Look at the Harlequins! (8 page)

I realized now that it was Nadezhda Gordonovna whom Iris had been talking to in that concert hall. I cannot say exactly when the lessons began or how long that fad lasted; a month or two months at the most. They took place either in Mrs. Starov’s lodgings or in one of the Russian
tearooms both ladies frequented. I kept a little list of telephone numbers so that Iris might be warned that I could always make sure of her whereabouts if, say, I felt on the brink of losing my mind or wanted her to buy on the way home a tin of my favorite Brown Prune tobacco. She did
not
know, on the other hand, that I would never have dared ring her up, lest her not being where she said she would be cause me even a few minutes of an agony that I could not face.

Sometime around Christmas, 1929, she casually told me that those lessons had been discontinued quite a while ago: Mrs. Starov had left for England, and it was rumored that she would not return to her husband. The lieutenant, it seemed, was quite a dasher.

At a certain mysterious point toward the end of our last winter in Paris something in our relationship changed for the better. A wave of new warmth, new intimacy, new tenderness, swelled and swept away all the delusions of distance—tiffs, silences, suspicions, retreats into castles of
amour-propre
and the like—which had obstructed our love and of which I alone was guilty. A more amiable, merrier mate I could not have imagined. Endearments, love names (based in my case on Russian forms) reentered our customary exchanges. I broke the monastic rules of work on my novella in verse
Polnolunie
(Plenilune) by riding with her in the Bois or dutifully escorting her to fashion-show teases and exhibitions of
avant-garde
frauds. I surmounted my contempt for the “serious” cinema (depicting heartrending problems with a political twist), which she preferred to American buffoonery and the trick photography of Germanic horror films. I even gave a talk on my Cambridge days at a rather pathetic English Ladies Club, to which she belonged. And to top the treat, I told her the plot of my next novel (
Camera Lucida
).

One afternoon, in March or early April, 1930, she peeped into my room and, being admitted, handed me the duplicate of a typewritten sheet, numbered 444. It was, she
said, a tentative episode in her interminable tale, which would soon display more deletions than insertions. She was stuck, she said. Diana Vane, an incidental but on the whole nice girl, sojourning in Paris, happened to meet, at a riding school, a strange Frenchman, of Corsican, or perhaps Algerian, origin, passionate, brutal, unbalanced. He mistook Diana—and kept on mistaking her despite her amused remonstrations—for his former sweetheart, also an English girl, whom he had last seen ages ago. We had here, said the author, a sort of hallucination, an obsessive fancy, which Diana, a delightful flirt with a keen sense of humor, allowed Jules to entertain during some twenty riding lessons; but then his attentions grew more realistic, and she stopped seeing him. There had been nothing between them, and yet he simply could not be dissuaded from confusing her with the girl he once had possessed or thought he had, for that girl, too, might well have been only the afterimage of a still earlier romance or remembered delirium. It was a very bizarre situation.

Now this page was supposed to be a last ominous letter written by that Frenchman in a foreigner’s English to Diana. I was to read it as if it were a real letter and suggest, as an experienced writer, what might be the next development or disaster.

“There’s one thing,” I said, carefully folding the sheet and pocketing it for later study, “one thing the little girl should know. This is not a romantic Corsican writing a
crime passionnel
letter; it is a Russian blackmailer knowing just enough English to translate into it the stalest Russian locutions. What puzzles me is how did you, with your three or four words of Russian—
kak pozhivaete
and
do svidaniya
—how did you, the author, manage to think up those subtle turns, and imitate the mistakes in English that only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family, but still—”

Iris replied (with that quaint
non sequitur
that I was to give to the heroine of my
Ardis
forty years later) that, yes, indeed, I was right, she must have had too many muddled lessons in Russian and she would certainly correct that extraordinary impression by simply giving the whole letter in French—from which, she had been told, incidentally, Russian
had
borrowed a lot of clichés.

“But that’s beside the point,” she added. “You don’t understand—the point is what should happen next—I mean, logically? What should my poor girl do about that bore, that brute? She is uncomfortable, she is perplexed, she is frightened. Should this situation end in slapstick or tragedy?”

“In the wastepaper basket,” I whispered, interrupting my work to gather her small form onto my lap as I often did, the Lord be thanked, in that fatal spring of 1930.

“Give me back that scrap,” she begged gently, trying to thrust her hand into the pocket of my dressing gown, but I shook my head and embraced her closer.

My latent jealousy should have been fanned up to a furnace roar by the surmise that my wife had been transcribing an authentic letter—received, say, from one of the wretched, unwashed
émigré
poeticules, with smooth glossy hair and eloquent liquid eyes, whom she used to meet in the salons of exile. But after reexamining the thing, I decided that it just might be her own composition with some of the planted faults, borrowed from the French (
supplication, sans tarder
), while others could be subliminal echoes of the Volapük she had been exposed to, during sessions with Russian teachers, through bilingual or trilingual exercises in tawdry textbooks. Thus, instead of losing myself in a jungle of evil conjectures, all I did was preserve that thin sheet with its unevenly margined lines so characteristic of her typing in the faded and cracked briefcase before me, among other mementos, other deaths.

On the morning of April 23, 1930, the shrill peal of the hallway telephone caught me in the act of stepping into my bathwater.

Ivor! He had just arrived in Paris from New York for an important conference, would be busy all afternoon, was leaving tomorrow, would like to—

Here intervened naked Iris, who delicately, unhurriedly, with a radiant smile, appropriated the monologizing receiver. A minute later (her brother with all his defects was a mercifully concise phoner), she, still beaming, embraced me, and we moved to her bedroom for our last “
fairela-mourir
” as she called it in her tender aberrant French.

