I don’t think I want to become an actor because it makes it impossible to love someone. I think actors can lust someone. Regularly. But I don’t think you can concentrate on yourself totally as actors must do and still place someone else’s welfare before your own. My definition of love.
I think acting is something like skin cancer or leprosy. It starts with a little spot and eventually it consumes you completely.
A friend of mine told me about working with Vanessa Redgrave in a revival of some Greek drama. Vanessa was a tempestuous queen. And every night she performed her role differently. No one knew what to expect on stage; what she would do, where she would be, how she would perform. One evening in a scene with a supporting actress, who happened to be black, she seized the actress by the shoulders and dragged her upstage and down, this way and that, as she delivered her lines.
Once in the wings, the black actress turned upon Vanessa and said, “Don’t you ever touch me like that again, Girleen!”
Vanessa exclaimed, “Girleen? Girleen? I love it. I want everyone to call me Girleen!” completely ignoring the other actress’s fury. So goes monomania, egomania, call it what you like.
By the way, I don’t refer to female stage performers as “actors.” For me, men are actors, women are actresses, which for me is a more glamorous and prestigious sobriquet. How do you like that? Sobriquet.
I’m beginning to think I really do love Steve. And that letting go of the control of my own life may be the result. What else can I do if I don’t act? Well may you ask. But I’m only 25. I’ll think of something.
You’re probably saying, “You’ll fall in love again. You don’t have to be so decisive right now.” But I don’t want to fall in love again. I don’t want to be careful. What if I didn’t fall in love again? I’d feel pretty silly when I was 70.
And you are also probably thinking, Is Steve Strapontin really worth all of this effort? Isn’t he just a silly, pretty, confused person? Perhaps. But it really isn’t about Steve. It’s about me. I love him. I don’t love some perhaps worthier person. You can’t call those plays.
“Graham, where is the vacuum cleaner?” Nina said.
“The big industrial one?” Graham said.
“Do we have any other kind?” Nina said.
“Not that I know of,” Graham said.
“Am I live or on tape?” Nina said.
“I just don’t want to tell you,” Graham said. “I loaned it to Cass.”
Nina came to the door of the salon and looked at Graham, who was sitting in the lavender plaid armchair reading the Herald Tribune from Paris. She said nothing.
Graham said, “He was helping me change the beds between the pink room and the blue room, and he asked me if he could borrow it, and I felt like I would be a real shithead if I said ‘no.’”
“I can understand that,” Nina said. “Is there no possibility of ever getting it back?”
“I checked on that, too. He left it over at the Château de Loupfou in St. Georges. And he can’t go back and get it.”
Nina said, “I understand perfectly. Another chatelaine screwed, and another house half-finished. Right?”
“Right,” Graham said, putting down the paper.
“Any ideas?” Nina said.
“Only the idea that I’m not going to go get it. Hell hath no fury like a chatelaine scorned.”
“Please call Cass and ask him how the hell one gets to the Château Loupfou. I’ll go recover our vacuum cleaner. My vacuum cleaner, I guess I should say, since you’re such a wuss. You’re probably afraid that Madame la Chatelaine is going to transfer her affections to you and pursue you through the streets of Cornichons like Adele H. Wearing black and not recognizing you when you finally speak to her.”
“Adele H. was the daughter of Victor Hugo, right? And she fell in love with an army officer and pursued him all over the world, right?” Graham said.
“They made a movie. With Isabelle Adjani. Movies. They take the most beautiful woman in the world to play the role of a woman scorned. Yes. You’ve got it right. Call Cass.”
Graham called Cass and without explaining in any way why he wanted directions to the Château de Loupfou, obtained them. Cass evidently understood the subtext without any problems. The directions were complicated.
“Across the river at Cornilly, across the Autoroute and into St. Georges; then up the hill at the main intersection by the farmacie, then the third road off to the left with the signs for Petitfour, Grandfour, Carrefour, and Loupfour, pass four farmhouses, take the left by the big elm, and then what?”
I went with Nina to recapture the vacuum cleaner. Nina was reading from the notes on the paper beside her on the front seat of the old black Peugeot. “And then what? Here I am lost among the brambles.” She was talking to herself. “I could kill Cass. I could kill Graham. Men. They always prefer buying a new vacuum cleaner to facing the music.” It was then she noticed that the wall of bushes on her right apparently had an opening in it. She drove through it and found herself on a winding road. Almost a path, with a large gray building in the distance. The large gray building was a house. Nina thought that the large stone house didn’t really have the right to call itself a château. But as she pulled up in front of the large flight of stone steps running up to the imposing front door, a tall woman with dark hair appeared at the top of the steps. Nina got out of the car. “Bonjour,” Nina said.
“We can speak English,” the woman said rather crossly.
“Hello. I’m Nina DeRochemont,” Nina said. She used her first husband’s last name. It was her professional name, and I guess she felt more comfortable using it with strangers. The woman approaching her must have been young in the 1970s, perhaps a half-generation before Nina. “I’ve come for my vacuum cleaner which I believe Cass Brewster left here.”
