The Prize (137 page)

‘I think you have accomplished exactly what you set out to do—make me helplessly curious.’

She tossed her hair. ‘Then we have a deal?’

‘No—not on your terms.’

‘I see you still don’t believe me.’ Her face had strangely darkened. ‘What will convince you? Do you want a preview tonight?’

‘Not if you would consider it an option on my services.’

‘Don’t be rude.’

‘I don’t mean to be rude, M
ن
rta. I’m simply not on your wavelength. We’re not communicating at all. You’re speaking to me about a parcel you label sex, and I’m saying if it has no other name, it’s a poor product. Haven’t you ever been in love? What would happen if you fell in love?’

‘I wouldn’t be where I am,’ she said stiffly. ‘Craig, I have never and will never let myself be used.’

‘But you will use someone else.’

‘How am I to take that? Are you being sarcastic, chastising me?’

‘I’m simply trying to believe you. I can’t believe you. I’m appalled.’

‘Quit simpering at me. Don’t be a sanctimonious child. And don’t start categorizing me with your cheap writer’s clichés—prefab characterization—Enter, the cold, calculating devourer of men, et cetera.’

‘I’m not judging you. I confine myself to observing, imagining, reporting. I’m trying to find out who you are. Do you know?’

‘You’re damn well sure I know,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you who I am, and who I am not. I am an actress, a great actress, the greatest in this century. That means one thing to me—my art comes first, and everything else can go merrily to hell. In this world, there are two kinds of actress. One is the actress-woman. She is schizoid. She is one-half public performer and one-half private human being. She is the one who winds up emotionally bankrupt, soon forgotten except for a fund-raising benefit and a ghost-written memoir. The other is the actress-actress, who is not split in two halves, but is of a single indestructible piece, single, whole, self-sufficient, self-directed, devoted only to herself as celebrity and artist. Everything in her life, every judgment, decision, every choice and turning, must measure up to one standard—is it good for the actress that I am? This applies to homelife, leisure, children, finances—and above all, it applies to love.’

She swallowed her drink, then, instead of asking Craig for another, she brushed past him to the table and began pouring her own.

‘I was fortunate,’ she went on, ‘because I became an actress-actress early. The moment I was brought to
America. I perceived how detestable and degrading the market-place was. American show business, I found, was exactly like American sports and commerce and politics—a game of naked bartering. In Hollywood, on Broadway, what
they
had to offer was a good role with good money. But beauty, personality, talent were not necessarily enough to win the role. There were dozens of beautiful and trained young girls for every part. Then, on what would the choice be based? What could win such a role? The added offer of easy sex? No, not even that was enough. These dozens of girls were all too eager to divest themselves of pants and maidenheads. In fact, so eager were they, so uniformly accessible, that even I, as a young Swedish girl, was shocked. But then, because I was clever, I saw what extra was needed to win the role. Beauty was good, but too cheap. Nonconforming beauty was better. Acting talent was good, but too widespread. Overlaid on it there must be personality. Sexual availability was good, but there was a monotony to it, like raw steaks displayed in the meat market. But to offer something different with sexual availability—to offer fornication with skill, real skill—and once it be made known, to make the experience gradually more difficult to possess—that, and those, were the extra factors I understood and put into use.’

She held her vodka before her, not drinking, and her earnestness was such that Craig felt she had forgotten his presence. But now she seemed to address him.

‘Have you ever slept with a starlet? Groomed hair, cameo face, cherry lips, and figure always either forty, twenty-four, thirty-five or thirty seven, twenty-four, thirty-five? If you’ve slept with one, you’ve slept with one hundred, one thousand. The same eagerness to oblige, the same tired endearments in accents of dramatic schools, the same practised wigglings, the same superficial gamut of love play—warm pliable receptacles of love by rote, as if waiting in the wings for the cue, only waiting horizontally—until they can get the waiting done and be on with their real roles, the payoff. That was wrong, and it was not for me. At once, I knew that I would not be another pound—pounds—of easy flesh, to evaporate from memory by daybreak, to be paid off by some minor casting man with a bit part. I would be no starlet. I would be more, and I would be an experience. And so I went at this as I went at my public career. I schooled myself in the art of satisfying in bed as well as on stage. No matter how I did it, or how long I took. But I did it, and a night with M
ن
rta Norberg became not a passing physical release for a producer or director or banker, but an adventure in a new dimension of sensuality, and an enslavement and commitment. Soon, as I made my way, I was able to resist the pastry cutter in other ways. I would not let them coiffure my head like all the others. Or shorten my nose. Or artificially inflate my breasts to the minimum expected size. Or learn the same carriage, and same, same diction. I stayed myself, and that made me unusual and different and remembered. And all the while, I remained a wonder in bed, and when this was known, and I was known, my roles grew larger, better, choicer, until they were the best, and exposure and publicity made me a household name. And when, at last, I was bigger than the spoiled men, the potbellied men, the sadistic men who had so often humiliated me—when they needed me, and I did not need them—I was able to becom e what I really was and am this day—remote, reserved, selective. My skills were less needed, but I had them when they were needed—a rivalry for the best play purchased, for the best director imported, for the great leading man, for a percentage of the gross. I kept my distance and gave sparingly, but when I gave, I gave well.’ She paused. ‘I still do, Craig.’

In a curious way, her story had moved him. His perception had filled in so much that had not been told. Yet the story made her even more difficult to understand. ‘But now you can do as you please, M
ن
rta. You’ve spent a life trying to be yourself again. You’ve won. You are yourself. Why not love whom you wish and when you wish?’

