“There’s nothing in the whole world except us,” says Bette Davis to Paul Henreid in Deception. “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Paul agrees.
The nutshell ending? Benchmarks? We were together, we got married, we were in love—so shoot me! A lot of people did want to shoot me. My Homeland Insurrection was Yahooed, YouTubed, Tweeted and Facebooked all over the world, and discussed on the News. Hunter got himself a talk-show slot and called me a traitor to my sex. Time, the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, Esquire and the National Enquirer all wanted to interview me. . . But I only wanted to be with Mimi. Mimì! Mimì! Crab lunches, oysters at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, now and then a little soup, and orgasms, odalisque orgasms.
Being with Mimi was everything to me. I was only sad that we had ever been apart. It felt like we’d been in a terrible car crash, but survived. (Like Bubbles!)
“Where were you, Mimi?” I asked on our way back to New York after my speech. “Why wouldn’t you answer my calls?”
“I was mad at you. I was hurt!”
“I know. I’m so sorry about all that, Mimi. . . But thanks for the bagels!”
“I had to get away for a while. I went to the Bronx.”
“Home to Mommy?”
“Yup. And then, when I tried to get you, you didn’t answer. I thought you were avoiding me, that you. . . that you didn’t want to see me anymore.”
“Never! Never,” I said (privately excising all memory of my craven jerkball attempt to reject her on the grounds of big feet and bra-straps).
This is the one problem with New York: too little protection from your enemies, and too much from your odalisque! You can lose each other, confuse each other, in a big city. But Mimi wasn’t giving up so easy: she’d decided to surprise me at the graduation ceremony. She couldn’t miss my maiden speech!
There were two attempts to tear us asunder, and not by lone right-wing Christian snipers but by people I knew. First came Gus, who wormed his way into my apartment and started flashing a knife around, rambling about my personal betrayal of him as well as my more general betrayal of all men. . . until Mimi whopped him with one of her shoes, and the knife fell (her big feet saved my life!).
We’d just succeeded in bustling Gus out onto the street when we were accosted by the pole-dancer’s father, who must have been skulking there for days, waiting for an opportunity to take a punch at me. He too felt I’d ruined life as we know it for all hot-blooded American males (which was and still is my intention). I’d ruined his life in particular, since his kids had gone into hiding with their mother, following the inconclusive police investigation.
“You shouldn’t have done that, you asshole!” he yelled at me. “You don’t come between a man and his family.”
“I’m no family man, I’m afraid,” I replied. “And yours needed dispersal.”
“Why I oughta. . .” The pole-dancer’s father started pawing at a suspicious black trash bag he had under his arm.
“Yeah, go for it,” Gus chimed in, standing back from the fray but egging him on.
At last wrenching his rifle free of the bag, the guy aimed it at me. But again, Mimi had the effrontery to nudge the guy’s arm just as he inexpertly pulled the trigger. The gun went off but didn’t hit anything.
“Women!” he moaned, collapsing on the ground.
Mimi later claimed she’d assumed it wasn’t loaded, but I think she just likes saving my life. Brave Mimi!
So we sought safety in sea and sand in Sagaponack, where each day is an event of a gentler nature. Yesterday at sunset the cresting waves were pink-tipped like opals; today, more like a crowd of white mice, leaping. Bubbles follows us around, a real beach bum: she can leap again.
And Claude visits. After Gus tried to kill me, Gertrude had second thoughts about him as a paramour: she wasn’t up for a prison romance, with no beau to attend her soirées or share the amuse-gueules of life. She and I are civil to each other now, and have worked out an arrangement whereby Claude can spend time with Mimi and me, since no woman should have to bring up a kid all on her own (and no kid should be all on his own with Gertrude!).
The first night he stayed with us, I dreamed we all went swimming in a big wide greenish river, much slower and safer than the Chevron, and only about five feet deep. It was early morning, the sky just starting to turn that poignant shade of blue. Mimi and Claude were near me, and we all swam easily through the water, zooming around as fast as we liked. I realized I didn’t even need to swim, but could just lie back and let the river carry me where it would, while I looked up through the trees at that beautiful sky. The sensation of being held by the water this way felt very like love.
My Manifesto for the Odalisque Revolution©, or rather, my womanifesto, hit the streets on the Fourth of July, all proceeds going to the Bee Hanafan Foundation, which offers microloans (and megaloans) to women who want to make art. My sage sister. Her own art sales go into it too. The Champagne Girls keep in touch, and will be coming over for the Retrospective. Bee’s dealer is fully engrossed in the preparations for it, hoping to cash in on what he calls “renewed interest” in Bee’s work (post-massacre). I still have my doubts about that guy, but liked seeing him on his knees among her valentines.
All my worldly goods are Mimi’s now, with any income from inventions going into our joint account. As for Pocket Change™ (formerly known as Meno-Balls™), a few technical hitches still need to be cleared up, but then we’re going into production. Mimi has chosen all the shapes, based on prehistoric patterns and artifacts, mostly goddess or vulva imagery, I gather: eggs, spirals, chevrons, fish, frogs, butterflies, and rings. (“Hey, what’s this bagel shape doing here?” I asked her, but got no answer.) We were going to charge $39.99 for the basic “balls” (I have got to stop calling them that), and $249.99 for the “Precious Jewel of Nature Collectible Robin’s Egg” version covered in Swarovski crystals—in this you might correctly divine the hand of our publicist and marketing advisor, Andy, whom I poached from my old practice. But there are ongoing arguments between him and Mimi about the money. She’d like the balls [sic] to be free. “They are meant to free women,” she says. “Free to the free!”
