A LEGENDARY BLANCHE
A NOVELLA AND SEVEN SHORT PIECES
by
Julian Silva
Copyright 2012 Julian Silva
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Table of Contents
Prologue
At the very least I was guilty of hubris. Midlife Crisis I had scorned as an invention of hucksters. A self-indulgent fashion for the pampered middle class. Then life set me up for a fall. And fall I did.
It began with the return of my first—and in a romantic sense, only—love. Had he lived, Romeo might, after Juliet, have gone on to any number of rich and fulfilling encounters, but one cannot imagine him ever again suffering from that particular form of delirium experienced beneath the Capulet’s balcony. Such delicious and self-immolating madness comes, if it comes at all, but once.
Out of the distant past he reappeared, my Romeo, like some Arthurian knight in tarnished armor, stouter and grizzled, but as laconic as ever, a slightly seedy Lohengrin luminous still with the same Christ-eyes and dimpled chin that had turned me to mush a quarter of a century earlier. Overnight I was twenty again, moving through my mid-century in a kind of euphoric daze, both feet always at least a fraction of an inch above ground in what seemed a perpetual high. Waking and sleeping were one. Life was a dream from which I hoped never to wake.
With scarcely a demur I broke off a relationship of twenty years’ standing. Granted, it had already been crumbling from dry rot and was desperately in need of structural changes, if not the sudden and brutal demolition order it received. But I was too deliriously happy to be much or long touched by anyone else’s pain. What was was. You do not stop a force of nature with an upraised hand; you ride the crest of a tidal wave or you are drowned. The wave itself is indifferent. And so was I. Or almost.
Turning fifty was nothing if one’s heart could still be twenty, but a richer, fuller twenty than any twenty-year-old ever imagined. It was emotion that endured. Love.
Balls!
So smitten was I, I could not recognize at the time that my grizzled and timeworn knight was himself already well into his own crisis. It was not me he had come in search of, but his own lost youth. My resurrected love made him young again. For awhile. When the scales fell from his eyes and he discovered I was no longer the lithe, sunburnt and totally submissive ephebe I once was, the knight-turned-bastard presented me, literally, with a bill of accounting for our resurrected romance.
Upon the instant, I fell victim to what proved to be very nearly a terminal case of déjà vu. For the first time since our first meeting on a New Year’s Eve in the early fifties, the scales fell from my own eyes and I saw him at last for what he was and surely must always have been: a cheap con-man with a too easy smile, the mind of a tight-fisted, nit-picking, toothpick counting CPA, and the soul of a small-time sadist too timid to explore his own dark impulses except from a position of absolute security. A stunning blow to the head followed by a quick attack where it was most apt to hurt—the purse.
My first reaction was fury at my own stupidity. To have so readily, so eagerly, even, let myself open to this second burning from the same fire deprived me of my own sympathy. Fools are not deserving of pity.
Self-contempt gave way to rage when The Bastard presented me with a full, itemized accounting of our joint expenses. Not so much as a grain of rice had been purchased without his recording pen taking note in his secret black ledger. The bill presented was so ludicrous even laughter seemed an inadequate response. To have been played for a fool and then asked to pay for our mutual folly down to the last penny seemed the ultimate insult. But not quite.
The second blow was physiological. As ye sin so ye shall be punished. Though I long ago lost my faith in salvation, I have never quite relinquished my belief in damnation. Heaven may be illusory, hell is only too real.
Alone at last I took stock of the wreckage strewn by the tidal wave of my fiftieth birthday. Shamed by the magnitude of my folly, I was left to brood in misanthropic solitude, my house stripped of lover, pictures, furniture, my friends alienated by the abruptness, and what many considered the brutality, of my “divorce.” I had made a very public fool of myself and must now suffer the consequences in solitude.
Pride, however, was not all that pained me. How much of the rest was physiological and how much psychological only a psychiatrist with preternatural powers would be able to sift out, but whatever its cause, something was very wrong. What for one mad moment I feared might be venereal proved instead to be only an infection of the bladder.
There was, I soon discovered, little comfort in that “only.” So enlarged so rapidly had my prostate become, infection became chronic, and though the chances of malignancy were slight, any chance at all seemed chance too much, and I quickly, foolhardily, consented to the recommended surgery.
A great hulking teddy bear of a man with the thick, brutal hands of a butcher, the surgeon gave new and exquisite meaning to the word pain with his exploratory catheter, which he manipulated with all the finesse of a riot policeman brandishing a truncheon. I should have been forewarned by the ineptness of his initial examination, but fear as well as ignorance led me blithely into his clutches. Later described by a doctor friend of mine (unprofessionally and far too late to benefit me) as “a bull in a china shop,” he did indeed end by smashing most of my personal china, leaving me for the first two years a virtual eunuch.
In the light of subsequent events, I have been forced, albeit reluctantly, to revise my thinking about my bullish urologist, for had he been anything like the artist he should have been, I would almost certainly be dead by now. For lonely and bitter, faced with the reality of lost youth and the grim prospect of ever-diminishing powers, I was a prime candidate for a wild and promiscuous fling just at the time the AIDS virus was clandestinely incubating in the steam baths of San Francisco, New York, and just about every other city of the western world. As I was not at the time gifted with foresight, he vied mightily with The Bastard as my prime candidate for extinction, until the latter very soon won out, hands down.
