Seducing Ingrid Bergman (27 page)

‘Okay,’ he says.

The thought floats free like one of the bubbles in her glass of water. ‘I feel capable of bad things.’

He stops eating for a moment. ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’

She plays with the food on her plate. ‘You resent me doing anything for myself.’

‘You’re inventing this.’

‘You always put me down,’ she says. ‘In front of other people, too.’

‘This is text-book paranoia.’

‘Would you even care if I left?’

He puts down his knife and fork, wipes his mouth with a napkin. ‘Are you telling me you want to leave?’

‘No.’

‘Then why bring it up?’

‘Just a feeling that we’re not getting on, and haven’t been for a while.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since I can remember.’

‘So what are you saying?’

Her shoulders slump, her knife remains at an angle as if aimed at him. ‘I’m telling you how I feel.’

‘It’s late. You’ll feel differently in the morning.’

‘I’ve felt this way for months.’

He resumes eating, stripping his lamb cutlet precisely with his knife. ‘It’s never enough is it? I negotiate a new film for you, free of Selznick. You get twenty-five per cent net profit. You get to work with Charles Boyer again. What more do you want?’

A silence opens up around them. She lifts her thin gold necklace to her mouth, nibbles on it. ‘I hate my life.’

‘You’re very capable, you know that?’

‘Meaning?’

‘You manage incredibly well.’ He ignores the shake of her head, ceases eating for a moment. ‘Can I ask you something?’

She sees his eyes and what lies behind them so that she has to look away.

He pours himself more wine, remains composed, obstinate, logical. ‘Have you been unfaithful?’

‘You think I hide things from you?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

A clock on the wall notches a second. ‘No.’

He examines her face like a magistrate. Pia calls from the living room. She’s thirsty.

‘Just a minute, sweetness,’ Ingrid shouts.

‘Is there someone else?’ he says.

She puts a finger to her lips to quiet him, afraid that Pia might hear. She moves to the refrigerator to get some milk, performing the task with deliberate slowness to buy herself some time.

Her mind is racing. Her hand trembles as she fills the glass. Some of the milk dribbles onto the table. She attempts to steady herself.

When she returns from the living room, she sees that Petter’s face has hardened. She can tell by the look in his eye that he wants to say something hurtful, something unanswerable, something that will hit the mark.

There’s a moment in which he seems to consider, leans forward. ‘You know the trouble with you?’

‘What is it this time?’

‘You have no passion,’ he says.

The cruelty, she decides, is in the control with which he says it. In this instant she despises him.

She says nothing, though she remembers a time before they were married when she was desperate to sleep with him, and he said no, insisting she save herself and remain a virgin until the wedding night. At the time, she thought this was noble and romantic, and she relished the sacredness of it, but since then she’s come to understand that this was not so much honourable as cold and controlling. She almost flings this at him now.

His face is tough, unforgiving. ‘You have no passion,’ he says.

Abruptly from the living room comes a thud and then a yell. It is Pia. She has tripped and hurt herself. The milk has spilt across the floor.

Ingrid and Petter look at each other, register the fact. For a second they share the complicity of caring parents and recognize it in themselves. They both rush into the living room.

When they reach her, there’s a competition suddenly for the child’s affection. Petter gets there first, but Pia makes it clear that it is her mother she wants. The girl holds out her arms towards Ingrid, ignoring her father, pressing her head into her mother’s chest.

Ingrid hugs her daughter with a desperate possessiveness. Already she feels she’s attempting to form a circle from which Petter is excluded. And though she might be wrong, she imagines in the last few hours and days that he has grown afraid of her, afraid of her power to wound, conscious of her ability to injure him.

Now when she comes back into the kitchen, he seems conciliatory, sheepish. He even risks, ‘I love you.’

The need to defend herself, to protect Pia, mixes with a retaliatory impulse inside her head. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ she says.

18

The days are warm, the nights are clear. Beyond the window, a full moon. Blood orange over the city.

I unspool a roll of film and it curls like a wood shaving around my finger. I set the perforations over the sprockets and wind it on with my thumb until I feel it grow taut. I close the back of the camera, hear a reassuring click and wind on, waiting for that little tug of resistance as on a fishing line when something bites.

