Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

  No doubt Charlie had been asleep hours ago. So had the little company.

  Though Lotte didn’t have many what she would call friends, she only felt at home, which is to say secure, when she was staying with one of them. She, too, was careful never to stay too long, but such visits were essential to her. She planned her life around them. In between times she had Miss Campendonck and the little company. Not that Miss Campendonck was a friend exactly. She was more halfway between a conscience and a maiden aunt, and when one is a child, a maiden aunt is a wonderful thing, who stuffs you with sweets; bullies you lovingly; unlike a parent, never wants revenge; and shares your basic irresponsibility. One may grow up and play all the other roles oneself, but one can never be a maiden aunt, and never have one again. Miss Campendonck was the next best thing.

  But here she was playing maiden aunt herself, even so, against all probability. She must admit that she’d never had any idea, as a child, how wistful that role felt.

  XLII

  HOWEVER, even maiden aunts can be inexorable.

  Miss Campendonck’s schedule was ruthless and explicit. One cup of tea (you’re too old for coffee) in bed. No cigarettes. Then breakfast in the sitting room: one coffee only (apparently if you can prove you can still sit up, you’re young enough for coffee again, one cup, that is), orange juice (tomato juice if the oranges weren’t fresh), one egg, poached or boiled, never fried, one rusk (or zwieback), no butter, and as much fruit as you can eat. Then, and this was the reward she held out, like Athene giving prizes, one cigarette, and after that, work.

  Obediently, Lotte worked. But not this morning. This morning she wanted to be irresponsible just once more, and she had an excellent excuse: Bill had a hangover. Goodness knows where he had gotten it, Luxembourg City perhaps, but then Bill would know where to get it. He always did. He was nice but lonely. Whenever he found himself at a loose end he got drunk. He didn’t mean to, but he did. When they’re left to themselves, they do.

  Lotte listened to Miss Campendonck fret, took her opportunity, and swooped out to freedom. It was Friday, wasn’t it? On Friday she’d promised to go back with Charlie to the Moselle. It had been Thursday, but never mind.

  So they went.

  It was like running away. It was what they had done sometimes when he was in Beverly Hills. It was what she always did when life got to be too small for her. She jumped in the car and drove out of it. Here, it was to the Moselle. At home, to Malibu.

  “Honi soit qui Malibu,” said Charlie, who had taken those drives with her and seemed to remember them just then, as she did, or maybe he recognized the posture appropriate to them. “Honi soit qui mal y but. What do you suppose the damn name means, anyway? Evil to him who drinks here: a motto for a waterhole. It was a ranch once, wasn’t it?”

  Yes, it had been a ranch, patrolled for a long time, with rifles, to keep the movie people out. But they’d gotten in anyway. So now it was only an upper-middle-class slum, though it still fascinated her as it always had. She didn’t know why.

  Lotte had been brought up in the Mark Brandenburg, which is to say, Europe’s sandbox, and had only gone to the coast one summer at seven, and later, as an anxious starlet. Nowadays, as far as Berlin went, the ocean was in Russian hands. But California had taught her to miss the sea. When the worse came to the worst, you could always drive out to it there, to that simple, saurian, and helplessly archaic coast. The evening walls move in. The cliffs crumble into the water.

  But still, when we are in trouble, we go to the sea. Even if the surf is only an exhausted ravel, it revives us, all the same. So we go back to the shore. Venus Anadyomene goes to see where she came from. It is a little like the Baltic, the Pacific there, heavy with salt, flaccid, a little tired, but much, much bigger.

  Charlie hadn’t liked the Pacific at all.

  The first roadhouse had amused him, so had his first drive-in, milkshakes, hamburgers, and a chromium-plated engine on the hot rod parked next to them, but he hadn’t felt easy there. He didn’t feel easy anywhere, outside of a luxury hotel. That was a pity. As some Jesuit had once said, the baroque finally expired in California, between 1775 and 1824. It was a true remark, except that it had never died. It always came back as a fetch.