What most offended me about the court summons announcing his lawsuit demanding half of all our mutual expenses, full repayment for the restoration of my stripped house (including the bed and sheets we slept upon), court costs, lawyers’ fees, damages, and just about anything else he could think of was the underhanded and insidious invasion of my privacy. On my front stoop I was greeted by a smiling stranger, who, without apparent malice but with a decidedly sadistic glint in his eye, proceeded to fling a trowelful of shit in my face. Even as I reeled from the blow, one part of me wondered what sick and secret impulses could drive so ordinary looking a man to make his living serving summonses to strangers.
If there was in the world in which circumstances had forced me to live a code of honor, (and I was romantic fool enough to believe there was), its first principle had always been that you solved your difficulties among your own kind. Because we had all in those antediluvian days before Stonewall been compelled to live outside the law, quite literally as outlaws, any recourse to that same law that had once proscribed our very existence was unthinkable. It was a betrayal of an ideal as well as an individual. That The Bastard and I would on our own come to some kind of agreement I had never doubted. With my revision of his reckoning, I had already offered him what I considered my just portion of his outlandish claim, considerably less than a third of the bill presented; but once I became the subject of his lawsuit, he forfeited in my eyes any moral claim to so much as a penny. He was only trying to frighten me, I thought. And I was frightened. The prospect of having to bare the details of my grand folly in a public courtroom turned me clammy with terror; but stronger than the terror was my resolve never to let him be a witness to it. And never myself even to consider giving in. If he was indeed going to send me to the stake, I meant to burn in glory—and with a hard, gemlike flame—before I would bend my knee to his will.
Of the law’s delay the world has already had ample evidence. Though there had been moves and countermoves, nothing had yet been resolved by the time I arrived in London for my sabbatical. Even with justice on one’s side, and I firmly believed at least moral justice was mine, lawyers do not act without retainers. But more depressing than any real or prospective cost was the uncertainty. All I could be sure of by now was that The Bastard was not bluffing. That our dispute would go to trial I no longer doubted. Only the time and the outcome remained uncertain.
It was like having a tiny, elusive mouse gnawing away at my pantry, not large enough to pose a real threat to my survival, but nightly leaving his droppings to taunt me with his continued existence. He would not be trapped, and miniscule as his droppings were, they yet tainted my every joy.
I was almost ready to believe at last in Zelda’s overworked stars, that some governing planet had come in conjunction with other obviously malign astral forces and my fate was now their plaything. If luck was a lady, she was certainly having her revenge.
The final blow was professional. After twenty-one years at the same school, the last seven as head of my department, I found myself suddenly in a kind of no man’s land. A long, bitter, and costly strike had left the entire teaching force, both strikers and non-strikers, at wit’s end when not at each other’s throats. Within a week of the settlement, I was told by my principal, in what was transparently a personal effort by a mean and vindictive man to exacerbate the already-rampant dissension, to submit the name of one member of my department for “consolidation.” The term is an administrative euphemism for a transfer to what is invariably a more onerous assignment. Since every class in the department was already filled well beyond the district limits, I had no other honorable choice than to call his bluff and submit my own name. And the principal, for whose tyrannical incompetence I had never been quite able to hide my contempt, accepted it with dismaying alacrity.
So rife was suspicion, not to say paranoia, throughout the district, I could not convince the department head at my new assignment that I had not been brought in at the instigation of his principal eventually to replace him. Thus I was given the kind of program reserved for teachers you hope will opt for a transfer to almost any other assignment with relief: five different classes in four different rooms, in four very different parts of a very large campus. I expended so much energy simply running from one classroom to the next there was little left over for teaching. Even worse was the blow to my esteem. I had moved from a school where my classes had been prizes eagerly sought to one in which I was a nonentity. At fifty-two and under the worst possible circumstances I had to prove myself all over again. I was a rooky. I was low man on the totem pole. I was tired. So I applied for a traveling sabbatical, and to everyone’s relief, mine most of all, it was granted.
Thus I arrived in London battered, bloody, and desperate for something, anything, to restore my faith in myself and give me back some sense of life’s joy. Had I been younger I would undoubtedly have chosen Italy or France or possibly Greece, where the living would have been cheaper and the challenges more stimulating, but so shattered had the last three years left me, I feared that if I were confronted with the additional barrier of a foreign tongue (and both my Italian and my French are rudimentary, while my Greek is non-existent) I might very well have retreated into a state of catatonic melancholia.
Beside the ready gift of language, London offered at least two friends: Roger Tubbs, an old actor friend who had once, years before, put me up after a too-indulgent tour of the Middle East, and Zelda. But the week of my arrival, the former took off for a six-month stint in Hong Kong with some traveling theatrical group to air his usual blood-and-guts repertory among the colonial holdovers. And my London friends were suddenly reduced to one.
That she would, all on her own, more than make up for a legion, I had at the time no cause to suspect. Of our fortuitous conjunction at what proved a propitious time for both of us, she would have said (and undoubtedly did say, many times over): “It was all written in the stars.”
And who am I to contradict?
What follows is a love story. An odd one, perhaps, but the richest my life has to offer. And as Swann was ruefully given to musing about his Odette: She wasn’t even my type. For one, she was a woman.
