Till We Meet Again (46 page)

Eve concentrated on her driving as she zipped along the coast road back from Oxnard. She still felt a little shaky from the emotion of being reunited with her daughter, and she resolutely emptied her mind of thoughts of Freddy, so that she could cruise along and regain her normal mien before she had to go back and confront Paul, and not tell him where she had been all day.

She sang snatches of songs she had almost forgotten, and thought, in a scattered way, of the men of the music hall who had made them famous. For long minutes Eve disappeared and Maddy returned to life. She remembered Chevalier and one of his first hits, “I Can’t Live Without Love.”
“Je n’peux pas vivre sans amour,”
Maddy sang,
“J’en rève la nuit et le jour.”
Memories, unbidden, almost twenty-five years old, touched and lingered. Suddenly, Eve pulled the car over to the side of the road with a screeching of brakes. She sat still in the smart little coupé, her heart thudding, her cheeks crimson, her hands shaking.

But, by God, she was stupid!
It was as clear as if they had made an announcement. As plain to see as the lipstick on Freddy’s mouth. Those two were wildly in love.
Lovers
. Oh, but there could be no question. Plain. Plain … in every look they had not given each other, in every time that their hands had not touched, in every word they had not spoken. How could she have missed a passion so evident? So … solid. Unadorned. Incontestable. Had it been the mask of Alice Faye on Freddy’s face that made her blind? Had it been because she still looked at her and saw only her little girl? Oh, but she was far deep into it, her daughter was, so deep, so gone, swept so far, far away to a land where mothers cannot follow. And he, poor man, he would never recover from Freddy. This was it for him.

Finally Eve started her car again, with a sigh as much of resignation as of experience. How it had happened wasn’t important. What would happen was not something she or anyone on earth could control. Freddy was blindingly happy. And she herself … yes, she had to admit it, she felt a touch of envy. Admit everything, while you’re alone, while you have time … envy for the remembered once-in-a-lifetime
madness of a first passion … and even … yes, admit it to yourself, while you’re still numb with the shock of realization, just a little normal female envy for the possession of that man. That enormously attractive man with his quiet, potent charm and his strong, muscular body, that exceptionally … desirable … man. Her daughter had chosen well.

La matinée grasse
, Delphine thought in hazy pleasure as she lay half-dozing in bed, was not a uniquely French invention, yet giving a name and a kind of official status to the idea of a “fat,” juicy morning, a totally lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing morning, made it seem less self-indulgent, more of a tradition. In any case, she deserved a
matinée grasse
, if anybody did, after making one film after another for month after month. She had instructed her personal maid, Annabelle, that she would be spending the morning in her room and was not to be interrupted, not even for an orchid tree, should one arrive.

It was raining in any case, on this tenth of April, 1938, but Delphine had grown accustomed to rain in her almost two years as a Parisienne and was indifferent to it. It never depressed her, for it never inconvenienced her. Her driver took her everywhere in her handsome, dove gray Delahaye; she spent most of her days at the studio where there was no weather; her house was always filled with offerings of flowers; and, unlike so many French homes, it was always warm and snug.

After Delphine’s enormous success in
Mayerling
, she had looked for a place to live, while her new agent negotiated a far better contract with Gaumont than the one she had first signed. Off the Avenue Foch, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, the richest section of the Right Bank, there are several little-known and particularly charming dead-end streets, known as “Villas,” that had been built in the 1850s. The houses, in those un-French streets, are like those in English mews: small, cozy, intensely private, with a garden behind each one of them. Delphine had found one on the Villa Mozart which reminded her of a Victorian doll’s house, built of pink, whitewashed brick, its woodwork painted turquoise. An old wisteria vine grew up the face of the house, shading its windows, and in the back garden there were pink hydrangea bushes and a weeping willow. Sun, whenever there chanced to be any, came in from the front every morning and from the back
every afternoon. There were two rooms and a bathroom on each of the upper floors, a dining room, a salon and a kitchen on the first floor, and a small but well-insulated cellar. The heating system was new and effective. Delphine bought it immediately with the first money she’d ever earned.

Another eighteen-year-old who woke up to find herself a star, albeit one with only a single film to her credit, might well have spent her money on furs or jewelry or a car, or even been too overwhelmed to spend it at all.

