The Old Man and Me (19 page)

“Something to drink? A cup of coffee? I’ve made a fresh pot,” I asked C. D. when he arrived for me on Wednesday.

“At six in the evening? Whatever for? Are you trying to poison me?” he replied indignantly.

“I’m having some. What’s the time got to do with it anyway? It’s so dreary out I felt like something hot.”

“Then guzzle it out of my sight then. And please be considerate enough at drink time to offer me a drink.” He softened this a little by leaning over to kiss me. “Where is your girlfriend?”

“Dody? She’s become an art student. She’s off with the Chelsea Sex Set or whatever they call themselves on the King’s Road.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Not really. I went along with her last night. I don’t know what it is—them or me. I’m either ahead of it or behind it but I’m not with it. I get the feeling that the essence of everything for them is to be thrown fully clothed into the fountain at Trafalgar Square at three in the morning.”

“Were you there? I’ve been reading about it in the papers. Sounded madly gay.”

“It wasn’t. Such organized high jinks. Such a determined bunch of cut-ups. And why this addiction to fancy dress? The last masquerade party I really enjoyed was when I was about eight.”

“Blasé.”

“Maybe. But it seems to me they’re not really happy unless they’re at the same time on public display and at their worst. That’s what one of the girls actually said to me last night. ‘Was I rude to that little man in the Underground? Goodness, I hope so!’”

“It’s the traditional Bright Young Thing attitude.”

“Well I’m giving it the traditional So What.”

“I wonder if England really is the place for an American,” he said ruminatively.

I let it slide. “I’ll get you a drink.”

“And then what would you like to do?”

“What would
you
?”

He grinned. “I suppose it’s too early for that.”

I was standing way over on the other side of the room by the drink things but I felt quite breathless.

“So I thought we might go to a cinema,” he went on, making the
c
hard, no doubt like in the original Greek pronunciation. Why didn’t he go the whole hog and call it the Cinematograph or the Magic Lantern or whatever they said before the flood?

“What’s on?”

“What do you feel like—murder, outer space or sex among the working classes?”

“Murder,” I said.

“Good. So do I. That Hitchcock thing,
Psycho
, is back again. I’m told it’s an absolute blood bath. I’ll look through the paper to find out where it is.”

Before we left I went along the passageway to the kitchen and put away the unused coffee things I’d carefully arranged on a tray. Silly precaution maybe, but in my mind’s eye they had seemed to be staring at me accusingly, warning me to cover my tracks. Then I checked to see that his pills were still in my handbag.

“Oh-oh. It’s queuing up time in kine-land,” I remarked as our taxi drew up in front of a large Phantasmagoric Palace.

“I say, do you mind?”

“Not at all. Give me the chance to observe the highways and byways of your happy folk at play.” I looked down the grim unbroken line of mackintoshes.

However, when we came to rest, directly in front of us as fate would have it (and fate was having it pretty much all my way in those days, if you remember) stood a striking couple with the hard bright glitter of New York so sharp about them I felt a tidal wave of homesickness surge up inside me. The girl had that extravagant lacquered flash: black hair, thick lashes, bright lips and smooth white face. Her body was built on generous, even gracious lines and you could feel all the abandon of her sensuality in the slow rhythmic rise and fall of her bosom as she breathed, her shining mouth permanently parted. The man’s elegant dark
Negro face with its broad mouth and high cheekbones, its thin delicate bridge of a nose between flaring eyebrows, was the contemporary mask of Comedy or Tragedy depending on which way he turned the corners of his mouth and eyebrows. Clothed from head to toe in Italian silk, he looked more New York American than anyone I’d ever seen.

“Behave yourself,” whispered C. D.

“What do you mean?”

“Such undisguised lust. If I were him I’d call for the police.”

“Oh shut up. There’s something familiar about them both, that’s all.”

“My, we
are
getting chippy on the shoulder.”

At this point the man turned and caught my stare and smiled vaguely back at me. The girl too swung around, almost automatically, and did the same. They were impersonal acknowledgement-of-recognition-type smiles: professional. But who were they? After a moment the girl turned back to the man and opened her mouth as if to speak. I strained forward for a clue.

“I forgot to pick up the pie,” she said.