1
My stay did not begin well. The North Sea oil boom had driven the pound to such ridiculous heights that half my monthly allowance went to pay for my tiny basement flat on Lincoln Street just off the Sloane-Square-end of the King’s Road. It had little to offer beside location. But that, I soon learned, was virtually everything in London. There were two rooms and a bath. The kitchen, which served also as laundry room for the master house above, would never have passed muster at home, but it proved adequate to my modest needs, a Sainsbury meat-or-mushroom pie and ready-made cole slaw being about the extent of my culinary adventures. The prospect onto the tiny, north-facing formal garden that I was not allowed to use was pleasant but hardly sunny enough to make me truly resentful of the proscription, which seemed in the long run gratuitous since I cannot remember ever seeing anyone during my entire stay use the area.
There was one other perk. The cockney char who “did” for the elegant gents above, the short, doughty, henna-rinsed Mrs. O’Reilly (“Irish, but no papist, mind you.”) was not against throwing my skivvies into the wash along with theirs; and were I prepared to listen to her morning chatter, she was even willing to wash up the previous evening’s dishes, taking careful note of every one of Zelda’s lipstick-imprinted cups and cigarette butts. Thus it was that I learned any number of arcane facts about life among the Chelsea poor (and despite appearances to the contrary, there do seem to be a few). But the single nugget of information that most intrigued me was the “secret” of her remarkable complexion. Though she was certainly no beauty and probably never had been, were she truly the seventy-two she claimed to be, her skin was indeed remarkable. It would have been remarkable for a woman ten years her junior.
“I never let soap touch it. Not since I was sixteen.”
The I’s more closely approximated the sound “oy” than the pronoun most of us are familiar with and the letter “h” was not a noticeable part of her alphabet.
In America, I assured her, she could undoubtedly make her fortune going on the telly to tout whatever substitute she employed in place of the scorned soap.
So delighted was she by this notion, nudging me not too gently in the arm as she giggled, “Get on with you,” I never did learn what it was she actually used to clean that remarkable skin of hers, undoubtedly some arcane concoction of squashed cucumbers and culled cream passed down from cockney mother to cockney daughter for countless generations.
The other room, a combination living room, dining room, drawing room, and bedroom all rather too compactly rolled into one was freshly painted white and decorated with the kind of floral prints one associates with genteel hotels of modest price to add color without making any definite stylistic statement. They were not offensive, simply innocuous. The limited space was more than amply filled with a small dining table capable of feeding two, an easy chair, and a tangerine-colored sofa-bed that made a far more comfortable sofa than it did a bed.
Since the room faced southwest, whatever sun there was that gray autumn I got. Though it sometimes cheered my spirits, it had virtually no effect on the pervading damp; nor did the gas heater in the chimney piece do more than warm the upper half of my body so that I was soon forced to acclimatize myself to the disconcerting combination of flushed cheeks and chilblained feet. But the address was SW3 and people have been known to kill for less.
There was the additional problem of what I was to do in this room—besides, that is, sleep, eat, and read. I did go so far as to rent an electric typewriter and occasionally pretended to write, but my ego was far too bruised for any serious effort, and I finished no more than an occasional letter. Even those were rambling, discursive efforts to reach out tentatively to anyone receptive enough to respond and thus confirm my continuing existence in some world or other that could with some justification be labeled “real.”
Nor was the common language an unmixed blessing. There were times, on the bus, for example, and I spent an inordinate amount of time aimlessly riding buses, watching, listening, getting the “feel” of London, I would have said if anyone had bothered to ask, when I would have to zero in on a conversation with my most sensitive antennae before I could assure myself it was indeed a version of English the strangers were speaking, so different were the rhythms as well as the sounds. And when the young Italian waitress at the Chelsea Kitchen on the nearby King’s Road, the ink on whose green card was scarcely dry, made me feel as if it were I who was speaking a foreign language rather than she, I would be suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of not belonging. Anywhere. Here or in America. For my brief stopover in New York had, if possible, made me feel even more acutely than in London a sense of exclusion. I was clearly in a bad way.
There was Zelda, but so keen was my sense of impending disintegration, I approached her at first warily. Since she was, in this vast metropolis, now the sole anchor to my own identity, the last thing I wanted to do was frighten her off with the desperation of my need. Whatever else I did, I was determined I would not in any way foist my depression onto her.
Then, to my astonishment, and well before she had a chance to spy out my not so secret need, her own was so nakedly exposed that she became, without ever knowing it, the glue that held me together. In my rush to rescue her I so completely forgot my problems, I inadvertently, without even being aware of the change taking place, became once again my own person.
2
When I first came across her years before, she was playing the crucial role of Archie Rice’s daughter in John Osborne’s The Entertainer with the Actors Workshop in San Francisco. And in those heady days, when the company was at its best, dynamic and professional, one went to the theater with a sense of high expectations that were more often than not rewarded. It was a splendid production of a fine play, but I came away with such a sense of ensemble playing that I did not distinguish the actors from their roles—which is about as fine a compliment as one can pay a group of actors. But since it was Zelda’s first appearance with the company, I doubt I even registered the name. I certainly did not remember it when we first talked on the telephone.
