Exiles in the Garden (20 page)

T
HEY FINISHED SHOOTING
a week early, leaving Annalise at loose ends. Alec was delayed in Washington, waiting with his father for the long-nosed man who did seem to be taking his own sweet time. The senator mostly slept, unresponsive except for a grunt or nonsense word. Alec was subdued, remarking only that the old man's spirit was somewhere between a snowflake and nothing. When Annalise asked if he would like her to join him, he thanked her and said no; surely they would be together in a week, perhaps less. She did not press him.

Annalise went to Marrakech for three days, staying at the good hotel near the souk. The heat was unbearable. She rented a car and drove to Agadir for the weekend but the beach was uninhabitable owing to the desert wind. She read during the day and at night dined alone in the hotel restaurant. Her last night she was joined by a young couple from Chicago. Annalise knew the city well and they stayed at table long after the room had cleared, talking of Chicago and its colorful politics and adventurous theater. They were lawyers who specialized in environmental issues; they majored in the environment but had a minor in political law, grand jury work and matters of that kind. When they asked her what she did, Annalise replied that she was a fashion consultant. Strange, the young woman said, you really resemble the actress—and she could not remember the actress's name.

Annalise Amiral, Annalise said.

That's the one, the young woman said. You look so much like her, Judy.

It happens all the time, Annalise said.

The next day she flew to Tangier, a city she had first visited in the late 1960s. She had never seen a place like it. The Bowleses and William Burroughs more or less led the expatriate community, remarkably louche and unbuttoned. Everyone drank all day long and the nights were wild and without restraint of any kind. She was on the fringes of a crowd that went from café to café and then split up into groups of three or four to finish the evening in someone's apartment, smoking hash and playing strip poker. When you woke in the morning you had no idea who you were with. Everyone was obliged to reintroduce themselves so there would be a name to go with the body. Tangier seemed to exist outside the normal rules, the rules not so much ignored as forgotten. Certainly there were other cities like Tangier elsewhere in the world but Annalise had never seen one; she carried the memories her whole life.

Almost forty years later Tangier seemed to her to have grown sedate. Of course the Bowleses and Burroughs were gone. Tennessee Williams was gone. There seemed to her fewer Americans and more Germans. She saw a busload of Asians in straw hats and sunglasses. The cafés were lively and the streets crowded and, as always, you avoided the noonday sun. The odor of hash was present but not ubiquitous and now seemed self-conscious; and then Annalise had cause to reflect that she was no longer young, and what seemed so lurid to her then was the norm today. Tangier had not receded. Other cities had caught up, the sex trade as much a part of GDP as dates or olives. She called Alec and left a long message on his answering machine describing Tangier and its white light and Asian tourists, the somnolence of midday, the crystal blue of the Mediterranean. She called the city Babylon in aspic. How is your father? Call me at the hotel. She told him that she thought it was time for her to return to America.

She put in at a small hotel near the port and spent her first day revisiting old haunts. The next morning she bought the American newspaper and settled in at the café around the corner, the one she remembered from her first visit. She ordered a croissant and a café crème, looking around the café to see if there was anyone who looked interesting. When she opened the paper she gave a start. Ingmar Bergman was dead. She put the paper aside and when the waiter came she asked him for a pony of cognac on the side. She looked again at the paper with its grainy photograph, the great director with his left eye screwed into a camera's lens. He was gaunt, probably about forty years old when the shot was made. Annalise sipped her coffee and read the obit all the way through. So many films. So many liaisons, wives and girlfriends, multiple children from the multiple liaisons. She wondered if the two went hand in hand. In Bergman's case they seemed to. She stared again at the photograph and thought that it was as if one of the world's great languages had disappeared from the repertoire, vanished like the dialects of central Europe and the steppes of Asia. No one would ever speak it again. It was mothballed in film.

More coffee, she said to the waiter.