Ivor was to fetch us at seven
P.M
. I had already put on my old dinner jacket; Iris stood sideways to the hallway mirror (the best and brightest in the whole flat) veering gently as she tried to catch a clear view of the back of her silky dark bob in the hand glass she held at head level.

“If you’re ready,” she said, “I’d like you to buy some olives. He’ll be coming here after dinner, and he likes them with his ‘postbrandy.’ ”

So I went downstairs and crossed the street and shivered (it was a raw cheerless night) and pushed open the door of the little delicatessen shop opposite, and a man behind
me stopped it from closing with a strong hand. He wore a trench coat and a beret, his dark face was twitching. I recognized Lieutenant Starov.

“Ah!” he said. “A whole century we did not meet!”

The cloud of his breath gave off an odd chemical smell. I had once tried sniffing cocaine (which only made me throw up), but this was some other drug.

He removed a black glove for one of those circumstantial handshakes my compatriots think proper to use at every entry and exit, and the liberated door hit him between the shoulder blades.

“Pleasant meeting!” he went on in his curious English (not parading it as might have seemed but using it by unconscious association). “I see you are in a
smoking
. Banquet?”

I bought my olives, replying the while, in Russian, that, yes, my wife and I were dining out. Then I skipped a farewell handshake, by taking advantage of the shopgirl’s turning to him for the next transaction.

“What a shame,” exclaimed Iris—“I wanted the black ones, not the green!”

I told her I refused to go back for them because I did not want to run into Starov again.

“Oh, that’s a detestable person,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll try now to come and see us, hoping for some
vaw-dutch-ka
. I’m sorry you spoke to him.”

She flung the window open and leant out just as Ivor was emerging from his taxi. She blew him an exuberant kiss and shouted, with illustrative gestures, that we were coming down.

“How nice it would be,” she said as we hurried downstairs, “if you’d be wearing an opera cloak. You could wrap it around both of us as the Siamese twins do in your story. Now, quick!”

She dashed into Ivor’s arms, and was the next moment in the safety of the cab.

“Paon d’Or,” Ivor told the driver. “Good to see you, old boy,” he said to me, with a distinct American intonation (which I shyly imitated at dinner until he growled: “Very funny”).

The Paon d’Or no longer exists. Although not quite tops, it was a nice clean place, much patronized by American tourists, who called it “Pander” or “Pandora” and always ordered its “putty saw-lay,” and that, I guess, is what we had. I remember more clearly a glazed case hanging on the gold-figured wall next to our table: it displayed four Morpho butterflies, two huge ones similar in harsh sheen but differently shaped, and two smaller ones beneath them, the left of a sweeter blue with white stripes and the right gleaming like silvery satin. According to the headwaiter, they had been caught by a convict in South America.

“And how’s my friend Mata Hari?” inquired Ivor turning to us again, his spread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging toward the “bugs” under discussion.

We told him the poor ara sickened and had to be destroyed. And what about his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was—

“In fact,” Iris continued, touching my wrist, “we’ve decided to set off tomorrow for Cannice. Pity you can’t join us, Ives, but perhaps you might come later.”

I did not want to object, though I had never heard of that decision.

Ivor said that if ever we wanted to sell Villa Iris he knew someone who would snap it up any time. Iris, he said, knew him too: David Geller, the actor. “He was (turning to me) her first beau before you blundered in. She must still have somewhere that photo of him and me in
Troilus and Cressida
ten years ago. He’s Helen of Troy in it, I’m Cressida.”

“Lies, lies,” murmured Iris.

Ivor described his own house in Los Angeles. He proposed
discussing with me after dinner a script he wished me to prepare based on Gogol’s
Inspector
(we were back at the start, so to speak). Iris asked for another helping of whatever it was we were eating.

“You will die,” said Ivor. “It’s monstrously rich. Remember what Miss Grunt (a former governess to whom he would assign all kinds of gruesome apothegms) used to say: ‘The white worms lie in wait for the glutton.’ ”

“That’s why I want to be burned when I die,” remarked Iris.

He ordered a second or third bottle of the indifferent white wine I had had the polite weakness to praise. We drank to his last film—I forget its title—which was to be shown tomorrow in London, and later in Paris, he hoped.

Ivor did not look either very well or very happy; he had developed a sizable bald spot, freckled. I had never noticed before that his eyelids were so heavy and his lashes so coarse and pale. Our neighbors, three harmless Americans, hearty, flushed, vociferous, were, perhaps, not particularly pleasant, but neither Iris nor I thought Ivor’s threat “to make those Bronxonians pipe down” justified, seeing that he, too, was talking in fairly resonant tones. I rather looked forward to the end of the dinner—and to coffee at home—but Iris on the contrary seemed inclined to enjoy every morsel and drop. She wore a very open, jet-black frock and the long onyx earrings I had once given her. Her cheeks and arms, without their summer tan, had the mat whiteness that I was to distribute—perhaps too generously—among the girls of my future books. Ivor’s roving eyes, while he talked, tended to appraise her bare shoulders, but by the simple trick of breaking in with some question, I managed to keep confusing the trajectory of his gaze.

At last the ordeal came to a close. Iris said she would be back in a minute; her brother suggested we “repair for a leak.” I declined—not because I did not need it—I did—
but because I knew by experience that a talkative neighbor and the sight of his immediate stream would inevitably afflict me with urinary impotence. As I sat smoking in the lounge of the restaurant I pondered the wisdom of suddenly transferring the established habit of work on
Camera Lucida
to other surroundings, another desk, another lighting, another pressure of outside calls and smells—and I saw my pages and notes flash past like the bright windows of an express train that did not stop at my station. I had decided to talk Iris out of her plan when brother and sister appeared from opposite sides of the stage, beaming at one another. She had less than fifteen minutes of life left.