I had placed an ad in the Sunday Chronicle for the sublet of my flat. (I should, of course, say “our flat” since I was already, by then, sharing it with Ed, whom The Bastard later supplanted; but this is not our story.) It was 1961. I was about to take off for a year’s sabbatical on which Ed was to join me. The flat was immense, larger, in fact, than the house I currently inhabit, with huge, light-filled rooms and ceilings that seemed to go on forever. In the heart of Pacific Heights, it was such a “find” that I did not in any way want to jeopardize my own future tenancy by turning the place over to someone who would disturb the landlords, a quiet, childless and charmingly eccentric couple who lived in the flat below and had, of course, granted permission for the sublet with the single caveat that they would not hesitate to evict anyone who disturbed their sleep. So special was the place, the problem was not finding a tenant, but finding the right tenant.
I also had a cat, a gorgeous chinchilla Persian who looked like Sophia Loren and chattered away, vociferously, like some southern belle. What was to happen to her during my absence I had not quite decided. Until Zelda appeared and solved all my problems.
Her telephone voice was deceptive. She was so soft-spoken with the air of a little girl lost that one longed, almost instinctively, to comfort her by giving her whatever it was she wanted. It was only later one discovered the little girl was not lost at all, but knew precisely where she was, and more important, where she intended to go. The southern drawl slipped out ever so discreetly as she announced that she was an actress, with a lingering stress on the first syllable, and I rolled my eyes, convinced that I had agreed to meet with some Broadway burlesque queen, the Broadway in question being San Francisco’s sleazy center of the topless craze, Mammary Row, home of the silicone-injected breasts blinking with coy, cherry-tipped electric lights from every marquee. Who else in San Francisco would have the gall to introduce herself as an “actress”? Even on the telephone one could sense the haughtily defensive lift of the chin defying anyone to challenge her right to the title. I was amused, touched—and wary. My landlords, both country-born and country-bred, were dear and tolerant people, but they were not so naive nor quite so broad-minded as to allow some local stripper to entertain half the sugar daddies of North Beach over their heads.
My flat was designed for grand entrances and Zelda, even at that age, never lost the opportunity to exploit one. The door opened at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, which she ascended like Eliza Doolittle arriving at her ambassadorial ball as I waited at the top landing to greet her. Thus we both had time for a full appraisal of each other before we spoke.
I don’t know whether I ever told her what I was expecting to explain the extent of my surprise and relief at her appearance. She was just a little girl, a very grand little girl, but still just a girl, in her early twenties, I surmised, though she was, in fact, rather later than earlier; yet at the bottom of the stairs, as she first stepped through the door, she might have passed for sixteen, the tiniest strawberry blond perched on precariously high spike heels. Her gigantic turquoise eyes seemed to change with the light so that it was impossible ever to decide definitively whether they were more blue than green, or more green than blue. That afternoon she chose to be just southern enough to add a touch of the exotic without ever becoming cloying; and I very soon came to the conclusion that the extent of her southerness was always a matter of her own choosing.
“What a dahrlin cat,” she said, scooping up the animal before offering me her hand, which, like the rest of her, was cool, lovely, and miraculously white, except for the thin netting of very faint freckles.
“You both have the same eyes,” I said. “Her name’s Isabella, by the way, and she won’t tolerate any abbreviations. She’s a d’Este,” I added, smiling like an over-indulgent parent.
“Oh, but hers are far too beautiful for any mere mortal’s.” She held up Isabella, who had obviously already fallen in love, to inspect the cat more closely. Nor was she fishing for a denial. She had, one felt, already long ago, before some secret mirror, made a coldly analytical appraisal of every one of her assets and knew their worth down to the last carat.
“But how can you bear to leave all this?” Still carrying Isabella, she followed me into the front room, its elegant proportions awash in the afternoon light.
Struck by some gesture as she took the seat opposite me, I said, “But I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? You said you were an actress.”
“Yes. With Actors Workshop.”
“Ah, yes.” The light dawned. “The Entertainer.”
“You saw it, then?”
“Oh, yes. I did, I did.”
“Well?” She smiled, coolly awaiting my appraisal. Almost too coolly, since again I felt she had already made her own thoroughly objective assessment of that performance and was not about to be swayed by mine.
“I’m sorry.” I answered her smile with one I hoped was as cool as her own. “I was just marveling at how different you are right now from the girl you played. That’s a compliment, I suppose.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I think it is.”
And with that it seemed understood that we were to be friends. The flat was hers if she wanted it. And she did want it, so eagerly I feared for a moment she might lose that marvelous cool of hers as she paused in the middle of my bedroom to perform a half pirouette and exclaim: “Why, it’s as big as a ballroom!” Since she was willing, even eager, to take Isabella into the bargain, I lowered the monthly rent from $150 to $125. I was actually paying the odd sum of $89—unfurnished, of course—a price even at the time so ludicrously low for anything so large and so well-located, I would have forfeited my sabbatical rather than risk losing the flat. Thus our first encounter left us both richer for the experience.
3
Upon my return eleven months later we did in fact become the friends our first encounter had promised. She had, I very soon discovered, dazzled everyone, from Isabella to my landlords—the butcher, the baker, and I’m sure if there had been one, she would have charmed the candlestick maker as well. My own welcome home was tempered by everyone’s sadness at her departure. She seemed to carry a klieg light with her wherever she went, as if it were part of her role in life to brighten dark corners and make whomever she was speaking to feel as if they had been given a box seat to a very special performance. And women seemed just as susceptible as men to her particular magic.
