Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

  Charlie could never tell whether she was kidding or emoting when she went through that routine. Probably he never would be able to.

  “I hope Unne’s all right. That’s why I sent her over. She looked peaked.” She turned to Charlie. “I heard you were here. I must say you look well.” Her voice had all the lightheartedness of a cancer specialist reassuring a hopeless case. She swiveled round to Lotte, like a turret gun on a tank, whose operator’s attention has been caught by a noise in the underbrush. “I can’t think why you agreed to come here. Though perhaps it makes up for Cannes. It really was a most awful trip. And everything will have to be pressed, of course. Is there a maid? I think I just will allow myself to have just one other.” She downed her glass like the horsewoman she was, and whinnied for more.

  The waiter had left the bottle on the table. Charlie shoved it toward her.

  “Roll your own,” he said.

  Miss Campendonck pouted. “Nobody does that any more, even in Sherman Oaks. People who used to do that smoke Camels. For one thing they’re still only 25 cents. For another, there isn’t any filter.”

  Goodness only knows what Miss Campendonck had come out West for originally, in 1928. You never heard about that. But she knew everybody who had been anybody, given only they were dead. On the living, her information was less apt to be current.

  “Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine,” said Miss Campendonck irrelevantly. Perhaps she had games of her own. If she had, she played them against people, rather than with herself. “It was an Edna Mae Oliver routine. That was before your time. Though you may just have seen her in Pride and Prejudice. She played Lady de Burgh. It was like W. C. Fields as Micawber, you know. It was good, but it wasn’t Dickens. Of course the rest of the picture wasn’t Dickens either, but that’s another subject, I expect.” She turned to Lotte. “The Berlin engagement isn’t selling well. Could we paper the house?”

  “What with?” asked Charlie.

  Miss Campendonck made a defense in depth. “Did you ever see Reginald Gard’ner imitate wallpaper? His daughter’s an actress herself now. Or is that Gene Lockhart’s daughter? Anyhow he’s very funny. Particularly on sporting prints.” And she looked at him from a vast shrewd distance, over ledger after ledger after ledger.

  Lotte must be quite rich, he realized suddenly. Richer, anyhow, than he. No doubt that was why she was always so careful to explain she didn’t have a cent to her name. In whose name, then, was the money held? He knew that ploy. He used it himself. The rich are always poorer than we are. It is wonderful to have enough money to be able to say one is poor without evoking resentment in one’s friends.

  Miss Campendonck circled back. “Though that’s a misquotation really. Actually what Mr. John Benn Johnstone wrote was, ‘I want you to assist me in forcing her on board the lugger; once there, I’ll frighten her into marriage.’ But the other version is better. It’s from The Gypsy Farmer.”

  That was another aspect of Miss Campendonck. Either she was irrelevantly erudite, or else Benn Johnstone was a relative. “She said it, I think, in a Richard Arlen comedy about car racing. My, that was a long time ago.”

  My God, thought Charlie, Americans have all those memories to haunt them, and they’ve never even really had a war.

  “I always liked Edna Mae,” said Miss Campendonck, and for a moment her eyes were misty.

  She downed her drink and left.

  “In my opinion,” said Charlie, “that woman invented dive-bombing.”

  “I hate it when she comes back, and always begin to fret when she doesn’t,” said Lotte. “Do you suppose she’s Diaghilev? Stravinsky’s never done anything worth listening to since.”

  He knew what she meant, but she startled him. It was so seldom that Lotte ever let fall into the conversation so much as one acid drop of what she knew.

  He envied Miss Campendonck, rather. It takes courage in this world to make yourself into a joke. It can only be done if you really believe that you aren’t one. Therefore, yes, Miss Campendonck had his hat and his homage. But she did not have his trust.

  I suppose she hates me, he thought, because she likes me rather, despite her better judgment. Let us take courage from that.

  XXXIV

  AND went right on thinking.

  Let us consider the Englishwoman, he instructed himself. Her husband we know all about. He wears a derby. He sports an umbrella. He descends and ascends into and out of the tube. He has bad teeth. He once, on foreign service, during his salad days, wrote a quite useful monograph upon The Paulownia Trees of the Assam District. A distinct subspecies. He never reads Kipling any more.

  His wife is more interesting.

  She is a horsey, horse-faced, buck-toothed, tweedy, sensibly shod and unattractive woman. She is a white-skinned, off-the-shoulder, drawing-room comedy, of course one does these things, but I much prefer dogs, indelible-nosed woman. She would very much like to look the way Englishwomen are supposed to look; and for the season she comes up from the country. So much we learn from novels. She is a mistress of the moue, a gesture for which the English have no word, but still, they can beat the French any day at making one.

  The Englishwoman has an American sub-species, less bland, but more vigorous. Its dictum is that the lonely lead lonely lives but do not fidget. Hence Miss Campendonck. Hence Lotte. Nationality has nothing to do with these things. For where do we belong anyway, when we don’t belong anywhere? We can’t remember where we came from. We can merely remember where we did our shopping.

  He had never quite been able to feel the self-possession of international people. Whereas Lotte had taken to transplantation quite well, and like an exotica, had shot up to the ceiling and then exfoliated as close to the out-of-doors as she could get. He admired her for that. What is it like up there?

