Old Acquaintance (14 page)

One of those sentences whizzed by, too fast to be caught, which only later you realize contained the real explanation of everything that happened afterwards. But Lotte couldn’t catch it. It had gone by too fast.

She looked around her. It was like being in a room full of devil dolls. They walk. They are jerked up on their strings, like marionettes, and yet they have no strings. Like all devil dolls, despite themselves, they have been put there for an evil purpose but look good. They have no choice. The original magician is dead, but they obey anyway. It is their nature. It explains why they are there. In films, the dancers have lovely expressive faces. They show joy. In life, they have no expression at all. It is not done for joy. It is a serious matter. It is an escape.

“I used to come to this place with a woman novelist from Hamburg,” said Charlie chattily. “She wrote Westerns, she was very advanced, very up-to-date, but she came of good
family, and you know what Hamburg families are. They are quite willing to be loose about the great world, but when it comes to themselves, they tighten up, they turn the screw. We were at a table for four. She liked these places. She’d brought Willi along. Willi is the third most famous
couturière
in Berlin. That was his big year, the year he moved up from fifth place. He had made an appointment with somebody, he said, such a nice young man. A young man who really seemed to care, not a gigolo, at all, somebody grateful. Would he come, or wouldn’t he? That was the question. He really was on tenterhooks. My female novelist was much concerned. Curiously enough she was called Charlie, too. It was her pen name. An hour late the boy came in through the far door over there. He had blond hair. ‘There he is,’ said Willi, ‘He’s come. He’s actually come.’ Willi wasn’t so young, even in those days, you know, and not as successful as he is now. It was a big relief. He was vindicated. The young man had come. Only Charlie never spoke to us again. It was her nephew, you see. She’d been to his wedding only the week before. She writes simple domestic love stories these days, I’m told. For the newspapers, you know. They sell remarkably well.”

Nobody else had anything to say.

“She wasn’t a very successful novelist, even so,” said Charlie. “She had a place in the south of France, but it was just an orchard, without a house. She used to camp out there all summer long. She was a marvelous cook. The larder was in a tree, the stove was under it, and she made her own marc. It was marvelous marc. I miss her.”

Nobody else had anything to say to that either.

The man at the far end of the bar was Bill. He smiled distantly, thought better of it, went through a pantomime about that, and ambled over. After a while, no doubt, you get used to it and no longer mind being caught out, just so you’re not at home. In Minneapolis he would have acted differently.

The jukebox was playing one of Lotte’s latest numbers.

“That’s
our
song,” said Bill. “Shall we dance?”

She was very glad to. It got her away. Besides, he was right. It was one of his better arrangements, and quite successful.

She looked around her curiously, while Bill moved her about. She was aware that there could not be a homosexual, Lesbian, or just plain maladjusted household in the Western world in which her records were not played, but she had never quite understood why, even though she did. They met to her records; quarreled to them; made up to them; and played them when they were brooding about the mutability of life (and the next mutation, of course) alone. It was pathetic in a way. There must be people who got through their whole day, just to come here in the evening, and then go away disappointed. But it was the world in microcosm, after all, and like most parodies, a parable.

Somebody must be feeling either very sentimental, or else very unhappy, or both, because this was her fifth record in a row, not one of the newer ones but a re-pressing of a collector’s item, the sound of how she used to sound.

It made her shiver. She preferred the way she sounded now.

A woman whirled sedately by, her face expressionless. At
least Lotte supposed it was a woman. Though she had had her tuxedo days, on advice from the studio, Lotte had never been able to tell a transvestite on sight. The girl had on one of those messy beehive Italian hair-dos popular at the moment, for as the fashion is discarded at home, it works its way north.

“You know what she has under there?” asked Bill. He was only trying to help. “A space rat. The Martians send them down. They always live in hair-dos like that. They’re roomy, and they just plug in on the brain wave and send the contents home. ‘Nothing doing here,’ says the space rat. ‘The earth is a vacuum. I’m starving to death. I haven’t found a thought to feed on yet. Operative 229 reporting.’ ‘It is worse than the invasion of Cuba,’ say the authorities at home. ‘Nobody is responsible, but you have failed. Our prestige is gone. For that you must be punished. The Supreme Council has decreed therefore that you must stay where you are.’ ‘No, no, not that,’ the space rat cries, ‘anything but that!’ He falls on the antennae of his molybdenum transistor transmitter, and suicides himself. It is months before she finds the corpse. She does not know it, but though he has been a traitor to them, she is a veritable Molly Pitcher to us.”

