She tried to steer him back to her main point, which was that the chance he had taken had come off abundantly, and that from now he would find himself in demand on something like his own terms, if these were at all reasonable. She told him then about her lunch with the other producer. “No need to rush things. Let Michaelson do most of the talking. Just sit back and realize that Morning Journey puts you in a market that’ll go on rising for some time yet.”
“You’re a smart gal,” he commented absently.
“Am I? It’s the first time I’ve ever really wanted to be.”
“I know how you feel,” he responded moodily. “That’s why I’m getting out of the place.” He said that without any emphasis, as if it were not an important remark.
“WHAT?”
“You heard me, as they say in every damned script I’ve ever read out here.”
“Paul… what do you mean? What’s happened?”
And of course nothing had happened except the worst that could have, for Paul’s equanimity; merely that as a result of Morning Journey’s success he had been showered with scripts by producers and agents who hoped he might be interested in some property of theirs; a few of these scripts were averagely good, but many were old stuff dusted off and sent him on the ‘how can you lose?’ principle. Paul should have ignored them, or at least have glanced at only a few pages to convince himself of their quality, but it seemed that out of sheer obtuseness he had read them carefully—as carefully as he had journeyed to small theatres in out-of-the-way suburbs if ever one of Randolph’s earlier pictures had been showing there. The fact that he had always returned from these expeditions fuming was no indication that he had not derived a macabre pleasure from them, once he had decided that an indictment against Randolph must be built up with every available piece of material. And now, in a similar but larger sense, an indictment against the whole industrialized picture industry was brewing in his mind, and the pile of scripts he had been sent was just the yeast to make it rise. So it had risen—mountainously. He was in a mood, Carey realized, when he was probably intending to do something he wanted to do and was finding many excellent reasons besides the real one. He kept saying: “There’s no mutiny here, Carey,” and when she asked what he meant he said one of those things she knew he had either said before or had coined so happily that he would certainly say it again; he said that to breed art and keep it alive there should be a continual mutiny of ideas. “But there isn’t any here. This place is swarming with craftsmen who might have been artists if only they’d stayed away. And everybody’s scared—scared of each other, of the future, of gossip columns, of ulcers, of the public, of Washington, of censorship —there’s something gets into the blood from being scared of so many things all the time—you can smell it, and I’ve smelt it lately… These folks are afraid for their lives, they’ve built themselves a concentration camp that they’re all fighting to stay inside—a damned democratic de luxe concentration camp where you hold elections by postcard poll of morons and smart alecks, where you bypass the adult intelligence and shoot for the blood pressure of the twelve-year-old!”
“That reminds me of what Mitchell said,” she interposed mischievously.
“Mitchell? The writer? Did he? I don’t recall.” (But she knew he did; he would never forget Mitchell, who had answered him back, who had left him hurt, speechless, angry, with ghost-phrases in his mind for ever that he could only exorcise partially by purloining them and adapting them for his own use.)
But he was continuing now, in full flood: “Anyhow, that’s the way it is with the people here—they’re afraid for their lives and they’ll do anything for those lives except run for them—they could if they wanted—the gate’s wide open that way—the fence is to keep the crowd OUT, not IN. Well, I’M getting out. I know they’d never really let me do what I want here. They’d hate me, I’d never be one of them, they’d just give me squatter’s rights inside the barbed wire… Oh dear, now I’ve upset you, I suppose—I always do, don’t I?”
He hadn’t, by what he had said; it was the recognition of his mood that troubled her, for so often in the past it had been a storm signal in their personal affairs, and though it could hardly be that again, she was disturbed in a way she found hard to explain.
“So you’re thinking of going away?” she said wanly.
“Oh, not immediately. I mean, not tomorrow or the next day. Maybe in a few weeks. Greg’s asking for time off too. Hasn’t had a real vacation in years, he says. We’re going to do something—somewhere—maybe in Europe. Don’t know what—yet. And by the way, that’s a secret. Not a word or it’ll be in all the columns.”