  Americanization had suited her. It suits international talents, on the whole. From out of that hothouse, Braque had gotten an enhanced color, Leger commissions, Grosz a chance to wallow in sentiment, Stravinsky a way to go on, Hindemith a new orchestral texture, and those it ruined would have been ruined anyway. But Charlie had flopped. It could not be denied. He had not been able to adjust. He was too sophisticated for the New World, and too sincere for the Old. It had brought him success. But he couldn’t find his taproots any more, anywhere. He envied Lotte. He was a popular novelist. He provided other people’s dreams. Whereas she had become the dream itself.

  I feel a little lost, he said to an empty room, I feel a little lost.

  XXXV

  HE was now up to Chapter XXXV, which was no more than fate knocking at the door, as in Beethoven. Repeat the syllables. But what on earth do they mean; what on earth do people say?

  What kind of music did Turgenev prefer? We have almost no information on the matter, but if he liked music at all, probably French opéra comique, Glinka, Grétry, and since all arguments are circular, opéra comique again. In other words, Là ci darem la mano, with the shakes nearly turned.

  La Gazza Ladra did not come to Venice to see me after all. She has an engagment at the Fenice. A chance remark has brought her up to concert pitch, and she cannot help it, the vibration of that means she must shake me loose.

  “Bill’s back,” said Miss Campendonck.

  XXXVI

  BILL was a late addition to the private circus. He was none the less valuable for that. Where he had come from, God alone knew, but his crewcut defined him. A combination of trepanning and castration, the crewcut. It gave him that harmless drained look which is the look of the American male in the presence of the American female, Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan, Goethe’s drainage projects at the end of Faust, or no.

  He was a male Miss Campendonck. Poor Miss Campendonck. No wonder she was a voice and nothing more.

  XXXVII

  LOTTE flowed smoothly up to Bill. Unlike Charlie, he had no barbs, only the sockets where they should have been, which is in some ways worse. But he was a cheerful soul. He was firm with himself about that.


  She did not ask him how Amsterdam had been. She knew better. Instead of asking, how did it go, she asked how will it go, which interested him more. She envied him the professional nature of his private life, which must have its trade secrets, like any other profession. Whereas all the discipline in her life was merely amateur.

  This appearance in Berlin, for which Mondorf was to be the warm-up, was important to her for reasons she had not told Charlie. She wanted to extract applause from a ghost. It is the one noise ghosts never make, but we always try to extract applause from the ghost of what we used to be, even so. The face we search for was once our own.

  Bill would pull her through. He always did. So in this case she trusted him, not Charlie.

  XXXVIII

  BILL was a pianist. More than that, he was a jazz pianist. More than that, he was a white jazz pianist. Therefore his manner was a mixture of apology that he was not a Negro and eagerness that perhaps people he met might be. It is thus with all minorities: they disguise themselves as each other. As an out-and-out, if antimacassar, homosexual, Bill always made a point of using the White lavatory in bus stations, and if it was too late to be a Negro himself, at least he had acquired one of the racial skills. It made him the perfect support for female roles, which hers was. He was not a problem, exactly, but she did worry about him. She always kept police money in her purse, just in case.

  If he had not played the piano so much, he would have been quite muscular. But as it was, sincerity and Chopin, and a dash of Bugs Berrigan besides, had made his chest too narrow. Hence these trips to Amsterdam (Americans are so exciting) and Taormina (Americans are primitive, but grateful, and they pay). His favorite authors were Truman Capote (whom he did not read), Tennessee Williams (in the movie version), and von Clausewitz (a name he had picked up somewhere). However, as an accompanist, and a bright arranger, he was fine.

  “Shall I sing it in English or French?” she asked.

  “In English,” said Bill. “It’s the new French. Nobody likes it much, but it has glamour, so they try to keep up. Next, I suppose, it will be Swahili or Chinese.”

  Swahili, Lotte was quite content to leave to Eartha Kitt, but Chinese interested her. Like us, they are the second oldest race. The first oldest race, apart from being a grammatical impossibility, is unknown.

  “Give it that old hound dog beat,” said Bill. “But give it a spaniel brilliance, too.”

  Lotte didn’t care for spaniels. “A beagle hound?”

  “Perfect. A good beagle costs 240 on the hoof. Give it style.”

  She gave it style. She liked working with Bill. He knew exactly how much nonsense to inject when you began to stiffen up.

  XXXIX

  MISS Campendonck came out of the sitting room, which she was using as a study.

  “What are you going to do about it?” she asked.

  “Do about what?”

  “It isn’t my position to say. But when you want the pieces picked up, I’ll be here.”

  Damn her! Lotte searched in the dressing table mirror for reassurance, but it wasn’t there. She could see too much of the empty room behind her.

  In addition to the games, there were the phrases. They came out regularly, when you least expected them to, like the bad weather figure in a weather clock. “A short wait between planes,” was one. “Take the next plane out,” was another. “Fiddlededee, a merchant prince,” was a third. You could never be quite sure what they meant, but you could be sure what emotional key they established. Charlie had a vivid imagination. If you were tuned in properly, you could get visual reception only too clearly. She had seen most of them.

