I'm Dying Laughing (10 page)

‘Well, it’s worth it to see my name flown at the masthead,’ said Stephen nastily.

‘That’s a petty, selfish view. If we waste all this money, it’s what we owe the country for our unnatural luck.’

They quarrelled again and the last part of the journey was passed in silence. When they got home, Emily went round the house fast, talking in a lively way with the servants, the children, neighbours’ children who were in. She looked through the children’s clothing and the laundry, checked the contents of pantry, icebox, deep-freeze and bar, ordered dinner and took her large bundle of letters up to her room, a little room at the stairhead, and overlooking the side and back gardens. Manoel, the manservant, brought up a pot of black coffee; and she locked the door behind him. Her room was furnished mainly with steel files containing copies of her voluminous writings of all sorts, her diary, her correspondence, the material for many novels and stories, copies of all her lectures and articles, bundles of clippings, household bills and the children’s school reports; as well as the exercise books in which she carefully went over their lessons with them. Besides this, there were wire baskets, a few reference books, a chair and an excellent typewriter. She drank the coffee, took a pill from a little drawer in the table and began to read her letters, with shouts and great guffaws and sighs. She began typing replies at once.

Downstairs, in a large front room well furnished as study and library, his own workroom, Stephen sat discontentedly going through the notes his research worker had sent him. He had a partner’s desk, a pale blue-grey carpet. The panelled sliding door communicated with a charming living-room decorated with chintzes, French paintings and flowers arranged in Japanese style by Stephen. Stephen found it hard to settle down to work, for Emily’s agents, the studios and her publishers kept telephoning her; and every conversation in which, in her jolly, loving, languishing manner, full of good sense, outrageous hope and
bonhomie,
she promised and put off, threw him into a frenzy. Last year, she had, without effort, made $80,000 in Hollywood. Yet she consumed hours, weeks in all, writing to friends and otherwise wasting time. A river of money was flowing through the telephone: she had only to direct it into their pockets. The thought poisoned him and stung him. Their expenses were large. The Portuguese couple who managed for them cost considerably over $400 a month; his own research worker had cost more than $5,000 in the course of five years.

Yet upstairs Emily flirted with the idea of writing a great novel. She sketched out one idea after another, and in each of them she wanted to tell some truth that would offend some section of the community. Some of the truths would offend everyone and get them on the black list. Also, she prepared lectures and courses for workers’ and students’ education. She wrote impassioned letters about her troubles to her friends, gave advice to young writers, worked harder on articles for ‘those snoots’ on the
Labor Daily
than on a script for Twentieth-Century Fox.

Emily came downstairs, very cheery, bustling the children to wash their hands, fix their neckties, come in to dinner.

‘What have you been doing?’ he said sourly.

‘Writing a letter to Ruth Oates.’

‘The house is full of unpaid bills, and Hollywood and Bookman Bros, are telephoning and telegraphing every hour. You’ve got a market shrieking for your work. Why don’t you do it?’

He said this before the children and Manoel the butler, who was serving. They always talked with the greatest freedom before intimates.

‘My writing’s crap,’ she shouted, ‘I don’t want to do it. I’m not proud they pay me gold for crap. That
Mr and Mrs
stuff is just custard pie I throw in the face of the mamma public, stupid, cruel and food crazy. I find myself putting in recipes—ugh!—because I know they guzzle it. They prefer a deepfreeze to a human being; it’s cold, tailored and shiny. I don’t believe in a word I write. Do you know what that means, Stephen? It’s a terrible thing to say. You believe in what you write! Why should I work my fingers stiff to pay off the mortgage on this goddamn shanty with electric lights on the stair treads so that the guests don’t roll down when they’re full—let ’em roll—and with dried sweetpea on the airspray in the linen closet—’

‘That dried sweetpea makes me gag,’ he sang out irately. ‘All right! Let’s get out of the crappy place, though we’ve only just got in, and find something cheap and nasty with no towel rails. Let’s go to one of my family’s modest little tax-saving apartments or a cabin in Arkansas. Let my family see I’m a failure. Let’s get rid of Manoel, who’s my only friend, and get a char smelling of boiled rag and with hair in her nose. I’ll do the buttling. Why not get a job as a butler? I’d make a good sleek sneak sipping the South African sherry in the outhouse. Let’s wear our shirts for a week and save on the laundry.’

