“I remember,” I said. And that said that I remembered everything else, including telling her again that I loved her.
I looked at her. She was really on thin ice. She wasn’t trembling so it could be seen. But I could see it. She stared at the food like it was something slightly horrifying to her. But she was staring at the table in the same way, and the vines twining around the wrought iron posts holding the ceiling of the porch above us.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She went very rigid, staring off to the right, past me. And then without the slightest movement or sound from her, her eyes moistened and glazed over.
“I wanted to,” she said.
Her lower lip started quivering. She took the napkin from the table and folded it and touched it to her nose. She was crying.
“I just wanted to,” she said again.
I felt like somebody had hit me in the stomach. I mean watching her break up and start to cry was awful. And it was so damned sudden. One moment her rigid face and the next moment the tears just spilling down her cheeks and her lips quivering, and her expression completely crumpled.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go back to the hotel where we can be alone.” I signaled the waiter for the bill.
“No, no. Wait a minute,” she said. She blew her nose hard and buried the napkin in her lap.
I waited. I felt like I should touch her, reach over and hug her, or something, and yet I didn’t because we were in this damned public place. I felt really stupid.
“I want you to understand a few things,” she said.
“I don’t want to,” I said. “I don’t care.”
But that was not true at all. I just didn’t want her to cry like this. She was all broken up now, though she wasn’t making a sound. She looked hurt, positively hurt.
All I wanted to do was hold her right now. Probably everybody who’d been looking at us before was thinking what’s that bastard done to make her cry?
She blew her nose again and wiped it and sat quiet for a moment. She was having a terrible time of it. Then she said: “Everything’s okay as far as you’re concerned. They know I tricked you. I led you to believe it was something we did. I told them that. And I’ll make double sure they know when I talk to them again. They’re pretty damned persistent. I expect they’re calling the hotel now. But the main point is, they know I took you, that you were the victim of the whole thing, it was my idea. I kidnapped you.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that.
“And what do they want you to do?” I asked. “What are the consequences?”
“Well, they want me to bring you back, naturally. I broke the rules. I violated your contract.” The tears welled up again, but she swallowed and made her face very calm deliberately as she looked away from me. “I mean this is a pretty terrible thing to do, you know.”
She looked at me for a second and then away as if I was going to say something terrible and accusatory to her. I had no such intentions. In fact, the idea was perfectly ludicrous.
“They want me back at work,” she said. “There’re all kinds of problems cropping up. We bounced a teeny bopper night before last and it seems it wasn’t the fault of the trainer who sent her. She’d switched with her older sister, and it turns out the older sister is married to some guy at CBS. The whole thing looks prearranged. And CBS is really pressuring us for an interview. We’ve never given anybody a real official interview. And everyone is really pissed about what I’ve done . . .” She stopped as if she had suddenly realized what she was doing now, telling me all this, and she glanced at me directly again, and then away. “I don’t know what is the matter with me!” she whispered. “Taking you out of there like this.”
I leaned across the table, and I took both her hands, and though she resisted just a little, I brought them together and pressed them together, and kissed her fingers.
“Why did you do it?” I asked again. “Why did you want to, as you said?”
“I don’t know!” she said, shaking her head. She was starting to cry again.
“Lisa, you do know,” I said. “Tell me. Why did you do it? What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was crying so that she couldn’t really pronounce the words. “I don’t know!” she insisted. She was breaking down completely.
I put a couple of twenties on the table, and I took her out of there.
ELLIOTT
Chapter 24
Literal versus Symbolic
There were more phone messages tacked to the door when we got back.
She was fairly calm now and she didn’t tell me to go out of the room while she called.
But she looked defeated and miserable and very pretty, and I felt miserable seeing her with that expression on her face.
In fact, I was completely and quietly unglued.
It was clear within a few minutes that she was talking to Richard, the Master of Postulants, and she was refusing to give him the exact time that we would come back.
“No, don’t send the plane yet!” she said at least twice.
I could tell by her answers she was insisting nothing bad was happening, that I was with her, that I was okay. She said she’d call tonight again, and tell them how much longer it would be.
“I will,” she said. “I will. I’ll stay right here. You know what I’m doing. Now what I’m asking you for is a little time.”
She was crying again. But they could not possibly have known it. She kept swallowing it, and her voice was very steady and cold. Then they were talking about this teeny bopper exchange and the CBS interview thing and I knew she wanted me to go out so I did. I heard her say: “I cannot give those kinds of answers now. You’re asking me to virtually create a public philosophy, a public statement! That takes time and it takes thought.”
I took some pictures of the yard, the little house in which we were living.
As soon as she came out into the yard, I stopped snapping, and I said immediately, “Let’s take a good walking tour of the Quarter, I mean really check out all the museums and the old houses, spend a little mad money in the shops.”
She was startled. She had a lost and chilled look, but her face became a little animated, and she hugged the backs of her arms nervously and studied me as if she didn’t quite understand what I said.