More striking even than her beauty was her sense of style. I had never before met anyone so much a product of her own creation. Life was for her an imperfect script that required both talent and discipline to transform it into something not merely palatable, but more closely resembling a work of art. The simplest dinner party (for obvious reasons always on a Sunday evening) became a ritual worthy of some ecclesiastical investiture, with banks and banks of candle stubs sitting in every available receptacle from saucers to ashtrays, and great bouquets of whatever flowers she’d been able to scrounge for mere pennies from the local florist just before Saturday closing time. The more improbable the combination of colors and species the grander the results. Though the main dish might be a tuna-and-potato-chip casserole and the wine decanted from the cheapest of screwtop jugs, her guests always dined more richly than the patrons of the city’s most famous restaurants. The real feast was not for the palate, but the eyes and the ears. Under her spell the tiny attic apartment she had taken after leaving my Jackson Street flat became a splendid court theater, about which we, her courtiers, sat, bewitched by her protean voice as she transformed the simplest of her daily encounters into an adventure worthy of Aladdin, until we were all left aching with laughter. But it was laughter that she could, in an instant, when the mood struck her, turn to tears. She was at these events stage designer, script writer, director, and actress all in one.
Our own particular friendship was sealed once and for all when I sold my first story, actually got paid what seemed at the time an enormous sum of very real money for something I had written. She marked the occasion with a bouquet almost as big as herself, two dozen, long-stem coral-colored roses that must have cost her a day’s wages. It was a gesture far too grand for her skimpy pocketbook, but I was too deeply touched to scold her. No one else had even come close to understanding—or for that matter, caring—what that check had meant to me—not as cash, but as a very personal, and until her gesture, very private, triumph over ogres I could not at the time have begun to describe to anyone, even to her.
Nor was the color of the roses accidental. She never left such matters to chance. Coral was her signature color, the perfect complement to her white skin, turquoise eyes, and strawberry-blond hair. It had been the coloring of my favorite grandmother, who had always looked upon the whiteness of her skin as a gift from heaven to be treasured like some holy relic. Never, in her youth, did she confront the sun without gloves and parasol, and though the parasol was later, in my youth, replaced by veiled hats, the gloves remained a constant fixture throughout her life. Even in old age she would not have dreamed of venturing outside her front gate without them.
Zelda, unfortunately, lived at a time when such pallor, exquisite though it might be in the artificial lights of January, was looked upon under the naked sun of July as a sign of illness or poverty. Only someone too sick or too poor to find her way to a proper beach was ever pale in summer. Perfect beauty required the perfect tan. So stoically, recklessly, and futilely she stretched herself out in any available patch of sunlight, immobile as a statue upon a stone sarcophagus, arms at her side, cotton swabs on her eyes, a kitchen timer within easy reach to signal the next turn, as her skin, glistening like some well-oiled endive, turned from white to pink, then red. After the painful and inevitable blistering had peeled, she was, for all her pains, left with nothing more than a protective net of freckles over her still shamefully-white skin. And doggedly she would try again, like some crazed zealot in search of the ever elusive miracle; but no matter how much pain she endured, even the imperfect tan eluded her.
I found the disfiguring freckles fetching, but her standards were far too high for her ever to be consoled by my paltry efforts at sympathy.
“Try to imagine Garbo with freckles,” she’d challenge. “Or Dietrich.” And as I laughingly shook my head, she’d silence me with a flash of her blue-green eyes. “Well, there you are then!” And freckles were forever relegated to their proper place—with the cute, not the beautiful; and if there was anything she did not want to be, it was cute. Even ugliness was preferable, for ugliness could harbor unfathomed depths of character, and she wanted to be someone—not a thing. A toy or a doll. “The ugliest word in the English language,” she had once intoned in my presence, “is starlet. May the Good Lord preserve me from ever becoming one of them.”
For various and complex reasons she had left the Actors Workshop for the Playhouse at the Aquatic Park end of Hyde Street. My judgment now was always colored by friendship. I could never be as coldly analytical of her work as she seemed to be herself. Only once was I so carried away as to forget it was Zelda up there I was watching. I had seen the original London production of The Lady’s Not For Burning, and though the Playhouse’s could not even approximate that magical cast, Zelda’s Lady was far more enchanting than that of the highly mannered Pamela Brown’s. And infinitely lovelier to look at. She was, we all agreed, far too good for the company she was keeping. She needed a Gielgud as her foil and there was no one around who came even close. She was like some precious jewel, an emerald, set in a nickel ring; one could never quite credit the jewel’s authenticity for the tawdriness of its setting. Thus I think we all, even her greatest admirers, tended to underrate her. The competition was simply too paltry for valid judgments.
Theatrically speaking San Francisco was a dead end. She had come by way of New York and the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis so that the only retreat left was back and beyond, to Europe. She had stayed so long, she admitted later, only because she had been in love—with a doctor at Children’s Hospital, where she had been working at the reception desk. A happily married man, as the expression goes, he was not about to leave wife and children for her or for anyone. Nor did she, typically, expect him to. All she wanted was her portion of his love, and when that dried up she was ready at last to move on.
