The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  “Nothing … or rather, energetic curiosity.”

  She took this in.

  “We blow hot and cold, Alex and me.… Alex and I? That’s all.”

  I left shortly after that. I felt a clawing ache in my chest. I walked up the Kurfürstendamm past the bright shops and gleaming cafés, the neon cinemas, the elegant overdecorated terraces of houses. The ache would not go away. It came, I know, from a mixture of intense longing and the saddened conviction that my life, or, rather, most of the things that pertained to me, were going to be altered, bruised or destroyed because of that very longing.

  I went into a café, ordered a drink, then went into the WC and masturbated into my handkerchief. It had the desired effect of dispersing those querulous emotions and querulous fears. Now I felt merely depressed and seedy. I hailed a taxi and went home to my wife and family.

  I strove intermittently and fairly valiantly to forget Doon. Or, more to the point as I would soon be seeing her every day, I strove to direct the remorseless impulse of my emotions elsewhere. I was not successful. It is an insidious force that operates on you when you love and lust after someone impotently. It not only trammels up you, the agent, it bears down also on those innocent of its workings. Such as Sonia. All the real attraction I used to feel for her slowly evaporated, like a puddle in hot sun. Her neatness, her straight parting, her haunchy bottom-heaviness, became irritants and flaws.

  I remember one day in August we went swimming, to the huge beach at Wannsee. Me, Sonia, Vincent and Noreen Shorrold, Vincent junior and baby Hereford. The beach was full of pink-and-brown Berliners. I sat in my swimming costume and toweling robe, steadily drinking cold hock from a Bakelite cup. My son Vincent (he was dark like me, but looked Shorrold through and through) tottered between his grandparents. Sonia knelt over Hereford, a safety pin in her mouth, busying herself with some mopping-up and cleansing operation (I have never known such a child for pissing and shitting himself: he had a vandal’s urge to soil clean things, did Hereford). I felt, and almost welcomed, such was the state of my mind, the harbingers of a headache creeping up on me. Feebly, I tried to nestle into some warm congratulatory mood of self-satisfaction. Here was my happy family, I told myself; here was my wife, my sons. I was comparatively rich, with the prospect of further riches eminently realizable. And, as an artist, I was on the point of making my first real moving picture. Why then did I feel the air around me electric with my own annoyance, crackling with static irritation? Why, when Hereford arched his back and squirmed his head round to look at me, did I not chuck the little fellow under his treble chin or rub his fat tum with a proud parental hand? Because … because I was thinking of Doon and wondering if she was spending the day with that bastard Mavrocordato. Why, that could be them in that white speedboat buzzing by, cutting across the lake heading for some rented birch-embowered villa on the far side of the Havel.… A girl swam strongly out to an anchored wooden raft and hauled herself up onto it in a fluent fluid motion. The cerise wool of her damp swimsuit clung to her breasts and belly. I tried to imagine Doon in a swimsuit. And even when the girl removed her rubber swimming cap and shook out her dark hair I thought of Doon, who had cut her long dark hair and died it blond for Julie. For me.

  A tap on my forearm. Little Vince (as his grandparents called him, to my horror) offering me a tongue-and-cress sandwich to the loud applause of the other adults. His eyes were wide with alarm. Why did the boy fear me? Cruelly, I said no, thank you. He burst into tears, dropped the sandwich in the sand and fled to his mother’s wide lap.

  “Johnny, really.”

  “I wasn’t hungry.”

  “Oh, but still …”

  “God Almighty! I can’t stuff myself just for his sake!”

  I stood up and angrily threw off my robe. I strode down to the water and dived in. Cool shock, a silent glide, a sudden calm. I hated myself.

  I will not bore you with the actual details of the filming of Julie. Suffice it to say I knew from very early on it was going well. Karl-Heinz was superb. We whitened his face and hollowed his cheeks and eye sockets to enhance his wracked, soul-tormented personality. The particular frisson in the film was the two types of delicious anticipation that operated in it. The first was before Julie and Saint-Preux’s love was consummated. Then, second, there was more suspense over whether their sense of honor would allow their virtue to survive. It was given an added twist by Doon’s loveliness and irresistible erotic allure. Her manner on screen was one of innocent carnal license, which, in the second half when she was trying to be faithful to Wolmar, toyed with one’s sense of frustration in the most agonizing way. The two lovers desperately wanted each other. All that was physically keeping them apart was the abstract airy strictures of morality. Once old Baron Wolmar left them they had everything—place, occasion, inclination—but some higher code kept them at arm’s length.