“Paul, you know I never gossip… But about YOU, after all you’ve just said—I don’t know quite WHAT to answer…”
“Then that’s good news, because I thought you’d be mad at me.”
“MAD at you?… Oh, Paul, I’m too—too BAFFLED—to be that. I wish I knew what it is…”
“What WHAT is?”
“The thing that drives you. What IS it you go for in life? I know it isn’t money—I used to think it was success, but you’d get that here… Is it fame? Or power? Or pleasure of a kind—do you EVER get pleasure? Or is it something inside yourself that forces you?”
He gave her the look she knew so well, because it was the most frightening reply of all, as if he had switched off his mind to a care-and-maintenance basis until the subject was changed. He said blandly: “No particular mystery about it, Carey. I just have my work to do and—”
“I know, I know. And that’s what you call it—your WORK. But it’s more than that. Work’s only a word… Oh, words, they’re not much use, are they? Greg can say ‘vacation’ and it just means golf, but to you— “
“You don’t really like Greg, do you?” he interrupted, switching on his mind again.
He knew she did, and she knew the question he was asking was a different one. She answered: “It isn’t that, Paul… Oh, never mind Greg—he can look after himself—he’s established—rich—”
“Sure—nearly as rich as your old man and a damn sight freer with his money.”
There was generally in any of his arguments a single explosion, rarely more than one, of sheer vulgarity; it so often marked a climax that she almost welcomed it. She said quietly: “You may as well tell me just what’s in your mind, now you’ve begun. You think Greg will finance you in some picture of your own, is that it?”
“Why not? He’s a millionaire—must be. He can’t act, as you say, and Majestic probably has him all sewn up anyhow, but there’s no law to stop a man from investing in something he’s interested in. Maybe I’ll make another picture as good as Erste Freundschaft or the one they didn’t let me finish. He’s a likeable fellow, Greg is—I get along with him fine.”
Carey half smiled. She did not know whether her main impulse was to warn Paul of Greg or vice versa—to warn Paul that Greg, though rich, was doubtless protected by lawyers and agents and business advisers who would certainly not let him put any substantial stake in a Saffron picture; to warn Greg also, in case by some miracle of Paul’s persuasion he should need it, that Paul was a splendid director who had probably, over a period of years, and balancing fabulous success against equally fabulous failure, won more personal prestige and lost more producers’ money than anyone else in the business… And then, in sheer weariness, the thought came: Why should she warn either of them? Greg could look after himself, and so in his own way could Paul… perhaps it had been the mistake of her life ever to think of Paul as helpless—it was like the old problem in Candida—who was really the strong man, the poet or the other fellow?
She said, speaking more in fatigue than in complaint: “So after all this, Paul… all the trouble… the fighting… you’re giving it up… the thing we came out here for…”
“WE? Doesn’t affect YOU, Carey. Right now you’re hot as a firecracker, as they say in these fantastic faubourgs. Didn’t you catch Randolph’s hint when he said he’d been talking to
Michaelson? I’ll bet he wants you for another picture.”
Another picture. The thought made a grey shape in her mind. She wondered if she could ever act again; but she had so often wondered this (sometimes five minutes before the curtain rose on a performance in which she did especially well) that she had come to disregard the misgiving as a mere symptom of mood; but now it would not be disregarded. And whether it was still foolish, or true for the first time, the fact remained that she was only good enough to satisfy herself when she had also to satisfy Paul. She could ‘get by’, of course, without him; she had done, many times in plays, and doubtless it would be even easier in pictures; doubtless too there were other directors just as great by any outsider’s reckoning. But the grey shape was still in her mind.
Paul was saying something about the Critics’ Dinner that night and the possibility that the picture might win a similar award from the New York critics. “If it does it’ll mean a trip there for us—Greg, you and me.”
“Oh dear, I don’t know that I want to go.”