  “Take the next plane out,” was sullen, but majestic. You saw the plane actually rising. The gentleman speaking to the stewardess was making his escape, though he wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He had just foiled both the police and a scheming wife. “A short wait between planes,” was sadder. You sat there surrounded by bundles, it seemed you had been there forever, trying to catch the announcements, which were in three languages, all unintelligible. Either you had just missed your plane, or the flight was canceled, or else it was postponed until seven, which left you at a loose end but without time to go into town. “Fiddlededee, a merchant prince,” on the other hand, was gayer, almost in the mood of Satie, and ironic wistful. One had caught a glimpse of that fur-hatted gentleman from time to time.

  Lotte had her own set. Charlie had never noticed them.

  “What dreadful thing have they done to the beautiful international adventuress?” was one. It was uttered under the dryer, or when someone was late to lunch. “The Astonished Heart” was another. Actually “The Astonished Heart” was a gesture used by Gertrude Lawrence during one of the tinnier emotional bits in a Noël Coward play, but since Gertrude Lawrence had been primarily a comedienne, it helped quite well with one’s own emotional bits, tinny or not. They were probably tinny, though.

  When she was tired, however, she tended to think in terms of lyrics and song titles. Such as:

  Young and Foolish

  Getting to Know You

  Ach, bedenken Sie, Herr Jakob Schmidt

  Ach, bedenken Sie, was man für dreissig Dollar kriegt!

  Dance Away the Night

  Un seul couvert, s’il vous plaît, James (even the famous often dine alone).

  (Meine Mutter war eine Weisse

  Sie sagte oft zu mir:

  “Mein Kind, verkauf dich nicht

  Für ein paar Dollarnoten, so wie ich es tat

  Schau dir an, was aus mir geworden ist.”

  [I have a run in my stockings. They were very expensive. They came from Havana.]

  Wunderbar (it is wonderful to meet again, shall we ever forget those nostalgic moments we only think now we had then? At the time they were hell).

  And at least fifty others.

  When she was not tired, she did her thinking for herself and said as little as possible.

  At the moment, being tired, she was not thinking. It wasn’t until after she had stopped that she realized she had been humming After You’ve Gone.

  Treacherous things, popular songs, because it is the subconscious that hums them, not we. Therefore they must tell us things we do not want to know, things that will happen next. Immediately, as other people cross their fingers, she sang one and a half choruses of “I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.” Blackface always helped.

  Evil, oh yes I’m Evil,

  Evil-hearted me.

  A Libby Holman song. Libby Holman had certainly been extremely good, it was a pity she did not sing any more. But then, probably she didn’t have to.

  Meanwhile, unless she hurried, the glamorous international adventuress would be late for dinner, and Charlie hated it if your arrival coincided with the melon balls in sour cream.

  All the same, Miss Campendonck was always right. So doubly damn her!

  Dreissig Dollar!

  Dreissig Dollar.

  Ach, bedenken Sie, Herr Jakob Schmidt.

  XL

  HERR Jakob Schmidt, totally unaware that he was a typical non-Aryan of the blond, Nordic type, was feeling restless. The thing in his mouth was not a badly chewed Havana cigar, but a banana, which he was just finishing. It was a not quite ripe banana with a peculiarly gorgeous skin, which now lay on his plate with all the self-satisfied vulgarity of a discarded yellow dogskin glove. Charlie looked at it fondly.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s go back to my beach.”

  By “my beach” he meant the river. Charlie’s rights were riparian, not pelagic, but of that he seemed unaware. “Let’s run away.”

  If only one could, she thought. Instead one merely went to the end of one’s run, changed the placards, and came obediently back. She shook her head.

  Charlie pouted. He really wanted that day in the country. He saw it wet and green. No doubt his own work had been going badly. He wanted refreshment somewhere else. In Turgenev people always went to the country, though it had to be
admitted, that, like their creator, they got away when they could.

  “Have you ever considered the simple, polychrome garden gnome?” he asked.

  It was not a good effort, but who can be amusing all the time? He merely wanted someone to curl up with and chuckle with about that appalling monster, oneself. Charlie, she supposed, had given up. And if you have given up, what you need is continuous change, the same face, and a spare bedroom.

  He’d never found it.

  XLI

  I WOULD like to be free of this life I lead, thought Charlie, but I cannot stand the silence. And so I am so absurdly grateful to see Lotte every year or two. And a few, a very few, other people for a little while. At least they make me feel wanted, so long as I remember not to stay too long.

  The whole world was like that. It was just that the others never let on, and so half-persuaded themselves and you that they were different.

  I am selfish. I like to be alone in the daytime. But in the evening one wants company. So now that it is evening, no doubt it is unseemly at my age, but I clutch for what company I can get. I bait my trap. And why not? Even the hardiest soul tires of sleeping pills, in time.

  In her bedroom, Lotte was just taking hers. She seldom did. Usually someone in the same house, sleeping, was quite enough. But now the little company was back, she had lain awake too long and needed one. How does Charlie manage, she wondered, this late at night?