  There was one scene towards the end of the film that, when we saw the rushes, had us all on the edge of our seats baying obscene encouragement at Karl-Heinz.

  It is late one evening. An albescent moon shines on Baron Wolmar’s château. On the terrace Saint-Preux wrestles with his conscience as he smokes a cigarette (remember, it has all been updated). Moths flutter round the lights (thank you, Georg). Then, further up the long terrace, Julie steps out through the French windows of her boudoir. She is wearing a luxuriant flimsy negligee, which billows occasionally in the night breezes. She advances towards Saint-Preux, their eyes fast upon one another. She stops eighteen inches from him. Caption: I love this time of the evening. May I have a cigarette? With one movement Saint-Preux slides his silver cigarette case from his pocket. Close-up of Julie’s fingers as she selects one—her lacquered nails on the slim white cylinder. Saint-Preux—cigarette in mouth—goes for his lighter in another pocket, but a slight hesitation on Julie’s part halts him. She puts the cigarette in her mouth (close-up: those wide dark lips, that white, white paper). She sways towards him. Tip of cigarette meets tip of cigarette. Ignition, burn, smoke wreaths. They move apart gazing at each other. They draw on their cigarettes, exhale. Smoke, backlit by the moon, coils and swoops thickly about them.…

  This scene has been much copied, at times blatantly, at times indirectly. It was the first use in a film, I believe, of the cigarette as an erotic symbol. The scene was mightily effective and so powerful that it was almost cut by the censor. Aram reported this dull bureaucrat’s comments to me: “He says they are fornicating on screen.” Our dumb literalness—“But they’re only smoking. They’re not even touching!”—won the day. Not a frame was removed.

  Naturally, Doon was a triumph in the film also. Not that she required any elevation from the stellar heights she already occupied. Her last day of filming occurred two weeks before the end of the shoot. It was her deathbed scene, where she declares she has been in love with Saint-Preux all along. Our final two weeks were to be occupied with Saint-Preux in Paris gamely resisting its temptations, sustained by Julie’s faith.

  I had champagne and flowers sent to Doon’s dressing room. Aram Lodokian had arranged a formal farewell party for later that evening. I felt calm. We had worked well together and there had been no disagreements. She could see I knew what I was doing (even if you do not know what you are doing, the crucial talent required by a director, as far as actors are concerned, is to give the unchallengeable impression that you do) and, importantly, there had been no hint of intimacy between us. Certainly not from her, and I had been prudent not to let my own desires be revealed again. It seemed to me that I was finally exerting some control over myself. Even when Mavrocordato visited the set a few times. Although, through my green eyes, it looked as if they were getting on uncommonly well for a divorced couple. So why did I go to her room alone? I wanted to say good-bye and I wanted, personally and privately, to set a seal on our relationship. Friendship with a tantalizing hint of what might have been. Or so I told myself.

  Doon had not changed from her deathbed nightdress, a strappy satin thing with a
low back. She had a long housecoat tied loosely over it. In an anteroom her dresser was ironing. Doon poured me a glass of champagne and we idly exchanged compliments about the film.

  “Did you see Alex on your way in?”

  “Alex who?” I always did this.

  “God, Jamie! Mavrocordato. He’s supposed to be picking me up.”

  “No. No sign.”

  The dresser—a small, cross-looking woman—came out of the anteroom holding a short black jacket with diamanté buttons.

  “Fixed it?” Doon asked.

  “You better try it on.”

  Doon slipped off the housecoat and put the jacket on.

  “It’s fine. Thanks, Dora, you can go.”

  Dora left. Doon checked the fit of the jacket, flexing, reaching, stretching, then she took it off and flung it over the arm of her chair. A wayward sleeve knocked her near-empty glass to the ground, shattering it.

  “Shit!” she said. She knelt down to pick up the pieces.

  Seeing Doon’s slim tall body, one might have thought her small-breasted. Not so. She had wide flat breasts, small-nippled, with almost no sag to them. A gentle convexity covering a largish area, like the lid of a soup tureen. I saw them now as she knelt on the ground before me, the drooping front of her nightdress affording me an unobstructed view.

