I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  She looked joyfully at Dolittle and Humphreys, both of whom were smiling, and at Fabia, who looked at her in curious thought, but not discontented with her.

  ‘I’m floating, don’t wake me up! But it is not a dream!’

  She briskly went away from them to tell the maid to bring round more drinks. She passed them on her way back and brought out, ‘Ah, well: I suppose—I know—I’m laughable. I know it’s nonsense. Perhaps shameful nonsense!’

  Fabia said, ‘Why is it? Don’t we all want to be happy? We have the right to be happy. I know what a relief it was when my aunt died and we got into the house; and then Austin got the job. I was jolly glad, I was really happy. I understand.’

  Emily had come back with another glass of brandy. ‘We—the world staggers about on the brink of war and war-in-peace, or even sudden doom, the end of the world, the sun blacked out for all, in peace. Paris may be a smoking ruin tomorrow morning. In God’s name, it’s shocking to be so happy, as if we were vegetables blooming because it’s spring. I know people are starving all over this thrice-damned city, the governments are either falling or getting into the clutches of the Marshall Plan or some other steel-jointed claw of the Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to ruin the western world—’

  Fabia stared at her, Douglas pulled his moustache, but Austin seemed much interested. She challenged them, ‘Well, it is so. In my country, Congress runs nothing but red scares to stampede the cowards. Just see how often the word red occurs in the New York Times index. That is an index. The lamp of Liberty is on the blink, there’s terror reappearing everywhere and the Great Fascist League is springing up fresh like grass from the mouths of a million innocent, martyred, doomed stinking bodies and my heart’s singing fit to burst because my husband got a job. A queer detail.’

  ‘It’s our right to rejoice, if that’s the state of the world,’ said Fabia.

  ‘Your life opens before you,’ said Austin sympathetically.

  Later, Emily, when alone with Humphreys, confessed that she was still haunted by worry from the old days. Their old friends and even Vittorio would now abandon them, say that they had shed their faith. Said she, ‘How can we bear the stinging brand? But we must live. We have not changed, we cannot change.’

  He seemed surprised, ‘But why worry about them? You have us.’ He smiled.

  ‘They are such a small part of the world. I know you hate to abandon the old troop, it’s like leaving school or the army, but that’s just a part of life. Do you respect their opinion so much? I don’t.’

  She said sharply, ‘Ah, tomorrow Austin, I must write to my old friends, to all who were in the movement with me and who still cling to me and I must tell them what I told you at dinner but in cold chilling terms. It’s an agreement between Anna and us.’

  He laughed and said quietly, ‘The pound of flesh!’

  ‘Not to leave them in the dark, tell everything. Anna wants it. To show her we’ve turned over a new leaf. How am I to do it? It’s a brutal, cruel, wrong thing to do. I lost nearly all my friends during the scandal and now—perhaps—I’ll lose all the others. I’ve got to write a letter of provocation. I’ll write it before I go to bed. Otherwise I’ll pass the night in the flames of hell-fire! I will anyway.’

  She burst out laughing and went to get herself another drink.

  Stephen came over to her, ‘Emily, don’t drink so much. Anna doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Anna! Is she going to be my bugbear?’

  She rolled away from him like a burly sailor, took the glass in both hands and took a big swallow. She went to Violet Trefougar with a glass for her in her hand and said, ‘Ha-ha!’

  ‘You’re happy tonight, I’m glad,’ said Violet Trefougar.

  Emily repeated, ‘Yes, I’m very happy, I’m deleerious with joy. I’m floating in an ocean of lilies. But Stephen!’

  He joined them.