  But though it was baroque, it didn’t look baroque, and what Charlie preferred was appearances. It was the same with everything. She liked to face the uninterrupted sea, which is to say, the unknown, so long as she could do so indoors, through a picture window or a windshield. It let her out, that view. Whereas Charlie didn’t like to admit to the existence of, let alone watch, the unknown. There are two ways to face a view. Charlie’s was to long for the country, like Amy Lowell or Madame Blavatsky, have himself driven there, and then sit with his back to it, smoking a cigar.

  The cliffs fell into the sea. The permanent residents came and went. But the sea remained. She had always found that reassuring, even while it frightened her. She had been in America too long. Europe made her uneasy. It was more civilized than America. It was wonderful to be back, always. And yet, it lacked a view. The Moselle did well enough. It was, in fact, discreetly beautiful. The Mediterranean, too, was everything one said of it. But Great Pan was dead, and she couldn’t help it any more: she was a double alien. In the land she had fled from, she saw the land she had fled to, and missed the vast impersonal heliotrope distances of Cortez’s idle sea. It had a rhythm of its own, a rhythm she had driven to so often, through the neon squalors of Los Angeles, alone, for reassurance, that now this string quartet Europe did not interest her any more, or at any rate, not in the old way. It had not that silent imperceptible ripple of life that comes to us from a world larger than we are, which is to say, from the Orient shore, to tell us yes, it is sad, but we will be reborn again, so let us go carefully, for what we do now, is what we will be then.

  Like most people when they’re driving alone, Lotte made up little songs about nothing in particular, while the wheels went round. She was not alone now, but she trusted Charlie, so she tried one now:

  All she ever got,

  When you put her on the spot,

  Was nothing in particular.

  R-r-riding up and down

  With a puzzled little frown

  On the Lisbon funicular

  Between the upper [it was pure barrelhouse]

  And the lower

  Town.

  Charlie smiled, and thought that over. He had a smothered singing voice, but the effect was charming, perhaps because of that:

  All she ever did,

  Though she nearly flipped her lid

  When you asked her

  In particular,

  Was r-r-riding up and down

  With a puzzled little frown

  On the Lisbon funicular

  Between the upper

  and lo-ho hower

  Town.

  “I don’t think it even has a funicular,” he said. “It seems to me it was just an elevator in an openwork tower.”

  “Were you ever in Lisbon?”

  “That’s where we sat it out while we waited for our American visas, in ’41. During the war, you know. But I must say the cooking was good.” Pulling the car over and stopping, he went round and ceremoniously handed her out.

  In a good mood he was apt to do anything, as long as there were no strangers to watch. Now he solemnly goose-stepped into the wood. She followed and found him leaning against a tree.

  “That was before my time, of course, but I must say it hurts. It must have been hell on my father’s legs. It would be nice, for once, to have the parade without the war.” For no reason at all, he burst into …

  Onward Christian Soldiers,

  Marching as to War …

  “Where on earth did you pick that up?”

  “In America. I always study the local folk art. Shall I do the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ next? Or shall I goose-step again? It’s wonderful for the stomach muscles, you know. I could even sing ‘Deutschland über Alles.’”

&nbs
p; “If you like,” she said. But apparently he had decided to give up song. He led the way into the wood, at a place where they had not entered it before.

  They came suddenly on a Hansel and Gretel hut, beside what had once been a railroad siding though the rails were gone, only the mound of the track-bed remaining. It was a neatly kept cottage. The half timbering had been pickled; the plaster between was primrose with calcomine; and there were red geraniums and lobelia and michaelmas daisies in precise beds behind the small fence of the even smaller yard.

  Lobelia and red geraniums were no-account flowers. They symbolized public parks and genteel poverty. You never saw them in the Hawaiian gardens of California. She quite saw everybody’s point. They were not costly flowers. But she liked them, all the same.

