I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  If it had been Vittorio? Why do I let myself be dominated by this clinging man? Fate of the big, tough woman? I’m just bashful. I’m still a little girl. I still think no other man would look at me. She sighed.

  Downstairs, Stephen was fuming, fidgeting, waiting for her with his accounts and his plans for Anna’s return. She got up and took one of her benzedrine pills. She took more and more of them; not to faint, weep, collapse from overwork and excitement. They did her no harm. She was strong enough to take anything. She went to the window, hearing footsteps and there she saw Madame Suzanne crossing the courtyard. She hailed her, ‘I’ll join you. Hang on!’

  Putting on a thin jacket, she ran downstairs, all merriment, smiles. She sailed past Stephen, rushed out into the courtyard and took Suzanne’s arm.

  ‘I’m walking home with you. Let’s go to a café for half an hour.’

  ‘Emily!’ Stephen called.

  She said laughing, ‘I’m taking a walk’; and to Suzanne, ‘Like a rat in a trap, I am.’

  ‘Emily!’

  ‘He’s scared! He thinks I got away from him. I never take a walk. I explain my every move. I’m a prisoner of sentiment.’

  Suzanne took her arm, ‘Come, walk a bit of the way. But you’ll be tired.’

  She laughed, ‘I’ll find a taxi somewhere. I don’t care when I get home. Isn’t there somewhere we can go?’

  Suzanne had to visit her invalid sister, then get home to the apartment she was getting ready for Christy. Emily was irritated. Here was a woman she paid a big sum to monthly. Christy was going to pay her full board, lodging and part of her furniture. Christy alone was paying Suzanne more than the average worker’s salary, in American money. She laughed lightly however, saying, ‘There he sits, a man with light employment as a husband. Oh, well, I guess it’s not so light being my husband. Like a querulous wife with his hand-out, and a poisonous tongue accusing me of waste, when who makes the money?’

  ‘Let’s talk of something else. Here you are taking a walk,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘Thank God. That stone pile weighs me down. How is it, every time I move I drag mountains with me to suffocate me? Stones, debts. Why can’t we live simply? Oh, well—once a sucker always a sucker. I’ll never get what I wanted. Do you know what I thought as a girl when I wanted to be a great writer? I thought, then, at long last, all the men would run after me, as a bonus you understand, crowd round my door, stand in the courtyard, all the morning with bouquets and in tophats. Of course, Stephen did. Poor lamb.’

  ‘Let’s talk of something else.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Let’s talk of Vittorio. I wrote him a letter. I don’t know his address. I don’t know his private life. I haven’t heard from him. Where is he?’

  ‘I think he’s in Rome. I saw it in the paper.’

  ‘He’s in Rome. And I want him here!’

  ‘Why?’ asked Suzanne drily, looking at the bounding, rosy woman.

  ‘Why did you bring such strange people round me? Aren’t there others?’

  ‘Why are they strange?’

  ‘They never have time to see you. They’re such bores. Philistines in a way. No one must laugh because they were in the Resistance. Too damn serious. Heroes. Faugh! But Vittorio’s magnificent. He knows the world has two sides. Oh, I understand him and he understands me.’

  ‘He’s going to Switzerland. He’ll be there for a week about the end of June. There’s a cultural congress on. Only I don’t know if he’ll be allowed to stay the week. Petty little police everywhere. He gets in and out invisibly.’

  ‘Oh, if I could go to Switzerland. But we have to wait on Anna.’ After a moment she said, ‘Is he married?’

  ‘He was married; but his wife died in concentration camp. Just a bore.’

  ‘Oh, lord, I’m sorry,’ said Emily with tears in her eyes. Then she said, ‘He showed me her photograph the first day he came but I didn’t know enough French then. Poor Vittorio. So he’s a widower.’

  Suzanne did not answer at once. Then she began to talk about Vittorio’s loyalty to his wife, his long passion for another woman, a lifelong connection with an infamous Roman society woman. And now a young girl—

  Emily said nervously, ‘Oh, heck? I suppose so. But he’s so ugly.’

  Suzanne laughed at this, ‘I know a beautiful society woman who wanted to marry him ever since the liberation; and he wanted to marry her, but he gave her up.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Emily sullenly.

  ‘She belongs to the most corrupt society of Rome and Paris. How could she reform? He had to give her up. He sacrificed his passion to his work.’