Sometimes Bill sounded rather like Charlie, only spritelier. The crust might be burned, but the dough was still wholesome, inside.

“What the hell is the old devil trying to do?” he asked.

“It’s been done already. He’s just adding a piece. He believes in teaching by example.”

“All you get that way is a tipple of hemlock when you’ve won,” said Bill. “She’s a nice kid.”

Right then she liked Bill, but then she usually did.

What a pity life is not a little waltz. We enter tenderly. And when it’s time, why then we waltz away, happy and tired, like guests at a party. Never mind: we do the best we
can. Life is nothing but the ghost of an old waltz. And how afraid we are, when we sit alone, to play it.

“We’d better go back,” she said.

Charlie was delivering a fireside chat about comedy. As a matter of fact there was a dummy fireplace in the inner room. When you pulled a switch it burned real imitation logs.

“The best comedians live in the worst times,” he said. “There haven’t been so many. Molière couldn’t have cared for Versailles too much, Aristophanes saw Athens dying, and Goldoni must have used maggots for candles. Sheridan did better in Parliament than you might expect. There isn’t any such thing as comedy. Unless you’re willing to suicide yourself in the bathtub, on call, you can’t write comedy, and even so, Seneca wrote terrible stuff. Seneca isn’t comedy. He’s just Aristotelean farce, and that’s tragedy. When the war began, Behrman wrote
No
Time
for
Comedy
, and he was right, there wasn’t any. It would have been a tragedy, if his people hadn’t been so small. Francis Lederer was in it. And there was a comedy about some Shakespearian actors stranded in Warsaw when the Nazis came. It was by Lubitsch. It was a Carole Lombard vehicle. That’s why Arthur Miller is a comedian. His people are too small. The trouble is, he isn’t funny.

“That’s where Tennessee Williams does better. His people are so ludicrous, one always gives them the benefit of one’s own doubts.”

Pedagogy was not Charlie’s forte. He held it, anyway.

said Bill. He and Charlie didn’t get along too well.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just a gloss,” said Bill, and took Unne off for a breather, this time.

*

It got worse. It got much worse. At midnight began the parade of the platypus. But Charlie wouldn’t let them leave until two-thirty.

The jukebox was still blaring away, and playing Lotte as usual, with time out for Presley now and then. The sound followed them out into the street. Then the door closed behind them.

They had come through into silence once again. But it was not an entire silence. In the vacant lot across the way the burdock rattled like knucklebones.

Lotte was determined to drive with Unne. Charlie wouldn’t have that. He took her arm and bundled her into his own car.

“Leave them alone,” he said. “I imagine they have a lot to say to each other. Or else nothing.” He slammed the door on her, went round to his own side, and drove off.

She kept her temper until they reached the suburbs. Then she let it out.

“That was brutal,” she said. She was furious that he had roped her into it.

“You bet it was.”

“You don’t even want him.”

“I never wanted any of them. All the same, I mean to keep him. I took care of all that, wouldn’t you say?”

She said nothing.

Ahead of the car, the headlights bored into the night like one of those disintegrator rays we read about, as children, in the science fiction of the past.

“Did you have one of those diving toys when you were young?” asked Charlie, after another ten kilometers. “It came in a bottle, like an automatic paste dispenser bottle. Inside was some kind of greenish fluid, it seemed heavier than water.
Perhaps it was waterglass. At the top was a diver. When you turned the bottle upside down, the diver was at the bottom and floated back to the top. It fascinated me. I used to play with it by the hour.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When you’re really unhappy, if you push it far enough you burst through the bottom, come up at the top, and feel quite content again, that’s all. You reverse your situation.”

“I haven’t got much use for you at the moment.”

“That’s because you didn’t have a toy diver as a child,” he said. And meant it.

Come to think of it, she hadn’t. She’d never heard of one until now.

It seemed a long drive back to the hotel.

UNNE
, to her surprise, far from being crushed, was scornful.

“My goodness!” she said. “Does he think I don’t know all about that?”

“Well, do you?”

“Paul tells me everything,” she said. “He always has.” Then, because she was beginning to cry, she went into her own room.

There seemed nothing to do for her. There seemed nothing to do for anybody. Lotte went to bed.

CHARLIE
woke up contrite. He hadn’t counted on making Lotte angry. She’d get over it, of course, they’d known each other too long for her not to, but he was sorry, and he was sorry he had made a monkey out of Paul, too. That had been bad strategy. If they forgive you for something like that, it means they’re cowed, and Charlie didn’t like his people cowed.

