Tender Is the Night (48 page)

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 comediennes have built up their
reputations by burlesquing 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
manoeuvred
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.

VIII

She
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.

“Don’t
move,” he said. “I’m going to look at you a great deal from now on.”

There
was some scent on his hair, a faint aura of soap from his white clothes. Her
lips were tight, not smiling and they both simply looked for a moment.

“Do you
like what you see?” she murmured.

“Parle
français
.”

“Very
well,”
and she asked again in French. “Do you like what you
see?”

He
pulled her closer.

“I like
whatever I see about you.” He hesitated. “I thought I knew your face but it
seems there are some things I didn’t know about it. When did you begin to have
white crook’s eyes?”

She
broke away, shocked and indignant, and cried in English:

“Is that
why you wanted to talk French?” Her voice quieted as the butler came with
sherry. “So you could be offensive more accurately?”

She
parked her small seat violently on the cloth-of-silver chair cushion.

“I have
no mirror here,” she said, again in French, but decisively, “but if my eyes
have changed it’s because I’m well again. And being well perhaps I’ve gone back
to my true self—I suppose my grandfather was a crook and I’m a crook by
heritage, so there we are. Does that satisfy your logical mind?”

He
scarcely seemed to know what she was talking about.

“Where’s
Dick—is he lunching with us?”

Seeing
that his remark had meant comparatively little to him she suddenly laughed away
its effect.

“Dick’s
on a tour,” she said. “Rosemary Hoyt turned up, and either they’re together or
she upset him so much that he wants to go away and dream about her.”

“You
know, you’re a little complicated after all.”

“Oh no,”
she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really—I’m just a— I’m just a whole lot
of different simple people.”

Marius
brought out melon and an ice pail, and Nicole, thinking irresistibly about her
crook’s eyes did not answer; he gave one an entire nut to crack, this man,
instead of giving it in fragments to pick at for meat.

“Why
didn’t they leave you in your natural state?” Tommy demanded presently. “You
are the most dramatic person I have known.”

She had
no answer.

“All
this taming of women!” he scoffed.

“In any
society there are certain—” She felt Dick’s ghost prompting at her elbow but
she subsided at Tommy’s overtone:

“I’ve
brutalized many men into shape but I wouldn’t take a chance on half the number
of women. Especially this ‘kind’ bullying—what good does it do anybody?—you or
him or anybody?”

Her
heart leaped and then sank faintly with a sense of what she owed Dick.

“I
suppose I’ve got—”

“You’ve
got too much money,” he said impatiently. “That’s the crux of the matter. Dick can’t
beat that.”

She
considered while the melons were removed.

“What do
you think I ought to do?”

For the
first time in ten years she was under the sway of a personality other than her
husband’s. Everything Tommy said to her became part of her forever.

They
drank the bottle of wine while a faint wind rocked the pine needles and the
sensuous heat of early afternoon made blinding freckles on the checkered
luncheon cloth. Tommy came over behind her and laid his arms along hers,
clasping her hands. Their cheeks touched and then their lips and she gasped
half with passion for him, half with the sudden surprise of its force. . . .