Seducing Ingrid Bergman (24 page)

She knows very well that it is.

It strikes her as ironic, the way every camera angle, each sound cue, every word of dialogue is established beforehand, fixed in the script. Her working day is a model of order and predictability, and mocks the confusion of her private life.

The studio has prepared five alternative endings to the film. She’s read all of them and it’s yet to be decided which one the producers will choose, but she’s clear in her own mind which one she prefers and has made her feelings known. If only she could ask one of the writers to resolve her personal problems, too. Maybe Ben Hecht could develop a few plot lines to show how she might navigate a way out of this mess.

She finds it impossible keeping it all to herself. She’s desperate to confess, to tell Petter everything, to put an end to all the lies and excuses, the daily deceptions. It seems wrong, her living here with him now in what she calls her home. Already she feels that she belongs elsewhere.

What would be his reaction if she were to leave? Violent? Incredulous? Suicidal, perhaps? She doubts the latter. Compassionate? That’s not him, either. She sorts through the possible range of his responses. Would he fight? Would he want immediate separation, divorce? And what about Pia? Would he want custody? He loves her. Whatever were to happen, she knows it would be spiteful and messy. The thought appals her, makes her want to cry.

The longer she leaves it, the more she worries that she might not have the strength to see it through. She understands suddenly why people join the Foreign Legion, why they jump from bridges, why they board planes with just some hand luggage, a few dollars in their pockets and are never seen again.

And now she learns from Joe that there are rumours, whispers at the studio. People are talking, muttering darkly. Capa, she hears, is indiscreet.

The walls are closing in. She decides that she must act, however painful the consequences. She’s seized by the need to do something, to resolve the situation once and for all. Only fools leave things to fate, she decides. She’s not going to wait for the operation of some remote destiny. She has a chance to change her life, to make it better, and she will. The opportunity may never come again.

Standing before the bedroom mirror, she practises a solemn expression. ‘I’m leaving you.’ She repeats, ‘I’m leaving you.’ As she tests the words in her mouth, her face grows stern, her voice deepening with conviction. ‘I’m leaving you.’

But as with all words repeated often enough, they seem nonsensical after a while and lose their relation to the world. Her throat grows tight and dry. She despairs of ever telling him. She feels it curled inside her, folded like a secret.

She gathers herself sufficiently to go downstairs.

‘I’m going for a drive,’ she shouts from the kitchen, retrieving the car keys from a drawer.

‘What?’ Petter says, above the noise of the radio.

‘I’m going for a drive,’ she says, not waiting for an answer, though she hears his distant question, ‘Where?’

*   *   *

I see the rushes at the studio.

Ingrid’s face fills the screen, her two great shining eyes like wounds I want to heal. There’s something magical about the way her features are transformed on the big screen. The artistry lies in the way she underplays the scenes. That nuanced wrinkle of the lip, the infinitesimal twitch in her cheek, the barely detectable flare of her iris – each inflection conveying more than any larger, dramatic gesture.

She inhabits her role as Alicia so deeply, her character seems completely real. She manages to draw the audience in so that immediately you’re on her side. And when in close-up she turns on that searching gaze, that misty, questing look, you feel as if you’d die for her, just as in the movie she’s prepared to die for love. I’m reminded again how beautiful she is, what a glow she gives off. Her beauty is like a thing apart. And when the stills are developed, the production team are thrilled. She looks gorgeous, framed like a painting, and I savour the sensation of her face lighting up breakfast tables all over America as people open their magazines.

Luckily for me, though, she now has two days off.

She waits until Petter leaves for the hospital and Pia goes to school. Then she takes her Oldsmobile from the garage, heads up the sweeping drive of her stone and redwood one-storey house and turns into Benedict Canyon, where we’ve agreed she’ll pick me up.

I get in quickly as she pulls over. A headscarf tightly frames her face. Her eyes are unfathomable behind dark glasses.

She drives, as she would every day, down Sunset Boulevard. But instead of heading east to the studio, she makes a right turn and speeds along Sunset to its end. Then we head north on the Pacific Highway towards Malibu.

I have the keys to Irwin’s beach house stowed safely in my pocket.

