Fictional Lives

by Hugh Fleetwood

  Obviously in one way she knew why she was helping David; it was for the same reason she had helped all those others. She was (trying to see herself objectively) a small, plump, unattractive, middle-aged woman, who was extremely wealthy and reasonably intelligent. Yet though she was intelligent, hers was an analytical intelligence, a critical intelligence. It was not a creative intelligence. She could see through anything; discern its nature, its texture, its composition. She could also see through anyone, herself included. Her vision of the world was, she liked to think, unclouded by rhetoric, sentimentality, or guilt. Or—she liked to think more—by meanness, greed or pettiness. Some of her friends summed her up by saying she had great taste; others by saying she was happy. Both in a way were true; yet they were both terms she dismissed as largely meaningless. She had taken account of the cards she had been dealt; and played with them as best she could. That was all there was to it. And one of the cards she hadn’t been dealt was imagination. She could cope with the facts as she saw them, and she saw them exceptionally clearly; but she couldn’t cope with facts, or even conceive of facts, that she didn’t see. Realizing this quite early on, and realizing equally that imagination was a force that had to be reckoned with—without imagination there would be no music, no paintings, no plays, no books (all the things, in other words, that served to make reality understandable to her)—she determined to do something to encourage the growth of this flower that was not in her own garden. And caring more for books than for any other form of art—and owning, amongst other things, an apartment building in the West Seventies—she had, from the age of twenty-six onwards, kept three rooms in this building free for writers who needed somewhere to live. She had offered the place to young authors she liked, or to authors who had been recommended to her, and she was always very business-like about the terms of their stay. She—aside from not charging them any rent—took care of the electricity and gas, did not (in theory; in practice she frequently did) take care of the telephone, and gave them money if they had none at all. They in return undertook to leave the apartment at the end of the year, or however long a period had been agreed upon; and to do some writing. (Only once had she had any trouble, and been forced to evict someone. It had been an unpleasant business; but necessary.) The fact that none of her tenants had fulfilled their promise had never worried her; she had never expected to see a prize rose bloom from every shoot she tended, and had always thought that if just one in her lifetime did, she would count herself lucky.

  Yet as she lay in bed, going through these reasons for having maintained that apartment and all its inmates for so long, she found herself wondering if, deep down in her, she hadn’t always known that those shoots wouldn’t bloom, and, what was more, hadn’t really wanted them to. She wondered, indeed, if far from trying to encourage imagination, she hadn’t always been afraid of it, and had been hoping to keep it in check. Which was why she had always thought (though without malice) of her writers in residence as pets, and then lame dogs; and why, in another way, Gerhard’s parting remark about David hadn’t been so ridiculous. Perhaps her husband had always perceived, more clearly for once than herself, the motives for her so-called generosity; and perceived now that David Chezzel didn’t, or wouldn’t, meet her requirements. He wasn’t, to return to the imagery of flowers, going to wither away; and he was, huge and scarlet, going to dominate her hitherto rose-less portion of the earth. He was going to overshadow her, he was going to draw all the goodness from the rest of her soil; and she, mere assistant gardener that she was, was going to find her life controlled by him. Controlled by the very fact of trying to keep him under control….

  No. Gerhard hadn’t after all been so ridiculous. God knows why she was helping David to write this story….

  She turned over and told herself to stop being stupid. Being overshadowed. Being controlled. What nonsense. David was just a writer—a good one—who had, for the reason she had understood immediately, told her an unkind story. There was nothing more to it than that. She had no cause to be frightened—either of him, or his projected book—and she would not be. She supported him for exactly the same purpose as she had supported everyone else—which was to encourage him—and she was glad to do so. And now she would think about something else.

  She would think, for example, about where Gerhard was. She would wonder if he was with Lucie Schmidt; and she would wonder, if he was, what they were talking about….

