OUT ON a LIMB Page 5

  “So, we’re back to hypocrisy again. Maybe sometimes it’s necessary. Maybe it’s the price you pay.”

  He looked at me strangely. He concentrated on the ice in his drink as though he didn’t want to talk anymore.

  “Will you tell me something? Honestly?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you feel as though you are living alone? I mean deep down where you really live, are you living there alone?”

  The question seemed to be new to him; as though he had never thought about it.

  “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

  “Then she must feel that way too.”

  He turned over on his side.

  “Maybe she needs another relationship just like you did.”

  He stared out the window. “No,” he said, “she’s happy raising the children. She knows what my work requires.” He put his arm over his face.

  I put a blanket over him and lay under it beside him.

  “You know,” he said, “I sound like one of your male chauvinist pigs, don’t I?”

  I didn’t say anything. Then he said, “… and besides, if I told her she wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Oh, Gerry,” I said, and soon we fell asleep together.

  A while later he woke up and said, “I’m very clear about what you are to me.”

  “And what is that?” I asked.

  Gerry didn’t say anything.

  “Gerry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Come on. Don’t freeze up on me. What do you mean, you’re very clear about what I am to you? Tell me, so I’ll know too.”

  He cleared his throat and said, “Well, I’ve told one of my aides that we met. I’ve told him you are in town. I asked him to take over my speech for tonight so I could be with you.”

  “Oh? And what did he say?”

  “Well, he asked if there was anything else he should know, and I said she’s in town and I want to be with her and that’s that.”

  I sat up in the bed. “I see,” I said. “And that’s what you mean by being clear about me?”

  “Look,” he said, “I have to go now. The speech would be over by now. I must go for the questions and answers.”

  The familiar chill went through me.

  He took a shower, washed his hair and dressed.

  “You didn’t need a shower tonight, you know. Not tonight.”

  “No,” he said, placing his glass on the sink in the kitchen. “I didn’t, did I?”

  He put on his coat and walked out of the door. For his sake I was glad it was the right one.

  The next day I went back to California.

  Chapter 3

  “What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it … The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.”

  —CARL G. JUNG

  Letters, Vol. 1

  I got up from the tub, dried my prune-wrinkled skin, put on a pair of fuchsia colored slacks and an orange sweater and went down to see Marie and have dinner.

  I walked into my kitchen. It was modern, fully equipped, and not really mine. Marie, being French and a cuisinière of exquisite ability, ruled her domain with possessive authority and wouldn’t let me fix even a glass of Tab for myself. She was tiny and fragile, with legs the circumference of most people’s wrists. Her fingers were twisted from arthritis and her hands and arms shook when she served. She wore slippers with toes cut out because her feet were deformed as a result of injuries sustained during World War Two running guns for the Free French against the Nazis. Her sister Louise, who had been in America twenty years and spoke not one word of English, was Marie’s shadow, taking orders from her and clucking in desperation that nothing much ever went right.

  Some six years before, about three in the morning, Marie had awakened me, excitedly knocking at my bedroom door and exclaiming that something was wrong with her husband John. I went downstairs to their room and saw he was stretched out on his bed. He was the color of oatmeal. His eyes were closed and he shuddered as though he was gagging for breath. I didn’t know what to do. I was truly horrified and didn’t want to touch him. I lifted his head to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. An awful sound came out of him, a deep guttural rattle. It sounded like an animal I didn’t recognize. It frightened me deeply. At first I didn’t know it was a death rattle and Marie didn’t understand either. She kept insisting that he had just collapsed. I shook him, afraid that the rattle sound would come louder. It did. And finally it stopped. He died abruptly in my arms.

  It was the first time I had ever seen a dead person. I wondered at what exact moment he had died, and I think it was at that moment that I began to seriously consider if there was such a thing as a soul. It seemed so impossible that what I held in my arms was all there could be that was left of a man. Did something that was John—his “soul”—live on? Did death hurt? If the soul survived the body, where did it go? To what purpose?

  I couldn’t sleep the rest of that night or for three nights after that, and I was working hard on shooting Sweet Charity. I seemed to be groping with the actual metaphysical meaning of death. I say metaphysical because it wasn’t anything I could see, or touch, or hear, or smell, or taste. All I knew was that John, as I knew him, was gone. Or was he? I had been fond of him, but aside from the initial shock, I felt no great grief, no desperate gap. Yet I couldn’t seem to accept his death as simply the end of his life. I knew somehow that there was more to it, and I knew I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Every time I walked into the kitchen I thought about it and now was no different.

  Marie and Louise and I talked awhile in broken French and English. I told her I was leaving for a long weekend, and she served me dinner in front of the television set in the living room. I watched the news and with the wine and a kind of exhaustion that I didn’t understand, I went back upstairs and lay down on my bed. I was depressed and didn’t know why.

