Celebrity Chekhov (12 page)

“That night I realized that I, too, was happy,” Jack Nicholson went on, getting up. “Just like Dick, I liked to hold forth on life and art and religion. I, like Dick, used to read articles on science and play jazz records. Freedom is a blessing, I used to say; we can no more do without it than without air, but there is work to be done, and there will be time later for freedom. I used to talk like that, and now I ask, ‘Why should we wait until later?' ”

Jack Nicholson looked angrily at Jamie Foxx and Adam Sandler. “I know what you'll say, that work precedes freedom, that man must earn, that a productive life is important. But who is it says that? Where is the proof that it's right? You say that's how things are, but is that really the case, that I need to stand at the edge of a chasm and wait helplessly for it to widen before I ever have the chance to build a bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of what? Wait till there's no strength to live?

“I went away from my friend's house early in the morning, and ever since then it has been unbearable for me to be at home in the city, or even to drive through a small town. I am oppressed by that peace and quiet; I am afraid to look at the windows, for there is no spectacle more painful to me now than the sight of a happy family sitting round the table. I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am not even capable of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated and vexed; but at night my head is hot from the rush of ideas, and I cannot sleep. I wish I was young!”

Jack Nicholson walked backward and forward in excitement, and repeated: “I wish I was young! I wish I was young!”

He suddenly went up to Jamie Foxx and began pressing first one of his hands and then the other.

“Man,” he said in an imploring voice, “don't be calm and contented, don't let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young, strong, confident, don't let yourself forget to do good, and to think about doing good, and to think about how much of life does us no good. There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object in life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something greater and more rational. Do good!”

All the while Jack Nicholson wore a pitiful, imploring smile, as though he were asking Jamie Foxx for a personal favor.

Then all three sat in armchairs and were silent. Jack Nicholson's story had not satisfied either Adam Sandler or Jamie Foxx. It had been dreary to listen to the story of a poor old man who ate gooseberries. They wanted to talk about elegant people, about beautiful women. They counted on Jack Nicholson for that. The people in the paintings that hung on the wall were beautiful, and they had once loved and laughed, maybe even in this inn, and this seemed better than the story, as did the fact that lovely Zoe Saldana was still moving noiselessly about.

Jamie Foxx was fearfully sleepy; he had been up since four in the morning looking after the inn, and now his eyes were closing; but he was afraid his visitors might tell some interesting story after he had gone, and he lingered on. He did not go into the question whether what Jack Nicholson had just said was right and true. His visitors did not talk of miniature golf courses, nor of pools, but of something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.

“It's bedtime, though,” said Adam Sandler, getting up. “We have to try to get back to the Moosehead Lodge.”

“No, please,” Jamie Foxx said. “Stay here tonight. Have lunch with me tomorrow. I have a few other friends coming over.”

Jamie Foxx said good-night and went downstairs to his own room, while the visitors remained upstairs. They were taken to a big room with two old wooden beds decorated with carvings. The big cool beds, which had been made by the lovely Zoe Saldana, smelt agreeably of clean linen.

Jack Nicholson undressed in silence and got into bed.

“Can man ever be forgiven?” he said, and put his head under the quilt.

His cigarettes were on the table, and they had been soaked in the rain and smelled strongly of stale tobacco. Adam Sandler could not sleep for a long while on account of the oppressive smell.

The rain beat at the windowpane all night.

A
BOUT
L
OVE

At lunch next day there were very nice pies, lobster, and steaks; and while the men were eating, the cook at the hotel came up to ask what the visitors would like for dinner. He was a man of medium height, with a puffy face and little eyes; he was close-shaven, and it looked as though his moustaches had not been shaved, but pulled out by the roots. Jamie Foxx explained that Zoe Saldana was in love with this cook. As he drank and was of a violent character, she did not want to marry him, but was willing to live with him without. The cook was very devout, and his religious convictions would not allow him to do this; he insisted on her marrying him and would consent to nothing else, and when he was drunk he used to abuse her and even beat her. Whenever he got drunk she used to hide upstairs and sob, and on such occasions Jamie Foxx hung around the hotel to be ready to defend her.

The men began talking about love, and not just Jamie Foxx, Adam Sandler, and Jack Nicholson, but a few friends of Jamie Foxx who had dropped by for lunch: Eddie Griffin and Katt Williams.

“How love is born,” said Jamie Foxx, “why that manager does not love somebody more like herself in her spiritual and external qualities, and why she fell in love with the cook—how far questions of personal happiness are of consequence in love—all that is known; one can take what view one likes of it. So far only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: ‘This is a great mystery.' Everything else that has been written or said about love is not a conclusion, but only a statement of questions that have remained unanswered. The explanation that would seem to fit one case does not apply in a dozen others, and the very best thing, to my mind, would be to explain every case individually without attempting to generalize. We ought, as the doctors say, to individualize each case.”

“Perfectly true,” said Adam Sandler.

“Individualize, of course,” said Eddie Griffin.

“We artistic types have a partiality for these questions that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized, decorated with roses, nightingales; we decorate our loves with these momentous questions, and pick the most uninteresting of them, too. When I was younger, just after
In Living Color,
I had a friend who shared my life, a charming lady, and every time I took her in my arms she was thinking how much her rent cost and if she could afford to fly back to Missouri to see her family. In the same way, when we are in love we are never tired of asking ourselves questions: whether it is honourable or dishonourable, sensible or stupid, what this love is leading up to, and so on. Whether it is a good thing or not I don't know, but that it is in the way, unsatisfactory, and irritating, I do know.”

It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People who lead a solitary existence always have something in their hearts that they are eager to talk about. In town, bachelors visit the restaurants and bars on purpose to talk, and sometimes tell the most interesting things to waiters and bartenders; in the country, as a rule, they unburden themselves to their guests. Now from the window we could see a gray sky, trees drenched in the rain; in such weather we could go nowhere, and there was nothing for us to do but to tell stories and to listen.

