his flowers from art, and had no sympathy with gardeners or with nature of any kind) was a sizable painting by Slabbinck, a Belgian whom he admired, of a blue table covered with a red cloth, on which sat two coffeepots and three yellow bowls. It was a good picture, but not what he wanted to see just then. He looked round the room in search of something more familiar.

  Those pictures Charlie dragged about with him were there not so much for themselves as for windows. They allowed him to peer out of the world in which he was trapped into other worlds which he preferred. They were good pictures: Charlie liked the glass in his windows clear; but that is what they were there for. Not being very happy with the present, he liked an eyeglass to the past. Hence the monocle. Hence the pictures. Like most of the rich, he was not really contemporary. The present does well enough, but for solace, there is nothing like a trip home, to the past, which is where all that
money came from. It is difficult to prestidigitate the present without a few props, and pictures were his props, though the trick is not so much to take the rabbit out of the hat, as somehow to get it back in.

  He found what he wanted soon enough. Back in went the rabbit, long ears, shovel teeth, kick in the stomach, and all.

  Charlie did not have a Tiepolo or a Guardi. The best Guardis were in museums and a Tiepolo was beyond his means. That left Canaletto, but the Canalettos he liked were either too large or else in Dresden, in which case they were by Belloto. What he did have was a Maulpertsch. He didn’t like it much. Maulpertsch was too red, which reminded him of that wet baby smell the Germans knew so well how to paint. One thing about Reynolds’s children, they may have been sentimental, but at least they were dry. He would have preferred a Carlone, or even a Casanova, though he didn’t care for the Seigneur de Seingault much, and applied the prejudice to his more successful relatives, and abhorred Russia besides, but he had the Maulpertsch. It gave him access to eighteenth-century Venice, no matter who it was by.

  If all this had happened in eighteenth-century Venice, Charlie would have felt happier. The present excites. Only the past exalts. In the past we are all nobler than we are now. One of the real comedowns Charlie had experienced was to discover that the rich are not sui generis witty. He had expected, on joining that international fraternity, drawing-room comedy at the least. Alas, the rich prefer decorum and the milder less accurate talents of a Noël Coward, to Goldoni, E. T. A. Hofmann, or, at a pinch, Sheridan. Even about Offenbach, who scored them, the rich had a tendency to mutter charmant, charmant, mais bourgeois, bourgeois, a word they had picked up, despite themselves, from Karl Marx, and repeated with the assiduity of Oscar Wilde honing an epigram. Wit sets the fashion, but fashion, alas, is dead set against wit.