“Oh,
baby
, not again,” said the man, his voice hoarse, caressing, coaxing, full of southern winds and midnight-blue New York nights.

“And I was thinking about it all afternoon,” the girl went on softly. “I don’t know how it... I must have been real... real.. .” She shook her head ruefully and let her voice trail off, her lips parted, breath coming voluptuously. God, they were relaxed those two. There was an eternity between them.

“What about the roast? Sure you turned down the oven?” Twitch of the mouth and eyebrows. Mask of Comedy. “That could be a bad scene if you didn’t.”

“Oh, baby, I’m not that...y’know...that...”

Mask of Tragedy. “You’re fine.”

Then there was a mass move and we all went in.

The idea of going to a murder movie in the first place was to watch it closely in the hopes of picking up some valuable pointers. I have since had people tell me that this particular one was the most grisly, fiendish and gruesome they have ever seen. Whether or not this is true I cannot say, as my body, assuming various knotted positions reminiscent of the Laocoön, was entirely bent on
not
seeing it. If this was what killing someone entailed—and presumably this was precisely what it did...my handbag had slid to the ground. I’d bent over to pick it up but found it impossible to straighten out. Better stay there for a while.

“You all right?” C. D. leaned over.

“Of course.” Steel bands clamped down on my forehead, pressing at my temples. “Only I think I’m fainting.” I rose and stumbled out to the lobby, C. D. following with my bag.

I was all right after that. We had a good meal at some polished walnut of a restaurant and lots and lots to drink and then he took me back to his place where he—well, we’ve been through all that already, haven’t we?

But what seems to have escaped me until just now was that it was the first time in my life I’d ever gotten drunk.

C.D. mckee...Cosmos? Darwin? Don’t you believe it—C Charlie D Dog McKee. You were a fraud and a fool and a fat flabby fifty-six-year-old rake fake, C. D.
Seedy
McKee.

Lying around every room of your house, my feet upon your chairs and sofas, “Oh
teach
me how to sneer,” I would say, remembering some disparaging remark of yours earlier on that day, let us say about a snuff box hopefully brought round for your approval by one of your worshipful friends: “Yes, it is an eighteenth-century snuff box” (pause for closer inspection—timing was everything in this game) “but it’s a poor man’s one.” (Seedy, I shall always think of you as a poor man’s snuff box. How merrily our eyes met, dancing over the defeated head of the downcast Collector.) But later on, I would start feeling sorry for her—it generally was a woman—for her carelessly spoiled pleasure, and I would remember (still earlier that same day) you to the proud owner of the newly decorated house in Brompton Square (and decorated only for your dismay it would seem, would it not, Sir Seed?): “
Never
put a Buhl clock on top of a Bahut Bretonne desk—not even a bogus one.” Oh good stuff, good stuff. And what was the other? “Well, if you’re going to collect Staffordshire you’re going to have an awful lot of awful things.” And so, “Teach me how to sneer,” I would say.

And you, your shoes off, curling your toes in your rich thick woollen socks, answering mildly enough, “At what? At things a Yank like you ought not to have the right to walk amongst, much less criticize?” Steel blue met steel blue with a blast of blowtorches and then I would reply: “Youse is slippin’, mah boy. You’ll have to do better than that.”

And then, of course, you would giggle.

“
The American girl syndrome, by which I mean the entire course of a relationship with one, has speeded up a lot during the past twenty-five years. Initial stimulation is now followed almost immediately by disinfatuation. Cuteness turns to banality overnight. The pert wisecrack degenerates into a maddening quack. Mental cruelty sets in about the third day
...” An Englishman reviewing some book or other about an American girl. Pointed out to me by C. D., natch. The American girl syndrome. I kept saying it to myself over and over again.
Syndrome
. It’s such a lovely word with its undertones of cymbals and drums, of sin dooms and sun downs, only finally, I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. So I looked it up. Syndrome: a concurrence of symptoms forming a clinical picture. Charming, I thought, to describe a relationship with an American girl as if it were a disease; as if knowing an American girl would make you catch something. Like death.

