Tender is the Night (46 page)

“It was a foolish thing,” Nicole insisted. Rosemary tactfully said nothing.

After a minute Dick got his breath, panting, “I couldn't have lifted a paper doll that time.”

An explosive little laugh relieved the tension caused by his failure. They were all attentive to Dick as he disembarked at the dock. But Nicole was annoyed—everything he did annoyed her now.

She sat with Rosemary under an umbrella while Dick went to the buffet for a drink—he returned presently with some sherry for them.

“The first drink I ever had was with you,” Rosemary said, and with a spurt of enthusiasm she added, “Oh, I'm so glad to see you and
know
you're all right. I was worried—”
Her sentence broke as she changed direction “that maybe you wouldn't be.”

“Did you hear I'd gone into a process of deterioration?”

“Oh, no. I simply—just heard you'd changed. And I'm glad to see with my own eyes it isn't true.”

“It is true,” Dick answered, sitting down with them. “The change came a long way back—but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks.”

“Do you practise on the Riviera?” Rosemary demanded hastily.

“It'd be a good ground to find likely specimens.” He nodded here and there at the people milling about in the golden sand. “Great candidates. Notice our old friend, Mrs. Abrams, playing duchess to Mary North's queen? Don't get jealous about it—think of Mrs. Abrams' long climb up the back stairs of the Ritz on her hands and knees and all the carpet dust she had to inhale.”

Rosemary interrupted him. “But is that really Mary North?” She was regarding a woman sauntering in their direction followed by a small group who behaved as if they were accustomed to being looked at. When they were ten feet away, Mary's glance flickered fractionally over the Divers, one of those unfortunate glances that indicate to the glanced-upon that they have been observed but are to be overlooked, the sort of glance that neither the Divers nor Rosemary Hoyt had ever permitted themselves to throw at any one in their lives. Dick was amused when Mary perceived Rosemary, changed her plans and came over. She spoke to Nicole with pleasant heartiness, nodded unsmilingly to Dick as if he were somewhat contagious—whereupon he bowed in ironic respect—as she greeted Rosemary.

“I heard you were here. For how long?”

“Until to-morrow,” Rosemary answered.

She, too, saw how Mary had walked through the Divers to talk to her, and a sense of obligation kept her unenthusiastic. No, she could not dine to-night.

Mary turned to Nicole, her manner indicating affection blended with pity.

“How are the children?” she asked.

They came up at the moment, and Nicole gave ear to a request that she overrule the governess on a swimming point.

“No,” Dick answered for her. “What Mademoiselle says must go.”

Agreeing that one must support delegated authority, Nicole refused their request, whereupon Mary—who in the manner of an Anita Loos heroine had dealings only with Faits Accomplis, who indeed could not have house-broken a French poodle puppy—regarded Dick as though he were guilty of a most flagrant bullying. Dick, chafed by the tiresome performance, inquired with mock solicitude:

“How are your children—and their aunts?”

Mary did not answer; she left them, first draping a sympathetic hand over Lanier's reluctant head. After she had gone Dick said: “When I think of the time I spent working over her.”

“I like her,” said Nicole.

Dick's bitterness had surprised Rosemary, who had thought of him as all-forgiving, all-comprehending. Suddenly she recalled what it was she had heard about him. In conversation with some State Department people on the boat—Europeanized Americans who had reached a position where they could scarcely have been said to belong to any nation at all, at least not to any great power though perhaps to a Balkan-like state composed of similar citizens—the name of the ubiquitously renowned Baby Warren had occurred and it was remarked that Baby's younger sister had thrown herself away on a dissipated doctor. “He's not received anywhere any more,” the woman said.

The phrase disturbed Rosemary, though she could not place the Divers as living in any relation to society where such a fact, if fact it was, could have any meaning, yet the hint of a hostile and organized public opinion rang in her ears. “He's not received anywhere any more.” She pictured Dick climbing the steps of a mansion, presenting cards and being told by a butler: “We're not receiving you any more”; then proceeding down an avenue only to be told the same
thing by the countless other butlers of countless Ambassadors, Ministers, Chargés d'Affaires….

Nicole wondered how she could get away. She guessed that Dick, stung into alertness, would grow charming and would make Rosemary respond to him. Sure enough, in a moment his voice managed to qualify everything unpleasant he had said:

“Mary's all right—she's done very well. But it's hard to go on liking people who don't like you.”

Rosemary, falling into line, swayed toward Dick and crooned:

“Oh, you're so nice. I can't imagine anybody not forgiving you anything, no matter what you did to them.” Then feeling that her exuberance had transgressed on Nicole's rights, she looked at the sand exactly between them: “I wanted to ask you both what you thought of my latest pictures—if you saw them.”

Nicole said nothing, having seen one of them and thought little about it.

“It'll take a few minutes to tell you,” Dick said. “Let's suppose that Nicole says to you that Lanier is ill. What do you do in life? What does anyone do? They
act
—face, voice, words—the face shows sorrow, the voice shows shock, the words show sympathy.”

“Yes—I understand.”

“But, in the theatre, No. In the theatre all the best comédiennes have built up their reputations by bur
les
quing the correct emotional responses—fear and love and sympathy.”

“I see.” Yet she did not quite see.