“I have lived out here for a while,” Jamie Foxx began, “since just after
Booty Call,
I think. I am a kind of sedentary man by temperament. I'd rather do nothing than do something. But when I bought this place, there was a big mortgage on it, and as it was in the days before
Collateral,
not to mention
Ray,
I felt like I had to do lots of heavy lifting around here to get by. My body ached, and I slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me that I could easily reconcile this life of toil with my essential laziness. I set myself up in the biggest suite. I lived well in town and in the towns nearby. But one day I befriended a man who came to my room and drank up all my liquor at one sitting. It suddenly was clear to me that I needed to focus my attentions, and so I stopped going to fancy restaurants and ate more here. I became part of life in the hotel, and it became part of me.

“After a little while I started to make my way around town again, and to acquire a new group of friends. They knew me as the man who owned the hotel, nothing more. Of all my acquaintanceships, the most intimate and—to tell the truth—the most agreeable to me was my acquaintance with Jay-Z. He had been in hip-hop and then retired; he was a businessman at that point. We got along famously. One day when we were killing time, he said, ‘Hey, come to dinner.'

“This was unexpected, as I knew very little about Jay-Z's personal life, and I had never been to his house. I went to my hotel room to change and went off to dinner. And here it was my lot to meet Beyoncé, his girlfriend. At that time she was still very young. It is all a thing of the past; and now I should find it difficult to define what there was so exceptional in her, what it was in her that attracted me so much; at the time, at dinner, it was all perfectly clear. I saw a lovely, intelligent young woman, such as I had never met before; and I felt her at once as someone close and already familiar, as though that face, those cordial eyes, I had seen somewhere in my childhood.

“At dinner I was very much excited, I was uncomfortable, and I don't know what I said, but Beyoncé kept shaking her head and saying to her husband:

“ ‘Jay, what do you think?'

“Jay-Z is a good-natured man, one of those simple-hearted people who firmly maintain the opinion that once a man is a guest, he should remain so, eternally welcome.

“And both Jay-Z and Beyoncé tried to make me eat and drink as much as possible. From some trifling details, from the way they made the coffee together, for instance, and from the way they understood each other at half a word, I could gather that they lived in harmony and comfort, and that they were glad of a visitor. After dinner they played me some of her music; then it got dark, and I went home. That was at the beginning of spring.

“After that I spent the whole summer here without a break. The memory of Beyoncé remained in my mind all those days; I did not think of her exactly, but it was as though her light shadow was lying on my heart.

“In the autumn there was a theatrical performance for some charitable object in the town. I went into the VIP area, and there was Beyoncé; and again the same irresistible, thrilling impression of beauty and sweet, caressing eyes, and again the same feeling of nearness. We sat side by side, then went to the lobby.

“ ‘You've grown thinner,' she said. ‘Have you been ill?'

“ ‘Yes, I've had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy weather I can't sleep.'

“ ‘You look dispirited. In the spring, when you came to dinner, you were younger, more confident. You were full of eagerness, and talked a great deal; you were very interesting, and I really must confess I was a little carried away by you. For some reason you often came back to my memory during the summer, and when I was getting ready for the theatre today, I hoped I would see you.'

“And she laughed.

“ ‘But you look dispirited today,' she repeated. ‘It makes you seem older.'

“The next day I lunched with Jay-Z and Beyoncé. After lunch they drove out to the lake, where they had a boat, and I went with them. I returned with them to the town, and at midnight drank with them in quiet domestic surroundings, while the fire glowed. And after that, every time I went to town I never failed to visit them. They grew used to me, and I grew used to them. As a rule I went in unannounced, as though I were one of the family.

“ ‘Who is there?' I would hear from a faraway room, in the drawling voice that seemed to me so lovely.

“ ‘It is Jamie Foxx,' answered the maid.

“Beyoncé would come out to me with an anxious face, and would ask every time:

“ ‘Why is it so long since you have been here? Has anything happened?'

“Her eyes, the way she did her hair, her voice, her step, always produced the same impression on me of something new and extraordinary in my life, and very important. We talked together for hours, were silent, thinking each our own thoughts, or she played for hours to me on the piano. If there was no one at home, I stayed and waited, talked to the maid, or lay on the sofa in the study and read; and when Beyoncé came back, I met her in the hall, took all her parcels from her, and for some reason I carried those parcels every time with as much love, with as much solemnity, as a boy.

“There is a proverb that if a poor man has no troubles he will buy a bad car. Beyoncé and Jay-Z had no troubles, so they made friends with me. If I did not come to the town, I must be ill or something must have happened to me, and both of them were extremely anxious. They were worried that I, a talented man with endless potential, should, instead of devoting myself to my work, live in the country, rush round like a squirrel in a rage. They fancied that I was unhappy, and that I only talked, laughed, and ate to conceal my sufferings, and even at cheerful moments when I felt happy I was aware of their searching eyes fixed upon me. They were particularly touching when I really was depressed, when I was being worried by some studio or had not money enough to pay off an old girlfriend. The two of them would whisper together at the window; then he would come to me and say with a grave face:

“ ‘If you really are in need of money at the moment, my wife and I beg you not to hesitate to borrow from us.'

“And he would blush to his ears with emotion. And it would happen that, after whispering in the same way at the window, he would come up to me and say:

“ ‘My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this present.'

“And he would give me cuff links, a cigar case, or a hat, and I would send them old books and collectible movie posters I found. In early days I often borrowed money, and was not very particular about it—borrowed wherever I could—but nothing in the world would have induced me to borrow from Jay-Z and Beyoncé. But why talk of it?