Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (14 page)

"Mary," he said with a sigh of irony, "there isn't a soul at the front desk. How the fuck am I supposed to check in?"

I think the three of us had the same thought, that this one was Madeleine's affair. Meanwhile, he had to be hidden until Mr. Farley had taken his leave. I stepped forward and greeted him, reluctant though I was to give up the intimacy of the rabble. I would see them all later, but there was something especially pungent about the moments just after the caper that I had to let go. I took Aldo by one fleshy arm and guided him through the house toward the kitchen.

"So you're Rick," he said.

"I guess we've heard a lot about each other," I said, feeling giddy as we crossed the hall into the safety of the dining room.

"Really?" he said. "I would have thought we hadn't heard a thing. She's said your name enough, but it's blood from a stone to get any hard information."

"Well, I guess I know more about you." And I did, though not much. I was glad Madeleine had confided more to me than to him, but I knew too that she wouldn't gossip and never told more than she had to. Because I lived far away, I think she had given me the clues and filled in the background that she kept from people whom she saw all the time. During our several days in France, when she was what she now called "between careers," she had talked over with me her time in films so that she could get at the narrative thread. She said then that it was unusual for her to be free with details. Since then, I have gotten only fragments here and there, but I am very good at the narrative thread of Madeleine's life and so can piece them in.

"Really?" he said again. It was his favorite word. "Do you know the
kinky
things about me?"

"No. I know you've been taking care of her finances."

We had come into the kitchen and now faced each other across the counter. Aldo played with a crock full of wooden spoons as if he were arranging flowers.

"Such as they are, my dear. She's broke."

"Again? Why?"

"Ask her. She's a one-woman welfare state. She gives cash to every broken-down bit player she ever worked with. If only she weren't so European. She feels she has to
earn
it first. I'd give her Japan if she'd take it."

"Do you own it?"

"In a manner of speaking. It's all to do with transistors and diodes and things. I don't understand it. I just sign the checks. She did tell you I was rich, didn't she?"

"Yes," I said.

"Oh good. It's so much less complicated when people know already. You're very good-looking."

"Thank you."

"Is that boy out in the yard yours?"

"No," I said, bristling. "I don't own anyone."

"So he
is
yours," Aldo said wistfully. "Well, mother will find some other mischief to get into. Don't worry about me, I can always amuse myself. It looks like the rest of you are going to be in jail anyway." He took a wooden spoon out of the crock and put it against his lips, as if he were about to lick chocolate off it. Then he waved it like a baton. "Jails are
very
kinky. But really, don't you think it's a little extreme?"

There were clothes everywhere. When David and I brought up the last of the luggage to Madeleine's room, she and Aldo had already opened four suitcases. One lay open on Mrs. Carroll's bed, another on the chaise in the bay window. Aldo was making room in the closets, bunching up the dead woman's clothes to one side. He had emptied drawers in the high dresser, the low dresser and the vanity, and I don't know what he did with the things he cleared out. Then he had gone into every bedroom on the second floor and ransacked the closets for coat hangers. Now he stood in the middle of the room, clutching a bundle of wooden hangers in his arms, deciding what next to throw into disarray.

"Don't worry," he said to me as I let down onto the floor a canvas and leather sack of boots and shoes, "I know where everything goes. I can tell you're a worrier. But I can put everything back where it was in five minutes if I have to. Tell him, Madeleine."

"Aldo is very visual," Madeleine said absently. She was standing at the bed, holding up a long linen skirt and examining it closely for wrinkles. She was wearing a peach-colored dressing gown, yards and yards of chiffon that must have taken up the whole of one suitcase itself. Her head was wrapped in a towel.

She had come out onto the landing after Mr. Farley left and, still in Mrs. Carroll's reedy voice, demanded an hour entirely to herself. When Aldo and I appeared in the downstairs hall, she sighed in her own voice. "Oh Christ, Aldo, I thought you'd never get here," she said. "Find me something to wear, will you?" Then she went away to take off her makeup and bathe.

