Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (6 page)

I know you much too well

To love you like a girl.

It isn't right,

But every night

I grow a little old

Just knowing you.

I am sure I heard that song first on the radio from my cradle (Madeleine, forgive me), but I heard it last on the Friday night before we came here. It was the encore in the middle of the thirty-two curtain calls. The truth does lie in time, as the song makes clear, but it is both harder and more life-giving than I have said.

"She could make you laugh about anything," Madeleine said. "I hope she's there. You'll like her."

I drove on through the arch and out of the village, and from there the road swept down through more fields, crossed a wooden bridge over a trickle of a stream, and went up again, perversely, into deep woods. The house would after all be in the woods and on the rocks, I thought, and then realized I could ask Madeleine all about it. But she seemed given over to her own memories. I kept quiet. To touch wood, I said again to myself that only the mildest things could happen so close to a dairy. Madeleine took off her scarf and stowed it in the bag she carried. Then she made herself up, her hands at her face working with the concentration and abandon of an old clown making himself happy. Madeleine has beautiful skin, and I never feel she uses makeup to cover anything up. (As far as
that
goes, she has worked from the inside out. When she last had money, she had a lift of the face and of the thighs, and she has done Switzerland for monkey glands and drunk the vivid waters of countless secret springs, most recently in Nepal.) She just touched her face with a fat brush that she powdered up on a palette whose dozen colors seemed all the same to me.
A
PENCIL AT THE EYES.
A fingertip of burgundy rouge smoothed over the lips.

Mind you, she does this so well that she does this while we are driving. I do not tell her to mind the bumps on the wooden bridge. She has made up in tanks in North Africa. In bunkers between bombs. They say that when Renoir was old and arthritis had frozen his fingers, his model would arrive at the studio in the morning and strap the brush to the painters hand. It is done with the wrists, he would say, not the fingers. I do not know how painting is done. But I bet it becomes like breathing for those who endure. Second nature. Much of Madeleine's life was lived by this sixth sense. She had done her own face in films before there were makeup men, and when the labor law required that she finally submit to one, he became a kind of consultant only. I don't think he ever touched her face.

As we came up into woods again, she reached over and tapped my arm and said, "We're almost there. Brace yourself, Rick. It's very lonely." The pines oppressed me. But just when I thought I would scream at the pines' dead-needle floor and the toothpaste smell, Madeleine saved me. Her perfume was the final scene. She brought out a crystal flagon and drew the stopper. Even in a convertible in the wilderness, it blew my way like a garden in full flower. This is the formula Patou made for Madeleine in the thirties, and it is locked in a Swiss vault or something. The story goes that she left behind a small valise full of silk stockings when she sang for the liberation army in 1944. A bottle of the Patou was packed inside. The valise became a good-luck charm for the advancing army, and it was passed from company to company. It was so thrown about that the perfume finally leaked all over the stockings. In the last days of the war, an American general got hold of the cache, and he passed out the stockings one by one as medals or battle ribbons to his bravest men. I don't know how it was done, whether he draped the stocking around the neck or balled it up and threw it in a soldier's tent. But the story survives.

The woods thinned, and we could see the house now, perched above the marsh on one side and the dunes on the other. As we approached the garden court, I saw David sitting on the bottom of the spiral stair, his head in his hands. He was hardly dressed, which wasn't fair. He stood up, and he was wearing cut-off jeans and was no longer a fawn, not any sort of boy at all. "Oh my God," Madeleine said, by which she meant he was beautiful. No, I wanted to say, or yes, but he is not the same. Now I was warning myself, and fast, as we pulled to a stop a moment away from him and he came forward smiling. Of course. I thought, of course he is older now, that goes without saying. But with me, if something goes without saying, it goes without seeing. He
was
beautiful, with the full, musky beauty of a grown man. I wanted him. And in the instant before he spoke and began to bring me home, I wanted only him and gave up gladly the boy he was.

"If it had been another car," he said, "I would have blown the whistle."