  ‘Stephen, a thought just struck me! All this rudeness, callousness, cruelty, was perhaps organizational! Perhaps, Stephen, when you’re a talent-scout, the well-known Gaudeamus Press, they’ll remember you were their friend and they’ll come to you; bygones, bygones. You know the old byword: the sympathizers, the fellow-travellers get the brass bands and the big hands; the faithful get the kicks! We’re no longer faithful; it’s the bouquets and banquets for us now. Eh? Perhaps Vittorio will still be with us and all the others. Will we keep our cake and eat it too? After all, take the Resistance movement, why one of the biggest men in it, so Mernie Wauters says, went into it for the danger and the game, outwitting people he despised. No one would even talk to him nowadays with his automobile lined with white velvet, his house of Vita glass, his gold-plated bathroom and handmade flat silver and his mistress with cuffs of diamond and ebony! He’s a great heroic monster—’

  She stopped, envisaged him, opened her eyes and laughed, ‘What a glorious, gorgeous monster! And helped the Resistance too. Can we too perhaps enter the annals of the red register as gorgeous monsters, human, all-too-human, a bit of Lucullus and Petronius, a bit like the Medici or even just like poor Cicero, adoring the fine life; but still faithful in our hearts, dependable, marked down to help in the next Resistance. Well, really they must think a bit like that. Look at Madame Gagneux, Suzanne. Why she is so human that she is willing to admit that her favourite writers were mostly bastards during the occupation: and that courage is an everyday virtue in need and that it passes over you, leaving you a coward. And she understands all, not exactly forgives all, but does not condemn all.’

  ‘Every human being is a sort of monster, if you get to know them,’ said Violet Trefougar.

  Emily said, ‘Yes, yes, that is exactly how I feel. I must write sweetness and light, but I know too well what people are like. Vittorio, who seems so kind and who makes people love him at first sight, is cruel and indifferent. He doesn’t give a damn for you, you’re a pawn in his game, he plays catch-as-catch-can with you. All our dear ones in the USA at the first hint of disfavour fell off as if we were lepers. Why, if I were a leper I’d expect my friends to try to get me a doctor, or offer to go with me to a leper island, and with love and sorrow. But they didn’t. And now I’m going to be a damned soul, yes, to them, a damned soul. And not a letter will come, not a telephone call. And will the other side so much as take me to their bosom? She was a damn red, they’ll say, what was the matter with her? To hell with her! Eh? Damned! Double damned! Emily Wilkes Booth. Oh, come upstairs with me, darling. I’ve got to take one of my headache powders. Don’t let Stephen know. He’ll rage. He might tell Mamma. I’m depressed and agitated. This brings me no happiness. I talk of happiness, joy, and I am thinking, What unhappiness, oh, what terrible unhappiness. Life isn’t worth living.’

  ‘Go upstairs and take one of your headache powders, you’ll find some comfort in it,’ said Violet.

  ‘You are right. I owe you so much. I couldn’t do all I do, without them. Man as a chemical compound, eh? But that’s the me they’re going to know. Come on! Bring some drinks with us.’

  The two women went away and stayed away some time talking in Emily’s room. When they came back they were both happier. The guests were going now. Anna left. She was to have lunch with them the next day at Jean Casenave; after that would come only one more family dinner, this time at Uncle Maurice’s before she went back to the States.

  The Trefougars waited some time, for Violet wanted another word with Emily. They were going to Switzerland for a weekend and wanted the Howards to go with them. Emily begged Uncle Maurice to stay a bit longer and stay he did. He did not leave till two in the morning. Emily had been very excited and even noisy; soon the fatigue and excitement wore her down again. But she found out a good deal about the Humphreys couple. The high-strung, handsome finishing school wife had been a hellcat in her day, had run about the continent alone, got a job as a housekeeper with a middle-aged man, who tried to kill her with a hatchet; and so on. Now she lived only for the houses they lived in and for mild affairs with local men. Maurice did not know whether A
ustin was happy or not. He was a quiet man, smoked his pipe, walked his dog, said little, and did not mind changing consulates every year or two. Emily’s eyes sparkled.

  In the meantime, a fresh trickle of hope had started in her. She and Stephen would see Douglas Dolittle almost every day. Dolittle had many friends, they would be happy again. Paris was already full of interesting, liberal Americans, who lived well, had luxurious villas, apartments, went abroad, loved France, drank wine at dinner, had good cooks. Life again, thought Emily to herself, after the plague hospital. She felt she had impressed the melancholy, good-looking Dolittle; they might become fond of each other. ‘Oh, God, how I long for a real affection, a love, to which a political proviso is not attached.’ How long had they wasted their time treading mazes in no man’s land. She sat down with Stephen after the party for a breather and talked things over. They both felt released and softer towards each other.

