Seducing Ingrid Bergman (18 page)

‘Of what?’

‘You going off to another war.’

‘I’m not going anywhere – for the moment anyway.’

‘But you will, I know it.’

I shrug. ‘I’m lucky, remember.’

‘I’m serious. You’ve got to stop.’

It’s true. Terrible though it is, however, it’s still the only job I’d consider getting up for in the morning. Nothing compares to the sensation of being there, testing yourself against it. Nothing compares to the dreadful energy that floods your body. You become focused on what’s happening and the fact that it really matters. It sounds nuts, I know, but everything else seems dull and unimportant, and it’s hard to imagine that I won’t keep on with it until either I die in my sleep or – more likely – in some hotspot, with an unpaid hotel bill, some cameras and a couple of fancy shirts. ‘You don’t think it’s brave?’

‘The brave thing would be to give it up.’

I laugh. ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

‘I don’t want you to die on me.’

‘There’s only one thing worse than death.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Domesticity.’

She regards me for a moment. And without warning, she slaps me hard across the face. A flat, angry smack, the sound of a belly-flop in water.

Startled, I feel the sting on my cheek, then a slow burning. High, the sound resounds for several seconds. The shape of each finger seems imprinted on my skin. The burning sensation penetrates deeper, quickens the heat inside me.

Her eyes glisten, borrowing a shine from the lamp. To prevent the tears from spilling, she lifts her chin.

I pull her towards me, needing her warmth. Her mouth still tastes of wine.

Then something happens that I don’t expect. The salt of her tears, the perfume of her rained-on skin, the way her eyes darken when she’s tired, mingle with the texture of the moment to generate something reckless in my head. ‘All right.’

‘What?’

A balance tips inside me. ‘I’ll come,’ I say.

Her eyes look up, flared, incredulous.

I feel a pull inside like a line tugging me. ‘I’ll come to America. To be with you.’

I hear myself say it, having promised myself I would not. I want to disguise the words suddenly, to withdraw them. I want them to be light, but they sound to my own ears heavy and solemn.

‘You will?’ Her sobs become more widely spaced. She starts laughing as part of sniffing up her tears. Her eyes blink rapidly. ‘Really?’

I can’t look her full in the face.

Her mouth is stretched tight with the effort of containment. She dabs the inside of her wrist against her eyes.

‘Really.’ I say it so she believes it, and so that I believe it, too. I can’t be sure that I don’t say other things, or that I don’t just suddenly take her in my arms and kiss her hard on the mouth.

‘You’re crazy,’ she says.

‘We’ve established that.’

‘But you’ll come?’ Her eyes search mine for any hint of a retreat.

I can still feel the smart of her hand against my cheek, the sting of her fingers, delicious, and it’s as if the warmth and goodness rise from her at this moment, condensing to cover us benignly in a cloud.

It’s a hard thing to acknowledge that you need someone, to admit that the existence of another person is a condition of your happiness, that you need her presence to see you through. And I’m not sure I want to acknowledge it now. Try as I might, I can’t make my thoughts come together so that they make any kind of sense. The only thing in this moment that seems right and proper is to tell her that I love her, and I don’t know where the words come from, but I’m conscious of them distantly as though spoken by a ghost. It makes me feel good to hear them, to feel the sound of them vibrating in my mouth.

One hour later and still early in the morning, we leave her room for the final time.

Called from some remote floor, the lift arrives with its lights on. As the door slides shut, we fall through space. The floors of the hotel as we descend in the lift seem hollow, bottomless.

The taxi’s motor is running outside. Ingrid’s luggage has gone on ahead of her, organized by Joe.

She walks out in her headscarf and coat. The driver holds the door open. We both slide into the back, huddle close in the deep seats. The cab leaves the hotel with a fan of spray, swings into a new lightless space.

*   *   *

We sit together in the back of the cab, holding hands, our fingers intertwined, and don’t let go until we get to the airport.

Joe is chatting amicably to an airline official, passport in hand. He looks relieved, even jubilant, to see Ingrid leaving at last. There’s a spring in his step. He seems to have grown taller, more authoritative. He allows us a few minutes alone.