"I keep it as a souvenir," I said.

He leaned on his elbow along the top rim of the windshield and looked down at us. His chest, once flat and clear, was dusted lightly now with hair, and the muscles were firm. He nodded at Madeleine and smiled what I suspected was a Florida smile. He was doing too good a job of not registering who she was.

"Madeleine Cosquer," I said, "David Rowland," pointing them out to each other, thinking that the two names had finally come together with a click, like billiard balls. But I did not understand what David was doing.

"I hope you'll let us wait on you hand and foot," he said in a breezy voice. "You deserve it after Friday night."

"Were you there?" Madeleine said.

"No, but the news travels. I heard you in Las Vegas three years ago. It was wonderful."

"It was all right," she said. "I hesitate to ask what you were doing at the Desert Inn."

"I was up to no good."

She tipped her head back and let out a short laugh. She often laughs in single syllables. I sat stupidly, one hand still on the steering wheel, as if I planned to drive on.

"But look at you," she said to him. "A man would be crazy to be good if he could look like you instead. I'd better warn Beth Carroll. I'm sure she's never been to Vegas."

Madeleine seemed to double the bet as she threw the dice. She didn't mind him coming on strong. She rather liked it. All the same, she had to show her own armies. She told me later that, since he chose to appear like a naked hustler, she decided to find out how much he was hustling for. He didn't stammer or say gosh, but he lost five years of savvy in an instant. He glanced at me and then looked down.

"I'm sorry, Miss Cosquer. Mrs. Carroll's dead. She died last Monday night."

"I see. Suddenly?"

"Yes. It was a heart attack, I think. Phidias says it was old age."

"She must have been nearly eighty-five. I should be sorry for
you
if you think there's anything sad in that." She spoke easily, willing to go where the road led, the surprises of the last half hour taken in stride. So David seemed to know about Madeleine and Mrs. Carroll; and, since I had just been told myself, he had known it longer than I. I didn't know what might happen now, but I was not getting anywhere sitting still. These two were chatting like neighbors over a garden fence.

"Who is Phidias?" I said.

"He runs the place," Madeleine answered, a little chagrined that I was not keeping up. "Right, David? He'll live to be two hundred. Where is he?"

"Oh, he's around," David said. "Why don't you come in and we'll have lunch. Someone will bring us horses, Rick, if you want to ride."

He smiled at me a little shyly. There may be monstrous subterranean motives here, I thought, but he is also trying to make peace and do things right. Madeleine seemed so well and so in touch with the past that it seemed wrong not to risk the intricacies of the afternoon. We got out of the car, and Madeleine came around and took each of us by one arm and walked us across the terrace to the library doors. She squeezed my arm. David opened the doors, and we came into the cool room.

"When I was here," Madeleine said, "you never knew where you were going to have lunch. Beth would have a picnic set in the summer house, or out in the woods somewhere. You couldn't second-guess her. We always met here at one for drinks, and then she would tell."

"Would you like a drink?" David asked.

"No no," Madeleine said. "Some mineral water perhaps."

"Rick?"

"Scotch," I said. He knew what I drank and when, but he was a little displaced, a little strained at finding Madeleine so possessed of the place. It delighted me. But by the time I had my drink in hand, I decided the strain had more to do with his perception of me, and I wanted to comfort him. They sounded like they could small-talk all day. Meanwhile, David clearly wanted Madeleine as an ally. He had guessed how angry and locked in I was liable to be, and he was hoping she would intercede for him. Little did he know how predisposed she was to pick him apart for my sake. I felt with a pang how much I wanted to be his ally against my anger. I was all Jekyll and Hyde as usual. And it made me want to cry to be in the same room with the two people who understood best how helplessly I werewolved between my angel and my demon. Oh David, I thought, let me know fast how much time you've planned for you and me. Enough for me to rattle around in my rage, or more than enough, in which case nothing will be the same. Because here I am, the man for whom everything is exactly the same. I dare you.