He lay in bed, listening cautiously to the silence while he looked around him. Nothing seemed to have changed. The Guys drawing was still on the dressing table. The statue of Kuan-yin was untouched. The Korean platter lay beside him, as motionless as that pan of water in which you look to see the future, or, if there is no future, which you place on the chest of the dead to make sure that they are dead.

Yet something was changed. The apartment felt as empty as the Maginot Line. It felt as though it had been left intact by a race long—and for no reason we know about—extinct. Charlie rang down for breakfast (kidneys and bacon, and tomato juice for health, a superstition he had acquired in America). He wasn’t supposed to eat anything fried, but that sort of last-minute gluttony is expected of a condemned man. Then he got up and folded his robe. It was a Chinese robe. When we are dead, we fold it to the left. If we are alive, we fold it to the right. For a second he hesitated. But the room reassured him.

If we live on the surface of things, at least we can catalog the flotsam as it wells up after the liner has gone down.
Curious that both depth psychology and depth soundings were developed at about the same time: we improvise these things when we need them: Charlie went to take a look.

The sitting room was much as the cleaning woman had left it the morning before. She would come again at eleven, but alter nothing. That is what cleaning women are for. Paul’s bedroom was the usual masculine mess. He had shed a pubic hair or two in the bed. Charlie went over to the closets. When the royal family fled Portugal in 1910, they left the staghorn furniture behind, also their underlinen, also their winter suits. Since he was unable to face the answers, Charlie seldom asked questions, but it did no harm to take a look. He worked his way down the clothes rack. As far as he could see, only the tennis shorts seemed to be missing from their habitual hook.

Relieved, he intercepted the waiter and had a leisurely breakfast. On the breakfast tray was a single rose, which did not amuse him. It suggested souvenir programs of
La
Traviata
.

After a good tubbing (no time for Penis Rock this morning. No time for serendipity, either. Willy-nilly, despite ourselves, we have drifted into northern seas. We must save what we can), and a shave, Charlie got dressed, in houndstooth slacks, loafers, and a yellow sweater. This morning we will be old, but brave. Then he wandered down to the tennis court.

Paul was there all right, getting the worst of it from the local Pancho Gonzalez, but working up a good sweat, which ran down the Hellenistic belly, over the gilded hair, and into Mr. Tripler’s second-best shorts (representatives in all principal eastern cities, and our man can be met by appointment at the following places: all Hilton hotels). Tripler turned out a very good quality of manna, really.

Charlie sat down in the bleachers to watch. It was one of
his sincere mornings. He had even forgotten his monocle. Tennis is only a superior kind of Ping-Pong, inferior in every way to squash, which in turn is inferior to
jai-jalai
, but why is the score kept in terms of love? Most tennis balls have undergone a dog, and feel mouthy. In places like this the tennis balls were hirsute and immaculate. Is there a Society for the Resuscitation of Old Tennis Balls? Or is that taken care of by some other charity?

Paul threw a towel round his neck and came over, looking every inch the professional he wasn’t.

“Good game,” said Charlie with a free conscience, not having seen it. The games we have not seen are always good games.

“He sure had me going there for a minute,” said Paul. Since he had nothing to lose and loads of time to waste, Paul was always what is called a good loser. For want of a better name, no doubt.

Neither one of them referred to the previous evening. Charlie’s bacon, as it always did, was sitting badly. On the other hand, he was glad to see Paul here. Warring forces contended, and the losing side won.

“It’s about the picnic Saturday,” said Charlie. “Lotte said okay.”

“That’s grand.” Paul enlarged an already dilated smile to a franker, more sincere, and comelier white. “I’ll look forward to it.” He had had his interview with Unne earlier. He knew exactly what to do. Besides, he liked Charlie.

Charlie, who was more accustomed to being indulged, which he demanded, than liked, which he did not expect, found himself with an agreeable morning on his hands. Though he couldn’t help feeling what a shame it was that if you admired teeth like that, you had to put up with the people they were in. That Paris is worth a mass is a dictum
whose truth he had never doubted. That Paris was also worth putting up with Helen round the house all the time, he was not so sure of.

Over their heads was a green huddle of some shrub whose tendrils had tight buds.

“It’ll be pretty when it flowers,” said Paul, touching the tight white fascicules, ready to burst through their sheaths.

People, thought Charlie, are no damn good. Perhaps it’s just as well.

*

That evening Paul did his best to please.

Charlie never got much fun out of his sexual encounters, because his mind was always off Bunburying somewhere.

Rats.

He finally got through to Lotte at close to midnight. She had forgotten, but said very well. She sounded rather far away. That bothered him. No doubt she was tired. Tomorrow would be better.