‘So,’ she says.

‘Don’t get sentimental on me.’

‘Always the tough guy.’

‘Why do you always assume that everyone is acting?’

‘They usually are.’

I stroke her hair.

She touches a button on my shirt.

Then I remember. ‘You never signed your photograph.’

She laughs. ‘You’d only sell it.’

‘Maybe I should.’

‘You mean while I’m still box-office?’

I feel the effort in smiling.

Her hand drops slowly to her side. ‘You know where I am, Capa.’

A man in airport livery tells her that the plane is boarding now. Ingrid knows she should go. She smiles bravely, on the verge of tears.

‘I’ll be waiting.’

‘I’m already saving up.’

‘Goodbye, Capa.’

I nod, moved by the solemnity of her attention and by the knowledge that things will never be the same again. I feel like crying myself.

*   *   *

The day has come, just as she knew it would. She experiences a flutter of panic. A feeling of dread grows heavy inside her. Too many things have happened in too short a time, and she can’t begin to absorb them. All she knows is that she doesn’t want to leave; she wants to turn around and go back so she can stay in Paris with Capa, but she knows this is impossible; she must face the fact that their time here together has come to an end.

In confronting this truth, she feels stricken with a kind of grief. And now here she is at the airport, saying goodbye. She’s played the scene often enough, for God’s sake, but for the first time in her life it seems horribly real. For a moment she has to fight to disentangle her own feelings from the reactions of characters she’s rehearsed over the years. For an instant her screen self and real self contend, and she can almost see herself in close-up, filmed from the left side as always, part of her face in shadow cast by the brim of her hat; but the despair she feels is genuine and unrepresentable in any script.

With the airline officials in full view and Joe just a few feet away, she embraces Capa, and with her head less than an inch from his ear she says in a whisper that she doesn’t want to leave, that she can’t stand the thought of being away from him. Her words mingle with what is unspoken until she can no longer remember what has been said.

And though he gives her a hopeless, doting smile, there is no chance to say anything more before Joe touches her arm, takes hold of her elbow and lightly but purposefully gives her a push. It is enough. Without willing it or being forced, she finds herself turned, directed away from Capa as if compelled by some physical law.

It’s as if already she’s in another country. The sound of the plane is loud in her ears. The engines surge. Things start to rattle. There’s a tremendous roar. Her stomach flips as the plane takes off, and she experiences a dragging sensation as though one half of her has been left behind.

She looks down through the scratched oval window at the ground below, at the buildings and boulevards touched with sun, at the river running across the city like a crack across a mirror.

He told her he loved her, and she said she loved him, too. She is sure of it. Still, she’s aware of the fragility of this feeling and how short-lived it might be. In wishing to affirm her love, to sing its existence, in the blind wish and impulse to say yes, she’s wary of the potential for any falling off. She’s bothered by it, like an animal by its shadow, watches for it like the first drops of rain. When will he come? What if he finds someone else? The thought torments her.

Uplifted, dizzy, weightless in the sudden immense space of the sky, she’s never felt so empty. Her insides sink. Only the rivets on the wings seem to hold things fast.

Below her, the world shrinks, and she with it. The air turns thin. The plane banks in a wide circle, continues to rise. The light is cool and shadowless. Everything that is big about the city grows abruptly very small.

12

I think of Ingrid, thousands of miles away in a warm rich city, standing under brilliant lights.

Every time I close my eyes, I see her face. So I close my eyes a lot. I talk to myself and pretend that she’s listening. I write things down so that I won’t forget to tell her. I think of funny things to make her laugh.

The bed seems empty and lifeless without her. The silence presses in. Through the window, the small white hole of the moon pulls everything into it. Dead light.

I needed to know what it was like and how I’d feel when she was far away, and now I know, it’s killing me. I can’t get her out of my mind.

I feel the need to reach out and hold her. I just want her here with me, and it doesn’t seem right or fair that she’s not. And when the streets grow silent and the air grows cold at night, I think of the heat she generates next to me, the hope and wonder she gives off. I long to see her, to touch her again.