I mix vodka, tomato juice and Worcester sauce, drop in two ice-cubes, notice the way they bob and float. Lovely.

The telephone rings.

It’s Ingrid.

The filming is over.
Notorious
is in the can.

‘Did you get the ending you wanted?’

‘You’ll have to judge for yourself.’

‘I will.’

‘So?’

‘So.’

We’ve already made an unspoken agreement not to talk about what happened the other night. I recognize it as a weakness. It is a lapse, that’s all, and though the spot on the wall remains like the aftertaste of a bad dream, I want her to understand that it won’t happen again.

A dead place comes back to life inside me. It’s a stinking shame, I tell her, that we can’t be together like a normal couple.

‘Since when have you wanted to be normal, Capa?’ A small silence follows. ‘What are you doing for Easter?’

‘It’s not a big Jewish holiday.’

Ingrid laughs. Then she says something, but I don’t quite catch it.

‘Can I what?’

‘Can you ski?’ she says.

The image of her teeth mixes for an instant with the crisp whiteness of the hills, a winter moon, the blankness of a new canvas. Snow.

*   *   *

Ingrid and Petter have organized two weeks skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. With a nanny engaged to take care of Pia and her husband still finishing off at the hospital, Ingrid manages to come early, so we can have a few days together, alone.

We wake to the whiteness of sheets and curdled sunlight. Outdoors the landscape sparkles with a brilliance that makes us wince. A marvellous transparency inhabits everything: the clarity of blue March days. The world is dazzling, glassy.

The snow has come late this year, then come in a rush, making some of the slopes treacherous. But the smell of pines and the blue of the sky, like an upturned bowl, make it good.

Ingrid is tanned and looks invigorated. Her cheeks glow and seem to widen her smile, her hair made wild by the wind and the sun. There’s an energy about her that she can’t suppress, a vitality that shines. Life simply spills from her, through the light in her eyes, the heat in her cheeks, her laugh like a shot of oxygen.

We have lessons each morning. The main trick, I learn, is to lean forwards rather than hang back; to sit lightly the way a jockey does, to maintain a low centre of gravity. I’m told to bend my knees and swivel more, leaning my weight into each turn, and to give myself to the descent, accepting it. It helps that the snow is soft and powdery, so that when you fall there’s no hard landing, just a mouthful of wet freshness that turns to water on your tongue.

I love the hiss and shush of it, the burning in the lungs as you hurtle down, the snow’s crispness smoking. It’s so quiet, the smallest noise becomes audible – the flap of a bird’s wings, a ledge of ice slipping from a tree. The sound of snow crunched underfoot is loud as a radish in your mouth.

In the morning, the air takes on a thick solidity. Big wet flakes swarm against the window. Sleet hurries against the glass. At night we feel sealed in here, with the snow gently falling and our bodies dissolving in the warm darkness. Then when it clears, the sky slides back like a planetarium, and the stars seem round and fat like fruit.

*   *   *

Petter arrives and everything changes. I move back into a separate chalet. The days of lovemaking, warmth and togetherness come to an end.

When I bump into him in the lodge, Ingrid passes it off as a coincidence. But she needn’t fear. He barely recognizes me. I’m like one of the many extras on the set, one of the dozens of Hollywood hangers-on and bit-part players that he must meet each week.

‘I know you from somewhere,’ he says.

I make the action of clicking a camera.

‘Oh, I remember, you’re that photographer fellow.’

What goads me most, I suppose, is that he doesn’t even seem to consider me worthy of suspicion. His wife together with someone like me? The notion must seem so preposterous, the idea so laughable and absurd, that the possibility never enters his head.

His eyes move on as though I don’t exist for him.

*   *   *

Two days later, Ingrid hits a mogul at a bad angle and goes over awkwardly on her skis. I see it happen. Her sticks trailing, she tumbles clumsily and fails to get up straightaway. It’s obvious that she’s hurt. She lies there for several seconds, then gathers herself slowly as if picking up bits of glass.

Petter has already gone up ahead. He’s way beyond us on the higher trails, a diminishing speck, a dark spot on the slopes.

I snowplough to a halt a few feet from her, take a couple of wide sideways steps. The impact of the spill has loosened the bindings on her boots.

