The Old Man and Me (24 page)

Now, let’s see. We had no Verdurins but for a favourite trysting salon Maretta’s would do. I rang up C. D. and suggested we meet there that night. Latish. (A more witching hour.) And in a voice full of deception I told him I had things to do before but if I hoped it would arouse his jealousy I was wrong. He sounded faintly relieved, replied that he also had things to do and went me one better by adding it would have to be a quick drink if I didn’t mind. Of course I didn’t mind, I said, grinding my teeth. 9.00 then? Fine.

Would he fall for this preposterous scheme? Really, why should he? It was so arbitrary; so something I’d read in a book. He might conceivably—barely conceivably have been a Swann, but I was in no sense Odette. And that point cannot be stressed enough. To put it at its strongest: I might have participated in her every adventure, practised her every vice, and still I would not have been Odette. For one thing, I was no femme fatale, no trained courtesan; neither a Lorelei, nor an enchantress, nor a witch. I had no feeling for, and absolutely no belief in, the extra-mystical powers of my femininity. I was (yes, indeedy, I still am) a plain ordinary American girl. All-right-looking; all right—even good-looking, attractive when well groomed, but in an entirely
unreminiscent
way. Looking at me one didn’t suddenly (or even at leisure) recall the Zipporah of Botticello “which is to be seen in one of Sistine frescoes,” nor yet a Tanagra figurine. If I reminded one of anything else it was merely of other American girls. I was, I repeat, nothing special. Only determined. I was that. Hey, am I a new type to history? Betsy Lou Saegessor, girl cad? And a far cry from the Green Hat, a farther and even fainter cry from the Verdurins and that glamorous Côté de chez Swann. But would C. D. seeing Maretta’s bare of me feel his heart wrung by a sudden anguish? Would he shake with the sense that he was being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he began then for the first time to estimate?

Would he, by all that was reasonable, behave like someone in a novel I had read?

I don’t quite believe it myself but here’s what happened. About an hour after I was supposed to show up at Maretta’s the phone began ringing at Dody’s—I was sitting there filing my nails—and continued ringing at about half-hour intervals through the night (I’d made Dody and Jimbo promise not to answer it). At ten the next morning, a wild-eyed Seedy staggered round, took my hand in his and said, “Please let me hold on to you for a minute and catch my breath. It gives me the temporary hallucination that you’re here.”

“I’m sorry I missed you last night,” I said nicely. “Some friends of mine came in from New York and we didn’t get around to Maretta’s till about eleven and by then you’d gone.” (I checked his departure with Jinkie.)

“But where did you go? I looked for you everywhere.”

“You probably just missed me. We had a few drinks here and there and actually I got back quite early. I was dead beat.”

“But I rang and rang. I was frantic. I thought something had happened to you.”

“Guess I didn’t hear. When I’m that tired nothing wakes
me up.”

I could see he didn’t believe me. And I was dimly perceiving through the layers of artificially created excitement drawing us both into its coils that it soothed him
not
to believe. It Made the Situation. There was no longer any need for him to draw on his own resources to endow us—to endow his desire for me—with truth. In that night’s search for me his taste had indeed become “exclusive.” And he was again feeling the “insensate agonizing desire” to possess me.

He was looking at me, his eyes welling with affection, gently clasping me to him in the way I had seen him clasp certain of his favourite objects—so mildly—as though making his peace with his love for them, his face totally devoid of cynicism, assuming in its harmony of concentration an ineffable tenderness; a kind of ruined beauty. Never had his inability to deal with life seemed so touching.

I behaved solicitously towards him. I leaned forward. “Would you like something to drink?” I asked.

“Would you—would you mind dreadfully—? It’s been such a shock. I feel quite faint. I don’t think I could stay here another moment. Won’t you come back to my house with me? But anything you like.” His grip tightened on my hand and he spoke with a panting mixture of anxiety and anticipation. “
Every
thing you like.”

Pe-pp-pl-auck!

(That’s the sound of the string breaking in
The Cherry Orchard
; a sound heard round the world.)

The morning after that I awakened to find myself in his guest room. It was the first time I had been permitted to stay overnight; stretching under the softest linen, being served a breakfast from the most delicate china with the tiniest roses, of the most aromatic coffee, golden strips of toast, the spiciest marmalade, the best butter; a tiny vase of field flowers; the phrase in clover, in clover, clovered.