  What a world; we all seemed to be sleepwalking like cruel, friendly strangers—bumping into each other but never really making contact with what was true … talking past and over and around each other … afraid of our own words as much as we were of those we might hear from others. There was such a communication breakdown that we were starving for trust, groping for handles and lifeboats and touching and niceness. We focused so much on big desperations and disciplined, quiet patience so as not to rock anybody’s boat—much less our own. Always hoping maybe things would get better, always wondering what we could do—on and on until our futility became institutionalized, almost as though it had become safer not to know what our lives really meant.

  I tried to feel sleepy. The glass in my hand dripped sweat from the warmth of my holding it. Little things, I thought. I should focus on the pleasure of little things. The soft green of the palm tree leaves just outside my window, the squashed black olives fallen on the cement driveway from the companion tree I had planted myself, wondering if I could actually be responsible for something growing … warm water and soap bubbles, the jog I would take tomorrow morning that would make me feel good all day because I had worked hard for it—small, but strung together, small stuff made me feel better.

  I remembered sitting on Clifford Odets’ bed just before he died. I had loved and respected his plays very much. He could really write about human hope and triumph over adversity … especially in people with small and unrecognized lives. The cancer had made his head look like that of a shriveled bird. His massive mane of hair had fallen out; his stomach was swollen with the disease and tubes hung from his nose. He sipped milk from a plastic container and asked me to open the windows so cool air would blow across the chilled container.

  “I want to live,” he said, “so that I can write for large bunches of people about how much pleasure there is in things no bigger than a fly’s eye.”

  About two o’clock I felt sleepy. In London it was ten in the morning.

  Images of
my life drifted in and out of my mind … a long stretch of the Sahara Desert I wished I had crossed once just to see if I could do it … dancing with a handkerchief and a Russian peasant in a restaurant in Leningrad while the patrons clapped … a Masai mother in Africa dying of syphilis while giving birth … a squadron of birds flying as one, on a film location in Mexico, while I wondered how they kept together … wide, vast spaces through the countryside of China where I took the first American women’s delegation, dressed in the same unisex Chinese clothing … Gerry’s face when I told him I loved to travel alone … a big but compact trunk with drawers and closets that I wished could be my mobile home so I would never have to live anywhere permanently … dancers, choreographers, flying sweat, tinny pianos, flashbulbs, standing ovations, hot television lights, quiet movie sets, press conferences, difficult questions, political campaigns, bumbling but well-meaning candidates … George McGovern’s crumpled face the night Richard Nixon won by a landslide … Academy Awards and my anxiety that I would win one for Irma La Douce when I thought my performance didn’t deserve it … my disappointment when I didn’t win one for The Apartment because that was the year Elizabeth Taylor had almost died with her tracheotomy … the four other times I was nominated and really didn’t care … long rehearsals, professional arguments, painful muscles and stage fright, dumb studio executives, disciplined hours of writing which revolved around the personal and ever-present feeling of a long search for who I really was.

  What was it that was missing? And was I, like so many other women, continually searching for the shape of my own identity in a relationship with a man? Did I believe the other half of me was to be found in loving someone, regardless of the frustration and futility involved?

  Hong Kong and Gerry flooded my mind. I had met him there on another of his conferences. Another hope that this time it would be different, more fulfilling.

  “It’s wonderful how you love to pick up and go on a moment’s notice,” he had said. “How do you do that? How can you be so flexible? And you see so much. I never have time.”

  He never noticed that I didn’t answer … that I wasn’t sure whether I was running toward something or away from myself. I wondered if Gerry would really have taken the time if he had it. I didn’t think he would see what he looked at … not really. He had traveled through Africa as a young man. But when he spoke of it, I suddenly realized that he never once mentioned what he ate, what he touched, what he saw, what he smelled, how he felt. He spoke mainly about Africa as a sociological trip, not as a human trip. He spoke of how the “masses” were exploited and poor and colonized, but never how they really lived and felt about it.

  He had never been to Hong Kong before, and when we sat in his hotel room I had to interpret the surroundings for him. He didn’t seem to feel the milling paradisiacal mess that was Hong Kong—the rickshaw coolies mingled with taxis; the teeming millions (5,500,000) swollen and spilling into the bay; the shoppers’ paradise of Chinese silks, Japanese brocades, Indian cottons, and Swiss laces; goods and watches, and food and jewelry and dope and perfume and designs and jade and ivory and trinkets from all over the world brought to this free port for profit—none of it seemed to dazzle Gerry or cause his mouth to drop open. In fact, he said he hadn’t even had a Chinese meal since he’d arrived.

  He was concerned that the guards patrolling his floor would recognize us and think ill of him. I told him that in Asia everyone always knows everything we foreigners do anyway and it doesn’t matter to them. They just need to know.

  He listened as though I were telling him a fairy tale when I described how I had walked to the bottom of Kowloon; past the silk shops, the jade factories, the watches from Switzerland and the residential district where his countrymen, the British, lived. I told him about the Star Ferry and the Bay itself where the crimson-sailed Chinese junks glided from the mainland. I told him about Cat’s Street where shopping stalls spilled over with anything your imagination could conjure up. I told him how I had climbed to the top of Victoria Peak and watched the boats below in the harbor. He sat entranced at my dizzying description of diamonds, pearls, antiques, luxurious food, hand-woven materials, and intricate artistry done by children as young as twelve who were doing grown-up business before they realized what it was doing to them. I described the throngs of tourists … European, African, Japanese, Malay, Indian, American … on and on, all looking for bargains.