It was not the last time a man was to come between her and her career, for better or for worse, and it was almost always the latter. But even to me, who was by this time virtually convinced she could do no wrong, her chosen escape route seemed highly improbable. She was dreaming too big and headed for a fall. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts! Though the intensity with which she longed to perfect her craft was admirable, she had to face the fact that she was an American. Hollywood and Broadway might be sprinkled with any number of British imports, but the traffic seldom, if ever, except for the occasional star turn, moved in the opposite direction. It was a long, long way from San Francisco to London, twice the distance from San Francisco to New York, figuratively as well as geographically. But far worse in her eyes (and to her friends she was always commendably honest in this regard), she had already irrevocably crossed the line into her thirties. As slender and bright-eyed as ever, she could still easily pass for twenty-five; the documents could be—and were—altered, but then her curriculum vitae made her earliest performances appear the work of a precocious teenager.
Nor could she, even if she were allowed to matriculate, survive the course without financial assistance. She needed, thus, not merely to be accepted into the academy itself, (which she was already, familiarly and affectionately, referring to as RADA), but to be accepted with such enthusiasm as to receive a coveted scholarship.
She never gave any sign of waivering in her conviction that she would, despite all obstacles, win out. The stars were in her favor, she said with a childlike faith so touching we rolled our eyes and shook our heads. Poor credulous dear. We kept our fingers loosely crossed and prepared to cushion her fall. While she, already rehearsing for life in her new home, ferreted out every British pub, tavern and restaurant in town, trying on accents like new blouses, eating kidney pie, putting milk in her tea, and swallowing warm bitters without wincing. We all humored her, though most of us drew the line at kidneys in any form and bitters warm or cold. We would far rather have spent the evenings washing down plates of pasta with what was always affectionately known as Dago Red for half the price and twice the pleasure, but Zelda, we were convinced, would very soon need all the indulgence we could spare. It was not that any of us doubted her talents. We were, after all, her devoted claque. But the impossibility of conveying whatever magic she possessed in a few reels of tape and a package of glossies was an obstacle too overwhelming for even our faith to transcend.
Well, she showed us all up for the Doubting Thomases we were. The day her acceptance came through we all got drunk on Bollinger’s best. No local substitute would do. So Zelda was as good as we knew her to be—or rather, hoped she was. Now the world would know as well. Dame Zelda Duke, we all agreed, had a fine, almost inevitable, ring to it, even if it meant giving up her citizenship for the honor. She was, anyway, like all great artists, a citizen of the world and now, for us, truly touched with magic. So we toasted Dame Zelda until we could toast no more—and were all properly chastened the next morning with monumental hangovers. Only Zelda seemed as clear-eyed and transported as ever, sustained by some perpetual high. And bully for her! For our little southern belle was off to London Town to give Dame Edith and Dame Sybil and Dame-everyone-else a run for their money.
Two weeks before her departure President Kennedy was assassinated. The fact is relevant only because it and the assassinations that were to follow forever after colored her feelings for her country. With a shudder of revulsion she left an America stunned by violence and grief. It would be almost exactly twenty years before she returned and then only for the briefest of visits.
4
It takes considerable effort to maintain a friendship from a distance of six thousand miles. She wrote, often, at first, and always in longhand as lovely to look at as her person: large, perfectly formed letters like the models we were all given to copy in grammar school but most of us never came close to approximating, and those who did were even less frequently able to maintain. It was a hand so elegantly disciplined one could only marvel at the self-control. Instantly identifiable, her letters adorned the post like flowers on a rubbish heap; and they were as much a delight to read as to look at. There was something sweetly old-fashioned and genteel about her letters. Like any proper southern lady’s conversation, they were intended to entertain, to charm, to delight, but never, never to direct the eye to shadows lurking in the corner. They were, in fact, almost too insistent in their effort to keep those corners hidden. Illness, debt, disease, and failure sneaked in, whenever they made an appearance at all, so well-disguised as self-mockery that laughter was intended to dispel any doubts as to the existence of any underlying pain as real as the laughter.
She did not wear her heart upon her sleeve. Where or with whom it might currently be engaged she never so much as hinted at. It was a gap in her epistolary history so wide that the real Zelda almost, but never quite, slipped through it altogether. Somehow I knew, as the letters mounted, and without ever being told, that her silences, long or short, were a sign that she was once again in love, more or less happily, and the lovers’ life together was sufficient unto itself; but as soon as something went wrong, and something invariably did, she would have to reach out, even across oceans and continents, for a supporting hand. Her letters were always a delight, but as my ears became ever more finely attuned, there was, I noticed, sometimes hidden in the genteel cadences a cry of desperation. It was not a scream, not yet, at any rate, just such a faint cry as any of us, pricking our finger, might make.
The enclosures—cast photographs and columns of journalistic praise—seemed intended to convey some message more meaningful than the Christmas card snapshots friends sometimes send to catalogue the march of time. They would come in spurts and sometimes after so long a silence; it was almost as if they were included to re-establish her credentials as a worthy recipient of my renewed interest and sympathy, as though it ever needed renewing. I could never quite determine whether the implied lack of faith was a comment upon the tenuousness of my affection or of her own ability to hold it, some deeply rooted fear of rejection, which had, perhaps, been the spur that drove her onto the stage in the first place. Certainly the actor’s need for public applause, in so far as it is a need, suggests some emotional deprivation, if only a failure of self-esteem, an inadequate sense of one’s worth, a longing to move out of the shadow of disapproval (Daddy’s or teacher’s or sibling’s) and into the sunshine of adulation.