‘Ouch,’ she says, as she tries to move, and then again, ‘Ouch!’ more emphatically this time.

She’s clutching her right foot, wincing. Aside from the dab of red that is her lips, her face is drained of colour.

I slap her jacket free of powder and carefully snap the bindings back on.

Tears spring to her eyes. ‘I felt something rip,’ she says. She struggles to put any weight on her foot.

‘It’s all right,’ I tell her, and give her my hand.

She removes her glove. Her fingers are warm and pink in mine.

One of the instructors swishes over in a series of effortless crescents. With his help, she clings to my supporting arm.

Back inside the chalet, Ingrid lowers herself into a chair, removes her boot and manoeuvres her leg up onto the table. Angry little red capillaries already snarl the skin around her ankle bone.

My fingertips sting with the cold. The frost on the windowpanes sparkles. Beyond the window, the clouds are motionless as though snagged in the tops of the trees.

‘A drink?’ I offer.

‘No thanks.’

‘I’ll get you some brandy.’

‘It won’t do any good.’

‘It won’t do any harm either.’ I pour two cups. The brandy bites, with an aftertaste of sweetness and heat. Sulky, beautiful, she takes a long sip.

I sit down. The thickness of the salopettes makes it difficult to cross my legs. ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask. It’s not just the ankle. Something else is bothering her, I can tell.

She doesn’t look at me, just nurses her drink in both hands, balancing it on her midriff. Her eyes focus on something remote beyond the window. Her foot, raised on the table, operates like a thumb held up for perspective. She moves it minutely, flinches, anticipating the pain.

Her voice is different suddenly, lower in tone. ‘I don’t want to become dead to you, Capa.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Emptied of brandy, the cup feels cold in my hand.

The world outside the window grows wobbly, though whether it’s a flaw in the glass making things wavy or things inside me shaking, I’m not entirely sure.

‘I feel,’ she says, ‘that if I didn’t make an effort, if I didn’t go out of my way to try and make this work, I’m not convinced you’d do much about it.’

‘I don’t give up that easily.’

‘You’d fight for me?’

‘I’ve been fighting all my life.’

‘That’s not the same,’ she says.

I start to argue.

‘Capa, I’m not going to chase you any more.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I want someone who’s crazy about me, someone who can’t live without me.’

‘You mean like Petter?’

I wonder if in the last few nights she has reconciled with her husband. Is that it? Is this her way of telling me that she no longer loves me? Or is she just being provocative?

The light through the window glistens. Beyond, the landscape is an answering blankness. She sits there in her ski jacket, her hair snarled, her hurt little foot all vulnerable on the table, her eyes shiny from the drink.

‘It doesn’t have to end badly,’ she says.

I catch a glimpse of my face in a mirror on the wall. The skin around my eyes looks flaky, my face unshaven, my cheeks hectic from the cold. Seeing myself like this revives a feeling of inadequacy, seems to confirm my unworthiness. ‘I thought you preferred happy endings.’

‘Don’t underestimate me,’ she says. There’s no mistaking the challenge in her voice.

Maybe she’s testing me, I consider, giving me a kind of ultimatum. I glance down at the varnished floorboards, see the scratches made by thousands of feet.

‘I want to tell you a story,’ she says. ‘About a man and a woman.’

‘Is this one of your movies?’

She stares into her empty cup. ‘They both love each other, only she’s married to somebody else.’

‘Right.’

‘The woman gets sick. But the man is afraid to ask after her, because the husband is suspicious and doesn’t like him anyway. He still comes by occasionally and watches the house from a distance, but there’s no longer any contact between them. And he makes no attempt to go inside.’ It’s as if she’s in a trance, I think, her voice steady, her eyes fixed on some distant point. ‘Days go by, months even, without them seeing each other. Finally he summons the courage to ask someone how she is. And you know what?’

‘What?’

‘She’s dead.’ She gives the syllable a solemn weight.

‘How?’

‘No one suspected how serious it was. She declined rapidly, and by the time the doctors arrived it was too late. So she’s dead. The man is devastated. He feels terrible, guilty because he didn’t write or telephone. And now there’s nothing he can do. She’s gone, and he’ll never see her again.’