Once we’re clear of the city limits, Ingrid releases her headscarf. We wind down the windows, and like bolts of foam the breeze from the ocean shoots through our hair.

Within minutes, the Pacific glints off to our left. The sun is shining, the sky cloudless, but there’s something wrong, I can tell. Ingrid seems sullen, unusually subdued.

I look at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘Are you missing work?’

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

‘Nothing.’ She straightens her arms on the steering wheel as if pushing herself back. There’s silence for several seconds. ‘A journalist spoke to me yesterday.’

‘Oh?’

‘He said you’ve been boasting to everyone.’

‘Boasting?’

‘You know, showing off.’

‘About what?’

‘That I’m your mistress.’

I laugh, catch her face in the mirror.

Her eyes remain stubbornly on the road. ‘Why would he say that?’

I shrug, wipe my hands on top of my knees.

‘Do you talk about us?’

‘No.’ My voice sounds thin in my own ears.

‘You talk to Irwin.’

‘We talk about all kinds of things.’

‘About us?’

‘He’s just sore because I took some money off him in a game.’

‘What about others?’

‘I might have let it slip once or twice.’

‘Jesus, Capa.’ Ingrid bangs her hand on the steering wheel, causing a small swerve.

‘I tell them it’s a secret.’

‘I don’t believe this. Are you mad? Why do you tell them anything?’

‘They’re friends. Wouldn’t you?’

‘No. Never.’

‘You told Hitchcock.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Is it?’

Unflustered. ‘I trust him.’

We’ve already had this argument. I decide not to raise again the way Hitchcock had Ingrid play a scene with Cary Grant nibbling her ear, kissing her lips and paddling in her neck for three uninterrupted minutes. Nor do I complain about the way he had the camera move in for an endless series of takes. Blah-blah (kiss) blah-blah (kiss) blah-blah (kiss), each kiss lasting no more than three seconds in order to get past the censor, while Hitchcock dribbled over his triple chin onto his tie. Nor do I mention the way he leered at her afterwards – his way, I guess, of getting back at me for his own failure to get inside her pants.

Ingrid’s anger is transferred to her foot. She presses down hard on the pedal. The car is travelling fast now. Her hair snarls wildly in the wind.

‘All right, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t.’

‘I keep forgetting how ambitious you are.’

The car shakes with the sudden increase in speed. The steering wheel judders. The trees either side of the highway grow blurred, hurtling by.

‘Things are different here. You have to understand that. We have to be careful.’

I stare straight ahead. ‘You’re ashamed of me. Is that it?’

‘I don’t want you ruining my career.’

‘You’ve been talking to Joe again.’

The needle on the speedometer quivers around eighty-five. The wheels emit a high whistle. The whole car vibrates from the strain.

‘Do you ever look at the tabloids?’ The road disappears quickly under the car, slips away like a river in spate. There must be a hundred bugs spattered on the windshield. Their blood makes little red flecks on the glass. ‘Have you ever heard of Hedda Hopper, Sheilah Graham?’

‘I’ve heard of them.’

‘Do you realize what they’re capable of? They serve up your life with the morning coffee.’

‘I said I’m sorry.’

‘The studios sell dreams,’ she says. ‘They don’t deal in damaged goods.’

She overtakes a car on a sweeping bend. For a few moments, she’s on the wrong side of the road. Blind, a second car careers around the corner. She accelerates into the narrow gap. The Oldsmobile almost tips over as she takes the curve.

I close my eyes, expecting a crash, but somehow the balance of the moment holds. The car squeezes through, then straightens. The prolonged hoot of a horn becomes lost in a cloud of dust behind us.

‘Are you crazy?’ I say. If I were Cary Grant right now, this is where I’d take the wheel. ‘A car crash with another man in the passenger seat? What would that do for your reputation?’

Her arms stiffen. ‘I have a lot to lose.’

‘And I don’t, I suppose?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘You don’t.’

I goad her. ‘Is that as fast as you can go?’

In the silence that follows she lowers her head. ‘Have you told anyone else?’

I don’t answer.

‘Who
have
you told?’

‘No one you know.’