  ‘But he’s so gay, so exuberant!’

  ‘Well, everyone weeps in private. Like you. And works hard to forget it. Like you.’

  ‘Yes, like me. Oh, I’m glad to be here. To understand myself,’ Emily thoughtfully said.

  ‘They scratched and blew up and smashed his face. The charm they could not take away.’

  ‘Oh, this is frightful,’ said Emily.

  Suzanne laughed, ‘You know you wouldn’t marry Vittorio. Leave your country, and Stephen, your husband’s family, the children! Would you?’ she enquired lightly.

  ‘Suzanne, you despise me. You’re right. I’m not good enough for Vittorio. But then he loved that degenerate woman. She was good-looking, I suppose?’

  ‘Extraordinarily beautiful. She’s a friend of mine. The strangest thing of all is, she’s been married in the meantime; and she still wants to marry Vittorio as he is.’

  Emily began to sob, ‘Here I am out in the cold. No one loves me. Suppose I lose my grip, my market? Did this Devil Dame, who was so cold and bestial, have any money?’

  ‘Her family was ruined. She lived off men.’

  ‘Good God. How could he? He so pure!’

  ‘Vittorio must have seen something else in her.’

  ‘This love of Vittorio for this cold devil is terrible. It kills me.’

  Suzanne sighed. Emily besieged her with a hundred more questions. She wanted to walk and walk, to frighten Stephen. But when she left Suzanne, though she hesitated in her thoughts, her steps hastened homewards. She was soon as the gate. He was pale and serious.

  ‘Did you have something to say to Suzanne?’

  ‘I need more exercise! Look at my figure. I’m like a pig.’

  ‘You ought to take up gymnastics.’

  She burst out laughing, ‘Think of me in a tunic! Tomorrow I start serious dieting. Dear Anna will be back in a few days and that means more stuffing. I shall be like a pig when we get to Switzerland and won’t be able to puff up the mountainsides. A typical American Middle-Western Mamma, with a beer-barrel waist, overstuffed dewlaps, panting about looking for an ice-cream soda. I’m going to become sylphlike. Sylphlike and vicious, then men will run after me.’

  ‘What have I been doing the last ten years?’ enquired Stephen plaintively.

  ‘Let’s eat! This is my last meal before martyrdom,’

  Stephen said he wouldn’t bother her with the accounts. She had to get to bed. They had to get to work early tomorrow. They had to get the serial in, revised. Anna was coming within a few days, another set of ten lost days. ‘Not to mention the days you always waste beforehand getting ready; all quite unnecessary and lost on her. She doesn’t know a house is even in disorder; so she doesn’t know what it takes to get it ready.’

  ‘Oh, well, everyone likes attention.’

  ‘Mamma would like a bank balance better. She’s a typical small-minded rich woman.’

  ‘Well, let her help us out.’

  ‘Why should she?’

  They quarrelled bitterly. She asked why should she entertain a millionairess. She’d borrow or steal and go off to Italy or Switzerland by herself. ‘Or if you want me, borrow from Anna. Don’t sing me your sad, sweet song about pride. Tell her I’ll pay her back. I’ll give her an IOU and I’ll honour it. When I can. Why not? When Anna or some Tanner or Fairfield or any other Jiminy Crickets come here I have to entertain them
like princes. We have to go out with them to restaurants where you can’t eat under four thousand francs a head, to put it at a small figure. Four or five of us, as much as a worker gets in a month.’

  ‘What have workers to do with it? Anna is not trying to live like workers, neither are we. All right, hate Anna and hate me, but don’t give me that about workers’ salaries. Because we don’t give a damn about them or we wouldn’t be living like this.’

  ‘No. I know. We’re rotten to the core. We’re not fit to mix with people like Suzanne and Vittorio.’

  ‘Oh, my stars! Again!’

  They had a cruel quarrel. While Stephen sat in an armchair draping his legs and arms in various ways, like a human spider, Emily walked about, went in and out, put a big platter of food in front of Stephen. He ignored it and she cleaned up the platter herself. After that, she drank several glasses of beer, ate half a box of the best French chocolates. She told him she was sick of him, his mother, his phony sister.

  Emily said, ‘She’d go to jail, face sentence of death just to get in the news as the red queen of the revolution. Don’t I know? People risk death, climb to the top of the Empire State, just to annoy or get in the news. Well, I’ll have a fine funeral, they say.’