  *

  In fact—there again because it would have required imagination to worry and wonder about such things, and she couldn’t worry about the unknown—she fell asleep almost immediately; and it wasn’t until the following morning, when she was having breakfast with Gerhard, that she really started to dwell on the subject of where her husband had been the night before. To dwell on it and, since he was sitting opposite her, to ask him.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I went out, had a few drinks, had dinner, had a few more drinks, then went to a movie somewhere.’ He smiled across the table with his most disarming smile. ‘But honestly I don’t remember.’

  Fran stared at him, trying to discover the truth in his eyes. She knew it was useless however. Gerhard’s loss of memory when he had been drinking was one of the basic moves of his game; and she had never, throughout the fifteen years of their marriage, known whether he were bluffing. It happened on average once a month—though recently had been happening more often—and sometimes made her laugh, sometimes irritated her, sometimes made her admire him—if he were bluffing he bluffed with such a straight face it was impossible not to admire him—and sometimes, as this morning, made her very angry. It was too easy. Not to know anything—and by implication not to be responsible for anything—just because he had had a few drinks too many. Or to have a few drinks too many in order to say he didn’t know anything, and wasn’t responsible for anything.

  For a moment she was tempted to challenge him; to tell him that he hadn’t been drunk at all last night, knew perfectly well where he had been—with his French mistress—and had only used his dislike for modern music and the smell of cigarettes as an excuse to walk out on her. He had been intending to walk out anyway, and if she hadn’t been smoking he would have found some other pretext for leaving. He would have told her that she was looking tired, or miserable, or old…. But partly because Cyrus too was sitting at the table, and she didn’t like to reveal her anger to her son, and partly because she did know it was useless—he would blandly assure her that he had been bombed; and less blandly tell her that it was her own fault anyway; he really couldn’t bear the smell of cigarettes, or the sound of that damn music she listened to—she held her tongue; and contented herself by remarking, sourly, that this was the third time in three weeks that he had been afflicted with amnesia, that if he weren’t careful his condition would become chronic, and that it was very strange he was only so afflicted in the evenings. Why was it that however much he drank at lunch he always managed to retain his faculties throughout an afternoon at the office?

  Now it was Gerhard’s turn to seem about to lose his temper. His grey eyes gazed at her as if she were not just unattractive, but truly repulsive; and he pursed his lips as if he were about to spit. Then, like her—and probably, again, because of the boy—he managed to control himself. And smiling at her once more, he told her it was undoubtedly because though he did sometimes drink a lot at his business lunches, he never totally let himself go. Whereas as soon as he had finished work….

  ‘Anyway,’ he added, as if the very idea were hilarious, ‘where did you think I was? Out plotting with Lucie?’

  That, Cyrus or no Cyrus, really would have made her explode—she would not have that woman’s name mentioned in her house—if, even as she was trying, as it were, to take aim, to make sure the whole blast went off in that smug German face, her son himself hadn’t defused her.

  ‘Why,’ he said brightly, ‘doesn’t Lucie stay with us any more when she’s in New York?’

  Because, Fran wanted to say, the last t
ime she did I caught your father making love to her. Or if not that, and to be certain that Cyrus’s sympathy was entirely with her: Because your father is planning to kill me and marry her. But naturally she said neither—the first was true, but might have upset the boy; the second, aside from upsetting him more, was definitely not true—and shrugged the question off with a murmured ‘Because she prefers to stay in a hotel. She likes to be independent.’ And by the time she had gathered her wits together to murmur this, the danger was over. Though if he ever did mention that name again, she told her husband with a glance, there would be such an explosion that the whole structure of their life together would come crashing down.

  *

  She had spent much of the evening before asking herself why she supported David Chezzel; she spent much of that day, after she had seen Cyrus off to school, had received a kind of apology from Gerhard—an apology that took the form of his asking her if it would be all right if he came to the ballet with her tonight—and had kissed him and wished him a good day at the office, asking herself why she supported her husband.