“Studio expense. See a few shows.” He had no particular care for money, but he was like a child if he could make someone else pay for a jaunt.
She shook her head. “I’m too tired, Paul.”
“Tired?”
“Yes… I don’t know how I’ll even get through tonight.”
He stared at her intently for a moment. “You look tired too.” He announced that with an air of discovery. “Come up and have a drink. I don’t believe you’ve ever been in my apartment.”
She never had—which might have seemed strange to others, but had not really surprised her. It was a penthouse at the beach, decorated in rather delicate pastel shades—the same standardized charm that you could buy anywhere for enough money, only she guessed Paul had paid far too much. He pulled back the drapes to expose the view of boulevard, harbour, and ocean; then mixed her a whisky and soda. “You know, Carey, it won’t be so bad here for you. You’ll be a big success without much trouble, and I’ll tell you why—it isn’t acting they want, it’s a funny kind of personality. You have that—by God you have—you make the camera sing like an instrument.”
“I must tell Norris that, because he almost prophesied it.”
“Norris? Oh yes. What’s he doing now? You hear from him?”
“He’s travelling in South America—with Austen.”
“Pleasure trip?”
“Austen will try to make it that. He needs it.”
“Austen?”
“No, Norris. He had a—a sort of breakdown after the strain of the war and the accident. He was IN the war, not just in uniform. He drove an ambulance for four years.”
“Couldn’t Austen have kept him out of it?”
“He could, and would have, but Norris wouldn’t let him.”
“What is the boy then—a fool or a hero?”
“Probably neither.”
“You miss them, I guess, now the picture’s finished?”
“Yes… especially Norris.”
“Why especially him?”
A quite fantastic impulse seized her, so that she said, hearing the words with a certain excitement: “Suppose I said I loved him?”
“WHAT?”
She smiled. Let him misunderstand her; it would perhaps be revealing, like the play within the play in Hamlet. For she could never discuss with him the real predicament without the mask, the protection of an acting part. “You heard me,” she said, “as they say in all the damned scripts you ever read out here.”
He looked uneasy. “I—I don’t get it, Carey. Are you joking? A boy half your age?”
“A little more than half.”
He snorted. “Good God, I don’t believe it. He’s practically your son.”
“Ah, now, if only he were…”
The speaking of the lines eased her, as so often at the opening of a play.
“Perfectly absurd,” he mouthed gruffly.
And it was, but the show must go on. “Oh, come now, Paul, use your imagination. You’ve handled situations like this in pictures, haven’t you? Too censorable to be shown over here, but all right for the Continent… People are people everywhere. The Saffron touch. You see life as it is, don’t you, not gift-wrapped?”
He sat heavily on the couch, his head bowed as in disgust or silent prayer. After a pause he said: “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“What do you advise?”
“Does he think he’s in love with you?”
At this she fluffed; she could not involve Norris in such a whim. “No,” she answered, after hesitation.
“Well, that makes it simple.”
“Simple?”
“Because there’s nothing you CAN do.”
“And that makes it simple?” (Back now in full stride.)
“I’m in a blind alley—I can’t move forward or backward—I’m just plain stuck, and that’s what makes it simple—as simple as being note-perfect in the Hammerklavier.”
He got up abruptly and glowered down at her. “Carey, what’s the matter with you? Is this a game—a gag of some kind? I can’t remember you in this mood ever before.”
“I never have been. Perhaps this is a first time—Erste Freundschaft.”
“You mean…” He weighed an interpretation in his mind and was clearly disconcerted. “You mean—you never were—in love—with ME?”
“Does the sun have to be like the moon?”
“What the devil does that signify?”
“You were the sun, of course, but the moon, as everyone knows, is for love.”
