Seducing Ingrid Bergman (8 page)

She heads on towards the river and walks along the embankment. Bits of orange peel and blue cigarette packets whirl in tight circles, tugged by the current. A film of oil glimmers in the sunlight with the iridescence of fish scales. The reflection of the water runs across her shadow as if the blood in her veins were suddenly exposed.

She walks until her feet grow tired, sauntering along the quai Voltaire, then down rue Bonaparte and rue Jacob, and across place Saint-Sulpice with its fountains scattering droplets in thin clouds of spray. She stops at a fruit stall where she buys two dusty, succulent peaches, the juice spilling on the ground around her and making her fingers sticky.

Refreshed, she sets off again, strolling through the Jardin du Luxembourg and then back along the boulevard Saint-Germain, where the traffic is busy and where political posters and slogans fill the walls. Everywhere she goes, she’s conscious of men’s eyes upon her, their lingering and languid glances, conscious of the way she swims across the net of their attention on this sultry afternoon. At least she knows that, if they look at her, it is not because they realize who she is, but because she’s fresh-faced, tall and pretty, and this is Paris in the summer, the radios bleating love songs and sap rising in the trees.

As she walks, she turns her wrist silkily this way and that as if trailing her hand from a boat in low water. Without her realizing, the feminine lilt of the motion operates like a siren song. She’s approached by at least three men who try to talk to her, and she smiles but waves them away. Another proves undiscourageable and only leaves when she threatens to call the police. Still, continuing up to the Ile de la Cité, she becomes aware of a strange sensation – a feeling that she could pick up any man and take him back to the cool of her hotel room, where they could undress and make love. The thrill she feels is partly that she knows she can do whatever she wants and there is no one there to stop her. Instantly she feels guilty, and a little ashamed. It’s not so much the thought she finds shocking, more her willingness to entertain it. In the same instant it surprises her to realize that she has thought little of Petter or Pia all day. Nor has she responded to Hitchcock about her character in the RKO feature due to shoot in the fall. It strikes her that, beyond the confines of the hotel and away from the oppressive attentions of Joe, she experiences none of the dependency she feels in America; she’s able to move at will in the streets, democratically to visit whatever shops, galleries, bars she wants, and enjoy the promise of a full-pulsed life. This seems genuinely amazing, and retains the weight of a revelation. It surprises her also quite how liberating it feels, and somehow this results in a lackadaisical impulse to swing her arms freely as she walks on. Attached to the action is a series of thoughts, including the knowledge that if Pia were here with Petter, she would make her mommy and daddy hold hands, and she becomes conscious, too, as never before, of the earth revolving constantly and the clock subtracting precious seconds from her life.

Her feet are really killing her now, and she slows down as she re-crosses the river and turns into the rue de Rivoli. The air thins, grows cooler, and the ache in her feet mixes with a hunger she feels in her stomach so that on an impulse she sits outside at a restaurant close to the Palais Royal, where she orders a lamb cutlet, a potato salad and a glass of lemony wine.

She’d intended to go back to the Ritz before dinner. Joe, she knows, will be furious with her for having been gone so long. But she’s happy sitting here, watching the world go by, the leaves of an elm tree spreading over her as if delivering a blessing.

The streetlights come on. A radio plays inside. But even though she eats until she’s full and her feet in time recover, the ache within her remains. She feels it like a gap inside her, and it lingers there as she returns with an obscure longing to the hotel in the near-dark on this hot night in July.

*   *   *

Wednesday night. Fouquet’s. After the first bottle, we both feel a little heady. After the second, she can’t remember my name. Following a third, Ingrid almost falls from her chair.

The room gains space, takes on an elastic sense of depth, while the things in it, the tables and glasses, the waiters and guests, begin to wobble.

In trying to stand up, she jars her arm against the chair. Her glass falls from her hand. We both expect it to break, and I listen for the high-pitched splinter and crunch. Instead, the glass just bounces and remains undamaged. Bits of ice skid off across the floor, sparkle on the carpet.

Baffled, she looks at the empty glass for a moment and blinks slowly. Her eyes have that drowsy, faraway look, and she’s leaning tipsily against my shoulder. She says she’s very tired now and wants to go to bed. She sways and presses against me, her hands coming together for a few seconds around my neck before we break apart.