‘Who?’ she insists.

‘You really want to know?’

‘Tell me, for God’s sake!’

Grudgingly. ‘My mother.’

Ingrid looks across at me for an instant, the sting gone out of her. She eases off the pedal. The world catches up with us, comes back slowly into focus. Her tone remains harsh, unyielding. ‘What did she say?’

‘She said she thought I could do better.’

She shakes her head. ‘You’re such a bastard,’ she says. ‘You know that?’ But she’s smiling now. She starts banging the wheel, then hitting me playfully with her right hand, laughing, her hair flying free.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I told her I was willing to give you a chance.’

*   *   *

At the beach, Ingrid runs full pelt across the sand and dives without flinching into the sparkling water of the Pacific. Her head bobs up like a seal’s twenty feet away. She shakes the wet from her head.

The hills are tan with purply stains, as if someone has spilt wine on them. The sand is ribbed beneath my feet. My shadow wobbles on the bottom as I wade in. I stretch out star-like on my back. And with my eyes closed, the skin behind my lids turns red.

We float, holding hands, allowing the breeze to twist us in gentle circles. Then, salty and warm, we swim out further.

I kiss her, push back her hair. Her limbs are slick, her body elongated like a Modigliani in the water.

We swim, buoyed not just by the water, but by something light inside us – an invisible gas: happiness. We laugh, and for a few minutes don’t care about anything or anyone else – not Petter, not Joe, nor the press – and suddenly everything is very funny as I send a long thin fountain of foam upwards from my mouth.

Back at the beach house, we draw the blinds, lock the door, and with the sound of the waves beyond the window and the smell of the ocean still in our noses, on the fresh white sheets of the bed we make love.

Later, a dribble of water seeps warmly from my ear onto the pillow. I tilt my head, put my little finger into my ear, and wiggle it.

*   *   *

Adultery has a colour, red. And a taste, dark and sweet. It is a heavy thing, this loving, she decides. The feeling weighs upon her like an atmosphere double the gravity of the earth.

In Hollywood, she finds there is too little time to consider relationships with other men. Of course she’s aware of her co-stars – Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck – those fantastically handsome actors with their rock-like jaws and spicy aftershave, the swirling energy of their sex like a cloud that surrounds her. How could she not be? But she feels immune to their charms and able to deflect their attentions.

Then in Paris, something unanticipated happened. She realized just how incidental a relationship she had with her own life, and how she craved more. She wanted to open herself up to fresh experiences, to educate herself sensually. It was like discovering a new dimension or set of colours in which to depict her life. And her mind was swept clean by the kind of love she didn’t think existed.

Back in Los Angeles, however, her situation seems little short of calamitous. Her life has reached an impasse, a violent crisis, an abyss from which she wonders if it’s possible to escape.

She repeats the mantra that she loves her husband and adores her daughter; she’s connected to them by essential threads. The ties are deep-rooted and, in the case of Pia, indissoluble. But now this man, this Capa, has come along and turned her world upside down, made her insides feel all kinked.

When she returns late from the studio after another gruelling day that started very early in the morning, with costume fittings, make-up tests, hair styling, she finds Pia is still up.

Ingrid says, ‘You’re not in bed?’

‘She hasn’t seen you for days,’ Petter says.

It’s true, of course. She leaves before her daughter wakes up in the morning and returns home long after she has gone to sleep. She can’t remember the last time she picked her up from school.

Pia runs up to her, having waited several hours for this moment. It’s not often she’s allowed to stay up for such a treat. She’s been drinking hot chocolate and her lips are smeared a milky brown. In a rush of tenderness she buries her face into the folds of her mother’s white dress.

If Ingrid had thought to drop down on one knee to receive her, to bend to the girl’s eye-level, it might have been avoided. But it all happens too fast, and when the girl comes away, a dark stain has transferred itself from Pia’s mouth onto the cloth. Tired from working all day, feeling anguished by her love for Capa, frustrated at the negotiations on her contract and bewildered by her own inability to see a way through, the fog of confusion mixes thickly in her brain and in a reflex she immediately regrets, Ingrid slaps her daughter across the face.