‘You’re eating my heart out with your aristocratic tastes,’ she roared, beginning to cry too. ‘Moth and rust are nothing to what a refahned young genteel gentleman from Princeton can do to an Arkansas peasant girl, when a spot on the carpet to him is like pickles to a stomach-ulcer. Oh, Jee-hosaphat, what was the matter with me, marrying a scion? You’ve ruined my life, darn it. I want to be a writer. I don’t want to write cornmeal mush for full-bellied Bible belters. Did I leave my little Arkansas share-cropper’s shanty for that? I was going to be a great writer, Miss America, the prairie flower. Now I’m writing Hh-umour and Pp-athos for the commuters and hayseeds.’

She helped the children with their homework. Both parents went up to sing to Giles in his cot, a song invented by Stephen.

Oh G, oh I, oh L, oh E, oh S!

Sle-ep, sle-ep, sle-ep, sle-ep!

Oh, Gilesy, Gilesy, Gilesy, sleep!

Stephen ran a bath, while Emily went downstairs; and after writing out the menu for the next day and saying, ‘I will make the crêpes suzette,’ she went to the butler’s pantry where she mixed herself a strong highball. Just as she was carrying it into the living-room, Stephen came down in fresh clothes. He scolded her for taking a drink and for the expense of some new handmade shirts which had just come in for the three boys; Lennie, aged fourteen, Christopher, twelve, and Giles, four. Emily defended herself; what was he just saying about a char with hair on her eyeballs? She was in a good humour. ‘I’ve got an idea that will work for my script; it’s so cheap I blushed for shame.’

Stephen picked up the evening paper and glanced over the headlines. They began once more to tear at the great wound which had opened in their love, mutual admiration and understanding, and great need for each other. This was an equally fundamental thing, a disagreement about American exceptionalism; the belief widely held in the USA that what happened in Europe and the rest of the world belonged to other streams of history, never influencing that Mississippi which bears the USA. The flood of American energy could and perhaps would swallow those others: the watershed of European destiny was far back in time and drying up. To this belief, Stephen liked to adhere. Emily accused him of servility to a system which had made his grandparents and parents millionaires; and Stephen would not have been so tenacious, if the Government, and all the political parties right across to the extreme left, had not agreed that America’s reason for invading Europe, joining the conflict in 1941, was to spread America’s healthy and benevolent business democracy everywhere: the western answer to communism. Stephen had everyone at his back, but a few.

‘We’ll help them make the big leap: they won’t have to go through the secular agonies,’ screeched Stephen.

‘Daddy!’ called Giles from the stairs: ‘Dadd-ee!’

Emily found this ‘a pill too big for a horse to swallow’ to quote Michael Gold; and she declared that the local doctrine held even by the communists, was wrong.

‘The Oil’ (Earl Browder) ‘has adjusted Marxism to US Government Policy.’

‘Dadd-ee! Mumm-ee!’

Both went up to Giles, put him in his cot and sang the song again, upon request, several times. Emily kissed the boy and went downstairs to get herself another highball. Stephen came down and reproached her. She said ‘Let me live!’

They went on about the mistakes of policy.

‘The quiet man from Kansas’ (Earl Browder) ‘is quiet because he needs his tongue for asslicking; and the Seventy Sages are waiting in a queue behind him.’

‘They know their theory better than you and me,’ said Stephen querulously; ‘at any rate better than me; and I don’t know what to answer them. I can only follow blindly; but I intend to follow. I went into Marxism for personal salvation. I know, a despicable reason; but I have to stick to it, or where am I? Just a failure; not even a playboy.’

‘I’m not going to follow anyone into a quagmire; and I don’t want to be saved.’

‘You’re an individualist; individualists become renegades.’

She sprang up from her chair. ‘Don’t you dare call me a renegade! I’ll scratch your nose. I won’t stand that.’

They quarrelled so bitterly, and such unforgivable things were said that she got a seat on a plane going east the next morning and telephoned the studio that she’d post the scripts from New York. ‘And I’ll be able to work there,’ she shouted to him, ‘not worried to death by a limpet throttling me. Maybe I’ll give up the whole crazy game, and get myself a hall-bedroom and really write.’