Her one regret in her professional life was that she had never made a film with Ingmar Bergman. Of course such a thing was impossible. Bergman had his own Swedish repertory company, von Sydow, Ullmann, and the others, and rarely used foreign actors, especially American actors. She had seen
The Seventh Seal
as a child and understood very little but seemed to feel it all; the enigma of the film reached to her very soul. She believed enigma was at the heart of both art and existence. She wished to understand the essence of enigma and thought Ingmar Bergman could point the way. Annalise tried a dozen ways to meet him and never succeeded. Once she saw him at a restaurant in Cannes, Annalise quite openly staring as he sat talking to a friend. She looked away a moment, and when she looked back he was gone, and a moment later she imagined him magically transported to that island he lived on, Faro, the place in the Baltic near Denmark, treeless and windswept, forlorn, the one place in the world where, he said, he felt safe. Years went by, her film career prospered, and she knew she would never meet Ingmar Bergman, let alone make a film with him. The one regret became part of her private personality, an invisible wound. It was her secret, which she shared with no one except Alec Malone. Her husband would not have understood. Invisible wounds were not in his inventory of useful patents. He had even less interest in enigma.

When Alec said he understood completely, that most everyone had something of the sort, Annalise smiled and said, Did it ruin your life?

Of course not, Alec said.

Bergman didn't ruin mine, either.

But it's there, isn't it?

Yes, she said. Yes, it is.

Annalise sipped her coffee and read the newspaper, news of Iraq and the unstable stock market; it seemed that many Americans were encouraged to buy houses for more money than they could afford to pay and now the payments were coming due. Surprise all around. Bergman had had a tax problem and exiled himself from Sweden, a move so painful that he suffered a nervous breakdown, and it was the Swedish government that apologized eventually. She dipped in and out of the newspaper all the while keeping an eye on the comings and goings in the café. Business was slack. In a far corner, at a table near a potted plant, someone was being interviewed. He did not look like an actor—more likely an athlete, a footballer or tennis star. He was talking and the reporter was transcribing every word, her pen racing across the pad. She had an avid look that Annalise recognized, having been interviewed often over the years, in the beginning milk-and-honey pieces in
Screen
and the other fan magazines. But as movies began to be taken more seriously the actors began to be taken more seriously too, and the questions became more pointed and intrusive from reporters who took themselves equally seriously. To Annalise the salient question was put delicately because in Hollywood it was seen as fundamentally insulting—and in Washington so insulting it would not be put at all, if the reporter wanted to remain on good terms with his source. But Annalise did not take reporters seriously, so when she answered it was often with a wisecrack or a confounding and unhelpful Darned if I know. The question was a variation on the following: Do you think you would have gone farther if you had been more ambitious? Fought a little harder? Demanded more? Did your temperament hold you back? Onscreen it seemed you were always out of range of the brightest lights. Everyone predicted great things—and here there were references to reviews in the national newspapers and newsmagazines—but the great things never quite materialized. One Oscar nomination. One Golden Globe. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

And that was when Annalise replied with her easy smile, Darned if I know. Had she felt inclined to enlighten her interviewer, so svelte, so British, leaning forward in her chair, her pen beating a little tattoo on the blank page of her notebook, her expression professionally sympathetic (she had aspirations in the business herself, it was obvious, and thought she might hear something of value, some insight that she might put to her own use somewhere down the line), Annalise would have added:

The perfect performance does not exist. For a few moments an actor could hold fire in her hands. But her fingers would open and the fire turn to embers. The audience might not be aware. The moment was fleeting. And there were so many externals, the lighting, the dimensions of the frame and what occupies the frame. The pentimento of the frame. It's an enigma, you see.

I have had an extremely enjoyable life in the movies.

I liked the work. The work liked me.

The camera liked me. I have made a very good living.

Perhaps there could have been more. But it is as likely that there would have been much less.

Had my temperament not, as you said, held me back.

Now scram.