C. D. was taking me around London. Luncheons, dinner parties, concerts and Art Galleries. I definitely got the feeling he enjoyed being seen with me. Hell, he liked us being talked about, the old goat. He loved the stately commotion we were causing among his friends and cronies, the heads we set in motion, the tongues we started wagging, and, though I say it, the sighs of envy we occasioned. He was focusing on me all right, concentrating, but I still couldn’t help feeling, with his constant corrections of my English, my education, my posture even, that it was the schoolmaster rather than the lover in the ascendant. And this angered and frustrated me as did, even more, the nagging feeling that anyone else, given my age, sex, looks, and incentive, might have had the whole thing sewn up by now.

The days slipped by. The pills lay in my bag unused, a constant reproach to my cowardice. My ineffectualness increased my impatience which in turn increased my ineffectualness, and as they both increased my temper caused my Anglophobia to grow in leaps and bounds. Not that I would have considered his little groupie a bargain over any counter and the fact that most of them shared Lady Daggoner’s view that another American liaison would be disastrous for our fat friend did nothing to improve my goodwill towards them. And so, like letting the cat out of the bag, I let the catty side of my nature slip out, shocked at how readily it jumped. But whereas before my lapses into bitchiness would have provoked a mild reprimand from C. D. now they actually seemed to amuse him. In fact, the more vindictive I became, the more he was delighted. And this too added to my annoyance, this corroding of my soul for his enjoyment, for after a while I couldn’t stop it, did it automatically like a reflex.

“But don’t you find So-and-So spirited and gay?” he might inquire.

“About as gay as an undertaker gone berserk,” would be my snappy rejoinder.

“At any rate her luncheon parties are the most sought after in London.”

“Yeah—where people come not so much to eat as be eaten,” I would flip back quick as a flash.

Or: “I thought little Miss X quite an exotic bloom—a Gauguin really.”

“I see what you mean. Those purple cheeks. Those blue lips.”

Suppressed giggle from C. D.

After a while I didn’t confine myself to the people but spread myself out so I could take in their homes and furnishings as well. “You’d think in that hideous brown drawing-room of hers the women would have had enough sense not
all
to show up in black,” I might complain.

And then, moving out of doors and into the Art Galleries: C. D. lost in admiration in front of a Bellini. “There really is so much to be said for him, isn’t there?” he would ask.

“Yes, all those terrible actors he paints.”

I had begun by imitating him, went on to compete and ended by outdistancing him—like waiting until he’d finished a loving description of some old Regency hand-cooler or whatever and then saying quietly to all present, “It isn’t nearly as pretty as he says it is.” Gone too far? Apparently not—for there he was hissing with laughter.

And then, suddenly from nowhere, a major crisis. Dody barrelling into my room early one morning with a letter in hand that she’d just received from her husband Scotty. My God, I thought, I’d forgotten all about him. She began reading from it hysterically, breaking up sentences and injecting comments in a way that made it almost impossible to make sense of. It seemed that now Scotty thought it was all a big mistake. The Indian girl didn’t seem to be so Indian any more in India. Turned out to be rather Western, in fact. And a bit of a bore. In fact, he d had to face it that one can be Indian and still be a bore. He was completely disillusioned on that score. Dody was far more exotic, really. Dear little Dody with her vague ways, far more mysterious and interesting. How he missed her. What a fool he’d been. What should he do? What should
he
do—what should
she
do, Dody kept breaking off to ask me and then going straight on without waiting. He was in despair. He wanted to return. If Dody would say so he’d take the next plane back. What should she do?

What should she do indeed. What should
I
do was more to the point. With Scotty back I’d be out on the street. There was no question of shacking up with C. D.; he was very proper, he never once even asked me to spend the whole night with him. I needed this place. That month of hotel living had taught me how much I needed this place. I needed it not just for the roof over my head or the smooth sheets on my bed or the closet space for my clothes or the iron for my blouses. I needed it to make coffee in, have a glass of milk and a snack during the day. I needed it to stay in when I wasn’t going out and to come back to when I had been. I needed it to listen to its records, read its books. I needed to be able to go from one room to another when I felt like it; not to have to go through a lobby of strangers, myself a stranger, every time I came indoors or out. I needed it so that when I got up in the morning eventually I didn’t feel as bad as I did when I first woke up. And of course I needed it not to get that weekly bill payable immediately. In short I needed it desperately and there was no question of giving it up.