  “You know,” said Charlie, “I saw one thing near Lisbon I’ll never forget. It was on a country road, at a railroad crossing like this, except that the garden was enormous with sunflowers all turned my way. The barrier went down, and a small man came out with a shiny bugle and played reveille. In about five minutes a Wild West train went by, sedately. When it had gone by the little man played taps. Then he raised the barrier and on we went. It was touching. Of course one couldn’t live here, but sometimes, when I’m depressed, I wouldn’t mind being the person who does live here.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  An old weather witch of a woman came out of the front door, glowered at them, and went right back in again.

  There seemed nothing to say to that. They went on to the meadow. It had changed the last two days. White daisies stood about in a little white crowd, in a green paseo of their own. A blackbird was a yellow beak plopped down among them, like a nightmare by Goya, or the Great Roc itself. Since there were no worms, and the flowers went right on talking among themselves as though nothing had happened, in a minute or two it got itself back into the air, though with difficulty, and disappeared.

  The river was the same. The little boat was the same. Only the flowers were new.

  “There is a pretty boy on the other side of the river, and here I am, without a boat,” said Charlie. “It’s from the Arabic. I’m afraid I can’t remember which Arab. I didn’t know they had rivers.”

  “There’s nobody there at all.”

  “I can see for myself,” said Charlie, faced the river and began to chant:

  Quis color ille vadis, seras cum propulit umbras

  Hesperus et viridi perfudit monte Mosellam.

  Tota natant crispis iuga motibus et tremit absens

  pampinus et vitreis vindemia turget in undis.

  or:

  Cold exile is no man’s pleasure.

  Living far from his familiar hills,

  Forcing roots in unproductive soil

  Without hope for his posterity.

  There is a place cool as the Moselle,

  But it has not the same name or nature,

  For old age sifts the barren soil

  For a black seed no man culls.

  “Ausonius,” he said, with satisfaction.

  “That’s not Ausonius,” Lotte told him, just to find out whether it was or not.

  “I didn’t say it was. However it’s my Ausonius. I’m a poet but I never publish. I’m preserving my integrity. I suppose even the ugliest flower must have a bee somewhere. Like Jupien and Proust.

  “Whatever are you talking about?”

  “Myself, probably. What do people ever talk about? After a while you get tired of the Cold War. So you fall back on something warmer.” But he was still in a cheerful mood.

  She left him in it and went down to the bank. She had never been a great one for rivers herself. They had a tendency to flow too fast. But this one was certainly agreeable.

  Charlie wandered over to her. “Of course Ausonius was farther down the river. A lot of water has flown under the bridge since then. The bridge, in case you care, is at Trier. We might go there one day, just the three of us, and have a picnic at a really good restaurant. I know Paul would like that. He admires you a lot, but he’s shy.”

  She noticed the “three,” but to please him, she said yes. Unne could be left somewhere, she supposed. Because of course it wasn’t what Paul would have liked, it was what Charlie wanted, and she liked to please Charlie sometimes.

  “Saturday, then, before we give prizes,” said Charlie. “Trier’s a nice town, so they say. I’ve never been there.”

  Charlie had more junk jewelry on than usual. It caught the light as they turned to go, a ring, a heavy bracelet. They were of silver. He didn’t like gold. He only gave gold to people he didn’t like. Silver suggested Fortunatus, the silver age, the minor emotions, and so forth. So he preferred it. This idiosyncrasy was well known, and doubtless had saved him the expense of many a gigolo.

  This time it was she who felt like going into the wood first. She led the way. It was not difficult. The branches parted of themselves, to show the path, as branches do in the brothers Grimm. A small wood has as many dynamics and side chapels as the floor-plan of a baroque church. The trees are piers, the ceilings vary in height, the beeches arch overhead, the altars are absent, but one enclosed space where they should be opens out into another.

  “It was Alexander Pope,” said Charlie, “who wanted a cathedral made out of trees, pleached of course, it was the Augustan age, but at least alive.”

  They had been walking softly, for it was the sort of soft summer wood which interdicts the making of noise. Ahead of her she saw a glade.

  “There’s a garden statue, or something,” she said.

  And stopped where she stood.