“But I thought you said thar was gold in them thar hills!” I pointed out to her. “Or maybe you meant thar were hills in that thar gold, as Hitchcock said when Grace Kelly wore a gold dress and falsies.”
“You can charge for the Swarovski ones,” Mimi conceded. And who am I to say no to freebies, or to Mimi?
As for the quilt, Deedee got it back for me from the dry cleaners, good as new. It is, I now fully acknowledge, a work of art. It is somehow Rothko, it is Leonardo. I presented it to Mimi as a wedding gift, and did she cry when she saw it? Did she ever! It’s now in the living room at 36th Street, hanging in front of the internal window between living room and dining room so you can see it against the light.
Mimi’s wedding gift to me was an Alisa Weilerstein recital, playing Bach solo cello suites, and Kodály. This woman makes the cello sound like it’s every instrument in the orchestra—you don’t need any of them anymore, she’s it. She can make the cello sound like a drum, like a recorder, she can make it sound like whirling water and water weeds, like a breeze, like flashing lights, stained glass, compassion, consumption, eighteenth-century cellars full of dirt, reflections, rocky places, animals of every sort, fire, and leaves blowing in the wind.
The aim of a musical instrument isn’t to imitate the human voice, as everyone’s always saying, but to be everything.
Walking near the house in Sagaponack one day, Mimi and I came upon a field of poppies. The man in me just stared, thinking about the power of numbers. Rebel! Arise and rebel, you fools, against the tyranny of work and war! The kid in me took Mimi by the hand and walked right into the field, to be a field of poppies, be joy.
What more can a man want than to please one gorgeous gal, a clever cat, and an amiable boy?
“By the way,” Mimi blurted out this morning before Claude was up, when we were eating peaches and cream out on the porch. “I tripped you over on Christmas Eve. You didn’t just fall.”
I dropped my spoon. “What?! Why?”
“I dunno. Just liked the look of ya, I guess!” she said cheerily.
Baba Yagas all!
Any zhlub can kill, but he wouldn’t if he’d ever seen the moon all bent out of shape in a puddle, or noticed the courage of grass growing through sand, or come upon a group of rounded stones on a beach, each in its own wind crevice—when all you want to do with the world is grab and adore it!
Don’t give up on life, life in the ascendant and descendant, crescendoing and decrescendoing, male and female, hot and cold, dark, bright, beautiful or ugly: it’s yours and mine. Don’t cherry-pick the bits you like, you’ve got to cleave to the whole ball game!
It ain’t all bad. Seeds still germinate, bees pollinate, birds migrate, caterpillars mutate, kangaroos gestate (externally!), beluga whales are born and somehow cared for, home runs are hit, snow falls, wine ferments, cork trees helpfully grow bark, spiders spin their own real estate, ivy winds lovingly around tree trunks, parrots preen, asparagus aspires, cats leap vertically six feet into the air. . . and somewhere, somebody gets a good haircut!
There are runnels of water gurgling through meadows, the smell of moist earth at dusk and dawn, streams and archipelagos and warm seas, waves like cozy canopied caves, and water weed that waves like hair in the current. There are quilts and carpets, and odalisques to lie on them. There are zebras, giraffes, okapi, aardvarks, and elephants. There are even still some bears and bison. And sex.
There’s light, shadow, color, the dank smells of women and cigars, the babbling of children, buzzings of insects, popcorn popping, drunken guffaws. Wild garlic, coffee, basil, mimosa, moldy autumn leaves, and the brand-new air of winter.
There are little girls who skip fearlessly down hospital corridors to unknown fates, wearing their favorite sandals (I’ve seen them!). There are porches and rocking chairs, figs and fig leaves and lilies of the valley. Come on, life is worth living just because there are cardinals. What could be better than a red bird?
It’s worth living just because there are horses’ manes, and clouds. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, and Casals. Mist, mint, honey, and bourbon. Saffron and sage. Eggs and nests. Hooves and paws. Snouts, tails, wings, feathers. Swimming and fucking and eating and drinking and just lying down. Pomegranates, monkeys, movies, cilantro, and jam! Matzo ball soup, pastrami, and Amatriciana. Clothes hanging on a line. Giotto, Giorgione, Masaccio, Rembrandt, Matisse, and Bee Hanafan. Starlings forming one big melting thrilling trilling ball at the end of each day. And all the other rustlings and scamperings and flutterings and weeping in the night. And all delight.
Cleave, you jerk! CLEAVE.
Love is a fact, neither tenuous nor debatable. You can hold yourself back from a woman and never be possessed. But if she can’t possess you, she’ll never be happy. And the world has got to start making women happy.
It saddens me sometimes that we met so late. And we both mourn our painful period apart. Mimi also wishes she’d met Bee. But what’s love without a little melancholy?
What I like most in Deception is that there’s never any question that they’ll shack up together, once they find each other again at the Haydn concert. What’s hers is his—Bette even carries his cello for him. She takes him straight home to her apartment, where the closet is instantly shared with him (the truest test of love: is there closet space?). She finds him a huge armchair by the fireplace, promises to get him a big cup for his coffee tomorrow, does the whole housewife act (with ironic sophistication), mopping his brow, bringing him a sandwich, kneeling at his feet. Come on, it’s the sexiest reunion in the movies!
But what is with that priest-like collar she’s got on, its prim white trim soon to be crushed by Paul’s mighty cellist’s hands when he tries to strangle her? Not his most heroic moment, but the guy’s confused. It’s not easy adjusting to all this love and comfort, all this coziness, after years in a concentration camp. It’s not easy adjusting to bette davis, even if she can play the Appassionata. And she keeps changing her story about Claude Rains.
Oh, for god’s sake, man, why do you think she’s got that gold telephone? She ain’t no priest. She’s a ho!
THE END