"I'll bet you've set us a formal lunch," Madeleine said to him as I clicked my glass against my teeth and studied the spines on a set of Dickens. "In the dining room, with the Spode and the Baccarat and the Belgian linen. We're going to have our lunch in a magazine, aren't we?"

"Actually," he said, wet to the skin with Madeleine's irony, "I set us up on the front porch, above the dunes."

"Why, that's my favorite place."

"I know."

She had to admire his persistence. She smiled to let him know he had gained the point, then turned to me.

"Rick? Do you want something to read with your lunch?"

"No, dear," I said. "I'm going to be witty and riveting. I'm going to thrall you both with the tale of my adventures in the Vale of Kashmir."

"It's not a love story, is it?"

"No."

"I knew it." She came up close to me and took my arm again. "That's what I love about you, Rick. You're the only man left with any discretion."

David stood waiting, as lovely as a statue. Madeleine led me over to him. And the right question finally came to me:
how had he known Madeleine would be with me?

"I guess we're all ready," she said to David. "Should we take off our clothes, or are you going to put some on?"

He grinned at me, and I cracked a smile in return. Somehow we had all three caught up with one another. It is something to discover that you have had the good fortune to be marooned with people who are old enough to be ironic. Then, if things go one way, you have fun. If they don't, you get very, very sad. But no one is going to get hurt. "I'll get a shirt," David said. "Well, hurry," Madeleine said. "We're starved."

PHIDIAS ARRIVED
the instant the last fork was laid down. David and I had nominally split the bottle of wine, but I was deferred to every time he poured, and so I bloomed with the good fellowship of an afternoon drunk. Incredibly, David had succeeded in getting Madeleine to talk about her films. How the boy
studies.
He knew the budgets and the cameramen, the locations, the wardrobe changes, even the problems with the nuns in the Hays office. Madeleine rewarded him with anecdotes so ripe they fell off the trees and rolled in the summer grass, where the bees buzzed and sucked at them. We stripped bare her leading men, and we laughed as she squashed the ingénues one after another like grapes between her forefinger and thumb. It was a loose, delicious hour, and I was boozy with gratitude to Madeleine. I wasn't even afraid of having some time alone with David. But then I felt safe that it wasn't going to happen.

"So!" Madeleine cried as he came up the steps to the porch. "How long am I supposed to wait, Phidias?"

"One thing at a time, Madeleine," he said, smiling, folding his arms as he leaned back against the banister. "I wanted you to get your sea legs. And I see David is right—I
should
believe everything I read. You didn't get old."

"I am a miracle of modern science, Phidias. Anyway," she said, holding her hands up to frame her face, "some people say this is all a mask."

"What do they say is behind it?"

"Well, opinions differ. Some say the real me is mummified, and what you see is a sarcophagus. Others think I died long ago, and someone has replaced me with a doll."

"So it's all done with wires now."

"Yes. The ones who make me cry myself to sleep, though, say there is nothing behind it at all. They think I
do
look old."

"But you haven't started to listen to anyone else, have you?"

"No. If they get too close, I break their windshields."

This dialogue, rapid-fire and tough-guy, went very fast. It sounded like the scene where the detective is called in by the beauty to find her vanished, very rich husband. The detective and the beauty used to be a thing, and look at them now, not quite over one another. One can be exact about these things because Madeleine wisecracked her way through the very part in
Full House
in 1942. The film is not really part of the serious canon, but it is distinguished by the fact that she smokes about four packages of Camels during the course of events, and does not bat an eyelash when Robert Taylor, having found her out, shoots her from four feet away. She
never
talks this way in public, opting for yes and no and the riddle of her half-smile. She does talk this way to
me
if we are both in a good mood. But as she had not seen this man in thirty years, I couldn't believe she could begin again so furiously, as if in mid-sentence. No bullshit at all. You could tell, for instance, that neither of them had wasted any time in the intervening years missing one another.