I was in clover. “In clover!” I said it out loud in my joy, snuggling into the fluffy goosequill pillows, elatedly contemplating the shining miracle of the love that
Proust’s
magic so unbelievably had wrought. Proust—that’s where the little stab of disappointment, the tiny twinge of shame even, came worming through the triumph and causing me to sigh “Only I can’t really take credit.” It was like following some childishly simple recipe and ending up with a perfect soufflé. And it wasn’t only myself I was disappointed in. I was disappointed in C. D. as well. More, I was furious with him. Didn’t he know a Literary Allusion when it hit him in the face? Served him right then. He’d have to take what he got. By the time I’d gotten dressed my confidence had wavered to the point where I found myself desperately wishing I was Odette. I more than wanted to—I
had
to be to keep the magic potent. To stay in power (as I combed my hair) meant to stay in Character. And I wouldn’t have to look too closely at what I was doing. (Drop a deximyl into mouth.) How convenient to be someone who disappeared into the printed page. I know this is the printed page, but I’m talking about—dammit—you know. I looked at myself closely. Might I not have become “reminiscent of a Botticelli” overnight? Nope. I combed my American hair and lipsticked my American mouth. I tried to remember what Betsy Ross looked like as I went downstairs (or what she’d done).

C. D. in the morning. Still under the spell (very powerful). “Let’s go shopping. I want to buy you a present. You come with me. I’ve thought and thought and I don’t know what you’d like.” We bought me a beautiful Georgian pin like the one we’d seen at the Antique Fair. I always wear it.

Moving from Odette, to Lady Brett, to Scarlett. Who shall I be today? (Oh, surprise me, I said to myself.)

“
You
remind me of Rembrandt,” I said to C. D., “I always tell you that. Don’t I remind you of anyone? You know, paintings and so forth? Goya, Manet, Degas, Modigliani? The Coca Cola girl? You never say? I feel shapeless.”

He shook his head and laughed. “You are the perfect shape for expressing yourself.”

Ah—how often I repeated that to myself. So it was me—the me-ness of me—he loved after all.

Shape. Where was I? Oh, yes. Shape. That’s what I was saying at the beginning of all this. We were in pretty bad shape Seedy and I when that night came. We had been going it some, hadn’t we? I had inoculated Seedy. I had finally given Seedy the disease of love. I was plenty aware he was stricken with love as a disease and the one thing I could not afford to do was to allow him to get well. It wasn’t his “well” state, this love for me. I knew his well state. It was robustly malicious at the Daggoners’ or exchanging snobbisms with Lady Mary—or tormenting poor Pauly. Now it was he who was being tormented. The game had become for both players. And when they shook their heads at the club and said “Poor old C. D.” they said it with alarm now and without a trace of indulgence. He had become Seedy. Everyone thought I was bad for him except C. D.

“I am in love with you as the earth revolves around the sun. If I don’t see you every few hours I shall take to my bed and have one of those wasting diseases people died of in Victorian novels.”

He had a way of getting things upside-down. Brushing aside the pretty sentiment I was perfectly aware that the truth lay really in the opposite direction—that if he stopped seeing me he would be well in no time.

The thing that kept me going was momentum. The train was moving too fast for me to jump off. There would be no next stop. I’d have to wait for the crash. The only way I can explain it is to ask you to observe how often a child learning to ride a bike will ride it straight into a hedge or a tree to stop it rather than try to jump off or use the brakes.

I have said about that night that it was a night like all the rest, a night beginning so usually I wasn’t even looking when it happened. But going back over it now I can see in how many ways this was not in the slightest true. For one important exception, a heavy fog had folded us up into its cold grey blanket. For three days we’d groped and gasped our way through a London from which streets, pavements, cars, even buildings and people had been quietly erased. A London no longer a city but a great cold, glowing field where the refraction of the street lamps, unable to pierce the opaque fog, nonetheless lit up the vast loneliness with an eerie yellow glow.

That’s it! That’s what I’ve been missing unremembered until this very moment: a taste in my mouth. I want that taste in my mouth. A taste of fog. A taste of C. D. Music in my mouth. And smoke. Alcohol, dope, and desire. A taste of dry breathlessness under my breath. A taste of lung, liver, and rusty blood. But above all, the particular taste of London air.