  My tongue seemed to swell to block my throat as I slipped off my chair to kneel before her, my fingers blindly searching for shards and fragments. The erotic archaeologist … I caught a gust of her perfume, a kind of lavender. She looked up. My eyes snapped up just in time.

  “Hey, don’t bother, Dora’ll get it in the—”

  I kissed her with undue violence, crushing my nose painfully on her cheek, simultaneously clutching her shoulders and hauling us both to our feet. I pressed my taut bulging groin against her thigh and pushed her back and down onto the sofa. She flung her head back.

  “I love you, Doon,” I said. “I love—MNEEAAGHHH!”

  The pain was infernal, not of this world. The hard apex of her knee mashed my testicles against the unyielding base of my pelvis. I felt as if I had been split from the perineum up to the top of my skull by an ice ax, or impaled, sitting, on a giant freezing horn. (Gentlemen, you surely know what I am talking about. Ladies, take my word for it, there is no more fiendish agony.) Everything went blue, black, purple, orange, white. I opened my eyes. An ultrasonic scream seemed to reverberate around the room as if it were a trapped demented presence. I was on the floor—balled up well and truly, you might say. Glass splinters sparkled before my eyes. My hands cupped the jangling fragments of my ruined groin.

  I twisted my head round. Doon stood by the door, fully dressed (how much time had elapsed, for God’s sake?). Through the scream in my head I seemed to hear her say calmly, “I never want to see you again, asswipe.”

  I felt the vomit—a prancing bolus—in my throat. I began to crawl to the bathroom. There was a knock on the door behind me, then Mavrocordato’s voice asking, “What is it?”

  Doon said, “Nothing,” and the door closed. I am sure I heard laughter.

  I never made it to the toilet bowl. I vomited over the linoleum—maroon fleur-de-lis in a pretty pattern—a yard short. I left it for Dora to clean up in the morning.

  Julie was an enormous hit. An international success. Realismus Films made over a million dollars in Germany, France, Britain and America. Doon Bogan became for a year or two the most glamorous and celebrated actress in Europe. Karl-Heinz Kornfeld was acclaimed as the “quintessentially hoch modern leading man.” But more of that later. My own life entered a strange troubled phase just as my personal fortunes were at their zenith.

  I was, I think, actually driven a little insane by my “falling out” with Doon—if that is not too absurd a euphemism. Even after such a brutal, unequivocal rejection I could not expunge or ignore my feelings for her. What can you do in such circumstances? If you are obsessed, you are obsessed. She telephoned me two days after the incident.

  “Are you all right?”

  “What? Yes. A slight limp, but otherwise … Look, Doon, I—”

  “I shouldn’t have hit you so hard. But I was mad. And not just at you. I was kind of upset that day.”

  “God, I’m so sorry. Terribly sorry. I should never—”

  “You’re a fool, John James Todd. A great, big, Grade A, ignorant fool.”

  She hung up. I had no idea what she meant. Or rather, I had one idea but it seemed to me she was implying something else.… In the event I grew none the wiser as I had to force my attention round to completing the film, which we did with little fuss and on time. Aram Lodokian paid my five-thousand-dollar bonus without demur. The film opened in the Kino-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm with a full symphony orchestra providing musical accompaniment on February 16, 1926, and the rest is history.

  We moved from Rudolfplatz, west, to a new villa in Charlottenburg. The area was being developed: on every corner new houses were being built and the streets were planted with frail lime-tree saplings guarded by tight palisades of iron spikes. Mrs. Shorrold left us and Sonia acquired an English nurse (Lily Maidbow, a plain, efficient, almost speechless girl) to look after the boys. Our house was fresh smelling—of wax from the wooden floor, of paint, of leather and fabrics—it had a wide garden planted with birch and larch, and was surrounded by a white picket fence. I never liked it. I felt like one of the lime-tree saplings. I did not need such sturdy penning in. These were the accouterments of prosperous middle age, of bourgeois plentitude. I found the place oppressive and minatory—but, conceivably, that would have been true of any home I lived in then. I was not of a mind to settle down, eat big dinners at my dining room table, dandle my babes on my knee. Doon had knocked me off kilter; I was askew, like that first time I’d gone over the top, drunk. Everything about Sonia was stable, placid and fixed. I was living in a different geometry.