‘Because avarice never ceases,’ she said with a smile, ‘and mine is the avarice of the ego. My monument is in people’s minds. To keep it there, I must continue building it. I have been idle too long. I must build again. And the materials I most urgently require are story properties. You have one such property, and I want it. Since I can’t have it for cash alone, I am willing to return to the market-place with my unique skills. But I am who I am, and I deserve to have what I want on my terms. Be sensible, Craig, I can dictate. You cannot. Despite this advantage, I am fair, because you are an artist as well as a man, and unless you are rightly rewarded you will not work happily, and I will suffer as well as you. So I offer you a fortune, and I offer you an experience, one that will be impressed upon your brain until it is senile, one that will mean more to your biographies than the silly prize. I am giving you all of me for a part of you. I’m leaning over backwards, and I don’t want to go on like this any more. Simply say yes, and we’ll seal the bargain with a kiss, and you’ll stay the night. Now, are you happy—?’

‘I’m revolted,’ he blurted out. The sympathy she had weaned from him had fled, as her cold bargaining had resumed. ‘For some money that can be earned elsewhere and some loveless convulsions in the hay, and a behind-the-hand conversation piece—you want a tooled novel, hammer and chisel and nails and plane, pounded and hacked out, slanted, a sham—’

‘Goddammit,’ she cried suddenly, ‘I’m sick of your friggin’ writer divinity—’

‘No, wait, wait—I’ve got to finish. I’m not putting my art above anyone on earth who accomplishes an honest day of labour honestly done, so that life is earned and deserved. I make no pretence of being touched by a heavenly hand, singled out for special treatment, stand back because he’s Muse-inspired—none of that. I’m not making myself out above a housewife who cooks a meal right and raises an infant well, or above a plumber who repairs the toilet efficiently, or the shoe assistant who gives you the right size. It’s not a hallowed creation of work I defend—but destruction of myself as honest and decent and already in debt for my place on earth. If I grind out your untrue book as the pretence of a book truly mine, to be peddled far and wide with my name on it, my book is a lie, and I am a pervert before every reader who reads me, because he or she trusts me.’

He caught his breath. ‘I am sorry, M
ن
rta, but I must write to please me, not you. That’s why my answer is flatly no, M
ن
rta, flatly no. I’m not worried about you. You’ll find fifty other properties, more suitable ones, or have them manufactured for you. And you’ll find men you won’t have to love to get them. And maybe someday you’ll find men—a man—you honestly love, without this barter, far from the market-place, although I doubt it. And as for me, I will keep my—I won’t say integrity—but my nerve and my self-respect, always regretting that I had to let you keep your money and your dazzling skill. Yes, M
ن
rta, I have no doubt, no doubt at all, you will find other men who can afford, better afford, your money and skill, who have a backlog of integrity that can survive one small corruption, but I no longer have that backlog, and I can’t afford you now. If I give you what little I have left, no reward of yours will help me survive as a man—because then, at last, I’ll be totally bankrupt.’

Where earlier had been her smile, he now saw her teeth bared. The drawn Nordic face gave him no satisfaction of emotion, but the teeth were bared, and she had never been more revealed.

‘No man has ever spoken to me this way,’ she said, ‘and lest you think you’ll get some satisfaction out of it, I’ll tell you right now why you’re turning me down—the real truth of it. I can tell—I can smell it—I always can.’

He waited.

Her throaty voice was a bullwhip, and she lashed savagely at him. ‘You’re quaking down to the crotch. You’re the boy without balls, and we both know it. You’re afraid of me, and that’s the beginning and end of it. You’re scared of sex, and you’re scared of a real woman, and it’s a thousand to one you’re afraid of my bed and my body, because you can’t get it up.’

It was then that he did a foolish thing. He had been controlled, but now, like a schoolboy taking a dare, he lost his control. ‘I wish I could save your face and say that’s true, but the truth is I’ve done all right by myself, and right here in Sweden, and with a woman who has the decency to give love for love and for nothing else.’

‘You’re a liar!’ she shouted. ‘I wouldn’t let you touch me now, if you were William Shakespeare and wanted to give me every word you ever wrote. I wouldn’t let myself be touched by a puny, running weakling—who’s got integrity instead of balls. Is that what you give your lady friend, your poor, starved lady friend, a hot injection of integrity? Get out of here, Craig, get out of my sight! Get your clothes and beat it, and stay out of my sight before I tell the whole world about their great masculine Nobel winner—the one man on earth who couldn’t get it up with M
ن
rta Norberg!’

She spun away from him, seething so furiously that the contraction of the muscles in her shoulders and back was visible. He remained a moment, looking at her, at the dishevelled hair no longer provocative, the slouched shoulders that would soon be old, the curved spine no longer lithe and slender but skinny and knobby, and the sparse folds of buttocks below the bikini strip no longer inciting but only grotesque and pitiful. The lofty, illusive female love symbol was, finally, only an embittered man-woman of the market-place, and no more. Wordlessly, Craig turned away from her and went to the
cabaٌa
.

He changed slowly in the confined room, without anger, with only an inexplicable burden of sorrow, and when he was fully dressed, he emerged.

The
lanai
was vacant of life. She had gone. He went into the living-room and found the yellow telephone. The number came to him at once. He dialed 22.00.00, and when the girl answered, he requested a taxi and told her where he was. As he hung up, his eyes caught the full-length oil of M
ن
rta Norberg on the far wall. As Manon Lescaut. The Trader, he thought—no, better—Trader in the Market-Place.