Like all other bad lines he had ever encountered, this maddened him. “For Christ’s sake… a cue for a song in a fifth-rate musical! What IS the matter with you? Talk sense. You’re not on the stage now…”
“But Paul, don’t you remember that at moments of intense emotion an actor has to act?—it’s the only way he can come to terms with things… it’s the consolation he has as an artist… you told me all that once…”
Even in his angry bafflement he picked up two words out of her speech and made, so to say, a ring round them. “Intense emotion?”
“Yes, Paul. Intense emotion—but not yet remembered in tranquillity. Whose definition was that? Perhaps I’m a fond foolish woman, and to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind… Ophelia might have said that too.”
“Carey, STOP it. I don’t know what you’re driving at. What about Austen in all this? Of course I’m not surprised if you haven’t been hitting it off too well with HIM—he didn’t seem to me your kind of man at all— “
“On the contrary, I hit it off with him very well indeed. I find it rather easy to hit it off with men. I’m a sensual woman, I sometimes think.”
“Oh, God, Carey, why are you talking like this?”
“Does it shock you? I had an idea you might be—at least— amused.”
“It—it makes me—it makes me feel—I don’t understand you—any more.”
He said that so pathetically that she got up and pulled him to the couch beside her. “And you don’t, darling, in several little ways. But why bother?” The absurd little play was over. Perhaps, if he had known it was a play, he could have put on his mantle of infallibility and understood, but she had caught him with an unfair test—like expecting Paavo Nurmi to sprint for a bus. She did not blame him. She went on with half-chiding affection: “Paul, Paul, don’t look so black, I’ve been acting—as you did when you were rehearsing me in Desdemona and you pretended to suspect me with Harry Foy… Can’t I have my own little act too?”
“But why? There was a reason for that, but THIS… I still don’t get it…”
“I know. There’s a hair’s-breadth of no-man’s-land between us. Only a hair’s-breadth. Woman’s-land, let’s call it. Oh boy, what dialogue!”
He muttered something, but she could see he was relieved, and the look of pathetic puzzlement changed to one of mere glumness. “When are they due back from the South American trip?” he aske
d after mopping his forehead.
“I don’t know.”
“I suppose you’ll want to be in New York to meet them?”
“I don’t know.”
“But won’t they expect you to?”
“I don’t know that either… I don’t know anything. I can’t see the future at all.”
He pondered this for a moment, then suddenly became emphatic. “Got an idea. Why DON’T you do another picture?”
“WHAT?”
“It’s the solution, Carey. Randolph would sign you up tomorrow, I’m certain. You’ve made a big reputation almost overnight—you’ve got a ready-made audience for the next thing you do, no matter what it is. And even with someone else directing you’d soon find how work would take your mind off things… Carey, why not? Let me get hold of Randolph right now…”
“No, no, Paul. Please don’t… I won’t talk to him… Paul, put that phone down…”
“You’d prefer Michaelson to handle it from his end? Well, maybe that’s smarter—”
“Paul… can’t you understand that just now I’d rather die than face another day in a studio?… I’m TIRED. Don’t you realize that? Things have piled up on me… I’m TIRED.”
For the first time he seemed to take her seriously. He said simply: “I wish I could help you.”
“You have—a little—just by saying that. But you can’t —really. There’s not a thing anybody can do. It’s in myself. But I can manage. I shall, I know. You don’t need to worry about me.”
He looked increasingly concerned. “Maybe you should take some time off. Carmel’s a good place—Greg likes it there. Six months, maybe… How’s your heart, by the way?”
“‘Tis broke,” she answered, so promptly that she startled herself. Then when he stared without smiling she went on: “Don’t you remember that— the time we first met—me driving down that hill in Kingstown with my leg under me and you asking what was the matter with it?”
He smiled then, but she couldn’t tell whether he did remember or not. Then she lost all control. She kept crying “‘Tis broke—‘Tis broke— ” and Paul was helpless at her side, genuinely distressed but knowing nothing of any way to console her. Presently the tears spent themselves and she shook herself free of grief. “I’m sorry, Paul. That was very silly. I’m really ashamed of myself.”