  I spent long hours over the autumn and winter of 1925 editing Julie, writing and rewriting the captions, Sonia made no complaint about my protracted absence from the house. She kept herself busy and enjoyed the newfound Todd prosperity more than I did. Leo, I think, suspected that something was wrong, but with his ineffable tact did not ask me anything about it. He was settling down rapidly in Berlin and was enjoying a diverting love affair with Lola Templin-Tavel. When I had had enough of work and could not bear the thought of going home, I used to meet Karl-Heinz in a bar of Uhlandstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm. There was nothing louche or depraved about this place, although those were qualities its neighborhood rivals strove earnestly to reproduce. Our bar, the Dix, consisted of two rooms: one, smaller, with a zinc-topped counter and a few tables and chairs; and the other, larger, with two billiard tables. Its very plainness ensured it was never overbusy. Karl-Heinz and I would sit and drink in the small room and from time to time play a game of billiards. I grew to love that place, warm and blurry with cigar smoke, the air filled with the noise of subdued conversation, the rustle of newspapers (hung from the wall on sticks) and the solid reassuring click of the ivory billiard balls. It was anonymous, populated by transients. The owner and his large ginger-haired wife made no attempt to cultivate regulars. It suited me at that difficult time.

  I told Karl-Heinz everything about Doon and he thoughtfully went through the motions of sympathizing with me. He was not surprised, he said. He had been waiting for something to turn my life upside down. How come? I asked him, but he would not expand. Later he told me he could never understand why I had married Sonia. When I told him the honest reason—for sex—he was even more baffled. I think he regarded me—as a representative heterosexual—as being something of a chronic naïf when it came to sexual matters.

  But he listened patiently, a true friend, to my protracted moans. I am ashamed to reflect now on those one-sided encounters. I never asked him about himself, never wondered how he did when I finally left him, or when he left me. I was up to my neck in a mire of my own selfishness. I thought of my drowning Ulsterman (I thou
ght a lot about the war, then) as he sank in the mud of the Salient: “I’m going doyn.” … No wonder I could not escape Doon: my day was spent watching her images shimmer by me on the editing machines. Karl-Heinz knew that all I required was a listener and he provided it, selflessly. At least we could break off and play billiards. (He was a terrible player, incapable of calculating the simplest angles. I always won.)

  It was early in the New Year. The film was finished and we were waiting for its release when his patience finally broke. As usual we were sitting in the Bar Dix. Karl-Heinz was drinking beer with a schnapps chaser. I was drinking Moselle. I was a little drunk, typically brimful of self-pity, rhapsodizing about Doon’s beauty and how I longed for her. I paused. To my intense surprise Karl-Heinz took both my hands in his and stared fixedly at me. I looked into his dark eyes, hooded by his sharp circumflex brows. He squeezed my hands.

  “Johnny,” he said, “I tell you something very simple.” He smiled faintly, a suggestion of mischief. “Boys are better than girls.”

  “Look, Karl-Heinz, no.” I smiled apologetically back. “I’m just not—you know—inclined that way.”

  “But you never tried properly. I can show you. It’s fun.”

  “No, really—”

  “But I like you, Johnny, I do.”

  “No, really. I know you do. I like you too.” I was moved.

  He let go of my hands.

  “It’s Doon,” I said. “She’s the only one.… I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with her.”

  “So. All right.” He sounded impatient. “There’s only one thing to do with such an obsession. You got to get another one.”

  He was right. After he had gone I thought about what he had said. I would never forget Doon (in fact I had not seen her for months), but surely, I reasoned, there was room in my life for something more than this destructive unrequited longing. I had to face up to the facts. My life could not simply stand still with this rejection.

  The lights were on in the house when I parked our new car—a Packard, Sonia’s choice. Sonia was awake, in bed. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair tucked behind her ears. She had put on some weight recently and the roundness of her face had increased, accentuating her small pointy chin. I thought she looked pretty. It was a good sign. Karl-Heinz may not have provided me with an answer, but he seemed to have given me a jolt with his proposition—knocked the Gramophone needle out of its groove. I switched off the light and snuggled up to Sonia, sliding a hand inside her nightdress to cup a girlish breast.… I am sure our third child was conceived that night.