  But though—as she spoke to friends on the phone, read the paper, did some shopping, had lunch with her lawyer, went round a couple of galleries, met the editor of a literary magazine that she helped to finance, had tea with her mother, went home, talked and read a book with Cyrus, bathed and got ready for the ballet—she did ask herself this question, the answer she kept on giving herself was, at least superficially, far simpler than the answer she had given herself regarding David. She supported Gerhard because she loved him.

  She had always believed that her looks, if they didn’t precisely account for her intelligence, accounted for its nature. From the age of twelve or thirteen she had realized that she was not, nor was ever likely to be, a pretty girl. She had short thick legs, pudgy little hands, dull brown hair that was neither straight nor curly, and a face that had absolutely nothing special or striking about it. She had a small nose, a small mouth, and small eyes; that was all. To begin with she told herself she didn’t care—her home life was very happy, and her quiet kind parents loved her as much as she loved them—and that she much preferred reading, listening to music, and going to the ballet, than dressing up and having boys ask her for dates. But inevitably perhaps, in a world so dominated by beautiful images, where appearance was held to be important, and an attractive appearance held to be desirable, her own less than beautiful image began, around the age of fourteen, to distress her. She could do, she instinctively realized, one of two things. The first was to flee from that distress, to feel upset, if not bitter about her looks, and to try to disguise them with carefully studied hair-styles, make-up, and clothes. The second was to face her distress head-on, analyse it, and attempt to see her longing for an attractive appearance for what she believed it was: either a longing to recapture the harmony of nature that she felt herself cut off from; or a longing to cut herself off entirely from nature, and make herself into a hard and brilliant artefact that was safe from the ravages of time, and the world. She chose, logically—since the first could only end in failure; in an ever more desperate flight, and bitterness—the second course. And having done so—having, that is, come to terms with her physical self—though she did, thereafter, have the occasional moment of regret that she didn’t look like a movie-star or a ballet dancer, she never really worried about not being tall and slim and possessing huge dark eyes, and accepted that those boyfriends she did have would be attracted by her personality rather than by her face and figure.

  She accepted and continued to believe this even when she realized that she was going, on her father’s death—and indeed before—to be a very wealthy woman. Outside cheap novels, she couldn’t imagine that anyone would be attracted to someone else for reasons other than personality or looks; the attraction of personality being obviously the preferable kind, and the only kind likely to provide a basis for a satisfactory relationship.

  Such a lack, once again, of imagination, combined with an already well-developed intellectual arrogance (by the age of twenty she was firmly convinced that she could see through everyone’s motives for all that they did; so that if there were such a creature in the real world as a man who cared only for money she would be able to spot him instantly), made her, clearly, vulnerable to attack. And when, at the age of twenty-nine, she was attacked—by a tall, blond, blue-eyed and athletic student of twenty-two, who had come to New York from his native Frankfurt in order, as he told her the first time they met, ‘to seek his fortune’—she capitulated; without a struggle.

  It was partly Gerhard’s honesty that made her lay down her arms so willingly. (What he had told her was literally true.) It was partly his sense of fun; his brightness, his kindness, and the way he had of making her feel alive. (‘Are you sure you’re German?’ she had asked him; for she too had her prejudices.) It was partly—despite her having risen above such things—his looks. But above all, it was his ability, as she saw it, to stay in the world—not being sheltered, as she was, by her family, her wealth, and the small closed circle of friends in which she lived—and to be uncorrupted by it. It was all very well for her to be, as she sincerely tried to be, good and aware and on the side of life. The house she had been born into had been built on stilts; and she had been able to gather her strength up there, in comparative safety, before setting out to explore—still from the comparative safety of a car that had been armoured by culture and security and money—the jungle. But for Gerhard to be, as she sincerely believed he was, good and aware and on the side of life, was altogether more of an achievement. For he, on the contrary, had been born in the jungle itself. He had been raised by parents who were, according to him, drunken, ignorant, and brutal; and had had, though he called himself a student, little formal education. To have survived at all under such circumstances struck Fran as being wonderful; to have survived as well as he had—still to prefer the sun to the cold dead moon—seemed positively miraculous.