Aldo paced around the downstairs waiting, the peach chiffon over his arm. He groaned about the austerity of Mrs. Carroll's oaken furniture. He flipped through her records in the library and said he'd never heard of any of them, giving you the impression that he owned all the records you ought to have heard of. "So you can't listen to music," he said. "What do you do? Talk? God help you." He said he didn't even need to ask, he knew we were without television. He said it as if we were without running water or indoor plumbing. I shook my head no, and I stood around listening to him and felt few-worded and unflappable like Gary Cooper. By comparison anyway. He never stopped talking. He made you think something terrible might happen if he did stop. And yet he was not one of those people who makes everyone as nervous as he is. All the nervous energy in a room flowed into him. He looked like he would register on a Geiger counter.

At last he was so edgy that he said we were going up, whether she was ready or not. He strode into her room, and I heard her squawk briefly from the bathtub. But the chiffon must have melted her because he came back and called down the stairs that I could start unloading the car. I had never volunteered to do it, but I didn't care until I reached the car in the back drive and found it piled with luggage like a first-class stateroom. I bellowed to David in the tower, and he came down.

Just now he entered Madeleine's room behind me, a fat garment bag slung over his shoulder like a sail.

"David, you're an angel," Aldo said. "And see, I've made a place for it right here in the closet. This is just for
dressy
things." David walked by him into the closet and hung up the bag. Aldo filled the doorway and said in a smutty voice, "We can meet here whenever you like, and we can play in the dark."

"No thanks," David said. "I'm not into closets." He squeezed by Aldo and took a long look at Madeleine as she drew one thing and then another out of the suitcase on the bed. He would have loved to sit cross-legged on the pillows and talk with her about her clothes. But he couldn't get his bearings on the situation. He looked at me and said, "If you need me, I'll be outside. I'm going swimming."

"I think that boy's in love with me," Aldo said when David had closed the door. He grinned at me. "You'd better watch out, Rick. I'm a terrible home-wrecker."

"Don't worry," I said. "We're all homeless here."

"Aldo," Madeleine said, holding out silk blouses in each hand. He went over and took them from her. "Go easy on David. Don't swallow him up."

Madeleine surprised me. I hadn't thought she was paying attention. It was difficult to say what was wrong anyway, since David had answered every one of Aldo's antic lines breezily enough. I thought I was the only one who noticed. David had never gotten on with the dizziest gay men, the reckless, boy-hungry types with their hysterics, their vamp's humor, and their greeting-card sentiments. I found Aldo's Ping-Pong conversation endearing as it shuttled back and forth between air-headed chatter and seamy innuendo. David seemed threatened by it. Once, when he was young and perfect, he must have sensed a nonstop sexual hunger in a man like Aldo, and he feared attack. He should know by now that they are harmless men, and they shock and act wildly camp because they don't get much action. Besides, Aldo was more complex than the queens in bars who drink too much and try to appear gay in the older, sadder sense of the word. I would have to remind David, I thought, that there were no rules. The queen's way was in its own way delicious and brave.

"He can take care of himself," Aldo said, folding the blouses on top of the dresser.

"Of course he can," Madeleine said, as if that were self-evident. "But he's not as jaded as you are."

"I'm not jaded. I still like simple pleasures. Salted nuts and cocoa. Clean sheets—"

"You have a bad case of reality, Aldo, and he doesn't."

"Don't let David put a spell on you, Madeleine," I said, walking over to the bay window. The late afternoon sun was hot and shining in, and I could feel sweat between my shoulder blades. "Remember the Desert Inn. He's been around, and he's gotten what he's wanted since he was a boy."

"If I didn't know you better," she said, sitting down on the bed and adjusting her turban, "I'd swear you were jealous of his youth."

"I'm not. I just don't want us to labor under the illusion that David is innocent."

"I didn't say he was innocent. I said he wasn't jaded."

"Like me," Aldo said, laying the blouses in a drawer.