Delphine wanted only one thing: a fortress. She had always lived in houses in which somebody older was in a position to hold her accountable for her actions. The house in the Villa Mozart was her guarantee that the growing demands of her body could always be satisfied in privacy.

There was no curious, officious concierge at the foot of the main staircase, as there was, by law, in all Parisian apartment buildings, to note the comings and goings of her visitors. In the Villa Mozart there were only a busy guardian and his wife, Louis and Claudine, who lived at the entrance to the street, several hundred feet away from Delphine’s front door, literally out of sight, since the street curved away from their windows.

Whenever she notified them that she would be expecting a guest, they opened the gate that barred the cul-de-sac to casual traffic, as soon as her name was mentioned, without demanding any further information. She tipped them well and often. Although they weren’t installed on her premises, she was already enough of a Parisienne to be aware of the necessity of their goodwill.

Delphine hired a staff, but required that none of them live in the house. Her driver, Robert, her personal maid, her cook and her
femme de chambre
all came to work early in the morning and left when their jobs were over. She paid them handsomely—far more than if she had provided room and board—but it was well worth it to her. Whenever any of them saw evidence, in the morning, that Delphine had not slept alone, they were far too pleased with their easy jobs to let her suspect that she wasn’t leading her life in the complete privacy she had constructed so carefully.

To each other they had a good deal to report about Monsieur Nico Ambert and their young mistress. Louis, in admiration, announced to his wife that Ambert had spent the night five times last week. Yes, he even had his own key to
the front door. Annabelle, the personal maid, who had the news directly from Claudine as she entered the street, whispered it with a wink to Helene, the cook. Claudine had installed her sister, Violet, as the
femme de chambre
, who did all the housework, so she knew each detail of the condition of Delphine’s bedroom, and how many times clean sheets were required on the bed, and precisely why. He must be a hot-blooded brute, that Nico Ambert, she told them all, with an envious grimace. Not soon satisfied, and as rough as a stevedore, that was easy to see. Well, he was young.

Delphine, in her fortress on the Villa Mozart, was the center of a web of information more precise and more explicit than if she had chosen to live in Hedda Hopper’s backyard, yet she would never be enough of a Parisienne to realize it.

Nico Ambert had lasted six months, until
Mayerling
was completed and Delphine had signed to star opposite Claude Dauphin in a film called
Rendez-vous d’Amour
.

Ambert had taught her more than he had intended, and Delphine, only hours out of his arms, would stroll slowly across a film set, as if she were contemplating her next scene, while she wondered which of the many men working there had begun to stiffen in arousal, as their eyes followed her passage. She would linger, from time to time, to greet a strong young assistant in any of the crafts and let her eyes wander down to his crotch, measuring his size with an imperceptible, practiced glance, as she asked a sensible question about his work. She would suck on her bottom lip in reflection as he answered while she looked steadily at his mouth, and only when she saw his face become flushed with desire would she quickly lower her eyes again to see how big he had grown, how far his trousers were bulging. Then she would bid him good-bye with a friendly smile, seeing in her mind the heavy, engorged member that she could so easily have drawn out from its hiding place, that marvelous hardness of blood-swollen flesh that she was utterly prepared to take, that she herself was now ripe to shove up deep inside her body.

But she never did. She fed gloriously on the lust of the crew, inflamed them without giving them a valid excuse to brand her a tease. Delphine became addicted to sexual need. She adored the blissful, giddy, pleasurable pain of her mounting tension, her maddened imagination; she gladly spent hours of excruciating desire, wet and needy, until the lights went on, until it came time for the cameras to turn, until the
director unleashed her. Only then would she allow herself the orgasms she concealed so well.

She threw Ambert over for the director of
Rendez-vous d’Amour
. He had been reluctant to return the key to her front door, and she never made that particular mistake again. When she started her next film,
Affaire de Coeur
, with Charles Boyer, she moved into the arms of the producer. The director had not tempted her. She paid no attention to actors. They were too self-centered to interest her. The better looking they were, the less attractive they were to her. Their screen kisses never had the sensual reality of the sight of the big hands of a master electrician at work.