  Emily wished they had Christy with them again: that would complete their happiness. She said to Stephen, ‘Our storms are over. Poor Christy suffered from them. I hope in a few months we can enchant him back again. We will all be different. It was a tearing-apart of ourselves. Now we are convalescent. What bliss! What a paradise! Eh, a real marriage at last: the voice that breathed o’er Eden, that earliest wedding day—oh, my heaven, what bliss!’

  She fell on Stephen’s neck.

  Stephen talked of practical things, too. He had to see his mother the next day about the actual conditions under which she would give or lend him the money. She had wanted to meet Dolittle and Stephen’s present friends.

  ‘As Anna says, you cannot get twenty-five to forty thousand dollars without a consideration. It’s fair enough, as Pegler would say. Henceforward I associate only with Dulles, Walter Lippmann, Truman, etc. But she has spoken to Dolittle: she is going through with it.’

  Stephen believed that Dolittle was delighted to have the support of a family like the Howards, even if the money was a comparatively small stake. Stephen was to be a partner.

  ‘I shall have my room, my desk, my secretary.’

  ‘And why not,’ said Emily. ‘Douglas is lucky to get a man like you. There are so many oddballs and deadbeats roaming around, opium-eaters of a sort, wanting to park their ragged ass in a publishing house, do anything to be the handmaids of literature. And you! He’s got someone right from the top of the tree.’

  ‘And when we really get started, we’ll take your books and mine and they’ll get translated, too.’

  ‘Thank heaven; and I can write what I want now,’ said Emily.

  Stephen frowned, ‘First, let’s get on our feet. I have managed to bring my family round and get them to respect me. Let’s not go wildcatting now. You have several money-books to finish. First things first.’

  Emily turned red. However she said, ‘Tomorrow, I must get off those letters Anna wants us to write.’

  Stephen thought it of no importance. Bad news could wait; also the curses of their former friends. Emily was restless, though; wanted to know the issue. Would even Mernie Wauters visit them now?

  ‘Why ever not? He’s a man of the world. Besides he likes our food and drink.’

  ‘Suzanne says that Mernie has had to do a lot of standing up for us, since the last visit of some character, sent especially from the USA to blacken us. Mernie has been faithful to us, she said, terribly decent and kind and warm. From him and Suzanne I learn that we never had any idea of what was really going on in this stupid inferno, fry’em and boil ’em business. Surely the people over there have something better to do than fry us on a pitchfork. Oh, I hate and despise them. And if it hadn’t been for Vittorio himself we would have never known what went on; and that there had been a frightful uproar among the great ones, that Cachin and Duclos and Togliatti and Palme Dutt and Harry Pollit had been warned of or knew of our taking part in a turmoil, over our miserable presences; and even our evening parties in Paris came up for discussion. Who would have guessed that such slight personages had international meaning? We’re the subject of an international conspiracy! And now because of our eminence we are in outer darkness. If only we had been nobodies, we could have disappeared and never been heard of again, led the quiet life. But because we were spotlighted, top names, we are therefore the worst traitors and fomenters of sedition and in general an international nuisance—Marxian reversals, eh? We could scarcely have got so much fame or notoriety if we had been faithful sheep.’

  Stephen said, ‘No more of it. Thank heaven it’s over. I shall never go down on hands and knees again to anyone. My novice days are over. I am now a democrat, a real one, anyone’s equal. I feel as if I’d been let out of a convent.’

  Emily said mechanically and sadly, ‘And I as if I had been let out of prison. My heavens, every word might be guilty, every action might bring you on the carpet. How did they invent in these days such a system of crime and punishment? They do nothing to make us want them and we must give up everything for them. So what if the age is decrepit; and eventually towards the year 3000 the world will be communist? My long-mouldy bones will have reached the democracy of dust. In my life I will have been tarred and feathered and ridden the rail for nothing.’

  ‘Well, it is over. What is there to cry about?’

  But she was crying. Large tears were welling from her eyes of their own accord—she sat in her chair, the picture of misery, round, rosy and not crying of herself, but with the regret, remorse, bafflement welling out of her, a profound sorrow.

  ‘What is it? What is it?’