  It wasn’t a garden statue. It was Paul and Unne, and they did not look in the least allegorical. Whatever they might be supposed to represent, what they were doing was explicit.

  They had not heard or seen her. She did not want Charlie to see them. She turned back. But he was right on top of her, and had had an excellent view. He did not even need his monocle. He turned around and went back the way they had come.

  Young lovers are not interesting to other people, only to themselves, but to come upon them, if we have outgrown all that but wish we hadn’t, can be appalling.

  “‘Pray, sir, by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round for the second time?’” he said.

  “What?” Lotte wasn’t listening. She had her own thoughts to listen to, and at the moment they roared.

  Charlie preferred the byways of literature to the highroads. He found it pleasant to saunter down them, undisturbed, while the lorries and heavy-duty critics whizzed by on the turnpike, from Dostoyevsky to Tolstoi, carrying a weighty load of critical apparatus and a charabanc full of overexcited Ph. D.s, followed by an ambulance and the matériel. What a lot of matériel they always needed.

  “It is a scene from Peacock,” he said. “The landscape gardener, who is an ass, says he adds to the picturesque and the beautiful a third element, which he calls the unexpected. ‘And pray, sir,’ says Mr. Milestone, ‘what do you call this element the second time round?’”

  But why explain? He felt suddenly withered. He had seen it before. Alas, these bits and pieces of cultural bric-à-brac, lightweight though they be, are all we have to pile against the door, when the frumious bandersnatch comes after us.

  “I wonder how the Magi felt,” he said, “when all the excitement of gift-giving was over, and they had to trudge empty-handed home? It’s not a scene you see on Christmas cards.”

  Lotte took his arm. But she didn’t want to see the expression on his face.

  XLIII

  THERE is a circus somewhere called Knoop’s Celestial Circus. I made it up. It’s a going concern now, but it used to be one of my games. I don’t write much any more, but I do still play games: the professional tapers off; the genius goes on.

  It is an unusual circus. Nobody knows where it comes from, or where it is going, but it may be pegged out in the meadow any time. Over the arch to the
midway is inscribed an Orphic hymn, copied from the lid of a cigarette case. I AM A STAR WANDERING ABOUT WITH YOU, AND FLARING UP FROM THE DEPTHS. Nobody knows what it means. It is found sometimes in waterlogged coffins, on the site of Sybaris.

  Some people are giving a party. They can’t stand it any more, because everyone thinks they are themselves guests. That’s one thing about being a host: you can run away, and no one will miss you. So taking the baby, they get in the car and flee. The road looks like an ordinary autobahn, but it turns out to be endless. Feeling sleepy, they pull off the tanbark and go to sleep.

  In the morning, George is still sleeping, that’s his name, George, when Eliza is wakened by the baby. It needs milk. In the distance she sees a cow, so she follows it. The cow goes down into a little glen, and there is the circus, set up, but abandoned. She goes back to rouse George, and since they don’t know where they are and the car won’t start, they move right in.

  It is not for some time after they have set up housekeeping that they notice the reason for the absence of exhibits. It is because they are themselves the exhibits. “Look,” says Eliza, “I’m a lion. I’m a man-eating lion,” and nips into a cage. At once the two of them appear in all the other cages. She is indeed a lion. He is indeed an ass. They are indeed nothing but trained animals, and not very well trained at that. Their whole life is a juggling act. When he sings in the shower George sounds like seals barking. The brown bears seem to play their bugles only because there is honey in the horn.

  Finally George and Eliza take the show on the road and wind up giving a benefit at an enormous sanatorium. It is Heaven. But the man at the gate isn’t St. Peter, he is the Marquis de Sade. If there is something wrong with you, you get to go in. The pleasures of the blest turn out to be nothing more than 4,000 bucks worth of psychiatry, the best treatment obtainable, if you qualify.

  “Nothing doing, George,” says Eliza. “There must be some other place. I didn’t bring my daughter up to be a has-been. Do you realize they might actually straighten her out in there?”