She went upstairs to pack; and on the way went into the nursery and looked at the family portrait photographs of all the children; and of them all, including Anna, ‘Dear Anna’, Stephen’s mother, who had had it all done by a fashionable New York photographer. Dear Anna wore a modest afternoon dress in silk from Bergdorf s, the boys had tailor-made suits and Olivia, their half-grown girl, an imported silk dress. Emily herself wore a simple dark suit imported from France and chosen by Anna. On the wall opposite were two photos of her cousin, Laura, both enlarged from snaps. Laura did not appear good-looking in these pictures; she looked downcast and thin; but she was debonair, cool at heart, had the cupid’s bow mouth which implies sex and intrigue, and ‘the smile of smiles’ when she cared to smile; she was loved but did not love; she spent all her time thinking of how she would appear to men, had many personal recipes, rituals, taboos; in company she was nonchalant, offhand, she was always moving out of sight and earshot with some man; and she would never be found surrounded by women; and women bored her so that she would never go out with them or go to their parties. ‘I want the musk of male,’ she said, ‘it’s what I live for.’ Behind her, in her many snaps, were always things fine to see, a long new car, pedigree dogs, a handsome man, a cherry tree in flower, the terrace of a private house, the Sound with a sail; or even an old jalopy with Laura, her hand to her mouth, laughing like a child at a man lying at her feet.

Laura had lived with Emily for years and Emily knew her recipes, her secrets; she wholeheartedly believed in her ways, and she loved men, too; but she could not apply Laura’s ways. It was by some inner power, she thought, that Laura was always successful with men, while she, Emily, was always a failure. ‘And I hate the waiting game!’

But Stephen said Laura was not attractive at all; ‘our friends, Axel and Jimmy and Mike don’t like her.’ This hurt Emily. ‘She’s like a best of breed and I’m like a big unclipped sheepdog.’

In the beginning of their marriage Emily feared Laura. The trio went to shows and concerts until Laura said, ‘I refuse to go with you and Stephen again. I don’t play walk ons.’

‘But he likes you!.’

‘But he married you!’

Stephen disliked all these photographs of Laura and when Emily raved, he said, ‘What was your cousin but a third-rate whore?’

At such remarks, Emily would for a moment become silent and then sadly, ‘Ouch! Oof! You know, you never appreciated her.’

‘You don’t know that she told other people she would gather me in. That finished her with me. She said I was worth a one-night stand, a scion stuffed with straw.’ Then Emily would smile, throw her arms around her darling Stephen, whom she had gathered in for more than one night and laugh, laugh with freshness, candour, charm and what health!

‘Oh, Stephen, I am not nearly as good as she was. You never knew her. I knew her. There never was anyone like her.’

Emily now looked across the room at Laura’s cheesecake photographs (as he said) and her eyes sparkled. Laura, with all her conquests, had in fact, been sure she would tip up Stephen, play with him and throw him away. ‘Stephen the Scion,’ she called him.

‘Laura never had a chance,’ said Stephen.

Emily now walked lightly up and down the room in which her own little son, Giles, her only child, slept pleasantly. He was a square-faced, rosy, dark-haired lad, with large dark-seeming eyes, really light hazel, which opened wide between long dark lashes. He had a well-shaped mouth which opened to smile and say wise things. He was like Laura in some ways. Emily sighed gustily and stood at the foot of her son’s bed.

‘Ah, dear Giles, what will you be? Mystery of personality! Are personalities developed so young? They are though. Each pregnancy I had was different, a different soul was there. Is it possible you see something different from us all and not even a shred of what Laura saw, or me? And nothing of Stephen? It’s possible. Can you go your own way so young? Yes. And you’re a mystery, a deep mystery. Why be parents at all? And I was always afraid I would never get a chance to be a parent! And I’m the writer, supposed to understand people and fix up their destinies. Ah me, I don’t even know the next critic who’s going to shy coconuts at me. Someone smiles, I think he’s warm and good. Then the smiler attacks, he’s indecent, inhuman, he contradicts all decorum, kills all hope in life. But destiny itself is a smiler with a knife. I haven’t any animal instincts, ah me, and yet I’m all animal.’ She sighed naturally and went on, in her soft, husky, resonant undertone, looking at the sleeping child, ‘I know you inside out! How can that be if you are so different from us? I won’t like you if you are! You have no right to be!’ Although she respected sleep, she was so excited that she went to Giles and kissed him, threw her arms round his head and when he woke, in his usual good temper, she said, ‘Giles darling, Giles, my own sweetheart, what would you do if Mother went away from your for ever. Went a long way away?’