“Why wouldn’t he have come himself?” the woman said sourly. She didn’t introduce herself.
“I’ve no idea. He simply was unwilling to. And I needed my vacuum cleaner as I am just about to indulge in some housecleaning.”
“The vacuum cleaner is out here,” the woman said, gesturing to a wing of the house. She led Nina toward the door that was standing open. I got out of the car and joined them. The woman ignored me. We entered a large room with lumber piled in the middle of the floor, much sawdust, and Nina’s vacuum cleaner. The woman didn’t move to pick it up. Nina didn’t ask about the interrupted renovation. “Is he working for you?” the woman asked.
“Heaven’s no,” said Nina.
“Why ‘Heavens’?” the woman asked.
Nina went to the middle of the room and picked up the vacuum cleaner. “I’m from Cornichons. Cass has a reputation in Cornichons for not finishing his work.”
“Is that the only kind of reputation he has?” the woman asked. Her arms were crossed and she wasn’t really blocking the door, but there was something pugnacious in her manner. I wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t been drinking. Nina passed her with the heavy vacuum cleaner and once outside said, “You don’t want to know.”
The woman joined us outside, closing the door behind her. I took the vacuum cleaner from Nina. “But I do want to know. I thought Cass and I had a kind of understanding. I’m alone here with my husband, who is crippled. He’s older than I am by quite a bit. He wanted to retire in France. I didn’t. And here I am. I’m Emmeline Wainwright, by the way.” She held out her hand. Nina took it. Emmeline offered me her hand also. Her handshake was firm, and her hand was cool.
I said, “I’m Hugo Bianchi.” She nodded.
“You may be giving me more information than I should have,” Nina said. “I’m sorry. I understand Cass has become involved with at least two other women while renovating their homes and departed midway in the project. Usually he leaves town and disappears in the south. At least he’s still here. In Cornichons, I mean.”
“I’m not going to go looking for him,” the woman said.
“I think that’s smart,” Nina said as she opened the trunk of the car and I put the vacuum cleaner inside. She slammed the heavy door down.
“I’m sorry you had to come over and get that yourself. I had no idea that it didn’t belong to Cass. Of course, if I did I wouldn’t have bothered to find the owner and return it. I was furious,” Emmeline Wainwright said.
“Who would have blamed you? You must come over to Cornichons and visit us. We’re here for the summer. I have a nice husband and an even nicer child, and I think I’m going to have another nice child pretty soon. We live facing the gates of the Abbey.”
Mrs. Wainwright said, “And I let you lift that vacuum cleaner. Now I feel like a rat.”
“No, the rat is over in Cornichons. I had a French husband once. He was a rat, too.”
“But he’s English,” Emmeline Wainwright said.
“They learn,” Nina said. “Come visit. Bring your husband. Here’s my card.” Nina reached into the car and rummaged around in her purse. “Truly. I’m a magazine editor. Maybe you can write an article for us.”
Back in Cornichons, Nina found Graham in the garden sunning himself in very brief shorts. “Would you please get the vacuum cleaner out of the car? That thing is as heavy as the car itself.”
Graham turned over. “You’re back. I feel like shit letting you go by yourself.”
“Why wait until now? You could have started feeling like that before I went.”
Graham got up and went toward the door.
“Aren’t you going to put on a little more than that?” Nina asked.
“Let’s give the natives a treat.” I went with Graham to the car. As we went into the street we noticed Toca Sacar with Cranston Muller, the director of the Cornichons Theater Festival. Graham had never been introduced, but he had seen him at a fund-raising party once. We waved, and the men waved back. Graham dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the trunk of the Peugeot and carried it into the house. The two men thought he looked hot I’m sure, and I think he was glad they did.
“Now you can start cleaning,” he said to Nina as he put the cleaner down on the kitchen floor. “Don’t you want some ice for that Coca-Cola?”
Nina was sitting in the dark, shadowy kitchen with a red and white can in front of her. “No, I kind of like it a little warm. And it’s not really warm in here. They were cooling off in these old stone houses long before there were refrigerators. That Cass Brewster is a real asshole.”
Graham said, “Look, it’s more like he’s doing charity work among the rich. He comes, he see, he conquers.”
“It’s more like ‘He sees, he conquers, he comes,’” Nina said. “But you’re right. I’m not sure these poor women would be better off if they never met Cass. He brings some drama into their lives, stuck out here in the wilds of La France profonde. But it’s tough to think for a little while that your looks aren’t completely shot, someone still desires you, you perhaps are going to escape the old ennui of life in the country. And then there’s this crash of reality. Whether it’s better for them or not, Cass Brewster is still a shithead.”
“You should tell him that the next time you see him,” Graham said.
“You know I won’t. I don’t want to embarrass all the women within earshot who have either slept with him or wished they had or are planning to.”