The passion that the camera captured in Delphine’s most exquisitely romantic scenes of love was inspired by her certain knowledge that the crew, if they had half a chance, would have fallen on her and taken her, one after another. And, she thought avidly, still relishing her morning in bed, she would have been ready for them. More than ready. But they were forbidden. They would boast. One slip, one false move, and everyone would know. Directors, producers, composers, designers or writers were acceptable partners for a star, but she could not risk gossip about working men, no matter how their raw, rough masculinity made her quiver inside.

She hadn’t so much as hinted to Margie. Her friend had come over to visit at Christmas and Delphine had imagined, before she arrived, that she might confide something of her new life to her old pal. What a bad idea that would have been, she thought wryly. Margie Hall had been so visibly impressed with Delphine’s stardom that she was no longer capable of treating Delphine with the free-and-easy camaraderie of outlaws that Delphine still took for granted.

What was worse, Margie, at twenty, Delphine’s age, had remained a virgin, continuing to live by the good-girl code that they had been faithful to in college. It was Margie’s senior year at UCLA, and she was engaged to a promising doctor from Pasadena, and, it seemed to Delphine, she had been profoundly altered by the solemn prospects of a gigantic June wedding. After one or two trips out to the studio, she’d confessed that she’d rather spend her time in Paris fitting custom-made lingerie for her trousseau, buying gloves and perfume and ordering handmade table linen for her future dining room table.
Her dining room table
, Delphine thought
in disbelief. Yes, Margie Hall was about to settle down and become a Pasadena matron in a few months. One day, not too many years from now, she’d find a strand of gray in her yellow curls, and she wouldn’t even consider doing anything about it. One didn’t, in Pasadena.

How was it possible to grow apart so totally, Delphine wondered. Margie in love was an utter stranger. Love. Would she ever fall in love? She hoped not. It changed people, and she had no desire to change anything about her life. Margie had as little in common with her now as the people who lined up at the box office to see her films. There had been seven of them since
Mayerling
, and each one of them a success. Her only equals in the eyes of the French public were Michèle Morgan and Danielle Darrieux.

The existence of those two actresses was the reason that she hadn’t been tempted by the Hollywood offers she’d received. Both of them were making films in France at a rate equal to her own. They were older than she, ravishing both, and as ambitious as she was. If she took the time away from her triumphant career to make a movie in California, one or the other of them would be sure to pick off a role that should have been Delphine’s. She’d been deeply upset when Morgan got the part she coveted opposite Gabin in
Quai des Brumes
. The Marcel Carné film was about to open and everyone she knew had been talking about it for months, using that infuriating word
masterpiece
.

Delphine picked up a copy of
Le Figaro
that Annabelle had put on her breakfast tray, and opened it to the page on which Carné was interviewed, a page she had already read from top to bottom. She had not yet worked with either Carné or Gabin, and until she did, she wouldn’t be content.

She turned away from the interview with a frown of irritation. To take her mind off it, she scanned the front page. Ninety-nine-point-seven percent of the voters of Austria had cast ballots in favor of Hitler’s “reunification” of their country with Germany—that number seemed insane, she thought idly. Otto von Hapsburg, she noted, hadn’t been allowed to vote because he had been arrested on suspicion of high treason for demanding that the great European powers react against Germany. Well, the Hapsburgs hadn’t been at all nice to little Marie Vetsera, had they? In France, Leon Blum was out, and Daladier was in—who could tell one from another? What difference could it make? Who gave a damn? French
politics were even more confusing than world politics, but she supposed that she should try to be aware of them since people seemed to talk about it all so much. It didn’t do to look utterly ignorant. Tunisia was in some sort of uproar … but wasn’t it always? There was a new way to travel—William Boeing had brought out a huge plane called the 314. It was the only really interesting thing in the paper. Apparently the passengers could walk down an interior staircase and meet in a bar.… Delphine wondered what Freddy was doing now. She’d gone to see
Tail Spin
and she hadn’t been able to see any sign of her sister, try as she might, but she knew, from her mother’s letters, that Freddy was going from work on one picture to another, just as she was. Only Freddy was not a star. Delphine threw the boring newspaper on the floor. A
matinée grasse
must never include newspapers. She’d instruct Annabelle.