“And then after that,” I said, “let’s make the two-thirty steamboat cruise. It’s dull, but hell, it’s the Mississippi. And we can get something to drink on the boat. And I have an idea for tonight.”
“What?”
“Dancing, straight conventional old-fashioned dancing. You’ve got some gorgeous dresses in there. I have never gone out dancing with a woman in my life. We’ll go up to the River Queen Lounge at the top of the Marriott and we’ll dance till the band stops playing. We’ll just dance and dance.”
She stared at me as if I were crazy. We just looked at each other for a moment.
“You mean it?” she said.
“Of course I mean it. Kiss me.”
“It sounds great,” she said.
“Then smile,” I said. “And let me take your picture.”
To my absolute amazement, she let me do it. She stopped in the door with her hand on the frame and she smiled, and she looked wonderful in her white dress, with the hat hanging by the ribbons from her arm.
We made the museum in the Cabildo first and then all the restored old houses that are open to the public, the Gallier House and the Herman Grima House and Madame John’s Legacy and the Casa Hove, and stopped in just about every antique shop and gallery we saw.
I had my arm around her again, and she was getting lighter and happier, and her face was smooth again, like a young girl’s face. With the white dress, she should have had a ribbon in her hair.
I thought if I do not love her forever, if this ends in some shabby and stupid disaster, one thing is certain: I will never be able to look at a woman in a white dress again.
By one o’c
lock, when we had lunch at the Desire Oyster Bar, we were talking again just as we had been last night. It was as if the handler and the phone calls had never intervened.
She was telling me as much as she could tell me about how The Club was organized and built. There were originally two financial backers and they had been in the black by the end of the first year. It was now impossible for them to satisfy the demand for memberships and they could pick and choose. She told me about the other clubs that were imitating them, the big one in Holland that was all indoors, and the one in California and the one in Copenhagen.
She was always getting offers to leave for higher pay, but with profit sharing she was now making half a million a year, and she never spent a penny of it except when she was on vacation. It just piled up.
I told her about the sports obsessions I had, how I’d almost cracked up an Ultralite plane in Texas, and the two winters I spent skiing the most dangerous mountains in the world.
I hated this part of myself, always had, and loathed the people that I had met through these activities because I felt like I was playing a part. It was a hell of a lot better photographing people diving off cliffs in Mexico than diving off yourself. I thought I’d gotten interested in photography because it was a way out.
But it had backfired.
I took every war assignment Time-Life would give me. I freelanced for two newspapers in California. The Beirut book took nine months of work night and day after the original shooting, and nothing dangerous happened to me in Beirut, but I came close to dying both in Nicaragua and in El Salvador. I had come really close in El Salvador. It was the incident in El Salvador that slowed me down and made me start to think.
I was kind of amazed as we talked about all this that she knew what was happening in these places. She didn’t just know the outlines; she knew about the religious factions in Beirut, the history of the government. I mean, Club or no Club, she read more than most people would have in the daily papers.
It was two o’clock and we had to hurry to catch the steamboat for the river cruise. The day couldn’t have been better, blue sky, the lovely fast-moving clouds that I never really see anyplace but in Louisiana, only little fits now and then of light sunshine rain, and not too many people on the boat because it was a weekday.
Together we leaned against the rail of the top deck just watching the city until we were well downriver and the view became industrial and pretty repetitive and the thing to do was to sit back in a couple of deck chairs, have a few drinks, and feel the movement of the steamboat and the river breeze.
I hated to admit it, I told her, but I love these steamer trips, commercial and dull as they seemed. I loved just being on the Mississippi, and there was no other river that engendered that kind of reverence in me except the Nile River.
She’d been in Egypt two years ago at Christmas time. It was one of those periods where she just couldn’t stand to be near her family, and she’d stayed at the Winter Palace at Luxor for two weeks by herself. She knew what I meant about the two rivers, because every time she crossed the river, she would think, “I am on the Nile.”
But every time she crossed a river she had a particular excited feeling, whether it was the Arno or the Thames or the Tiber, like she was touching the passage of history itself.
“I want you to tell me,” she said, rather abruptly, “how you nearly got killed in El Salvador. And what you meant when you said it made you think.”
She had that same intense and almost innocent expression on her face that she had had last night when we talked. And both of us were going really slowly with our drinks. She was not really like my conception of a woman when she talked. But I knew this meant I had a pretty lousy conception of women. I mean she was sexless or something, interesting, without conscious seduction. She could have been anybody. And I found that extremely seductive.
“It wasn’t anything you couldn’t read in the papers,” I said. “It was nothing. Just nothing.” The truth was I did not want to describe it blow by blow, build to the moment of climax, reliving every second. “I was with another reporter and we were in San Salvador and we stayed out after the curfew. We got stopped, and we nearly got shot. And we knew it.”