Maybe it was the London air. I’m sure it’s unhealthy. At least it had an unhealthy effect on me. Yes I’m sure it did. Or was it foreign air? Air foreign to my nostrils. If all the magic pills and potions I was pouring into my stomach could have such an effect on me—why not get sent through all the orifices? Man is not fed through the stomach alone. Was that what was releasing all my wildness? A whiff through the nose, a taste on the tongue? All right, I was wacky. I was cracking up, but I’ll never be the same again as in that litmus-paper state where if you held my hand in yours for a minute your imprint was on me for ever, where my shadow permanently stained the wall, where the air was real and active, tactile, writhing all around me. And when I say London air I am not talking about the fog, which of course was the exaggeration, the stirring up, the pouring out, the laying it on thick. I’m talking about the ordinary everyday London air, lying low through September and October, pretending anonymity, only to rise in November, pungent and dangerous. Come to think of it, it was C. D. that pointed it out to me. He sniffed the air and said, “Now it’s beginning to smell like London again,” and when I asked him what he meant he said that for instance Paris smelled like apples and French cigarettes and Seville like rancid olive-oil and hair-oil and Barcelona like decaying bodies and bull sweat. London, he said, smelled of a well-bred mustiness of old newspapers boiled with vegetables. But I thought it had an evil smell. I know it did: The Sulphur Fumes of Hell; particularly apparent during fog.

And I must say that in my exaggerated state of Anglophobia I was quite happy to see London given a good mud-bath. It meant the gods were angry too. It meant I had Satan on my side, belching out great spills of sulphur fumes from his Underground. (What the authorities couldn’t seem to grasp with all their nonsense about smokeless zones and put-out-the-coal-fires was that
these gases were shooting out of the ground—
not descending upon them from the sky.) Dear old London, my cosy old chimney-pot.

But back to that night. Satan was pumping fresh waves of smog steadily into the already besieged city. (If you don’t think that fog is caused by supernatural powers then why is it able to penetrate
walls
, I’d like to know, a trick neither the wind nor the rain seems to have mastered.) We had gathered at C. D.’s house that night, Jimbo, Dody, C. D., and I, staring greyly at each other’s grey outlines in the fog-filled drawing-room. Not a night to venture forth in, you would think. But I who had made my pact with the devil longed to be abroad in his weather. I always like to be out in emergency weather, blizzards and thunderstorms and heat waves and things; and that wandering around in a bad fog would do C. D.’s health no good barely influenced my decision. As a matter of fact we all wanted to go out. We’d been out every night before, that week. Been out and come back and stayed up and stayed overnight at C. D.’s. Always the four of us. It was like a kind of house-party in Limbo.

I see the tableau in the softly greying room: for the past hour no one had really spoken—that is, no one had said anything that required either comment or answer. Jimbo always sat, or rather stretched himself out, on a sofa, feet straight ahead, relaxed but not properly collapsed, so that there was a triangle of air between the straight line of his back and the angle of the sofa. I could stare for hours hypnotized by that triangle of space. My eyes might wander over the contours or rather the flat planes and surfaces of his body, but they would always return to that spot. The essence of the Jimbo silhouette was that it defined the things around him—as a bird defines space. That was Jim—on the wing. Jimbo would sit in a chair (he would sit the same way on anything, even a bench), and the chair was what you would see. With C. D. it was the opposite. He sat only in armchairs, and only the best ones at that. He had a way of placing himself in a straight-backed chair and looking so uncomfortable—not unhappy, too obvious, uncomfortable—that he was immediately offered the best chair in the room: a gift he would accept without any modesty, and the chair would snuggle up lovingly around him. It was on C. D.’s upholstered body that the eye rested, rather than on the chair’s.

Jimbo on the sofa, C. D. in the chair and Dody curled at his feet looking lovingly at Jimbo. C. D. was stroking Dody’s soft brown hair. I was bolt upright, very uncomfortable, near the fireplace, arms and legs akimbo. I was trying to teach myself yogi for I was beginning to feel I was heading straight for Nirvana by a short cut and that I ought to get in a few basic exercises for the sake of authenticity.