I feel her absence inside me like a stone.

*   *   *

There’s a dream I keep having.

It’s about my father. We’re in a department store. He’s holding my hand. I’m four years old.

Everything’s fine and I feel happy, and then suddenly it isn’t and I’m not. I don’t know when he let go of my hand, but already it seems like a lifetime ago. I look around and there’s no sign of him. I’m lost, and though I can’t yet put a name to the feeling, it seems terribly real.

Fear grips me. Panic sets in. I don’t know what to do. I take a right, a left, another left, a right, redouble back in what I think is a square to find that I’m in a different part of the store. I’m completely disoriented.

I start to cry. A ring of faces surrounds me. I try my best to explain what has happened, but no one understands me, I’m crying so much. The words won’t come out right.

Moments unroll.

Then beyond the circle of faces, I see him a few yards away. He’s looking at me, arms folded, smiling.

Afterwards he repeats three things:

‘I love you.’

And: ‘I won’t always be here.’

And: ‘You have to be strong.’

*   *   *

When Petter quizzes her about Paris just before they go up to bed, she reacts angrily, dismisses his insinuations, complains that he wants to take away what little freedom she enjoys.

‘Ingrid, is everything okay?’

She looks at her husband. His lips seem thin and bloodless. ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ she says.

He finishes pouring a glass of wine. ‘There’s nothing you want to tell me, then?’

Outside, spasms of rain tremble and break against the windows. The treetops stir wildly. The promised storm has come. Seeing this, Ingrid expects flashes of lightning to tear open the sky, to shock the trees into relief, followed by shapeless whoomphs of thunder. She waits for several seconds, tenses. Nothing happens.

‘You think it’s fine to go away for months, barely keep in touch, and because you bring back a suitcase full of presents, everything will be okay?’

‘You didn’t like yours?’

He doesn’t blink. ‘Do you ever keep things from me?’

‘What is this?’

‘I’m serious.’

Her tapping foot is the only clue to her inner agitation. After a silence, she tells him to turn out the lights when he comes up, and quickly leaves the room.

Upstairs Petter wears his reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. Glancing across, he sees the skin above his wife’s nightdress both over and through his glasses, and is struck by the difference between the two. Seen with the naked eye, her skin appears a slightly reddened but otherwise undistinguished plane of flesh. Through the lenses of his spectacles, however, there’s a graininess, a powdery texture that seems palpitating and alive.

He makes a show of setting down his book, removing his glasses and switching off his bedside light. He snuggles down into the covers, stretches his arm across her tummy.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. There’s no response. Ingrid continues to read. He tries again. ‘I’m sorry.’ She says nothing. And then, ‘I love you.’

He begins to caress her stomach, the tops of her legs – nothing she could object to. After a minute, his hands widen in slow circles to touch the base of her breasts, her tidy triangle of hair. His movements are so gentle, he knows it would seem odd for her to protest. When he touches her more coarsely, though, she makes it plain that she’s not interested. She’s reading, she says. But he’s not to be discouraged. He returns to those slow circles. He persists, knowing that there’s an established routine between the two of them in their lovemaking, a slow inevitability. Still she resists his touch, and he senses her reluctance. Then he hears her gulp. She snaps a page over.

‘No,’ she says, slapping his hand. He carries on, more gently but just as insistently. ‘I said no. I mean it.’

He ignores her and continues. He’s reclaiming her, re-establishing his control, and wants her to know it.

Her legs twitch. It’s some time now since she has turned a page. He senses the tension rise within her. He tries to swallow but his throat is dry.

Something animal gathers itself and overtakes them both.

It’s brusque and a little brutal, and if it hurts her a bit, then fine, he thinks. There needs to be a little pain mixed in with the excitement. His heart races. He presses against her, though he notices she hardly participates at all. She averts her mouth from his kisses as if he has bad breath and trains her eyes on the ceiling, her mind seemingly elsewhere.

Eventually he senses her tremble violently to a climax, enjoys watching her eyes slide into that familiar whiteness like the snow.