There she was, virtually unrecognizable but frighteningly convincing, as a toothless old crone in The House of Bernarda Alba, as a haggard Blanche clutching her glass of gin, as a drug-crazed Mary Tyrone cradling her wedding gown like the corpse of all her hopes, but never as herself, so that I might have assumed from the only evidence at hand that her expatriation had aged her almost beyond recognition. And the reviews, mostly from provincial papers (though the Manchester Guardian was certainly more than that) were so extravagant in their praise, I could never quite understand why she should need mine as well. Thus there was for years a question mark hanging over our relationship.
Perhaps the truly inadequate sense of self-esteem was not hers at all, but mine, and it was I who could never imagine how anyone leading what seemed to me, in my snug little back-water, so glamorous and exciting a life could possibly need or even want my attention, let alone my affection. My feelings for her seemed more than comprehensible, but her affection for me I could not for years quite fathom or even fully credit. Then on my first visit to London after her move, I thought I found the secret: she had been writing to someone who did not exist.
That first visit was hardly the success our letters had promised. She was still living on Gower Street, directly across from RADA, on the top floor of a handsome Georgian building, the first two floors of which were taken up with the surgery and home of the doctor-owner. She put Ed and me in the vacationing doctor’s third-floor guest bedroom on beds she herself had made up with gold-colored nylon satin sheets so slick that I could not turn over at night without fear of sliding off and so stifling one might just as well have tried sleeping in a sauna. I was touched by the effort but longed for the cool, plebian comfort of cotton.
The fashions of the period, designed to show off the long, elegant legs of slender Dianas, did not become Zelda, nor had she yet developed that sense of personal style that later allowed her to transcend all popular fashions, particularly in their most extreme forms, and create a personage uniquely her own. With her electric-blue miniskirt, her stiletto heels, and her high-piled hair, rather fuller and blonder than I recalled, she looked like a little doll, Hoffman’s Olympia, rather than a real woman, and one by this time, I knew despite all evidence to the contrary, to be well into her thirties. The heels and the hair seemed the most transparent attempt to transform the toy poodle nature had made her into the borzoi she’d always longed to be. Only once during that visit, with her hair down and wearing an evening dress that covered her knees, did she seem convincingly a woman and as beautiful as I had remembered. It was also the only evening I ever spent with her that I felt less than comfortable in her presence. I was, in fact, miserable.
In San Francisco she had always demonstrated a touching desire to please and to enchant, and perhaps she was still attempting to do the same thing and it was simply I who misread her efforts to enchant as an attempt to impress, even to overwhelm. She was still beautiful, far more beautiful than she had ever before been; still apparently talented, or she could not have attracted the obviously successful and handsome young agent who accompanied her; and still a mistress of style. She seemed, in fact, virtually all style that evening so that I could never find the woman beneath and certainly not my friend.
But more even than her beauty or her talent or her style, what had always most enchanted me about her was the shy vulnerability that no performance could ever entirely disguise. She was, as anyone who looked close enough and long enough into those turquoise eyes could tell, someone who bruised easily. There had always been a touch of Blanche about her, but a Blanche just brave and stubborn enough not to let the world crush her. Though any number of Stanleys might knock her about, she would, no matter how bruised, never stay down for the final count. That evening she seemed as brilliant, beautiful and hard as a diamond, and any Stanley who dared to lift his hand against her would have cut his fist on one of her sharp edges.
She and her handsome young agent took us to the very new, very posh, and very expensive Inigo Jones for dinner, where the two of them carried on like characters out of a latter-day Evelyn Waugh novel, bright young things so diabolically clubby and sophisticated, I could not even pretend to keep up, and as the evening wore on and the arcane allusions fell faster and faster, I grew ever more sullen, ending, I fear, in virtual silence. If I couldn’t answer their repartee with something brilliantly amusing, I was determined not to answer at all.
Only years later did I learn what a sad comedy the evening had been. For they had been as intimidated by me as I had been by them. My silence they interpreted not as the hurt pout it was, but as a glower of contempt for their inability to respond to my all too scholarly allusions, beginning with some off-handed remark about the namesake of the restaurant itself. My classical education proved as great an obstacle to conviviality as their glamour.
It was later that same evening, while having a final coffee in her tiny attic kitchen, that I noticed on a cork bulletin board my own photograph in a rather prominent position among a collage of personal mementos. The picture had been taken some years before by a photographer friend of hers who had done a roll of portrait studies to accompany the story that had inspired the two-dozen coral-colored roses. It was dashingly Byronic, a chiaroscuro portrait with a brilliantly lit half-profile and one mysteriously dark cheek with a flashing eye, my sun-bedazzled hair windblown, my shirt open at the neck. It was the portrait of a romantic voyager standing on the prow of a ship at the moment of landfall.
Since it bore no relationship to any reality I recognized, I hadn’t even considered it as a possible choice; but I remembered now it striking some fancy of hers and my own silly pleasure when she asked if she could keep it. For one who doesn’t bed them, I have always been ridiculously susceptible to the flattery of women.