  She had her doubts, naturally. He was, compared to her, a mere child. He tended, at times, to drink too much. He didn’t care for any of the things she cared for. (Though he said he was quite prepared to care for them.) She didn’t care, she claimed, for the one thing he claimed to care for: cash. He didn’t have, as she hoped she had, and thought everyone should have, any—as she perhaps priggishly termed it—sense of living in a society. (He believed in looking after himself, and all that, or only that, which was necessary to his well-being. He also believed that everyone else should do the same. Any other course of action was, he claimed, mere self-deception and falsity. And self-deception and falsity could only lead to personal unhappiness, and general misery.) And she knew he would never really be a friend of her friends; though he would always be good-natured and pleasant with them, and was too smart to—or anyway smart enough not to—feel threatened by them.

  But when he told her that he loved her and asked her to marry him; and told her further that if she accepted him she would never have reason to regret it—if the contract was, to put it crudely, his love in exchange for her money (with her own love thrown in as an extra), he would keep his side of the bargain if she kept hers—she cast her doubts aside. And having received the blessing of her parents, who told her that in spite of everything they couldn’t help liking Gerhard, and the approval of nearly all her friends—who told her, loathe though many were to say it, the same—Fran left the Englishman she had been involved with for the previous five years, and had vaguely assumed she would one day marry—he was very tall, very thin, and was a musicologist whose special field was modern Eastern European music—exchanged the small apartment in Greenwich Village she had been living in for a penthouse on Park Avenue, and told the young German yes.

  Gerhard was right. She never did have reason to regret it. Her husband was nearly everything she had hoped he would be. (And if it hadn’t been for his occasional drinking bouts, and consequent amnesia, he would have been absolutely everything.) He had been bright and fun and kind before the
marriage; he became more so as the years passed. He had made her feel alive when she had met him; with time, he not only made her feel alive, but even—she who had always thought of herself as having been born old—young. Her parents and friends who, while giving her their blessing, had had some misgivings about the match, were, ten years after the wedding, almost more charmed with her mate than she was. He was immensely generous with anyone he liked—and he liked practically everyone—and he was able to talk to and get on with the oddest assortment of people; people who Fran herself couldn’t talk to, or get on with. Often, at parties, Gerhard could be seen sitting quietly in a corner chatting with the most notoriously reticent writer, smiling about something with the most violently rich-hating socialist, or making fun of, and laughing with, the most extreme feminists.

  At times Fran was tempted to subscribe to his philosophy of total selfishness….

  In fact, until a few years ago, the union couldn’t have been happier, or more successful. But then, one spring, they had gone to Paris together on business. While there, they had had dinner in a restaurant with some French colleagues of Gerhard’s. And amongst these colleagues had been Lucie Schmidt.

  Fran, later, hated to admit it; but it was she, in the first instance, who had become friendly with the woman. She supposed the reason was that Lucie, in a way, and aside from being in the same business, was a female version of Gerhard. (Which was also the reason, probably, why Gerhard, to begin with, took one of his rare dislikes to her.) She was the same age as Fran, and she couldn’t have been described as beautiful. Her nose was too big, her chin was too small, and her hair was too untidy. Yet in spite of this, in spite of a tiresome habit of being endlessly foul-mouthed in four different languages, and in spite of an even more tiresome habit of turning every conversation round to sex, she was immensely attractive. Because she had a beautiful body—above all beautiful legs—because she made clothes, that on anyone else would have looked drab, look wonderful, and because, notwithstanding her continuous swearing and her obsession with sex, she was fun, and alive, very bright—and no fool. (Fran got the impression that the swearing and the talk about sex were put out as a smoke-screen in order to hide this last fact from fools. Especially from fools with intellectual pretensions.) What was more, not only did she like Lucie, but Lucie liked her. For the first five minutes in the restaurant the Frenchwoman tried to shock the American. But after that—having apparently failed—she relaxed; and the two of them got on as well together as friends who had known each other for years.