I'm Dying Laughing (56 page)

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 with 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.

Emily sighed, ‘Heigh-ho. I suppose it is because she is Viennese, Germanic tastes after all. And always boasting they are small-town—well, they are!’

Stephen said his stomach was bad but serve him right for eating with the poor. The poor didn’t know how to eat and hadn’t the materials and if they did where would be revolution? Why improve them? If every ragged Frenchman knew how to cook like Véfour, why not leave them alone? Why a revolution? The French revolution produced good French cooking because the cooks of the nobility lost their jobs and had to go and cook in cheap wine-cellars. ‘Come the revolution Fernande will have to cook not for us but for Hongree; then you’ll see.’

Emily was still repelled and fractious. ‘How can a man who has had money, really been in the money, had a decent house and eaten properly, had a servant, how can he serve a dinner like that? Or how can she? After all, she ate darn well in America. After all, we were often at their house. They had servants, she did nothing but hand out the drinks; the drinks were all right, the hors-d’oeuvre were passable. We really enjoyed ourselves talking politics, revolution, Marxism, talking Europe, the Europe we were going to see after the war. And now—Hongree has forgotten all that. He’s gone back to grubbing in a cold-water apartment eating food for the concierge’s dog and letting his wife dress in old curtain lengths. He knows how to make money.’

Emily fretted. They talked in their immense kitchen downstairs. She was eating, he was drinking coffee and a little cognac which always made him feel easier. Emily ate and heaved sighs of relief.

‘It’s bad for their digestion’. And if that’s their company food think what they eat when alone! I don’t wonder she’s sad, looking at him. It’s not only the food but the feeling of oppression, the feeling you get they’ve been up since dawn rubbing cabbage into bits and hunting round for the peas for the soup, running down the street for a bone to improve the stone-broth, tasting and smelling and calculating, will it be enough? And of course the whole musty, dirty old place, though it’s cold as paupers, full of the smell of centuries of such cooking. Oh, my God, I see why you have to go to a decent restaurant to eat. No old boards with mice, lice and leaking toilets in the offing. And then the guests have to worry, but this is a feast for them, otherwise they wouldn’t have invited us; and they’ll probably have to live off the leavings for a week. Well, let me tell you, I didn’t. I ate all I could, even if I didn’t want it. And when I went into her room, I took half her bottle of perfume. I think it’s so paltry, scrappy to make guests feel humble and try to choke them off. And then the wine—ugh!—why have wine? I’d have swopped the party drinks and the wine for a single spot of whisky. God, they could have asked us for it. “We’re too poor to buy drinks, won’t you send us some?” I’d have preferred that. I didn’t feel myself till the thin brandy came and it was mixing brandy. My goodness, why make your guests miserable for the sake of a social ritual? It’s vanity. I must repay. And I repaid with a full course meal and drinks. Good heavens, never again! And you were right about Vittorio. Imagine eating stewed fowl off a one-lung burner. How can they? I don’t get it. I didn’t enjoy it when I was a cub reporter and lived on franks and orangeade.’

She walked up and down worrying about Vittorio and Hongree. ‘But I don’t get it, Stephen, I don’t get it. And they’re men I like. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t waste my spit on them. But these ought to know better.’

Then she began to laugh, a full-throated laugh of enjoyment.

‘What are you laughing at?’ he said suspiciously.

‘At the side-shows! It’s like going to the local fair in some one-pig town. You think about it for weeks, you get dressed up, you fight with your parents: “I’ve got to go!” You’re hot, sweaty, everyone runs, shouts himself hoarse, little sister’s lost her ribbon off her pigtail before she’s off the streetcar, the car wouldn’t start that morning; but you’ve got to get to the fair. When you get past the wooden gates, you pay your money, you’re in an enclosure where you’re going to see the side-shows—hot-dogs, dry rolls, dirty lemonade with flies in it, steaming coffee with maybe coffee in it, at the beginning, and such sad eastern harem girls, with steamy bits of veiling on their fat, dirty haunches, looking hungry, as if they don’t believe in it; hideous, revolting monsters which you can see are put together with cardboard and glue; but at the end of the day you’ve had a hell of a good time, you had fun. We ought to take Hongree and Vittorio in that spirit.’

Stephen growled, ‘I never went to fairs. I hate them. I never ate hot-dogs even in Hollywood parties or Connecticut barbecues. What’s funny? My belly aches.’

‘You’ll have to see the doctor.’

‘I know. I’m putting off, hoping it will go away, but it won’t. I know.’

Anna came with the news that Fairfield was very anxious to come and that, if they could make room for her, Fairfield could come over at once and stay with them till Christmas. Anna, it was clear, was anxious for the marriage between Christy and Fairfield to take place when they were both very young to avoid other attachments. They were to receive Fairfield in September. Anna also suggested that if Christy could not make his way at the Sorbonne he might go to his English relatives, the English Tanners, stay with them, or under their tutelage and make his way at Cambridge or Oxford. If he could not make the grade, she hinted, there were ways of getting him in; tutors, friends of the Tanners. Emily was very indignant.

Emily was sick and worked, and Stephen was sick and worked, but when Anna had gone at the end of July, Emily found she had sold her book for a good price and that they could have a holiday in August before Fairfield’s arrival. The Trefougars had visited them several times during Anna’s stay and neither had given any hint about their sad domestic secrets. In fact, Anna thought them very fine people; and she softened towards Emily and Stephen.