Still—she thought of this as she watched a flutist attempting to coax a cobra from a wicker basket, tourists gathered on the sidewalk—there were things that might have been done differently. Her given name was Judy Jones, but when the studio put her under contract her agent insisted she change it. Her looks were so unusual that he thought something European was apt, so he suggested Annalise Amiral and she agreed at once, not without misgivings. An unwholesome precedent, she thought. If you surrendered your name so easily, what else would you surrender? Yet wasn't it all make-believe? You played a made-up character in a made-up story, the product of a dozen typewriters. What difference if your name was made up also? Later on, when the Renée Zellwegers and Parker Poseys came along, she realized she should have objected. She should have pushed back. Pushing back gave you respect. Pushing back signaled that you were one tough customer, not to be trifled with or condescended to. And she knew her agent's reply: in the history of the motion picture industry there has never been a star called Judy except for Garland, and that's very bad luck. She also knew in her heart that she wasn't an especially tough customer. She was Judy Jones from Winnetka, high school cheerleader, president of the drama club, field hockey captain, backstroke champion—and the stands surrounding the pool were near full at the girls' meets because that Jones girl looked superb in a tank suit. She was an adored only child. Her mother was a buyer of women's fashions at Marshall Field's. Her father was a popular congressman, a moderate Republican, no stranger to compromise; for that and for other reasons he drank more than was good for him and died at fifty-five after ten terms in the House of Representatives. Judah Jones objected to the agent-supplied nom de théâtre—for crissakes, Judy, you don't look any more European than I do—but never failed to come to the opening of her films, no matter the city. He was tall and broad, so tall and broad that when she was a little girl and walked with him she could not see his head when she looked up, only his long arms leading to his shoulders. His voice, a congressional tenor, seemed to come from the heavens. Her mother remarried a year after his death, but by then Annalise was living in Los Angeles. She did not care for the man her mother married, a property developer with houses in Florida and Phoenix. Her mother took up golf and quit her job with Field's. So they grew apart.

When Annalise was with the young Chicago couple in Agadir she mentioned her father, asking if they had met him in their political work. No, they hadn't. Republican, wasn't he? Yes, she said, he was, and mentioned his committees. An apologetic smile: We're Democrats. As if that mattered.

The flutist had managed to charm the cobra to the edge of the basket, its head swaying drunkenly to the music. The half-dozen tourists took a collective step back. Annalise thought the poor creature looked exhausted, as if it had been roused from a siesta. On cue it collapsed again into the basket. The flutist gave a little push with his shoe, nudging the basket an inch or two. He produced a long single note from the flute, evidently the signal to dance, but he was unsuccessful. The cobra continued to lay doggo. The tourists waited a minute more before moving off to the next sidewalk entertainment. One of the women dropped a copper coin into the purse next to the basket and the flutist frowned, most disappointed.

Annalise paid her bill and rose. Her cognac sat where the waiter had put it, untouched. In the corner the reporter was talking into a cell phone. The athlete had disappeared. She thought she had made a mistake remaining in Morocco. She knew no one in Morocco; all the old crowd had moved away. Many were dead. That was a part of her life that was amusing to look back on—hilarious, really, everyone so footloose and ardent, unafraid. Tangier was a parallel universe with its own language and code of conduct. Now they call it living in the moment. But where else were you supposed to live? And when you had had enough you went back to the other. Annalise left the American newspaper on the table after one last glance at hypnotic Ingmar Bergman. He had seduced all those others and surely he would have seduced her, too; and if he didn't, she would have done the honors. But there would have been no children because she was badly wired. Probably that would have been a disappointment to him.

She walked into the street. The snake charmer was gone. A breeze had come up and blew dust in her face. She felt the heat of the desert. Annalise thought the buildings were shabbier than they were those many years ago. The interiors were still closed to the street, and now and again there was movement behind the latticed windows; that was where the women watched after things. The glare of the sun on the whitewashed stone caused her to avert her eyes. Tangier, so exotic and febrile then, was just another rundown North African seaport, not much coming in, even less going out. In the street nothing moved except dust. The cafés were empty. She stepped into the store on the corner to look at jewelry, bracelets and rings, brightly colored pins. The proprietor rose heavily to his feet and offered to open the case, so many exceptional values at reasonable prices, authentic Moroccan craftsmanship. Please, madame, to try on whatever pleases you. I give you tourist discount. So Annalise bought a bracelet, a souvenir of a Thursday morning in Tangier.