  Emily walking about, eating and drinking, laughed. Stephen said he wished he had the guts to do it. She said, ‘Well, that’s not such a bad idea. If you’re such a pill. Well, OK, go ahead, take poison or the big jump, what do I care? I used to make my living out of types like that. There are all kinds of ways of committing suicide, did you know? I used to know them all, some are quite ingenious. I believe some of them think up ingenious ways, so they’ll be sure to get in the papers. You can take it that all suiciders are neurotics with a publicity hunger. I know a man went to Spain to fight in the civil war and it was suicide.’

  ‘Fred,’ muttered Stephen. ‘He ran right into the shooting.’

  She burst out crying. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Stephen.

  She wiped her tears aside with both hands, ‘Oh, baloney. I’m a bunk artist. Putting on a scene. When they come back they’re misfits; so it’s suicide either way. Not for all. Look at Vittorio! He has everything against him but he’s all over the lot fighting. He’s lecturing in Rome, lecturing in Switzerland—’

  Stephen said, ‘Ah, that’s why we’re going to Switzerland.’

  She turned on him a vapid smile which grew; she flushed and burst out laughing, ‘After all, Stephen, if we were there, we could hear him, see what he’s got. So far all we’ve seen is a salon monkey.’

  ‘The simple fact is he’s a man of tremendous ability and he fascinates women with his male energy and I have none of that. No woman ever went to Switzerland or anywhere else to hear me speak.’

  She sat down complacently, ‘Oh, I went to Philadelphia to hear you speak. And that girl who used to follow you around pawing you.’

  He shrieked with a nervous shudder, ‘No girl ever pawed me!’

  ‘She did so! I used to wait and then sail down the aisle, or roll down the aisle, and she fell back palpitating. Obviously I could have laid her out with one blow of my ham fist!’

  Stephen’s mouth twitched.

  ‘I used to sit in the back—I have long-sight anyway—and I could hear you all right and I used to watch their backs, I’d look along the rows and see their open mouths drinking you in; and I’d wait for the ohs and ahs, swimming around the Party silk-stocking, oh-ah! And then Red Mike would appear. They couldn’t get over it, such a nice man and Emmie with the fat red face. I heard it said that you had an Electra complex, not electric, Electra, not electoral.’

  They both laughed. Stephen got up and kissed her, ‘You’re a wonderful girl, I’ll kill any gut that takes you away from me. If the Germans didn’t get Vittorio, I will.’

  ‘You’re crazy. I don’t like Vittorio. He’s plain, he’s repulsive.’

  ‘Yeah! I noticed.’

  Five minutes later she was eagerly telling him about the corrupt society woman and Stephen deduced that this was the reason she wanted to slim ‘to cut out that Roman candle’. He urged, ‘Stay as you are. I like you that way; and if Vittorio doesn’t, he’s not your man. You couldn’t marry Vittorio under false pretences; you know yourself that three weeks later you’d blow up into a captive balloon.’

  But domestic winds blew harsh and cold during the next few days while Emily was dieting. The children, the servants, Suzanne and her friends reproached her with such excess. Stephen raved. She kept it up. She caught a cold, became very ill, with aches, swellings in her head, heart palpitations and she moaned, ‘I can’t go on like this. This life will finish me. I can’t keep the whole world on my shoulders. My book may sell but it’s you who’ll enjoy the profits. I won’t be here.’

  They tore the serial to pieces paragraph by paragraph, word by word. She reproached him, cursed her choice of him, her own weak will. She wasn’t making money and she was going down-hill.

  ‘Talent is a thing that doesn’t stand still. You’ve only just got it by the tail if you’ve got it. If you let go the slightest, it’s away from you and off to the woods. You’ll never catch it again. How many in Hollywood found that out? I’ve let go, Stephen. It’s got away from me. It’s off in the glens ferreting around having a wild time and I’m here without it, lost. It’s your fault. And it’s my fault.’

  Anna’s visit approached and Emily began to recover and made her usual preparation. The month of June passed by in this trouble. Paris was lovely. Emily dictated her revisions from her bed. A chapter sent off by airmail at the beginning of Emily’s illness had been accepted by one of her magazines and though it was only for $500, the Howards cheered up. They needed $30,000, but it was a promise.