I could feel myself getting that ugly, absolutely abysmal feeling again that had been with me for six weeks after I’d gotten out of El Salvador, that sense of the futility of just about everything, that transitory despair that can come on you any time in life, actually, that you just don’t let in most of the time.
“I don’t know where the hell we thought we were, in some café on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, couple of upper middle-class white liberals, talking Marxism and government and all that rot to other upper middle-class Berkeley liberals. I mean I guess we felt that safe, nobody was going to hurt us in some foreign country, it wasn’t our war. Well, we were coming back to the hotel and we got stopped in the dark by two guys, I don’t even know what they were, national guard, death squad goons, whatever, and the guy we were with, the Salvadoran we’d been talking to all night, got fucking terrified. And after we had showed our identification and everything, it got pretty clear that we weren’t going to be let go. I mean this kid with this M-16 rifle just backed up and looked at the three of us. And it was pretty damn clear that he was just standing there thinking about shooting us.”
No desire to recapture the pure white tension of that moment, the stink of real danger, the absolute helplessness of not knowing what to do, to move, to talk, to remain still, when the slightest change of facial expression might have been fatal. And then the rage, pure rage, that follows that helplessness.
“Well, anyway,” I said. I took out a cigarette and packed it lightly on my knee. “He and the other guy he was with got into an argument, all the time the kid was aiming this gun straight at us, and something happened at that moment, like a truck appeared, and they were supposed to go, and they both looked at us, and we didn’t move or say anything. I mean frozen, man.”
I lit the cigarette.
“It was about two seconds there, and we knew what they were thinking about, at least it seemed again that they were going to shoot us. And to this moment I can’t tell if it was true, not true, and if it was true, why they didn’t. But they took the Salvadoran with them. They took him right in the truck while we stood there and did nothing. And we’d been in his mother’s house all night talking politics, mind you. And we did nothing.”
She sucked in her breath with a scorched sound.
“Christ,” she whispered. “Did they kill him?”
“Yeah, they did. But we didn’t find that out until we were back in California.”
She murmured something under her breath, prayer, curse, something like that.
“Exactly,” I said. “And you understand, I mean we did not even argue with them,” I said. This was why I did not want to talk about this, did not, absolutely did not want to talk about it.
“But you don’t think you should have argued . . .” she said.
I shook my head. “I have no idea whether I should have or not. I mean if I had had an M-16, you know, it would have been different.” I took a draw on the cigarette. The smoke vanished in the river breeze and the cigarette, for that reason, seemed tasteless. “I got the fucking hell out of El Salvador immediately.”
She gave a little nod.
“And that’s when you started thinking.”
“Well, I think for the first week or so, I just kept telling people the story. I kept going over it in my mind, what happened, and thinking what if, what if, what if, you know this guy had just let go with the M-16 and we were another couple of dead American newsmen. I mean one half-inch column in the New York Times or something, and then it was over. It was like the damn thing kept happening. It was a fucking tape loop in my mind. I couldn’t get rid of it.”
“Naturally,” she said.
“And what became clear to me, really clear, was that I had been doing all kinds of dangerous things. That I’d been walking throu
gh these countries like they were Disneyland rides, like I was, you know, asking for assignments to get in where the action was, and I didn’t have the faintest notion what I was doing. I was using these people. I was using their wars. I was using everything that was happening.”
“How do you mean using them?”
“Honey, I didn’t give a damn about any of them. It was talk. Berkeley liberal talk. Inside here, it was all a three-ring circus for me.”
“You didn’t care about them . . . the people in Beirut: Twenty-four Hours?”
“Oh, yeah, I cared about them,” I said. “They ripped me apart. I mean I wasn’t some stupid shutterbug just photographing these things as if they didn’t mean anything. In fact the agony was the way the photographs cooled everything down, abstracted everything. You just cannot get it on camera. You can’t get it on video. But in a very real way, I didn’t give a damn about it all. I had no intention of ever doing anything about it, what was going on! I was riding these experiences, like they were the roller coaster. I was skiing downhill. I was, in my heart of hearts, glad the war and the violence and the suffering were there so that I could experience them. That’s the truth!”
She stared at me for a second. Then slowly, she nodded.
“Yes, you understand,” I said. “Like when you’re standing by the track at Laguna Seca and you think, well, if there’s going to be a car crash, well I hope it’s right here so I can see it.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
“But even that was not enough,” I said. “I was one step from getting involved in the action itself. And not because I gave a damn or thought I could change anything in this world, but because it would have been a perfectly legal license to . . . do things I couldn’t do otherwise.”
“Kill people.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” I said. “In fact, that was exactly what was coming and going through my head. War as sport. Didn’t matter what cause, really, except, you know, they should be the good guys, what we liberals call the good guys, but it really didn’t matter finally. Fighting for the Israelis, fighting in El Salvador, what the hell.” I shrugged. “Pick a cause, any cause.”