When we get back to the hotel, she’s still struggling to hold a straight line. There’s a man waiting in the lobby, seemingly asleep in a chair.

‘Shit,’ Ingrid says.

This is my first real glimpse of Joe Steele. He’s been dispatched as a chaperone by International Pictures. It is his job, apparently, to see that Miss Bergman wants for nothing, that she remains safe, that nobody bothers her. He fields her incoming calls, orders her food, books her in wherever she wants to go. There is nothing Joe will not do to keep the bubble secure around her, nothing he will not do to ensure that her reputation for sanctity remains intact.

‘Let me go in first,’ she says, ducking out of sight of Joe. She tells me to wait a few minutes, tip-toe past her sleeping guardian, then go on up to her room.

I do as she says, and five minutes later I knock softly on her door. It seems an age before she answers. She leaves me to close the door behind her and totters back inside.

‘Open the window,’ she says, with a quickly raised and quickly falling gesture of her arm.

Cool air enters the room, stirring the blue curtains. The sound of a passing car reaches up, diminishes to a hiss.

Beyond her bedroom door, there’s a loud clank and an ascending hum. Down the corridor, the lift doors open. Footsteps tick along the hall. A man’s footsteps. The sound grows louder. The light under the door darkens. Ingrid puts a finger to her lips. She’s obviously worried that Joe is on the prowl. I feel anxious for her suddenly, sense her girlish fear. Then she stretches her mouth wide as if relishing her own mischief, and gives me a conspiratorial grin.

The sound of footsteps fades away. Whoever it is continues on. We both giggle with relief.

Exhausted, Ingrid sits on the edge of the bed, her face in shadow, her head slumped to one side. Her body sways a fraction before she catches herself. She makes a conscious effort to sit up straight. After a moment, she starts to rise and tells me to help take off her dress. She raises her arm in a failed effort to manipulate the zip. ‘You see?’ Her fingers make a doomed attempt to stretch the extra inch.

The silk of her dress feels cool beneath my fingers, like a trickle of liquid hardening. It parts in two halves from the back, revealing a V of white skin. A blinding flash like the bare shoulders of Tolstoy’s women. The whiteness of wood once you peel the bark. The white flesh of a pear.

With an effort, she straightens, relieving each arm of its sleeve. There’s an automatic quality to her motions, a learnt routine. The dress tumbles forward onto her lap. The two black arcs of her brassière become dark staring eyes.

Clumsily she stands, sloughing off her dress with an instinctive shimmy and a final kick of her legs. It falls in a wrinkly heap at her feet. She motions groggily for me to pick it up. Her eyes are hooded with tiredness. ‘Thanks,’ she says, as an afterthought.

Shoulders hunched, she sits again on the edge of the bed. Her stockings glisten like nets catching the light. The skin of her arms and shoulders glows. The black of her underwear seems a kind of armour.

My mouth grows dry. The back of my throat feels scratchy. A tingling sensation enters my limbs.

With difficulty, she stands and walks towards the bathroom.

She is gone a long time.

I wait for a while, then knock.

No answer.

All I can hear is the thin continuous drizzle of water in the basin. I knock again, ask if everything is all right.

The water ceases running.

After a moment’s delay, she says, ‘Everything’s fine.’

There follows the soft tumult of the toilet flushing and a click as she opens the door. She has changed into a nightdress, a rich creamy gold. She falls backwards onto the bed, where she lies in a languorous zigzag.

I hear her say she likes me. I hear her say I have nice brown eyes.

She rubs her legs together, lifts both arms above her head as though about to dive into a pool. The lamplight creates a circle round her shoulders. Obscured by her hair, her face remains in shadow. I can see that her eyes are open now. She props herself on one elbow. Her hair tumbles to one side.

She stares questioningly at me.

‘What?’ I say.

A look of drunken puzzlement overtakes her face. ‘I don’t fascinate you?’

My heart turns over. A door slams far away. I’m conscious of her body’s warmth, her perfume, the rustle of the bedclothes.

‘You’ve drunk too much,’ I tell her.

‘Come here,’ she says, patting the space beside her. ‘I want you next to me.’