Losing the thread of it, Nicole's impatience increased as Dick continued:

“The danger to an actress is in responding. Again, let's suppose that somebody told you, ‘Your lover is dead.' In life you'd probably go to pieces. But on the stage you're trying to entertain—the audience can do the ‘responding' for themselves. First the actress has lines to follow, then she has to get the audience's attention back on herself, away from the murdered Chinese or whatever the thing is. So she
must do something unexpected. If the audience thinks the character is hard she goes soft on them—if they think she's soft she goes hard. You go all
out
of character—you understand?”

“I don't quite,” admitted Rosemary. “How do you mean out of character?”

“You do the unexpected thing until you've manœuvred the audience back from the objective fact to yourself.
Then
you slide into character again.”

Nicole could stand no more. She stood up sharply, making no attempt to conceal her impatience. Rosemary, who had been for a few minutes half-conscious of this, turned in a conciliatory way to Topsy.

“Would you like to be an actress when you grow up? I think you'd make a fine actress.”

Nicole stared at her deliberately and in her grandfather's voice said, slow and distinct:

“It's absolutely
out
to put such ideas in the heads of other people's children. Remember, we may have quite different plans for them.” She turned sharply to Dick. “I'm going to take the car home. I'll send Michelle for you and the children.”

“You haven't driven for months,” he protested.

“I haven't forgotten how.”

Without a glance at Rosemary whose face was “responding” violently, Nicole left the umbrella.

In the bathhouse, she changed to pajamas, her expression still hard as a plaque. But as she turned into the road of arched pines and the atmosphere changed—with a squirrel's flight on a branch, a wind nudging at the leaves, a cock splitting distant air, with a creep of sunlight transpiring through the immobility, then the voices of the beach receded—Nicole relaxed and felt new and happy; her thoughts were clear as good bells—she had a sense of being cured and in a new way. Her ego began blooming like a great rich rose as she scrambled back along the labyrinths in which she had wandered for years. She hated the beach, resented the places where she had played planet to Dick's sun.

“Why, I'm almost complete,” she thought. “I'm practically standing alone, without him.” And like a happy child, wanting the completion as soon as possible, and knowing vaguely that Dick had planned for her to have it, she lay on her bed as soon as she got home and wrote Tommy Barban in Nice a short provocative letter.

But that was for the daytime—toward evening with the inevitable diminution of nervous energy, her spirits flagged, and the arrows flew a little in the twilight. She was afraid of what was in Dick's mind; again she felt that a plan underlay his current actions and she was afraid of his plans—they worked well and they had an all-inclusive logic about them which Nicole was not able to command. She had somehow given over the thinking to him, and in his absences her every action seemed automatically governed by what he would like, so that now she felt inadequate to match her intentions against his. Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

They had a tranquil supper with Dick drinking much beer and being cheerful with the children in the dusky room. Afterward he played some Schubert songs and some new jazz from America that Nicole hummed in her harsh, sweet contralto over his shoulder.

“Thank y' father-r

 Thank y' mother-r

 Thanks for meetingup with one another——”

“I don't like that one,” Dick said, starting to turn the page.

“Oh, play it!” she exclaimed. “Am I going through the rest of life flinching at the word ‘father'?”

“—Thank the horse that pulled the buggy that night!

     Thank you both for being justabit tight——”

Later they sat with the children on the Moorish roof and watched the fireworks of two casinos, far apart, far down on the shore. It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other.

Next morning, back from shopping in Cannes, Nicole found a note saying that Dick had taken the small car and gone up into Provence for a few days by himself. Even as she read it the phone rang—it was Tommy Barban from Monte Carlo, saying that he had received her letter and was driving over. She felt her lips' warmth in the receiver as she welcomed his coming.

S
HE
bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel. She looked microscopically at the lines of her flanks, wondering how soon the fine, slim edifice would begin to sink squat and earthward. In about six years, but now I'll do—in fact I'll do as well as any one I know.

She was not exaggerating. The only physical disparity between Nicole at present and the Nicole of five years before was simply that she was no longer a young girl. But she was enough ridden by the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world, to feel a jealousy of youth.

She put on the first ankle-length day dress that she had owned for many years, and crossed herself reverently with Chanel Sixteen. When Tommy drove up at one o'clock she had made her person into the trimmest of gardens.

How good to have things like this, to be worshipped again, to pretend to have a mystery! She had lost two of the great arrogant years in the life of a pretty girl—now she felt like making up for them; she greeted Tommy as if he were one of many men at her feet, walking ahead of him instead of
beside him as they crossed the garden toward the market umbrella. Attractive women of nineteen and of twenty-nine are alike in their breezy confidence; on the contrary, the exigent womb of the twenties does not pull the outside world centripetally around itself. The former are ages of insolence, comparable the one to a young cadet, the other to a fighter strutting after combat.

But whereas a girl of nineteen draws her confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff. Desirous, she chooses her apéritifs wisely, or, content, she enjoys the caviare of potential power. Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. But on the landings of nineteen or twenty-nine she is pretty sure that there are no bears in the hall.

Nicole did not want any vague spiritual romance—she wanted an “affair”; she wanted a change. She realized, thinking with Dick's thoughts, that from a superficial view it was a vulgar business to enter, without emotion, into an indulgence that menaced all of them. On the other hand, she blamed Dick for the immediate situation, and honestly thought that such an experiment might have a therapeutic value. All summer she had been stimulated by watching people do exactly what they were tempted to do and pay no penalty for it—moreover, in spite of her intention of no longer lying to herself, she preferred to consider that she was merely feeling her way and that at any moment she could withdraw….

In the light shade Tommy caught her up in his white-duck arms and pulled her around to him, looking at her eyes.