Read Online Old Acquaintance by David Stacton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Stacton
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kept him locked up on a diet of breadcrumbs to write them for her. Sarah played Juliet at sixty, Phèdre to please the critics, Hamlet whenever she felt like it, and herself all the time. Whereas I am merely allowed to impersonate myself impersonating myself in a film now and then, and Charlie has never written anything for me at all. They just bring me a Lotte part from time to time, like a pair of old galoshes they found somewhere, and are they mine?
The Divine Sarah was followed by the less Divine Mistinguett, and by Maurice Chevalier. As we know, for the French have told us so, most celebrities and all life’s golden moments are, by their nature, French.
So naturally, when the film turned black, it turned German. The worst thing that can happen in Paris is that we may not have charged the American tourists enough. There were some brief clips of flappers shopping. How quickly women used to walk in the 1920’s, as though what they wanted was just ahead of them, and they had to catch up beforeit got away. Then came the serious bits. Despite all improvement in communications since, the French have never quite given up brooding about the consequences of the Ems telegram, and so there were long clips of the Germans being punished for Sédan, Alsace-Lorraine, and, presumably, like the rest of the world, simply and justifiably for being non-French.
So they had to watch shots of the inflation period (she could remember it. It isn’t pleasant for a professor’s daughter to have to borrow a pair of stockings and sing in a cabaret, to eat); a glimpse of Stresemann, looking like an indignant, well-bred Lenin, but also like her father (he had not approved of cabarets, her father); Bolshevik rioters fresh out of the closed factories; and other symptoms of world disturbances never to be found in France.
“Here we are,” said Charlie.
She didn’t know where. It was only another shot of rioters being beaten back by old-fashioned policemen in funny hats. She didn’t like to watch the 1920’s. It was too much like riding the bucket back down the well. When she was about six, out in the woods, ahead of her parents, in the must-have-been autumn woods, because she could remember the leech cling of the damp brown leaves, she had stepped through the rotten cap of an abandoned well, fallen, and struggled down there up to her waist in she didn’t know what, for what seemed hours. That was what her own youth meant to her.
Then the clip Charlie had been waiting for came on. She didn’t like that either.
She never watched her past. She always wanted it to be now, always now. But there she was, in the film that had made her famous, plump, bleached, awkward, raucous, in an enormous fuzzy wig that looked the way it had felt, undignified and horrible, when all she had wanted was dignity, comfort, safety, and decorum, the things she had now. The things, it doesn’tmatter how we feel, which we must never lose, no matter what we have to pay for them.
She shut her eyes. She did not want to be embarrassed by that flabby ghost. She did not want to see how it envied her. She did not want to remember anything. She just wanted it to be now.
The film came to an end after a while. They went out into what was left of the day.
She should not have come this close to home.
XVI
THE evening was quiet. It usually is. The nocturnal amusements available to us are curiously few. We could go to bed with each other, of course, but after thirty this is seldom exciting, though we do it anyway. We can read, but we seldom have the right book. Cards and gambling are available to the inarticulate. There are night clubs. Conversation is best, but so few people really know how to talk. We can dance.
“Dance away the night,” said Jerome Kern, in one of his more touching and thus less popular songs, “and we’ll all be together at the dawning.”
Would we were. At dawn we fall asleep.
It was a charming song. She would have liked to add it to her repertoire,
The Divine Sarah was followed by the less Divine Mistinguett, and by Maurice Chevalier. As we know, for the French have told us so, most celebrities and all life’s golden moments are, by their nature, French.
So naturally, when the film turned black, it turned German. The worst thing that can happen in Paris is that we may not have charged the American tourists enough. There were some brief clips of flappers shopping. How quickly women used to walk in the 1920’s, as though what they wanted was just ahead of them, and they had to catch up beforeit got away. Then came the serious bits. Despite all improvement in communications since, the French have never quite given up brooding about the consequences of the Ems telegram, and so there were long clips of the Germans being punished for Sédan, Alsace-Lorraine, and, presumably, like the rest of the world, simply and justifiably for being non-French.
So they had to watch shots of the inflation period (she could remember it. It isn’t pleasant for a professor’s daughter to have to borrow a pair of stockings and sing in a cabaret, to eat); a glimpse of Stresemann, looking like an indignant, well-bred Lenin, but also like her father (he had not approved of cabarets, her father); Bolshevik rioters fresh out of the closed factories; and other symptoms of world disturbances never to be found in France.
“Here we are,” said Charlie.
She didn’t know where. It was only another shot of rioters being beaten back by old-fashioned policemen in funny hats. She didn’t like to watch the 1920’s. It was too much like riding the bucket back down the well. When she was about six, out in the woods, ahead of her parents, in the must-have-been autumn woods, because she could remember the leech cling of the damp brown leaves, she had stepped through the rotten cap of an abandoned well, fallen, and struggled down there up to her waist in she didn’t know what, for what seemed hours. That was what her own youth meant to her.
Then the clip Charlie had been waiting for came on. She didn’t like that either.
She never watched her past. She always wanted it to be now, always now. But there she was, in the film that had made her famous, plump, bleached, awkward, raucous, in an enormous fuzzy wig that looked the way it had felt, undignified and horrible, when all she had wanted was dignity, comfort, safety, and decorum, the things she had now. The things, it doesn’tmatter how we feel, which we must never lose, no matter what we have to pay for them.
She shut her eyes. She did not want to be embarrassed by that flabby ghost. She did not want to see how it envied her. She did not want to remember anything. She just wanted it to be now.
The film came to an end after a while. They went out into what was left of the day.
She should not have come this close to home.
XVI
THE evening was quiet. It usually is. The nocturnal amusements available to us are curiously few. We could go to bed with each other, of course, but after thirty this is seldom exciting, though we do it anyway. We can read, but we seldom have the right book. Cards and gambling are available to the inarticulate. There are night clubs. Conversation is best, but so few people really know how to talk. We can dance.
“Dance away the night,” said Jerome Kern, in one of his more touching and thus less popular songs, “and we’ll all be together at the dawning.”
Would we were. At dawn we fall asleep.
It was a charming song. She would have liked to add it to her repertoire,
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