No I'm not, I thought. Not jealous and not like Aldo either. In fact, I thought I was doing beautifully, keeping cool and free of jealousy during the onslaught of Aldo. I wanted to talk to Madeleine about the scene with Mr. Farley. We had had a brief laugh over it when I brought the first of the suitcases up. She did a cruelly apt imitation of him reading his Latinate legal prose. But I wanted every pause and every shade of irony, and she wanted to unpack. Phidias had been so pleased with things that he didn't even wait for Farley to leave. He went home to the dairy, David told me, to supervise the afternoon milking as usual. David, too, seemed to think it was all behind us and, having won his round with the lawyer, didn't think twice about Madeleine's. Only I needed to know. The lone musketeer. But the mood had altered utterly with Aldo's arrival, and so I went along, trying not to pout and get left behind. I stood in the bay and looked down onto the dunes, and I saw David in his shorts, trotting along the planks toward the beach.

"Don't be cross, Rick," she said, and I turned back, not realizing we were still in conversation. "We agree in principle. He hasn't been hurt so badly yet, and we both want to protect him so that he won't. It's dumb of both of us, but there you are."

"In a way he
is
pretty innocent," I said.

"You keep saying that. It's not a word I attach much favor to. You know what he asked me yesterday?"

He had reached the beach. He slipped off his shorts and ran naked to the south, toward the cove where I spent my afternoons. My chest tightened. I turned away from him and watched Madeleine dry her hair with the towel. I noticed that she was still wearing the cameo earrings.

"What?"

"Who, if I had my choice of anyone, would I have liked to know. 'You mean since Adam and Eve?' I asked. No. He meant the twentieth century."

"David has no past," I said. "He doesn't understand that there have been other centuries."

"Carole Lombard," Aldo said. "That's who I should have known. We were both Virgos."

"Who did you say, Madeleine?"

"Well, that's it, I couldn't think of anyone," she said. She stopped toweling her hair, and she shook her head and let the hair fall. It was blond again. "I mean, I've met everybody as it is, and I don't go out of my way to meet them a second time. I said it would have been nice to meet Freud because I knew Jung a little bit. I would have liked to compare the effect on the two of them. But really, it's not the same as
knowing
them." She shrugged like a movie star. "I don't know anyone at all."

It was the glamorous, offhand answer David must have been looking for, full of small confessions. And I think it is probably true that Madeleine didn't care about the names on her dance card. But I suspected what the question reminded her of.

"I know who you didn't say," I said.

"Charles A. Lindbergh?"

"Right."

Madeleine once admitted to me that she survived her fame by putting on the Madeleine mask in public, particularly when she crossed paths with someone famous. She had told me long ago that the only star she met before she took on the press herself was Lindbergh, in Paris when she was twenty-three. She had not been so impressed as the French at large about his flight, since she had little patience with technology in any incarnation. He was all tarted up in a leather flyer's jacket and a white scarf. It was at a party on a boat in the Seine. She had spent half a year's wages to take the train to Paris and buy a dress. "It was a fabulous dress," she said. "Black crepe, with white silk gardenias sewn on at the shoulder, and then a shower of white petals down the front." And Lindbergh had looked right through her. He asked her a dumb question and then turned to talk to yet another reporter. It was the single occasion where Madeleine had stood with her nose pressed against the glass of the sweetshop. God knows what resolutions she made that evening.

"Who did
he
say?" Aldo asked.

"David? David is so irresistible," she said. "He said
me.
Now is that jaded?"

"Well, it's a very complicated bit of seduction," I said, as precisely as I could.

"I think it's darling," Aldo said, and he walked back into the deepest closet and for the moment disappeared.

"Wasn't today marvelous?" she asked me. "Weren't we
all
marvelous?"

"Yes. But I thought things were going to stand still for a while." I opened my hand in the direction of the shipwreck that littered the room.

"Don't worry, Rick. We're going to settle down now to our summer vacation and get fat and lazy. Aldo is going to last about a week here. He likes you."

"I like him."

"I guess you do. But you don't know what to make of
me.
The point is—I was thinking this in my bath—you've seen too many Madeleine Cosquer concerts and not enough of
me
in these last years. I lounge around your apartment for three days eating my vitamins and unwinding from my singing. Now we have a little time, and that's good." She stood up and walked toward the bathroom, the chiffon sweeping in a wave behind her. She called over her shoulder. "On the other hand, don't expect things to stand still. I have to get dressed. They used to say in Hollywood, 'If you don't get dressed after a bath, you'll start to drink.'"