The bed feels soft and shifts with the addition of my weight.

She turns on her back, yawning like a big cat, and I see the pink wet insides of her mouth. Her legs slither amid the sheets. Her arms extend until they meet the headboard. She seems to enjoy the resistance this gives her. Her fingers push for an instant against the wood. By way of an answer, I reach for it, too, and feel a sweet straining sensation in my arms.

Her face glimmers with the cream she has put on. Lying there side by side, our shadows mingle on the white sheets of the bed. Light from the lamp prints a gold bar on her shoulders.

In bringing her knees up, feet together, the nightdress climbs a little over her legs. She makes no attempt to adjust or tug it down.

She closes her eyes and tells me to close my eyes, too.

The silence deepens, with only the sound of our breathing to underline how quiet everything is. And at first I think I’m imagining it, but then I feel it, infinitely soft, effortlessly gentle – the touch of a single fingertip against one eyelid, then the other. The pressure is so delicate, my skin scarcely registers it.

I bend towards her the way you bend towards any source of light. My hands are trembling, my heart pounding. Here she is right next to me, open, gorgeous, feminine, and I feel achy and half strangled inside.

‘I’m tired, now,’ she says. Limply her hand falls onto the cover.

It is enough. I never thought it would be, but it is enough for the moment just to be here, enjoying a few minutes of intimacy, experiencing the warmth of her breathing as she begins to sleep. And though I’d do anything in the world to stay here beside her, I know that, sober, she’d probably want me to go.

Moving from the gloom of her apartment to the brightly lit cage of the lift, I have the ghostlike sensation of moving into another world. The lift descends through the darkness of the early hours, gliding downwards noiselessly like a diving bell through the floors.

Back in my own room half an hour later, I lie awake, my eyes open, staring at the ceiling. The bed is cool and empty. The bleaching sweep of car headlights generates sly angles across the walls. I find myself wanting to lean against something, to find the resistance of her skin. Her touch stays with me where her fingers lingered. The hum of the lift continues on inside my head.

I feel myself fall into a long nothingness. A steep sorrow. Sleep.

*   *   *

She wakes and feels wretched, groans, holds her head in her hands. She experiences an instant of vertigo, fights it. Slowly she gets up. The room begins to spin. She closes her eyes. Seconds later, she attempts to re-open them, slowly focusing.

Where is Capa?

She remembers him being here, but can’t recall him leaving. Well, he’s not here now, so he must have left at some point. He must have pulled the covers over her, which was sweet of him.

Did anything happen?

She doesn’t think so, though she can’t rule it out. And she finds herself wondering how she’d feel if she discovered something had gone on between them. Is this the kind of adventure she had in mind? Is this the unscripted excitement she was after? She’s not so sure. Rather than liberated, she feels guilty and conjures an image of Petter and Pia sitting patiently at home in their vaulted living room back in Los Angeles, Petter reading in his easy chair, Pia frowning over a drawing, crayon in hand. The image enjoys a remembered glow, remote but wholesome, inside her head. It is, though, overtaken in her imagination by another scene: cameras flashing and journalists pushing as, pale-faced and drawn, she fights a way through a jeering crowd, denounced as an adulterer and taunted like a witch. Shame and humiliation are heaped upon her. Scandalous banner headlines burst, the thick type falling like rain over her head. Her heart freezes for an instant just contemplating the disgrace. The shadow of her downfall seems to darken the world around her. Nevertheless, when she spools back in her mind from this darkness to what she can remember of last night, and sees the sun against the curtains, hears the sound of French voices in the square outside, her anxieties seem distant and unreal.

She had a nice time again with Capa, she considers. She feels happy, relaxed, at ease in his company. She tries to recapture the sound of his voice, his way of walking, his sad smile, the way his cigarette waggles up and down in his mouth when he talks. It is only later, when she sees her underwear crumpled on the bathroom floor and recollects the way she stretched out next to him on the bed that abruptly she feels her face grow hot.

As the morning goes on, she’s surprised to find she can’t concentrate; surprised to find herself staring out of the hotel window at nothing; startled to find herself contemplating images of herself with Capa. The rightness of the images jars with the wrongness of the feeling and the clash serves to paralyse her for a few seconds.