  I described to Gerry how the spices hung in the air, how rock and roll music mingled with Chinese opera. How hawkers of plastic necklaces stooped and squatted to shovel rice into their mouths from delicate china bowls with hand carved ivory chopsticks. Tourists rushed, merchants rushed, children rushed, buses rushed, coolies rushed … a rush to cram as much buying and selling into the smallest amount of time.

  And somehow it all worked. Everybody there was dedicated to making money, with no illusions, no pretensions about why Hong Kong existed. It was like Las Vegas. No self-righteousness about it. It was what it was. If you got taken it was part of the game. And somehow you expected it because all anybody wanted was a bargain anyway. Hong Kong was a place where you went broke saving money.

  Gerry’s eyes sparkled and gleamed as I talked every night of what I had done during the day while he was attending meetings. It was true that he didn’t get out as much as he wanted, but when he did it was as though he had never left his room.

  And on our last day I had arranged for a small boat to take us to the New Territories where I knew a spot for a picnic. I packed lemon squash and sandwiches and tarts.

  But on the boat he talked again of the squalid conditions he saw the Chinese living in. He spoke again of the disparity between rich and poor. He talked of how the wealthy must find a way to willingly share their profits with those who were less fortunate. It never occurred to him that the poverty stricken might have a richness of spirit the wealthy would envy if they knew of it. It never occurred to him that a rich person might be miserable in another more isolated and alienated way. He never thought “a rich person.” It was “the rich,” “the poor,” an amorphous whole.

  I remembered how a dear friend of mine had caught me in my sometimes knee-jerk liberalism by accusing me of having absolutely no compassion for the wealthy while I lavished my bleeding heart completely on only the poor. The truth of it had shocked me deeply.

  “Gerry?” I stopped him. “What about those hills over there that look like jade that even the poor can enjoy?”

  He looked up.

  “And look at those sampans gliding by with the crimson sails. How about the way those people are waving at us?”

  He stood up. “I guess I sound like the Sunday Observer, don’t I?” Gerry smiled shyly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I can get tedious, can’t I?”

  We put into port at an inlet in the New Territories and went ashore. The crew remained aboard. Gerry carried the picnic boxes and I carried the thermos and a blanket.

  Overhanging trees rustled in the sea breeze at the edge of the water as we began to walk into the lush hills above. We breathed the fragrant air. He took off his shoes and sank his feet into the earth. He sighed and spread out his arms into the warm sun. He stopped at every tree and wild flower. He stuck a daisy behind his ear.

  We came to a stream sparkling in the sun with birds swooping through the flowering bushes on either side. No one was around. He took off his shirt and trousers and with a movement like liquid he sprawled on his back in the gushing water. He reached up for me. I took off my summer dress and waded in and lay next to him. We felt the slippery rocks under us and didn’t care when the stream began to gently glide us downstream. Birds chirped at us above from the trees. We locked arms and stood up at the same time dripping sparkling drops from our hair. Gerry circled his arm around my head and rolled me into his chest. Silently we walked back to our clothes.

  I stood beside him.

  “Oh shit,” he said, resting his arms on my shoulders and looking into my eyes. “How am I going to reconcile
you with the rest of my life?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  He unfolded the blanket and spread it out on the ground. We lay on it and looked up through the big tree at the sky.

  About an hour later we walked back to the boat. I wondered how he would reconcile himself with the rest of his life.

  The next morning Marie fixed me breakfast as I sat on the patio. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking—my thoughts were too jumbled, clanking against one another. Certainly I was frustrated with Gerry, but it was much more than that. I was in between pictures, but my work was going fine. And I had another date to play Vegas and Tahoe soon which I knew I’d be prepared for. So I can only say that I was a reasonably happy person by all comparative standards but I was not particularly peaceful.

  David called. He had just gotten into town and asked if I was going to yoga class. I said I’d meet him there.

  I loved hatha yoga because it was physical, not meditational, although it did require concentration and a sense of relaxation. But with the sun streaming through the window and the sound of the instructor’s voice acting as accompaniment, I loved it as I strained every muscle and sinew in my body to feel activated. The physical struggle cleared my brain.

  “Have respect for your body and it will be nice to you,” said my teacher (he was Hindu), “and go slow. Yoga requires common sense. Don’t take your body by surprise. You must warm up before you stretch. Don’t ambush your muscles. Muscles are like people; they need preparation, otherwise they get frightened and tighten up. You must have respect for their pace. Think of it like an explorer going into new territory. A wise explorer goes slow, for he never knows what may be around the bend. Only when you go slow can you feel it before you reach it. You see, yoga gives you self-esteem because it puts you in touch with yourself. It is very peaceful inside yourself. Learn to live there. You will like it.”

  I listened to his words in between postures.