The picture’s presence there among her souvenirs I found at first too puzzling for flattery, even a bit troubling. If that was the man she had been writing to, it was somebody I didn’t know; worse, it was somebody who didn’t exist. There were other possible interpretations I didn’t, at the time, even want to explore. Perhaps it was there simply as a tease, to add a touch of mystery to her life:
“Who’s the handsome stranger?”
“Oh, him. A writer friend. In America.”
But whatever its reason for being there, the picture and its unexpected appearance in her kitchen seemed to compound the misunderstandings of that awful evening, like some mocking counterpoint to the joyless laughter, the forced hilarity, the fawning service, and my own intimidated and intimidating silences. So little relation did it bear to me or to our friendship, it seemed no longer just a chance trick of light and shadow frozen forever by the camera’s lens, but a flagrant lie. And I could not bear to look at it.
5
And there, a good decade later, the picture still was, attached to the same cork bulletin board on the wall of another kitchen, in Roland Gardens, SW7, this time, and bearing even less resemblance to any person living or dead. Someone now virtually young enough to be my own son.
“So you still have it,” I said, more puzzled than ever, but for some reason deeply touched. “After all these years.”
Puzzled as well, she followed my eyes. “Oh, the picture. Of course I still have it. It goes wherever I go.”
“But why?”
“But Darling, what an odd question. Why not? Don’t you have a picture of me somewhere?”
“In The Lady’s Not For Burning. On my bedroom wall, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, there you are.” She blessed me with her most radiant smile and then turned to study the picture. “It’s always acted as a kind of talisman for me. It gives me hope. You look, my darling, as if you’re just about to sweep the world into your arms. Anyway, something momentous is about to happen. The ship’s going to land and any moment now the treasure will be yours.”
She seemed a little girl at a pantomime.
“But it didn’t land,” I reminded her. “Twenty years later I’m still waiting.”
“Oh, Darling, what does that matter?” Deflated, she lost patience with me. “At that moment you thought the world would be yours. That’s what matters—that beautiful moment of promise. It’s all most of us ever have. I’ll take it down if it disturbs you. “
She turned to me with a quizzical look for signs of some hidden motive too personal to probe.
“No, leave it there,” I said, more disturbed suddenly at the prospect of its removal than at the mockery of its implications. “For continuity’s sake.”
But it was, I knew, not my unrealized promise that so hurt.
“And speaking of promise,” I continued, “I’ve never been quite able to understand why you gave up acting.”
“Oh, Darling, that’s such a long, long story, you don’t want to hear it.”
“But I do,” I persisted. Since her promise had come so much closer to fulfillment than mine, the printed praise for her acting inordinately flattering, her abandonment of the stage had always baffled me.
“For that, my darling, I’m going to need another drink.”
And she poured herself another vodka and tonic, leaving me to doctor my own scotch. “The British theater has always been a closed shop,” she began, seating herself again at the table of her tiny kitchen. “I will admit it took me a while to discover Americans quite simply, aren’t welcome. It’s as simple as that. Oh, a few of them do manage to break into the holy of holies, but they’re usually married to powerful directors.” Her resignation was tinged with bitterness. “I could, I suppose, have continued playing Blanche for the rest of my life. In the provinces, of course. But not without endangering my own emotional stability. And no British director was ever going to cast me in Shakespeare. It’s the real Church of England, you know. That you have to be born to.”
“But you played Lady Macbeth,” I protested. “I remember, because you sent me the clippings. They were quite funny, actually. “
Her laugh was close to a hoot. “That was Birmingham, my darling. Not London. The director was some mad Slav imported for the occasion who couldn’t tell Alabama from Yorkshire if his life depended upon it. English was all one to him. But what a production he did put on for the locals! It was so outrageous no one had a chance to notice me accent wasn’t county. I carried a whip and wore six-inch platform shoes. Not to mention the black-leather mini skirt spangled all over with chrome studs. I looked like some leather queen who’d left her motorcycle parked at the stage door. A dominatrix in stilettos.” She paused for a brief nostalgic chuckle before continuing. “Poor Nigel—my Macbeth—thought for sure I was going to gobble him up for supper. And I very nearly did. But to get back to your original question. I tried, at first, pretending I was Canadian, until I discovered the British have about as much regard for Canadians as we Americans do for Puerto Ricans. So it was always back to Blanche, with an occasional Mary Tyrone thrown in on the side. At thirty-five I was playing a broken down drug addict of sixty. And doing a damn fine job of it, too, I’ll have you know. But that’s neither here nor there.” She quickly reined in any impulse to charge headlong into the past. “And it wasn’t age, either,” she added with a defiant lift of her chin, a gesture she used sparingly because of the distressing little pouch of flesh that joined chin to neck. “Or not just age.”
A little more than four years my junior, she too was, by this time, pressing hard upon fifty, had, in fact, just turned forty-nine, a secret I would never have dreamed of divulging to anyone. But whatever its cause, her pain was too naked and familiar for me to let her go on. So I quickly changed the subject.
“What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“I have to go out to Kilburn. To the Tricycle Theater to check out a prospective client. You’re welcome to come along, if you like.”
“Are you sure I won’t be in the way? I don’t want—“