  While getting ready for Anna they had a note from a friend, Henri Villeneuve, a French writer who had gone to Hollywood during the occupation and done well there. He had been laughed at a little, for saving his money; but now, as soon as it was possible, he had returned to Paris and bought there a small apartment in the rue Bonaparte. Henri was about Stephen’s age, forty. Immediately upon returning to France, Henri joined the Party. He lived with his new wife and their small child in these small quarters, wrote all day and night for the Party press and endeavoured also to write novels as well as making translations. Hongree, the Howards called him. Hongree had done very well in Hollywood, quickly adapting himself; and now, because he had gone back to his former life, he did very badly, in money. They asked him to the party for Anna. But first he insisted they must visit him at his apartment. They were to call before lunch. He was unable to invite them, as yet, to eat there, because of the shortage of goods; but they had with him, they told Suzanne, ‘a sweet children’s drink, a mixer they call San Rafael.’ They then had him to dinner. They had known him in Hollywood, a well-paid successful writer. Hongree was to come to dinner with his pretty little dark-haired Viennese wife, who was twenty years younger than he. Though he was still a radical and working in the Party, they thought he had enough savoir-faire, knew enough about American ways, not to irritate Anna; and they invited him for the big afternoon party. Vittorio was invited to all their dinners, all their cocktail parties, all their evenings and to private dinners, too. But it happened that Vittorio had to turn down their afternoon party. He had to leave for Italy. Hongree had invited them to dinner by this; and to get ahead of him, they decided to fill in his vacant evening with the Villeneuves.

  Stephen said, ‘At least Hongree has a daily woman and a European wife and he’s French, so he’ll probably have something to eat. It’s too much for me to face indigestion for the sake of comrades.’

  They were disappointed however, and laughed lugubriously on the way home. Hongree had not had cocktails but had served two sweet drinks, the ladies’ sweet drink called porto and a sweet mixer, Italian vermouth. They had to take their choice of these. Naturally he was saving money: but after all, for a company dinner!

  Emily said to Stephen, ‘And probably up since the crack of dawn wit
h the entire family, the cleaning-woman and the concierge to make these titbits.’

  They had vegetable soup, called saint-Vincent, lamb’s brain fritters, roast pork, tomato salad and a home-made rice and cream cake covered with chocolate and whipped cream, but the whipped cream was confectioners’ cream. They were offered, but did not take, the national bread, yellow; and the national coffee, bean. With this they were offered two bottles of poor, sour red wine. Emily was very angry. ‘But if that’s all they had, why did they ask us? If they want to even accounts with us, they can’t do it with vinegar.’

  Emily found it hard to understand how a man who had succeeded in Hollywood and was a leading man in the Party in France, could behave in such an awkward uncivilized manner. ‘He was in Hollywood for years—didn’t he learn anything? But of course he always was niggardly: they never gave parties in Hollywood, they had a bad reputation for that; they were mean.’

  However, when they got home and had something to eat and drink, Emily’s natural good humour rose and she saw it was funny enough as a episode. Hongree returning from ‘Hollywood luxe’ to wear a frayed clerk’s suit in Paris of all places’. His wife, apparently dressed in the remnants of an old rose brocade curtain, was sitting on a seat which was really a travelling trunk covered with a hand-made, stuffed cover and on this was the same brocade or something very alike. Perhaps both dress and cover had once been a bed cover? The kind of thing they had in old-time Vienna? And what was in the trunk? For they showed them: old family heirlooms in the shape of pounds and pounds of heavy curtain lace, miles of hand-worked embroidery, several pairs of hand-embroidered curtains and everything old, rich and out-of-date. ‘Her hope-chest, you could see,’ said Emily screaming with laughter: ‘musty old Vienna saved from the barbarians.’ Madame in rose brocade sewn together with trembling hands for the rich Howards, tossing together lamb’s-brain fritters, things they could scarcely touch (‘I’m glad Christy was not there, with his sensitive taste,’ said Emily shuddering), and roasting pork. ‘It was just like a fine old Harlem get-together, black and white unite and bite.’ And then the hit of the evening, the rice-cake affair with melted chocolate on it, mushy and gluey. ‘And we’re in Paris and they’re in Paris!’ They compared it with the real French desserts they had had in Véfour and the Tour d’Argent; and even, after all, compared with the desserts Fernande made for them; even the ones Emily made.