  She said humbly, ‘It’s to be free of that overhanging sensation—I guess. It’s the sadness that once we were loved by people we respected.’

  She sat drooping, drowned in tears.

  ‘Don’t cry, Emily. I can’t stand it.’

  ‘And Suzanne told me that Madame L’ (she named a high Party name) ‘said that she could never come near us, not even in the presence of fifty people. That if we were at a party with someone else, she could not come, because she would herself rather have died or committed suicide—and you know how repugnant and wrong that is to a communist!—than do what we have done!—and,’ she said with a dreadful sob, ‘are doing tonight. She said that even supposing for a moment that everything we say about the Party is true, to do what we do is worse than death, a filthy and contemptible thing beyond description.’

  The tears were pouring down her face.

  ‘My God, I thought we were going to be happy now. When did she tell you this?’

  ‘Tonight. I said to Suzanne, Bring me face to face with her and I’ll say to her, “You are a leader of women. Don’t you understand the problems of a woman like me? What have I ever done against the human race? I am just a woman who can’t live in disgrace!”’

  She got up and was angrily standing in front of Stephen.

  ‘And tomorrow or tonight I have to write those damn letters to suit your mother, in order to ease twenty or thirty thousand measly dollars out of her. When I myself made, with a turn of the hand, three times that in Hollywood in one year. She’s putting her foot on my neck.’

  Stephen said, ‘Don’t talk that way of my mother: she could be worse. Didn’t you say she let you out of prison. Let’s bury the episode. Tomorrow we’ll get down to business. Yes, let’s go to bed. Let the servants clean up for once. Don’t let the ghost of your stepmother keep you out of bed.’

  ‘No, I’ll clean up and begin to mumble the text of those letters over to myself. I won’t sleep unless I get that fixed. It’s like Mernie said. You knew they were on your trail and at last the Gestapo knocks on your door and you’re almost thankful. It’s over.’

  Stephen was very pale, ‘Let’s go to bed. Leave the ashtrays. I can’t stand any more.’

  They got into bed and turned off the light. Suddenly she shivered a little, but it was a giggle. It increased: she began to laugh. She laughed outright, frankly, hilariously: she roared with laughter.

  ‘Go to sleep: the bed’s shaking, Pagliaccio,’ he s
aid, touching her with his hand.

  ‘Oh-ho-ho,’ she continued.

  ‘All right, you dumb ox, you down, what is it?’

  ‘We were going to clean up Europe with the Marshall Plan and already Europe has cleaned us up,’ said she, strangling between laughs. She continued wilder.

  He said, ‘Very funny. Go to sleep.’

  ‘Haw-haw-haw.’ The house rang with her gigantic laughter, ‘Ha-ha-ha, oh-hoho.’ She got up and tried to walk about, ‘Stephen—oh-hoho, save me!’ She fell on the bed and turned on her side trying to stifle her laughter. ‘Haw-haw-haw, oh, my God, oh-ho-ho, I shall die!’

  She sobbed, struggled, strangled, shouted, screamed with laughter, strong, immense laughter, it seemed, not hysterical, the great roaring of big lungs and a strong heart.

  Stephen turned on the light and sat up. Her face was crimson, tears poured out of her eyes. Her bosom heaved convulsively. He said, ‘Stop it! You’ll have convulsions. Stop! Stop it!’ He slapped her.

  She stopped, still heaving, and sat up to glare ferociously at him, ‘Don’t you dare touch me. I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Calm yourself.’

  She said, ‘You wretched worm. How I hate you! How I despise and hate you!’

  He looked at her astonished, his mouth half-open. Her eyes fell lower, thoughtfully, and she said forcibly, ‘And myself!’

  She laughed a little, feebly, ‘But we are happy! But we have made good. The Howards have squeezed a pittance out of Mamma. We have lost all our friends, but we have made genteel acquaintances and we’ll get yet to a Walter Lippmann cocktail party.’

  She laughed softly, ‘I’m deleerious, I’m raving, I’m so happy.’

  ‘Have you finished?’

  She turned to him, ‘I’m a damned soul, I’m lost, I’ve betrayed everyone and everything. But it’s all right, we can pay the servants.’